[Epistemic status: I'm not a neuroscientist nor any kind of medical nor biological professional. I have an amateur understanding of neurochemistry and cognitive science. This post is primarily based on what has worked for me and my intuitions around why. I err on the side of epistemic transparency and caution where possible.]

Prerequisite Concept: Hedonic Set Point

Disclaimers/Warnings

I think this can be a genuinely very useful technique for people. However,

This can Probably be Dangerous

This is a post about doing some light amount of hacking your brain's chemicals, specifically in a way that involves temporarily taking away enjoyable things. Do not do this if you think that would be long-term bad for your mental health. This is not a technique for dealing with e.g. severe depression (nor probably most smaller-magnitude depressions). This is not a technique for fixing complex mental health issues, it is a technique for dealing with a very specific thing in some subset of people whose brains are somewhat like mine along some relevant axes.

I think there are some mental states and neurotypes where this is an actively harmful technique if you try to push through it for >0.5 days when that isn't the right move. I suspect it's relatively safe if you have the mindfulness to realize if things are making you long-term worse off and immediately Nope Out of the detox (described near the end). This is worth being cautious about.

And I'm Noticeably Biased

Also, this post is about a mental technique that

made me feel good after doing it
recently temporarily fixed what happened to be the most [big × tractable] bottleneck to my productivity.

For these reasons, the picture I paint of the benefits may be rosy and portray an effect size that does not generalize reliably to other people. Given those forces acting upon me, I try to paint a true picture and convey a general technique to whatever extent I reasonably can.

Introduction

(You can probably skip this section if you already know what a dopamine detox is and why you might want to do one.)

A "dopamine detox" is, for the purposes of this post, a period (usually a day) in which you try really hard to get rid of superstimuli in your environment. I've written in some probably-helpful additional detail about how superstimuli can hack your cognition, but this post does most of the necessary conceptual explaining.

I'd apprecia...

Superstimuli

Blog posts

External Links

See also

Superstimuli

Blog posts

External Links

See also