Why I Downloaded Yet Another App (And Then Didn’t Use It)

Around the new year, I noticed something weird happening on my TikTok feed. Everyone was suddenly organizing their joy like meal prep. Little flowcharts. Color-coded spreadsheets. Hashtags with millions of views. The “dopamine menu” had arrived, and it looked like exactly the kind of thing that would either save my life or collect digital dust alongside my abandoned meditation apps.

For context, the concept came from ADHD coach Jaclyn Paul and got absolutely massive on social media. The idea is simple: you categorize activities by how much emotional restoration they require. “Appetizers” are quick hits—scrolling, texting a friend, making tea. “Main courses” are moderately engaging things like going for a walk or watching a show. “Desserts” are the deep, meaningful activities that take real energy but pay dividends: cooking something ambitious, seeing friends in person, working on creative projects. By February 2025, Notion had released an official template for this, and 400,000 people downloaded it in the first month alone. The trend had racked up over 180 million views on TikTok.

I was skeptical, but also curious. And more importantly, I was tired. The APA 2025 Stress in America Report found that 77% of adults listed lack of meaningful leisure time as a top stressor. That felt precise enough to read as a personal attack.

The Spreadsheet Era Begins (Slightly Chaotically)

I created a spreadsheet instead of using an app. This was intentional. I wanted friction. I wanted to notice what I was doing. So every time I did something restorative—or tried to—I logged it. The category. The time spent. How I felt after on a scale of one to ten. By day three, I’d added columns for what I was avoiding and whether I’d chosen the activity or just defaulted to it.

The early days were revelatory in ways I didn’t expect. I realized I was treating scrolling Instagram as a main course when it was clearly an appetizer. More importantly, I was never eating actual desserts. Real desserts. The kind that require setup. My life had become a diet of appetizers and the occasional guilty microwaved main course. No wonder I felt perpetually unsatisfied.

By day seven, my spreadsheet had morphed into something between a diary and a surveillance operation. Tuesdays were bad—I’d hit a wall around 3 p.m. and just mainline appetizers until bedtime. Weekends had too many open hours and I’d freeze. Rain made me retreat. Productivity hangovers were real: after a big work week, I’d refuse to do anything that felt like “self-care” because it sat too close to productivity culture for comfort.

Studies show that structured leisure planning actually works. A 2025 study in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that when adults with ADHD tracked and intentionally planned their activities across these categories, emotional exhaustion dropped by 23% over eight weeks. But here’s what surprised me: the tracking wasn’t the magic part. The categorization was. It forced me to stop thinking of my downtime as failure and start thinking of it as something worth planning for.

When Your Tracking Spreadsheet Gets Too Real

Around day twelve, I hit what I’m calling “the awareness cliff.” I could suddenly see very clearly how I was spending my time. Not just the hours, but the emotional quality of them. And it wasn’t always flattering.

I had desserts on my list that I almost never actually did. Painting. Coffee with actual friends. These weren’t missing from my calendar because I was too busy. They were missing because they required me to believe I deserved them. That was the part the dopamine menu didn’t warn you about. It’s great for categorizing activities, but you still have to choose yourself.

The spreadsheet got messy here. Some days I’d scribble little notes. “Didn’t do this but wanted to” or “Did this and felt weird after” or “This felt like a chore, categorization wrong.” The data became less clean, which meant it became more honest.

What emerged was something useful but uncomfortable: the permission structure. Once I’d decided that an activity was a “dessert” worth doing, I could actually do it without feeling like I was wasting time. And once I’d accepted appetizers as legitimate sometimes, I stopped treating them as a failure state. I could have toast and tea at ten in the morning and call it what it was—a necessary break—instead of evidence that my life had no meaning.

The Thirty-Day Data That Probably Means Nothing Specific But Everything General

After thirty days, my spreadsheet looked like someone had organized their thoughts with both precision and abandon. Here’s what the actual numbers said:

I was doing desserts about twice a week. Before this experiment, I would have guessed never. Appetizers had gone from a guilty blur to a known quantity—I could have them without narrating my own failure. I’d started choosing a main course most days, something that moved the needle without requiring full setup. The quality-of-life improvement wasn’t massive, but it was consistent. I was sleeping better. Less of that restless feeling of having wasted the evening.

The spreadsheet also showed something weirder: I was doing different things on days I’d tracked versus days I forgot. Knowing I’d have to log it made me more intentional. But some days I just didn’t log anything and had a perfectly fine time anyway. The tracking itself became another appetizer sometimes. That felt worth noting.

The trend is popular for a reason. Notion Template Gallery had hundreds of different dopamine menu variations, and people were genuinely finding this framework useful. What worked wasn’t the specific categorization. It was the permission it gave to think about restoration as something you could plan for and actually deserve.

What Actually Stuck (And What Didn’t)

I still use a version of this system. Not the spreadsheet—that started feeling like homework after a while. But I keep a running note on my phone with activities in each category. It’s useful when I’m stuck, when I don’t know what I need but I know something’s off. I’ll scroll through and think, oh, appetizer. Or maybe it’s time for a main course. Sometimes it’s the weekend and I know a dessert is available and I should just do it.

What didn’t stick: the optimizing. I’m not trying to hit a certain ratio of activities or prove I’m doing it right. That’s when it becomes another thing to fail at. The framework works best when it’s loose, when you’re using it to notice yourself rather than grade yourself.

The thirty days taught me that I was more starved for intentionality than for specific activities. I didn’t need a magic formula. I needed permission to choose myself—to decide that today was an appetizer day or a dessert day and stop judging it. The spreadsheet was just the thing that let me see I’d never actually given myself that permission before.

If you’re curious about this, try it. Build your own framework. Make it messy. Track what you do and notice what patterns come up. And if you find that you’ve been living on appetizers for months, well—that’s the actual data point. What would change if you scheduled a dessert next week?