Firstly, it’s worth understanding exactly what dopamine is, so we’ve roped in Dr Rachel Taylor, neuroscientist and founder of UN-Broken to explain a bit more about the hormone.

“Dopamine is a neurohormone released by the hypothalamus and the adrenal glands,” she explains. “It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise and, importantly, when we have successful social interactions.

“In an evolutionary context, dopamine rewards us for beneficial behaviours and motivates us to repeat them.”

All of those things sound good, right? So, when does dopamine activation get out of control? Essentially, positive social stimuli – whether in person or online – release dopamine, encouraging us to pursue that behaviour. (When we were hunter-gatherers, we would have relied on those social ties to keep us alive.) A Harvard University report concluded that while not as powerful as taking cocaine, social media platforms provide hits of dopamine in a similar way to the drug to keep us coming back to their products.

“I tried a week-long dopamine detox – here’s why the concept is so huge on TikTok”