The Wellness Scoop - The Extra Scoop: Are Our Phones Making us Miserable? 

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

We’re living in a screen-saturated world—and many of us are starting to ask: what’s all this phone time actually doing to our brains? In this episode, we’re joined by TJ Power, neuroscientist, founder of The DOSE Lab, and author of The DOSE Effect. TJ’s work explores how our brain chemicals—dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins—shape our mental wellbeing, especially in a digital age where constant scrolling is the norm. In This Episode, We Cover: What dopamine is and how it’s affected by our screen habits How social media and phone use influence mood, motivation, and mental health Whether excessive phone use is actually addictive—and what the warning signs are The science behind phone-free mornings and pre-bed habits How constant scrolling might be affecting your emotional resilience Common myths about dopamine and tech Three practical, science-backed ways to reset your brain and improve focus Live Show Tickets - ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://cadoganhall.com/whats-on/the-wellness-scoop-with-ella-mills-and-rhiannon-lambert/⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's get started. ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

? ? ? ? ? ? As our listeners probably know, our Extra Scoop episodes are all about taking those topics that everybody's talking about

and quickly breaking them down for you, so that you have got expert-led insights that leave you feeling informed and empowered when it comes to your wellbeing. And one topic that has been on our minds, and I'm sure yours too, lately, is the link between our phone news and our mental health and our dopamine.

It's something that's becoming more and more relevant in our very screen-filled lives. So we are very excited to explore this today with TJ Power, a neuroscientist, founder of the Dose Lab, and the author of the Sunday Times bestseller, The Dose Effect. TJ's work looks at how our brain chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins shape our mental wellbeing,

particularly in the context of our modern, digitally driven lives. So we cannot wait for this one. Personally, it feels very, very relevant to someone who is way too addicted to their phones. So welcome, TJ. Amazing. Thanks for having me. Can I just share something a little personal from Ella and I on this episode? When Ella first rung me about the concept for the wellness scoop

and when we were chatting about podcasts, she said, I've been seeing things about dopamine everywhere. I really want to do things about screen time, how it impacts me. So you, TJ, have been, I think you are this goal guest that we've wanted on from day one. So let's... That's so exciting. Well, we're chuffed to have you. So in a nutshell, let's talk about excessive screen time.

Is it making us unhappy? Unfortunately it is, as nice as it is to kind of binge scroll these social media feeds. It does really deplete this dopamine chemical very rapidly. Dopamine is so important for our capacity to be motivated towards all of our goals and all the effortful things we have to do in life. Then also our ability to just feel pleasure from life is impacted by dopamine. Unfortunately, if we over consume the social media, or we just too frequently check it, we begin to deplete it and it does affect how we feel.

Right. I know, but there's answers to this and I still love using social media. I use it every day. So there's solutions. I think it's one of those things, honestly, we all know it's true and we all feel it, deeply feel it. You know, when I don't spend time on my phone, I am just a better person. I think there's that anecdotal element, but you kind of don't want an expert to tell you it's true because it's so addictive. So now if we kind of we've answered the macro and we can now go

into a little bit more detail, tell us about dopamine and the various different brain chemicals that we have that you're talking about a lot, this dose premise. How do they work? How are they impacted by modern life? What does everybody need to know? Yeah. So if we start with the dopamine one, there's this kind of way in which you can visualize it in your brain so you can actually understand what happens on social media versus

maybe other healthier activities you do in day-to-day life. You have this small area of your brain called the ventral tegmental area. And you can think of this as like a little ball that operates as a dopamine factory. And you can think of this as like a little ball that operates as a dopamine factory, and it can build little bubbles inside it of what we call dopamine vesicles. And then you have something called your nucleus accumbens, which is your reward center.

And say for example, you cleaning your house, just like kind of a boring, effortful task. In your brain, basically what happens is your dopamine factory starts making loads of these dopamine bubbles to get you motivated to do the activity. And then occasionally, it will ship some of these bubbles to your reward center and you'll get this slight feeling

of satisfaction. And when you do clean your house, it's not a fun task, but gradually you start thinking, oh, it's kind of good that I'm doing this actually. And like when you finish like cleaning your kitchen, for example, it's a pretty nice feeling. And you've built some of the bubbles and slowly ship them to the reward center.

Basically what happens when we open social media is we start mass shipping the bubbles from the factory towards the reward center. And because there's no effort involved, we don't build any and kind of replenish the factory, but we just ship loads towards it, which is why it feels so good when you're scrolling and get loads of stimulation.

But if you're ever struggling with that kind of depleted feeling where you struggle with procrastination and you can't seem to get the hard things in life done, whether that's cooking healthy food or things to do with your work or getting yourself to exercise or go to bed on time, it's very interconnected with the factory being low

in these bubbles effectively. So it makes perfect sense because sometimes you can be scrolling and not realize you're scrolling because you literally are consuming Content at such a rapid rate. It can be very hard to disconnect from that and we've mentioned the word Mental health or you know, it makes you feel low Is there any defining research or criteria that is proving that this is actual fact? Do you think this is going to be the sort of thing

that will end up in schools in five, 10 years time saying, look, this actively impacts mental health, it should come with a warning? Yeah, 100%. Research is always about five to seven years behind reality of humans. And social media is quite hard for research to keep up with. There's something called the DSM manual, for example, which is like the addictive

mental health disorder manual and it doesn't yet have social media addiction as one of them, like it would have alcohol, for example. And I think that social media only became truly addictive when TikTok was invented and then everyone copied TikTok. If you actually look at your relationship with your phone before COVID, before TikTok, and therefore just all short form video, you'd kind of go on Instagram, look at some pictures, maybe watch like an IGTV video

that was kind of boring to watch, and you'd get bored quite quick. Your dopamine would get tired of it, and you would leave the apps. And I do believe that, especially for young people, but for all of us in the world, we do need to consider social media in a very similar way

to how society looks at alcohol and sugar and smoking. I actually think it's more significant and more detrimental, the social media, because it's the first thing we've ever engaged with so frequently. Like it's rare to, for example, wake up and nail a glass of red wine as soon as you wake, but it's very normal to wake up

and immediately open TikTok or Instagram. So I think it's really important to consider. Unless you're following the Vogue diet, Ella. Yes, we're talking about that sort of crash diet in the 70s. Is that a thing? Yeah, you have some hard boiled eggs and a glass of wine for breakfast. Like, what does it dry you out or something? Yeah, literally, it's like ketogenic with wine.

It was awful. So bad. Interesting. Very interesting. Look, I think what you're saying there as well is really reassuring to people because it's very easy and one of the things that Ria and I talk about a lot in this show and I feel like it's very connected to your work, TJ, is that we often look at ourselves and we think, am I normal? Is my behavior normal? Is what I'm doing normal? What is wrong with me that I can't concentrate or, you know, I'll notice that I'm with my kids and they should be so present and for some reason I'm looking at someone's

cat on Instagram. You know, you just think like, what am I doing? What is wrong with me? And I also think in part of this conversation, yes, we really want to understand those brain chemicals and the impact and the healthy things we can do, but I think it's also we've got to normalise that there's nothing wrong with you, me, any of us. These are now highly addictive and the way they're created, and am I right in saying these short form videos are what really sends our brains haywire basically. Yeah, effectively, and it's so important to normalize it. Like I spend my life teaching about this and researching it with Dose Lab and I still every day battle the desire to just get

sucked into the phone. It's not an easy thing to solve but I do believe it's solvable and in terms of the short form video feeds, effectively dopamine evolved for hundreds of thousands of years when we were hunter-gatherers as this chemical that would rise when something novel in our environment would happen and would get us motivated to take action. And what I mean by that is, say you're walking through the forest and you see some fruit over on a tree, your dopamine would be slightly stimulated by something new in your environment

and then you'd go towards the tree and then you'd get the fruits that you could eat. And maybe three, four, five times a day, we'd see something new in our environment, like the opportunity to maybe hunt for food or find some fruit or some honey or whatever it might be. But it wouldn't be very frequent, the novel experience. The short form video content is just novelty, novelty,

novelty, novelty, novelty. So it's like a hunter gatherer walking through the forest and they're just being so many different things the whole time. And then they would get very hooked. They'd be like, oh my God, I can't even leave this place because there's so much stimulation here. And that's what's happening

in the short form video feed effectively. And I do think we then need quite good kind of guidelines and boundaries with ourselves as to how much of this sort of stuff we're going to consume. So how can somebody know and measure? You said these little bubbles are being sent all the time when we're consuming content, but we're not actively aware of it. So are there any common signs that you've hit a dopamine wall?

You know, suddenly, you know, the instant hit of TikTok or whatever someone's on is hitting you and then you're starting to notice that come down or whatever it is. Is there anything people can look out for when they're in the middle of this addictive process? Like what's the stop gap? Yeah, that's a great question.

Effectively, there's two things that will happen. One is it'll actually start to not feel that good, the scrolling. Like at the beginning when you scroll, when you sit down on the sofa for your like first scroll for a bit, like it feels, oh, I can't wait to have this nice scrolling session. What a world do we live in.

I know. That's like the most exciting thing in our day now is just like lying in bed scrolling off. You'll feel like a big dopamine stimulation, that's why it feels good. But you can reach a point when you're scrolling where it's like, you're kind of just numb, but you're continuing to do it.

The first symptom would be you feel a bit numb and it's not even that good. And the second would be you actually begin to physically find it hard to move your body because there's this big trend on TikTok called rotting, where people get like stuck in their bed rotting. It's big with teenagers, where they like wake up, score their phone for hours,

and then they quote unquote like rot, because they can't get out of bed. They just like can't get themselves to initiate action. And effectively, if you reach a point where you're kind of chilling on the sofa, you're scrolling your phone, and then your brain says like, oh, we should go to bed soon,

or we should go brush our teeth, but you can't get yourself to get off the sofa. That's another clear sign. The dopamine is so low, because dopamine riots core literally initiates movement in our body, it motivates movement. So feeling numb and struggling to literally move and get yourself to do something else is the key sign.

Is there a safe limit before it starts really impacting our mental health? Yeah, I would say whenever you're on social media, let's say you're someone that likes Instagram, whenever you could try and consume more effortful content, that would be really useful. So if ever you can read a whole caption of someone that you like,

or if someone posts a story and it's got some text and you need to read that text, whenever it's more effort, it's actually a lot better for your dopamine system because you're engaging more effortful attention which makes the dopamine spike less. What makes the dopamine really spike is where you're kind of like really zoned out

and just banging through the content. So there's that element is try and choose effortful content to consume is really good for your dopamine. In terms of the short videos, I really would say as we're showing is like 15 to 20 minutes would probably be the max your brain could actually take before it's going to begin

to enter that pretty depleted type state. And it's just, when you're going to have these scrolling sessions, it's very important to consider like, is there something afterwards you're trying to achieve? And then it's probably not best to have it then. Like for me, my main time, which I love to consume social media is like after dinner in the evening, because I don't have anything

that I need to then go on to achieve. But if it's kind of like, you're going to wake up in the morning, have your shower, sit down at the kitchen table to have your coffee and smash through loads of videos, that's going to then really deplete your capacity to go and actually do the things you need to do that day. So timing it and making it slightly shorter is really good.

So this would be why then, we've got the rules that I think, well, I say rules, they're not really rules, they're goals aren't they? That we all put our phone away in a phone holder and we don't look at it for a set amount of time before bed or is it first thing in the morning? By the way, I break both of those.

As does the whole world. Things every single day. It's very difficult because I use my phone as an alarm clock as well, which I'm sure lots of people do. If I did try to get a Lumi light to do it, it didn't work. So what is the science behind not having that section of phone time in the evening and the morning? Yeah.

So there's two elements there and we can also go into the alarm clock piece because that is a really important piece of the puzzle to solve, because it's like the number one reason just to always justify having the phone. So in the evening, there's this big phrase that's actually becoming a part of psychological research now called revenge bedtime procrastination, which is this idea of lying in bed, your brain is very clearly telling you it really wants to go to sleep,

but you're kind of forcing yourself to not go to sleep so that you can continue to scroll. That is going to effectively massively burn our dopamine before we go to sleep, keep us awake for longer, and lead to a much lower mood when we wake, a much like kind of flatter, oh God, I can't be bothered for today type experience. So that's kind of exhausting our system.

The challenge with going on the phone in the morning is how it's training the addiction. And that's the biggest thing with the morning one is because if I say, for example, wanted to get you two really, really hooked on smoking vapes, that if that was a goal of mine, which it isn't, what I would recommend you do is wake up and hit a vape as soon as you woke

because your brain wakes up and it begins to evolutionarily think like where am I going to get dopamine from today? Is it hunting or building or making fires? Wherever it gets the first source from, it's going to think, okay, that's my source of dopamine. And then if it is a vape or for example, in this situation, social media,

we train our brain to get very, very hooked on that being our main source of stimulation throughout the day. And if there can be a delay whereby our brain gets dopamine from anything, having a shower, making your bed, having a cup of tea, talking to your partner, whatever it might be, your brain is trained towards more effort rather than easy pleasure. Before we get on to the positives, there are ways to kind of naturally support the production of the chemicals that really help our focus, our concentration, our get up and go, etc. Our happiness. I'm very curious to take

like a very, very macro view of this. Obviously, we're all consistently taken aback by the statistics of how much as a collective we are currently struggling with our mental health. And obviously, the data only gets worse as you go down generations. As someone that's so tuned in to this conversation on the impact of our phones and our screen time on our mental health, do you find yourself not to be reductive and say like the sole cause of the mental health catastrophe that we're having at the moment is social media?

Of course, that's overly reductive. There's so many factors at play and a huge number of macro events that are very overwhelming for people. But do you find we're not having a serious enough conversation in terms of the impact that this is now actually having on a societal level, obviously on productivity, on economic growth as a result, on the NHS? It feels so silly to be sitting here saying, looking at TikTok is such a massive issue. But actually, when you start to look at the impact it's having on our brain, on our habits,

it feels like a serious issue is smoking to some extent, but it's not necessarily getting that cut through. I definitely do think it's as serious as smoking. I actually would definitely hold the perspective of being more serious than smoking. I'd probably rather society smoke than like mass-consumed social media just because of how challenging all the downstream effects of being hooked on our phone are. And you're right,

there's a multitude of things that are impacting our mental health in the modern world. Food, for example, is another huge component of it. You're doing beautiful work to try and move towards more natural ways of eating, which I think is a really key part of the puzzle. And I think overall as a species, we're just deviating from nature in so many ways. And our brain and body was brought up for hundreds of thousands of years for a very specific way of living life. And with every decade that passes, we're going further and further away from that, whether it's with our food or sleep or sunlight or movement.

And then now technology is a really big component of it. And you have with the phone, yeah, this kind of dopamine depleting component, which does kind of just depress our brain and make it a bit flatter and affect our mental health. But a huge proportion of why the phone is creating difficulty is the fact that it's leading to us not doing a lot of other things.

Like if you take your average teenager that we work with in schools, yeah, like scrolling TikTok in their bedroom every evening for five hours is not great for their dopamine. But it's also like, what would they have been doing before five hours of TikTok every evening, which might have been playing sport or socializing or contributing to their family or doing work or reading. And it's all the things that are now getting put on the wayside behind the idea of our social media is my main source of pleasure in my life. And there's this other chemical we can explore, this oxytocin chemical, which is this love hormone, which really is the core of what humanity is looking for. Like that's the thing we want most as a species is love. We want love with our

partners, with our kids, our friends, our families, communities. There's nothing that's really a more positive experience in the world than love. And so much of our time in the modern world is spent choosing dopamine over oxytocin. And that's really challenging for our mental health because every time you lie in bed with your partner,

both scrolling your phones instead of like talking or cuddling you lie in bed with your partner, both scrolling your phones instead of like talking or cuddling or connecting in like more physical way, in those moments, you're choosing dopamine over oxytocin and that's happening all the time in all relationships, whether it's with kids or friends or intimate relationships and it's meaning our body's getting lower and lower in this love hormone, more and more addicted to pleasure

and then the downstream effects are coming from there. So yeah, I do reckon it should be deeply considered. And I think it will. In the decades to come, I think something like that adolescence TV show really sparked and struck a chord with humanity because I think deep down we know there's something going on here. I couldn't agree more. I also think it's so interesting you say we're choosing dopamine over oxytocin, but what happens as well when, and I find myself really, really reacting poorly to this, I often end up consuming unintentionally bad news. So on your feed, and it stays with me,

there's been a lot of heavy, tragic world events in the last, well, since COVID, because we're seeing more than we ever saw before. You know, when we grew up, I probably wouldn't have known the details to the extent I do now. Obviously, it's important education. We know details. But do we really need to be seeing it every time we turn

our phone on something that's heartbreaking, something that's so tragic? And I find myself, I'm so deeply impacted by it. I cannot shift it out of my head for a week if I've seen something really sad. And like a lot of people are experiencing that. So what happens to our brain in terms of dopamine, oxytocin,

when this is also thrown into the mix? Yeah, and this is why, like, if you really come down to it, the phone is so at the core of a lot of the emotional difficulty we're facing, because it's not just like kind of addiction to scrolling videos of cats and stuff like that, but it's also like the kind of news you might be consuming. The cats are pretty cool too. News itself is, again, following that rule of novelty, and novelty stimulates dopamine. And when, for example, COVID began, the addiction to the news was mental. Like when we had had Boris Johnson sitting at that table and it was at 6 p.m.,

it felt like you had to watch it. It was obviously very fearful, but there was almost this weird excitement energy in your system of trying to figure out what the hell was going on. But what really happened is our brains got very hooked on the news because they're trained to be very aware of fear and stuff, and it was providing us with the source of what could potentially create fear and stress to our health, our families, and so on.

And yeah, it's cool to have a good idea of what's going on in the world, and maybe you like following all the political stuff. But I think it's really important just to be conscious of how frequently do you need to actually consume these things. If you said to yourself, every Wednesday, I'm going to watch the news for an hour, and I'll have a good idea as to what's going on in the world and be updated when I have conversations with people and have some awareness, that's cool. But if it's kind of like, every time work is a bit boring

or every single meal you're eating when you have your phone in your hand and every time you're watching TV, you're just consuming, consuming, consuming, our brains are just getting into a very kind of fearful and flat state and that's really tricky for them. And that's why it seems so basic to think so much the answer to this modern mental health is just coming away from the phone. But it really does have a

massive, massive impact at calming us down. I mean, I resonate with it so much last week when all the stuff with the US was happening and the tariffs and the trade war and the kind of fear to the global economy. I just found myself addicted to refreshing the news, like every 30 seconds, and as you said, I'm just sitting here nodding, saying I absolutely felt deeply fearful and flat because I was suddenly spending so much time on my phone, as though I could have any impact on it whatsoever.

Do you know like why? Yes, it's very important to understand, but to your point, you could have taken a period of time at the end of the day to read in detail detail as opposed to having minute by minute live updates. And it's almost as you say, it's like you're getting high on the fear. It's intoxicating, it's addictive. And it's as you said, it's then what you're not doing. Instead of that, you're not going to exercise, you're not going to cook, you're not going to connect with someone because you're addicted to the phone. And so it's so simple to say, oh, the phone's through with everything. But to your point, what we're doing on our phones

is what we're not doing elsewhere. And I think that in and of itself is very, very telling. But moving to the flip side, what should we be focusing on to support our mental wellbeing? Thinking about how do we harness our brain's chemistry for the good, get ourselves feeling more focused, more connected, more excited,

get more, get up and go. Just staying in the phone lane, then we can move to even behaviors beyond that that can also help balance things. But we had this lady, for example, called Julie the other day that sent a big message who's been through a lot of the dose stuff and very, very addicted to her phone, like classic sort of like seven hours a day of scrolling social media, which is really normal to almost be at these numbers and was struggling with many of these symptoms, kind of feeling anxious, scared, low, flat,

stressed out, overwhelmed, all these kinds of emotions that are very common now and began this concept of really getting good at physical separation from the phone. And that really is the answer is just learning to not always have your phone right by you. Because if you're trying to sit on the sofa and go, right, tonight, I'm just going to watch a movie,

the movie is going to get boring now because we're so addicted to dopamine that you will pick up the phone as soon as the movie's a bit boring or the TV show is a bit boring or an advert comes on. And the same when you're working on your computer, as soon as it gets hard or too easy, the task you're doing, you go for the phone.

And it's really important just to have a bit of a new framework in your mind of like, it actually is okay to be bored and to like not be always in hyper stimulation. With that being said, a lot of people then try that and they'll say like, for example, go on a walk and not have stimulation or like try and chill on the sofa and like read for longer than two minutes

because that's normally how long we'd read before we picked up our phone again. People actually now find it very uncomfortable, the boredom, because our nervous system goes like, where the hell is that nice stimulating dopamine? In a very similar way to like when you have some drinks, if you have drinks like early in the afternoon, if you have alcohol early in the afternoon, like on like a particular sunny day or whatever it might be, you'll notice that if the alcohol begins to wear off very quickly, you get a message saying, give me more alcohol the alcohol begins to wear off very quickly, you get a message saying,

give me more alcohol, because it begins to feel quite uncomfortable when the alcohol wears off. The phone does exactly the same thing. So part of it is physical separation from the phone and beginning to just actually develop the ability to be like, oh, it's okay. It's okay to be bored.

I'm okay in this like de-stimulated state. And we have this thing in our lab called the boredom barrier where we basically see that if people stay in a state of boredom on a walk or chilling at home or eating for longer than 10 minutes, they actually become comfortable again with that experience. But for many of us, we actually never go past 10 minutes of boredom.

We never even feel it. So I'd say that step one is this physical separation and acceptance of boredom. I am just completely motivated. I think everybody listening, I feel like step one is so hard, it's so hard. I was telling Ella and our listeners last week that I got this phone box and I've said to my husband, right, I'm going to put the phone in when we come through the door. We've done it some days but not all the time and it's so interesting, 10 minutes

and reading a book for two minutes these stats that you're pulling up I'm literally thinking this is everybody in the population right now. We do have a phone crisis, I lose my phone about five times a day in the chaos of kids and I'm constantly even saying to my children if you see mommy's phone before we can get in the car, where's mommy's phone before we can't leave without the phone? You know, the things that I think are so drummed into it. So do you have any other tips? So we've got practice boredom, we've got physical separation from the phone. And do you have anything else that you think our listeners can take away today that they can try now at home?

What about natural ways to boost your dopamine instead? So trying to kind of in the boredom, like be proactive in replacing it with something else. Yeah, and that's the big thing then, because rather than just being in crashing the dopamine, you actually want to be building the dopamine. And this is a good challenge to try today. We call this finding direction using your feed. And we as humans all have something that uniquely gets us into flow state. Flow state is this really deep state of focus that is exactly what our dopamine is looking for. And that might be a specific area of your work, it might be cleaning, drawing, art, sport, climbing trees, anything.

Like everyone has their unique flow state. And if you closely observe your social media feed, there'll be certain videos that are frequently reoccurring very regularly in your feed. For example, many people like watching cooking videos. That's a common thing to watch. And what's often happening in the modern world is we're actually scrolling and watching other people engage in our flow state rather than ever doing the thing ourself anymore.

And therefore we're like passively getting dopamine rather than actively building dopamine. And if every day you challenge yourself to actually do one of the things that you're watching in your feed, that's a really good way to try and utilize the social media for good. And that might be you see someone

on a really cool picturesque walk and you think, okay, so I actually have to go for a walk today. Or it might be you see someone eat a really nice, healthy meal, you watch someone chop it up and cook it, and you think, okay, I'm gonna go to the supermarket, I'm gonna buy some healthy food, you watch someone chop it up and cook it, and you think, okay, I'm going to go to the supermarket, I'm going to buy some healthy food, and I'm going to chop the food up. You see someone reading, playing sport,

whatever it might be. And if every day you could do something that naturally built the dopamine through effort rather than just passively watched it and crashed it, that would be such a huge win for the brain. Can I quickly ask, and this is actually a personal thing, it's linked back to the first dissertation I did, my first degree, I looked looked into on a very small scale

obviously small scale study looked at self-esteem and diet and I looked at obviously yeah behavior change because I was interested in self-efficacy and you know what resilience are we naturally built with in order to engage in these types of behaviors so would you say mean, that's an amazing tip, go and do it, but it's so much easier said than done. Is there a level of self-efficacy that comes into play here? There's certain individuals that are going to be able

to do this with a drop of a hat, and others that we really need to set ourselves small goals for to work up to this challenge? Yeah, that's a great question. So one part of this, and this is why I'm constantly talking about this topic with people, is actually beginning to understand and accept and become aware that social media is disrupting how you feel and your experience of life so that there's actually something to motivate change. When the whole of society was addicted smoking cigarettes, only once the lung cancer studies became massive did people quit smoking.

Only once there was a real reason, they were like, okay, now I'm gonna quit the thing that I really love to do. With social media, often what can happen is, we don't think social media is causing the disruption in how we feel with our mental health, and we think it's just the negative thoughts in our brain, stressed about work, stressed about money, family, kids.

And we don't attribute it to social media maybe disrupting our brain chemistry. So therefore we're just going on as normal. But eventually, like with the smoking, when we realized it was creating some real challenge, change came. So the first step in really just actually creating some motivation deep within your nature,

like within your core to change is accepting that is the case. The other most most important point is in order to be someone that can be bothered to do something, to bother to go and do the task, whatever it might be, you need an abundance of these dopamine bubbles sitting in your brain. And the biggest error we're making right now is not building them the moment we wake up in the morning because we're crashing them from the get-go and then the whole day is just a fight effectively to try and get through it. And if you were to wake up in the morning because we're crashing them from the get-go and then the whole day is just a fight, effectively, to try and get through it. And if you were to wake up and go straight to the bathroom, for example, and get cold water onto your face,

you can, of course, do all the cold shower stuff if you're willing to do that, but even a more realistic everyday thing you can definitely do is wake up, cold water straight on your face, and then if ever you can just go straight outside. If you had a garden, it'd be amazing just to stand outside for two minutes.

If you don't have a garden, I don't have a garden. You could just walk like five minutes round your block, you brush your teeth. If you go to the bathroom and normally scroll your phone, you could read two pages of a book. But if you program into your brain, when I wake, I need to earn dopamine. When I wake, I need to build these bubbles.

You then have a much larger amount from the get-go, not from very hard things, from like a few minutes of walking or reading or something really basic. But then your brain is set on a completely different course where it begins to put more effort into life and build more dopamine and more dopamine. And then when you're looking at your social media feed

at lunchtime, you think, oh yeah, I've got to do that annoying thing, right? You have to do this task rather than watch someone do it. Then you'll actually have enough of the dopamine in the brain. So there's the dopamine in the brain. So there's the understanding and the awareness of what it does to your mental health.

And then there's the really important component of building dopamine when you wake. It's such wise advice. I feel like we all need to challenge ourselves for a month or so to have that short, as you're saying, five, 10 minute morning routine, but something that says to ourselves, I matter, this day matters.

I'm going to go for it and not watch what someone else's, not someone else's morning routine online, your own morning routine, albeit as you said, simple as wash your face, look at the outside world. 100%. And I had this the other day. I'm pretty disciplined with my sleep. I think sleep is like a big part of this whole feeling good thing. And on Sunday night, I stayed up to 2 a.m. to watch Rory McRoy win the Masters, which is not my usual thing. But I've been a big fan of golf my whole life.

I couldn't believe Rory was going to win it. So I was like, I'm staying up and waking up on a Monday morning. I have to go to bed at 2 a.m. It's not normally how I would feel on a Monday morning. Like Sundays are particularly early night for me typically. And I woke up and I felt like crap. Like my brain felt like foggy and full of like gel almost. I don't know how that would work, but that's what it felt like.

And my brain in that state was like, it wanted social media and sugar and caffeine and all the things that I try and find a good relationship with. And there was no way I was going to like do something really healthy, like go to the gym or go for like a massive hike or something like that. But in my head, I just said to myself, if I just brush my teeth, do two minutes of breathing on the sofa and do 10 press-ups, then that's a big win. I sat in my bed and I did the five, four, three, two, one countdown. I sat there, I was like five, and then I just went.

It obviously didn't take me long. I said, five minutes, brush my teeth, 10 press ups and two minutes of breathing. But then suddenly I was like, oh that's pretty impressive that I've actually managed to do that. And then I had a completely different day because of like a tiny decision. So it really is just those small decisions

when you wait that make a difference. Thank you. Oh, it's so helpful. As a chronically sleep deprived parent and anyone listening out that just does not get sleep, I had a night where I was literally up all night. And I know it's really, it's tough because it's ongoing. You never know when it's coming.

But I have learned and it echoes what you've said. I don't cancel my gym sessions anymore if it's on a day where I've had no sleep. I just think, you know, it's taken me five years to get to this point with my kids. But now I finally think it doesn't matter. I'm just gonna go. and even if I just turn up and don't really do much, I've still showed up

and it makes me feel better. Doesn't matter if it's not a great routine. And what you just said about I made myself do the 10 pushups or I took a breath, everybody can action that. Everyone can do it. But it took me time to know myself to get to that point. So I think what we're discussing is a practice. We need to practice. And I think, you know, one of the things that we always talk about,

just as a kind of closing thought on this is that in the very noisy world and the very saturated wellness market that exists around all of us, it's a very, very easy to be sucked into. You just need this one supplement. That's why you can't focus. You've just got to start taking this powder or you've got to do this class or these kind of quite expensive, quite time consuming things. And actually, I think this conversation to me just speaks to this fundamental need to get the basics right. Like ultimately the basics wire our bodies and our brains for the most part to feel pretty good,

but we're all struggling to do them. We're struggling to exercise. We're struggling to eat properly. We're struggling to control stress, to sleep enough. And our phones are a massive, massive, massive, massive part of that. And I think it's just interesting for anyone listening who's thinking they've been feeling a bit flat, a bit demotivated. They're seeing these ads on their feeds. They're seeing

these people do these 100 step routines and thinking they need to go out and buy and consume a huge amount of stuff. And actually, maybe you just need to strip it back. I'm talking to myself here as well. You know, strip it all right back and focus on the basics. Wake up in the morning without screens, drink some water, wash your face, do a five minute routine. She said two minutes of breathing. And I just think it's in a world where we're struggling so much with our collective health. I think to me, there's a kind of urgency after this conversation in looking at those basics. And once you're covering all those basics on a daily-ish basis, then I think we could look at where the problems sit for ourselves or what

we need to add on. But we've got to get those basics and we've got to get the phones out of the way. Definitely. I love it. And there'll be some days where you feel freaking amazing and you do loads of hard things. And that's really cool. But I think the challenge is coming when we have the bad days and then we do nothing and we binge the phone or the sugar or whatever it might be. And that's what really can disrupt our mental health and stuff like that. So if there's like a minimum requirement, like 10 squats or something when you wake up each day, something really doable, that's just training your brain more towards effort

and away from quick pleasure, that then begins to compound and then you get huge benefits over time. Wow, TJ, thank you for sharing something that I think, and I use the word, I feel an urgency to do this. That's how I feel. Thank you for sharing something that I think, and I use the word, I feel an urgency to do this. That's how I feel. Thank you for sharing such groundbreaking outlooks on life and the life we currently lead

and the advice for our listeners in such a simple way. Thank you for coming on The Extra Scoop. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you guys so much for listening to us on The Extra Scoop. We are a community-based podcast. We want this to be helpful for you. So any requests, we want to hear it.

Absolutely. Let us know which experts that you want on the Extra Scoop and we will see you on Monday. Can't wait. you