Dr. Anna Lembke

And this is, of course, you know, the sort of underpinning of exposure therapy that I think so many people are finding helpful.

It messes up our motivation because we become narrowly focused on short-term rewards.

And we lose the ability to see the longer-term rewards that require the upfront work that are actually better for our well-being over months to years.

Absolutely.

And again, by changing our hedonic or joy set point, what it means is that we need bigger pleasures to feel any pleasure at all.

And even the merest pain is incredibly painful.

And we see this now in clinical care, where people talk about really quite ordinary things that they struggle to do, simply paying a bill,

or getting off the couch and going and meeting with people or doing the dishes.

Now, these are, you know, kind of everyday things that, you know, nobody really likes or generally we don't like, but they're even more painful than in prior generations.

Just add something in there.

And key to this abstinence trial or this dopamine detox, and we're not actually abstaining from dopamine because we're not ingesting dopamine.

It's something that gets triggered in our brains, but it's kind of a metaphor or a meme at this point.

The key to it, though, is to abstain for long enough to allow those gremlins to hop off the pain side of the balance and for homeostasis to be restored.

Because if we don't abstain for long enough, what happens is we take our pleasure, our reward off of the pleasure side, the gremlins accumulate on the pain side, crash us down, and we are in withdrawal, right?

And in that state of withdrawal, we experience anxiety, irritability, insomnia, dysphoria, and also intense craving that feels like it will never get better.

But what is so amazing is that once we get over the hump of sort of that acute withdrawal for most people, which is about 14 days,

We come out the other side.

Well, that's for a hard drug.

In fact, you know, studies looking at teenagers who get off of social media

find that they feel less depressed, less anxious, and less lonely, but only if they go for long enough, which is on average about three to four weeks of abstaining from social media.