Dopamine Detox, Self-Discipline, and the Populist Moralization of Responsibility

This commentary interrogates the rising popularity of “dopamine detox” as a moralized response to digital overload and burnout, situating it within contemporary populist logics. Rather than challenging the political economy of platform capitalism, the discourse reframes structural problems of attention extraction, inequality, and exhaustion as failures of individual self-discipline. Drawing on political economy and cultural sociology, the piece argues that dopamine detox resonates with a depoliticized form of populism that governs through moral binaries—disciplined versus undisciplined—rather than through explicit elite–people antagonism. By transforming self-control into a civic and economic virtue, the trend normalizes inequality and obscures corporate and regulatory responsibility. Ultimately, the commentary shows how neoliberal self-help cultures intersect with populist moralization to shift blame downward while leaving platform power largely unchallenged.

By Zeynep Temel*

The term “dopamine detox” has emerged as a popular self-regulation trend across digital platforms, wellness cultures, and productivity discourses in the past few years. It is being promoted as a remedy for distraction, burnout, and declining focus; through practices such as abstaining from social media, minimizing pleasurable stimuli, reducing digital consumption such as screen time, and deliberately embracing “boring” routines. The concept promises mental clarity and renewed productivity through individual restraint on various different platform ranging from TikTok videos to self-help books and corporate wellness advice.

However, this trend goes beyond dopamine detox’s popular neuroscientific framing, as it effectively reflects a broader political and moral shift. This shift is visible in how attention, self-control, and responsibility are actively governed under contemporary capitalism. This commentary therefore argues that dopamine detox should be understood not merely as a lifestyle trend or productivity technique, but as a neoliberal moral project that resonates with contemporary populist narratives. The reason behind this is that dopamine detox, instead of challenging the structural conditions that produce distraction and exhaustion, places the responsibility onto individuals. This relocation transforms self-discipline into moral virtue while also depoliticizing systemic inequalities embedded in the digital attention economy.

From Neuroscience to Moral Narrative

The scientific language surrounding dopamine detox is often misleading. In essence, the neuroscientific definition of dopamine is more complex than it simply being a “pleasure chemical.” It is a neurotransmitter that is involved in motivation, learning, and reward prediction. In fact, work by Berridge & Robinson (1998) demonstrates that dopamine is more closely associated with “wanting” and incentive salience than with pleasure itself. Clinical interventions related to dopamine regulation are also typically reserved for neurological or psychiatric conditions, bearing little resemblance to the lifestyle practices promoted online as “dopamine detox.”

Several scholars and clinicians further emphasize that dopamine detox lacks empirical grounding as a medical or neuroscientific intervention. Psychiatrist Anna Lembke notes that while excessive stimulation can indeed shape habits and compulsive behaviors, the idea of “resetting” dopamine through short-term abstinence is mainly metaphorical than clinical (Lembke, 2021). 

However, the concept has gained remarkable cultural traction, and for a reason. As Eva Illouz (2007) argues, therapeutic language often migrates into everyday life not for being scientifically precise, but because it provides moral narratives of self-improvement and personal responsibility. In the case of “dopamine detox” therapeutic language functions to frame distraction as personal weakness, and to frame restraint as a signal of maturity, rationality, and self-mastery.

The Attention Economy and Individualized Responsibility

Political economy of digital platforms is also a crucial component of the rise of dopamine detox. Systemic extraction and monetization of attention are building blocks of contemporary platform capitalism. Similarly, social media platforms rely on algorithmic personalization, feedback loops, and continuous stimulation to maximize engagement and advertising revenue (Zuboff & Schwandt, 2019).

The way in which social media infrastructures shape user behavior is demonstrated in various empirical research. One of them is Zulli & Zulli’s (2020) work saying TikTok fosters “imitation publics” by encouraging users to replicate trends, sounds, and formats through algorithmic visibility incentives. Another one is Schellewald’s ethnographic research demonstrating how TikTok’s “For You” page structures everyday interaction by curating content flows that blur the boundary between personal expression platform-driven circulation (Schellewald, 2024). 

While these structural dynamics exist, dopamine detox discourse rarely questions platform design, corporate incentives or regulatory responsibility, and instead reframes overstimulation as a problem of individual excess (too much scrolling, too much pleasure, too little discipline). This shift echoes Michel Foucault’s description of neoliberal governmentality, in which individuals are encouraged to govern themselves according to market rationalities rather than asking for collective or institutional intervention (Foucault et al., 2010). The result is a paradoxical form of resistance that leaves the underlying economic model of attention extraction intact.

Moralized Productivity and Populist Resonance

Dopamine detox resonates with contemporary forms of populism not through electoral rhetoric or charismatic leadership, but through moralization. Because cultural and neoliberal variants of populism often operate by translating structural and economic problems into questions of individual virtue and responsibility, dopamine detox mirrors populist logics that divide subjects into “disciplined” and “undisciplined,” or the self-controlled and the irresponsible. In this sense, dopamine detox does not mobilize populism through the language of “the people” versus “the elite,” but through a moral distinction between the disciplined and the undisciplined. This type of populism governs through self-blame; thus dopamine detox discourse exemplifies a depoliticized, affective form of populist reasoning. 

This framework transforms self-control into an economic and moral virtue, and productivity into a character trait instead of output. As observed by Jonathan Crary, even rest and withdrawal are increasingly instrumentalized as strategies to enhance future productivity rather than as forms of genuine refusal (Crary, 2014). 

Dopamine detox fits neatly into this moral economy. High-dopamine activities such as social media usage, gaming, and entertainment are viewed as threats to cognitive capital and economic self-worth. By contrast, abstention is celebrated as common sense and self-discipline. This logic mirrors Weberian asceticism in a digital age-updated way, where self-denial signals moral legitimacy and economic rationality (Weber, 1930). 

Crucially, this moralization obscures inequality as the capacity to disengage from platforms, curate “low dopamine” lifestyles or embrace minimalist routines assumes material security. For precarious workers, freelancers, and gig-economy participants, constant connectivity is more of a condition of survival than that of choice. 

Affective Governance and the Politics of “Calm”

“Affective governance,” a term coined by Sara Ahmed (2024) signifying the circulation of emotions that attach moral value to certain ways of being is an important component of dopamine detox narrative. This affective hierarchy favors calm, controlled subjects whose lives fit white-collar work and middle-class wellness norms. 

Crucially, this hierarchy is not sustained only through discourse, but also through aesthetics. It is reproduced through carefully curated visual and lifestyle cues involving neutral color palettes, quiet mornings, and minimalist routines, thereby connecting dopamine detox to broader cultural trends such as “clean girl” aesthetics, soft productivity, and wellness minimalism. 

Depoliticization Through Self-Blame

What makes dopamine detox particularly significant is its depoliticizing effect. It normalizes exhaustion as a personal management issue rather than a political one by turning structural problems of attention extraction into individualized moral responsibility. This shift mirrors broader neoliberal-populist dynamics in which systemic failures ranging from labor precarity to digital surveillance are reframed as matters of individual choice and discipline.

In this regard, dopamine detox illustrates a subtle but powerful form of contemporary populist reasoning: one that governs through affect, morality, and self-blame; rather than focusing on regulating platforms, addressing corporate power or rethinking digital labor. 

Conclusion: Detox Without Transformation?

This commentary argues that dopamine detox should be understood not as a scientifically grounded intervention, but as a neoliberal and moralized response to platform-induced overstimulation. It claims to resist distraction and burnout by framing them as failures of individual discipline which ends up in reinforcing the very economic logics causing them.

The political question then, is not about whether individuals need to reduce screen time, but why attention economies remain largely unregulated while self-discipline is constantly promoted as the solution. Another question that arises is if dopamine detox risks becoming yet another form of self-blame -rather than transformation- in an economy designed to exhaust, unless the political economy of platforms is addressed.

(*) Zeynep Temel is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at Marmara University, Istanbul, but currently based in Shanghai. Her research interests span inequality, platform capitalism, popular culture, and gender, with a regional focus on East Asia. She works on how economic and political structures shape everyday practices, identities, and moral expectations, particularly through attention, consumption, and labor under contemporary capitalism.

References

Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press.

Berridge, K. C. & Robinson, T. E. (1998). “What is the role of dopamine in reward? Hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience?” Brain Research Reviews, 28(3), 309–369.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(98)00019-8

Crary, J. (2014). 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep. Verso.

Foucault, M.; Senellart, M.; Ewald, F.; Fontana, A.; Davidson, A.I. & Burchell, G.D. (2010). The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79.

Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Polity Press.

Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine nation: Finding balance in the age of indulgence. Unabridged. Penguin Audio.

Müller, J. (2016). What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812293784

Schellewald, A. (2024). “Discussing the role of TikTok sharing practices in everyday social life.” International Journal of Communication, 18, 909–926.

Weber, M. (1930). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Scribner/Simon & Schuster.

Zuboff, S. & Schwandt, K. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

Zulli, D. & Zulli, D. J. (2020). “Extending the Internet meme: Conceptualizing technological mimesis and imitation publics on the TikTok platform.” New Media & Society, 24(8), 1872-1890. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820983603 (Original work published 2022)