TJ POWER: PHONE ADDICTION IS REAL & HERE'S HOW WE BEAT IT

0:02Hello everyone, my name is Jamie Lang, and this is Great Company.

0:10Well... Sorry, let's start again. No, we're going to keep that in. No, that would sound like a burp. Everyone's just picked up their phone. Yeah. That's how they listen to it. Yeah. I actually do listen to my phone at my ear when I'm brushing my teeth. You do that. Do you do that? I don't. I... Because I have an electric toothbrush. Right. Fancy. Yeah, very fancy. I'm burning the big bucks. I'm burning the big bucks. I'm burning them big bucks. I'm earning the big bucks and I have an electric toothbrush and sometimes I'll listen to a little something while I'm getting ready for bed through your toothbrush?

0:45no, through my phone could be a toothbrush that can play music? yeah, because it's very loud when it's on in my head so then I have to hold my phone right to my ear interesting I think lots of people do that write in if you do write in where? to this address Let's look it up. Right into our PO box. PO box. We should get a PO box. I would love a PO box. Hello, everyone. Hello. I am Jamie, the host of the show, and this is my producer, Jemima. PJ. Yeah, she is. Yeah. Welcome back to Great Company. Welcome back. The podcast, which is full of fun, laughter, ups and downs, lefts and rights. Northeast, south and west.

1:27South. South and west. Jamie's in a really weird mood. We also just came up with a small handshake before. We did. I think everyone should do that in life. If you haven't come up with a handshake with your friend, do it today. Come up with a handshake. It involves a dab. It does. Slash bow. A dab slash bow, which is quite exciting. Hey, listen, we should probably tell who we have on the episode today. Oh, I'm so excited. We have TJ Power on today. And TJ Power. You like this episode. So much. So TJ Power actually DM'd us and was like, I'd love to come on the show. And I have listened to him on other podcasts.

1:59Yes. Don't listen to those. Listen to this one. but I heard him on fun got into a happy place and like I he's just full of wisdom and he talks all about phones and how addicted we are and kind of all our brain chemicals yeah and this episode I found actually deeply profound and I have changed my life since listening to it have you? yeah big time wow okay this is interesting because halfway through Jemima was Jemima and I communicate through this iPad that we do and she can type in some different things in it that's how it works in the show and Jemima wrote halfway through I'm loving this episode it's so good so what have you implicated within your life?

2:39so he talks about our phone like how addicted we all are to our phones and I've been really really aware of it so when you did your run I don't know if anyone remembers that episode I told you about how I'd lost my phone and I had to turn up to watch you with an iPad remember that? and losing my phone made me realise how often my reflex is to go and grab it to go and check your phone so I've been really really aware of how addicted I am to it. And TJ gives some really, really good tips. Amazing. And I've actually been doing them. And I feel genuinely calmer. Yeah, it's insane. We talk about dopamine addiction.

3:11We talk about... Dating. Dating. That explains so much. Huge amounts. We talk about oxytocin. We talk about endorphins. We talk about... Serotonin. Serotonin as well. We talk about so many things. We talk about porn. We talk about how actually social media is shrinking our brains. this episode is one of those episodes that you truly really cannot miss with TJ I literally couldn't believe afterwards some of the things that he was telling me that is happening to our brains, to our bodies, to our minds and this episode may help you a lot It's helping me, it's helped me So I really hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did recording it I can't wait for you to listen to it Before you do, if you haven't clicked that subscribe button on the show, please do it does us wonders and if you want to get in touch you can via social media at greatcompanypodcast or send us an email, greatcompanyatjampproductions.co.uk.

4:04All right, before we get to the episode, we're going to take a quick break. You ready for this, Jemima? I sure am.

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6:57lovely adverts love to hear them okay you ready for this episode i cannot i actually cannot wait for people to hear this okay enjoy this episode of great company with tj power hi i'm tj power and i'm in great company

7:16anyone who is listening to this right now and they've clicked on it maybe by mistake or maybe on purpose. How would you describe you and what you do? Yeah, I effectively provide modern humans that are struggling with the intensity and overwhelm of technology and work and money and how challenging the modern world is to navigate with a very clear game plan as to how to chill your brain back out, get you feeling connected in your relationships, calm, energetic and healthy. It's a great answer. You were telling me how many talks have you done the past year? In the last year, about 200. I've done like 600 over the last three years.

7:52And it's super fun. People seem to enjoy learning about this stuff. I love delivering it. Are you tired at the moment? Are you all right? I am all right in this moment. I go through waves where I do get quite tired. But I'm having to live the kind of lifestyle I'm suggesting in order to manage it myself effectively around good relationship with my phone and all these different aspects. Yeah, because I suppose that's the thing, right? which is when I find when we get tired and exhausted, that's when bad habits start to seep back in. 100%. Because it's much easier to do the bad habits than it's to do the good habits.

8:26Yeah, and you require a certain amount of dopamine in your brain to make smart decisions, effectively. So if you get completely run out and exhausted of dopamine and we can speak into how that operates, then eventually it's like, I can't resist my phone, I can't resist the sugar, the booze, whatever it might be. What is tiredness? Do you know what it is? what is it like when we get tired what does that matter because people don't really understand tiredness do they or sleep or is that fair for me to say or am I talking nonsense I think people feel it but maybe don't necessarily know like biochemically what's happening in their system it's really your nervous system running on overdrive for too long like you know how fast life can feel from when we wake up it's like bang bang bang bang all day all day and our bodies aren't designed for that for hundreds of thousands of years they used to spend time in the daytime I'm just like lying on the grass, looking up at the sky, chilling out.

9:13Now we just run on overdrive and our heart effectively wears itself out. And then we get very tired. But we're living longer. Yeah, we are living longer. There's like an element, obviously medicine plays a big part now. They didn't have medicine, but our ancestors didn't live to like 30 years old. Like we're kind of led to believe they actually, a lot of them lived to like 80s, 90s. It's just that the life expectancy was really low, but it went in childbirth. So when you, we used to lose a lot of babies at like one years old. So it's cut the number in half. Whoa. But there are a lot of people that used to live a very long time.

9:46So it's not about, so life expectancy was only, that's why it got brought down because of childbirth. So people died in childbirth, their babies died early. Yeah, the infant mortality rate was super high because obviously giving birth is a dangerous process. And for a baby, like they had physical danger, animals and all that kind of stuff in their environments. So then cuts the number in half. But if you watch shows on, like there's a show called Primal Survivor and he goes and visits different tribes that are still in the world today. And there's loads of old people cruising around. They're pretty fit as well.

10:14Sounds ideal. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Farnham in Surrey. It's like an hour or so away from here. And what were you like as a kid? Were you inquisitive? Were you healthy? Wasn't healthy. Kind of inquisitive. I was just, I really just didn't connect with the whole school thing at all. I was just a nightmare. moved to schools lots and really struggled with authority as a kid and thought of myself as like a really dumb person until i was about a few years ago i actually started to maybe try and change that belief to be honest like i've always thought myself as an idiot and then at 18 19 found psychology and finally found something that actually connected from there it's funny how that happens i had the same thing that as a kid like i i for so long i just thought i was naughty and dumb.

11:01Yeah. Because I wasn't good at school. I was great at sport, but I wasn't not good at working, not good at lessons, not good at education. And I was a troublemaker. Yes. And so then that narrative sticks with you and you just constantly, it's on repeat in your mind. So then you just think you're a bad kid. It was pretty fun though. At the time, I enjoyed it. I just wasn't very good at the grades thing. But at the having fun with my friends thing, I was good at that. the saying that i read that you said you lost five friends yeah i lost uh it was actually five people in my family over the course of five years from like uh 16 to 21 and that was just a nightmare like at 16 you got no idea what to do with that sort of information and what happened uh initially the first person i lost was when i was 16 my cousin passed away she was like 27 so she was super young got like a really rare cancer and uh that was just hell to go through my whole family really crumbled around that it's just so hard especially when someone's really young yeah and then over the next few years we had uncles passed away and just like people very close to us passed away and i went pretty i just i used to not be able to cope with it at all the emotion i was just like what do i do with this how do you grieve like i couldn't comprehend it at that age so i basically just get super super drunk because i was like let's get super drunk and then i'd do that thing you like cry when you're drunk and that would be like a nightmare because i get super like deep when i was drinking and a lot of people resonate with that yeah when they you cover up with alcohol and then when you and then you wake up the next day having had that emotional spurge yeah and you're like why have i done that like i didn't really oh no and it's like towards the end of the night when it's not as like good vibes and stuff so i did that for years and years and then that just got me super into like quick dopamine as i'd describe it like all the smoking and partying and alcohol i just went as hard as you possibly can down that line i went everything you can do to have a lot of fun that's where i went wow because you're just covering up everything yeah and i was describing like how we were as kids like i also just wanted to have a lot of fun so i there was an element of just i want to have loads of fun be social like have loads of friends but then there's also an element of like loads of shit buzzing through my head that was just like so much easier just to like smoke and ignore it or whatever it might be do you know what's funny is like i'm relating to so much of this and i know so many people listening right now will be relating to it when i remember when man as a kid anything that was exciting yeah i loved it okay to begin it was like climbing to the top of the tree like like with the chance i might fall off that was exciting then when i remember when i first drank a bacardi breezer and i felt like this man like the first time i drank alcohol and i read the statistic right which is like loads of alcoholics actually start drinking from an earlier age because they suddenly i remember when i first drank alcohol i couldn't believe this nectar existed yes i couldn't believe it did this to my brain and it made me feel this exciting and then i remember the first porn mag that was like passed around at school and i remember seeing this pornographic magazine and being like so excited about that and then it was like girls that was so exciting and kissing and this and it was always chasing that dopamine the whole time wherever that dopamine was i wanted it yeah because it just fed me and there are some brains that are just more inclined to chase the dopamine you have some brains that naturally produce a little bit less dopamine as your baseline like the natural amount of production and it means when you engage with something like porn or sugar or booze or drugs the difference with where your dopamine goes is greater so more dopamine floods your brain so it's like holy shit this is the real deal and then if you have that from super young like i remember seeing porn like so young probably nine ten years old or something i just watched porn for the first time which is crazy i think i remember like as ridiculous this is like googling because my brain was so young googling on my mom's computer a teacher that i fancied her name with like the word boobs or something thinking that my brain would be able to find that person on the internet because obviously i was like a nine-year-old kid and then suddenly i was like whoa there's a whole world on the internet i had no idea i didn't even know what sex was and then suddenly you're like nine ten 10 years old.

15:12And this is what I feel so worried about. That was whatever, 17 years ago or something. Whereas now kids can get it like even younger and stuff with the phones. There were no smartphones then. So I worry for the young people because it wasn't necessarily great for my brain. So how do you get yourself out of that? Out of the whole thing of just addiction to anything or specifically dating or... Well, I suppose I want to start here first is how did you get yourself out of it? I had a moment at a festival when I was about 22 years old where I went super hard as hard as you can go and then it was still quite early in the evening probably like 10 o 'clock and I was really not feeling good I kind of just like almost became conscious after three hours of really not knowing what the hell was going on and it was like 10 p.m and I remember thinking like shit I've got to leave this festival I'm gonna have to just like walk back and it was like a 45 minute walk back or something to where we lived and uh I just remember on that walk thinking wow like I'm really not gonna have a very good life if I just like nail this for the next few years because I was leaving university at this point and I knew based on like my schooling that getting a job wasn't really going to be like the path for me because I just wouldn't do that well in that environment so then I was like so I've got to find a way to like make money and build a career and with this current lifestyle which is basically like drinking smoking partying every day there was no way that I was going to get any success i also just like super anxious and stuff like that and then that night i remember sitting in bed it was like 11 o 'clock i remember making a smoothie i never used to do things like that and i remember sitting there with a smoothie like oh that's probably what healthy people do and uh i know yeah yeah so so many of us have done that yeah sit there like super coming down and uh just remember like chatting to myself just thinking okay i'm gonna really try and change from today this is going to be like the change day and then i went to live with my grandpa because he lived out in nature and I hadn't really spent that much time in nature had no interest in nature and I thought if I just live there away from my friends for a bit and try and like work and all the like booze and stop drinking for a bit and all that sort of stuff maybe I'd be able to change things up and I spent a lot of time walking in the nature on my own without my phone just like chatting to myself and eventually I think if you spend enough time out there in the quiet like the truth of how you should live your life comes through I just think we're always too distracted from it.

17:25That's a really great hack. Yeah. Cause you can almost think of these brain chemicals as like friends within our system that are trying to guide us all the time just towards our optimal life. And they've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years, just guiding us towards the food and the shelter and the connection and the sex and the caregiving, the birth, everything. And a lot of the time when you're in a deep dopamine addiction life, you get like an uncomfortable feeling. You feel like a little bit depressed or anxious or stressed about a girl or whatever it might be and then you just think oh don't like that straight stick touch like bang some videos or watch some porn or eat some sugar or drink some alcohol and it just silences it but if you provide your brain with enough time to not have the opportunity for it to be silenced like it will always tell you the truth and i just think for the vast majority of people there's not spending enough time listening to it so explain to me what is dopamine it's effectively this chemical that lives within us just to motivate us towards doing hard things.

18:21So for our ancestors, they had to hunt and make fires and build shelter. And they needed this chemical that made doing that a desirable activity and then something that was really rewarding. So if you found food or you built the shelter or the fire finally lit and it was like, yes, okay. And they got this dopamine hit. For them, they might've got three or four increases in dopamine, like big natural increase in dopamine per day. In the modern environment, we've now obviously created the phones and all these other things we're talking about and we're experiencing like three or four hundred of these dopamine rises a day and effectively the engine that creates dopamine can't cope with how much we're over burning it so does it so what is a dopamine hit for someone who doesn't know what can give us that joy so back in caveman times what was giving us our hit and what is currently giving us our hits now so in caveman times anything that was advantageous to your survival so if you found some food or you saw some like honey in a tree like okay i'm gonna get some honey or you built some shelter anything that was like okay now this is rewarding and our group are now going to survive more that meant that you were getting some kind of increase in dopamine now it's just anything that provides you with pleasure to your brain so if ever you're eating like if you compare drinking alcohol as drinking a glass of water obviously the pleasure is very very different in your brain unless you're super super thirsty because you haven't drunk in like five hours then you get some dopamine off water but just sipping water very little dopamine drinking alcohol it's like bang and we've just created ways to artificially increase dopamine to a very high level.

19:44And it is very strategic. Like the people that are creating all the products use neuroscientists like me to figure out the optimal way to get dopamine super high. Because if dopamine goes super high, you literally, it becomes irresistible. So I need more, I need more. Like vaping, for example, is super hard to manage. So is dopamine the chase or the reward? It's actually the anticipation of what might be is what really, really drives us. Like you'd actually get your biggest dopamine hit out of the thought of something that you could do like say for example you take that dating example yeah you're in a stable relationship and it's like very stable you're actually moving at that point to oxytocin towards that love and connection but then your brain is like nah i need dopamine and then the thought of like mess dming someone on instagram or replying to someone's story or like going around the house and getting with them whatever it might be the thought of it is actually what makes our dopamine go crazy and then it drives you towards that decision and that's what's then like very very enticing wow that's why what happens is that when you let's say you you have a one night stand or you sleep with someone let's focus on dating right once you've done that or if you talk about masturbation right once you've done it yeah there's that sense of like deflation deflation afterwards because it's actually the chase rather than the actual achieving what you want to achieve it's the chase of it yeah only things that are deeply deeply rewarding feel good for a prolonged period of time some things in your work for example you might think oh it's actually really rewarding or like the whole like baby thing having a family that's going to be like long-term rewarding whereas when you sleep with someone or you masturbate especially if you sleep with someone you don't care about necessarily but it's just like a chase your dopamine just goes bang bang bang as you anticipate the experience of the pleasure and then you get it and it's like and then that feeling is what so many of us have we just can't bother for life i'm depressed and flat and that brain rot type vibe it's a if we if we're constantly having dopamine hits the whole time and our brain can't keep up with it yeah does that mean at some point we get a dopamine we're flooded with dopamine where actually then that's an issue where we have too much dopamine going on that we actually can't reach those certain highs so then we become addicts because we're constantly chasing that dopamine exactly and effectively you can imagine dopamine as like little like bubbles in your brain so it's literally your brain has an area called the ventral ventral tegmental area and it's like a dopamine factory and it can create these bubbles and it then has another area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens which is like a reward sensor and say for example you're doing something that's effort like you go to the gym you go to the gym you don't like walk in the gym and think oh fuck i love this so amazing i feel amazing i feel amazing but gradually throughout the workout you'll notice oh it's kind of good that I'm doing this and you get a nice reward at the end effectively what happens is the factory builds the bubbles because oh this human's doing something that's effort I'm going to build some bubbles to help motivate them and then it sends a few of these bubbles towards the reward center to mean you enjoy doing it and you keep doing it and it's something you'll enjoy in a situation where you're like going on pornography for example what happens is the factory just starts flooding the bubbles towards the reward center and it's not regenerating any because there's no effort involved when you're like watching porn for example so just flooding the bubbles, loads, loads to the raw center.

22:49And then suddenly the factory of dopamine just gets empty. And then your brain like lose the ability to produce any because it's just used it all up. And it's like, I can't make more. I've just given you all the dopamine on the porn. And then you get into that state where you're super low in dopamine. And then when you're in that state and you've got no dopamine. And what happens when you're in that low dopamine state? What happens then? You basically just can't bother to do anything. Like your zest for life just disappears. Like, you know, sometimes you're like walking to work and you've got your music here and you think, I love life.

23:13Life's so good at the moment. I'm so vibey. And then other days, maybe on a Monday morning it's a bit like i hate life life shit yes that's really your dopamine level that's deciding that feeling within your brain and when it is very low it's just very hard to get yourself to do anything that's effort and our happiest lives are the other side of doing lots of things that are effort like effort with your partner of connecting with them effort with your work your exercise your health your food effort leads to happiness for the human brain and if you're very low in dopamine you just can't bother to do anything wow man because i had for so long and i spoke about this for so long.

23:47How do I explain this? The reason for so long that lots of my relationships didn't work, right, is because when it became what I would call still, when it would become normal, when it would become quiet, I thought that wasn't exciting. It wasn't right. I wasn't having that rush of excitement towards the other person. And then what happens when I met my wife, Sophie, it was exciting, exciting, exciting, exciting, exciting, but we were also best friends. So that was something interesting about that. And I remember I went to a therapist and the therapist said, you just have to learn to be still. Being bored or being quiet is a good thing.

24:22Very good. It's a really good thing to be. And I said, what do you mean? That's not fun. I want everything to be exciting the whole time. I wanted everything to be chaotic because that brought real excitement. And actually what you're saying is, no, that's just my brain chasing a dopamine hit the entire time. And actually when you're still and relaxed and calm, especially in a relationship in life, that's a good thing. It's a very good thing. And your greatest moments by assumption, but you can tell me whether this is true with Sophie might have been more of the oxytocin than the dopamine. And what I mean by that is the moments where you really lay together and thought, I actually think I'm like falling in love with you.

24:58And when you decided to like, start trying to have a kid or however that worked. And then when you found out you're having a kid, none of that is dopamine that's all oxytocin it's all calm steady falling in love the initial phases of relationships are pure dopamine it's very interesting because women's brains actually move towards oxytocin faster than men so it will both start dopamine it's like oh this is really exciting going on a few dates i hooking up whatever it might be a woman's brain naturally because of the whole childbirth process they have more oxytocin in their system will begin to move towards a deeper connection calmer steadier quite fast and a male brain especially a male brain that's quite hyperactive will then get really stuck in the dopamine.

25:34Then there's this imbalance between like a steady person that's like, oh, I'm quite nice, just like chilling out on the sofa, like watching a movie, cuddling. And then there's like, we need more, we need more, we need loads of fun. And the more you can move towards oxytocin being the priority, the calmer your brain begins to become. Holy shit, man. So the dopamine part of our brain is tricking us. So when we're craving something, desiring something, when we need that thrill or that chaoticness, that's just our dopamine level saying, no, we know that's good. When I'm hungry and and or whatever and i reach out for sugar that's because i just want a quick kit yeah a hundred and these mechanisms never had all this artificial stuff to try and manage of like oh i can instagram dm that person or i can eat the sugar i can get the alcohol the drugs or vape whatever it might be like naturally these systems all worked in harmony bit of dopamine to motivate you then connect with someone oxytocin and so on whereas now it's like there's so much temptation so it's getting harder to manage let's talk about the relationships because that i had this and now I get it you know in relationships and I'm generalizing here right but I feel like men and women as you said are different in relationships at the beginning of a relationship a man typically and I've been one of those people I love you I want to spend the rest of my life with you this is the best thing ever oh my god I can't wait I just this is I've never been on a date like this oh my god I love you so much yeah and I've been in situations with when the partner the woman has been like hang on a second whoa whoa whoa relax relax And then what happens is, is because the man is in the, you're, you're dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine all the time.

27:03Yeah. And then what happens is that dopamine naturally becomes less and less and less because the excitement of being in this brand new relationship, kissing, having sex, whatever it is. Yeah. Goes off because you're not being hit with the same dopamine hit. For sure. And then what happens is the oxytocin comes in for women. And that's why women then start to fall in love. And that's when the man goes, well, hang on a second, I'm not in love. And he said, well, hang on a second, you were in love here. So that's when the confusion happens. Can you explain that? In that initial phase, you weren't actually in love right at the beginning.

27:32It wasn't like I'm falling in love with you nice and calm. It was like, I love you. You're the best. I can't wait to spend our lives together. Let's travel the world and go on boats and do lots of fun, exciting stuff. That's all dope for me and just driving excitement. And the words of love aren't necessarily real at that point. It's just the excitement of what might be. It's like, wow, imagine this is the girl. Imagine I'm going to fall in love with her. And for the woman, they might be slightly more cautious. they're programmed to be a little bit more cautious with men because men are programmed to just like hunt, hunt, hunt.

27:58Women are programmed to make very smart selections so they can have good like caregivers for their families and babies. Like women are programmed to be much smarter decision makers than men with that kind of thing. So you're effectively going against each other. Like one is going, no way is he in love yet. So I'm going to ignore that for now and begins moving towards oxytocin slowly. And you just break your dopamine system and it desensitizes effectively in a very similar way to if you keep taking drugs, they stop working as well. The exact same thing happens if you just like keep getting too excited about relationships.

28:26You just like burn out that desire for them. And a relationship works extremely well when a man begins to realize that oxytocin is something that is important. And there's a huge shift that happens then. And I imagine at the point you're in your relationship now, oxytocin is a priority for both of you, not necessarily that terminology, but slower, calmer, grateful, loving connection where you contribute to each other and you're very thoughtful to one another. that's really what the male and female brain wants in the long term but someone listening to this right now right yeah who is constantly going into relationships and they're constantly failing because they find them boring or unexciting and the initial phase of the relationship is the best thing in the world how does someone break that cycle i think going on less dates is probably step number one less frequency is important like the dating apps have obviously made it insanely frequent and Instagram DM has made it insanely frequent.

29:18So it's just like burning the excitement of dating in itself. So I definitely slow down the frequency and I'd be very selective over who you choose to even bother to go on a date with purely really, of course, on attraction. Attraction is important, but based on similar values because oxytocin and love is really based on value alignment within a relationship. And if you make your selections on whether you're going to go on dates with people and continue to date someone purely based on, does it seem like our values and what we want for our lives and our futures and our families are connected, then that's a good person to pursue.

29:50If it's just someone you think is cool or popular or hot or rich, none of those things are necessarily going to fulfill you long term. So less frequent dating and more focus on alignment of values would be the key. So values is the key to a successful relationship? A hundred percent, because eventually all the excitement and the sex, it just does begin to reduce. You can still have a great sex life long term, but it's not going to be that like super crazy bit at the beginning because the dopamine just begins to cool down for both of you and then it's like do we want to have a similar life do similar activities raise kids in a similar way that's the stuff that's actually going to lead to a long-term successful one and ultimately as a human all we're looking to experience is love we think we're looking to experience dopamine we think all we want is to get rich and have the house and the car and the perfect kitchen all these things that our brains transfixed on because of instagram But in reality, everything you get, your brain just goes more, more, more.

30:46It never is going to find satisfaction in that because dopamine is designed to never fill us up. So the hunter gatherers always kept chasing for more, better hunting, better shelter, better fires. And that's what brought us here. All we're really looking for that actually slows us down is oxytocin and a lot of families, contributions to our parents, good relationships with our friends, good contribution to our partners. How do you keep the dopamine up in a long term relationship? You continue to have novelty. is really important novelty is great for dopamine explain that so that's just new experiences together so if for example you decided oh we've never gone on a big hike in richmond park that would be a novel experience maybe you've done that a million times so then it wouldn't be a novel experience but it could you really want to just continue to create new adventures together effectively that would be the key to maintaining dopamine because dopamine loves new and that's why it loves instagram because it's like new stuff new stuff new stuff and when you tell someone something really exciting on instagram like when you shared about your baby to everyone's brain it's like wow new thing and then it's really exciting to people because it's novelty and in a relationship it's really just important to maintain novelty and not let the relationship get boring and do you know what and the reason why we're not having sex in relationships is because we're constantly getting dopamine hits from our phone from other places and so we don't need that extra hit when we're with each other the reason why people are having sex in bed at night is because you would finish your day of work which was long and laborious come home eat your food chat with each other and then have connection hold each other's hands and then have sex definitely everything else is distracting us from having sex because it's all much easier because the act of sex is effort effort it is effort so much more effort than watching porn and georgia and i did this challenge the other day that went really viral on instagram we called it meals bedroom bathroom where we had to for seven days try and not look at a screen in when we're eating meals, when we're in the bedroom, when we're in the bathroom.

32:34And you discover it's actually really hard to do this. To always eat, just like either together or looking out a window is hard. To never take it to the bathroom is hard because it's boring to sit there now. And then in the bedroom, it was like actually challenging to get into bed and be like, okay, now I'm just going to lie here. And what we discovered, and I didn't put this bit in the video, but I can share it now, is you lie there, you talk, you chat about your day, and eventually you just get bored of chatting away. And boredom's fine. Then you get bored enough where you just start having sex with each other because you're like, oh, what should we do?

33:02Because we've got nothing to do with it. And then you just start, and our sex life transformed by just getting the screens out of our bed because your brain then looks for natural dopamine rather than getting it artificially in the device.

33:17I want to focus just quickly on porn for a second. Yeah, 100%. How bad is porn for us? Porn is like, top three worst things in the world right now. Like if we, in terms of our brain and if porn got deleted overnight, we would see a tremendous change in society. Get out of here. A massive change in society because it's completely destroying the male brain. Like men are becoming weaker because of porn, like less capacity to like chase their dreams and like do good things with their life and contribute to their family. So it's like really just zapping you of the one thing that gives you the willpower to do anything good.

33:57And just let me just go on that because what happens is, let me just try and explain. Let me see if what I think it is and then correct me. Yeah, definitely. Is because that drive comes from that dopamine. So when you drive for success or family, when you go out to hunt, right, that's that dopamine. Because once you get it, great, you get it. Yeah. Because porn is so accessible. You go on, you watch porn, you masturbate, you climax, done. That's it. Then you're depleted. You don't want to do anything again. you use up all of that resource that gave you the will to do anything so when you wake up in the morning you've got to do stuff you've got to work hard to build a good life that's just how humanity works and if you the night before have watched a load of porn you're going to wake up with very small amounts of that chemical sitting in your brain so then the chance of you actually doing anything that's effort is much lower and there's huge variation even in masturbation with porn versus without porn because porn itself has that whole novelty novelty element that i explained earlier and especially as you get more into porn you start watching more weird stuff because your brain is like how do i get the dopamine how do i get the dopamine you're like watching instagram one day then you got to get the thought of oh i could watch porn and then that like what might be thing that we talked about earlier the anticipation thing is like wow i'm gonna go on porn then you start scrolling it your dopamine is just going completely mental then you finish and your dopamine just plummets super super hard if as an experiment you masturbate without pornography you'll notice that the high is less but also the low is less and that's a really significant difference because it's not bad to climax as a human orgasms are great it's porn that is the bad thing for humans and you have that motivational component which just gives you less will to do anything and then it's also completely destroying your capacity to actually go out there and find partners to be with it's really killing that because i have a lot of people message me on instagram and of course wouldn't share who they are but they'll message me saying like i'll go on a night out and like i'm really wanting to find a partner but i get this thought process in my head where it's like i can't even really be bothered because i know i could just go home and watch porn so then i just like give up on the idea of like trying to talk to a girl in a bar or whatever it might be using the easiest route yeah i have this very simple theory for men and this is all men in relationships and all single men that the more boobs you see on a screen the less boobs you're going to see in real life and it's a very simple framework but if you consistently see loads of boobs on a screen, your will to go and find them real life is going to reduce.

36:19If you're single, it means you're not going to date as much because you're going to lose the will. And then if you're in a relationship, your partner is probably going to begin to realize you're probably watching a lot of porn and lots of men are watching a lot of porn in their relationships. Then your sex life is going to reduce and you're not going to be as connected to them. So whether you're single or in a relationship, the porn thing is so huge. And for me, breaking the porn addiction is one of the hardest things. Like I watched it like my whole teenage life. And then I was like, okay, now I've got to get rid of this thing that just had become a part of my life porn is also very different to other addictions because it's so private so secretive like if you start like really drinking hard yeah if you start drinking hard smoking hard eating really bad like people begin to notice like you're right you're like always drunk whereas porn is like super silent so it's very hard to get rid of that but doable how did you break it i initially thought of it from a like a will drive perspective.

37:11Like I wanted to build a good career. I really wanted a nice life and a nice home and a good job and all that sort of stuff. And I thought this is just completely killing my desire to do anything that's hard. So that was like initial motive. Okay. I'm going to try and have less of it. And that was a similar motive to why I want to drink less alcohol, for example. It's like, I wanted more motivation as a human. And I always knew when I was motivated, my mental health was just much better because I was making smart decisions. Then I started to try and think of it as like a not nice activity like i started to create a framework in my mind of like really observing what i was observing and try and like step out of the like real dopamine hit and think it's a bit weird like it's a bit rank you change it from pleasure to pain yeah almost change it and change it that's how you do you change your brain when you think something's pleasure you go no that's not pleasure it's bad for me and you swap it around yeah a hundred percent and i especially after you finish i'll be like oh that's a bit rank actually like that i've done this and so that began and this this was honestly it took me like five years to quit porn it's really not easy to quit it and i found other things a lot easier and then ultimately what worked once i realized the motivation thing started to think it was a bit gross then when i uh became connected to my new partner georgia like started last year i talked to her quite a bit about it and also because i talk about porn on instagram she has to start like dating someone that looks like some like weird porn addict so for her it's like okay and i'm not some weird porn addict i'm just like every single guy in the whole world effectively and we had this headline in the times this month like this year where it was like neuroscientist porn addict and it was like my face right in the front of the times i thought great that's such a nice thing to be known for i've had worse titles but uh this was my worst and uh i talked to her about it and she actually described to me that it wouldn't be nice for her that i was watching porn and i'd never really thought about that from a woman's perspective she was like you watching loads of like naked girls have sex like isn't actually a very nice thing for me and she described to me and this might not be the common perspective that she sees it as like a cheating type activity she was like you watching how the girls have sex like isn't you being deeply immersed in this relationship that's you being curious about other women and i have a huge amount of love for her for the first time in my life i was like oh if i'm if we're gonna see it down that lane then i'm not gonna watch it at all and i would say that was the final thing that really made a difference but someone sitting here would say no hang on i'm just focusing on a dopamine hit i mean in the relationship maybe someone's in a relationship right now where the partner doesn't want to have sex or doesn't want to um engage for whatever reason and so that so then the partner's thinking well hang on a second what am i meant to do i'm just going to go and watch porn because if my partner isn't giving me what i want then i go and find it somewhere else and i would argue they're not giving you what you want because you're watching porn.

39:53It's like a spin round situation. And a lot of the time, like a woman particularly wouldn't want to connect and have sex and be intimate is because their oxytocin satisfaction in the relationship is so low. And for a male brain, we can go from like watching TV to watching porn in 30 seconds, super aroused back straight into it. Like our dopamine system fires so fast. Whereas for the female brain, you see in the research that it's like there's a warmup period for them to decide that intimacy is something they desire in that moment. There's cuddling on the sofa, there's kissing, there's holding hands there's like lying next to each other in bed and there's this big warm-up period and if we lie in bed together choosing dopamine aka scrolling our phone she's like where our dopamine system out and then finish and then turn over to a partner and like have sex with me she's gonna be like what are you talking about like you haven't done anything to get me to a point where i would like that so then you're gonna think oh my girlfriend's so annoying i need to go watch porn but there's like a pre-process that's required for the brain if porn is one of the top worst things for us what are the two other things the phone is 100 number one definitely the phone is number one it's really important humanity learns to manage the phone the only only time that mental health change in our society is the advent of the phone we were fine before the phones and we had the alcohol and the sugar talk to me about the data on that the data is just so clear that our brain when we overuse a smartphone is actually beginning to shrink in key areas there are specific regions of our brain you have a component in psychology and neuroscience called gray matter which is like the volume of certain areas and then you have different areas like an area called the insula and the temporal cortex and the hippocampus these kind of things are responsible for our ability to regulate emotions to make good decisions to be able to memorize things these areas for the first time in human history are literally devolving they're getting smaller because of mass consumption of low value content on our phones is just burning our brains to pieces and then suddenly our ability to manage our emotions make good decisions in our life is plummeting and then suddenly our mental health is declining a lot and the insane like addictive scroll the short video feed that is definitely number one like if that just is that's when we all started feeling really bad is when that thing got invented in covid when the short video feed came humans started to struggle because it just depletes the molecule in us that makes us feel like good and motivated for life and when you change the phone addiction your whole life transforms relationship work health exercise everything transforms because it's just killing our desire to do the things that we know we need to do this is scary scary but definitely there's a solution so talk to you about the solution what do we do because and i yeah it's really important to preface that because i don't think humanity is screwed by any sense like i think we now have the greatest opportunity to be the happiest and healthiest and most connected we've ever been because we have abundance in terms of we can get to nature and we can exercise and we can eat food even if you're in a central city you can get to park so we have abundance of the things that are important for a human but unfortunately we're choosing all the bad things whereas if you live in a world where you can use all these like things like a phone to enable you to like work and make money and stay connected and things like that but you focus on lots of healthy stuff humans can thrive in terms of breaking the phone addiction, you have to like win back control over the phone.

43:08Cause currently a lot of people will feel like it's almost out of their control, their compulsive checking of it. Like the amount of times you just pointlessly check your phone, even though there's absolutely no purpose for it because you're just a little dopamine hit, very similar to hitting a vape. It's basically identical in the brain. So you have to win back control. And when our brain wakes up is when it's like time to win the beginning of the day. Like Like if, for example, you did an experiment where for the next seven days you woke up and you drank a glass of red wine every day. Obviously, you drink a lot of red wine that week.

43:38Like I'm sure at some point in your life, you drank alcohol in the morning and you know how that day goes. Because alcohol then is just like, boom, drives me towards the behavior. Alcohol and phones, if you were to put someone in a brain scanner, you wouldn't even know which one they were doing. Whether it was alcohol or phones, it would look exactly the same. And when we wake up and go on the phone, the brain's like, oh, nice. This is where I'm going to get dopamine today. So then it just like primes us all day to continue the obsessive checking. so if in the morning we wake up and even if we manage to beat it for five minutes and we like and then we build this up then it's like okay so now i'm starting to be in control of this device and then a big shift can begin to come and we take people all the time from eight hours a day on their phone to like two hours a day based on a set of decisions we can go through so people are listening right now yeah right firstly listening is a good thing so podcasts are a good thing they are they're slower dopamine slower dopamine so dude put your phone down right now watching this and listen to this rather than watching this.

44:32Get off your phone right now. Definitely do that. Yeah. What practically can our listeners do to get past this, to help them with it? So step one is you don't charge your phone on your bedside table anymore. You start either charging it at the end of your bed, just so there's some tiny distance and you work on a journey whereby in the future, it doesn't charge in your bedroom. And you can gradually get there. All the excuses of alarms and emergency calls, you can buy an alarm for two pounds and ask yourself how many of those emergency calls you're actually answering in the night they're never happening if people have an emergency they call the ambulance so that initial bit is just try and get the phone out and there are important caveats here because people then say i need sound at night to fall asleep because like we've got really uncomfortable with the thoughts in our mind you'd be better off having an ipad in your bedroom that plays a podcast that you listen to to go to sleep than scrolling before bed and what's happening at snapchat like great company yeah great company would be the perfect one after you've listened to great company and fallen asleep had the best sleep of your life after the best conversation you've ever heard you then wake up in the morning and you've got to do something that's effort for your brain so your brain starts to learn the effortful path is better than the easy path because there's that simple phrase where it's like easy choices hard life hard choices easy life and if you make the hard choice when you wake up and you go and brush your teeth splash cold water on your face and you make your bed it's going to take you like a few minutes your brain is like, okay, I'm on the hunt now for healthy dopamine.

45:56I'm not going to live inside my phone all day. Then throughout your day, you have to find a way to break the compulsive checking of opening Instagram or TikTok or Facebook, whatever it is, your app, Instagram is probably the one because the compulsive checking, they're like, oh, just a quick hit, just a quick hit, just a quick hit is what is burning our brain to pieces. So you need to create some kind of framework in your mind called social media moments where these are going to be moments you commit to and you never break as to when you're going to go on social media. It's hard. Super hard. There are a lot of screen time blocking apps that could help you that opal is amazing opal is good there's a really good one called roots and you could download these apps and you could put it so it only gives you a certain amount of parameters like my instagram will only let me open it three times a day so something like that is really good definitely not going on instagram before 10 a.m is super important so that you have the morning it's like i can't do f f f like i posted about the uh having a baby yesterday on instagram at like 3 p.m and then my brain as a dopamine addict could literally get obsessed read comments read the lights and completely take away from the fact it's actually beautiful having a baby and just get obsessed with dopamine so i haven't even seen that post i haven't opened instagram since i posted at 3 p.m yesterday because i know it'll fuck me if i if i go in there and get stuck that discipline is amazing but it's gradually learned because i've discovered that my happiest life is the other side of not being addicted to my phone so now i'm very very motivated so when i'm like i want my phone i'm like but do i want to be depressed and then again you change it from you instead of pleasure you say no that's painful that's a negative so swap it around again and you keep swapping it and the more you speak truthfully to yourself about the reality of if i'm really listening to my phone i feel like crap and that's not a nice life it's so nice when you feel good in life and then you begin to motivate yourself through the desire for happiness because i have it a lot of the time right now where um like the fridge analogy or whatever as i go onto my phone i don't even know what i'm looking for i scroll through tiktok and instagram i'm endlessly looking for something i don't really know what it is it's never going to be found.

47:49And now what's happening, I find, which I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way, is it's not as rewarding as it used to be. And so I'm doing more of that, but to get more of the reward because the dopamine isn't hit, it's like taking a drug. Yeah, it's desensitizing. Your brain can't cope, the modern human brain in general, can't cope with these elevations in dopamine. So it's actually starting just to produce less for us because then it doesn't spike as hard. If it's producing less, it's like, oh, well, I can't get that high anyway, anyway. But then give it to me, how long does that does it take to break the habit?

48:17How long does it take in terms of days, hours, weeks, months, years to try and break a habit of being addicted to a phone, porn, vaping, whatever it is? You could begin a monumental change within 72 hours. Big changes could occur. Like if you had three days where you didn't watch porn and you didn't go on like social media for 72 hours, you'd see massive shifts, specifically in dopamine and serotonin. Big study came out about this recently where they got people to have 72 hours without going on any social media apps rapidly you see change in their motivation their mood how calm they feel 72 hours would be the beginning then you'd move towards seven days gradually if you spent 30 days in a new kind of lifestyle big habitual changes would occur but I want to go back to the beginning of this conversation you have to continue to go back out into nature in the quiet and talk to yourself about the decisions you're making because otherwise you'll just get lost back in the dopamine and it's like oh fuck it like I'll just live in this dopamine land because like that's what feels kind of good in the now whereas if you go into nature and you get really bored and you talk to yourself then you start going it was good actually when i did that period where i went on social media less maybe i should keep doing that and you find the motivation through the friendship you build with yourself in the choir man we but we're so worried we're going to be the fomo we're going to miss out on something we're going to not see something happen we're going to be left behind that's like a genuine feeling and fomo is scary we feel like this needs of like acceptance and belonging within the group, the massive group we now try and belong to inside Instagram.

49:46But all you have to do is run the experiment and see it because I went to Greece like three weeks ago with my partner and I attempted seven days with my phone actually turned off. I just wanted to see if I could do it. So I turned it off. My team knew exactly how to manage the business with me doing seven days off to run it as a, see what would happen. And it was good. It was hard. It was like, I had that anxiety of like, what's going on my Instagram in my head I thought like my Instagram has been deleted I was like what if it's been deleted my whole career's gone just because like I couldn't check it and I told my team to tell me nothing so I would really experience all the emotions of being off Instagram and very quickly within a couple days I was just like well that's thank god that's gone like I can have a break and I actually enjoy this holiday and I loved the fact I wasn't trying to get photos for my Instagram story and stuff of this holiday like I because I wasn't making any content at all so I'm just going to actually be on this holiday, which was super calming experience to come to the FOMO thing.

50:40Seven days comes. It's now Saturday morning. I'm going to go into the airport to get back on the flight. And I was like, right, phone's coming on, need it for the flight and everything. And I think, wow, the world is going to be so mental. Like when I come back in here, Instagram is going to be huge. I'm going to have missed loads and you open it and life is just exactly the same. You've missed all the irrelevant crap that we're all consuming on social media all the time. Anything that's really important is going to be at the top of your feed anyway and then you're just like oh no one missed me and like even with us as creators you realize like oh no one even really noticed that you were gone and then you come back and they're like oh yeah that guy like i follow him who's here and uh it's a very good reality check as to how life doesn't change if you go off

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53:25Did you talk to me about dose? Yeah. What is dose? Obviously, we have dopamine. Talked about that. Motivation. Oxytocin is this connection chemical that enables us to feel love. That's the O in dose. That's underrated, that one. That's the one humanity is all really looking to find, but we're lost in dopamine land. Oxytocin is actually the answer. Your best life is when oxytocin is the priority. Give me examples of oxytocin. Oxytocin is physical touch. It's socializing with your friends. It's feeling deeply grateful for experiences you get to have. it's celebrating your own progress and not focusing on what you haven't got but what you have those kind of experiences where you feel a deep love for the experience of life you're getting to have that's oxytocin and i was chatting to this guy yesterday i went to this like nature thing yesterday evening and they had these people from nairobi who had been like crafted these stones and they lived in like mud huts these individuals and they'd craft these stones that were getting sold at this like nature fair thing random thing for me to go to but i was speaking to these people and they live in mud huts in nature and they are like the happiest people you'd ever meet and they have nothing.

54:30And they're not addicted to dopamine. They're addicted to contributing to their group, to being in nature, to connecting, to love, to singing, to contribution. That's really what oxytocin wants. It wants deep relationships. And in our pursuit of dopamine, we're sacrificing oxytocin effectively. Like even when you go with your friends, like it's all about just getting yourself as drunk as possible, not necessarily connecting with the friends. Why don't we just have loads of oxytocin? Well, you can't artificially spike it. That's the big difference. We learn as humanity how to hack dopamine. Initially with like cigarettes and alcohol and brothels.

55:03Those would have been like the early dopamine hacks. Then we've got really fine tuned to the point of now TikTok, where it's like just like artificial bang in our brain. And oxytocin can't be hacked. There is in research something called intranasal oxytocin, where you like inhale oxytocin. But luckily that's just not something that's hit the market because that would do a terrible thing. That's a bad idea. That's a terrible thing. That's a bad idea. I shouldn't even tell the world what it is. You can inhale oxytocin. Yeah, you can inhale oxytocin. And there's oxytocin components in inducing child labor and stuff like that.

55:33But it's not hit like the world as a drug, effectively, that's consumed. Heroin would have an effect on oxytocin. So obviously that's a percentage of society would be struggling with that. During childbirth, you have oxytocin hits. Yeah, oxytocin really enables the woman to go through the whole process of childbirth and then enables the initial bond to take place with the baby itself. And you'll experience oxytocin when you hold the baby on your chest. That's going to be like super oxytocin. There's going to be no dopamine. It's just going to be oxytocin. Explain that more to me because lots of people, there's this whole idea.

56:02And look, I mean, we're going through this whole process. Different types of births, right? C-sections, this, vaginal birth, all those different things. And someone said that when you go, and again, I might be hit with a lot of different things here, but I'm just saying from what I understand. Yeah. when it's a natural birth yeah that's when oxytocin really hits in is that fair to say or no yeah oxytocin enables us to cope with pain so it will really help that process of giving birth naturally like totally like if something is not going to plan like a cesarean might be what you have to do but the world like the human brain and body loves nature to run its course effectively and there's also a huge component when you give birth naturally where we as a human have a microbiome all these bacterias that live within us that really impact the serotonin chemical that we can come to the S in dose.

56:51When you get given birth to naturally, a huge amount of microbiome stuff goes into your body as you exit the vagina effectively. And that's actually really good for a baby to experience ingesting all that. So, but that's not to say like, if you had to do a cesarean, that's just part of life. Like that's okay. But it would be cool. Why does oxytocin get released? Where does it come from? You know, when you're touching skin to skin, what happens? So effectively, it's within your brain and it enables you to care for the thing that you're making contact with. If you had no oxytocin in your brain when that baby is born, you'd feel nothing for it.

57:27You'd just be like, oh, there's a baby. There's a baby there. Yeah. And that's why you potentially can't connect with other kids. I find it sometimes why I can't connect with another baby because I go, well, that's just a baby. Yeah, for sure. So that's an element. There's also something to really understand here, though, about dopamine and having a baby, because it's good for you to prepare your brain for this and your partner, which is postnatal depression is a real thing where you don't feel good when you have a baby. And it can happen for women, of course, but then men can also have a bit of a dip.

57:57Our dopamine system works a lot on expectation reality. And what I mean by that is say, for example, your birthday was coming up and you said to yourself, this is going to be the best birthday of my life. Can't wait for all my friends are coming. Oh my God, this is going to be the best birthday ever. And then it was just like a pretty good birthday, even though it was a pretty good birthday because you expected so much, the dopamine is actually lower than the reality of what you were wanting. So your dopamine actually crashes. So your pretty good birthday becomes shit in your head because you had too much expectation.

58:22With a baby, and this is what Georgia and I are really preparing us for, just in case this is the case, you can create this massive anticipation in your mind. It's like, when I have that baby, I'm going to feel loved like I've never felt before, like all these sentences. And like, Georgia is going to be so bonded to it. And we're going to be so connected. And I'm just going to feel such a deep connection with this baby. And then sometimes, similar to how relationships work relationships take a little bit of time to form and bond and if particularly with a woman's brain if it goes in with hyper expectation that this baby's going to change their life and then doesn't deliver their brain can dip and not feel too good so it's actually quite good to go in quite steady like this is going to be a beautiful time but it might take time for us to really enjoy this process and feel a deep connection and if you go in with low expectations your mental health is going to be much much better that's such great advice yeah what's going on with anxiety anxiety is that message from these chemicals that are our friends saying this really did not make your gut feel very good serotonin the third chemical in this dose thing is predominantly built in your gut 90 of it is generated in your gut literally in your intestinal lining your body has the capacity to stitch together these little serotonin molecules you then have a very clever system called your vagus nerve it's one of your 12 cranial nerves that connects your brain and body together.

59:37And if there's a good abundance of serotonin in the gut, it sends a message to the brain. It's like, oh, nice. We've got serotonin in there. We feel nice and steady and calm. And the opposite, if there's not much serotonin. When the booze comes in, we obviously get this massive dopamine. It's like, yeah, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. Then it comes down into the gut and the gut's like, holy shit, what is all this? So this is going to be hard for me to process this, to detoxify it from the liver. And it begins breaking that the priority and serotonin just plummets because we don't have any time to build serotonin in here right now.

1:00:06We've got to try and get this alcohol out of us. And to the gut, it's a poison. It's got to try and get through. And when the serotonin dips hard, the vagus nerve then sends a message to the brain and we start going, oh, I'm so anxious. I'm so anxious. I don't know why I'm so anxious. And that's anxiety. TK, you're blowing my mind. So is serotonin the S of dose? Is the S. Is serotonin that gut feeling that we have? Yeah, definitely. It's very interconnected with that gut feeling. Gut feeling is interesting. Gut feeling is also connects to our hearts. But gut feeling I sometimes don't think is true.

1:00:39Okay. And I'll tell you why. Yeah. Okay. Because if you're going through an anxious period, if you're feeling doubt in your mind, if you've been drinking too much, living a life of too much dopamine the whole time, your body's going to be out of skew. It's not producing enough serotonin. So you're going, well, I don't know. The gut feeling doesn't quite work. And I've had that occasionally where my gut has gone, well, I'm not sure that's right. And then I've actually gone and done it. It's been actually really great. Yeah, I would say... Am I wrong? If the gut isn't functioning because you've just done a lot of damage to it, your gut feeling should just be, don't listen to my gut, because it's not actually going to work very well at the moment.

1:01:15A good thing to do with your... It's really the difference between the brain and the body. You can think of oxytocin serotonin as quite like heart, body, gut, these things that are within us that are really intuitive and wise. And dopamine is more like the playful psycho in our brain. It's like, give me loads of fun. when you have to make big decisions it's really important to just ask yourself like what does my heart want in this situation and then what does my brain want and what you'll notice is the answers are often quite different georgia and i are navigating conversations she's from australia so it's like okay so do we bring this baby up in australia like how does that work with my career all that kind of stuff so i have to sit down like in the quiet and really think through like what does my thoughts want that's like logical and like what's best for my career or finance and then what is my heart one for georgia and this baby and if in any situation you navigate whether you're dating someone and you're wondering whether you like them for example if you say to yourself what is my heart one it will give you a much more truthful answer yeah great way man that's so good because also life is about discipline yeah you have to be disciplined and and that moment of like having that moment of quietness to make a decision is discipline not going on your phone is discipline not looking at not vaping is discipline not looking at porn is disciplined.

1:02:22You just got to be disciplined in those areas. That doesn't mean removing fun. It just means being disciplined. And I think the best discipline in life comes from actually a place of love, not from being hard on yourself. That's it in the quiet. Yes. Like when I try and force myself to not go on my phone through like hard discipline, I always get annoyed at it and I want to fight it. Whereas when I don't go on my phone from a loving place of like, that'll actually be a kind thing to do for myself because then I won't feel like anxious or depressed and I'll work well and be happy with my day. if a decision comes from love it just seems to be much easier to listen to so what is serotonin it's this molecule that effectively is here it's just steady our nervous system we've got this nervous system that either lives in sympathetic nervous system like stress fight or it lives in parasympathetic nervous system where it's nice and calm and naturally as hunter-gatherers it was perfectly balanced like bit of sympathetic when you're like running and hunting and stuff and then sit by the fire and chill and dance and sing and laugh goes into calm parasympathetic and serotonin really helps with that balance.

1:03:21Nowadays, we are just sympathetic overdrive. Like we live in cities and we wake up, it's like bang, bang, bang, bang. And our serotonin system just gets like disregarded effectively. Your serotonin wants you to take a nice healthy picnic to nature with some friends and lie on the grass and chat and listen to music. That's what your serotonin wants. Whereas our dopamine wants us to like get rich and famous and successful and make loads of money and like chase success. So they're very different experiences. And if they're balanced, you can be nice and successful but also nice and calm but if you go dopamine obsessed your serotonin is like oh what about me and then you get anxious what is so interesting man is like how you said to me before that we spent 3 000 years as cavemen 300 000 300 000 years as cavemen living this life of balancing serotonin with dopamine and oxytocin all these different things and in our current state we've lived about 30 years yeah with these screens yeah 30 years ago we start to really change things like even our grandparents whilst they weren't living like hunter-gatherers their life was still way more effort everything was more effort washing cleaning effort is so good we literally survived outside for 300 ,000 years you can't imagine the effort of like scratching a rock together for five hours to make one tiny bit of fire to survive a cold night you can't imagine the effort we used to put into life now effort to us is like taking out our phone and beeping as we go through a tube station is awesome so much effort it's like it's like perspective we got to realize so and uh our brain just used to live in such like nice natural harmony 30 years ago we moved everyone indoors that was huge all work began to be very predominantly indoors and we basically now spend all day indoors for context we used to spend 85 of our time as humanity outdoors we now spend seven percent of our time outdoors so we've just like completely killed our relationship with the outdoors.

1:05:08So we live indoors, our diet has changed, and we're on our computers and technology all the time. And that's not good for our brain chemistry. And I don't want to say this from the view of like, oh, we're all screwed. There's a nice life where you can balance these things out. But you have to reprioritize the outdoors, reprioritize getting off the screens, reprioritize how you eat, what you eat. How do we up our serotonin in 2025? Definitely step one is going out into natural environments without screens and without headphones. And we're now afraid of the quiet. You know when you go outside for a walk without the headphones, it's like, oh my God, what are all these voices in my mind?

1:05:42Outside, in the quiet, listening to your mind, even if it's a little bit anxiety inducing at first, everyone that we recommend does this, immediately begins to see by the end of the walk, they're like, oh, I'm actually a little bit more chilled out. So nature is step one. Gut health is a humongous component. There's this whole ultra processed food thing that's obviously now massive. And when we eat nice natural foods, we build an abundance of serotonin in the gut. And then the final one is our sleep. And the biggest thing with sleep is there's this concept now called revenge bedtime procrastination, which is where you know you should be going to sleep and everything, everything inside you is saying go to sleep.

1:06:15But you feel like this almost need to fight that reality because you deserve the long scroll that you're currently doing. I think we all do that. We all do that. And like beginning to realize that the nicest thing you can do to yourself at night and the best thing you can do is just like letting yourself go to sleep. How simple. Nature. Yeah. Stillness. good diet sleep it's very basic and it's like oh well the mental health is easy but unfortunately we need to go back to the basics it's very important of dose what is the e e is endorphins endorphins effectively help us manage intense stress and frustration in our minds we all have those moments where we think ah life's really annoying and i feel really stressed overwhelmed or frustrated and people experience emotions differently some go towards stress some get angry, annoying situations.

1:07:02For humanity throughout that period of time, for hundreds of thousands of years, we didn't get stressed by what's called micro stresses now, like lots of little things niggling at us. We just got stressed by things like a bear chasing you would be really stressful, starving to death, super stressful. When we were extremely stressed, one thing would always happen and that would be intense physical movement. We'd have to run, fight, climb, hide, whatever it was. in that moment of intense physical movement when we're under stress endorphins then flood our brain and body and take all the stress out of our mind so that we can be laser focused on surviving that situation so we're not like running away like oh my god a bear's gonna eat me which is like bang into survival mode and nowadays we get very stressed at little things on email and work and effectively we sit dead still so we just swallow it into our body and our body never gets the opportunity to release it and from a brain chemistry point of view the key is understanding that when you're stressed you need to physically get it out of you through whatever kind of movement or activity we can describe it where do our endorphins come from they're both within the brain and the bloodstreams they're in both and they love hard things for the body specifically like the dopamine system likes effort even if it's reading a book but endorphins love hard exercise they love stretching and yoga they love cold water the cold water hot water thing is interesting or like cold versus hot because if you're in a really deflated mood cold water is going to activate the dopamine and give you motivation to do stuff if you're on the opposite scale and you've been doing so much that you're actually burnt out and physically exhausted and mentally exhausted heat from like saunas and baths and steam rooms is actually going to activate the endorphins and de-stress you and calm you back down so you want to use cold and hot strategically Like if you're burning hard in your career, cold water is actually not necessarily super advantageous to you because you're already doing so much.

1:08:54Cold water is very useful if you're just like chilling, doing nothing. But if you're going super hard at the moment, you want baths and saunas and steam rooms. That's joy for everyone to realize you don't have to do the cold water. Yeah, you don't have to do that. I might prefer to sit in a sauna. Yeah. But then you just have to be honest with yourself. Like if you are having a really lazy period, you're like, okay, I need some oomph, the cold is neat. so upping your endorphins it helps you deal with stress better much much better and we think the answer to stress and there's truth in it is just about calming down like going on a walk and stuff like that and that's really good serotonin is really good it is going to help but first we're going to get it out of us like it literally sits within our system like for example you see kids with ipads and that's something that would be good for you to consider how you're going to approach that world because you want your kid to thrive and the problem is now is the intensity of the modern world and having like double working families mom and dad both working it's like people are exhausted so like tech isn't easy easy out but when a kid for example is on an ipad this comes back to the endorphins sometimes you take the ipad away and the kid literally physically goes crazy like there's like videos and stuff where kids go nuts i'm hitting things and the reason is is because they're like chasing dopamine as if their brain is out there in the wild like running after their friends or whatever it might be that's what their brain thinks they're doing when they're inside the iPad because it's like chasing dopamine in the iPad.

1:10:10But they're not simultaneously releasing the endorphins to de-stress them back down whilst they're chasing the dopamine. So suddenly they're chasing dopamine, chasing dopamine. Mom says iPad's gone. The kid goes mental, but it's because they've got no endorphins to cope with the stress and the anger that's coming through their system. And if you struggle with intense stress and anger, you always need to think, shit, I've been super stressed or pissed off today. I've got to get this out of me through running, climbing, gym, weights, Pilates, yoga, cycling, swimming, anything that's just like, get this shit out of me is really important.

1:10:45Gila, what do you want to achieve in life? Why are you doing all this? Because this is a battle. I'm sitting here with you right now. Yeah. And I'm loving every single second of it. I'm so excited to implicate some of these in my life. I'm going to get off this podcast right now and phone my wife and say, either she's got to meet you, she's got to listen to or see all of your work, or she's got to just trust me and this is what we're going to go and do. And I promise you that it will be better. But I want to change my life. I want to make myself better. I believe because I'm in my 30s now. I've done all of what you're saying.

1:11:26All of that dopamine. I'm a dopamine addict. I've done all of that and it hasn't made me incredibly happy. And so I know all that other stuff will. What are you trying to achieve in life? Because it's a battle. It is an immense battle. And I think about this all the time. Like I'm very, I'm very ambitious and I hope to have a good dent on a very complicated problem. But to put it really simply, we have been a pure natural species for a very, very long time. And throughout our lifetime, we're seeing, and we're already observing now a significant merge with technology. And that really is going to scale up when it's like augmented reality glasses and Neuralink head brain chips and that whole world.

1:12:02And I'm studying it very carefully to understand exactly what's to come for us and effectively as humanity goes through this merge with machine i just really want to help us hold on to what makes us human and if i can really inspire lots of young people lots of adults to just make sure we remember all the things that brought us up until this point i think we'll manage this merge with technology a hell of a lot better because you have your books and you have everything yeah so so someone who's listening to this right now yeah and you've said loads of things that you do where should they go and find everything that they need to about you and all your stuff and everything that you're doing because man that if people are going to be running to it right now because we're crying out for this help we need to make smart decisions we are crying out because we are man we are drowning at the moment in all of this i would uh start i've written a book called the dose effect and it takes you on this journey of 20 actions five in each chemical and it progressively helps you integrate this stuff it's also written for people that don't necessarily love reading because reading is quite hard now and it's very easy to journey through and it'll create huge huge change within 30 days as to how you're approaching your life and then i uh share content on instagram at tj power and if you want to learn how to like build a healthy relationship with all this technology on there you'll discover how to do how do you man DJ I have honestly you've blown me away let's go man it's it's so just great you're so articulate you explain it to make it understandable you don't make it scary you make us realise that we can change and you're also putting into practice what you're preaching yeah which is the most important I'm working hard to do that and it is hard I think that's the big thing it is hard and hard is good and for anyone who's watching this It's going to be hard, but if we do it together, we'll get to this amazing place.

1:13:56There's a magical world for humans in this modern world. We've got so much abundance, so much help in order to live a beautiful life. We just need to make smart decisions. This was what Great Companies was all about. It was all about connecting and feeling things together. I feel like as a nation, we've become disconnected. And so this is about connecting people back together. And this is why this episode is so important. Man, TJ, I've loved every minute of them, not even kidding you. I have eight final questions for you. Are you ready for this? Hit me, man. what's a saying or phrase that you'd want people to come away from this interview with easy choices hard life hard choices easy life I've taken that one best compliment anyone's ever given you for your work the most beautiful thing is when a young person comes to me that's like 12 or 13 years old and they say I'm out in nature building forts with my friends we do this thing called forts with friends and they have to go and build forts in nature instead of playing fortnight all the time and uh when a kid says that to me that's just magic what scares you most about your work oh the unbelievable challenge i've got ahead of me to try and help humanity realize that we really need to get disciplined with the technology and uh some are going to have a beautiful life where they do it and some are going to get really stuck in a challenging world when was the last time you cried and why i uh cried on sunday why i uh we had some uh fear with the baby and had to go and fly quite a sudden scan.

1:15:24And, uh, everything turned out to be pretty good. But in that moment, I, uh, when we got the relief and saw the scan and the heartbeat was there cause they had worried us, I really discovered in that moment, just how much I want this baby. And I was really surprised. Like I just started crying and I thought, wow, I'm ready to be a dad. Man, it's yeah. That got me in the feels right now. That's oxytocin. It means a lot. Yeah. And you just want your partner to be okay. Yeah, he just wanted to be safe. And I was worried about what she might journey through. I had that all, like, I didn't even talk about that with safe.

1:15:55I had that every day with her. Yeah. And you just have to stay strong all the time. Definitely. And you want to be like a machine. And all day up until we saw the heartbeat, I was just like a machine. Like, this is going to be all good. Don't worry. Like, we're all okay. But then once I had the relief that everything was okay, I was like, fuck, thank God. It's going to be okay, man. I promise you. Yeah. It's going to be amazing, dude. Definitely. What's something you can't let go of? My phone. i can't like that i kind of wish i could just completely let go of it but i have to keep it in my life what's a guilty pleasure

1:16:31um youtube i love youtube watching youtube videos is education everything it gives you yeah there's some youtube channels i just love there's this like guy called marco that does these like goes up to strangers and says can i paint your bedroom and then he's like this insane artist in America and it is just heaven I watch one of those videos that's definitely my guilty pleasure you're now gonna get me into that I can't wait what turns you off what turns me off

1:16:58people not asking me any questions when I see them and only chatting about what's going on in their life and it's something I actually turn myself off about myself is sometimes I'll talk to someone and it might seem a bit self-focused and I'll just be like shit I haven't asked how their life is going so i really work on that myself and i don't like when it happens it's a really good answer what turns you on um someone just being like really passionate about whatever their thing is just like being really fired up and caring about something whatever it is whatever it is yeah what do you like most about yourself i'm extremely determined i really believe i can put a huge dent on society in this technology management thing.

1:17:41And I like that. TJ, this has been beyond amazing. We're going to put every link to every book, to everything that you have in all the show descriptions. So everyone, please go and check it out. Man, it's been amazing. I'm full of oxytocin because of that. Thank you so much. You're the greatest, man. TJ, really appreciate it. Thank you so much. That was insane. That was insane, man. That was insane. That's good. Okay, what do you think? Loved it. As I said, it has changed my life. Do you want me to tell you what I've started doing? What? I have started leaving my phone in a different room when I go to bed.

1:18:17And I will try not to look at it for 10 minutes when I wake up in the morning. So I've just ordered myself an alarm clock. Oh, I've got one. And I'm now going to leave my phone outside my bedroom as well. Yeah, yeah. I wake up, the thing is I have my alarm clock wakes me up to Radio 3. So towards the end of my sleep, it just feels like I'm in a film because it's like classical music. Lovely. It doesn't really wake me up. It's actually music you go to sleep to. I just wake up really calm, like... But it's amazing. Dopamine, porn, so many different things, which I had no clue about. No, definitely.

1:18:49I had like inklings, but not to like that extent. Fascinating. Fascinating. And just the great advice around childbirth. Oh my God, so good. I actually spoke to Sophie about that. Did you? Yeah, to not expect the best, but actually probably expect the worst, and then the only best can happen. That's encouraging. Yeah, it was good. Maybe let's just expect the worst. Expect the worst, because then only the best can happen. We really hope you enjoyed this episode. Remember, if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do. And also, get in touch. Let us know what you think of the show, what guests you want us to have on next, at Great Company Podcast on Instagram, or greatcompany at jamppoproductions.co.uk.

1:19:22And we're going to see you next week. For another episode of Great Company.

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