My Week of Rest and Relaxation

How I got my dopamine-overdosed brain to sit still and feel my feelings.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the “Dopamine Detox”, whether it be from some article floating around the internet or from scrolling TikTok. Initially I thought it was another fruitless wellness trend (because let’s face it, there is a whole lot of nonsense out there), but there was one particular TikTok I came across that made me rethink my initial reaction and consider doing a detox of my own.

In this TikTok, a woman described her week-long experience of living without TV, social media, podcasts, Youtube, etc. She went on to explain how it made her feel like a little kid again; her mind almost completely devoid of the dysregulation the internet, smartphones, and media cause. She even claimed that she was so bored at one point, she started writing a book. This was what hooked me: I wanted my brain to stop buzzing, and my nervous system to feel at ease. I wanted to make the most of my time and do all the creative projects I had kicking around in my brain instead of squandering hours away on my phone. I was so intrigued, I mentioned it in passing to my partner. “Do you want to do a dopamine detox next week?” He agreed. And so we set out to avoid all media – TV, movies and social media – and embark on the seven-day detox ourselves.

I kept a diary during this experiment and thought it would be interesting to share my experience. It’s important to note that I believe the term “dopamine detox” can be misleading, as there is no real way to decrease the amount of a naturally-occurring chemical in our brains. There are also some extreme versions of the detox others are participating in, which includes avoiding music with lyrics, socially isolating yourself and essentially removing all pleasure from your life. Dr. Cameron Sepah, a California psychiatrist specializing in addictive behaviors, thinks these measures are unnecessary and I agree.

“Sepah believes conscious restriction of addictive activities can help people become more aware of impulsive behaviors and encourage more flexible thinking.”

Approaching the detox from Sepah’s perspective by replacing harmful numbing behaviors with beneficial ones like walking, playing with our dogs, calling loved ones, or reading is the best way to conduct your own detox.

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DAY ONE: 6.19.23

I woke up, meditated, walked the dogs, ate breakfast, and started my work day. I found myself involuntarily opening the Instagram app, then remembering that I’m not supposed to be doing that this week. I noticed that I felt a lot less “buzzy” and filled with nervous energy. My eyes were also significantly less tired since I wasn’t scrolling so much and looking at screens outside of work.

I finished my work day at 4pm because I was finally able to focus given these new restrictions. Ed walked the dogs, and I made us ramen for dinner. We went to sleep later than I wanted, around 12pm, but that was mostly because I couldn’t put down The Clasp by Sloane Crosley.

DAY TWO: 6.20.23

Today was my tenth consecutive day (!!) of my 30-day meditation challenge. I’ve grown to love and look forward to the act of waking up and meditating on the sheepskin in front of our window. I can hear the birds each morning and the sun shines through, warming and waking me up.

I took an early work call at 8 then headed to the gym around 9. On my way back I considered treating myself to a coffee, but decided against it. I was just prolonging the dread of being back at my desk and looking for something to assuage the anxiety I was fostering over several work projects. The fact that I was able to step back and observe my actions, however, struck me as progress. Instead of doing something mindlessly and regretting it later, I paused and examined it. I knew didn’t need it, so I moved on.

In the evening, Ed and I had dinner and retreated to the living room to put on a record and read our books. I finished The Clasp by Sloane Crosley (5/5 stars).

DAY THREE: 6.21.23

Today my thoughts were a little more scattered, despite my morning meditation and my morning phone ban (no looking at phones the first 30-60 minutes after waking). I think this had to do with the fact that I had several things to take care of for clients that involved social media. I managed to keep from scrolling, but the small exposure to it threw me off slightly. The frenetic energy returned and my eyes felt tired in the way they usually do after a full eight hours of squinting at a blue-lit screen. At one point I slipped and accidentally opened the Instagram app. It opened to a photo of my friend who got married last month, so of course I liked and commented on it, realizing after I had already done it that I was supposed to be avoiding all media this week. It made me feel so weird how natural opening the app felt, how insidiously it has become such a reflexive part of our lives. After this, I put my phone away for the rest of the day and picked up a new book, The Housemaid by Freida McFadden. It’s not winning any literary awards (and this isn’t necessarily even a recommendation, so proceed with caution) but she writes really fun psychological thrillers I can devour in a day. I read nearly half of it in one sitting before retreating to bed.

DAY FOUR: 6.22.23

I decided to switch up my workspace this morning and work from a coffee shop down the street for a few hours. It turns out the change of scenery was just what I needed because I plowed through about 3 hours worth of work in an hour. Just like the detox, removing the external stimuli of the distractions in my home made it so much easier to get work done. I surveyed the scene around me: all people like me, clicking away at their laptops and sipping their warm beverages from the cafe’s ceramic mugs. It was comforting. I work from home, so it felt really good to be in a quiet space but still among other people. I resolved to do this once a week.

I had therapy later in the day. We talked about Father’s Day, and I confessed how sad it made me this year. It doesn’t usually make me feel sad, so I wasn’t expecting to feel that way. I think the extra room the detox cleared in my mind allowed for a deeper consideration of my feelings toward the holiday.

Later that evening I did some breathwork with Open and felt clear-headed and ready to rest. I finished my thriller and went to bed.

DAY FIVE: 6.23.23

Friday was uneventful and primarily a day of work for me as I had several end-of-day deadlines; but the work felt easier, there was more flow and less friction. I completed my tasks one by one and checked nearly everything off of my to-do list.

After work, I made Ed and I crispy brussels sprouts and gnocchi for dinner and read some of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom before falling asleep.

DAY SIX: 6.24.23

I slept in until 8, meditated for fifteen minutes (while the dogs noisily wrestled behind me), and headed out the door for a three mile walk. When I got home, I showered and got ready for some tentative plans I had later in the day which never came to fruition. I was a bit unsure what to do with myself for the rest of the day and began to feel bored, which is part of the purpose of this experiment, so that felt like an accomplishment.

Around 2pm I started to feel a small whisper of sadness, so I thought I’d run some errands I had been putting off. I stopped at Vroman’s on the way home and picked up Real Estate by Deborah Levy. That little whisper grew louder as I walked to my car, and amplified even more when I arrived home and saw my neighbors’ extensive family all sitting outside on their lawn for a barbecue. It made me miss my own family.

I was beginning to get the sense that this experiment had finally fulfilled its purpose: to make me sit with the feelings I had unknowingly ignored for weeks, with no other distractions to alleviate the discomfort.

DAY SEVEN: 6.25.23

Today is the final day of this experiment, which I ended early due to the fact that I needed to write this! It started like most days do, easing into the morning with a meditation and a coffee. I walked the dogs and got some sunshine to regulate my circadian rhythm (which truthfully has felt a bit off lately). The feeling of ease I carried with me throughout the week continued to permeate my senses, even while the dogs pulled on their leashes and made me feel frustrated. I breathed through the frustration and calmed myself down fairly quickly, something that is often difficult for me to do in those moments of sensory overload. After our walk, I sat down, collected my thoughts, and began writing.

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After seven days of limited dopamine triggers, I feel significantly more at ease. The removal of any excess input made me feel like I could breathe again, and my mind has the space for new thoughts to weave around the old, like water flowing around stones. I am less irritable, less reactive. I genuinely feel happier. Ed noted that his screen time was down by 21% from last week, which prompted me to check my own and gasp in complete shock: my screen time was down a whopping 83% from last week, my daily average clocking in at thirty-two minutes total.

The point of all this, I realized, is that while I am an extremely emotional human being, even I succumb to numbing behaviors when discomfort arises. I’ll turn to my phone to take a break from work when I’m frustrated, or scroll mindlessly at the end of the day as a response to incipient feelings of anxiety or unhappiness. I may feel things deeply, but I often don’t let the feeling run its course, preemptively turning off the spigot even when I know there is more that needs to flow. Although I did have work to distract me during the day, once that work was finished and I couldn’t turn on an episode of Arrested Development I’ve seen 1000 times or scroll TikTok for an hour, it was just me, my books, my thoughts, and my feelings.

Ultimately, this detox made it easier to identify exactly what I’m feeling because I had the time and space to do so. I like to reference Gloria Wilcox’s Feeling Wheel (it is now my phone background) when things become too muddy and unclear, or when I feel multiple emotions at once. By naming the feeling and sitting with it no matter how uncomfortable, I found it easier to make peace with. No, it doesn’t make the feeling disappear, but that’s not what we should be striving for anyway. Life will hurt you inevitably, and the avoidance of hurt hinders our emotional growth. Establishing a regular practice that allows thoughts to flow freely and without judgement makes us better equipped to deal with pain when it shows up in our lives. For me, this looks like meditating, journaling, and creating.

Feelings are involuntary, they are not facts. They may tell you something about yourself, but we cannot use them like hard data. Feelings are little somatic messages that arise as a response to something external; they are often mutable. They certainly may feel like facts when they arise, but they really aren’t much of anything until our brains assign them meaning. I found that considering and sitting with my feeling before assigning it meaning, or simply not assigning it any meaning at all, allowed me to see a situation objectively and not through the lens of past traumas and experiences.

So was the detox worth it? Absolutely, and I’ll probably continue to do them regularly and in shorter increments. I think anything that forces you to tune out the noise and tune into yourself is beneficial, especially in our too-fast, too-loud world that often promotes numbing over healing, band-aids and quick fixes over difficult inner-work. I learned so much about myself during this process, and I finished the detox feeling more well-adjusted and emotionally intelligent than ever.

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I’d love to hear if anyone else has attempted one of these, and what your experience was like. Feel free to email me (kaitlynnlucas@gmail.com) or leave a comment below. Thank you for reading and supporting!