590: The science of dopamine, oxytocin, & serotonin | Neuroscientist Tj Power
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What if the secret to feeling motivated, connected, and calm wasn't more productivity hacks or a 10-step routine, but better brain chemistry? Today's guest, TJ Power, is here to show us how to work with our brain, not against it. A neuroscientist, mental health educator, and the author of The Dose Effect, TJ is on a mission to change how we think about well-being in a digital age.

Through his work at the Dose Lab, he's demystifying the science of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, those four powerful neurotransmitters that influence how we feel, act, and perform every single day. In today's show, we unpack the surprisingly simple and surprisingly overlooked ways to rebalance your brain chemistry.

From how to start your day without depleting your motivation molecule to why boredom might be the missing ingredient in your mental health routine, TJ breaks it all down. We also explore what too much screen time is really doing to your brain, how to support dopamine naturally, and why reconnecting with flow, stillness, and social bonds works.

might be the ultimate path to sustainable happiness if you're feeling drained deflated or stuck in a cycle of scrolling and stress sounds familiar this conversation is for you tj's insights are science-backed and highly practical let's get to it so let's start with dose

Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Can you walk us through each one briefly? Give us a primer. Yeah, for sure. So these are these fascinating brain chemicals that live within us, and each of them have a very specific function for us. Dopamine is effectively our motivation chemical.

creates the capacity and the desire to do hard things. Oxytocin connects us together and creates the desire to socially bond. Serotonin is our kind of mood stabilizing chemical that really wants us to live very natural experiences of life as a human. And then endorphins is this very useful chemical that can de-stress our brain whenever we need. Right.

Very helpful. And I think our audience is probably somewhat familiar with all of these, but less familiar, or maybe it's just me, when you start to dig into the why, the what behind these. So let's start with dopamine. So we want high dopamine, not low dopamine. Correct?

Correct. We want naturally high dopamine. There's differences between just any old high dopamine or naturally high. Well, I think that's a very important point. So let's go there. Yeah, effectively, your brain has the capacity to build dopamine. They're called dopamine vesicles. They get built in an area of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. You can imagine it as like a little dopamine factory.

And some things will naturally and slowly build these bubbles and then send them to what we call the reward center. If you took something as basic as cleaning your house, that would be slowed over me. And it's not super fun to do it. But you feel kind of satisfied after you've got it all organized and clean. You've built some of these bubbles and send some of them to your reward center.

When you take something like social media, we open social media, your brain starts mass shipping these bubbles to the reward center. But because there's no effort involved, it doesn't actually manufacture any. And then you get into low dopamine as a result. There we go. The elephant in the room. We got there quickly. So let's talk about that. I think...

I think there's been lots of commentary on dopamine and the role that technology is playing. And so how can we focus before we get to the avoiding technology and social media and best practices, which you talk about in the book? What are some of the things we can do beyond cleaning the house, which I'm all for?

to naturally impact our dopamine in a positive way. Yeah, I would say nothing is quite like the experience of flow state for our dopamine levels. Flow state being a really deep immersion in a task for a prolonged period of time.

And everyone in the world has unique things that could enable them to access flow state. There might be a specific access of your work that enables you to access flow state. You might do creative things, musical things. You might build stuff out in nature. But if we can find a task in our life that we can enter a prolonged state of focus, sort of 45 minutes to an hour where we don't do anything else, we don't think about anything else. We just do that one thing. That's a magical way to build dopamine.

And I think about boredom a lot here. You know, this idea that I think most people, myself included often, when you tend to be bored, you pick up the phone. And how do you, because boredom is going to happen. You're going to be waiting in traffic. You're going to be, you know, waiting in line, like boredom. How do you think about boredom and avoiding the urge for that quick response?

dopamine hit. How do you build that resilience? Yeah, I think you have to have a reason to avoid picking it up. There has to be something that you care for that motivates you to not because I grew up, I had like a phone since I was 11 years old, an iPhone. So I really grew up inside technology and social media. And I

When I attempted to break the addiction to it, moments like that where you're in traffic or even you're in a coffee shop with your partner and they go to the bathroom and you're like on your own for two minutes and you're like, I have to go on my phone in this two minute gap. There's like that massive gap.

desire and pull towards it. And for me, when I think about this, if I'm faced with that situation, I know that having good mental health is a desire of mine, feeling happy and at peace in my brain and also being motivated to do my work and things like that. These things are a value to me.

And I know that with every phone check, especially if they're too frequent, I'm depleting the molecule that's going to lead to me having good mental health and good capacity to chase my goals. So I utilize that as the motivating energy, like to not let me pick it up. And in terms of the impact to our overall health and mental health specifically, if our dopamine is off,

What are the implications, whether it's the phone or whatever it is, like what sorts of health issues do we encounter when we're out of balance? If your dopamine is low, you'll feel very deflated. You'll feel that kind of low mood, deflated, I can't be bothered to do anything type energy within you. And

That in itself isn't a great feeling. But then, as everyone will be so familiar with, so much of the effortful practices that lead to us having good health, whether it's bothering to cook healthy meals or go to the shop and get the healthy food, or whether it's making sure you do your exercise or your walk or you go to bed early, all these core practices can get influenced by the fact we're breaking the motivation molecule with the phone.

So if we can begin to raise the dopamine naturally, our desire to take action on all the important things that really lift us becomes better. And I'm a big believer in habit stacking and dopamine at its core is motivation. And so what that means for me is in the morning,

I have my series of tasks and it often involves, you know, eating something healthy, you know, brushing my teeth, having coffee, cold plunge, working out some part. So like I'm getting these wins and then at night, same thing. I'm prepping for the morning. I'm getting all my supplements out. I'm getting the coffee ready to go. Like I have a routine and then there's like the middle of the day. And so in terms of dopamine and motivation, I,

In my view, it's important to get these quick wins, like these quick accomplishments. What's your take on how do we start our morning and evening so we set ourselves up for success? Yeah, for sure. So how you're starting your day sounds good. I think the absolute number one goal is to not open the phone the moment we open our eyes. If, for example, we were to run an experiment whereby...

Every morning when you woke up for a week, you drank a glass of red wine. You'd get pretty hooked on that red wine pretty quickly if you woke up and drank it. And so much of our addiction to the phone is fueled by the fact it's so easily accessible from the moment we wake. So we need a delay whereby we're earning dopamine through effort. That could be having a shower, doing your cold plunge. That has a huge amount of additional brain chemistry and dopaminergic benefits. It could be making your food. It could be brushing your teeth, making your bed. But you effectively want to wake and earn dopamine.

You don't want to just have it easily. And that can be whatever someone feels is best for their routine, their families, their kids. I think gold standard rules within it are avoiding the phone, of course, and then just making sure that you don't remain sedentary and that you do spend some time in sunlight.

Those are like the main core components and make sure you leave your house and you physically move your body before you've entered the world of social media. Very helpful. And I'm curious, do you have a go-to? In terms of my morning routine? Yeah, for dopamine, like what's your go-to? Yeah, I do have a very specific practice that's been built over the years. Oh, wake up.

I'll go to the bathroom. I'll then sit down on the sofa. On the sofa, my iPad is waiting for me with Insight Timer as an app that I do my meditation on. And I'll use the iPad so there's no notifications in there. Like I don't have all the socials on my iPad. So then I'm not going to get distracted. It's just open it straight to Insight Timer. I do about a 15 minute silent, just breathing based meditation.

I'll then brush my teeth and then I'll normally either I'm walking or I'm going to the gym. And then I'll really try and not go onto technology for the first maybe 60 minutes. When I eventually am going to go on technology, and I think this is a game changer for everyone, my laptop will always be the first way in which I see technology, not my phone. I'll open my laptop and head into WhatsApp and email and these things that you know you need to do, but via the laptop instead of the phone. So social media is not tempting. So it feels like limiting time

time on your phone is half the battle with dopamine. It really is because we've had access to quick dopamine for a while. Things like alcohol and cigarettes and sugar, pornography. These things have been here for some of them, a few hundred, if not a thousand years.

But the phone has increased the frequency in which we can access dopamine. Like we weren't drinking alcohol, having a sip every sort of five to 10 minutes all day, every day. But that's how we're operating with these phones. So the addiction to it is so much stronger than anything else ever before. And it's

so over stimulating because short form content particularly is very dopaminergic because of the amount of novelty that's in those feeds and novelty increases dopamine that it's just constantly plummeting our dopamine level making us feel bad then we procrastinate then we're not happy with our productivity and so on well you mentioned reaching for you know alcohol sugary food pornography

It feels like those are things one reaches for when they're emotionally upset or there's something going on. They're looking to get outside themselves. And what's your take on that connection? What's a better reach for

Like we all know the cliche, we're stressed, we reach for the pint of ice cream in the freezer. Yeah, I mean, it would be situational. I think in those moments, yeah, often we're seeking for pleasure, we're seeking for distraction from our emotional experiences.

if it's porn, we could also be seeking for love and connection, but we're kind of falsely getting it via that method. I think situationally it would vary. Sometimes, say for example, I've been working till 2, it's like 2pm for me right now, and I might get like a bit exhausted. And then it could be tempting to be like, okay, now I'm going to go sit on the sofa and just smash some short form content. That could be quite tempting after I've been working for a while. But

I'll know that if I do that, I'm going to feel a bit flat this evening if I just spend hours scrolling short form content. But if I wanted to chill, if I was to go to the sofa and go on YouTube on the TV and pick a 10 minute video or a 20 minute video or a podcast like this, lie back on the sofa and watch it, long form content like that really doesn't disrupt our dopamine pathway very much at all. So it's almost being selective over which type of content we consume when we're seeking for that feeling of chilling out.

I think it's very practical. You're better off watching a documentary that's 90 minutes than going on TikTok, which seems to be probably the most disruptive thing I can think of in terms of dopamine. It is because it's all about novelty. Dopamine always, for our ancestors, for hundreds of thousands of years, would rise when something novel in our environment would occur. So if you saw some fruit or a deer or some honey, dopamine would rise and it would create the desire to take action towards that thing.

And TikTok is just novelty, novelty, novelty, novelty. So then your brain goes crazy on the dopamine. Whereas when you watch a movie like Gladiator, I watched that the other day. When you watch Gladiator, particularly Gladiator 1, because it's less dopamined up than Gladiator 2, you just sort of sit back and at times you're a little bit bored. And it's just that it's so good to learn to be okay with that slower feeling. Yes, because I think eventually you just become numb. You do. You need bigger and more frequent quick hits. And it's the cycle.

which leads to nothing good in terms of one's mental health and ability to function in the world. It doesn't. And I think that's why we've never seen mental health struggling as much as it is right now in our society. And we had access to a lot of the other dopamine for a very long time, as I said, but the phone is the thing that is radically changing very fast in our relationship to it as a species. And that's why I think it's right at the core of this challenge. And it's

It's important to know some people might think, okay, I'll try that. I'll try to watch a movie tonight with my phone in another room. Like that would be a good experiment.

And you might sit there and actually feel a bit like agitated and irritated in the uncomfort of not having so much stimulation. And it's important to understand in our research lab, we study this thing called the boredom barrier, whereby there is a moment about 10 to 15 minutes into a slower paced experience where your brain does settle and it feels okay with the fact that's the level of stimulation you're only going to get. But you have to get to it. You have to battle through the moment of like, oh, I really need more than this. Yes.

And so we touched on this, but let's go there next. Oxytocin connection. This is the chemical that creates the deep desire within us as humans to bond with one another. And it...

Facilitates our family relationships, our romantic relationships, our friendships that we have. And effectively in the modern world, this chemical, rather than sort of spiking it and crashing it like dopamine, it's just very under satisfied this chemical because we're living in dopamine land where society has become so obsessed with success and pleasure that

We're undervaluing the deep need for just moments of slow human connection. And a simple example of dopamine land instead of oxytocin is if you're sitting in bed, lying in bed with your partner and you're both scrolling your phones instead of talking or cuddling, you're choosing dopamine over oxytocin in that moment. I think everyone can relate to that.

At some point. And so this one is also, I think, worrisome given the loneliness epidemic. Walk us through an ideal way to build oxytocin. Is it as simple as a conversation IRL? Is it like walk us through the different

modalities, like what this looks like ideally in the real world. Yeah, definitely. So right at the core of oxytocin is physical touch. So if ever in your life you have a moment where you're interacting with a human that you feel comfortable to hug, always you should be taking that opportunity to hug that person.

kids, family, partners, colleagues, if you're good friends with them. But we really need more physical touch. And ever since COVID, physical touch is rapidly reduced. And it's a really core component of our system. It needs oxytocin through the physical touch. And the big thing to understand is many people in the modern world are struggling with sort of a stressful, anxious, fearful feeling within their mind.

and as a hunter-gatherer and I always refer back to this because these chemicals weren't built for this world we're in now they were built for the original way humans operated for 99% of human history as a hunter-gatherer if you were cast aside from the tribe that would have been the most anxious and stressful experience ever because you would not survive alone in the wild and your oxytocin level would become extremely low because you were disconnected from the group for many of us now because this chemical is under satisfied whilst we're not

out there in the wild on our own. Our biochemistry almost perceives that we are because it's not satisfied from a connection point of view. So touch is at the forefront. Then the way in which you socially connect with people is really important. So when you're with people, the eye contact you make, the questions you ask, how well you listen, how engaged you are in that conversation and not distracted by technology. These kind of things enable good oxytocin to transfer between you.

And I believe it was oxytocin in the example I'm going to use. So there's a fantastic book. It's a heartbreaking book written by Kate Fagan. It's called What Made Maddie Run? And it came out, I think, maybe a decade ago. And it's just this terrible story around a female athlete at the University of Pennsylvania here in the States and here in the UK who ended up taking her own life. And it was this situation where

everything looked okay. You know, she's at, she's running, she's at an Ivy League school, she has friends. And the theme of this, of one of the story is she, she's suffering and so much of the exchanges are happening on text. And I think I recall that there is a, there's a significant difference between a parent saying to a child over text and

in terms of serotonin, sorry, oxytocin, I love you, everything's going to be okay, versus the boost from a parent saying that, looking eye to eye at their child and touching the child. It is a world of difference. And I think that's an important thing

And it was one of the things they made a point of in the book, which I thought was a salient point. Yeah. And that's super accurate. Like as our brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, it never necessarily could have perceived that we were going to come up with these little glass screens that could create the experience of connecting with humans without you even being there. And,

When you look into these research studies, yes, being face-to-face, in person, and physically having a moment of embracing one another is the absolute goal. There's even this great study by this lady called Seltzer who just compares people sending each other messages versus people calling one another. And when we receive texts, no oxytocin transfers in the brain. When we call one another and we hear one another's voices, oxytocin does begin to transfer.

And it just really makes you think with many aspects of society, whether it's parents calling their kids, they're at university or your partner's away for a while, or you're in the dating world and you're on like apps like Hinge or whatever it might be. So much is digital based when we're actually looking for something that requires the sound of someone's voice to stimulate the hormone that we're actually chasing in the first place.

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Investing involves risk. Offer is subject to terms and conditions. You know, I think if there's one PSA in the conversation, it's this. It's if someone you know is suffering or you believe they're suffering, text is not enough. Pick up the phone. In terms of boosting oxytocin, which has a significant impact on someone's mental health, a text, what you said, does zero versus...

A boost begins when they hear your voice. Pick up the phone. And if you can meet in person, but like pick up the phone, a text, zero. It's remarkable. Yeah, it really is. And I noticed that I have a good relationship with my brother and I haven't seen him for over a year in real life. And he lives out in Bali. And we noticed that we hadn't been calling much, but we had been texting.

but we noticed that like we just really weren't bonding and then we were like okay let's intentionally start calling and suddenly it's a very different experience because we now hear each other's voices on the phones and

And when you're a very young baby lying in a cot, so much of your oxytocin comes from hearing the sound of your primary caregiver's voices and then knowing, okay, they're near me, I'm safe. And it came from sound and also came from touch. A baby wasn't growing up reading a little message saying, okay, now I'm safe because I've read a message. And these primal things that are deeply wired into our brain are important to consider. Texting probably better use for what time are we meeting?

Text has its function for sure. Don't have to call everyone on that list, but the people you really love or the people that need your love, I think it's important. And so we'll move on to the next one, serotonin, which we've talked about this, but I want to make a point of it because I think that the number is just paramount here. 90% is produced in the gut. Yeah. And that's an interesting phenomenon for modern humans that

So much of this key chemical that impacts our mood, the stability of our mood, but also our energy levels is manufactured there. And our body deeply craves nice, natural food to enter it so that it can be broken down into amino acids like things like tryptophan, which are the precursors to the construction of serotonin and vitamin

the modern gut is struggling. There's so much of this sort of ultra processed food, very high in chemical food that is very addictive, very dopaminergic, very pleasurable to eat, but it's really disrupting our gut and therefore disrupting our capacity to build this chemical. Well, again, the mental health epidemic, a lot of people are struggling and you think of serotonin and boosting your serotonin.

And of course, therapy is something that works and should absolutely be part of someone's mental health protocol. Pharmaceuticals can work, but not all the time. A lot of people don't respond. We talked about dopamine and how that can wreak havoc on one's mental health. But an area which I think is the most interesting and exciting is the gut. Ultra processed foods. We've had people like Chris Palmer on this podcast talk about how

you know, proper nutrition can really significantly help someone's brain health and mental health. I think this is an area we're probably underestimating the impact, even though the numbers are 90%, it's pretty clear. We're underestimating

the power of nutrition and its impact on our mental health. We are. And I think nutrition is a complicated landscape in the modern world because there are so many opinions and there's like, we need to be extreme meat eaters or extreme vegans, or you have to follow this diet or that diet. And it can be very complicated for maybe the average person who's not a nutritionist themselves to actually understand like, which of these foods am I supposed to be eating? But I think by and large, if we can get back to the core of just

most of our diet being natural foods that were here on earth before we got here as humans. If the food, if you look at it on your plate and you think, could that actually exist without human intervention? Then yeah, it's probably going to be pretty good for your health. It's going to be good for your microbiome and the serotonin production. And then of course, as you dive deeper into nutrition, you can optimize your protein and your antioxidants and everything. Those sort of decisions are really good decisions to be making. But I think

The addiction we currently have to ultra processed food in the modern world, like here in the UK, 57% of our calorie consumption on average is ultra processed food, which is a huge proportion. I don't actually know the exact figure for the US, but I imagine maybe some. I think it's probably higher. Might be even higher in the US. And we got to do, yeah, we got to do something about that. Yeah. And I think to your point, lots of opinions on which diet is best and my view is,

It's highly individualized. Where we sit in 2025, there's lots of testing where you can dial that in and figure out what ultimately is the best diet for you. But amongst all the different tribes and opinions on diet, there is consensus. Ultra processed foods are terrible for your health and you should try to avoid them. They're going to happen, but they shouldn't be 50 to 60%.

of your calories. Definitely. And I think these two things, I think foods and phones are the big thing that if you like really get good with your food and your addiction to your phone, I think big shifts happen with your mental health. And so endorphins, de-stressing, another important one. Yeah, endorphins are interesting. And just the general conversation about stress is interesting because

So much of the kind of modern conversation around stress is about calming our system, which is super accurate. Meditative practices, calming the system as much as you can, being in nature, all of these things are really beautiful for calming you down. But when we look specifically at the emotion of stress, like when we feel really stressed and really heightened, evolutionarily, stress was much more simple for our ancestors. Rather than all these micro-stresses that we have in the modern world,

We were basically really stressed if we were starving and we didn't have any food or if we were going to get eaten by some kind of animal and we were in extreme physical danger for our life. And in both of those moments of extreme stress, the significant thing that would occur is physical action within our body. We'd have to go hunt and search for that food or we'd have to fight for our life or climb a tree or sprint as fast as we can. And our body over hundreds of thousands of years paired together the idea of I'm stressed,

physical action is coming next. During this physical action, endorphins are going to flood through the brain and body in order to de-stress my brain to make it more likely that I can survive this threat or find this food. And I think often in the modern world, we're experiencing stress via our computers, via our phones, by someone saying something, a colleague, whatever it might be, a political opinion, but we're staying sedentary and we're effectively swallowing the stress into our body. And I think

really good calming practices in your mornings and evenings are super important but i think whenever you're really stressed and really heightened you need to have a framework in your mind where you need to literally physically release it through your system through physical activity and there's a tension here not all stress is bad you know we mentioned cold cold punch you know exerting yourself during exercise

sauna that's good stress yes these things that these things are healthy for our system our system is very physically capable it survived outside for a very long time those deep colds and extreme heats and

lack of food, all kinds of things. And our body is much more physically capable than it experiences today. Now it's in perfect regulated temperature all the time. And most often it's seated. And that's just not what the system was designed for. It's designed for much more physical stress than that. And so if I think about all of these dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, I can't help but think of exercise as an elixir. What's your take?

Exercise is interesting. If it's completing some form of goal, you're getting a dopaminergic experience. Like if you're making progress towards some kind of accomplishment that you're seeking for. If you were exercising with someone, playing sport, gymming with someone, you're in a class, you'd get oxytocin. If you were outside whilst exercising, you'd get serotonin through the nature and the sunlight. And then obviously through the physical activity, you get endorphins. And

We are very sedentary now. I think some people are great with their exercise and I imagine lots of your listeners are really good with their exercise. So it's an important thing to continue to nail. But I do think

I do think, I mean, for example, I spent a lot of time in schools with thousands of teenagers. If I could get them all to just start doing press ups and squats and pull ups and like really physically using their bodies, I know their mental health would improve a lot. You know, I think of run club. I don't know if they have that in the UK, but they're all over US run club. It's a, it checks all the boxes.

You're outside, you're running, you're with people. It really does. And then it's funny because we do this thing called dose stacking when people are going through all our live experiences and they learn all about the chemicals and all the 20 different actions you can utilize. And then they try and come up with some kind of activity that could hit multiple cards within each chemical and multiple chemicals at once.

And ultimately everyone ends up concluding, oh, maybe I should go out into nature with my friends and do some physical activity and eat some healthy food. That's like when you go through it or you conclude that and then it's like,

oh yeah that's what we did for 300 000 years we walked around in nature with our friends and ate healthy food and although that might seem so simple it's not what we're doing in the modern world we don't spend enough time out in nature with our friends walking eating healthy food and that's what our system wants hike up a mountain with a group of friends to a healthy restaurant at the top of the mountain yeah take some fruit with you take some coconut water the dream

And so let's talk about the stack. Like what are some other examples that come to mind for people who want to stack? Yeah. So if they were having some kind of social experience, that would be a good opportunity for some stacking, but it could be a social experience at home. It doesn't have to be an exercise based one. But if say you were having some friends over for dinner, if you chose in that situation when everyone got there,

to all agree to not go on your phones for the next like say hour or two hours and you all put your phones like on a windowsill and you're like, okay, we're just going to have a break. A good way to do this in a restaurant as well is to all put your phones in the middle and then whoever touches their phone has to pay for the meal and then you're really motivated to not touch the phone and whoever touches the phone first.

And yeah, if you are with them, you are socializing, hopefully with some good nutritious food. And then it's really good in social settings to really lean into this whole gratitude conversation. And if you were, say, with someone and you looked across them and you said the question, why do you feel grateful that I'm in your life? They would go.

what the hell that's a ridiculous question that's like a shocking question to ask but if you just said no seriously like can you think of anything they would easily be able to answer that question that's why they're friends with you because they think you have something to offer them and some form of connection if they shared those thoughts and then you shared yours back you would get this unbelievable oxytocin experience you know i also think of kids i have two little girls uh i think of the power of team sports

Yeah. Team sports are powerful. They're really beneficial, especially for the youngsters that are even more hooked on all this stuff than us as adults. It's really powerful. And also as a family being active. Yeah. I mean, we do this thing called in the schools in the UK, this thing called forts with friends where we just try and get

young people into woods and forests to build forts. Like a lot of people, like when I grew up as a kid, that's what a lot of our free time was. It was like in nature, putting big sticks against the tree and then building little forts. And that's just been lost now, ironically, something called fortnight instead of building the forts yourself. And if we can just get young people into nature with their families or with their friends, just doing hard physical activity, teamwork, collaboration,

It's very, very good for their brain chemistry. I think you're hitting on free play also for kids. Definitely, definitely. And free play often has some level of social connection involved. And the challenge is, is so much of the desire for young people now is free time on their iPad playing games or watching YouTube shorts. And that's not truly what the brain is wanting. It's wanting group cohesion. And how do you think about free play for us grownups? I think it's powerful. I mean, when I came up with this whole thoughts with friends thing a few years ago,

I, uh, went and did it myself, built a big fort in nature. That was an experience of play. And that was magic. My brain absolutely loved it. I was also much stronger than when I was a kid and I tried it last time. So it was actually a lot easier. And, uh, I think any form of lightness is very powerful for the modern human. I think life is quite heavy and serious. There's a lot of like political division. I was actually interesting in an interesting debate on, um,

The Times radio yesterday, which is a big radio here, which was all about his dopamine addiction, creating political division in the modern world. And I think a lot of the energy inside our phones is quite tough, heavy and serious for us to manage. Something like Free Play for Adults is just this lightness. And our system needs more time in that state. And so in terms of your own health and well-being,

What addition, because if I were to say deletion or edit, I'm guessing you would say your phone, but what addition has had the most significant impact for you? I would say there's two things that have been really powerful for me that stand out. One is, for me, I struggled for many years with my mental health. I grew up with really severe OCD. That led me into a lot of addiction and challenges arose from there. And I

I really struggled with spending any time with myself. I really, part of my addiction was trying to silence the noise in my mind, whether it was at the booze or smoking or food or phones. A lot of it was to try and quiet the voice in my head. And I was going through therapy a number of years ago. And this guy who's my therapist, he recommended I went for a long walk without my phone. He said two hours. And I thought there is literally no way, two hours on my own in my mind.

And I then began a practice of really trying to integrate long walks on my own in nature without even a phone on me. If you had to have one on you for safety, you could have it in your bag, but it'd be too tempting if it's in your pocket to check it.

And that for me, just like the the amount of wisdom and answers that came through to me when I was out there in the choir and the amount of messages I got a chance to finally hear that I was ignoring and distracting myself from. I think that is right up there for me, both from a personal life perspective with relationships and health, but then also creativity in my career. I think it's a really key one.

And it's hard sitting alone with your thoughts is often really hard. And I was so negative and I was just like an asshole to myself in my mind. So judgmental of myself and like,

I think the brain is a powerful machine. And if you don't ever give it a chance to send, to really hear those messages, it's just going to keep sending them and keep sending them and leave this kind of irritable feeling within you. And I think there's got to be times that we just really get some time to have a conversation. And so the book is called The Dose Effect. It's filled with a number of studies that are really impactful. And I'm curious from your vantage point, which study really stood out to you if you were to pick one?

That's a good question. I would say there's this study by this chap called Schultz that actually came out in 1998. He was at Cambridge University and he looked into the idea of dopamine and the pursuit of rewards. And I think many of us

are chasing a number of different rewards in our life. We might be chasing financial goals, houses, wins with our companies, followers, likes, all kinds of things you might be chasing, career promotions. And he did this study where he was looking at the dopamine level when you finally achieve the reward that you've been chasing for a period of time. And you would imagine it would almost just be like a simple graph where it's low and then eventually reaches high when you get the reward. And he basically found that your dopamine is actually at its highest.

When you're about 80% there towards getting the reward, and when you finally get the reward in that final 20% as you get it, and then once you get it, the dopamine actually dips quite significantly. And I think for many of us,

we're waiting to feel really happy once we finally attain the thing in our mind that we think is going to create happiness. But when you look into the dopamine research, that's not actually the case. Simply just being in the pursuit of a reward is what our brain wants. It doesn't actually want to acquire them all the time. So I think it's been a shift for me, just an understanding that whatever it is, a financial goal, house goal, follower goal, like

a shift around just being in pursuit is actually the goal. Well, I think it speaks to this idea that you should try to love the journey and it's not about the destination. It's important. Look, I believe in goals. I'm a goal setter, but I think you really have to try and love the journey. If you're there just for the goal and not the journey, then

you're probably going to end up unhappy. Definitely. And there is actually, there's a thing called gold medal syndrome in research where people finally win a gold medal in the Olympics and then they actually feel quite depressed after winning it, which seems counterintuitive. It's like, why would I be depressed? I finally got the thing I was looking for.

But the brain is designed to just always be in pursuit. It's designed to always be on the journey so that for our ancestors, they didn't finally find some food and then think, cool, we're done. We don't have to go find any more food. The whole goal of being human is just to be in a consistent, steady journey of pursuit and

For me, that's made a big difference to kind of my overall happiness and the number of people we train with in our lab because it's this idea that you don't have to just wait to be happy once you finally have that thing. Happiness is something that can come right now. You know, you mentioned the medalists and we have some friends who are swimmers and medalists and really struggled with their mental health after winning. And I think it was a couple of things. One, it was, you know, there's... Swimmers are probably going to not like that I say this, but I think of swimming...

You're in the pool, you're doing two days. It's a very isolating sport. You're underwater. Like you're not really, maybe there's a little camaraderie with the team, but like your head's down in water. Pretty isolated. Yeah, you are. And that takes a toll on one's mental health and they're working their entire lives to

to achieve this outcome. And it's a sport where there's really not much after the Olympics. It's kind of over. It's not like, you know, basketball per se, where, you know, you can maybe go on professionally or so on. Like this is it. And there's this moment where you're at the Olympics and you're the most well-known people on the world. You're on national TV around the world globally. You're well-known and then it's over.

Unless you're Michael, even Michael, I think of Michael Phelps. Yeah. It's hard that because you're experiencing this monumental level of dopamine whilst you're in that moment. And then it's very hard to ever satisfy that feeling again. It's almost like taking drugs. Like it's actually quite a similar experience taking drugs. And there's a chap here called Johnny Wilkinson who is a rugby player and he won us the world cup back in like 2003. He did this amazing drop goal in the rugby world cup.

And we won the World Cup. He was the absolute man for years. He was the guy that won England the World Cup. I don't know. It might be the only one we ever won. And he struggled a lot with his mental health because it's very hard to keep, to try and return to that level of a high. And that's why sometimes in those situations when you have an athlete, if they suddenly channel it into something

a charitable idea or some kind of thing where they're starting a business, they need a new pursuit. And if ever you're in that deflated feeling, you need new direction and new pursuit. Yeah. You know, the other example that comes to mind years ago, maybe it's like 20 years ago, I saw an interview with Michael Stipe, the lead singer of REM. And he was talking about after touring, he would, and they're touring, you know, REM at their peak, you know, 50,000, 100,000 people all over the world.

After touring, he would go out to a group dinner with a number of friends. And he said he just couldn't do it. He was just so bored and disconnected. And then he finally came to the conclusion, wait, the problem's not them. Like, they're really interesting people. The problem's me.

I need a process to decompress and re-acclimate myself because I'm coming off this ridiculous high of touring that I can't enjoy myself around a group dinner of a dozen people who are really interesting. He became numb to it. I thought that was really fascinating for performers. I think Broadway performers, elite athletes...

playing like that that rush is hard to come down from it really is and you need a period of significant almost under stimulation to find normal stimulation exciting once again and in a situation like that if i was ever working with someone in that world i would almost recommend they were to do like a

10-day Vipassana silent meditation, if they were coming off touring like that and go into complete boredom and total zero stimulation and then reset these neurotransmitters. And at a small level, and this is why I care so much about the phone, the phone is actually doing that to society. It's making us so acclimatized with extreme dopamine stimulation that sometimes we sit with our partner in the evening and talk to them and that doesn't even feel exciting enough anymore.

that in itself is feeling boring. Or we go and socialize or we go for dinner. And it's really important to understand the phone is what's shifting our capacity to just enjoy the mundane. So it feels like, again, the phone is the public enemy number one here in your view. I just think we need the capacity to have time away from it more than we currently get. I don't think it needs to go. I love my phone. Like it's amazing. I love social media. I love making content. It's not that I want no phone. I just think

currently we're too tipped towards it being the dominant form of relaxation and pleasure. Fair enough. We covered a lot today other than pick up the book. It's called Dose Effects, an excellent read. Thank you for writing it. What else?

should we talk about that we didn't talk about? What did we miss? I would say the only thing that I've also seen significant, significant benefits from is trying to move my dinner earlier. I think it's really powerful and it's a really underestimated shift because of course, maximizing your sleep is just ridiculously beneficial for all kinds of aspects of your motivation, your stability of your mood, how your day begins.

I recently, about four months ago, began an experiment where I started shifting the dinner earlier. We started at eight, then we went to seven, then we went to six, now we're even at 5.30. It's like when kids eat dinner. And I cannot believe the shift in my relaxation period in the evening, the

the time in which I'm then falling asleep because everything is set forward, the time I can then wake but really be energized when I wake and be capable of having enough time for a good morning routine. And I would say if there's any chance that dinner can shift earlier, there's so many downstream benefits of doing so. That might be my favorite tip. If you find yourself in South Florida, I'll grab dinner with you at 4.30. I'm down for it. TJ, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.