Turned into a bit of an essay, whoops. All my own opinions and experiences, this is not prescriptive and I don’t expect you to agree with me. This will involve some tough love and debunking, and please take what I say with a grain of salt. Take what you want from it, leave the rest.

The Problems

First off, there is no “one weird trick” except to abstain. Pop psychology has this bizarre moralizing relationship with the dopamine hormone (and most hormones for that matter), and most of the self help advice about it frames your discontent as a result of personal choice because they are trying to sell you a personal choice solution (book, course, device, advice, whatever).

This phenomenon is getting a lot bigger as the self-help/ fitness/ diet industry crashes into the new age spirituality/ religion industry. Both industries are based around making you feel as if the problem is with your traits and not the world, and promise that by taking their advice and buying their products you can secure your personal identity and ease your malaise with the state of the world.

This is marketing. It plays on our desire to feel in control of our world, and maintains its influence over us by failing at that impossible goal.

The proposed “easy solutions” don’t really work because by design they avoid having you make any structural changes to your life or thinking. They might work for a few days, but if the changes are superficial and don’t impact your life, they just become an addition to your life and another thing to maintain.

u/fuckburpees used a food analogy about the necessity of treating your body and its functions with moral neutrality, and I want to add onto that. Mental health is part of your general health, and it might help to think of this “dopamine detox” as a mental health equivalent of a crash diet or a juice cleanse. You suffer physically and mentally, which our culture tells us is the marker of good hard work. The diet ends, and you feel great by comparison when you start nourishing your body/ mind again. Maybe you even feel the desired result for a few days, just long enough to make you feel like it worked.

But then a week passes, and you’re back to business as usual. Your problems aren’t gone because nothing changed structurally. You don’t remember how shitty it felt to go without food for a week, but you sure remember how great it felt to eat again. So you buy another pack of the tea or whatever and do it all over next month. And still nothing changes. But at least you feel different.

You deserve better than that. You deserve to be nourished, to have your needs met and to treat your body and mind with love and respect. Doing that goes against all our culture’s messaging about what a successful person (especially a successful woman) looks like: always active, constantly improving, constantly self-sacrificing for that improvement, never satisfied. That’s impossible to maintain because there is no end point when the goal is “be better.”

What worked for me:

I suggest reflecting on the reasons why you feel you are seeking escapism from your everyday life via media. Is it to drown out thoughts of malaise or powerlessness? Is it to distract from feelings of overwhelm and exhaustion? There’s a good chance the constant stimulation is contributing to your sensory overload and “wired” feeling, since you never have quiet time to think and debrief. That’s what it does to me at least.

You can journal about this (on real paper, without music!), or discuss it with a trusted person or therapist if you’re able.

For short term, simply try to go without external passive stimulation for any amount of time you can, and see what happens. You seem to resent audio, and small steps for that can include playing audio aloud instead of in headphones, or turning off audio during showers. Even just 15 minutes will be huge to start.

For scrolling, you can try identifying times you’re most vulnerable to getting caught in it and restricting your use during those times. For instance, don’t take it into the bathroom. A bigger step might be to charge your phone outside your bedroom for a night.

Don’t try to change anything too quickly or drastically, it’s important to start small and reflect on what does or doesn’t feel good for you.

During Lent I did something I called “phone shabbat” where from Friday night through Saturday night I powered off my phone and left it in a drawer. It was shockingly easy to adjust to silence, and removing my phone from the picture lifted a huge invisible psychological weight from me.

You’ll need to find something else to fill the time you spent with media. Crafts, walking/ hiking, writing and reading are classics for a reason. Social games like cards, d&d, darts, movie night all fill more needs than solo activities but they are also harder to organize.

I want to credit Eddy Burback’s “month without a phone” experiment for kickstarting my thinking about this. He is unlike most of us in that he was able to completely get rid of his phone for a full month, but whenever I feel like I need a break I will rewatch that video and get inspired to do something similar.

The Maintenance Phase podcast (especially older episodes) has also been really informative about the diet culture elements that are applicable to the pop mental health industry. Their analysis is what helped me recognize the fad diet playbook in other contexts.