The key ideas

Dopamine Detox: A Short Guide to Remove Distractions and Get Your Brain to Do Hard Things

Thibaut Meurisse, 2021

You sit down to do something important, and your hands open your email and your feed all on their own. Thibaut Meurisse believes the biggest and most overlooked cause of procrastination is overload from stimulation: next to all those stimuli, hard work feels boring. He suggests turning that noise down for a while and rearranging your surroundings and your morning so that starting on what matters gets easier.

Who it is for

For anyone who keeps putting off something important without really knowing why. And for everyone whose morning starts with the phone and ends with the feeling that the day slipped by.

Everything seems like a great idea. Everything except the very thing we should be doing.

One more cup of coffee

There is one task that could change a lot: say, a report your promotion depends on. In the morning you sit down to finally get to it, and first you open your email. Then the news feed and one more video, and then one more cup of coffee. The longer you put it off, the higher the invisible wall between you and the task grows.

Thibaut Meurisse, a French author of books on productivity, knows this scene from his own life. There are many reasons to put things off, but he sees one as the biggest and the most overlooked: overload from stimulation. The author has a special word for it: overstimulation. When the brain gets lots of easy, vivid impressions in the morning, hard work next to them feels bland.

The author calls his remedy a dopamine detox: removing strong stimuli for a while so the mind can return to a calm state. Next you will see how this trap works and how to get out of it step by step.

Dopamine promises, it doesn't deliver

Dopamine, as Meurisse explains it, is a neurotransmitter: a chemical messenger one nerve cell uses to tell another something. It makes you anticipate a reward, such as tasty food, and act to get it. This force helped our ancestors survive.

The main point the author insists on: dopamine is responsible for anticipating a reward, not for pleasure. Hence the familiar emptiness when the reward arrives and there is almost no joy. A red notification badge promises something interesting, you tap it, and a minute later your hand is already looking for the next one.

As Meurisse sees it, the people who make money from attention take advantage of this. The longer you stay in an app, the more they earn from ads. Email, investment stats and likes work in a similar way: each time you are waiting for a pleasant surprise.

This is the author's simplified picture, not a full description of how the brain works. But it helps you ask an honest question after an evening in your feed: which of the things you saw actually made your life better?

Read in Livria

About the author

Thibaut Meurisse is from France. He writes books on personal development and productivity and created the blog whatispersonaldevelopment.org. He writes in English and lived in Japan for almost ten years.

All books by this author: Thibaut Meurisse

Terms from the book

  • Dopamine
  • Overstimulation
  • Procrastination
  • Friction
  • King
  • Detox: Cleansing the body. In the book, a “dopamine detox” means a period when a person removes strong stimuli. It is the author's name, not a medical term, and Meurisse himself calls it inaccurate.
  • Neurotransmitter: A substance one nerve cell uses to pass a signal to another. Dopamine is one of them.
  • Stimulation: In the book, this is everything that excites and entertains: notifications, videos, the feed, sweets. The author talks about its “level”, which can be high or low.
  • Open system: The author's name for an app or activity that feeds you new stimuli without end. For example, email, social media, YouTube and the internet as a whole.
  • Closed system: In the author's terms, an activity that leaves almost no room for distractions. For example, a document, a spreadsheet or a presentation. It keeps you on one task.

All terms

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