Gemma Speck

You wouldn't think of it as having a role in encoding how we think of fear and things that have hurt us and frightened us and terrified us in the past.

So this is what we miss when we see dopamine purely through the pleasure lens.

The other thing that happens is that a misunderstanding about dopamine can mean that we... How do I say this?

It can be used for pseudoscientific purposes.

Because dopamine is such a flashy catch word...

Any random person can pop it on an Instagram slide or pop it in a video or put it next in a marketing campaign and make us believe that what they are saying is true because dopamine has such a reputation, right?

The biggest example of this is or the biggest example of ways that dopamine can become like...

The ways that dopamine can become pseudoscientific and people can talk about it in an incorrect way is dopamine detoxes.

What is a dopamine detox?

If you haven't heard about it, basically it is a practice that's been popularized in the last 10 years.

It was firstly introduced by this man named Dr. Cameron Sapath, I think.

Sapath, Dr. Cameron, I'll call him Dr. Cameron.

And the premise is that you abstain from easy dopamine activities with the hopes of reducing your baseline sensitivity to dopamine so that you feel rewarded by less dopamine.

Basically, if you're addicted to sugar, let's say artificial sugar, going days without artificial sugar, testing your self-control such that when you have artificial sugar again, just a little bit feels as amazing as when you used to have a lot of it.

That is the premise of a dopamine detox program.

Switched artificial sugar with dopamine.

The idea is we can reset our brain and therefore certain compulsive behaviors by essentially starving our brain of easy dopamine.

Now, I'm going to call myself out here and I'm going to say I have mentioned dopamine detoxes on the podcast before in a very positive light, specifically with regards to our smartphones.

I read a few studies about how interrupting your brain's immediate anticipation of dopamine when you pick up your phone is like essential for breaking an addictive loop.

And I have talked about it, but I've recently dug a little bit further into it.