In pursuit of pleasure: A ‘dopamine fast’ won’t save you from addiction

Maia Szalavitz

In August 2021, while promoting her new book “Dopamine Nation,” the Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke discussed addiction with NPR’s Terry Gross. She explained the neurotransmitter dopamine is the “common pathway for all pleasurable, intoxicating, rewarding experiences.” The more dopamine an experience or substance releases, and the faster it does so, she argues, the more addictive it is. In her book, she says recovery from addiction requires a radical reset that should often include a “dopamine fast” — basically, avoiding pleasures to help rebalance the brain.

Dr Lembke is far from alone in promoting puritanism as an addiction cure. In recent years, the idea that a dopamine fast — which typically includes abstaining from drugs, sugar, porn and social media but can extend to avoiding healthy highs like socialising — is beneficial has spread rapidly through Silicon Valley and on sites like TikTok. Proponents contend that like alcohol and other drugs, phones, video games, shopping, highly processed food and gambling desensitise people to dopamine, making it harder to resist further indulgence. They claim corporate giants in pharma, tech and food are using dopamine science to hook people on their products. To fight back, we must abstain from having fun as much as possible. We’ve breached our pleasure credit limit and need to get back under budget.

The problem with this neuroscience shorthand is that hedonistic excess isn’t the cause of addiction, and dopamine’s role in the brain is not all about pleasure. While dopamine does play an important role in addiction, it’s not what traps people in self-destruction. Americans aren’t facing an addiction crisis since we get too much dopamine from overabundant cheap thrills. Our problem, instead, is a lack of connection, community and purpose.

It’s easy to understand why people mistakenly believe the pursuit of pleasure drives addiction. Films and addiction memoirs frequently describe drugs like heroin as being better than orgasm multiplied by a thousand, or like “kissing God,” as Lenny Bruce once said. But although people compare social media’s addictiveness to crack or opioids, no one calls compulsively scrolling TikTok sublime.

In the brain, pleasure and addiction are incredibly complex. When released in certain neural circuits, dopamine is critical to making us want to repeat behaviours that feel good, which tend to be linked to experiences that led to the survival and reproductive success of our ancestors.

But dopamine also affects neural circuits that control movement. That’s why a genuine dopamine fast would be a terrible idea. People with Parkinson’s disease know this firsthand: Their condition is caused by the progressive destruction of dopamine-containing neurons, especially those controlling movement. This causes tremors and difficulty moving. But while Parkinson’s can cause depression and apathy, it doesn’t always.

Dopamine is linked with creating a desire to repeat actions that previously led to pleasure, rather than causing the feeling of pleasure itself.

The solution, isn’t to ban or quit potentially addictive escapes, though they should be regulated to minimise harm. Instead of a dopamine fast, what we really need is a

dopamine feast — one that makes us want experiences we actually like, rather than compulsively responding to cravings.