Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus

0:00If you've ever been worried about how certain activities in your life, how they might be affecting your brain and how it might be causing long-term damage in the future. then this is the episode for you because we have a powerful conversation with neuroscientist and author T.J. Power, who is revealing some eye-opening information around the brain, how our modern lifestyle is disrupting it, and the chemistry in the brain and what we can do about it. We're going to be talking about the shocking truths about how social media affects your brain chemistry, similar to addictive substances, why quick dopamine activities make you feel increasingly numb to life's real pleasures and what those pleasures are.

0:44And also a practical three times daily method to break phone addiction that actually works when nothing else does. There's so much scientifically backed information in this episode that I believe you are going to love this. And please share this with one friend. If you know anyone who might be struggling with kind of like brain fog or just feels like their mood has been kind of, well, moody off and on consistently, and they haven't figured out how to unlock that pure present energy throughout daily life. And they just feel like they're kind of been stuck or like trapped in a brain fog. Then make sure to send this to that friend and say, Hey, I'm thinking about you.

1:25And there's some powerful insights in here that can support you and ask them to share their biggest takeaway with you in this episode. This show, the school of greatness is all about supporting each other, this community of individuals who've been listening for over 12 years. It's all about supporting each other and just improving the things where we feel stuck or we feel challenged with. And in no way have I figured everything out in life. I've been deep in this work for 12 years, and I'm constantly looking for the best experts to just give me that little edge to continue to either remind me of what I need to keep doing or give me a new tool to unlock what I can do at this season of life where maybe I haven't faced this challenge yet.

2:08So we're all on this journey together. I hope you're gaining value out of this. And again, I hope to see you on my book tour. That's right, I'm going on tour here, March 15th through March 25th, 10 days, seven cities all around the country for the Make Money Easy book tour. And if you're looking to create financial freedom and live a richer life and really unlock abundance, then make sure to pre-order a copy of my new book right now. Get a ticket over at lewishouse.com slash tour to come see me live as I would love to see you, your family, your friends at one of the bookstops. And we'll be doing a live taping of the School of Greatness show as well with some big surprise special guests.

2:51So go to lewishouse.com slash tour right now to get your book, to get a ticket to the book tour as well. Without further ado, let's dive into this episode right now. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring TJ Power in the house. Good to see you, sir, and thank you for being here, man. Thanks for having me. Very excited about this. You've got a lot of incredible content online. You're a neuroscientist. You've got a book called The Dose Effect, which is about small habits to boost your brain chemistry. And the The first thing I asked you off camera was what is the biggest struggle that humanity is really faced with right now in this season of life?

3:29And you said ADHD, the lack of attention to really life and being able to be present, focused on their lives, being distracted a lot. Yeah. What do you think is the main cause of ADHD right now? And also, what is the superpower that people with ADHD have if they lean into it? yeah i think adhd is a fascinating topic for our world i think it's something that many humans may have had for thousands of years i think there would have always been a subset of society that potentially had this lowered baseline dopamine level there's a brilliant scientist called volkow who's done like a lot of research into adhd and dopamine levels and you see with those that are genetically born with adhd that they might have a lower production of dopamine within their brain.

4:17So there's that element of the genetic component. We in our modern world, with all the things we've been discussing of social media and porn and sugar, are really disrupting this pathway. So we have some people that are exhibiting it as a result of their genes from when they're born. And a lot of people that are also exhibiting it as a result of the altered modern lifestyle, regardless of the cause, it really does create a lot of difficulty for people's lives of inattention and lack of action and procrastination. And it's extremely important and then we begin to get it in check and help these people to thrive.

4:48If someone feels like they can't focus, maybe they've been diagnosed with ADHD, or maybe they feel like, maybe I have it, maybe I don't, but I just know something's off energetically, and I can't stay focused, or I feel a little more depressive at times. Is there a positive side to having ADHD? Is there a benefit to having it if someone's able to learn how to harness their ADHD? There is, for sure. And this is where it gets really fascinating. I do a lot of events around schools and we help them a lot with ADHD. And I also grew up as a young guy with ADHD without necessarily knowing it. I wasn't diagnosed as frequently back then.

5:26But I grew up with real difficulty in school, massive inattention, big highs, big lows, a very like addictive personality to anything I engaged with, whether it was healthy stuff or unhealthy stuff. And I began really investigating this world of if someone has ADHD, how can they thrive? partly selfishly out of like i really wanted to get going i wanted a business and i wanted to be able to serve and i began thinking a lot about our ancestors the whole of the dose effect is built upon our brain spent 300 000 years running around out there hunting and building and making fire and connecting as small groups 300 000 years and nowadays we've spent about 30 years as modern sedentary digital humans and you can imagine for our bright biochemistry that's pretty tricky that change.

6:12If you were to look at a hunter-gatherer and they grew up with ADHD, for example, so say they had genetically low dopamine, they got to like seven, eight years old, and suddenly they're expected to contribute. Maybe they had to start the fire one night, maybe they had to hunt, build, make the food, whatever it may be. They would have had to begin engaging with very challenging, effortful based activities. If you were to compare the hunter-gatherer with ADHD to the one without it, the one with ADHD, because it's got low dopamine levels, would experience a greater elevation in their dopamine and actually enjoy the activity more and thrive more than the other hunter-gatherer without it so then they would get really into it and they might actually become the greatest hunter or the greatest shelter builder as a result of the fact they would effectively experience more pleasure from the activity itself and with the schools we're really trying to reframe this for a lot of young people we've kind of changed it from adhd attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to adha attention deficit hyperactivity ability to try and make it like a concept in their mind, whereby this is going to be challenging.

7:13It definitely comes with a lot of difficulty. If you find something to isolate on, you can really, really thrive. That's interesting because I relate to that. I mean, I just hated school. I was just like, get me out of here, watching the clock all day long, like hoping for the bell to ring. It just felt like it took forever. And anything the teacher said, I just feel like I have no idea what they're saying. And I can't comprehend and reading. I have to reread the page over and over again. I still don't understand. just feeling defeated every day in class. Like I'm never going to get this stuff.

7:44Me too. And because it was so hard and I wasn't excited about it, I checked out. I had a lack of attention. But once I found something that I was excited about, it was hard, but it gave me more of a purpose. Like I'm excited about this. I'm willing to do the hard work because I'm seeing improvement. I'm learning something. I'm liking what I'm learning. Like I'm seeing results, like something's exciting and I have a goal or a dream that I can work towards that excites me. So I was able to use that energy or that lack of energy I had from school and put it towards sports most likely and eventually evolve into what I'm doing now.

8:23So it was figuring out a way to use that lack of attention and feeling of ADHD into, well, find something you're curious about. It may be hard to learn how to do it, but at least you're curious enough and have the excitement enough to go work on it over and over again until you get better at it. Definitely. And it made me kind of obsessive on mastering things that I was curious about. Like you said, like becoming the best hunter-gatherer or whatever. It's like, okay, I suck at everything else and I have no attention for these things, but this one thing is really exciting. Let me go all in. And it's like, now I have hyper focus and like super attention to detail for these things.

9:07So it's interesting how that, you know, kryptonite, you can turn it into a superpower. And if you think evolutionarily, it would actually be very useful for us to all have a specific thing that we can hyper focus on. You didn't just want a group that were all identical at every single skill because that group wouldn't thrive as much as a group that had an unbelievable set of hunters and unbelievable set of builders unbelievable set of food providers all that kind of stuff so it makes sense that naturally there would be different things we would be more and have a greater inclination towards and the big thing there is understanding you don't have to be good at something for it to be your thing and the beginning it's only that it has to interest you in some way like i've had the exact same nightmare in school really couldn't engage with any of it until I found this psychology world and neuroscience.

9:54And I thought, wow, that actually, for some reason, sparks my mind. But even when I started doing it like 15, 16, I still wasn't very good at it. I just thought, well, this is at least something that's interesting to me. And finding the niche things as someone that has an ADHD brain, you think I like it. That's where you can thrive. And I've even had it with slide design in terms of making presentations with work. I always just thought for some reason that interested me. And I was not good at it when I started doing it but i just niched so hard and i'm just going to design slides really like your slides are beautiful i saw them i was like man who's your designer i like that i actually kept as that design role i have a great guy on my team that supports me now with it to make it extra cool but it was something that i wasn't necessarily good at but it's something i liked i found it interesting and then you eventually because if you have a brain that gets a big dopaminergic stimulation of that activity you will eventually be extremely good at it but you just have to realize that you don't have to be good at something straight away wow that's interesting man.

10:47Now, what are the things that are causing us the most amount of lack of energy, low mood, and a struggle to focus? What is the things that's causing that the most for our society? I would say if we're putting it down to a few specific ones, phones, specifically social media, would be the largest factor, I would say, is number one. And then I would say ultra processed food and sugar would be secondary to that. And I would say a lot of stuff then comes off of those two. If you look at the phone, it impacts the quantity of sunlight we get, the amount of exercise we do, it creates a really sedentary lifestyle and so on.

11:25So there's downstream effects. But I would say if you niched on someone creating an extremely healthy relationship with social media, there would then be a big knock-on effect on their mood and energy and so on. What is a healthy relationship with social media? One way you reduce significantly the frequency of engagement, not completely getting rid of it. you can do that like that would definitely serve you to get rid of it but i think for a very significant proportion of society they would like to continue to engage with the social media world and when you look into it from a dopamine point of view every single time you enter social media you're experiencing this very fast elevation in dopamine and that creates a really fast elevation and then a very quick crash as the brain seeks for its homeostasis seeks for its balance just to put that into context to go back to that hunter-gatherer example we only originally could experience that elevation in dopamine from successfully spending five hours building a hut or making a fire or hunting down an animal so it was a very slow increase we experienced pleasure one high and then it was done a nice slow steady decline you might get two dopamine hits in the whole day wow if you look at social media you're effectively experiencing the same elevation in dopamine as a hunter-gatherer would after five hours of hunting but you're experiencing it within three or four seconds from opening the app and therefore because it rises so fast and the brain is just thinking wow I can't deal with this overstimulation after you come off social media you get this really significant crash this is called phasic and tonic dopamine you get this really significant crash and that creates this low mood low energy inattention type experience when you're looking at social media just going on it once or twice like it's not going to do it's going to create stimulation and dopamine your brain is going to experience a bit of a crash but it's okay if it happens let's say four or five times a day but when we look into our data on the frequency of opening the phone it's often between about 140 and 170 opens per day on the device so if you look at on social media or on your phone opening the phone but then if you look at first app is either whatsapp or instagram typically typically those two instagram being more dopaminergic than whatsapp it's very hyper connected to the novelty of the information you're about to see so instagram's really novel loads of new stuff especially how the feeds are designed now because we're not as in control of what we see like followers and stuff like that and if someone really frequently engages hyper dopamine stimulation hyper crash for me like I'm someone that is so addicted to my phone like I find phones extremely like exciting and entertaining I got my first iPhone when I was like 11 years old or something so I've like my whole life has just been like an iPhone life and I got Instagram then I got Facebook then Facebook was really big back then it was like the app and throughout that next period of my life maybe 11 to 25 I was just laser hooked on my phone and eventually I was like this is really disrupting my happiness my relationships my work my attention and so on and I thought I'm not going to completely quit social media because it's creating my business life and it's allowing me to help people and I like it I find it fun like I like learning things on there and so on and I was like how can I actually learn to manage this and I tried so many different things I tried app blockers and I tried like making the screen black and gray and all that different stuff that's big online nothing worked except a daily commitment to myself that I could only open the app at 10 a.m., 3 p.m., and 8 p.m.

14:38Wow, three times a day. Three times a day. And if it's outside that window, even if I have some really important message to reply to, it's just not allowed to be open, 10 p.m., 3 p.m., and 8 p.m. And I had to create this boundary. My girlfriend also finds social media really addictive, and she now lives the boundary with me. And we'll know at 10 o 'clock. You'll see the dopamine excitement. It's like, yes! It goes off at 10. Now we can have it. But that shift makes a big difference, And we've got a lot of our people that go through dose doing this. And having really strong boundaries to reduce frequency seems to be very important.

15:08Wow. As a neuroscience based on science and research, what is the benefit of delayed gratification, of creating boundaries or barriers to either check your phone or do something that's going to create gratification for you versus having instant gratification whenever you want of that thing? it's really nice to experience a high amount of reward for something our brain wants really significant reward so for the hunters the food and the shelter and so on for us today that might be reward in your relationship something like a really special moment happens in your relationship something in your career something with a friend whatever it might be something like winning sport sports matches our brain wants those real elevations of yes life is going to plan life is going well.

15:52The problem with really frequently engaging with the dopamine is it effectively works similar to a car engine where if you took like a manual car like a gear stick car and every morning you got in that car and you didn't put it into gear but you just started revving the engine which is like making it room every day. After a few weeks that engine would begin to burn out and it literally wouldn't work anymore. Eventually it would stop working completely but eventually over that period of time it would just break down and break down. Really frequent dopamine hits, the quick easy ones like social media and sugar and pornography and so on are like that and they're just revving the engine way too hard way too hard without actually making the car go forward and achieve something and then if you actually think about that over time the engine gets weaker and weaker so then when you do have a great moment in your career or relationship or in a sports match it doesn't even feel that good because you've effectively broken the system and if you want a life that feels really rewarding and fulfilling we have to get the dopamine in check otherwise our life feels all like numb and boring so you could have a lot of dopamine hits throughout the day but still feel numb yes for sure it will make you nummer and nummer over time the more dopamine especially this quick dopamine if we were separating it into quick dopamine being i feel pleasure immediately and slow dopamine meaning i feel pleasure after a period of time you could even take a niche example of sex and pornography sex is something that you have to start engaging with that person you get intimate with them you kiss and so on eventually find you find yourself in a nice experience of having sex.

17:18Pornography is you've seen something on Instagram and then you're on pornography within 10 seconds and the stimulation has risen extremely fast. So one would be slow dopamine, eventually you experience pleasure, one will be quick and then a crash. And if you're looking at your day, overdoing the quick causes that numb, deflated inattention, and then having the slow dopamine, not meaning having sex all day, but doing some other activities that are rewarding for you is going to lead to a much more fulfilling experience. What are the things that cause the most pain and suffering in a human based on neuroscience?

17:49Is it the addiction to pornography, the addiction to alcohol, drugs, vaping, or social media? What is... Out of that list. What hurts a human being and their brain and their mood and their energy the most? This is interesting. I think humans have had access to these quick dopaminergic behaviors for about one or 200 years. The first being sort of alcohol and cigarettes and sugar. And sugar. Sugar was significant. Sugar altered into the more ultra processed food version of sugar now, like fructose, corn syrup, and these kind of things is even more extreme for a dopamine point of view. But I would say if we look at society and we look at mental health, the most significant change that's brand new is short video content on social media.

18:38I think that's the thing that has massively shifted the world from a mental health standpoint. And if you look at your relationship with your phone before and after COVID, COVID was the era of short video being created. And also in these moments, I appreciate the irony of the fact I literally make short video content. So it's like a tricky situation. But if we look at the frequency of engagement with that behavior, we're going to cause the greatest dopamine destruction. because where alcohol really has a big effect and pornography has a really big effect you're unlikely to engage with that behavior 50 times a day whereas if you look at the phone it is more destructive for society because of how often we're going on it so i would say the phone is the number one thing to get in check i also have had to come off of alcohol and things like that because for me like i find everything way too addictive so i've had to move towards a pretty healthy lifestyle to be honest in order to manage it and almost get addicted to the experience of a healthy lifestyle.

19:33But I think for a lot of people, the domino that needs to fall is significant separation from social media. What is harder to break? Alcohol, pornography, or phone addiction? That's such a good question. What's been the hardest for you? To just always speak in the most truthful way. I think pornography is something that's really difficult to come away from because it's a very private behavior and none of society knows that anyone else is doing it because it's like an isolated behavior. Whereas often, if you were really heavily drinking, it would be quite apparent to your partner or your friends, family, and so on.

20:12It's more of a shared experience. It's more of a shared experience. And even if you end up drinking on your own, it's going to become quite obvious to other people that you're now drinking on your own and so on. You can't hide it. Yeah. You can't hide it. And you'd be like, okay, what are they doing? Yeah. Whereas pornography is very easy to hide. And therefore, when I, a number of years ago, maybe four years ago or so i started thinking okay i've got to get dialed in on the dopamine i need to like come off alcohol and for me like that was the necessary step because i couldn't manage alcohol and then it was like really think about the food think about all these different steps and then pornography was this one whereby i'd just come off it for a period of time but there'd always be that like temptation to re-engage with that behavior and it is like a challenging conversation to have pornography i feel like society isn't really considering it but in terms of the elevation in dopamine, it's absolutely insane.

20:58And in order to understand that, you only have to think about how much pleasure you experience and how rapidly you experience that pleasure when you engage with it. And then you know how big of a deal it is. And when you compare, say, scrolling your Instagram reels to pornography, you'll notice you feel much more pleasurable during the pornography because of the hyper dopamine stimulation. So where alcohol, social media, porn, they've all been challenging to come away from, I would say, yeah, porn is probably the most difficult yeah do you feel like it's got a the greatest high in our brain chemistry over you know short-form videos vaping and alcohol i think uh it's interesting this because i also wasn't someone that was like a super porn addict in terms of like it's not like someone that would be like engaging with it all day every day and stuff like that i was someone that just grew up as a teenager and that was just like an option of like oh yeah you can watch porn so that's like a thing you can do and then if i was ever engaging with the behavior of masturbation it would be always accompanied by porn because i just thought that's the given thing when you look at would it be more of a dopaminergic stimulation than social media and alcohol i think you always have going to like a deeper philosophical spiritual idea of what is porn tapping into from a human innate desire point of view and where humans would have really sought after social connection that was like fundamental to our survival with social media and alcohol being kind of modern versions of social connection they're both driven by our pursuit of interacting with other humans pornography is really tapping into the desire to procreate and there's nothing stronger in a human than the desire to procreate so i do think it's tapping even deeper into that instinctive driver within us interesting and what happens when you have a false sense of procreation on a consistent basis through pornography?

22:44What I basically believe the brain evolved to do throughout these like hundreds of thousands of years was simply discover the process of survival and how it can be optimized, which is a given. Like obviously we've managed to survive to this point and survival is important. When you look specifically at dopamine, like why is it really living within our brain? It effectively lives within our brain to reward us for behaviors that are advantageous to our survival. To survive. to survive so in that moment that the fire struck after rubbing rocks together for three hours a massive dopamine hit comes because that would have been a very yeah it would have been so annoying doing that yeah like you think how easy our lives are now imagine actually coming home from a day of work and they're doing that for three hours until you got some fire like it was hard and we needed a chemical that every single day just drove us to keep making the fire and keep looking for the food even when it was freezing cold outside and so on and we got here as a species and just like dopamine evolved is this very sophisticated mechanism to reward survival activities that promoted survival i think it has the same capacity to negatively create experiences that are disadvantageous to survival of us and are prospering as a species and then if you look rather than having to like look on instagram at a list of what's good for my dopamine what's bad for my dopamine if you simply ask yourself the question is this actually advantageous to my survival as a species then you will know immediately whether it's pro or not pro for your dopamine and you look at pornography if you go further with pornography a society that only watches porn as an engagement of sex is actually going to be one that doesn't procreate at all and the brain is only going to send society a stronger and stronger message saying please stop engaging with that path because that's not going to lead to a prospering society in a thousand years and if you think of it with when you feel crap after cigarettes or you feel crap after spending a whole day socially isolated from being on your phone all day.

24:32Well, the ultra processed food, all of it is a very sophisticated message from our biochemistry as a result of our brain's desire to prosper for thousands of years. Wow. That's interesting. How hard is it going to be for society to stop engaging in pornography? Puff. Because it seems like it's just everywhere, especially with young men, right? It's part of the culture. It seems like it's accessible. I'm assuming there's a lot of shame still, but it's more acceptable, I guess, for younger men. I don't know what it's like. I definitely don't think that's my age. Because you're in your late 20s, right?

25:07Late 20s. So what are men in their teens and 20s that you work with, what are they saying about it? I definitely don't think people feel that much like remorse or guilt or shame for engaging with it. It's definitely a very normalized behavior, just like it's normal to get super drunk. Like that's not necessarily that judged across the world. Pornography, I don't feel is that judged. I think it would vary from gender to gender and generation to generation, how people thought about it. Certainly in the world of being in your 20s, I don't think it's a very judged action. And I do think it's a very hard thing for society to come away from.

25:41It's also evolving in terms of virtual reality is going to create a very difficult experience. I can't even imagine what that would do to dopamine. And all of that lane is becoming faster and faster. I dread the day that pornography has a feed like Instagram Reels, where you don't even have to watch one video but you could watch videos at pace that that would be hell i shouldn't even give them that idea and i believe the only path to coming away from it is very very deeply observing how it's actually impacting your life because what happens with all this dopamine stuff is you just think i feel okay maybe you do struggle feeling like depressed or anxious and then you really need to start considering like how your lifestyle is creating that experience potentially but a lot of people might feel quite neutral they're like I feel all right it's not really doing too much damage and with all the different particularly men they engage with this but women do too that we guide they come away from it for a week they say okay seven days I'm just not going to watch porn and they're like uneasy as to whether that's even going to do anything for them and they're like I don't really want to lose that like pleasurable experience that I have in my life and you rapidly see a change in motivation and attention when you come away from it you really quickly see the ability to just take action on whatever you're wanting to do like i want to go to the gym i want to go for a walk in the morning so apparently they're good for you or i want to work hard you see a shift and it's simply because like just before you're going to sleep in that nice regenerative dopamine experience of sleep just before that you're just having this huge spike crash off sleep and you're waking up with a lower dopamine level and if you can end the day with a healthier experience you're going to wake up with a higher regeneration of dopamine and then you're going to think, okay, I'm ready to attack the day.

27:19And it's important. As a neuroscientist, what is the best way, what is the best evening routine to set you up to have the most productive next day? Yeah, I think that definitely starts with you finish your work. I think it's extremely important. So you finish your work, say 5, 6 p.m. The first check-in I would do is make sure you have some short 60 second or so short reflection of your day that helps you to celebrate the progress that has occurred. It's very easy to go into the end of the day looking at your calendar and task this and thinking shit I have a lot more to do and then enter your evening in a state of dissatisfaction which isn't good for our mind.

27:56So the first thing quick reflection very simple way to do that would literally just be to look back at your task this or look back at your calendar and think okay cool I've done this day I've done a podcast we've done some meetings or whatever it may have been. Then I think you need a period of time away from wherever you were working. So if you're in the office you're naturally leaving the office which is good A lot of people obviously work from home now. You then need to leave your home. Go outside. Go outside. That could be walking. If it's still light in the summer sort of months, go into nature, have a period of that.

28:23Could be to the gym. The most important thing is after that work period, you're then entering 60 to 90 minutes completely screen free. So you need a moment where your brain is going to de-stimulate. And it almost can be uncomfortable, that experience, because our brain is in that dopamine loop all day. We separate from the technology of our phone or our laptop and suddenly we can almost feel a bit of a decline and that's when we're like well actually i think i'll just stay on the phone for the evening or turn the tv on or something tv on a different screen different screen and i think if you can have a period so it could be gym it could be for a walk it might be that you just need to go like supermarket shopping you could at least get away from make yourself dinner or whatever it might be like do an activity right for sure and then we basically try and get people to they come back from that activity they've then got dinner and you've got potentially like tv watching and social that's kind of your potential evening activities typically in our world and we'll try and continue that concept of a phone fast effectively so there's progress prolonged periods of time away from the phone so that this dopamine system can regenerate so you can step away from all your work emails and conversation and so on and phone fasting really requires and this is very clear in our work it requires physical separation from the device not even just being close it can't be anywhere flipping it over, that's not a fact.

29:36That does not work. It has to be in like an office on a windowsill away from you so that you're not near it because we effectively have this experience of boredom begins to arise in our brain. Like we're cooking and we're like, this is uncomfortable. I'm bored. And the reason we feel that way is because dopamine is declining. Or it might be like we're eating dinner. We're talking to someone and that even might be boring now because we're so in stimulation all day. And we call this the boredom barrier where basically what you see is there's a period of maybe 10 to 15 minutes where you feel uncomfortable and you're like, this is kind of shit and you want your phone and you want stimulation.

30:08But you do quickly surpass what we call the boredom barrier if you stay in the state of boredom. And then it becomes okay again. Unsurprisingly, humans were able to do life without phones prior to them being a thing. And we'll then guide them. They cook, they eat, and then maybe they watch TV. With the TV, I really don't think the TV is as significant as a problem as all the other aspects of technology. I think it's not a quick scrolling at least you're engaging in a storytelling or something slower hopefully right for sure and we have these simple questions when people are going through the experiences these interactive questions when we ask people whether they watched tv and scrolled at the same time the night before we have a 96 yes rate to that question wow so the vast majority of society scrolls and watches tv and then you explore why that is boring now tv is so boring it's too slow so it's like let me scroll and watch yeah like sitting there and just watching netflix or like i watched gladiator the movie the other day that's a great yes good movie my girlfriend had never seen gladiator gladiates are really well you watched the first one or the second one first one we haven't seen the new one yet first one as you'll see if you observe the difference between the new one that comes out the new one will be dopamine carnage compared in comparison slower storytelling yeah the old one yeah and we're watching and you're kind of sitting there and you actually are a bit bored while you're watching a film and back in the day if you went back to the 70s that would have been like hyper dopamine stimulation but this is how the baselines are changing over time because of the overstimulation like this is too slow of a movie where like most people it's their top 10 movie of all time it's like and uh we just need to become comfortable with that experience so this chemical can restore itself effectively and again physical separation is important if you're with other people they've got a partner or kids anyone it's unbelievably important that they also participate in the phone fast and there's this really interesting area of neuroscience about anticipatory dopamine which is basically the concept that your dopamine will rise simply at the thought of accessing dopamine not just when you engage with it 10 3 and 8 yeah and that's pretty i get the i get the big answers i know when's my hit coming and like if you're like you know you're sitting at a restaurant with your wife and you're eating some food and then they take out their phones check it quickly before you've even thought yours is boom straight in the hand and effectively your brain has seen their dopamine rise experienced anticipation then it's driven you into action towards the same experience of dopamine so it's very important like if you're going to sit on the sofa and not be on it they have to not be on it as well because the battle is too hard to fight what is the benefit of having strategic boredom time every single day we really want as a society high baseline dopamine it's so important that we all every day are waking up and we're generating a ton of this chemical it leads to you just living your best experience of life you possibly can in terms of everything your ability to cook and exercise and work and connect and have sex and just be a thriving modern human all of us are basically waking up with low baseline dopamine and therefore it is not the greatest experience of life humanity can have and if we do begin to get this chemical back into balance that's what's going to be the end product so when you have all these different actions coming into play ultimately you're just looking at do i want to absolutely love my experience of life or do i want it to feel like pretty cool like pretty average medium and it's like if you can experience like your life feeling really good and i've had this like all of this guidance doesn't come from a neuroscientist that thinks dopamine is cool it comes from an addict that lived a pretty shit experience alive for like 10 years and i just wasn't that happy i wasn't thriving in my work my food wasn't good my exercise wasn't good dating wasn't good everything was off my ability to like feel connected to my family and contribute to my family everything felt misaligned and ultimately getting dopamine in check just changed all of that it completely change the experience i'm having and we all get this period of time where we get to be a human it would be nice if we can thrive throughout that time so you think if people learn how to change their dopamine they can change their life 100 i actually believe it's the most important thing society does really definitely focusing on dopamine yeah and having a healthy balance of it having a healthy balance of it and learning step away as frequently as we can from the quick stuff move towards the slow stuff and then you obviously have these other neurochemicals oxytocin and serotonin and endorphins these are absolutely pivotal to society thriving but the big issue we have right now is we've become dopamine driven where we're all only in the pursuit of either pleasure or also success is dopamine addiction as well we're in the pursuit of that society used to live its life very in the pursuit of oxytocin serotonin and endorphins now we've shifted it so if dopamine gets in check you then open this door and it's like cool how else can i optimize my neurochemistry.

34:40So as a neuroscientist, then what is the greatest morning routine to get our dopamine in check? Okay. So the most important aspect is it starts with the night before with where you charge your phone. You can't charge your phone by your head. It's the most fundamental change society has to make with the dopamine. And if it has to be in the room for an alarm, it charges the other side of the room and you get out of bed to turn it off. Ideally, you get yourself an alarm clock you get on for like two pounds on amazon or you get yourself a nice one for christmas whatever it might be but we need an alarm clock and we need to wake up and not go into quick dopamine i would say we need an absolute minimum of 15 minutes before we see a phone screen ideally i would push that towards the morning yeah i don't think you can see a phone within 15 minutes even this morning like i woke up i was pretty jet-lagged i woke up at like 4 a.m today and it was obviously very tempting oh i wonder what's going on in the world social media and we got the whole presidential election style.

35:36I was curious to have a look at how that was going and I was like no because this is the day I want to be thriving. I've got an important podcast today. If I go into my phone I'm disrupting the capacity for that moment to happen. So the first thing is 15 minutes minimum, 30 minutes ideally. You want to wake up and you want to immediately take action. You want to start doing something that's effortful. So not only are you not spiking and crashing it and living in that world which is what most of us live in but you're actually going in the opposite direction and dopamine is on the rise and that would involve you wake up you immediately walk to the bathroom and you go to the bathroom after you've been to the bathroom if you if you're sitting there and you're going to the toilet you've got to have a book in there to entertain you if you're going to potentially go on your phone then you're engaging in effortful reading and that's much much better books are way better for our dopamine because they're challenging not easy then use flash cold water on your face you brush your teeth and you brush your teeth properly and then you walk back to your bedroom and you make your bed so very simply you wake, you don't go on your phone, you go to the bathroom, you brush your teeth, you splash cold water on your face and you make your bed.

36:35You've experienced a drastically different situation from a neurochemistry point of view. Your dopamine is climbing fast and hard and then whatever else you want to do that morning, maybe it's that you want to get out and go for a walk, maybe you've got to make your kids breakfast, maybe you've got to start your working day. You're starting from a higher baseline dopamine state which is when you're going to perform at a really high level with whatever action you're wanting to take. Rather than climbing out of low dopamine and finding everything annoying and feeling irritated and feeling flat it's drastically different wow okay so do something effortful will actually help your dopamine levels in the morning definitely as opposed to something like gives you quick dopamine right away it's central you imagine imagine waking up as a hunter gatherer how much effort they immediately engage with instantly they didn't just go and chill they would have just been up get the fire going so we've got warmth who's going out for the food who's rebuilding the shelter who's looking after the kids like it would have just been wake and go every single day.

37:29And some people come through our dose experience and they say this is a bit like military training, like waking up, making my bed. And I honestly believe like we are living in a world where we've got to get more disciplined. I don't think a sort of balance, moderation, sometimes phone, I don't think that works in the world we have now. A hundred years ago, moderation might've been great with food and all that sort of stuff. I think we're living in a world where we do have to become a more disciplined species if we want to feel our best. Yeah. And I think it's something that I've been doing for a long time.

37:55And I noticed you did in your book, which I really like, is at the beginning of every chapter, it's kind of like you have an assessment from one to 10. And I always ask this scale, from one to 10, how much joy, fulfillment, happiness, peace are you feeling right now? If it's a five, you've got to evaluate every area of your life that's causing you to feel under an eight. Now, why am I at a lower level energies? Why do I feel depression? Why do I feel sadness? Why do I feel hurt, anxious, scared? Why? You have to look at that. You have to take an assessment, a personal assessment, and start saying, okay, well, let me look at every part of my day.