Dopamine Expert: This 30 minute Rule Will Fix Your Dopamine Addiction

32:05And when you had these ideas, because this would be my fear. You have these ideas. Am I going to remember this idea by the time I come back to the wall? yeah I had that because I was someone that like every time I had an idea it would be straight to Apple notes and like write the idea down but the challenge with that is if you're walking and you have a really good idea but it's 40 minutes till you get to your house and you think I really think this is a great idea the only way you're going to remember it is by continuing to think about it so then when I had a really good idea I'd be thinking shit I don't want to forget this but I'm not going to be home for like 40 minutes so then I would like be like okay let's try and keep it in my brain.

32:40So then I'd have to think about it more and more and more. And I ended up going much, much deeper on the ideas I was having. And a lot of the time previously, I'd have these notes in my phone full of like lots of different ideas. Whereas in this in this lens, I'd come home and I'd have one idea, but it'd be very, very deeply thought through. And I felt like over time that was actually formulating much better ideas. Okay. And I presume, you know, the quality of the ideas that you can have really stem. Sure, there's a side of creativity, but they stem from how much knowledge and expertise you have on a subject.

33:10Yeah, for sure. So if I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm thinking, all right, this sounds really helpful and stuff, you know, you still probably have to do a decent amount of sector specific reading and collecting other ideas and stuff to be able to formulate your own point of view in this specific area, right? For sure. Not like some divine intervention, spiritual concept that just lands on you as you're on these walks. Yeah, that you never held in your head in the first place. For sure. And you got to consume content, consuming content is magic like i think it's amazing we've got these phones and youtube and everything to just like learn and on mass i think podcasts especially in the scientific community but in all communities that's just the one i consume a lot of but in all worlds of learning about business and technology and ai there's so much to learn so i think consuming is amazing and long form is so much better for our brain than short form so if you're gonna sit on the sofa and scroll all evening it'd be so good if you just cast it to the tv and just sat and watched it for example the other time in which i would always really consume content is breaking up with scrolling my phone whilst having a shit in the morning was extremely difficult to do yeah that was for me was like wake up go to the bathroom and just sit there like that and that was a hard thing to break the only way i could break that was by putting a book in the bathroom and every morning just sit there and i just read and that's basically the only time i read but day by day you do like five or ten pages every morning you're slowly building dopamine through reading which is great.

34:31And then you just like gradually churn through books. So I think reading first thing in the morning is awesome for the brain. And then I think consuming longer form content is great, but you're definitely going to have to learn things in order to then create good ideas. Okay. Last clarification on dopamine from a selfish point of view. Yeah. Is there a point of no return? Like, is it possible to just run out of dopamine? Yeah, that's a great question. So there's an area of our brain called the ventral tegmental area. And you can think of this as basically your dopamine factory in your ventral tegmental area.

35:01It's a little ball like in the center of my brain if I went through here. In there, you can build what's called dopamine vesicles, like little dopamine bubbles. And you can literally imagine that when you're doing something that's effortful, say something as simple as like cleaning your house, not like a fun task, but it's very effortful. As you're cleaning your house, your brain is literally stitching together little dopamine vesicles. You then have something called your nucleus accumbens, which is your reward center. And during that time in which I'm cleaning the house, what my brain is doing is it's stitching together the bubbles and then it's gradually shipping some of those bubbles to the reward center and it's giving me this feeling of like oh this is actually kind of good like sometimes like even for example you you clean your kitchen all the dishes and the hob and everything and it's like an annoying task but gradually as you get through it you're like oh it's actually kind of nice i'm like cleaning all this stuff i know bill gates was like a big guy about how good it is to like slowly clean your kitchen every day for motivation and from a dopamine lens that's exactly why in a situation like that building loads of bubbles slowly shipping them, that's great.

35:55You're replenishing the system and you're feeling satisfied. In a situation where we're on the social media, specifically if we're scrolling short videos, what basically happens is your brain goes, oh my god, this is so pleasurable. And it starts mass shipping the bubbles from the factory to the reward center. And gradually, like during that, it's like, wow, this feels amazing. This feels amazing. You're scrolling and you're scrolling and scrolling. But during that time, you're not putting in any effort at all. So there's no people in there stitching together new bubbles and replenishing the factory.

36:20So eventually, after enough scrolling or enough drinking alcohol or enough sugar, the factory is going to get so ridiculously low on this molecule. And the experience of like real depression where you can't do anything at all, like I navigate like two years of depression, the experience of depression, even going and having a shower or making some food is like, oh my God, I can't do it. And you're so low in that molecule. Lighter than depression, like if you're really just low in motivation and focus and so on. Again, that's just like a slightly more molecules, but still very little. So in answer, yes, you can reach a point where you basically have none of this, but there's never a point of no return.

36:57Because as soon as you start doing effortful actions again, even if it was just today, I made my bed, you've still at least built a few more and you can gradually replenish the factory. And this is the brake and accelerator system you're talking about. So by doing some activities on serotonin, you're putting the brake on dopamine, which enables it to create more bubbles, so to speak. Yeah. So then you bring in the serotonin situation and this whole center of building the factory, building the molecules and shipping them to raw center, all of that would just get a chance to just pause for a bit whilst you're doing serotonin.

37:28If you were out on a walk in nature with your family talking about like what you're happy about that happened that week, that's just like a beautiful serotonin oxytocin land that's letting this dopamine system go, oh, finally I can have a break. And originally for our ancestors, they were operating with like an equal amount of each of these. They did hunting all day. But then they'd also come back and sit around fires and they made like music and they did all kinds of stuff. They were balancing them. Whereas now it's just dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. And the system is like, please give me a break.

37:55So we need to do so. Do you think entrepreneurs are more dopamine seeking than other people? A hundred million percent. A hundred million percent. A lot of entrepreneurs probably have ADHD. And that's, it could be that you have quite light level ADHD. It could be you were born with ADHD. So many I know have it. Yeah, I mean, it's... Myself included. For sure. Me too. And I think it's really interesting when you look at this evolutionarily, because when you have ADHD, you have lower dopamine production. So your factory makes a few less bubbles. It ships a few less bubbles. But in a situation like that, when you then experience something that's dopaminergic, like porn or sugar or alcohol, because you are coming from a baseline here and suddenly you experience massive stimulation, the climb is much greater than someone that had like a neurotypical level of dopamine in their brain.

38:39So it feels really, really, really good. and the same can occur when you do something effortful say for example you get really into a work task you also get this bigger climb so that can feel really really good so you can get really good at those things so you're prone to each one if you took a hunter gatherer that had low baseline dopamine that they were born with genetic adhd that hunter gatherer would get to like seven eight years old whenever they were required to do something for the tribe you got to make the fire you got to build the shelter you got to go hunting with us in that moment they would go out and do it and experience a greater level of dopamine increase than the rest to the tribe and likely would then enjoy it the most and then over time would actually become the best at it and I actually reckon our world was built off of the ADHD brain.

39:17I think the ADHD brain would have been so magical for building an effortful part of the community that really drove progress and there's this interesting theory whereby about 12 ,000 years ago we invented farming and that radically changed the human experience because prior to farming everyone's sole goal was go and get food, bring it back to the tribe and eat the food. As soon as farming was invented, it really changed things and it slowed the pace of humanity because suddenly a few people took care of food and everyone else could like sit around and think and do different activities. There's this theoretical model that some people have a farmer type brain where they're happy with a slower pace of life.

39:54And some people still have the hunter brain that's obsessed with more, more, more, more, more. And I think a lot of the ADHD people in our world have that hunter brain that's just like I need more and that's not a bad thing it's great to have those people in society okay so as someone who's had burnout I'm assuming that dopamine you know dopamine spikes and dopamine drops are very responsible for things like burnout right yeah for sure so how do you square or what is almost your perspective on the types of entrepreneurs that are building tools and building products that really feed this problem that's very true and burnout is something super Like if you've got a dopamine level addiction to like good work stuff or quick pleasure stuff, burnout is going to occur.

40:39And you're meaning that the people that are literally building the softwares that we're interacting with. I mean, even worse, right? Even being even more cynical. Yeah. Go cynical. So, you know what? I won't even slag someone else off. Once upon a time, I had a company called Gravel. Okay. And Gravel's entire job was a mobile app. And the job is to get people to purchase shopping online. That is dopamine. Right? So yeah, our job at Grabble was literally to get people addicted to our app. And if we don't, we don't survive. Yeah. And there are thousands of entrepreneurs. I'm not a bad person, but that's the game I had to play to win.

41:20And I know, whilst I'm building this kind of company, that that's the job. And every single person, I promise you this, every single person who's an entrepreneur and let's just keep it focused that builds an app within the mobile app ecosystem yeah knows that that is 100 the job even my like one of my best friends michael from calm yeah so yeah i know that even the guys at calm they only survive if they can work that out that is so deeply cynical but so deeply true how do we get so unfucked from that yeah i mean that's tricky i think the scenario of calm like at least the time spent in there is slower dopamine which is good like listening and meditating and so on of sleeping i uh come back to this point of view that we really have to have a better capacity to have physical separation from the phone because if you're anywhere near the technology, they're in control of your brain and you're not going to win the fight.

42:28And this is why, for example, I even gave that scenario where have the iPad as your alarm instead of the phone, because the iPad is not as carefully constructed to get you addicted to it. That's why Instagram don't have an iPad app, for example. They've just got a blown up version of Instagram. They know that if everyone could use it on the iPad, it'd be less addictive. So it's like keep everyone dialed in on the mobile version of it. And I think for many of us, we've gone over the last 10 years as phones have got much, more advanced and social media has got much more like easy to interact with and better to interact with i think we've like lulled ourself into thinking that we need to always have this device near us and in our research at dose lab we can literally cut people's screen time in half and all we're teaching them to do is learn to not have the phone on them as often so like when they're sitting at a desk it's just in another room when they're watching tv on the sofa it's in another room the bedroom kitchens when they go for walks they just develop this capacity to physically separate from it more.

43:22And I think if the phone's always on you, they're going to win that battle. And when you're looking at burnout, if you just eliminate technology that you mentioned, you like doing those retreats where you come off tech for like three days, I'm sure those feel magical for your level of burnout, because on those retreats, you're entering serotonin land where it's just like slow and present. You feel quite content and you're just nature walking and like cooking food and reading and so on. And I think so much of the burnout is just driven by the fact we think we need to be on tech all the time. And it's really important to just consider, ah, I'm burning out because I'm literally burning myself out with technology and learning to find much more space from it and quote unquote phone fast is the best thing you can do.

44:02So I think it was spot on by the way. And I know many entrepreneurs, sadly, like myself, quite often, I'm as bad as anyone else, you know, can pride myself on hustle culture. and the hustle culture is like quite passé but fundamentally the winners in society on an entrepreneurial level tend to be those who are just obsessed with their work and they just have that much more to give that much more energy that much more passion it's why one of the reasons why i'm so obsessed with energy it's because i need it yeah to contain my obsession and energy for the things that i put myself like forward for and that's good and someone else is going to win if I don't.

44:42And whether or not those are insecure, anxious thoughts inside my head or practical realities that will hopefully see me through to some kind of imaginary finish line, who knows? Yeah. But it's probably toxic. So what are the sort of neurochemical things going on inside my head and how do I stop them from happening and still win? And still win. I mean, the neurochemical thing is taking place is you're living on this perpetual hunt for dopamine and dopamine never satisfies us. It's literally evolutionarily programmed to never satisfy us so that even when we found loads of food out there, we wanted to keep going out and finding more so that we always had a good supply.

45:20So it's designed to perpetually make you just, I need more, I need more. And we're living on that conveyor belt as a species whereby you right now have a ridiculously thriving company, but I'm sure you feel just as ambitious as you did five years ago, prior to the company being that successful. More. Terribly. Annoyingly more. You just want more. And an element of this is understanding that separating from dopamine, so consuming a little bit less social media, for example, at nighttime on Twitter or not consume content in the morning, that's only going to serve your capacity to actually achieve more because you're going to have more healthy dopamine enabling you to take action on the goals, focus on the goals, do those hard, annoying things that you don't want to do that enable the business to make progress.

46:00so there's an element of helping your brain understand that by coming away from this device which I perceive as the answer to me being successful by coming away from it for windows of time is only going to lead to a much more motivated brain in the same way that an Olympic athlete the way to win the 100 meters isn't to spend all day every day running the 100 meters like the 100 meter sprinters are the best at like the rest effectively they're so good at recharging and ensuring their body is optimized the same occurs with technologies that are addicted to making products on their phones and laptops that you have to come away from it in order to build the best thing.

46:35The other side of this then brings in the oxytocin conversation, which comes into the how much gratitude and how much love do you feel for what you've already built? And bear in mind, I'm on the exact same journey here. I'm completely obsessed with Dose. All I want is for Dose to be in every school in the world one day and all kids across the world are learning Dose and adults can all have access to dose. And I kind of have this like naive potentially belief in my head that that is going to be a reality. Like I believe that might be the case one day. And therefore I'm obsessed with making that happen.

47:06But then it's so important for me in order to live in a brain that feels calm and settled at times. So I'm not just like yearning for more every single second of my life, which I have spent doing, is to come into this oxytocin pathway of like feeling deep love and gratitude for what is as well got it is entrepreneurship just fundamentally unhealthy no I don't say I don't think it's fundamentally unhealthy I don't know you laughed in my face I'm pretty sure there was some truth in it then I mean I think it can drive a very unhealthy lifestyle and I think you definitely got to be super careful with it being your sole goal in life is entrepreneurship and I think for me I'm constantly trying to think how does my entrepreneurship serve these other chemicals so like for me my biggest dream in life is eventually having like a beautiful home in a forest with my wife and kids and that's what I'm aiming towards and that's not a dopamine dream that's like an oxytocin serotonin type dream sort of like the unabomber but with family effectively and I think you just got to make sure your entrepreneurial ambition is also serving connection and love and like a experience of life that's slow as well as an experience of building things okay so is is there a problem almost with what you're saying and for someone that like yearns to be in city life like active energetic city life that is that it's fascinating as a lot of people move from city to countryside for exactly what you're saying yeah and then a lot of people also choose to stay in a city for other reasons which include their kids right includes access to culture access to education yada yada yada you can cut probably down the middle both ways the arguments are really sound and valid both ways yeah i grew up in a city i grew up in london um so is that bad for me so to speak like is there is that is it really bad to replenish dopamine is is it you know we've talked about the granular level of dopamine, my phone habits, et cetera, at home.

49:10But is there a more macro environmental concept as well about where you exist as well? Yeah, I think in a city, you are definitely going to be more tempted by dopamine. There's just more dopamine to be had in a city environment. There's more fast food, there's more pubs, there's more of that energy of like fast and hustle and stimulation. But it doesn't mean you couldn't thrive in a city. Like I was in New York last week. New York's obviously pretty full on experience, but I still managed to spend little windows of time in Central Park and nice time in like cool chilled out coffee shops where I could slow down a little bit.

49:43And I think it's just important to make sure as an entrepreneur, even if you're a city based entrepreneur, that you do some things just to do that thing and not for it to be a productive experience. Like it's really great to go and sit in a coffee shop with your family on a Saturday morning and drink a coffee or a hot chocolate or a decaf coffee if you want to try and slow down on the weekend a little bit. And just to like be in the present experience talking to your wife or really engaging with your kid and so on and just having complete separation from slack and email and checking the stripe sales and all these kind of things like as long as there's windows of time where you're just present in the experience and it feels a little bit slower for your nervous system you could definitely thrive in any environment if you're thinking i'm so screwed by this like dopamine addiction lifestyle and it's really holding me back and affecting my mental health then i do think you could let your mind ponder living out in nature like maybe that would be a route whereby you actually were more successful when you felt more peaceful but it doesn't have to be the case where do you live now in nature in nature i live in a town called farnham which is an hour south of london and for me like i could i could not resist like the thursday night pints for example like to me i think you sent me a photo of your house actually i remember it is like it is in nature yeah it's like i live i live in a town i'm very close to like parks and stuff and hopefully as dose grows like i'll be able to move out into deep deep nature that's my goal to basically be a hunter-gatherer with a phone and a starlink on my roof or whatever i need and uh i think for me i just couldn't manage the the addiction to the dopamine i don't think that's the same for everyone but like when all my friends are saying like let's go get smashed on a thursday night and like no let's just go for one pint and then it's like impossible to have one pint for me anyway then it's like six pints and then friday's ruined and then like saturday it's like i feel so shit so i'm gonna get really drunk again for me i couldn't manage that loop and be a successful entrepreneur some people like just can they're just like so driven they can deal with it but that's what i needed but okay is it a problem if you can just deal with it so here's i guess the other side of this question i can just deal with being in london great um i can deal with uh a lot of this dopamine addiction stuff it turns out and i'm listening to you and i'm thinking that sounds even more toxic and worse maybe than not being able to because like maybe I'm just you know it's a bit like uh someone who doesn't feel pain but they're still gonna get the bleeds and burns and all the things it's not good that you couldn't feel the pain there's a reason it's there is that problematic if you feel like you can actually just push through that stuff and still be really productive and make stuff work it might not be problematic to your success if you're able to just be super successful but live in quick dopamine it might just be problematic to how peaceful you feel and it depends like is that a priority for you like do you feel like it's important to you to feel peaceful in your brain like is that something you desire uh yes yeah and i think but i mean that's some so because this is a good question because i i do work on that as well as part of my own process and system so you're not only living in dopamine land you are doing i practice gratitude and i'm quite deliberate with certain things and i make sure for example i see my mum every week you know i do the things that i'm like this is what a good healthy human male would do at this age etc etc right i have a daughter cool um we play doll's house let's go not a lot not a lot of dopamine going on in doll's house just pure fascination oxytocin i guess yeah oxytocin yeah so i suppose there's that side of you know when you when you have a family as well you're sort of brought out of your reality yeah if you choose to be present with it which i do yeah you are taken out of your reality and you know i do bedtime bath time every single day let's go so that's like six to eight thirty you know i'm not on my phone that i'm publicly saying on a podcast no i probably am i still do some flicking but in my head i'm not in my head i'm with her yeah so you know there's definitely ways i could do her do you think she's with does she perceive that you're there or does she perceive you're on the phone no i think mostly she perceives that i'm with her reading stories and stuff cool yeah um and she's now three so she calls me out if i'm on my phone oh wow daddy put your phone away yeah one day she'll be learning about dose and she'll be like dad that's bad for you yeah 100 100 we've got her uh we've got her currently learning about what's good and bad for her microbiome oh let's go at three years old can she understand a little bit of that yeah her happy forest and her sad forest wow that's beautiful in teaching i mean gut health yeah let's gotta do it is she on SAPS well she's on like kids probiotics cool yeah yeah so you know you've got to start to get the education and that stuff in early yeah but it's a great party trick as well when you can get your friends come around you're like Margot say that thing about your happy forest and bad forest oh yeah this is good for my microbiome they're like oh your child's a genius you're like no no we just want her one sentence to say in front of people yeah exactly I would say like with that scenario you're giving there you're not just living in dopamine no sure like yeah you are living in London.

54:43London's like a really cool place and you can do, you can do London and also get the other chemicals. If you still are having beautiful, loving, slow moments with family, your mom, your daughter, your partner, that's amazing for your oxytocin. If ever you can do things like go to Richmond park, like maybe she might like Richmond park, seeing like the reindeer, not the reindeer, whatever they're called. They're pretty big, those deer. That's why I say. We go to Kew Gardens a lot, actually. Kew Gardens, like as long as there's still a priority of the other chemicals the endorphins chemical is all about like hard physical action through exercise through sauna even things like singing and dancing i think taking your three-year-old to a sauna is probably a human rights abuse but don't take her into the sauna but like as long as there's like things in your lifestyle that are also enabling the other chemicals to rise then you can live in dopamine land aka london but it's just important that you don't only live in dopamine land which is just only work and alcohol and social media yeah okay let's talk about some practical things you can do then.

55:37So you've talked about phone fasting. Yeah. All right. Teach me, indoctrinate me, give me a new addiction, but this one can be healthy. Aside from phone fasting. No, no, no. Talk to me about phone fasting. So the goal of phone fasting has a few components. It involves 30 minutes before you see the phone when you wake up in the morning. That being said, you could go into the laptop if you needed to check other things. So it's 30 minutes before a phone gets scene in the morning. It involves 60 minutes complete physical separation in the evening. So that means hanging out with your daughter, having dinner, watching movies, whatever it might be, but 60 minutes.

56:14And it involves two times on the weekend, a two hour break on a Saturday and a Sunday. That one is really hard. And like, it's great to just like evolve into these things. You don't have to like do it first week thing. I've nailed it. I'm now phone fast pro. But the goal is 30 minutes morning, 60 minutes evening, two hour breaks on Saturday and sunday and then you're a professional phone faster two hour consecutive like two whole hours or one hour and one hour or what i think sometimes it's better to start with one hour one hour but there's two hours on saturday and two hours on sunday where you're fully separated from a device but if ever there's an opportunity to have two hours in a row that would be a massive win like if you're playing sport just a cheat code for that then because i'm playing paddle yeah i'm not on my phone for a couple of hours and then i feel like that's cheating it's not cheating that can be your phone fast that's like full dosing paddle you're with people you're exercising you've got like the focus of like healthy dopamine paddle just magic typically anything that's physically active with your friends is magic because all we did for the hundred thousand years was run around hunting with our friends so the paddle is just like a modern example of that judged into a little box in london and uh yeah so that's a great use of your your phone fast time okay one of my friends spencer matthews absolutely swears by this and i see him do it and it really winds me up every single day cold water immersion yeah i'm that is i'm i'm good at trying most things i've tried it multiple times i just can't yeah try and indoctrinate me cold water immersion is super powerful for the dopamine to put into context when you have a glass of alcohol if you have a glass of wine or you have about 400 mils of beer your dopamine level will double and that will occur within 15 minutes of drinking the drink.

57:54So you drink the alcoholic drink within 15 minutes, you're double the amount of dopamine heading to your wards, your reward center. And then after that 15 minutes, it begins to fall. In that fall, you then begin to feel a little bit uncomfortable and your brain goes, make sure you give me another drink. And you get that feeling of like, oh, we're having more drinks tonight. If you take a powerful drug like cocaine, it will 2.5 times the dopamine level, more significant than alcohol. And then it will hit that point within nine minutes. And then it will begin to fall. And anyone that's interacted with that knows that you feel very good very quickly and then very quickly you don't feel good and you want more of it and you go through these big curves what about sex sex probably i haven't seen a specific research study i've seen one that looked at like a 200 increase but it required you to have sex for about 20 minutes so you need to make sure you're having sex for a while and not getting it done quickly which porn is kind of training us to do yeah and uh then you look at something like cold water emerging cold water is the only thing that can 2.5 times the dopamine, the same as what cocaine can achieve.

58:52But because it's acting on a completely different part of the brain, it's a primitive part of the brain that's actually perceiving you're in physical danger. And it's activating dopamine with your nervous system to help you survive a threat effectively. You see the dopamine actually remains in the brain for about two and a half hours. So if you think about your day, you're thinking, okay, I really want to attack today. I want to be crazy motivated. I want to be able to get into flow state, get deeply focused on things it is very useful if cold water has hit your body or your head in the morning and we kind of whilst it's really cool if you can get in those cold bars and like absolutely kill yourself in there if you just do anything that's in the right direction starting with splashing cold water on your face is a good win wake up in the morning splash cold water on your face cold dopamine still going to go up from that having your warm shower and turning it cold for 10 seconds at the end and not even so cold that you hate your life but a bit cold that you go oh that's cold why the end because you want your body to go through the thermoregulation of reheating itself you don't want to do cold and then you want your body to have the challenge of trying to get itself warm again whereas if you had the cold and then you warmed back up with the hot water very easy for the body so if you could end with cold that'd be great if that could become 20 seconds 30 seconds you can like ease yourself in there the only other thing i'd add on cold water because cold water is getting kind of hailed as this phenomenal thing that just serves humans I actually think if you're in a situation where you're very demotivated and you're apathetic and you can't get yourself going in life cold water is fantastic it's going to absolutely surge your dopamine and give you much more like will to do hard things if you're on the other end of the scale where you're actually doing a lot in your life you're already working ridiculously hard and you are achieving a lot and you're leaning more on the burnout side rather than the demotivated side I don't think cold water serves you in those environments at all I think it overstresses your nervous system and actually could lead to burnout.

1:00:41And I think if you're on that end of the scale, hot environments, baths, saunas, steam rooms, those will activate your endorphins, which is much more about calming and slowing your system. And I think that's actually a better way to go. Okay. That's good to hear. You'll be happy with that. Yeah. I love a sauna. I love the heat. I'm really happy to get in those steam rooms, etc. Stick it on for 20 minutes, stick on for 30 if you want to. I can handle that. Cool. 30 seconds in cold water, I'm the world's biggest win. And I think you can just - I disappoint myself. You can tactically use these things.

1:01:10You don't have to have just like one routine that's always the same. Like for me right now, because I've just done like two months of book touring, I'm leaning heavily towards burnout. Like my brain and body is like, well, I've been traveling a lot in different time zones and so on. So for me, this evening, for example, a bath or a sauna, that's perfect for my brain because it's going to chill me out. If on Monday I wake up and I think, oh, I've got a really annoying task that I don't want to do, that's then a really good time for me to utilize cold water because it's going to surge some dopamine in my brain and my capacity to do that hard thing that I don't want to do is going to be easier effectively because you're going to have more of these molecules sitting there.

1:01:42So you strategically use them dependent on how you're feeling on those particular days. It's interesting as I just reread for the nth time Atomic Habits. Nice. It's a good January like reset. Get you in the zone. And obviously James Clear in that talks about cue habit reward. Yeah. And actually what I'm learning from you sharing this is a lot of this is actually understanding what are you feeling recognizing what that thing is and then what is a good almost natural high or you know or some kind of solution to try and bring the best out for you in that yeah a hundred percent so there's just two examples that you've got so one is you said um low motivation cold water is great yeah over exertion and like too much energy etc which is usually the end usually the end of the spectrum I'm at hot heat etc maybe why I gravitate more that way as well definitely what are the other natural highs and other things that we should potentially be looking out for inside our systems I would say if if you're this is a really important concept to understand to bring up because a lot of the time now if ever we don't feel good we feel like something's annoying with work something's annoying with our partner we just don't feel good the basic go is cue cue and then it's like straight to the habit of scrolling the phone it's like I'm just gonna just numb this out scroll my phone and then all that does is burn the dopamine out and just leads you feeling even shitter than before and the useful thing with these brain chemicals is they've got very specific symptoms if you're low in them so you can you can learn to listen to the symptoms so demotivation is low dopamine something like really overwhelming stress frustration type feeling is low endorphin so you need to try and use things like hot environments on a different lane if you were really struggling with lots of overthinking and anxiety in your brain that would be very serotonin based and you'll be thinking oh my brain's going really rapidly and it's worrying a lot okay so my serotonin system is low the best thing you could possibly do for your serotonin you've got kind of two aspects to it one is going to be the gut health component because 90 of our serotonin is built in the gut anything that's going to put nutrient dense molecules into your gut so that your body can use those to build serotonin magic so we'd never normally think for example oh i'm overthinking things so i should eat a healthy meal that's like you'd never think oh those two things are paired, but biochemically, they're unbelievably paired together.

1:03:56So the nutrient dense meal would be a component. The other component that we promote so much, and we touched on it earlier, is just headphone-free walks in natural environments. There is nothing better than this. In Japan, there's this great scientist called Keeling, who's done a lot of research into forest bathing. That's one of my favorite discoveries. Yeah. And they see this massive rise of what's called serum serotonin when you're just in natural environments. And serotonin is this chemical that creates a feeling of peace and contentment in us. And humans spent 300 ,000 years walking around in a forest.

1:04:27So it's no surprise when we walk in it, our brain experiences peace and contentment rather than this perpetual, I need more, I need more. Forests give you the opposite. They're just like, okay, just happy with what is. And if your brain is in this rapid overthinking stage, it either needs a nutrient dense meal or ideally nutrient dense meal and then a walk in nature, no headphones. Yeah, there's a book I read at Unplugged actually so I went on one of these it was all very meta I found a book called Wabi Sabi which is Japanese philosophy basically a Japanese art of slowing down essentially yes I have seen that and in it they had like you know a whole chapter on forest bathing cool and I did my honeymoon in Japan I went on a whole forest bathing thing and it was great but I hadn't really read about the science of it all and you know it was like I say it was so meta I was in a cabin in the woods found this book that was in there already about this Japanese forest bathing thing was like oh yeah I kind of did that my honeymoon I'll read about it And then I just went into the forest and I was just there for like two, three hours.

1:05:22Nice. It was hard to describe genuinely that kind of euphoria that I felt. And it's unbelievable. And I've tried to indoctrinate quite a few friends. It's also, there's a weird process that you do for a forest bathing for anyone listening that wants to give it a go. The very simple way of starting this off is actually you take unbelievably slow steps. Yeah, you do. unbelievably painfully you look like you know if someone was to film you well this was the only problem by the way i wasn't the only person in the woods and i can tell you you look like an absolute psycho well it looks like you're gonna kill someone like slowly 100 you're not having a normal walk so if you bump into someone in a forest they're having a walk you're having a wall hello how you doing yeah you're there oh you're slowly walking past each other and the next step is like 10 seconds later i mean honestly i was terrifying quite a few people so that's the downside of forest bathing um but the upside is the peace and tranquility and the sounds of the leaves and the sounds of the branches the sounds of the air you're so suddenly in tune with all of these uh natural senses it's one of the most amazingly connected feelings i've ever had amazing and in that scenario your serotonin has gone wild so this peace has come towards your brain because of the accelerator brake mechanism with dopamine dopamine is like oh i'm gonna chill out for a bit.

1:06:43I don't need to tell this guy like he keeps needing to do more, more, more, more. It's like, we're just going to switch off that thinking and we're going to just slow down in this environment. And it's really important to understand, like, especially as an entrepreneur, what can happen is you spend all day hammering technology. And I do this too. It's like smashing through things on my computer, email, to messaging, to creating stuff, to editing, to like all of these things. And then in your breaks, you might be spending time on the phone and so on. And then you think, oh, okay, I should go for a walk, but or lie in a bath and do nothing.

1:07:11and the thought of that is actually quite horrible because you think well it's gonna be quite like uncomfortable and like quite I feel almost too agitated for that like I had this last night I was like fuck I need to try a line of bath and chill out because I'd had like a really we're going through lots of decision making as a company and it's just like a lot for my brain to manage and I lay in the bath and it's like oh it's actually like I don't feel good in this experience so it's like you have to understand that we've been programmed to believe you should feel good immediately when you do something because that's what dopamine and our phones and alcohol and so on have taught us to do.

1:07:42But when you go for the walk or you sit in the bath and you slow down, you have to be prepared that there's like a 15 minute, I call it the boredom barrier. There's like this 15 minute boredom barrier where you think, oh, this is all really horrible, really horrible. And then slowly your brain, all that noise winds down. Then you enter three hours a piece in a forest, for example, is unreal. But it's just important to be prepared for the agitated feeling that it takes to get to the piece. So you've studied flow state and its relationship with dopamine. Probably for those that don't know, you know, flow state is a sort of magical zone of ultra productivity that all entrepreneurs want to be in all the time.

1:08:16Yeah. So how can we help people get into that zone? What do they need to do? The prerequisite to flow state is you need a good amount of dopamine already sitting in your brain. So if you were to say, for example, do what we all do, which is sit down at your desk and think, okay, I'm going to get into flow state. Prior to getting into flow state, I'm just going to check what's going on on LinkedIn, see if I've got any likes on Twitter and maybe go on my phone as well. The challenge is, is you're not just preventing yourself starting the task for 10 minutes. You're actually massively depleting the resource of dopamine in your brain.

1:08:48So then when you go, okay, I'm going to get into flow state, you sit there and you're coming from a lot lower level. And say it takes X in order to get into flow state, you've got a much bigger journey to climb in order to get there. So the first thing is, is you want to have done something that's slightly effortful if you're working from home like if you just had lunch and like cleaned up your kitchen a bit a little bit of effort dopamine is built in your brain then you sit down at the desk and whilst you're cleaning in the kitchen you could think okay what is my flow state task going to be so you don't have to go and like navigate your whole computer in order to try and identify what it might be you want to have a game plan in mind before you even sit down then you sit down and you just got to absolutely go for it and you want to make sure that what's happened slack and email and everything is shut for a period of time when you're operating with teams, I appreciate you need to try and get that right.

1:09:31It's not that you have to spend all day in flow state. You're just wanting to try and have once a day, a period of say like 50-ish minutes of deep flow state. That would be a really good number to strive for. So for that period of time, you just write in the team channel, I'm going to attempt flow state today at one o 'clock. So it's like kind of set in stone. Everyone knows they're not going to be able to contact you because you can't access flow state if you're still opening Slack and email and so on. So hard activity first, build up some dopamine, sit down, make sure everyone knows that you're going to be going into flow state and then just dial in and there's this thing we call fight the urge which is very quickly there's going to be a feeling of i really want my phone i really want to check linkedin notifications i need some help in order to do this project i can't do this on my own there's gonna be all these stories that come into your brain that are actually stories that just want dopamine they and they don't want you to push through that difficult barrier and you want to see like getting into flow state as if you're like an artist for example an artist wouldn't like sit there with their beautiful canvas in their art studio and do one line and then pick up their phone and do one line and then pick up their phone they would spend time getting so unbelievably immersed in that project and eventually they're there and they're in flow state and they're seeing this vision for this idea that's exactly how it works even if you're building slides or doing an excel spreadsheet like you want to see yourself as this artist that's creating that requires just that task and single tasking to access true flow yeah i actually once interviewed on this podcast john Cleese.

1:10:54And he'd written a book on creativity. And it literally like how to creativity. And his whole thing was, you know, he's like creativity for me when I was writing Monty Python, when I was writing 40 Towers, doesn't matter. The process was always exactly the same, which is that I would go into my writing room. No one's allowed to talk to me for an hour. My wife isn't allowed to speak to me. The phone's not allowed on the rate, like absolutely no one. And for an hour, I'll just fuck around on whatever I feel like doing. I have absolutely no connection to the internet or a phone or anything. I might be typing.

1:11:29I might be playing some instrument. I might just be chanting. Whatever I feel like doing. It's like playtime. And then my two hours of my day, which is like ready for pure creativity, I sit at the typewriter and stuff just comes out. And I was like, so interesting. That's how I wrote everything. That's cool. And he didn't challenge himself to do more than that. that was the other side of it it wasn't like I didn't you know sometimes I'd write there all day of course but actually what I needed really was to get about two hours of the ideas out and the prep before was the most important part without the prep I could never get the good ideas out yeah he's just like allowing his brain to just get out of that dopamine urge effectively of it's spending an hour just chilling out doing present experience type activities and then he's sitting down and that like need for other things is reduced because you just settled the brain and And then it's like, boom, straight in.

1:12:19And as writing a book, if you actually got two hours of deep focus a day, you'd smash out a book in no time. Yeah, true. But a lot of the time when you're writing a book, it's like a little bit, and then this and that, and this and that, and then it takes all day. And it's so much better for our brain as an entrepreneur to just get into these deep states of focus and then allow our brain to rest, then deep states of focus, and then rest, rather than just like feeling as though it's a productive thing to do, to just work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day, but just like kind of go between everything the whole time.

1:12:46really intentional usage of your time like you're an athlete effectively is the goal so what is the one brain chemistry molecule intervention that you would advise that's showing the most dramatic impact on productivity and focus i think it would be so hard for me to effectively pick between developing a good phone fasting practice prioritizing the sleep or the headphone free walks in nature and those three things i think those are the most fundamental thing for an entrepreneur physical separation from the phone headphone free walks in nature to solve all your problems and create solutions and then increasing the quantity of sleep so that the domino of good sleep falls and all your decision making gets better and i don't know which one i'd start with whichever one of those feels when you listen to it like intuitively like yeah i need to do that thing i would say that's your answer fair enough because when people ask me about um you know tips for entrepreneurs etc etc my number one piece of advice and maybe because i had depression anxiety a lot of mental health problems my number one piece of advice is go for a walk yeah interesting it's my number one mental health advice because it's the thing that made the biggest impact to me in my life and everything felt like downstream from just going for a walk and did you go on your phone much on those walks listening to audible and podcasts and stuff not like endless scrolling because obviously i appreciate that gets in the way of the purpose of going for a walk yeah um but i have to say it's less it was just about making sure that i'm physically in nature i'm in a park i'm seeing dogs like other people it's a nice thing to do rain or shine as well yeah uh you're moving your body yeah regardless that's a good thing for your mental health obviously your physical health too but it's just a good thing to do and you're also getting yourself out of your physical environment which at the end of the day especially you said you'd have depression as well you know when you're when you are depressed the last thing you want to do is leave your house for sure so forcing yourself out of your house the basically going for a walk solves a lot of other things that are you know uh getting in the way of your overcoming your depression a hundred percent so it's sort of like without micromanaging how do i get out of depression or how do i stop feeling less anxious it's like you know what going for a walk solves so many of the things that are stopping you over here that for me I was like I can't believe how miraculously helpful just going for a walk is interesting I mean we're a big believer at Dose Lab in steps like in terms of just making sure that you hit 10 ,000 steps a day and it's not actually that easy to hit 10 ,000 steps no I do 10 ,000 a day pretty much every day and it's a lot of walking you have to consciously get yourself to walk like today I got a train into Waterloo and it was like 40 minutes or something to get here and obviously I could have just got a tube and got here like in a second and then I walked it because it gets the steps I think it got me like 2.8k or something not that i'm tracking it and uh yeah i think steps in itself is super powerful for context hunter gatherers we're averaging about 35 000 steps a day and we're a bit much we're now that's sort of averaging about six so i mean just to say i did 50 000 one day at glastonbury yeah and you had some additional support and it's not really possible to do more than that because i was pretty much walking the whole entire day yeah it was the most i've ever done in a day and i've done hiking holidays and all sorts and and 50 000 was absolutely the peak of that's how much one can walk in a day so 35 000 is insane they were just cruising that every day and obviously that's not them they got or like do 35 000 a day but it just puts into context what do you reckon they were tracking on the people that have gone and hunted with them so there's this guy called there's a show called primal survivor and he goes with them then he just spends their days but he's being tracked and when he spent his their normal days he was getting 35 000 doesn't it and uh the other thing that steps are so significant on is the more like physically exhausted your body is the better it then sleeps and you mentioned you sleep quite well you fall asleep quite quickly but i was a former insomniac and you're a former insomniac do you think the walking impacted that can you have you ever seen a connection between when you started doing the increased walking not necessarily because i had depression before i had insomnia so So depression and the walking stuff came from solving that.

1:16:53And a few years later, I had insomnia. And then when did the sleep get better? Just nutrition. That's why I started heights. Yeah, yeah. So it's like your serotonin eventually started thriving. So I had obviously just nutrition depletion. And my brain wasn't getting the nutrients that it needed. And I just didn't know any of that stuff. And I went to sleep labs and all sorts of things to be like, what is going on with me? And in the end, went to see a dietician. and that actually solved your sleep that's super interesting super interesting and we need this serotonin molecule in order to get build melatonin which puts us to sleep at night and if your gut wasn't thriving then you wouldn't have been building much serotonin exactly 90 % of your serotonin is made in your gut like you say that's cool that's a good reason to have built the company yeah yeah i mean there's just a sort of i guess not too similar to you in that sense because you seem quite directional and purposeful but you know like i was running a mobile app company i've no awareness of this stuff at all until it happened to me and was like, wow, what?

1:17:52I had no idea. You said it earlier yourself. No idea that nutrition could have any impact on any of this stuff whatsoever. It was a complete epiphany to me. I think that's such a big part of entrepreneurship is solving your own pain. I also saw this great quote that the amount of income you generate is directly proportional to the problem you solve in the world. And for you, you're now solving a significant problem for people in the world of serious nutrient deficiency. And then the income of heights has been fantastic. And I think in entrepreneurship, it's so useful to consider things down that lane.

1:18:24Like this oxytocin chemical is a chemical that we experience when we feel love. And the greatest way, according to this research scientist called Algo, to increase it is through contributing to other human beings. Like whenever you serve the group, effectively it goes up. And evolutionarily, that obviously just makes a ton of sense. And I think it's really important in entrepreneurship to think about how is this idea serving our world in some way. And then for those people that find they struggle with their ambition and their want for more, it's really important to regularly acknowledge in your mind the service you are already doing.

1:18:57So for you, it's really important when you're going to sleep at night just to think like, wow, it's so cool that all these people are taking these supplements and that's really helping their health and so on. That feeling and that thought process will bring on oxytocin, which is very settling for the brain. And then it kind of puts the moment of I need more, I need more customers, like that feeling of I want to serve more. It just lets it rest for a little bit. That can always come back. But considering and acknowledging your contribution is key. Many people use things like, you know, caffeine or alcohol, not just to cure their own social anxiety, but you know, to be with other people, right?

1:19:31To exist with other people in a comfortable state. Like we said, we're quite comfortable doing this because we'll have a certain personality type and we're practiced. But for other people, they'll use those stimulants in order to almost survive those moments right and those kind of interactions so how do we square that off like what kind of um impact does using substances for socializing have on your ability to manage dopamine and dose yeah interesting i mean they vary between the substances something like alcohol is definitely like a very strong social lubricant effectively and alcohol will progressively like inhibit a lot of the function of your prefrontal cortex so that you get less analytical when you're drinking it and effectively like as our brain was evolving from like reptilian brain right at the core of the root of our brain then it evolved into mammalian brain and then the human brain with this front bit this front bit gave us the ability to deeply deeply analyze our experience which is why humans have evolved to what we have because we have this capacity to think so deeply on things when you drink the alcohol it switches off that front bit of your brain a little which means you kind of effectively you're devolving your brain a little bit when you're drinking but it's just meaning a lot of the noise calms down and I think that's why for example in a social setting where you fit where you feel awkward or uncomfortable alcohol can be so useful in those scenarios the only thing to understand is that because it's switching something off then it has to switch yourself back on and that's sometimes why when we drink we have this peaceful experience during and then an over analytical brain the next day that gets more and more worried so it's just important to recognize our case it's switching off but it also is switching it back on but i mean a little bit of alcohol if it was really serving you socially like that could be manageable depending on how addictive you find it fair enough um you've said and you said this before we started you know most entrepreneurs don't fail because of strategy they fail because of execution so what do they need to learn to master to get over that problem?

1:21:27I think you need to build really solid routines with yourself that are non-negotiable routines. I think something like for me, meditation really serves me, but it's like the most ridiculously difficult habit to build meditation because it's just like an uncomfortable experience meditating and you think, oh, I don't have time for it. And there's like a million reasons to not meditate. And for me, the only way I've successfully managed to get meditation to happen is I do it as soon as I wake up in the morning. Like it's nothing comes first. It's just that. And because I've got such a non-negotiable routine with it, I've managed to get it to happen.

1:22:00Whereas if it was, I'll meditate like sometime before work, like maybe I'll do the walk, maybe I'll do this, maybe I'll hang out with my girlfriend for a bit, then it's just never going to be consistent. So that's a niche example of the routine is non-negotiable. And I think wherever your priority is that you're wanting to execute on, you need to pick some foundational routines that become non-negotiable that serve that goal of effectively okay because you mentioned that you get a dopamine hit from planning and not so much execution or how does that actually it's not that you don't you do get it from the execution you get like a massive healthier level of dopamine from the execution but the challenging is your effect the challenging component is you're effectively getting quick dopamine from just telling people about the idea or just like in your head dreaming about the idea like we're working on this school project at the moment which is going to enable dose to be much more scalable within schools and when I was telling the whole team about it I was getting this huge dopamine rush like oh wow this feels so exciting and I felt really really good in that moment and it's almost easy to then feel like wow I've done it then because your brain is experiencing this rewarding it's like a hunter-gatherer sitting there in the tribe and like really clearly describing how good the deer is that they're going to find today but they're not going out and actually getting the deer and it's just very important to make sure of course dream but don't just spend your life telling people your dreams.

1:23:16It's very important to be much more disciplined on focusing on the actions required in order to attain the dream. And I found that early on in my career, I was a bit too much of a dreamer, effectively, just saying all these things I was going to do, but not necessarily doing them. I think it's better to actually sometimes not tell people all your goals and then tell them once you've achieved the goal and say, oh, yeah, it's really cool. We've managed to build this thing. Even that school project, me saying out loud, my brain's like, oh, cool. But I haven't yet done it. It's very important to actually take action rather than just talk about the girl yeah there's definitely a balance to be had there though because a lot of the time an entrepreneur's job is chief storyteller yeah and bringing people along for the ride and you were talking about the different types of brains um you know part of the prefrontal cortex and the human side of the brain is our ability to tell stories and that is one of the most fundamentally uh you know unique evolutionary advantages that human brains have which is can be weaponized for lies as well yeah but we are able to tell a story about a vision of a thing we're going to create which creates an opportunity for people to collaborate over something that doesn't yet exist a hundred and that's a beautiful skill for sure and there are different people within organizations that serve different roles it's just very important to also be an executor effectively not one that kills people like a virus caribbean but someone that executes on the task and you don't just want to spend your time like hyping up a team and then not having the systems in place that make that a reality yeah that makes that makes a lot of sense okay we've talked about a lot today so if we were to implement your approach uh the whole dose system um how do you think our life would change i think you would finally be in control of how motivated you feel each day which is massive in entrepreneurship to not be living on this massive fluctuating path and your capacity to do the hard things is easier once the dopamine is stabilized.

1:25:06And then I think the whole other lens of this conversation is you might actually be able to feel some peace at times as well. And I think that's like the hardest emotion for an entrepreneur to experience. There's this capacity where dose is going to serve you in keeping motivated and doing the hard things, but then it's also going to enable you to have times where you're actually out of that world and you just feel peaceful and more content and more grateful for what you have done at the same time. Do you feel like most entrepreneurs really exist in a state of either ambition or peace? Is there some like beautiful middle ground for those?

1:25:37I think we're just living in ambition as entrepreneurs and not much peace. And I think peace should be a really important priority. If you have really long term ambition where you want your business or to build for years and then sell and build another one or you want to build this business for decades. I think the idea of like peaceful progress of like making sure that it's not just like chase chase chase but you're slowly building is super important to consider and the more peace you experience and the kind of more your nervous system is allowed to rest the better you're going to be as a high performing athlete or entrepreneur you can see them as basically the same thing yeah anyway okay and a really important message to get out into the world for sure okay so where can people find you where can they find out more about your work where can they get your book yeah so at tj power on Instagram is my kind of best platform.

1:26:22The irony of sharing content on there is kind of funny. And then thedoselab.com is where you can join DOS, track your brain chemicals. And the book is called The DOS Effect. Amazing. TJ, thank you so much for joining us on Secret Leaders. Thanks for having me.