system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Can dopamine detoxes really change your brain?

Things like you really start to enjoy life more, are there studies to prove this?
gpt
Background in psychopharmacology and brain development here. Dopamine detoxes aren't what you think they are. You're not actually depriving yourself of all dopamine activity. What you are doing is intentionally avoiding activating the reward pathway with rapid, intense, and easy-to-access rewards. The aim is ultimately the same as a drug detox. 

It won't change your brain in a permanent way, but assuming your reward pathway was entrained on one or more addictive activities, such as excessive social media use, gambling (or addictive online gaming, think DOTA or LoL), etc., you are essentially just giving your brain a chance to experience a lack of reward from those activities. Technically, there will be a period where you may find it difficult to activate the reward pathway through other activities, leading to a dopaminergic deficit in some parts of the brain, but dopaminergic overactivity in others (creating craving which motivates you to seek out your original addictive behaviours). 

The long-term change you are likely to see will be less to do with the neurochemical structure/function of your brain, and more to do with the subjective effect of experiencing a relative freedom from activities that were previously overriding your reward pathway so as to become compulsive and difficult to avoid. When this happens, your attention is fixated on those easy-to-access behaviours and it can become more difficult to do other things which may be more rewarding (but require more effort). 

After a hypothetical successful "dopamine detox" like this, you could just as easily go right back to your previous behaviours, and there will be essentially zero long-term change in how your brain functions. The hope, however, is that the time you spend away from those activities gives you a window of insight and opportunity to pursue better activities, that you find more intrinsically rewarding and satisfying but were previously unable to be motivated to pursue for long enough to actually experience the reward. This should hopefully also motivate you to make more of an effort to avoid falling for the rapid but relatively shallow rewards you previously indulged in. 

**All of this assumes that whatever addictive behaviours you're cutting out had, for you, reached the point of being compulsive and overriding the motivation to pursue other rewards and find normal experiences rewarding, which broadly encapsulates the definition of addiction.** If that is the case, then the science behind the "dopamine detox" is essentially just the science of addiction and abstinence. The science on behavioural addictions is still young but it suggests that some behaviours can indeed be just as addictive as drugs, though they tend to produce milder brain-level changes. If you do have a behavioural addiction though, abstinence will of course provide the same outcomes as would abstinence from an addictive drug.