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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.