The 4 Chemicals That Run Your Brain…and Your Life | Tj Power

What if I told you your life is being controlled by four chemicals that your brain makes, and once you learn to harness them, which you are about to do, nearly everything from love to accomplishing to help gets better. In this conversation, you'll discover the four brain chemicals that control nearly everything you do and feel. How to turn the right ones up to boost motivation and fuel action and achievement. You'll learn which ones deliver you into the zen zone and dial down stress and anxiety and how to tap them. And you'll learn how to rewire your brain chemistry to deepen love and connection and joy. Our guide is acclaimed neuroscientist, founder of the Dose Lab and author of the Dose Effect, TJ Power. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is a Good Life Project, and we'll jump right in after the break. 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We have these four that I'm particularly focused on in my research lab, dopamine, which is super famous, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins, and they very conveniently spell the acronym dose. These chemicals evolved over a huge period of time for our pre-hominin ancestors, 2.5 million years for our homo sapien ancestors, 300,000 years. And they really evolved for a very different experience of life, one that was deeply connected with nature, tons of sunlight, tons of movement, tons of effort. Our environment now is very different to the one that humanity grew up in, and it's causing disruptions to the balance of these chemicals. So what is that disruption doing to us? How's that actually showing up in our lives? Yeah, so with each of these chemicals, and our whole goal with dose lab is to really demystify these rather than just seeing them as sort of like, quote unquote, happy hormones. They have very specific functions. So for example, how it may show up for us is, if our dopamine level was very low, we'd find it really hard to take action towards any form of goal. So if you were like, I need to work hard on a project, or I need to get myself to go to the gym, or I need to spend longer cooking so that I can eat healthier. If the dopamine is low, it's very hard to get momentum. Oxytocin is much more about the love and connection we feel. If you're feeling lonely and disconnected and potentially struggling with your confidence about who you are, that could be oxytocin. Serotonin explores our energy levels and the stability of our mood. If your mood is very fluctuating, you're thinking a lot in your brain, you're very worried, and you're very tired, that would be serotonin. And then endorphins really help us to tolerate stress through physical action. If you're feeling very, a lot of tension inside you, stressed out, angry, frustrated, it's going to be tricky there. And the useful thing about understanding your own dose is that if you end up not feeling good, for whatever reason, you're then going to be able to create a game plan as we'll explore today as to how you could alleviate that challenge. So I mean, here's my curiosity around this. The sort of like quote symptoms that you just listed out, what so many of us have felt. We've moved in and out of, sometimes stayed in for long windows of time, sometimes it's sort of like passing, a lack of motivation, a lack of energy, or a lack of a feeling of disconnection or isolation, stress, mood fluctuations. We live in a world where it's really easy for us to point to all of these things happening around us as, oh, this is why it's happening. So we have all these external circumstances, these external stimuli that somehow we can look at and say, this is why I'm feeling this way. This is why I just can't get up out of bed. This is why I can't motivate to go and move my body or eat healthier. This is why I'm feeling disconnected. We can point to all these different things that exist outside of us. And what you're offering is, I don't want to, I want to run my head around this. You're not necessarily saying all those things aren't true and all those things are not, in fact, contributors, but it's a yes and and maybe we're actually not looking as much about what's happening internally in our brain. Yeah, I think it's great to have awareness, for example, understanding that the food system is a complicated one and it can really disrupt the chemical balance within our system or the phones could disrupt us. Awareness and understanding is an amazing first step. So you can have that, okay, so this is causing that, but what we're really trying to do is provide really achievable actions that people can take so they can actually get themselves out of these states. And when we learn about these brain chemicals as well, it's not necessarily just about learning what happens if the chemical is not in balance and if we're not feeling good. It's really about learning what happens if the chemical is really, really thriving. And I think in general with mental and physical health, rather than kind of the mindset of running away from feeling bad, I think learning to chase feeling really, really good is actually often something that will lead to better results. So once you're on a satellite, in case if my dopamine is charged up, I'm going to feel super focused and driven towards my goals or oxytocin, I'm going to feel a lot of deep love and fulfillment and safety within my life. Once you chase feeling really good on these chemicals, it can be pretty profound. What about modalities that are often pointed to as a way to sort of like fix all the types of things that you just listed? Because we talk about behavioral modification therapy of just have discipline, change your environment, your structure, technology, can we harness technology to do this? And of course, pharmaceutical interventions, medication, these are things that for all the things that you just listed out, people generally turn to these different modalities, these interventions to try and fix them or feel better or get into the state of mind that you listed out. How are these working and how are these also not working in the context of what we're talking about? Yeah, interesting. There's a variety you mentioned there. I think behavioral change is right at the core of what we're really aiming towards. I think our behavior is misaligned to what our body is evolutionarily desiring. So I think anything down the lane of behavior change can be powerful. It needs to be very deeply rooted with an internal motivation, though. It can't just be like, oh, I heard on Instagram that this is good for you. So I'm going to do it too. It needs to be something that feels truthful to you and feels genuinely important to the direction you're wanting to head towards in your life. I think therapy is magical. I think I've personally navigated a huge amount of grief. I grew up with OCD, which has been super tricky in my brain. I've had some great therapeutic interventions. I think it serves an important purpose, but without significant behavior change, I don't think therapy can solve the entire thing. Like if you're going through significant grief, but you're having fantastic therapy, but you're also drinking a lot every day of alcohol, then it really disrupts the capacity for that therapy to be successful. Technological interventions. I think some can be great. I think things like wearable devices can be motivating. I think they can also be complicated. I think they can actually dissuade you from how you're feeling. They can always convince you you're not feeling good, but maybe you were. So I think there's nuance with these different approaches. I think really it comes down to deeply learning to listen to your own intuition. Like I see these brain chemicals as almost like our friends that live within our system and they're simply trying to guide you towards your greatest experience of life. If you make them unhappy, they're going to create some tricky symptoms within you that are going to try and get you away from that state. If you make them happy, they're going to say, good job, keep heading down that lane. The more you build a relationship with them and almost a conversation with them, I think the better you can feel. I think we're just in a world, I like to call our world dopamine land now, where we're so in our heads and so focused on more and more and more digital stimulation. I think our general relationship with having a good feeling and connection with what's going on in our body is reducing. I think wearables on top of that is outsourcing it even further. I then think with the advent of AI and how much we're utilizing that, I think also outsourcing our capacity to think deeply is a challenge. I'm someone that's very pro-tech, like I love tech, but I do think there's a really specific balance to strike with it in order for humanity to thrive and live in harmony with it. Yeah, I'm right there with you. I'm not a lot of it by any means. I surround myself with technology all day every day, and yet I'm also deeply aware of the fact that on any given moment, it can both give and take from you. When we talk about the chemicals that you mentioned, like that shorthand dose, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and dorphin, those are not the only four chemicals that exist. Why focus just on those four? Yeah, these are the ones that I went deep into throughout my time at university, so I was just learning a huge amount about them. Dopamine really was the beginning for me of understanding more about on neurochemistry, very conveniently with the acronym, and this is just by chance. Dopamine is really the first chemical to work on because it's the motivational chemical that will enable you to have the desire to do things with the others. Dopamine, because it's just getting so significantly influenced by the modern world, it's the only chemical we've learned how to hijack and alter artificially. Oxytocin, because I actually believe our greatest goal in humanity as humans is actually to acquire oxytocin and not dopamine. I think currently we're in the pursuit of the wrong goal as a species. I think oxytocin is very important to pursue how do we create more love in our life and more connection, both with ourselves and others. Serotonin, because it's so influenced by food, nutrition, and time outdoors, and they are integral factors to the circadian rhythm and a huge variety of areas. Then I'm fascinated by endorphins because of how deeply they influence our ability to tolerate stress. I think the modern mind is stress. I think our ancestors minds are also stressed by getting chased by bears and all kinds of things, but those forges seem to encapsulate a really great insight into how to approach living in this world today. Yeah, that makes sense to me. If you think about, okay, so if we sort of shorthand dopamine as motivation, we shorthand oxytocin as connection, we shorthand serotonin as mood and energy and endorphin as stress or de-stressing, those four qualities, they play a huge role. If we have some neurochemical that is directly associated with our ability to experience them at a level which is nourishing to us, it makes sense that we would really want to try and do that as much as we can. I want to go through your methodology, which you shorthand is a dose effect. In each one of these different chemicals, before we talk about some of the ways that we can influence them also, one of the curiosities for me is are these four different chemicals, things where there's an endogenous version of them, a pill, a shot where you literally take it and in the blink of an eye, get what you need? Or are these things that are actually much harder to control then or are there risk factors in doing that even if it was available? Yeah, so dopamine and serotonin would be the main ones you could influence endogenously through medication and things like that. We have all kinds of medication like Adderall and Ritalin that will influence your dopamine pathway. We have selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs like Citalopram and Surchveline that will influence serotonin. Those are definitely paths that can support these brain chemicals. I think it's always, I didn't pursue the psychiatry route. I pursued more of the behavioral change route. So I think whether you're taking a medication to support them or not, I think behavioral change is very useful for all. On the oxytocin lane, in research, you can utilize intranasal oxytocin. You can inhale oxytocin to check how things are operating in different studies. We can go into different things that can occur there in our conversation. In dolphins, you can't really do that. You need to physically push the body in some way to get those to rise. Typically, I feel the behavioral influence on them is the best way to go. They're built in abundance inside our body and we can just expand and increase how much it can do so. Yeah, so these are four things that we have the ability to manufacture inside of us. We don't actually need them externally. Although, as you were just describing oxytocin intranasally, like as a nasal spray, I'm thinking, isn't that sort of the classic love potion that's been fabled in so many different ways? Because effectively, if that is the feel good, I want to be around other people, I guess, feel a deep sense of connection. It's kind of an interesting way to do it. Yeah, I'm pleased to have hit the market as a product that everyone can take. Humans are low in oxytocin. So I think if it came out as a pharmaceutical drug, I think it would be a big thing. So I'd rather humans desire it through actual connection with humans. From a research point of view, it's interesting to see what happens with different scenarios. But yeah, I'm definitely in general, like in my true nature, just more on the natural path to getting these chemicals up, where it's possible. Yeah, and I love that approach also. Let's kind of jump into the four different ones in more detail and explore some of the ideas, some of the things we might do to harness them. So starting out with dopamine. So you mentioned that this is the neurochemical, which is really connected to motivation. Take me a little bit deeper into what dopamine is and what it does to us. Yeah, so dopamine is definitely super famous now. It's probably the most famous of the four chemicals. And whilst now we kind of hear the word dopamine, and we might think about social media dopamine hits, like that's a classic thing, oh yeah, apparently you get dopamine off social media that would be something that may be in someone's mind. We might also think about things like cold water exposure that's got very popularized, the ice baths and stuff. That's another thing that can influence dopamine. Right how it's core, it evolved within our brain to ensure that we would enjoy the experience of pursuing hard things for our ancestors. And I continue to refer to our ancestors because the brain did that for hundreds of thousands of years. And then for the last 30 years, we started massively changing the human experience. Like even if you go back 100 years, life was still a lot more effort, a lot more discipline, a lot more natural in terms of food, a lot more social connection, better sleep. Like humanity really changed about 30 years ago. This is called the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis. Originally, we had to scratch rocks together for five hours to make fire. We had to hunt for days, build shelter to survive cold winters. Dopamine would come into our brain and give us the desire to pursue survival. And then it would reward us when we were aligning ourselves to that. So when the fire did eventually get created, when we were building the hut and nearly finished building the hut when we found the food. And it really wants us to experience long term success. So even something as basic as tidying your house as an example of slowly building dopamine in your brain. It's boring. It's not particularly fun, but it creates a feeling of satisfaction. The real thing that has got dopamine, I was about to say almost a swear word there, but has really got dopamine held is the phone. The phone has given us this capacity to attain the feeling of hunting an animal for three hours, but within one second of getting a phone in our hand. And that's very confusing for how this chemical operates. Yeah. So it's almost like, you know, we've evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to have this chemical to that both motivates us to do hard things, largely probably historically based on, okay, that's how we survive. And then gives us a really good feeling when we do it. So that we want to do it again. And then what you're saying is more recently, the phones is basically hijacking this impulse and giving us that flooding sensation, but in a very different way. And I would imagine dysfunctional. Yeah, I mean, to say this further, just so you can visualize in your brain exactly what's happening here. We have an area of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. It's called the VTA. And you can think of this as like your dopamine factory, where your brain is literally manufacturing dopamine vesicles, like little dopamine bubbles, tiny little things, but it can manufacture them. You then have something called your nucleus accumbens, which is your reward center in the brain a little bit further along from the VTA from the factory. In that scenario there, I was talking about tidying your home, or you can think about this with anything, the hunting, the building, the making the fires. What's happening in your brain is your brain is putting in effort. So your factory starts to generate dopamine because it's thinking, okay, this human's putting in effort, it's going to need its motivational chemical. And occasionally it will ship these dopamine vesicles, these bubbles towards the reward center in order to create a feeling of satisfaction whilst we're in the pursuit of the goal. So as you were building the shell, so you'd be like, oh, it's looking pretty good. This is looking pretty safe. And you get little hits of dopamine just like going towards the reward center. And during the effort, the factory would be replenishing, we'd get a nice bit of reward in the reward center. Great. In the phone, when we open the phone, there's obviously no effort involved to experience the pleasure in our brain. Once you start scrolling one of those short video feeds, you're experiencing deep experiences of pleasure with no effort. So what happens is the factory starts mass shipping the bubbles towards the reward center going, oh, nice, this is really good, this is really good. After a period of time, if you look back at the factory, there's not been anyone working on generating more dopamine. So suddenly the factory gets very low in that resource. And when we're in that kind of apathetic state, we can't concentrate, we can't be bothered to do anything, we're out on computer and we're just clicking around on loads of different things and not really actually doing the hard task that we know we need to do. That's because this factory is very low in this chemical. The phone is the sole source of reducing the quantity of dopamine within that. So if that's happening inside of us, is there a risk that over time, is there a sort of like a dopamine resistance type of thing where the nucleus comes and just gets flooded and flooded and flooded because we're scrolling on a phone for hours and hours and hours and seeing the quick hit on the video and this and that. And then do we get to a point where the same volume of dopamine no longer gives us the same feeling of satisfaction or joy or relation and we just need more and more and more? Yeah, it really does. And from a scientific perspective, there's not yet a name for insulin resistance in the dopamine world. I think one will come in time, for sure. What effectively happens is you have a baseline level of dopamine production in that factory, your brain is producing a certain amount of dopamine each and every day and that's based on your genetics and it's also very heavily based on the lifestyle you've had. If I took a 14-year-old hunter-gatherer that's in the Hudson right now in Central Africa, his brain would be manufacturing a ton of dopamine because he's expected to do so much. If I took a 14-year-old in a local school near here that might spend all day scrolling social media and not doing lots, his brain wouldn't need to manufacture much dopamine and effectively you can imagine if the brain is getting super exhausted by shipping so much dopamine to the reward center and not manufacturing much of it, what it starts to do in response is just goes, can't cope with how low we're getting in dopamine because of how much you're sending to the reward center. So I'm just going to produce less for you. Very similar to what happens in terms of insulin as well. So then the dopamine starts producing less and less and then when it's a bit of a downward spiral because reward stops feeling as good, we're not generating as much of the motivation chemical, so then we want to do less hard things, keeping our home tidy, exercising, working, connecting and we pursue more and more of the quick hits and it's like this journey towards very low levels of dopamine, which huge amount of humanity is now there. The good thing is this system can respond fast. So if you start taking the right course of action, the brain again will begin to regenerate dopamine in a healthy way. We think of dopamine primarily as a reward chemical, that's kind of how we've been taught to understand dopamine. Dopamine is caused much more about just being in the pursuit of something rather than just receiving reward. This is why the phones are so disruptive and a chap called Schultz from Cambridge University had a huge discovery about 20 years ago where he found that dopamine levels are actually at their highest, not once we achieve the thing we're looking for, it's actually just before that. And that would make sense evolutionarily, if I was trying to actually catch a deer or like an antelope in the wild, I don't need the most dopamine in my brain once I've got it. I need it just before, so I've got the peak level of focus and motivation and in a scenario like that where suddenly you can't pursue the goal that you had been pursuing for a long period of time and you can't get that reward from it, it's very tricky, the brain can crash and this also happens when people win the lottery, when celebrities reach the pinnacle of success. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. The most technologically complex FIFA World Cup ever? Just another day for Verizon Business. 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So, and this is one of the things you write about, like the role of pursuit and the role of goals as a mechanism to effectively harness or regenerate dopamine so that you can get the feeling that you want to have. So this is one of the techniques that we can think about. You also explore the notion of flow states and the relationship to dopamine. Take me there. Yeah, so flow state is this idea of a really deep immersion in a task. And it was initially really understood and conceptualized by a chap called Mihail Chikzentmahai. And he discovered through watching athletes and musicians and a variety of different domains, people entering really deep states of high performance and focus. And you see this primarily within the sporting environments. If you're watching the Wimbledon final, you might see the player is just in this deep, deep state of flow. You might see an NFL, baseball, all kinds of things. In that state, our dopamine level rises a lot in a really nice, healthy and natural way. And for humanity, originally, for our ancestors, flow state would have just been a daily occurrence, hours and hours of flow state. Like I love watching this show called Primal Survivor, where this guy goes and visits these different tribes that are still here today. And the different genders and different age roles have all different functions from creating tools to building to hunting. But regardless, they spend hours on end just focusing on one thing, a really deep state of focus, not really thinking about anything else. In the modern world, we're rarely entering deep flow state. You and I in this conversation throughout an hour, as our brain gets more and more immersed in this, that's almost a flow state type experience, because our brains aren't currently clicking on our email and WhatsApp and checking Instagram and all kinds of things. In our day to day life, when we are just working on our computers, typically flow state is far from the reality of what happens. Like if I were trying to write my book, for example, if I write one paragraph and then go on WhatsApp, one paragraph, go on WhatsApp, one, I'm never getting anywhere close to flow state. And getting into this deep state of immersion in work or in personal creative activities is really important. Yeah. And I think on a day to day basis, it is one of the things that is increasingly hard to access, especially as we have technology all around us and notifications turned on. What are some of the things that we can do to make it easier for us to actually be able to access that state on a regular basis without just completely isolating ourselves from humanity? Yeah. I think I met you guys this an hour in the process of my next book. So I've really got to get dialed in on entering flow state. And the sort of considerations I'd be taking is if you're working with other people, if you have colleagues or teammates or maybe even people in your family, you need to make sure people are aware that you're about to try and enter this state so that they can understand that interruptions are really not particularly conducive to you getting there. If you're in a working environment where people are expecting you to reply every two minutes, it's important for them to know I'm just about to get in flow state. It's going to be beneficial to my work if I get there. And you don't have to do this all day. Like I wouldn't expect myself to be in 10 hours of flow state, but it's just like a nice 60 minute block or like a 30 minute block. It takes about 15 minutes for the brain to get into a deeper state of focus. So at the beginning, it's hard. Your brain is battling for distraction. Eventually, your brain starts coming to terms with the fact that your brain wants to be isolated on just one thing. Typically, our brain is scanning an environment, just scanning, scanning, scanning. Then eventually, if the brain's like, okay, I'm going to go into deep focus, it really can. It just takes a bit of warm up time to get there. So I'll make sure that my phone is not in this room. If my phone is in this room while I try to enter flow state, zero chance. I'll make sure things like WhatsApp, LinkedIn, email, everything is shut so that there's no opportunity for me just when I get bored or something's challenging just to click because if it's open, you're going on it 100%. Then once that's done, I'll typically start a stopwatch from zero minutes on Google. So I'll just go on like stopwatch just like a basic one and I'll start it. Then I'll begin the task and eventually I will find myself desperate for something else, like desperate for distraction, desperate for stimulation and a quick feeling of dopamine. Before I let myself do it, I'll always go back to the stopwatch and I'll just see where I'm at. Like am I at eight minutes? Am I at two minutes? Am I at 20 minutes? I'll always know that beyond 15 minutes proper focus is coming my way and I'll use it to motivate me. Like if I get to 14 minutes and I click on it, then I think, well, if I go on LinkedIn right now and get some crappy dopamine out of there, I'm just resetting back to zero minutes. So that's pointless. So I'll kind of utilize it to motivate me. When I first started doing this on my first book, I literally had no attention span at all. Gradually as you gamify this and train this over time, you can get into deep states of focus. It's just practice and strengthening the muscle. Like I have the same on my phone. I have really useful blockers that enable me to reduce my social media usage and stuff like that. And tech is such a different dopamine addiction to anything else because if you want to quit smoking, you obviously wouldn't put a pack of cigarettes on your desk and then like expect yourself to not smoke. But tech just doesn't work like that. Like we have to use it and setting up parameters, like putting like almost a padlock on a pack of cigarettes is almost what we have to do to be honest. And with the social media, for example, I have a blocker that enables me to only go on Instagram three times a day. So I could use all my three times when I wake up if I wanted to. But that would then mean I couldn't have Instagram 24 hours. So I then have learned to kind of study it out 10am, 3pm, 8pm is my moments to go on Instagram on my phone. And I think systems like you've shared there, like freedom or whatever it is that you can utilize to block your computer or your phone are almost just essential. They have to be used. Yeah, that's actually a great idea. And I need to actually set up some sort of blocker for my social media too. Oh, I think. And also then when you go on it, it's actually much more enjoyable because social media gets really boring if you go on it all the time. But when I go on it, like tonight, 8pm will come. And I'll be like, no, it's not been on Instagram five hours, quick checks and messages, whatever it might be, watch a few videos. And social media in small bursts like that is absolutely fine. We can tolerate it. But it's the social media checks in every moment of boredom that are creating massive disruption. Yeah. And I think one of the things we struggle with also is for us to actually say, I literally need a mechanism on my device that stops me from being able to do this, you know, like with the exception of this agreed upon window. It also kind of makes us have to admit that that we failed at being able to do it ourselves. And we don't like that. We don't like to actually sit there and say, okay, so it's me against the device and device is winning. And I need, I need help, like either from person or technology to actually make this happen. And but they're, you know, that's sort of like a prerequisite, you have to acknowledge about that I need help with this thing. We do. As a species, we need help to manage tech. Tech is a monumental force that we have to manage. And it's going to make humanity better in so many ways as it already is. But I think it's the number one thing for a human being to be focusing on is their relationship with technology, because we're only in tech's infancy as well. Like over the next few decades, AI will evolve rapidly, we'll get glasses, headsets, all kinds of things are coming our way. And some are just going to end up in doom, scrolling, consumption, distraction land. And then that's going to be really hard to live a life like that, where some will utilize its assets for good, and also prioritize connection and stillness and creation and so on. And I think it's very, very important to, to make massive priority in your life. So great. And like, we're not far away from a time where, you know, like glasses will be readily available at reasonable prices for everybody that will project whatever it is on your device into, you know, the lens of your glass. So it's not even a matter of taking out your device anymore, or looking for it. It's literally going to be in your field of vision. And that freaks me out a little bit. I'm nervous for that day. And I watched all the latest tech events. I always watch the tech events, because I'm in this weird position where I, I love tech, like I've watched every afternoon, it's about 13, like I literally cast them on my TV on YouTube. And I watched them, I love it. But I also just feel the massive disruption it's causing. And the glasses is going to take things to a whole new level. If you can sit with your partner and have your Instagram reels feed to the right of their face whilst you're talking to them, that's the new, new world for humanity to navigate. And I think whilst it's somewhat manageable now, it's time for us to individually take action and start taking control of the relationship. Yeah. And I think that also kind of brings us to the, the, the O and DOS or the second neurochemical oxytocin. Take me to this a little bit more. Yeah. So in neuroscience, we like to call oxytocin the great facilitator of life. It really is that it creates the desire to bond with humans, to care for humans, to procreate, to build a family, to love people. And it's a chemical that is underwhelmed and low as a result of this dopamine land that I like to call it, that we're living in. Because in simple terms, in a moment where you're lying in bed with your partner and you're both scrolling your phones rather than talking to each other or cuddling, dopamine is winning in that moment. The same as when you're with your kids, your family, your friends, and a huge amount of the time in moments where oxytocin has its opportunities, but yes, connection, love, eye contact, questions, listening. In those moments, dopamine keeps winning. And originally for our ancestors, dopamine was just a prerequisite to then experiencing oxytocin. And what I mean by that is if you watch these tribes, they spend all day hunting and they have a good time. They're laser focused, they get a lot of like accomplishment and reward and achievement from the hunting. But their real joy comes from when they get home from the hunting and they all laugh around the fire and connect and have fun and tell stories and bond. That's really the aim of life for them, and the hunting enables it to occur. The modern environment has flipped that whereby we quote unquote hunt all day on our computers by looking for dopamine down that lane, financial reward and so on. It gets to the evening when we're like, okay, now originally we would just be laughter and chat and conversation and love. But in reality, it's Netflix and scrolling and sugar and just more and more dopamine. And dopamine is designed in our brains who never provide the feeling of satisfaction and true fulfillment because our brain is programmed to just more, more, more dopamine to help us survive. Oxytocin is a very fulfilling, nourishing chemical that if it's prioritized, you feel way more full and way more satisfied with your experience of life. Is there almost like an inverse relationship between dopamine and oxytocin? There are times where they would increase together. If you were having sex with someone that you felt a deep feeling of love with, both of them would rise together. If you were intimately connected with someone that you had no emotional connection with, then it would just be purely dopamine and no oxytocin. There are times when they interconnect, but in the modern environment, dopamine is distracting us from oxytocin massively. And one of the big parts of oxytocin is feeling love for what you do have in your life, like a deep feeling of gratitude. Everyone's aware of grass-tutor is important. We really lack as a species a consistent approach to how we engage with grass-tutor, I think for many of us. But oxytocin is this nice thing, oh yeah, I love my life a lot. I've got what I need. I've got safety. I've got comfort. I've got people and so on. Dopamine is I need more, I need more, I need more. And I think a lot of us spend more time in our brain in the eye, I need more than I love what I have. Yeah. What about group or team activities? And this can be in work, it can be as a family, you're doing something together, it can be sports. When you're in pursuit of something, but also you're working together really intimately and maybe really enjoying the quality of the relationship along the way and that facilitates the pursuit of the goal too. Would that be potentially an example of where they're both rising together? That would be a perfect example and cohesion within a group and contribution to a group outside of yourself just for the sake of contributing to that group is magic for oxytocin. Then in the pursuit of a goal, it's going to be the additional rewarding sensation of dopamine rising as well. And interestingly, I played on the weekend on Sunday, I played a sport called Rounders, I don't know in the US if you know Rounders, but it's basically like a mini version of baseball. Effectively, if you think about the difference between England and the US in terms of country size and population, it's like that, but for Rounders and baseball. And we play in groups of eight and you're just like, it's a little bat with one hand rather than a big bat and you just hit it and run around some area. And it was unbelievable how a group of strangers were suddenly best friends in our separate teams and how everyone was high-fiving and connecting and bonding. And that experience is so rewarding as a human. It was like everyone was the most fun I've had in ages. I love today. It was so good. It was so good. It was just like a family come together of random different families and not an activity that any of us do regularly. And it was so amazing just because me, I'm always observing people's state and people all show up kind of exhausted, but socially awkward, but isolated. That's just like the modern humans a little bit like that. By the end of it, everyone is actually buzzing, so happy. And that's because of that group cohesion towards a goal. Yeah. And this is one of the things that you talk about under oxytocin also is the role of socializing in actually consistently creating more oxytocin. Yeah. We need to socialize. We are a deeply social species. It's what's brought us as humanity to this point is how well we work as groups and how much we want to be around each other. There are some species in the animal kingdom that thrive alone. If you take a polar bear, for example, that really isolated species, they can cruise around on their own, they can thrive like that. Humans are not like that. We did not survive in the jungle unless we were in a group. If you were isolated on your own, you were terrified and very, very anxious because you're not physically capable of taking on the animal kingdom as a human as a group obviously we're super smart, very good at coordinating together. And socializing is reducing massively in the modern world because we're falsely satisfying it through our phones. And what I mean by that is if you spend all evening looking at people, hearing their voices, hearing their laughter on your social media feed, your brain doesn't quite understand. It's very hard for our brains to comprehend that we're looking at a glass electric panel that's a video feed of another reality. That's so confusing for our natural brain that we have within us. And if we just deleted all the phones and technology, everyone would be out there trying to socialize because we'd all be so like bored of just being in our own company. And I think the more discipline you have with your phone to scroll social media less, the more your brain instinctively, and this comes back to the intuitive relationship we have with our system, the more the brain starts going okay, so I'm not getting it via social media, I'm going to have to get it from actual social. And it makes you much happier if it's from the real thing. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Hello, it's William Hansen here from the Luxury Podcast. Now, I've got something very lovely to share with you. Lavatory paper, but elevated with Who Gives a Crap Bamboo toilet paper, our current sponsors. It's made from super soft, sustainable bamboo materials and wrapped in beautifully designed paper packaging that genuinely improves the look of one's bathroom, which is rare praise for Lou paper. And better still, Who Gives a Crap denates 50% of profits to help provide clean water and toilets to communities around the world. 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You also talk about the role of giving or generosity, which we've kind of been touching on because in a way when you're socializing or like that, when you're playing rounders with all these other people, in a weird way it's almost like you're, especially in a group activity, it's like you're giving to everybody else by your participation and shared pursuit of something. But just more broadly, talk to me about how generosity or giving influences actually to us. Yeah, so the brain is so hardwired to not be selfish at its core because if we were a selfish species, again, it would have just really harmed our potential for survival. If I was to go on a walk and find a load of food and think, F the tribe, I'm just going to eat all this myself, that's not going to be very useful. Like our brain has to be programmed. Like I found food, take it to the group, take it to the group, contribute to the group. And the same with all the hard activities, making the fires. It was all about group survival. And the modern environment is a bit more self-focused. We spend a lot of time in our own head thinking about our own experience of life. We've got social media profiles. We're constantly looking at pictures of ourselves, videos of ourselves, our own name. It's very self-focused in comparison to what humanity was a long time ago. But even if you go about 50 years, there was more of a community type focus. And when you look in family environments, the West has become pretty isolated in terms of family-based contribution to our parents and elders and stuff at that in comparison to the East. And we all know, like when you do something nice for another human, it just feels good. And that's just useful, the fact that that's a reality. It doesn't mean contribute to others just to make yourself feel good. It's very useful that doing something kind for another human helps. And you can think about this in loads of minor scenarios. Like even this morning, I got home from my walk and I live on a street in a town and there were a number, there were like four of the bins from the different apartments here where I live. And it's not my duty to take all those bins into everyone's houses. I could leave them on the road. It's not, I don't have a responsibility to do that. But in my brain, I then look at the bins and I think that's contribution that helped them out. And I don't do it just for me, but I also know in my brain that will have built oxytocin that makes me feel more connected, more like I'm contributing and consciously thinking, am I contributing? And also just recognizing the contribution you're making to your kids, your family, your partner, your work, acknowledging it within your own mind is important. Yeah, I love that. I love the idea also, like when you take the bins in for somebody else, where they didn't expect it, it wasn't your job, you just did it. It makes you feel good. And at the same time, if somebody comes out and they're like, oh, I got to go take the bins in and they're like, wait, somebody did this already. And it's like, it almost, I would imagine it creates a little bit of a flip in the switch of the way that you feel about society at large. It's sort of like, you know what, like there's a lot of that stuff happening around. Like maybe I don't agree with a lot of people, but there's kindness around me too. And this was just like a little tiny reminder in a way that it didn't see coming. Yeah, your brain wants to feel like it's in a group that's working together. It doesn't want to feel like a super isolated species. And that's what I used to live in central London. And it's really tricky because there was so many people around, but I was like way more isolated than ever because no relationship to all the neighbors in the coffee shops, no one knew who I was. And because it's too many, it's just so many people. And for me, that was tricky. And in that scenario with the bin, I didn't knock on the doors and say, Hey, by the way, I took your bin in. Thank me. Like they'll never have an idea who it was that took the bin in, but it's useful for them. And it's beneficial to me to contribute. Yeah, I love that. Serotonin next up on our list. Take me into this. Yeah, so serotonin is fascinating. 90% of the serotonin within our system is generated in the intestinal lining within our gut, literally in the lining of our gut in our intestine, our serotonin is built. 10% is then generated in the brain. The serotonin in the gut doesn't directly cross the blood brain barrier straight into the brain. But you have something called your vagus nerve, which is reading the state of the gut and then thinking and then relaying that information towards the brain. And our gut really wants a nice calm life, like moments of deep calm and presence. It wants lots of great nutrients in there. It wants lots of good sleep. It wants lots of sunlight throughout the day. Unfortunately, that's quite far from the reality of what it gets. It gets a lot of unnatural nutrients coming into it, poor sleep, a lack of sunlight. And this is the chemical that just wants us all to be running around in the nature in the sunshine, like eating fruit, basically. And the more we can lean towards getting moments like that, the better. So it's sort of like the good mood, good energy chemical. And I think a lot of us have heard of serotonin. There's a huge category of drugs, SSRIs, SNRIs, which are, which effectively, from what my understanding, they don't actually produce more serotonin. What they do is they stop the brain from re-uptaking it more quickly. So it kind of, it sticks around longer so we can experience the effects of it longer. But the effect says calm, relaxed, feel good, like good energy. Gut health then, and probably it's going to be a big surprise for a lot of people listening that so much of this is actually produced in the gut and not in the brain itself. So gut health has got to be a really important part of your serotonin balancing. Yeah, crucial. And I really kind of hold this stance that if I was picking two things that were the most important things for us to focus on for our brain chemistry, it would be food and phones. I think if we get the phone right and we get the food right, I think those can be two big levers that have a big impact. And for our gut, we have a great clinical nutritionist at DOSLAB that's really deeply studying this. We're writing a cool paper on it at the moment. And we have our kind of gut lining within our gut that's enabling us to hold the nutrients that are entering our body, that are entering the gut specifically. When the ultra-processed food type ingredients turn up, I know America is having loads of conversations about ultra-processed food at the moment. I seem to see headlines on that. They begin to disrupt the gut lining effectively because they're very harmful to the gut. They're very toxic and they create little gaps, effectively, little tiny micro holes within our gut that then cause a huge amount of inflammation to happen within the gut. And in our serotonin system, that's the last of its priorities at that point, building serotonin. It begins to focus on detoxification of the challenge that's happening within the gut. And our gut really wants all these natural foods. And that could be a vegetarian diet, it could be a meat diet, but it wants foods that were here on earth before we got here as humanity. When those foods turn up, they break down into a variety of enomino acids like tryptophan. Tryptophan is a key building block for serotonin. And there is a life where you only eat natural foods. I really believe it's be possible. For many people that are within our dose of that process, they've come from lots of UPF diets to diets where there is literally zero UPF. And that could seem almost extreme. It could seem like diet culture, but it's really not. It's not dieting to only eat natural foods. It's really just what the body has wanted for a long time. And the longer you go with just natural foods, the more you're craving for this modern diet begins to reduce. Yeah, that makes sense. And UPF, for those who don't know that, are going to be ultra processed foods, that's what we're talking about. Ultra processed food. And there's a lot of stuff in ultra processed foods that's very intentionally designed to really impact how our body connects with food. We have these two hormones within the gut, ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin makes us really hungry. Leptin makes us full. The UPFs are quite strategically designed to make our ghrelin go crazy. So we're super hungry and our leptin to switch off. So we're not full at all. And when you eat like a bag of Doritos, for example, you can just nail the Doritos. Nothing really changes in your satiation. Whereas when you're eating some chicken, a steak, salmon, fruit, nuts, your brain begins to go. Cool. Pretty satisfied with that. That was great. And that's the sort of feeling you're wanting to create with food. Yeah, I love that. Nature and sunlight are also things. And you kind of reference this. Like for us to be out in nature and to be out in the sun. And I know for me, you know, just intuitively, this has been my go to. If I'm kind of cranky, if I'm not feeling, if I'm kind of low energy, I'm incredibly fortunate to live in both of Colorado. I can walk out my front door and be surrounded by breathtaking nature and often a lot of sun different than the UK, whether it's not nearly as much sun. But these are like I've just, I've seen within a matter of minutes, these just have a profound effect on my mood. Yeah. And that really is serotonin in action. If the mood stabilizes or improves, it's serotonin that's coming into play there. And a lot of the cool research comes out of Japan around nature and serotonin. The Japanese created a concept called forest bathing, which has been really powerful for Japan over the last 20 years. They created this term called Karoshi, which is someone that's really burnt out from intense experiences within urban environments with work and technology and people that are very burnt out and mentally exhausted. And they started prescribing all the way back in 2008, something called Shinrin Yoku, which translates to forest bathing, just to see if it would have any impact on their mental state. Rapidly, you see what's called serum serotonin rise within the brain and body. And a great scientist called Dr. Keeling has looked into this. If you're interested in that real deepening into nature, if you search his name of forest bathing, it's pretty cool. And it's just really important to understand that we literally spent millions of years walking around in a forest. And then now we're not doing that. Like we could never even get away from it. Like nature was all there was. And when we're in a forest or any form of nature, mountains, rivers, parks, the brain effectively is getting a signal that it's home. It basically thinks, I'm at home now. Like I'm in a safe environment. The serotonin rises, the nervous system regulates. And one of the big benefits in the modern world is we get very hyper stimulated by these computers and phones. And then sometimes if you go and try and sit on the sofa and chill out, like if I told you to just go and sit on the sofa and do nothing after this, your brain would be like really, rapidly operating. It'd be quite hard to just sit and chill. Nature offers such a perfect way to kind of calmly de-stimulate the brain so that then you can properly relax. After these calls this evening, I'll always go and get a bit of nature to chill me out so that when I relax, I actually relax. And I'll be able to be off my phone. If you just go from tech to tech to tech to tech, it's very hard to ever enter like a nice peaceful high serotonin stay. Yeah, I mean, I've experienced that so many times. Oftentimes, I'll actually, I'll, I'll hike in the middle of the day because I'll have an intense morning, maybe we're recording, maybe we're just like doing something. And then I know that from my brain to actually be able to function the way I want it, maybe I want to drop into a writing mode in the afternoon. I've actually got to get into nature because I need the reset to be able to drop back into the mode where I'm like, okay, so now I can, like I have this new window where I can feel good. I can drop in and do really good work again. And one of the, sorry, I was just going to add that one of the big recommendations I would have is to really create a framework in your brain where headphones don't come with you into nature anymore. That can seem unusual because I understand like podcasts are really cool, definitely, given that we're having this conversation. But I think there needs to be time where it's just you in your brain, even if it feels uncomfortable. For me, it actually feels quite uncomfortable at first when I go into nature without stimulation. Those thoughts have their moments to come through, different challenges and worries. Eventually though, once they've had their moments to be heard, a nice peaceful state can arise and a lot of creativity can come from there, a lot of gratitude and love and goal planning and direction can come from there. So nature, headphone free, heaven for the serotonin. Yeah, so agree with that. Let's drop into the last one here in Dorfind. Yeah, so I briefly mentioned at the beginning that stress really evolved as something that was designed to be supported with physical action. And what I basically mean by that is in the modern world, we have loads of what we call micro stresses that are stressing us out. You might see someone's political opinion, you think, oh, I hate that. That's really annoying. That stressed me out. And then something with your bank account and then like 10 emails come through, and then something happens with your wife. And it's just a lots of tiny little things stressing us out. Originally, the main things that stress us out were starving to death or chased by an animal. And those would have equally been extremely stressful. But in those scenarios, your body is doing one thing, it's moving hard and fast. It's going to be moving a lot in order to tolerate the experiences coming its way to find the food, to survive the threat. And in Dorfind's basically evolved as this chemical that in intense stress, it would come in when our body was physically taking action to take the stress back out of our mind so that we could survive. So you didn't run away going, oh my God, I'm going to die. Your brain just got locked in. Similarly, when you're hungry, you weren't like, oh, I'm so hungry. I'm so hungry. I'm going to die. You just got locked in to try and find the food. Nowadays, with all those micro stresses that I mentioned before, what typically happens is things stress us out and our body remains dead still. And it just swallows more and more and more stress. And you'll notice when you exercise, you get this stress relief experience or when you go for a walk or when you hike. And our body really wants us to physically release the stress from our body through movement by activating endorphins. Yeah. So movement is one of the key things to activate endorphins, which then helps us sort of de-stress or release the stress. Yeah, definitely. Like after work, you never want to go straight to the sofa. You always want to move your body first, get a bit of an endorphin release. Whenever you have the energy and the motivation to work out or walk up a hill or even just like go to the park and sprint like 20 meters, just anything that will really get the body to activate is going to be super, super beneficial. Then there's a variety of other ways we can activate the body. Things like stretching, super powerful. That could be things like yoga if you're quite committed down that lane. Even just a few minutes of standing up, stretching your body in between tasks, in between calls, really powerful. For me, I've also started making a conscious effort to actually have calls with headphones in, ironically, after I just mentioned headphones there, but just walking around like I literally walk around my town here. So that's not necessarily one of my nature experiences. But if ever a work call could be done on the move, definitely do it on the move because your body needs more movement, more stretching. And then we can explore another few lanes if you want to. Yeah. And it's funny. For years, I have, my default has always been to take calls with headphones on and being outside walking. And this is a pre-pandemic time. And then pandemic comes and everybody switches to video as the primary mode of meetings and conversations. And I still, when people want to meet with me, I'm like, look, if there's an important reason where we need to be on screen, then let's do video. But if there's not, I'm going to default to the phone. I'm going to have a headphone on. And you're probably going to hear a little bit of outside noise when we're walking. And people kind of like for a hot minute, they're like, oh, that's weird because everyone's so devaulted to being in a chair in front of a screen now. And then they're kind of like, you know what, I'm going to do the same thing. I'm putting on my earbuds and I'm going to go out and walk around and talk to you too. And it's, it's, it's a little jarring to sort of like have that reset. But then I find it, it's so much better for me. I think so much better when I'm moving my body. You know, like that. I'm just tuned in a different way. And I also feel like I can connect better to people when I'm moving in a weird way. 100%. You can have great conversations in those environments. Like even this afternoon, I had a really important conversation with a director at Harper Collins about my new book. And that would be one of those pressure conversations where a year ago, I would have thought, it has to be on the computer. I've got to be locked in. But with the knowledge of what you've shared there, like if I go for a walk, whilst I have that cool, like I'm going to actually probably communicate in a really effective and clear and creative way. And she also chose to do a walk as well at the same time, which is really cool. And so we're both walking around chatting about this. And that's a great approach to take. Obviously, sometimes you've got to share your screen and present whatever it might be. But if the opportunity presents, take it. We need 10,000 steps a day. And it's actually quite a lot of effort to get there. Yeah, that's so great. Music is also one of the modes that you talk about that affects endorphins, which I thought was really interesting. There's no doubt music for me is one of the great joys. It's one of the mood changers for me. If I'm kind of tired, if I'm kind of stressed out, and I just put on my favorite playlist, and then I go walking and listening to the playlist, or even if it just lie down with headphones on, it just completely transforms my experience in the way that I feel. But I never really thought about it as something that would affect endorphins. Yeah, it's interesting. There's kind of two chemicals that can be at play with music. If you were kind of lying on the sofa listening to some music that you really like, and you were just passively listening to it, and it was calming you and it was regulating your nervous system, that could have a big impact on serotonin, that could help bring your brain into presence. Where endorphins really come into play with music and how it can be so effective for de-stressing you is when you sing or dance to the music, because the body really wants physical activation. If you just sort of like hum to it one day in the car, just hum to a song, then one day really sing to it in the car, and you don't feel good at singing, because it's relevant to how good you are. I'm not a good singer, but I sing a lot now. You'll notice that if you really sing, it creates a very euphoric experience. It's not just calming, it's actually like euphoria to sing. There might be a time in your life where you have really sang with your friends or on your own or in the shower, in the car, a silent disco. Funny, a silent disco is when people have the headphones on, because suddenly they feel like this confidence to sing in front of others, because now I can hear them. Real euphoria can come from singing. For hundreds of thousands of years, singing and chanting was a big part of humanity. A lot of the religious practice involved a lot of singing as well. Singing out loud is something that you might think in your head, well, it's been like a week since I sung out loud, maybe longer, it could be a year since you sung out loud. Singing out loud to music, walking in the car at home, super powerful for the endorphins. Okay, so you just give me permission to strap on headphones next when this conversation ends. Go out in my neighborhood, walk around and sing at the top of my lungs. My neighbors might not love it all that much, but I'm good. They might not be sure about it, but they might ask you what the hell are you doing? And you can say it's my endorphins. You got to do it. Exactly. I'm tuning my brain. I'm giving it what it needs. It's therapeutic. 100%. That's beautiful. Well, love that. And again, we shorthand that as dose, right? We have these four different chemicals. And what I love about this is there are so many different things that we've talked about here. It's not something where you have to go somewhere, we have to buy something where you have to... Yeah. Like these are just accessible interventions. These are things that almost anybody can do. They can customize it the hell or to whatever it is if it's their abilities or limitations, their lifestyle. And so nobody is excluded from the invitation to actually drop in and really experience this dose effect that you described. Definitely. Within the dose effect, within the book, what we basically did was we made it into 20 actions. These are 20 behaviors we study, many of which we've chatted through throughout this. And as you say, there's no cost in any of them. They're all just natural things. The humans are deeply, deeply craving and not quite getting enough of. Some of the things you might be nailing, like you mentioned, you might already be hiking loads in beautiful nature. That's amazing. And for those, it might be really affirming and help you think, cool, that's great that I'm doing that. For others, things like with the phones, for example, more disciplined when you wake up in the evening, more breaks in the, sorry, wake up in the morning, more breaks in the evening, these can be really useful things to add in. Love that. Feels like a great place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase, to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life, I would say to really contribute your family to a really good job of being there for your family. To find a way to create instead of consume all the time. I think humans are such an amazing creative species. And I think it's getting reduced by our consumption. So I'd say create over consume, deeply contribute to your family. And I really just think we need to spend as much time in nature as we possibly can. I think that's the goal. The way to live in harmony with tech is to spend a lot of time in nature balancing it out. Thank you. So let's talk about some of the big a-has and actionable takeaways from this conversation. The thing I'm really thinking about is the framing of the dopamine factory, that image of the ventral, tegmental area, manufacturing these little dopamine vesicles, and the phone mass shipping them toward the reward center with nothing going back into production. It reframes just a lot of what I thought was a motivation problem or a discipline problem into something much more mechanical and honestly much more solvable. A few other things I carry out of this. One, dopamine is the pursuit chemical, not the reward chemical. It peaks before you get the thing, not after. That's why the chase, it just feels better than the arrival so many times. And it's also why losing a meaningful pursuit, whether that's a career, an identity, a physical practice, it can feel like a crash that has nothing to do with how good your life actually looks on paper. The second thing is TJ's argument that we're chasing the wrong chemical as a species. Dopamine is designed to never satisfy. Oxytocin is the fulfillment chemical. And modern life, it keeps us kind of locked in dopamine pursuit while blocking the oxytocin that would actually make us feel like enough. That is a design problem worth sitting with. And finally, the gut serotonin connection. 90% of your serotonin, the feel good chemical for so many of us in a lot of different ways, kind of like the chill, the relaxation chemical, it's built in the lining of your gut. What you eat is a direct input into your mood. That's not a wellness claim. That's just anatomy according to TJ. So this week, pick one of TJ's 20 behaviors, not all 21. The stopwatch method for focus, three scheduled windows for social media, a walk without headphones, one act of contribution to someone who won't even know that you did it. And then notice what shifts. And hey, before you leave, next week, we're sitting down with Dr. Vanda Wright to talk about why most of what you've been told about aging, especially in the context of muscle, is actually data about people who did nothing while they aged to try and stop any of this. The decline curves so many of us fear and have been told is inevitable. It turns out is negotiable. And ages 35 to 45 in particular are the highest leverage window. We'll talk about why. She also makes the case that the door never closes. So be sure to follow Good Light Project wherever you get your podcasts. So you don't miss that conversation or any other episode. And do me a favor, a seven second favor, share this episode with just one person who might need to hear that what they're calling a motivation problem might actually be a chemistry problem. This episode of Good Light Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields, editing helped by Troy Young, Chris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already, follow us wherever you get your podcasts. So you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Light Project. When considering care for a loved one with dementia, you want peace of mind that they'll be in the very best hands with care delivered by expert teams and supported to live life happily, comfortably in a dedicated environment that supports independence. You can expect all of this and more with Southern Down Care Home. 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