Resisting temptation can give you a sense of control over your life.

I’ve heard that a dopamine detox can help you to resist temptation and can lead to happiness.

What is Dopamine Detox?

Think on this. Every time you hear a ding on your phone ,you pick it up , look at it only to see that it’s spam, that initial rush of excitement goes back down after reading the message. If this is your life everyday , it could simply mean that you phone controls you.

What is NOT a dopamine detox?

By removing the things that make you happy in small increments,(like staying away from social media) you won’t be a different person afterwards. You will still love the same things but this time, after having them removed, they won’t control you.

Instead of compulsively grabbing your phone, you stop , think and make a decision to refrain from games , gadgets , likes , dislikes and social media’s control over you.

Do you incessantly scroll through social media a lot? Or mindlessly play video games to pass time? If your answer is yes, these are the types of temptation that you would to want avoid during a dopamine detox.

Be realistic and only do it for 12 hours at 1st.

So it’s not about removing things that you like or the things that make you feel good. It’s about reassessing , observing and re-aligning how things affect you.

Dopamine Research

Dopamine researchers were able to test the effect of dopamine on rats’ with pellets of food being given to them. Each time a pellet was given to a rat, It’s dopamine levels skyrocketed.

When the frequency of the pellets being given to the rats were increased, they recorded a decrease in dopamine , perhaps owing to the familiarity and expectation of the food. In other words, the rats’ systems weren’t firing off as much dopamine as it did before because their system had become used to it . Studies then determined that dopamine really gets activated when we are least expecting a reward.

if we witnessed a random act of kindness where somebody bought for us, our favorite cup of coffee, then it’s expected that we would experience the feel good hormone of dopamine more so than if we were to buy it ourselves.

Though anyone can argue that animal studies can’t be used to generalize a concept for humans, the findings are pretty impressive.

Is Dopamine Detox the key to happiness?

The findings beg us to question whether the key to happiness is to manage our dopamine levels by not getting too excited or too sad. This concept may be compared to the a basic stoic movement but that is for another discussion.

Do you see yourself skipping out on your favorite episode or tv show on Netflix Or do without the series entirely?