Dopamine Reset Program

Overcome smartphone/social media/email excessive use, reset your dopamine levels, reclaim focus, enjoyment, vitality, clarity and motivation for the things that matter most to you.

Let me tell you my story...

From the outside you would have never said that I had "an addiction". I saw myself as a capable and passionate person. I had a strong foundation in mindfulness and self-discipline.

AND YET...

I've started noticing changes in my life. Subtle changes, but slowly building over time. Like a silent, insidious current running through my day it showed up like:

My motivation and fulfillment were not where I knew they could be;
My focus was less sharp than it used to be;
I was strangely tired;
I was not moving my body as much as it needed;
I had a hard time choosing my priorities and finishing what I started;
My mood was subtly deteriorating;
The little things in life seemed to have lost some of their magic;
I was not as emotionally involved in important relationships in my life;
I was more vulnerable to emotional upset and physical aches;
I seemed to need more rest but when I'd rest I would end up not feeling recharged.

Sounds familiar? What was going on? The answer kept escaping me. Until I made the first observation that held the key to this puzzle:

I would often decide that I was not going to look at my phone/email/social media...and then I would do it anyways.

Again and again.

It usually masked itself as something meaningful, like:

"I'm just doing it for work"
"I'm just staying in touch with my friends"
"I'm just learning about this interesting topic"
"I'm just making chores less boring"
"I'm just learning about what's going on in the world"

And often it was true that I was doing those things. However, when I started to have a more honest conversation with myself I could see that something didn't add up. The frequency, the intensity, the timing, the duration and the topics of my usage were telling a different story.

The uncomfortable truth was that:

I was not fully in control
I was often acting against my own commitment to not do it
At the end of doing it I didn't feel like I accomplished anything all that meaningful

Then the second piece of the puzzle clicked...

There was a relationship between my out-of-control usage and all those subtle changes in my quality of life. There was something tying together my life deteriorating in 10 seemingly disparate areas and that one particular out-of-control behavior. Having been a neuroscientist for over a decade, the answer came in a split second, as obvious as exhilarating:

DOPAMINE

Over the course of months and even years, I had disrupted my dopamine balance. Not with the severity that drugs or alcohol would. But in a much more insidious way, one phone scrolling, news reading and email checking at a time.

What was totally baffling is that I did it without realizing it. I wasn't getting drunk from alcohol, high from drugs or bankrupt from gambling. I was "just" doing stuff on my phone. How bad could that be?

But our dopamine system is a delicate miracle. It's incredibly sensitive. It takes little to throw it out of whack. And it immediately makes a difference when you bring it back to a more optimal level. Those seemingly benign out-of-control behaviors had more than enough firepower to totally destroy the level of mental clarity, drive and heart expansiveness that I wanted to have in my life.

Armed with my knowledge of the brain and know-how in emotion regulation, I was able to turn this around in just a few weeks. This is what my change felt like:

I felt more in the driver's seat of my life;
I felt more optimistic about my life and willing to take risks;
I felt a subtle undercurrent of awe running through the day;
I felt greater capacity to rest and like I needed shorter periods to feel re-energized;
I felt more desire to move and I found ways to exercise more regularly regardless of how much time I had available on that week;
I put my rich knowledge about what's good for me to use more frequently instead of letting it sit idle in my mind;
I was able to focus on important projects from start to finish with less detours, and less second-guessing myself - for example, I was able to create this offer from idea to copy written, website up and running and first participants registered in basically 48 hrs (while sleeping great, playing with my kids and exercising);
I felt more grateful for my family and took initiative to improve my parenting, taking action on things that "I knew I should do" but I wasn't doing;
I felt less resentful for technology and more grateful for what it enables me to do;
I felt more deliberate in my learning and less driven by an algorithm-driven fear of missing out;
I reached out to important friends more than I have in the past- which seemed counterintuitive given that I basically eliminated my casual phone usage;
I become less dupe and more able to see clearly my mind playing tricks on me, like when it's set on trying to convince me that "using it right now is just okay" at times where I know it's not going to feel good.

To be clear:

Not all of my problems or my flaws are suddenly gone. My life is not all unicorn farts and candy rainbows. I'm not a radically different person. Most of these benefits are subtle. But they matter to me, a lot, because of the work I do and how I want to live my life. They also compound on each other, overall creating a noticeably different experience of being in my life.
It's not a one-and-done. As long as I own a smart phone and work on a computer, I'll have to keep working on this. But as I continue to stay on the path, I notice this benefits slowly multiplying, little by little, likely as a result of my baseline dopamine levels continuing to heal after years of ineffective use. Sustaining this work is doable when you have a strategy and you know what to look for.

First of all...

What is dopamine?

Dopamine is a molecule released in the brain in response to pleasurable events. It plays a key role in triggering seeking behavior, giving us the feeling of "wanting" and mobilizing us for that purpose.

Evolutionary that makes sense. Imagine our ancestors, constantly trying to secure scarce resources like food, water and shelter. Evolution figured out a way to keep us in "seeking mode", represented by our baseline dopamine levels. When we stumbled on some goodies, dopamine neurons would hit us with a brief powerful shot, so that we would notice how valuable was our discovery. That burst would then quickly dissipate so that we would go back to baseline and continue to feel motivated to look for those scarce and vital resources. A delicate balance of dopamine, fine-tuned over hundreds of thousands of years, underlies this dance between feeling engaged, enjoying your goodie, and then feeling engaged again.

Zooming in a bit further, dopamine is considered a "neuromodulator" (as opposed to a classic "neurotransmitter") because it's used not only to pass information between two adjacent neurons, but it's also projected diffusely throughout the nervous system, altering how millions of other neurons in every corner of the brain do their job.

This is why dopamine is involved in so many functions. Subtle changes in dopamine levels have far-reaching implications in terms of your motivation, focus, attention, movement and mood. You can see how these are all faculties our ancestor needed to secure those vital and scarce resources.

Now, flashforward to our days...

How Our Modern Lifestyle

Disrupts the Dopamine Balance

The modern world poses a unique challenge to the delicate dopamine balance. Here is how the cycle goes:

Step 1: Potent Instant Gratification

Our smartphones, social media platforms, and endless streams of online content are designed to deliver quick dopamine hits. The carefully engineered potency, frequency and multi-layered nature of these stimuli result in your dopamine system being triggered to an extent it was never design for. After every hit, your system goes into a temporary low-dopamine state, from which it would need some time to recover. But it never gets that time. The unpleasant dip in dopamine that follows every hit - that subtle discomfort of "I want more" - compels us to search for more hits. Unfortunately for us, resources are no longer scarce. On the contrary, dopamine-triggering stimuli are available through our devices in infinite supply.

Step 2: Dopamine Desensitization

As your brain get flooded with dopamine from constant stimulation, it starts to adapt by reducing the number of dopamine receptors or becoming less sensitive to dopamine. This means you need more stimulation to achieve the same level of satisfaction, leading to compulsive behaviors like constantly checking, binge-watching and endless scrolling.

Step 3: Decreased Motivation and Focus

As your brain becomes desensitized to dopamine, everyday tasks that once brought satisfaction and fulfillment may no longer feel rewarding. Imperceptibly, life turns dull. There is a progressive loss of motivation, difficulty concentrating, and a growing sense of emptiness or dissatisfaction.

Step 4: Emotional Instability

You find yourself more prone to mood swings, anxiety, or even depression, as your brain struggles to regulate emotions, caught between cycles of too much and too little dopamine. Effective emotion skills become harder to deploy. Emotion regulation requires some degree of tolerance for distress, but the addicted brain has tilted its chemistry to the point of over-reacting to pain. You're cornered in a narrowing spiral of increasingly unavoidable discomfort...

and that throws you right back into Step 1, seeking more potent instant gratification, in a never-ending loop.

Can you see this loop at play in your life?

THEN LET'S BREAK IT 😈💥💪