The School of Greatness
Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus
Wed, 5 Mar 2025
I'm going on tour! Come see The School of Greatness LIVE in person!Get my new book Make Money Easy here!Prepare to completely rethink your relationship with technology as neuroscientist TJ Power reveals the shocking truth about what's happening to our brains in the digital age. Drawing from his groundbreaking research and personal struggle with addiction, TJ explains how our modern environment is creating an epidemic of dopamine dysfunction that's sabotaging our ability to focus, feel joy, and connect meaningfully with others. The conversation explores the fascinating evolutionary mismatch between our hunter-gatherer brains and our modern digital environment, with TJ offering a compelling reframe of ADHD as a potential superpower when properly channeled. Whether you're fighting distractions, battling mood swings, or simply feeling numb despite constant stimulation, this episode delivers practical, science-backed strategies to reclaim your focus, energy, and capacity for genuine happiness through what TJ calls "The Dose Effect" – a revolutionary approach to balancing your brain's essential neurochemicals.Buy TJ’s Book The Dose EffectIn this episode you will learn:Why constantly checking your phone (140-170 times daily for most people) is more damaging to your brain than alcohol or other addictionsThe counterintuitive reason people with ADHD often become exceptional performers when they find their passionHow implementing strategic "phone fasts" and scheduled social media times can dramatically improve your mood and focusWhy "quick dopamine" activities like scrolling and porn create numbness while "slow dopamine" activities create fulfillmentThe essential morning routine practice that ancient hunter-gatherers naturally did that modern humans desperately needHow pursuing oxytocin (connection) rather than dopamine (pleasure) leads to deeper life satisfaction and meaningWhy disciplined boundaries around technology actually create greater freedom rather than restrictionFor more information go to https://www.lewishowes.com/1741For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Dr. Caroline Leaf – greatness.lnk.to/1079SCDr. Charan Ranganath – greatness.lnk.to/1632SCDr. Andrew Huberman – greatness.lnk.to/1072SC Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy!Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX
Chapter 1: What is the biggest struggle with brain health today?
You've got a book called The Dose Effect, which is about small habits to boost your brain chemistry. And the first thing I asked you off-camera was, what is the biggest struggle that humanity is really faced with right now in this season of life? And you said ADHD. The lack of attention to really life and being able to be present, focused on their lives, being distracted a lot.
Yeah.
What do you think is the main cause of ADHD right now? And also what is the superpower that people with ADHD have if they lean into it?
Yeah, I think ADHD is a fascinating topic for our world. I think it's something that many humans may have had for thousands of years. I think there would have always been a subset of society that potentially had this lowered baseline dopamine level. There's a brilliant scientist called Volkow who's done like a lot of research into ADHD and dopamine levels.
And you see with those that are genetically born with ADHD that they might have a lower production of dopamine within their brain.
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
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.
If someone feels like they can't focus, maybe they've been diagnosed with ADHD or maybe they feel like, maybe I have it, maybe I don't, but I just know something's off energetically and I can't stay focused or I feel a little more depressive at times. Is there... a positive side to having ADHD? Is there a benefit to having it if someone's able to learn how to harness their ADHD?
There is for sure. And this is where it gets really fascinating. I do a lot of events around schools and we 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.
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Chapter 2: How can ADHD be a superpower?
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.
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.
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.
They would have had to begin engaging with very challenging, effortful-based activities. If you were to compare the hunter-gatherer with ADHD to the one without it, The one with ADHD, because it's got low dopamine levels, would experience a greater elevation in their dopamine and actually enjoy the activity more and thrive more than the other hunter-gatherer without it.
So then they would get really into it and they might actually become the greatest hunter or the greatest shelter builder. As a result of the fact they would effectively experience more pleasure from the activity itself. And with the schools, we're really trying to reframe this for a lot of young people.
We've kind of changed it from ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, to ADHA, attention deficit hyperactivity ability, to try and make it like a concept in their mind whereby this is going to be challenging. It definitely comes with a lot of difficulty. If you find something to isolate on, you can really, really thrive.
It's interesting because I relate to that. I mean, I just hated school. I was just like, get me out of here. Watching the clock all day long, like hoping for the bell to ring. It just felt like it took forever. And anything the teacher said, I just feel like I have no idea what they're saying. And I can't comprehend. And reading, I have to reread the page over and over again.
I still don't understand. And just feeling defeated every day in class. Like, I'm never going to get this stuff. Me too. And because it was so hard and I wasn't excited about it, I checked out. I had a lack of attention. But once I found something that I was excited about, it was hard, but it gave me more of a purpose. I'm excited about this.
I'm willing to do the hard work because I'm seeing improvement. I'm learning something. I'm liking what I'm learning. I'm seeing results. Something's exciting. And I have a goal or a dream that I can work towards that excites me. So I was able to use that energy or that lack of energy I had from school and put it towards sports, most likely. And eventually evolve into what I'm doing now.
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Chapter 3: What are the main causes of low mood and energy?
After a few weeks, that engine would begin to burn out and it literally wouldn't work anymore. Eventually it would stop working completely, but eventually over that period of time, it would just break down and break down. Really frequent dopamine hits, the quick, easy ones like social media and sugar and pornography and so on, are like that.
And they're just revving the engine way too hard, way too hard without actually making the car go forward and achieve something. And then if you actually think about that over time, the engine gets weaker and weaker. So then when you do have a great moment in your career or relationship or in a sports match, it doesn't even feel that good because you've effectively broken the system.
And if you want a life that feels really rewarding and fulfilling, we have to get the dopamine in check. Otherwise, our life feels all like numb and boring.
So you could have a lot of dopamine hits throughout the day, but still feel numb.
yes for sure it will make you 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
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
What are the things that cause the most pain and suffering in a human based on neuroscience? Is it the addiction to pornography, the addiction to alcohol, drugs, vaping, or social media? Out of that list. What hurts a human being and their brain and their mood and their energy the most?
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.
And sugar.
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Chapter 4: How does social media affect our brain chemistry?
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.
And when you compare, say, scrolling your Instagram reels to pornography, you'll notice you feel much more pleasurable during the pornography because of the hyper dopamine stimulation. So where alcohol, social media, porn, they've all been challenging to come away from, I would say, yeah, porn is probably the most difficult. Yeah.
Do you feel like it's got the greatest high in our brain chemistry over short-form videos, vaping, and alcohol?
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.
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
what is porn tapping into from a human innate desire point of view and where humans would have really sought after social connection. That was like fundamental to our survival with social media and alcohol being kind of modern versions of social connection. They're both driven by our pursuit of interacting with other humans.
Pornography is really tapping into the desire to procreate and there's nothing stronger in a human than the desire to procreate. So I do think it's tapping even deeper into that instinctive driver within us.
Interesting. And what happens when you have a false sense of procreation on a consistent basis through pornography?
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?
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Chapter 5: What are the hardest addictions to break?
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.
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.
With the TV, I really don't think the TV is as significant as a problem as all the other aspects of technology.
It's not a quick scrolling. At least you're engaging in a storytelling or something slower, hopefully, right?
For sure. And we have these simple questions when people are going through the experiences, these interactive questions. When we ask people whether they watched TV and scrolled at the same time the night before, we have a 96% yes rate to that question. Wow. So the vast majority of society scrolls and watches TV. And then you explore why that is. TV is boring now.
TV is so boring now. It's too slow. So it's like, let me scroll and watch. Yeah.
Like sitting there and just watching Netflix. Or like I watched Gladiator, the movie the other day. That's a great 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.
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.
But this is how the baselines are changing over time because of the overstimulation.
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Chapter 6: Why is strategic boredom beneficial?
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.
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.
Wow. What's the biggest struggle you face today as a neuroscientist personally? with all the research and information you have, what's the hardest thing for you still to manage?
I think the
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
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.
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.
How do you navigate in your brain chemistry if results are going down, if you're not getting the growth that you've seen in the past for a period of time or financially you're not making as much or the following isn't working or something is changing? How do you navigate that in your brain?
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.
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