dopamine detox

A voluntary break from the use of computer technology, electronic devices and the Internet, intended to benefit people who spend an excessive amount of time using such technology.

Intentionally avoiding digital devices — phones, laptops, social media — for a set period to reset focus and mental health. Weekend digital detoxes are forgiving; week-long ones uncover how much of your identity was tied up in the scroll. Half the genre is the comeback post.

The act of removing/hiding metrics (e.g. "like" count, view count, repost count) on social media websites.

Compulsively scrolling bad news even though it's making you feel worse. A specifically post-2020 hobby — pandemic onset, political anxiety, climate dread, all algorithmically served at 2am. Oxford shortlisted it as Word of the Year 2020.

When someone fully locks in on filtering out the noise and extracting only what actually matters, they've entered distillation mode. It's that hyper-focused state where you stop consuming and start refining — cutting fluff from your feed, your schedule, your relationships, your thinking. Distillation mode is less about doing more and more about compressing everything down to its purest, most useful form. Productivity girlies, minimalists, and deep-work devotees all know the feeling: phone goes face-down, the irrelevant falls away, and only the essential survives.