Do You Need A Dopamine Fast? | Ep 17

Speaker A

00:00:00.560 - 00:23:44.420

This is episode 17 and I dig into the effects dopamine has on us and how I'm resetting it through media fast through December. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that. Hey. Hey. Welcome to the episode. I'm excited to dig in with you today. I think, I think this topic of dopamine fasting is quite appropriate right now.

I ended up, I'm taking a fast for the month of December from Facebook and thought that I'd see what would come of it. And I'm only 11 days in, but I gotta say, the realizations are pretty profound.

And it's not that they're earth shattering realizations, but I think just having space and seeing the behaviors that I was falling into. So obviously I've spoken earlier in previous episodes about 2020 being a year that drew me into Facebook because I didn't have an outlet in Hawaii.

I didn't have enough friends to hang out with. My closest friends all moved back to mainland and I found myself quite isolated and being an extreme extrovert. Quite isolated.

And even the tennis that I was playing got canceled. So I really didn't have any kind of outlet. And so Facebook became my channel because I've made some great connections on Facebook.

I've got friends that I've made on Facebook that I've never met in person. But we have a great friendship and I've done business with plenty of them. I would consider them friends.

I would have them over for dinner if we lived in the same town. So there's, there's real, real connections that can be made through social media.

But I found that I was venting a lot on Facebook and working out frustrations or ideas or questioning the narrative, questioning the insanity that's going on that doesn't make any sense to somebody like me, where there's so many holes in logic and so many double standards, so many things that don't make any sense.

Like Memorial Day, sitting on the beach in Hawaii for the first time in two and a half months because they had the beaches closed and wondering why is that more dangerous than shopping at Costco and the just idiocy of it. So Facebook became quite the outlet. And then obviously everybody was on Facebook because we all were stuck at home and we all were frustrated.

So it became this vortex to pull us in. And the amount of arguments that started and if you know me, you know I'm not interested in arguing I don't have to be right.

I don't have to prove that I'm right about something. I don't have to win you over.

But I'm up for discussions and I'm up for challenging assumptions and I'm up for questioning beliefs that aren't serving us. And all in the pursuit of more truth, more freedom, more abundance, more flow.

Those are the things that I find myself getting into over and over with close friends. But Facebook obviously is just an open platform. And I realized over the last week at a contact reach out to me and wonder where am I?

And it's awfully quiet without me posting on Facebook. And I didn't make a big public announcement of I'm going to be gone for 30 days and I might be back or anything like that.

I think those are all petty and childish and attempts for cries for attention or whatever when I see people post those. But he reached out to me on messenger and said, hey, it's awfully quiet. Where are you? And I said I was on a fast.

And I said, you know, I think the thing I realized about Facebook is it's a really cheap megaphone in that in my space, being a thought leader, being a consultant, having a book, writing about things that help others, being able to broadcast and share my ideas through a channel, whether it's email or YouTube videos or Facebook posts or being on some kind of media outlet, whether it's Fortune or Forbes or Fast Company or something like that, they're all some kind of megaphone platform out there, going from the old street corners where the megaphones were used in the huckster days or the carnival days. They're all a form of a megaphone.

And I realized that Facebook really is a cheap megaphone in that I've built up, I don't know, three or four thousand contacts on Facebook and I'm sure my reach is throttled severely. But. But I'm able to go on there and share my thoughts and have a few hundred people respond.

But the problem is that cheap megaphone also allows others with their megaphones to run right by and bark right back at me. And I've realized there's a lot of not just trolls.

I've gotten rid of most of the trolls out there that just want to call me names or attack me personally or make assumptions about who they think I am. There's no room for those people in my life. And thankfully the block button block function on Facebook works well.

But then there's this next level of pest, I guess irritant where they post or they respond with very passive aggressive questions or statements or challenges like, oh, you don't really believe that, do you? I mean, that kind of BS doesn't really feel fit for somebody as intelligent as you. And just again, very demeaning passive aggressive statements.

And I realized that even those and these are people I don't know from Adam, they've friended me, they've requested a connection with me for some reason, I don't know, but I went through a spell this year where I was getting 50 plus connection requests a day and I don't accept all of them.

I try to whittle out the ones that look like they're fake accounts or especially the hot girl fake accounts that I don't know why people I'm connected with keep friending them. I don't know what they're thinking is going to happen from it.

But anyway, I try to filter through and now if I don't have at least 30 or 50 mutual friends, then I'm just not going to connect unless they have some personal message or something that they've sent that makes them stand out.

So anyway, I've got these contacts that just turned into trolls and even they, even though I don't know them, even though they're not writing back anything intellectually stimulating, they're just barking at me through their megaphone. I realized that that was a drain that would cause some kind of negative emotional reaction inside me.

And that's what really pushed me over the edge, was the combination of those kind of responses and then finally blocking those people, even though from the outside they don't look like they're that negative and they're just questioning my assumptions and they're wanting me to get to truth. Like that could be the argument, I guess. But at the end of the day they're just a drain on my energy.

And then the other part was the volume of posts that would just make me irritable about the fraudulent election and that I 100% agree that it was fraudulent.

I 100% can prove the inconsistencies of the data and impossibilities of Biden winning, but the both sides of the argument of it's all it was the most secure election ever, that bullshit or the evidence after evidence after evidence being shot down in courts, all of it would just get me irritable. And I realized that there's nothing I can do about it.

And so I need to go back to my previous policy pre Covid around the news that I don't watch It, I don't pay attention to it. I don't give a shit about it. It does not matter to me.

To me it's all some form of fear porn or politiporn that gets you worked up and there's nothing you can do about it as a typical citizen. And I'm not going into politics never happening and have zero interest in stepping into those murky waters.

And so for me, getting back to ignoring it all and realizing if there's a bomb coming or if there's a war starting, somebody's going to tell me about it. And I gotta say, the silence has been fantastic.

I still keep up with some political outlets through YouTube and that'll get me to another layer of this in a second. So I'm not just tuning out.

I've still got friends sending me videos or articles through messenger or whatever, so I can read up on things that I'm interested about with this election, lawsuits and stuff, but without seeing it all day, every day in posts. My frustration, my irritability, let's call it, has gone way, way down.

And anyway, I think that it's been a really useful experiment and I'm only 11 days in and who knows what it's going to be like after 30 days, or 31 days since December is 31 days. But the reduction in noise is fantastic.

So one byproduct of it was I've watched a mountain of YouTube videos and my consumption of YouTube has gone up through the roof because I had to replace it scrolling on Facebook or commenting or writing these big long posts, replace it with something else. And like most addicts, you pick a lesser of two evils and so consuming YouTube videos that I'm searching for.

And so like I'm building a desk for my office out of a big walnut slab and I've got that finished. I. I've got the epoxy in it and I've got it sanded and stained and finished and sealed. But I've been trying to figure out what to do for legs for it.

And so sure enough, I was searching around on YouTube and I searched for DIY metal legs and I didn't really find anything.

But from watching enough of those videos, then sure enough, YouTube recommended a video and it was about a guy building a tabletop out of some 1 inch square tubing and it just looked fantastic. And so a buddy of mine, that's a welder got a welding rig, we brainstormed around it and I designed it.

And so we're going to build it over the weekend.

So it's much, much better content, much better use of my time to be watching a YouTube video than writing a big long post for Facebook or engaging with comments or just to be honest, scrolling through the feed. I have the feed blocker on my desktop, so I've never gotten consumed by that.

But sure enough, I'll be sitting, taking a break on my phone, and lo and behold, 20 minutes goes by and I've got nothing to show for it because I was scrolling through Facebook back in the day or prior to the fast. So watching YouTube last night, ironically enough, I came across an after school video. These guys do great doodle videos on really great topics.

And this one was on dopamine fasting. And I'd watched it before, but it never quite hit because I wasn't ready to take the steps to detox from this.

But it was great because I realized that YouTube videos were part of the dopamine hit the stimulation. And for those of you that don't know what dopamine is, it's a neurotransmitter in our brain that gives us a reward for finding new things.

And all of our modern technology is built around triggering that dopamine.

I just consider it like a big button right on our forehead that we just, every time we press that button, we get a shot of that neurotransmitter dopamine, that makes us feel good. So Afterschool talked about it in their doodle video.

That dopamine is what we feel when we take the first lick of an ice cream, but it's not as strong when we finish that ice cream and take our 20th lick or bite or whatever of an ice cream cone. And so it, it's like any, any other drug response that it wanes quickly.

And so those of us that are more susceptible to addictive behavior, I can include myself in that list. And we are searching for that hit of dopamine will then consume more and more and more stuff. And to get a marginal hit of dopamine.

And so email is that way, and I've cured myself of that years ago from needing to see what's next in my email. That it's kind of like email and the Facebook feed or Instagram feed or YouTube feed are all similar to pulling the arm on a slot machine.

You just don't know what's going to come. But it could be something great.

And that's the anticipation that your mind is looking at in your stimulus, stimulus cycle or stimulation cycle is looking for to get a hit and to feel Good. And to have something new and novel.

And us entrepreneurs tend to have ADD and ADD and entrepreneurial tendencies and visionary minds and big thinkers are quite susceptible to all of this. So I realized that, you know what, I'm just going to cut out YouTube now for the rest of the month.

And it's interesting because that leaves a lot of space. And this is a problem with addiction. I had really good friends in college that were in a rehab program when I met them.

And I learned a lot about drug addiction and substance abuse through college and saw it firsthand with, with guys living in this live in facility. And the, the biggest problem with addiction behavior is not stopping it. It's filling the void that it leaves behind when you stop it.

And so that's why a lot of times at AA you'll see people smoking like a chimney and they go through packs a day.

And it's because smoking is less detrimental than doing heroin or meth or whatever other substance is that that you cannot stop or that is causing detrimental behavior or detrimental outcomes in your life. And so for me, the easy replacement is sports. And so I can go and play tennis or disc golf or ping pong or go ride my motorcycle or whatever.

And so I'm fortunate that a, that Facebook and YouTube and being on my phone is not such a compulsion that I'm in pain over stopping it, thankfully. But also that I've got lots and lots of friends and activities that I can go replace it with.

And so the fun one this morning I had a professor from college, my favorite professor of all time, Richard Rawls. He was a history professor, ancient history professor. And we reconnected here in the last few years and got into discussions around jazz.

And I enjoy eccentric jazz. I'm not a smooth jazz fan, like no Kenny G or any of that stuff for me.

But I found Miles Davis's old Bitches Brew album in the last year and started messaging Rawls about it. And he started sending me articles that he found on Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck.

And he actually found a really great article in the Atlantic from the mid-90s. And we were, he just wrote me a letter and a handwritten letter on lined paper and it was great.

We, I read that article and got back to him and I just wrote a two page letter back to him. And so guess what? When you're not scrolling on Facebook, you have time to write, write a letter, handwritten letter to a friend.

And I gotta say, it's pretty fulfilling. And I know I sound like a hipster thinking about Writing letter, handwritten letters and being a pen pal with somebody.

But there is something of appeal to the manual side of the hipster movement or the millennials that are going against the digital world. And I'm really tempted to switch out my Apple 6S smartphone for a light phone. My friend Mark McSherley has one and it is a stripped down smartphone.

It has essentially like a Kindle paper white screen. So there's no graphics or anything. It's just text and it can handle email and text and phone calls. And I think that's it.

I'm not sure what else it can do. I don't really care because that's all I need a phone to do. And maybe just leave my iPhone for when I need Google Maps and taking pictures.

So it'll be interesting as I get to the end of this detox dopamine fast to see what other things I can cut out that allow me to be more connected, more present and do what Cal Newport, the professor from I think he's at mit, says of getting back to deep work. And on that front I also grabbed prior to starting the dopamine fast a few days prior. Cal Newport's new time blocking, the time block planner.

And it's interesting going through it because I'm not a structure guy by nature. I'm just not. I tend to focus on the moment and whatever's in front of me and, and flow from one thing to the next is my goal.

But by having his time block planner and it's way more structured than I need. But by just focusing on can I get one one to two hour time block a day to carve out to work on something proactive, man, it's been fantastic.

So if you haven't gotten it, I'd recommend it, you can pick it up on Amazon. I think it's 15 bucks or something. And it's got a little preamble, like 10, 15 pages explaining how to use it, why to use it.

And I mean I'm only, I mean I'm day 11 now of the month, but I'm only on day six of week one in the doc, in the calendar, the planner, because I'm not using it daily. I've kind of stack up some things in the columns from day to day.

But regardless, having the time block, having the intention of working on something meaningful in an uninterrupted block of time and prioritizing my stuff because I build stuff for clients all day long, getting, getting shit done is not a hard thing for me, is not a behavior that I need to work on. But getting my own shit done is really critical because I tend to put that last. And so it's been really nice.

I felt my productivity go up and it's also coincided with not having the distraction or Facebook of arguments or discussions or people coming at me and saying this or that, that I got wrong or that I'm a horrible person or whatever that is triggering people. And I'm just enjoying not having that noise in my life.

But I'm thinking that I will end up creating like a private Facebook account and invite people to it that I know and trust and that we can just to kind of use it as a think tank, share ideas and wonderings of well, if this is coming, what should we do about that? Or have you heard about this?

I think this is important for us to kind of keep a finger on the pulse of or whatever that change it from the venting and frustration side of things to more of maybe it's a community around my private profile or something because I've got such disparate contacts and so many people in so many circles that I don't think creating like a group or a membership site or whatever, I think those all kind of devolve, but leading the discussion around what's on my mind and the stuff that my friends bring up to me that we have meaningful conversations around. I think. I think there's used to that and I think there's used to spreading those conversations.

But my personal profile, my current profile is too far gone to try to redeem it for something like that. So it'll be interesting. Shoot me a note, send me an email, Facebook messenger me, whatever. If you want to chat about any of this.

I'm obviously still available in the Facebook group for Bottleneck Breakthrough Method, but I'm not. I don't have the app installed and I'm not checking it daily. So I guess I'm missing out on conversation threads if they're going on there.

But yeah, I'd be very curious what your thoughts are on some kind of dopamine fast or what you found that's worked for you to keep it corralled. And I know like my wife, she just doesn't care about any of it and isn't on it very much at all.

So I know it doesn't grab people or hook people the same all the time. Just like various drugs and substances don't cause everybody to spiral into a massive addiction.

I know plenty of people that have used drugs recreationally and have fun with them or therapeutically and can take them or leave them and don't have any problem with that.

So anyway, I'd be very curious and I hope this helps stimulate some thoughts for you if you're finding Facebook or Instagram or any kind of social outlet not fulfilling and not making you feel better. Because it's all a toll and it all weighs on us and it builds up over time and definitely got me to a point of irritation that I just didn't need.

So I'm happy to be over it for now and see what how it evolves. But I hope that's useful for you and hope you have a wonderful Christmas. If I don't get something out before then. And have a great day.

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