80 – Dopamine Dizziness

Dopamine Detox: A Short Guide to Remove Distractions and Get Your Brain to Do Hard Things by Thibaut Meurisse

• What are you addicted to? 
• Where are you feeling like you’re getting your primary sources of stimulation or overstimulation?
• What is it that distracts you?
• Do you feel like some companies and websites are trying to manipulate you into visiting it more or buying more?

Try to get rid of those distractions so that you can focus on the essential things. You only have so much time and attention. You only have so much money and resources. If dopamine leads you astray, you will use your resources in the wrong places. You won’t get your goals, and you will waste your resources on things that don’t matter. 

Get away from the dopamine drug, which is always working on the next thing. Do the next something! Instead, focus on what he calls the “here and now neurotransmitters,” which he calls endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin. Those are all things that try to bring us to our present. They are all things that try to award us for the immediate things happening, not the promises of the next great thing. He says give it 30 minutes. Give it a shot and see if it works for you. He thinks you should do a 24 or 48-hour detox. That means to give up all the things that give you that dopamine hit. Start immediately in the morning, so you don’t get on the rollercoaster. Make sure you don’t start using some other dopamine-inducing activity and replace the old behavior with just another new distraction. 

Challenge

Could do his 48-hour detox, you can do him 24-hour detox, but let’s start even smaller just to ensure we don’t fail. What is the number one thing that leads you to distraction and keeps you in that dopamine cycle? Can we just for one day get rid of it? And see, when we don’t have our doom scrolling on Facebook when we don’t have that chocolate cake we’ve been looking forward to all day. It’s going to be tough, but it will help you go towards your goals. So, can you just get rid of those things for one day? And if you find that you can’t figure out what it is that stopped you from doing it.