How Dopamine Shapes Your Habits and Productivity - Tj Power

the fact you chose the harder path mean means your brain has had to work harder throughout your life and therefore your brain will have a greater capacity to generate dopamine than the average brain so then you're going to be a more motivated individual the pursuit of satisfaction is the goal with dopamine you want to pursue any kind of activity that at the end you think wow I feel satisfied with that you feel So Satisfied when you sit down and read for 20 minutes you don't feel satisfied after 20 minutes of scrolling Instagram at all you're

actually just yearning for more at the end it's the opposite of satisfaction if we spend a lot of our time moderately satisfying this chemical eventually the chemical begins to kick back and it will actually increase feelings of loneliness within our brain because it's trying to create a greater desire to actually pursue meaningful connection oh by the way before we get into this episode I would love to tell you a little bit about life notes now Life notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers and it contains my notes from

life so notes from books that I've read podcasts I'm listening to conversations I'm having and experiences I'm having in work and in life and around once a week I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers so if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning almost in real time as I'm learning it you might like to subscribe there is a link down in the show notes or in the video description all right TJ welcome to the podcast thanks for having me um what

are your can you tell us a little bit about you like who are you and why are we why are you qualified to talk to us about these chemicals yeah my name is TJ power and I'm the lead neuroscientist at the dose lab and we've basically built research Center to study our four main brain chemicals dopamine oxytocin serotonin and endorphins I've spent the last 10 years going through my undergraduate and Masters and lecturing getting deep into really understanding how our brain operates and how to maximize these chemicals to enhance our life solid that was really

good that perfect nailed it okay cool um so should we start with doine yeah um cool so I was hoping we could take a little bit of a deep dive into these four main chemicals dopamine oxytocin serotonin and endorphins and so let's start with dopamine why should we care about dopamine dopamine is the chemical that's getting hit the hardest by the modern world for sure it's the chemical that Society has managed to figure out hi to how to hijack and as hunter gatherers and my whole kind of journey into understanding these chemicals is that our

brain spent 300,000 years developing them for an entirely different lifestyle a lifestyle to wake up hunt for food build shelter connect with each other fight one another that's what they're designed for and me was this chemical that lived deep within us that enabled us to take action toward all these challenging things that would Keep Us Alive in our modern world we basically figured out how to hack that feeling that hunting or connecting with people or building shelter and we'd hack it with things like porn and Tik Tock and cigarettes alcohol whatever it may be and

then it goes on to create very big challenges within our dopamine system specifically with our dopamine baselines nice and so what is what's what's wrong with that effectively this chemical enables you to have motivation and we all need motivation in our lives whether it's with our partners our jobs to exercise to bother to cook healthy food motivation is like the core of being a human being and all of these things that over stimulate this chemical and then crash the chemical out lead to dopamine not functioning very well anymore and so many people in the modern

world are just struggling to take action towards what they're seeking for they struggl they have dreams in their mind with their careers or I really want to be healthy and they get a little bit motivated for a second and then it crashes and Society really needs to understand that operating and getting this chemical into balance is what's going to enable you to actually get focused and stay consistently motivated nice what's the science behind that like how does how does dopamine lead to motivation effectively the chemical evolved within us to be earned so the whole way

in which it operates is that if we do something that is effortful dopamine will begin to generate in our brain and dopamine actually operates in little they're called vesicles and any kind of activity that requires hard work will literally manufacture these vesicles in the brain so say you wake up and one option would be you go and scroll Tik Tok one would be you get up and you go and brush your teeth and you make your bed one of them the effortful path is going to lead to these bubbles being generated and building and that's

then generating motivation within your brain so that you can take action to whatever you're seeking for that day if you say go straight into Tik Tok your brain's been building some dopamine throughout the night from their regenerative process of sleep you get the ti Tik Tok immediately effectively you're bursting these bubbles you're reducing the quantity of dopamine within the brain and then suddenly you're there and you think oh I really can't be bothered with today I can't bother to do any work you get that flat depressed type feeling so if it gets optimized and you

can take action it's going to feel good wait so so the brain manufactures do me in response to the doing of hard things yeah effectively if you actually imagine having to spend like five hours hunting for a deer that would be an extremely difficult thing to do and we had to find that deer for 300,000 years in order to help us and our family survive and in the pursuit of the deer we needed two things we needed a ridiculous amount of motivation so that we didn't give up on the hunting and we needed insane hyperfocus

effectively so you didn't get distracted by lots of different things you just locked in the deer is what we're going to track and Chase and in that Pursuit you just progressively need more and more and more dopamine in order to get there because your brain's going to find it harder physically you're going to get more and more exhausted in the modern world it's more that we're mentally exhausted than physically exhausted but regardless dopamine is required for that Pursuit of a challenging objective as you pursue something with more and more effort dopamine generates more and more

and more in order to support you in that Journey okay so you're saying that I'm doing a hard thing like trying to hunt a deer or like trying to I don't know build a website whatever the thing might be and over time you're saying that like there's in there's more and more dopamine that's building in my brain how can we feel into this dopamine increasing effectively when you sit down and start a task sometimes it can be very hard to begin and something like procrastination for example where you can't take action that's caused by low

dopamine levels and when you start a task so let's say cleaning your home because that's an annoying task that we all have to do it's not like super pleasurable especially at the beginning you start the task and you also put it off for ages because you can't be bothered then eventually you start the task and at the beginning it's like so much effort you maybe have some music playing on in the background you think oh I can't bother to do this but I need to do it a good example is something like cleaning a bathroom

because that's a particularly annoying task in our home what you'll find is the first 5 minutes pretty annoying and gradually you begin to what's called gain momentum effectively after 10 minutes you might start getting more and more into it and then what can happen is the opposite can occur rather than thing you can't really bother to do this you actually get more into it than you even expected to and that's because you're effectively entering cleaning Flow State flow state is when our brain gets hyper focused on something it takes on average a human brain about

15 minutes to enter Flow State brilliant psychologist called gold discover this whole Flow State and doine connection and effectively the beginning of a task very very challenging as you engage the effort the brain start to realize oh this human is in the pursuit of some kind of goal they need the dopamine vesical to help they need the dopamine vesical to help and it's why whenever you sit down forti cleaning your home completing a specific annoying work project going into the gym is so important to understand the first 50 minutes are always going to be the

hardest because at that point you're sitting at Baseline dopamine you might even be sitting below it because if you've just scrolled Tik Tok for 10 minutes before you're actually now in a dopamine deficit State and you've got to climb to this High dopamine in order to get into a highly motivated driven experience so beginning hard battle through 15 minutes that's where flow state begins sick um what are the enemies of this dopamine system in our modern world you can imagine that with a graph anything that requires effort like hunting or building shelter would take a

long time for the dopamine to be experienced within the brain so you can quickly access it you suddenly have to engage like two hours of effort dopamine would slowly increase with the brain you get this really pleasurable rewarding experience and that would motivate us to do that action again in the future anything in the modern world that has developed the ability to get that level of dopamine increase but immediately is effectively what's hijacking it because the brain is always seeking for homeostasis that balance experience if you suddenly get super high Tik Tok Spike of dopamine

you then put the Tik Tok down and you're suddenly like I feel like [ __ ] you're apathetic you can't take action towards anything and it's because your brain is just so confused by the unnatural Spike that it crashes out effectively and the way to identify if something is unnatural dopamine it's just how quickly does it give you pleasure a simple comparison would be reading a book versus scrolling on Instagram when you open a book and start reading a book it's not like wow this is so enjoyable I love reading this it might be for

some but I think for the majority it's like okay I got to get into this and your brain begins to put in more and more effort as you read the lines and the pages and you try and get into it gradually after 10 or 15 minutes when you kind of enter that flow State type experience with reading it does become a very pleasurable experience because the dopamine is been slowly eared and increased in a natural way when you you open Instagram immediately you feel good you get some notifications you get likes comments a message from

a girl you're getting loads of stimulation off all the videos whatever it might be and then the dopam spikes extremely high and then as a result we going so unnaturally High the brain seeks that balance and crashes it out and so many of us are struggling to take action towards our dreams because we're just constantly crashing the system that's responsible for getting us towards them so what I'm hearing is that really the pursuit of pleasurable things that involve a level of feeling as if you've earned it mhm is important here like you're not just getting

the free pleasure from just doing the thing I wonder if so sort of I enjoy playing video games on like very hard difficulty playing Horizon forbidden West at the moment and there's like you know people would look at me and be like we you spent the last three hours on the same boss fight like why not just tune down the difficulty level but there's something about doing the hard thing that feels way more rewarding than just like I don't know killing the boss on story mode or on easy mode or whatever I think similar I

used to go on these Wilderness medicine trips at University where it was like um we we' we'd spent the whole day hiking and then we'd do like medical scenarios of like this person's like broken their leg and you got to splint it and stuff and then at the end of the day we would all have a lovely big dinner in the cottage and play some board games and there was something about the fact that we had to do a whole day of hiking to feel as if we've earned that that really made it way more

rewarding compared to if we had just sort of randomly started playing board games is that this sort of idea of like feeling as if you've earned the thing 100% that is exactly it and if you had just immediately woken up in the boarding and done the board game it wouldn't be as nearly as pleasurable and you just have to imagine surviving was so hard for 300,000 years like if you actually think about suddenly being put out in a forest and you've got to suddenly survive out there it would be insanely difficult so the brain has

to be so deeply programmed to seek for effort that's exactly how it's designed to operate if you look at that gaming example when you're playing Horizon did you call it when you're playing Horizon the fact that you have the desire to put it onto the heart level is probably why you're actually in the position you're in in your life right now in terms of your career and your business because you've actually chosen the harder path in life and it means your brain because you've consistently chosen the harder path when you're at University making your YouTube

videos whilst also studying all of these things the fact you chose the harder path mean means your brain has had to work harder throughout your life and therefore your brain will have a greater capacity to generate dopamine than the average brain so then you're going to be a more motivated individual you can imagine if you 200 hunted gatherers and one had an easy time at surviving because it was like warm and there was an abundance of food around and then you had one that was trying to survive in the cold with no food this one

is going to have to work way harder they're going to need more motivation so suddenly they're going to have to require so much more dopamine in order to survive and if you start pursuing the lane of effort in your life more regularly generate more dopamine Your Capacity to pursue effort in all Lanes whether that's being more attentive with your partner eating healthier food being more disciplined in your home working towards your goals whatever it might be becomes actually easier and easier cuz you've got a ton of the chemical sick is this uh sort of there's

there's often a phenomen and you hear about around like the sort of kids that grow up very wealthy and they're sort of playing life on easy mode and then they grow up and become sort of demotivated and depressed and stuff because life was sort of too easy and on the other side of the of the coin you get a lot of stories from like the Gary Vaya trucks of the world who came into the us as immigrants from Russia and had to grind and work really hard and they seem to have much more motivation to

do stuff compared to like the kids that grew up with a silver spoon up there behind 100% like if if you're forced to have to put in more effort to your life you're just going to be a more motivated individual I think about this a lot like if my dreams come true and like finances are something that I have a good abundance of then I'm going to raise kids that potentially have money around them and I don't want lazy kids that can't take action towards what they're seeking for whether that's like sport or school or

whatever it may be so you really need to instill in them hard work work before pleasure and I think about it all the time I literally imagine myself in the future like the kid wanting to have their VR headset for a period of time and them having to earn it by doing some kind of cold water immersion before they can go into the headset and fundamentally you just can't be given anything in life like you look at individuals that win the lottery for example and become a millionaire overnight very quickly depression arises after that because

there's no longer a Pursuit and fundamentally the human brain is just designed to be in the pursuit of a goal at all times because it had to be for us to get here as a species yeah I've spoken to a bunch of people who have sold their businesses for tens to hundreds of millions and they all basically said that yeah I kind of got fairly depressed afterwards because I had nothing more to do and they realized that the last 10 years of working with people that they like to build something cool that brought them way

more joy than seeing 100 million in the bank 100% And we as humans just always need to be climbing some kind of mountain and the difficulty is all of these things like social media or drinking some alcohol eating some sugary food are effectively hacking that experience in our brain so it feels like we're actually achieving something effectively in our brain our brain thinks wow massive reward I must have done something really good then it gets into this deep state of confusion because it's like wait but I didn't do anything that was hard work and then

it goes through this big crashing experience of dopamine so constantly having this clarification of what is my Pursuit every day is fundamental and we teach people regularly in dose that they need to go on walks in nature without their headphones I actually heard you speak into this recently whereby you feel like you have creative thoughts out there and our brain needs prolonged periods of time away from technology where it Daydreams about our dreams effectively so that it can then think okay what can I chase what can I be in the pursuit of instead of just

being in the pursuit of porn and Tik Tock and cigarettes or whatever it may be nice um is there a way of taking this too far like I'm imagining someone listening to this saying that well you know growing up in poverty with an abusive family and stuff sure that requires you to work really hard to succeed but actually those people often end up screwed up as well like what's the is there a Tipping Point of stress Beyond which it stops being useful for sure the thing to understand is that there are four chemicals at play

here this dopamine one is simply helping people to be able to have motivation and take action when you look at an individual that may had have had an abusive experience when they were young or some kind of really hard time or poverty in terms of lack of nutrition whatever it may be then comes into play the other three chemicals of oxytocin the love chemical maybe there wasn't that much nurturing around around them all of these things then are really key factors to understand someone's likelihood to be able to go where they want to Fantastic cool

so let's go on to action points so we've talked about what dopam mean is why it's important uh we've talked about a few general principles like uh hard work before pleasure um and always being in the pursuit of something what are some action points that someone watching or listening to this can apply to their life from today that will help improve the way we use dopamine yeah so with dopamine the first thing to understand the most effective thing we've seen in all of our research and training is this concept we've developed called phone fasting which

is just having a greed times with yourself where you will Fast quote unquote from your phone the most important time in your whole life to fast from your phone is when you wake up in the morning your brain wakes up it's seeking for dopamine it's seeking to attack the day if it goes straight into the phone you're really setting yourself on a much more difficult Journey so we really guide people to phone fast when they wake up ideally they're charging the phone knocked by their head either the other side of the room or outside of

the room would be best and they have to immediately take action so we get people to go and pick up their toothbrush soon as they wake up and start brushing their teeth Splash cold water on their face and come back and make their bed so the first thing most important thing for do for me no phone brush teeth Splash God water on your face and then make your bed and that just at least generates the dopamine to Kickstart the day to make the rest of it easier so that's your morning phone fasting at least 15

minutes first thing in the day take action in the evening we then need a minimum of 60 Minute period where again we're physically away from the phone so during that period of time you might be cooking and eating you might be exercising socializing even something like watching TV which is an unnatural dopamine experience but nowhere near as bad as social media for our brain because of the speed in which pleasure arises just with that TV point if you sit and you watch Netflix similar to the concept they gave with the book before if you sit

and watch Netflix you don't click play and think wow this is insanely amazing but eventually if you pay attention you get into the story line it becomes pleasurable so the spike is slightly less than Tik Tok so phone fasting in the evening 60 Minutes you don't want to spend the whole day working and then burn your dough for me all night because you're going to wake up with really low levels of motivation then on the weekend we try and guide people on a Saturday and a Sunday to have a 2hour phone fast so you try

and engage with some kind of activity maybe you go on to walk with your friends maybe go out for lunch and you all agree phones in your bags but if you try and have a 2-hour period Sunday and Saturday and then 50 minutes in the mornings 60 Minutes in the evenings then you're developing like a very clear structure into your life where you're getting away from the quick dope mean of the phone fundamentally the phone is the main thing in our lives hijacking the system if you get away from the phone more you're just going

to have way more motivation nice what's your theory about Apple blockers and screen time limits and the whole shank I think they can be really valuable I think I'm using one that's called One tech at the moment it seems to be very effective in stopping my like constant opening of the app I think it's very important that the brain experiences boredom and in every moment of boredom you end up always opening the phone actually in a state of boredom your brain will be generating dopamine it goes into this like restorative state where it's sitting there

thinking oh I've got a break right now so it's going to build some dopamine if you can't just crash your dopamine during your moments of boredom it's not great for the brain chemical so I think they can be affective I think the Apple stuff for me didn't really work like i' constantly just skip it and stuff like that but I think some of these stronger more powerful ones that will block things are very valuable and we need to only open these apps like a maximum of maybe five times a day if you're opening them which

I have no judgment for like 30 or 50 times a day which is so easy I did that for years then it is just going to be very harmful to open me nice yeah one thing I find super helpful is I I carry this little pocket book in my back pocket at all times which is why it's warped on this in the shape of my bum yeah um with a little pocket fountain pen as well and uh one thing I've started doing recently is sort of aiming for 15,000 steps a day nice so I live

fairly close to Regent Park and so now anytime I'm doing a meeting I do it walking around um did an hour of walking this morning while taking a call 8,000 steps that was super nice and even sometimes where I'm like I'm i' I've got a break in the middle of the day or it's a weekend or something I'll have my phone in my pocket because I also have my phone in my pocket uh but I will try and consciously think okay I'm going to go I'm going to walk through the park go to the cafe

grab a coffee and just do some physical pen and paper journaling because there's something about slowing the process down rather than typing on my phone or bringing the iPad bringing the laptop which are like high octane devices and just like the chill experience of writing in a journal find leads to way more insights compared to just consuming more stuff on the phone for sure the awesome thing about doing that is your brain doesn't have an association with social media in that book whereas when you're on the phone opening it just to go on your notes

to do something that's healthy for your brain your brain is experiencing anticipatory dopamine at the thought of opening Instagram so even though you're sitting there trying to just do your notes your brain knows that Instagram's around the corner just like when someone has a drink in a pub they start thinking I might want a vape or whatever it might be because of these connections that our brain will create so it is very important to create these barriers if the phone always needs to be on you airplane mode is also just so effective because the brain

just works by these cues if you see some kind of email or anything at all that can be novel for your brain anything that's new information will Spike the dop main so having these periods away from it is powerful one thing that I've noticed about entrepreneurs is that they always have their phone on some sort of D not disturb Focus mode I noticed that whenever I'm trying to iMessage anyone it's like this person has the notifications turn on on quite it like notify silently or something like that and I interviewed Jordan Harbinger on the Pod

a few weeks ago which has not yet come out um and he mentioned that like this is a thing he's noticed as well that every entrepreneur he knows just always has the phone in some sort of focus mode cuz like why would you need the notifications and you can always set up like online I've set it up so that like my girlfriend my mom and my brother and my grandma are the only ones whose notifications can actually come through and so if there's an emergency or anything which there often isn't I'll see the notification if

it's anything else I'll only see it when I choose to take it off of focus mode which means I'm in control of the notifications of the timing of notifications rather than them being in control of me I think that is the way to do it I think having the emergency calls is good and again it's good to reflect and realize they very rarely happen I think lots of us have this like fear around the phone that we're like wow what if something happens but very rarely things do and if you remind your brain of that

you might calm a little bit about it and I really believe like Society just got trained over like a 10 to 15 year period that notifications need to be part of our life but I don't think they need to be on the phone at all I have no badges on any apps I've got no notification that can come in at any time and we're all so hooked on these phones that you're never going to miss anything important like you're always going to open your WhatsApp and your Instagram DMS and your emails you're never going to

miss anything so you don't need to be told it's there we're so trained to open these apps now by these habits of dopamin that if you just turn absolutely everything off it does empower you to actually decide how you're going to use it nice um one thing we haven't you talked about is the law of dopamine what is the law of dopamine the law of dopamine is to take action when you wake every day and what I mean by that is as soon as you open your eyes in the morning the most important thing you

can do is get moving effectively dopamine is literally involved in movement there's actually this really big phenoma on Tik Tok at the moment called rotting which is where people literally can't get out of their bed and particularly teenage girls call it rotting where they like cannot move they can't get out their bed to do anything the reason that's happened is cuz doine is so low from the Tik Tok and sugar and so that they can't take action at all if you wake up in the morning and you just immediately get the system moving even if

it feels horrible actually the more horrible it is the more dopamine you're going to generate because it operates in terms of that pain pleasure type balance and if you start adopting that kind of principle take action when you wake every day it just means dopamine is on a very good path for the moment you begin amazing okay so we talked about actionable strategy number one was phone phone fasting yeah what are some other things that we can do second big action for dopamine is what we call Flow State flow state has become a big phenomenon

there's that great psychologist called chick Zen Mahi who popularized this a number of years back and flow state is the idea of our brain getting extremely hyperfocused on one thing it's effectively the opposite of how the modern human is spending their time we're constantly focused on like 10 different things at once believing we can all multitask to Journey back to our ancestors and what we did for 99% of History was focused on one thing one time we'd be hunting then we'd be building and then we'd be cooking we would never be like trying to build

our shelter and hunt a deer at the same time that's not how we operated so we would have spent hours and hours every single day deeply immersed in what we call Flow State nowadays we spend less when we enter this Flow State experience it builds dope mean in crazy crazy amounts because our brain's like wow they obviously need me right now you want to think of this Dopeman chemical as your friend and when you're trying to engage in something that's challenging it's like oh he needs support he needs support help him Focus people can enter

Flow State in a variety aspects of their life you might be able to get it in your work if you're fortunate to work in something you kind of enjoy that is challenging you might be able to get Flow State there things like music art cooking cleaning connecting with humans anything that gets your brain hyper locked in on one thing for a prolonged period of time is going to create Flow State video games video games are interesting because how Flow State operates is it has to be this perfect balance between the amount of effort you're going

to put in into something and your skill level and that will decide for whether you can enter Flow State so if for example you did some editing you might find if you did editing back when you're at University that might have been quite flow statey for you because it was quite challenging and you had to like kind of you were learning the ropes and stuff so it was a good balance between difficulty and your skill level if you edit now you might find that a little bit boring compared to what you used to because it

might be a more simple task so you might not enter Flow State so you're looking for these tasks that are perfect balance of your skill level and the difficulty video games are very strateg rically designed to always make sure you're at that exact spot so they've made it so that as the levels are upgrading and something like skill-based batch matchmaking in fortnite and War Zone and all that kind of stuff is designed to constantly you leave you in this state of skill and challenge balance so yes video games could enter Flow State video games are

an interesting topic as well because I don't put them in the same camp as all the unnatural dopamine in terms of social media and sugar and alcohol and so on because of the effort required to place some of them if you looked at a game like Candy Crush on the phone that is zero effort it literally draws the line for you and then you put it into the box like a kid basically so there's zero effort Max pleasure dopamine crash if you take potentially that Horizon game some things that you can do on like a

Minecraft type games some Call of Duty games they can be extremely strategic and challenging which means your brain is actually working hard so it is generating dopamine on a more natural curve than the spike can crash this episode of Deep dive is very kindly sponsored by wab which stands for you need a budget now for many people money is a cause of guilt and anxiety you're never entirely sure where all your money goes and you're left feeling guilty about purchases big or small money is often associated with restriction fear and uncertainty but your money is

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found that I get a lot more sustained pleasure from like immersive storytelling Style video games that require quite a lot of work and occasionally a reasonable amount of grind to like achieve something um rather than the more like like this is why I don't like phone games cuz phone games are they're just too too quick they're too quick to get the pleasure yeah you want to earn it yeah where it's like you know 3-hour evening solo evening cool I'm just gone for a walk I've got my 15,000 steps I'm now going to settle in to

try and defeat that one boss on Horizon just going to take three hours doing the thing yeah that's that's weirdly way more pleasurable than 3 hours of scrolling Tik Tok even though 3 hours of scrolling Tik Tok is like more I don't know pleasure inducing there's something that's more satisfying about about the the extended video game or the reading a fiction book where the payoff is 600 pages in rather than on on on page one for sure and the pursuit of satisfaction is the goal with open m you want to pursue any kind of activity

that at the end you think wow I feel satisfied with that you feel So Satisfied when you sit down and read for 20 minutes you don't feel satisfied after 20 minutes of scrolling Instagram at all you're actually just yearning for more at the end it's the opposite of satisfaction and I would say getting very immersed in like a challenging video game isn't bad for our brain in the slightest in schools I have this all the time I have loads of is asking me a lot of questions about specifically video games particularly in young boys that

video games is a big big part of their lives and I really go down the route of just like it's about the skill level required in order to engage with it and as long as you have the other behaviors like you mentioned like walking and eating and socializing like core things then video gaming can definitely be okay nice cool what is uh strategy number three strategy number three for raising your dopamine is going to be immersing our body in cold water a brilliant psychologist back in 199 called ceramic discovered for the first time that cold

water emersion can raise our dopamine levels by 250% 2.5 times and when you get into this cold water immersion conversation it's really important to understand this concept called the pain pleasure balance this was developed by Anna lmy in America brilliant American psychiatrist and effectively what we discovered was all of these really quote unquote painful challenging activities of hunting and fighting and building resulted in a pleasurable experience in the brain after ws and again that was our brain just reinforcing do hard things feel good keep doing hard things survive as a species and cold water immersion

is the Pinnacle of this it's a highly painful horrible experience having a cold shower or getting in a plunge pool or something like that that will lead to this massive generation of dopamin and so should we all have cold showers in the morning or buy an ice plunge bath or what's the what's the thing is interesting I think the ice plunge is a good example of like an extreme version but don't think it's necessary I think it's actually almost comical that humans are living so much in a pleasurable world that one of the biggest Trends

on social media is freezing our to death in an ice bath and it's like that is actually how clever the human brain is and trying to rebalance itself that everyone's sitting there on social media getting quicked open me watching people have horrible experiences in ice plunges that's like quite ironic really and Co plung like if if you've access to one in like your gym or like you're on holiday and you can swim in a cold lake or something like that that's awesome but I would say the most sustainable way to do this is just to

every single time you have a shower have 30 seconds of cold at the end and that will provide a good natural increase in this dopamine chemical to create a rise in motivation and your capacity to focus to again understand with something like Flow State our ability to get locked in it requires dopamine so if you had cold water immersion first thing in the morning and then you try and go to a flow State task you're going to get into that state easier so if you can have your normal shower turn it cold at the end

we found with all our training that if people put music on when they get in the shower and turn it cold at their favorite moment in the song at the chorus or whatever it may be people seem to stay in the shower for longer because they're in a slightly more positive vibe as they go through the hell of the cold water nice what a strategies for in fight so next strategy for boosting our dopamine is this action we called my Pursuit and this comes back to the importance of a human always having a very clear

Mountain that they're climbing in their life and this was huge for me I actually was someone that struggled a lot with all of the different addictive behaviors our modern world has to offer I went through a pretty challenging period of loss in my life from 16 to 21 where five people in my family passed away in five years which was a pretty intense experience as a young man and during those years I went very heavily into the world of alcohol and drugs and social media and porn and everything that would kind of distract me from

the experience in my mind at 22 I then decided I like really wanted to create a life that I enjoyed and that would be naturally pleasurable and that would provide like Good Financial income and everything like that and I had to go through the clar the clarification of what am I going to chase instead of all that quick dopamine and this is where the whole idea of my Pursuit came from that if you are someone that is addicted to all these different things really the only way to get off of them is to have something

else that you're chasing that you're willing to sacrifice for say for example not watching porn not watching porn is probably one of the hardest things in the world because it's like a secret addiction like drinking less is like something that's like at least it's in public for the majority of people so it's like if you're constantly getting pissed at the PB people are going to start thinking oh you've got a drinking problem porn is this giant Secret in society that everyone does but doesn't talk about and it is one of the worst open behaviors in

the world it's hyper hyper stimulation and crash and you feel it like immediately after porn you do not feel your best self and quitting Paul was then one of the hardest of these things in order to let go ultimately the only way I managed to quit it was by really deeply observing how it was affecting my capacity to take action towards my primary goal The Next Step and I began to notice that if I watch ball one evening before going to sleep there would be this like more of a fuzz and lack of motivation in

my brain when I woke up the next morning that's why having a very clear Pursuit is so important because you're only going to be willing to sacrifice eating sugary lunches and going on your phone every morning and drinking loads of alcohol on a Friday night if there's a higher goal you're chasing and we go through this process of really helping people identify what is my primary Pursuit what is the thing I should be chasing down nice what is that process how do we figure this out this is where we go to this prolonged period of

time in nature without your phone and I did this largely because I was so addicted to my phone and I thought I need to start spending time off my phone sitting around on a sofa board is hell so what if I walk in nature and I found prolong periods of time in nature pretty hard without my phone and you could have it in a bag on AirPlay mode or ideally just not with you at all and you need to be in a nature environment that you can spend at least 60 minutes with your mind and

what I found is at the start of these walks some of your problems come into your mind or some of your like critical selft talk where you tell yourself you're not enough or you're ugly or you're stupid or whatever it might be and other different challenges you're navigating and a lot of us experiencing these little moments of time in silence and they are very they are very enjoyable so then we're always headphones in podcast on distraction distraction what I came to discover is that if you spend a prolonged period of time in nature which is

our home as a species where we spend 300,000 years eventually after 15 to 20 minutes that kind of stuff eventually subsides it has its moment to be heard those different emotional messages that your brain and body are trying to send you and then creativity begins to arise and if you go on a 60-minute walk in nature simply with the question of what is the primary thing I'm seeking for in my life right now and that might be a relationship it might be something to do with your work it might be that you know physical fitness

is something you have to pursue harder it might be your food but if you spend 60 minutes and then on a regular basis pondering what is my pursue you'll fine you'll get extremely clear once you've identified what it is on the following walks you begin to then stress how the hell am I going to get hold of that goal and doing this every morning without my phone 100% is the absolute main thing that has put me in the situation I'm in in my life right now nice yeah that really Vibes with me um I've recently

become a big advocate of uh goal setting and just like figuring out what you want and taking the time to make a goal towards it because goals have a a tendency to focus the mind on a thing and I remember when I was in school my primary proced was how do I make money on the internet after school and so that was the thing that I was doing in the evenings when other people were like playing video games or browsing I was chatting on MSN Messenger or whatever it was back then I was like learning

how to build websites and coding and stuff because I had this primary pursuit of making money similarly at University unfortunately my Prim primary Pursuit was how do I make money so that I can go parttime as a doctor yeah and so that was the thing that I was doing um when I had the option of doing other things but the thing that I was doing was was was focusing on that and I did find that the point where I made enough money and money no longer was the primary Pursuit I felt a bit like rudderless

I was like oh [ __ ] like what do I what do I want to do stuff and I think one of the things with money is that it's a very easy primary Pursuit uh but it's also a bit of a dangerous primary Pursuit because then you get it and then you're like oh crap what like you know filling the void as Tim Ferris calls it in in the 4-Hour Work Week um and I find that every few months I will ponder that question um I will I I tend not to phrase it as what's

my primary Pursuit but that's a really good way of phrasing it I tend to think why am I doing what I'm why am I doing what I'm doing in terms of like the work or the YouTube channel or the podcast or the books or any of this sort of stuff um but I really like what's what's my primary Pursuit I think it's ridiculously fundamental when you say it needs to be a clear goal that is so important because if a h gatherer wakes up and they think right I'm going to go try and get some

food today they are going to get very distracted by all the different things they could seek for whereas if they're like right I'm going to only try and make sure I hand down a deer they're going to at least be able to be laser focused on one thing when you're trying to figure out the difference between like a money Pursuit I've also had a similar thing where you get money and you think maybe that's not like actually fulfilling me fully you really want your primary pursuit to somehow contribute to other people as well because fundamentally

like the H gather wasn't going out to find the deer to feed themsel they were feeding a group or building shelter for the group and we're always fundamentally designed to help the group survive and your most fulfilling Pursuits will contribute to a wider amount of people than just yourself yeah one of the questions that I um always include is part of uh every quarter I do like a sort of alignment quarterly alignment workshop for my for my audience where you figure out what you want and figure out and turn it into goals and one of

my favorite questions is if I had all the time and money in the world how would I use my talents to serve other people and that question really gets at that okay money's not a thing anymore time's not a problem anymore and you have to use something that you are good at to help someone else and that question sort of ticks all the boxes of like yeah usually people's answer to answer to that question is a good way of figuring out okay what should the primary Pursuit really be I love that and the interesting thing

is I obviously I'm only seeing entrepreneurship from the lane that I'm currently living in I remember a number of years ago reading this quote from Elon Musk that the amount of income you generate is directly proportional to the problem you solve in the world and I remember just thinking if you can find a way to solve some kind of significant problem for society money may arrive as a result of that and say for example when we started dose we primarily only trained companies and I really wanted to train young people financially it made no sense

to go into the school Market because obviously a company like Amazon has a lot more money than a state school in London and I chose to just think okay we're just going to pursue it because it's actually a very important problem to solve and it's very interesting how money is arriving now from that lane because of various ways in which we're managing to do the model simply by just solving an important problem in the world so if your Pursuit can solve a problem is probably going to bring money as well yeah there's a nice quote

from MJ DeMarco which is to make millions all you have to do is impact Millions that's true so yep that makes sense um okay finally thing uh final thing you mentioned uh was discipline let's talk about that yeah discipline specifically discipline in your home is a fantastic way to constantly be raising your Baseline dopamine level and we want like a high Baseline dopamine so that we constantly have this like urge within us to take action towards whatever we're seeking I want to go to the gym I want to cook food I want to do my

job you just want a high level of Baseline dopamine anytime you engage discipline in your home you're raising that Baseline so if you for example finish your lunch and leave everything around the place you don't Engage The dopam me system if you bother to just rinse put in the dishwasher you've just put in a little bit of effort and your do your brain has generated dopamine and if people go through the process are really working towards maintaining a much more organized and tidy home it's very interesting the translation that has to their motivation and one

of our biggest clients that we work with is the NHS training lots of doctors there and many people in the NHS are really struggling with their mental health there are a lot of people that come to us experiencing a lot of depression in their minds and that like real low period where you can't really do anything even working is really hard showering is hard anything that's effortful is hard and in the first week of Dos we simply get them to select one room in their home that they're going to organize and try and get it

done and that's like their worst nightmare like some of us depressed the idea of cleaning a room in their home is hell and I say to them like we've done this with 50,000 people and this really does work please just trust us and clean that room in your house they'll put music on sometimes we get people to FaceTime someone else and they go both clean their rooms at the same time they clean a room and they come back the next week and suddenly they have this more vibrancy in their energy and suddenly all the other

things we need to do for our mental and physical health to do with food or exercise whatever it may be come from a place of higher baselined op so it's easier to actually take action one of the things that we um Teach as part of our productivity lab is you know we have these like Focus lab workshops where you know we'll we'll do a few hours Zoom co-working session where we'll get a few hundred people in a zoom room and I always recommend to people for the first like 5 minutes we say align and organize

align I.E figure out what you want to do with this next hour and organize spend three minutes just clearing your workspace or like getting that coffee mug and putting it downstairs or like you know just taking the [ __ ] off of your desk or your surroundings or whatever and I found that when I've experimented with that it's really worked but I I I suspect there's something about tidying up your environment and having that discipline around even like the workspace that contributes to that High dopamine Baseline which makes it easier to stay focused definitely if

you look at either scroll social media for five minutes before I get started or have to clean up my workspace very simply one of them is effortful and your brain is like oh they're engaging effort quick shove the dopamine friend in there and uh get it all organized dopamine's goingon to rise amazing um anything else on dopamine before we move on to the other three hormons with dopamine there's this fundamental principle to understand around human survival and humans for a long time have just simply tried to find food build shelter and survive as a species

and our brain very cleverly knows our chance of survival so whenever we did things that were optimizing our likelihood to survive in the years to come like finding food building sustainable shelter whatever it may be dopamine was constantly increasing when we look at how humans are engaging in the modern world there's actually a very clear reason these symptoms of depression low mood procrastination in attention there is actually a really specific reason they're arising and it's that our dopamine is extremely good at predicting the fure future there's this huge concept with in dopamine called reward predictive

error where it's constantly predicting future outcomes future outcomes currently as a as a species if you take something like watching loads of porn versus having sex with someone one of them is prospering for society if humans have sex and procreate that's going to help Society Prosper if humans all imagine if it eventually got to 95% of us weren't having sex and we were all only watching porn that would be terrible for the future the future survival of our species and whenever you're engaging with a behavior in your life if you ask yourself the question is

this actually advantageous to my survival as a species that's going to immediately tell you whether it's healthy or unhealthy dopamine if you pursue something in your work or even have a clean and organized hygienic home or you cook and eat a healthy meal anything that is advantageous to your future is going to be healthy dopamine anything that is slightly drawing back your potential so when we do drink too many alcoholic drinks or we are smoking a vape or we're eating a sugary meal or we are watching pwn it's a really simple distinction to make rather

than having to constantly go online and think what was the healthy dopamine list what was the unhealthy dopamine list if you just look at every single Behavior you do if it is advantageous to your survival it's going to be amazing if it's disadvantageous it's going to take from you all right so we've just spent the last X however long talking about dopamine um what is the next chemical we're talking about the next chemical is oxytocin this is the O in dose and this is the chemical that is completely designed to connect Humanity together and it

has a big effect on both our relationship sh but also our confidence and how we connect with ourselves so this is driving the experience of love as a species why should we care about oxytocin if it comes to wanting to improve our lives I would say at the human core oxytocin is actually the most desirable chemical in order for humans to procreate and survive oxytocin has driven us to have relationships and as much as we all seek for finance and wealth and things like that a lot of what we're really seeking for is love and

a family and relationships and if you satisfy your oxytocin your brain is going to be much calmer it's going to be much more confident it's going to be a happier experience within your mind and you are generally going to feel much more fulfilled in your life if your oxytocin is high nice so what are the things in the modern world that uh stop this oxytocin from being high anything that distracts our capacity to connect with one another effectively so whereas with dopamine humans figured out how to hijack the chemical and literally access high levels of

dopamine without experiencing the effort required to attain it oxytocin we can't hijack it but we can disrupt its capacity to increase so say for example you and I are having this conversation and as we were having it I was constantly looking at my phone would really disrupt our connection with one another if we weren't making eye contact Hearing what one another are saying so the phone is fundamentally the primary thing in the modern world that is leading to low oxytocin levels what about the connection we get through Instagram stories and Snapchat stories and commenting on

people's Tik toks I don't even know that that's a thing like what about the kind of social media internet type connection the challenge I have with this is I think it's actually creating a lack of desire to pursue meaningful oxytocin because we're moderately satisfying this deep human need to connect with one another and I had this really uh bad at one point in my life I went to lizbon I was like I'm going to move to Lisbon and be like an entrepreneur that lives there and I didn't know anyone there and I got there and

very quickly I saw that my screen time had risen significantly when I was looking at the data and I was think wow my screen time is so high and I got there and I found it really hot to connect with people I'd never put myself that much out of my comfort zone where you need to walk up to people in coffee shops and make friends and for all of my life with school and youi like friends should just sort of like appear in your life by environment and I noticed that because I had this deep

desire of human connection and I wasn't attaining it suddenly my social media time spent was increasing significantly and if we spend a lot of our time moderately satisfying this chemical eventually the chemical begins to kick back and it will actually increase feelings of loneliness within our brain because it's trying to create a greater desire to actually pursue meaningful connection so you're sitting there and you're scrolling and you don't really know why you feel [ __ ] but you just feel [ __ ] part of it is your dopamine is low but really right at the

core of that constant OB observation of other people is the fact you're not getting what you need which is proper human- to human connection what's the law of oxytocin the law of oxytocin is to make someone else in your life happy every day and it's extremely important to understand this because in our modern world we are struggling with mental health like many people struggling with worrisome thinking in the head and we get very Analytical in our own minds one of the most fundamental ways in which we can significantly Elevate human mental health is by just

not being in our own head and instead focusing on other people and for years and years humans were always outwardly focused if you actually think about the invention of social media social media meant that we all suddenly created profiles we sudden look at our name all the time and all our own pictures of oursel and this General environment has made us extremely focused on our own experience and how is our experiencing elevating and how many friends do we have and how much money do we have but it's all about us prior to that for 300,000

years we as the human were actually kind of irrelevant and it was more focused on how is this group prospering and any time in which you're helping someone else to feel happy oxytocin doesn't just rise in them because they're experienc a human connection we fundamentally feel way happier as a human when we contribute to their life have you looked at all into the difference between individualistic and collectivistic societies as it relates to oxytocin and stuff for sure if you look at a collectivistic society some of like the more Eastern practices in our world and Eastern

philosophies lead to you having a deep deep focus on the group spending time with them serving them caring for your grandparents more supporting with grandchildren more all of those get you out of your mind and into supporting the group and that is going to lead to way higher oxytocin levels the more Western individualistic Society is not good for this chemical because it doesn't deeply make you serve others it actually orients you towards serving yourself MH there was a good um blog post from a friend of mine Paul Millard who wrote the book The pathless Path

and he called he he he he called it The Accidental meaning hypothesis okay which was the idea that uh let's say in the 1950s or whatever in most uh Western countries uh the the way that you lived your life was that you went to college you got a job and you stayed at that job for 40 years and you worked your way up the corporate ladder and you got a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and you went to church on a Sunday and the wife was at home looking after the kids

and hanging out with the community and stuff and the husband was at work doing the thing and actually this is a pretty good setup for having a meaningful a meaningful experience of life with like strong sort of family ties and a local community that you're part of and you go to church every week and kind of the family and the home in the suburbs where everyone all the us kind of know each other by virtue of the fact that you were confined to the same job mean meant that you were kind of living in the

same place meant that you were just getting this experience of life that was quite group and Community focused and then as we moved into individualism where it's like okay now move to the city now switch jobs every couple of years live in the fanciest high-rise apartment you can not even know who your neighbors are um maybe you're not going to move close to where your parents are because that's kind of weird maybe now you want to move to where you want to go because it's all about you and your own experience of Life all of

this has created this accidentally created this void of meaning and purpose purposelessness in a lot of our lives where we're so focused on attaining individual quot success that we don't and we don't realize that actually a huge part of what makes life feel meaningful and fulfilling is this sort of group-based community experience so fascinating and I really think what's effectively happened there as Society has progressively moved from oxytocin the group being our primary focus to toward Wards dopamine and the chase for success and if you look at that original lifestyle well even just like a

100 years ago lifestyle with Church community all these kind of things that aligns much more to what's called dunbar's number Dumar basically suggested that humans prospered for the longest period of time throughout our ancestry in groups of 150 people and we really are fundamentally designed to have a very core group around us that we serve that serve us that we feel like we're deeply a part of and living a life whereby you're maybe successful and you have money and you live in this amazing place but you're not fundamentally satisfying oxytocin which is the experience of

love in you as a human being is just going to be extremely hard it's going to be an underwhelming experience for you as a human so what are the actionable things that you encourage people to do or that we can viewers and listeners can Implement to help boost the oxytocin that we have in our lives yeah so action number one is physical touch and this is really important to not underestimate is any time which you come in physical contact with another human or an animal oxytocin Rises extremely quickly and we as a society would have

been extremely physically connected imagine actually sleeping outside in the cold in Winter for six months we'd have literally hugged and cuddled each other to survive and especially since like 2019 and stuff with covid and the big shift we actually do physically connect less as a society and anytime in which you do make a moment of whether it's like just with a friend high-fiving hugging them whether it's with your kid whether it's in a room rantic way oy toen Rises and we've had some really interesting experiences with this because when I'm on stage I explained this

idea that humans really need physical connection and I get the entire audience to rate how many hugs they think they're averaging per day on average of all 50,000 people we're at 1.6 hugs a day is what we've seen in our data and when you look into the research it's very clear that we need much more like five hugs A Day In This Moment where I'm on stage whether it's like teenagers or adults in companies I will then suggest to that audience that they all have to stand up and hug the two people next to them

every single time without fail when I look out at that audience they are Furious that I have suggested that idea of hugging the two people next and they all think oh I can't want to do that that's awkward that's uncomfortable but they proceed to do it sometimes it takes them longer to stand up than others but they do hug everyone and I see this Monumental shift in that entire audience I do this at the start of the oxytocin event where they go from Awkward disconnection towards massive happiness by the time they've all hugged each other

they're all laughing and smiling and much more bonded up and very simply oxytocin has risen within their brains so fundamentally regular human connection either romantic or in a friendly way is important I was also delivering this training in a company and there was a Japanese company that was about 55 years old and he was pretty averse to the fact his company had put him on Mental Health trading which is fair like that's part of our whole goal with this do thing is to provide an alternative narrative and this isn't really therapy is a different way

to operate and during this moment about this hug thing he actually came up and spoke to me and said he had realized he was no longer really hugging his wife and it's sad to hear that and it's actually something I've now heard so many times is that people like just aren't hugging their Partners at all and I set him this simple challenge where he has to try and make sure that he gave his wife like a proper 5 to 10 second hug the longer you hug for the more oxytocin will release 5 to 10 second

hug when he left for work and when he came back in from work and he came in the next week with a very big smile on his face and I was thinking wow this guy looks like different from last week he looked much more energized and he was pretty averse in the fact he was even receiving the guidance originally and I said how did it go and he said not only like have we connected and felt like more bonded and talked more but they had actually reignited a part of their life that apparently hadn't been

there for nine years oh well and whether you're seeking for just like normal natural connection or even like more deeper romantic sexual connection it's very important to understand that simple human connection of holding hands and cuddling and hugging one another is fundamental to actually achieving maybe the deeper more romantic goals that you desire nice all right what's what's next okay so action number two to raise your oxytocin levels is called contribution and this is any time in which you're in service to another human being it's going to raise the levels this clo follows very closely

to the law of oxytocin to make someone else happy every day and it's really important to every single day just ask yourself what is one simple contribution I have made to somebody else's life and we run this simple challenge whereby people have to attempt to in a coffee shop buy a stranger a coffee and that's quite like an awkward uncomfortable thing to do it's not particularly expensive thing to do so you probably can spend 33s like serving someone else and buying them A coffee but the experience people have from doing so is actually really surprising

not only do they bomb with this human the other human is so surprised that a stranger would talk to them because we're living in such an individual world now that you can't even believe that a stranger would talk to you so that in itself then Bridges the gap between humans and creates some oxytocin and then you discover that this moment of serving someone else actually makes you feel really really good and there's this really good episode of Friends the TV show where Joey says to Phoebe that there's no such thing as a selfless good deed

and in this episode Phoebe tries to do kind things for other people so without feeling good herself so she for example goes and rakes someone's guard and leaves without them knowing so they have a good deed done but what she ultimately discovers in this episode is it's fundamentally impossible to do something for someone else and not feel good to yourself and it's very important to on a regular basis just have that in your mind like how am I serving other people family friends colleagues kids whatever it might be because the more you serve others the

happier you will feel as a result no one of the stories I told uh in in the book in the third chapter on people was how um I realized that one of the things that made my day job much more energizing and enjoyable was when I would offer the nurses a cup of tea a few times a day and interesting I would be sort of I'd be sitting at my desk doing my thing and then I'd think you know what I want a cup of tea and then on the way to the tea station I'd

Pok my head into the nurse's office and be like hey anyone fancy a cup of tea and then some of them be like oh yeah sure thanks and then over time I learned like what the what the tea order was like how strong they liked it individuals how much meal how much sugar you all that kind of stuff and I bring the tea back and it's it's not much skin off of my back to make more Cups of Tea CU I've got to wait my for my own one to steep for the 2 minutes anyway

and it just added a lot of good vibes to the ward it made me feel really good I'm sure they appreciate it as well just having a cup of tea brought to them uh realized for me that acts of service is my love language as well so it's like there was just something really nice about doing that and it was such an easy thing to do I also did real like um when I was working during the pandemic uh the hospital was serving was um was we selling like scones for like 20p cuz a local

Baker would like bake all these scones and donate them to the hospital because like NHS clapping hor bang and he sces are 20p and so whenever I'd go to the to to so and and so whenever I'd go to the cafeteria to get lunch or something I just pick up like five or six of these scones in like just some random order and just bring them back to the ward and just you know plop them on the nurses station being like hey this is for whoever wants them it cost me12 but it adds adds so

much so much good vibes to my own life and to that it's like oh was super nice um so I am I am very bullish on just trying to do random acts of kindness for other people not because you're like a saint or a good person just cuz it makes you feel good and it makes them feel good and it's just it's kind of a no-brainer for sure the more we move towards collectivism of helping other people the happier our brains are all get a feel and we just have to really understand this modern world

has made us very self focused and it serves you extremely well and the person you support to uh put your attention on them instead of yourself cool what's strategy number three strategy number three is what we call social life and obviously we all know that we need some kind of social life but it's very interesting when you go deep into the literature of oxytocin how there's fundamental ways in which people socialize that can actually increase or decrease the level of oxytocin when you're in that kind of environment obviously we have this idea of physical connection

so it's always good if you can meet someone to always have a moment of physical Embrace first however when you're actually socializing with someone there is two main things and it's qual quality and quantity of eye contact that occurs during the conversation and then what we call active listening which is deeply paying attention to what someone is saying the way to know if you're actively listening is when you're listening to someone and I've struggled with this a lot it's very easy to actually spend your time formulating your response in your head to what they're saying

whilst they're talking so you're not actually really listening you're just in your mind creating something that you're going to say back next active listening is just taking the time to listen and then respond taking the time to listen and then respond and even in our conversation here like it's very easy for my brain to think oh should I plan what I'm going to say next but the more deeply I actually understand what you're saying the better capacity I'm going to have to engage in a proper conversation and oxytocin will then transfer between the two of

us so the action there is social life social life with eye contact eye contact an active listener oh okay nice cool um sweet so number four number four and number five then go into a different side of oxytocin which explores the relationship you have with yourself in your own brain because when you connect with other humans it does create oxytocin but we also all have the capacity to connect with ourself and when you go into this a lot of us do really struggle with the relationship we have in ourselves some of us are super critical

of oursel in our mind some people are really tough they're really judgmental their appearance success whatever it might be there's two fundamental actions that lead to a better conversation in your mind about who you are and your experience of Life the first one is what we call gratitude which is an extremely popular and common understanding in the modern world that we need to action gratitude into our life but still something we seriously seriously lack in our day-to-day experience so humans are very aware oh yeah you're supposed to be grateful but many of us don't have

like a sustainable practice whereby we're like often thinking about this the reason gratitude is so fundamental to the conversation you have in your head is that we in the Moder world are struggling so much with comparison comparison on absolutely everything how good our social life is what our girlfriend looks like how rich we are whatever it might be and effectively comparison is constantly thinking about what you don't have in your life and our modern mind is plagued by that experience I don't have this I don't have that I don't have this I don't have that

when realistically we are we have literally everything now in terms of human survival compared to what all our ancestors had and and gratitude if you think comparison is thinking about what you don't have gratitude is very simply thinking about what you do have in your life and if you make sure that in your moment when you wake in the morning and you begin to take action and you go and brush your teeth which is fundamental for our dopamine if in that moment you're brushing your teeth you make sure you have conscious grateful thoughts throughout that

period of time it means that you're constantly starting your brain with that style of thinking rather than the more envious style of thinking that many of us can struggle with nice and then our fifth oxytocin is something we call achievements and achievements is fascinating this our capacity to celebrate the achievements we have in our life and this then really goes into neuroplasticity and how our brain can adapt and mold and rewire itself over time very simple example of neuroplasticity is just learning to drive a car if you get in the car and you try and

drive it is an absolute nightmare with the gear stick and the clutch and so on and someone sitting there saying no just do the biting point it's a nightmare for our brain then over a period of time we train the skill and we practice the skill and and then in a few months time you find yourself not even having to think about the GE gear stick or the clutch as a result of an alteration in what's called your Visio motor cortex which is the area responsible for that kind of physical fine movement our brain can

shift and change and when you look at how you communicate with yourself in your mind it's very common that there's been a huge amount of critical selft talk that has taken place and rather than just trying to stop the critical selft talk because that's actually a really hard thing to do you just need to learn to drive a new car effectively and learn to communicate with yourself in a much more positive way and this has two big big impacts on us one is that it creates much more positive experience in our brain and our confidence

will then increase as a result of us talking to oursel in a much more positive way the other is it actually really impacts our capacity to succeed on whatever we're seeking to attain when we look at the confidence the first part of this is that if you say for example had two groups of parents and they were both raising a toddler one of those groups of parents decided to raise that toddler by constantly telling it everything it was doing wrong you're doing this wrong in school this wrong with your friends this wrong with us at

home and then the other group of parents decided to raise the toddler by of course identifying when it made mistakes but really learning to celebrate the things that had gone to plan for that kid this rent right in school with this subject and this rent right with your friends and whatever it may be if you look at the confidence in these two individuals the first one is going to be spinning in circles with absolutely no self-belief and no belief that it can actually do anything that's a value the other one is really going to begin

to grow in its level of self-belief purely based on selft talk if you look at how you communicate with yourself we're very much like that first set of parents that only judge oursel and very rarely celebrate the achievements we're making the more often you celebrate the achievements the more confident you become then if you look at this down the lane of your capacity to succeed at what you're seeking to attain if you had two uh women they were both 35 years old and they both wanted to eat healthier food Monday to Friday they both ate

great food and suddenly had loads of healthy Whole Foods loads of natural meals and then on Saturday they both ate a tub of Ben and Jerry's ice cream and a big Domino's Pizza so they've both eaten and done exactly the same thing the whole week if one of them goes down the lens of communication in their mind of oh [ __ ] sake like why do I do this I'm so bad with my diet I'm fat I'm really unsuccessful whenever I try and do these things and the other one goes that is annoying that I

ate the ice cream and the pizza but I've actually just achieved six days of eating healthy food and that's a massive accomplishment for me one of them reinforces the negative behavior and one of them reinforces the positive and if you look at the outcome of these two individuals one of them is going to become much healthier than the other so fundamentally having a practice in your mind where you celebrate a achievement every single day is just going to lead to a more confident and more successful bright nice um any specific practices you recommend or you

found work for people the best thing I can recommend is when you are just about to fall asleep as your last thing at night you've had your entire day you simply review your day and you think what is my primary achievement it really is important to understand this doesn't need to be a massive thing this can be that you ate a healthy lunch you manage to clean up your room you submitted an important email to someone but if you celebrate an achievement you start training this new pattern of thinking in your brain it becomes much

more natural over time you actually start to communicate and think in that way more often and then gradually those experiences are created what is the third chemical we should be thinking about the third chemical in dose is serotonin 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 increas in serotonin in the gut which then improves how we feel in our mind oh nice um what is it about our modern society that screws up with serotonin we've got nutrients dense food that arrive into our mouth and then we start eating them and then immediately our body is like okay look at all these resources that are coming in from these Whole Foods which would be like protein sources or fruit or vegetables or nuts or whatever it may be as

those molecules come into the body the body literally breaks them down for example it breaks it into this chemical called called tryptophan tryptophan then builds serotonin 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 o so what is 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 now to how our body breathes effectively we're serotonin the whole thing is about getting our system more aligned to Nature and how it

originally spent its time I think the biggest disruption we've had to that is the fact that humans no longer spend any time in nature so we're not actually connecting to the area that made us human and if we spend long time prolonged periods of time in nature without headphones connecting to it we see a human then actually become more natural in all aspects of their desires with their food sleep patterns and so on what is it about nature that is so good for our serotonin levels do we know effectively a fantastic psychologist in Japan called

gin Park back in the early 2000s discovered that spending time in forest was extremely valuable for humans Japan has had a great deal of mental health difficulty they actually developed a term called karosi which basically means an overworked modern human that is struggling with depression and suicide radiation and whatever it may be they then knew given that is Japan they have the world's biggest forest they have the most dense forest of anywhere in the world they thought maybe we could just test out putting people for prolong period of time in Forest because scaling therapy is

not particularly easy they developed this practice called shinrin Yoku which is effectively walking headphone free slowly through a forest and they see huge transformations in stress and sleep and anxiety and depression just as a result of being there and it's so important to understand you know when you've been away for a while and you come home and you feel like slightly calm because you've come home and you're in your own little nest and that's where you feel peaceful we as a species are only at home when we're in nature that is humans 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 and what you basically see especially when you put people through a variety of different Neuroscience measurement tools you see as soon as a human is in nature the heart rate drops their blood pressure drops their thoughts slow down and effectively our brain and body thinks I'm home I can slow the whole system down and that's is why nature is so powerful what if someone is living in a concrete jungle like New York or London or

something like that then they just really we have this a lot like with schools we trade and stuff I said what about access to Nature it is really important to understand there is always parks nearby of some kind and I don't think it's necessarily access to Nature I think it's lack of priority of wanting to spend any time there because it's pretty affordable to either walk there cycle there get on a tube there and we just need short periods of time in these Parks preferably as hippie as possible which means Barefoot on the grass in

the sunshine you actually see from this grounding effect which is where we have our bare feet on grass that the nervous system calms even even more if we're directly in contact with the Earth and humans really need to return to that prioritization of spending time in these environments even if it's tiny Windows if it's 10 minutes few times a week it then begins to build a connection but so much of society doesn't really perceive the Nature has value because they have no relationship with it because they spend no time there just like if you were

trying to develop a relationship with a human you'd have to spend time hanging out with them and listening to them and talking to them and we effectively don't do that with nature anymore so we don't perceive there is benefit but when you spend time there and a relationship grows the benefits that nature can bring to your life increase a lot it's interesting you say that there is this guy I had dinner with a few weeks ago who uh travels with a grounding mat cool cuz he goes to all these like hotel rooms and then these

like sky scrapers and stuff and has a grounding mat that has like some mud on it or something like that and apparently helps calm him down and I was thinking how much of this is legit and how much of this is quackery but there is some interesting science on it a human being has an electronic charge just like anything does and we have a positive elic charge and the Earth has a negative electronic charge and effectively when we make direct contact with it it neutralizes our electronic charge which then causes a balancing of our heart

rate and blood pressure and so on when someone has like a grounding map for example they're tapping into that Earth electronic charge through the plug system that is a cool solution obviously amazing to actually be on the nature if possible that's a very like modern way to do it but uh there is some good science that grounding can have a positive effect on us for sure so when I do my daily walks around the park I should go barefoot and not walk on the concrete puff but walk on like the grass next to the concrete

puth 100% it actually would be much better for your body's benefits in terms of these two different systems we have our parasympathetic calming system and then our sympathetic more energizing system soon as our body makes direct contact the parasympathetic fires up and we are living in very stressful environments you take that City example it's very sympathetic nervous system it's like loads of loud sounds and buildings even in research you see that straight edge buildings can stress our brain out over what we call fractal which is like the variety that nature has to offer and if

you can get maximum parasympathetic nervous system activation which is anything that calms the body down that's what then leads to the body functioning well and maximizing serotonin can you think of any other cool studies on serotonin off the top of your head because this kind of cool there's a lot of different studies you then go into the whole nutrient world and there's a very interesting psychiatrist called young who has investigated the relationship between anti-depressant medications and foods that could boost the bacteria in our gut that could Elevate serotonin levels and is really important on anti-depressive

medication to always obviously consult whoever guides you towards that path but there's good things you can do in addition to it or if you don't take medication just something to elevate your serotonin levels and what they basically see is our gut is trying to produce serotonin all the time and our gut is just a giant microbiome of bacteria and effectively when there's a really good healthy range of diverse bacteria it functions really well and manufactures a ton of this serotonin chemical you can then take what's called probiotic strains of bacteria this is drinks like kombucha

or you can take it in pill form or cafir yogurt and these then add these healthy bacterias to the gut they've then done good comparative studies where they've had people taking these probiotic type formulas and people taking anti-depressant medications the reason there's a connection there is anti-depressant medications are called ssris which is selective serotonin reuptake in hibitors they impact the serotonin Pathway to try and make us feel happier and you basically see very comparable data with increasing the amount of good bacteria in the gut and raising serotonin and artificially kind of medicating the serotonin level

up so that's a pretty interesting new discovery that if we can Elevate our serotonin level naturally it might have medication type benefits oh that's cool um what relationship does serotonin have with energy and productivity the big one here would be the energy impact of our nutrition and our sleep and effectively it is so important to understand that your capacity to feel clear in your mind and think clearly is directly connected to food and sleep and so many of us now struggle with brain fog where our brain literally feels fuzzy effectively I posted on Instagram recently

about a morning routine and so many people say that they wake up and their brain almost feels like blurry so they can't even take action towards a goal that is heavily connected to the food you've eaten before you've gone to bed and then how much sleep and good quality sleep you've actually got anytime which we're eating the nutrient dens food or we're sleeping at night we're generating the serotonin chemical we then have a very clever system called the vagus nerve which is connecting the two together the vus nerve is constantly sitting there in the body

in your chest with your heart with your stomach with your throat reading the state and if throughout the night from the nutrient-dense food and the good quality sleep the brain is like cool we got a load of Serotonin your brain wakes up the next day much more clear so the capacity to be productive when you're working and have a sharp focus is going to be far better if we do and have no judgment for it but then eat like a really sugary dinner late at night which is tempting because it hits our dopamine system and

makes us feel really good temporarily and then after that we get a bit of a crash and then we scroll Tik Tok then we watch some porn and we just annihilate all these systems then we wake up in they say we don't sleep as well and we get a very foggy brain which means that we're going to be way less productive nice um so what are the actionable things that we can do to boost our serotonin so strategy in order to maximize serotonin is what we call sunlight before social media specifically sunlight in the morning

is extremely good for elevating this serotonin chemical we obviously evolved out in nature and when we had that bright morning sunlight it was designed to elevate these chemicals to give us a big boost to start our day so if you're can to have a framework in your mind whereby you have to earn your social media by first stepping outside and seeing sunlight that's a good way to make sure you're maximizing this chemical an important note is that even if it's cloudy you still get the benefits 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 the next thing that is extremely good the second action for serotonin is then how our body breathes and there's a lot of research and science into this world into this world of meditation and breathing 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 so what we try and guide people to do

is to get outside for their sunlight before social media sit down on a bench and then sit down and go through a pattern of what we call resonance breathing that's seem to be one of the best methods for this resonance breathing is where you're trying to only breathe six times in a minute and you can therefore gamify it in your head so it doesn't have to be meditation meditation is beautiful if you can do it but I know many people struggle with the the kind of agitation in the mind 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 so you sit down you're out there in the sunlight in the morning you haven't yet seen your phone so the chemicals are starting off the day in a good way and then you sit down in for 4 Alpha six INF for four Alpha six do that for two minutes that's the second action that's going

to be extremely valuable give back the third action then is what we call gut health gut health has obviously become a foundational pillar in the modern world people are very aware that are we supposed to eat healthy food fundamentally when nutrient-dense food enters the stomach you build a ton of Serotonin nutrition is one of those topics that's got extremely complicated of how many carbs I eat how many protein fat which this which that you can actually simplify this from a serotonin perspective down to could this food have been on Earth before humans got here or

could it not and if you actually think through that lens everything like meat fish eggs dairy fruit vegetables n s seeds these are all what we call Whole Foods they're just one ingredient all of those Foods would be on earth even if humans weren't here if you look at a lot of the supermarket that is basically to the left of the first few aisles of those two things basically 80% of the supermarket those are all then modern Creations there's obviously some exceptions to this rule but if you're thinking about the lens of maximize serotonin you

want to look at your plate and think could these foods be here on Earth without humans actually artificially manufacturing them in factories and if that is the case these Whole Foods are going to help you elevate H interesting um Raw versus cooked foods does cooking something count as processing the thing that's a good question I would say no it doesn't count as like turning into an ultra processed food so if you were looking at the distinction You' basically have if you turn the food around and on the ingredient list there's like 50 words that you

can't say out loud you're then looking down the ultr processed food Lane if you turn around and it's yogurt for example and it literally just says milk as the ingredient then you're thinking okay that's fine or if you have to cook your cette for example to make it softer in order to eat that's just like good modern invention that enable some more foods to be eaten but in general you're just wanting to look at and is there only one ingredient in this specific food and you basically want a plate of one ingredient items rather than

things that have loads and loads of different things like if you buy a chicken kyev for example and you turn it around you'll notice on your chicken kyev there is actually 20 words on there that you wouldn't expect to see or if you buy a pret sandwich which we might think could be healthy again 20 ingredients that you wouldn't know the names of but if you're in Pre and you for example get a chicken and tuna salad or something like that and you look through the ingredients you're like oh this only says the things that

I can see with my eyes and the more that you eat just Whole Foods the more serotonin you build interesting nice that's good stuff um four and five fourth action for serotonin is nature and this is spending prolong periods of time in a natural environment 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 hunter 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 in order to become a human that deeply internally desires a natural way of being so really wants these natural Whole Foods and wants to get their morning sunlight and sleep loads and have intimate connections with humans you need to get your brain and body much more connected to our natural form the way of doing that is to spend prolong periods of time in nature deeply connecting with your senses when you're out there so your

brain has something to focus on so if you're out there and you get there and you're actually trying to intentionally pay attention to what you're looking at so you're like hey I can see a tree over there and I can see grass and I can see the Sun and I can see a river and you start tuning your eyes in and this is effectively helping you induce what we call like nature Flow State flow state is when we get hyperfocused on something if we can get our brain hyperfocused on nature it's going to be valuable

for serotonin and also our dopamine which motivates us to want to back every time which is really really good so you tune in with your eyes you tune in with sound you tune in with your nose if you can ever actually physically interact with nature be a kid and climb a tree if you start connecting into that original path of how humans spend their time not only is it amazing when you're out there but you start Desiring a more natural way of being nice and then finally our final one is deep sleep deep sleep is

one of it's hard to negotiate between these but it's extremely important for the generation of this chemical and the biggest point I would put around sleep is what is the content you're consuming is the final content you consume before you go to sleep 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 as the final thing that you do social media

is going to be a part of your evening for sure and like you sit there catch up with people scroll some videos whatever it might be but a lot of people in the modern world are now almost like Tik tocking or Instagram reeling their brain to sleep like they line there and they're scrolling it again there's no judgment we're just looking to try and optimize these things if you can have a rule with yourself whereby the phone can't be used after 9:30 so you have to send your messages do whatever the phone can't be used

after 9:30 of course the optimum would be getting bed and go to sleep I appreciate that's just not necess the path for everyone for me personally I absolutely love watching YouTube so I want to watch YouTube when I get into bed but if you can get into bed have some long form content videos need to be a minimum of 15 minutes long and get in bed watch something far away from eyes on low brightness that's actually going to enable your brain to actually go through a period of calming down again to reinforce if you can

get a bed and just do some breathing that's definitely the best thing but for everyone else in the world that is going to want to basically scroll social media a much better alternative is long form content lying in bed to allow your brain to get into a better state of rest before it actually enters sleep and then once it enters sleep it's going to get into deep sleep much quicker and the Deep Sleep is where the serotonin restoration will occur nice um what's the value of whoops and aura rings and the horche bank in your

view I think they're extremely good for making you aware of how your behavior is impacting your experience as a human I interestingly have taken my whoop off the first time four days ago after two years of wearing it and that's just because I want to see whether like it's having a positive or negative impact I've had it on and I've meticulously checked it every single day for two years and for me it did make me extremely conscious of going to bed much earlier cuz my scores were much better if I went to bed earlier like

even if I had the same amount of sleep from 8 till let's say 12 till 8 8: a.m. or I had like 10 till 600 I noticed the score was much better and back in the day like my grandfa and stuff used to always say it was like an old wife's tale that an hour before midnight is worth two after there was this old phrase and when you look into the research it's really clear that your sleep before midnight is actually much more restorative for your body than your sleep after midnight because originally obviously the

sun would have said at 7:8 p.m. we went to bed like that was actually sleeping hours we didn't just like stay around hang out watching porn and going on social media which is what keeps us awake these days so if you can get to sleep a little bit early I think these these things can help I also personally found it super impactful on alcohol these metrics I think these rings and stuff make it very clear that alcohol is pretty disruptive to our system nice can we just elaborate a little bit on the link between serotonin

and mood yeah effectively serotonin is measuring the state of our body and it's simply wanting our body to be energetic and healthy and then it needs some kind of communication system with our brain to tell us whether that's the case and if our body is in a good state it wants us to have some kind of positive reinforcement in order to make us want to continue to engage with these behaviors 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 will 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 you move 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 what's your take on the whole like depression equals imbalance

of hormones versus depression is and I I think there's been a bunch of books about this recently and obviously in med school you learned some of this stuff uh I think some people feel that if I'm depressed is because there is something wrong with my brain and I cannot do anything about it and other people view depression or you know depression is low mood persistently for a very long period of time mood is a signal that your environment is a bit [ __ ] or the things that you're doing are a bit bad and therefore

it's feels more in your control as to what you can do about it what's your take or your approach to to what extent is depression within a person's control how much impact can we actually have on our our own mood yeah this is a fascinating question I do believe it is predominantly within our control and I'll take some caveats on that our experience and when you look at this I really believe that the emotions we experience are simply messages guiding us towards our optimal path as a human being and if depression arises for example something

is effectively off when we look at depression I specifically think it's actually much more connected to the dopamine pathway than to the serotonin pathway whilst serotonin for example can just Elevate our mood so it might take us out of a depressive type thinking pattern if we wanted to fully alleviate ourselves from depression we would need a lot more dopamine in our brain the reason depression for example is so connected to dopamine is because it enables us to take action towards something when you're in a depressive State your brain is just really struggling to pursue anything

and fundamentally as a human being you are designed to pursue things you're designed to contribute to a family get hold of resources and like be a high functioning species in this world like all humans were high performers before this modern world you could not be a high performer otherwise you wouldn't be it and when you get an experience of depression and I personally have really navigated depression I've got extremely low before for prolonged periods of time rather than seeing it as my brain is just broken it's more wow my brain and body is so clever

that it's sending me this message that my behavior needs to change and I really struggled with alcohol and drugs it was like a really difficult experience for me and I effectively for a long time just thought oh these depressive symptoms just like part of who I am and I'm just going to keep taking these pleasurable things because they temporarily alleviate them from me however over time I actually came to realize that it was simply a message trying to guide me away from the things that were creating it in the first place and the same would

be if you suddenly felt anxious on a different lens suddenly you feel like nervous and fearful in your body it's your body guiding you that something is off effectively so I do believe these are predominantly within our control these emotions I do think there are caveat to that in terms of sometimes life throws you an extremely challenging events effectively so if suddenly a load of people pass away or you go through a really significant breakup or you lose your job that actually creates like a significant challenge within our brain that we have to navigate but

because we've like Mass talked about depression and anxiety we're now conflating things like grief for example from a breakup or someone passing we're thinking that's depression but they're actually different experiences within our brain so the more you can listen to them and align to their Guidance the better you're going to feel nice On a related note what are your thoughts on ADHD and the ADHD epidemic ADHD is fascinating I think for a very long period of time maybe all of human history some percentage of society may have had ADHD and when you look at ADHD

down this neuroscientific lens it's really clear that those with ADHD have genetically low levels of dopamine production which can be seen as a b challenge but it has also can provide some serious advantages and we'll go into that so it can be a genetic experience and you'll remember back school there are some kids that go really hyperactive and then they crash and really hyperactive and they crash and they struggle to sit still and focus and things like that it's very likely that from the moment they were born they had slightly low dopamine levels it's important

to understand that even if that is the case if it is genetic there's AE of a of stuff you can do to support it in our modern world we are now creating ADHD through our Behavior because rather than genetically being born with low dopamine levels we're actually artificially creating low dopamine levels by constantly burning out this machine if for example youve gotten a car every day and didn't put it into gear and rev the engine eventually that engine is going to burn out and every day that we wake up and we have social media and

we have loads of sugar and watch pornography or drink alcohol we overstimulate this pathway which causes is the amount of dopamine it can produce to progressively reduce so if you're looking at it you've basically got genetic could be born with it low dopamine or you've got more behavioral ADHD happening as a result of our modern lifestyle interesting and so I guess in either case learning how to harness our dopamine system and figuring out like what are the sensible things we can do some of which we've talked about in this in this podcast in this video

series would just help regardless of what the cause is it's fascinating this because I obviously am always viewing things down the hunter gatherer lens and that's just how we spend our time and if you actually imagine a hunts gatherer was born with low dopamine levels so for whatever reason they had low dopamine production in their brain they would get to say 10 years old and they'd be asked to contribute to that group in some way like help us find the food help us build the shelter those are dopamine type experiences hunting food building shelter contributing

to the group in some way that individual let's call him Sam has low doine and he goes out hunting for the first time and he actually is going to experience more of a dopamine elevation than everyone else in that group because he's coming from a lower number like if they were all coming from 5 out of 10 and jumping to 10 out of 10 but he was coming from one he's jumping 10 points when he's doing that hunting and he is going to feel insanely good in that pursuit of that goal so then he's going

to come home and think wow I love hunting I'm going to do loads of hunting and those with ADHD wouldn't have actually been the ones that were struggling to contribute they actually likely would have been the greatest contributors and high performers in the group and you do see a very strong relationship between ADHD and high performance because effectively if you are someone with ADHD you have more more dopamine seeking within your brain because you're coming from lower so you get bigger elevations and we have been working on this framework whereby we're trying to rename ADHD

attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to adha attention deficit hyperactivity ability and if an individual like particularly with young people can find something to harness in their life doesn't have to be career based it could be music art creating whatever it might be if they can find something to harness they're actually going to progressively every single day raise their dopamine in a more natural way and if you take Sam the hunter gatherer that's been out there hunting eventually he's going to do so much hard work out there that he's actually going to lift a lot of those

ADHD symptoms away from him by constantly raising his Baseline dopamine so it might have been that humans originally had ADHD and then actually dissipated throughout their life because of all the hard work they had to do which raised their dopamine whereas nowadays you get into this modern world you've got low dopamine anything pleasurable feels amazing gaming social media sugar and so on and then you constantly go on this very volatile journey of ups and downs and then your ADHD symptoms get extremely challenging so ADHD individuals that do figure out how to harness something that they

like in their life will have a much better experience all right so we've talked about dopamine we talked about oxytocin we talked about serotonin we're just milking you for all the knowledge that you have and there there's so much more so much more to tap um what's the fourth and final hormone that we're going to be talking about yeah our final chemical here is endorphins and with endorphins I'm basically going to give you an entirely different perspective on how humans should be managing stress and stress is a huge topic it's part of being a human

it has benefits and it has challenges like stress can actually help us to advance as a human and hyperfocus our brain when we're under stress and also if it's too chronic the stress can be challenging most of society is perceiving that stress should only be reduced from trust trying to calm oursel down and that's really good like we really do need to calm oursel down if you look evolutionarily at the function of these chemicals endorphins being the main one that helped us cope with stress it actually wasn't necessarily about calming oursel down to activate it

so here we're going to look at how we destress the brain nice so how do we distress the brain the interesting thing about stress is we have all kinds of stress now in the modern world you have looking at your bank statement you have an argument you have whatever it might be we have a lot of alternative ways of stress originally there was only two stress one was hunger and one was danger and those would put our brain into extreme stress oh God we di have food for the family or all God someone trying to

kill us an animal is trying to kill us whatever it may be and those would have been the really high stressful experiences when you then look at how we would respond to those two experiences one thing is in common that we'd have to do which is physically exert our body pretty hard in order to get out of the stressful state so we' have to fight an animal we'd have to run away from another human we'd have to deeply try and pursue finding food but the one thing in common is our body had to physically work

pretty hard and when you look into this effectively when our body is Extreme experiencing extreme physical exerion in order to help us cope with the experience of that stress it begins to release endorphins which will calm our brain down so that if for example in a situation where oh my God there's a bear there and it's running towards me instead of being like Oh my God there's a bear there it's running towards me which is not a very advantageous way to survive your brain just immediately goes into physical exertion Sprint as fast you can pick

up a stick whatever it means to survive but effectively we needed something to remove stress from our brain and remove fear from our brain so that we could focus on the task at hand and what you basically see is if a human is highly stressed and then they physically exert their body and they stry five different ways we can physically exert the body then you're going to see distress immediately begin to reduce within the brain cuz you hear about this a lot where people are like oh when I feel stressed I go for a walk

or I go for a run or I go to the gym and I've been reading a bunch of stuff on Instagram reals of like you know any anytime you're struggling with your mental health do something physical and chances are it will help it's not going to hurt at least 100% the endorphins model supports that theory and we are experiencing two really specific symptoms of low endorphins in the modern world one is our brain feeling highly stressed and like tight and like worried that kind of like fastpac experience in our thoughts the other is anger and

frustration that's another really clear sign your endorphin system is low if you feel suddenly like annoyed you'll notice your body literally wants to move itself you if you're really annoyed you want like punch a wall or whatever it may be and it's because stress and frustration they're really natural human emotions they used to be reduced down by physical movement and now we are so sedentary like I think it's amazing that we all like have these walks and all this sort of stuff but like comparatively like if you go and look at like the Huda for

example which is a tribe that's still functioning within Africa they're averaging about nine hours of movement a day so that's what a human probably did for 300,000 years was actually physically move their body for nine hours and now we're really lucky if we get like 30 minutes 60 Minutes whatever it may be and when people come to discover this there's a really big shift in how they respond to stress because typically stress to us means such stressful day at work I like really need to go home tonight just like have a glass of wine and

like watch Netflix and like scroll my phone because that's going to temporarily alleviate all the pain because it's going to put you into a high dopamine state where no stress can occur it's only going to exacerbate the problem though in the long term and if people can start associating that feeling of stress or irritability and frustration with wow my body is effectively asking for movement because that's how it originally perceived stress was movement then you go down the path of first I'm going to move then I can go and chill and watch Netflix on the

sofa but if movement is the first response to stress you're going to end up in a much calmer mind nice what is the law of endorphins the law of endorphins is physically push your body every day and this is interesting because like there's different approaches to like how much movement should we get how many gym workouts and so on but if you have a fundamental principle that the body has to work hard every day in some form that's a great goal and on days where the motivation is higher and remember your motivation is only high

if your dopamine is IM balance so it's always good to be thinking about getting the dopamine level is naturally high on the dopamine level on the high dopamine days where your motivation is high go to the gym do your hard 60-minute workouts and when you're there in the gym it's important to understand the maximum endorphin release will occur in the moments where you're physically struggling the most so if you're for example running away from a b running away if it starts to run faster you have to run faster which means you need more endorphins to

cope with that stress so in the moment where you're in your final reps in the gym where you think can't be bothers do these reps it's those reps that are going to maximize the Endorphin release within the brain so hard phys workouts really really good on a day where you think nope I do not want to do an exercise today because exercise is boring or I hate it or whatever it may be the most effective thing I've seen is to do what we call walk run which is we get loads of people doing this in

our training you go out for a walk in the park preferably if you're also trying to boost your other dose chemicals you're kind of headphone free and so on and when you're out there you try and pick three moments in that walk where you're going to effectively artificially run away from a bet so you're going to put your brain through that experience so if you see for example a small hill and you have to accept the fact that if people are around they're going to think wow that person is running and that's weird and you

might get self-conscious about it always with those things it's important to realize like no one actually cares about you they're only focus on their own experience of Life they won't even notice you sprinting past them and in that moment if you have three Mo you're on a walk 20 minute walk Three moments where you just go oh my God bad behind me and you just run as fast you can you're then going to every day be getting this activation of this chemical that's constantly de-stressing your brain h that's fun and you look like a weirdo

which is just also part of the goal it's perfect yeah also trains the anti- self-consciousness muscle yeah which like how Phoebe runs in France you know where she runs like she would get way more endorphins running like that because of the extra physical work she's adding it nice all right cool so what are the actionable things that we can then do to boost the endorphins so the first endorphins action is going to be exercise so anytime which you can physically exert your body walking running swimming hiking sport whatever it might be physical exertion of the

body through exercise is going to be number one there are going to be other days where you think exercise just isn't the path that I can pursue and we have a variety of other ways that you see in the research can also increase it action number two is heat anytime in which you put your body in a hot environment your body experiences this thing called a heat stress response where similar to running away from the bear the physical pain that it would get from that it actually perceives heat like a sauna or a bath as

a similar experience it doesn't necessarily know that you're not going to stay in that SAA for hours so effectively starts preparing itself for physical danger so that's why when you're get a sauna you'll notice that you come out and you feel less stressed out or if you're getting a bath literally as you sit in the bath there'll be a relaxation effect occur and that's because of the heat stress response so on the days you can't exercise SAA or even just getting in a bath is really good the reason those to are better than a hot

shower is you need about 15 minutes in the hot environment to get the endorphins to release you might want to have a 15-minute hot shower but typically a bath or sa is going to be a better path okay nice number three number three is music and this is specifically singing music out loud is one of the most effective ways you see to boost this and you again you look back at the hunter galleries they were chanting and singing that was a big part of life if we look back at humans over the last few hundred

years religious practices used to have humans singing much more singing does have a very euphoric effect on our brain and coming back to the rule of physically pushing your body if you really sing it actually puts your body through physical work and you'll notice if you hum a song or if you really sing a song you'll enjoy singing it much more from from a neuroscientific perspective that's cu the endorphins are releasing as a result of the body going through physical effort so if you can and we have this game plan where they have to try

and sing for five minutes every day and that's like a goal if you're [ __ ] singing like me that doesn't matter you can just sing out loud in your car on a walk in your bedroom whatever it may be but singing the more you go for it the better is going to be a good way to activate it and de-stress the brain all righty number four number four is laughter so many of us will have had the joyest moment in our life at some point of laughing so much that it actually hurts our stomach

whilst we're laughing and laughter is an extremely effective way to raise these endorphins again it's really euphoric and laughter is kind of an obvious one like of course humans would seek for laughter we all know laughter is a fun thing to be doing the only question I like would guys some to ask himself is if you were to rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 10 how much laughter do you think you have in your life right now if you answer that in your mind you might discover that that score isn't 10 it might

be more like five or six of how much laughter we've seen over our training that we've averaged a number at 5.7 in terms of the amount of laughter people feel they're having so whilst we know it's something we desire it's something we're not necessarily getting enough of and with that I then guide you to ask yourself like how many laughter environments are you putting yourself in environments that are conducive to facilitating you having a good time and laughing and in this modern techie World we're spending a huge amount of time just on our computers all

day when we're working so not really communicating with others especially not in person or we're sitting in the evening watching TV or on our phones and if you compare that to 10 hours a day back in the day with humans laughing and having a good time it's a significant drop in frequency of laughter as a species so if you do think my score is kind of low I'd really guide you to consider like what laughter environment could I literally get myself into today if you can't get out and about from your house you could face

on someone that you think has the capacity to make you laugh literally ask them to make you laugh and see what they can pull off or try and see people in person more often you can't underestimate how powerful laughter is for activating endorphins and de-stressing US h what about watching funny clips on YouTube or Tik Tok if you laugh if you chuckle then no that wouldn't necessarily activate the endorphins but if you sit there and you think wow that got me and I am laughing then yeah that's an acceptable way to boost the endorphins just

don't overdo and burn your do for me now excellent and then strategy number five our final one is stretching so this again comes to that pathway of physically exert the body as the body experiences a little bit of physical pain it will release the endorphins and again imagine running away from animal you might have to climb a tree and stretch your body out loads in order to escape that anytime stretching occurs your body will release endorphins yoga for example is always known to have a really euphoric effect on the brain and that's heavily connected to

stretching of the body releasing this chemical interestingly with stretching a lot of people hate stretching myself included I'm a pretty I've become a pretty disciplined person as a result of optimizing my dopamine but yoga is Hell on Earth to me like I can't go through an hour of yoga I've tried many times to get into it so I developed like a more simple practice which I call UPS downs and twists which I do when I wake up in the morning and before I go to sleep UPS downs and twists is literally reach up as tall

as you can reach down to the floor and then twist your spine like this and effectively it's designed to constantly counter the effect with always sitting like this in a chair stretching your shoulders out it's twisting your spine which is always stationary and then it's stretching your hamstrings which are always short cuz we're seated and if you start having this framework of like anytime you're just not doing anything like you're cooking your food out bed or whatever it might be up down twist and it just keeps the body generating this chemical and always with this

brain chemistry stuff we in the modern world are seeking for these big pleasurable experiences because that's what modern dopamine has t us to seek for but if you start having loads of foundational pillars in your life like making your bed for dopamine stretching for endorphins lots of water and nutritious food for serotonin you just start raising the Baseline of all these chemicals and then your mind begins to thrive so I've been trying so for so long to build a healthy gym habit mhm and I found that the personal train is really useful and I'm getting

a bit more jacked and some people commenting oh he's looking a bit more jacked now but I I don't enjoy weights at the gym I don't I don't really enjoy if I if I'm on my own then I kind of enjoy it because I sort of half ass it while listening to an Audi book or something that's kind of fun um but with a personal trainer or an exercise class I just don't I don't really enjoy it but I love playing racket Sports Squatch batminton tennis like paddle the horche bang but there's part of me

that's like I know it is good for you to progressively lift heavier things but our ancestors would't like going to a freaking gym and like lifting One Log and then two logs and then and then three logs to what extent in your view is resistance training at the gym an important part of a healthy kind of Lifestyle compared to replacing that with sports or things like that if someone was either going to only gym or only play sport I would get them to only play sport I think sport would be more conducive to better brain

chemistry in terms of the competitive element which is super effective the connection with other humans the progress that you experience as a result of getting better I think the gym is amazing I force myself to the gym as well I don't particularly love the gym my absolute dream would be to be like out in the forest climbing trees like that would actually be a more like effective way to train my body and a more natural way and building huts and so on like using our bodies like that I think the gym is classic like modern

human super rushed off their feet and just tries to get like 30 minutes of extremely quick benefit from something I do personally have I have personally found that something like cross overweight training seems to be more effective for my capacity to sustain a relationship with that form of weightlifting and I think you and I will be similar and we are both big dopamine Seekers like we want the pursuit of goals badly in our working lives and whatever it may be and with the gym whilst you do have the progressive overload of lifting heavier weights it's

not like that exciting of a mountain to climb lifting like w I got 32 kilos instead of 30 kilos it's not like wow yes I am so happy whereas CrossFit then has like a more competitive element between you and the other people that are there and it's very varied in terms of the types of movements you're doing so I found like my desire to want take action towards going has actually been higher because there's a more clear Mountain That I'm Climbing and if resistance training is the path view there just needs to be very clear

cut targets effectively where it's like I really want to be able to bench 80 kilos for five reps by June the 1st and then you just like make this really clear goal that you're trying to chase down so then there's like much more Drive whereas if the drive is just like I want at our deepest parlor we don't care as much about that we need some kind of like achievement involved nice yeah I I've had a bunch of friends recommend CrossFit for this reason I've never tried it but I think CrossFit is is an interesting

path I do think like exercising with your friends is the best like hiking like getting out of London and going for a hike with your mates like that would definitely be the best form of exercise nice okay so TJ final question um if anyone's watching or listening to this as a podcast um then they will have heard now 20 different action points and we'll probably be thinking bloody hell got to do 20 things now let me add that to my sort of calendar or to-do list or whatever um how should how would you recommend someone

start thinking about incorporating these habits into their life yeah so with these 20 behaviors our goal is for people to progressively test this sort of thing over 60 days so we have like a long habit formation period if you've just listened to this podcast and you're thinking like I actually want to take action on some of this we really want to Think Through the lens of dopamine first of all which is the motivation chemical because for all of the behaviors you're going to need motivation and you really want to immediately after this podcast be thinking

only about how you're going to start your day tomorrow morning everything about our brain operates through momentum and however you start your day is going to dictate the rest of how your day goes and if for example right now like you are waking up and you have like a bit of a check of your phone and you don't like really make your bed and you kind of gradually get the day started if tomorrow morning you have an extremely disciplined morning where you wake up you immediately go and brush your teeth and splash cold water your

face you come back you make your bed and then you go and get your sunlight before you see social media if you make only your goal that you're then going to suddenly think wow you're going to have a huge elevation of dopamine and serotonin in your brain which is going to have give you energy a better mood and more motivation and then your capacity to maybe take on board some of these other things like oh should I go into nature today or should I eat a healthy lunch that may happen but if you make your

only core rule to make sure the start of your day is Super optimized you'll then begin to see it translates to other behaviors in your life amazing thank you so much this has been wonderful TJ where can people find out more about you yeah so TJ power on Instagram is definitely my best Channel and then I also have a book the dose effect coming out in January which brings all of this stuff into life and teaches you how to embed it into your experience nice and we'll put links to all of your socials and also

the pre-order link to your book and the order link to your book depending on whenever people are reading this or are watching or listening to this down in the video description and the show notes thank you so much thank you for having me all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and read ources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to

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