How long does a dopamine detox take?
Quiet Wall ·
Seven days, thirty days, a weekend: how long a dopamine detox is supposed to take, where those numbers come from, and why ten minutes counts.
The short answer
As long as you decide it takes. A dopamine detox is not a medical treatment, so there is no prescribed length. The numbers people quote, seven days or thirty, come from challenges and books rather than from anything measured.
What matters more than the length is that you decide it in advance and finish it.
Where the numbers come from
The idea began as dopamine fasting, in a 2019 post by Cameron Sepah, a psychologist and UCSF professor. He did not give it one length. He suggested a schedule:
- one to four hours at the end of each day
- one weekend day
- one weekend a quarter
- one week a year
He called these suggested guidelines, not strict rules.
The longer numbers came later. Thirty days is the length of the plans in Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism and Catherine Price's How to Break Up with Your Phone. Thibaut Meurisse's Dopamine Detox describes cutting stimulation within 48 hours. Seven days is mostly the length of a challenge, because a week is easy to say.
A weekend, a week or a month
- a day or a weekend is long enough to notice how often you reach for the phone, and short enough to start this week
- a week gets past the first few days, when the reach is most automatic
- a month is a bigger change and a bigger ask; it suits someone who wants to rethink which apps to keep at all
None of these is the right one. The right one is the one you finish.
Ten minutes counts
The first line of the original schedule was the daily one, and it is the part most people skip in favour of a dramatic weekend. A short stretch every day, without the phone and without anything to replace it, is closer to the idea than a heroic month you abandon in the second week.
Ten minutes is enough to start: long enough for the urge to reach for something to arrive and pass, short enough to do on a Tuesday.
Rules for ten minutes
- put the phone in another room, or face down across this one
- no music, no podcast, no book
- sit somewhere with little to look at
- set a timer, so the end is not your decision
Quiet Wall is a timer for those ten minutes: a reminder arrives, you tap once, and you look at a blank wall until a sound brings you back. There is more on what a dopamine detox is for, and what it is not, on dopamine detox.
How long should a dopamine detox be?
There is no prescribed length. Its originator suggested one to four hours a day, a weekend day, a weekend a quarter and a week a year. Ten minutes a day is a good start.
Read on
- Dopamine detox books, and what each one argues — The books people find when they look up a dopamine detox: who wrote them, when, and what each one actually argues, in a sentence or two.
- How to do nothing, on purpose — Doing nothing is harder than it sounds. What it means to do it on purpose, where the idea comes from, and how to start with ten minutes and a wall.