The importance of principles
The beauty of effective principles is that they are easily memorable and thus can be internalised to give you the necessary constraints and guidance.
These principles are the rules that we gave ourselves and are a reflection of the boundaries of our behaviours towards a common goal.
The 7 Dopamine Detox Principles
Tech downtime between 9pm and 9am.
You need to get your time back.
Don’t worry about messages.
If someone urgently needs to contact you, they will find a way.
Increase friction for tech usage.
Add hassle to your experience, for example: phone away from bedroom and office, TV turned off at wall. See experiments.
Engage with technology with intentionality.
Always ask: What are you gaining from it? And to what end? How will you remind yourself to ask?
Save it till we meet.
Do I need to inform these people right now? Do I need to share this now? Or can it wait till we meet in person?
Do less!
Less is more. You do not need to fill time. Embrace periods of solitude, reflection.
Embrace the world.
Prioritize interactions in the real word and conversations face-to-face.
Make them yours
One way of making any principles memorable and applicable is to modify the language or wording yourself. Before beginning a dopamine detox, modify them for yourself. Make them yours.
The commitment: The 30-day detox is an attempt to create a new baseline for the dopamine levels but also surface any triggers. In the face of those triggers, which will arouse in us the urge to revert back to our behaviour, we are trusting these basic principles to guide us for thirty days, with the ultimate aim of transcending the forces that pull us away from meaningful pursuits.