How to Control your Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin & Endorphins levels with TJ Power

welcome to a brand new episode of The Talk 20s podcast if you're a fan of the podcast can we ask you to do one simple thing that literally takes two seconds but it helps us more than you can imagine and that is hitting that subscribe or follow button the more of you guys who do that the more we can keep bringing you amazing guests onto the top 20s podcast and today that's no different because we're very lucky to be joined in the studio by the amazing TJ power TJ has built an incredible career as a

neuroscientist spending years researching why we feel anxious stressed lack concentration and motivation in this episode you'll learn about the brain chemicals that have a huge influence on our mental health and wherever you're listening to this podcast you'll finish up this episode with a deeper understanding of your body and some positive actions to apply to your life so hi TJ welcome to the studio it's a delight I'll be on top 20s podcast hello I'm excited to be here all right so you have a really really interesting story and it's one that I cannot wait to dive

into because your 20s has been super interesting and I'd love for you to tell our listeners a little bit more before we head into some really interesting conversation about our brain and how it works for us so tell us a little bit more about who you are yeah so I'm born in Surrey like just south of London and always grew up like pretty interested in this world of psychology originally played quite a lot of golf as a kid and that was my original dream was to go down the golfer route and if you've ever experienced

golf at all you know it's quite a stressful game in your head so I started having good like psychology guidance quite young and thought Oh the brain is pretty interesting and then yeah I chose at College to study psychology and then go to university to study psychology and finally at school connected with someone that I really liked like I found school pretty difficult discovered psychology and thought yes this is the one and uh yeah for my 20s I've been pursuing it pretty hard but your 20s have also been a little bit challenging as well like

one of the main reasons that you started the company that you have nerify was because of some a quite a big experience that you had in your life tell us a little bit more about that yeah so definitely throughout the period of becoming a teenager then going to University and going into being an adult I got very into the world of partying and drugs and alcohol and things like that and it definitely was like a journey I was pretty into the fun of all of those kind of things and ultimately discovered drugs to make you

feel pretty [ __ ] they can uh affect your mental health for sure and I reached a Point University where I thought I'm not feeling that good I was also studying psychology and really understanding it and went on this my own journey to try and get myself feeling really really good and offer those kind of things and then in the process discovered quite a clear path and then began laying that path out for other people basically so for you then going back to like your early 20s you're in University you're doing quite a lot of

drugs um for you then what was it that you felt like it was how did you feel like that was impacting your brain yeah I mean it was definitely for me just like creating anxiety and I felt fortunate to be someone that didn't like grow up naturally having like a mental health problem we have some people that definitely experience that as they grow up I always had a very like positive and happy brain and during that period of yeah partying too hard I definitely discovered a lot of nights at lying in bed awake unable to

sleep and for people that have experienced these kind of things like that is definitely what can happen it can over stimulate your brain and put me in a place where I was more anxious I didn't have as much like Drive I was really struggling to concentrate and stuff like that and at a similar time I was thinking I really want a really cool career and I want to get into this psychology space and yeah I had to make that kind of transition to get myself into a good spot did you feel like you could work

in the in Psychology what you're really passionate about and still be taking like recreational drugs nah I didn't think that would be a particularly good idea and always I knew that it wasn't gonna be something I continued in my life like I wouldn't consider it as like a almost like a drug problem I was like I was trying to have lots of fun effectively and I became very throughout this period of my life like I started supporting friends and family and navigating some tough stuff with my personal family and things like that with a lot

of loss and family loss and I really discovered like I can help people feel pretty good and in the process of that obviously these things had to be let go because I thought I gotta have a balanced relationship with this stuff I want to be in like a really good healthy headspace if I'm going to support people and I discovered effectively new ways to create a similar experience of having fun and getting loads of excitement that wasn't down that path so talk to us a little bit about the dose uh the daily dose strategy that

you've got this what you talk about all the time in with nerify and I find it fascinating and we're going to do a bit of a deep dive on it in this episode because I think it's you know super interesting and I think so many people are going to learn so much goodness from this episode um but for for us then explain to us what what a daily dose is tell us a little bit more about it yeah so we basically have these four primary brain chemicals they're having a massive impact on your whole experience

of your life you got dopamine which is the first one in dose that's the really famous one and that's the one that basically creates all of our drive and our motivation you've oxytocin which is one that basically connects humans together when a mum gives birth it connects the mama baby together and then as you go through life and you receive connection you get oxytocin the S is serotonin which is really our mood really affects things like anxiety and our emotions and then you have the E which is endorphins which is like a famous one that

everyone thinks our exercise endorphins and stuff like that and dose is basically a process that gives you a very very clear idea as to why lots of us don't feel that good in the modern world maybe we're like procrastinating or we feel anxious or we feel lonely or unconfident and it tells you why these things happen in our Modern Life of living on our phones and drinking a lot of booze and all these kind of things we do and gives you a realistic and like fun way to get yourself into a good space so what

are you noticing about the generation that is growing up right now that means that we're having a really big Mental Health crisis especially in the UK yeah I mean the phone thing is massive and the social media thing is massive and I come at it from a realistic perspective I love social media I grew up always I was buzzing to get my first iPhone get my first social media account start posting so it's not like I'm against this kind of stuff but it is very clear that it's having like such a Monumental impact on what

our thoughts are like and our motivation all this kind of stuff because even if you jump back like 10 years to when I was in school I'm 25 now if you jump back 10 years when I was in school it was quite rare to have like a mental health illness or problem or whatever it may be still happened but was rare and now I go to schools and it's very rare to meet a kid that doesn't have some kind of Challenge and the only real big shift in our world is the fact we now spend

our lives on Tech and that got really escalated in covid and we can dive into it as to why like over scrolling these social media platforms impacts our brains there's a lot of things Beyond just like the normal like oh we're all comparing ourselves online that's a component but yeah we can go deeper into social media effect if you found it yeah I absolutely would love to because I think so many so many of our listeners will be on social media whether that's because they work in it or it's a part of their job or

just they're there for fun and none of us there for fun I mean oh my God is like the funnest thing but for so many people like that just feels like a normal part of our Lives now but if you're right like people who are you know in their 30s or a little bit older they didn't have that when they were in their 20s like so what how is that making us different how are we having a different experience yeah so it really connects into this dopamine system and for me as someone as we talked

about at the beginning being someone that likes dopamine related behaviors mastering and like understanding this chemical has been so significant to my life to be able to get me focused and calmer and motivated and all that kind of stuff and basically what happens is dopamine is responsible for our ability to feel pleasure and feel like Joy effectively and it's something that originally Phil hunter-gatherers would have been something they had to put in a lot of effort to get hold of and I always talk about hunter-gatherers because we spent like 400 000 years doing that and

then now we've come up with this brand new idea so our brain and our whole neurobiology and stuff is designed to effectively be small groups of tribes living in a forest so you can see this new world is a big change for our brain and with a dopamine idea a hunter-gatherer would effectively have to hunt down some food or build some shelter or put a load of effort into raising their kids or find a new place to live these things were loads and loads of effort putting all that effort and then dopamine would come into

their brain it'd make them feel really really good and over the last like few hundred years we've basically come up with a lot of ways to experience that feeling of dopamine without putting in any effort and it's causing this like big crash in these dopamine levels and that experience for example like when you score tiktok for like 30 minutes and it feels really good when you're on it and then you put your phone down and you like feel quite crap and you can't be bothered to do anything it's basically because it's just like killing that

dopamine level and the challenge is being in a state of load opening literally makes our brain anxious like you can imagine a hunter gather for example if you took out this chemical from their brain that was giving them the drive to survive effectively that's not supposed to be an F1 reference but that happened to happen it gives them the dry survive and like effectively destroying this chemical having too much this pleasure on this platform which just makes our brains anxious and makes it low so for you then obviously you said that you have kind of

hacked your brain in terms of understanding dopamine and really how that has an impact on you there are so many other topics that we want to discuss when it comes to dopamine as well tell us a little bit more about the work that you've done and specifically to do with porn as well yeah porn is a mad topic because it's something that isn't getting chatted about at all in our society it's like a secret behavior that like most people are engaging with in some form especially the male population like really really dominantly engaging with it

and Paul is something that I never really wanted to talk about online I didn't really want to be the guy that gets associated with talking about porn it's not particularly cool look and during this period of time where I was like I don't want to engage in so many of these like really high pleasure dopamine activities whether it's drugs or alcohol or like sugary food or vaping and smoking all these kind of things porn is another thing that's in that category it's like really really quick pleasure to the brain dopamine levels go up really fast

and then they crash out and I went through this period of thinking right I'm not going to watch it and I grew up watching this stuff like maybe 12 13 years old I probably Google something on my iPhone and thought wow that looks pretty fun to watch start watching that stuff like harmlessly thinking like what could this do to my brain I wouldn't have even thought that I would have just watched it and then watch this say like 10 years or something and went through this period of like okay I'm not going to watch it

for two weeks which sounds ridiculous without even be a challenge but for a lot of people it's like especially guys it's ridiculous to basically go a day without watching porn and I did it I didn't watch it for two weeks and I like felt insane so much less anxious so much more motivated so much more focused and I was thinking wow I need to get other people to try this so originally before I even posted online I'd text my mate so mate you got to do a seven days without watching it did they do it

tell me what happened yeah those that are open-minded enough to give it a shot which to be honest is very few of them because like guys love this stuff and girls I'm sure and uh yeah I started posting about it and now it's like the most DMs I get from anyone it's like young guys being like hey I didn't watch porn for 10 days and I feel amazing and it's really important to understand that like sex is like a really instinctive Primal Behavior that's something that is designed to be a lot of effort to get

hold of and you have to meet someone connect with them get intimate with them and then eventually have sex with them and like every day effectively performing a similar act but like very very quickly in like a two or three minute period it's just like depleting this resource in you that's giving you a lot of Drive effectively and it's very worth watching it less and seeing what happens so have you done any like specific like research in terms of that like what what is it that you understand about kind of the people's behavior towards it

and how can you actually get this message out to the people who live to hear it yeah there's it's very difficult because it is like it does require you being open-minded and considering what could happen if I tried this just like some people have got used to like dry January and they don't drink in January and that's become like a trend in our society and typically people do feel like Oh I'm a bit more motivated in January because I didn't drink and stuff like that it definitely is one of those things where I've gone down

the route I always explain to people it really crashed out your dope with me and it destroys this like molecule within you that creates a lot of your motivation and I guide them to just like experiment effectively and set yourself a challenge of like okay five days I'm not gonna watch it from Monday to Friday I'll slightly like observe how I feel during the week and when you do it everyone that does it message me saying okay and it's now a habit it literally takes in five days to consider it and then immediately they're like

okay now I'm not gonna watch it very regularly and if possible like not at all and as soon as the frequency of it drops I think the motivation to keep doing it rises um so when it comes to dopamine then like using your kind of daily dose strategy yes what can we learn about it and how can we fix it yeah okay so basically you gotta pick which is your biggest addictive behavior that you're smashing out of junk sugary Foods alcohol and drugs so like your alcohol and vaping your social media or kind of online

shopping gambling that kind of stuff like on your phone so first of all just think what am I like ridiculously addicted today most of us is probably social media the one we're engaging with the most so your first challenge is like how can I reduce the frequency of that behavior and like a lot of these addictive things they're gonna remain in our life that we don't have to eradicate them all but it's like okay I'm gonna set myself a challenge I'm not gonna go on social media when I first wake up I'm gonna have a

break from it in the evening maybe for 60 minutes I have a break from it when I'm like with my friends or when I'm working on my laptop and then you basically have five potential things that would be extremely good for boosting your dopamine levels we can maybe go through these and you can assess how you're doing on them and then you can pick one okay yeah I do think that mine mine would probably be social media and also like sugary Foods okay yeah so they're probably the two with most people like yeah you when

you're like a little bit tired and you're working through a bit of sugary food like a boost yeah so sugary food social media I think many people listening probably have a similar experience and then we've got five possible things that would be very good for you to consider to be your like main dopamine boosting activity the first one is getting into a state of like really deep focus when we're working is insanely good for our dopamine and you know that experience where you do cut the distraction away like your different distracting apps on your computer

and your phone and you have to really lock in on a task and after you've got through that like immediacy of oh I really want to check my phone and you actually invest yourself in a task you can feel quite good after it you get like that satisfaction accomplishment feeling and there's some really cool data on deep focus that it basically takes a human on average about 17 minutes of staying on one task in order to get into a state where they are really focused and we gain momentum and we work a lot faster most

of us never get to that 17-minute points we do a little bit of work and then we get bored and check our phone and go back and forth so deep focus in your work cutting the distraction that would be extremely good your next one is discipline in your home and like you know when you're tidying your house and at the beginning it's like oh this is quite annoying I can't really be bothered and then at the end it feels really good insane for the dopamine third one is the cold water stuff have you heard much

about cold showers and stuff like that I have I mean I wouldn't say I've done it I've tried to like turn the shower to to cold right at the end of my shower and I maybe can do 10 seconds that's pretty good of my big toe it's I I would like to be able to do it better but a lot of people have said just start off for like 10 seconds and 30 then the minute and go from there yeah the the cold shower thing is something that's like obviously you don't have a cold shower

like why would you want to do that it's nice having a nice warm shower but the the science and the Daytona is so ridiculous especially for this dopamine system for example when uh when we drink an alcoholic drink there's this great University in Prague that's done a lot of research into how different behaviors affect this chemical balance and when we drink an alcoholic drink our dopamine levels will 2x effectively they'll double and that'll feel really good and we'll like oh yes I love drinking and that'll then Peak so it increases dab when it Peaks at

15 minutes and then it begins to fall below its Baseline level which is why like after you finish your first Pine you start like really thinking where's the next Plant coming from because your brain can feel that you're actually effectively going to feel worse than before that first drink 15 minutes after definitely starts going down and then you can't see how the next drink so you've got alcohol 2x 15 minutes Peak if you take something like Coco again really powerful drug in our world that were 2.5 x the dopamine so it goes up two and

a half times Peaks at nine minutes so it Peaks really really quick wow hence the desire to like interact with that drug and then it'll begin to crash which for anyone that's interacted with that drug you start wanting it more and more frequently throughout the night effectively as the things go up and down the cold water immersion is the only Behavior they found that can also 2.5 x the dopamine the same as what cocaine can do which is just like mental and rather than it peaking at nine minutes then crashing itself out it rises for

two and a half hours which is a long time wow that's absolutely insane and then you think what the what the chemical is responsible for is all your motivation also effects like anxiety levels and stuff like that if you can in the morning like you have your normal shower you turn it cold at the end and you just deal with the pain and tell yourself how good it is the fact you're in this pain effectively then uh yeah you see this massive rise in how you feel for the rest of the day which is crazy

wow you've sold it to me I am 100 taking a cold shower now because that is amazing like two and a half hours of like a progressive build of this chemical and the easiest way I've found to do it is yeah turn it cold at the end and don't turn it like so-called that you hate us for suggesting it like you just turn it a bit cold taking deep breaths and you get out and you just gradually build each day and I found if you put music on before you get in the shower and then

when your favorite bit of the song comes on then you kind of like put it cold and you dance around no one can see you everyone loves that stuff in secret we all just pretend we don't and uh yeah dance around the shower deal with the fact it's cold and understand that like pain is just extremely good for us as humans we didn't used to have like a super comfortable life like we have now we literally lived outside it would have been hard and hard things are very good for us so that's 100 having a

cold showers 100 really good for you there's no bad things no I mean if you were suffering from a cold and you're really ill maybe it wouldn't be that good to freeze your body but everything else like it's insane I wouldn't have it late at night because it ended typically morning would be better and uh it also has just like crazy benefits to lots of stuff how your muscles work your heart your immune system so okay it's a good daily practice and it's kind of like a opposite to Tick-Tock scrolling it's like tick tock's Pure

Pleasure this is pure pain and we effectively need more stuff on that side of the scale I love it though I'm definitely going to try it and if any of you listeners are listening now and you go away and try it definitely message us about it because we'd love to know what you think of it you've got to I think number three yeah guys deep focus we've got discipline in your house cold water fourth one is something we call phone fasting humans have known for a long time that you have to take periods away from

food for your health and fasting from our Tech is effectively something we need and this is very simple it's just 60 Minutes every evening where you commit to not be on your phone so it could be as basic as I'm going to try and watch TV for 60 minutes in the evening and not simultaneously watch TV and be on our phone which is what most of us do might be in the gym it might be when you're socializing but having like a prolonged period where you don't see any notifications you don't scroll anything it allows

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for the highest interest rate you need to save a minimum of one pound and the interest is paid monthly and a subject variation and the final one is this concept that we call my pursue which is basically originally as I said the reason we have this chemical is to chase down and hunt to survive and we as humans are really designed to have something that is like a primary goal that we're chasing down and this is something that's big especially when you're in your 20s when you're trying to figure things out because this dopamine system

gives us the desire to do do hard things as I've said and when you look at our society when anyone hits the peak if someone like wins the lottery or a celebrity hits the peak you often see their mental health actually decline when they suddenly reach the peak and that's because you're no longer having something you're chasing down and a huge amount of the like depression and low experience people have is because there isn't like a clear goal that they're in pursuit of so having a think about what is the main thing I'm chasing down

in my life it could be career based it could be family based it could be a health thing but having something that's like yes I'm chasing and I'm gonna go for it extremely good for building this app do you think then just hypothesis do you think that when obviously a lot of young people they go through University and school and what have you but they finish University they graduate and then they step out into what is adult life is their 20s and they have a big and many people have a really big like breakdown they're

like you know a lot of people are calling it a quarter life crisis and there's something definitely going on there there is obviously a little bit abnormal but would you say that that is kind of an effect of it because they've essentially well completed school and now they need to find their New Passion or Pursuit would that be right a hundred percent a hundred percent and it is very tricky that period because you have you're a face of your pursuit or your goal laid out for you your whole childhood life is that you've got to

get your gcses then you've got to get your A Levels and you just have this clear thing you're aiming towards and you finish University and it's like what do I do now and having a lack of Direction really like our mind isn't designed to be in that state it wants to have a clear goal and this is why I think it's so wise when you're in that University period to start like opening doors and networking and connecting with people and trying to figure out what kind of thing could interest me after University and it's not

like you have to have your exact grad role nailed and secured in your interview done which I think is like an expectation people can feel at University but just being open-minded to is there something I'm finding interesting that I'm studying or in General Life something I'm watching on social media and can I start like moving myself in that direction I think it's very powerful absolutely um so on dopamine whenever I think about dopamine I see a lot of stuff on social media about ADHD and how how dopamine is larger links with ADHD what what do

you know about ADHD and how how does it kind of because we've got a bit of like a I don't want to say an epidemic but there are so many more I think I saw a stat the other day that in the past three years that have been eight hundred there's been 800 growth in ADHD and people being diagnosed with ADHD so what do you think about that yeah 100 I would almost call it ADHD epidemic it's it's growing very fast and across all the schools all the companies whenever we do our testing processes we're

seeing everyone having many of the symptoms of ADHD and there is a huge relationship with dopamine when you look like neurobiologically like in a brainy sort of way at someone with ADHD they have very low dopamine levels and effective you have you effectively you have this Baseline level of dopamine like the amount of dopamine your brain is producing and when you have big spikes big crashes big spikes big crashes which is typically what someone with ADHD experiences they get really excited about things and like really excited about a TV show or really excited about going

on social media or really excited about some sugary food big big spike and then a big dip and then a big spike and a big dip and we have had ADHD in our society for a long time people have genetically been born with a predisposition to experience like big surges and fools in this chemical but now with our modern world we're effectively all giving ourselves these symptoms because of the accessibility to all these new ways to spike up the dopamine so it might be the pawn it might be the social media it might be like

vaping for example like many people I don't think would realize that there'd be a relationship with their ADHD and vaping but vaping it surges the dopamine crashes surges crashes and as a result many of us are struggling with this staff and that's why the first first thing we do with all training is like identify where is my addictive behavior and addiction's always been this term and I Society it's like very like negative and it's like oh God you're addicted to something but like we just need to be honest that we are all addicted to this

stuff for sure like if you took all the sugary food and phones away and alcohol away we'd all be [ __ ] to be honest and uh we would be so understanding where your addictive thing is and it's all about basically frequency of Engagement and how long you engage with the behavior for so like we're gonna have these addictive things in our life in some form but if you can reduce like how long you spend interacting with the behavior and then also how frequently you interact with the behavior if they both just go down a

little bit ADHD symptoms of massive procrastination and anxiety and that kind of stuff reduces as well so interesting I mean I think you know it is what we're seeing everywhere and I think a lot of people learning and understanding about themselves if they do have ADHD this is probably one of the key things like learning about how dopamine we are how that works in your body and your brain is it should be just like on the pamphlet when you get diagnosed it's sure like it really yeah it needs to be better understood because I think

many people go down like immediately the root of medication and medication can definitely work for people but it's not necessarily like sorting the problem it's just the medications just add more dopamine into your brain effectively so you don't have the big fluctuations but looking behaviorally at how you live your life and your diet and your relationship with your phone like these are big things that you can change and then suddenly feel way better super interesting um any more dopamine I want you to pick one of those five things okay out of deep focus discipline in

your home cold water phone fasting or having a very very clear goal you're chasing down for me it's gonna be cold water cold water wins it yeah it does for me um oxytocin is the next part so we've got dose d-o-s-e oxytocin yeah oh tell us a little bit about that yeah so as I mentioned release most prominently when a mum gives birth so during that moment of birth the mum and the baby huge surge of oxytocin and then as you go through your life and you go through breastfeeding and all the physical touch and

love and stuff like that oxytocin goes up and Aussie toasting kind of works in two ways you have all your connection Your Love with the people in your life and the bonding you get from that and that calm and happy feeling it can provide and then you also have the relationship you have with yourself and like the potential love you can give yourself and then for many people the opposite of that like a lot of us don't give ourselves much love at all like we're super super tough on ourselves and many of our relationships with

ourselves are very very critical like that is definitely something I experienced massively like during that University period just like a really critical kind of negative voice in my head that I really really wanted to work on reducing and getting like more positive relationships you've got yeah love with the people in your life and love with yourself basically um so I think a lot of people will be able to relate if we start with the self like for someone who is you know they may not even realize that they're doing it but they are talking bad

about themselves they are giving themselves a hard time about a lot of different things what are the steps that they can take to make themselves feel better yeah this is a this is interesting because as you say I think people are very like unaware potentially that they're doing this it's just like a natural kind of narrator in your brain that's chatting away and I it was actually interesting in covid was when I went through like a big transition with all this stuff and I think like covid was a potential time for like growth and learning

and stuff like that or partying really hard I guess it depends what phase of your life you're at but I don't think many people parties I think that unusual that first lockdown I hit at University yeah but I was in your houses yeah I was living up at like my ex-girlfriend's parents on like a farm and I more from like a city life so it was a very different different experience for me and I had this thing where I really wanted to deal with the addiction to my phone so I was like this is insane

like I'm spending my whole life just checking this thing so I wanted to go on walks on the on in the like in these farms and stuff without my phone and see if I spend like an hour out there and I discovered that's extremely hard it's been like an hour with your thoughts especially when you've like always been addicted to a lot of stimulation like or someone that always music in the shower and then always like TV on when I'm getting ready and all that kind of stuff I never really had that much time chatting

to myself I kind of probably just felt more comfortable distracting myself from those potential thoughts that wanted to chat to me so I went on these quiet walks and in that initial phase and that's what I'd guide people to do you do hear some of the annoying things that are in your thoughts it might tell you that you're not doing that great with your working life or how you're interacting with your relationship with your boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever it may be you might hear some negativity in your brain and there is an element of

it actually needs to be heard it needs to be listened to like our brains now body they're very clever machines and they have good guidance for us giving it the space to be heard is really important and then when I was on these walks I started thinking I don't want the whole thing to just be like a negative experience where I'm telling myself off so I gave it like space to hear some of these things I thought maybe that is important that I make like a slight adjustment in my life maybe I don't drink as

much anymore or all these kind of areas and then I start thinking how can I make this feel really good and I started thinking I am putting lots of effort into my life right now and many many people will be doing these kind of things putting lots of effort into their life but only telling themselves off for where they're not getting things right so they started having this moment in the walk where the first thing I do is do like a little bit of a gratitude practice and I think what has been making me happy

recently and this gratitude thing I think people can consider is like quite cliche like religious stuff and things like that but like it really like scientifically in our brain just surges this oxytocin chemical and calms us down basically so I'd say what am I happy about what has been going well recently and things think through some activities that have happened and then on the other side of it I think where have I actually making some like good progress in my life and where could I recognize some progress and that could be I've been making some

progress with my relationship my phone or my exercise or my girlfriend at the time or whatever it may be and I found that if you do that if you go on quiet walks without your phone and you just ask yourself like what has been going well recently where have I been making progress you start celebrating the accomplishment a bit more and how our brain basically works is if it receives celebration for something it does that activity more like if you're training a toddler to say like thank you when it leaves someone's house when it when

they say thank you you say Well done well done and then it learns okay I should repeat that behavior because that's like this positive conditioning idea and so many of us are just constantly effectively negatively conditioning ourselves we're just saying you're so bad for drinking too much and being on your phone and by doing that we actually just make the behavior happen more often because it's what our brain focuses on so if you start creating that relationship with yourself or you say like good job for doing this good job for getting off your phone good

job for like connecting with your girlfriend well or good job for working on your career you start basically just repeating that behavior more often and things start getting a lot better I can totally see how that would work I think that's that's yeah I think that's spot on um in terms of like the grouped side of things as well I definitely think that well I think I studied at a university that belonging is so so important yes and does that come into the oxytocin conversation a hundred percent 100 like you can imagine the Primitive reason

we have this chemical is so that we all remained in groups together and we didn't go into isolation because in the wild as an isolated person you're gone like you can't compete against a tiger or something on your own but as a group we're amazing and we've survived to this point and a lack of belonging is really really tough for our brain because although we're now like safe effectively in our modern like society when you experience the feeling of being like excluded from a friendship group or like not invited to a gathering or a party

or something like that it makes you like deeply anxious it like can really worry you and that is because of that primitive part of you that's like I must not be kicked out of this group and I think it's very important especially in your like 20s when you're forming new friendships and all that kind of stuff just to be open-minded to who you connect with I think sometimes we have an expectation of I need to be in this group of friends or I need to like be their same way or be cool or whatever it

may be and finding people that you feel really really safe around and I do this a lot with with the teenagers in school so they really struggle with their sense of belonging and their friendship groups and stuff and I was like try and eliminate the hierarchical stuff and find people that make you feel really really safe and like they're going to be a good friend they're going to give you love you're going to be able to give them love making that feeling like I'm actually be part of a tribe effectively a big priority is massive

for this chemical I love it I'm learning so much from this episode already and I'm sure our listeners are too um serotonin is a huge part in our lives tell us something about that yeah serotonin is interesting because serotonin is actually the one that is all of the mental health medication that's what it targets like there's lots of medication in our world now like Citalopram and Sertraline and stuff and these are called ssris which is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor which for many many people this is a chemical that's so good to get right because medication

can work for people for sure but there's a lot of great natural ways in which you could be boosting this chemical up and the very interesting thing about serotonin is these other chemicals I'm chatting about are largely made in your brain in an area of your brain called your hypothalamus and serotonin 95 of it is being made inside our body inside our gut and eventually the reason we have this chemical is so that we have like an instinct of desire to make our body happy and it's very interesting because we as a society have created

this term mental health and we think of this as very much like in our head but actually the state of our body is massively impacting how we feel in our mind just like if you like a big part of the reason now Carl can stress us out it's like it goes into the body and the body's like how do I deal with this and the body effectively gets worried about the fact there's all that alcohol in the stomach and then it worries your mind to try and tell you guys have got a lot of alcohol

in here this is quite tough for us to manage and the kind of behaviors that like really boost the serotonin up the first one is sunlight is massive for this and that's why like in England when it's sunny outside we all love each other love the government everything's amazing when it's sunny everything's going to plan and they're like when it's great the opposite happens you see lots of people struggling winter and serotonin literally like the sunlight hits the skin the skin loves Sarah that loves the sunlight Vitamin D Rises the body gets happier and then

suddenly serotonin builds in the body so sunlight is massive in a similar way natural environments are big for serotonin this is really like the most primitively hunter-gathery chemical in terms of Lifestyle so sunlight is massive nature the reason like we feel good in nature and forests and when we have like big spacious views around us it's just like tapping into that part of us food is absolutely huge here you can imagine if it's literally made in your stomach in your gut then good food turns up and Sarah's hand is like yes I can build out

of that stuff I can use all those good nutrients crappy food turns up the opposite happens and then the final one is our sleep so it's basically sunlight natural environments good food and lots of sleep and then when you look at how a human lives their life now sunlight we all live in the doors all the time basically don't go outside nature I mean what even is nature to us now because you spends zero time in it good food I think people are making good aggress of that but a lot of shitty food still gets

eaten and then sleep we spend most of the night on tick tocks they're like yeah you can see how the serotonin levels are dipping and low serotonin is like a kind of irritably anxious low energy state which I think many people struggle with it's fascinating I think and it's kind of really interesting because whenever we hear the conversation around mental health we immediately go to kind of you know depression anxiety and and kind of labeling it and then can we get help and medication but I think what you're discussing here is kind of the fundamental

Basics that like if you're struggling right now these are some things that you can kind of look to to go do I have this in my life could this explain a lot of different things which I think is fascinating for sure for sure and I think one thing that's really important to recognize here is when you're in a really low space and you're not feeling that good being told to like go and take a walk isn't it feels like what the hell is that gonna do that's not gonna do anything I feel really [ __

] right now and there's this really interesting study that happened at Stanford University where they basically had two groups of people and they gave them smoothies one was a really unhealthy smoothie and one was a really healthy smoothie and they told the group drinking the healthy smoothie they was really bad for them and then they traveled the group drinking the unhealthy smoothie they was really good for them and then they measured how the body responded and the group that thought they were drinking a healthy smoothie even though it was crap had a really positive effect

in their body their immune markers went up and their body actually reacted as if it was good because their brain thought it was healthy wow and then on the other side the group that actually drank that healthy one but was told it was unhealthy their body had like an inflammatory response and it was like oh this isn't good for us and that's just because of what the brain was thinking about wow so when you take something like I need to eat healthy food or I need to go into the sunlight or I need sleep more

if you're saying yourself oh but what will that do it will do nothing but if you say to yourself this is going to be something that's really valuable and this is why we put all the science behind it this is something that's really good for me like when I'm out in the sunlight tell myself oh my serotonin levels will go up if I eat the good food my serotonin levels go up and if you tell your brain this your body literally responds in a better way so realizing it's good and convincing yourself that is very

very important and then also I guess like if we're going outside and we're doing a bit of exercise endorphins comes into that yes so tell us a little bit more about that endorphins are cool the reason we actually have endorphins is to deal with like the extreme mental and physical stress of living outside and like so imagine the Ridiculousness of fighting an animal or something like that and it could hurt you in your mind it'd be very stressful and basically what endorphins would do is when you're in that big state of like physical exertion trying

to run from something or fight something or fighting another person endorphins flush throughout the bloodstream and they basically take stress out of your mind they calm your mind down in that moment of high pressure and they take pain out of your body so that literally if it scratches you like you don't feel that pain in that moment so that you can keep focused and something like morphine for example the drug we have in hospital it's all that you're injected into you if you're injured takes the pain out of that area we as a society built

morphine off of our understanding of the endorphins endorphins are effectively like our natural painkiller and if we boost them up our mind is basically way way less stressed out and I think many of us struggle with that I'm so overwhelmed I'm so stressed mental like mindset experience and there are a lot of easy ways we can boost these so exercise is very good that's the classic one the moments you push your body particularly hard or when they particularly go high so like the moment you run up the hill or Swim as fast as you can

or cycle a bit harder when the body experiences a bit of pain they rise up any kind of hot environment is really good so saunas are becoming super popular again like the body goes into a bit of physical distress endorphins rise in a similar way hot baths are also really really good for this system that's why and when you sit in a hot bath you can get like a relief of tension in your brain you feel a bit calmer so the heat is very good music is insane and part of the reason that when we're

like driving in our car and we're singing and we think oh my God this is pretty fun like endorphins rise like crazy especially the harder you sing and the harder you dance in your house or in your car and stuff like that and if you are in a really stressed out State I can't explain how good it is just to put music on and sing and dance even though you think I don't want to do this I feel annoyed right now I guarantee like the release of them will calm their mind yeah so you've got

the exercise hot environments music and then stretching our body as well is insane for this any kind of stretching I know lots of people are into yoga and stuff I personally try to get into yoga and found it impossible literally impossible I was like I could do this no I can't I tried for many months but any kind of stretch in your body out getting out of bed moving your arms around like anything that physically exerts off exerts us awesome for the endorphins and then yeah de-stresses us it's such a fascinating strategy to understand our

brain chemicals more and I think why why we're not taught this stuff in school I really don't understand or maybe we will be doing a little bit but just not enough like this is so important that we need to really know um for someone listening to this episode what would be their biggest takeaway that you think they should do I would really focus on getting the mornings right I think if you start the day in like a good way your whole day gets changed massively and I think it's very easy to wake up and like

just be oh just check my phone quickly and then start the kind of tick tock scroll and then end up not feeling like that motivated and then your day doesn't set off that gray so I think if you can wake up especially now with the time of year if you sleep with the curtains a bit open so it's quite bright in your room that helps you get up it helps get these chemicals going and then I really struggled to break that habit of not going straight on the phone like I appreciate how ridiculously difficult that

is so when the alarm goes off if the phone's on airplane there'll be nothing in there which is really good so airplane it when you go to sleep wake up immediately go and brush your teeth in that like sleepy State start brushing your teeth and then splash some cold water on your face and then if you put some clothes on and go straight outside and if you can get like 10 or 15 minutes outside that morning sunlight is insane and if you just start your day in like a little bit more of a motivated way

it's ridiculous how much that carries forward effectively and one of the big things I really love to get this point across that we always see in the training is when people come through it they always say to us I'm really proud of myself for all this new stuff I'm doing like I'm eating better or I'm connecting with my partner better or whatever it may be but they say this sentence I'm really proud of myself and in general if you pursue that feeling with your mental health making yourself feel proud of yourself you start doing a

lot of great things and I think a lot of us know that we're doing a lot of [ __ ] that's not good for us and we have a like slightly guilty shame feeling of the fact that we're not doing like our most with our time and our brain and body is just like a very clever system them and it knows that if you have potential and you're not living like putting the effort into live to your potential it will make you feel pretty [ __ ] and depressed and stuff like that until you hear

that message and get going so if you start the day I think I really want to make myself proud of myself today do some of these good activities pick some from this episode I think that's a very very good message to understand absolutely um one of the things we really like to discuss on this podcast is the fact that despite all the hints and tips that you've given us today that absolutely no one is perfect especially none of us are the finished product for you what is it that you're trying to work on getting better

at this moment in time give us some inspo interestingly I would say worrying too much about my appearance would actually probably be the thing that I I care for I think always grew up like wanting to look good and feel good in that kind of way and getting into the social media world and posting loads of videos you really put yourself in front of people which like I feel very comfortable with now and I feel very very happy that I kind of met the awkwardness of posting videos like I can imagine there are lots of

people out there that would love to post stuff on social media and that like fear of what you look like really can like impact people's ability to do it and I would say yeah just caring less about maybe how people think I look would be like a big thing that for some reason I do just struggle with to be honest and it would be cool if I can let it go more and more well I'd love to hear your journey on that um yeah I think a lot of people you're not the first guy actually

specifically to say that on the podcast today you know especially people who are in the public eye that they really kind of it's made them think a lot about how they look so yeah it's really great that you've opened up on that we always end the podcast with uh the exact same question that we ask every single one of our guests okay and you have been a very amazing guest I must put it out there because I have absolutely loved this episode I think it's going to be one of the ones that I listened back

to was like a gentle reminder of like what I need to be doing because for one of for everything you've had this episode it will be really hard for someone to to go from this episode and you know implement it all it's not possible it's not possible that's way too overwhelming yeah but if you just Implement one or two things from this and then maybe in six months time you come back and listen to this episode I bet you'll be proud of yourself just not the mic I bet you'll be really proud of yourself for

what you've done and then you can layer that on top of the other to then to then kind of create this life and and become a little bit happier so don't feel overwhelmed by listening to this episode but you have been really amazing if you were to look back at 20 year old TJ and give him just one piece of advice that would see him through his 20s you can only say one thing you said a lot in this episode if you could only say one thing to him looking back what would you say to

him um just open as many doors as possible basically in in conversations with people and yeah don't don't shy away from like scary experiences basically I think uh it's very easy to like feel what would happen if I do this what would happen if I do that and I think having very open-minded approach is extremely useful and something I think I've got in the last few years would love to have got that like a lot earlier and uh could have helped me a lot yeah definitely well thank you TJ I have absolutely loved this episode

it's gonna be one that I listen back to a lot please share all your comments uh below tag us on social media share this episode with a friend it is not cool to gatekeep this is an amazing episode so if you've enjoyed it send it on to your friends make sure you're subscribed and following as well and thanks for listening