Will Dopamine Detox Boost Digital Marketers’ Creativity? Here’s What the Selzy Team Discovered

What is dopamine detox?

Dopamine detox, or dopamine fasting, is the practice of identifying the impulsive behaviors that bring the feeling of instant gratification, and quitting them for a fixed period of time — usually it’s from a few days up to a week. The technique was suggested by cognitive behavioral therapist Cameron Sepah as a method to control addictions. He proposes six groups of the said addictions:

• Emotional eating
• Internet and gaming
• Gambling and shopping
• Porn and masturbation
• Thrill or novelty-seeking behaviors
• Recreational drug use

However, the term is misleading. “Detox” implies that you’re flushing something out of your body. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is produced by the brain no matter what — you can’t really detox from it. The name may be one of the reasons why many people thought of it as asceticism. A BBC reporter misinterpreted it as literal fasting and didn’t even eat for 24 hours. A journalist from The NY Times thought of it as total sensory deprivation. And this article from British GQ compares dopamine fasting with “hunger cure” and questions the validity of the practice, calling it a “Silicon Valley Fad”.

Thanks to this representation in the media, some Reddit users took the practice to the extreme too. For example, this r/DopamineDetoxing member asks if an intellectual game that requires niche skills and strategic thinking is “too fun”:

Let’s get one thing straight. Dopamine detox is not:

• Sensory deprivation
• Starvation
• Robbing yourself of all the good things in life

If anything, dopamine detox is far less romantic than a Buddhist monk routine — it’s simply quitting the behaviors that don’t benefit you in the long run. But will you become a superhuman if you throw away your smartphone? Let’s explore the matter.

Smartphones vs. executive functioning

Executive function is a set of mental skills involved in decision-making, planning, accomplishing goals, and self-control. Some mental disorders like depression, borderline personality disorder, and bipolar disorder may worsen one or more of these skills. Major executive functioning issues are one of the main symptoms of ADHD and may come together with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). What does it have to do with smartphones?

There’s not a lot of research digging into the correlation between excessive social media use and poor executive functioning. This 2023 study showed a significant association between social media/gaming addiction, executive dysfunction, and emotional dysregulation. Another fresh study explored the connection between smartphone addiction and executive dysfunction in the context of Covid-19 and proposed the following relationship model. According to it, the root of all evils is anxiety. It worsens attention and strengthens the executive dysfunction — and all these three factors fuel smartphone addiction. Here’s a visualization:

This study looks particularly exciting to me. My social media and internet addiction got really bad specifically in 2020, during the quarantine — and I’m happy to learn I’m not alone in the struggle! If anything, I suggested the dopamine detox project for the blog because I wanted to find ways to manage it. However, neither this paper nor my case explain if smartphone use worsens executive functioning.

Luckily, there’s more. One study actually showed that phone addiction worsens behavioral self-control. Another study focused on academic procrastination suggested a complex relationship where smartphone addiction directly affects several factors, including procrastination.

So, the problem is more nuanced than “TikTok bad”. However, excessive smartphone use, even if we include a bunch of other factors in the picture, is not good for your ability to meet deadlines and accomplish your goals. That’s why we’re checking out what might happen if you quit.

We could be heroes, just for one week

Firstly, we have to warn you that we’re by no means scientists and we don’t pretend to be. You can’t extrapolate our outcomes on yourself or other people — we’re only sharing our experiences for funsies. However, it still may be useful for your possible reconsideration of daily routines.  And, if you’re curious about dopamine fasting, it may encourage you to try it yourself. Anyway, let’s get to know our heroes!

Four Selzy team members in different positions related to marketing agreed to go on dopamine detox for a full week, including the weekend:

Two team members described themselves as people with no prior executive dysfunction issues, two other participants reported having trouble with controlling their internet use. They all have different reasons to take part in our experiment — most of them can be boiled down to improving mental health and productivity.

The origin stories

All heroes’ journeys start somewhere. That’s why before the detox week we did an extensive interview of our participants’ current situation — what behaviors they’re struggling with and how much it interferes with their work and personal lives. Here’s what they have to say on the matter:

Despite different levels of executive functioning issues, all of our participants have their own “dopamine needles”, with reading the news being the most popular. Other answers included scrolling social media feeds, watching too many short videos, getting distracted by push notifications, and so on.

The end goals were also quite similar across all our participants. The reports included more mindful social media and internet use, better focus on work and improving work-life balance, and consuming less information during free time.

XP points: before

Qualitative data is not enough to check out the effects of dopamine detox. So, aside from a long list of questions, we asked our participants to rate their average productivity, creativity, and mood from 1 to 10, where 1 is awful and 10 is excellent. Here’s our starting point:

The rules

As we mentioned, dopamine detox doesn’t mean getting rid of all the fun things in your life. The rules of our experiment are focused on social media and content consumption — here’s the list of behaviors to quit:

• Scrolling short videos — this includes Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts, and TikTok
• Social media — no reading, no posting anywhere, unless you need it for work
• Reading news from any sources (unless you need it for work) — no doomscrolling!
• Reading infotainment like Buzzfeed and reading articles online in general unless you need it for work
• Watching TV shows and long-form Youtube videos unless you need it for work
• Listening to familiar music — for example, you can’t listen to the songs you know, love, and play on repeat, but you can listen to a new album each day
• Listening to podcasts
• Consuming any type of erotic content and engaging in *interesting* activities

The rules also included quitting alcohol for a week and a list of optional behaviors our test subjects can quit if they considered them problematic:

• Drinking caffeine
• Consuming added sugar in foods and drinks
• Texting, unless for work
• Using a smartphone, unless for calls
• Ordering takeout and eating junk food
• …and whatever else tickles your dopamine receptors in an unhealthy way

And here’s what we can do instead:

• Spend more time outdoors
• Talk to and spend time with your friends and loved ones, online or offline
• Read books and watch movies from your backlog
• Learn something, work-related or not
• Engage in your hobbies
• Sleep
• Try cooking with a new recipe
• Finally wash that pile of dishes in the sink

The preparation

Quitting several problematic behaviors at once requires discipline, dedication, and maybe some external help. That’s why we asked our participants to tell us about how they would prepare for the experiment and make sure they don’t relapse.

Answers included using blockers, having the thought of the experiment in the back of the head, seeking support from the social circle, establishing new routines, and even putting the phone away in the drawer. This one is our favorite though 🙂

The journey

We instructed all our test subjects to log their experiences in the standardized diary form that consisted of rating productivity, creativity, and mood on a scale from 1 to 10, and four additional questions each day. Here’s what it looks like:

Not everyone is used to journaling as a practice and a little bit of structure wouldn’t hurt — that’s why we made this questionnaire instead of forcing our participants to just do freewriting sessions each day. However, that wasn’t enough. One team member still forgot to log his daily experiences, so further we’ll include abstracts from the extensive post-experiment testimonial. 

Now, let’s find out how it went for our participants.

The good

Most team members noticed positive effects on their workday routines since Day 1, such as:

• Starting and ending the work day earlier
• Distracting less and doing more within the same time period
• Feeling more energized than usual
• Finishing postponed tasks and resolving issues not related to work
• Spending more time outdoors and being more physically active

Personally I was curious if I would start walking more steps a day during the experiment. I compared my Huawei Health stats for the detox week and the week before it started, and the difference was shocking.

Some participants also noticed positive changes in their content consumption habits. Two of them have a habit of constantly revisiting comfort content instead of getting acquainted with something new. It’s not a good pattern because it prevents expanding knowledge and tastes. During the detox week, both team members started exploring new media:

The experiment also gave our team members some food for thought about their daily digital habits and the reasons behind them:

Our team also noticed a boost in creative thinking — both at work and outside it:

Finally, one particularly interesting effect I noticed was being more attentive to how I feel and what I need right now to feel better. I guess, it can be attributed to being less dissociated than usual.

The bad

Drastically changing your routines for a week is by itself quite a task — but we didn’t expect that dopamine detox has its drawbacks, with one of which being lower stress tolerance.

Personally I was angry and frustrated most of the time, and I reached the breaking point on Thursday:

There was more than one reason why I felt that way. That week was a lot both at work and outside it, and being robbed of a coping strategy didn’t make the situation better. But my biggest mistake was not coming up with alternatives to scrolling beforehand — what to do during breaks, after work, and so on. I should’ve exchanged some knowledge with my team members:

The struggles

Since social media use counts as a behavioral addiction, we expected some kind of dopamine withdrawal and the struggles coming along. Here’s what our team had to say on the matter:

Keeping up with the detox routine on a weekend was a challenge on its own too.

The outcomes

As you can see by the answers above, no one went through this completely unchanged — but what about the numbers?

XP points: after

During the post-experiment assessment, we faced a couple of issues. We mentioned that one person didn’t write a log journal. Another team member did but he had trouble rating creativity, so he put question marks in this field across the entire journal. That’s why we can’t show you the full picture. However, the numbers we got are still pretty interesting. Here’s the spreadsheet with our participants’ average productivity, creativity, and mood, and how it’s different from the pre-experiment ratings.

We can’t jump to conclusions since the data is a little murky and we don’t have a large enough sample. However, it looks like a week of strictly limited internet use will not make you the most productive, creative, and cheerful digital marketer in the world.

Most unhealthy habits didn’t appear out of thin air. Maybe you started overusing social media to cope with something, or you need external stimulation for passive work — for example, you scroll videos while thinking of a problem and figuring out its solution in “the background mode”. That’s why maybe quitting all these habits cold turkey is not the one-size-fits-all solution.

Will we do it again?

Should you go on dopamine detox then? We don’t know you, so we have no idea. If you feel like it may benefit you right now or in the long run, go for it. And if you want to make the most out of the practice, here’s some advice based on our experience:

• Personalize your approach. Instead of taking pre-made lists of rules from the internet or listening to maximalists on Reddit, think of your sources of quick dopamine that count as unhealthy habits. 
• Don’t rely on willpower. If you have a problem with scrolling TikTok, you already have a problem with self-control. Use blocking apps and extensions like Stayfocusd and Freedom.to to ensure you don’t relapse. Also, by doing this, you put less pressure on yourself and end up less stressed during the detox time.
• Think of a replacement. Don’t repeat my mistake! If you want your dopamine detox sustainable and useful instead of it being one more stress factor, come up with what you will do instead of scrolling.