TJ Power
Appearances
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Do you feel like your attention span is really strong? Do you feel very consistently motivated? Do you have great relationships? If any of the answers are you're not thriving, the brain chemistry is your answer. And pursuing a life where you intentionally boost these is going to lead you towards a life where you feel exceptionally good a lot of the time.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
For sure. And this is where, this is the most important factor. So it's good we've come to this idea. Four... All of humanity's evolution, dopamine was the primary chemical we were in the pursuit of because we would get dopamine hits off the main things that were keeping us alive.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
So if we successfully stumbled across some fruit or if we caught an animal or if we built shelter or if we started a fire, these things that were essential for our survival that were a lot of effort to attain would create dopamine in our brain, they create satisfaction and they would help humanity survive. Without dopamine in the human brain, there would be no humans.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
It drove us to do all these actions. In the modern world, Maybe about 500 to 1,000 years ago, we figured out how to hack dopamine for the first time with things like alcohol and tobacco. Those are the first sort of things that could create a very rapid stimulation of dopamine in an unnatural way. These were concepts that weren't from the natural world.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
They were modern creations, especially as we began to harness them and chemically them more and more. And then we began inventing more stuff, pornography. We also invented social media, which is huge. And these kind of things overstimulate dopamine. They create this rapid increase in the chemical. And because of that rapid increase, we effectively burn out the dopamine engine.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Like if you got in a manual car and you didn't put it into gear and then you just rev the engine every day, eventually you would burn that engine out and it would break. That's exactly what we're doing with the overstimulation of dopamine through things like social media or alcohol or sugar or pornography. And that's then causing what we call low dopamine levels.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And if ever in your life you're in a state where you feel kind of apathetic, you can't be bothered to do anything, that you might be sitting on the sofa scrolling your phone for a while, and then even the thought of getting up and going and making your dinner feels like effort, that's because your dopamine level is low.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, often nowadays, the phone is like the primary factor. And as we've seen the phone grow in popularity and how much humans spend their time on it, how every generation, whether it's young teenagers that people worry about or when I was in the coffee shop earlier, I saw a couple that must be in their 70s that didn't say a word to each other for 20 minutes whilst they both rolled their phones.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
The phone is disrupting all generations in humanity because of the way in which it stimulates our dopamine. We're so hooked. on interacting with it.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, laughter is magic. Laughter actually really is great for our endorphin system, especially if you really laugh. Like if you're really finding something funny and it almost is like hurting your stomach level funny, that's magic for endorphins, which provides an amazing de-stressing effect on our brain. It calms our brain a lot. Music as well. Music is really powerful.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
As long as you're not changing song very regularly. In the modern world, people are like clicking next song every like 20 seconds. So it's not as calming for the brain, but especially back in the day of cassette players and putting the, I don't even know what it was called when you put like a disc on there and it's like a nice proper old method of listening to music.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
That sort of stuff would have been great for the brain.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
It's very rare to do too much of it.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I mean, you could choose to only do one of the, if you fell in love with someone and you decided you're just going to lie in bed and sleep together for 10 hours a day, every single day, you'd certainly get a lot of oxytocin, but the other chemicals would begin to reduce because you'd stop working and getting dopamine from hard work and stop going outside and getting serotonin and so on. So
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
You technically could, but it's unlikely in the modern world that you're going to overdo one of these chemicals. The vast majority of the challenge we're facing is that we're completely hooked on dopamine. So we're spending a lot of our time centering our life around when am I going to be on my phone? When am I going to watch Netflix? When am I going to have my next drink of alcohol?
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
When am I going to have my next sugary meal? Not only is that overstimulating dopamine, it's creating a life where the prioritization of really close, intimate relationships and hiking outside in nature and listening to music and singing songs and these key actions humans need, they're going lower on the prioritization list.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
100%. It is hard to break these addictions. And this whole framework, I've not built this as just like a neuroscientist. I think, oh, everyone should be healthy. I was in an extremely unhealthy lifestyle with alcohol and partying and pornography and social media. I just grew up as a teenager. That's what everyone around me was doing. And I thought, well, that's the life you live.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Then I went to really study this and got deep into the research behind it. And I was like, wow, I'm completely breaking my brain chemistry. And that's no wonder that I'm there for overthinking things and struggling with my mood and sometimes feeling depressed and so on. And I thought it was just because of the life events I was going through this grief that I was going through.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I came to discover that these addictions like needed to be broken and they can be broken. But it's just like, how much do you want to feel good? You have to start asking yourself that question. I made that decision in my life that I was like, I actually really want to feel good. I want to energetically feel good. I want to be able to exercise regularly. I want to feel confident.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I want to be able to really nail my career and build an awesome career. And some of the addictions have to be sacrificed in order to attain a life that you really love.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Depending on the intensity of the addiction. For me, with alcohol, for example, I loved drinking alcohol too much for alcohol to remain a key part of my life. So I had to let go of alcohol. If you are someone that... worked all week and had a great week and then on a Friday night had a glass of red wine, then that's fine. That's not going to do any damage to your experience of life.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
It might enhance your experience of life whilst you have that glass of red wine. If you're someone that really over consumes different things, it would be important to step away from them.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I hold the perspective that the phone is the most significant challenge facing our world today. And that varies across generations how much people believe that is the case. The only real evidence I would suggest it really is the case is that mental health has rapidly, rapidly changed since phones became massive, specifically smartphones and social media.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
We always had the alcohol and the cigarettes and the pornography, but we didn't have the phone. And I think every single human in the world could benefit so much from waking up
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
and not having their phone in their bedroom, not having a charging in their bedroom, waking up, going to the bathroom, splashing cold water on their face, brushing their teeth, maybe having their shower if you have a shower in the morning and getting your day going, creating momentum for your day before you see a single notification from the phone.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
We've done this process, as I say, with over 50,000 people, and it's ridiculous what happens to things like depression and their anxiety, how motivated someone becomes. just by simply not going on to that device when you wake up.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I like those questions, mate. I do lots of podcasts, and they were really cool. They were fun.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
These chemicals evolve within the human brain over our hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. And each of them has a specific function. Dopamine basically drives all our motivation. Oxytocin connects us together. Serotonin lifts our mood and our energy levels. And then endorphins can de-stress our brain.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, I mean, they're good things to have. And these chemicals were once thriving when we were living in a more ancestor type lifestyle of waking up, living outdoors, loads of light, hunting, hard physical work, natural food. They were really designed for that experience of life. And a lot of us are experiencing low levels of these chemicals in the modern world.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And that's causing a lot of the mental difficulties we struggle with.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, so there is a genetic component to how much your brain will produce of each of these chemicals. Each chemical has what we call a baseline. So you'd have, for example, your dopamine baseline, which is in any given moment, how much dopamine can your brain generate? However, in our modern world, behavior itself can have a massive impact on each of these chemicals.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Say, for example, with dopamine, if you were sitting doing nothing, your dopamine would stay at a pretty stagnant level. If you pulled out your phone and opened a social media feed and started watching videos, your dopamine would rise very, very rapidly. That, for example, is an example of quick dopamine. Then we'd also have other examples of things like slow dopamine, which you would get from,
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
cleaning your home for 30 minutes, that would be slow dopamine. So there's different behaviors that will impact these chemicals.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
So we're in direct control of where these chemicals are at with each of the behaviors. we have if you take oxytocin for example that second chemical whenever you come in physical contact with a human so if you hug your kids or your partner for example immediately in that moment oxytocin begins to increase creates feelings of love and connection and safety in your body
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
serotonin something like when you eat natural foods fruits meats veg these kind of foods serotonin increases and there's a good lasting impact of that benefit you'll have an hour or so a few hours where the chemical will rise if you then went through a prolonged period where you weren't stimulating the chemical it'd begin to fall back to baseline but is the idea that you would want to deliberately impact these levels or is the idea to just lead a healthy life and these things take care of themselves
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
If I was chatting with a hunter-gatherer, they would have to not even think at all about whether these chemicals were high. It's really important to consider this hunter-gatherer idea because for 99.9% of human history, that's what our brain did. It's a very small percentage of time that we've all sat inside and played on computers and phones.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
and if you looked at their lifestyle the chemicals were always thriving so they'd never have to intentionally make sure they boosted them the modern lifestyle where we wake up we spend all of our time inside pretty much we spend a lot of time isolated our diets can be quite poor we've had it very sedentary that lifestyle is leading us to now have to become much more conscious of how are we intentionally boosting these chemicals
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
As you said, like if you live a healthy lifestyle, you are going to be doing a lot of actions that can boost them, but you still may be missing some key components. Someone might be really good with their exercise and food and sleep, but they might also be spending five hours a day scrolling social media. So they, for example, could also take some action towards boosting them.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I would ask yourself the question, do you feel like you're really thriving as a human being right now? Like, do you feel like your attention span is really strong? Do you feel very consistently motivated throughout the day? Do you have great relationships? Do you have great sleep? Do you have good energy levels or really positive mood? And if any of those questions are,
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Now, sometimes I feel really low motivation and my concentration isn't as good as it used to be. And I do have trouble in my relationships where I do feel tired quite often. If any of the answers are you're not thriving, the brain chemistry is your answer to that question.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And pursuing a life where you intentionally boost these is going to lead you towards a life where you feel exceptionally good a lot of the time.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, that's a good question. It's becoming really familiar with what each chemical would feel like. So if I ask you the question, what is an activity or task that you've done in the last week that's made you feel really satisfied? Is there any activity that comes to mind that created the emotion of satisfaction for you? Well, exercise does that for me. Yeah.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
So you got like a good feeling of satisfaction. So that if you felt satisfaction, that means dopamine increase. And that's a good win. Some people might get satisfaction from arts. They might get it from cleaning. They might get it from sport. They might get it from whatever it may be. So dopamine would be you feel satisfied.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And if you just look at the other side of dopamine, what we call quick dopamine, when you scroll your phone or you drink alcohol or you eat sugar, it doesn't actually create a feeling of satisfaction. It creates a feeling of I really want more, which is the part of the difficulty with dopamine.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
With oxytocin, if you had a moment where you felt loads of love in your body, like a real peace, content, loving feeling as a result of like a relationship moment with a kid or a family member, that would mean oxytocin was up. If your mood just felt quite like happy and light and positive, that would be serotonin.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And then the endorphins is a very powerful euphoric feeling which can come from real feelings.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
hardcore exercise so if you for example might have heard of runner's high where someone runs for a prolonged period of time and gets a very euphoric almost drug-like experience from it that would be endorphins you've got satisfaction love positive mood or proper euphoria well can we run through the four and just like an example of what you could do to increase them given that you identify as having maybe low levels of any one of them
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, so with the dopamine, I would say if I could pick two things that would be really powerful for your dopamine levels, one would be what we call phone fasting. Fasting being the term of taking a prolonged break from something. We would really recommend phone fasting for the first 30 minutes of your day when you wake up.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
I run a research lab called Dose Lab, and we see in our research that that's insanely beneficial for the brain. So you phone fast for 30 minutes in the morning. and 60 minutes in the evening. And that means physical separation from your phone where you don't see it once for those periods.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
The other thing for dopamine that's amazing is what we call flow state, which is where you get into a really deep state of concentration on a task. If I was to ask you the question, like, have you done a task recently, maybe a working task, maybe a task in your home that's really deeply focused your brain,
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
And is there any one aspect of the work that you find the most enjoyment in, you get the most into focus?
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Yeah, the focus. Yeah. Yeah, so this, for example, may be your flow state, which is podcasting. And that would make sense if that's your career. That would make sense that podcasts would be your flow state. And everyone has something that is their flow state, something they intrinsically are good at and their brain really likes to focus on.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
When we focus for longer than 15 to 20 minutes on just one thing. So that would mean like, just like right now, you and I aren't also going on our iMessage or our email or something that would take us out of flow state.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
oxytocin physical touch is a really good one whether that's romantic physical touch or friendly friends and family increasing the quantity of interaction with humans and also pets so that's hugging humans interacting and cuddling pets is really good for oxytocin The other one for oxytocin is really thinking about how often you make a contribution to somebody else's life.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
We've all had that experience of doing something kind for someone and then thinking, oh, I feel quite good now that I've helped that person out with whatever it may be or made someone dinner or pick someone up from somewhere or whatever it might be. Oxytocin is driving you to contribute. So you've got touch and contribution. Serotonin, natural environments, absolutely unreal.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
There's this incredible researcher called King Lee in Japan who's done this whole research into forest bathing and what we call serum serotonin levels. And when humans are in forests, you build tons and tons of serotonin. So if you can ever get into a forest, that would be awesome. The other one for serotonin is your food.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
If you can eat single ingredient foods, meaning steak, chicken, fish, eggs, yogurt, fruits, nuts, anything that just came from the jungle, basically, and has been here for hundreds of thousands of years, as opposed to ultra processed foods, that'd be great in nature and gut health. And then the final one, endorphins, either exercising hard, like you mentioned earlier, or singing music out loud.
Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Those are two methods that are really good. Oh, not my singing. It doesn't matter whether it's good or bad quality. I'm sure there's been a time in your life, maybe you're at like a bar or something and you were drinking and you had a good sing and you probably felt quite good when you were doing it.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
yes for sure it will make you number and number 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 you find yourself in a nice experience of having sex
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
pornography 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 would 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 like fulfilling experience
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
This is interesting. Humans have had access to these quick dopaminergic behaviors for about one or 200 years, the first being sort of alcohol and cigarettes.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But if we look at the frequency of engagement with that behavior, we're going to cause the greatest dopamine disruption. 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But I think for a lot of people, the domino that needs to fall is significant separation from social media.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's more of a shared experience. 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Whereas pornography is very easy to hide. And therefore, when I, a number of years ago, maybe...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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 be able to 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
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But in terms of the elevation in dopamine, it's absolutely insane. And 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I think 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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 to go into like a deeper philosophical spiritual idea of
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
What 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?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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 then doing that for three hours until you got some fire like it was hard
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And just like dopamine evolved as 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 our prospering as a species. And then if you look...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Rather than having to look on Instagram at a list of what's good for my dopamine and 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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, or 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I definitely don't think people feel that much remorse or guilt or shame for engaging with it. It's definitely a very normalised behaviour, just like it's normal to get super drunk. 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 or generation to generation, how people thought about it. Certainly...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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. It's also evolving in terms of virtual reality is going to create a very difficult experience. I can't even imagine what that will do to dopamine. And all of that lane is becoming faster and faster.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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 would be hell. I shouldn't even give them that idea. Don't give them that idea. My goodness, man. And I believe the only path to coming away from it is very, very deeply observing how it's actually impacting your life.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Because what happens with all this dopamine stuff is you just think, I feel okay. Maybe you do struggle feeling depressed or anxious, and then you really need to start considering 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And with all the different, particularly men that engage with this, but women do too, that we guide,
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
they come away from it for a week they say okay seven days i'm just not gonna watch porn and they're like uneasy as to whether that's even gonna 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
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's very easy to go into the end of the day looking at your calendar and task list 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So the first thing, quick reflection, very simple way to do that would literally just be to look back at your tasks list or look back at your calendar and think, okay, cool, I've done this, 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
That could be walking. Yeah, if it's still light in the summer sort of months, go into nature, have a period of that. Could 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Different screen. And I think if you can have a period, so that could be gym, it could be for a walk. It might be that you just need to go like supermarket shopping.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
For sure. And then we basically try and get people to, they come back from that activity and 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So there's prolonged periods of time away from the phone so that this dopamine system can regenerate, so that 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 to you and flipping it over. That's not a fact. That just does not work.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
We're talking to someone and that even might be boring now because we're so in stimulation all day. Gosh. 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But you do quickly surpass what we call the boredom barrier if you stay in the state of boredom and then it becomes OK 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
With the TV, I really don't think the TV is as significant as a problem as all the other aspects of technology.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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. TV is boring now.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Like sitting there and just watching Netflix. Or like I watched Gladiator, the movie the other day. That's a great movie. My girlfriend had never seen Gladiator. Gladiator is a really good film. Oh, you watched the first one or the second one? First one. We haven't seen the new one yet. Oh, the first one.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
As you'll see, if you observe the difference between the new one that comes out, the new one will be dopamine carnage in comparison. Slower storytelling of the old one. Yeah. And we're watching it 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But this is how the baselines are changing over time because of the overstimulation.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And 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, like you've got a partner or kids or anyone, it's unbelievably important that they also participate in the phone fast.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah. I get the big anticipation. 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, and before you've even thought, yours is boom, straight in the hand.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And effectively, your brain has seen their dopamine rise, experienced anticipation, and then it's driven you into action towards the same experience of dopamine. Wow. 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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 of life 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Everything was off. My ability to 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 changed 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I actually believe it's the most important thing society does. Really? Definitely.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And having a healthy balance of it. Having a healthy balance of it and learning to 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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. And 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So if dopamine gets in check, you then open this door and it's like, cool, how else can I optimize my neurochemistry?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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 size he 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
You get off 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 30 minutes. In the morning. Yeah. I don't think you can see a phone within 15 minutes.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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. We got the whole presidential election style. I 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
After you've been to the bathroom, 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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. You've experienced a drastically different situation from a neurochemistry point of view.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Your dopamine is climbing fast and hard. And then whatever else you wanna do that morning, maybe it's that you wanna get out and go for a walk. Maybe you've gotta make your kids breakfast. Maybe you've gotta start your working day. You're starting from a higher baseline dopamine state, which is when you're gonna perform at a really high level with whatever action you're wanting to take.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Rather than climbing out of low dopamine and finding everything annoying and feeling irritated and feeling flat, it's drastically different.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Definitely.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's central. Imagine waking up as a hunter-gatherer, how much effort they immediately engage with. Instantly. 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And 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, sometimes... I don't think that works in the world we have now.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
A hundred years ago, moderation might have 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Nice.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And you see with those that are genetically born with ADHD that they might have a lower production of dopamine within their brain.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It is so essential. And I think Just as you and I really believe in how important it is to be in service to people in our world, like contribution is very, very important. It also creates this stimulation of oxytocin, this love hormone within our brain when we serve others. We also have the capacity to contribute and serve ourself. And that is exactly what you're doing.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
You're in service to yourself. And it isn't actually serving yourself by going straight in the phone when we wake up. And just as I explained earlier with how clever our dopamine is at reinforcing the positive action, it's going to send us a message saying, this isn't what I want. Like, I'm a body here and I want to be thriving. I want my hormones to be calm.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
so 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 are also exhibiting it as a result of the altered modern lifestyle
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I want my whole body to be in a good stay. And when you live that lifestyle that you just described, your brain is going to send you a great message saying, please continue this path. And then your happiness rises. And we're, as a society right now, very much in the pursuit of pleasure, not happiness. And that is the pursuit of happiness. The alternative option is the pursuit of pleasure.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And pleasure is not the best life.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It feels good at the time. It feels good. It's very addictive.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Extremely hard. I had to go, yeah, big periods of abstinence. When I was at university, I got so into this pleasure loop of smoking cigarettes and drinking and everything, basically. And when I was about 22 years old, I was thinking, there's no way I'm going to live a life that I'm really happy experiencing with this. And I knew that my grandpa lived in...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
this like natural setting, they had a house with a garden and stuff like that. And I didn't grow up, I grew up more like a bit more town life. And I took myself there and I spent like 90 days at this house living like a monk basically, because I was like, I have to somehow get off this stuff. And very quickly I discovered there is a different thing that you can be in the pursuit of.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
You can be in the pursuit of a pleasureful experience of a really healthy life. Like you can start really loving like the nature walks and the hiking and the cooking and just the getting really dialed in to optimization. And if you are someone that's super addicted to all the unhealthy dopamine, I really think the only route is addiction towards the healthier pursuit of life.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah. And it doesn't mean it has to be unhealthy with that lane, but it needs like the big thing with addiction, like my favorite definition of addiction is the progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And if you look at when you're in a period of addiction, like if you look at alcoholism, eventually your family don't make you happy and your work doesn't make you happy, exercise doesn't, but the alcohol brings you the pleasure. And it's this narrowing of what is the pursuit of pleasure for you in your life.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And then the other side of this, the good life being the progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. And rather than like, for me, I had alcohol and pornography and cigarettes being like really driving things of what created pleasure for my brain. Then it suddenly became this fast array of nature and exercise and food and social and contribution and work and so on.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And suddenly when I had a variety of things that were giving me the experience of happiness, the kind of deep need I had for the quick stuff began to fade. And this thing was actually fulfilling me.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I think the
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Addiction to kind of success with work is quite tricky to manage I have been so thrilled over these last few years as to how things have gone with dose and I Really am doing this from a place of like I just want people to be able to have a great experience of their life But then you build pressure around the system as I'm sure you've experienced where you suddenly have a team to fund and all that kind of stuff and I feel
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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 that we begin to get it in check and help these people to thrive.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
kind of deeper weight to carry as to like social media needs to always be thriving, business needs to always be thriving. And then I can get quite hooked on the pursuit of that dopamine as well. And things like followers, it taps into like your ego and things like that as well.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So I think managing kind of like the financial and social media side of this life I'm now in is definitely difficult to manage.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's really interesting in these moments because as I started to do more and more of these podcasts and these conversations, whenever I had a question that I think, what is the answer to that question? I've always thought I have to just ask the most truthful thing in my being, not the thing that I think would be the right thing to say. Yes. You got to be honest.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
If I am honest, a conversation and a connection with God is actually the thing that's began to help me in those moments. And I didn't grow up with a Christian family. I didn't grow up going to church. I basically have had no religion in my life, my entire experience of life. And When things weren't going to plan, I found that like prayer was really good.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Like I have this morning routine where I have this really specific bench that I always like to walk to in the morning. No phone involved, of course. And I walk there and for a lot of the time, my practice there was to sit down and do like a breathing process to calm my nervous system and some gratitude and some like kind of accomplishment celebration stuff for myself talk.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And I had this experience. I was doing this every day for like three or four years. And then with some various things that have happened, life stuff and work stuff, I added praying into that moment. And I found this conversation of like, thank you for all I have and promising my life to serving the world and things like that.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I found it to be very powerful in calming my moments of fear effectively in that experience and created this conversation trust in things are going to go okay so when i'm in those deep states of fear my mind race i have a very overthinking mind where i just rapidly go into worst case scenario and i found really like a conversation with god in those moments is the best thing to calm you down
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
This is where things get so fascinating because with that new... I would say I started this prayer maybe a year ago. I then, about four or five months ago, began going to church for the first time in my life. I haven't even told anyone this. And on Sundays, I'll go to church and I'll spend like an hour in there. And... my natural kind of inquisitive brain of like the neuroscience side of things.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's like observing the whole experience of the prayer and the gratitude and the contribution to one another and the connection and the singing. And I'm thinking this is like Dose. This is a lot of actions that we're kind of promoting in the modern world, but just through a different lens. And I've been sitting in there thinking this is the original mental health therapy, basically.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Like this is obviously the original model that really helped people's minds to thrive. And I think what's interesting in the church environment, when you look at a relationship with God, that is putting you more in the pursuit of oxytocin as an experience of life. It's a very oxytocin dominant moment in the church.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's like this thanking to God is this contribution to everyone, like everyone kind of
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
shakes their hands says peace be with you and connects with one another it's this singing it's this like celebration of what has been and that is the pursuit of oxytocin and love and i basically believe that for much of the experience of humanity oxytocin was the driving chemical it was how does this group prosper how does this group survive and dopamine was required in our brain to make sure we were giving the resources to the group but i think we are in the pursuit of others and i think nowadays a lot of us are in the pursuit of serving ourself basically it's
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
How do I make myself feel good all the time? My phone, alcohol, sugar, all this stuff. And I think when I'm sitting in church, I'm thinking, wow, this is not about me anymore. This is about a group and God. And that feels like a much better place for the human brain. It feels like it's stepping you out of your own problems.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Definitely. Effectively, dopamine is about taking away the overstimulation and getting it back into natural stimulation. And then with the other ones, we haven't necessarily learned how to hack them like we have with dopamine, but they're very low as a result of our lifestyle. All of those three, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, are underproducing themselves. So we get them boosted.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Dopamine equals motivation. So that's just completely driving your ability to take action in your life.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Connection.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Energy.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
De-stress. It effectively has evolved to de-stress our brain.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
They wouldn't. It's an interesting idea. Like would phone fasting serve the other chemicals? So it's like, yes, it definitely is serving dopamine coming away from any dopamine hits from the phone. So that's definitely serving dopamine. But then if you were just to sit in your bed and do nothing in your phone fast and meditate, that would stay in quite a dopamine type world.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But if you were to, during your phone fast, cook and serve your family when cooking and socialize with them, or if you go out and exercise or whatever it might be, then the other chemicals are going to rise. So effectively, I think dopamine is largely distracting us from pursuing the other chemicals.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
If you step away from a lot of the quick dopamine, naturally, just as a human being, you're going to think, oh, I need to entertain myself because I'm bored. And then the other actions are going to cause a rise in the other ones.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
What is the- They've basically evolved to de-stress our brain. If ever we were in a situation where we were in extreme physical and psychological danger, like we were under threat of seeing an animal and it began to chase us, we were forced into a moment of extreme physical exertion to try and survive that situation.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
There is for sure. And this is where it gets really fascinating. I do a lot of events around schools and we have them a lot with ADHD. And I also grew up as a young guy with ADHD without necessarily knowing it. It wasn't diagnosed as frequently back then.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
and it'd obviously be very annoying in that moment if one your brain was like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die and if it was two also experiencing like a stitch and stuff like that and endorphins has this incredible capacity to just eliminate the stress from our mind and take pain out of our physiology as well in order to help us survive in that moment where we're no longer running away from bears which is great we are still stressed as hell and in moments where you feel extremely stressed out endorphins can be an incredible response and action that builds endorphins is a really good way to respond to it
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Because it's going to release in your brain and your brain's going to settle itself.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah, I think stress is a very interesting topic and I do want to touch on the laughter because
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
stress is like very widely researched and cortisol this other hormone is also very impactful and a lot of the work we look at in stress is about calming the body down and there is so much truth in that our heart rates are racing in the modern world and having breathing practices and nature and good sleep and everything is very important for calming our stress endorphins is taking a slightly different lane on that idea if we look evolutionarily
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
We never really experienced stress for 300,000 years that wasn't accompanied with a physical action immediately after it. So if we were super stressed because we were starving, food was the only thing that was going to settle that stress. Hunting, getting up and moving. Getting up and moving. And if we were in some kind of physical danger from a human or an animal or...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Our environment was under threat, whatever it may be. Physical action always was accompanying the stress to calm us back down. And I think for me, I do feel stressed by life. Life can be stressful for sure. And in stressful moments, I've done a lot of the breathing stuff, which I think is great, breathing and sleep and so on.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But I actually think the most useful thing is utilizing physical action first. And then after the physical action, chilling out and slowing down is even easier because you've kind of completely settled the system. But I think a lot of us just feel stressed and we're like, I feel really stressed. So I need an evening on the sofa with my glass of wine and the TV show.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
That is not the optimal way to recover. The optimal way would be getting to a challenging physical experience effectively first. Then chill out for sure and have an early night. For sure. And the laughter side of things, we, as they're going through with the dose lab, they are... beginning to assess all these different metrics.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And we have been so unbelievably surprised at how much people rate, how much laughter they have in their life. And as they're going through it, they get asked this question, how much do you like laughing? One to 10. And we have a 9.3 average on this question. Unsurprisingly, humans like laughing. Few people click A, most people click 10.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Then they get asked the question, how frequently do you laugh from one to 10? And we have an average at 5.6. So there's this like massive disparity between how much we like it and how much is actually occurring. And as these programs evolve with people, people have this real realization of like, wow, I'm living a very isolated lack of laughter lifestyle.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Like I'm spending a huge amount of time whereby my social stimulation is being partially satisfied by watching people socialize on my phone. And I'm not actually there socializing and being in that experience and maybe a little chuckle at some like dog jumping off a wall or something. There's that little, but there's not like proper physical laughter, which is what the endorphins need to release.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And, people then have this awareness of like, wow, I need to get myself into what we call laughter environments. And they literally plan out, okay, when are my three laughter environments this week? Is it a FaceTime with my daughter? And is it going for like a walk with this particular person? A comedy show. We really need laughter. We're underestimating how much we're lacking it.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And it's very clear. Like we all know that laughter is one of the greatest experiences of the human there is out of everything. Healing. Yeah. And when we went into the research, as I was going through that, I...
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
over the last few years selected these 20 actions based on what had the most research evidence behind it in order to boost the chemicals because that was the most simple formula to take and then i could pick the 20 behaviors when i was writing a chapter for example flow state which is all about deep concentration there is obviously like crazy amounts of stuff on your attention span big widely researched area if you look at laughter versus attention spans there is significantly less work going into laughter
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And I then had the task of I need to get an entire chapter out of this experience of laughter. So I went really deep into that world. And it is so clear that human beings that laugh significantly more and significantly more frequently are having a better experience of life. And we need to become conscious of it. We need to be more social.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yes, at TJ Power on Instagram. Empower is my name. As we shared earlier, that is actually my real name. It's not a stage name. And, uh, the way in which you can engage with dose and learn it is, uh, the dose lab.com, the dose lab.com. Okay.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It would be to... Every single week, spend a prolonged period of time in nature completely without a phone. Ideally, the phone is at home or if it has to be with you for safety, it's in a bag and it's on airplane. So that'd be one thing. Prolonged period of time in nature, no phone. The second one would be
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
To ensure each day your day is centered around how your actions will serve others rather than how are they serving yourself and your pleasure. And the third one would be to put the people around you in your life at the center of your mind to make sure that every single day you are conscious of how those people are.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
These are your direct closest connections, your girlfriends and boyfriends and wives and husbands and kids and so on. And to have like a very conscious thing in your life as to are these people's experience of life rising as a result of how I'm interacting with them and teaching them and learning from them and so on?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
If 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Or are they creating greater difficulty as a result of me promoting unhealthy things within their lives? So I'd say prolonged nature, constant service to humanity, and a real conscious aspect of are you educating and serving the people that you love?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
I think living a disciplined life, living a really disciplined life where you're feeling incredibly proud of each action you take. I watched a great movie recently, The Last Samurai, which is that old movie.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Well, it was slower paced and I'm in the pursuit of slow. Good movie. And I was watching, he goes to the samurai and he visits that Japanese village. And they're all so deeply in the pursuit of hyper-discipline from the moment they wake. And I so deeply believe that the path to us feeling our happiness is very much rooted in how much discipline we show to ourselves.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
And I believe greatness will come if you live a disciplined life.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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. It definitely comes with a lot of difficulty. If you find something to isolate on, you can really, really thrive.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So it makes sense that naturally there would be different things. We would be more 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 at the beginning. It's only that it has to interest you in some way.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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. And 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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?
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Your slides are beautiful. I saw them.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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 was something I liked and 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
But you just have to realize that you don't have to be good at something straight away.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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 School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Quasi of sunlight we get, the amount of exercise we do, it creates a really sedentary lifestyle and so on. So there's downstream effects. But I would say if you niched on someone creating extremely healthy relationship with social media, there would then be a big knock-on effect on their mood and energy and so on.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
One way you reduce significantly the frequency of engagement, not completely getting rid of it. You can do that. 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,
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Yeah, 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. Wow.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
When you're looking at social media, just going on it once or twice, 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
On social media or on your phone? Opening the phone. But then if you look at the first app, it's 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
So Instagram is 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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. Wow, three times a day.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's like, yeah, 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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
It's really nice to experience a high amount of reward for something. Our brain wants really significant rewards.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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 sports matches. Our brain wants those real elevations of yes, life is going to plan, life is going well.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
the 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
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.
The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
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.