One of the learnings from Start with Why by Simon Sinek helped me actually analyze why I do what I do. I learnt to be more aware and conscious of my actions and thoughts. It comes at the cost of speed of action, but there is enough time right now. While analyzing why I do the unproductive things that I know are unproductive and yet I do, I realized that the cause was closely related to Dopamine.

Dopamine is an important hormone, which governs a lot of things that you do, and also the things you do not do. It is on you how you train your mind to use it at your benefit. Dopamine, or the pleasure chemical is a rewarding mechanism of the body. Is it bad? Certainly not, anything bad is eliminated by nature during the evolution process. A whole lot of evolution is because of this. Reproduction cycles work because of Dopamine, the pleasure makes it work. If there is no reward associated with a particular activity, there probably is no motivation to do it, and we may not do it at all. For the sake of completeness, let us also briefly discuss the complementary factor, the fear. Not everything that results in dopamine rush is what you would do, because of fear. Jumping from a mountain can lead to a huge dopamine rush, but the fear of dying helps you from saving yourself by not doing it. These two things largely help the species sustain. Let us stick to Dopamine for this article, a lot about fear has been discussed in previous posts. Being a roboticist and a math lover, I cannot help relating it with reinforcement learning. You are as good as your reward function, and a lot of the success is dependent on how well the reward function is shaped.

Fortunately, the reward shaping for your body is in your control. You, to a very large extent, can control where you wish to get rewards and where penalty, and it is just a matter of priorities and discipline. A lot of us fall for short term rewards. Most of us what to be on the stage, have a million people in the audience, listening to your success story, and a lot of us already might have a speech prepared for the occasion. That moment would undoubtedly give an excessive Dopamine rush, but the journey to reach there doesn’t have enough rewards on the way. Anything that is hard and boring, by default, doesn’t release this pleasure chemical. This is what keeps you from doing the right thing even when you know that is the right thing. You look for short term rewards, a constant source of pleasure, and with the advent of internet services, instant gratification is easily accessible and easy. You unlock the phone and there is a world waiting to get you excited. The small bubble, you choose to not see beyond, gives you the love you want, the likes on the photos, the entertainment you want, and everything else, at your finger tips.

Another thing that can make things worse is the tolerance. The marginal benefit goes down over time if anything is done in excess. If you eat at a fancy restaurant one day, it may be a lot more exciting than after 7 days of continuing the same thing. An hour of instagram surfing is not enough once you develop tolerance, and then you make it 2 hours to cope up. The ease of getting reward from such activities is much more than the reward from the long term success we talked about. When you see an easily accessible source of dopamine, you fall for it and neglect the productive things which do not give as much pleasure but you know are important. And the social media industry is exploiting exactly that. Flashy titles on the youtube videos, the notifications on getting likes, the markers for messages that makes you click on it, everything is designed to increase the clickthrough rate, and exploit your pleasure chemical. So how to go about solving this and not falling for the trap?

Dopamine detoxification is the solution. In simple words, you appreciate something more if you are starved of it. You find the home food boring, but only when you go to hostel, you miss the home food and appreciate it more. If you are stuck on an island for a week, the same food you call boring will be something you will crave for.

So how do you starve yourself of dopamine, and should you completely starve yourself of it and go against the evolutionary process? I’ll try to justify both of these in the rest of the post.

Dopamine detoxification is the process of starving yourself of dopamine. Discipline is the most important part of the process once you know what you have to do. You can do it for some time every day, or for a day every week as it suits. During this period, avoid anything that leads to dopamine rush. This means boring yourself to death, no internet surfing, no watching movies, no algohol/drugs, no good food, no masturbation. You only do the things which are boring, going to the gym, meditating, self-reflecting, writing in a diary (because on screen you can find distractions), reading, and in my case it was even taking a bath. This helps you bring back the tolerance levels down. The 10 minutes of instagram scrolling will be more interesting than 30 minutes, once you deprive yourself of it completely. You need to regulate it yourself.

To answer the second question, dopamine is necessary. Complete deprivation would mean that you make yourself a monk, who has given up on all the worldly pleasures. And if you are reading this, chances are that you do not want to be one. So you need to trick your mind into using it at your benefit. You know the tasks which are important but do not lead to pleasure, at least in short term. Place these tasks in the schedule followed by a reward period, where you allow yourself for some dopamine releasing activity. So after a hard day at work or studying for 4 hours, give yourself a treat. Allow yourself 15 minutes of social media surfing, or however and how much depending on your judgement of the important tasks pending, and the amount of time you can afford. Trick your brain into feeling that boring activities are rewarding by placing some reward at the end of the boring task.

Lastly, be sincere in your efforts and you are guaranteed to see the results.