[VortexDream]

No, you're right. The whole article misses the forest for the trees. The term "dopamine fast" doesn't literally mean fasting from dopamine. It's about fasting from easy "dopamine hits" from media designed to exploit the way our rewards circuitry works.

[bildung]

I think this criticism is itself missing the forest for the trees. The idea behind dopamine fasting is, (possibly unfairly) reduced to the minimum, that doing less of a harmful behaviour for a while will cure us of our problematic behaviour. In other words, we actually are addicted to dopamine itself, instead of having built up maladaptive cognitions. This is what (I think) the article tried to refute.

Even with the little we know about the inner workings of our brains, this doesn't appear to be true: We have to actively build up alternative behaviour and critically inspect/change the cognitions that actually promote the problematic behaviour.

So if a person has unhealthy bevaviour patterns regarding social media consumption, just doing less of that without also actively changing the cognitions that lead to the unhealthy behaviour in the first place won't help much. We do these things because we have a mostly subconsious theory that doing this is good for us. If this actually isn't, than that assumption has to be challenged, and healthy alternatives have to be built up. Just not doing the thing for a while won't replace the assumption, unless one is abstinent for a really long time (think years).

[coldtea]

>So if a person has unhealthy bevaviour patterns regarding social media consumption, just doing less of that without also actively changing the cognitions that lead to the unhealthy behaviour in the first place won't help much. We do these things because we have a mostly subconsious theory that doing this is good for us. If this actually isn't, than that assumption has to be challenged, and healthy alternatives have to be built up. Just not doing the thing for a while won't replace the assumption.

It's not about replacing the assumption. I don't even think there's much of an assumption (that it's good for us), it's rather the opposite: people actually hate themselves for spending so much time on social media, youtube, etc.

So, it's more about kicking a bad habit, than about trying to change some non-existing assumption that it's a good thing.

[darkerside]

Seems almost purposefully dense in that way. I'd consider flagging it except, ironically, the headline itself was more informative to me than the article.

[patmorgan23]

Exactly, it's like the author has never hear of the hedonic treadmill. Something I a 24 year old who has taken exactly one psychology course knows about.

[bildung]

This has nothing to do with the hedonic treadmill. The treadmill model describes changed on much larger timeframes and of much larger impact, i.e. how your model of the world changes if you lose both legs, or become a parent, or become rich etc.

Dopamine fasting is a mechanistic model trying to explain unhealthy behaviour patterns that can occur dozens of times a day.