What is dopamine fasting and why are people doing it?

Scientists are getting ever closer to understaning what creates a calm, contented and happy brain.(Shutterstock)

TORONTO — Life is filled with things that make us happy: music, food, funny memes on the internet. But what if we’re being desensitized to joy?

That’s the central question behind dopamine fasting, a new wellness trend that has prompted eye rolls among some psychiatrists and brain experts.

A dopamine fast is when someone abstains from anything that could potentially release the neurotransmitter often linked to motivation. Think phones, social media, shopping, Netflix, food, internet use, exercise, social situations, sex, music and books. Some even go as far as to avoid talking.

The phenomenon has been widely reported – sometimes as a joke -- and is often described as a Silicon Valley fad. The trend has been linked to Cameron Sepah, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco who wrote about the idea last summer. The term also appeared in a YouTube video from 2018 with more than 1.8 million views.

Proponents believe that modern society is filled with dopamine-releasing factors that bring us pleasure and that, by avoiding these factors for up to 24 hours, they will feel more intense later and potentially “reset” our dopamine levels.

But does the brain work that way?

Stan Floresco, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, said he and some colleagues learned about dopamine fasting on Twitter and “basically our hair has been on fire” ever since.

That’s because the general public’s understanding of dopamine is widely misinterpreted, Floresco said.

“It is a myth that dopamine equals pleasure. Dopamine is often referred to as the pleasure molecule. It is not,” he told CTVNews.ca in an interview from Vancouver.

In fact, dopamine is linked to a variety of feelings, such as stress, aversion and motivation. Floresco, whose research focuses on neurocircuits related to dopamine and the brain’s frontal lobes, explains it using pizza.

“When you walk by a pizza joint and you smell pizza, that will cause an increase in dopamine release. But that dopamine release requires an incentive to go in there,” he said.

But when a person bites into a slice of pizza, the pleasure they feel is related to a mix of other endorphins in the brain.

“Dopamine is more a kind of motivation or incentive to go get those good things,” he said.

CAN YOU CONTROL YOUR DOPAMINE LEVELS?

To that end, suggesting that fasting from pleasurable things could reset a person’s dopamine levels is simply not accurate.

“Dopamine shouldn’t be wrapped up in this,” he said. “Dopamine is not pleasure. It gets you there, but it doesn’t make you like it.”

Increasing dopamine levels will not necessarily increase a person’s level of happiness, and the premise of dopamine fasting vastly oversimplifies the complex systems happening inside the brain.

“Dopamine by itself will not take care of everything. It is one helper molecule in a soup of many neurotransmitters involved in our day-to-day lives. Increasing that by itself may throw other systems out of balance.”

As for the idea that people can control their dopamine release to achieve greater joy, Cecilia Flores, a psychiatry professor at McGill University who studies the development of the dopamine system, isn’t convinced.

Even sitting alone in an empty room with zero stimuli – no food, no music – still wouldn’t be enough to limit the release of dopamine. That’s because we need dopamine for “our everyday survival,” Flores said.

“Preventing encounters with those stimuli does not mean that the next time, more dopamine will be released,” she said.

“Maybe the person feels like that. But what they cannot say is that it’s because of their dopamine. Even to make the link between the dopamine and pleasure is far-fetched, because what dopamine does is much more complicated than that.”

Asked whether or not the idea of dopamine fasting is ridiculous, Flores laughed.

“It’s too simplistic, I would say.”

Studies have shown that too much screen time is linked to a person’s brain development. Among preschoolers, more time in front of a screen can lower the structural integrity of the brain in areas related to language, literacy and imagination.

Efforts to unplug are hardly new. Apple, Facebook and Instagram have all introduced features that allow users to limit their screen time. The Canadian-made app Flipd encourages users to connect with others while they track their time spent offline.