A Neuroscientific Guide to Understanding Alcohol and Our Brain with TJ Power

[Music] welcome to another fantastic wonderful spin delivers episode of the one year Nubia podcast today I'm joined by somebody I've been trying to get in touch with for quite some time and finally got him to come onto the podcast lots of Instagram messages and finally got him to agree today I'm joined by TJ power TJ is a neuroscientist he has dedicated most of his life to psychology and understanding the brain and he has now created an incredible program that follows the dose method we're going to get into this but we're going to talk about chemicals

neurochemicals we're going to talk about our relationship with alcohol and the significance on the brain we're going to talk about what happens from drinking a lot over a long period of time and how to change that and then he's going to give you some amazing amazing tools that you can introduce so simply into your day that you understand about your neurochemistry that is going to help you change your relationship with alcohol not just that change your relationship with stress change your relationship with yourself so this is a really really powerful episode and once again I

know I say this almost every episode but once again this is the science that we are using in complete control so when we meet great people who are doing great things out there that resonate with our science that it is abs see aligned we love having them on the podcast so I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did making it now let's welcome TJ power well welcome to the show um so good to have you on I've been um admiring your stuff for a while and um seeing all the good work that you're

doing out there so super exciting and I'd love it if you could take a bit of a moment now just to you know amazing you know past story you have difficulty in 20s and I think a lot of people are going to resonate with your story so why don't you give us a bit of background um on you so effectively played uh high performance golf as a young kid and that exposed me to the world of psychology and performance psychology very early from like eight nine years old so I discovered this world of high performance

and then decided to study psychology at college and it was the first kind of subject that I really connected with I didn't particularly connect with the like school education I found School fun but not necessarily the education side and then suddenly discovered psychology and loved it um chose to study at University and during that period of my life also navigated quite a lot of difficulty I had like five people pass away five years in a row in my life so we uh it kind of matured my mind pretty fast and exposed me to the world

of emotional pain and stuff like that and really dramatic yeah for sure just very young brain to be going through those kind of things and I then yeah studied psychology at University loved it went on to lecturer Exeter University and build my own kind of Psychology and Neuroscience education and then went into research and became a neuroscientist and then during covid I was kind of in that whole researchy lecturing space and thought maybe I could be teaching companies in schools and stuff like that how to navigate the mental health challenges that covered was creating and

launched this company called neurofi and uh yeah over the last few years have trained a lot of people in our Neuroscience based method how to feel a bit better that's super cool um and what Amazing Project you've got going on there and do great stuff so um yeah but you during the 20s and I mean you rush through some things there we've covered a lot of topics um you had a bit of a party lifestyle for a while which I know my audience will resonate well with I did I I definitely was someone that was

inclined towards the party lifestyle from a very young age I mean I was a sad as you say I was smoking cigarettes when I was about 12 13 years old super young drinking vodka and having fun like that and uh then yeah normal in the UK pretty pretty pretty normal in the UK like it's what the people around me were doing as well and I would say them from like sort of 16 to 21 22 really engaged hard into that lifestyle got very into the party scene lots of drinking lots of buying and had its

fun experiences within it but also definitely came with its challenges and its lows and it's demotivation and anxiety and stuff like that and yeah have been through a big process I'm 26 now over these last kind of four years of really readjusting my relationship with all these fun things that you can engage with and it's been a journey and a journey that I've been very very happy to do it's led to a much more fulfilling happier more connected more motivated life now that I've got that stuff under wraps and yeah I'm happy to dive into

whatever aspects of the experience you think could be cool yeah well um interestingly um I guess you know talking about this relationship with alcohol I'm curious uh to to hear a bit more about your relationship with alcohol I know you've been through some iterations of stopping drinking for a while um and um you know then trying to control it and things like that so yeah tell me a bit more about your relationship with alcohol yeah I would say so for context almost a relationship for five years of close to drinking every day uh and there

there were periods of time where a non-drinking day could be two or three pints that would be a non-drinking day and then there was days with significantly more parts than that and when I was at University I got very into the sport side of University and there was this big kind of social scene and it included a lot of drinking so I was very immersed in that I was actually the social SEC like I ran the events so I was like kind of in charge of getting everyone charged up and partying and stuff and then

I finished Universe I finished my third year of University I was going back to go to the Masters and go into the lecturing and I thought right this summer I'm gonna really get myself together I'm gonna get myself super clean super healthy fit motivated so then I had about three months of that period no drinking and throughout that next sort of six to nine months really didn't drink much at all I said very low drinking I then came back to drinking a little bit it was very hard I was living in a house of University

students they were all partying super hard so it's very hard to not engage with it at all and then drunk for another few years like a little bit nothing too crazy and then last year I did seven months without drinking from uh early in the summer like uh May sort of time all the way through to January this year which was really good I think really helped me to adjust my relationship with kind of social life and drinking and in general led to me feeling really good I cannot explain the joy that I experienced when

I wake up on a Saturday or a Sunday morning feeling really good and it's like these are our two rest days depending on how you construct your work but these are our two rest days and they almost become like hangover recovery days and not joyful rest days and waking up on a Saturday morning going for a coffee and sitting there feeling good is uh so unbelievably enjoyable so I love that it over the last or six months I have had alcohol back in my life a little bit but not really to the extent of like

getting smashed and stuff like that yeah and so when you were going through this journey how much did the understanding that you were going through in the research and the Neuroscience play into you changing your relationship with alcohol you like self-analyzing and then learning about it and being like well I mean why am I doing this and what's going on and yeah how much did that play into that a huge amount I I've gone so deep into neuroscience and specifically neurotransmitters things like dopamine and oxytocin serotonin and I've gone so deep into that world that

I almost see the world through the lens of these neurotransmitters just because I teach it all the time and I see my own experience of life through how my dopamine levels are right now how my orchestos and hours are and it's just a useful framework for me to construct my life through because if I'm high in these chemicals and I feel motivated and connected and confident and energetic like I love that experience I love feeling awesome and the alcohol really hits the dopamine system extremely hard and the low dopamine experience of feeling kind of apathetic

and yeah after drinking of feeling apathetic and demotivated and then if you really Smash It kind of like a depressed type energy in your mind I hate that feeling and I do think my brain has an inclination to feel that feeling I don't just have like a natural super happy brain it always will feel amazing I really feel the hangovers I feel the the challenge it brings and I find The more I've deeply understood and connected to the feeling that it brings the more I'm motivated to not find myself in that experience basically yeah completely

okay well let's talk about that so what does alcohol do to the brain from the neurotransmitter perspective yeah so if we focus on the dopamine Dove means such an interesting chemical and it's become pretty famous in the modern world I think people know that oh dopamine yeah that's like a happiness chemical it makes you feel good to give you some deeper context effectively the reason your hat your brain has dopamine in it the reason it evolutionarily developed within us is it basically is a chemical that creates drive to pursue activities that are difficult and then

gives you a rewarding feeling if you're doing them so if you're say for example we go back to the hunter-gatherer days and I think it's useful to see Neuroscience through Evolution because our brain for 300 000 years was running around in forests and now it sits behind these computers but it's really built for that original concept and if you had a hunter-gatherer dopamine would basically give them drive and desire to want to go and hunt and build shelter and find food and explore new lands and give them the want to do it then as they

did these things found food bill shelter give them a nice rewarding feeling and the main main thing to understand with dopamine is how it was developed is it something that's designed to be earned so you basically have to put in effort and then your brain gives you dopamine as a result and therefore dopamine follows this nice curve where say for example we take a modern day activity you need to do some focused work tasks and complete a project your dopamine will start building as you do that task and it's not that easy at the beginning

and then gradually you're like right I'm getting more focused and then you have a nice satisfying satisfying feeling of I've done that task and then it goes back down and on a graph your dopamine slowly Rises nice peak of feeling good and then it slowly falls back down lovely the difficulty we have now is we've always wanted dopamine we've always wanted to find the food and build the shelter however over the last few hundred years we created all these ways to hack the dopamine with the cigarettes and originally things like brothels would have also been

like a hack for dopamines to get dopamine from sex so like cigarettes alcohol brothels these kind of things a few hundred years ago and then now we've furthered that with social media and drugs and junk food and stuff like that but effectively the biggest thing with alcohol is rather than earning pleasure putting in effort and then feeling good you immediately experience a huge huge spike in dopamine and when you drink alcohol for example as once you ingest a drink your doping levels will 2x they'll effectively double and takes about 15 minutes to get there so

drink an alcoholic drink your dopamine levels double and after about 15 minutes of drinking it and then because they've gone up so quickly instead of like slowly earning the dope and they got really quickly the brain doesn't know any better than to try and rebalance it back to its Baseline level just like if uh if your heart starts beating really quickly when you've seen a heart monitor in like a hospital show it starts being quickly but it also beats really slowly and it starts going like this because it's always trying to counter and effectively what

happens is you drink the alcohol you feel really really good and then the dopamine is like how do they get up here and then it starts to crash really hard and it goes below the Baseline level and it will make you feel crap effectively and that repestive cycle really quickly dopamine crash really quick doping crash eventually causes this mechanism to burn itself out basically if you imagine it like if you had a manual car and every day you got in there and you rev the engine and didn't put it into gear you'd burn that engine

out and effectively the alcohol is burning this dopamine mechanism out by giving us too much quick pleasure wow what is the actual effect of burning this dopamine system out what's the what is what are the signs well the dopamine system if we go that's the original is creating all your drive and your desire to do anything to do your work to bond with the people in your life to go to the gym to cook and eat healthy food and if you burn the mechanism out you start losing desire and want and motivation effectively and from

my perspective I think mental health does to have good mental health it does require a certain amount of effort and if people are struggling with like feeling like lethargic cardboards do anything not pursuing the goals they want in their life that is a real sign that probably your dopamine system is very burnt out and it can create that kind of depressed lethargic apathetic experience basically really interesting What proportion of burnout do you think is the burnt outness of the dopamine system in terms of humans burn out now yeah from what you said it sounded like

they're very very well linked so I'm wondering I mean if I think you know recently been through a bit of a spite of burnout um but you know it's it's a low thing for me um it it just you know because I go at it like the clappers um and then I suddenly get to a place where I just need to take a breath um and I think that's what people call burnout these days but uh basically enforced rest mentally and physically um so um yeah if I think back to that you know obviously work

is high but you know we I'm sure we get dopamine Rush from from work right it's a similar sort of level of addiction well my business is on part social media so of course there's a social media element to it and I'm also doing deals I'm I'm selling and there's a dopamine part to that so yeah there yeah there's definitely two elements with the burnout piece I think we are burning out this mechanism with all the quick pleasure social media would be a good example when you look at burnout also interconnects with another one of

these chemicals which is serotonin and serotonin is the the chemical that's really responsible for your actual energy levels and your mood and this chemical is being made inside your gut 95 of it has been made in your gut and the kind of things that are impacting your serotonin are your sleep your nutrition how much time you're getting out in sunlight rest your breathing patterns and I've actually I think a lot of people are very burnt out because that mechanism is actually not activating very well people sleep is off their food is off and their body

isn't affects are getting treated in a nice natural healthy way so you've got like two elements of it one is the quick pleasure staff burning out the desire and want but then one is like the lack of like care for the body that's burning out the serotonin system yeah amazing um just before because uh I can't wait to get into the the daily dose and the dose system it's such a it's a great concept that you're doing with neurophy um just before I jump into that and go further deeper just going back into the alcohol

subject specifically um so we've we've got this effect where you know 2x rise in 15 minutes and then suddenly this crash and this repetitive use is burning at the system so what happens to the brain over time and if I think about my relationship with alcohol um and you know I know tolerance goes up so you have to build tolerance and so psychologically you can take I mean back in the day I could probably do 10 pints and still have come you know completely clear conversations with people no problem because it was my job right

I'd be drinking all day all night and still be able to function remember stuff the next day you know psychologically I just didn't let myself get into a state where I forgot or didn't know what was going on because it was so critical to my role but then if I look at that relationship and then after changing my relationship with alcohol now if I have a drink I mean you say depressed after a binge session I'm depressed or low I can get you know but it's very very low after just having one or two drinks

um so yeah let's talk about the evolution of the brain over time what is it doing um from alcohol perspective yeah well one of the challenges is it would have taken you a lot of drinks back then to get that significant dopamine rise whereas now because you don't have much tolerance to it and you're not drinking that much you will get a big sharp price of dopamine when you have just one or two drinks and that's why for you now you could still get quite depressive symptoms just off of one or two and I have

the same like I really notice energetically in my mood and my thought process is very significantly impacted off just a few drinks and relatively speaking it might have taken it by six or seven or eight to achieve the same challenge of one or two that I have now and it's just because yeah the dopamine is going to get a sharper Spike effectively if it doesn't have it very often just like if you went and had a McDonald's every day eventually the McDonald's wouldn't be that exciting whereas if right now I went in a Big Mac

I don't really eat Big Macs I'd be like [ __ ] this is really really high dopamine I'd get a big spike off it so it's just you build tolerance to the amount of spiking can happen that's great and I guess that also is ensuring because it shows that when you do change your relationship with it your dopamine system starts to to rectify itself it starts to go back to a healthier State 100 you basically have in your brain what's called your Baseline dopamine the amount of dopamine your brain is producing each day is that

different for everyone different for everyone if you meet someone that's like a really highly excited person they're going to be a slightly higher naturally based on dopamine if you meet someone that's a little bit like Karma maybe they're going to be slightly lower but everyone has the amount of their Baseline dopamine will be producing and when we live a life that requires significant amounts of hard work so say you're someone that wakes up you make your bed you have your shower you're quite disciplined you work hard you go to the gym you put an effort

with your family you do things that are hard your brain is thinking okay this is someone that's going to require a significant amount of natural dopamine production because I need to support them to have the motivation to live this life they want and gradually when you live a life of effort your Baseline begins to rise and rise and a high based on dopamine feels like a very productive excited happy stay on the other side if you're waking up you're going to the social media your food's crap your booze is high effectively when we're talking about

revving that engine you start burning out the production of it and the Brain goes can't cope anymore I can't I can't produce so the Baseline begins to drop into a more apathetic stay in a very similar way to how kind of type 2 diabetes works you know you eat too much sugar and fat and then suddenly your body can't produce insulinx you may break the mechanism we eventually type 2 diabetes in our dopamine in the brain wow that's so fascinating yeah um but the amazing thing is that this thing recovers I mean it does the

recovery period how long is that you know if you if you're changing how you bring dopamine into your life how long does it take to recover that system yeah so it depended on quantity of consumption prior to like the abstinence or the drinking less or however someone chooses to approach it one thing that's really important to understand and I talk to a lot of people about recovery from drink or drugs or whatever it may be is the brain will adapt to whatever it's experiencing like it's like no it knows that it gets dopamine from the

phone or it knows you're just opening from the alcohol whatever it may be when you come away from one of these behaviors there will be a withdrawal experience because the brain's like oh I don't have that dopamine anymore so there will be a a week or two weeks depending on like quantity of consumption prior where you actually do go into a more discomfort because the brain's got very used to that experience but once you come through the withdrawal your brain starts going okay we're not going to get the boot we're not going to get doping

from booze anymore we've got to start the natural production of this and some are very close to me in my life for example has been very addicted to cannabis and that's really like a huge consumption and they have been through a big withdrawal experience and cannabis really hits the serotonin system but now their serotonin is beginning to naturally recreate itself and quiz is no longer reliant on that drive to create it and it's the same like after a period of time the brain starts thinking okay we're not getting it from there let's re-kick in the

engine effect let's start producing this at this ourselves and and then it starts to recover and it can be fast and especially like in a withdrawal time when you're coming away from one of these addictive behaviors if you can engage in some of the exercise or some cold showers or whatever it may be one of these like dopamine enhancing behaviors that is going to support because it's going to provide natural dopamine when you're not getting it artificially anymore yeah amazing so you just touched on a couple of those let's go through a few more um

cold showers is is huge for for that actually let's just touch on that cool showers um yeah cold showers really uh really fast way to Surge the dopamine just for some context on those dopamine levels we had the alcohol 2x 15 minutes to get there yeah if you with uh with cocaine a more powerful drug you've got a 2.5 X increase and it will take about nine minutes to get there so it's even faster Spike faster crash and if you've interact with that people may have interacted with that you'll notice the big surge in full

showers is the only thing that this psychologist called sramek in the early 2000s found that it could also 2.5 x the dopamine the same as what the cocaine was doing and it operates at a completely different side of dopamine we can go into this but it basically will last around two and a half hours so you're looking at a really prolonged soap of energy benefit so it's fast but then has a longer tail it's really interesting because how dopamine actually functions as it works on this system called your pain pleasure balance and you've basically got

this part of your brain called the hypothalamus it's above like the roof of your mouth if you imagine so you can have some knowledge in your head right now it's above the roof of your mouth you've got this hypothalamus and in there is where dopamine is initially produced and in there is also where you can experience pain and discomfort and you can experience pleasure and joy and how it basically Works they work on a seesaw so that when we experience pain and discomfort so for a hunter-gatherer they're out there in the cold fighting animal was

trying to survive ridiculously painful experience our brain would create a pleasure response and almost make us feel good because if we were just like this is horrible we'd give up effectively so it has this mechanism where the Seesaw tips towards pain you're in a painful discomfort place and pleasure would rise okay so you'd have like a good experience in your head the difficulty now is we have the Seesaw on the other side so we're doing super high pleasure and our brain is trying to go no I'm going to make you feel like crap to reinforce

not engaging with this we when you take something like cocaine or alcohol it just spikes pleasure and then crashes and the dopamine crashes the cold shower actually goes the opposite way it puts you into pain and then as a result of going into pain the body's like oh [ __ ] I've gone into pain I'm gonna put them into pleasure afterwards and you have that I love them prolonged benefit because we are as humans really adapted to be able to deal with way more physical discomfort than we do now like we we actually survive you

can't even imagine surviving outside now like we'd all struggle to do like a day or two out in a forest speak yourself and uh just hand me an ax and I'll sort everything out for you and if you came back from that trip with your ex you'd feel pretty good because your dose would be surging but the uh effectively is that opposite mechanism in action it's pain and discomfort results in pleasure it's the other side of the Seesaw it's somebody I need to introduce you to do you know the founder of Spartan Joe the center

I don't think I do okay I need to I need to get you on his podcast that's all he talks about he's like you're like we've all got too soft um he had he had Dr Hannah Lemke on his on his podcast as we did um on the podcast here and she talked about the pleasure pain balance and things like that so I know he loves your chat so yeah so I need a hammer at the desk and every time I need a little Spike I just smash my hand with a hammer will that help

that unfortunately won't help the brain has a good survival mechanism where it'll make you feel bad about hurting yourself in that way don't trick it that way that's more sales inflicted pay but um we need some what are the what are the um tools called to monitor dopamine levels in in brain or is it is it yeah what do they do Carly is a very complicated process to in a mediacy measure dopamine you can measure it through like urine and blood but you wouldn't get a media data you can use things like EEG and fmri

but I would say society's understanding of of these dopamine levels like immediate understanding like of how it's taking place is still in its infancy and it's something I'm very excited about to be a part of over these next sort of few decades because we're going to make a lot of advancement we are I mean one day the whoop on my wrist yeah exactly measure my uh dose and then completely I mean and and recommend and and let you know and say you're low here and go for a run north I do have some visions of

how I'm gonna um yeah you're in you're in such a cool space I'm I'm envious and anyways awesome okay um we've gone quite heavily into dopamine uh really really interesting stuff so let's just jump over to you have this amazing acronym dose um it comes as part of what you're doing with neurofi just tell me those in detail and then we'll go through the others in a bit more detail yeah and I think it's really cool for us to look at all of these through the lens of alcohol because that'd be obviously unique to this

this podcast but so you have dopamine and that's creating your drive requires effort in order to create it you've then got the O in dose which is oxytocin this is the human bonding chemical and uh this is most predominantly released in a human when you're born so in that moment of birth your mum and you experience this massive surge of oxytocin that pairs bonds you together then you start having breastfeeding and all the physical touch and love in those first few months and oxytocin starts building creating this deep desire for human connection within you and

human connection and being part of a group in a family is very very important particularly for humans because in a jungle a human on its own is gone you've got no chance we're not physically actually much of a predator but as groups we are extremely powerful and this chemical effectively makes us want that group feeling of belonging and anything that is moments where you're receiving love where you're giving love where your conscious shooting physical touch hugging cuddles sex all of that intimate experience of being a human that bonds you with people that is oxytocin and

where alcohol creates challenges here is especially when you're drinking significantly it might significantly impact your relationships effectively and I'm sure many people have had that you might get more aggressive in relationships you might disconnect from relationships and that's where I think alcohol yeah it would significantly impact this chemical okay so um but I imagine I mean for all of those things right alcohol leads to more sex for most people I mean that's how most people get sex in the first place right they find a lover through alcohol most people are drinking with friends because it's

their sense that they've intrinsically linked alcohol to uh probably the risk of oxytocin and thinking that it's alcohol releasing it or the alcohol's aiding it but actually what they're getting is from being there with a group of people and having a laugh and enjoying that company I'm just making some assumptions here you can these are good yeah and then you know obviously increases physical touch um allows people to feel more connected things like that so there's probably quite a alcohol doesn't directly produce oxytocin nope it doesn't directly produce it nor does it directly reduce uh

reduce it either it's not directly impacting the chemical itself oxytocin wouldn't various you have a drink but the things we are doing when we're drinking are increasing the oxytocin yeah and I do think that's a real challenge I think we have created a society where social connection is predominantly based on the booze and it's something I have found extremely difficult like I now live about 45 minutes outside of London and a big reason a big component of that is I can't do the lifestyle that my friends all live like they love to get drunk for

five days a week and with how I want to feel and my work I just couldn't do that so I now live outside of London for that reason and it is a real difficulty the social connection I think if you have like a glass of wine or two and you can have a little bit of the dopamine of the booze and connect and that's okay but once you take the booze far you wouldn't even necessarily be getting as much like intimate oxytocin because you're eventually when you're actually drunk you're talking over people you're not really

paying attention to anyone saying you're just like in an app more animalistic form and with that I do want to go into some evolutionary aspects of the booze actually but yeah I would say it might be it always does an enhancer for a little bit of time at the start of the night but then it's going to lead to more of just uh I'm pissed I'm not really even paying attention so I'm not getting the bonding yeah but I mean interestingly we're all taking the short-term hit with alcohol right we're all we're I mean if

everyone did the math properly on the impact that alcohol is having on them versus the positive is make nobody would drink yeah if you did like a cost benefit analysis nobody would drink nobody would drink The Hangover is much worse the cost is much worse though it problems it causes is much worse but it's so normalized it's so socially acceptable it's so driven all of those things that we we ignore that stuff most people are we do we live in a world of wanting to feel good right now basically like we're much more in the

now I think lots of people don't necessarily have a bigger thing that they're wanting that they're really clear on in their life like I found for me it's been it's been really hard for me to get off all this dopaminey stuff like I love it it's really fun all my friends are in Amsterdam a Festival this weekend partying pretty hard I would have loved to be at that I wouldn't love how I would feel right now though which is why I'm not there which is why I didn't go and I found the only way to

to alongside the knowledge of the impact it has the only way to truly have the capacity to sacrifice the pleasure right now is uh having some kind of North Star guard that's bigger that I can chase down and when I consider for example like right now I'm doing a lot of writing um for a book and I actually had the analysis in my head if it goes that Festival I'm going to feel [ __ ] for a whole week I'm not gonna be able to write and then immediately I can sacrifice the festival because I've

got this bigger thing I'm aiming towards and I think for anyone that's seeking to come out of an addictive behavior you've got to have something you're willing to sacrifice for yeah exactly so in our um highest level program complete control um there are 12 core drivers that drive compulsive behavior and and that when you understand where you are on the those and make those shifts in your life you will be able to put yourself into a position where you can control now you are controlling your relationship with alcohol and you've done things like change your

environment which is one of our core drivers you've changed your environment in order for you to be able to be able to control it better because if you were still in London and you're still being booze handed by everyone it would be difficult right of course it would you've changed some of your connections you're now more aligned to people who are building businesses or going for success or networking with more people like that who are living how you want to live critical to being able to control Behavior right you um you have meaning and purpose

is absolutely key so many people realize they're climbing the wrong tree right and you'll find this in in organizations I've spent 13 years trying to be the world stop oil broker and then when I go almost to the top I was like what the [ __ ] am I doing here this is not what I'm supposed to be doing so I think there's there's all these factors and I think you've been you well from what what we're showing and you're coming from a neuroscience perspective and psychology background and and we're coming from it for now

from eight years of helping you know over a hundred thousand arguably many many more um people who change their relationship with alcohol let's pause just for a brief moment I just want to share with you some of the heartfelt feedback from our incredible complete control community members listen to this I I don't know how I signed up I think I just got an ad on Instagram and just got a whim just hit the button and did a call and then signed up and didn't really consciously think much about it and then after that I was

like what did I just sign up for wait a second here like far exceeded my expectations I'm usually extremely skeptical so I don't know how I even signed up in the first place but whatever it was um so it's just amazing how like the transformation that I've seen and even the drinking part is just kind of the super it was the Achilles heel but it's kind of just the superficial problem and it's like once I kind of clear that up there's so much more possibility and and you know the exploration discussions with Gary with Candace

have just been so powerful and kind of they both kind of focus on a different area and then with Glenn kind of looking at my data and with my cohorts or classmates or you know it's just been just everything has just been so powerful and kind of supportive of you know completing the whole picture of how I do this um so just really grateful and and uh yeah and and also just feel more grateful and not only just for all of you but just just in life in general it's just a little bit more clarity

and peace and calm and and so forth so I am incredibly grateful for this entire program everybody on this call and everything that we were able to experience um I I think that it delivered more than I expected honestly I I like I've said before I've done a couple of like challenges and different things and I think that this Beyond um examining my relationship with alcohol and making I think pretty good strides in in um staying alcohol-free um I think it taught me a ton about myself and how to like examine my habits and my

thoughts and those kind of um patterns and ways to ways to approach the things that worried me the most in this in this experience um have just been invaluable I think I'm leaving feeling um in stronger in general more self-aware in general and um just really more anchored in who I want to be and what my values are and how I can you know take better steps to achieve those so it's been fantastic for me and again the our team I really um appreciate all the feedback and support from every single person on this call

but my cohort as well it's been great so I love everybody that I've met here I have loved the program I am not an emotional person like this but this has changed my life it has given me a life um and there's other things I need to do too but I don't have to do a protocol anymore so thank you it's been an amazing journey and a very I appreciate the professionalism whenever I feel the stress there's there's something that I can go back to to everybody and the sharing from everybody and the professionalism of

the program so I loved it and I've grown a lot so one word is transformational that's a word that's been bandied about for decades but in this it is absolutely accurate if I was to use one word this was a great investment it's not it's not self-help it's self-realization it's um super powerful but it exceeded my expectations or maybe it was Sharon who said that um uh or maybe I'm exceeding my expectations and I like that I mean the program has been hugely I'm hugely grateful for the program make the Journey of for myself has

been amazing I mean I remember telling I don't know if it's Candace or Gary the first three or four weeks of the program I was like I can't stop thinking about not drinking it's just it's in my head every day I'm thinking about not drinking and it's it's like now I'm not even thinking about it you know it's just like my life has sort of stepped on I'm excited about the future um things are looking good things are looking good I just love sharing the things people are saying about our complete control program okay let's

get back into the episode right so we've touched on oxytocin um and um that's really powerful into there what about um serotonin yeah so serotonin is a really cool camera car the alcohol is directly impacting this one so this is the chemical that is being produced within your gut and so 90 of it is produced there a little bit is also producing your hypothalamus but you really want to think about this chemical as the chemical that's wanting your you to take care of your body and for hunter-gatherers the body was instinctively cared for it had

rest we slept a lot so we just slept we start we had a lot of time out in the sunlight we ate all the nutritious natural foods that were around and we couldn't really poison the gut in any way back then however now when you look at how our body is treated we might lack a significant amount of sleep and rest that's going to lead to low serotonin and we might lack a lot of time out in the daylight it's very easy as British people to know that our mood is directly connected with whether it's

sunny outside and serotonin is the Neurology of why that is that's why I live in Majorca there you go you're getting the serotonin off of that and then most importantly with the booze your gut is wanting great nutritious food to turn up it's wanting fruits and it's wanting when nutritious is a big topic but it's one in good natural nutritious food to turn up and those could go brilliant I'm going to be able to build serotonin out of that and as a result of the only serotonin your mood and your energy levels are going to

be great and unfortunately when the booze comes in not only is it creating this Spike and crashing dopamine but it's coming into the gut and the guy is thinking [ __ ] I'm not gonna not only am I not gonna be making serotonin at that that's actually going to reduce our entire function as a as a like a being within your stomach right now and this process is going to go towards okay how do I get the booze out instead of how do I build serotonin and this dip in your mood your energy levels this

is really connected to the alcohol sitting in your stomach effectively there's something else in here which I'm gonna forget to ask if I if I don't or comment on it now and I think you'll probably align with this um there are an awful lot of people out there who are going to a doctor um because they feel low or they feel depressed or they feel anxious or they feel sad and all of those things and and the first Port of Call for a doctor or even most psychiatrists is for you to take a medication um

for taking medication and we're not talking about that here we're talking about like the absolute Basics the absolute fundamentals and I wish we could get this to be the first step like why are people not prescribed go do cold showers go and do some exercise spend some time with loved ones stop bloody drinking a poisonous depressant for you right that is that is one of the most powerful psychologically manipulative drugs that is available in society or it's that available in society and let's start there first and then come back to me in two or three

weeks and let's see how you feel right yeah I think it is a a real difficulty I think it's mostly layered as to why we've chosen that route I think an element of it is society just wanting a quick solution where a pill solves things for you and as I said before like we always like quick wins as a society these days and that might seem like a an easier route to take I think medication can serve its purpose if someone's really really in a very very difficult spot and it might be the thing that

can stabilize them but I definitely don't think it should be the first point of call I think if if all of these things were in play and your relationships were good and you weren't drinking you were getting good movement your nutrition was good you're working on your sleep and all of it was really stabilized and then you were like wow I feel awful I'm super anxious and depressed then maybe then it should be a consideration but I think we're very much we've got it flipped round and uh it is challenging it is challenging for us

as a society I really hope that gratitude we begin to realize how much connecting with the intelligence of our nature and just basically aligning to how your body wants to be treated is the initial solution and there is some progress New Zealand has green prescriptions where the first point of call is now a lot of times in natural environments which is really really cool super cool Japan has something called foreign bathing which another a great practice gets you moving gets you into the sunlight gets you out connecting with people and yes I do believe that

should probably be the first point of call before the uh the pills good thank you well it's a very very diplomatic answer TJ there you go well done that's my answer now wait till I'm about 35 and I really come into my uh fold like me I have my we we can chat after about the full respite um and when you get to my old age you start to just call a speed of speed and and worry about who you piss off later uh endorphins was the one we were about to come on next so

the lovely dolphins nice so just to run it back we've got dopamine we're doing hard things and that's giving us motivation and drive we got oxytocin that's bonding us together making us feel love and belonging serotonin caring for our body nutrition sleep time and sunlight that's creating our mood and our energy and then endorphins is another one like oxtosis it's not getting directly hit by the alcohol however there is going to be a significant impact here the reason we actually have endorphins I think many people immediately associate exercise with endorphins which is right and the

reason we have endorphins is say we're in the hunt together situation again and we are faced with the ridiculously challenging situation about actually having to fight an animal or run away from an animal or fight a human we basically needed to evolve and have a mechanism that in the in the moment of extreme physical and psychological stress that and a chemical would release within us to take the stress out of our brain and to take the physical pain we may experience out of our body so that in that situation you're about to have to fight

a bear I mean if you're flying about it is lights out unfortunately but if you if you're buying like it's tiny little stuff always he's got a chance beginning we are to fire there but in that moment it scratches you and all this stuff you don't want your brain going oh my God oh my God oh my God this is so scary you just need to focus on survival and similarly you don't want to be thinking how that really hurt my arm you need something that's taking this away and endorphins they de-stress our brain and

they take physical pain out of our body and they're basically released when our body physically exerts itself so when we're exercising hard they release when we're sitting in saunas they release when we're singing and dancing that's a really good way to do lots of things releasing which you could associate that go stretching our body really laughing is a big endorphin based thing so our body basically wants to physically exert itself and the wonderful thing about this system is whilst we're not necessarily having to cope with the stress of bears our life now is still extremely

stressful and the biggest thing to understand is if your brain is in a stress State the fastest way to de-stress it is going to be to physically exert it in some way whether that's exercise stretching singing and dancing sauna anything like that is going to lead to these endorphins releasing in your brain thinking oh we're going in some kind of physical effort release the endorphins de-stress that person's brain interesting wow okay so direct correlation between de-stressing and um stressing your body de-stressing the mind and stressing the body through endorphins through the release of through endorphins

which is interesting you can just imagine like say your in the extremely stressful situation of running away from a pack of animals or something you effectively need a mechanism that's going to help you cope with that stress and in that moment your body's gonna physically excite itself very hard the interplay I'd see with alcohol here is for many people the endorphins are just extremely underactive because of a very sedentary lifestyle and alcohol demotivates us and leads to a much less exercise physically healthy lifestyle and for many the endorphin system is so underactive and many people

are struggling with this chronic stress experience but they're never doing actually the core behaviors that de-stress them right I've just realized a way to help my whole team de-stress is like when they're all fully stressed out their mind and people are talking about burnout and things I can just dress up in a beer outfit and come running into the office foreign if you could ever do a team day where you go like in saunas or something that would be a good endorphin release that sounds a bit better also have a good endorphin release like I'm

sure people have experienced like you getting a bath and you suddenly feel like a de-stress coming over you and that's your body although we know we're lying into nice warm water and it's okay the body's like [ __ ] I'm lying in really hot water here is this dangerous an endorphins are less yeah so now um we came up with this idea of this self-care Smorgasbord right so not you don't always want to do everything all the time you don't you know consistency sometimes right so if you have a smorgasbord 16 items which you consider

a self-care for you right things like acts of giving or having a cold shower or you know doing some exercise or meditating breath work right so you've got 16 things on this and you just look at it and you go look what four can I do today right well for four of those can I do and and and at least they're moving me forward from a self-care perspective now it sounds like you could you could similarly pull a whole list for the for the dose here when should you be thinking now you've mastered this so

when should you be thinking oh I need to do something for serotonin or oh I need to you know are you teaching people to get more aware of when they need these chemicals and when they're deficient on them yeah yeah definitely so the the key thing here and as I said at the beginning like I really have progressively began to see my life through the chemicals and it's been great for mental health and work performance and things like that and it's really being able to identify with the symptoms of how you're feeling and then the

more you can understand the symptoms the more you can figure out which chemical to boost and in general with everything to do with making progress with your health say without Carl you have to have like a deep awareness of how it is actually making you feel and then you might be motivated for change so spending time tuning into how you feel I think is valuable and effectively you'd break it down into four parts if you're in a very demotivated apathetic can't be Factor State effectively that is dopamine you need dopamine so demotivated you need the

dopamine if you're in a kind of lonely isolated I don't feel that connected to people stay you need oxytocin if you're in a low mood low energy stay and energy is different to motivation motivation is like your will whereas energy is just like if you're just like tired and exhausted low mood you need the serotonin and then if you're in a stressed State you need the endorphins so demotivated dopamine lonely oxytocin low energy serotonin and stressed you need endorphins and I just say try and see it through that lens like say for example I can't

be bothered I'm in a demo but State I need to do some work one of the awesome things to build dopamine is actually the act of discipline and cleaning your environment around you and you'll notice that if you clean up your kitchen or your lounge or something you get kind of a feeling of accomplishment of satisfaction and rather than just trying to push myself through the task I'll be like I'm just going to leave it I'm going to put some music on which puts me into a bit of a good mood and I'm gonna go

like clean the kitchen so I'm a bedroom saw on my desk and the act of that accomplishment will build some dopamine and then coming back to the task is in a way easier because I'm going to have more dope in abundance in my brain so you and you can begin to just like play this like musical instrument of your brain chemistry effectively that's amazing I love that it's super smart stuff that you're teaching people here okay so tell us about neurophyte um what are you up to what are you doing um and and yeah tell

us about your phone yes a new revised company I launched a couple years ago and the the primary thing I've been focused on is how do we get this education to people in a very impactful way that really works and we've built this four-part training experience where we have one session on each of these chemicals and it takes place over a month it's hyper interactive and extremely good we do extremely good for bonding companies together and connecting them on this whole topic of mental health through a very optimistic lens of chasing feeling good rather than

like running away from anxiety and depression and yeah we do it in companies we do it in schools we have trained about 35 000 people now in the method over the last sort of 12 to 18 months and it's pretty fun it's uh I love delivering it we're now kind of maxed at the delivery component of things I've I've with with the book to something like April next year and now I've got to figure out the next stage as an entrepreneur or figure out how to scale it into a platform we've got some uh we

have these 20 core behaviors um of dose and we've just recently been going through a process of turning all these things I'm chatting about into these physical forms so companies and stuff like that can have them in front of them which is great for discussion and yeah I feel like dose is a cool method and I'm just trying to get it to as many people as I can love it and I'm super happy to share the message and we have a lot of business owners um a lot of people who work at large organizations who

listen to this podcast who are part of oamb who come into our programs so um yeah I think it's really really interesting what you're doing and I already told you before that I think there's definitely some synergies um perhaps we can we can help each other a bit more and then just um yeah love love the stuff that you you're doing it's super cool um yeah so any touch on booze lightly in dose and uh it'd be great to send people to you for the true booze training I think yeah exactly literally one of the

most important things Society needs is managing the boots I think it's vital so I think it's very cool what you do thank you very much um and I think you know we're coming at such a different angle from from most others now um having moved you know into a more wider Market about being controlled I think that's where the vast majority of people are are looking um what they want they want to be able to reduce down and that's far more complex than getting just somebody to stop it's much easier to stop but I also

we didn't talk about this but I also entirely agree with you that the the best way for somebody to get a better relationship with alcohol is a period of abstinence like there's just no we're not gonna We're Not Gonna doubt that but abstinence does not equal control um and we've seen that for for many many people so that's the importance of doing this work and I think what you're doing here is so intrinsically linked into this part I've learned a lot you're going to help me improve some of our program programs based on the the

conversations we've had today so that's going to have a knock-on effect on everybody that we do work with going forward so thank you for that um and hopefully this is the beginning of conversations um between us TJ so thank any any any final thoughts or anything you want to share with anyone before we finish up I would really like everyone listening to have a goal where this week they have to go on a walk without their phone and if it's scary to go without your phone just put it in a bag and have it on

airplane and you have to try going like a 40 minute walk in the choir and you have to ask yourself what's the number one thing that you want in your life right now and try and map out what the vision looks like to get towards that goal wow that's cool okay so homework for everyone 40 minute walk uh in some nature let's not do it in the city or if it needs to be a part yeah it has to be in an actual environment no phone and go and think about no it's fine yeah think

about what you want to do what's the plan number one thing you want in your life what is the number I think ask it your instinct knows already so it won't take long to come up with an answer but it might be something you deeply want in a relationship it might just do with your career it might be you need to work on your relationship with alcohol it might be something to do with exercised but ask yourself and Ponder what a plan looks like I think our insane deeply knows the solutions to lots of our

problems I just think we're constantly distracting ourselves away from them and the more time I think you spend out in the nature in the choir and tap into your intelligent instincts the uh the better your behavior becomes yeah amazing there's so much we didn't touch on um but we we're running short time so I need to get you back on again so that's easy um this is the first of many different oh and where does everybody find you how do we you're prolific on Instagram you're on LinkedIn so yeah share those yeah LinkedIn and Instagram

definitely good platforms if you just look at TJ and then power up here at w-e-r Instagram's my main platform lots of different ways in which you can learn guidance about how to optimize your brain chemistry over there fantastic thank you for the work you do keep going my man you're doing great stuff so thank you right well done all right thanks DJ see ya