How Dopamine Shapes Your Habits and Productivity - Tj Power | Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

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The fact you chose the harder path means your brain has had to work harder throughout your life and therefore your brain will have a greater capacity to generate dopamine than the average brain.

So then you're going to be a more motivated individual.

The pursuit of satisfaction is the goal with dopamine.

You want to pursue any kind of activity that at the end, you think, wow, I feel satisfied with that.

You feel so satisfied when you sit down and read for 20 minutes.

You don't feel satisfied after 20 minutes of scrolling Instagram at all.

You're actually just yearning for more at the end.

It's the opposite of satisfaction.

If we spend a lot of our time moderately satisfying this chemical, eventually the chemical begins to kick back and it will actually increase feelings of loneliness within our brain because it's trying to create a greater desire to actually pursue meaningful connection.

All right, TJ, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

What are your, can you tell us a little bit about you?

Like who are you and why are you qualified to talk to us about these chemicals?

Yeah, my name's TJ Power and I'm the lead neuroscientist at the Dose Lab and we've basically built a research center to study our four main brain chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.

I've spent the last 10 years going through my undergraduate and master's in lecturing, getting deep into really understanding how our brain operates and how to maximize these chemicals to enhance our life.

Solid, that was really good.

Was that perfect? Nailed it.

Okay, cool. So should we start with dopamine?

Yeah. Cool. So I was hoping we could take a little bit of a deep dive into these four main chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.

And so let's start with dopamine.

Why should we care about dopamine?

Dopamine is the chemical that's getting hit the hardest by the modern world for sure.

It's the chemical that society has managed to figure out how to hijack.

And as hunter -gatherers, and my whole kind of journey into understanding these chemicals is that our brain spent 300 ,000 years developing them for an entirely different lifestyle, a lifestyle we had to wake up, hunt for food, build shelter, connect with each other, fight one another, that's what they're

designed for. And dopamine was this chemical that lived deep within us that enabled us to take action to all these challenging things that would keep us alive.

In our modern world, we basically figured out how to hack that feeling that hunting or connecting with people or building shelter, and we'd hack it with things like porn and TikTok and cigarettes, alcohol, whatever it may be.

And then it goes on to create very big challenges within our dopamine system, specifically with our dopamine baselines.

Nice. And so, what's wrong with that?

Effectively, this chemical enables you to have motivation, and we all need motivation in our lives, whether it's with our partners, our jobs, to exercise, to bother to cook healthy food.

Motivation is like the core of being a human being.

And all of these things that overstimulate this chemical and then crash the chemical out, leads to dopamine not functioning very well anymore.

And so many people in the modern world are just struggling to take action towards what they're seeking for.

They're struggling, they have dreams in their mind with their careers, or yeah, I really want to be healthy, and they get a little bit motivated for a second, and then it crashes.

And society really needs to understand that operating and getting this chemical into balance is what's gonna enable you to actually get focused and stay consistently motivated.

Nice. What's the science behind that?

Like, how does the mean lead to motivation?

Effectively, the chemical evolved within us to be earned.

So the whole way in which it operates is that if we do something that is effortful, dopamine will begin to generate in our brain.

And dopamine actually operates in little bubbles, they're called vesicles.

And any kind of activity that requires hard work will literally manufacture these vesicles in the brain.

So say you wake up, and one option would be you go and scroll TikTok, one would be you get up and you go and brush your teeth and you make your bed.

One of them, the effortful path, is gonna lead to these bubbles being generated and building, and that's then generating motivation within your brain so that you can take action to whatever you're seeking for that day.

If you say go straight into TikTok, your brain's been building some dopamine throughout the night from the regenerative process of sleep.

You get there, TikTok, immediately effectively you're bursting these bubbles, you're reducing the quantity of dopamine within the brain, and then suddenly you're there and you think, oh, I really can't be bothered with today, I can't bother to do any work, and you get that flat, depressed type feeling.

So if it gets optimized and you can take action, it's gonna feel good.

Wait, so the brain manufactures dopamine in response to the doing of hot things?

Yeah, effectively, if you actually imagine having spent, like, five hours hunting for a deer, that would be an extremely difficult thing to do, and we had to find that deer for 300 ,000 years in order to help us and our family survive, and in the pursuit of the deer, we needed two things.

We needed a ridiculous amount of motivation so that we didn't give up on the hunting, and we needed insane hyperfocus effectively.

So you didn't get distracted by lots of different things, you just locked in, the deer is what we're gonna track and chase, and in that pursuit, you just progressively need more and more and more dopamine in order to get there, because your brain's gonna find it harder, physically, you're gonna get

more and more exhausted.

In the modern world, it's more that we're mentally exhausted than physically exhausted, but regardless, dopamine is required for that pursuit of a challenging objective.

As you pursue something with more and more effort, dopamine generates more and more and more in order to support you in that journey.

Okay, so you're saying that I'm doing a hot thing like trying to hunt a deer, or like trying to, I don't know, build a website, whatever the thing might be, and over time, you're saying that like there's more and more dopamine that's building in my brain.

How can we feel into this dopamine increasing?

Effectively, when you sit down and start a task, sometimes it can be very hard to begin, and something like procrastination, for example, where you can't take action, that's caused by low dopamine levels.

And when you start a task, so let's say, cleaning your home, because that's an annoying task that we all have to do, it's not like super pleasurable, especially at the beginning.

You start the task and you also put it off for ages, because you can't be bothered, then eventually you start the task.

And at the beginning, it's like so much effort, you maybe have some music playing on in the background, you think, oh, I can't bother to do this, but I need to do it.

A good example is something like cleaning a bathroom, because that's a particularly annoying task in our home.

What you'll find is the first five minutes, pretty annoying, and gradually you begin to what's called gain momentum, effectively.

After 10 minutes, you might start getting more and more into it.

And then what can happen is the opposite can occur.

Rather than thinking, I can't really bother to do this, you actually get more into it than you even expected to.

And that's because you're effectively entering cleaning flow state.

Flow state is when our brain gets hyper -focused on something.

It takes an average of human brain about 15 minutes to enter flow state.

Brilliant psychologist called Gold discovered this whole flow state and dopamine connection.

And effectively, the beginning of a task, very, very challenging, as you engage the effort, the brain starts to realize, oh, this human is in the pursuit of some kind of goal, they need the dopamine vesicles to help, they need the dopamine vesicles to help.

And it's why, whenever you sit down for a task, cleaning your home, completing a specific annoying work project, going into the gym, it's so important to understand the first 15 minutes are always gonna be the hardest.

Because at that point, you're sitting at baseline dopamine, you might even be sitting below it.

Because if you've just got ticked off for 10 minutes before, you're actually now in a dopamine deficit state, and you've got to climb to this high dopamine in order to get into a highly motivated driven experience.

So beginning hard, battle through 15 minutes, that's where flow state begins.

What are the enemies of this dopamine system in our modern world?

You can imagine that with a graph, anything that requires effort like hunting or building shelter would take a long time for the dopamine to be experienced within the brain.

So you couldn't quickly access it, you suddenly have to engage like two hours of effort.

Dopamine would slowly increase with the brain, you get this really pleasurable rewarding experience, and that would motivate us to do that action again in the future.

Anything in the modern world that has developed the ability to get that level of dopamine increase, but immediately is effectively what's hijacking it.

Because the brain is always seeking for homeostasis, that balance experience, if you suddenly get super high tick tock spike of dopamine, you then put the tick tock down, and you're suddenly like, oh, I feel like shit, you're apathetic, you can't take action towards anything.

And it's because your brain is just so confused by the unnatural spike that it crashes out effectively.

And the way to identify if something is unnatural dopamine is just how quickly does it give you pleasure?

A simple comparison would be reading a book versus scrolling on Instagram.

When you open a book and start reading a book, it's not like, wow, this is so enjoyable, I love reading this.

It might be for some, but I think for the majority, it's like, okay, I've got to get into this.

And your brain begins to put in more and more effort as you read the lines and the pages, and you try and get into it.

Gradually, after 10 or 15 minutes, when you kind of enter that flow state type experience with reading, it does become a very pleasurable experience, because the dopamine has been slowly add and increase in a natural way.

When you open Instagram, immediately you feel good, you get some notifications, you get likes, comments, a message from a girl, you're getting loads of stimulation off all the videos, whatever it might be.

And then the dopamine spikes extremely high.

And then as a result, we're going so unnaturally high, the brain seeks that balance and crashes it out.

And so many of us are struggling to take action towards our dreams, because we're just constantly crashing the system that's responsible for getting us towards them.

So what I'm hearing is that really, the pursuit of pleasurable things that involve a level of feeling as if you've earned it is important here.

Like you're not just getting the free pleasure from just doing the thing.

I wonder if sort of, I enjoy playing video games on like very hard difficulty, playing Horizon Forbidden West at the moment.

And there's like, you know, people would look at me and be like, you spent the last three hours on the same boss fight, like why not just tune down the difficulty level?

But there's something about doing the hard thing that feels way more rewarding than just like, I don't know, killing the boss on story mode or on easy mode or whatever.

I think similarly, I used to go on these wilderness medicine trips at university where it was like, we'd spent the whole day hiking and then we'd do like medical scenarios of like, this person's like broken their leg and you've got to splint it and stuff.

And then at the end of the day, we would all have a lovely big dinner in the cottage and play some board games.

And there was something about the fact that we had to do a whole day of hiking to feel as if we've earned that, that really made it way more rewarding, compared to if we had just sort of randomly started playing board games.

Is that this sort of idea of like feeling as if you've earned the thing?

100%, that is exactly it.

And if you had just immediately woken up in the morning and done the board game, it wouldn't be as nearly as pleasurable.

And you just have to imagine surviving was so hard for 300 ,000 years.

Like if you actually think about suddenly being put out in a forest and you've got to suddenly survive out there, it would be insanely difficult.

So the brain has to be so deeply programmed to seek for effort.

That is exactly how it's designed to operate.

If you look at that gaming example when you're playing Horizon, did you call it?

When you're playing Horizon, the fact that you have the desire to put it onto the hardest level is probably why you're actually in the position you're in in your life right now in terms of your career and your business, because you've actually chosen the harder path in life.

And it means your brain, because you've consistently chosen the harder path when you're at university making your YouTube videos whilst also studying all of these things, the fact you chose the harder path means your brain has had to work harder throughout your life.

And therefore your brain will have a greater capacity to generate dopamine than the average brain.

So then you're going to be a more motivated individual.

You can imagine if you're two hunter -gatherers and one had an easy time at surviving because it was like warm and there was an abundance of food around and then you had one that was trying to survive in the cold with no food.

This one is going to have to work way harder, so they're going to need more motivation.

So suddenly they're going to have to require so much more dopamine in order to survive.

And if you start pursuing the lane of effort in your life more regularly, generate more dopamine, your capacity to pursue effort in all lanes, whether that's being more attentive with your partner, eating healthier food, being more disciplined in your home, working towards your goals, whatever it might be,

becomes actually easier and easier because you've got a ton of the chemical.

Sick. There's often a phenomenon you hear about around the kids that grow up very wealthy and they're playing life on easy mode.

And then they grow up and become demotivated and depressed and stuff because life was too easy.

And on the other side of the coin, you get a lot of stories from like the Gary Vayner trucks of the world who came into the US as immigrants from Russia and had to grind and work really hard.

And they seem to have more motivation to do stuff compared to like the kids that grew up with a silver spoon up there behind.

100%. Like if you're forced to have to put in more effort to your life, you're just going to be a more motivated individual.

I think about this a lot.

Like if my dreams come true and like finances are something that I have a good abundance of, then I'm going to raise kids that potentially have money around them.

And I don't want lazy kids that can't take action towards what they're seeking for, whether that's like sport or school or whatever it may be.

So you really need to instill in them hard work before pleasure.

And I think about this all the time, I literally imagine myself in the future, like the kid wanting to have their VR headset for a period of time and then having to earn it by doing some kind of cold water immersion before they can go into the headset.

And fundamentally, you just can't be given anything in life.

Like you look at individuals that win the lottery, for example, and become a millionaire overnight, very quickly depression arises after that because there's no longer a pursuit.

And fundamentally, the human brain is just designed to be in the pursuit of a goal at all times because it had to be for us to get here as a species.

You know, I've spoken to a bunch of people who have sold their businesses for 10s to hundreds of millions, and they all basically said that, yeah, I kind of got fairly depressed afterwards because I had nothing more to do.

And they realized that the last 10 years of working with people that they liked to build something cool, that brought them way more joy than seeing a hundred million in the bank.

A hundred percent. And we, as humans, just always need to be climbing some kind of mountain.

And the difficulty is all of these things like social media or drinking some alcohol, eating some sugary food, are effectively hacking that experience in our brain.

So it feels like we're actually achieving something effectively in our brain.

Our brain thinks, wow, massive reward.

It must've done something really good.

Then it gets into this deep state of confusion because it's like, wait, but I didn't do anything that was hard work.

And then it goes through this big crashing experience of dopamine.

So constantly having this clarification of what is my pursuit every day is fundamental.

And we teach people regularly in dose that they need to go on walks in nature without their headphones.

I actually heard you speak into this recently, whereby you feel like you have creative thoughts out there.

And our brain needs prolonged periods of time away from technology where it daydreams about our dreams effectively.

So that it can then think, okay, what can I chase?

What can I be in the pursuit of?

Instead of just being in the pursuit of porn and TikTok and cigarettes or whatever it may be.

Nice. Is there a way of taking this too far?

Like I'm imagining someone listening to this saying that, well, you know, growing up in poverty with an abusive family and stuff, sure that requires you to work really hard to succeed.

But actually those people often end up screwed up as well.

Like what's the, is there a tipping point of stress beyond which it stops being useful?

For sure. The thing to understand is that there are four chemicals at play here.

This dopamine one is simply helping people to be able to have motivation and take action.

When you look at an individual that may have had an abusive experience when they were young or some kind of really hard time or poverty in terms of lack of nutrition, whatever it may be, then comes into play the other three chemicals of oxytocin, the love chemical.

Maybe there wasn't that much nurturing around them.

All of these things then are really key factors to understand someone's likelihood to be able to go where they want to.

Fantastic. Cool. So let's go on to action points.

We've talked about what dopamine is, why it's important.

We've talked about a few general principles like hard work before pleasure and always being in the pursuit of something.

What are some action points that someone watching or listening to this can apply to their life from today that will help improve the way we use dopamine?

Yeah, so with dopamine, the first thing to understand, the most effective thing we've seen in all of our research and training is this concept we've developed called phone fasting, which is just having agreed times with yourself where you will fast, quote unquote, from your phone.

The most important time in your whole life to fast from your phone is when you wake up in the morning, your brain wakes up, it's seeking for dopamine, it's seeking to attack the day.

If it goes straight into the phone, you're really setting yourself on a much more difficult journey.

So we really guide people to phone fast when they wake up.

Ideally they're charging the phone, knocked by their head, either the other side of the room or outside of the room would be best.

And they have to immediately take action.

So we get people to go and pick up their toothbrush.

As soon as they wake up and start brushing their teeth, splash cold water on their face and come back and make their bed.

So the first thing, most importantly for dopamine, no phone, brush teeth, splash cold water on your face and then make your bed.

And that just at least generates the dopamine to kickstart the day to make the rest of it easier.

So that's your morning phone fasting.

At least 15 minutes, first thing in the day, take action.

In the evening, we then need a minimum of 60 minute period, where again, we're physically away from the phone.

So during that period of time, you might be cooking and eating, you might be exercising, socializing, even something like watching TV, which is an unnatural dopamine experience, but nowhere near as bad as social media for our brain because of the speed in which pleasure arises, just with that TV point.

If you sit and you watch Netflix, similar to the concept I gave with the book before, if you sit and watch Netflix, you don't click play and think, wow, this is insanely amazing.

But eventually, if you pay attention against the storyline, it becomes pleasurable.

So the spike is slightly less than TikTok.

So phone fasting in the evening, 60 minutes, you don't wanna spend the whole day working and then burn your dopamine all night because you're gonna wake up with really low levels of motivation.

Then on the weekend, we try and guide people on a Saturday and a Sunday to have a two hour phone fast.

So you try and engage with some kind of activity, maybe going to walk with your friends, maybe you go out for lunch and you will agree, phones in your bags.

But if you try and have a two hour period, Sunday and Saturday, and then 50 minutes in the mornings, 60 minutes in the evenings, then you're developing like a very clear structure into your life where you're getting away from the quick dopamine of the phone.

Fundamentally, the phone is the main thing in our lives hijacking the system.

If you get away from the phone more, you're just gonna have way more motivation.

Nice. What's your theory about app blockers and screen time limits and the whole shemang?

I think they can be really valuable.

I think I'm using one that's called OneTech at the moment.

It seems to be very effective in stopping my like constant opening of the app.

I think it's very important that the brain experiences boredom and in every moment of boredom, you end up always opening the phone.

Actually in a state of boredom, your brain will be generating dopamine.

It goes into this like restorative state where it's sitting there thinking, oh I've got a break right now, so it's gonna build some dopamine.

If you can't see just crash your dopamine during your moments of boredom, it's not great for the brain chemical.

So I think they can be effective.

I think the Apple stuff for me didn't really work like I'd constantly just skip it and stuff like that.

But I think some of these stronger, more powerful ones that will block things are very valuable.

And we need to only open these apps like a maximum of maybe five times a day.

If you're opening them, which I have no judgment for like 30 or 50 times a day, which is so easy, I did that for years, then it is just gonna be very harmful to dopamine.

Nice. Yeah, one thing I found to be helpful is I carry this little pocket book in my back pocket at all times, which is why it's warped in the shape of my bum.

With a little pocket fountain pen as well.

And one thing I've started doing recently is sort of aiming for 15 ,000 steps a day.

Nice. And so I live fairly close to Regents Park.

And so now any time I'm doing a meeting, I do it walking around, did an hour of walking this morning while taking a call, 8 ,000 steps, that was super nice.

And even sometimes where I'm like, I've got a break in the middle of the day, or it's a weekend or something, I'll have my phone in my pocket because I was having my phone in my pocket.

But I will try and consciously think, okay, I'm gonna walk through the park, go to the cafe, grab a coffee, and just do some physical pen and paper journaling.

Because there's something about slowing the process down rather than typing on my phone or bringing the iPad or bringing the laptop, which are like high octane devices.

And just like the chill experience of writing in a journal I find leads to way more insights compared to just consuming more stuff on the phone.

For sure, the awesome thing about doing that is your brain doesn't have an association with social media in that book.

Whereas when you're on the phone opening it, just to go on your notes to do something that's healthy for your brain, your brain's experiencing anticipatory dopamine at the thought of opening Instagram.

So even though you're sitting there trying to just do your notes, your brain knows that Instagram is around the corner, just like when someone has a drink in a pub, they start thinking, oh, I might wanna vape or whatever it might be because of these connections that our brain will create.

So it is very important to create these barriers.

If the phone always needs to be on you, airplane mode is also just so effective because the brain just works by these cues.

If you see some kind of email or anything at all that can be novel for your brain, anything that's new information will spike the dopamine.

So having these periods away from it is powerful.

One thing that I've noticed about entrepreneurs is that they always have their phone on some sort of do not disturb focus mode.

I noticed that whenever I'm trying to iMessage anyone, it's like this person has the notifications turned on quiet, like notify silently or something like that.

And I interviewed Jordan Harbinger on the pod a few weeks ago, which has not yet come out.

And he mentioned that like, this is a thing he's noticed as well that every entrepreneur he knows just always has the phone in some sort of focus mode.

Cause like, why would you need the notifications?

And you can always set up, like on mine, I've set it up so that like my girlfriend, my mom and my brother and my grandma are the only ones whose notifications can actually come through.

And so if there's an emergency or anything which there often isn't, I'll see the notification.

If it's anything else, I'll only see it when I choose to take it off of focus mode, which means I'm in control of the notification, of the timing of notifications rather than them being in control of me.

I think that is the way to do it.

I think having the emergency calls is good.

And again, it's good to reflect and realize they very rarely happen.

I think lots of us have this like fear around the phone that we're like, wow, what if something happens, but very rarely things do.

And if you remind your brain of that, you might calm a little bit about it.

And I really believe like society just got trained over like a 10 to 15 year period that notifications need to be a part of our life.

But I don't think they need to be on the phone at all.

I have no badges on any apps.

I've got no notification that can come in at any time.

And we're also hooked on these phones that you're never gonna miss anything important.

Like you're always gonna open your WhatsApp and your Instagram DMs and your emails.

You're never gonna miss anything.

So you don't need to be told it's there.

We're so trained to open these apps now by these habits of dopamine that if you just turn absolutely everything off, it does empower you to actually decide how you're gonna use it.

One thing you talked about is the law of dopamine.

What is the law of dopamine?

The law of dopamine is to take action when you wake every day.

And what I mean by that is as soon as you open your eyes in the morning, the most important thing you can do is get moving effectively.

Dopamine is literally involved in movement.

There's actually this really big phenomenon on TikTok at the moment called rotting, which is where people literally can't get out of their bed.

And particularly teenage girls call it rotting, where they like cannot move, they can't get out of their bed to do anything.

The reason that's happened is because dopamine is so low from the TikTok and the sugar and so on, that they can't take action at all.

If you wake up in the morning and you just immediately get the system moving, even if it feels horrible, actually, the more horrible it is, the more dopamine you're gonna generate because it operates in terms of that pain, pleasure type balance.

And if you start adopting that kind of principle, take action when you wake every day.

It just means dopamine is on a very good path from the moment you begin.

Amazing. Okay, so we talked about actionable strategy number one was phone fasting.

What are some other things that we can do?

Second big action for dopamine is what we call flow state.

Flow state has become a big phenomenon.

There's that great psychologist called Chikzent Mahai who popularized this a number of years back.

And flow state is the idea of our brain getting extremely hyper -focused on one thing.

It's effectively the opposite of how the modern human is spending their time.

We're constantly focused on like 10 different things at once, believing we can all multitask.

To journey back to our ancestors and what we did for 99 % of history was focus on one thing.

One time we'd be hunting, then we'd be building, and then we'd be cooking.

We would never be like trying to build our shelter and hunt a deer at the same time.

That's not how we operated.

So we would have spent hours and hours every single day deeply immersed in what we call flow state.

Nowadays we spend less.

When we enter this flow state experience, it builds dopamine in crazy, crazy amounts because our brain's like, wow, they obviously need me right now.

You wanna think of this dopamine chemical as your friend, and when you're trying to engage in something that's challenging, it's like, oh, he needs support.

You need support, help him focus.

People can enter flow state in a variety of other aspects of their life.

You might be able to get it in your work.

If you're fortunate to work in something you kind of enjoy that is challenging, you might be able to get flow state there.

Things like music, art, cooking, cleaning, connecting with humans, anything that gets your brain hyperlocked in on one thing for a long period of time is gonna create flow state.

Video games? Video games are interesting because how flow state operates is it has to be this perfect balance between the amount of effort you're going to put into something and your skill level and that will decide for whether you can enter flow state.

So if, for example, you did some editing, you might find, if you did editing back when you were at university, that might have been quite flow state -y for you because it was quite challenging and you had to like kind of, you were learning the ropes and stuff.

So it was a good balance between difficulty and your skill level.

If you edit now, you might find that a little bit boring compared to what you used to because it might be a more simple task.

So you might not enter flow state.

So you're looking for these tasks that are a perfect balance of your skill level and the difficulty.

Video games are very strategically designed to always make sure you're at that exact spot.

So they've made it so that as the levels are upgrading and something like skill -based batch matchmaking and Fortnite and Warzone and all that kind of stuff is designed to constantly leave you in this state of skill and challenge balance.

So yes, video games could enter flow state.

Video games are an interesting topic as well because I don't put them in the same camp as all the unnatural dopamine in terms of social media and sugar and alcohol and so on because of the effort required to play some of them.

If you looked at a game like Candy Crush on the phone, that is zero effort.

It literally draws the line for you and then you put it into the box like a kid basically.

So there's zero effort, Max Pleasure, dopamine crash.

If you take potentially that Horizon game, some things that you can do on like a Minecraft type game, some Call of Duty games, they can be extremely strategic and challenging, which means your brain is actually working hard.

So it is generating dopamine on a more natural curve than the spike in crash.

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I've definitely found that I get a lot more sustained pleasure from like immersive storytelling style video games that require quite a lot of work and occasionally a reasonable amount of grind to like achieve something rather than the more like, like this is why I don't like phone games because phone

games are, they're just too, too quick.

They're too quick to get the pleasure.

Yeah. You want to earn it.

Yeah. Whereas like, you know, it's three hour evenings, solo evening, cool.

I'm just gone for a walk.

I've got my 15 ,000 steps.

I'm now going to settle in to try and defeat that one more sunrise.

Just going to take three hours doing the thing.

That's weirdly way more pleasurable than three hours of scrolling TikTok.

Even though three hours of scrolling TikTok is like more, I don't know, pleasure reducing.

There's something that's more satisfying about the extended video game or the reading a fiction book where the payoff is 600 pages in rather than on page one.

For sure. And the pursuit of satisfaction is the goal with OpenMain.

You want to pursue any kind of activity that at the end you think, wow, I feel satisfied with that.

You feel so satisfied when you sit down and read for 20 minutes.

You don't feel satisfied after 20 minutes of scrolling Instagram at all.

You're actually just yearning for more at the end.

It's the opposite of satisfaction.

And I would say getting very immersed in like a challenging video game isn't bad for our brain in the slightest.

In schools, I have this all the time.

I have loads of parents asking me a lot of questions about specifically video games.

Particularly in young boys, video games is a big, big part of their lives.

And I really go down the route of just like, it's about the skill level required in order to engage with it.

And as long as you have the other behaviors, like you mentioned, like walking and eating and socializing, like core things, then video gaming can definitely be okay.

Nice. What is strategy number three?

Strategy number three for raising your dopamine is gonna be immersing our body in cold water.

A brilliant psychologist back in 1998 called ceramic discovered for the first time that cold water immersion can raise our dopamine levels by 250%, 2 .5 times.

And when you get this cold water immersion conversation, it's really important to understand this concept called the pain pleasure balance.

This was developed by Anna Lemke in America, a brilliant American psychiatrist.

And effectively what we discovered was all of these really quote unquote painful challenging activities of hunting and fighting and building resulted in a pleasure role experience in the brain afterwards.

And again, that was our brain just reinforcing do hard things, feel good, keep doing hard things, survive as a species.

And cold water immersion is the pinnacle of this.

It's a highly painful, horrible experience having a cold shower or getting in a plunge pool or something like that, that will lead to this massive generation of dopamine.

And so should we all have cold showers in the morning or buy an ice plunge bath or what's the thing?

It's interesting. I think the ice plunge is a good example of like an extreme version, but I actually don't think it's necessary.

I think it's actually almost comical that humans are living so much in a pleasurable world that one of the biggest trends on social media is freezing ourselves to death in an ice bath.

And it's like, that is actually how clever the human brain is and trying to rebalance itself that everyone's sitting there on social media getting quick dopamine, watching people have horrible experiences in ice plungers.

And it's like quite ironic really.

And cold plunge, if you have access to one in like your gym or like you're on holiday and you can swim in a cold lake or something like that, that's awesome.

But I would say the most sustainable way to do this is just to, every single time you have a shower, have 30 seconds of cold at the end.

And that will provide a good natural increase in this dopamine chemical to create a rise in motivation and your capacity to focus, to again understand with something like FlowState, our ability to get locked in, it requires dopamine.

So if you had cold water immersion first thing in the morning and then you try and go to a FlowState task and you get into that state easier.

So if you can have your normal shower, turn it cold at the end, we found with all our training that if people put music on when they get in the shower and turn it cold at their favorite moment in the song at the chorus or whatever it may be, people seem to stay in the shower for longer because they're

in a slightly more positive vibe as they go through the hell of the cold water.

Nice, what else, strategies four and five.

So next strategy for boosting our dopamine is this action we called my pursuit.

And this comes back to the importance of a human always having a very clear mountain that they're climbing in their life.

And this was huge for me.

I actually was someone that struggled a lot with all of the different addictive behaviors our modern world has to offer.

I went through a pretty challenging period of loss in my life from 16 to 21, where five people in my family passed away in five years, which was a pretty intense experience as a young man.

And during those years, I went very heavily into the world of alcohol and drugs and social media and porn and everything that would kind of distract me from the experience in my mind.

At 22, I then decided I like really wanted to create a life that I enjoyed and that would be naturally pleasurable and that would provide like good financial income and everything like that.

And I had to go through the clarification of what am I gonna chase instead of all that quick dopamine?

And this is where the whole idea of my pursuit came from that if you are someone that is addicted to all these different things, really the only way to get off of them is to have something else that you're chasing that you're willing to sacrifice for.

Say for example, not watching porn, not watching porn is probably one of the hardest things in the world because it's like a secret addiction.

Like drinking less is like something that's like, at least it's in public for the majority of people.

So it's like if you're constantly getting pissed at the part, people are gonna start thinking how you've got a drinking problem.

Porn is this giant secret in society that everyone does but doesn't talk about.

And it is one of the worst dopamine behaviors in the world.

It's hyper, hyper stimulation and crash.

And you feel it like immediately after porn.

You do not feel your best self.

And quitting porn was then one of the hardest of these things in order to let go.

Ultimately, the only way I managed to quit it was by really deeply observing how it was affecting my capacity to take action towards my primary goal the next day.

And I began to notice that if I watched porn one evening before going to sleep, there would be this like more of a fuzz and lack of motivation in my brain when I woke up the next morning.

That's why having a very clear pursuit is so important because you're only gonna be willing to sacrifice eating sugary lunches and going on your phone every morning and drinking loads of alcohol on a Friday night if there's a higher goal you're chasing.

And we go through this process of really helping people identify what is my primary pursuit?

What is the thing I should be chasing down?

What is that process?

How do we figure this out?

This is where we go to this prolonged period of time in nature without your phone.

And I did this largely because I was so addicted to my phone and I thought I need to start spending time off my phone sitting around on a sofa board is hell.

So what if I walk in nature?

And I found prolonged periods of time in nature pretty hard without my phone.

And you could have it in a bag on airplane mode or ideally just not with you at all.

And you need to be in a nature environment that you can spend at least 60 minutes with your mind.

And what I found is at the start of these walks some of your problems come into your mind or some of your like critical self talk where you tell yourself you're not enough or you're ugly or you're stupid or whatever it might be and other different challenges you're navigating.

And a lot of us experienced these little moments of time in silence and they are very enjoyable so there were always headphones in podcast on distraction, distraction.

What I came to discover is that if you spend a prolonged period of time in nature which is our home as a species where we spend 300 ,000 years eventually after 15 to 20 minutes that kind of stuff eventually subsides.

It has its moment to be heard those different emotional messages that your brain and body are trying to send you and then creativity begins to arise.

And if you go on a 60 minute walk in nature simply with the question of what is the primary thing I'm seeking for in my life right now?

And that might be a relationship.

It might be something to do with your work.

It might be that you know physical fitness is something you have to pursue harder.

It might be your food.

But if you spend 60 minutes and then on a regular basis pondering what is my pursuit you'll find you'll get extremely clear.

Once you've identified what it is on the following walks you begin to then strategize how the hell am I gonna get hold of that goal?

And doing this every morning without my phone 100 % is the absolute main thing that's put me in the situation I'm in in my life right now.

Nice, yeah that really vibes with me.

I've recently become a big advocate of goal setting and just like figuring out what you want and taking the time to make a goal towards it because goals have a tendency to focus the mind on a thing.

And I remember when I was in school my primary pursuit was how do I make money on the internet after school?

And so that was the thing that I was doing in the evenings when other people were like playing video games or browsing or chatting on MSN messenger or whatever it was back then.

I was like learning how to build websites and coding and stuff because I had this primary pursuit of making money.

Similarly at university.

Unfortunately my primary pursuit was how do I make money so that I can go part -time as a doctor?

And so that was the thing that I was doing when I had the option of doing other things but the thing that I was doing was focusing on that.

And I did find that at the point where I made enough money and money no longer was the primary pursuit I felt a bit rudderless.

I was like, oh shit what do I wanna do and stuff.

And I think one of the things with money is that it's a very easy primary pursuit but it's also a bit of a dangerous primary pursuit because then you get it and then you're like, oh crap what like filling the void as Tim Ferriss calls it in the four hour work week.

And I find that every few months I will ponder that question.

I tend not to phrase it as what's my primary pursuit but that's a really good way of phrasing it.

I tend to think why am I doing what I'm doing in terms of the work or the YouTube channel or the podcast or the books or any of this sort of stuff.

But I really like what's my primary pursuit.

I think it's ridiculously fundamental.

And so when you say it needs to be a clear goal that is so important because if a hunter -gatherer wakes up and they think right I'm gonna go try and get some food today.

They are gonna get very distracted by all the different things they could seek for.

Whereas if they're like, right I'm going to only try and make sure I hunt down a deer they're gonna at least be able to be laser focused on one thing.

When you're trying to figure out the difference between like a money pursuit I've also had a similar thing where you get money and you think maybe that's not like actually fulfilling me fully.

You really want your primary pursuit to somehow contribute to other people as well because fundamentally like the hunter -gatherer wasn't going out to find a deer to feed themself.

They were feeding a group or building shelter for the group.

And we're always fundamentally designed to help the group survive and your most fulfilling pursuits will contribute to a wider amount of people than just yourself.

Yeah, one of the questions that I always include as part of every quarter I do like a sort of alignment quarterly alignment workshop for my audience where you figure out where you want and figure out and turn it into goals.

And one of my favorite questions is if I had all the time and money in the world how would I use my talents to serve other people?

And that question really gets at that, okay, money's not a thing anymore, time's not a problem anymore and you have to use something that you're good at to help someone else.

And that question sort of ticks all the boxes of like, yeah, usually people's answer to that question is a good way of figuring out, okay, what should the primary pursuit really be?

I love that. And the interesting thing is I obviously am only seeing entrepreneurship from the lane that I'm currently living in.

I remember a number of years ago reading this quote from Elon Musk that the amount of income you generate is directly proportional to the problem you solve in the world.

And I remember just thinking, if you can find a way to solve some kind of significant problem for society money may arrive as a result of that.

And say for example, when we start a dose we primarily only trained companies.

And I really wanted to train young people, financially it made no sense to go into the school market because obviously a company like Amazon has a lot more money than a state school in London.

And I chose to just think, okay, we're just gonna pursue it because it's actually very important for the problem to solve.

And it's very interesting how money is arriving now from that lane because of various ways in which we're managing to do the model simply by just solving an important problem in the world.

So if your pursuit can solve a problem it's probably gonna bring money as well.

Yeah, there's a nice quote from MJ DeMarco which is to make millions all you have to do is impact millions.

That's true. That makes sense.

Okay, finally thing, the final thing you mentioned was discipline.

Let's talk about that.

Yeah, discipline specifically discipline in your home is a fantastic way to constantly be raising your baseline dopamine level.

And we want like a high baseline dopamine so that we constantly have this urge within us to take action towards whatever we're seeking.

I wanna go to the gym, I wanna cook food, I wanna do my job.

You just want a high level of baseline dopamine.

Anytime you engage discipline in your home you're raising that baseline.

So if you for example, finish your lunch and leave everything around the place you don't engage the dopamine system.

If you bother to just rinse, put in the dishwasher you've just put in a little bit of effort and your brain has generated dopamine.

And if people go through the process of really working towards maintaining a much more organized and tidy home it's very interesting the translation that has to their motivation.

And one of our biggest class that we work with is the NHS, training lots of doctors there.

And many people in the NHS are really struggling with their mental health.

There are a lot of people that come to us experiencing a lot of depression in their minds and that like real low period where you can't really do anything.

Even working is really hard, showering is hard, anything that's effortful is hard.

And in the first week of dose we simply get them to select one room in their home that they're gonna organize and try and get it done.

And that's like their worst nightmare, like some of those depressed, the idea of cleaning a room in their home is hell.

And I say to them like we've done this with 50 ,000 people like this really does work, please just trust us and clean that room in your house.

They'll put some music on, sometimes we get people to FaceTime someone else and they go both clean their rooms at the same time.

They clean a room and they come back the next week and suddenly they have this more vibrancy in their energy.

And suddenly all the other things we need to do for our mental and physical health to do with food or exercise or whatever it may be comes from a place of higher baseline dopamine so it's easier to actually take action.

One of the things that we teach as part of our productivity lab is we have these like focus lab workshops where if we'll do a few hours of Zoom co -working session where we'll get a few hundred people in a Zoom room and I always recommend to people for the first like five minutes, we say align and organize.

Align i .e. figure out what you wanna do with this next hour and organize spent three minutes just clearing a workspace or like getting that coffee mug and putting it downstairs or like just taking the shit off of your desk or your surroundings or whatever.

And I found that when I've experimented with that it's really worked but I suspect there's something about tidying up your environment and having that discipline around even like the workspace that contributes to that higher dopamine baseline which makes it easier to stay focused.

Definitely, if you look at either scroll social media for five minutes before I get started or have to clean up my workspace very simply one of them is effortful and your brain is like, oh, they're engaging effort quick, shove the dopamine friend in there and get it all organized, dopamine is gonna rise.

Amazing, anything else on dopamine before we move on to the other three hormones?

With dopamine there's this fundamental principle to understand around human survival and humans for a long time have just simply tried to find food, build shelter and survive as a species.

And our brain very cleverly knows our chance of survival.

So whenever we did things, they were optimizing our likelihood to survive in the years to come like finding food, building sustainable shelter, whatever it may be, dopamine was constantly increasing.

When we look at how humans are engaging in the modern world there's actually a very clear reason these symptoms of depression, low mood, procrastination, inattention, there's actually a really specific reason they're arising and it's that our dopamine is extremely good at predicting the future.

There's this huge concept within dopamine called reward predictive error where it's constantly predicting future outcomes, future outcomes.

Currently as a species, if you take something like watching loads of porn versus having sex with someone, one of them is prospering for society.

If humans have sex and procreate that's gonna help society prosper.

If humans all imagine if it eventually got to 95 % of us weren't having sex and we were all only watching porn that would be terrible for the future survival of our species.

And whenever you're engaging with a behavior in your life, if you ask yourself the question, is this actually advantageous to my survival as a species?

That's going to immediately tell you whether it's healthy or unhealthy dopamine.

If you pursue something in your work or even have a clean and organized hygienic home or you cook and eat a healthy meal, anything that's advantageous to your future is gonna be healthy dopamine.

Anything that is slightly drawing back your potential.

So when we do drink too many alcoholic drinks or we are smoking a vape or we're eating a sugary meal or we are watching porn, it's a really simple distinction to make that rather than having to constantly go online and think, what was the healthy dopamine list?

What was the unhealthy dopamine list?

If you just look at every single behavior you do, if it is advantageous to your survival, it's gonna be amazing.

If it's disaventages, it's gonna take from you.

All right, so we just spent the last X however long talking about dopamine.

What is the next chemical we're talking about?

The next chemical is oxytocin.

This is the O in dose, and this is the chemical that is completely designed to connect humanity together.

And it has a big effect on both our relationships, but also our confidence and how we connect with ourselves.

So this is driving the experience of love as a species.

Why should we care about oxytocin if it comes to wanting to improve our lives?

I would say at the human core, oxytocin is actually the most desirable chemical.

In order for humans to procreate and survive, oxytocin has driven us to have relationships.

And as much as we all seek for finance and wealth and things like that, a lot of what we're really seeking for is love and a family and relationships.

And if you satisfy your oxytocin, your brain is gonna be much calmer, it's gonna be much more confident, it's gonna be a happier experience within your mind, and you are generally gonna feel much more fulfilled in your life if your oxytocin is high.

Nice, so what are the things in the modern world that stop this oxytocin from being high?

Anything that distracts our capacity to connect with one another effectively.

So whereas with dopamine, humans figured out how to hijack the chemical and literally access high levels of dopamine without experiencing the effort required to attain it.

Oxytocin, we can't hijack it, but we can disrupt its capacity to increase.

So say for example, you and I are having this conversation, and as we were having it, I was constantly looking at my phone, would really disrupt our connection with one another.

If we weren't making eye contact, hearing what one another is saying, so the phone is fundamentally the primary thing in the modern world that is leading to low oxytocin levels.

What about the connection we get through Instagram stories and Snapchat stories and commenting on people's TikToks?

I don't even know, that that's a thing.

Like what about the kind of social media internet -type connection?

The challenge I have with this, and I think it's actually creating a lack of desire to pursue meaningful oxytocin, because we're moderately satisfying this deep human need to connect with one another.

And I had this really bad at one point in my life.

I went to Lisbon, I was like, I'm going to move to Lisbon and be like an entrepreneur that lives there.

And I didn't know anyone there.

And I got there, and very quickly I saw that my screen time had risen significantly when I was looking at the date and I think, my screen time is so high.

And I got there and I found it really hard to connect with people.

I'd never put myself that much out of my comfort zone where you need to walk up to people in coffee shops and make friends and for all of my life at school and you need friends to just sort of like appear in your life by environment.

And I noticed that because I had this deep desire for human connection and I wasn't attaining it, suddenly my social media time spent was increasing significantly.

And if we spend a lot of our time moderately satisfying this chemical, eventually the chemical begins to kick back and it will actually increase feelings of loneliness within our brain because it's trying to create a greater desire to actually pursue meaningful connection.

So you're sitting there and you're scrolling and you don't really know why you feel shit, but you just feel shit.

Part of it is your dopamine is low, but really right at the core of that constant observation of other people is the fact you're not getting what you need, which is proper human to human connection.

What's the law of oxytocin?

The law of oxytocin is to make someone else in your life happy every day.

And it's extremely important to understand this because in our modern world, we are struggling with mental health.

Many people are struggling with worries and thinking in their head and we get very analytical in our own minds.

One of the most fundamental ways in which we can significantly elevate human mental health is by just not being in our own head and instead focusing on other people.

And for years and years, humans were always outwardly focused.

If you actually think about the invention of social media, social media meant that we all suddenly created profiles, we suddenly look at our name all the time and all our own pictures of ourselves.

And this general environment has made us extremely focused on our own experience and how is our experiencing elevating and how many friends do we have and how much money do we have, but it's all about us.

Prior to that for 300 ,000 years, we as the human were actually kind of irrelevant and it was more focused on how is this group prospering and anytime in which you're helping someone else to feel happy.

Oxytocin doesn't just rise in them because they're experiencing human connection.

We fundamentally feel way happier as a human when we contribute to their life.

Have you looked at all into the difference between individualistic and collectivistic societies as it relates to oxytocin and stuff?

For sure, if you looked at a collectivistic society, some of the more Eastern practices in our world and Eastern philosophies lead to you having a deep, deep focus on the group, spending time with them, serving them, caring for your grandparents more, supporting with grandchildren more.

All of those get you out of your mind and into supporting the group.

And that is gonna lead to way higher oxytocin levels.

The more Western individualistic society is not good for this chemical because it doesn't deeply make you serve others.

It actually orients you towards serving yourself.

There was a good blog post from a friend of mine, Paul Millard, who wrote the book, The Pathless Path, and he called it the accidental meaning hypothesis, which was the idea that, let's say in the 1950s or whatever in most Western countries, the way that you lived your life was that you went to college,

you got a job, and you stayed at that job for 40 years, and you worked your way up the corporate ladder, and you got a house on the suburbs with a white picket fence, and you went to church on a Sunday, and the wife was at home looking after the kids and hanging out with the community and staff, and the husband was at work

doing the thing, and actually this is a pretty good setup for having a meaningful experience of life with strong family ties and a local community that you're part of and you go to church every week and the family and the home in the suburbs where all the neighbors know each other by virtue of the fact

that you were confined to the same job, me, it meant that you were living in the same place, meant that you were just getting this experience of life that was quite group and community focused, and then as we moved into individualism where it's like, okay, now move to the city, now switch jobs every

couple of years, live in the fanciest high -rise apartment you can and not even know who your neighbors are, maybe you're not gonna move close to where your parents are because that's kind of weird, maybe now you wanna move to where you wanna go because it's all about you and your own experience of life.

All of this has created this, accidentally created this void of meaning and purposelessness in a lot of our lives where we're so focused on attaining individual success that we don't realize that actually a huge part of what makes life feel meaningful and fulfilling is this sort of group -based community

experience. So fascinating and I really think what's effectively happened there is society has progressively moved from oxytocin, the group being our primary focus, towards dopamine and the chase for success and if you look at that original lifestyle or even just like 100 years ago lifestyle with church,

community, all these kind of things, that aligns much more to what's called Dunbar's number.

Dunbar basically suggested that humans prospered for the longest period of time throughout our ancestry in groups of 150 people and we really are fundamentally designed to have a very core group around us that we serve, that serve us, that we feel like we're deeply apart of and living a life whereby you're

maybe successful when you have money and you live in this amazing place but you're not fundamentally satisfying oxytocin which is the experience of love in you as a human being, it's just gonna be extremely hard, it's gonna be an underwhelming experience for you as a human.

So what are the actionable things that you encourage people to do or that we can, you know, viewers and listeners can implement to help boost the oxytocin that we have in our lives?

Yeah, so action number one is physical touch and this is really important to not underestimate is anytime in which you come in physical contact with another human or an animal, oxytocin rises extremely quickly and we as a society would have been extremely physically connected, imagine actually sleeping

outside in the cold in winter for six months, we'd have literally hugged and cuddled each other to survive and especially since 2019 and stuff with COVID and the big shift, we actually do physically connect less as a society and anytime in which you do make a moment of whether it's like just with a friend,

high fiving, hugging them, whether it's with your kid, whether it's in a romantic way, oxytocin rises and we've had some really interesting experiences with this because when I'm on stage, I explain this idea that humans really need physical connection and I get the entire audience to rate how many

hugs they think they're averaging per day.

On average of all 50 ,000 people, we're at 1 .6 hugs per day, is what we've seen in our data and when you look into the research, it's very clear that we need much more like five hugs a day.

In this moment where I'm on stage, whether it's like teenagers or adults in companies, I will then suggest to that audience that they all have to stand up and hug the two people next to them.

Every single time without fail, when I look out at that audience, they are furious that I have suggested that idea of hugging the two people next to them, they all think, oh, I can't be bothered to do that, that's awkward, that's uncomfortable, but they proceed to do it.

Sometimes it takes them longer to stand up than others, but they do hug everyone and I see this monumental shift in that entire audience.

I do this at the start of the oxytocin event where they go from awkward disconnection towards massive happiness.

By the time they've all hugged each other, they're all laughing and smiling and much more bonded up and very simply oxytocin has risen within their brains.

So fundamentally regular human connection, either romantic or in a friendly way is important.

I was also delivering this training in a company and there was a Japanese company that was about 55 years old and he was pretty averse to the fact his company had put him on mental health training, which is fair, like that's part of our whole goal with this dose thing is to provide an alternative narrative

and this isn't really therapy, this is a different way to operate.

And during this moment about this hug thing, he actually came up and spoke to me and said that he had realized he was no longer really hugging his wife and it's sad to hear that and it's not just something I've now heard so many times is that people just aren't hugging their partners at all.

And I set him this simple challenge where he has to try and make sure that he gave his wife a proper five to 10 second hug, the longer you hug for the more oxytocin will release, five to 10 second hug when he left for work and when he came back it from work.

And he came in the next week with a very big smile on his face and thinking, wow, this guy looks like different from last week, he looked much more energized.

And he was pretty averse to the fact he was even receiving the guidance originally.

And I said, how did it go?

And he said, not only like, have we connected and felt like more bonded and talked more, but they had actually reignited a part of their life that apparently hadn't been there for nine years.

Oh well. And whether you're seeking for just like normal natural connection or even like more deeper romantic sexual connection, it's very important to understand that simple human connection of holding hands and cuddling and hugging one another is fundamental to actually achieving maybe the deeper,

more romantic goals that you desire.

Nice. All right, what's next?

Okay, so action number two to raise your oxytocin levels is called contribution.

And this is any time in which you're in service to another human being, it's gonna raise the levels.

This follows very closely to the law of oxytocin to make someone else happy every day.

And it's really important to every single day just ask yourself what is one simple contribution I have made to somebody else's life.

And we run this simple challenge whereby people have to attempt to, in a coffee shop, buy a stranger a coffee.

And that's quite like an awkward uncomfortable thing to do.

It's not a particularly expensive thing to do, so you probably can't spend three pounds like serving someone else and buying them a coffee.

But the experience people have from doing so is actually really surprising.

Not only do they bond with this human, the other human is so surprised that a stranger would talk to them because we're living in such an individual world now that you can't even believe that a stranger would talk to you.

So that in itself then bridges the gap between humans and creates some oxytocin.

And then you discover that this moment of serving someone else actually makes you feel really, really good.

And this is a really good episode of Friends, the TV show, where Joey says to Phoebe that there's no such thing as a selfless good deed.

And in this episode, Phoebe tries to do kind things for other people without feeling good herself.

So she, for example, goes and rakes someone's garden leaves without them knowing.

So they have a good deed done.

But what she ultimately discovers in this episode is it's fundamentally impossible to do something for someone else and not feel good to yourself.

And it's very important to on a regular basis just have that in your mind.

Like how am I serving other people, family, friends, colleagues, kids, whatever it might be, because the more you serve others, the happier you will feel as a result.

No, one of the stories I told in the book in the third chapter on people was how I realized that one of the things that made my day job much more energizing and enjoyable was when I would offer the nurses a cup of tea a few times a day.

And I would be sort of, I'd be sitting at my desk doing my thing.

And then I think, you know what, I want a cup of tea.

And then on the way to the tea station, I'd poke my head into the nurses office and be like, hey, anyone fancy a cup of tea?

And then some of them would be like, oh yeah, sure, thanks.

And then over time I learned like what the tea order was, like how strong they liked individuals, how much milk, how much sugar, you know, that kind of stuff.

And I bring the tea back.

And it's not much skin off of my back to make more cups of tea, because I've got to wait for my own one to steep for the two minutes anyway.

And it just added a lot of good vibes to the ward.

It made me feel really good.

I'm sure they appreciate it as well.

Just having a cup of tea brought to them realized for me that acts of service is my love language as well.

So it's like, there was just something really nice about doing that.

And it was such an easy thing to do.

I also did realize when I was working during the pandemic, the hospital was serving was selling like scones for like 20p, because a local baker would like bake all these scones and donate them to the hospital, because like NHS clapping whole shebang and these scones are 20p.

And so whenever I'd go to the cafeteria to get lunch or something, I just pick up like five or six of these scones and like just some random order.

I just bring them back to the ward and just, you know, pop them on the nurse's station being like, hey, this is for whoever wants them.

It cost me one pound 20, but it adds so much good vibes to my own life.

And to that, it's like, oh, super nice.

So I am very bullish on just trying to do random acts of kindness for other people.

Not because you're like a saint or a good person, just because it makes you feel good and it makes them feel good.

And it's just, it's kind of a no -brainer.

For sure. The more we move towards collectivism of helping other people, the happier our brains are all gonna feel.

And we just have to really understand this modern world has made us very self -focused and it serves you extremely well and the person you support to put your attention on them instead of yourself.

Cool. What's strategy number three?

Strategy number three is what we call social life.

And obviously we all know that we need some kind of social life, but it's very interesting when you go deep into the literature of oxytocin, how there's fundamental ways in which people socialize that can actually increase or decrease the level of oxytocin when you're in that kind of environment.

Obviously, we have this idea of physical connection, so it's always good if you can meet someone to always have a moment of physical embrace first.

However, when you're actually socializing with someone, there is two main things, and it's quality and quantity of eye contact that occurs during the conversation, and then what we call active listening, which is deeply paying attention to what someone is saying.

The way to know if you're actively listening is when you're listening to someone, and I've struggled with this a lot, it's very easy to actually spend your time formulating your response in your head to what they're saying whilst they're talking.

So you're not actually really listening, you're just in your mind creating something that you're gonna say back next.

Active listening is just taking the time to listen and then respond, taking the time to listen and then respond.

And even in our conversation here, it's very easy for my brain to think, oh, should I plan what I'm going to say next?

But the more deeply I actually understand what you're saying, the better capacity I'm gonna have to engage in a proper conversation, and oxytocin will then transfer between the two of us.

So the action there is social life.

Social life with eye contact.

Eye contact and active listening.

Oh, okay, that's cool.

Sweet. So number four.

Number four and number five then go into a different side of oxytocin, which explores the relationship you have with yourself in your own brain.

Because when you connect with other humans, it does create oxytocin, but we also all have the capacity to connect with ourself.

And when you go into this, a lot of us do really struggle with the relationship we have in ourself.

Some of us are super critical of ourself in our mind.

Some people are really tough, they're really judgmental of their appearance, success, whatever it might be.

There's two fundamental actions that leads to a better conversation in your mind about who you are and your experience of life.

The first one is what we call gratitude, which is an extremely popular and common understanding in the modern world that we need to action gratitude into our life, but still something we seriously, seriously lack in our day -to -day experience.

Like humans are very aware, oh yeah, you're supposed to be grateful, but many of us don't have like a sustainable practice whereby we're like often thinking about this.

The reason gratitude is so fundamental is the conversation you have in your head is that we in the modern world are struggling so much with comparison.

Comparison on absolutely everything, how good our social life is, what our girlfriend looks like, how rich we are, whatever it might be.

And effectively, comparison is constantly thinking about what you don't have in your life.

And our modern mind is plagued by that experience.

I don't have this, I don't have that, I don't have this, I don't have that.

When realistically, we have literally everything now in terms of human survival compared to what all our ancestors had.

And gratitude, if you think comparison is thinking about where you don't have gratitude, is very simply thinking about what you do have in your life.

And if you make sure that in your moment when you wake in the morning and you begin to take action and you go and brush your teeth, which is fundamental for our dopamine, if in that moment you're brushing your teeth, you make sure you have conscious grateful thoughts throughout that period of time,

it means that you're constantly starting your brain with that style of thinking rather than the more envious style of thinking that many of us can struggle with.

Nice. And then our fifth oxytocin action is something we call achievements.

And achievements is fascinating, this is our capacity to celebrate the achievements we have in our life.

And this then really goes into neuroplasticity and how our brain can adapt and mould and rewire itself over time.

Very simple example of neuroplasticity is just learning to drive a car.

If you get in a car and you try and drive it, it's an absolute nightmare with the gear stick and the clutch and so on.

And someone's sitting there saying, no, just do the biting point.

It's a nightmare for our brain.

Then over a period of time, we train the skill and we practice the skill and then in a few months time you find yourself not even having to think about the gear stick or the clutch as a result of an alteration in what's called your visiomotor cortex, which is the area responsible for that kind of physical

fine movement. Our brain can shift and change.

And when you look at how you communicate with yourself in your mind, it's very common that there's been a huge amount of critical self -talk that has taken place.

And rather than just trying to stop the critical self -talk because that's actually a really hard thing to do, you just need to learn to drive a new car effectively and learn to communicate with yourself in a much more positive way.

And this has two big, big impacts on us.

One is that it creates much more positive experience in our brain and our confidence will then increase as a result of us talking to ourself in a much more positive way.

The other is actually really impacts our capacity to succeed on whatever we're seeking to attain.

When we look at the confidence, the first part of this is that if you say, for example, had two groups of parents and they were both raising a toddler, one of those groups of parents decided to raise that toddler by constantly telling you everything it was doing wrong, and doing this wrong in school,

this wrong with your friends, this wrong with us at home.

And then the other group of parents decided to raise the toddler by, of course, identifying when it made mistakes, but really learning to celebrate the things that had gone to plan for that kid.

This ran right in school with this subject and this ran right with your friends and whatever it may be.

If you look at the confidence in these two individuals, the first one is gonna be spinning in circles with absolutely no self -belief and no belief that it can actually do anything that's of value.

The other one is really gonna begin to grow in its level of self -belief, purely based on self -talk.

If you look at how you communicate with yourself, we're very much like that first set of parents that only judge ourself and very rarely celebrate the achievements we're making.

The more often you celebrate the achievements, the more confident you become.

Then if you look at this down the lane of your capacity to succeed at what you're seeking to attain, if you had two women, they were both 35 years old and they both wanted to eat healthier food.

Monday to Friday, they both ate great food and suddenly had loads of healthy whole foods, loads of natural meals.

And then on Saturday, they both ate a tub of Ben & Jerry's ice cream and a big Domino's pizza.

So they both eaten and done exactly the same thing the whole week.

If one of them goes down the lens of communication in their mind of, oh, fuck's sake, why do I do this?

I'm so bad with my diet, I'm fat, I'm really unsuccessful whenever I try and do these things.

And the other one goes, that is annoying.

They ate the ice cream and the pizza, but I've actually just achieved six days of eating healthy food and that's a massive accomplishment for me.

One of them reinforces the negative behavior and one of them reinforces the positive.

And if you look at the outcome of these two individuals, one of them is going to become much healthier than the other.

So fundamentally, having a practice in your mind where you celebrate a achievement every single day is just gonna lead to a more confident and more successful break.

Nice, any specific practices you recommend or you found work for people?

The best thing I can recommend is when you are just about to fall asleep as your last thing at night, you've had your entire day, you simply review your day and you think, what is my primary achievement?

It really is important to understand this doesn't need to be a massive thing.

This can be that you ate a healthy lunch, you managed to clean up your room, you submitted an important email to someone.

But if you celebrate achievement, you start training this new pattern of thinking in your brain and it becomes much more natural.

Over time, you actually start to communicate and thinking that way more often and then gradually those experiences are created.

What is the third chemical we should be thinking about?

The third chemical in dose is serotonin.

This is the chemical responsible for our mood and our energy.

And the most important thing to understand about this chemical is 90 % of it is being made in our guts.

Our brain and body is constantly assessing how healthy our body actually is.

And if the body is in a good state, if it's well rested, if it's got sunlight, if it's got loads of good nutrient -dense foods in, it leads to an increase in serotonin in the gut, which then improves how we feel in our mind.

Oh, nice. What is it about our modern society that screws up with serotonin?

We've got nutrient -dense food that arrive into our mouth and then we start eating them.

And then immediately our body is like, okay, look at all these resources that are coming in from these whole foods, which would be like protein sources or fruit or vegetables or nuts or whatever it may be.

As those molecules come into the body, the body literally breaks them down.

For example, it breaks it into this chemical called tryptophan, tryptophan and builds serotonin.

Biggest challenge we have in the modern world is we've got all these ultra -processed foods.

Entering our ultra -processed food has become a massive topic now in the last few years.

And as these foods enter our body, our body's capacity to make serotonin is the least of its priority.

The priority is them removing these toxic products from it and then our serotonin levels dip.

And so many of us are now struggling with the feeling of exhaustion and low mood and that is heavily connected to the nutrients and the foods that we're eating.

So what is the law of serotonin?

Interestingly, the law of serotonin is to make sure you walk headphone -free in nature every day.

And that actually goes on to have an impact on all aspects of serotonin, which covers things like our nutrition, our sleep, quantity of sunlight, even now to how our body breathes.

Effectively with serotonin, the whole thing is about getting our system more aligned to nature and how it originally spent its time.

I think the biggest disruption we've had to that is the fact that humans no longer spend any time in nature.

So we're not actually connecting to the area that made us human.

And if we spend long time, prolonged periods of time in nature without headphones connecting to it, we see a human that actually become more natural in all aspects of their desires with their food, sleep patterns, and so on.

What is it about nature that is so good for us our serotonin levels?

Do we know? Effectively a fantastic psychologist in Japan called Gin Park back in the early 2000s discovered that spending time in forests was extremely valuable for humans.

Japan has had a great deal of mental health difficulty.

They actually developed a term called karoshi, which basically means an overworked modern human that is struggling with depression and suicidal ideation and whatever it may be.

They then knew given that it's Japan, they have the world's biggest forests.

They have the most dense forests of anywhere in the world.

They thought maybe we could just test out putting people for prolonged periods of time in forests because scaling therapy is not particularly easy.

They developed this practice called shinrin yoku, which is effectively walking, headphone free slowly through a forest.

And they see huge transformations in stress and sleep and anxiety and depression, just as a result of being there.

And it's so important to understand, you know when you've been away for a while and you come home and you feel like slightly calm because you've come home and you're in your own little nest and that's where you feel peaceful?

We as a species are only at home when we're in nature.

That is humans' original home.

We spend 300 ,000 years nowhere else.

That's all there was to spend our time in forests, beaches, mountains, whatever it may be.

And what you basically see, especially when you put people through a variety of different neuroscience measurement tools, you see as soon as a human is in nature, their heart rate drops, their blood pressure drops, their thoughts slow down.

And effectively our brain and body thinks, I'm home, I can slow the whole system down.

And that is why nature is so powerful.

What if someone is living in a concrete jungle like New York or London or something like that?

Then they just really, we have this a lot.

Like with schools, we train and stuff and say what about access to nature?

It is really important to understand there is always parks nearby of some kind.

And I don't think it's necessarily access to nature.

I think is lack of priority of wanting to spend any time there because it's pretty affordable to either walk there, cycle there, get on a tube there.

And we just need short periods of time in these parks.

Preferably as hippy as possible, which means barefoot on the grass in the sunshine.

You actually see from this grounding effect, which is where we have our bare feet on grass that the nervous system calms even more if we're directly in contact with the earth.

And humans really need to return to that prioritization of spending time in these environments.

Even if it's tiny windows, if it's 10 minutes, few times a week, it then begins to build a connection.

But so much of society doesn't really perceive that nature has value because they have no relationship with it because they spend no time there.

Just like if you're trying to develop a relationship with a human, you'd have to spend time hanging out with them and listening to them and talking to them.

And we effectively don't do that with nature anymore.

So we don't perceive there is benefit.

But when you spend time there and a relationship grows, the benefits that nature can bring to your life increase a lot.

I said, would you say that?

There is this guy I had dinner with a few weeks ago who travels with a grounding mat.

Cool. Cause he goes to all these like hotel rooms and then these like sky trays scrapers and stuff and has a grounding mat that has like some mud on it or something like that.

And apparently helps calm him down.

And I was thinking, how much of this is legit and how much of this is quackery?

There is some interesting science on it.

A human being has an electronic charge, just like anything does.

And we have a positive electronic charge and the earth has a negative electronic charge.

And effectively when we make direct contact with it, it neutralizes our electronic charge, which then causes a balancing of our heart rate and blood pressure and so on.

When someone has like a grounding mat, for example, they're tapping into that earth electronic charge through the plug system.

That is a cool solution.

Obviously amazing to actually be on the nature if possible.

There's a very like modern way to do it, but there is some good science that grounding can have a positive effect on us for sure.

So when I do my daily walks around the park, I should go barefoot and not walk on the concrete path, but walk on like the grass next to the concrete path.

100%. It actually would be much better for your body's benefits in terms of these two different systems.

We have our parasympathetic calming system and then our sympathetic more energizing system.

Soon as our body makes direct contact, the parasympathetic fires up and we are living in very stressful environments.

You take that city example, it's very sympathetic nervous system.

It's like loads of loud sounds and buildings.

Even in research, you see that straight edge buildings can stress our brain out over what we call fractals, which is like the variety that nature has to offer.

And if you can get maximum parasympathetic nervous system activation, which is anything that calms the body down, that's what then leads to the body functioning well and maximizing serotonin.

Can you think of any other cool studies on serotonin off the top of your head?

Because it's just kind of cool.

There's a lot of different studies.

You then go into the whole nutrient world and there's a very interesting psychiatrist called Young who has investigated the relationship between antidepressant medications and foods that could boost the bacteria in our gut that could elevate serotonin levels.

And it is really important on antidepressant medication to always obviously consult whoever guides you towards that path.

But there's good things you can do in addition to it or if you don't take medication, just something to elevate your serotonin levels.

And what they basically see is our gut is trying to produce serotonin all the time.

And our gut is just a giant microbiome of bacteria.

And effectively, when there's a really good healthy range of diverse bacteria, it functions really well and manufactures a ton of this serotonin chemical.

You can then take what's called probiotic strains of bacteria.

This is drinks like kombucha or you can take it in pill form or kefir, yogurt.

And these then add these healthy bacteria to the gut.

They've then done good comparative studies where they've had people taking these probiotic type formulas and people taking antidepressant medications.

The reason there's a connection now is antidepressant medications are called SSRIs which is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

They impact the serotonin pathways to try and make us feel happier.

And you basically see very comparable data with increasing the amount of good bacteria in the gut and raising serotonin and artificially kind of medicating the serotonin level up.

So that's a pretty interesting new discovery that if we can elevate our serotonin level naturally it might have medication type benefits.

Oh, that's cool. What relationship does serotonin have with energy and productivity?

The big one here would be the energy impact of our nutrition and our sleep.

And effectively, it is so important to understand that your capacity to feel clear in your mind and think clearly is directly connected to food and sleep.

And so many of us now struggle with brain fog where our brain literally feels fuzzy effectively.

I posted on Instagram recently about a morning routine and so many people say that they wake up and their brain almost feels like blurry.

So they can't even take action towards a goal.

That is heavily connected to the food you've eaten before you've gone to bed and then how much sleep and good quality sleep you've actually got.

Anytime we're eating the nutrient dense food or we're sleeping at night we're generating the serotonin chemical.

We then have a very clever system called the vagus nerve which is connecting the two together.

The vagus nerve is constantly sitting there in the body in your chest with your heart, with your stomach, with your throat, reading the state.

And if throughout the night from the nutrient dense food and the good quality sleep, the brain is like cool.

We got a load of serotonin.

Your brain wakes up the next day much more clear.

So the capacity to be productive when you're working and have a sharp focus is gonna be far better.

If we do, and I have no judgment for it, but then eat like a really sugary dinner late at night which is tempting because it hits our dopamine system and makes us feel really good temporarily.

And then after that we get a bit of a crash and then we scroll to TikTok and then we watch some porn and we just annihilate all these systems.

Then we wake up and they say we don't sleep as well and we get a very foggy brain which means that we're gonna be way less productive.

So what are the actionable things that we can do to boost our serotonin?

So first strategy in order to maximize serotonin is what we call sunlight before social media.

Specifically sunlight in the morning is extremely good for elevating this serotonin chemical.

We obviously evolved out in nature and when we had that bright morning sunlight it was designed to elevate these chemicals to give us a big boost to start our day.

So if you're gonna have a framework in your mind whereby you have to earn your social media by first stepping outside and seeing sunlight, that's a good way to make sure you're maximizing this chemical.

An important note is that even if it's cloudy you still get the benefit.

You just need slightly longer out there.

On a really sunny day you'd need about five minutes.

On a really cloudy day you'd need about 15 minutes of morning sunlight in order to get the system started.

The next thing that is extremely good, the second action for serotonin is then how our body breathes and there's a lot of research and science into this world of meditation and breathing.

What we see from a serotonin perspective is if the body is breathing very slowly serotonin levels will rise because the body is getting into a calmer state.

So what we try and guide people to do is to get outside for their sunlight before social media, sit down on a bench and then sit down and go through a pattern of what we call resonance breathing.

That seems to be one of the best methods for this.

Resonance breathing is where you're trying to only breathe six times in a minute and you can therefore gamify it in your head.

So it doesn't have to be meditation.

Meditation is beautiful if you can do it but I know many people struggle with the kind of agitation in the mind.

Effectively with resonance breathing trying to breathe just six times a minute.

How you do that is you try and make your breathing round take 10 seconds.

So then you only do six 10 second chunks.

In order to do that you do four seconds in and six seconds out.

So you sit down you're out there in the sunlight in the morning you haven't yet seen your phone.

So the chemicals are starting off the day in a good way.

And then you sit down in for four alpha six in for four alpha six do that for two minutes.

That's the second action that's going to be extremely valuable.

The third action then is what we call gut health.

Gut health has obviously become a foundational pillar in the modern world.

People are very aware they're always supposed to eat healthy food.

Fundamentally when nutrient dense food enters the stomach you build a ton of serotonin.

Nutrition is one of those topics that's got extremely complicated of how many carbs they eat, how many protein, fat, which this, which that.

You can actually simplify this from a serotonin perspective down to could this food have been on earth before humans got here or could it not?

And if you actually think through that lens everything like meat, fish, eggs, dairy, fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, these are all what we call whole foods.

They're just one ingredient.

All of those foods would be on earth even if humans weren't here.

If you look at a lot of the supermarket that is basically to the left of the first few aisles of those two things, basically 80 % of the supermarket those are all then modern creations.

There's obviously some exceptions to this rule but if you're thinking about the lens of maximise serotonin you wanna look at your plate and think could these foods be here on earth without humans actually artificially manufacturing them in factories.

And if that is the case these whole foods are gonna help you elevate serotonin.

Interesting. Raw versus cooked foods, does cooking something count as processing the thing?

That's a good question.

I would say no, it doesn't count as like turning it into an ultra processed food.

So if you're looking at the distinction you'd basically have, if you turn the food around and on the ingredient list, there's like 50 words that you can't say out loud you're then looking down the ultra processed food lane.

If you turn around and it's yogurt for example and it literally just says milk as the ingredient then you're thinking okay, that's fine.

Or if you have to cook your courgette for example to make it softer in order to eat that's just like good modern invention that's enabled some more foods to be eaten.

But in general, you're just wanting to look at anything is there only one ingredient in this specific food?

And you basically want a plate of one ingredient items rather than things that have loads and loads of different things.

Like if you buy a chicken kiev, for example and you turn it around you'll notice on your chicken kiev there is actually 20 words on there that you wouldn't expect to see.

Or if you buy a Pret sandwich which we might think could be healthy, again, 20 ingredients that you wouldn't know the names of.

But if you're in Pret and you for example get a chicken and tuna salad or something like that you look through the ingredients you're like, oh this only says the things that I can see with my eyes.

And the more that you eat just whole foods the more serotonin you build.

Interesting, nice. That's good stuff.

Four and five. Fourth action for serotonin is nature.

And this is spending prolonged periods of time in a natural environment.

I actually believe this is the most important thing in all of this dose theory is spending time in natural environments.

The reason I believe that is humans are extremely misaligned to our former hunter gatherer self.

And the more you can become a hunter gatherer in the modern world the more you're gonna thrive from a productivity point of view, from a relationship point of view, health, mood, energy, whatever it may be.

In order to become a human that deeply, internally desires a natural way of being.

So really wants these natural whole foods and wants to get their morning sunlight and sleep loads and have insulate connections with humans.

You need to get your brain and body much more connected to our natural form.

The way of doing that is to spend prolonged periods of time in nature deeply connecting with your senses when you're out there.

So your brain has something to focus on.

So if you're out there and you get there and you're actually trying to intentionally pay attention to what you're looking at.

So you're like, yeah, I can see a tree over there and I can see grass and I can see the sun and I can see a river.

And you start tuning your eyes in.

And this is effectively helping you induce what we call like nature flow state.

Flow state is when we get hyper focused on something.

If we can get our brain hyper focused on nature, it's gonna be valuable for serotonin and also our dopamine which motivates us to want to come back every time which is really, really good.

So you tune in with your eyes, you tune in with sound, you tune in with your nose.

If you can never actually physically interact with nature be a kid and climb a tree.

If you start connecting into that original path of how humans spend their time, not only is it amazing when you're out there but you start desiring a more natural way of being.

And then finally. Our final one is deep sleep.

Deep sleep is one it's hard to negotiate between these but it's extremely important for the generation of this chemical.

And the biggest point I would put around sleep is what is the content you're consuming is the final content you consume before you go to sleep.

There's a lot of different sleep strategies out there in the world.

But what I really want people to understand is your brain needs to go through a calming period before it then enters sleep.

You don't wanna be burning it out with social media as the final thing that you do.

Social media is gonna be a part of your evening for sure.

And like you sit there, you catch up with people scroll some videos, whatever it might be.

But a lot of people in the modern world are now almost like TikTok and you're Instagram reeling their brain to sleep.

Like they're lying there and they're scrolling it.

Again, there's no judgment but we're just looking to try and optimize these things.

If you can have a rule with yourself whereby the phone can't be used after 9 .30.

So you have to send your messages, do whatever, the phone can't be used after 9 .30.

Of course the optimum would be get in bed and go to sleep.

I appreciate that's just not necessarily the path for everyone.

For me personally, I absolutely love watching YouTube.

So I wanna watch YouTube when I get into bed.

But if you can get into bed, have some long form content.

Videos need to be a minimum of 15 minutes long and get in bed, watch something far away from your eyes on low brightness.

That's actually gonna enable your brain to actually go through a period of calming down.

Again, to reinforce, if you can get in bed and just do some breathing, that's definitely the best thing.

But for everyone else in the world that is gonna wanna basically scroll social media, a much better alternative is long form content, lying in bed to allow your brain to get into a better state of rest before it actually enters sleep.

And then once it enters sleep, it's gonna get into deep sleep much quicker.

And the deep sleep is where the serotonin restoration will occur.

What's the value of whoops and aura rings and the horseshoe bank in your view?

I think they're extremely good for making you aware of how your behavior is impacting your experience as a human.

I interestingly have taken my whoop off for the first time four days ago after two years of wearing it.

And that's just because I wanna see whether like it's having a positive or negative impact.

I've had it on and I've meticulously checked it every single day for two years.

And for me, it did make me extremely conscious of going to bed much earlier because my scores are much better if I went to bed earlier.

Like even if I had the same amount of sleep from eight till, let's say 12 till 8 a .m.

or I had like 10 till six, I'd noticed the score was much better.

And back in the day, like my grandparents' stuff used to always say it was like an old wives' tale that an hour before midnight is worth two after.

There was this old phrase.

And when you look into the research, it's really clear that your sleep before midnight is actually much more restorative for your body than your sleep after midnight.

Because originally obviously, the sun would have set at seven, eight p .m.

We went to bed. That was actually sleeping hours.

We didn't just like stay around, hang out, which important going on social media, which is what keeps us awake these days.

So, if you can get sleep a little bit earlier, I think these things can help.

I also personally found it's super impactful on alcohol, these metrics.

I think these rings and stuff make it very clear that alcohol is pretty disruptive to our system.

Nice. Can we just elaborate a little bit on the link between serotonin and mood?

Yeah, effectively, serotonin is measuring the state of our body and it's simply wanting our body to be energetic and healthy.

And then it needs some kind of communication system with our brain to tell us whether that's the case.

And if our body is in a good state, it wants us to have some kind of positive reinforcement in order to make us want to continue to engage with these behaviors.

So you'll notice that if you get some really good sleep or you spend some time walking out in the sunshine or you eat a big plate of fruit, for example, a mood elevation will actually occur.

And that's our brain simply trying to reinforce the natural way of being as a human.

And that's why it's effectively affecting our emotional balance.

If on the other side, you do eat some really unhealthy food, you spend all your day inside, you don't sleep very well, your mood will dip.

And effectively, your mood is a really clever communication pathway between your brain and body, guiding us to engage in a more healthy way of being.

What's your take on the whole, depression equals imbalance of hormones versus depression.

And I think there's been a bunch of books about this recently, and obviously in med school, you learned some of this stuff.

I think some people feel that if I'm depressed is because there is something wrong with my brain and I cannot do anything about it.

And other people view depression more, depression is low mood persistently for a very long period of time.

Mood is a signal that your environment is a bit shit or the things that you're doing are a bit bad.

And therefore it feels more in your control as to what you can do about it.

What's your take or your approach to, to what extent is depression within a person's control?

How much impact can we actually have on our own mood?

Yeah, this is a fascinating question.

I do believe it is predominantly within our control, and I'll take some caveats on that, our experience.

And when you look at this, I really believe that the emotions we experience are simply messages guiding us towards our optimal path as a human being.

And if depression arises, for example, something is effectively off.

When we look at depression, I specifically think it's actually much more connected to the dopamine pathway than to the serotonin pathway.

While serotonin, for example, we just elevate our mood so it might take us out of a depressive type thinking pattern, if we wanted to fully alleviate ourself from depression, we would need a lot more dopamine in our brain.

The reason depression, for example, is so connected to dopamine is because it enables us to take action towards something.

When you're in a depressive state, your brain is just really struggling to pursue anything.

And fundamentally as a human being, you are designed to pursue things.

You're designed to contribute to a family, get hold of resources, and be a high -functioning specie in this world.

All humans were high performers before this modern world.

You could not be a high performer, otherwise you wouldn't be it.

And when you get an experience of depression, and I personally have really navigated depression, I've got extremely low before for prolonged periods of time.

Rather than seeing it as my brain is just broken, it's more, wow, my brain and body is so clever that it's sending me this message that my behavior needs to change.

And I really struggled with alcohol and drugs, it was like a really difficult experience for me.

And I effectively for a long time just thought, are these depressive symptoms just like part of who I am, and I'm just going to keep taking these pleasurable things because they temporarily alleviate them from me.

However, over time I actually came to realize that it was simply a message trying to guide me away from the things that were creating it in the first place.

And the same would be if you suddenly felt anxious or a different lens, suddenly you feel nervous and fearful in your body.

It's your body guiding you that something is off effectively.

So I do believe these are predominantly within our control, these emotions.

I do think there are caveats to that in terms of sometimes life throws you in extremely challenging events effectively.

So if suddenly a load of people pass away, or you go through a really significant breakup, or you lose your job, that actually creates like a significant challenge within our brain that we have to navigate.

But because we've like mass talked about depression and anxiety, we're now conflating things like grief, for example, from a breakup or someone passing with thinking that's depression, but they're actually different experiences within our brain.

So the more you can listen to them and align to their guidance, the better you're going to feel.

Nice, on a related note, what are your thoughts on ADHD and the ADHD epidemic?

ADHD is fascinating.

I think for a very long period of time, maybe all of human history, some percentage of society may have had ADHD.

And when you look at ADHD down this neuroscientific lens, it's really clear that those with ADHD have genetically low levels of dopamine production, which can be seen as a big challenge, but it also can provide some serious advantages.

And we'll go into that.

So it can be a genetic experience.

And you'll remember back to school, there are some kids that go really hyperactive and then they crash, and really hyperactive and they crash, and they struggle to sit still and focus and things like that.

It's very likely that from the moment they were born, they had slightly low dopamine levels.

It's important to understand that even if that is the case, if it is genetic, there's a hell of a lot of stuff you can do to support it.

In our modern world, we are now creating ADHD through our behavior.

Because rather than genetically being born with low dopamine levels, we're actually artificially creating low dopamine levels by constantly burning out this machine.

If, for example, you've got in a car every day and didn't put it into gear and revved the engine, eventually that engine is going to burn out.

And every day that we wake up and we have social media and we have loads of sugar and watch pornography or drink alcohol, we overstimulate this pathway, which causes the amount of dopamine it can produce to progressively reduce.

So, if you're looking at it, you've basically got genetic, could be born with it, low dopamine, or you've got more behavioral ADHD happening as a result of our modern lifestyle.

Interesting. And so I guess, in either case, learning how to harness our dopamine system and figuring out what are the sensible things we can do, some of which we've talked about in this podcast, in this video series, would just help regardless of what the cause is.

It's fascinating this, because I obviously am always viewing things down the hunter -gatherer lens, because that's just how we spend our time.

And if you actually imagine a hunter -gatherer was born with low dopamine levels, so for whatever reason they had low dopamine production in their brain, they would get to, say, 10 years old and they would be asked to contribute to that group in some way, like, help us find the food, help us build the shelter.

Those are dopamine -type experiences, hunting food, building shelter, contributing to the group in some way.

That individual, let's call him Sam, has low dopamine and he goes out hunting for the first time.

And he actually is gonna experience more of a dopamine elevation than everyone else in that group because he's coming from a lower number.

Like, if they're all coming from five out of 10 and jumping to 10 out of 10, but he was coming from one, he's jumping 10 points when he's doing that hunting.

And he is gonna feel insanely good in that pursuit of that goal.

So then he's gonna come home and think, wow, I love hunting, I'm gonna do loads of hunting.

And those with ADHD wouldn't have actually been the ones that were struggling to contribute, they actually likely would have been the greatest contributors and high performers in the group.

And you do see a very strong relationship between ADHD and high performance, because effectively, if you are someone with ADHD, you have more dopamine -seeking within your brain because you're coming from lower so you get bigger elevations.

And we actually have been working on this framework whereby we're trying to rename ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to ADHA, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Ability.

And if an individual, like particularly with young people, can find something to harness in their life, it doesn't have to be career -based, it could be music, art, creating, whatever it might be.

If they can find something to harness, they're actually gonna progressively every single day raise their dopamine in a more natural way.

And if you take Sam, the hunter -gatherer, that's been out there hunting, eventually he's gonna do so much hard work out there that he's actually gonna lift a lot of those ADHD symptoms away from him by constantly raising his baseline dopamine.

So it might have been that humans originally had ADHD and then actually dissipated throughout their life because of all the hard work they had to do which raised their dopamine.

Whereas nowadays, you get into this modern world, you've got low dopamine, anything pleasurable feels amazing, gaming, social media, sugar, and so on.

And then you constantly go on this very volatile journey of ups and downs, and then your ADHD symptoms get extremely challenging.

So ADHD individuals that do figure out how to harness something that they like in their life will have a much better experience.

All right, so we talked about dopamine, we talked about oxytocin, we talked about serotonin, we're just milking you for all the knowledge that you have and there's so much more, so much more to tap.

What's the fourth and final hormone that we're gonna be talking about?

Yeah, our final chemical here is endorphins, and with endorphins, I'm basically gonna give you an entirely different perspective on how humans should be managing stress.

And stress is a huge topic, it's part of being a human, it has benefits and it has challenges, like stress can actually help us to advance as a human and hyperfocus our brain when we're under stress.

And also, if it's too chronic, the stress can be challenging.

Most of the society is perceiving that stress should only be reduced from just trying to calm ourselves down, and that's really good, like we really do need to calm ourselves down.

If you look evolutionarily at the function of these chemicals, endorphins being the main one that helped us cope with stress, it actually wasn't necessarily about calming ourselves down to activate it, so here, we're gonna look at how we de -stress the brain.

So how do we de -stress the brain?

The interesting thing about stress is we have all kinds of stress now in the modern world.

You have looking at your bank statement, you have an argument, you have whatever it might be.

We have a lot of alternative ways of stress.

Originally, there was only two stress.

One was hunger and one was danger, and those would put our brain into extreme stress.

Oh God, we don't have food for the family, or oh God, someone's trying to kill us, an animal's trying to kill us, whatever it may be.

And those would have been the really highly stressful experiences.

When you then look at how we would respond to those two experiences, one thing is in common that we'd have to do, which is physically exert our body pretty hard in order to get out of the stressful state.

So we'd have to fight an animal, we'd have to run away from another human, we'd have to deeply try and pursue finding food.

The one thing in common is our body had to physically work pretty hard.

And when you look into this, effectively, when our body is experiencing extreme physical exertion, in order to help us cope with the experience of that stress, it begins to release endorphins, which will calm our brain down.

So that if, for example, in a situation where, oh my God, there's a bear there and it's running towards me, instead of being like, oh my God, there's a bear there, it's running towards me, which is not a very advantageous way to survive, your brain just immediately goes into physical exertion, sprint

as fast as you can, pick up a stick, whatever it means to survive.

But effectively, we needed something to remove stress from our brain and remove fear from our brain so that we could focus on the task at hand.

And what you basically see is if a human is highly stressed and then they physically exert their body, and there are actually five different ways we can physically exert the body, then you're gonna see the stress immediately begin to reduce within the brain.

Because you hear about this a lot where people are like, oh, when I feel stressed, I go for a walk, or I go for a run, or I go to the gym.

And I've been reading a bunch of stuff on Instagram reels of like, anytime you're struggling with your mental health, do something physical, and chances are it will help.

It's not gonna hurt at least.

100%, the endorphins model supports that theory.

And we are experiencing two really specific symptoms of low endorphins in the modern world.

One is our brain feeling highly stressed and like tight and like worried, that kind of like fast pace experience in our thoughts.

The other is anger and frustration, that's another really clear sign your endorphin system is low.

If you feel suddenly like annoyed, you'll notice your body literally wants to move itself.

You will, if you're really annoyed, you wanna like punch a wall or whatever it may be.

And it's because stress and frustration, they're really natural human emotions, they used to be reduced down by physical movement.

And now we are so sedentary.

Like I think it's amazing that we all like have these walks and all this sort of stuff, but like comparatively, like if you go and look at like the Hudson, for example, which is a tribe that's still functioning within Africa, they're averaging about nine hours of movement a day.

So that's what a human probably did for 300 ,000 years was actually physically move their body for nine hours.

And now we're really lucky if we get like 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever it may be.

And when people come to discover this, there's a really big shift in how they respond to stress.

Cause typically stress to us means such a stressful day at work, I like really need to go home tonight and just like have a glass of wine and like watch Netflix and like scroll my phone.

Because that's gonna temporarily alleviate all the pain because it's gonna put you into a high dopamine state where no stress can occur.

It's only gonna exacerbate the problem though in the long term.

And if people can start associating that feeling of stress or irritability and frustration with, well, my body is effectively asking for movement because that's how it originally perceived stress was movement.

Then you go down the path of first, I'm gonna move, then I can go chill and watch Netflix on the sofa.

But if movement is the first response to stress, you're gonna end up in a much calmer mind.

What are the law of endorphins?

The law of endorphins is physically push your body every day.

And this is interesting because like there's different approaches to like how much movement should we get, how many gym workouts and so on.

But if you have a fundamental principle that the body has to work hard every day in some form, that's a great goal.

And on days where the motivation is higher, and remember your motivation is only high if your dopamine is in balance.

So it's always good to be thinking about getting the dopamine levels naturally high.

On the high dopamine days where your motivation is high, go to the gym, do your hard 60 minute workouts.

And when you're there in the gym, it's important to understand the maximum endorphin release will occur in the moments where you're physically struggling the most.

So if you're, for example, running away from a bear, running away, if it starts to run faster, you have to run faster, which means you need more endorphins to cope with that stress.

So in the moment where you're in your final reps in the gym, where you think it already bothers to do these reps, it's those reps that are gonna maximize the endorphin release within the brain.

So hard physical workouts, really really good.

On a day where you think, nope, I do not wanna do any exercise today because exercise is boring, or I hate it, whatever it may be.

The most effective thing I've seen is to do what we call walk run, which is, and we get loads of people doing this in our training, you go out for a walk in the park, preferably if you're also trying to boost your other dose chemicals, you're kind of headphone free and so on.

And when you're out there, you try and pick three moments in that walk where you're going to effectively, artificially run away from a bear.

So you're gonna put your brain through that experience.

So if you see, for example, a small hill, and you have to accept the fact that if people are running, they're gonna think, wow, that person is running and that's weird and you might get self conscious about it, always with those things it's important to realize that no one actually cares about you.

They're only folks on their own experience of life.

They won't even notice you sprinting past them.

And in that moment, if you have three moments, you're on a walk, 20 minute walk, three moments where you just go, oh my God, there's a bear behind me and you just run as fast as you can.

You're thinking that every day you'll be getting this activation of this chemical that's constantly de -stressing your brain.

That's fun. And you look like a weirdo, which is also part of the goal.

It is perfect, yeah.

Also trains the anti -self -consciousness muscle.

Yeah, like our Phoebe runs in France, you know?

Yeah. So when she runs, like she would get way more endorphins running like that because of the extra physical work she's at.

Nice, all right, cool.

So what are the actionable things that we can then do to boost the endorphins?

So the first endorphins action is gonna be exercise.

Anytime where you can physically exert your body, walking, running, swimming, hiking, sport, whatever it might be, physical exertion of the body through exercise is gonna be number one.

There are gonna be other days where you think exercise just isn't the path that I can pursue.

And we have a variety of other ways that you see in the research can also increase it.

Action number two is heat.

Anytime in which you put your body in a hot environment, your body experiences this thing called a heat stress response.

Where similar to running away from the bear, the physical pain that it would get from that, it actually perceives heat like a sauna or a bath as a similar experience.

It doesn't necessarily know that you're not gonna stay in that sauna for hours.

So it effectively starts preparing itself for physical danger.

So that's why when you get in a sauna, you'll notice that you come in, and you feel less stressed out.

Or if you get in a bath, you literally as you sit in a bath, there'll be a relaxation effect occurred.

And that's because of the heat stress response.

So on the days you can't exercise sauna or even just getting in a bath is really good.

The reason those two are better than a hot shower is you need about 15 minutes in the hot environment to get the endorphins to release.

You might wanna have a 15 minute hot shower, but typically a bath or a sauna is gonna be a better path.

Okay, nice. Number three.

Number three is music.

And this is specifically singing music out loud, is one of the most effective ways you see to boost this.

And you again, you look back at the hunter -gatherers, they were chanting and singing.

That was a big part of life.

If we look back at humans over the last few hundred years, religious practices used to have humans singing much more.

Singing does have a very euphoric effect on our brain.

And coming back to the rule of physically pushing your body, if you really sing, it actually puts your body through physical work.

And you'll notice if you hum a song or if you really sing a song, you'll enjoy singing it much more.

From a neuroscientific perspective, that's because the endorphins are releasing as a result of the body going through physical effort.

So if you can, and we have this game plan where they have to try and sing for five minutes every day.

And that's like a goal.

If you're sure singing like me, that doesn't matter.

You can just sing out loud in your car, on a walk, in your bedroom, whatever it may be.

But singing, the more you go for it, the better, is gonna be a good way to activate and de -stress the brain.

All righty, number four.

Number four is laughter.

So, many of us will have had the joyous moment in our life at some point of laughing so much that it actually hurts our stomach whilst we're laughing.

And laughter is an extremely effective way to raise these endorphins.

Again, it's really euphoric.

And, laughter is kind of an obvious one.

Like, of course, humans would seek for laughter.

We all know laughter is a fun thing to be doing.

The only question I would like, would guide someone to ask themself, is if you were to rate yourself on a scale from one to 10, how much laughter do you think you have in your life right now?

If you answer that in your mind, you might discover that that score isn't 10.

It might be more like five or six of how much laughter.

We've seen over our training that we've averaged a number at 5 .7 in terms of the amount of laughter people feel they're having.

So, whilst we know it's something we desire, it's something we're not necessarily getting enough of.

And with that, I then guide you to ask yourself, like, how many laughter environments are you putting yourself in?

Environments that are conducive to facilitating you having a good time and laughing.

And in this modern techie world, we're spending a huge amount of time just on our computers all day when we're working, so not really communicating with others, especially not in person, always sitting in the evening watching TV or on our phones.

And if you compare that to 10 hours a day back in the day with humans laughing and having a good time, it's a significant drop in frequency of laughter as a species.

So if you do think, mm, my score is kind of low, I'd really guide you to consider like, what laughter environment could I literally get myself into today?

If you can't get out and about from your house, you could face down someone that you think has the capacity to make you laugh, literally ask them to make you laugh and see what they can pull off, or try and see people in person more often.

You can't underestimate how powerful laughter is for activating endorphins and de -stressing us.

What about watching funny clips on YouTube or TikTok?

If you laugh, if you chuckle, then no, that wouldn't necessarily activate the endorphins.

But if you sit there and you think, wow, that got me and I am laughing, then yeah, that's an acceptable way to boost the endorphins.

Just don't overdo it and burn your dough for me now.

Excellent. And then strategy number five.

Our final one is stretching.

So this again, comes to that pathway of physically exert the body.

As the body experiences a little bit of physical pain, it will release the endorphins.

And again, imagine running away from an animal, you might have to climb a tree and stretch your body out loads in order to escape that.

Anytime stretching occurs, your body will release endorphins.

Yoga, for example, is always known to have a really euphoric effect on the brain, and that's heavily connected to stretching of the body, releasing this chemical.

Interestingly with stretching, a lot of people hate stretching, myself included.

I've become a pretty disciplined person as a result of optimizing my dopamine, but yoga is hell on earth to me.

Like I can't go through an hour of yoga.

I've tried many times to get into it.

So I developed like a more simple practice, which I call ups downs and twists, which I do when I wake up in the morning and before I go to sleep.

Ups downs and twists is literally reach up as tall as you can, reach down to the floor and then twist your spine like this.

And effectively it's designed to constantly counter the effect of always sitting like this in a chair, stretching your shoulders out, twisting your spine, which is always stationary.

And then it's stretching your hamstrings, which are always short because we're seated.

And if you start having this framework of like, anytime you're just not doing anything, like you're cooking your food or you get out of bed or whatever it might be.

Up down twist and it just keeps the body generating this chemical.

And always with this brain chemistry stuff, we in the modern world are seeking for these big pleasurable experiences because that's what modern dopamine is taught us to seek for.

But if you start having loads of foundational pillars in your life, like making your bed for dopamine, stretching for endorphins, lots of water and nutritious food for serotonin, you just start raising the baseline of all these chemicals and then your mind begins to thrive.

So I've been trying so for so long to build a healthy gym habit.

And I found that the personal trainer is really useful and I'm getting a bit more jacked and some people commenting, Oh, he's looking a bit more jacked now.

But I don't enjoy weights at the gym.

I don't really enjoy it.

If I'm on my own, then I kind of enjoy it because I sort of half -ass it while listening to an audio book or something.

So that's kind of fun.

But with a personal trainer or an exercise class, I just don't, I don't really enjoy it.

But I love playing racquet sports, squash, badminton, tennis, like paddle, the whole shebang.

But there's part of me that's like, I know it is good for you to progressively lift heavier things, but our ancestors weren't like going to a frickin' gym and like lifting one log and then two logs and then three logs.

To what extent in your view is resistance training at the gym an important part of a healthy kind of lifestyle compared to replacing that with sports or things like that?

If someone was eating an only gym or only play sport, I would get them to only play sport.

I think sport would be more conducive to better brain chemistry in terms of the competitive element, which is super effective, the connection with other humans, the progress that you experience as a result of getting better.

I think the gym is amazing.

I force myself to the gym as well.

I don't particularly love the gym.

My absolute dream would be to be like out in a forest climbing trees.

Like that would actually be a more like effective way to train my body in a more natural way and building huts and so on, using our bodies like that.

I think the gym is classic, like modern humans super brushed off their feet and just tries to get like 30 minutes of extremely quick benefit from something.

I do personally have, I have personally found that something like CrossFit over weight training seems to be more effective for my capacity to sustain a relationship with that form of weightlifting.

And I think you and I will be similar and we are both big dopamine seekers.

Like we want the pursuit of goals badly and our working lives and whatever it may be.

And with the gym, whilst you do have the progressive overload of lifting heavier weights, it's not like that exciting of a mountain to climb lifting.

Like wow, I got 32 kilos instead of 30 kilos.

It's not like wow, yes, I am so happy.

Whereas CrossFit then has like a more competitive element between you and the other people that are there and it's very varied in terms of the types of movements you're doing.

So I found like my desire to want to take action towards going has actually been higher because there's a more clear mountain that I'm climbing.

And if resistance training is the path for you, there just needs to be very clear cut targets effectively, where it's like, I really want to be able to bench 80 kilos for five reps by June 1st.

And then you just like make this really clear goal that you're trying to chase down.

So then there's like much more drive.

Whereas if the drive is just like, I want muscles, at our deepest part, we don't care as much about that.

We need some kind of like achievement involved as well.

Yeah, I've had a bunch of friends recommend CrossFit for this reason.

I've never tried it, but.

I think CrossFit is an interesting path.

I do think like exercising with your friends is the best because like hiking, like getting out of London and going for a hike with your mates.

So that would definitely be the best form of exercise.

Okay, so TJ final question.

If anyone's watching or listening to this as a podcast, then they will have heard now 20 different action points and we'll probably be thinking, bloody hell, I've got to do 20 things now.

Let me add that to my sort of calendar or to do list or whatever.

How would you recommend someone start thinking about incorporating these habits into their life?

Yeah, so with these 20 behaviors, our goal is for people to progressively test this sort of thing over 60 days.

So we have like a long habit formation period.

If you've just listened to his podcast and you're thinking like, I actually want to take action on some of this.

We really want to think through the lens of dopamine, first of all, which is the motivation chemical, because for all of the behaviors, you're going to need motivation.

And you really want to immediately ask this podcast be thinking only about how you're going to start your day tomorrow morning.

Everything about our brain operates through momentum and however you start your day is going to dictate the rest of how your day goes.

And if, for example, right now, like you are waking up and you have like a bit of a check of your phone and you don't really make your bed and you kind of gradually get the day started, if tomorrow morning, you have an extremely disciplined morning where you wake up, you immediately go and brush your

teeth and splash cold water on your face.

You come back, you make your bed, and then you go and get your sunlight before you see social media.

If you make only your goal that, you're then going to suddenly think, wow, you're going to have a huge elevation of dopamine and serotonin in your brain, which is going to have, give you energy, a better mood and more motivation.

And then your capacity to maybe take on board some of these other things like, oh, should I go into nature today?

Or should I eat a healthy lunch?

That may happen, but if you make your only core rule to make sure the start of your day is super optimized, you'll then begin to see it translates to other behaviors in your life.

Amazing, thank you so much.

This has been wonderful, TJ.

Where can people find out more about you?

Yeah, so at TJ Power on Instagram is definitely my best channel.

And then I also have a book, The Dose Effect coming out in January, which brings all of this stuff into life and teaches you how to embed it into your experience.

Nice, and we'll put links to all of your socials and also the pre -order link to your book and the order link to your book, depending on whenever people are reading this or are watching or listening to this or down in the video description and the show notes.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive.

Thank you so much for watching or listening.

All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this.

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That would be awesome.

And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode.

So thanks for watching.

Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time, bye bye.

[Optimizing Your Brain Chemistry: The DOSE Framework for Motivation and Well-being]-[How Dopamine Shapes Your Habits and Productivity - Tj Power]

📋 Summary

Unlocking Your Potential: The Neuroscience of DOSE

1. Dopamine: The Molecule of Motivation

2. Oxytocin: The Chemical of Connection

3. Serotonin: The Mood and Energy Regulator

4. Endorphins: The De-stressors

Conclusion: The Path Forward

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript