Neuroscientist: How To Hack Your Dopamine To Boost Your Mood, Energy, and Focus

I'm going on tour! Come see The School of Greatness LIVE in person! Get my new book Make Money Easy here! Prepare to completely rethink your relationship with technology as neuroscientist TJ Power reveals the shocking truth about what's happening to our brains in the digital age. Drawing from his groundbreaking research and personal struggle with addiction, TJ explains how our modern environment is creating an epidemic of dopamine dysfunction that's sabotaging our ability to focus, feel joy, and connect meaningfully with others. The conversation explores the fascinating evolutionary mismatch between our hunter-gatherer brains and our modern digital environment, with TJ offering a compelling reframe of ADHD as a potential superpower when properly channeled. Whether you're fighting distractions, battling mood swings, or simply feeling numb despite constant stimulation, this episode delivers practical, science-backed strategies to reclaim your focus, energy, and capacity for genuine happiness through what TJ calls "The Dose Effect" – a revolutionary approach to balancing your brain's essential neurochemicals. Buy TJ’s Book The Dose EffectIn this episode you will learn:Why constantly checking your phone (140-170 times daily for most people) is more damaging to your brain than alcohol or other addictionsThe counterintuitive reason people with ADHD often become exceptional performers when they find their passionHow implementing strategic "phone fasts" and scheduled social media times can dramatically improve your mood and focusWhy "quick dopamine" activities like scrolling and porn create numbness while "slow dopamine" activities create fulfillmentThe essential morning routine practice that ancient hunter-gatherers naturally did that modern humans desperately needHow pursuing oxytocin (connection) rather than dopamine (pleasure) leads to deeper life satisfaction and meaningWhy disciplined boundaries around technology actually create greater freedom rather than restrictionFor more information go to https://www.lewishowes.com/1741For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Dr. Caroline Leaf – greatness.lnk.to/1079SCDr. Charan Ranganath – greatness.lnk.to/1632SCDr. Andrew Huberman – greatness.lnk.to/1072SC Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  If you've ever been worried about how certain activities in your life, how they might be affecting your brain? And how it might be causing long-term damage in the future? Then this is the episode for you because we have a powerful conversation with neuroscientist and author TJ Power, who is revealing some eye-opening information around the brain, how our modern lifestyle is disrupting it? And the chemistry in the brain and what we can do about it? We're going to be talking about the shocking truths about how social media affects your brain chemistry, similar to addictive substances? Why quick dopamine activities make you feel increasingly numb to life's real pleasures? And what those pleasures are?

• 0:45Lewis Howes?

  And also a practical three times daily method to break phone addiction that actually works when nothing else does? There's so much scientifically backed information in this episode that I believe you are going to love this. And please share this with one friend. If you know anyone who might be struggling with kind of like brain fog or just feels like their mood has been kind of, well, moody off and on consistently. And they haven't figured out how to unlock that pure present energy throughout daily life. And they just feel like they're kind of been stuck or like trapped in a brain fog. Then make sure to send this to that friend and say, hey, I'm thinking about you. And there's some powerful insights in here that can support you.

• 1:29Lewis Howes?

  And ask them to share their biggest takeaway with you in this episode. This show, The School of Greatness, is all about supporting each other. This community of individuals who've been listening for over 12 years. It's all about supporting each other and just improving the things where we feel stuck or we feel challenged with. And in no way have I figured everything out in life. I've been deep in this work for 12 years. And I'm constantly looking for the best experts to just give me that little edge to continue to either remind me of what I need to keep doing, or give me a new tool to unlock what I can do at this season of life where maybe I haven't faced this challenge yet. So we're all on this journey together. I hope you're getting value out of this.

• 2:12Lewis Howes?

  And again, I hope to see you on my book tour. That's right. I'm going on tour here March 15th through March 25th, 10 days, seven cities, all around the country for the Make Money Easy Book Tour. And if you're looking to create financial freedom and live a richer life and really unlock abundance, then make sure to preorder a copy of my new book right now. Get a ticket over at lewishouse.com/tour to come see me live as I would love to see you, your family, your friends at one of the book stops. And we'll be doing a live taping of the School of Greatness show as well with some big surprise special guests. So go to lewishouse.com/tour right now to get your book, to get a ticket to the book tour as

• 2:56Lewis Howes?

  well. Without further ado, let's dive into this episode right now. Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring TJ Power in the house. Good to see you, sir, and thank you for being here, man.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:11Lewis Howes?

  Very excited about this. You've got a lot of incredible content online. You're a neuroscientist. You've got a book called The Dose Effect, which is about small habits to boost your brain chemistry. And the first thing I asked you off camera was, what is the biggest struggle that humanity has really faced with right now in this season of life? And you said ADHD, the lack of attention to really life and being able to be present, focused on their lives, being distracted a lot.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:40Lewis Howes?

  What do you think is the main cause of ADHD right now? And also, what is the superpower that people with ADHD have if they lean into it?

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think ADHD is a fascinating topic for our world. I think it's something that many humans may have had for thousands of years. I think there would have always been a subset of society that potentially had this lowered baseline dopamine level. There's a brilliant scientist called Volkow, who's done like a lot of research into ADHD and dopamine levels. And you see with those that are genetically born with ADHD that they might have a lower production of dopamine within their brain. So there's that element of the genetic component. We in our modern world, with all the things we've been discussing of social media and porn and sugar, are really disrupting this pathway. So we have some people that are exhibiting it as a result of their genes from when they're born, and a lot of people that are also exhibiting it as a result of the altered modern lifestyle.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Regardless of the cause, it really does create a lot of difficulty for people's lives of inattention and lack of action and procrastination. And it's extremely important that we begin to get it in check and help these people to thrive.

• 4:47Lewis Howes?

  If someone feels like they can't focus, or maybe they've been diagnosed with ADHD, or maybe they feel like, ah, maybe I have it, maybe I don't, but I just know something's off energetically, and I can't stay focused, or I feel a little more depressive at times.

• 5:03Lewis Howes?

  Is there a positive side to having ADHD? Is there some, is there a benefit to having it if someone's able to learn how to harness their ADHD?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  There is for sure. And this is where it gets really fascinating. I do a lot of events around schools, and we have them a lot with ADHD. And I also grew up, grew up as a young guy with ADHD, without necessarily knowing it. It wasn't diagnosed as frequently back then. But I grew up with real difficulty in school, massive inattention, big highs, big lows, a very like addictive personality to anything I engaged with, whether it was healthy stuff or unhealthy stuff. And I began really investigating this world of if someone has ADHD, how can they thrive? Partly selfishly out of like, I really wanted to get going. I wanted a business and I wanted to be able to serve. And I began thinking a lot about our ancestors. The whole of the dose effect is built upon our brains spent 300,000 years running around

• 5:56Speaker 01

  out there, hunting and building and making fire and connecting as small groups. 300,000 years. And nowadays, we spend about 30 years as modern sedentary digital humans. And you can imagine for our bright biochemistry, that's pretty tricky, that change. If you were to look at a hunter gatherer and they grew up with ADHD, for example, so say they had genetically low dopamine, they got to like seven, eight years old and suddenly they're expected to contribute. Maybe they had to start the fire one night, maybe they had to hunt, build, make the food, whatever it may be. They would have had to begin engaging with very challenging, effortful based activities. If you were to compare the hunter gatherer with ADHD to the one without it, the one with ADHD, because it's got low dopamine levels, would experience a greater elevation in their

• 6:41Speaker 01

  dopamine and actually enjoy the activity more and thrive more than the other hunter gatherer without it. So then they would get really into it and they might actually become the greatest hunter or the greatest shelter builder. As a result of the fact, they would effectively experience more pleasure from the activity itself. And with the schools, we're really trying to reframe this for a lot of young people. We've kind of changed it from ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Ability, to try and make it like a concept in their mind whereby this is going to be challenging. It definitely comes with a lot of difficulty. If you find something to isolate on, you can really, really thrive.

• 7:18Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting because I relate to that. I mean, I just hated school. I was just like, get me out of here, watching the clock all day long, like hoping for the bell to ring. It just felt like it took forever and anything the teacher said, I just felt like I have no idea what they're saying and I can't comprehend and reading, I have to reread the page over and over again, I still don't understand and just feeling defeated every day in class. Like, I'm never gonna get this stuff.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 7:45Lewis Howes?

  And because it was so hard and I wasn't excited about it. I checked out. I had a lack of attention. But once I found something that was I was excited about, it was hard, but it gave me a more of a purpose. Like, I'm excited about this. I'm willing to do the hard work because I'm seeing improvement. I'm learning something. I'm liking what I'm learning. Like, I'm seeing results. Like, something's exciting and I have a goal or a dream that I can work towards that excites me.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:14Lewis Howes?

  So I was able to use that energy or that lack of energy I had from school and put it towards sports, most likely. And eventually evolved into what I'm doing now. So it was figuring out a way to use that lack of attention and feeling of ADHD into, well, find something you're curious about. It may be hard to learn how to do it, but at least you're curious enough and have the excitement enough to go work on it over and over again until you get better at it.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 8:47Lewis Howes?

  And it made me kind of obsessive on mastering things that I was curious about. Like you said, I became the best like hunter gatherer or whatever, right? It's like, okay, I suck at everything else and I have no attention for these things, but this one thing is really exciting. Let me go all in. And it's like, now I have hyper focus.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:04Lewis Howes?

  And like super attention to detail for these things. So it's interesting how that, you know, kryptonite, you can turn it into a superpower.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  And if you think evolutionarily, it would actually be very useful for us to all have a specific thing that we can hyper focus on. You didn't just want a group that were all identical at every single skill because that group wouldn't thrive as much as a group that had an unbelievable set of hunters and unbelievable set of builders, unbelievable set of food providers, all that kind of stuff. So it makes sense that naturally there would be different things we would be more, have a greater inclination towards. And the big thing there is understanding you don't have to be good at something for it to be your thing at the beginning. It's only that it has to interest you in some way. Like, I've had the exact same nightmare in school, really couldn't engage with any of it until I found this psychology world and neuroscience. And I thought, wow, that actually for some reason sparks my mind.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  But even when I started doing it, like 15, 16, I still wasn't very Good at it. I just thought, well, this is at least something that's interesting to me. And finding the niche things as someone that has an ADHD brain, you think, I like it. That's where you can thrive. And I've even had it with slide design in terms of making presentations with work. I always just thought, for some reason, that interested me. And I was not good at it when I started doing it, but I just niched so hard and I'm just going to design.

• 10:22Lewis Howes?

  Really? And slides are beautiful. I saw it. I was like, man, who's your designer? I like that.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  I actually kept as that design role. I have a great guy in my team that supports me now with it to make it extra cool. But it was something that I wasn't necessarily good at, but it was something I liked and I found it interesting. And then you eventually, because if you have a brain that gets a big dopaminergic stimulation of that activity, you will eventually be extremely good at it, but you just have to realize that you don't have to be good at something straight away.

• 10:46Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's interesting, man. Now, what are the, what are the things that are causing us the most amount of lack of energy, low mood and a struggle to focus? What is the things that's causing that the most for our society?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I would say if we're putting it down to a few specific ones, phones, specifically social media would be the largest factor, I would say is number one. And then I would say ultra-processed food and sugar would be secondary to that. And I would say a lot of stuff then comes off of those two. If you look at the phone, it impacts quantity of sunlight we get, the amount of exercise we do. It creates a really sedentary lifestyle and so on. So there's downstream effects. But I would say if you niched on someone creating an extremely healthy relationship with social media, there would then be a big knock-on effect on their mood and energy and so on.

• 11:34Lewis Howes?

  What is a healthy relationship with social media?

• 11:37Speaker 01

  One way you reduce significantly the frequency of engagement. Not completely getting rid of it. You can do that. Like, that would definitely serve you to get rid of it. But I think for a very significant proportion of society, they would like to continue to engage with the social media world. And when you look into it from a dopamine point of view, every single time you enter social media, you're experiencing this very fast elevation in dopamine. And that creates a really fast elevation and then a very quick crash as the brain seeks for its homeostasis, seeks for its balance. Just to put that into context, to go back to that hunter-gatherer example. We only originally could experience that elevation in dopamine from successfully spending five hours building a hut or making a fire or hunting down an animal. So it was a very slow increase. We experienced pleasure. One high and then it was done.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, a nice, slow, steady decline. You might get two dopamine hits in the whole day. Wow. If you look at social media, you're effectively experiencing the same elevation in dopamine as a hunter gatherer would after five hours of hunting, but you're experiencing it within three or four seconds from opening the app. And therefore, because it rises so fast and the brain is just thinking, wow, I can't deal with this overstimulation, after you come off social media, you get this really significant crash. This is called phasic and tonic dopamine. You get this really significant crash and that creates this low mood, low energy, inattention type experience. When you're looking at social media, just going on it once or twice, like it's not going to do, it's going to create stimulation in dopamine. Your brain is going to experience a bit of a crash, but it's okay if it happens, let's say, four or five times a day.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  But when we look into our data on the frequency of opening the phone, it's often between about a hundred and forty and a hundred and seventy opens per day on the device. So if you look at. On social media or on your phone? Opening the phone. But then if you look at first app is either WhatsApp or Instagram typically, typically those two. Instagram being more dopaminergic than WhatsApp. It's very hyper connected to the novelty of the information you're about to see. So Instagram's really novel, loads of new stuff. Especially how the feeds are designed now because we're not as in control of what we see, like followers and stuff like that. And if someone really frequently engages, hyper dopamine stimulation, hyper crash. For me, like I'm someone that is so addicted to my phone, like I find phones extremely like exciting and entertaining.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  I got my first iPhone when I was like eleven years old or something. So I've like, my whole life has just been like an iPhone life. And I got Instagram then, I got Facebook then, Facebook was really big back then. It was like the app. And throughout that next period of my life, maybe eleven to twenty five, I was just laser hooked on my phone. And eventually I was like, this is really disrupting my happiness, my relationships, my work, my attention and so on. And I thought, I'm not going to completely quit social media because it's creating my business life and it's allowing me to help people. And I like it. I find it fun. Like I like learning things on there and so on. And I was like, how can I actually learn to manage this? And I tried so many different things. I tried app blockers and I tried like making the screen black and gray and all that different stuff that's big online.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Nothing worked, except a daily commitment to myself. I could only open the app at 10 a.m., 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.

• 14:38Lewis Howes?

  Wow, three times a day.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Three times a day. And if it's outside that window, even if I have some like really important message to reply to, it's just not allowed to be open, 10 p.m., 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. And I had to create this boundary. My girlfriend also finds social media really addictive and she now lives the boundary with me and we'll know at 10 o'clock, you'll see the dopamine excitement, it's like, yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Now we can have it. But that shift makes a big difference and we've got a lot of our people that go through those doing this and having really strong boundaries to reduce frequency seems to be very important.

• 15:07Lewis Howes?

  Wow. As a neuroscience, based on science and research, what is the benefit of delayed gratification? Of creating boundaries or barriers to either check your phone or do something that's going to create gratification for you versus having instant gratification whenever you want of that thing?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  It's really nice to experience a high amount of reward for something. Our brain wants really significant reward. So for the hunters, the food and the shelter and so on, for us today, that might be reward in your relationship, something like a really special moment happens in your relationship, something in your career, something with a friend, whatever it might be, something like winning sport match, sports matches. Our brain wants those real elevations of yes, life is going to plan, life is going well. The problem with really frequently engaging with the dopamine is it effectively works similar to a car engine, where if you took like a manual car, like a gear stick car, and every morning you got in that car and you didn't put it into gear, but you just started revving the engine, which is like making it rum every day. After a few weeks, that engine would begin to burn out and it literally wouldn't work anymore.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Eventually it would stop working completely, but eventually over that period of time, it would just break down and break down. Really frequent dopamine hits, the quick, easy ones like social media and sugar and pornography and so on are like that. And they're just revving the engine way too hard, way too hard, without actually making the car go forward and achieve something. And then if you actually think about that over time, the engine gets weaker and weaker. So then, when you do have a great moment in your career or relationship or in a sports match, it doesn't even feel that good because you've effectively broken the system. And if you want a life that feels really rewarding and fulfilling, we have to get the dopamine in check, otherwise our life feels all like numb and boring.

• 16:49Lewis Howes?

  You could have a lot of dopamine hits throughout the day, but still feel numb.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yes, for sure. It will make you numb and numb over time. The more dopamine, especially this quick dopamine. If we were separating it into quick dopamine, being I feel pleasure immediately and slow dopamine, meaning I feel pleasure after a period of time. You could even take a niche example of sex and pornography. Sex is something that you have to start engaging with that person. You get intimate with them, you kiss and so on. Eventually you find yourself in a nice experience of having sex. Pornography is you've seen something on Instagram and then you're on pornography within 10 seconds. And the stimulation has risen extremely fast. So one would be slow dopamine. Eventually you experience pleasure. One would be quick and then a crash. And if you're looking at your day, overdoing the quick causes that numb, deflated in attention.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  And then having the slow dopamine, not meaning having sex all day, but doing some other activities that are rewarding for you, is going to lead to a much more like fulfilling experience.

• 17:44Lewis Howes?

  What are the things that cause the most pain and suffering in a human based on neuroscience? Is it the addiction to pornography? The addiction to alcohol, drugs, vaping? Or social media? What is?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Out of that list.

• 17:59Lewis Howes?

  What hurts a human being and their brain and their mood and their energy the most?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  This is interesting. Humans have had access to these quick dopamine energy behaviors for about one or 200 years. The first being sort of alcohol and cigarettes and.

• 18:18Lewis Howes?

  And sugar.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  And sugar. Sugar was significant. Sugar altered into the more ultra-processed food version of sugar now, like fructose, corn syrup and these kind of things is even more extreme for a dopamine point of view. But I would say if we look at society and we look at mental health, the most significant change that's brand new is short video content on social media. I think that's the thing that has massively shifted the world from a mental health standpoint. And if you look at your relationship with your phone before and after COVID, COVID was the era of short video being created. And also in these moments, I appreciate the irony of the fact I literally make short video content. So it's like a tricky situation. But if we look at the frequency of engagement with that behavior, we're going to cause the greatest dopamine distraction.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Because where alcohol really has a big effect and pornography has a really big effect, you're unlikely to engage with that behavior 50 times a day. Whereas if you look at the phone, it is more destructive for society because of how often we're going on it. So I would say the phone is the number one thing to get in check. I also have had to come off of alcohol and things like that because for me, like I find everything way too addictive. So I've had to move towards a pretty healthy lifestyle, to be honest, in order to manage it and almost get addicted to the experience of a healthy lifestyle. But I think for a lot of people, the domino that needs to fall is significant separation from social media.

• 19:39Lewis Howes?

  What is harder to break, alcohol, pornography, or phone addiction?

• 19:45Speaker 01

  God, that's such a good question.

• 19:47Lewis Howes?

  What's been the hardest for you?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  To just always like speak in the most truthful way, I think pornography is something that's really difficult to come away from because it's a very private behaviour and none of society knows that anyone else is doing it because it's like an isolated behaviour. Whereas often, if you were really heavily drinking, it would be quite apparent to your partner or your friends, family and so on.

• 20:12Lewis Howes?

  It's more of a shared experience.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  It's more of a shared experience. And even if you end up drinking on your own, it's going to become quite obvious to other people that you're now drinking on your own and so on.

• 20:20Lewis Howes?

  You can't hide it. Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  You can't hide it.

• 20:21Lewis Howes?

  You smell grass and you'd be like, okay, what are they doing? Yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Whereas pornography is very easy to hide. And therefore, when I, a number of years ago, maybe four years ago or so, I started thinking, okay, I've got to get dialed in on the dopamine. I need to like come off alcohol. And for me, like that was the necessary step because I couldn't manage alcohol. And then it was I really think about the food, think about all these different steps. And then pornography was this one whereby I'd be able to come off it for a period of time, but there'd always be that like temptation to re-engage with that behaviour. And it is like a challenging conversation to have pornography. I feel like society isn't really considering it. But in terms of the elevation in dopamine, it's absolutely insane. And in order to understand that, you only have to think about how much pleasure you experience and how rapidly you experience that pleasure when you engage with it. And then you know how big of a deal it is. And when you compare, say, scrolling

• 21:07Speaker 01

  your Instagram reels to pornography, you'll notice you feel much more pleasurable during the pornography because of the hyper dopamine stimulation. So where alcohol, social media, porn, they've all been challenging to come away from, I would say, yeah, porn is probably the most difficult.

• 21:21Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:22Lewis Howes?

  Do you feel like it's got the greatest high in our brain chemistry over, you know, short form videos, vaping and alcohol?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  I think uh it's interesting this because I also wasn't someone that was like a super porn addict in terms of like it's not like someone that would be like engaging with it all day, every day and stuff like that. I was someone that just grew up as a teenager and that was just like an option of like, oh yeah, you can watch porn. So that's like a thing you can do. And then if I was ever engaging with the behavior of masturbation, it would be always accompanied by porn because I just thought that's the given thing. When you look at would it be more of a dopaminergic stimulation, the social media and alcohol? I think you always have go into like a deeper philosophical spiritual idea of what is porn tapping into from a human innate desire point of view and where humans would have really sought after social connection. That was like fundamental to our survival with

• 22:16Speaker 01

  social media and alcohol being kind of modern versions of social connection. They're both driven by our pursuit of interacting with other humans. Pornography is really tapping into the desire to procreate and there's nothing stronger in a human than the desire to procreate. So I do think it's tapping even deeper into that instinctive driver within us.

• 22:34Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. And what happens when you have a false sense of procreation on a consistent basis through pornography?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  What I basically believe the brain evolved to do throughout these like hundreds of thousands of years was simply discover the process of survival and how it can be optimized, which is a given. Like obviously we've managed to survive to this point and survival is important. When you look specifically at dopamine, like why is it really living within our brain? It effectively lives within our brain to reward us for behaviors that are advantageous to our survival.

• 23:08Lewis Howes?

  To survive.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  To survive. So in that moment that the fire struck after rubbing rocks together for three hours, a massive dopamine hit comes because that would have been a very, yeah, it would have been so annoying doing that.

• 23:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Like you think how easy our lives are now. Imagine actually coming home from a day of work and then doing that for three hours until you got some fire. Like it was hard. And we needed a chemical that every single day just drove us to keep making the fire and keep looking for the food, even when it was freezing cold outside and so on. And we got here as a species. And just like dopamine evolved as this very sophisticated mechanism to reward survival, activities that promoted survival. I think it has the same capacity to negatively create experiences that are disadvantageous to survival of us and our prospering as a species. And then if you look, rather than having to like look on Instagram at a list of what's good for my dopamine and what's bad for my dopamine, if you simply ask yourself the question, is this actually advantageous to my survival as a species?

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Then you will know immediately whether it's pro or not pro for your dopamine. And you look at pornography, if you go further with pornography, a society that only watches porn as an engagement of sex is actually going to be one that doesn't procreate at all. And the brain is only going to send society a stronger and stronger message saying, please stop engaging with that path, because that's not going to lead to a prospering society in a thousand years. And if you think of it with when you feel crap after cigarettes, who you feel crap after spending a whole day socially isolated from being on your phone all day, or the ultra-processed food, all of it is a very sophisticated message from our biochemistry as a result of our brain's desire to prosper for thousands of years.

• 24:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow. That's interesting. How hard is it going to be for society to stop engaging in pornography?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Puff.

• 24:52Lewis Howes?

  Because it seems like it's just everywhere, especially with young men, right? It's like it's part of the culture. It seems like it's accessible. I'm assuming there's a lot of shame still, but it's more acceptable, I guess, for younger men. I don't know what what it's like.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  I definitely don't think it's.

• 25:06Lewis Howes?

  This is your late twenties, right?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Late twenties.

• 25:08Lewis Howes?

  So what are men in their teens and twenties that you work with? What do they say about it?

• 25:15Speaker 01

  I definitely don't think people feel that much like remorse or guilt or shame for engaging with it. It's definitely a very normalized behavior, just like it's normal to get super drunk. Like that's not necessarily that judged across the world. Pornography, I don't feel is that judged. I think it would vary from gender to gender and generation to generation, how people thought about it. Certainly in the world of being in your twenties, I don't think it's a very judged action. And. I do think it's a very hard thing for society to come away from. It's also evolving in terms of virtual reality is going to create a very difficult experience. I can't even imagine what that will do to dopamine. And all of that lane is becoming faster and faster. I dread the day that pornography has a feed like Instagram reels, where you don't even have to watch one video, but you could watch videos at pace.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  That that would be hell. I shouldn't even give them that idea.

• 26:02Lewis Howes?

  That idea.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Don't give them that idea.

• 26:04Lewis Howes?

  My goodness, man.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Um, and I believe the only path to coming away from it is very, very deeply observing how it's actually impacting your life. Because what happens with all this dopamine stuff is you just think, I feel okay. Maybe you do struggle feeling like depressed or anxious. And then you really need to start considering like how your lifestyle is creating that experience potentially. But a lot of people might feel quite neutral. They're like, I feel all right. It's not really doing too much damage. And with all the different, particularly men that engage with this, but women do too, that we guide, they come away from it for a week. They say, okay, seven days, I'm just not going to watch porn. And they're like uneasy as to whether that's even going to do anything for them. And they're like, I don't really want to lose that like pleasurable experience that I have in my life. And you rapidly see a change in motivation and attention when you come away from it.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  You really quickly see the ability to just take action on whatever you're wanting to do. Like, I want to go to the gym. I want to go for a walk in the mornings. Apparently they're good for you. Or I want to work hard. You see a shift and it's simply because like just before you're going to sleep, in that nice regenerative dopamine experience of sleep, just before that, you're just having this huge bike crash off sleep and you're waking up with a lower dopamine level. And if you can end the day with a healthier experience, you're going to wake up with a higher regeneration of dopamine. And then you're going to think, okay, I'm ready to attack the day. And it's important.

• 27:20Lewis Howes?

  As a neuroscientist, what is the best way? What is the best evening routine to set you up to have the most productive next day?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that definitely starts with you finish your work. I think it's extremely important. So you finish your work, say five, six P M. The first check in I would do is make sure you have some short sixty second or so short reflection of your day that helps you to celebrate the progress that has occurred. It's very easy to go into the end of the day, looking at your calendar and tasks and thinking, shit, I have a lot more to do. And then enter your evening in a state of dissatisfaction, which isn't good for our mind. So the first thing, quick reflection, very simple way to do that would just be to look back at your tasks or look back at your calendar and think, okay, cool, I've done this, I've done a podcast, we've done some meetings or whatever it may have been. Then I think you need a period of time away from wherever you were working. So if you're in the office, you're naturally leaving the office, which is good. A lot of people obviously work from home now. You then need to leave your home.

• 28:15Lewis Howes?

  Go outside, get some.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Go outside, that could be walking, if it, yeah, if it's still light in the summer sort of months. Go into nature, have a period of that, could be to the gym. The most important thing is after that work period, you're then entering sixty to ninety minutes completely screen free. So you need a moment where your brain is going to de-stimulate. And it almost can be uncomfortable that experience because our brain is in that dopamine loop all day. We separate from the technology of our phone or our laptop. And suddenly we can almost feel a bit of a decline. And that's when we're like, well, actually, I think I'll just stay on the phone for the evening.

• 28:47Lewis Howes?

  Or turn the T V on or something.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  T V on.

• 28:49Lewis Howes?

  A different screen.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Different screen. And I think if you can have a period, so it could be gym, it could be for a walk. It might be that you just need to go like supermarket shopping. You could at least get away from.

• 28:57Lewis Howes?

  Make yourself dinner or whatever it might be, like do an activity, right?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  For sure. And then we basically try and get people to, they come back from that activity. They've then got dinner and you've got potentially like T V watching and social. That's kind of your potential evening activities typically in our world. And we'll try and continue that concept of a phone fast effectively. So there's progressed prolonged periods of time away from the phone. So that this dopamine system can regenerate, so you can step away from all your work emails and conversation and so on. And phone fasting really requires, and this is very clear in our work, it requires physical separation from the device.

• 29:32Lewis Howes?

  Not even just being close to you.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  It can't be anywhere near.

• 29:35Lewis Howes?

  That's not a fact.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  That just does not work. It has to be in like a. Office on a windowsill away from you so that you're not near it because we effectively have this experience of boredom begins to arise in our brain like we're cooking and we're like this is uncomfortable I'm bored and the reason we feel that way is because dopamine is declining or it might be like we're eating dinner we're talking to someone and that even might be boring now because we're so in stimulation all day and we call this the boredom barrier where basically what you see is there's a period of maybe ten to fifteen minutes where you feel uncomfortable and you're like this is kind of shit and you want your phone and you want stimulation but you do quickly surpass what we call the boredom barrier if you stay in the state of boredom and then it becomes okay again unsurprisingly humans were able to do life without phones prior to them being a thing

• 30:19Speaker 01

  and we'll then go and they cook they eat and then maybe they watch TV with the TV I really don't think the TV is as significant as a problem as all the other aspects of technology

• 30:30Lewis Howes?

  It's not a quick scrolling at least you're engaging in a storytelling or something slower hopefully right

• 30:35Speaker 01

  For sure and we have these simple questions when people are going through the experiences these interactive questions when we ask people whether they watched TV and scrolled at the same time the night before we have a ninety six percent yes rate to that question so the vast majority of society scrolls and watches TV and then you explore why that

• 30:52Lewis Howes?

  TV is boring now

• 30:52Speaker 01

  TV is so boring now

• 30:54Lewis Howes?

  It's too slow so it's like let me scroll and watch

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah like sitting there and just watching Netflix or like I watched Gladiator the movie the other day that's a great yes good movie my girlfriend had never seen Gladiator Gladiator's a really

• 31:05Lewis Howes?

  Well you watched the first one or the second one

• 31:06Speaker 01

  First one we haven't seen the new one yet but as you'll see if you observe the difference between the new one that comes out the new one will be dopamine carnage in comparison

• 31:15Lewis Howes?

  Slower storytelling of the old one yeah

• 31:17Speaker 01

  And we're watching and you're kind of sitting there and you actually are a bit bored while you're watching a film and back in the day if you went back to like the seventies that would have been like hyper dopamine stimulation but this is how the baselines are changing over time because of the overstimulation

• 31:29Lewis Howes?

  Like this is too slow of a movie where like most people it's their top ten movie of all time it's like

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And we just need to become comfortable with that experience so that this chemical can restore itself effectively. And again, physical separation is important. If you're with other people, like you've got a partner or kids, anyone, it's unbelievably important that they also participate in the phone fast. And there's this really interesting area of neuroscience about anticipatory dopamine, which is basically the concept that your dopamine will rise simply at the thought of accessing dopamine, not just when you engage with it.

• 32:01Lewis Howes?

  Ten, three and eight.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:03Lewis Howes?

  Ten, three, eight.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  I get the, I get the big anticipation. I know. When's my hit coming? And like, if you're, like, you know, you're sitting at a restaurant with your wife and you're eating some food and then they take out their phones, check it quickly. And before you've even thought, yours is boom, straight in the hand. And effectively, your brain has seen their dopamine rise, experienced anticipation, then it's driven you into action towards the same experience of dopamine. So it's very important. Like, if you're gonna sit on the sofa and not be on it, they have to not be on it as well, because the battle's too hard to fight.

• 32:32Lewis Howes?

  What is the benefit of having strategic boredom time every single day?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  We really want, as a society, high baseline dopamine. It's so important that we all, every day are waking up and we're generating a ton of this chemical. It leads to you just living your best experience of life you possibly can, in terms of everything. Your ability to cook, and exercise, and work, and connect, and have sex, and just be a thriving, modern human. All of us are basically waking up with low baseline dopamine, and therefore, it is not the greatest experience of life humanity can have. And if we do begin to get this chemical back into balance, that's what's gonna be the end product. So when you have all these different actions coming into play, ultimately, you're just looking at, do I want to absolutely love my experience of life? Or do I want it to feel like pretty cool, like pretty average, medium? And it's like, if you can experience like your life feeling really good, and I've

• 33:20Speaker 01

  had this, like, all of this guidance doesn't come from a neuroscientist that thinks dopamine is cool. It comes from an addict that lived a pretty shit experience of life for like 10 years. And I just wasn't that happy. I wasn't thriving in my work. My food wasn't good. My exercise wasn't good. Dating wasn't good. Everything was off. My ability to like feel connected to my family and contribute to my family, everything felt misaligned. And ultimately, getting dopamine in check just changed all of that. It completely changed the experience I'm having. And we all get this period of time where we get to be a human. It'd be nice if we can thrive throughout that time.

• 33:52Lewis Howes?

  So you think if people learn how to change their dopamine, they can change their life?

• 33:56Speaker 01

  One hundred percent. I actually believe it's the most important thing society does.

• 33:59Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 34:01Lewis Howes?

  Focusing on dopamine?

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:02Lewis Howes?

  And having a healthy balance of it.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Having a healthy balance of it and learning to step away as frequently as we can from the quick stuff, move towards the slow stuff. And then you obviously have these other neurochemicals, oxytocin and serotonin, endorphins. These are absolutely pivotal to society thriving. But the big issue we have right now is we've become dopamine driven, where we're all only in the pursuit of either pleasure or also success is dopamine addiction as well. And we're in the pursuit of that. Society used to live its life very in the pursuit of oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. Now we've shifted it. So if dopamine gets in check, you then open this door and it's like, cool. How else can I optimize my neurochemistry?

• 34:40Lewis Howes?

  So as a neuroscientist then, what is the greatest morning routine to get our dopamine in check?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Okay, so the most important aspect is it starts with the night before with where you charge your phone. You can't charge your phone by your head. It's the most fundamental change society has to make with the dopamine. And if it has to be in the room for an alarm, it charges the other side of the room and you get out of bed to turn it off. Ideally, you get yourself an alarm clock. You can get one for like two pounds on Amazon or you get yourself a nice one for Christmas, whatever it might be. But we need an alarm clock and we need to wake up and not go into quick dopamine. I would say we need an absolute minimum of fifteen minutes before we see a phone screen. Ideally, I would push that towards the morning. Yeah. I don't think you can see a phone within fifteen minutes. Even this morning, like I woke up, I was pretty jet lagged. I woke up at like four AM today and it was

• 35:31Speaker 01

  obviously very tempting. Oh, I wonder what's going on in the world, social media. And we got the whole presidential election style. I was curious to have a look at how that was going. And I was like, no, because this is the day I want to be thriving. I've got an important podcast today. If I go into my phone, I'm disrupting the capacity for that moment to happen. So the first thing is 15 minutes minimum, 30 minutes ideally. You wanna wake up and you wanna immediately take action. You want to start doing something that's effortful. So not only are you not spiking it and crashing it and living in that world, which is what most of us live in, but you're actually going in the opposite direction and dopamine is on the rise. And that would involve you wake up, you immediately walk to the bathroom and you go to the bathroom. After you've been to the bathroom, if you, if you're sitting there and you're going to the toilet, you've got to have a book in there to entertain you if you're gonna potentially go on your phone.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Then you're engaging in effortful reading and that's much, much better. Books are way better for our dopamine because they're challenging, not easy. Then you splash cold water on your face, you brush your teeth and you brush your teeth properly. And then you walk back to your bedroom and you make your bed. So very simply, you wake, you don't go on your phone, you go to the bathroom, you brush your teeth, you splash cold water on your face and you make your bed. You've experienced a drastically different situation from a neurochemistry point of view. Your dopamine is climbing fast and hard. And then whatever else you wanna do that morning, maybe it's that you wanna get out and go for a walk. Maybe you've got to make your kids breakfast, maybe you've got to start your working day. You're starting from a higher baseline dopamine state, which is when you're gonna perform at a really high level with whatever action you're wanting to take.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Rather than climbing out of low dopamine and finding everything annoying and feeling irritated and feeling flat. It's drastically different.

• 37:03Lewis Howes?

  Wow, okay. So do something effortful will actually help your dopamine levels in the morning.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 37:09Lewis Howes?

  As opposed to something like gives you a quick dopamine right away.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  It's essential. Imagine, imagine waking up as a hunter gatherer, how much effort they immediately engage with. They didn't, they didn't just go and chill. They would have just been up, get the fire going, so we've got warmth, who's going out for the food? Who's rebuilding the shelter? Who's looking after the kids? Like, it would have just been wake and go every single day. And some people come through our dose experience and they say this is a bit like military training, like waking up, making my bed. And I honestly believe like we are living in a world where we've got to get more disciplined. I don't think a sort of balanced moderation, sometimes phones, sometimes. I don't think that works in the world we have now. A hundred years ago, moderation might have been great with food and all that sort of stuff. I think we're living in a world where we do have to become a more disciplined species if we want to feel our best.

• 37:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I think it's something that I've been doing for a long time and I noticed you did in your book, which I really like is, you know, at the beginning of every chapter, it's kind of like you have an assessment from one to 10. And I always ask the scale from one to 10, how much joy, fulfillment, happiness, peace are you feeling right now? If it's a five, you've got to evaluate every area of your life that's causing you to feel, uh, you know, under an eight. Now, why am I at a lower level energies? Why do I feel depression? Why do I feel sadness? Why do I feel hurt, anxious, scared? Why? You have to look at that. You have to take an assessment, a personal assessment, and start saying, okay, well, let me look at every part of my day. Maybe I'm eating all day. Maybe I'm just having sugar. Maybe I'm drinking alcohol. Maybe I'm watching porn. Maybe I'm disconnected on my phone all day. You just have to assess it.

• 38:37Lewis Howes?

  Not make it good or bad, right or wrong. You just have to assess it and say, is this serving me feeling better? Is it helping me? Is the quick service of making me feel a high helping me feel overall better every single day?

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 38:52Lewis Howes?

  And you may not like the answer and it's going to be really hard to change and make different choices every single day to support you in going from a three, four or five on the scale of one to 10 to a six, seven, eight. And it's going to be challenging, but like you said, and Jocko Willink says, you know, discipline equals freedom.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:13Lewis Howes?

  And if you want to feel free, we've got to create our own boundaries and discipline in our life. And I, I went to a private boarding school for five years. So I lived in a dorm.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:23Lewis Howes?

  And we had to wake up at 6:00 AM. We had an hour of Bible study. Then we had to make our bed, clean our room. Then we had someone come and check and score us based on the cleanliness of a room. So it was like an accountability scoring and there was discipline if we did not clean our rooms at the end of the week. Um, it was a dress code. It wasn't a military school, but it was like a Christian, like strict school. So we had a dress code. You would get like suspended if you didn't wear a belt, if your hair got too long or if you had facial hair, like all these things. And it felt restrictive, right? It felt like, ah, you want to rebel against this. But it's so interesting, like the more I got into it, the more I appreciated and respected it years into it.

• 40:06Lewis Howes?

  Cause I was like, wow, it's actually helping me accomplish my goals. I actually can focus my energy towards my sports goals and that discipline, those boundaries. Gave me focused attention to becoming better at my goals. And I would see results and I was like, oh, okay. Now I still was like, ah, it'd be nice to be a sloppy every now and then, right? Which I rebelled after school and it's like, I'm never cleaning my bed and I'm like, whatever. I'm not picking up after myself. I'll wear whatever I want. Screw you guys in my early twenties.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:36Lewis Howes?

  But then something switched in my mid twenties to late twenties. I was like, man, I'm feeling like I'm staying up really late, working hard, nonstop. Like I'm getting certain results, but I'm gaining a lot of weight. I'm not feeling good. My mood is down. Let me try this discipline thing again.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:54Lewis Howes?

  I started going to bed early. I started waking up and making my bed every single day. It was a non-negotiable. Every day make my bed in my late twenties and thirties.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 41:02Lewis Howes?

  And I was like, ah, man, dang it. There is something to this make your bed thing. Like there is something like just getting up and doing something you don't wanna do. Even if it takes two minutes, like I don't wanna do it. But you're like, oh, I look at it. Oh, I just accomplished this thing and I'm pretty proud of like how I made my bed look. Let me go like brush my teeth and organize my bathroom and make that look clean, right? Okay, let me do the next. Let me like put a nice shirt on and like do my hair and like. Okay, like I'm feeling good about myself as opposed to quick dopamine hits or lazy laziness. And that discipline started to create more freedom in my life and started to create more self-love, self-worth. Appreciation of self and be like, oh, okay, I can do these things.

• 41:46Lewis Howes?

  And look what I created. When I come home at night, I can appreciate the work I put in in the morning. Oh, I have a nice bed to to open up and go into, right? It's like, thank you, you know, ten hours ago self for like putting in the work to create an environment of peace at night as opposed to chaos and messiness. And and it created a viral loop of positivity and gratitude and peace and harmony. And it didn't make everything perfect, but that discipline actually created a lot more freedom than than people think.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  It is so essential and I think. Just as you and I really believe in how important it is to be in service to people in our world, like contribution is very, very important. It also creates this stimulation of oxytocin, this love hormone within our brain when we serve others. We also have the capacity to contribute and serve ourself. And that is exactly what you're doing. You're in service to yourself and it isn't actually serving yourself by going straight in the foam when we wake up. And just as I explained earlier with how clever our dopamine is at reinforcing the positive action, it's gonna send us a message saying, this isn't what I want. Like, I'm a body here and I wanna be thriving. I want my hormones to be calm. I want my whole body to be in a good state. And when you live that lifestyle that you just described,

• 43:03Speaker 01

  your brain is gonna send you a great message saying, please continue this path. And then your happiness rises. And we're as a society right now, very much in the pursuit of pleasure, not happiness. And that is the pursuit of happiness. The alternative option is the pursuit of pleasure and pleasure is not the best life.

• 43:19Lewis Howes?

  Pleasure's not the best.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  It's not. It feels good at the time.

• 43:22Lewis Howes?

  It feels good. It's very addictive.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Very addictive.

• 43:24Lewis Howes?

  It's very hard to break the addiction of pleasure.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Extremely hard. I had to go, yeah, big periods of abstinence. When I was at university, I got so into this pleasure loop of smoking cigarettes and drinking and everything, basically. And when I was about 22 years old, I was thinking, there's no way I'm gonna live a life that I'm really like happy experiencing with this. And I knew that my grandpa lived in this like natural setting, they had a house with a garden and stuff like that. And I didn't grow up, I grew up more like a bit more town life. And I took myself there and I spent like 90 days at this house, living like a lot, like a monk, basically. Cause I was like, I have to somehow get off this stuff. And very quickly I discovered there is a different thing that you can be in the pursuit of. You can be in the pursuit of a pleasurable experience of a really healthy life.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Like you can start really loving like the nature walks and the hiking and the cooking and just the getting really dialed into optimization. And if you are someone that's super addicted to all the unhealthy dopamine, I really think the only route is addiction towards the healthier pursuit of life.

• 44:24Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:25Lewis Howes?

  It's like making that your addiction.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it doesn't mean it has to be unhealthy with that lane, but it needs like, the big thing with the Like my favorite definition of addiction is the progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. And if you look at when you're in a period of addiction, like if you look at alcoholism, eventually your family don't make you happy and your work doesn't make you happy, exercise doesn't, but the alcohol brings you the pleasure. And it's this narrowing of what is the pursuit of pleasure for you in your life. And then the other side of this, the good life being the progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. And rather than like, for me, I had alcohol and pornography and cigarettes being like really driving things of what created pleasure for my brain. Then it suddenly became this fast array of nature and exercise and food and social and contribution and work and so on. And suddenly when I had a variety of things that were giving me the experience of happiness,

• 45:13Speaker 01

  the, the kind of deep need I had for the quick stuff began to fade and this thing was actually fulfilling me.

• 45:19Lewis Howes?

  Wow. What's the biggest struggle you face today as a neuroscientist personally?

• 45:26Lewis Howes?

  With all the research and information you have, what's the hardest thing for you still to manage?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  I think the addiction to kind of success with work is quite tricky to manage. I have been so thrilled over these last few years as to how things have gone with dose. And I really am doing this from a place of like, I just want people to be able to have a great experience of their life. But then you build pressure around the system, as I'm sure you've experienced, where you suddenly have a team to fund and all that kind of stuff. And I feel a kind of deeper weight to carry as to like, social media needs to always be thriving, business needs to always be thriving. And then I can get quite hooked on the pursuit of that dopamine as well. And things like followers, it taps into like your ego and things like that as well.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  So I think managing kind of like the financial and social media side of this life I'm now in is definitely difficult to manage.

• 46:19Lewis Howes?

  How do you navigate in your brain chemistry if results are going down? If you're not getting the growth that you've seen in the past for a period of time, or financially you're not making as much, or the following isn't working, or something is changing? How do you navigate that in your brain?

• 46:37Speaker 01

  It's really interesting in these moments because as I started to do more and more of these podcasts and these conversations, whenever I had a question that I think, like, what is the answer to that question? I've always thought I have to just ask the most truthful thing in my being, not the thing that I think would be the right thing to say.

• 46:53Lewis Howes?

  Yes, you gotta be honest.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  If I am honest, a conversation and a connection with God is actually the thing that's began to help me in those moments. And I didn't grow up with a Christian family. I didn't grow up going to church. I basically had no religion in my life, my entire experience of life. And when things weren't going to plan, I found that like prayer was really good. Like I have this morning routine where I have this really specific bench that I always like to walk to in the morning, no phone involved, of course. And I walk there and for a lot of the time, my practice there was to sit down and do like a breathing process to calm my nervous system and some gratitude and some like kind of accomplishment celebration stuff and myself talk. And I had this experience and I was doing this every day for like three or four years. And then with some various things that have happened, life stuff and

• 47:38Speaker 01

  work stuff, I added praying into that moment. And I found this conversation of like, thank you for all I have and promising my life to serving the world and things like that. I found it to be very powerful in calming my moments of fear effectively in that experience and created this trust in things are going to go okay. So when I'm in those deep states of fear, my mind races, I have a very overthinking mind where I just rapidly go into worst case scenario. And I found really like a conversation with God in those moments is the best thing to calm me down.

• 48:12Lewis Howes?

  What does the research in neuroscience talk about when someone has a relationship with God versus not having a relationship with God?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  This is where things get so fascinating because with that new, I would say I started this prayer maybe a year ago. I then about four or five months ago began going to church for like the first time in my life. I haven't even told anyone this. And on Sundays, I'll go to church and I spend like an hour in there and. My natural kind of inquisitive brain of like the neuroscience side of things is like observing the whole experience of the prayer and the gratitude and the contribution to one another and the connection and the singing and and I'm thinking this is like those this is a lot of actions that we're kind of promoting in the modern world but just through a different lens and I've been sitting in there thinking this is the original mental health therapy basically like this is obviously the original model that really helped people's minds to thrive

• 49:05Speaker 01

  and I think what's interesting in the church environment when you look at a relationship with God that is putting you more in the pursuit of oxytocin as an experience of life it's a very oxytocin dominant moment in the church it's like this thanking to God is this contribution to everyone like everyone kind of shakes their hands says peace be with you and connects with one another it's this singing it's this like celebration of what has been and that is the pursuit of oxytocin and love and I basically believe that for much of the experience of humanity oxytocin was the driving chemical it was how does this group prosper how does this group survive and dopamine was required in our brain to make sure we were giving the resources to the group but I think we are in the pursuit of others and I think nowadays a

• 49:48Speaker 01

  lot of us are in the pursuit of serving ourself basically how do I make myself feel good all the time my fur and alcohol sugar all this stuff and I think when I'm sitting in church I'm thinking wow this is not about me anymore this is about a group and God and that feels like a much better place for the human brain it feels like it's stepping you out of your own problems

• 50:06Lewis Howes?

  This is interesting because you have a whole program called the dose is it the dose method?

• 50:10Speaker 01

  The dose effect.

• 50:11Lewis Howes?

  The dose effect which is kind of like a curriculum to help people get their dopamine oxytocin serotonin endorphins in a healthy balance I would say right is that what it is? Like a healthier balance of those things?

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Definitely effectively dopamine it's about taking away the overstimulation and getting it back into natural stimulation and then with the other ones we haven't necessarily learned how to hack them like we have with dopamine but they're very low as a result of our lifestyle all of those three oxytocin serotonin endorphins are under producing themselves so we get them boosted.

• 50:41Lewis Howes?

  What is each one dopamine equals what?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Dopamine equals motivation so that's just completely driving your ability to take action in your life.

• 50:49Lewis Howes?

  Oxytocin equals?

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Connection.

• 50:51Lewis Howes?

  Serotonin?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Energy.

• 50:54Lewis Howes?

  Endorphins?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  De-stress effectively is evolved to de-stress our brain.

• 50:58Lewis Howes?

  And if they're all off if you have the ability to focus on regulating dopamine will all the others start to rebalance?

• 51:08Speaker 01

  They wouldn't. It's an interesting idea, like would phone fasting serve the other chemicals? So it's like, yes, it definitely is serving dopamine, coming away from any dopamine hits from the phone. So that's definitely serving dopamine. But then if you were just to sit on your bed and do nothing in your phone fast and meditate, that would stay in quite a dopamine type world. But if you were to, during your phone fast, cook and serve your family when cooking and socialize with them, or if you go out and exercise or whatever it might be, then the other chemicals are going to rise. So effectively, I think dopamine is largely distracting us from pursuing the other chemicals. If you step away from a lot of the quick dopamine, naturally, just as a human being, you're going to think, I need to entertain myself because I'm bored. And then the other actions are going to cause a rise in the other ones.

• 51:52Lewis Howes?

  You talked about, what is endorphins again? What is the?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Effectively evolved to de-stress our brain. If if ever we were in a situation where we were in extreme physical and psychological danger, like we were under threat of seeing an animal and it began to chase us, we were forced into a moment of extreme physical exertion to try and survive that situation. And it'd obviously be very annoying in that moment. If one, your brain was like, oh, my God, I'm going to die, I'm going to die. And if it was two, also experiencing like a stitch and stuff like that. And endorphins has this incredible capacity to just eliminate the stress from our mind and take pain out of our physiology as well in order to help us survive in that moment, where we're no longer running away from bears, which is great. We are still stressed as hell. And in moments where you feel extremely stressed out, endorphins can be an incredible response and action that builds endorphins is a really good way to respond to it.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Because it's going to release in your brain and your brain's going to settle itself.

• 52:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and if you you said, if you have low endorphin levels, there's four causes of low endorphins. The first cause is a lack of hard physical exercise. The second key cause is a sedentary lifestyle, which is kind of like a complication to that. Third is a lack of laughter. And the fourth is a final cause is chronic stress, constantly just being in stress all day long. It's interesting because this is just most of society, I feel like. Most people don't have a hard sense of physical exercise every day. They want to have a more relaxed lifestyle, more sedentary lifestyle. And those two things are interconnected. That's half of the causes of low endorphins.

• 53:24Lewis Howes?

  Not having a physical exertion, exercise routine, sitting all day or laying all day.

• 53:32Lewis Howes?

  And and I think the third one is actually really interesting because I was asking someone this morning, I was texting with someone this morning, it's the, I was saying, what are the biggest lessons of the year for you? And they were sharing their big lessons. One of them was actually stress is like learning how to minimize stress because they had some physical problems occur from chronic stress. And as I was telling them, they're like, what's one of your lessons? Or they were asking me in return, what's one of your like lessons? And I was like, bringing joy back into everything. You know, not, and I think the antidote of stress is laughter and joy.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 54:07Lewis Howes?

  It's like, okay, this is a stressful moment or season or like, things are struggling right now. But how do I just find ways to bring play into my day, even for like five, 10 minutes? How do I bring joy, play? And I'm not talking about bringing laughter in every sad, sensitive moment.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:24Lewis Howes?

  Being, you know, having a lack of like awareness of the moment.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 54:29Lewis Howes?

  Bringing it in your life, having playful moments when you can, having fun, just whatever you can to laugh.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  It's important.

• 54:38Lewis Howes?

  It is massive. And the research is showing that as well, based on what you have in your book. So I think that's really interesting, these four causes.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think stress is a very interesting topic, and I do want to touch on the laughter because stress is like very widely researched and cortisol, this other hormone is also very impactful. And a lot of the work we look at in stress is about calming the body down. And there is so much truth in that. Our heart rates are racing in the modern world and having breathing practices and nature and good sleep and everything is very important for calming our stress. Endorphins is taking a slightly different lane on that idea. If we look evolutionarily, we never really experienced stress for 300,000 years that wasn't accompanied with a physical action immediately after it. So if we were super stressed because we were starving, food was the only thing that was going to settle that stress. If we were

• 55:30Lewis Howes?

  hunting, getting up and moving.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Getting up and moving. And if we were in some kind of physical danger from a human or an animal, or our environment was under threat, whatever it may be, physical action always was. Accompanying the stress to calm us back down. And I think for me, I do feel stressed like by life, life can be stressful for sure. And I've in stressful moments, I've done a lot of the breathing stuff, which I think is great, breathing and sleep and so on. But I actually think the most useful thing is utilizing physical action first. And then after the physical action, chilling out and slowing down is even easier because you've kind of completely settled the system. But I think a lot of us just feel stressed. Then we're like, I feel very stressed. So I need an evening on the sofa with my glass of wine and the TV show. Yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  That is not the optimal way to recover. The optimal way would be getting to a challenging physical experience effectively first. Then chill out for sure and have an early night and so on. Sure. Um, and the laughter side of things. We, as I said, as they're going through with the dose lab, they are beginning to assess all these different metrics and we have been so unbelievably surprised at the how much people rate, how much laughter they have in their life. And as they're going through it, they get asked this question, how much do you like laughing? One to 10. And we have a nine point three average on this question. Unsurprisingly, humans like laughing. A few people click eight, most people click ten. Then they get asked a question, how frequently do you laugh from one to 10? And we have an average of five point six.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  So there's this like massive disparity between how much we like it and how much is actually occurring. And as these programs evolve with people, people have this real realization of like, wow, I'm living a very isolated lack of laughter lifestyle. Like I'm spending a huge amount of time whereby my social stimulation is being partially satisfied by watching people socialize on my phone. And I'm not actually there, socializing and being in that experience and maybe a little chuckle at some like dog jumping off a wall or something. There's that little but there's not like proper physical laughter, which is what the endorphins need to release. And people then have this awareness of like, wow, I need to get myself into what we call laughter environments. And they literally plan out, okay, when are my three laughter environments this week? Is it a FaceTime with my daughter? And is it going for like a walk with this particular person?

• 57:38Speaker 01

  A comedy show? We really need laughter. We're underestimating how much we're lacking it. And it's very clear, like, we all know that laughter is one of the greatest experiences of the human there is, out of everything.

• 57:49Lewis Howes?

  Healing.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And when we went into the research, like, as I was going through that, I, over the last few years, selected these 20 actions based on what had the most research evidence behind it in order to boost the chemicals, because that was the most simple formula to take, and then I could pick the 20 behaviors. When I was writing a chapter, for example, Flow State, which is all about deep concentration, there is obviously like crazy amounts of stuff on your attention span, big widely researched area. If you look at laughter versus attention spans, there is significantly less work going into laughter. And I then had the task of, I need to get an entire chapter out of this experience of laughter. So I went really deep into that world. And it is so clear that human beings that laugh significantly more and significantly more frequently are having a better experience of life. And we need to become conscious of it. We need to be more social.

• 58:32Lewis Howes?

  Wow. This is powerful, man. I'm excited about this book and all the things that you're creating. Make sure you guys pick up a copy of The Dose Effect: Small Habits to Boost Your Brain Chemistry by T.J. Power. Powerful research, content, and information to support you improving the quality of your life. I've got a couple of final questions for you, T.J. But before I ask them, where can people go to follow you and support you beyond the book as well?

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so at TJ Power on Instagram. And Power is my name, as we shared earlier. That is actually my real name. It's not a stage name. And the way in which you can engage with those and learn it is at thedoselab.com. Thedoselab.com.

• 59:13Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 59:16Lewis Howes?

  Check all that out. I love it, man.

• 59:21Lewis Howes?

  I want to acknowledge you, T.J., for your courage to talk openly today. I think I felt something in your heart that you wanted to share more of this stuff, so I'm glad you're able to talk about it openly. And I'm glad that you, as a neuroscientist, have also tapped into the spiritual laws of the universe to support you in your constant personal growth, healing, eliminating certain distractions or addictive habits that might not serve you, and finding something to replace that can serve you and your mission at a greater level. So I acknowledge you for, it's probably not easy being in your mid 20s, and not being easy at any age, but in your mid 20s, when your peers of that age...

• 1:00:02Lewis Howes?

  Are pushing against the thing that you're leaning into.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Lewis Howes?

  And are normalizing addictive behaviors that don't support you for quick dopamine. And that's been how you were raised through culture, society, communities, things like that. So for you to go against the grain and lean into curiosity to find more peace and harmony within yourself. I acknowledge you for that. And for opening up about it and started to talk about it. And I hope to see it in some of your content as well in the future.

• 1:00:33Lewis Howes?

  This question I ask everyone towards the end, it's called the three truths. Imagine a hypothetical scenario. You get to live as long as you want, but it's your last day on earth. You get to create and accomplish everything that you dream of. But for whatever reason, on this last day, you have to take all of your work with you. It can't stay in this world. Your books are gone, your content, it's erased. This conversation's gone. Everything's gone. But in the last day, you get to leave three truths behind. Three things you know to be true from all of your experiences. And the lessons you would leave behind to others. This is all we would have of your content. What would be those three truths for you?

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  It would be to

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  every single week, spend a prolonged period of time in nature, completely without a phone. Ideally, the phone is at home or if it has to be with you for safety, it's in a bag and it's on airplane. So that'd be one thing, prolonged periods of time in nature, no phone. The second one would be

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  to ensure each day, your day is centered around how your actions will serve others, rather than how are they serving yourself and your pleasure? And the third one would be to put the people around you in your life at the center of your mind. To make sure that every single day you are conscious of how those people are. These are your direct closest connections, your girlfriends and boyfriends and wives and husbands and kids and so on. And to have like a very conscious thing in your life as to are these people's experience of life rising as a result of how I'm interacting with them and teaching them and learning from them and so on? Or are they creating greater difficulty as a result of me promoting unhealthy things within their lives? So I'd say prolonged nature, constant service to humanity.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  And a real conscious aspect of are you educating and serving the people that you love?

• 1:02:25Lewis Howes?

  It's beautiful, man. I love those. And TJ, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  I think living a disciplined life, a living a really disciplined life where you're feeling incredibly proud of each action you take. I watched a great movie recently, The Last Samurai, which is that old movie.

• 1:02:43Lewis Howes?

  Hopefully it wasn't too boring for you.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Well, it was slow paced and I'm in the pursuit of flow. Good movie. And I was watching, he goes to the Samurai and he visits that Japanese village and they're all so deeply in the pursuit of hyper-discipline from the moment they wake. And I so deeply believe that the path to us feeling our happiness is very much rooted in how much discipline we show to ourselves. And I believe like greatness will come if you live a disciplined life.

• 1:03:12Lewis Howes?

  TJ Power, my man. Thanks for being here, brother.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:03:15Lewis Howes?

  Powerful. I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant. Then make sure to go to makemoneeeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to the next episode on the School of Greatness.

• 1:03:57Lewis Howes?

  I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter.

• 1:04:41Lewis Howes?

  And now it's time to go out there and do something great.