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The Ultimate Guide to Dopamine Detox
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The Ultimate Guide to Dopamine Detox

Crush Your Vices. Block Distractions. Become your Most Focused Self

Noah Ryan's avatar
Noah Ryan
Oct 09, 2024
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The Ultimate Guide to Dopamine Detox
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The Ultimate Dopamine Detox Protocol

Modern life has robbed us of our most valuable asset: attention. Energy that should be spent exploring unique interests and building a strong sense of self is now wasted on TikTok and Fortnite. We're missing the very thing that used to drive us to gain new skills, read books, and become better: boredom.

Our brains, wired for a much less stimulating environment, are overwhelmed. We're constantly chasing dopamine hits from social media likes and video game XP.

Here's the kicker: these modern attention traps are facades. Video games, porn, and social media give the illusion of adventure, relationships, and networking. But none meet our actual human needs.

To reach your potential, you need to retrain your brain. Create an environment that makes bad habits hard and good ones frictionless. Replace fake dopamine hits with fulfilling activities that bring you closer to your ideal self.

It'll be tough, but understanding the science of habit formation will give you the tools to make this change stick. Break through the "attention threshold" of wiring new habits, and you'll be living life on easy mode.

Ted Kaczynski - Wikipedia
The Attention Economy has been a disaster for the human race

This is the Dopamine Detox Protocol. Your roadmap to resetting your brain, forming lasting good habits, and finally getting your shit together.


Where Did it All Go Wrong?

Evolutionary Mismatch

Our brains are wired for a drastically different environment. 10,000 years ago, anything stimulating was worth attention:

  • Sex: incentivizes reproduction

  • Food: necessary for survival

  • Human interaction: increases survival chances

  • Violence: keeps you alive

Our brain hardwired stimulation with survival. In ancient times, these were scarce and had utility. Now we live in abundance, and our drive for stimulus is unchecked.

Image
Your addiction to stimulation is what kept you alive in caveman times

Modern Traps

Modern inventions trick these primal pathways:

  • Porn is more stimulating than sex

  • Junk food trumps meat and berries

  • Instagram likes outweigh real connections

Your brain thinks it's meeting base needs, but it's not. You're getting stimulus input without natural output, causing downregulation. You chase the dragon, needing more stimulus to feel normal.

The Business of Addiction

This is by design. Businesses make products addictive, leaving you always wanting more. Marketers have figured out what makes our brains tick and abused it to no end.

My Wake-Up Call

I realized this while building Threat Intelligence software. For two years, I studied behavioral design to make our product addicting. Color psychology, gamification, rewards – I learned what hooked humans.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal – Rebel Playbook  Supply Store (UK)
The book that changed everything

Then I recognized it happening to me. Disgusted, I deleted social media, ditched my Xbox, and removed attention-robbing distractions.

It was difficult but transformative. Time once spent on games and scrolling became reading time. I replaced every bad habit with a good one.

Eventually, a Khan Academy course gave me the same stimulation as TikTok. But it felt good after, too. Modern traps make you think you're accomplishing something, but it's all facade – enough to keep you from pursuing real goals, not enough to meet actual needs.

This protocol will help you remove bad habits and build good ones. Actions that unlock your potential. You'll enjoy hard work, and your life will flourish.


The Science of Habit Formation

How Habits Form

Our brains constantly save energy by automating frequent behaviors. This efficiency can work for or against you.

Habits become hardwired when migrating from the prefrontal cortex (decision-making, willpower) to the basal ganglia (routine behaviors, reward processing). The prefrontal cortex requires lots of energy, which is why willpower alone fails.

C-REM: Improve Your Gait And Your Brain - ABC30 Fresno

The Role of Willpower

Migrating habits takes about 66 days on average, but you can speed this up. Willpower is only needed when forming new habits or breaking old ones. It's tough at first, but each conscious effort nudges the action closer to becoming hardwired.

Eventually, your brain adapts. By successfully using willpower, you teach your brain that it works, gaining confidence in your ability to change.

This understanding enabled my total behavior change – from a slave to my habits and loaded up on SSRIs to a decently dialed startup operator.


The Dopamine Detox Protocol

4 steps for total behavior change. Thats all it takes.

Step 1: Identity Change

Behavior change requires identity change. Create a new identity and meditate on it. The distractible, stimulant-dependent version is your old self. The new you doesn't tolerate lesser behavior.

Use present tense: "I don't use social media" instead of "I will use less."

Create your ideal routine and to-do/not-to-do lists.

Step 2: The Two-Day Reset

Your brain has acclimated to supraphysiological levels of stimulus. Just like how it acclimates to hyper-savory foods, 12 mg nicotine pouches, and 3 cups of coffee before noon.

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