Photo by Grant Ritchie on Unsplash

During December 2025, I voluntarily started a detox challenge that I called Dopamine Detox December. For the entire month of December, I stopped:

• Using social media of any kind (including platforms that some people don’t count as social media, such as LinkedIn)
• Consuming news. I asked my wife to let me know if there was any urgent news I needed to know about.
• Using video streaming services such as Netflix or Amazon Prime
  (I was still watching movies with my family, but we knew exactly which movie we wanted to watch and when.)
• Playing video games of any kind

Contrary to what I was expecting, quitting social media was not the most difficult part. After about a week, everything felt normal, almost as if social media had never existed. That said, the first five days were very difficult.

I was also not a heavy consumer of video streaming services, so quitting them was relatively easy. Given that we were already watching movies only on Sunday afternoons, I barely felt their absence.

Avoiding news, however, was very challenging for me. Given everything that is happening in my country, it sometimes feels like destiny for Persians to be tied to news websites. Despite this, I tried very hard to “change the subject” every time my mind urged me to check the news.

Whenever I felt that urge, I went for a walk. This helped a lot, but it wasn’t enough on its own. What helped the most were my conversations with my wife during breakfast. Every day, she would tell me what had happened the day before. Some days there was complete silence and we talked about something else; on other days, it was all about politics.

The most difficult habit to quit

I never thought video games would be this difficult to quit. I never considered myself dependent on games — I was playing maybe an hour a day. But what I realised during this detox was that video games produced the strongest dopamine stimulation for me.

Even now, I sometimes feel the urge to play something when I get stressed or bored. To create a barrier, I uninstalled all the games I was playing from my gaming console so that reinstalling them would take at least 30 minutes.

The type of game I was playing also played an important role. Games like ANNO are extremely addictive. So addictive, in fact, that there is a built-in mechanism that notifies the player to take a break every two hours.

Why is that? Because these games are endless. There is no real mission, and there is always something to improve. They give you control over building a city exactly the way you want, and when it comes to that, the possibilities are practically unlimited.

Besides willpower, deleting the games from my console helped a lot.

What really helped during my detox period?

Reading books and walking helped me the most during this period.

Reading is especially powerful because it releases dopamine slowly but steadily. I placed the book I was reading next to me instead of my phone, and I put my phone in a different room the moment I arrived home.

I already liked reading before the challenge, but during the detox month I managed to finish four books. My screen time before the detox wasn’t very high — around two and a half hours a day — but redirecting even two extra hours towards reading made a significant difference. I turned time I was essentially wasting into self-improvement.

Walking was another big help. Every day after work, I went for a 30-minute fast walk. Sometimes I went for a run, but during December, Berlin’s weather isn’t ideal for running, so I replaced it with walking.

It was important that during these walks I didn’t listen to anything. I often see people walking while listening to music or audiobooks. That’s not a bad thing, but the purpose of these walks was different: to reset my mind from work mode into family mode.

The brain needs time to “defrag” what happened during the day and put things in the right place — similar to what happens during sleep. During sleep, our brain organises the information it needs to remember and throws away what it doesn’t need.

My learnings

During December, I realised that I don’t need to know about other people’s lives through social media. I can live a happy life without binding myself to TV shows and endless YouTube videos. That’s exactly how people lived for millions of years. Streaming services are relatively recent inventions, yet suddenly we act as if we can’t live without them.

I also realised that human life depends on social interaction — but not through social media. It depends on real, meaningful communication. By “in-person”, I don’t necessarily mean meeting physically. Video calls can provide a similar level of satisfaction. For example, I noticed that I feel much better sending and receiving voice messages than text messages. Voice carries emotion in a way text doesn’t. Over the years, we’ve tried to compensate for that with emojis, but hearing someone’s voice — especially that of a loved one — is different.

Bad habits can be changed, even when they turn into addictions. There is usually a period during which we simply need to tolerate discomfort and wait. After that, things improve exponentially. What matters most is replacing bad habits with better ones.

Another important lesson for me was learning to deal with boredom. We should allow ourselves to be bored from time to time. In the past, there were moments when we had nothing to do — and we simply did nothing. That was normal. Today, there seems to be constant pressure to always be doing something. Doing nothing is often seen as being unproductive, but that’s wrong. We should give our brains time to catch up and our bodies time to relax.

Humans evolved to move, explore, and search for food — not to sit and stare at phones. For millions of years, we had no TVs, smartphones, or tablets, and many of humanity’s most important inventions came from those quieter times. When Newton was sitting under the apple tree, he wasn’t checking Instagram or X. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have discovered the law of gravity. Great ideas often come from boredom. It’s perfectly fine to sit in silence and do nothing — and doing so doesn’t mean you’re falling behind.

Probably the most important thing I realised during this challenge was how much healthier I felt overall — not just mentally, but physically as well. My resting heart rate improved, and my sleep schedule normalised. Without social media or FC 2026 before bed, my evenings slowed down. I was reading instead, and after about an hour my eyes would naturally get tired. Falling asleep no longer felt like a struggle. This change carried over into my work too. I stopped skimming Slack messages and RFCs. With a single focused read, I could actually comprehend what I was reading.

Nothing dramatic changed overnight. I didn’t suddenly become more productive or happier every single day. But life became quieter, more intentional, and more present — and that turned out to be enough.