The Link Between ADHD, Dopamine, and Our Hunter-Gatherer Past | TJ Power | Be Well Moments

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

0:10With somebody who's recently been diagnosed with ADHD, and I know that you have ADHD too, and it's not something that I've really publicly spoke about. It's only recently that I've just started. I've only just come to terms with it. I didn't actually seek the diagnosis, as I told you. It came up during an interview. God just went bang, here you go. Yeah, it was quite a lot to process. And I'm still processing it, which is why I'm very, you know, aware of how I'm speaking about it, because I'm still going through that, understanding what it really means for me. But it's really interesting. There's this big conversation now with, you know, everyone's getting diagnosed with ADHD, which is another reason why I'm also very aware of not talking about this as another person who's been diagnosed with ADHD.

0:49But you also have ADHD. I don't know how young you maybe got diagnosed with it. I mean I've known it all my life my mom had a similar thing where she knew like oh he's definitely like super hyperactive and I was just an absolute nightmare in school so it was like super obvious so you knew it from quite a young age but maybe two or three years ago like I had a proper understanding okay right so I think like there's this whole wave of people either getting diagnosed with ADHD or realizing that their attention is like massively plummeting do you think that like dopamine is having that effect like everything that we're going through or do you think we're just becoming more aware of it is it like an environmental cause is it a genetic thing like I guess like people seeking this or kind of connecting to maybe what you and I have just found out in the last few years it's trying to understand like is the world making us this way or is it actually you know there's is there a genetic factor in link Yeah, so I reckon ADHD is a evolutionary adaptation that was really important to hunter-gatherers surviving.

1:53I constantly go back to this evolution thing just because our brain and its chemicals spent 300 ,000 years doing that. And then we just suddenly went, okay, now we're doing this. We started farming 12 ,000 years ago, but we really became modern society a couple thousand years ago. And even if you go back a thousand years, life was very different. It was much more effort outdoors, very connected. It was very different to the experience we have today. But for 300 ,000 years, the goal was to find food and build shelter and survive. An individual that had ADHD, and I believe many hunter gatherers would have had ADHD, would have been effectively extremely good at hunting for dopamine.

2:27They would have been very good at hunting for food, building shelter, making fires. They might have been amazing with like finding new ways to help kids survive. There would have been this massive advantage to ADHD. And I think a subset of the population would have been designed with it. 12 ,000 years ago, we invented farming and humanity began to slow down massively in our pursuit of food. A small subset of the community would be able to provide food for the entire group. And then gradually the invention of writing and poetry and all the things that evolved humanity began to form. I think there's a huge population of humanity now that still have that hunter-gatherer brain and don't have the farmer brain effectively.

3:05So they have a brain that is seeking dopamine more than a neurotypical brain. And that was useful. The challenge that's now presented with us is we no longer can only acquire dopamine through effort, which the hunter-gatherers had to do. So their dopamine was staying nice and stable. Like if they had ADHD, they might've seeked dopamine harder, but their dopamine never spiked and crashed. It just would have built and they would have had this like ridiculously strong dopamine system, very motivated, very focused. The challenge we're presented with now is all of the individuals with ADHD are being given the opportunity to access dopamine quickly with ease via their phones, via pornography, via alcohol, nicotine, cigarettes, so on.

3:40And that's then causing a massive dysfunction in the dopamine pathway, creating big spikes and crashes and then low dopamine baselines. If you have a low dopamine baseline, your ADHD symptoms are going to worsen. They're going to get more intense, your inner tension, your hyperactivity, your difficulty like sitting still and being present in activities. And I think that's where the situation is really confusing because I think some people will have been born with ADHD. They've genetically got this hunter brain. And if you look back over your childhood, typically men might physically display ADHD more and women might mentally have more ADHD.

4:17But if you look back over your childhood, if you were someone that was very hyperactive within your mind or your body, you might have had ADHD since you were born. But if you're an individual that is suddenly feeling as though they're developing ADHD, suddenly they can't focus, suddenly they find stillness really hard, suddenly they're hyperactive, then it's more of like behavioral inattention developing as a result of behavior than maybe something you've genetically had since birth regardless of where you are on that scale understanding dopamine and beginning to figure out how you're going to reduce quick dopamine and increase slow dopamine i think is the answer for everyone is essential i think that's where the self-awareness component really really comes in like actually being aware of just how much your attention is decreasing or increasing and i know this because i'm in the midst or hopefully near the end of finishing my book yeah the book's a big journey for your oh my gosh i I can't tell you like the highs and the lows of trying to hyper focus, which I'm very good at doing.

5:12But I think it's, you know, knowing that there's constant distractions with my phones or like messaging different parts of my team or running everything else and trying to write a book. It's really, really difficult, especially in this environment. I feel like I just need to be locked in a room. You need to be locked in a room with literally only Google Docs and maybe like your AI or your Safari or whatever you do to search and look at ideas, because even just like trying to write, like I've been writing my second book and the difference between my first and second book, even just now with like increased stimulation via the computer, because they're just getting better at stimulating our brains.

5:47And if you try to like write a little bit, like one or two sentences, and then you check your WhatsApp web, and then you check your Slack, and then you check your email, you never really get any like good deep work done. And humans, it's so good. Like if you actually work for an hour on something you feel insanely good like you feel next level because your dopamine has gone on the path it wants to go on and uh requires so much discipline it does so hard it's so hard thanks so much for listening to hear the full episode there's a link in the description