Greetings kambo warrior. I've spoken before about fasting and the keto diet. In today's video I want to talk about another, 'chemical' kind of fasting - dopamine fasting and this is probably something you've never heard of so I'll explain it to you. In a nutshell dopamine is the reward chemical in our brain so anytime we do anything stimulating or something that makes us feel good generally there's a release of dopamine and this makes us feel rewarded but it also reinforces that activity to make us want to do it again and this is where addiction comes from.
Essentially addiction is an addiction to dopamine not the substance or activity itself so with a dopamine fast what you do is for a minimum of 24 hours you abstain from any stimulation, so that means no electronics of any kind, so no phone, no laptop, no food, no conversations with people, no music, no reading. Essentially you do nothing for 24 hours. The only things you're allowed to do are meditating, writing, going for walks, being in nature, drinking water but essentially you're gonna have a really really boring day or week or however long you decide to do it where you don't have any stimulation whatsoever.
Now why would you want to do this, it sounds horrible but when you starve your brain of dopamine what you're doing is you're resensitizing your dopamine system. This follows on from the previous video I made where I talked about how we don't feel because we use substances and electronics to numb our feelings and when we do that it messes up our dopamine system so if you're scrolling on your phone all the time and you're on your laptop all the time what you're doing is you're creating an artificially high level of dopamine based on the use of these electronics and then every day life will lose its sheen and you won’t be motivated to do basic tasks, things like going for a walk, and just “being” because they're not giving you enough of a hit.
When we do a dopamine fast what we're doing is we're resensitizing our dopamine system. What should happen is you’ll become more motivated to do basic tasks and this can permeate through all aspects of your life. It's something I found out about recently, I watched a video on it and I will put a link to that video in the description below this video but essentially what you're doing is you're starving your brain of dopamine.
I'm going to try and do a 24-hour one so either next week or the week after, I haven't decided what day but I'm going do it, but from the moment I wake up in the morning I don't turn my phone on and don't go on the computer, I basically do nothing. I will sit and meditate and go for walks, I will write if anything comes up and we'll see what happens and then I will report back in another video and explain what happened.
When we do a dopamine fast it might bring up some emotions or certain things because when we're using electronics, having food, using substances and doing different activities what it does is it pushes feelings down and when you take all of that stimulation away a lot of feelings can come up.
A couple of years ago I did something called a “Vipassana” which is a Buddhist meditation retreat and that's where you go for 10 days of silent meditation. Now on that retreat there is food so you're not fasting but it's 10 days of silent meditation and there's no stimulation. There's literally nothing to do, so I have done something like this before, not exactly the same but I've done something similar but it was a couple of years ago and I really feel like I need it so I'm gonna do a 24 hour dopamine fast in the next week or two and then I will make a video about it and report back to you my findings and if it's good then it's something I might work in regularly into my schedule, maybe once a month once once every six weeks, something like that.
Jon
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