Brain Expert: 6 Habits to Boost Focus & Concentration By 48 Percent (Hack Your Dopamine!) with TJ Power

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Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Dopamine is a chemical that the human being so deeply desires.
We've now been given very quick ways to access it. Are you wanting a life where you're in the pursuit of pleasure and just like momentarily feeling good? Or do you want like a really happy, fulfilling experience alive? He's a neuroscientist and author.
TJ Power. Pornography is like this secret addiction.
And that's why I think it's being massively underestimated. you have habits and systems to increase concentration and deep focus by 48 yeah what are they the number one health and wellness podcast jay shetty jay shetty he won the only jay shetty hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the number one health podcast in the.
Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen, learn, and grow. Today's guest is someone that I've been really excited to speak to.
His name's TJ Power. He's a neuroscientist and author dedicated to understanding how modern lifestyle habits shape brain chemistry and emotional well-being in the digital age.
His upcoming book, The Dose Effect, is out very soon and focuses on how we can optimize dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins through practical everyday changes. TJ's research highlights the impact of social media, nature, and technology on mental health.
And through his work, he empowers individuals to take control of their minds and lead healthier, more balanced lives. If you don't already follow TJ across social media, you're going to want to follow him right now and straight after this conversation.
Please welcome to On Purpose, TJ Power. TJ, it's great to have you here, bud.
Jay, thanks for having me. This is surreal for me, and I'll explain why

to the audience, because 11 years ago, I met your dad. Yeah.
And Thomas Power became a mentor of

mine when I'd just left the monastery. I'd started working at Accenture.
Your dad had been brought

in as an external consultant to help the company with different aspects of its digital strategy.

We became good friends. He became a mentor.
He became a coach. And I'd always say to him,

Thank you. help the company with different aspects of its digital strategy.
We became good friends. He became a mentor.
He became a coach. And I'd always say to him, how can I repay you? Like, what can I do for you? Because he did so much for me.
He helped me build my mindset when it came to work and life and business. There's so much influence that your dad's had on me in a very deep way.
And he'd always say to me, I'll coach you and one day you'll coach my kids. And now I feel bad because I can't take any credit for your career success.
And so I actually didn't live up to my end of the bargain. He was absolutely wonderful to me.
And watching you rise, honestly, and by the way, I just want to put it out, I can't take any credit for anything you've done. The incredible rise that you've had and the content you're making is so powerful.
It's having such an impact. And I'm having you on the show because I'm a fan and knowing your dad's a bonus, but I think the work that you're doing is phenomenal.
So congrats, bud. And I'm so excited to have you here after having so many dinners and lunches over the years and watching you grow, but the work's so impactful.
So thanks for turning up. Thanks for having me, man.
You've inspired me so much over this last decade when I became fascinated by this world of mental health and helping people thrive. You're like that person I turn to on the internet.
So it's a magical moment for me to be here now. Oh, thanks, man.
But yeah, let's dive into the work because there's so many exciting things to discuss. The first thing I want to ask you is, you've got this phrase dose.
And dose means so much more than what we think the word means. And it's based on this idea of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.
I think we know very little about these chemicals. We kind of hear these as buzzwords and trend words.
And I think what you've done is really demystified them and unpacked them for us in a really simple way. Can you walk us through what each of these do for us and how we interact with them on a daily basis? A hundred percent.
I think with these chemicals, you see them talked about a lot on the internet now, and you see them all called kind of feel good and happy hormones, which there is truth in that. But the fascinating thing about really understanding dose is each of these chemicals have a very specific function.
And when you begin to understand the symptoms of being low or high in them, you then begin to understand your brain and body much better. And you start responding to the different challenges that the modern world brings us in a much better way.
If you were to look at dopamine, primary function of dopamine would be motivation. And it also is a secondary function of our attention span.
If you find yourself in a situation where you feel like low and deflated and flat, and you can't get yourself to take action and do things, it's a very clear sign that dopamine is low and you need something to boost dopamine. You have oxytocin, the connection and the love hormone.
If you felt lonely and a little bit unconfident and disconnected, we'd be guided towards oxytocin. Serotonin has a massive impact on our mood and energy.
So if you're tired or a bit sad, serotonin would be beautiful. And then endorphins have this incredible function of de-stressing our brain.
In our modern world, the cortisol hormone has become the big stress hormone, which is really accurate, is a stress hormone. But endorphins, as we'll go on to explore, also play a vital role in calming our brain when it's experienced extreme stress.
It's fascinating to me because I don't think we understand how our daily habits affect these chemicals. So walk us through what's actually happening in our brain when we're doom scrolling on social media.
Effectively, this all comes down to this concept called phasic and tonic dopamine release. This psychologist called Dreher really popularized this back in 2011.
And what you basically see is when we interact with social media, you get a rapid rise in dopamine, which is why when you open the social media app, you immediately feel extremely good. Just to put that into context, the whole of dose is built upon something called the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis.
This was created by Gluckman. And it's basically this idea that our brain spent 300,000 years evolving out in nature, developing these chemicals to help us survive and thrive in that kind of environment, hunting and making fire and building shelter and looking after one another.
And with dopamine specifically, the only way we were capable of accessing it was through hard, challenging activities. We had to effectively earn the increase in dopamine.
And we might have experienced that like once or twice a day, like the fire finally lit, or we successfully caught some food or whatever it may be. In the modern world, this social media example, you experience that same level of dopamine increase, but you experience it instantaneously within a few seconds.
Because it rises so fast, it then causes this really significant crash in dopamine because your brain tries to get back to balance. And so many of us struggle today with this idea of just taking action on what we want to do.
Like we're sitting there and we think, yeah, I need to do that bit of work. Or yeah, I need to go and cook myself a healthy meal.
Or yeah, I need to go and do some exercise, but we can't be bothered. And we just like procrastinate it.
And that's heavily connected to this overstimulation through social media. It's fascinating to hear that we used to have to earn dopamine.
How quickly does it diminish? And what does that crash look like? It would be experienced within our behavior. There's actually this big topic you get seen talked about on TikTok called ADHD paralysis.
And they also have this phrase called rotting on TikTok where people literally can't move. They can't get themselves to move.
Dopamine right at the core of its function even impacts our motivation to physically move our body. And if you're in that state where you just can't get yourself to do anything, and loads of us experience this, like it's a Saturday morning, we think, oh, I don't have work today.
So I'm going to scroll my phone way more. And we sit there and we get into this doom scrolling cycle of feeling that elevation in dopamine, this rapid increase of dopamine.
And then we eventually find ourselves saying to our mind, like our instinctive mind comes on and says, put the phone down, like go do something else. And then you don't really want to.
And then even if you do put it down, you just can't get yourself to do anything. So it's that symptom of paralysis, not being able to get going.
Yeah. So what do we do? I believe it all starts with how the beginning of your day begins.
And it's really important to understand this. Throughout sleep, there's regenerative processes taking place that are creating elevations in dopamine as part of that restoration.
And you can imagine this, all of our work is built upon this hunter-gatherer idea of a human being far before our world came, this modern world we live in, had to wake up and do hard things. It was so important to our survival.
When we woke up, we'd have a nice amount of dopamine and we'd immediately take action and do challenging stuff. Nowadays, the opposite of that occurs.
We wake up, we've got this abundance of dopamine sitting there, and then it's straight to the phone. And I understand that this is hard to break.
My whole work in this space comes from my own addictions to these things. Like I got a iPhone when I was like 11 years old.
So to me, my whole life has been sitting on an iPhone basically. And I spent 10 to 15 years waking up, going straight into the phone.
And fundamentally, if you develop the discipline to have a 30 minute window before you go into the phone, and we can talk through what the steps in there would include to resist it, that's going to then set that discipline within your life to I have the capacity to resist it. And then once you start training this discipline in your capacity to resist it in other times in your day will grow as well.
The fact that you've been using a phone since you're 11 years old, kind of puts into perspective, because I got my first phone when I was 14. But it was one of those phones where you still had to like, key in a ringtone., you had to earn the dopamine on that thing.
Yeah, you had to earn the dopamine.

I used to sit there for like 30 minutes keying in a ringtone

so that I could have my favorite song be my ringtone.

For sure.

And you had like a few songs on there.

You didn't have loads of novelty, loads of different stuff.

Yeah, that's so fascinating, this idea of earning something.

And I feel like when you wake up in the morning,

it's almost like we want life to be easier and simpler and everything in our lives become so instant, whether it's food, coffee, anything, right? We're looking for something that's quick. How do we train ourselves to be like, oh, I should earn something? How do you even make that mindset shift of actually earning something's good versus having it be ready made for me? I think right at the core of that, it comes down to, are you wanting a life where you're in the pursuit of pleasure and just like momentarily feeling good? Or do you want like a really happy, fulfilling experience of life? And I struggled a lot with various addictions.
I struggled a lot with alcohol, as you and I have discussed, social media, pornography, all these very dopaminergic activities. And ultimately, if you really spend some time with your mind, I think you have to spend prolonged period of times in nature, chatting to yourself about your lifestyle.
And if you start really considering like, is this current lifestyle I have where I work a bit and then I get my pleasure from my phone and then I do another activity and then I get my pleasure from my phone. Is that ultimately creating a life that you're really loving or is it just creating momentary experiences of pleasure? And I think when you begin having those conversations with yourself and observing more closely how you feel, and this is why I really like people to understand the symptoms of whether you're low or high in these chemicals because then people start thinking like, okay, this is why I'm feeling that way and then they tie it to the phone and then they're like, okay, I need to start phone fasting, which is what we call it, these prolonged breaks from it.
So I think it's that mindset shift around pleasure versus happiness. What's the longest you've ever done a phone fast? I did three years ago, I did seven days.
No phone whatsoever. No phone seven days.
I actually wouldn't recommend that as a solution. It's really interesting because I've been really niching into this world of the phone connection.
I think fundamentally, when you look at mental health, there has been a lot of quick dopaminergic activities for the last hundred years, be that alcohol or cigarettes or sugary food or whatever it may be. But mental health has shifted rapidly since the iPhone became a thing.
And then if you look at since COVID, when we started really scrolling the short videos, mental health has declined even further. And I think the big reason that's the case is because we can more frequently engage with dopamine via the phone than the dopamine we used to get from those other sources.
You might eat sugar three times a day. You might drink once a day.
You might watch pornography once a day. Social media, like with the Dose Lab where we do our research, we see people opening their phone about 140 to 150 times a day.
So it's that frequency of increase, which is challenging, which brings us to that phone fasting idea. Now I tried seven days off.
I tried three days off. The difficulty is because we're operating in such a rapid society with the amount of information coming at us on our email and WhatsApp and with our jobs, I think big breaks from it can actually be very stressful when you turn the phone back on.
And what we've seen in our research is if people commit to short, frequent breaks, where they know the morning is a frequent break, they'll always do. They have a 60-minute phone fast in the evening.
They have a prolonged one in the middle of the day. If they have these frequent breaks rather than long breaks, it actually seems to be more effective, definitely for me as well.
I can agree with you more. I've done those phone fasts as well for a while.
And there are times in my year where I think that that can be important. But overall, I fully agree with you that I think if you're going oscillating between these extremes, you just keep kind of pinging back and forth.
And so you go from being really addicted to doing the phone fast and going back to being really addicted. And that can get really exhausting and really, really tiring.
And so what has been your best set of tips that you've found for someone who doesn't want to look at their phone first thing in the morning or to not turn to that because you said the morning's so important? What do we do? Because I feel like that's the first thing, you know, 80% of us look at our phones first thing in the morning, last thing at night. We look at it before we look at our partners and our kids, after we look at them at night.
Our phone gets more FaceTime than the people we love. That is our life.
What do we do? We have these four underlying laws for each of the chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. The underlying law from all of the research we looked into, like in this book, there's like 250 studies we explored around these topics.
Fundamentally, the law that we found to be most appropriate with dopamine is take action as soon as you wake every day. And that fundamentally means you wake, you don't snooze your alarm as painful as it is, but simply beating that challenge of, oh, I could just lie in bed and stay in this comfort and doing something that's difficult is beginning that dopamine increase.
We then get people to, if they really struggle with snoozing, to literally when the alarm goes off, just sit at the side of the bed and just get themselves out of the prone position effectively and sit there. We then get them to go straight to the bathroom.
If you can, you then start brushing your teeth. Brushing your teeth is an annoying slow activity.
Again, you're earning dopamine. Like if you do it for 20 seconds, you always know that I feel a bit guilty for the fact I just did 20 seconds.
You do the two minutes, you think, yes, task complete. So you go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, you splash cold water on your face, and you come back and you make your bed.
There's this brilliant psychologist called Walton that looked at the relationship between dopamine and effort. And it's very clear that if you utilize effort right at the beginning of your day, your dopamine starting on that nice slow curve, motivation then builds.
and then your capacity to further resist the phone and maybe get outside for a walk or do some exercise or get to your desk or make your kids breakfast is going to come from an easier place than the wake up, spike dopamine and crash and then try and get going from there. Yeah, that's great advice.
I think one thing that helped me out for a while was I have a few instrumentals or music that I like, and I'll have that on my phone. So I'll wake up and I'll put this song on because I know I have the urge to pick up my phone and I'll press play and then the phone's with me while I'm brushing my teeth, but I'm not now scrolling because I'm now listening to something.
And I know people do it with podcasts, people do it with audio meditation, whatever it may be. For me, it's music that reminds me of being back in the monastery.
And so I'll play that. And it's just like the soundtrack to my morning.
And it may have birds chirping, it may have nature sounds, it may have a bit of water. And for me, that allows me to feel like there's something distraught.
Is that bad? Is that good? What's your take on that? Be honest with me. It's interesting.
And there is so much nuance with how the beginning of the day starts. And we get these questions all the time in our training and things like that.
Fundamentally, the absolute gold standard would be you don't see a phone for 30 minutes. Okay.
However, there are scenarios where definitely a phone is not disadvantageous to these chemicals. So if you think about listening to music, as long as you're not rapidly tapping through it and you're just listening to a song, that's okay.
If you woke up and it's part of your routine to go straight into a meditation, utilizing a meditation app, again, that's a good use of your time. I know many people like because of the brainwave state to go straight into meditation when they wake.
This is where it gets interesting. You really want to make sure that the phone doesn't charge directly by your head.
That's like a gold standard rule. It can't be charging there because our willpower goes up and down depending actually on our dopamine levels and different areas of our brain being activated.
Willpower in the morning is going to be slightly lower. If the phone is there, it's irresistible.
I always have this. Like when I come away, for example, we're here at the moment, I don't have my alarm.
So then my phone has to become my alarm. And suddenly it's like, where is the phone going to be? And I have to make sure that it charges the other side of the room.
So it still wakes me, but I don't have that moment of, oh, I might just quickly check. With that in mind, when you do check, if there's a whole stream of notifications, again, it's going to create this anticipatory rise in dopamine, then you're going in, you're not going to be able to resist it.
So you need to really be on airplane mode when you're going to sleep. So you wake up and there's nothing there.
You then have these really nuanced components of if you want to go into meditation app, like I have these things that I want to do, I would open the phone, click the app, then un-airplane it. So you haven't seen a notification, do your meditation, come back out, go away from the phone.
But fundamentally, we've trained like 50,000 people in dose. It is so clear that if people have 30 minutes when they wait without going on their phone, it creates a radical shift in their experience of life.
Yeah. I remember when I first trained myself, I had to have to lock my phone in my car outside because it was just so addictive.
And I found, especially in moments of high anxiety and high tension, like whether there's something in the news cycle, whether there's, you know, just, just everything that we get sucked into. I found that having my phone out of the room is like a must because I found like how hard it is to get good quality sleep when your phone's right there and you're either on it at night or you're on it first thing in the morning and you're getting sucked into the latest updates, the latest news, whatever it is, and the anxiety and stress that you're taking on is colossal.
For sure. And the nighttime component is really key as well to consider.
It's almost quite pleasurable to just lie in bed and just doomscroll your brain sleep. We train a lot of schools, and a lot of kids literally will just go to sleep watching TikTok.
That's just how their brain sleep. And we look at all their screen times.
And some of them have like 16, 17 hours a day of screen time. But we look into that and they're about 9 to 10 hours in the daytime.
But it's largely that TikTok just stays open throughout the night. Because if they wake, they then just click next video.
So sound continues. Because a lot of us struggle with like the quiet effectively.
If you need some kind of stimulation at nighttime, of course, like reading would be incredible. If that's an option for you and you could achieve doing reading, that would be a perfect act.
But if you were going to think, okay, I need some kind of stimulation, you want to think, how can I do something that's a little bit of a slower release dopamine activity that's still on technology? So for me, there will be evenings where I think, oh, I really want to watch a podcast, for example. If you were to sit and you were to put like a tablet across your bed and you would sit and watch a podcast, that's nowhere near as stimulating as like an Instagram Reels feed because the novelty is different.
Like you sit and you watch a podcast, the first like five to 10 minutes, you're kind of getting into it and you're getting hold of the storyline and your dopamine is gradually increasing. You open social media, it's like rapid.
Okay, now I'm in and I'm engaged. That difference is really important to understand because if we're just burning our dopamine before we go to sleep, it's highly likely we're going to wake up in this more deflated, low willpower type state.
If you can have a slower dopamine technological activity at night, it's going to be better for those mornings. Yeah.
What's actually happening though? So I love the idea of slow release versus instant release, but what's actually happening in a fast release? And why does that lead to lower willpower and lower motivation? It's really important to just understand that the brain chemical evolved simply to be earned over a long period of time. Like if you actually imagine the challenging activity of being outdoors, you have a family and you have to spend 10 hours in the cold building a shelter.
Your brain wasn't designed to just give you a really quick dopamine hit, because then you think, oh, nice, I feel good now, I'm done, far before the task was complete. So it evolved to slowly increase.
Dopamine operates with these little vesicles in your brain. You can imagine them as little bubbles that go across your synapses.
Those bubbles are designed to slowly transfer across the synapses as more and more effort is engaged. As soon as you open the social media, immediately a ton of those vesicles are rapidly going across the synapse.
And that's why your brain is like, wow, this feels really good. Your brain starts thinking like, I'm not going to be able to cope with this.
This is unusual for my brain to be increasing at this level. And then you have the brain seeking to try and get itself back into balance.
Our brain always seeks homeostasis, as does our body. And if you think about a medical show you may have watched on TV before, when you see someone having an issue with their heart, you see this rapid increase and rapid decline, rapid increase, rapid decline.
And that's because the heart is increasing because of some kind of physiological difficulty, but it keeps trying to slow it down because it's trying to keep it at a balance level. The exact same thing happens with the dopamine because it experiences the rapid increase it then goes oh my god try and slow the production try and slow the production it slows the production then as we have less vesicles happening because of the social media we're then like oh can't bother doing anything we procrastinate against this low willpower experience well thanks for explaining that i was like i've never heard that before so it's super useful to get what's going on behind the scenes because I think naturally when we're doing it, we don't see any of that.
You were mentioning a few seconds ago, this idea, the difference between how we can sense whether we're high or low in each of these chemicals. Is that right? For sure.
Could you walk us through some of the symptoms and you can either choose to start a dopamine or if you think we've talked about that, switch to oxytocin. Yeah, so just to remind the dopamine, if you're procrastinating, you're low in motivation, you can't focus, it's a clear sign that you need some kind of challenging activity.
I'm very aware that in that state, that's the worst thing you want to do. You're like, I don't want to do anything difficult right now.
This is why, for example, cold showers have become so popular in our modern world because they're absolute hell, pure pain, very challenging, and they will rebuild the dopamine. So dopamine, if you're in that low motivation state, that's when you need a challenging activity.
Let me ask you that question, actually. So how do we build dopamine in a healthy way? First one would be the phone fast when you wake up.
Second one would be any kind of discipline in your home environment. That's not like a super sexy way to build it, but it's very clear that it has a positive effect.
If I give you the example of having to change and wash our bedding, we all hate that activity. It's like you wake up one day and you think, wow, that bed looks like it needs washing.
A week later, you're like, yeah, I definitely need to now wash it. You take all the sheets off, you jam it in the washing machine.
Then you have to wait for it to dry and that's so boring. And then you have to go to the process of actually buttoning it all back up.
Eventually that evening though, you find yourself getting into your freshly washed bed. And it's literally one of the most rewarding human experiences when the sheet is tight and it's all really nice as you get in.
You never get into your bed and think, I feel really annoyed that I bothered to wash my bedding today. It's like the opposite experience.
Whereas you do sometimes feel annoyed at yourself for overscrolling. And this is our brain having very sophisticated guidance mechanisms.
Dopamine is here just to reward anything that's advantageous. So you have the phone fast, any kind of discipline in your home environment.
And I do want to stress that one, like we all have to do this annoying style, empty dishwashers, takeout bins. And if you start framing it in your head as something that's actually elevating your motivation and elevating your experience alive, it shifts what those annoying tasks are for us all.
We then have cold water immersion. This has been a big topic.
Andrew Huberman's been really popular on this. There's that amazing study that came out back in 2000 that showed we have a 250% increase in dopamine when we put ourselves into a significantly cold environment.
So if you can do the cold, that's awesome. Our next one is this one called My Pursuit.
And this is really, really key to understand with dopamine. There's a chap from Cambridge University called Schultz, who in 1998 looked at the different times in which dopamine increases.
And what you fundamentally see is that dopamine is actually at its highest point just before we achieve something, not actually when we achieve the goal itself. And this is really important to consider in our lives because if you go back to that hunter-gatherer example, given that dopamine is the motivation and attention molecule, it's very useful.
Say you were hunting for an animal, just before you hunt it, you need the most dopamine. When you've actually got it, you don't necessarily need as much as just that momentary period to really motivate you to push the final part.
When we look at our life today, a lot of us can think that our happiest life is when we achieve the thing. But it's very clear from a research point of view that our happiest life is actually simply when we're in the pursuit of the goal itself.
And we get people to go out for about 30 minutes into nature without their headphones, we're always promoting to be in nature without headphones, and simply for a whole 30 minutes, ask themselves the question, what is my primary pursuit right now? Once they start considering what it is, maybe they have a creative pursuit, a pursuit with their family, their work, their health. They ask themselves, why is that? And they spend another 10 minutes really trying to clarify why that's the case.
Then they go into the process of how the hell am I going to get towards that goal? And a consistent daily pursuit,

a consistent daily striving for something

that's beyond your comfort zone

is so incredible for this system.

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But I've realized over time that things that are good for me feel terrible before and feel amazing after. And that's dopamine.
Yeah. And things that are unhealthy for me or bad for me feel great before and terrible afterwards.
Yeah. Right.
Like what you just said about if you've got to clean your bedsheets and all of that, when you're doing it, you're like, this is the biggest waste of my time. After when you get in bed, it feels great.
great. Whereas leaving it dirty feels good and like being lazy and just being like, oh, I can't be bothered, whatever.
But then when you get in bed, you're like, oh, this is filthy. Right.
And so it's interesting how I've had to consciously focus on how I feel after something. Like even now I've been, I had surgery last year and then, so I got, no, two years ago and I had surgery, couldn't really lift weights for a while.
I got back into lifting probably consistently only a couple months back. And so I've been working out, you know, five days a week for the last, just over a month now.
It's been great. And I don't enjoy, like if you ask me to play sports, I can play sports any day.
Like if you ask me to play football, I'd love to play football. You tell me we'll go work out at the gym.
I don't really love it, but I know it's important for me, especially with my age and what I'm trying to do with my body. And so I've had to convince myself of how I feel after a workout to get in the gym.
And I know for a fact that I never regret going to the gym after it, but before I'm always tempted to text either my mate or my trainer and go, don't want to forget it. I'm just tired today.
Right. And so it's almost like, what does it take to kind of let go of that immediate instant feeling that we all have of like, press the snooze button, message my mate and cancel the hike, cancel on my trainer.
Don't turn up to that class, even though I already paid in advance. Like, what do you do with that tiny little thought that pops in that kind of sets us all off on the wrong course? Do you relate to that, by the way? So much.
I literally struggled so much with the addiction to everything. I lived for 10 years in a life where I just wasn't completing the challenging activities that life has to offer.
I lived in easy dopamine. So I relate massively.
We tried to convince ourselves to go to the gym this morning. It was brutal to get ourselves there.
But I had this today and I was thinking, no, I'm going to elevate my dopamine through this hard work in the gym. That's going to put me in a more motivated state.
It gives me a high likelihood to have a good attention span during this conversation. So I think considering the ultimate outcome of the action and how it's going to impact your day ahead is key.
There is this fundamental principle of dopamine that I really want people to understand though. And then with this idea, rather than needing to go on Instagram and think, okay, what are those good dopamine activities and what are the bad ones? With this simple principle, you just know.
And whilst obviously it's good to look at those posts on Instagram, that's what I post all the time. Having this base understanding is very motivating.
This chemical evolved within us for a very long time. it evolved for one simple reason, to promote the survival of our species.
Without dopamine, we simply wouldn't be here. We would have never pushed ourselves to scratch rocks together for three hours to make the fire to keep our family warm.
We never would have gone through a Sahara desert for three hours in order to find a little bit of fruit to keep our family alive. It was rewarding the ridiculously challenging activities that kept us alive.
Just as dopamine for all that time had a very sophisticated way of communicating with humanity to keep us doing the hard things, nowadays we're experiencing the opposite message from this chemical. Fundamentally, dopamine knows at its core that overengaging with pornography and no longer having sex with people is not good for the survival of our species.
Eating too much sugar and not eating enough protein is not good for the survival of our species. Living a very isolated teenage life and no longer building friendships and working in your school life and scrolling social media is not good for the survival of humanity.
And it's really important to understand that whenever you're engaging in an activity, if you simply observe the activity and think, ultimately, does this increase or decrease my survival? And you think exercise obviously increased, protein obviously increased, sugar obviously decreased, pornography ultimately does technically decrease because it's reducing procreation. And then you have this fundamental principle.
When you then are looking at your activities and thinking, how am I going to engage with my day? You really want to be thinking, how am I going to do activities that are going to lead to my day being the best experience it can be? And this comes down to that difference of, do I just want to feel short-term pleasure, or do I want to feel really happy? And I had these questions with myself in my mind. I went on these walks every day in nature.
I literally equate the entirety of my career, my working life, my ability to find my beautiful partner, to walking in nature every day and having a proper, truthful conversation with myself of, am I only in the pursuit of pleasure? And is that going to be my experience of life? Or am I going to experience a life that feels really happy and fulfilling? And when I wake in the morning, like this morning, and I think, oh, I wonder what's been happening on social media. I wonder how many likes I got on this thing, whatever it might be.
I ask myself the question, do I want pleasure or do I want a really happy, fulfilling day? And that ultimate conversation leads to better decision-making. Yeah.
That's a great way to look at it. And I'm glad that you laid it out across the board.
I mean, you've mentioned pornography a few times and I feel like that's become just such a big issue now where I feel like when I was growing up, it was less of an issue. Then when it kind of took off, it was something that you kind of hid and people didn't talk about it as much.
And now it's become like totally public. Like, you know, there's talk about it in mainstream news and not in a positive sense, but in the sense of you just see it becoming more normalized, but that doesn't mean people are using it less.
Yeah. If that makes sense.
Yeah, for sure. Does that resonate? It's definitely rapidly rising.
Yeah, it's rapidly rising. But it is definitely at least now getting communicated about.
It is getting communicated about, yeah. But it isn't necessarily like, oh, we're talking about it more.
You'd hope that, like, for example, when we talk about mental health more, you'd hope that it gets destigmatized and then people, whereas with pornography, it's kind of like it's being talked about more, but it's usage is like going through the roof. And so it's like, what have you seen work for people there? You've worked with people in dose, I'm sure you've worked with people who've had like really deep pornography addictions.
Pornography addiction is fascinating because it's very different to alcohol and social media and sugar, because it's very private. And when you say, for example, get really into alcohol, and you become an alcoholic, or maybe you just slightly over drink, it becomes very apparent to your family and your friends that you're drinking a lot whether you're going out and partying a lot or like every time you socialize you're always requiring wine and beer in order to have a good time the same happens with the phone like you're always engaging with it the same happens with sugar pornography is like this secret addiction that society has and that's why i think it's being massively underestimated And where with these other actions, things like eating chocolate, we know it has 150% increase in dopamine from baseline causing the spike and crash.
When we engage with something like alcohol, it's a 200% increase. Cocaine, 250% increase.
All of these different studies are showing us a lot about those actions, but very little is showing us much about pornography because it's a very private behavior. When we look into how people solve it, fundamentally, people need to become very clear as to how it's actually impacting their life.
There's the whole moral and ethical side of pornography. And if that can motivate someone away from it, that's incredible.
We're obviously looking with the Dose Lab more at what is it actually doing to your experience of life and your motivation and your dopamine levels. And for me, I grew up as someone that started engaging in porn.
I was like 13, 14. I just heard that was a thing, searched on Google, discovered it was a thing, massive amount of pleasure, and then watched it for like 10 years of my life.
I didn't think anything of it. All my friends watched it.
I didn't even feel any real guilt or shame around watching it because it was so normalized in the world that I grew up in. And it's very unusual to even be in this moment now.
Like I never thought, oh, pornography is going to be something I hope I talk about one day on a show. But this really needs to be considered with mental health.
It's something that society is definitely underestimating. Because if you think through the lens of sex versus pornography and this idea of earning dopamine, sex, especially like a nice, intimate, loving experience of sex, is a slow progress.
It's like you have a period of time together and maybe you have dinner together and then you cuddle and then you kiss and then eventually you have an intimate experience and then eventually you have sex. It might be like 20, 30 minutes before that moment has happened.
Pornography is very different. It's I'm scrolling Instagram or that person's pretty good looking.
Now I'm on a porn website. And within 60 seconds, it's like you're all the way there.
Your dopamine is so high. We then went through the process of getting people to just try and have seven days without watching it.
Just okay. Seven days, you're not going to watch it.
If you need to engage with the activity, you simply watch it. You simply do the activity, but you use your imagination.
And even with that, you try and reduce it to maybe twice a week rather than what a lot of people, particularly men, but I think women struggle with this as well. That's

what we're seeing in our research and now doing it sort of seven days a week. You have seven days

off and you very closely observe your motivation, your attention span, and your general kind of

enthusiasm and excitement for life. People then come off it for the first time, maybe in their

whole life because they never even considered it was a factor in their mental health. They spend

seven days off it and they start genuinely noticing a difference. They're like, wow, I actually feel different without this activity.
I felt so different when I first came off it. I remember texting some of my friends and they're like, God, what is TJ going to have us doing now? Now we've got to quit porn doing.
They then came off it for seven days and they're like, wow, I actually noticed a very significant difference. You then extend that to two weeks, three weeks, four weeks.
Very rapidly, you see a significant difference. As a result of your dopamine baseline beginning to not have this constant destruction.
Once you have that period of abstinence, a beginning of a seed is planted within your brain and body that begins to see the pornography in a different way. As the frequency reduces, the motivation rapidly rises in your life and you start thinking, ah, maybe it's something I could let go.
What about people who are saying, like, well, it's natural. It helps me de-stress.
It's what I turn to. It feels easy.
It gives me a release. Anyone who's coming up with any of that, and for the people who did it for those seven days who were like, well, all I was thinking about was porn the whole time.
For sure, easily. I'm sure that was a reaction.
How do you encourage those people to deal with that kind of a notion or that instinctual reaction to being like, well, that's what I feel like I want to do naturally right now? Wanting an orgasm is a very natural experience for the brain and body. It's, of course, amazing if you can have those experiences with your partner, but we go through periods where we're away from our partner, or maybe we don't have a partner, and we're still seeking for an orgasm.
When someone is seeking to de-stress through that experience, the orgasm is all they need. It's not the pornography that's also needed.
And if you go through the process of masturbating without pornography, you also notice the same dopamine curve of your earning the reward, and it's a slower process, and you have to get yourself into that experience. Eventually, you experience the rise of dopamine, you feel pleasure.
And afterwards, you don't feel this really deflated flat feeling that you do when you watch porn. And it's really important to understand that someone can just go through a period of time of utilizing their imagination whenever they're seeking for that activity.
If it's impossible with your imagination, you can look at a photo. But similar to that example I gave earlier, where at night you're trying to go towards long form content over short form.
With pornography, you're just trying to get away from really rapid stimulation. So if reducing it down to one video was like the possible thing to do, then reducing it down to a picture, then going down to your imagination, that progressive journey, if you're finding it super addictive and super hard to quit, would be a path that you could follow.
It's such an interesting conversation when you're looking at it through dose. Like, I think that's what's so interesting because I think for so long, people have talked about moral reasons, ethical reasons, or whatever it may be.
And then when you hear about it from a scientific perspective, you're just like, oh, wow. Like, I had no idea what I'm doing to my brain.
For sure. And I'm hoping that everyone who's listening and watching and struggling with these things, you know, I don't think me or TJ judging anyone or making anyone feel bad about it, but really realizing what we're doing to ourselves.
For sure. When our habits don't change.
And the judgment piece on all this Do For Me stuff is so important to consider. Like I would have zero judgment for yourself if you currently wake up and scroll your phone for an hour, or if you eat a lot of sugar, or if you watch pornography all the time.
We didn't all wake up one day as babies and set up the world that we're all living in today. We've just been born into it.
These are the options we have. Dopamine is a chemical that the human being so deeply desires.
And we've now been given very quick ways to access it. There is no judgment.
I overengaged with everything, worse than probably everyone that's listening. And it's really important to understand that there is a path where you can come away from judging yourself from it, but start considering, is this ultimately leading to me having my happiest experience alive? The only reason people are sitting and listening to these podcasts is because they want to learn.
They want to feel happier or more fulfilled or more connected to people whatever it may be and this is a fundamental component optimizing our dopamine and getting it back into balance yeah and and you're right about this secret hidden addiction because i think a lot of people struggle with like like if you saw your partner drinking too much you could talk to them about it if you saw them on their phone too much you could talk to them about it and i think people always feel very betrayed when they find out that oh their partner's been on using porn or whatever it may be and like there's a feeling of not knowing how to bring it up and how to talk about it and i've had i've had a lot of people reach out to me recently because it's been such an issue in their relationship yeah and i've said to them it's kind of you've got to treat it like the other ones in a for sure compassionate understanding way to raise it with your partner it's not something that just calling it out will help definitely my partner and i met earlier this year and it was definitely a conversation we had i spent like the last five years coming off it few years ago i really like cut the cord and there would be these moments where once a month once every two months i'd be sitting there i think oh yeah i could watch pornography could have that stimulation, that de-stress as we talked about before. And having a good open dialogue around, this is why I used to engage with it.
This is how we could potentially like enhance our sex life and our experience together in order to fulfill that aspect of what you're seeking for in porn. I think many people are struggling with things like their sex drive and their sexual connection with their partners.
And porn is just the easy outlet. It's like you want to have an orgasm, you can go to the bathroom and have that in a few minutes with pornography, instead of having like a slow, intimate experience with your partner.
Ultimately, for all of us as human beings in this modern world to feel our happiest, anything that provides slow pleasure is the pursuit that we should be on. We're in a society right now where this is brand new, all this quick stuff.
And we really just need to consider it. Like, let's have a conversation.
Let's not judge one another for engaging with it, but let's consider how we can enhance our relationship in order to come away from that activity. Yeah.
You have habits and systems to increase concentration and deep focus by 48%. Yeah.
What are they? This is a really interesting area of dopamine. There's this brilliant scientist I love called Gold that looked into the relationship

between dopamine and what we call flow state. Flow state being when we get incredibly deeply immersed in a task.
Again, with that hunter-gatherer example, they lived their lives in flow state, building, you get so into deep flow state, making fire, hunting, foraging for food. Big proportions of their day were spent deeply focused on one activity.
Nowadays, we're basically doing like 500 activities a day. I even saw recent research shows that we have 35,000 decisions that we're making a day now, comparably to an estimate with them of about two and a half thousand decisions a day.
So we're just doing much more different stuff than the things we did when we were living our former lives. And when we look at increasing someone's attention span, fundamentally, all of the dopaminergic stuff is going to impact it because you need an abundance of dopamine in your brain in order to concentrate.
So waking up, not going on the phone, things like the big morning routine of the cold water on your face and brushing your teeth and making your bed, then at least your dopamine is coming into a good place. You then have to sit down at your desk and think, how the hell am I going to increase my attention span by 48%? Fundamentally, the phone cannot be anywhere near you.
It needs to be physically separate from you. So you need to select the task if your phone is required for your calendar or your task list, whatever it may be.
One task has to be selected. Never select multiple at once because our brain simply cannot get into a deep state of flow if we're in that kind of experience.
We then have this process of gamifying the experience of trying to get into a deep state of concentration. We get people on their computer.
So once they've selected their task, they've separated themselves from their phone to click on a new tab and just search the word stopwatch on Google and you'll see a stopwatch appear. It's very important to do it by that and not with the phone.
You then go on the stopwatch. Once you're ready to start the task, you click start.
You begin the task and very quickly you find yourself beginning to feel bored or too difficult, too challenged by the task itself. These are the two things that take us out of flow, something being boring and too easy effectively or something being too difficult.
In the moment that you have that first experience arise, you say to yourself the sentence, I'm going to fight the urge. You repeat this as a mantra.
I'm going to fight the urge for the distraction, effectively. You do that as many times as you can.
Maybe you successfully do it three, four, five times. I'm going to fight the urge.
Eventually, you find yourself irresistibly needing to go on YouTube or needing to go onto Twitter or whatever it might be. In that moment, you can do that.
But before you do it, you head back to the stopwatch that you had on one of those tabs and you look at the number. You look at the number and the first time you ever do it, it says six minutes and 27 seconds.
That's what we then call your baseline attention span. That's how long you manage to push yourself for to stay in a state of concentration.
We know from recent research that it takes about 15 minutes for the brain to start to lock in, for the attention span to really start to zone into one place. Maybe you've got six minutes the first time, the next time you get 12.
Eventually, once you get to 15, that's when your brain is really locking in. It's staying centralized on one thing.
What we've then found is because it's very difficult to get to 15 minutes of only focusing on one task, when you fight the urge, you give up on fighting the urge and you look at the stopwatch and you see it's beyond 15 minutes. You think, wow, I've actually managed to climb here.
I've actually managed to get to the number that I was targeting. And then people have this elevated motivation to maybe I should just stay in this.
We're way more productive. We complete tasks in 40% less time if we get into flow state.
So it's extremely advantageous. We go through that process, separate from the phone, select the task, open the stopwatch on a new tab, target the 15 15 minute number and if you can get beyond it into 30 45 minutes that's incredible for flow state incredible for dopamine that's so powerful man that's such a great great system i really hope people are going to try it out and i can honestly say that i saw myself over the last 12 months see my attention diminishing i've always prided myself on having like really great attention, being able to immerse myself deeply into things.
And I found that because I live quite a regimented, disciplined life, my phone became what I did in every gap. And so, because that was the only time I really had for my phone, I could be in the studio like this for four to six hours a day.
And so every gap I could get, I'd grab my phone and fill in the gap. And sometimes I saw that gap actually being 30 minutes.
And I used to think of it as a gap. And actually I was like, I used to think I couldn't be productive in those 30 minutes because I got so focused on my phone.
But recently I've been leaving my phone out of the room and those 30 minutes have been transformative. And so it's so easy to think, even as someone who I consider myself to have very good concentration and focus and flow state, I found that just diminishing daily because it was so easy to get lost in everything else.
Yeah, I think it's so important to understand even if it wasn't productive, like doing work in that 30 minutes, it would arguably be productive just to go and sit on the sofa and not go on your phone or just to go and stand outside for a period of time or to call someone and talk to a human being. But the nuance of this is so important to understand because this is huge.
Everyone basically completes one task on their list and then seeks for some kind of reward. And it's like, now I've earned my next dopamine hit on the phone.
Next task, next dopamine hit. And it's not even necessarily a whole task.
Sometimes we do a little bit of a task and we think that's enough of this task done. Now I deserve my dopamine hit.
And this is something I've struggled with massively. Like I grew up with no attention span.
I really struggled with hyperactivity in school, really struggled for my whole life to get into states of focus. It was in the process of writing this book that I had to figure out how the hell do I concentrate for a prolonged period of time.
And in those moments where I'm about to go onto the phone, I actually consider like, what is the ultimate impact that's going to have on this task? Because as soon as you go on the phone through that dopamine lens, you're not just rewarding yourself for a little bit and going back to the task. You're spiking the dopamine, crashing it out.
Then you're trying to come back to the task from a low dopamine state, which is then really hard to get back into that state of concentration. Or maybe at the beginning of our working day, we sit down at our desk and we're thinking, I really want to be productive today.
I want to have a good day with my working life. And then we're like, okay, just before that, I'll just have like 10 minutes of Instagram just before I start.
But then we spike and crash it. And then we try and enter the state of concentration from low baseline dopamine.
And it's so difficult. But if we were to sit there, try and resist the phone, get into the state of focus, then go, it's going to be so much better.
Yeah. How can someone increase their sleep quality by 54%? Sleep is a fascinating topic.
It's one that our world has become very clear that it's extremely valuable to all aspects of our physical and mental health. I think it all starts with how your day begins.
When we wake up in the morning, we need to see sunlight as quickly as we possibly can. You can imagine for our hunter-gatherers, they probably saw sunlight pretty fast given they were sleeping outside.
When we woke up in the morning, we get the sunlight. We then need to consider the amount of physical activity throughout our day.
It's very important that our body physically requires sleep when we get into bed. Many of the people that go through our dose experience really struggle with quite sedentary lifestyles as many of us do today.
Like we spend our whole life seated. So I say sunlight, making sure you have some kind of physical activity that slightly exhausts your body throughout the day.
Then I think it really comes down to your approach in the evening. It's very clear from a research point of view that sugar really interrupts our quality and depth of sleep.
If we're going to have sugar, I'd be moving the sugar earlier in the evening, and if possible, towards a healthy form of sugar, fruit and honey and so on, like that kind of sugar away from the more ultra-processed type sugar. And then with the nuance of our phone in the evening, obviously that's the hyper-stimulation, the phone being charged by our bed, the phone being utilized at night.
When you're watching TV in the evening, I would consider that another period where your phone fasting. So you're having this period of de-stimulating from your phone.
Many of us struggle with like work-life balance or addiction to our phone. And that's largely caused because we just sit watching TV while scrolling our email and Slack and so on.
So in the evening, the TV becomes an environment where it's like, okay, this is a phone fasting experience. And that's why we called it phone fast, not technology fast.
Watching TV is nowhere near as bad for our dopamine system as when we're scrolling the phone. After you watch TV for a bit, you're then going to want your next phone check before you go to bed.
And you can have it. You can have a little bit of WhatsApp.
You don't go back into a scroll. It's very useful during that phone check to be standing up instead of lying prone on your bed.
Like if you're lying on your bed, you're entering the deep loop. If you have to like stand in the kitchen while you do your few messages and you check one notification or DM on Instagram, whatever it may be, if you're standing, it then causes action to continue.
You then make sure the phone doesn't charge by the bed. You get into the bed.
If you can't go to sleep with the choir, you opt towards podcasts and audio books and things like that. But I would say that process is the most important factors.
Yeah. It's, it's so interesting to me how screen time has become like five screens

where it's like you have your phone

and your laptop out,

your partner has their phone and their laptop out

and then you have a screen on.

So you've got five screens in between you

and you're staring and being distracted

by three different types of media.

And you're so right.

I've been doing that too with the PhoneFast outside of me and Radhi are watching a show together. I've been leaving my phone in the kitchen.
Yeah, it's better for your relationship as well. Yeah, it's better for everything.
But I used to find myself doing that all the time. I'm bored of what I'm watching on TV.
So I'm just going to scroll away. And now she's watching the TV and then Radhi's like, well, Jay, are you watching this with me? You know, are we doing? And I'm like, oh yeah.
And then she gets distracted on her phone. I'm like, oh, are you with me? And it becomes this really ridiculous thing where you're both bored of what you're watching on TV.
You're kind of scrolling to make up for it. And now it's disrupting the relationship as well.
This boredom thing is really important to consider because boredom is something our mind experienced in abundance for most of human history that we spent loads of our time bored. Even if you think back to being a kid, how much time did you sit around and say, Mom, I'm bored? That was a big thing.
And now that's not a thing. People don't really experience boredom because we've got the tablets and we've got the phones to always stimulate us.
We've discovered this thing called the boredom barrier, effectively. And I'm someone that really struggles with this.
As I said, I really struggle with that hyperactivity. If I sit and do very little, it's like, what can I do? What can I do? So I relate to the experience.
And when I started trying to do these phone fasts in the evening and watch TV, like I'll put on a movie, for example, and I think, this used to entertain me and this is so boring now, this film. We were watching Gladiator the other day, great movie.
I know Gladiator 2 is coming out. So I was like, okay, let's watch Gladiator 1.
And you're sitting there and you're thinking, wow, this is pretty boring watching this experience. The important thing to understand is we see a boredom barrier about 12 to 15 minutes of being bored.
So for that first period, you're going to have your brain and body literally physically fighting to try and recover that experience of stimulation. So it's trying to get you to get up and go to the fridge and get the sugar.
It's trying to get you to get the phone and open the social media. It's trying to seek to get back to that state that it was in of highly elevated dopamine.
If after about 12 to 15 minutes, the brain begins to discover, okay, the dopamine is not coming back. I'm going to have to stay in this state.
The brain and body will settle. The heart rate will slow.
That desire for stimulation will occur, will reduce. And in that moment, we'll then begin to find like a more peaceful state in our body.
And we think it feels peaceful scrolling our phone, but really it's just numbing our dopamine receptors. That feels like it's peaceful, but that is not restorative.
That is not the actual rest our brain and body is needing. The one thing I'd add to this is if you try and phone fast and watch TV, it's very important the other people do it like you were saying with Radhi, because's this fascinating area of dopamine called anticipatory dopamine which basically means that our dopamine will rise simply at the thought of accessing dopamine that's why for example if you like drinking alcohol and you walk past a bar and you see some people having some like glass of wine in the sun you suddenly get this massive urge of I want a glass of wine I want a glass of wine your dopamine has risen just at the thought having it.
The same thing is happening with the phones. Like you're sitting at dinner with your partner or your kids.
One person gets their phone out and immediately the entire table have them out. And that's simply because everyone's brain has experienced this anticipatory dopamine, which has then driven us into action towards the dopamine that they were receiving.
So if you're phone fasting as a family and with your partner, it has to be a group commitment. We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill.
PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one. That's terrifying.
That's fair. Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.
We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down. I would love to see that.
We're on our way. I hope so.
PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year. Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines.
Dr. Joy here.
You may know me from Therapy for Black Girls, where we're celebrating 400 episodes of the podcast. That's a whole lot of girl me too moments.
For years, we've had deep, thoughtful and inspiring conversations about Black women's mental health. And now we're celebrating this milestone in a big way.
In this special episode, Peloton yogi Chelsea Jackson Roberts shares how yoga has taught her to stay grounded and present while balancing motherhood and self-care. I can't control my partner.
I can't control my child. I can't control anyone outside the way that I govern myself in this world.
And the celebration doesn't stop there. We'll continue this milestone with Dr.
Lauren Mims, who joins me to discuss the powerful yet sometimes challenging transition from girlhood to womanhood for Black femmes. Together, we explore how we navigate this transformative journey with strength and grace.

Black girlhood is giggling.

It's sisterhood.

But it is also, I think,

focusing on learning how to cope

with really difficult things that are happening.

With insights like these,

this 400th episode celebration is one for the books.

Listen to Therapy for Black Girls

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm so sick of hearing men talk about women's basketball.
If only there were a professional WNBA player with her own podcast I could listen to. You rang? Hey, this is Lexi Brown, WNBA player and professional yapper.
And this is Mariah Rose. You may know me from Spilling the Tea on Hoops for Hotties on TikTok.
And we've got a new podcast, Full Circle. Every Wednesday, we're catching you up on what's going on in women's basketball.
And not just in the WNBA, but with Athletes Unlimited, Unrivaled, and college basketball. We've got you with analysis, inside stories, and a little bit of tea.
I know you guys have seen a lot of former and current basketball players telling their stories from their point of view, and I just think it's time for the girlies to tap in. We want to share all of the women's basketball stories that you won't see anywhere else.
Tune into Full Circle, an iHeart Women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment.

You can find us on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.

Yeah.

And the group commitment, I guess,

makes it much more collaborative and effective

because there's a feeling of like,

we're going to try to do this together.

It's a common commitment.

I think that accountability is really important too.

I'm intrigued.

And if you're comfortable to share, how do you keep each other accountable without making each other feel bad? Because I feel like that's a really important thing for me and Radhi. And I think that's one of the reasons why I think me and Radhi have been able to be together for as long as we have.
And why I feel happy in my relationship is because Radhi's never judged me or made me feel bad for even my bad habits, but slowly coached me and nudged me out of them, which I'm so grateful for. Because I think if I would have had someone who would have judged me and kind of pointed fingers, I think I would have, my ego probably would have like defended myself and not been comfortable with that.
But this approach that she's taken, which comes to her quite naturally, I feel like has helped me kind of become better in so many ways? I think as you've shared there, the way in which it's communicated is very important. If it's an attack type communication of put your phone down, why are you on your phone, watch the TV.
If it's that attack type energy, it's only going to create a cortisol and stress rise within that person. And then they're going to feel more of a desire to resist the guidance that's coming their way.
So I think that's a component, gentle, nice, loving communication. The other aspect of this is utilizing this dose language effectively.
We have loads of parents that join our dose process and it's really interesting. A lot of them are trying to help their really young kids understand these frameworks.
They've got like eight-year-old kids or 10-year-old kids or 12-year-old kids. They're trying to get them to reduce their like scrolling on the tablets or the phones or whatever it may be.
And I get so many messages on Instagram saying, my eight-year-old kids or 10-year-old kids or 12-year-old kids, they're trying to get them to reduce their scrolling on the tablets or the phones or whatever it may be. And I get so many messages on Instagram saying, my eight-year-old kid now says, mommy, put your phone down.
It's screwing up your dopamine. And using the language of dopamine and dose instead of having other words is actually really useful because it's not like a judgmental place.
It's just, you've got a brain chemical and this is something that's negative for it. So utilizing that as a communication framework, maybe sharing this podcast with them so they can understand it as well would be a good process.
Yeah. Let's talk a bit about oxytocin and serotonin.
Which one do you want to go for? Oxytocin. Okay, why? Because you're Mr.
Oxytocin. Okay, go on, tell us.
Your pursuit of life over the last 10 years has been oxytocin and not dopamine. Ultimately, it's led you to have great dopaminergic, pleasurable, successful experiences, but your pursuit of life has been service to humanity.
And when you look into oxytocin, oxytocin increases whenever we make some kind of contribution to the world. There's this brilliant scientist called Marsh who really looked into this alongside a lady called Algo, and they've basically found that any time in which we do something kind for another human being, whether that's through physical touch, acts of service, grateful thoughts, celebrating someone's progress, anything that's kind for other human beings drives this chemical.
And it's really clear that we as a society have become dopamine driven and less in the pursuit of oxytocin. I deeply believe that for our ancestors' lives, oxytocin was the dominant desire within us.
How do our groups survive and thrive and stay connected? I think we've moved towards a more pleasure dominant society that's dopamine driven and a little bit more self-focused. When you get more into that lane of I'm living my life to serve, I'm living my life to build oxytocin, you have a much more fulfilling and happy experience.
Yeah. And what's the enemy of oxytocin? Like what's holding it back? It's interesting because dopamine is the only one we've managed to discover how to hijack effectively.
We can't rapidly, in a kind of fake way, increase the oxytocin or the serotonin or the endorphins. Ultimately, when we look into the research, it's not that something can rapidly increase it and crash it out, but it's that someone might have a low level of oxytocin production through things like a lack of social connection, in social moments, always having phones that are disrupting the quality of the connection.
Things like how we connect with ourself in the conversation we have with ourself is a factor here. Things like criticizing our appearance and being unkind to ourself is a big factor.
So if you look down that lane of lack of human connection or disconnection from yourself, that's reducing the production. Yeah.
And so that's how we can sense it as well, right? For sure. Like if you're finding you have a very critical voice in your mind that's very hard on yourself, it's really important to understand that there's an oxytocin relationship happening there.
You don't have necessarily a lot of love for yourself going through your brain. Just like with the dopamine, I would have no judgment for yourself if that's the case.
We live in a world now where it's mass comparison. We've got the mirrors, we've got the selfies, we've all got social media profiles where we're trying to create what we look like, dating profiles that need to be amazing in order to get a match.
It's very hard to not really, really care for your appearance, but going down that lane of constant judgment is really challenging for this chemical. Yeah.
And I find that that kind of bleeds into all of our relationships as well. We see gossip, unhealthy competitiveness, comparison.
You're seeing that idea of not being, we've talked about this before, not being able to be happy for other people's success, not being able to acknowledge someone that you even may believe that you like or love and being able to be happy for them and, and, you know, revel in that success. And so, and, and it almost feels like we, we find friends who kind of cement that negativity bias or that gossip bias.
And so we'll find a bunch of people who also dislike something or someone and we kind of feel closer to people when we do that. It's like that weird balance where it's like, you're becoming closer to people by all hating on the same person.
That's definitely how our world is working at the moment. And so what are some of the antidotes to getting away from that? And how does that affect the oxytocin? Right at the beginning, the gratitude piece is so fundamental.
And I think our world is very aware now that we need grateful thinking. The comparison and the negative thinking is largely fueled by what do I not have effectively.
And gratitude is very simply the reminder to your brain of what you do have. And whilst I think society is very aware, it's important and people have grassroot journals and all kinds of things, I think still a huge percentage, definitely in the research that we're doing, don't actually have like a consistent daily practice whereby they're asking themselves what they're grateful for.
And then most importantly, why they're grateful for that action or activity or experience that they have within their life. And adding to that morning routine, we eventually try and get all these chemicals in.
So someone goes through that dopaminergic process of getting that into balance. When they step outside, we get someone to find a bench that they will typically walk past on a frequent basis.
Whenever you habit stack or pair environmental cues with a habit, it makes it stronger. And we get them to always sit down on the bench.
We then get them to have a grateful thought and ask themselves why they actually feel grateful for that thing. Frequency of gratitude is the most important factor.
Just once a week thinking, oh yeah, I'm kind of grateful. I've got my house.
It's great for your mind. But to really get the oxytocin production, we need it to be frequently occurring.
And that's going to reduce our mind constantly focusing on others and move yourself into that state of, okay, I do actually have quite a lot in my life as well. Yeah, I think gratitude is underrated and over talked about, like you're saying, like, it's like, you hear it everywhere, you see it everywhere.
But I love that you said that if you actually look at the research of how many people are doing it on a daily basis, it's very few. Because it's not like some super sexy, oh my God, cold showers, boost your dopamine by this percentage.
It's not got that same thing. But in terms of the effectiveness on your experience in your life and your mental health, it's so right at the core of exactly what our brain needs.
We help a lot of people with overthinking. Overthinking is just like a massive challenge in our world where our brain rapidly spirals into negative scenarios.
You hear a piece of news about your family or your work or your health, and our brain goes so quickly into worst case scenario. It's very clear that in an overthinking state, gratitude is such a powerful practice to start settling the mind back down.
Because in the overthinking, it's like fear, fear, what's not going right, what's not going right? Gratitude is this safety, safety, okay, I have some things. I'm okay.
I have some kind of stable foundation to build on. Such a powerful antidote to so much of the pain we have now.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought up overthinking, because you're right. A lot of people are struggling with procrastination and overthinking.
What do you see as the difference between procrastination and overthinking? And how should people think about them differently? Procrastination is largely spent on the phone. People aren't often procrastinating while sitting, doing nothing.
Like if you were to sit on the sofa, I doubt that's often the state people in when they're procrastinating. I imagine they're more likely scrolling their phone.
So I would see procrastination more as a dopaminergic challenge. Whereas I would see the overthinking more as a conversation that's happening in your mind, a little bit of oxytocin, and then also something that's happening with serotonin.
Serotonin really interconnects with the state of our body and our nervous system. And I think when we're in an overthinking type state, our body is actually getting into fear and over arousal, whereas procrastination would be kind of under arousal and lack of action.
So I'd see it as quite different things, to be honest. Yeah, yeah.
No, it's good to know that difference because, I don't know, I just feel like there's just a sense that the critical voice we talked about earlier, the overthinking of a scenario, focusing on what's the worst that could happen, focusing on nightmare scenarios, that all takes away action. It takes away accountability.
It takes away responsibility. It takes away any sort of feeling like I can change, I can do something.
How do we switch from that powerless feeling of I can't do anything about this to this is what I can focus on? I mean, I feel like, I'm sure you do this. I talk to friends all the time and I find everyone I talk to, and I try and coach myself out of this, but everyone I talk to is constantly focused on what they can't control.
And it seems to be like the most common thing. Like everyone will list out a list of reasons that they can't do something or something won't happen.
But rarely is someone saying, hey, I've got 10 strategies. Here are the 10 things I'm working on right now.
This is what I'm focused on. How do we shift from what we can't do to what we can do? I think it's natural for the mind to focus on what isn't going to plan.
Evolutionarily, it's very useful for it to consider, okay, the hut isn't built well enough or our food system isn't going to provide well enough. So our brain will naturally orient towards the negative.
I think in these states of paralysis, of I't get myself to take action and I'm fearing and I'm in state of all the worries of what I can't control. Ultimately, we need to separate ourselves from the modern world for a little period of time and spend some time with ourselves.
And this is where, and we really push this within dose, but periods of time on your own in nature are very, very, very important and very underestimated. People know, oh yeah, nature's good.
Like yeah, nature would

make me feel good. You see in COVID, like apparently walks are good for your mental health,

but we're really missing the trick on how important this actually is. If you were in a real state of,

I'm worrying a lot. I'm in a real, I don't, I'm in constantly thinking about what I can't control.

I'm in fear. I'm not taking action on what the goal is.
The best thing you could do would be throw the phone away from you because I imagine it might be in your hand during that moment. At least that's what we see.
Throw the phone away from you. Count yourself down from five seconds.
Once you've counted yourself down, you go and put your trainers on and you leave the house without your phone in your hand. If you have to bring the phone from a safety perspective, in the bag, airplane mode so that you've got physical separation.
And for a period of time out there in the quiet, ultimately, if possible in nature, but maybe it's walking around your local town if it's a little bit further to get to, you just have a really honest conversation with yourself. And when you say people are having all these negative thoughts, like judging themselves and stuff, some of these thoughts are messages we do need to hear.
Like if your mind is saying, oh, stop scrolling your phone so much, Stop getting so drunk on the weekend. Stop eating sugar.
That is really clever that it's doing that. Like there's a component of maybe I need to be grassroots.
Maybe I need to be more grateful for the way my brain is so sophisticated and operating in a way of guidance. If it's focusing on other things, it's just like this state of let's listen to these thoughts.
Let's not constantly distract myself from the thoughts. Let's hear the message I'm trying to be sent.
And then once I've heard it, let's try and calculate some kind of smart response to this rather than this constant distraction. And what about if people are getting close to like high stress and burnout? That's the other end.
Yeah, that's happening a lot in the workplace now, right? Like there's a overworking, crazy hours, always on, always connected. We've talked about that, that pressure of like, what if my boss emails me at midnight? What if an email comes through at 6 a.m.
and I just got up? You know, whatever it is, there's this high performance mixed with high stress, high burnout environment. This is where I come to that idea of we've become a dopamine-driven society rather than an oxytocin-driven society.
Oxytocin being this love hormone, love is the most beautiful experience a human can have. Nothing is as pleasurable and as enjoyable as the experience of love with your partner, your parents, having a child, whatever it may be.
That's ultimately what humanity is here to connect with, the experience of bonding with humans. When you're in that world of burnout, it's very likely that you've become slightly overly focused on dopamine, whether that's in the pursuit of pleasure through burning out through partying and having fun, or if it's from a work perspective, you've probably got a little bit too focused on your financial win and your career progression and so on.
That's then leading you towards dopamine burnout effectively, which many of us experience. With that in mind, and I experienced this myself, like you, like I have a striving desire within my career to make progress and help and so on.
I really in your mind would be asking yourself, how much oxytocin am I getting? And is it balancing out the dopamine? And with that, that means how good is the connection that I'm experiencing in my life right now? Like, am I making time to FaceTime and call my mom and dad and ask how their lives are going and sit for a whole conversation and just ask questions and not say loads about you and what's going on in your life and how amazing you are in your career, but just simply ask them, how are you doing? That might be connecting with your children more, your partner more, but fundamentally you see that if we get more oxytocin, it moves our mind towards that close connection that a human so deeply needs. And currently we're all in dopamine, dating apps, DMs, all that world.
We need to move towards more intimate connection with the people that are really close to us, our family and our friends and our kids and our partners. What do you think that's actually going to take to do? Like when you really think about that, it feels like we're so far gone from that.
Now what's that actually going to take for us to really value connection for what we know it can do? I think ultimately society needs a massive shift on the phone. I think people really need to start reconsidering this phone.
I think when you look at the quality of the connection you have with your family, you go around to your parents' house to see them or you go to see your friends. And if you really start observing from the moment you've listened to this podcast, how much is that phone actually disrupting the experience I have with these people that I love? It's very significant.
And I think families and partners and kids need to adopt the mentality of considering this is phone free time. I walk through my parents' door.
I actually now have found that I have to leave my phone at home when I go to my parents' house simply because I'll talk to them for a bit and then I'll be going to the bathroom. There's like phone out.
Okay, Instagram, email, WhatsApp. And then my mind leaves oxytocin and returns to dopamine desire.
It's so important to have these prolonged dopamine detoxes where oxytocin is the primary goal. And the phone is the primary thing disrupting that.
If we can start becoming comfortable with the idea of, wow, I'm going to spend two hours off my phone. I'm going to spend an hour off my phone.
And my only goal is going to be to listen to these people, to look them in the eye, to ask them good questions, and to give them love. I think that fundamentally is going to shift the way society operates.
TJ, I love that. You've been amazing talking today, and I'm glad that people are going to read The Dose Effect, dive into more on dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.
We only touched the tip of the iceberg today, but we learned so much. I feel like I've gained so much great self-talk material from listening to you.
And I think that's what I really value. And I think we undervalue about when you're listening to a podcast, when you're reading a book, the goal is to get so much more of a new script in your mind as to how you talk to yourself about the challenges you have, how you talk to others about the challenges you have, and then how you talk yourself out of making bad decisions and into good decisions.
And as I've been listening to you, I feel like you're such a hub of incredible insights and information and so well researched where I'm like, oh, now I'm going to hear TJ's voice in my head remind me of that when I'm brushing my teeth and I've got my phone out or when I'm about to go to bed and even the idea of standing up before I lie down. There's so many things you've said today where I'm like, I think there's just these mini shifts and nudges that hopefully will save me and everyone who's been listening a lot of stress and a lot of trouble.
Is there anything I haven't asked you that you wanted to share or something that's on your heart or mind that you really want to share with my community? I would love everyone after listening to this podcast to plan in the next seven days to spend 60 minutes in nature without their phone considering what their primary pursuit is in their life right now. It can be a bit uncomfortable when you go into the quiet.
Remember the idea of the boredom barrier. Your brain will settle.
It will calm. Worries might come into your mind at the beginning of that walk.
But I promise you, by the end of that 60 minutes, you're going to be incredibly clear as to what you're truly seeking for in your life. Maybe the phone is impacting you.
Maybe you want a stronger relationship with your partner. Maybe you think, oh, porn could be a factor in my life today.
Maybe your work needs to be a greater priority in your life. But we need, as a society, long periods of time in nature without our phones.
I love that challenge. And everyone who's going to do that challenge, tag me and TJ when you're out in nature so we can see pictures of you on walks, hikes, taking your dog out, whatever it may be.
We want to see the amount of time you're spending in nature. And if you get to 60 minutes, tag us and tell us the time as well.

Let's go.

It'd be amazing to see.

TJ, we end every episode of On Purpose

with a final five.

These questions have to be answered

in one word to one sentence maximum.

Okay.

So TJ Power, these are your final five.

Question one,

what is the best advice

you've ever heard or received?

To take action as soon as you wake up.

I received this guidance

from a number of people in my life. I realized that waking up and scrolling my phone was the worst thing in my experience.
Take action as soon as you wake. Great advice.
Second question, what's the worst advice you've ever heard or received? That it's fine to constantly drink tons of alcohol and that to be like a normalized aspect of society and that that isn't negatively impacting you. Expand on that for me as to why that really helped you and why that was a path you decided to take.
I just grew up in a world where alcohol was just the most normal thing. It was let's get drunk three, four days a week.
And it was so strongly like disrupting my experience of happiness, my capacity to pursue my goals. And because it's so normalized, I just think it's something that society is just so deeply immersed in.
I don't have judgment for it. Like alcohol is a big thing.
It's very pleasurable. But I think so many of us are underestimating what it's doing.
I literally had to leave all my friends in London, move into a very lonely life for like three years before I met my partner just to separate myself simply from alcohol because I think people are underestimating what it's doing to their capacity to get to their dreams. How do you think it was affecting motivation, discipline, capacity? What was it doing? Well, I was drinking while still understanding dose.
And we, of course, get the physical hangover experience. Well, I've got a headache and I feel sick or whatever it might be.
But we so deeply underestimate that it takes about 72 hours for that alcohol to fully leave your system. Throughout that 72 hours, alcohol then drops very significantly.
And in that period on the Monday and Tuesday in this very low dopamine state, we get into that low motivation. We overthink loads.
We feel fearful and we can't take action on our goals. And I was someone that had goals.
Like I had things I wanted to achieve. I was beginning to build dose.
I was beginning to build the research lab. And I was thinking, how the hell am I going to live a life that I'm really happy with if alcohol remains? I love that.
Thanks for sharing that. Question number three, what's something you're trying to value less? Maybe social media following.
And that's really hard because it's like a double-edged sword where it's so beautiful to know more people are hearing the message. But there's a really nuanced perspective of am I seeking for like the dopamine of the progress and the more followers or am I seeking for the oxytocin of this is serving people.
And I really am constantly trying to consider when I'm looking at likes and views and followers, am I chasing dopamine here or am I tracing service and oxytocin? And it's very easy to get into the dopamine. So I'm trying to move my mind on that.
Nice. Question number four, what's something you're trying to value more? Intimate time with my partner where we really make sure there's no computers and phones.
We work in the same world. My partner's a nutritionist and I'm a neuroscientist.
So it's this difficult interplay of us constantly wanting to work. And it's very important.
We have times where we are just in TJ and Georgia land and not in the land of dose. Fifth and final question, which we asked every guest who's ever been on the show.
If you could create one law that everyone had to follow, what would it be? That the entirety of humanity would spend 60 minutes on their own in nature every single day without their phones. I love that.
TJ, you've been incredible. The book's called The Dose Effect.
I hope you go and grab your copy, Small Habits to Boost Your Brain Chemistry. Highly, highly recommend this book.
And TJ, how else would you like people to connect with your work? You kept referring to the Dose app there as well and the research you're doing. How can people connect more deeply with that? Yeah, so if you go to thedoselab.com on Google, that begins your opportunity to start your journey with Dose.
And if you go to at TJ Power on Instagram, all my guidance is on there. I love it.
TJ, thank you so much for joining today. I can't wait for people to share this episode with their friends, their family.
We covered so many different themes and topics. And I want to thank you for your personal vulnerability in so many of those topics as well.
I think it takes a lot of courage to be someone who's sharing so many great insights and share personal challenges. And I think you beautifully shared both.
So thank you so much, man. Thank you for having me.
That was magical. Appreciate you.
If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.
If we want a healthy mind,

it actually starts with a healthy brain.

You know, I've had the blessing or the curse

to scan over a thousand convicted felons

and over a hundred murderers,

and their brains are very damaged.