Life Uncut - New Year, New You? The Micro Changes We Can Make To Have A Much Happier Life. Uncut with TJ Power

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

New Year, New You is a bit outdated, but in January many of us are looking for ways to improve our lives—whether it’s forming healthier habits, becoming more focused, or simply feeling happier. But how often do we think about how our brain chemistry plays into all this? Today, we’re joined by neuroscientist, international speaker, and author of The DOSE Effect, TJ Power. His work focuses on small, practical habits that can help us regulate our brain's key chemicals: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Today we chat about: How the modern world affects our brain chemistry. Quick fix and crash dopamine - porn, sugar,  social media, alcohol. Why we hate being bored and why boredom is good for us. The new 5 minute morning routine that will change the rest of your day. How different types of communication affects oxytocin - texting = 0, calling = some.  How porn is affecting our brains and our relationships. Whether we have control over our willpower or not. Kids and entertainment vs boredom You can find more from TJ from his website Find his new book The Dose Effect  And instagram  You can watch us on Youtube Find us on Instagram Join us on tiktok Or join the Facebook Discussion Group Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! xx    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode was recorded on Camaragal land. Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Brittany. And I'm Laura. And welcome back to the new year. I was about to say, I forgot when it is. It's 2025. How wild. You can tell we recorded this in 2024. We recorded this because I completely forgot what we were doing for a second. We recorded this right at the end of 2024. It is a new year and every new year I feel like we come back here at the podcast, but also as individuals and you're like, okay, I'm going to kickstart the year off

with a new fitness plan or a new year's resolution, or I want to go run a marathon. I want to eat better. What's your resolution, Laura? Do you have one this year? Nah, I've given up. I know that it doesn't work for me because I go hard for about a week, like everyone does, and then it just doesn't stick. So I'm like, I'm already a perfected human guy, so I'm not even going to try this year. Well, today's a bit of a different episode. We're joined by neuroscientist, international speaker, and author of the brand new book, The Dose Effect, T.J. Power. Now, his work focuses a lot on the small practical habits that you can use in the new year to help you regulate your brain's chemistry. Now, DOSE, The Dose Effect, which is what the book is,

DOSE stands for, this might sound really obvious, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. This is going to be a different look at how we can regulate and kickstart the new year. So TJ, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Okay, we start every episode the same with our guests, and that is with our Accidentally Unfiltered stories. You looked very, very concerned when we asked you for your embarrassing story before.

Do you have one? I do have one. It's one of those things where it's like, should I necessarily share that? Yeah, we're going to like drag it out of you. that i am having online i uh as we may talk about in this had a lot of trouble particularly with the dopamine chemical throughout like my teenage into my early 20s years specifically with partying and alcohol and so on and when i was 18 i came to australia to work here i worked in a bar in melbourne and one of the most embarrassing things i've ever done is they did like a it was at christmas they

did an open bar for the staff that were working there i ended up getting way too hammered 18 years old wow free alcohol couldn't believe it ended up standing on the bar and peeing off the bar fired fired from my job you peed in front of the whole work christmas party i'd only got the job two weeks before i uh lost my job which was a nightmare shock shock i mean fair enough for them did not want me back and uh yeah that was probably one of the stupidest things i've ever done in my life it was a good turning point of thinking maybe I need to start managing my dopamine a bit better I don't think it's the dopamine I think it's the excessive alcohol you know what they say dopamine was the desire for the alcohol you know what they say right when you hit rock bottom you

can only go up yeah I mean that was a good rock bottom that's like 10 years ago we've been climbing since then I mean we're gonna get into dose and the different parts that make it what it is and why you kind of went deep on these four different pillars yeah but I find what you just said really interesting that I mean the fact that you got into this because you yourself had problems regulating your own dopamine. What was that period of your life like and what led you into this research? Yeah, I just grew up as someone that as soon as I had access to what we call quick dopamine, which was like cigarettes or pornography or social media or alcohol, I immediately found that sort of stuff super exciting as a teenager. And everyone in the modern world will find some

kind of dopamine activity pretty exciting, but some people just have a greater predisposition to get a lot of pleasure from these activities. And periods of that were like a fun time. It was very social I wrapped quite a lot of my identity around like being someone that was really like fun and like a party person and then during that time I went to study psychology and neuroscience at university and eventually found myself in quite an ironic position of learning a lot about my brain chemistry whilst absolutely destroying my brain chemistry and I got to about 21 22 years old and I realized I really wanted to start thriving in like my research world and I was lecturing at university and I thought wow this current lifestyle I have just doesn't align

and with everything I knew about these chemicals I kind of put myself through almost like a self-prescribed rehab to be honest of like how could I get my brain back into balance and that big low point caused by my addictive behaviors was then like a big driver for the change that came. I find this so fascinating as well because I mean we touched on it briefly but so many people go into the new year with this idea of like really big life resets and often it feels the dreams and ambitions that we set for ourselves are almost insurmountable because you'll stick to it for a month and you'll feel really good about it. And then you have a blowout weekend and you fall off the bandwagon and then you're drinking again and things kind of spiral. Do you think

that we set ourselves up for failure by not correcting the internal things first? For example, if you do have an issue with going after those quick dopamine hits, you're never going to be able to have those long-term sustained goals because of it. Yeah, I think the New Year's resolution thing is particularly unique because in december we all absolutely smash our dopamine to pieces with christmas we take our dopamine in like an unnatural way very very high and then it all dips for us around like the 27 28 then we all get really drunk on new year's then we wake up and we all go through this big swing but it's a very extreme change yeah and often the only way to really get in the pursuit of healthy dopamine is to have like a very good long-term goal that

you're striving towards that makes you willing to sacrifice some of the addictive stuff so it's like I'm not going to get pissed all the time because there's this thing I'm trying to attain and only having the goal of I'm just not going to drink but with no like greater purpose behind it doesn't normally sustain for very long so there needs to be something long driving you so how do we then focus on or how important is focusing on the brain chemistry to set these new goals I think the brain chemistry just provides like really clear pillars for people and health is like a world that's getting spoken about so much now in the modern world and we hear guidance on everything sleep and food and exercise and all these different areas and the brain chemistry as we'll discover

in this episode just provides you with such like a stable structure of this is how a chemical works this is how it feels if i'm low in this chemical and this is how you boost it up and people can come to really understand exactly what's going on in their brain and then create really smart responses to their challenges that get them feeling good talk us through what the four pillars of dose are and why and how each one of those things affects us yeah so the first one dopamine that's the one that's become super famous in the modern world dopamine effectively evolved to create all of our drive and our motivation if we're low in it we start procrastinating we can't be bothered to do anything if we get really low in it we feel really depressed and it's basically

built by anything that's really effortful anytime in which you're doing hard work you're building dopamine anytime you get kind of easy pleasure from social media or porn or alcohol it crashes it out you then have oxytocin that's the chemical that connects humans together when a mom gives birth she creates this huge surge of oxytocin with the baby and then as you go through your life and form friendships and family relationships and then sexual relationships all of that will build oxytocin serotonin is effectively built within our guts 90 of it is built in our stomach which is a bit different from the other three and any time in which we're eating good nutritious food getting outdoors in nature getting sunlight getting sleep those sort of things are building

serotonin impacting our mood and then endorphins is a very useful chemical that can de-stress our brain and when we were out there in the wild evolving for hundreds of thousands of years developing these chemicals the main things that would stress us out were being like starving hungry or being in physical danger and our body basically evolved if we ever extremely intensely moved our body it would release endorphins to de-stress our brain and in our modern world we're not running away from bears but if you feel stressed out you can boost the endorphins to calm you down why are things like pornography and uh sugar or these quick when you say these quick access to dopamine is what crashes it out yeah why do these negative things crash dopamine

out is it because it's not hard to attain is it because it's easily accessible because you said earlier that like hard work is what gives you a high dopamine level so why do things like pornography quote-unquote crash dopamine out yeah if you go back to kind of how these chemicals evolved and all of this dose theory that we've built and all the research we do in my lab is built on something called evolutionary mismatch which is just the idea that for 99% of human history we are running around in the forest making fires hunting finding food and so on and dopamine was a chemical that evolved to make us have the will and the desire to do the ridiculously hard things that would keep us alive so when we had to hunt for an animal for four

hours we needed something that would drive us to want to bother to do that so that we'd find the food and our family would survive and therefore with dopamine it was taking four hours or so to experience a really big natural high but it took a long time for the dopamine to increase to that point if you take something like going on tiktok your dopamine experiences that level of elevation but experiences it within two or three minutes and because it goes so high so rapidly the brain is then very good at getting itself into what we call homeostasis into balance and the brain's like how the hell did dopamine get so high so then you put your phone down because you're thinking i don't want to scroll tiktok anymore and the dopamine crashes below what we call the baseline level

because it's trying to get itself back into equilibrium and then when it crashes that's when we can't be bothered to do anything we feel kind of shit and we feel a bit depressed and so on do you think that there are or is it the case that there are some people who are more predisposed to this type of behavior so for example like there are some people who are more predisposed to having like addiction issues or addiction with social media specifically and going for these quick highs yeah 100 when you're born as a human being your brain can naturally generate all these chemicals and every single human brain will generate different quantities of them and some people in the modern world will have a genetic predisposition to low dopamine production

so their brain produces a bit less and then when they interact with something like social media or alcohol the elevation is greater than an average brain so then the elevation is greater so the pleasure is much greater so then it's like wow i really really like this it's so interesting because i think everyone has that friend who it's like why can't you just enjoy this in moderation whatever it is like why are you the one that's the drunkest one at the party why can't you get off your ass and like get off tiktok like whatever that looks like it might not be the friend you might be that person but I think everybody has someone that they know and I think sometimes we can kind of trump it up to like low motivation or like that they're not trying hard enough almost but do you

think in those instances it can be this type of like dopamine production that prevents people from being able to maybe be as proactive or be as driven as what some other people are yeah 100% and it's a unique situation because those people that have this low dopamine production if they get really into something that they really like like some kind of sport or art or music or whatever it might be they also get big elevations greater elevations than a neurotypical brain with those activities as well and that's why some people that are the kind of addict type people can also become really talented at things as well but it's just where is the dopamine being directed and it is really important to empathize with people that are having that like it's really

not easy like you take have one sip of alcohol and then it's like wow i want to down this alcohol and then I want more alcohol. It's very hard. I want to piss off the table at my work Christmas party. Yeah, you want to ruin your life at 18. But I literally have one person in mind at the moment as we're having this conversation. So do I.

Who I'm like, fuck, that's you. Everything is to the extreme and when it's not to the extreme, it's zero effort or it's zero energy. It's like such like opposite ends of the table. It's a really hard person to like manage either a relationship with but also to manage work around, like those sorts of things. It's a difficult one because especially when we talk about this whole new year, new you type thing. Often we can trump stuff up to motivation or

drive or dedication and like setting yourself goals and all this sort of stuff. But it does make you think like, what are the limiting factors that are preventing some people from achieving it than others? Like for it being so much harder for some people than what it is for others. Definitely. And it's really important with motivation specifically to understand that we are actually very much in control of our motivation as a human being and there's a lot of stuff you see on instagram that kind of describes it as we're not in control of motivation motivation is fleeting sometimes it's high sometimes it's low and in our life today you are very much in control of how motivated you are purely based on particularly how you're interacting

with your phone and a lot of low motivation is being caused by waking up going into social media raising the dopamine super high crashing it out then you're like oh i need to go to the gym or a walk or go to work whatever it may be and you feel like oh I'm just someone with low motivation but you've burnt out the chemical that actually creates that feeling within you at the in the first place so when we look at new years and getting people trying locked in and trying to get them productive it's very important that we think about particularly at the start of their day how do they interact with their phone what kind of challenging activity do they do when they wake so they can get more and more motivated throughout the month I feel like we live in a

society now where I want to say more of the younger generation coming through but I think it's crept into our generation as well but we don't know what boredom is anymore because we have such quick access to things like TikTok and Instagram and a hundred streaming sites but I think it's really interesting that you talk about the importance of boredom and and why you think we should be bored so what are some of the benefits and why because there's someone listening to this right now that's like why would I want to be bored yeah for sure and I'm someone that particularly despises being bored like I hate that feeling I love it do you I love being bored what just sitting around chilling just sitting around with my dog yeah I love it I don't have to have one

noise in my house I don't have to have a tv I don't have music I don't have to be on my phone I like I can just be in my head it's interesting you say that because I feel the complete opposite I feel an immense sense of guilt when I'm bored like I'm not doing enough stuff you need to be productive yeah you've also got kids and stuff so if you're bored I'd be asking where are my children. I'd be saying, where are the kids? I don't have kids. My partner lives overseas. I don't feel, that feeling for me isn't boredom. It's peace. So maybe I look at it differently. And in that situation, would you put your phone in another room so you don't go on it? Or do you just not need to go on it? Yeah. I often can put my phone on do not disturb.

I think you're an anomaly then in that situation. Cause I would say, I don't know many people who can kind of just check out entirely and hashtag meditate. I do too. I think I'm an anomaly, but yeah tell the people listening now why you think we should be bored effectively all of the stuff that's over stimulating us is breaking dopamine because it's over generating the chemical and burning out the machine and any time in which you're bored your brain is in this peaceful state where it can remake that chemical and humans used to spend loads of time bored if you go to like our parents generation and above them people spent like a lot of their day in these bored states so dopamine was just sitting there remanufacturing itself and it's very

important our brain develops the ability to have more time manufacturing this chemical because of the over excessive way in which we're interacting with it the other thing with boredom is it's very important to spend time in the quiet listening to those thoughts in your head and for so many of us we hate those thoughts like we sit in the quiet and say i don't want to hear all this shit about my life or relationship whatever it might be and our brain and body is a very clever machine and it's effectively here just trying to guide us towards the best experience of life we can have So if you're overeating and then you spend time in the quiet, you might get a message saying,

actually, you've been overeating at the moment. And then you'll hear that. And it's kind of annoying to hear that message. You think, oh, I just got on my phone. You don't want to hear that yet. You don't want to hear it. Or it could be anything, over drinking or being an arsehole to your partner or whatever it might be.

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

people run away from. How do we manage it in a way that's productive? I think the best way to interact with like the quiet mind is in nature on your own without the technology. Because when you go into the research on nature, nature is insane, particularly for the serotonin chemical. And so that's anytime you walk in the forest or you guys call it like the bush, don't you if you're walking in the bush then uh the forest sounds particularly majestic though but if you're there you get a good increase of this serotonin chemical they've done loads of cool research in japan that's looked at people spending time in these environments and it then calms a lot of the anxious feelings within your body when you're there and then your capacity to

deal with those worrisome thoughts that are coming up is much better but if you say for example well like i'm going to sit on like a train in like a really stimulating environment and sit in the quiet and try and deal with these thoughts that's not a very calming experience it's actually going to exacerbate the problem with your thinking so nature quiet is the best it does feel as though and it's definitely something we've talked about on this podcast before we've interviewed johan harry around our attention deficit that we all kind of experience but it does feel as though the modern world that we live in is completely geared to fuck up these pillars in every way in sleep in our like quick fixes for thrills in wanting to feel good and also in wanting to like

fix everything instantly we have this instantaneous need that if something's not right well you just fix it straight away yeah rather than having to work through something in a long form knowing that we kind of live in a society that's geared against us like how do we start putting parameters in place that protect our brain chemistry i think it's very important to start deeply considering how you wake up in the morning when our brain wakes up it's been restoring dopamine throughout the night and then it wakes up and it's like in the pursuit of where's my next dopamine arriving from and for hunter gatherers their brain will wake up with a deep desire to restart the fire or rebuild their shelter or go out and find the food or do stuff

with the kids whatever was important to that group survival and wherever it gets that first source of dopamine from it then instinctively craves in that direction for the rest of the day as its source so then if we wake up and we get it from like a vape or our phone whatever it may be we effectively preset ourselves to be in these addictive patterns all day and then that then goes on to disrupt all the chemicals because you get into the dopamine loops so then you don't socialize as much with the oxytocin and then you don't eat as well with the serotonin and so on so the beginning of the day is the key in order to manage it how do you start your day then i uh i wake up desperate for my phone but i don't have the phone in the room because i wouldn't be able to resist it

oh you sleep with a phone in another room i do i have to it's a lot of control i just like i'm too hooked on all this stuff. They're like, if it's near me, like I'm going to go on it a hundred percent. And I know if I wake up and I go on it, if I was to go on like Instagram or something, it's just going to like rile my brain out for no reason and get my dopamine spiking. So I wake up, I walk straight to the bathroom and I start brushing my teeth. The boredom of brushing your teeth is actually really good. If you like do it slowly and do it for two minutes, do it properly. It's like beginning from right from the moment you woken up to like generate dopamine, splash cold water on my face, go to the bathroom, make your bed. And I try and go

those four patterns and then step outside. And I have this rule in my head where I have to have seen sunlight before I can see social media. So I'll step outside, done a little bit of hard work, it's like five minutes of hard work, and then I can then begin my day. But that beginning routine is very key. That's really interesting. And something you just said really struck a chord with me, literally when you said, you know, back in the day we used to wake up and you would think of what you had to do. So it'd be like lighting a fire. This year I went into the I'm a Celebrity jungle cool and that is exactly what happened to my brain after a month because I wake up now and I will say I pick up my phone and probably stay in bed for a bit yeah I pick up my phone

and I have a routine of I check what my fiance has written me I check my family group chat I check Instagram I read the daily mail to catch up on like what because we have such a job in this world yeah but when I was in the jungle I would wake up first thing and I'd be like the fire literally I was like we need to get the fire going now because we need to be able to cooking four hours and what i needed to do in the day changed and i have said to these guys i have never felt better in my entire life than a month without a phone and any addiction never you lived how we evolved to live yeah and so when you just said that i was like wow that rings so true and this is the power of addiction when i came out of there i had said probably like every person says

i'm gonna keep living like this i'm not gonna and the creep of the phone comes back in and the creep of the addiction and that's what addiction is right how has it changed your relationships because we want to talk about relationships so when you started to really like be a bit more introspective and be like okay I'm pretty cooked here I need to change some things especially if I'm going to practice what I preach yeah what did you see physically literally happen to your relationships I think what's tricky is when you're in the pursuit of dopamine whether it's like your phone or booze or whatever it may be you do begin to live and it's not even like a bad thing but this is just what's happening in the modern world.

You begin to live quite a selfish life where your kind of main purpose is how do I get my brain to be in as much pleasure as possible? And you're not in the pursuit of how are my family doing or my girlfriend doing? That's not your top priority.

Your top priority is satisfying your addictions effectively. And as humans were evolving, oxytocin being this chemical that drove humans to just serve the group. That's why it evolved within us to just make sure we were always contributing to that group

so that they survived, so that you could survive because it was just one system out there in the wild. And we've basically moved in the modern world away from being an oxytocin driven society to a dopamine driven society where we're now very much in the pursuit of how do we feel good rather than how does the group feel good. And I very quickly began to notice that as I reduced the dopamine addictions, my desire

to find my beautiful girlfriend or who's in the room, who's in Aussie, which is cool, or even things like call my mom and ask how my mom was doing or like help my sister with something or help my friends with something. my desire to actually do things that were more selfless was increasing as my desire for dopamine reduced. That's interesting because you also learn that once you do weed away the rest and you become a little bit selfless, that is another dopamine hit, right? Like once you start to do things for other people, you start to feel good. But I assume you have to stop doing so much for yourself in a way. Like I think that that would be a hard balancing act because we often preach

on the podcast that like you need to put yourself first and, you know, give yourself your oxygen mask first but there's a lot to be said for finding that balancing act and making sure those people in your life are also looked after yeah i agree with the the oxygen mask analogy and i think it is an important one it just depends like what is it that you're prioritizing as helping yourself like if you are prioritizing yourself in terms of like making sure you're eating well and getting time to exercise or like have a bath where you can chill out from your kids for a bit whatever it might be those sort of actions would be good but if it's i'm prioritizing myself so i can like have loads of booze and scroll my phone loads like those things aren't actually serving you

You're not really helping yourself. Do you feel prioritized in the relationship? You feel like he's serving you? Okay, great. Just checking. How does food affect us? You know, we've talked about like consumable things like social media, but also our diet has changed so much over the years.

Yeah, this invention of ultra processed food over the last 20, 30 years has been wild for our brain chemistry. And effectively, as sad as it is, you have people very much like myself, neuroscientists that study things like dopamine. but on the end of how do we get people as addicted as possible to these foods and these foods work in crazy ways from a hormonal point of view they mass stimulate this hormone called ghrelin which makes you extremely hungry when you start eating it so you want more of it so you want more of it and then it turns off this hormone called leptin which makes you full so then you don't feel full

and you feel extremely hungry and then you like really override the dopamine system and it's super important to understand with this kind of upf ultra processed food world that that doesn't mean just like fast food like mcdonald's like upfs these chemicals have been put into everything into our yogurts and cereals and loads of all the micro food everything like that and i appreciate how tricky it is like it's hard like it's also much cheaper all of that food so that makes it difficult but anytime we're eating the really nutrient dense food meat fish fruit veg all the stuff we evolved eating it builds these chemicals and all of the modern food effectively overstimulates them and crashes them out what does upf food stand for like what is it the people need to look out

for or even if they want to reduce this in their diets when you say it's kind of in everything yeah what does that look like what does it mean and how do we pick the things that are low in upf yeah we like to break it down into either single ingredient foods we call them sifs or ultra processed foods upfs and if you took a really simple scenario like greek yogurt greek yogurt something that's great for us good for our fat and brain chemistry and if you're in the supermarket like in the next few days and you look at a variety of greek yogurt some of them you'll turn them around and they'll say loads of random words in the ingredient list like soy lecithin and like all kinds of random stuff and natural flavorings and all these things that kind of you don't know

what they are and if there's a lot of words you don't know what it is it's a upf if you turn it around and it says like 100 whole milk or something like that then it's a single ingredient food and the more often like when you're looking at your supermarket trolley and stuff the more often you can look at it and just ask yourself like is this predominantly single ingredient foods is there only one thing in each of these items or is it full of loads of words i've never seen and if it's full of those words you've never seen it's not very good for our brain it's so hard though because the average family in this cost of living can't afford to go in to the farmer's market and buy organic whole food you know the things that are presented to us that are the easy option are

the cheapest option are the unhealthiest option and convenient you know fast food yeah it's like it's made they are made to make you want more and to be affordable i want to segue into connection human connection it's like yeah it's like one of the most important things how does different kind of connections affect your brain chemistry and i guess in that i mean maybe like yourself like long distance versus physical touch yeah porn versus real sex yeah how does that affect our brain yeah so the long distance one is a good example there's this really cool scientist called seltzer who has looked at how different types of communication impact oxytocin this chemical that connects us and they found and this is very relevant for all humans in the world whether

you're maintaining relationships with your kids a new relationship with your partner whether you're dating they've basically found that when two humans are texting one another and they measure their brain chemistry no oxytocin releases in their brain at all and then as soon as those two humans call one another and they hear their voice oxytocin begins to release and it's very clear in the research that we need to hear people's voices in order for oxytocin to release and if you think like even just specifically in the dating world with the dating apps a lot of the initial connection is only text based and you're not actually stimulating the hormone that's required for you to develop proper feelings for that human being so

in the dating scenario the more rapidly you can get towards voice notes and facetime and then obviously seeing each other in person the better in order to build a relationship i guess that's why the dating apps don't know if you know but the dating apps introduced voice text like voice notes so that you can hear someone's voice before you even match with them oh that's true yeah you Yeah, there's like stories on that. Yeah, it's in their bio. And so what then happens, how much does it skyrocket when you, let's just use the long distance, so texting to calling, different,

and FaceTime, I guess, but physical touch. Physical touch. Sex on like long-distance sex on an iPad, you know, to actual sex. We know it's different, but I'm assuming it's just like an upward graph, right? Like every time you add that little bit extra connection in, whether it's physically looking at someone and not just the voice, but then to human touch. yeah with each tier it would be increasing the oxytocin i can't tell you there's a specific

study about sex on the ipad but maybe one day i'll do that i'm in the middle of the study definitely sex on the ipad with your partner would be far better than watching porn by yourself and having that experience as your sexual moment like it'd be obviously way better to connect with one another and create pleasure for one another talk to one another whatever it may be that happens in that moment then when you have physical physical touch is like the absolute number one for oxytocin whenever we were in our early few months of life we'd experience moments where our oxytocin dropped because we might not be able to hear our parents voice or they might not be physically with us we're just like lying in a cot for example and the only way to then satisfy that

upset baby is by physically interacting with them like you wouldn't go and talk to it and explain that the baby shouldn't be upset you just hold it and then it calms back down and our brain evolved from very early in our life to know that anytime touch happens, oxytocin begins increasing, cortisol, which is stressing us all out in the modern world, begins to rapidly reduce. So if you can physically connect with friends and romantic partners more, it's very, very good. What about, I mean, you touched on it very briefly,

but like porn, it's such a common thing now in our society. It's so accessible. It's frighteningly accessible for kids as well. Like it is just everywhere online. And it's so common in relationships. Yeah, and I think like, you know, on one side, we can be like sexually progressive and be like like you know you can introduce in your relationship there are benefits to it but what are the really sort of like problematic effects

that it's having on our brain chemistry yeah i think the porn is an interesting one because there's the whole kind of like moral side of porn that has been the current narrative of maybe why humans shouldn't watch as much porn but i think unfortunately it's so stimulating that people don't care enough about that being the lane i think people will likely only change their relationship with porn if they feel it's going to have a genuine impact on how they're experiencing life. Well also if it's genuinely impacting your relationship I think so many people and we could we do ask on Carton here where we get questions from listeners and so many people who talk about how their partner's watching of porn is affecting their relationship. 100% and I think that is very

common many men will like kind of sneak off and go and watch porn just because it's an easier thing to do and with all of this dopamine disruption we're doing in the modern world even the act of like having sex with your partner is an effortful act so you have to like have a nice time with them in the evening and then kiss them and get connected and then have sex whereas porn is just like a few minutes of very rapid pleasure and nothing stimulates dopamine like porn like porn is comparable to like cocaine and stuff like that because it's such a deep primitive need for us to have sex it's something that our brain is so driven towards and being able to access this kind of virtual experience of having it is very stimulating and for everyone that's interacted

with porn like you watch it and it's this incredible experience during and then it's a very rapid decline like you feel the dopamine decline after you feel that deflated feeling and i grew up as someone like watching porn i remember googling like boobs as like a teenager and then discovering oh wow you can see a lot more than just tits you can see uh all kinds of stuff yeah i didn't think anything of it i just started watching it found it very pleasurable and then when i was going through university and studying dopamine i was like wow that is one of the actions in my life that would definitely be screwing this chemical up and screwing my relationship up like i had a girlfriend at the time and I would still watch porn and it was definitely disrupting the

quality of our sex my desire to have sex with her and I then just decided to test like I'm sure gonna do seven days and see how it impacts my life and it was so surprising like the difference when I was waking up how much more driven I felt how much more focused I felt how much more excited for my day I felt and then I remember texting some of my friends being like can you test this out for me and they're like oh shit what's TJ got us doing now they're like this is the worst test this is such an annoying friend to have and uh they all did they did like seven days my brother did the same and like it's very very surprising i think it's particularly overstimulating for men i think it's very overstimulated for men i think in general women might engage with that action a

bit less frequently than men like i know many men that will two or three times a day be watching porn so it's like a massive over increase is there a gender implication in this can men be more predisposed to chasing this sort of like fast and quick dopamine versus women or is it something that is kind of like nondescript across the board no there would be gender differences at a specific level a man would be slightly more dopamine driven like men it was extremely important for us to basically spend all of our time hunting and looking for food so we had to be very dopamine driven and the female brain is slightly more driven by oxytocin it spends more time obviously like giving birth and then interacting with kids and in a relationship both people might want to have

sex with one another but the man wants the dopamine side of the sex a lot of time just the pleasure whereas the woman might be more looking for the intimacy and the love and the connection the holding and all that kind of stuff and that nuance then could drive separation because the man starts looking for that and then a woman lying in bed knowing their boyfriend might be in the toilet watching porn is going to create like a big dip in their oxytocin because they're going to feel like less connected yeah for sure and it's really important just in that scenario to understand that if less sex has been happening and the sex in a relationship has reduced it's very important to just bring back physical touch but not aim for sex because as soon as a not

mother and dad but mom and dad maybe but a partner boyfriend and girlfriend lie together and just hold one another even if for like a week you're just like we're just gonna like cuddle for 10 minutes every night before we go to sleep even without the intention of we have to have sex tonight so there's not like pressure on it that then begins to rebuild the oxytocin between you which could then create more of a desire for sex. It's the intimacy. The intimacy is so important. A lot of people get into bed, they have a busy day,

then they both sit on their phones, they're separate from one another in bed, and it's just like what's happened in the modern world. And I guess this goes back to, let's go back to basics when, you know, a man and a woman are like, let's hook up, let's have a situationship. And I feel like often the woman goes in with every intention for it to be a situationship and just have sex. But I guess this leans into why women are more likely to be getting attached because it's out of their control, right?

Like their body is releasing far more oxytocin without their control. Like they want to just be having sex, but the feelings are developing at a more rapid rate. Definitely. Like initially when the two of you meet, you meet in a bar or something like that, it's dopamine that drives you to want to hook up for the first time. But very quickly, particularly in a female brain,

oxytocin will begin to be created. We plan the wedding. Yeah, we plan the wedding. And for the man, it does take longer. and it's actually one of the reasons it's really useful for a woman not to give over too much dopamine too early on to a man like the idea of playing hard to get from a brain chemistry point of view would actually be quite advantageous because if the man gets all the dopamine they needed from that experience very quickly i think i'm done i'm going to look for another source of

dopamine now whereas if it takes a long period of time like a long distance relationship is a good example of you can't access loads of the quick dopamine so you're the man is kind of forced to world it's not the only reason i'm with you but i was i was forced to build more oxytocin more connection before i was only driven by the sexual pursuit it's true and i often say that about my fiance ben i often think if it would have developed how it did develop if he just lived here and if we just saw each other i'm not convinced because we had to build so much rapport and so much intimacy like we said so like i reckon i tricked him into it and i'm worried that maybe when we live together he'll be like bye it's a fascinating thing isn't it because you want to be well you want to be like

new age and be like no like we don't shouldn't have to play games like women can have sex on one night stands and like it can end in relationships but like when you actually get down to the nuance of how our brain chemistry is structured and how women and men differ in those ways makes sense it's almost like there's a part of me that's like you know if you really do like a person like maybe just wait a little bit longer it may not pan out no one's saying that for a fact but like there is a I guess like there are reasons why the stereotypes exist yeah like that that phrase of playing hard to get had to have been created from somewhere like and it's not that i have any judgment for people wanting to have sex neither sex like super fair

to want to hook up but i do think we have got a situation in the modern world where relationships are not thriving as they used to i think many people are single many people are struggling today many sexual relationships are not going to plan and i think there's an element of us being in this dopamine driven society where sex is the goal not the really high quality relationship and I do think oxytocin needs to be prioritized a bit more. How is the person that you choose so important to your brain chemistry? Yeah, I mean, you're going to spend so much time with that person. You eat so many meals with them. You ask them how their day's gone. You understand exactly how they're doing in their life. Your partner is going to have a massive impact on how your brain

is operating. And I think it's extremely important just to try and align yourself with someone that wants to live a similar lifestyle to you effectively and I had this I had a ex-relationship and it was a nice relationship but we became so misaligned on how we wanted to spend our time and ultimately led my brain into a really tough place because we were so misaligned and I remember thinking about three or four years ago like I don't want to go back into another relationship unless I can find someone that would align to my kind of brain chemistry pursuit as geeky as that is it's a ridiculous thing to say to be honest but that actually was my goal and then I was just I'll just patiently wait. And whatever your desire, like you might be a very high dopamine

person that wants to party like crazy, but you just need someone that also wants a similar experience to you. How does oxytocin change over like a long-term relationship? I'm assuming it deteriorates slightly because we don't have that same chemistry hit that we get at the start, the same dopamine hit, but can we maintain it or can we consistently bring it back in a long-term relationship or is it one of those things that we need to accept love changes we still love people just as much but in a different way oxytocin is something you could maintain throughout a whole relationship you could still be having oxytocin 50 years into marriage is dopamine that would reduce rapidly the honeymoon period is the dopamine period effectively like that would be

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

ability to be created and everyone's had that like you're trying to talk to your partner and it's just clear they're a bit vacant and they're not fully with you and it really pisses you off it's like why that why are you not with me right now and as the relationship evolves sometimes the kind of prioritization of connection reduces so if you maintain that real desire of okay oxytocin something we need we're going to make sure we physically connect we're going to spend really present time together we're going to get off our phones together when we eat meals together we're really going to pay attention to one another those sort of things can then maintain the chemical be great if there's like a multivitamin you could just take that was like an oxytocin vitamin

it's so interesting to me because i i think like when you are someone who like in your position who you can see that you were chasing this fake dopamine for so long and it was giving you those bursts of like okay i feel good but now i feel shit so i'm gonna go and do something else but then you're also simultaneously studying neuroscience it's like you get given all the tools to fix it and I think for a lot of people there's just so many areas in their life where they're getting this fake dopamine from that it would almost feel insurmountable to be like okay well where do I even start and how do I start putting parameters around these things in my life because for a lot of people with the stuff that we're talking about and I keep going back to this

one person in my mind I'm like they're doing all the things it's like it's almost too many things like the porn drinking the going out late the being on the phone they're like it's like how does someone start to kind of restructure their life and restructure good boundaries around what they're doing for their brain chemistry if they're already kind of dipping into all these things yeah i mean i relate to that experience that's exactly where i was i was literally addicted to every source of dopamine that you could access yeah and i think when you say addicted it's like some people are thinking like i'm not talking like a heroin addict like he like he's a fully functioning normal person but like at the same time just everything's to the extreme everything's

to the extreme and it's like it's just a big prioritization for you every single day is like how am I sourcing those dopamine hits and I think starting with the phone is a really good place to start like I had lots of problems with partying and alcohol and cigarettes but I thought the phone is like this really quick access I'm getting all the time that isn't necessarily giving me even as big highs and lows but it was just like a very quick dopamine source and then because the phone was constantly putting me into high and low dopamine because you're in low dopamine you then really seek for I'm going to get pissed tonight or I'm going to smoke or whatever it might be so I really thought through okay if I start with the phone maybe that will have a knock

on impact if I develop the ability to effectively resist something and we can go into this this is really interesting around willpower and stuff like that but I really believe if you're in that situation you're super hooked on all the quick dopamine you need to start dopamine fasting in nature regularly for like an hour each day if you can like if you could make the time for an hour each day if it could be half an hour that would also be amazing but it means like going out preferably leaving your phone at home if it needs to be with you from like a safety perspective it needs to be in a backpack and like on airplanes you can't interact with it and then you need to hear that voice in your head and start listening to it because our brain is so good at survival

it's so good at trying to get us onto a healthy path but we're just so distracted from the message And I was out there and I hated it. Like I hated hearing all those measures. Oh, you can't have all this fun anymore. And I was like, that's fucking boring. But I very quickly realized that like there is some useful guidance coming through to me here. And I think the more time someone in that situation spends in that environment, the

smarter and smarter decisions they'll begin to make. What do you find so interesting about willpower? Do you think that anybody can have it? Because it's such a throwaway comment that we say to people without thinking like, we're like, what's wrong with you? Just have a bit of willpower. willpower is crazy the neuroscience of it is super cool we have an area of our brain called the anterior mid cingulate cortex they call it the amcc and it's effectively the home of your

willpower and any time in which you have an instinctive desire to do something and then don't let yourself do it this area of your brain lights up so as simple as you're sitting at your desk you're trying to work and then your brain's like i can't be like i'm gonna go on social media if you manage to go actually no i'm not this area the brain lights up and with every activation it begins to get stronger and stronger. And actually the area of your brain gets larger and larger. And you see in people that are called super ages, people that live over a hundred or really high performing athletes, when these people pass away, if you do anatomical measurements of their brain, they have bigger AMCCs because they've developed willpower over time. And

with all of our dose training we do in our lab with people, we try and get people every day to actually be thinking in their head, how am I activating my AMCC and getting this stronger and stronger. And for me, for example, the reason I think not going on the phone when you first wake up is so valuable is it's not just about not going on the phone. You have this real desire to go on it and you resist going on it. So the AMCC lights up and the stronger this area of the brain chemistry the brain gets, the easier it is to then think, oh, I'm not going to get pissed tonight. You begin to develop this ability to be able to resist stuff, which is very important. I think of people like Ned Brockman and I'm like, you're amazing. And I run a hundred meters and I'm like, I'm tired

now i'll stop like when you think about the caveat between the willpower that some people have and then the absolute lack of it that other people have it's just such a disparity because it can get bigger and smaller and sometimes you meet people and you think like how are you like so healthy and exercising so much and you eat perfect you think it's so easy for you but effectively over decades they've successfully activated the area so much that it's become easy to be disciplined and it can grow like a learned yeah yeah it's like a learned tray i i mean as a parent i find this fascinating because I'm like how do we build this in our children from a young age so that they're not dealing with it when they're in their 20s going like okay well you know everything was

set up kind of working against me as a kid and now I've got to fucking undo all this stuff yeah how do we kind of as parents put the best parameters in place for our children to build healthy brain chemistry in them as they grow it's just really important to understand that doing things you don't want to do is actually very good for you and we have evolved in a world now where like a real prioritization with raising kids is making sure they're safe and comfortable and stuff like that and i understand like how that has happened but it's not necessarily best serving them always making life feel as good and calm and pleasurable as possible like doing things like i had my nephews over niece and nephews over the other day and they see me as like the uncle that

wants to like wrestle with them i like fighting with them and stuff nice fighting and uh we really like messed up my bedroom and i with all this dopamine stuff have a real prioritization of keeping my bedroom organized and when it was all messed up I then thought oh let's like clean it together because I wanted to see like how they would respond to that and when I said to them we were going to make the bed they're like three four years old or something they were like what the hell like what yeah I've never been asked to do that in my life and I just explained to them like that is what we were going to do and they did do it and in that moment for two or three minutes their brain is going I don't want to do this why am I having to do this but they are doing it and

this AMCC would be lighting up like crazy and if like as I go into the period of my life of becoming a parent I will have that thought in my mind of like how can you just get them to do like not ridiculously hard stuff but things they don't necessarily really want to do because it's going to strengthen it and the AMCC directly communicates with this area called the hypothalamus which is where your dopamine is generated so you're becoming someone that generates more dopamine becomes more strong-willed and I think in a world where addiction is just everywhere there's so much quick dopamine and we're going to have VR headsets coming and all this other stuff like having good willpower is like an absolute need it's not like a nice to have yeah i completely agree i like come

back to the conversation we just had around boredom my husband i had a really interesting chat recently because like we do big long car trips at the moment with the kids and they're three and five and they're in the back seat and at one point we were like should we get them ipads or something kids like you know they're if they're having to travel for long distances every fucking kid's on an ipad these days and my husband himself was like nah it's good that they're bored he's like it is good that they're bored and I didn't think much of it at the time but then listening to this conversation I'm like it really is and it's so important for their creativity because it's in that boredom where they create okay we're gonna play a game or we're gonna try and fix the

boredom ourselves and that's been a real learning curve for me as a parent because I think for a long time I was like what's the easiest route and now it's not always what's the easiest route that's for sure. Well it helps their imagination but also think back to like when I was doing five-hour car trips as a kid you didn't have ipads nothing you didn't have earpods you didn't have i didn't even have a walkman you just sat in the car and you played i spy my parents for five hours like didn't you just terrorize your siblings isn't that what you did just like yeah i think the uh the ipad thing is really really big i think in like 10 years i think the world's really going to realize just how big it actually was putting kids on ipads and i don't have kids

yet like i'm sure it's ridiculously hard when your kid's crying and you want some peace and stuff like that so I appreciate how difficult it actually must be but I think giving a kid access to a lot of the quick dopamine really early on is giving you peace now but potentially a really chaotic experience when they're like a teenager and their brain is struggling a lot more with school and relationships and so on and I think if you can find ways whereby they can entertain themselves and they do develop the ability to calm themselves down and stuff like that it is going to serve your experience of life and their experience of life very much in the long term and it's just like another example of it's better for the slow dopamine than the quick stuff

It also comes like everything you've said just comes back to human connection and it's fascinating the fact of the studies that they did post COVID where everyone was so concerned about the fact that people didn't have human connection, but they're like, it's okay. We've got social media. It's so important that our kids are on social media so that they can connect with their school friends, connect with their families, connect with the world. Then the study comes out that says that they've never felt lonelier. So I think it's so important to remember when we're like, oh yeah, people need that social

media connection that it's it is not the be all and end all it's also not relating to real connection it's not real it's not real connection well it's actually falsely satisfying the desire as well so then it's reducing our quantity of socializing we're doing like if you come home and every evening you're watching kind of people socialize on instagram you're kind of falsely satisfying the desire to bother to do it then we don't do it at all and you don't get any from watching people hang out on social media but because the brain thinks i've kind of done that it then doesn't desire it as much and we really need to hang out with each other like it's a very very important experience for us tj thank you so much for coming and being a part of the podcast like

it's been yeah like i've learned so much it's so cool to like break everything down and know that there's actually science behind it like especially going back to when you're like why am i developing feelings when i'm having sex with this guy he's not developing feelings like you're not crazy not crazy your body's doing stuff and always doesn't will start eventually she's a little bit slower for the man yeah thank you so much can i add one thing for the new year's resolution Absolutely. All of the new year's resolutions people have come up with. I love it. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. If you can make the one thing you're definitely going to do be waking up, not going straight on the phone, going to the bathroom, brushing your teeth,

splash cold water on your face, come back and make your bed and then go outside for like two minutes. If that can be the way you start your day every single day, your whole year will transform as a result of that action. I'm going to start doing it. Well, TJ's book, The Dose Effect is out right now. We're going to link it in our show notes. We're going to link the Instagram in our show notes. You've been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.