What would happen if I took away your phone, cut-off your internet, and took away your TV?

Would you be angry?

Would you start to shake if you couldn’t text, binge or download?

Perhaps it’s time you tried dopamine fasting.

But what the heck is that you ask? Well come with me, let’s get virtual! 

First up: Dopamine. It’s a neurotransmitter that's a bit like a messenger in your brain. It encourages you to do things that give you rewards. It’s sort of like anticipation. 

MORE VIRTUALLY RICK:

So imagine a giant, delicious piece of cake. The very thought of it means our brain has a clue a reward is about to happen so we get a zap of dopamine because we know it’s yummy. We’re anticipating eating it. And then, as we put it in our mouth, another zap.

Weirdly the same thing happens when we get a ton of likes on social media. And it’s also the same with addictive drugs.

The downside is that with more and more hits our brain actually changes, reducing the receptors that respond to dopamine over time. Which explains why when people are addicted to something, they need more and more of it just to get the same amount of zaps. 

Most of us are addicted to our phones or exciting new technology. Unboxing it is exciting isn’t it? The average adult American spends 4.5 hours on the internet a day, plus the exciting pings and dings on our phone: 'Ooh who’s messaging us? Someone famous? Our lover? A cat picture?'

Plus the fact that giant corporations are all begging us to binge them. Even Netflix’s CEO has said that their single biggest competition is sleep. They’re actively making products that target our dopamine delivery system.

So the latest trendy-trend from those oh-so-cool-NorCal-Silicon-types is to fast from all this zapping.

The idea is that over-doing the dopamine reduces our enjoyment of more basic things like taking a walk in nature or even enjoying a simple meal. So dopamine fasting aims to replace that by spending a day or so reducing our connection and interaction with all the electronic things or behaviors we have that over-excite us.

It’s essentially a way to cut out our cravings and addictions and restore our enjoyment of the simple life by switching off our phones for a bit. However, scientists agree you can’t basically cut yourself off from dopamine because that would probably be fatal and actually impossible. Just being proud of fasting for a day would release dopamine anyway as a reward — so it’s a bit of a moot point I suppose. 

In a nutshell, dopamine fasting is more like something they’ve been using in cognitive behavioral therapy for years called, “stimulus control” or the even older Vipassana meditation practice — just with a new name.

And the guys prescribing it aren’t saying you have to cut back on everything. It’s merely more about a new way of being mindful and learning to reign in your love-affair with all things digital or over-stimulating because let’s face it, how many sunsets and sunrises have you missed because you were watching a TV show, checking your Facebook or posting on Instagram?

Not so 'dope' now, is it?