TJ Power

And then for the last...

30 years, we started massively changing the human experience.

Even if you go back 100 years, life was still a lot more effort, a lot more discipline, a lot more natural in terms of food, a lot more social connection, better sleep.

Humanity really changed about 30 years ago.

This is called the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis.

Originally, we had to scratch rocks together for five hours to make fire.

We had to hunt for days, build shelter to survive cold winters.

Dopamine would come into our brain and give us the desire to pursue survival.

And then it would reward us when we were aligning ourselves to that.

So when the fire did eventually get created, when we were building the hut and nearly finished building the hut, when we found the food.

And it really wants us to

experience long-term success so even something as basic as tidying your house as an example of slowly building dopamine in your brain it's boring it's not particularly fun but it creates a feeling of satisfaction the real thing that has got dopamine

I was about to say almost a swear word there, but has really got dopamine held is the phone.

The phone has given us this capacity to attain the feeling of hunting an animal for three hours, but within one second of getting a phone in our hand.

And that's very confusing for how this chemical operates.

Yeah, I mean, to take this further, just so you can visualize in your brain exactly what's happening here.

We have an area of the brain called the ventral tegmental area.

It's called the VTA.

And you can think of this as like your dopamine factory, where your brain is literally manufacturing dopamine vesicles, like little dopamine bubbles, tiny little things, but it can manufacture them.

You then have something called your nucleus accumbens, which is your reward center in the brain, a little bit further along from the VTA, from the factory.