Sober October 2021

Sober October is right around the corner and I felt inclined to put out a small piece with some of my specific intentions that I will be approaching this upcoming month with. I hope some of you join me in this; some of us desperately need a little factory reset in the dopamine department.

As a brief background, I’ve done Sober October for the past 4 years and thus far have had a wide variety of experiences ranging from highly distressing to wonderfully peaceful and stable.

My intentions usually surround suspending my use of cannabis, coffee, alcohol, and other potent dopamine agonists like social media.

When I first started doing these 30-day challenges, I was highly motivated to see exactly what I was capable of in terms of abstaining from things that I do on a nearly day-to-day basis. It started out as a fun little test I would give myself to practice what I preach. But what it turned into rather quickly was eye-opening and incredibly profound.

Within the first week of my first Sober October in 2017, I began to get a sense of the ground that I had walked on for nearly a decade prior. My average day always consisted of large amounts of caffeine, cannabis, social media doom scrolling, gazing off into the distance, winning fake arguments in my mind, and being more or less “out of the moment”, constantly fighting to ground myself amongst the storm I had slowly accustomed myself to.

It will always come as a surprise just how radical of a shift is possible after a short while of abstaining from these dopamine hinging behaviours. In the first week and the several weeks that followed in that first challenge, I found a clarity of mind that I was until that point, relatively unfamiliar with. That’s the hidden “gift” that you earn from these challenges, you meet a part of you that you are… well, a little uncertain of. You don’t realize the effects of chasing these otherwise average behaviours until you suspend your use entirely.

Every year, it takes a slightly different form, but the messages and the lessons always seem to have things in common. Things like: most of my behaviours are completely unintentional (or at least within a few minutes I’m questioning why I just did something), the subtle effects of seemingly harmless things add up quicker than I think, and that I reliably overestimate my ability to flex my way through desire.

Admittedly, I actually gave up halfway through last year’s Sober October, not because it was “difficult” per se, but rather a part of my “deciding” mind lost the point of doing it. Perhaps that contains a bit of a self-serving bias, but as far as my conscious mind is aware of, I quit out of boredom.

And when I really think about it, I can see that most of the behaviours that I choose to abstain from have only become problematic because of my intolerance to boredom. Bored? Coffee. Still bored? Joint and coffee. Still bored? Joint, coffee, and Instagram.

The power of these dopamine hinging behaviours changes over time, you need more of it, more often to get to the place it initially brought you. This is the principle of tolerance; needing more to get to where you got the first time. Nearly every behaviour that induces large hits of dopamine is susceptible to this change in sensitivity. We see it everywhere, from date nights with grander and grander plans, to how we relax; it may have started with just a warm bath, but we now need a warm bath, candles, bath salts, a book, and someone else in the tub.

And if I’m being really honest, Sober October has two intentions behind it.

The first being a challenge (albeit a reliably humbling challenge), and the second being a way around tolerance. Taking a month off of anything will do wonders for its effects when you do decide to take it up again. Coffee (or anything for that matter) not giving you the same kick it used to? Stop using it for a little while.

The science is fairly sound, by allowing our dopamine reward pathways to return to a baseline level of firing, we are more capable of reaching those highly motivating or pleasant states of being. On the flip side, pulling the dopamine lever every day, or every few hours, over a long period of time, leaves very little dopamine left, mixed with a high tolerance as a result of constantly pulling the lever, you are bound to be disappointed by the lack of euphoria or drive that you’ve become accustomed to.

The way Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation puts it is highly understandable. She has developed this model of a teetertotter called the Pleasure/Pain Balance. On one side of the teetertotter, you’ve got pleasure, and on the other side, you’ve got pain. When you do something pleasurable that induces dopamine, such as having a cup of coffee, you tip the scale towards pleasure - awesome. But what happens when you finish that coffee (and aren’t a ball of shaky anxiety)? You briefly dip into the pain side of the scale. Like oof, that sucks, I would love another cup of coffee to keep this pleasure going. So what do you do?

Well, if you’re tired, or stressed, or tired, or a coffee addict, you listen to that brief discomfort and you go back for seconds. Or if you’re sufficiently caffeinated, or you’re determined to maintain a healthy relationship with coffee, you think “better hold off, maybe later or tomorrow”. This is an example of how one might deal with the pain/pleasure balance that our dopamine system has set up.

And to tie this back into what we started with, you might be wondering, well can I reset this pain/pleasure balance? “I’ve spent a lot of time running from the pain that comes at the bottom of a coffee cup or beer, and have found myself having a tough time stopping these once pleasurable things.

Abstain. Stopping that behaviour, even for a few weeks, can be sufficient enough in allowing that pain/pleasure balance to recalibrate and come back to baseline.

And if you do decide to give this a shot, I hope that in addition to your newly reminted tolerance, you’ve also learned just how slippery this slope can be and that you’ll at least be a little more considerate in the future when that voice of “oh, maybe one more” comes to knock.