TJ Power

Yeah, it really does.

And from a scientific perspective, there's not yet a name for insulin resistance in dopamine in the dopamine world.

I think one will come in time for sure.

What effectively happens is you have a baseline level of dopamine production in that factory, your brain is producing a certain amount of dopamine each and every day.

And that's based on your genetics.

And it's also very heavily based on the lifestyle you've had.

If I took a

14-year-old hunter-gatherer that's in the Hadza right now in Central Africa, his brain would be manufacturing a ton of dopamine because he's expected to do so much.

If I took a 14-year-old in a local school near here that might spend all day scrolling social media and not doing lots, his brain wouldn't need to manufacture much dopamine.

effectively you can imagine if the brain is getting super exhausted by shipping so much dopamine to the reward center and not manufacturing much of it what it starts to do in response is just goes can't cope with how low we're getting in dopamine because of how much you're sending to the reward center so i'm just going to produce less for you very similar to what happens in terms of insulin as well so then the dopamine starts producing less and less and then when it's a bit of a downward spiral because reward stops feeling as good we're not generating as much of the motivation chemical so then we want to do less hard things

keeping our home tidy, exercising, working, connecting.

And we pursue more and more of the quick hits.

And it's like this journey towards very low levels of dopamine, which a huge amount of humanity is now there.

The good thing is this system can respond fast.

So if you start taking the right course of action, the brain again will begin to regenerate dopamine in a healthy way.

We think of dopamine primarily as a reward chemical.

That's kind of how we've been taught to understand dopamine.

Dopamine at its core is much more about just being in the pursuit of something rather than just receiving a reward.

And that's why the phones are so disruptive.

And a chap called Schultz from Cambridge University had a huge discovery about 20 years ago where he found that dopamine levels are actually at their highest not once we achieve the thing we're looking for.