5 Simple Habits that Will Make You Feel Incredible

okay so if you've ever felt really sad and tired all the time you've probably found yourself trapped in this cycle of feeling bad for yourself and so you don't end up doing anything healthy or productive which makes you feel even worse about yourself and you end up getting stuck in this sort of negative spiral and then it becomes very difficult to get out now I recently interviewed a neuroscientist about how the key to unlocking all of this stuff is the chemical serotonin so you'll notice that if you get some really good sleep or you spend

some time walking out in the sunshine or you eat a big plate of fruit for example a mood elevation actually occur and that's our brain simply trying to reinforce the natural way of being as a human and that's why it's effectively affecting our emotional balance if on the other side you do eat some really unhealthy food you spend all your day inside you don't sleep very well your mood will dip and effectively your mood is a really clever communication pathway between your brain and body guiding us to engage in a more healthy way of being

this is TJ power a neuroscientist who runs the dose lab which specializes in understanding the four main brain chemicals that influence our day-to-day lives dopamine oxytocin serotonin and endorphins and very excitingly we are exploring each one of these in a four-part video series and so today we are going to be looking at serotonin how it influences our mood and five simple habits simple things we can do to improve our mood so that hopefully we never find ourselves stuck in a rut or burnt out with low mood and energy levels part one the second brain so

we all obviously have these incredibly complex brains that control pretty much everything we do and how we feel and what we say and who we kind of are as people but you might have heard yourself say things like I've got butterflies in my stomach or I need to trust my gut or I'm myself if you're really scared now on one level these are just phrases that we throw around in conversation but from a scientific perspective they actually do hold a lot of Truth and that is because our gut is also known as the second brain

this is not the productivity bro type second brain this is like the science bro second brain there are more than 100 million nerve cells in our gut and our brain and gut communicate with each other all the time through What's called the gut brain axis and the hormone serotonin has a really big influence on their communication this is the chemical responsible for our mood and our energy and the most important thing to understand about this chemical is 90% of it is being made in our gut our brain and body is constantly assessing how healthy our

body actually is and if the body is in a good state if it's well rested if it's got sunlight if it's got loads of Good nutrient-dense Foods in it leads to a increase in serotonin in the gut which then improves how we feel in our mind and then on the flip side if our serotonin levels decrease then our mood and energy levels will be pretty low as well now there are two main reasons why this is the case the first thing is because of your vagus nerve and this is the part of the nervous system

that connects our brain to a bunch of other important organs in the body including the heart and the stomach and the intestines of the gut and crucially serotonin influences the signals that are sent from the gut to the brain through the vagus nerve so if our gut makes less serotonin then there's going to be a change in the signals sent along the vagus nerve and ultimately that will result in changes to our brain so the chemical serotonin influences communication with the vagus nerve and then the second thing to understand about serotonin before we get into

the Practical tips is that serotonin is made from an amino acid called a tryptophan and tryptophan from our diets travels into the brain where then the brain converts it into serotonin and so if we are not getting enough tryptophan through our diet then we won't be able to make enough serotonin in the brain so the key takeaway here is to remember that if we want to improve our mood and feel more energized and just generally feel better overall we need to think about how we can support both our brain and our gut in making more

serotonin and if you do things to boost your serotonin levels then you're going to feel happier and more energized which will then reinforce those healthy behaviors to keep our serotonin levels High so let's now look at five actionable and evidence-based ways to boost our serotonin starting with the law of Serotonin interestingly the law of Serotonin is to make sure you walk headphone free in nature every day and that actually goes on to have an impact on all aspects of Serotonin which covers things like our nutrition our sleep quantity of sunlight even down to how our

body breathes effectively with serotonin the whole thing is about getting our system more aligned to Nature and how it originally spent its time so in Japan they've got this practice called Shin Rin Yoku which literally means Forest bathing which is basically where you spend some time in a forest walking around and looking at what is around you and a researcher actually ran an AB test on students to actually test does this Forest thing actually work is it legit so they took a bunch of University students and they had them spend one day in a forest

doing shinrin Yoku and then a second day doing the exact same thing like walking around and looking around but in a big city rather than in a forest and the results of this study were actually really impressive they wrote that Forest environments promote lower concentrations of cortisol which is our stress woman lower pulse rate lower blood pressure greater parasympathetic nerve activity and lower sympathetic nerve activity than do City environments now as you might know the parasympathetic nerve is that branch of the nervous system that causes us to feel chill and relaxed so more activity in

the parasympathetic system and less activity in the sympathetic system which is our sort of fight and flight kind of like wired kind of nervous system that essentially promotes the feeling of relaxation and reduces our stress levels we as a species are only at home when we're in nature that is human's original home we spent 300,000 years nowhere else that's all there was to spend our time in forests beaches mountains whatever it may be I actually believe this is the most important thing in all of this dose theory is spending time in natural environments the reason

I believe that is humans are extremely misaligned to our former hunter gatherer self and the more you can become a hun gatherer in the modern world the more you're going to thrive from a productivity point of view from a relationship point of view health mood energy whatever it may be so really the goal here is to make sure that ideally we are spending some time in nature every single day even if that means cycling or walking to a local park if you live in a big city here like I do now while we're there in

these green spaces we want to be ideally trying to activate all of our senses and so we want to be a little bit mindful about what we hear and see and smell and feel and there is some interesting evidence that walking barefoot on grass is great too because it has what people call a grounding effect now more research on this topic definitely needs to be done but the basic idea is that we as humans have a slightly positive electric charge in our bodies and the Earth has a slightly negative electric charge and so in theory

if we expose our skin directly to the Earth's surface then there is a transfer of electrons and that balances out the charge and that theoretically makes us feel less stressed I've yet to find any major scientific evidence as to whether this works but a bunch of traditions from around the world outside of the West say that this is you know this is a core part of their Traditions uh and also I know a bunch of people who swear by grounding and so it is something I do want to experiment with a little bit more myself

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the morning has a bunch of benefits firstly it increases our cortisol levels first thing in the morning and that helps us feel more awake secondly it synchronizes our internal body clock or Cadian rhythm with the environmental day night cycle and so the idea is that you then feel sleepy at the right time in the evening but what's also really interesting is that the sunlight signal tells our brain to make serotonin and so we feel happier and more energized for the rest of the day and this is obviously a much better way to start your day

than scrolling through social media which a lot of us tend to do in the absence of something better to do an important note is that even if it's cloudy you still get the benefit you just need slightly longer out there on a really sunny day you'd need about 5 minutes on a really cloudy day you'd need about 15 minutes of morning sunlight in order to get the system started action number three happy gut happy brain Okay so action number three is all about then improving our gut health because we know that this is where we

make 90% of our serotonin and as we've talked about the gut has these strong connections to our brain through the gut brain axis daily consumption of a probiotic supplement could have a positive effect in improving the mood anxiety and cognitive symptoms present in major depressive disorder and this might be because probiotics are essentially trying to do the same thing as some branches of anti-depressant medications in that they are trying to increase our levels of Serotonin but rather than being drugs probiotics are actually much more natural they're basically Foods or supplements that contain live microorganisms like

bacteria and yeasts and all of these can help promote a healthy balance of microorganisms in our gut there are also Probiotic foods and these are things like kombucha and kimchi and sarot however you pronounce that and Tempe and even cheese and yogurt can be probiotic but on top of probiotics it's also important that we eat nutrient-dense foods with lots of fiber because that helps our bodies make serotonin and generally the healthier your diet the better you're going to feel overall biggest challenge we have in the modern world is we've got all these ultr processed foods

entering our G ultr processed food has become a massive topic now in the last few years and as these Foods enter our body our body's capacity to make serotonin is the least of its priority the priority is then removing these toxic products from it and then our serotonin levels dip and so many of us are now struggling with the feeling of exhaustion and low mood and that is heavily connected to the nutrients in the foods that we're eating Ultra processed foods are things like sweets and chocolate and cakes and all of the stuff that we

find in bright colorful packaging filled with a long long list of ingredients and there are two key questions that you can ask yourself to work out if something is going to help you make serotonin or not firstly could this food have been on Earth before humans got here and so these would be single ingredient Whole Foods like fruits and vegetables and beans and even things that you can cook like rice and potatoes and the second question is do I recognize all of the ingredients if the answer is yes then probably the food is not that

processed and is probably better for you but if the answer is no and there is a long list of ingredients that you can't pronounce or you don't know what they are or this sort of these like all these chemicals and stuff then chances are the food is more likely to be processed or or even ultr processed and probably isn't too good for your serotonin levels this is an important point to emphasize back when I was working in medicine we saw loads and loads of people with depression we saw loads loads of people with major depressive

disorder and also with sort of like mild depression and generally most of these people didn't have healthy diets and obviously is you know correlation and causation all that kind of stuff but for most people watching this like your diet is probably under your control to a pretty large degree and so you're just like leaving money on the table by or like leaving happiness points on the table by having a really shitty diet so so yeah just saying action number four in for four out for six what we see from a serotonin perspective is if the

body is breathing very slowly serotonin levels will rise because the body is getting into a Karma State now this is because slow deep breathing activates our parasympathetic nervous system which as we talked about is our relaxing e type nervous system that puts us into a state of rest and digest and to help with that there is this technique called resonance breathing effectively with resonance breathing trying to breathe just six times a minute how you do that is you try and make your breathing round take 10 seconds so then you only do six 10c chunks in

order to do that you do 4 seconds in and 6 seconds out in fact why don't we try this now so if you are like me and you watch every video at 2x speed it's now time to shift the speed setting back to onetime speed cuz we're going to do a little bit of guided breathing so we are going to inhale 2 3 4 exhale 2 3 4 5 6 and let's do one more around inhale 2 3 4 exhale 2 3 4 5 6 you get the idea even like even as I as I've

been doing I'm just like I just feel a little bit better in myself from just breathing a little bit slowly it's weird anyone can do this literally at any point and it's just so easy to forget that we have so much control over our physiology based on how we choose to breathe and it's just you know this is why part of Ang management part of like energy management is you know a lot of it is the breath the breath connects to pretty much every aspect of our nervous system or rather some of the key aspects

of our nervous system and so it's just again we are we've got fre happiness points that are just there if we can do a little bit of funky stuff with our breathing and then action five Delta Sleep okay so this last action has all to do with our sleep and the interesting thing about serotonin at night is that this chemical mostly switches off at night time especially during deep sleep which is also known as Delta wave sleep and this lets our serotonin receptor almost go through this kind of reset period so the next day they're

more sensitive to serotonin binding to them and therefore the same amount of Serotonin becomes more effective this is probably why you might have noticed that if you don't get enough sleep you feel kind of cranky in the morning a big part of this is because your serotonin receptors haven't had that chance to reset and getting enough of this deep sleep all starts with having a healthy wind down routine there's a lot of different sleep strategies out there in the world but what I really want people to understand is your brain needs to go through a

calming period before it then enters sleep you don't want to be burning it out with social media is the final thing that you do so in an Ideal World we wouldn't be looking at our phone at all before we go to bed and we would do something like resonance breathing or reading to enter this calming period as TJ talks about in my case I read on my Kindle at night time and generally the books that I read at nighttime these days are spirituality type books I'm currently currently reading living untethered by Michael Singer which is

amazing if you're interested into that kind of stuff The Power of Now the untethered Soul the surrender experiment this is some good stuff and it's so calming and it's so nice and I love it but if for whatever reason you are on your phone in the evening then there's sensible things that you can do like turn down the brightness and turn on like the night mode thing that makes the light yellow rather than blue make sure the screen isn't too close to your eyes and in particular watching high octane high energy High dopamine short form

content is a terrible thing for your brain because then it's sort of like going in all these frazzled circles so if you do need need to watch something I don't think you need to watch anything before bed but if you if you're telling yourself the story that oh I need to watch stuff to relax before sleeping try and try and make it long form content rather than short form content on that note it just generally amazes me how many people seem to convince themselves that they have to do unhealthy things in order to like survive

you know oh I have to watch 2 hours of Netflix to wind down in the evening no you don't if you had something better to do you wouldn't watch those 2 hours of Netflix if you had like a really interesting social thing to do or you were playing sports you were doing something you genuinely enjoyed you wouldn't have to you know use Netflix for those 2 hours and if you found yourself on like a camping trip or something you wouldn't have to watch Netflix for 2 hours to wind down it's worth considering and you know

I do this myself so this is sort of notes to myself it's worth as considering what are the arbitrary rules that we've made up for ourselves and are they serving us if they're serving us great I I'm all in favor of arbitrary rules that serve us but if they're not serving us then why are we doing it do you really need to watch Instagram reals for 60 minutes to wind down probably not so why bother making that rule for yourself I don't know anyway that brings us to the end of this video I hope you

enjoyed it uh this playlist over here has the other three videos in our series about dopamine oxytocin serotonin and endorphins so check out that playlist if you haven't yet seen those videos and I will see you hopefully in the next video bye-bye