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

Dopamine Detox : A Short Guide to Remove Distractions and Get Your Brain to Do Hard Things by Thibaut Meurisse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

To be honest, the reason I picked up this book, was because it was short, and was free on amazon. After reading the first quarter or so however, I liked the subject matter. In how it was able to put on page, the exact sort of issues a serial procrastinator such as myself runs into, whenever trying to accomplish any task without distractions.

Some of the things mentioned in the book, describes me to T, as in to a terrifying degree.

There was however a small section in the middle, where I began to suspect whether I was reading a thinly veiled promotional pamphlet for amazon's perfectly curated collections and innovate business model. Thankfully that passed.

As you'd expect from the book of this length, the action points and observations are simple, and to the point. It presents a hypothesis (a call it as such, as I've yet to corroborate the science and psychological theories presented in the book), as to why, in the modern world, we are prone to distraction. Or perhaps it's better to say, how we're Driven to Distraction, eh, eh? Nah, that doesn't make any sense.

Getting back, the book describes how our brains crave instant gratification, and the easier avenue to gaining that dopamine high, is via the internet and social media, as well as other stimulating but fruitless activities.

This is the running theme; our mind wants to keep putting us in a state of high stimulation, creating dopamine surges. But unfortunately, productive work, which is often difficult in nature, is one which is low in stimulation, and such, the mind would try not to engage in it, unless you rein it in.

Hard to do that, when there is that next juicy update on Facebook, or a new inane worthless yet gratifying short on tik tok and shit. Which often ends up consuming a lot of mental energy and more importantly, time.

I can personally attest to that last part. Youtube shorts are the bane of my existence. Oftentimes, I start watching them, and before you know it, 5 hours have passed with me having my face glued to the screen without break; followed by a killer headache, depression, guilt and steadily lowering self-worth, which forms further barriers to getting back on track. (Unfortunately for us peons, the overlords at Android and other smartphones have decided in their infinite wisdom, to make youtube an inbuilt app, which honestly sucks. I can give the boot to social media apps but have to constantly combat the temptation of this turd on my phone. Sometimes corporate greed makes me sick and nauseous)

The methods prescribed in the book, they're hardly novel. But they're arranged and presented in a way, allowing you to design a system, where in you can train yourself to stay away from distractions, deal with procrastination, then sit down and get cracking with your next project which is to write a book for 7 years now. Gosh darn it man, time goes at a normal pace, but it accumulates regret like a pain in the ass.

I would recommend it to serial procrastinators such as me, who regularly trawl the internet searching for articles like 'How to beat Procrastination', 'How not to waste time', 'How to make your day productive', or 'How to curb your smartphone addiction'. People, who have a sack full of knowledge of what to do but haven't yet gotten around to actually implementing it.

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