Dopamine vs Oxytocin: How Our Phones Are Rewiring the Brain’s Reward System | Tj Power | Be Well Moments

0:00Welcome to Live Well, Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10I was out for dinner with a friend the other evening and we were sat outside in a restaurant and to the table next to us there was the parents, the grandmother, and probably, she was probably about 15 years old, the daughter. Cool. Guess who was on their phones? Maybe the older individuals. so the parents were sat there the whole dinner and this isn't judgment this was just a really interesting observation the parents sat there the whole through dinner scrolling on their phones on tiktok on short form content the girl the daughter was just sat there looking quite i guess sad but didn't pick up wasn't the phone wasn't even on the table like it wasn't even out on site so she was sitting there bored of it just doing nothing looking and the grandma was kind of dipping a bit in and out but you know wasn't as addicted to the phones and it was just really interesting observation for me to go well okay there's a family meal going on but the parents haven't once spoke to the daughter yeah it's wild they are completely addicted to the phones and like hearing what you've just said about what we really want to be getting is the oxytocin yeah and that comes from connection like the dopamine the kind of addiction to this phone is is completely collapsing the void of connection because if you think about how many times you might go out for dinner people will check their phones so we're already kind of hemorrhaging any hyperthuse with our oxytocins just from having them aware so i'm now when i'm having dinner will put my phone away yeah you need physical distance can't be near you so that's quite interesting in the fact that just of how it's just affecting us even now with our connections day to day and because we're not necessarily linking them together because when you go on a phone you don't get say as strong of an impact as like a hangover from alcohol you're not like wow i feel like so sick and anxious now when you come off alcohol those individuals may get home that evening and just kind of like in the evening just feel like a little bit irritable and a little bit annoyed and a little bit depressed and just think our life is kind of shit and just like have no idea that the fact that they chose dopamine over oxytocin that evening is actually creating that feeling within them because our brain is so deeply craving oxytocin and when it gets it goes cool I'm full like I don't need any more it takes us out of that deep starvation of needing more and that's why for example when you drink a sip of alcohol you scroll a phone you never think like oh that was enough you always think need more need more need more and dopamine is evolutionarily programmed to make us want more so that we always try to hunt better make better fires build better shelter like God put it in us to make sure or nature put it in us to make sure that we'd always need more of it so that society would progress but oxytocin is complete opposite it deeply fulfills us.

2:48Like when you hold a newborn baby, like your own baby or like someone's baby that you love, you don't think like, oh, I need more babies in my arms. You just think like, cool, like there's a baby. And you just feel like deep fulfillment. And humans are lacking a feeling of deep fulfillment because of this obsession with dopamine. And that kid will get home. They're also being programmed from very young to imitate their parents. So their parents are priming a deep addiction within them for when they grow up. Even if it's like a two-year-old, if they're constantly observing a phone, their brain is thinking, oh, so that's what I do when I grow up.

3:16I go with the phone. I go with the phone, just as the hunter-gatherers would have observed building the swords and the bows and the shelter and the fires. And it's something that really can't be underestimated because the only way humanity is going to solve the big, big problem in the youth is by solving it for us as well. I mean, it's just so fascinating when we're kind of thinking about, as you just said, holding a newborn baby, you aren't craving, can I have more babies? You're kind of like, you're very satisfied. Yet everything around us is driving us to dopamine. Yeah, for sure. which is really interesting so how can we like does that actually change our brains like okay like obviously we know that we get kind of a quicker and slower release of dopamine but is there anything structurally that can be happening within our brains if we're just constantly craving this dopamine like is it affecting any other parts of us so there's two parts to this one is how your dopamine is being built and then rewarding you so as i shared before you have this area called the ventral tegmental area, VTA, and it's your dopamine factory.

4:15Your brain is generating dopamine vesicles, like little dopamine bubbles in your dopamine factory. And then you have your nucleus accumbens just across from it, which is your reward center. And in a situation where you are, for example, cleaning your house, when you clean your house, not like super fun activity, but you do get a level of satisfaction when you clean your house. And effectively, the dopamine factory will occasionally send a few of those bubbles towards the reward center, the nucleus succumbens. And you'll get this progressive feeling like, oh, it's kind of good that I'm doing this actually.

4:42Then eventually you'll finish cleaning your house. A few extra bubbles will cross to the reward center. And you'll be like, nice. And that's telling your brain, like, do that again sometime soon because you'll feel good again. Because our brain is just programmed to do things that are good for us, like obviously hygienic, clean environments are advantageous to our survival. And at the core, dopamine just wants us to survive. That's what it's here to help us do, just to survive. So it rewards any behavior that's useful for that and doesn't reward behaviors that are against our survival, like socially isolating ourselves on phones or drinking loads of alcohol or eating ultra-processed foods.

5:13You have that component. Then when you look at like scrolling a social media feed, effectively what happens is your brain starts to flood dopamine vesicles from the factory towards the reward center, floods them across and feels really good. But the big distinction between cleaning and scrolling a phone is one requires effort and one doesn't require effort. In the cleaning scenario, when you're cleaning the house, your brain begins to regenerate dopamine in the factory whilst it's shipping some to the reward center. So it's constantly replenishing itself and going, here's some more dopamine. There's a little bit for the reward.

5:43Here's some more. There's a little bit for the reward. In the scenario where you scroll the phone, no replenishment takes place and your factory literally ends up empty. And when someone enters a state where they're like, oh, I'm so depressed and I can't be bothered to do anything and they have goals in their life, but they just can't really be bothered and they procrastinate all the time. That's a state where the factory, the VTA has become empty of dopamine because they've flooded it all to the reward center and not replenished any through effort. Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.