Dopamine Detox - How I Reset my Brain in 7 Days | Anuj Pachhel

have you ever wondered what would happen if everything that you loved doing was taken away from you in a single second yes me neither because that's what normal people are supposed to do but guess what I watched a video from Nicholas Christie about a year ago where he talked about something called as a dope for me in detox but he stopped doing everything that he enjoyed and gave his brain a rest for one week and this is a story of how my dopamine detox went what is this dopamine molecule that we are very very crazy

about dopamine is something which is responsible for you getting gratification gratification is something which is called as feeling good whenever you want something entertaining you get a hit of dopamine and you're happy whenever you do drugs your brain dopamine level increases that makes you feel happy anything and everything that makes you happy somehow related to dopamine but in the modern day and age we are programmed for this instant gratification and that causes over saturation of dopamine in our brain and we can no longer derive happiness from simple activities which were very normal back a few

years ago such as walking down the street and just sitting alone doing nothing so there are two rules to this game rule number one is no instant gratification whatsoever whatever satisfaction you have to derive must come naturally in simple word it means no video games no movies no TV shows no chocolates no YouTube no Instagram no nothing and secondly the rule number two is most important rule of this game that is to follow rule number one so as the rules of the games were set I began my dope detoxing but before you get there hi

my name is Anuj I'm finally an mbbs student at government Medical College nagpur thank you so much for clicking on this video and please consider subscribing if you enjoy watching stuff like this so here's how it went it was the 12th of November 2022. I was on my phone scrolling reels on Instagram as one does instead of studying from a prelims which are just 15 days away as one doesn't at the night time just before sleeping I looked up at my mobile phone and saw a screen time of 5 hours and 32 minutes that number

absolutely blew my mind and the worst part was that for the entire week that was my average time spent in my phone things were certainly out of hand and that is what actually pushed me over the border to go and try dopamine detoxing for at least a week within five minutes my phone was cleared of all the social media apps now these apps combined costed me half of my screen time for the last week doing this was liberating I almost felt like a rebel when I took control of my time instead of giving it freely

away to the companies Behind these apps so now what now it's time to follow rule number one thoroughly for at least one week day one Sunday it was 13th of November and you know what Sunday means every 10 am on a Sunday upload every video on the channel and I absolutely did that but for that I had to open YouTube but I opened YouTube as a Creator and not as a consumer I did that from my laptop and not from my phone which prevented me from scrolling unnecessarily and falling into the Trap of one scroll

turning into two kilometers of scrolling what are the changes I noticed in the first day every time I picked up the phone my muscle memory immediately took me to the same place where the apps were originally present in my home screen that was the search bar and I immediately realized the sign of the addiction and since all the other apps were not there on my phone I opened up YouTube Studio quite frequently to reply to all your comments but I had to control that urge so I deleted YouTube Studio as well I felt a weird

feeling like time was really passing slowly in the first day without any of these apps because I was so used to just opening these apps to consume so much content and without even realizing so much time would be wasted when I felt like it would be like 4 pm right now it was originally just 2 30. and suddenly I had all this extra time and on the 13th November I did use this extra time all by myself to study surgery precisely git A system that should be classified as many systems and finished revising a grand

chunk of it in the evening since I had more time than usual my natural habit was to go to my PS4 pick it up and start playing Verizon forbid investigate some machines but then it came to me rule number one was standing there right in my face so instead of using my PS4 I detached it completely from my TV and took it back to my room to plug it into my monitor no that is not what I did I took it to my room kept it in malmari permanently not to touch it till March arranged

my closet did some shows around the house which felt really good again I had so much more time but I could not use my phone whatsoever I could only use it for WhatsApp or for calling and since I have no friends I did not use WhatsApp or had a call from anybody so I set an alarm for around 75 minutes and I started reading the book called as that night by nadio path there and I finished the last remaining part of the book just within that time frame reading books was not instant gratification it was

delayed gratification because some effort went into doing that day two was here Monday was here it was the 14th of November and I immediately realize that this challenge is going to fail today because I would not last one single minute because it was the day of my birthday and as you grow older you get less and less excited for your birthday and I turned 22. so naturally I received many calls from my relatives from my friends and a lot of chocolates and hugs and so many things that actually made me really happy dopamine levels in

my brain were peaking after one day of dopamine fasting I did open Instagram for 10-15 minutes to reply to a lot of you guys who had posted stories for me and who had replied to me and I tried to reply to as many of you as possible in the evening I realized that rule number one was actually a joke at this point because birthdays are supposed to be fun as you can see my screen time again went more than five hours but more than three hours was just calling replying and shooting things using the camera

app of the phone well that's what we are supposed to do on your birthday and it was really fun day three Tuesday was your 15th of November was here I was extremely motivated and I saw this opportunity to complete two units of medicine namely CVS and renal in a single day the impulsive behavior that I'd seen on Sunday was no longer there my fingers were no longer searching for the apps and all the time that I'd spent on my phone I was utilizing this to read a lot of books I denied myself any sweets except

for a cold coffee that I bought when I went to the cafe near my house and in that Cafe I was actually studying operative surgery the biggest change that I noticed on day three was since my Springtime was when I was not wasting a lot of time and studying quite a lot I was feeling really great about myself and feeling like I was actually going ahead in my life which made me happy and satisfied this was the way dopamine was actually supposed to be released in our brain through delayed gratification by doing the things that

actually take a lot of effort and finally getting the reward in the end another thing was my sleeve quality improved drastically since I was no longer being affected by the blue light at the night where usually used to sleep after scrolling Instagram for like 30-40 minutes I was reading books and that caused my sleep cycle to change and I was falling asleep more peacefully in fact even my waking up was affected because it usually took me three to four alarms to wake up now I used to wake up before the alarm itself because I had

such good refreshing sleep so if you're facing any problems with sleep try to use this dopamine detox method and reduce the blue light especially before going to sleep it will change your life dramatically I would be lying if I said I did not miss social media but I only missed it severely when I was in the washroom I started a new book to sleep in the sea of starts and I completed around 100 pages of it on day three day four was here I woke up and I went to have some chai with my friend

Abhijit my concentration in my studies was better than usual and I did not even pick up my phone for any reason I was having a good time in general and I picked up two of the Hobbies which I felt like I had not done in a long time and by long time I meant over a week one was playing my guitar because for some reason I had just stopped it for one week so I bet it up again and I spent quite a lot of time just enjoying playing some of the beautiful songs that I

know and secondly I restarted my habit of journaling every day and even if it was just for five minutes I made sure that I wrote down at least something in my channel and one of the questions that I get frequently Asked is how do you take notes on your iPad jealous how do you read PDFs on your iPad there are a lot of apps which can do this but one app which stands Out Among the rest is wondershare PDF element see you you can download it from the App Store just import the PDF into the

app and start annotating it's that easy so let's say that PDF is of some important book that you can't afford you should download the PDF import it and start using it like it was a book inside every document you can write draw annotate markup and add text to your document that includes assigning a document as well which is one thing I certainly have to do almost every other day the best part about PDF element however is that if you are a paper based student before you can import all of your notes into PDF element by

scanning them directly on the app and now those nodes are directly converted into digital copies which you can markup sign annotate and even publish online making notes like this is a very fun task and it will help you retain information more than traditional note taking or just reading the book here's a suggestion download wondershare PDF element using the link in the description because I'm sure it will help you out and this way you can also support the channel thanks a lot to wondershare for sponsoring this segment and now back to the main video I missed

my PS4 quite a lot because it was a really refreshing activity to play Horizon forbidden West after a hard session of studying but sometimes holding on does more damage than letting go so it was not really something which I should feel bad about in general the last few days of this challenge were not as significant as one would think I did feel a bit about missing out on everything that is going on but I looked near me and I saw my friends all in my house and we were all having a good time I feel

Instagram is a place where people put on masks and show how perfect their lives can be how beautiful their current lives are to post aesthetic photos and poses which makes absolutely zero sense in following Trends which actually have no significant impact on the world it was intoxicating at times and slowly slowly Instagram had lost that feeling of being an app where you are seeing only the content which you follow to becoming an app in which Maximum content is from the people you don't actually follow it had lost all of its time and became just another

generic app lastly I appreciated nature a lot more and I enjoyed flying my drone day five Thursday Gynecology the study of the female reproach system that's what I did boys I studied the female reproductive systems and we did half of Guinea in the two hours abhiji taught us that and the best part is even right now like 10 days have passed since I did that I remember a lot of it so naturally my retention capacity was also increasing because I was overall feeling much more positive getting good sleep studying a lot so yeah day six

Friday it was the same stuff different day gyne was done mostly thanks to Abhijit and I had another cold coffee day seven had come challenge had ended and I was left with the feeling of genuine happiness that it was finally over so that I could reinstall the apps on my phone and spend just a little amount of time every day scrolling through them so what are the overall things which I learned from this experiment first of all it all felt very positive and I felt good and liberated after deleting all the apps it felt like

I had taken back control of my time which was initially just wasting away like anything second I found my passions again that is I played my guitar a lot and I journaled a lot which was so amazing third of all I never regretted this decision of dopamine detox and I think that you should absolutely give it a try both I spend naturally more time with my friends and family and that was the way I derived my happiness that was very natural and it made me closer to my friends fifth I was overall productive much more

and got more stuff done there is so much more to do yet but I got so much done in one week that it made me really happy looking back that I'd completed surgery a part of medicine Gynecology all in just one week and lastly I gave all this time to reading a lot more books other than academics which was again a sense of delayed gratification picking up the old habit of reading the book I was actually doing a challenge of reading two books a week a video on that coming next Sunday anyways that was my

story of dopamine detoxing I really hope that you enjoyed watching this video and if you did please make sure to hit the thumbs up button and let me know that it was worth it dopamine detox but if you do find it interesting over there hello Instagram thank you so much for watching it's your boy and please subscribe if you haven't already you know making this video takes up a lot of time effort and energy and sometimes it takes up a lot of deleting your apps on your phone and I'll see you next Sunday at 10

am thank you