TJ Power
Appearances
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Do you feel like your attention span is really strong? Do you feel very consistently motivated? Do you have great relationships? If any of the answers are you're not thriving, the brain chemistry is your answer. And pursuing a life where you intentionally boost these is going to lead you towards a life where you feel exceptionally good a lot of the time.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
For sure. And this is where, this is the most important factor. So it's good we've come to this idea. Four... All of humanity's evolution, dopamine was the primary chemical we were in the pursuit of because we would get dopamine hits off the main things that were keeping us alive.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
So if we successfully stumbled across some fruit or if we caught an animal or if we built shelter or if we started a fire, these things that were essential for our survival that were a lot of effort to attain would create dopamine in our brain, they create satisfaction and they would help humanity survive. Without dopamine in the human brain, there would be no humans.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
It drove us to do all these actions. In the modern world, Maybe about 500 to 1,000 years ago, we figured out how to hack dopamine for the first time with things like alcohol and tobacco. Those are the first sort of things that could create a very rapid stimulation of dopamine in an unnatural way. These were concepts that weren't from the natural world.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
They were modern creations, especially as we began to harness them and chemically them more and more. And then we began inventing more stuff, pornography. We also invented social media, which is huge. And these kind of things overstimulate dopamine. They create this rapid increase in the chemical. And because of that rapid increase, we effectively burn out the dopamine engine.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Like if you got in a manual car and you didn't put it into gear and then you just rev the engine every day, eventually you would burn that engine out and it would break. That's exactly what we're doing with the overstimulation of dopamine through things like social media or alcohol or sugar or pornography. And that's then causing what we call low dopamine levels.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And if ever in your life you're in a state where you feel kind of apathetic, you can't be bothered to do anything, that you might be sitting on the sofa scrolling your phone for a while, and then even the thought of getting up and going and making your dinner feels like effort, that's because your dopamine level is low.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, often nowadays, the phone is like the primary factor. And as we've seen the phone grow in popularity and how much humans spend their time on it, how every generation, whether it's young teenagers that people worry about or when I was in the coffee shop earlier, I saw a couple that must be in their 70s that didn't say a word to each other for 20 minutes whilst they both rolled their phones.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
The phone is disrupting all generations in humanity because of the way in which it stimulates our dopamine. We're so hooked. on interacting with it.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, laughter is magic. Laughter actually really is great for our endorphin system, especially if you really laugh. Like if you're really finding something funny and it almost is like hurting your stomach level funny, that's magic for endorphins, which provides an amazing de-stressing effect on our brain. It calms our brain a lot. Music as well. Music is really powerful.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
As long as you're not changing song very regularly. In the modern world, people are like clicking next song every like 20 seconds. So it's not as calming for the brain, but especially back in the day of cassette players and putting the, I don't even know what it was called when you put like a disc on there and it's like a nice proper old method of listening to music.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
That sort of stuff would have been great for the brain.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
It's very rare to do too much of it.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I mean, you could choose to only do one of the, if you fell in love with someone and you decided you're just going to lie in bed and sleep together for 10 hours a day, every single day, you'd certainly get a lot of oxytocin, but the other chemicals would begin to reduce because you'd stop working and getting dopamine from hard work and stop going outside and getting serotonin and so on. So
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
You technically could, but it's unlikely in the modern world that you're going to overdo one of these chemicals. The vast majority of the challenge we're facing is that we're completely hooked on dopamine. So we're spending a lot of our time centering our life around when am I going to be on my phone? When am I going to watch Netflix? When am I going to have my next drink of alcohol?
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
When am I going to have my next sugary meal? Not only is that overstimulating dopamine, it's creating a life where the prioritization of really close, intimate relationships and hiking outside in nature and listening to music and singing songs and these key actions humans need, they're going lower on the prioritization list.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
100%. It is hard to break these addictions. And this whole framework, I've not built this as just like a neuroscientist. I think, oh, everyone should be healthy. I was in an extremely unhealthy lifestyle with alcohol and partying and pornography and social media. I just grew up as a teenager. That's what everyone around me was doing. And I thought, well, that's the life you live.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Then I went to really study this and got deep into the research behind it. And I was like, wow, I'm completely breaking my brain chemistry. And that's no wonder that I'm there for overthinking things and struggling with my mood and sometimes feeling depressed and so on. And I thought it was just because of the life events I was going through this grief that I was going through.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I came to discover that these addictions like needed to be broken and they can be broken. But it's just like, how much do you want to feel good? You have to start asking yourself that question. I made that decision in my life that I was like, I actually really want to feel good. I want to energetically feel good. I want to be able to exercise regularly. I want to feel confident.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I want to be able to really nail my career and build an awesome career. And some of the addictions have to be sacrificed in order to attain a life that you really love.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Depending on the intensity of the addiction. For me, with alcohol, for example, I loved drinking alcohol too much for alcohol to remain a key part of my life. So I had to let go of alcohol. If you are someone that... worked all week and had a great week and then on a Friday night had a glass of red wine, then that's fine. That's not going to do any damage to your experience of life.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
It might enhance your experience of life whilst you have that glass of red wine. If you're someone that really over consumes different things, it would be important to step away from them.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I hold the perspective that the phone is the most significant challenge facing our world today. And that varies across generations how much people believe that is the case. The only real evidence I would suggest it really is the case is that mental health has rapidly, rapidly changed since phones became massive, specifically smartphones and social media.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
We always had the alcohol and the cigarettes and the pornography, but we didn't have the phone. And I think every single human in the world could benefit so much from waking up
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
and not having their phone in their bedroom, not having a charging in their bedroom, waking up, going to the bathroom, splashing cold water on their face, brushing their teeth, maybe having their shower if you have a shower in the morning and getting your day going, creating momentum for your day before you see a single notification from the phone.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
We've done this process, as I say, with over 50,000 people, and it's ridiculous what happens to things like depression and their anxiety, how motivated someone becomes. just by simply not going on to that device when you wake up.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I like those questions, mate. I do lots of podcasts, and they were really cool. They were fun.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
These chemicals evolve within the human brain over our hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. And each of them has a specific function. Dopamine basically drives all our motivation. Oxytocin connects us together. Serotonin lifts our mood and our energy levels. And then endorphins can de-stress our brain.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, I mean, they're good things to have. And these chemicals were once thriving when we were living in a more ancestor type lifestyle of waking up, living outdoors, loads of light, hunting, hard physical work, natural food. They were really designed for that experience of life. And a lot of us are experiencing low levels of these chemicals in the modern world.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And that's causing a lot of the mental difficulties we struggle with.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, so there is a genetic component to how much your brain will produce of each of these chemicals. Each chemical has what we call a baseline. So you'd have, for example, your dopamine baseline, which is in any given moment, how much dopamine can your brain generate? However, in our modern world, behavior itself can have a massive impact on each of these chemicals.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Say, for example, with dopamine, if you were sitting doing nothing, your dopamine would stay at a pretty stagnant level. If you pulled out your phone and opened a social media feed and started watching videos, your dopamine would rise very, very rapidly. That, for example, is an example of quick dopamine. Then we'd also have other examples of things like slow dopamine, which you would get from,
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
cleaning your home for 30 minutes, that would be slow dopamine. So there's different behaviors that will impact these chemicals.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
So we're in direct control of where these chemicals are at with each of the behaviors. we have if you take oxytocin for example that second chemical whenever you come in physical contact with a human so if you hug your kids or your partner for example immediately in that moment oxytocin begins to increase creates feelings of love and connection and safety in your body
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
serotonin something like when you eat natural foods fruits meats veg these kind of foods serotonin increases and there's a good lasting impact of that benefit you'll have an hour or so a few hours where the chemical will rise if you then went through a prolonged period where you weren't stimulating the chemical it'd begin to fall back to baseline but is the idea that you would want to deliberately impact these levels or is the idea to just lead a healthy life and these things take care of themselves
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
If I was chatting with a hunter-gatherer, they would have to not even think at all about whether these chemicals were high. It's really important to consider this hunter-gatherer idea because for 99.9% of human history, that's what our brain did. It's a very small percentage of time that we've all sat inside and played on computers and phones.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
and if you looked at their lifestyle the chemicals were always thriving so they'd never have to intentionally make sure they boosted them the modern lifestyle where we wake up we spend all of our time inside pretty much we spend a lot of time isolated our diets can be quite poor we've had it very sedentary that lifestyle is leading us to now have to become much more conscious of how are we intentionally boosting these chemicals
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
As you said, like if you live a healthy lifestyle, you are going to be doing a lot of actions that can boost them, but you still may be missing some key components. Someone might be really good with their exercise and food and sleep, but they might also be spending five hours a day scrolling social media. So they, for example, could also take some action towards boosting them.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I would ask yourself the question, do you feel like you're really thriving as a human being right now? Like, do you feel like your attention span is really strong? Do you feel very consistently motivated throughout the day? Do you have great relationships? Do you have great sleep? Do you have good energy levels or really positive mood? And if any of those questions are,
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Now, sometimes I feel really low motivation and my concentration isn't as good as it used to be. And I do have trouble in my relationships where I do feel tired quite often. If any of the answers are you're not thriving, the brain chemistry is your answer to that question.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And pursuing a life where you intentionally boost these is going to lead you towards a life where you feel exceptionally good a lot of the time.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, that's a good question. It's becoming really familiar with what each chemical would feel like. So if I ask you the question, what is an activity or task that you've done in the last week that's made you feel really satisfied? Is there any activity that comes to mind that created the emotion of satisfaction for you? Well, exercise does that for me. Yeah.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
So you got like a good feeling of satisfaction. So that if you felt satisfaction, that means dopamine increase. And that's a good win. Some people might get satisfaction from arts. They might get it from cleaning. They might get it from sport. They might get it from whatever it may be. So dopamine would be you feel satisfied.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And if you just look at the other side of dopamine, what we call quick dopamine, when you scroll your phone or you drink alcohol or you eat sugar, it doesn't actually create a feeling of satisfaction. It creates a feeling of I really want more, which is the part of the difficulty with dopamine.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
With oxytocin, if you had a moment where you felt loads of love in your body, like a real peace, content, loving feeling as a result of like a relationship moment with a kid or a family member, that would mean oxytocin was up. If your mood just felt quite like happy and light and positive, that would be serotonin.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And then the endorphins is a very powerful euphoric feeling which can come from real feelings.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
hardcore exercise so if you for example might have heard of runner's high where someone runs for a prolonged period of time and gets a very euphoric almost drug-like experience from it that would be endorphins you've got satisfaction love positive mood or proper euphoria well can we run through the four and just like an example of what you could do to increase them given that you identify as having maybe low levels of any one of them
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, so with the dopamine, I would say if I could pick two things that would be really powerful for your dopamine levels, one would be what we call phone fasting. Fasting being the term of taking a prolonged break from something. We would really recommend phone fasting for the first 30 minutes of your day when you wake up.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I run a research lab called Dose Lab, and we see in our research that that's insanely beneficial for the brain. So you phone fast for 30 minutes in the morning. and 60 minutes in the evening. And that means physical separation from your phone where you don't see it once for those periods.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
The other thing for dopamine that's amazing is what we call flow state, which is where you get into a really deep state of concentration on a task. If I was to ask you the question, like, have you done a task recently, maybe a working task, maybe a task in your home that's really deeply focused your brain,
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And is there any one aspect of the work that you find the most enjoyment in, you get the most into focus?
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, the focus. Yeah. Yeah, so this, for example, may be your flow state, which is podcasting. And that would make sense if that's your career. That would make sense that podcasts would be your flow state. And everyone has something that is their flow state, something they intrinsically are good at and their brain really likes to focus on.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
When we focus for longer than 15 to 20 minutes on just one thing. So that would mean like, just like right now, you and I aren't also going on our iMessage or our email or something that would take us out of flow state.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
oxytocin physical touch is a really good one whether that's romantic physical touch or friendly friends and family increasing the quantity of interaction with humans and also pets so that's hugging humans interacting and cuddling pets is really good for oxytocin The other one for oxytocin is really thinking about how often you make a contribution to somebody else's life.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
We've all had that experience of doing something kind for someone and then thinking, oh, I feel quite good now that I've helped that person out with whatever it may be or made someone dinner or pick someone up from somewhere or whatever it might be. Oxytocin is driving you to contribute. So you've got touch and contribution. Serotonin, natural environments, absolutely unreal.
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How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
There's this incredible researcher called King Lee in Japan who's done this whole research into forest bathing and what we call serum serotonin levels. And when humans are in forests, you build tons and tons of serotonin. So if you can ever get into a forest, that would be awesome. The other one for serotonin is your food.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
If you can eat single ingredient foods, meaning steak, chicken, fish, eggs, yogurt, fruits, nuts, anything that just came from the jungle, basically, and has been here for hundreds of thousands of years, as opposed to ultra processed foods, that'd be great in nature and gut health. And then the final one, endorphins, either exercising hard, like you mentioned earlier, or singing music out loud.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Those are two methods that are really good. Oh, not my singing. It doesn't matter whether it's good or bad quality. I'm sure there's been a time in your life, maybe you're at like a bar or something and you were drinking and you had a good sing and you probably felt quite good when you were doing it.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And if you want a life that feels really rewarding and fulfilling, we have to get the dopamine in check. Otherwise, our life feels all like numb and boring.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
yes for sure it will make you number and number over time the more dopamine especially this quick dopamine if we were separating it into quick dopamine being i feel pleasure immediately and slow dopamine meaning i feel pleasure after a period of time you could even take a niche example of sex and pornography sex is something that you have to start engaging with that person you get intimate with them you kiss and so on eventually you find yourself in a nice experience of having sex
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
pornography is you've seen something on instagram and then you're on pornography within 10 seconds and the stimulation has risen extremely fast so one would be slow dopamine eventually you experience pleasure one would be quick and then a crash and if you're looking at your day overdoing the quick causes that numb deflated inattention and then having the slow dopamine not meaning having sex all day but doing some other activities that are rewarding for you is going to lead to a much more like fulfilling experience
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
This is interesting. Humans have had access to these quick dopaminergic behaviors for about one or 200 years, the first being sort of alcohol and cigarettes.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And sugar. Sugar was significant. Sugar altered into the more ultra-processed food version of sugar now, like fructose, corn syrup, and these kind of things is even more extreme for a dopamine point of view. But I would say if we look at society and we look at mental health, the most significant change that's brand new is short video content on social media.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I think that's the thing that has massively shifted the world from a mental health standpoint. And if you look at your relationship with your phone before and after COVID, COVID was the era of short video being created. And also in these moments, I appreciate the irony of the fact I literally make short video content. So it's like a tricky situation.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But if we look at the frequency of engagement with that behavior, we're going to cause the greatest dopamine disruption. Because where alcohol really has a big effect and pornography has a really big effect, you're unlikely to engage with that behavior 50 times a day. Whereas if you look at the phone, it is more destructive for society because of how often we're going on it.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So I would say the phone is the number one thing to get in check. I also have had to come off of alcohol and things like that because for me, like I find everything way too addictive. So I've had to move towards a pretty healthy lifestyle, to be honest, in order to manage it and almost get addicted to the experience of a healthy lifestyle.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But I think for a lot of people, the domino that needs to fall is significant separation from social media.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
To just always speak in the most truthful way, I think pornography is something that's really difficult to come away from because it's a very private behavior. And none of society knows that anyone else is doing it because it's like an isolated behavior. Whereas often, if you were really heavily drinking, it would be quite apparent to your partner or your friends, family, and so on.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's more of a shared experience. More of a shared experience. And even if you end up drinking on your own, it's going to become quite obvious to other people that you're now drinking on your own and so on. You can't hide it.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Whereas pornography is very easy to hide. And therefore, when I, a number of years ago, maybe...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
four years ago or so i started thinking okay i've got to get dialed in on the dopamine i need to like come off alcohol and for me like that was the necessary step because i couldn't manage alcohol and then it was like really think about the food think about all these different steps and then pornography was this one whereby i'd be able to come off it for a period of time but there'd always be that like temptation to re-engage with that behavior and it is like a challenging conversation to have pornography i feel like society isn't really considering it
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But in terms of the elevation in dopamine, it's absolutely insane. And in order to understand that, you only have to think about how much pleasure you experience and how rapidly you experience that pleasure when you engage with it. And then you know how big of a deal it is.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And when you compare, say, scrolling your Instagram reels to pornography, you'll notice you feel much more pleasurable during the pornography because of the hyper dopamine stimulation. So where alcohol, social media, porn, they've all been challenging to come away from, I would say, yeah, porn is probably the most difficult. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I think it's interesting this because I also wasn't someone that was like a super porn addict in terms of like, it's not like someone that would be like engaging with it all day, every day and stuff like that. I was someone that just grew up as a teenager and that was just like an option of like, oh yeah, you can watch porn. So that's like a thing you can do.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And then if I was ever engaging with the behavior of masturbation, it would be always accompanied by porn because I just thought that's the given thing. When you look at, would it be... more of a dopaminergic stimulation than social media and alcohol, I think you always have to go into like a deeper philosophical spiritual idea of
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
what is porn tapping into from a human innate desire point of view and where humans would have really sought after social connection. That was like fundamental to our survival with social media and alcohol being kind of modern versions of social connection. They're both driven by our pursuit of interacting with other humans.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Pornography is really tapping into the desire to procreate and there's nothing stronger in a human than the desire to procreate. So I do think it's tapping even deeper into that instinctive driver within us.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
What I basically believe the brain evolved to do throughout these like hundreds of thousands of years was simply discover the process of survival and how it can be optimized, which is a given. Like obviously we've managed to survive to this point and survival is important. When you look specifically at dopamine, like why is it really living within our brain?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
it effectively lives within our brain to reward us for behaviors that are advantageous to our survival to survive to survive so in that moment that the fire struck after rubbing rocks together for three hours a massive dopamine hit comes because that would have been a very yeah it would have been so annoying doing that yeah like you think how easy our lives are now imagine actually coming home from a day of work and then doing that for three hours until you got some fire like it was hard
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And we needed a chemical that every single day just drove us to keep making the fire and keep looking for the food, even when it was freezing cold outside and so on. And we got here as a species.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And just like dopamine evolved as this very sophisticated mechanism to reward survival, activities that promoted survival, I think it has the same capacity to negatively create experiences that are disadvantageous to survival of us and our prospering as a species. And then if you look...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Rather than having to look on Instagram at a list of what's good for my dopamine and what's bad for my dopamine, if you simply ask yourself the question, is this actually advantageous to my survival as a species? Then you will know immediately whether it's pro or not pro for your dopamine.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And you look at pornography, if you go further with pornography, a society that only watches porn as an engagement of sex is actually going to be one that doesn't procreate at all. And the brain is only going to send society a stronger and stronger message saying, please stop engaging with that path because that's not going to lead to a prospering society in a thousand years.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And if you think of it with when you feel crap after cigarettes, or you feel crap after spending a whole day socially isolated from being on your phone all day, or the ultra processed food, all of it is a very sophisticated message from our biochemistry as a result of our brain's desire to prosper for thousands of years. Wow.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I definitely don't think people feel that much remorse or guilt or shame for engaging with it. It's definitely a very normalised behaviour, just like it's normal to get super drunk. That's not necessarily that judged across the world. Pornography, I don't feel, is that judged. I think it would vary from gender to gender or generation to generation, how people thought about it. Certainly...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
In the world of being in your 20s, I don't think it's a very judged action. And I do think it's a very hard thing for society to come away from. It's also evolving in terms of virtual reality is going to create a very difficult experience. I can't even imagine what that will do to dopamine. And all of that lane is becoming faster and faster.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I dread the day that pornography has a feed like Instagram Reels, where you don't even have to watch one video, but you could watch videos at pace. That would be hell. I shouldn't even give them that idea. Don't give them that idea. My goodness, man. And I believe the only path to coming away from it is very, very deeply observing how it's actually impacting your life.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Because what happens with all this dopamine stuff is you just think, I feel okay. Maybe you do struggle feeling depressed or anxious, and then you really need to start considering how your lifestyle is creating that experience potentially. But a lot of people might feel quite neutral. They're like, I feel all right. It's not really doing too much damage.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And with all the different, particularly men that engage with this, but women do too, that we guide,
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
they come away from it for a week they say okay seven days i'm just not gonna watch porn and they're like uneasy as to whether that's even gonna do anything for them and they're like i don't really want to lose that like pleasurable experience that i have in my life and you rapidly see a change in motivation and attention when you come away from it you really quickly see the ability to just take action on whatever you're wanting to do like i want to go to the gym i want to go for a walk in the morning so apparently they're good for you or i want to work hard you see a shift and it's simply because like just before you're going to sleep
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
in that nice regenerative dopamine experience of sleep, just before that, you're just having this huge spike crash off sleep and you're waking up with a lower dopamine level. And if you can end the day with a healthier experience, you're going to wake up with a higher regeneration of dopamine. And then you're going to think, okay, I'm ready to attack the day.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah, I think that definitely starts with you finish your work. I think it's extremely important. So you finish your work, say 5, 6 p.m. The first check in I would do is make sure you have some short 60 second or so short reflection of your day that helps you to celebrate the progress that has occurred.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's very easy to go into the end of the day looking at your calendar and task list and thinking, shit, I have a lot more to do. and then enter your evening in a state of dissatisfaction, which isn't good for our mind.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So the first thing, quick reflection, very simple way to do that would literally just be to look back at your tasks list or look back at your calendar and think, okay, cool, I've done this, I've done a podcast, we've done some meetings or whatever it may have been. then I think you need a period of time away from wherever you were working.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So if you're in the office, you're naturally leaving the office, which is good. A lot of people obviously work from home now. You then need to leave your home. Go outside.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
That could be walking. Yeah, if it's still light in the summer sort of months, go into nature, have a period of that. Could be to the gym. The most important thing is after that work period, you're then entering 60 to 90 minutes completely screen free. So you need a moment where your brain is going to de-stimulate.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And it almost can be uncomfortable, that experience, because our brain is in that dopamine loop all day. We separate from the technology of our phone or our laptop. And suddenly we can almost feel a bit of a decline. And that's when we're like, well, actually, I think I'll just stay on the phone for the evening. Or turn the TV on or something.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Different screen. And I think if you can have a period, so that could be gym, it could be for a walk. It might be that you just need to go like supermarket shopping.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
For sure. And then we basically try and get people to, they come back from that activity and they've then got dinner and you've got potentially like TV watching and social. That's kind of your potential evening activities typically in our world. And- we'll try and continue that concept of a phone fast effectively.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So there's prolonged periods of time away from the phone so that this dopamine system can regenerate, so that you can step away from all your work emails and conversation and so on. And phone fasting really requires, and this is very clear in our work, it requires physical separation from the device. Not even just being close to you and flipping it over. That's not a fact. That just does not work.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It has to be in like an office on a windowsill away from you so that you're not near it. Because we effectively have this experience of boredom begins to arise in our brain. Like we're cooking and we're like, this is uncomfortable. I'm bored. And the reason we feel that way is because dopamine is declining. Or it might be like we're eating dinner.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
We're talking to someone and that even might be boring now because we're so in stimulation all day. Gosh. And we call this the boredom barrier, where basically what you see is there's a period of maybe 10 to 15 minutes where you feel uncomfortable and you're like, this is kind of shit and you want your phone and you want stimulation.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But you do quickly surpass what we call the boredom barrier if you stay in the state of boredom and then it becomes OK again. Unsurprisingly, humans were able to do life without phones prior to them being a thing. And we'll then guide them. They cook, they eat, and then maybe they watch TV.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
With the TV, I really don't think the TV is as significant as a problem as all the other aspects of technology.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
For sure. And we have these simple questions when people are going through the experiences, these interactive questions. When we ask people whether they watched TV and scrolled at the same time the night before, we have a 96% yes rate to that question. Wow. So the vast majority of society scrolls and watches TV. And then you explore why that is. TV is boring now.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Like sitting there and just watching Netflix. Or like I watched Gladiator, the movie the other day. That's a great movie. My girlfriend had never seen Gladiator. Gladiator is a really good film. Oh, you watched the first one or the second one? First one. We haven't seen the new one yet. Oh, the first one.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
As you'll see, if you observe the difference between the new one that comes out, the new one will be dopamine carnage in comparison. Slower storytelling of the old one. Yeah. And we're watching it and you're kind of sitting there and you actually are a bit bored while you're watching a film. And back in the day, if you went back to the 70s, that would have been like hyper dopamine stimulation.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But this is how the baselines are changing over time because of the overstimulation.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And we just need to become comfortable with that experience so this chemical can restore itself effectively. And again, physical separation is important. If you're with other people, like you've got a partner or kids or anyone, it's unbelievably important that they also participate in the phone fast.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And there's this really interesting area of neuroscience about anticipatory dopamine, which is basically the concept that your dopamine will rise simply at the thought of accessing dopamine, not just when you engage with it.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah. I get the big anticipation. I know, when's my hit coming? And like, if you're, like, you know, you're sitting at a restaurant with your wife and you're eating some food and then they take out their phones, check it quickly, and before you've even thought, yours is boom, straight in the hand.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And effectively, your brain has seen their dopamine rise, experienced anticipation, and then it's driven you into action towards the same experience of dopamine. Wow. So it's very important. Like if you're going to sit on the sofa and not be on it, they have to not be on it as well because the battle is too hard to fight.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
We really want as a society high baseline dopamine. It's so important that we all every day are waking up and we're generating a ton of this chemical. It leads to you just living your best experience of life you possibly can in terms of everything. Your ability to cook and exercise and work and connect and have sex and just be a thriving modern human.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
All of us are basically waking up with low baseline dopamine and therefore it is not the greatest experience of life humanity can have. And if we do begin to get this chemical back into balance, that's what's going to be the end product.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So when you have all these different actions coming into play, ultimately you're just looking at, do I want to absolutely love my experience of life or do I want it to feel like pretty cool, like pretty average, medium?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And it's like, if you can experience like your life feeling really good, and I've had this, like all of this guidance doesn't come from a neuroscientist that thinks dopamine is cool. It comes from an addict that lived a pretty shit experience of life for like 10 years. And I just wasn't that happy. I wasn't thriving in my work. My food wasn't good. My exercise wasn't good. Dating wasn't good.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Everything was off. My ability to feel connected to my family and contribute to my family, everything felt misaligned. And ultimately, getting dopamine in check just changed all of that. It completely changed the experience I'm having. And we all get this period of time where we get to be a human. It would be nice if we can thrive throughout that time.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I actually believe it's the most important thing society does. Really? Definitely.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And having a healthy balance of it. Having a healthy balance of it and learning to step away as frequently as we can from the quick stuff, move towards the slow stuff. And then you obviously have these other neurochemicals, oxytocin and serotonin and endorphins. These are absolutely pivotal to society thriving.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But the big issue we have right now is we've become dopamine driven, where we're all only in the pursuit of either pleasure or also success is dopamine addiction as well. And we're in the pursuit of that. Society used to live its life very in the pursuit of oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. Now we've shifted it.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So if dopamine gets in check, you then open this door and it's like, cool, how else can I optimize my neurochemistry?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Okay, so the most important aspect is it starts with the night before with where you charge your phone. You can't charge your phone by your head. It's the most fundamental change size he has to make with the dopamine. And if it has to be in the room for an alarm, it charges the other side of the room and you get out of bed to turn it off. Ideally, you get yourself an alarm clock.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
You get off like two pounds on Amazon or you get yourself a nice one for Christmas, whatever it might be. But we need an alarm clock and we need to wake up and not go into quick dopamine. I would say we need an absolute minimum of 15 minutes before we see a phone screen. Ideally, I would push that towards 30 minutes. In the morning. Yeah. I don't think you can see a phone within 15 minutes.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Even this morning, like I woke up, I was pretty jet lagged. I woke up at like 4 a.m. today and it was... Obviously very tempting. Oh, I wonder what's going on in the world. Social media. We got the whole presidential election style. I was curious to have a look at how that was going. And I was like, no, because this is the day I want to be thriving. I've got an important podcast today.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
If I go into my phone, I'm disrupting the capacity for that moment to happen. So the first thing is 15 minutes minimum, 30 minutes ideally.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
you want to wake up and you want to immediately take action you want to start doing something that's effortful so not only are you not spiking and crashing it and living in that world which is what most of us live in but you're actually going in the opposite direction and dopamine is on the rise and that would involve you wake up you immediately walk to the bathroom and you go to the bathroom
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
After you've been to the bathroom, if you're sitting there and you're going to the toilet, you've got to have a book in there to entertain you if you're going to potentially go on your phone. Then you're engaging in effortful reading and that's much, much better. Books are way better for our dopamine because they're challenging, not easy. Then use flash cold water on your face.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
You brush your teeth and you brush your teeth properly. And then you walk back to your bedroom and you make your bed. So very simply, you wake, you don't go on your phone, you go to the bathroom, you brush your teeth, you splash cold water on your face, and you make your bed. You've experienced a drastically different situation from a neurochemistry point of view.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Your dopamine is climbing fast and hard. And then whatever else you wanna do that morning, maybe it's that you wanna get out and go for a walk. Maybe you've gotta make your kids breakfast. Maybe you've gotta start your working day. You're starting from a higher baseline dopamine state, which is when you're gonna perform at a really high level with whatever action you're wanting to take.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Rather than climbing out of low dopamine and finding everything annoying and feeling irritated and feeling flat, it's drastically different.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Definitely.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's central. Imagine waking up as a hunter-gatherer, how much effort they immediately engage with. Instantly. Instantly. They didn't just go and chill. They would have just been up, get the fire going so we've got warmth. Who's going out for the food? Who's rebuilding the shelter? Who's looking after the kids? Like it would have just been wake and go every single day.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And some people come through our Dose experience and they say this is a bit like military training, like waking up, making my bed. And I honestly believe like we are living in a world where we've got to get more disciplined. I don't think a sort of balance, moderation, sometimes phone, sometimes... I don't think that works in the world we have now.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
A hundred years ago, moderation might have been great with food and all that sort of stuff. I think we're living in a world where we do have to become a more disciplined species if we want to feel our best.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah, I think ADHD is a fascinating topic for our world. I think it's something that many humans may have had for thousands of years. I think there would have always been a subset of society that potentially had this lowered baseline dopamine level. There's a brilliant scientist called Volkow who's done like a lot of research into ADHD and dopamine levels.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Nice.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And you see with those that are genetically born with ADHD that they might have a lower production of dopamine within their brain.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It is so essential. And I think Just as you and I really believe in how important it is to be in service to people in our world, like contribution is very, very important. It also creates this stimulation of oxytocin, this love hormone within our brain when we serve others. We also have the capacity to contribute and serve ourself. And that is exactly what you're doing.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
You're in service to yourself. And it isn't actually serving yourself by going straight in the phone when we wake up. And just as I explained earlier with how clever our dopamine is at reinforcing the positive action, it's going to send us a message saying, this isn't what I want. Like, I'm a body here and I want to be thriving. I want my hormones to be calm.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
so there's that element of the genetic component we in our modern world with all the things we've been discussing of social media and porn and sugar are really disrupting this pathway so we have some people that are exhibiting it as a result of their genes from when they're born and a lot of people are also exhibiting it as a result of the altered modern lifestyle
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I want my whole body to be in a good stay. And when you live that lifestyle that you just described, your brain is going to send you a great message saying, please continue this path. And then your happiness rises. And we're, as a society right now, very much in the pursuit of pleasure, not happiness. And that is the pursuit of happiness. The alternative option is the pursuit of pleasure.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And pleasure is not the best life.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It feels good at the time. It feels good. It's very addictive.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Extremely hard. I had to go, yeah, big periods of abstinence. When I was at university, I got so into this pleasure loop of smoking cigarettes and drinking and everything, basically. And when I was about 22 years old, I was thinking, there's no way I'm going to live a life that I'm really happy experiencing with this. And I knew that my grandpa lived in...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
this like natural setting, they had a house with a garden and stuff like that. And I didn't grow up, I grew up more like a bit more town life. And I took myself there and I spent like 90 days at this house living like a monk basically, because I was like, I have to somehow get off this stuff. And very quickly I discovered there is a different thing that you can be in the pursuit of.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
You can be in the pursuit of a pleasureful experience of a really healthy life. Like you can start really loving like the nature walks and the hiking and the cooking and just the getting really dialed in to optimization. And if you are someone that's super addicted to all the unhealthy dopamine, I really think the only route is addiction towards the healthier pursuit of life.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah. And it doesn't mean it has to be unhealthy with that lane, but it needs like the big thing with addiction, like my favorite definition of addiction is the progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And if you look at when you're in a period of addiction, like if you look at alcoholism, eventually your family don't make you happy and your work doesn't make you happy, exercise doesn't, but the alcohol brings you the pleasure. And it's this narrowing of what is the pursuit of pleasure for you in your life.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And then the other side of this, the good life being the progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. And rather than like, for me, I had alcohol and pornography and cigarettes being like really driving things of what created pleasure for my brain. Then it suddenly became this fast array of nature and exercise and food and social and contribution and work and so on.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And suddenly when I had a variety of things that were giving me the experience of happiness, the kind of deep need I had for the quick stuff began to fade. And this thing was actually fulfilling me.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I think the
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Addiction to kind of success with work is quite tricky to manage I have been so thrilled over these last few years as to how things have gone with dose and I Really am doing this from a place of like I just want people to be able to have a great experience of their life But then you build pressure around the system as I'm sure you've experienced where you suddenly have a team to fund and all that kind of stuff and I feel
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
regardless of the cause, it really does create a lot of difficulty for people's lives of inattention and lack of action and procrastination. And it's extremely important that we begin to get it in check and help these people to thrive.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
kind of deeper weight to carry as to like social media needs to always be thriving, business needs to always be thriving. And then I can get quite hooked on the pursuit of that dopamine as well. And things like followers, it taps into like your ego and things like that as well.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So I think managing kind of like the financial and social media side of this life I'm now in is definitely difficult to manage.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's really interesting in these moments because as I started to do more and more of these podcasts and these conversations, whenever I had a question that I think, what is the answer to that question? I've always thought I have to just ask the most truthful thing in my being, not the thing that I think would be the right thing to say. Yes. You got to be honest.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
If I am honest, a conversation and a connection with God is actually the thing that's began to help me in those moments. And I didn't grow up with a Christian family. I didn't grow up going to church. I basically have had no religion in my life, my entire experience of life. And When things weren't going to plan, I found that like prayer was really good.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Like I have this morning routine where I have this really specific bench that I always like to walk to in the morning. No phone involved, of course. And I walk there and for a lot of the time, my practice there was to sit down and do like a breathing process to calm my nervous system and some gratitude and some like kind of accomplishment celebration stuff for myself talk.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And I had this experience. I was doing this every day for like three or four years. And then with some various things that have happened, life stuff and work stuff, I added praying into that moment. And I found this conversation of like, thank you for all I have and promising my life to serving the world and things like that.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I found it to be very powerful in calming my moments of fear effectively in that experience and created this conversation trust in things are going to go okay so when i'm in those deep states of fear my mind race i have a very overthinking mind where i just rapidly go into worst case scenario and i found really like a conversation with god in those moments is the best thing to calm you down
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
This is where things get so fascinating because with that new... I would say I started this prayer maybe a year ago. I then, about four or five months ago, began going to church for the first time in my life. I haven't even told anyone this. And on Sundays, I'll go to church and I'll spend like an hour in there. And... my natural kind of inquisitive brain of like the neuroscience side of things.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's like observing the whole experience of the prayer and the gratitude and the contribution to one another and the connection and the singing. And I'm thinking this is like Dose. This is a lot of actions that we're kind of promoting in the modern world, but just through a different lens. And I've been sitting in there thinking this is the original mental health therapy, basically.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Like this is obviously the original model that really helped people's minds to thrive. And I think what's interesting in the church environment, when you look at a relationship with God, that is putting you more in the pursuit of oxytocin as an experience of life. It's a very oxytocin dominant moment in the church.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's like this thanking to God is this contribution to everyone, like everyone kind of
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
shakes their hands says peace be with you and connects with one another it's this singing it's this like celebration of what has been and that is the pursuit of oxytocin and love and i basically believe that for much of the experience of humanity oxytocin was the driving chemical it was how does this group prosper how does this group survive and dopamine was required in our brain to make sure we were giving the resources to the group but i think we are in the pursuit of others and i think nowadays a lot of us are in the pursuit of serving ourself basically it's
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
How do I make myself feel good all the time? My phone, alcohol, sugar, all this stuff. And I think when I'm sitting in church, I'm thinking, wow, this is not about me anymore. This is about a group and God. And that feels like a much better place for the human brain. It feels like it's stepping you out of your own problems.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Definitely. Effectively, dopamine is about taking away the overstimulation and getting it back into natural stimulation. And then with the other ones, we haven't necessarily learned how to hack them like we have with dopamine, but they're very low as a result of our lifestyle. All of those three, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, are underproducing themselves. So we get them boosted.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Dopamine equals motivation. So that's just completely driving your ability to take action in your life.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Connection.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Energy.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
De-stress. It effectively has evolved to de-stress our brain.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
They wouldn't. It's an interesting idea. Like would phone fasting serve the other chemicals? So it's like, yes, it definitely is serving dopamine coming away from any dopamine hits from the phone. So that's definitely serving dopamine. But then if you were just to sit in your bed and do nothing in your phone fast and meditate, that would stay in quite a dopamine type world.
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Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But if you were to, during your phone fast, cook and serve your family when cooking and socialize with them, or if you go out and exercise or whatever it might be, then the other chemicals are going to rise. So effectively, I think dopamine is largely distracting us from pursuing the other chemicals.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
If you step away from a lot of the quick dopamine, naturally, just as a human being, you're going to think, oh, I need to entertain myself because I'm bored. And then the other actions are going to cause a rise in the other ones.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
What is the- They've basically evolved to de-stress our brain. If ever we were in a situation where we were in extreme physical and psychological danger, like we were under threat of seeing an animal and it began to chase us, we were forced into a moment of extreme physical exertion to try and survive that situation.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
There is for sure. And this is where it gets really fascinating. I do a lot of events around schools and we have them a lot with ADHD. And I also grew up as a young guy with ADHD without necessarily knowing it. It wasn't diagnosed as frequently back then.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
and it'd obviously be very annoying in that moment if one your brain was like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die and if it was two also experiencing like a stitch and stuff like that and endorphins has this incredible capacity to just eliminate the stress from our mind and take pain out of our physiology as well in order to help us survive in that moment where we're no longer running away from bears which is great we are still stressed as hell and in moments where you feel extremely stressed out endorphins can be an incredible response and action that builds endorphins is a really good way to respond to it
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Because it's going to release in your brain and your brain's going to settle itself.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But I grew up with real difficulty in school, massive inattention, big highs, big lows, a very like addictive personality to anything I engaged with, whether it was healthy stuff or unhealthy stuff. And I began really investigating this world of if someone has ADHD, how can they thrive? Partly selfishly out of like, I really wanted to get going. I wanted a business and I wanted to be able to serve.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah, I think stress is a very interesting topic and I do want to touch on the laughter because
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
stress is like very widely researched and cortisol this other hormone is also very impactful and a lot of the work we look at in stress is about calming the body down and there is so much truth in that our heart rates are racing in the modern world and having breathing practices and nature and good sleep and everything is very important for calming our stress endorphins is taking a slightly different lane on that idea if we look evolutionarily
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
We never really experienced stress for 300,000 years that wasn't accompanied with a physical action immediately after it. So if we were super stressed because we were starving, food was the only thing that was going to settle that stress. Hunting, getting up and moving. Getting up and moving. And if we were in some kind of physical danger from a human or an animal or...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Our environment was under threat, whatever it may be. Physical action always was accompanying the stress to calm us back down. And I think for me, I do feel stressed by life. Life can be stressful for sure. And in stressful moments, I've done a lot of the breathing stuff, which I think is great, breathing and sleep and so on.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But I actually think the most useful thing is utilizing physical action first. And then after the physical action, chilling out and slowing down is even easier because you've kind of completely settled the system. But I think a lot of us just feel stressed and we're like, I feel really stressed. So I need an evening on the sofa with my glass of wine and the TV show.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
That is not the optimal way to recover. The optimal way would be getting to a challenging physical experience effectively first. Then chill out for sure and have an early night. For sure. And the laughter side of things, we, as they're going through with the dose lab, they are... beginning to assess all these different metrics.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And we have been so unbelievably surprised at how much people rate, how much laughter they have in their life. And as they're going through it, they get asked this question, how much do you like laughing? One to 10. And we have a 9.3 average on this question. Unsurprisingly, humans like laughing. Few people click A, most people click 10.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Then they get asked the question, how frequently do you laugh from one to 10? And we have an average at 5.6. So there's this like massive disparity between how much we like it and how much is actually occurring. And as these programs evolve with people, people have this real realization of like, wow, I'm living a very isolated lack of laughter lifestyle.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Like I'm spending a huge amount of time whereby my social stimulation is being partially satisfied by watching people socialize on my phone. And I'm not actually there socializing and being in that experience and maybe a little chuckle at some like dog jumping off a wall or something. There's that little, but there's not like proper physical laughter, which is what the endorphins need to release.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And, people then have this awareness of like, wow, I need to get myself into what we call laughter environments. And they literally plan out, okay, when are my three laughter environments this week? Is it a FaceTime with my daughter? And is it going for like a walk with this particular person? A comedy show. We really need laughter. We're underestimating how much we're lacking it.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And it's very clear. Like we all know that laughter is one of the greatest experiences of the human there is out of everything. Healing. Yeah. And when we went into the research, as I was going through that, I...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
over the last few years selected these 20 actions based on what had the most research evidence behind it in order to boost the chemicals because that was the most simple formula to take and then i could pick the 20 behaviors when i was writing a chapter for example flow state which is all about deep concentration there is obviously like crazy amounts of stuff on your attention span big widely researched area if you look at laughter versus attention spans there is significantly less work going into laughter
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And I began thinking a lot about our ancestors. The whole of the dose effect is built upon our brain spent 300,000 years running around out there, hunting and building and making fire and connecting as small groups, 300,000 years. And nowadays we've spent about 30 years as modern sedentary digital humans. And you can imagine for our bright biochemistry, that's pretty tricky, that change.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And I then had the task of I need to get an entire chapter out of this experience of laughter. So I went really deep into that world. And it is so clear that human beings that laugh significantly more and significantly more frequently are having a better experience of life. And we need to become conscious of it. We need to be more social.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yes, at TJ Power on Instagram. Empower is my name. As we shared earlier, that is actually my real name. It's not a stage name. And, uh, the way in which you can engage with dose and learn it is, uh, the dose lab.com, the dose lab.com. Okay.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It would be to... Every single week, spend a prolonged period of time in nature completely without a phone. Ideally, the phone is at home or if it has to be with you for safety, it's in a bag and it's on airplane. So that'd be one thing. Prolonged period of time in nature, no phone. The second one would be
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
To ensure each day your day is centered around how your actions will serve others rather than how are they serving yourself and your pleasure. And the third one would be to put the people around you in your life at the center of your mind to make sure that every single day you are conscious of how those people are.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
These are your direct closest connections, your girlfriends and boyfriends and wives and husbands and kids and so on. And to have like a very conscious thing in your life as to are these people's experience of life rising as a result of how I'm interacting with them and teaching them and learning from them and so on?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
If you were to look at a hunter-gatherer and they grew up with ADHD, for example, so say they had genetically low dopamine, they got to like seven, eight years old, and suddenly they're expected to contribute. Maybe they had to start the fire one night, maybe they had to hunt, build, make the food, whatever it may be.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Or are they creating greater difficulty as a result of me promoting unhealthy things within their lives? So I'd say prolonged nature, constant service to humanity, and a real conscious aspect of are you educating and serving the people that you love?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I think living a disciplined life, living a really disciplined life where you're feeling incredibly proud of each action you take. I watched a great movie recently, The Last Samurai, which is that old movie.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Well, it was slower paced and I'm in the pursuit of slow. Good movie. And I was watching, he goes to the samurai and he visits that Japanese village. And they're all so deeply in the pursuit of hyper-discipline from the moment they wake. And I so deeply believe that the path to us feeling our happiness is very much rooted in how much discipline we show to ourselves.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And I believe greatness will come if you live a disciplined life.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
They would have had to begin engaging with very challenging, effortful-based activities. If you were to compare the hunter-gatherer with ADHD to the one without it, The one with ADHD, because it's got low dopamine levels, would experience a greater elevation in their dopamine and actually enjoy the activity more and thrive more than the other hunter-gatherer without it.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So then they would get really into it and they might actually become the greatest hunter or the greatest shelter builder. As a result of the fact they would effectively experience more pleasure from the activity itself. And with the schools, we're really trying to reframe this for a lot of young people.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
We've kind of changed it from ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, to ADHA, attention deficit hyperactivity ability, to try and make it like a concept in their mind whereby this is going to be challenging. It definitely comes with a lot of difficulty. If you find something to isolate on, you can really, really thrive.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And if you think evolutionarily, it would actually be very useful for us to all have a specific thing that we can hyper focus on. You didn't just want a group that were all identical at every single skill because that group wouldn't thrive as much as a group that had an unbelievable set of hunters and unbelievable set of builders, unbelievable set of food providers, all that kind of stuff.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So it makes sense that naturally there would be different things. We would be more have a greater inclination towards. And the big thing there is understanding you don't have to be good at something for it to be your thing at the beginning. It's only that it has to interest you in some way.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Like I've had the exact same nightmare in school, really couldn't engage with any of it until I found this psychology world and neuroscience. And I thought, wow, that actually for some reason sparks my mind. But even when I started doing it like 15, 16, I still wasn't very good at it. I just thought, well, this is at least something that's interesting to me.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And finding the niche things as someone that has an ADHD brain, you think, I like it. That's where you can thrive. And I've even had it with slide design in terms of making presentations with work. I always just thought for some reason that interested me. And I was not good at it when I started doing it. But I just niched so hard and I'm just going to design slides. Really?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Your slides are beautiful. I saw them.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I actually kept as that design role. I have a great guy on my team that supports me now with it to make it extra cool. But it was something that I wasn't necessarily good at, but it was something I liked and I found it interesting. And then you eventually, because if you have a brain that gets a big dopaminergic stimulation of that activity, you will eventually be extremely good at it.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But you just have to realize that you don't have to be good at something straight away.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I would say if we're putting it down to a few specific ones, phones, specifically social media, would be the largest factor, I would say, is number one. And then I would say ultra-processed food and sugar would be secondary to that. And I would say a lot of stuff then comes off of those two. If you look at the phone, it impacts...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Quasi of sunlight we get, the amount of exercise we do, it creates a really sedentary lifestyle and so on. So there's downstream effects. But I would say if you niched on someone creating extremely healthy relationship with social media, there would then be a big knock-on effect on their mood and energy and so on.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
One way you reduce significantly the frequency of engagement, not completely getting rid of it. You can do that. That would definitely serve you to get rid of it. But I think for a very significant proportion of society, they would like to continue to engage with the social media world. And when you look into it from a dopamine point of view,
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Every single time you enter social media, you're experiencing this very fast elevation in dopamine. And that creates a really fast elevation and then a very quick crash as the brain seeks for its homeostasis, seeks for its balance.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Just to put that into context, to go back to that hunter-gatherer example, we only originally could experience that elevation in dopamine from successfully spending five hours building a hut or making a fire or hunting down an animal. So it was a very slow increase. We experienced pleasure.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah, a nice, slow, steady decline. You might get two dopamine hits in the whole day. Wow. If you look at social media, you're effectively experiencing the same elevation in dopamine as a hunter-gatherer would after five hours of hunting, but you're experiencing it within three or four seconds from opening the app. Wow.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And therefore, because it rises so fast and the brain is just thinking, wow, I can't deal with this overstimulation. After you come off social media, you get this really significant crash. This is called phasic and tonic dopamine. You get this really significant crash and that creates this low mood, low energy, inattention type experience.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
When you're looking at social media, just going on it once or twice, it's going to create stimulation and dopamine. Your brain is going to experience a bit of a crash, but it's okay if it happens, let's say, four or five times a day. But when we look into our data on the frequency of opening the phone, it's often between about 140 and 170 opens per day on the device.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
On social media or on your phone? Opening the phone. But then if you look at the first app, it's either WhatsApp or Instagram, typically. Typically those two. Instagram being more dopaminergic than WhatsApp. It's very hyper-connected to the novelty of the information you're about to see.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So Instagram is really novel, loads of new stuff, especially how the feeds are designed now because we're not as in control of what we see, like followers and stuff like that.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
and if someone really frequently engages hyper dopamine stimulation hyper crash for me like i'm someone that is so addicted to my phone like i find phones extremely like exciting and entertaining i got my first iphone when i was like 11 years old or something so i've like my whole life has just been like an iphone life and i got instagram then i got facebook then facebook was really big back then it was like the app and
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Throughout that next period of my life, maybe 11 to 25, I was just laser hooked on my phone. And eventually I was like, this is really disrupting my happiness, my relationships, my work, my attention and so on. And I thought, I'm not going to completely quit social media because it's creating my business life and it's allowing me to help people. And I like it. I find it fun.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Like I like learning things on there and so on. And I was like, how can I actually learn to manage this? And I tried so many different things. I tried app blockers and I tried like making the screen black and gray and all that different stuff that's big online. Nothing worked except a daily commitment to myself that I could only open the app at 10 a.m., 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Wow, three times a day.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Three times a day. And if it's outside that window, even if I have some really important message to reply to, it's just not allowed to be open 10 p.m., 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. And I had to create this boundary. My girlfriend also finds social media really addictive and she now lives the boundary with me. And we'll know at 10 o'clock, you'll see the dopamine excitement.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's like, yeah, now we can have it. But that shift makes a big difference. And we've got a lot of our people that go through dose doing this and having really strong boundaries to reduce frequency seems to be very important.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's really nice to experience a high amount of reward for something. Our brain wants really significant rewards.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So for the hunters, the food and the shelter and so on, for us today, that might be reward in your relationship, something like a really special moment happens in your relationship, something in your career, something with a friend, whatever it might be, something like winning sports matches. Our brain wants those real elevations of yes, life is going to plan, life is going well.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
the problem with really frequently engaging with the dopamine is it effectively works similar to a car engine where if you took like a manual car like a gear stick car and every morning you got in that car and you didn't put it into gear but you just started revving the engine which is like making it room every day
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
After a few weeks, that engine would begin to burn out and it literally wouldn't work anymore. Eventually it would stop working completely, but eventually over that period of time, it would just break down and break down. Really frequent dopamine hits, the quick, easy ones like social media and sugar and pornography and so on, are like that.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And they're just revving the engine way too hard, way too hard without actually making the car go forward and achieve something. And then if you actually think about that over time, the engine gets weaker and weaker. So then when you do have a great moment in your career or relationship or in a sports match, it doesn't even feel that good because you've effectively broken the system.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
If you're sitting in bed, lying in bed with your partner, and you're both scrolling your phones instead of talking or cuddling, you're choosing dopamine over oxytocin in that moment.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, definitely. So right at the core of oxytocin is physical touch. So if ever in your life you have a moment where you're interacting with a human that you feel comfortable to hug, always you should be taking that opportunity to hug that person. Kids, family, partners, colleagues, if you're good friends with them, But we really need more physical touch.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And ever since COVID, physical touch is rapidly reduced. And it's a really core component of our system. It needs oxytocin through the physical touch. And the big thing to understand is many people in the modern world are struggling with sort of a stressful, anxious, fearful feeling within their mind.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And as a hunter-gatherer, and I always refer back to this because these chemicals weren't built for this world we're in now. They were built for the original way humans operated for 99% of human history.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
As a hunter gatherer, if you were cast aside from the tribe, that would have been the most anxious and stressful experience ever because you would not survive alone in the wild and your oxytocin level would become extremely low because you were disconnected from the group. For many of us now, because this chemical is under satisfied, whilst we're not out there in the wild on our own,
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Our biochemistry almost perceives that we are because it's not satisfied from a connection point of view. So touch is at the forefront. Then the way in which you socially connect with people is really important. So when you're with people, the eye contact you make, the questions you ask, how well you listen, how engaged you are in that conversation and not distracted by technology.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
These kind of things enable good oxytocin to transfer between you.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, and that's super accurate. As our brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, it never necessarily could have perceived that we were going to come up with these little glass screens that could create the experience of connecting with humans without you even being there.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And when you look into these research studies, yes, being face-to-face in person and physically having a moment of embracing one another is the absolute goal. There's even this great study by this lady called Seltzer who just compares people sending each other messages versus people calling one another. And when we receive texts, no oxytocin transfers in the brain.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
When we call one another and we hear one another's voices, oxytocin does begin to transfer. And it just really makes you think with many aspects of society, whether it's Parents calling their kids they're at university or your partner's away for a while or you're in the dating world and you're on like apps like Hinge or whatever it might be.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
So much is digital based when we're actually looking for something that requires the sound of someone's voice to stimulate the hormone that we're actually chasing in the first place.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, it really is. And I noticed that I have a good relationship with my brother and I haven't seen him for over a year in real life. And he lives out in Bali. And we noticed that we hadn't been calling much, but we had been texting. But we noticed that we just really weren't bonding. And then we were like, okay, let's intentionally start calling.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And suddenly it's a very different experience because we now hear each other's voices on the phones. And when you're a very young baby lying in a cot, so much of your oxytocin comes from hearing the sound of your primary caregiver's voices and then knowing, okay, they're near me, I'm safe. And it came from sound and also came from touch.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
A baby wasn't growing up reading a little message saying, okay, now I'm safe because I've read a message. And with these primal things that are deeply wired into our brain are important to consider.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Text has its function for sure. Don't have to call everyone on that list, but the people you really love or the people that need your love, I think it's important.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah and that's an interesting phenomenon for modern humans that so much of this key chemical that impacts our mood, the stability of our mood but also our energy levels is manufactured there and our body deeply craves nice natural food to enter it so that it can be broken down into amino acids like things like tryptophan which are the precursors to the construction of serotonin and
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
the modern gut is struggling. There's so much of this sort of ultra processed food, very high in chemical food that is very addictive, very dopaminergic, very pleasurable to eat, but it's really disrupting our gut and therefore disrupting our capacity to build this chemical.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
We are. And I think nutrition is a complicated landscape in the modern world because there are so many opinions and there's like, we need to be extreme meat eaters or extreme vegans, or you have to follow this diet or that diet.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And it can be very complicated for maybe the average person who's not a nutritionist themselves to actually understand like, which of these foods am I supposed to be eating? But I think by and large, if we can get back to the core of just
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
most of our diet being natural foods that were here on earth before we got here as humans if the food if you look at it on your plate and you think could that actually exist without human intervention then yeah it's probably going to be pretty good for your health it's going to be good for your microbiome and the serotonin production and then of course as you dive deeper into nutrition you can optimize your protein and your antioxidants and everything those sort of decisions are really good decisions to be making but i think
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
The addiction we currently have to ultra-processed food in the modern world, like here in the UK, 57% of our calorie consumption on average is ultra-processed food, which is a huge proportion. I don't actually know the exact figure for the US, but I imagine maybe some.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Might be even higher in the US. Yeah. We got to do something about that.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Definitely. And I think these two things, I think foods and phones are the big thing that if society, if you like really get good with your food and your addiction to your phone, I think big shifts happen with your mental health.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, endorphins are interesting and just the general conversation about stress is interesting because so much of the kind of modern conversation around stress is about calming our system, which is super accurate. Meditative practices, calming the system as much as you can, being in nature, all of these things are really beautiful for calming you down.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
But when we look specifically at the emotion of stress, like when we feel really stressed and really heightened, evolutionarily, stress was much more simple for our ancestors.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Rather than all these micro stresses that we have in the modern world, we were basically really stressed if we were starving and we didn't have any food or if we were going to get eaten by some kind of animal and we were in extreme physical danger for our life. And in both of those moments of extreme stress, the significant thing that would occur is physical action within our body.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
We'd have to go hunt and search for that food or we'd have to fight for our life or climb a tree or sprint as fast as we can. And our body over hundreds of thousands of years paired together the idea of I'm stressed, physical action is coming next.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
During this physical action, endorphins are going to flood through the brain and body in order to de-stress my brain to make it more likely that I can survive this threat or find this food.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And I think often in the modern world, we're experiencing stress via our computers, via our phones, by someone saying something, a colleague, whatever it might be, a political opinion, but we're staying sedentary and we're effectively swallowing the stress into our body. And I think Really good calming practices in your mornings and evenings are super important.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
But I think whenever you're really stressed and really heightened, you need to have a framework in your mind where you need to literally physically release it through your system, through physical activity.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
sauna that's good stress yes these things that these things are healthy for our system our system is very physically capable it survived outside for a very long time those deep colds and extreme heats and lack of food all kinds of things and our body is much more physically capable than it experiences today now it's in perfect regulated temperature all the time and most often it's seated and that's just not what the system was designed for it's designed for much more physical stress than that
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Exercise is interesting. If it's completing some form of goal, you're getting a dopaminergic experience. Like if you're making progress towards some kind of accomplishment that you're seeking for. If you were exercising with someone, playing sport, gymming with someone, you're in a class, you'd get oxytocin.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
If you were outside whilst exercising, you'd get serotonin through the nature and the sunlight. And then obviously through the physical activity, you get endorphins. And we are very sedentary now. I think some people are great with their exercise. And I imagine lots of your listeners are really good with their exercise. So it's an important thing to continue to nail. But
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
I do think, I mean, for example, I spend a lot of time in schools with thousands of teenagers. If I could get them all to just start doing press-ups and squats and pull-ups and like really physically using their bodies, I know their mental health would improve a lot.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
It really does. And then it's funny because we do this thing called dose stacking when people are going through all our live experiences and they learn all about the chemicals and all the 20 different actions you can utilize. And then they try and come up with some kind of activity that could hit multiple cards within each chemical and multiple chemicals at once.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And ultimately, everyone ends up concluding, oh, maybe I should go out into nature with my friends and do some physical activity and eat some healthy food. That's like when you go through it or you conclude that. And then it's like, oh, yeah, that's what we did for 300,000 years. We walked around in nature with our friends and ate healthy food.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And although that might seem so simple, it's not what we're doing in the modern world. We don't spend enough time out in nature with our friends walking, eating healthy food. And that's what our system wants.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, so if they were having some kind of social experience, that would be a good opportunity for some stacking, but it could be a social experience at home. It doesn't have to be an exercise-based one. But if, say, you were having some friends over for dinner, if you chose in that situation when everyone got there,
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
to all agree to not go on your phones for the next like say hour or two hours and you all put your phones like on a windowsill and you're like, okay, we're just going to have a break.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
A good way to do this in a restaurant as well is to all put your phones in the middle and then whoever touches their phone has to pay for the meal and then you're really motivated to not touch the phone, whoever touches the phone first. If you were with them, you were socializing, hopefully with some good nutritious food.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Then it's really good in social settings to really lean into this whole gratitude conversation. If you were, say, with someone and you looked across them and you said the question, why do you feel grateful that I'm in your life? They would go, what the hell? That's a ridiculous question. That's like a shocking question to ask. But if you just said, no, seriously, like, can you think of anything?
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
They would easily be able to answer that question. That's why they're friends with you because they think you have something to offer them and some form of connection. If they shared those thoughts and then you shared yours back, you would get this unbelievable oxytocin experience.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah. Team sports are powerful. They're really beneficial, especially for the youngsters that are even more hooked on all this stuff than us as adults. It's really powerful.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, for sure. So these are these fascinating brain chemicals that live within us, and each of them have a very specific function for us. Dopamine is effectively our motivation chemical, creates the capacity and the desire to do hard things. Oxytocin connects us together and creates the desire to socially bond.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, I mean, we do this thing called in the schools in the UK, this thing called Forts with Friends, where we just try and get young people into woods and forests to build forts. Like a lot of people, like when I grew up as a kid, that's what a lot of our free time was. It was like in nature, putting big sticks against the tree and then building little forts. And that's just been lost forever.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Now, ironically, it's something called Fortnite instead of building the forts yourself. And if we can just get young people into nature with their families or with their friends, just doing hard physical activity, teamwork, collaboration, it's very, very good for their brain chemistry.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Definitely, definitely. And free play often has some level of social connection involved. And the challenge is so much of the desire for young people now is free time on their iPad playing games or watching YouTube shorts. And that's not truly what the brain is wanting. It's wanting group cohesion. And how do you think about free play for us grownups? I think it's powerful.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
I mean, when I came up with this whole thoughts with friends thing a few years ago, I went and did it myself, built a big fort in nature. That was an experience of play and that was magic. My brain absolutely loved it. I was also much stronger than when I was a kid and I tried it last time. So it was actually a lot easier. And I think any form of lightness is very powerful for the modern human.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
I think life is quite heavy and serious. There's a lot of political division. I was actually in an interesting debate on... The Times radio yesterday, which is a big radio here, which was all about his dopamine addiction creating political division in the modern world. And I think a lot of the energy inside our phones is quite tough, heavy, and serious for us to manage.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Something like Free Play for Adults is just this lightness. And our system needs more time in that state.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
I would say there's two things that have been really powerful for me that stand out. One is for me, I struggled for many years with my mental health. I grew up with really severe OCD that led me into a lot of addiction and challenges arose from there. And I really struggled with spending any time with myself.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
I really part of my addiction was trying to silence the noise in my mind, whether it was at the booze or smoking or food or phones. A lot of it was to try and quiet the voice in my head. And I was going through therapy a number of years ago. And this this guy who's my therapist, he recommended I went for a long walk without my phone. He said two hours.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And I thought there is literally no way two hours on my own in my mind. And I then began a practice of really trying to integrate long walks on my own in nature. Without even a phone on me, if you had to have one on you for safety, you could have it in your bag, but it'd be too tempting if it's in your pocket to check it.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And that for me, just like the amount of wisdom and answers that came through to me when I was out there in the quiet and the amount of messages I got a chance to finally hear that I was ignoring and distracting myself from, I think that is right up there for me, both from a personal life perspective with relationships and health, but then also creativity in my career.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Serotonin is our kind of mood stabilizing chemical that really wants us to live very natural experiences of life as a human. And then endorphins is this very useful chemical that can de-stress our brain whenever we need.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
I think it's a really key one.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And I was so negative and I was just like an asshole to myself in my mind. So judgmental of myself. And I think the brain is a powerful machine. And if you don't ever give it a chance to send, to really hear those messages, it's just going to keep sending them and keep sending them and leave this kind of irritable feeling within you.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And I think there's got to be times that we just really get some time to have a conversation.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
That's a good question. I would say there's this study by this chap called Schultz that actually came out in 1998. He was at Cambridge University and he looked into the idea of dopamine and the pursuit of rewards. And I think many of us are chasing a number of different rewards in our life. We might be chasing financial goals, houses, wins with our companies, followers, likes, all kinds of things.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
You might be chasing career promotions. And he did this study where he was looking at the dopamine level when you finally achieve the reward that you've been chasing for a period of time. And you would imagine it would almost just be like a simple graph where it's low and then eventually reaches high when you get the reward.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And he basically found that your dopamine is actually at its highest when you're about 80% there towards getting the reward. And when you finally get the reward in that final 20% as you get it, and then once you get it, the dopamine actually dips quite significantly.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And I think for many of us, we're waiting to feel really happy once we finally attain the thing in our mind that we think is going to create happiness. But when you look into the dopamine research, that's not actually the case. Simply just being in the pursuit of a reward is what our brain wants. It doesn't actually want to acquire them all the time.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
So I think it's been a shift for me, just an understanding that whatever it is, a financial goal, house goal, follower goal, like a shift around just being in pursuit is actually the goal.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Definitely. And there is a thing called gold medal syndrome in research where people finally win a gold medal in the Olympics and then they actually feel quite depressed after winning it, which seems counterintuitive. It's like, why would I be depressed? I finally got the thing I was looking for. But the brain is designed to just always be in pursuit.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
It's designed to always be on the journey so that for our ancestors, they didn't finally find some food and then think, cool, we're done. We don't have to go find any more food. The whole goal of being human is just to be in a consistent, steady journey of pursuit.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And for me, that's made a big difference to kind of my overall happiness and the number of people we train within our lab because it's this idea that you don't have to just wait to be happy once you finally have that thing. Happiness is something that can come right now.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, it's hard that because you're experiencing this monumental level of dopamine whilst you're in that moment. And then it's very hard to ever satisfy that feeling. Again, it's almost like taking drugs. Like it's actually quite a similar experience taking drugs. And there's a chap here called Johnny Wilkinson, who is a rugby player. And he won us the World Cup back in like 2003.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
He did this amazing drop goal in the Rugby World Cup. And we won the World Cup. He was the absolute man for years. He was the guy that won England the World Cup. I don't know. It might be the only one we ever won. And he struggled a lot with his mental health because it's very hard to keep, to try and return to that level of a high.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And that's why sometimes in those situations when you have an athlete, if they suddenly channel it into a charitable idea or some kind of thing where they're starting a business, they need a new pursuit. And if ever you're in that deflated feeling, you need new direction and new pursuit.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
We want naturally high dopamine. There's differences between just any old high dopamine or naturally high.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
playing like that that rush is hard to come down from it really is and you need a period of significant almost under stimulation to find normal stimulation exciting once again and in a situation like that if i was ever working with someone in that world i would almost recommend they were to do like a 10-day vipassana silent meditation if they were coming off touring like that
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, effectively your brain has the capacity to build dopamine. They're called dopamine vesicles. They get built in an area of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. You can imagine it as like a little dopamine factory. And some things will naturally and slowly build these bubbles and then send them to what we call the reward center.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
and go into complete boredom and total zero stimulation and then reset these neurotransmitters. And at a small level, and this is why I care so much about the phone, the phone is actually doing that to society. It's making us so acclimatized with extreme dopamine stimulation that sometimes we sit with our partner in the evening and talk to them And that doesn't even feel exciting enough anymore.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
That in itself is feeling boring. Or we go and socialize or we go for dinner. And it's really important to understand the phone is what's shifting our capacity to just enjoy the mundane.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
I just think we need the capacity to have time away from it more than we currently get. I don't think it needs to go. I love my phone. It's amazing. I love social media. I love making content. It's not that I want no phone. I just think currently we're too tipped towards it being the dominant form of relaxation and pleasure.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
I would say the only thing that I've also seen significant, significant benefits from is trying to move my dinner earlier. I think it's really powerful and it's a really underestimated shift because, of course, maximizing your sleep is just ridiculously beneficial for all kinds of aspects of your motivation, your stability of your mood, how your day begins.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And I recently, about four months ago, began an experiment where I started shifting the dinner earlier. We started at eight, then we went to seven, then we went to six, now we're even at 5.30. It's like when kids eat dinner. And I cannot believe the shift in my relaxation period in the evening,
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
the time in which I'm then falling asleep because everything is set forward, the time I can then wake but really be energized when I wake and be capable of having enough time for a good morning routine. And I would say if there's any chance that dinner can shift earlier, there's so many downstream benefits of doing so.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
I'm down for it.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
If you took something as basic as cleaning your house, that would be slow dopamine. It's not super fun to do it, but you feel kind of satisfied after you've got it all organized and clean. You've built some of these bubbles and send some of them to your reward center.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
When you take something like social media, we open social media, your brain starts mass shipping these bubbles to the reward center. But because there's no effort involved, it doesn't actually manufacture any. And then you get into low dopamine as a result.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, I would say nothing is quite like the experience of flow state for our dopamine levels. Flow state being a really deep immersion in a task for a prolonged period of time. And everyone in the world has unique things that could enable them to access flow state. There might be a specific access of your work that enables you to access flow state. You might do creative things, musical things.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
You might build stuff out in nature. But if we can Find a task in our life that we can enter a prolonged state of focus, sort of 45 minutes to an hour where we don't do anything else. We don't think about anything else. We just do that one thing. That's a magical way to build dopamine.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, I think you have to have a reason to avoid picking it up. There has to be something that you care for that motivates you to not. Because I grew up, I had like a phone since I was 11 years old, an iPhone. So I really grew up inside technology and social media. And
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
When I attempted to break the addiction to it, moments like that, where you're in traffic or even you're in a coffee shop with your partner and they go to the bathroom and you're like on your own for two minutes. And you're like, I have to go on my phone in this two minute gap. There's like that massive desire and pull towards it.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And for me, when I think about this, if I'm faced with that situation. I know that having good mental health is a desire of mine, feeling happy and at peace in my brain and also being motivated to do my work and things like that. These things are a value to me.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And I know that with every phone check, especially if they're too frequent, I'm depleting the molecule that's going to lead to me having good mental health and good capacity to chase my goals. So I utilize that as the motivating energy, like to not let me pick it up.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
If your dopamine is low, you'll feel very deflated. You'll feel that kind of low mood, deflated, I can't be bothered to do anything type energy within you. And that in itself isn't a great feeling.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
But then, as everyone will be so familiar with, so much of the effortful practices that lead to us having good health, whether it's bothering to cook healthy meals or go to the shop and get the healthy food or
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
or whether it's making sure you do your exercise or your walk or you go to bed early, all these core practices can get influenced by the fact we're breaking the motivation molecule with the phone. So if we can begin to raise the dopamine naturally, our desire to take action on all the important things that really lift us becomes better.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, for sure. So how you're starting your day sounds good. I think the absolute number one goal is to not open the phone the moment we open our eyes. If, for example, we were to run an experiment whereby... Every morning when you woke up for a week, you drank a glass of red wine. You'd get pretty hooked on that red wine pretty quickly if you woke up and drank it.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And so much of our addiction to the phone is fueled by the fact it's so easily accessible from the moment we wake. So we need a delay whereby we're earning dopamine through effort. That could be having a shower, doing your cold plunge. That has a huge amount of additional brain chemistry and dopaminergic benefits. It could be making your food. It could be brushing your teeth, making your bed.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
But you effectively want to wake and earn dopamine. You don't want to just have it easily. And that can be whatever someone feels is best for their routine, their families, their kids. I think gold standard rules within it are avoiding the phone, of course, and then just making sure that you don't remain sedentary and that you do spend some time in sunlight.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Those are like the main core components and make sure you leave your house and you physically move your body before you've entered the world of social media.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, I do have a very specific practice that's been built over the years. I'll wake up, I'll go to the bathroom, I'll then sit down on the sofa. On the sofa, my iPad is waiting for me with Insight Timer as an app that I do my meditation on. And I'll use the iPad so there's no notifications in there. Like I don't have all the socials on my iPad. So then I'm not going to get distracted.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
It's just open it straight to Insight Timer. I do about a 15 minute silent, just breathing based meditation. I'll then brush my teeth and then I'll normally either I'm walking or I'm going to the gym. And then I'll really try and not go onto technology for the first maybe 60 minutes.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
When I eventually am going to go on technology, and I think this is a game changer for everyone, my laptop will always be the first way in which I see technology, not my phone. I'll open my laptop and head into WhatsApp and email and these things that you know you need to do, but via the laptop instead of the phone. So social media is not tempting.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
It really is because we've had access to quick dopamine for a while. Things like alcohol and cigarettes and sugar, pornography. These things have been here for some of them, a few hundred, if not a thousand years. But the phone has increased the frequency in which we can access dopamine. Like we weren't drinking alcohol, having a sip every sort of five to 10 minutes all day, every day.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
But that's how we're operating with these phones. So the addiction to it is so much stronger than anything else ever before. And it's,
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
so overstimulating because short form content particularly is very dopaminergic because of the amount of novelty that's in those feeds and novelty increases dopamine that it's just constantly plummeting our dopamine level making us feel bad then we procrastinate then we're not happy with our productivity and so on well you mentioned reaching for you know alcohol sugary food pornography
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Yeah, I mean, it would be situational. I think in those moments, yeah, often we're seeking for pleasure. We're seeking for distraction from our emotional experiences. If it's porn, we could also be seeking for love and connection, but we're kind of falsely getting it via that method. I think situationally it would vary. Sometimes, say, for example, I've been working till 2, it's like 2 p.m.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
for me right now, and I might get like a bit exhausted. And then it could be tempting to be like, okay, now I'm going to go sit on the sofa and just smash some short form content. That could be quite after I've been working for a while. But I'll know that if I do that, I'm going to feel a bit flat this evening if I just spend hours scrolling short form content.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
But if I wanted to chill, if I was to go to the sofa and go on YouTube on the TV and pick a 10 minute video or a 20 minute video or a podcast like this, lie back on the sofa and watch it. Long form content like that really doesn't disrupt our dopamine pathway very much at all. So it's almost being selective over which type of content we consume when we're seeking for that feeling of chilling out.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
It is because it's all about novelty. Dopamine always for our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years would rise when something novel in our environment would occur. So if you saw some fruit or a deer or some honey, dopamine would rise and it would create the desire to take action towards that thing. And TikTok is just novelty, novelty, novelty, novelty.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
So then your brain goes crazy on the dopamine. Whereas when you watch a movie like Gladiator, I watched that the other day. When you watch Gladiator, particularly Gladiator 1, because it's less dopamined up than Gladiator 2, you just sort of sit back and at times you're a little bit bored. And it's just that it's so good to learn to be okay with that slower feeling.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
It doesn't. And I think that's why we've never seen mental health struggling as much as it is right now in our society. And we had access to a lot of the other dopamine for a very long time, as I said. But the phone is a thing that is radically changing very fast in our relationship to it as a species. And that's why I think it's right at the core of this challenge.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And it's important to know some people might think, OK, I'll try that. I'll try to watch a movie tonight with my phone in another room. That would be a good experiment. And you might sit there and actually feel a bit like agitated and irritated in the uncomfort of not having so much stimulation.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
And it's important to understand in our research lab, we study this thing called the boredom barrier, whereby there is a moment about 10 to 15 minutes into a slower paced experience where your brain does settle and it feels okay with the fact that's the level of stimulation you're only going to get. But you have to get to it.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
You have to battle through the moment of like, oh, I really need more than this.
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
This is the chemical that creates the deep desire within us as humans to bond with one another. And it facilitates our family relationships, our romantic relationships, our friendships that we have. And
The mindbodygreen Podcast
590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
Effectively, in the modern world, this chemical, rather than sort of spiking it and crashing it like dopamine, it's just very under-satisfied, this chemical, because we're living in dopamine land where society has become so obsessed with success and pleasure, we're undervaluing the deep need for just moments of slow human connection. And a simple example of dopamine land instead of oxytocin is