New Year, New You? The Micro Changes We Can Make To Have A Much Happier Life. Uncut with TJ Power
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This episode was recorded on Camaragal land. Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Brittany. And I'm Laura. And welcome back to the new year. I was about to say, I forgot when it is. It's 2025. How wild. Yeah.

You can tell we recorded this in 2024. We recorded this because I completely forgot what we were doing for a second. We recorded this right at the end of 2024. It is a new year and every new year I feel like we come back here at the podcast, but also as individuals and you're like, okay, I'm going to kickstart the year off with a new fitness plan or a new year's resolution or I want to go run a marathon. I want to eat better.

What's your resolution, Laura? Do you have one this year? Nah, I've given up. I know that it doesn't work for me because I go hard for about a week, like everyone does, and then it just doesn't stick. So I'm like, I'm already a perfected human guy, so I'm not even going to try this year. Well, today's a bit of a different episode. We're joined by neuroscientist, international speaker, and author of the brand new book, The Dose Effect,

T.J. Power. Now, his work focuses a lot on the small practical habits that you can use in the new year to help you regulate your brain's chemistry. Now, D.O.S.E., the D.O.S.E. effect, which is what the book is, D.O.S.E. stands for, this might sound really obvious, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.

This is going to be a different look at how we can regulate and kickstart the new year. So TJ, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Okay. We start every episode the same with our guests and that is with our accidentally unfiltered stories. You looked very, very concerned when we asked you for your embarrassing story before.

Do you have one? I do have one. It's one of those things where it's like, should I necessarily share that? Yeah, we're going to like drag it out of you. That I am having online. I, as we may talk about in this, had a lot of trouble, particularly with the dopamine chemical throughout like my teenage into my early 20s years, specifically with partying and alcohol and so on. And when I was 18, I came to Australia to work here. I worked in a bar in Melbourne and

And one of the most embarrassing things I've ever done is they did like a, it was at Christmas. They did an open bar for the staff that were working there. I ended up getting way too hammered. 18 years old. Wow. Free alcohol. Couldn't believe it. Ended up standing on the bar and peeing off the bar. Jesus. Fired. Fired from my job. You peed in front of the whole work Christmas party? In front of the whole, I'd only got the job two weeks before. Oh.

lost my job which was a nightmare shock shock I mean fair enough for them to not want me back and uh yeah that was probably one of the stupidest things I've ever done in my life it was a good turning point of thinking maybe I need to start managing my dopamine a bit better I don't think it's a dopamine I think it's excessive alcohol you know what they say like dopamine was the desire for the alcohol you know what they say right when you hit rock bottom you can only go up yeah I mean that was a good rock bottom that's like 10 years ago we've been climbing since then I mean we're

going to get into dose and the different parts that make it what it is and why you kind of went deep on these four different pillars. But I find what you just said really interesting that, I mean, the fact that you got into this because you yourself had problems regulating your own dopamine, what was that period of your life like and what led you into this research?

Yeah, I just grew up as someone that as soon as I had access to what we call quick dopamine, which was like cigarettes or pornography or social media or alcohol, I immediately found that sort of stuff super exciting as a teenager. And...

Everyone in the modern world will find some kind of dopamine activity pretty exciting, but some people just have a greater predisposition to get a lot of pleasure from these activities. And periods of that were like a fun time. It was very social. I wrapped quite a lot of my identity around like being someone that was really like fun and like a party person. And then,

During that time, I went to study psychology and neuroscience at university and eventually found myself in quite an ironic position of learning a lot about my brain chemistry whilst absolutely destroying my brain chemistry. And I got to about 21, 22 years old, and I realized I really wanted to start thriving in my research world. And I was lecturing at university, and I thought, wow, this current lifestyle I have just doesn't align. And with everything I knew about these chemicals, I kind of put myself through this.

almost like a self-prescribed rehab, to be honest, of like, how could I get my brain back into balance? And that big low point caused by my addictive behaviors was then like a big driver for the change that came. I find this so fascinating as well, because I mean, we touched on it briefly, but so many people go into the new year with this idea of like really big life resets. And often it feels like the dreams and ambitions that we set for ourselves

souls are almost insurmountable because you'll stick to it for a month and you'll feel really good about it. And then you have a blowout weekend and you fall off the bandwagon and then you're drinking again and like things kind of spiral. Do you think that we set ourselves up for failure by not correcting the internal things first? Like, for example, if you do have an issue with going after those quick dopamine hits, like you're never going to be able to have those long-term sustained goals because of it.

Yeah, I think the New Year's resolution thing is particularly unique because in December we all absolutely smash our dopamine to pieces with Christmas. We take our dopamine in like an unnatural way, very, very high. And then it all dips for us around like the 27th, 28th. And we all get really drunk on New Year's. And then we wake up and we all go through this big swing, but it's a very extreme change. Yeah. And...

Often the only way to really get in the pursuit of healthy dopamine is to have like a very good long-term goal that you're striving towards that makes you willing to sacrifice some of the addictive stuff. So it's like, I'm not going to get pissed all the time because there's this thing I'm trying to attain and only having the goal of I'm just not going to drink, but with no like greater purpose behind it doesn't normally sustain for very long. So there needs to be something long driving you. So how do we then focus on, or how important is focusing on the brain chemistry to set these new goals? Yeah.

I think the brain chemistry just provides like really clear pillars for people and

Health is like a world that's getting spoken about so much now in the modern world. And we hear guidance on everything, sleep and food and exercise and all these different areas. And the brain chemistry, as we'll discover in this episode, just provides you with such like a stable structure of this is how a chemical works. This is how it feels if I'm low in this chemical. And this is how you boost it up. And people can come to really understand exactly what's going on in their brain and then create really smart responses to their challenges that get them feeling good. Talk us through what the four pillars of dose are.

and why and how each one of those things affects us. - Yeah, so the first one, dopamine, that's the one that's become super famous in the modern world. Dopamine effectively evolved to create all of our drive and our motivation. If we're low in it, we start procrastinating, we can't be bothered to do anything. If we get really low in it, we feel really depressed. And it's basically built by anything that's really effortful. Anytime in which you're doing hard work, you're building dopamine. Anytime you get kind of easy pleasure from social media or porn or alcohol, it crashes it out.

You then have oxytocin. That's the chemical that connects humans together. When a mom gives birth, she creates this huge surge of oxytocin with the baby. And then as you go through your life and form friendships and family relationships and then sexual relationships, all of that will build oxytocin. Serotonin.

effectively built within our guts 90 of it is built in our stomach which is a bit different from the other three and any time in which we're eating good nutritious food getting outdoors in nature getting sunlight getting sleep those sort of things are building serotonin impacting our mood and then endorphins is a very useful chemical that can de-stress our brain and when we're out there in the wild evolving for hundreds of thousands of years developing these chemicals

the main things that would stress us out were being starving, hungry or being in physical danger. And our body basically evolved that if we ever extremely intensely moved our body, it would release endorphins to de-stress our brain. And in our modern world, we're not running away from bears. But if you feel stressed out, you can boost the endorphins to calm you down. Why are things like pornography and child abuse

sugar or these quick, when you say these quick access to dopamine is what crashes it out. Yeah. Why do these negative things crash dopamine out? Is it because it's not hard to attain? Is it because it's easily accessible? Because you said earlier that like hard work is what gives you a high dopamine level. So why do things like pornography, quote unquote, crash dopamine out?

Yeah. If you go back to kind of how these chemicals evolved and all of this dose theory that we've built and all the research we do in my lab is built on something called evolutionary mismatch, which is just the idea that for 99% of human history, we are running around in the forest, making fires, hunting, finding food and so on.

And dopamine was a chemical that evolved to make us have the will and the desire to do the ridiculously hard things that would keep us alive. So when we had to hunt for an animal for four hours, we needed something that would drive us to want to bother to do that so that we'd find the food and our family would survive.

And therefore with dopamine, it was taking four hours or so to experience a really big natural high. But it took a long time for the dopamine to increase to that point. If you take something like going on TikTok, your dopamine experiences that level of elevation, but experiences it within two or three minutes. And because it goes so high so rapidly, the brain is then very good at getting itself into what we call homeostasis, into balance.

And the brain's like, how the hell did dopamine get so high? So then you put your phone down because you're thinking, I don't want to scroll TikTok anymore. And the dopamine crashes below what we call the baseline level because it's trying to get itself back into equilibrium. And then when it crashes, that's when we can't be bothered to do anything. We feel kind of shit and we feel a bit depressed and so on. Do you think that there are, or is it the case that there are some people who are more predisposed to...

to this type of behavior? So for example, like there are some people who are more predisposed to having like addiction issues or addiction with social media specifically and going for these quick highs. Yeah, a hundred percent. When you're born as a human being, your brain can naturally generate all these chemicals and every single human brain will generate different quantities of them. And some people in the modern world will have a genetic predisposition to low dopamine production. So their brain produces a bit less and

And then when they interact with something like social media or alcohol, the elevation is greater than an average brain. So then the elevation is greater. So the pleasure is much greater. So then it's like, wow, I really, really like this. It's so interesting because I think everyone has that friend who it's like, why can't you just enjoy this in moderation? Whatever it is, like, why are you the one that's the drunkest one at the party? Why can't you get off your ass and like get off TikTok? Like whatever that looks like, it might not be the friend. You might be that person. But I think everybody has someone that they know and it

I think sometimes we can kind of trump it up to like low motivation or like that they're not trying hard enough almost. But do you think in those instances, it can be this type of like dopamine production that prevents people from being able to maybe be as proactive or be as driven as what some other people are? Yeah, 100%. And it's a unique situation because those people that have this low dopamine production, they're

if they get really into something that they really like, like some kind of sport or art or music or whatever it might be, they also get big elevations, greater elevations than a neurotypical brain with those activities as well. And that's why some people that are the kind of addict type people can also become really talented at things as well. But it's just where is the dopamine being directed? And it is really important to empathize with people that are having that. Like, it's really not easy. Like you have one sip of alcohol and then it's like, wow, I want to down

this alcohol and then I want more alcohol. It's very hard. I want to piss off the table at my work Christmas party. Yeah, you want to ruin your life at 18. But I literally have one person in mind at the moment as we're having this conversation. So do I. Who I'm like, fuck, that's you. Everything is to the extreme and when it's not to the extreme, it's zero effort or it's zero energy. It's like such like opposite ends of the table. It's a really hard person to like

manage either a relationship with but also to manage work around like those sorts of things it's a difficult one because especially when we talk about this whole new year new you type thing often we can trump stuff up to motivation or drive or dedication and like setting yourself goals and all this sort of stuff but

it does make you think like what are the limiting factors that are preventing some people from achieving it than others like for it being so much harder for some people than what it is for others. Definitely and it's really important with motivation specifically to understand that we are actually very much in control of our motivation as a human being and there's a lot of stuff you see on Instagram that kind of describes it as we're not in control of motivation. Motivation is fleeting sometimes it's high sometimes it's low and

In our life today, you are very much in control of how motivated you are purely based on particularly how you're interacting with your phone. And a lot of low motivation is being caused by waking up, going in social media, raising the dopamine super high, crashing it out. Then you're like, oh, I need to go to the gym or a walk or go to work, whatever it may be. And you feel like, oh, I'm just someone with low motivation. But you've burnt out the chemical that actually creates that feeling within you.

in the first place. So when we look at New Year's and getting people locked in and trying to get them productive, it's very important that we think about particularly at the start of their day, how do they interact with their phone? What kind of challenging activity do they do when they wake so they can get more and more motivated throughout the month?

I feel like we live in a society now where I want to say more of the younger generation coming through, but I think it's crept into our generation as well. But we don't know what boredom is anymore because we have such quick access to things like TikTok and Instagram and a hundred streaming sites. But I think it's really interesting that you talk about the importance of boredom and why you think we should be bored. So what are some of the benefits and why? Because there's someone listening to this right now that's like, why would I want to be bored?

Yeah, for sure. And I'm someone that particularly despises being bored. Like I hate that feeling. I love it. Do you? I love being bored. What, just sitting around, chilling? Just sitting around with my dog. Yeah. I love it. I don't have to have one noise in my house. I don't have to have a TV. I don't have music. I don't have to be on my phone. I can just be in my head. It's interesting you say that because I feel the complete opposite. I feel an immense sense of guilt when I'm bored. Like I'm not doing enough stuff. You need to be productive. Yeah. But you've also got

kids and stuff. So if you're bored, I'd be asking where are my children? I'd be saying, where are the kids? I don't have kids. My partner lives overseas. I don't feel that feeling for me isn't boredom. It's peace. So maybe I look at it differently. And in that situation, would you put your phone in another room so you don't go on it? Or do you just not need to go on it? I often can put my phone on do not disturb.

I think you're an anomaly then in that situation. Cause I would say, I don't know many people who can kind of just check out entirely and hashtag meditate. I do too. I think I'm an anomaly, but yeah. Tell the people listening now why you think we should be bored. Effectively all of the stuff that's overstimulating us is breaking dopamine. Cause it's overgenerating the chemical and burning out the machine and

And any time in which you're bored, your brain is in this peaceful state where it can remake that chemical. And humans used to spend loads of time bored. If you go to like our parents' generation and above them, people spent like a lot of their day in these bored states. So dopamine was just sitting there remanufacturing itself. And it's very important that our brain develops the ability to have more time manufacturing this chemical because of the over excessive way in which we're interacting with it. The other thing with boredom is it's,

It's very important to spend time in the quiet, listening to those thoughts in your head. And for so many of us, we hate those thoughts. Like we sit in the quiet and say, oh, I don't want to hear all this shit about my life or relationship, whatever it might be. And

our brain and body is a very clever machine and it's effectively here just trying to guide us towards the best experience of life we can have so if you're overeating and then you spend time in the choir you might get a message saying actually you've been overeating at the moment and then you'll hear that and it's kind of annoying to hear that message you think i just go on my phone you don't want to hear that yeah you want to be able to hear it or it could be anything over drinking or being an arsehole to your partner or whatever it might be but the brain and body can guide you and

a lot of the time we don't listen to these thoughts and because we're not listening to them, they get louder and louder and they create like anxiety and so on. So the quiet for the dopamine restoration, but also hearing the messages from your body is key. How do people manage those messages though? Because I think you hit the nail on the head where you say a lot of people manifest in anxiety. Yeah. And it's like, it is something that a lot of people run away from. How do we manage it in a way that's productive?

I think the best way to interact with like the quiet mind is in nature on your own without the technology, because when you go into the research on nature, nature is insane, particularly for the serotonin chemical. And so that's any time you walk in the forest or you guys call it like the bush, don't you?

It's a bush here, yeah. If you're walking in the bush, then... The forest sounds particularly majestic, though. It's like Harry Potter. We've got forests back home. But if you're there, you get a good increase of this serotonin chemical. They've done loads of cool research in Japan that's looked at people spending time in these environments. And...

it then calms a lot of the anxious feelings within your body when you're there. And then your capacity to deal with those worrisome thoughts that are coming up is much better. But if you say, for example, well, like I'm going to sit on like a train in like a really stimulating environment and sit in the quiet and try and deal with these thoughts, that's not a very calming experience. It's actually going to exacerbate the problem with your thinking. So nature quiet is the best.

It does feel as though, and it's definitely something that we've talked about on this podcast before. We've interviewed Johan Hari around our attention deficit that we all kind of experience. But it does feel as though the modern world that we live in is completely geared to fuck up these pillars. Yeah.

in every way, in sleep, in our quick fixes for thrills in wanting to feel good and also in wanting to fix everything instantly. We have this instantaneous need that if something's not right, well, you just fix it straight away rather than having to work through something in a long form.

knowing that we kind of live in a society that's geared against us, like how do we start putting parameters in place that protect our brain chemistry? I think it's very important to start deeply considering how you wake up in the morning. When our brain wakes up, it's been restoring dopamine throughout the night and then it wakes up and it's like in the pursuit of where's my next dopamine arriving from. And for

hunter gatherers, their brain will wake up with a deep desire to restart the fire or rebuild their shelter or go out and find the food or do stuff with the kids, whatever was important to that group survival. And wherever it gets that first source of dopamine from, it then instinctively craves in that direction for the rest of the day as its source. So then if we wake up and we get it from like a vape or our phone or whatever it may be, we

effectively preset ourselves to be in these addictive patterns all day. And then that then goes on to disrupt all the chemicals because you get into the dopamine loops. So then you don't socialize as much with the oxytocin and then you don't eat as well with the serotonin and so on. So the beginning of the day is the key in order to manage it. How do you start your day then? I wake up desperate for my phone, but I don't have the phone in the room because I wouldn't be able to resist it. You sleep with a phone in another room. I do. I have to. It's a lot of control.

I just like him too hooked on all this stuff that like, if it's near me, like I'm going to go on it a hundred percent. And I know if I wake up and I go on it, if I was to go on like Instagram or something, it's just going to like rile my brain out for no reason and get my dopamine spiking. So I wake up, I walk straight to the bathroom and I start brushing my teeth the

boredom of brushing your teeth is actually really good. If you like do it slowly and do it for two minutes, do it properly. It's like beginning from right from the moment you woken up to like generate dopamine, splash cold water on my face, go to the bathroom, make your bed. And I try and go through those four patterns and then step outside. And I have this rule in my head where I have to have seen sunlight before I can see social media. So I'll step outside, done a little bit of hard work, like five minutes of hard work, and then I can then begin my day. But that beginning routine is very key.

That's really interesting. And something you just said really struck a chord with me, literally when you said, you know, back in the day we used to wake up and you would think of what you had to do. So it'd be like lighting a fire. This year I went into the I'm a Celebrity jungle. Cool. And that is exactly what happened to my brain after a month because I wake up now and I

I will say I pick up my phone and probably stay in bed for a bit. Yeah. I pick up my phone and I have a routine of, I check what my fiance has written me. I check my family group chat. I check Instagram. I read the daily mail to catch up on like what, cause we have such a job in this world. But when I was in the jungle, I would wake up first thing and I'd be like the fire. Literally. I was like, we need to get the fire going now because we need to be able to cooking for hours. And what I needed to do in the day changed. And I have said to these guys, um,

I have never felt better in my entire life than a month without a phone and any addiction. Never. You lived how we evolved to live. Yeah. And so when you just said that, I was like, wow, that rings so true. And this is the power of addiction. When I came out of there, I had said, probably like every person says, I'm going to keep living like this. I'm not going to. And the creep of the phone comes back in and the creep of the addiction. And that's what addiction is, right? Yeah.

How has it changed your relationships? Because we want to talk about relationships. So when you started to really like be a bit more introspective and be like, okay, I'm pretty cooked here. I need to change some things, especially if I'm going to practice what I preach. Yeah. What did you see physically literally happen to your relationships?

I think what's tricky is when you're in the pursuit of dopamine, whether it's like your phone or booze or whatever it may be, you do begin to live. And it's not even like a bad thing, but this is just what's happening in the modern world. You begin to live quite a selfish life where your kind of main purpose is how do I get my brain to be in as much pleasure as possible? And you're not in the pursuit of how are my family doing or my girlfriend doing? That's not your top priority. Your top priority is satisfying your addictions effectively. And

As humans were evolving, oxytocin being this chemical that drove humans to just serve the group. That's why it evolved within us to just make sure we will always contribute to that group so that they survived, so that you could survive because it was just one system out there in the wild. And we've basically moved in the modern world away from being an oxytocin driven society to a dopamine driven society where we're now very much in the pursuit of how do we feel good rather than how does the group feel good. And

I very quickly began to notice that as I reduced the dopamine addictions, my desire to find my beautiful girlfriend or... Who's in the room. Who's in the room. Who's an Aussie, which is cool. Or even things like call my mom and ask how my mom was doing or like help my sister with something or help my friends with something. My desire to actually do things that were more selfless was increasing as my desire for dopamine reduced. That's interesting because...

You also learn that once you do weed away the rest and you become a little bit selfless, that is another dopamine hit, right? Like once you start to do things for other people, you start to feel good. But I assume you have to stop doing so much for yourself in a way. Like I think that that would be a hard balancing act because we often preach on the podcast that like you need to put yourself first and, you know, give yourself your oxygen mask first. But there's a lot to be said for finding that balancing act and making sure those people in your life are also looked after. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with the oxygen mask analogy. And I think it is an important one. It just depends like what is it that you're prioritizing as helping yourself? Like if you are prioritizing yourself in terms of like making sure you're eating well and getting time to exercise or like have a bath where you can chill out from your kids for a bit, whatever it might be, those sort of actions would be good. But if it's,

I'm prioritizing myself so I can like have loads of booze and scroll my phone loads. Like those things aren't actually serving you. So you're not really helping yourself. Do you feel prioritized in the relationship? You feel like he's serving you? Okay, great. Just checking.

How does food affect us? You know, we've talked about like consumable things like social media, but also our diet has changed so much over the years. Yeah, this invention of ultra processed food over the last 20, 30 years has been wild for our brain chemistry. And effectively, as sad as it is, you have people very much like myself, neuroscientists that study things like dopamine. But on the end of how do we get people as addicted as possible to these foods? And these foods work in crazy ways from a hormonal point of view. They make us feel like we're

mass stimulate this hormone called ghrelin, which makes you extremely hungry when you start eating it. So you want more of it. So you want more of it. And then it turns off this hormone called leptin, which makes you full. So then you don't feel full and you feel extremely hungry. And then you like really override the dopamine system. And

It's super important to understand with this kind of UPF ultra processed food world that that doesn't mean just like fast food like McDonald's like UPF these chemicals have been put into everything into our yogurts and cereals and loads of all the micro food everything like that and

I appreciate how tricky it is. Like it's hard. Like it's also much cheaper, all of that food. So that makes it difficult. But anytime we're eating the really nutrient dense food, meat, fish, fruit, veg, all this stuff we evolved eating, it builds these chemicals and all of the modern food effectively overstimulates them and crashes them out.

What does UPF food stand for? Like, what is it that people need to look out for? Or even if they want to reduce this in their diets, when you say it's kind of in everything, what does that look like? What does it mean? And how do we pick the things that are low in UPF? Yeah, we like to break it down into either single ingredient foods, we call them SIFs or ultra processed foods, UPFs. And if you took a really simple scenario, like Greek yogurt, Greek yogurt is something that's great for us, good for our fat and brain chemistry. And

If you're in the supermarket, like in the next few days and you look at a variety of Greek yogurt, some of them you'll turn them around and they'll say loads of random words in the ingredient list, like soy lecithin and like all kinds of random stuff and natural flavorings and all these things that kind of, you don't know what they are. And if there's a lot of words, you don't know what it is, it's a UPF. If you turn it around and it says like,

100% whole milk or something like that, then it's a single ingredient food. And the more often, like when you're looking at your supermarket trolley and stuff, the more often you can look at it and just ask yourself, like, is this predominantly single ingredient foods? Is there only one thing in each of these items? Or is it full of loads of words I've never seen? And if it's full of loads of words you've never seen, it's not very good for our brain. It's so hard though, because...

The average family in this cost of living can't afford to go into the farmer's market and buy organic whole food. For sure. You know, the things that are presented to us that are the easy option are the cheapest option are the unhealthiest option. And convenient, you know. Fast food, yeah. It's like it's made, they are made to make you want more and to be affordable. I want to segue into connection, human connection. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, it's like one of the most important things. How does...

different kind of connections affect your brain chemistry? And I guess in that, I mean, maybe like yourself, like long distance versus physical touch, porn versus real sex. How does that affect?

affect our brain? Yeah. So the long distance one is a good example. There's this really cool scientist called Seltzer who has looked at how different types of communication impact oxytocin, this chemical that connects us. And they found, and this is very relevant for all humans in the world, whether you're maintaining relationships with your kids, a new relationship with your partner, whether you're dating, they've basically found that

When two humans are texting one another and they measure their brain chemistry, no oxytocin releases in their brain at all. And then as soon as those two humans call one another and they hear their voice, oxytocin begins to release. And it's very clear in the research that we need to hear people's voices in order for oxytocin to release. And if you think like even just specifically in the dating world with the dating apps,

A lot of the initial connection is only text-based and you're not actually stimulating the hormone that's required for you to develop proper feelings for that human being. So in the dating scenario, the more rapidly you can get towards voice notes and FaceTime and then obviously seeing each other in person, the better in order to build a relationship. I guess that's why the dating apps, don't know if you know, but the dating apps...

introduced voice text, like voice notes so that you can hear someone's voice before you even match with them. Oh, that's true. Yeah. You have those stories on that. Yeah. It's in their bio. And so what then happens, how much does it skyrocket when you, let's just use the long distance. So texting to calling different and FaceTime, I guess, but physical touch to long distance sex on an iPad, you know, to actual sex. We know it's different, but I'm assuming it's just like an upward graph, right? Like every time you add that

little bit extra connection in whether it's physically looking at someone and not just the voice but then to human touch. Yeah, with each tier it would be increasing the oxytocin. I can't tell you there's a specific study about sex on the iPad. There would be though. Maybe one day I'll do that. Ask your

I'm in the middle of the study. Definitely sex on the iPad with your partner would be far better than watching porn by yourself and having that experience as your sexual moment. Like it'd be obviously way better to connect with one another and create pleasure for one another, talk to one another, whatever it may be that happens.

in that moment. Then when you have physical touch, physical touch is like the absolute number one for oxytocin. Whenever we were in our early few months of life, we'd experience moments where our oxytocin dropped because we might not be able to hear our parents' voice or they might not be physically with us. We're just like lying in a cot, for example.

And the only way to then satisfy that upset baby is by physically interacting with them. Like you wouldn't go and talk to it and explain that the baby shouldn't be upset. You just hold it and then it calms back down. And our brain evolved from very early in our life to know that anytime touch happens, we're

oxytocin begins increasing cortisol, which is stressing us all out in the modern world begins to rapidly reduce. So if you can physically connect with friends and romantic partners more, it's very, very good. What about, I mean, you touched on it very briefly, but like porn, it's such a common thing now in our society. It's so accessible. It's frighteningly accessible for kids as well. Like it is just everywhere online. And it's so common in relationships. Yeah. And I think like, you know, on one side,

we can be like sexually progressive and be like, look, you know, you can introduce it in your relationship. There are benefits to it. But what are the really sort of like problematic effects that it's having on our brain chemistry? Yeah, I think the porn is an interesting one because there's the whole kind of like moral side of porn that has been the current narrative of maybe why humans shouldn't watch as much porn. But I think unfortunately...

It's so stimulating that people don't care enough about that being the lane. I think people will likely only change their relationship with porn if they feel it's going to have a genuine impact on how they're experiencing life. Well, also if it's genuinely impacting your relationship, I think so many people, and we do ask on Cartoon here where we get questions from listeners and so many people who talk about how their partner's watching of porn is affecting their relationship. Yeah.

100%. And I think that is very common. Many men will kind of sneak off and go and watch porn just because it's an easier thing to do. And with all of this dopamine disruption we're doing in the modern world, even the act of like having sex with your partner is an effortful act. So you have to have a nice time with them in the evening and then kiss them and get connected and then have sex. Whereas porn is just like a few minutes of very rapid pleasure. And

nothing stimulates dopamine like porn. Like porn is comparable to like cocaine and stuff like that because it's such a deep primitive need for us to have sex. It's something that our brain is so driven towards and being able to access this kind of virtual experience of having it is very stimulating and

For everyone that's interacted with porn, you watch it and it's this incredible experience during and then it's a very rapid decline. You feel the dopamine decline after. You feel that deflated feeling. And I grew up as someone watching porn. I remember Googling boobs as a teenager and then discovering, oh, wow, you can see a lot more than just tits. You can see all kinds of stuff. I didn't think anything of it. I just started watching it, found it very pleasurable. And then when I was going through university and studying dopamine, I was like, wow, that is one of the actions in my life that would definitely be screwing this chemical up.

and screwing my relationship up like I had a girlfriend at the time and I would still watch porn and it was definitely disrupting the quality of our sex my desire to have sex with her and I

I then just started to test, like I'm going to do seven days and see how it impacts my life. And it was so surprising, like the difference when I was waking up, how much more driven I felt, how much more focused I felt, how much more excited for my day I felt. And then I remember texting some of my friends being like, can you test this out for me? And they're like, oh shit, what's TJ got us doing now? They're like, this is the worst test. This is such an annoying friend to have. And they all did. They did like seven days. My brother did the same. And like, it's very, very surprising. I think it's,

particularly overstimulating for men. I think it's very overstimulated for men. I think in general, women might engage with that action a bit less frequently than men. Like I know many men that will two or three times a day be watching porn. So it's like a massive over increase. Is there a gender implication in this? Can men be more predisposed to chasing this sort of like fast and quick dopamine versus women? Or is it something that is kind of like nondescript across the board? No, there would be gender differences. I

At a specific level, a man would be slightly more dopamine driven. Like men, it was extremely important for us to basically spend all of our time hunting and looking for food. So we had to be very dopamine driven. And the female brain is slightly more driven by oxytocin. It spends more time obviously like giving birth and then interacting with kids and in a relationship.

both people might want to have sex with one another but the man wants the dopamine side of the sex a lot of time just the pleasure whereas the woman might be more looking for the intimacy and the love and the connection the holding and all that kind of stuff and that nuance then could drive separation because the man starts looking for that and then

A woman lying in bed knowing that their boyfriend might be in the toilet watching porn is going to create like a big dip in their oxytocin because they're going to feel like less connected and less loved. And it's really important just in that scenario to understand that if less sex has been happening and the sex in a relationship has reduced, it's very important to just bring back physical touch but not aim for sex. Because as soon as a, not mother and dad, but mum and dad maybe, but a partner, boyfriend and girlfriend...

lie together and just hold one another even if for like a week you're just like we're just gonna like cuddle for 10 minutes every night before we go to sleep even without the intention of we have to have sex tonight so there's not like pressure on it that then begins to rebuild the oxytocin between you which could then create more of a desire for sex but the intimacy the intimacy is so important a lot of people like get into bed they have a busy day then they both sit on their phones they separate from one another in bed and it's just like what's happened in the modern world and i guess this goes back to let's go back to basics when

you know, a man and a woman are like, let's hook up. Let's have a situationship. And I feel like often the woman goes in with every intention for it to be a situationship and just have sex. But I guess this leans into why women are more likely to be getting attached because it's out of their control, right? Like their body is releasing far more oxytocin without their control. Like they want to just be having sex.

but the feelings are developing at a more rapid rate. Definitely. Like initially when the two of you meet, you meet in a bar or something like that, it's dopamine that drives you to want to hook up for the first time. But very quickly, particularly in a female brain, oxytocin will begin to be created. We plan the wedding. Yeah, we plan the wedding. And for the man, it does take longer. And it's actually one of the reasons it's really useful to,

for a woman not to give over too much dopamine too early on to a man. Like the idea of playing hard to get from a brain chemistry point of view would actually be quite advantageous because if the man gets all the dopamine they needed from that experience very quickly, I think I'm done. I'm going to look for another source of dopamine now.

Whereas if it takes a long period of time, like a long distance relationship is a good example of you can't access loads of the quick dopamine. So the man is kind of forced to build. It's not the only reason I'm with you, but I was forced to build more oxytocin, more connection before I was only driven by the sexual pursuit. It's true. And I often say that about my fiance, Ben. I often think,

if it would have developed how it did develop if he just lived here and if we just saw each other. I'm not convinced because we had to build so much rapport and so much intimacy, like we said. So, like, I reckon I tricked him into it and I'm worried that maybe when we live together he'll be like, bye. It's a fascinating thing, isn't it? It's fascinating. Because you want to be, well, you want to be, like, new age and be like, no, like, we shouldn't have to play games. Like, women can have sex on one-night stands and, like, it can end in relationships. But, like, when you actually get down to the nuance of how our brain chemistry works

is structured and how women and men differ in those ways. Makes sense. It's almost like there's a part of me that's like, you know, if you really do like a person, like maybe just wait a little bit longer. It may not pan out. No one's saying that for a fact, but like there is a, I guess like there are reasons why the stereotypes exist.

Yeah, like that phrase of playing hard to get had to have been created from somewhere. And it's not that I have any judgment for people wanting to have sex or want to have sex. It's super fair to want to hook up. But I do think we have got a situation in the modern world where relationships are not thriving as they used to.

I think many people are single, many people are struggling to date, many sexual relationships are not going to plan. And I think there's an element of us being in this dopamine driven society where sex is the goal, not the really high quality relationship. And I do think oxytocin needs to be prioritized a bit more.

How is the person that you choose so important to your brain chemistry? Yeah, I mean, you're going to spend so much time with that person. You eat so many meals with them. You ask them how their day's gone. You understand exactly how they're doing in their life. Your partner is going to have a massive impact on how your brain is operating. And I think...

it's extremely important just to try and align yourself with someone that wants to live a similar lifestyle to you effectively. And I had this, I had a ex relationship and it was a nice relationship, but we became so misaligned on how we wanted to spend our time and ultimately led my brain into a really tough place because we were so misaligned. And I remember thinking,

about three or four years ago, like I don't want to go back into another relationship unless I can find someone that would align to my kind of brain chemistry pursuit, as geeky as that is. It's a ridiculous thing to say, to be honest, but that actually was my goal. And then I was just like, I'll just patiently wait. And whatever your desire, like you might be a very high dopamine person that wants to party like crazy, but you just need someone that also wants a similar experience to you. How does oxytocin change over like a long-term relationship?

I'm assuming it deteriorates slightly because we don't have that same chemistry hit that we get at the start, the same dopamine hit. But can we maintain it or can we consistently bring it back in a long-term relationship? Or is it one of those things that we need to accept now

love changes. We still love people just as much, but in a different way. Oxytocin is something you could maintain throughout a whole relationship. You could still be having oxytocin 50 years into marriage. It's dopamine that would reduce rapidly. The honeymoon period is the dopamine period, effectively. That would be the neurobiological way of describing it. And

as the relationship progresses sometimes because you don't have this like really exciting dopamine you can begin to prioritize each other a little bit less you come home from work and you don't catch up as much and you sit on the sofa and you're both on your phones and you become less connected as the relationship can evolve and it's just very important to be constantly planning very present time with one another and to be constantly listening to one another when you're in conversation making eye contact and like being really present in that experience and you see in oxytocin research that

when people are in conversation, if they're at all distracted from one another, it really disrupts the oxytocin's ability to be created. And everyone's had that. Like you're trying to talk to your partner and it's just clear they're a bit vacant and they're not fully with you. And it really pisses you off. It's like, why are you not with me right now? And as the relationship evolves, sometimes the...

kind of prioritization of connection reduces. So if you maintain that real desire of, okay, oxytocin is something we need. We're going to make sure we physically connect. We're going to spend really present time together. We're going to get off our phones together. When we eat meals together, we're really going to pay attention to one another. Those sort of things can then maintain the chemicals.

It'd be great if there was like a multivitamin you could just take. It's like an oxytocin vitamin. It's so interesting to me because I think like when you are someone who like in your position, who you can see that you were chasing this fake dopamine for so long and it was giving you those bursts of like, okay, I feel good, but now I feel shit. So I'm going to go and do something else.

But then you're also simultaneously studying neuroscience. It's like you get given all the tools to fix it. And I think for a lot of people, there's just so many areas in their life where they're getting this fake dopamine from that it would almost feel insurmountable to be like, okay, well, where do I even start? And how do I start putting parameters around these things in my life? Because for a lot of people with the stuff that we're talking about, and I keep going back to this one person in my mind, I'm like, they're doing all the things. It's like, it's almost too many things like the paw,

drinking, the going out late, the being on the phone. It's like, how does someone start to kind of restructure their life and restructure good boundaries around what they're doing for their brain chemistry if they're already kind of dipping into all these things?

Yeah. I mean, I relate to that experience. That's exactly where I was. I was literally addicted to every source of dopamine that you could access. Yeah. And I think when you say addicted, it's like some people are thinking like, I'm not talking like a heroin addict, like he's a fully functioning normal person, but like at the same time, just everything's to the extreme. Everything's to the extreme. And it's like, it's just a big prioritization for you every single day is like, how am I sourcing those dopamine hits? And I think

with the phone is a really good place to start. Like I had lots of problems with partying and alcohol and cigarettes, but I thought the phone is like this really quick access that I'm getting all the time that isn't necessarily giving me even as big highs and lows, but it was just like a very quick dopamine source. And then because the phone was constantly putting me into high and low dopamine, because you're in low dopamine, you then really seek for, I'm going to get pissed tonight or I

in a smoke or whatever it might be. So I really thought through, okay, if I start with the phone, maybe that will have a knock-on impact if I develop the ability to effectively resist something. And we can go into this. This is really interesting around willpower and stuff like that. But yeah,

I really believe if you're in that situation, you're super hooked on all the quick dopamine, you need to start dopamine fasting in nature regularly for like an hour each day if you can. Like if you can make the time for an hour each day, if it could be half an hour, that would also be amazing. But it means like going out, preferably leaving your phone at home. If it needs to be with you from like a safety perspective, it needs to be in a backpack and like on airplanes, you can't interact with it. And then you need to hear that voice in your head and start listening to it because you

our brain is so good at survival. It's so good at trying to get us onto a healthy path, but we're just so distracted from the message. And I was out there and I hated it. Like I hated hearing all those measures. I kind of all this fun anymore. And I was like, that's fucking boring. But yeah,

I, uh, but I very quickly realized that like there is some useful guidance coming through to me here. And I think the more time someone in that situation spends in that environment, the smarter and smarter decisions they'll begin to make. What do you find so interesting about willpower? Do you think that anybody can have it? Because it's such a throwaway comment that we say to people without thinking like, we're like, what's wrong with you? Just have a bit of willpower. Willpower is crazy. The neuroscience of it is super cool.

We have an area of our brain called the anterior mid-singulate cortex. They call it the AMCC. And it's effectively the home of your willpower. And any time in which you have an instinctive desire to do something and then don't let yourself do it, this area of your brain lights up.

So as simple as you're sitting at your desk, you're trying to work and then your brain's like, oh, I can't be back because I'm going to go on social media. If you manage to go, actually, no, I'm not, this area of the brain lights up. And with every activation, it begins to get stronger and stronger. And actually the area of your brain gets larger and larger. And you see in people that are called super ages, people that live over 100 or really high performing athletes,

When these people pass away, if you do anatomical measurements of their brain, they have bigger AMCCs because they've developed willpower over time. And with all of our dose training we do in our lab with people, we try and get people every day to actually be thinking in their head, how am I activating my AMCC and getting this stronger and stronger? And

For me, for example, the reason I think not going on the phone when you first wake up is so valuable is it's not just about not going on the phone. You have this real desire to go on it and you resist going on it. So the AMCC lights up and the stronger this area of the brain chemistry, the brain gets,

the easier it is to then think, oh, I'm not going to get pissed tonight. You begin to develop this ability to be able to resist stuff, which is very important. I think of people like Ned Brockman and I'm like, you're amazing. And I run a hundred meters and I'm like, I'm tired now. I'll stop. Like when you think about the caveat between the willpower that some people have and then the absolute lack of it that other people have, it's just such a disparity. Yeah, because it can get bigger and

smaller. And sometimes you meet people and you think like, how are you like so healthy and exercising so much and you eat perfect and you think it's so easy for you. But effectively over decades, they've successfully activated the area so much that it's become easy to be disciplined and it can grow. Like a learned tray. Yeah. It's like a learned tray. I mean, as a parent, I find this fascinating. So I'm like, how do we build this in our children from a young age so that they're not dealing with it

when they're in their 20s, going like, okay, well, you know, everything was set up kind of working against me as a kid and now I've got to fucking undo all this stuff. How do we kind of, as parents, put the best parameters in place for our children to build healthy brain chemistry in them as they grow? It's just really important to understand that doing things you don't want to do is actually very good for you. And we have evolved in a world now where like,

a real prioritization with raising kids is making sure they're safe and comfortable and stuff like that and I understand like how that has happened but it's not necessarily best serving them always making life feel as good and calm and pleasurable as possible like doing things like I had my nephews over niece and nephews over the other day and they see me as like the uncle that wants to like wrestle with them I like fighting with them and stuff nice fighting yeah and uh

We really like messed up my bedroom and I, with all this dopamine stuff, have a real prioritization of keeping my bedroom organized. And when it was all messed up, I then thought, oh, let's like clean it together because I wanted to see like how they would respond to that.

And when I said to them we were going to make the bed, they're like three, four years old. They were like, what the hell? I've never been asked to do that in my life. And I just explained to them like that is what we were going to do. And they did do it. And in that moment for two or three minutes, their brain is going, I don't want to do this. Why am I having to do this? But they are doing it. And this AMCC would be lighting up like crazy. And

if like as I go into the period of my life of becoming a parent, I will have that thought in my mind of like, how can you just get them to do like not ridiculously hard stuff, but things they don't necessarily really want to do because it's going to strengthen it. And the AMCC directly communicates with this area called the hypothalamus, which is where your dopamine is generated. So you're becoming someone that generates more dopamine, becomes more strong-willed. And I think in a world where addiction is just

everywhere. There's so much quick dopamine and we're going to have VR headsets coming and all this other stuff. Like having good willpower is like an absolute need. It's not like a nice to have. Yeah, I completely agree. I like come back to the conversation we just had around boredom. My husband and I had a really interesting chat recently because like we do big long car trips at the moment with the kids and they're three and five and they're in the back seat. And

At one point we were like, should we get them iPads or something? Kids like, you know, if they're having to travel for long distances, every fucking kid's on an iPad these days. And my husband himself was like, nah, it's good that they're bored. He's like, it is good that they're bored. And I didn't think much of it at the time.

But then listening to this conversation, I'm like, it really is. And it's so important for their creativity because it's in that boredom where they create, okay, we're going to play a game or we're going to try and fix the boredom ourselves. And that's been a real learning curve for me as a parent, because I think for a long time, I was like, what's the easiest route? And now it's not always what's the easiest route. That's for sure. Well, it helps their imagination. But also think back to like when I was doing five-hour car trips as a kid.

You didn't have iPads. Nothing. You didn't have ear pods. I didn't even have a Walkman. You just sat in the car and you played I Spy, my poor parents, for five hours. Didn't you just terrorize your siblings? Isn't that what you did? Yeah, I used to do that. I think the iPad thing is really, really big. I think...

In like 10 years, I think the world's really going to realize just how big it actually was putting kids on iPads. And I don't have kids yet. Like I'm sure it's ridiculously hard when your kid's crying and you want some peace and stuff like that. So I appreciate how difficult it actually must be. But I think giving a kid access to a lot of the quick dopamine really early on is giving you peace now, but potentially a really chaotic experience when they're like a teenager and their brain is struggling a lot more with school and relationships and so on. And I think

If you can find ways whereby they can entertain themselves and they do develop the ability to calm themselves down and stuff like that, it is going to serve your experience of life and their experience of life very much in the long term. And it's just like another example of it's better for the slow dopamine than the quick stuff. It also comes, like everything you've said, just comes back to human connection. And it's fascinating the fact of the studies that they did post-COVID where everyone was so concerned about the

the fact that people didn't have human connection, but they're like, it's okay. We've got social media. It's so important that our kids are on social media so that they can connect with their school friends, connect with their families, connect with the world. Then the study comes out that says...

that they've never felt lonelier. Yeah, for sure. So I think it's so important to remember when we're like, oh yeah, people need that social media connection that it is not the be all and end all. It's also not relating to real connection. It's not real. It's not real connection. Well, it's actually falsely satisfying the desire as well. So then it's reducing our quantity of socializing we're doing. Like if you come home and every evening you're watching kind of people socialize on Instagram, it's

You're kind of falsely satisfying the desire to bother to do it. Then we don't do it at all. And you don't get any oxytocin from watching people hang out on social media. But because the brain thinks, oh, I've kind of done that, it then doesn't desire it as much. And we really need to hang out with each other. Like it's a very, very important experience for us. TJ, thank you so much for coming and being a part of the podcast. Like it's been, yeah, like I've learned so much. It's so cool to like break everything down and know that there's actually science behind it. Like especially going back to when you're like,

Why am I developing feelings when I'm having sex with this guy? He's not developing feelings. Like, you're not crazy. Not crazy. Your body's doing stuff. And always does and will start eventually. She's a little bit slower for the man. Yeah. Thank you so much. Can I add one thing for the New Year's resolution? Absolutely.

All of the New Year's resolutions people have come up with. I love it. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. If you can make the one thing you're definitely going to do be waking up, not going straight on the phone, going to the bathroom, brushing your teeth, splash cold water on your face, come back and make your bed and then go outside for like two minutes. If that can be the way you start your day every single day, your whole year will transform as a result of that action.

I'm going to start doing it. Well, TJ's book, The Dose Effect, is out right now. We're going to link it in our show notes. We're going to link the Instagram in our show notes. You've been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.