Is Making Yourself Sad The Ultimate Happiness Hack?

Dopamine fasts are being touted as the cure to bad habits and low mood...But does the science really stack up? Morgan Fargo puts it to the test.

- Moran Fargo

Buzz. Snooze. Repeat. Grab my phone, then fall into a scroll-hole. Each morning begins the same way. As soon as I manage to pry my eyes open, I receive a barrage of emails, Instagram, news, and WhatsApp messages—all before I have even cleaned my teeth. When the screen time reminder pops up, telling me I’ve already used 25 of my allocated 30 minutes for social media, I just press ignore.

Instead of filling up my happiness meter, the endless and incessant scrolling (often done without conscious intent) makes me feel icky and gross...and it happens regularly throughout the rest of my day, too. But could the latest wellness buzz phrase dopamine fasting—which is the idea of eschewing quick happiness hits, found in the likes of notifications, Nutella, and Netflix, in favour of boredom—be the cure needed to ditch my bad habits? Is forcing yourself into mind-numbing nothingness really the key to lowering anxiety, improving your sleep, and experiencing more joy?

Coined in 2019 by the Californian psychiatrist Cameron Sepah, a dopamine fast is the practice of denying yourself gratification. So no music, sugar, sex, and social media, for example, for a set period of time. It is based on the idea that abstaining from external stimuli will reset your happiness baseline, which allows you to ‘feel more’ when the fast has finished. It taps into the theory that in our full-on, tech-orientated world, we have lost the ability to be bored— and it is a skill we ought to be cultivating for our inner peace.