On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Brain Expert: 6 Habits to Boost Focus & Concentration By 48 Percent (Hack Your Dopamine!) with TJ Power
Fri, 24 Jan 2025
How long can you stay focused on one task? What distracts you the most when you’re trying to focus? Today, Jay chats with neuroscientist and author TJ Power to uncover the science behind our brain’s chemistry and how it shapes our emotions, habits, and overall well-being. TJ, known for his expertise in optimizing dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins (the "DOSE" chemicals), explains how modern lifestyles can disrupt our brain’s natural balance and offers practical strategies to realign it for a happier, healthier life. TJ and Jay begin the discussion with the brain’s evolutionary design and its mismatch with the modern digital age. TJ explains how our ancestors earned dopamine through hard work and perseverance, but today’s quick-fix solutions like social media, instant gratification, and other overstimulating activities lead to addiction, low motivation, and even burnout. They shift into actionable steps to break free from these patterns. From implementing a simple morning routine, such as resisting the urge to check your phone first thing, to engaging in cold water therapy, TJ emphasizes the importance of earning dopamine through effort rather than shortcuts. He also shares the groundbreaking idea of "phone fasting" and how small, consistent breaks from screens can reset your brain chemistry, improve focus, and enhance productivity. In this interview, you'll learn: How to Start Your Day with Action How to Detox from Your Phone in the Morning How to Earn Dopamine Naturally How to Improve Sleep by Cutting Sugar and Screens How to Practice Gratitude Daily How to Reset Your Mind in Nature Small changes, like starting your day with action, spending less time on your phone, and practicing gratitude, can have a profound impact on your mental well-being. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty Visit https://jayshettyshop.com - 100% of Proceeds are donated to National Alliance on Mental Illness. NAMI is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness. What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 03:19 What is DOSE? 05:13 Social Media Triggers Rapid Rise in Dopamine 07:40 The 30-Minute Window Discipline 09:32 The Benefits of Phone-Fasting 12:42 Take Action as Soon as You Wake 14:36 How to Start the Day Phone-Free 19:16 Fast Release Leads to Low Motivation 21:06 Build Healthy Dopamine 26:25 How to Motivate Yourself to Keep Going 27:47 Pornography Addiction 34:25 Destressing Through Orgasm 36:04 Optimizing Dopamine 37:29 Slow Pleasure for Better Relationship 39:09 Dopamine and Flow State 42:53 Staying Focused and Improving Concentration 45:23 How to Improve Your Sleep Quality 47:39 Dealing with Boredom While Phone-Fasting 51:13 Positive Reinforcement of Dopamine at Home 52:58 How Oxytocin Affects Your Day 56:19 Grateful Thinking Works 58:46 Difference Between Procrastination and Overthinking 01:00:04 Focus on What You Can Do 01:02:42 High Stress and Burnout 01:04:42 Phone Detox is Necessary 01:07:13 Spend More Time in Nature 01:08:16 TJ on Final Five Episode Resources: TJ Power | Instagram TJ Power | X TJ Power | LinkedIn The DOSE Lab The DOSE EffectSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is DOSE and why is it important?
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Chapter 2: How does social media affect dopamine levels?
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Dopamine is a chemical that the human being so deeply desires and we've now been given very quick ways to access it. Are you wanting a life where you're in the pursuit of pleasure and just like momentarily feeling good or do you want like a really happy fulfilling experience alive?
Chapter 3: What is phone fasting and how can it help?
He's a neuroscientist and author, TJ Power.
Pornography is like this secret addiction and that's why I think it's being massively underestimated.
You have habits and systems to increase concentration and deep focus by 48%. Yeah. What are they?
Chapter 4: What morning routines boost dopamine?
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Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only, Jay Shetty.
Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen, learn, and grow. Today's guest is someone that I've been really excited to speak to. His name's TJ Power.
He's a neuroscientist and author dedicated to understanding how modern lifestyle habits shape brain chemistry and emotional wellbeing in the digital age. His upcoming book, The Dose Effect, is out very soon and focuses on how we can optimize dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins through practical everyday changes.
TJ's research highlights the impact of social media, nature, and technology on mental health. And through his work, he empowers individuals to take control of their minds and lead healthier, more balanced lives. If you don't already follow TJ across social media, you're going to want to follow him right now and straight after this conversation. Please welcome to On Purpose, TJ Power.
TJ, it's great to have you here, bud.
TJ, thanks for having me.
This is surreal for me and I'll explain why to the audience because 11 years ago, I met your dad.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How can we improve our sleep quality?
I believe it all starts with how the beginning of your day begins. And it's really important to understand this. Throughout sleep, there's regenerative processes taking place that are creating elevations in dopamine as part of that restoration. And you can imagine this.
All of our work is built upon this hunter-gatherer idea of a human being far before our world came, this modern world we live in, had to wake up and do hard things. It was so important to our survival. When we woke up, we'd have a nice amount of dopamine and we'd immediately take action and do challenging stuff. Nowadays, the opposite of that occurs.
We wake up, we've got this abundance of dopamine sitting there, and then it's straight to the phone. And I understand that this is hard to break. My whole work in this space comes from my own addictions to these things. Like I got an iPhone when I was like 11 years old. So to me, my whole life has been sitting on an iPhone, basically.
And I spent 10 to 15 years waking up, going straight into the phone. And fundamentally, if you develop the discipline to have a 30-minute window before you go into the phone, and we can talk through what the steps in there would include to resist it, that's going to then set that discipline within your life to I have the capacity to resist it.
Chapter 6: How do we deal with boredom while phone-fasting?
Chapter 7: What are the effects of pornography addiction?
We kind of hear these as buzzwords and trend words. And I think what you've done is really demystified them and unpacked them for us in a really simple way. Can you walk us through what each of these do for us and how we interact with them on a daily basis?
100%. I think with these chemicals, you see them talked about a lot on the internet now. And you see them all called kind of feel good and happy hormones, which there is truth in that. But the fascinating thing about really understanding dose is each of these chemicals have a very specific function.
And when you begin to understand the symptoms of being low or high in them, you then begin to understand your brain and body much better. And you start responding to the different challenges that the modern world brings us in a much better way. If you were to look at dopamine, primary function of dopamine would be motivation. And it also has a secondary function of our attention span.
If you find yourself in a situation where you feel like low and deflated and flat and you can't get yourself to take action and do things, it's a very clear sign that dopamine is low and you need something to boost dopamine. You have oxytocin, the connection and the love hormone. If you felt lonely and a little bit unconfident and disconnected, we'd be guided towards oxytocin.
Serotonin has a massive impact on our mood and energy. So if you're tired or a bit sad, serotonin would be beautiful. And then endorphins have this incredible function of de-stressing our brain. In our modern world, the cortisol hormone has become the big stress hormone, which is really accurate. It is a stress hormone.
But endorphins, as we'll go on to explore, also play a vital role in calming our brain when it's experienced extreme stress.
It's fascinating to me because I don't think we understand how our daily habits affect these chemicals. So walk us through what's actually happening in our brain when we're doom scrolling on social media.
Effectively, this all comes down to this concept called phasic and tonic dopamine release. This psychologist called Dreyer really popularized this back in 2011. And what you basically see is when we interact with social media, you get a rapid rise in dopamine, which is why when you open the social media app, you immediately feel extremely good.
Just to put that into context, the whole of DOS is built upon something called the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis. This was created by Gluckman. And it's basically this idea that our brain spent 300,000 years evolving out in nature, developing these chemicals to help us survive and thrive in that kind of environment, hunting and making fire and building shelter and looking after one another.
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Chapter 8: How can nature reset our minds?
I can agree with you more. I've done those phone fasts as well for a while. And there are times in my year where I think that that can be important. But overall, I fully agree with you that I think if you're going oscillating between these extremes, you just keep kind of pinging back and forth.
And so you go from being really addicted to doing the phone fast and going back to being really addicted. And that can get really exhausting. and really, really tiring. And so what has been your best set of tips that you've found for someone who doesn't want to look at their phone first thing in the morning or to not turn to that because you said the morning's so important? What do we do?
Because I feel like that's the first thing, you know, 80% of us look at our phones first thing in the morning, last thing at night. We look at it before we look at our partners and our kids, after we look at them at night. Our phone gets more FaceTime than the people we love. Like that is our life.
What do we do? We have these four underlying laws for each of the chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. The underlying law from all of the research we looked into, like in this book, there's like 250 studies we explored around these topics. Fundamentally, the law that we found to be most appropriate with dopamine is take action as soon as you wake every day.
And that fundamentally means you wake, you don't snooze your alarm, as painful as it is, but simply beating that challenge of, oh, I could just lie in bed and stay in this comfort and doing something that's difficult is beginning that dopamine increase.
We then get people to, if they really struggle with snoozing, to literally, when the alarm goes off, just sit at the side of the bed and just get themselves out of the prone position effectively and sit there. We then get them to go straight to the bathroom. If you can, you then start brushing your teeth. Brushing your teeth is an annoying slow activity. Again, you're earning dopamine.
Like if you do it for 20 seconds, you always know, I feel a bit guilty for the fact I just did 20 seconds. You do the two minutes, you think, yes, task complete. So you go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, you splash cold water on your face, and you come back and you make your bed. There's this brilliant psychologist called Walton that looked at the relationship between dopamine and effort.
And it's very clear that if you utilize effort right at the beginning of your day, your dopamine starting on that nice slow curve, motivation then builds.
And then your capacity to further resist the phone and maybe get outside for a walk or do some exercise or get to your desk or make your kids breakfast is going to come from an easier place than the wake up, spike dopamine and crash and then try and get going from there.
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