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Deep Dive with Ali AbdaalHow Dopamine Shapes Your Habits and Productivity - Tj Power
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125 min read · 25,085 words- 0:00 – 14:46
The Power of Dopamine: Motivation and Satisfaction
- TPTJ Power
The fact you chose the harder path mean y- means your brain has had to work harder throughout your life, and therefore your brain will have a greater capacity to generate dopamine than the average brain. So then you're gonna be a more motivated individual. The pursuit of satisfaction is the goal with dopamine. You wanna pursue any kind of activity that at the end you think, "Wow, I feel satisfied with that." You feel so satisfied when you sit down and read for 20 minutes. You don't feel satisfied after s- 20 minutes of scrolling Instagram at all. You're actually just yearning for more at the end. It's the opposite of satisfaction. If we spend a lot of our time moderately satisfying this chemical, eventually the chemical begins to kick back, and it will actually increase feelings of loneliness within our brain because it's trying to create a greater desire to actually pursue meaningful connection.
- AAAli Abdaal
Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life, so notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description. All right, TJ, welcome to the podcast. [laughs]
- TPTJ Power
[laughs] Thanks for having me.
- AAAli Abdaal
Um, what are your-- can you tell us a little bit about you? Like who are you and why are we, why are you qualified to talk to us about these chemicals?
- TPTJ Power
Yeah. My name's TJ Power, and I'm the lead neuroscientist at the Dose Lab, and we've basically built a research center to study our four main brain chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. I've spent the last 10 years going through my undergraduate and master's in lecturing, getting deep into really understanding how our brain operates and how to maximize these chemicals to enhance our life.
- AAAli Abdaal
Solid. That was really good. [laughs] Was that perfect? [laughs] Nailed it. [laughs] Okay, cool. Um, so should we start with dopamine?
- TPTJ Power
Yeah.
- AAAli Abdaal
Um, cool. So I was hoping we could take a little bit of a deep dive into these four main chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. And so let's start with dopamine. Why should we care about dopamine?
- TPTJ Power
Dopamine is the, uh, chemical that's getting hit the hardest by the modern world for sure. It's the chemical that society has managed to figure out hi- to how to hijack. And as hunter-gatherers, and my whole kind of journey into understanding these chemicals, is that our brain spent three hundred thousand years developing them for an entirely different lifestyle, a lifestyle where you had to wake up, hunt for food, build shelter, connect with each other, fight one another. That's what they're designed for. And dopamine was this chemical that lived deep within us that enabled us to take action toward these challenging things that would keep us alive. In our modern world, we basically figured out how to hack that feeling, that hunting or connecting with people or building shelter, and we'd hack it with things like porn and TikTok and cigarettes, alcohol, whatever it may be. And then it goes on to create very big challenges within our dopamine system, specifically with our dopamine baselines.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. And so what is... what's, what's wrong with that?
- TPTJ Power
Effectively, this chemical enables you to have motivation, and we all need motivation in our lives, whether it's with our partners, our jobs, to exercise, to bother to cook healthy food. Motivation is like the core of being a human being. And all of these things that overstimulate this chemical and then crash the chemical out leads to dopamine not functioning very well anymore. And so many people in the modern world are just struggling to take action towards what they're seeking for. They struggle. They have dreams in their mind with their careers or, "Yeah, I really wanna be healthy," and they get a little bit motivated for a second, and then it crashes. And society really needs to understa- understand that operating and getting this chemical into balance is what's gonna enable you to actually get focused and stay consistently motivated.
- AAAli Abdaal
Hmm. Nice. What's the science behind that? Like how does, how does dopamine lead to motivation?
- TPTJ Power
Effectively, the chemical evolved within us to be earned. So the whole way in which it operates is that if we do something that is effortful, dopamine will begin to generate in our brain. And dopamine actually operates in little bubbles. They're called vesicles. And any kind of activity that requires hard work will literally manufacture these vesicles in the brain. So say you wake up, and one option would be you go and scroll TikTok. One would be you get up and you go and brush your teeth, and you make your bed. One of them, the effortful path, is gonna lead to these bubbles being generated and building, and that's then generating motivation within your brain so that you can take action to whatever you're seeking for that day. If you, say, go straight into TikTok, your brain's been building some dopamine throughout the night from the regenerative process of sleep. You get there, TikTok, immediately, effectively, you're bursting these bubbles. You're reducing the quantity of dopamine within the brain. And then suddenly you're there and you think, "Oh, I really can't be bothered with today. I can't be bothered to do any work," and you get that flat, depressed type feeling. So if it gets optimized and you can take action, it's gonna feel good.
- AAAli Abdaal
Wait, so the s- so the brain manufactures dopamine in response to the doing of hard things?
- TPTJ Power
Yeah. Effectively, if you actually imagine having to spend like five hours hunting for a deer, that would be an extremely difficult thing to do. And we had to find that deer for three hundred thousand years in order to help us and our families survive. And in the pursuit of the deer, we needed two things. We needed a ridiculous amount of motivation so that we didn't give up on the hunting, and we needed insane hyperfocus effectively. So you didn't get distracted by lots of different things. You just locked in. The deer is what we're gonna track and chase. And in that pursuit, you just progressively need more and more and more dopamine in order to get there because your brain's gonna find it harder. Physically, you're gonna get more and more exhausted. In the modern world, it's more that we're mentally exhausted than physically exhausted. But regardless, dopamine is required for that pursuit of a challenging objective. As you pursue something with more and more effort, dopamine generates more and more and more in order to support you in that journey.
- AAAli Abdaal
Okay, so you're saying that I'm doing a hard thing, like trying to hunt a deer or like trying to, I don't know, build a website, whatever the thing might be, and over time you're saying that, like there's in-- there's more and more dopamine that's building in my brain. How can we feel into this dopamine increasing?
- TPTJ Power
Effectively, when you sit down to start a task, sometimes it can be very hard to begin. And something like procrastination, for example, where you can't take action, that's caused by low dopamine levels. And when you start a task, so let's say cleaning your home, because that's an annoying task that we all have to do, it's not like super pleasurable, especially at the beginning. You start the task, and you also put it off for ages because you can't be bothered. Then eventually you start the task, and at the beginning it's like so much effort. You maybe have some music playing on in the background. You're thinking, "Oh, I can't be bothered to do this, but I need to do it." A good example is something like cleaning a bathroom, because that's a particularly annoying task in our home. What you'll find is the first five minutes, pretty annoying, and gradually you begin to what's called gain momentum effectively. After 10 minutes, you might start getting more and more into it. And then what can happen is the opposite can occur. Rather than thinking I can't really be bothered to do this, you actually get more into it than you even expected to, and that's because you're effectively entering cleaning flow state. Flow state is when our brain gets hyperfocused on something. It takes on average a human brain about 15 minutes to enter flow state. A brilliant psychologist called Gold discovered this whole flow state and dopamine connection. And effectively the beginning of a task, very, very challenging. As you engage the effort, the brain starts to realize, oh, this human is in the pursuit of some kind of goal. They need the dopamine vesicles to help. They need the dopamine vesicles to help. And it's why whenever you sit down for a task, cleaning your home, completing a specific annoying work project, going into the gym, it's so important to understand the first 15 minutes are always gonna be the hardest, 'cause at that point you're sitting at baseline dopamine. You might even be sitting below it, because if you've just scrolled TikTok for 10 minutes before, you're actually now in a dopamine deficit state, and you've got to climb to this high dopamine in order to get into a highly motivated, driven experience.
- AAAli Abdaal
Mm-hmm.
- TPTJ Power
So beginning hard, battle through 15 minutes, that's where flow state begins.
- AAAli Abdaal
Sick. Um, what are the enemies of this dopamine system in our modern world?
- TPTJ Power
You can imagine that with a graph, anything that requires effort, like hunting or building shelter, would take a long time for the dopamine to be experienced within the brain. So you couldn't quickly access it. You suddenly had to engage like two hours of effort. Dopamine would slowly increase with the brain. You get this really pleasurable, rewarding experience, and that would motivate us to do that action again in the future. Anything in the modern world that has developed the ability to get that level of dopamine increase but immediately is effectively what's hijacking it. Because the brain is always seeking for homeostasis, that balance experience. If you suddenly get super high TikTok spike of dopamine, you then put the TikTok down and you're suddenly like, "Oh, I feel like shit." You're apathetic. You can't take action towards anything, and it's 'cause your brain is just so confused by the unnatural spike that it crashes out effectively. And the way to identify if something is unnatural dopamine is just how quickly does it give you pleasure? A simple comparison would be reading a book versus scrolling on Instagram. When you open a book and start reading a book, it's not like, "Wow, this is so enjoyable. I love reading this." It might be for some, but I think for the majority it's like, "Okay, I got to get into this," and your brain begins to put in more and more effort as you read the lines and the pages and you try and get into it. Gradually, after 10 or 15 minutes when you k- kind of enter that flow state type experience with reading, it does become a very pleasurable experience, 'cause the dopamine is being slowly added and increased in a natural way. When you open Instagram, immediately you feel good. You get some notifications. You get likes, comments, a message from a girl. You're getting loads of stimulation off all the videos, whatever it might be. And then the dopamine spikes extremely high, and then as a result of it going so unnaturally high, the brain seeks that balance and crashes it out. And so many of us are struggling to take action towards our dreams because we're just constantly crashing the system that's responsible for getting us towards them.
- AAAli Abdaal
So what I'm hearing is that really w- the pursuit of pleasurable things that involve a level of feeling as if you've earned it-
- TPTJ Power
Mm-hmm
- AAAli Abdaal
... is important here. Like, you're not just getting the free pleasure from just doing the thing. I wonder if sort of, sort of... I enjoy playing video games on, like, very hard difficulty, playing Horizon Forbidden West at the moment, and there's like... You know, people would look at me and be like, "We c- you spent the last three hours on the same boss fight. Like, why not just tune down the difficulty level?" But there's something about doing the hard thing that feels way more rewarding than just like, I don't know, killing the boss on story mode or on easy mode or whatever. I think similarly, I used to go on these wilderness medicine trips at university where it was like, um, we'd, we'd, we'd spend the whole day hiking, and then we'd do like medical scenarios of like, this person's, like, broken their leg and you've got to splint it and stuff. And then at the end of the day, we would all have a lovely big dinner in the cottage and play some board games. And there was something about the fact that we had to do a whole day of hiking to feel as if we've earned that that really made it way more rewarding, compared to if we had just sort of randomly started playing board games. Is that this sort of idea of, like, feeling as if you've earned the thing?
- TPTJ Power
100%. That is exactly it. And if you had just immediately woken up in the morning and done the board game, it wouldn't be as nearly as pleasurable. And you just have to imagine surviving was so hard for 300,000 years. Like, if you actually think about suddenly being put out in a forest and you've got to suddenly survive out there, it would be insanely difficult. So the brain has to be so deeply programmed to seek for effort. That is exactly how it's designed to operate. If you look at that gaming example, when you're playing Horizon, did you call it?
- AAAli Abdaal
[laughs]
- TPTJ Power
When you're playing Horizon, the fact that you have the desire to put it onto the hardest level is probably why you're actually in the position you're in in your life right now in terms of your career and your business, because you've actually chosen the harder path in life. And it means your brain, because you've consistently chosen the harder path when you're at university making your YouTube videos whilst also studying all of these things, the fact you chose the harder path mean y- means your brain has had to work harder throughout your life, and therefore your brain will have a greater capacity to generate dopamine than the average brain. So then you're gonna be a more motivated individual. You can imagine if you had two hunter gatherers and one had an easy time at surviving because it was, like, warm and there was an abundance of food around, and then you had one that was trying to survive in the cold with no food. This one is gonna have to work way harder, so they're gonna need more motivation. So suddenly they're gonna have to require so much more dopamine in order to survive. And if you start pursuing the lane of effort in your life more regularly, generate more dopamine, your capacity to pursue effort in all lanes, whether that's being more attentive with your partner, eating healthier food, being more disciplined in your home, working towards your goals, whatever it might be, becomes actually easier and easier because you've got a ton of the chemical.
- AAAli Abdaal
Mm. Sick. Is this, uh, sort of there's, there's often a phenomenon you hear about around, like the sort of kids that grow up very wealthy-
- TPTJ Power
Mm.
- AAAli Abdaal
-and they're sort of playing life on easy mode.
- 14:46 – 29:51
Understanding Dopamine's Role in Modern Life
- AAAli Abdaal
is there a way of taking this too far? Like I'm imagining someone listening to this saying that, "Well, you know, growing up in poverty with an abusive family and stuff, sure, that requires you to work really hard to succeed," but actually those people often end up screwed up as well. Like what's the... Is there a tipping point of stress beyond which it stops being useful?
- TPTJ Power
For sure. The thing to understand is that there are four chemicals at play here. This dopamine one is simply helping people to d- be able to have motivation and take action. When you look at an individual that may had a, have had an abusive experience when they were young or some kind of really hard time or poverty in terms of lack of nutrition, whatever it may be, then comes into play the other three chemicals of oxytocin, the love chemical, maybe there wasn't that much nurturing around them. All of these things then are really key factors to understand someone's likelihood to be able to go where they want to.
- AAAli Abdaal
Fantastic. Cool. So let's go on to action points. So we've talked about what dopamine is, why it's important, uh, we've talked about a few general principles like, uh, hard work before pleasure, um, and always being in the pursuit of something. What are some action points that someone watching or listening to this can apply to their life from today that will help improve the way we use dopamine?
- TPTJ Power
Yeah. So with dopamine, the first thing to understand, the most effective thing we've seen in all of our research and training is this concept we've developed called phone fasting, which is just having agreed times with yourself where you will fast, quote-unquote, "from your phone." The most important time in your whole life to fast from your phone is when you wake up in the morning. Your brain wakes up. It's seeking for dopamine. It's seeking to attack the day. If it goes straight into the phone, you're really setting yourself on a much more difficult journey. So we really guide people to phone fast when they wake up. Ideally, they're charging the phone not by their head. Either the other side of the room or outside of the room would be best. And they have to immediately take action. So we get people to go and pick up their toothbrush as soon as they wake up and start brushing their teeth, splash cold water on their face, and come back and make their bed. So the first thing, most importantly for dopamine, no phone, brush teeth, splash cold water on your face, and then make your bed. And that just at least generates the dopamine to kickstart the day to make the rest of it easier. So that's your morning phone fasting. At least 15 minutes first thing in the day, take action. In the evening, we then need a minimum of a 60-minute period where again, we're physically away from the phone. So during that period of time, you might be cooking and eating, you might be exercising, socializing, even something like watching TV, which is an unnatural dopamine experience, but nowhere near as bad as social media for our brain because of the speed in which pleasure arises. Just with that TV point, if you sit and you watch Netflix, similar to the concept I gave with the book before, if you sit and watch Netflix, you don't click play and think, "Wow, this is insanely amazing." But ev- eventually, if you pay attention, you get into the storyline, it becomes pleasurable, so the spike is slightly less than TikTok. So phone fasting in the evening, 60 minutes. You don't want to spend the whole day working and then burn your dopamine all night because you're gonna wake up with really low levels of motivation. Then on the weekend, we try and guide people on a Saturday and a Sunday to have a two-hour phone fast. So you try and engage with some kind of activity. Maybe you go on a walk with your friends, maybe you go out for lunch and you all agree phones in your bags. But if you try and have a two-hour period Sunday and Saturday and then 50 minutes in the mornings, 60 minutes in the evenings, then you're developing like a very clear structure into your life where you're getting away from the quick dopamine of the phone. Fundamentally, the phone is the main thing in our lives hijacking the system. If you get away from the phone more, you're just gonna have way more motivation.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice What's your theory about app blockers and screen time limits and the whole shebang?
- TPTJ Power
I think they can be really valuable. I think I'm using one that's called One Sec at the moment. It seems to be very effective in stopping my, like, constant opening of the app. I think it's very important that the brain experiences boredom, and in every moment of boredom you al- end up always opening the phone. Actually, in a state of boredom, your brain will be generating dopamine. It goes into this, like, restorative state where it's sitting there thinking, "Oh, I've got a break right now," so it's gonna build some dopamine. If you constantly just crash your dopamine during your moments of boredom, it's not great for the brain chemical. So I think they can be effective. I think the Apple stuff for me didn't really work. Like, I'd constantly just skip it and stuff like that, but I think some of these stronger, more powerful ones that will block things are very valuable, and we need to only open these apps like a maximum of maybe five times a day. If you're opening them, which I have no judgment for, like 30 or 50 times a day, which is so easy, I did that for years, then it is just gonna be very harmful to dopamine.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. Yeah, one thing I found super helpful is I, I carry this little pocketbook in my back pocket at all times, which is why it's warped on this, in the shape of my bum-
- TPTJ Power
Yeah
- AAAli Abdaal
... um, with a little pocket fountain pen as well. And, uh, one thing I've started doing recently is sort of aiming for 15,000 steps a day.
- TPTJ Power
Nice. That's not that long.
- AAAli Abdaal
And so I live fairly close to Regents Park, and so now anytime I'm doing a meeting, I do it walking around. Um, did an hour of walking this morning while taking a call, 8,000 steps. That was super nice. And even sometimes where I'm like, I'm d- I've, I've got a break in the middle of the day or it's a weekend or something, I'll have my phone in my pocket because I always have my phone in my pocket. Uh, but I will try and consciously think, "Okay, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna walk through the park, go to the cafe, grab a coffee, and just do some physical pen and paper journaling," 'cause there's something about slowing the process down rather than typing on my phone or bringing the iPad or bringing the laptop, which are like high octane devices. [laughs]
- TPTJ Power
Mm-hmm.
- AAAli Abdaal
And just, like, the chill experience of writing in a journal I find leads to way more insights compared to just consuming more stuff on the phone.
- TPTJ Power
For sure. The awesome thing about doing that is your brain doesn't have an association with social media and that book, whereas when you're on the phone opening it just to go on your notes to do something that's healthy for your brain, your brain's experiencing anticipatory dopamine at the thought of opening Instagram. So even though you're sitting there trying to just do your notes, your brain knows that Instagram's around the corner. Just like when someone has a drink in a pub, they start thinking, "I might want a vape," or whatever it might be because of these connections that our brain will create. So it is very important to create these barriers. If the phone always needs to be on you, airplane mode is also just so effective because the brain just works by these cues. If you see some kind of email or anything at all that can be novel for your brain, anything that's new information will spike the dopamine, so having these periods away from it is powerful.
- AAAli Abdaal
One thing that, that I've noticed about entrepreneurs is that they always have their phone on some sort of do not disturb focus mode.
- TPTJ Power
Mm-hmm.
- AAAli Abdaal
I noticed that whenever I'm trying to iMessage anyone, it's like this person has their notifications turned on, on quiet, like notify silently or something like that. And I interviewed Jordan Harbinger on the pod a few weeks ago, which has not yet come out, um, and he mentioned that, like, this is a thing he's noticed as well, that every entrepreneur he knows just always has their phone on some sort of focus mode, 'cause, like, why would you need the notifications? And you can always set up... Like on mine, I've set it up so that, like, my girlfriend, my mom, and my brother, and my grandma are the only ones whose notifications can actually come through. And so if there's an emergency or anything, which there often isn't, I'll see the notification. If it's anything else, I'll only see it when I choose to take it off of focus mode, which means I'm in control of the notification, of the timing of notifications rather than them being in control of me.
- TPTJ Power
I think that is the way to do it. I think having the emergency calls is good, and again, it's good to reflect and realize they very rarely happen. I think lots of us have this, like, fear around the phone that we're like, "Well, what if something happens?" But very rarely things do, and if you remind your brain of that, you might calm a little bit about it. And I really believe, like, society just got trained over, like, a 10 to 15-year period that notifications need to be a part of our life, but I don't think they need to be on the phone at all. I have no badges on any apps. I've got no notification that can come in at any time, and we're all so hooked on these phones that you're never gonna miss anything important. Like, you're always gonna wa- open your WhatsApp and your Instagram DMs and your emails. You're never gonna miss anything, so you don't need to be told it's there. We're so trained to open these apps now by these habits of dopamine that if you just turn absolutely everything off, it does empower you to actually decide how you're gonna use it.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. Um, one thing we haven't yet talked about is the law of dopamine. What is the law of dopamine?
- TPTJ Power
The law of dopamine is to take action when you wake every day, and what I mean by that is as soon as you open your eyes in the morning, the most important thing you can do is get moving effectively. Dopamine is literally involved in movement. There's actually this really big phenomenon on TikTok at the moment called rotting, which is where people literally can't get out of their bed, and particularly teenage girls call it rotting, where they, like, cannot move. They can't get out of their bed to do anything. And the reason that's happened is 'cause dopamine is so low from the TikTok and the sugar and so on that they can't take action at all. If you wake up in the morning and you just immediately get the system moving, even if it feels horrible, actually the more horrible it is, the more dopamine you're gonna generate 'cause it operates in terms of that pain-pleasure type balance. And if you start adopting that kind of principle, take action when you wake every day, it just means dopamine is on a very good path from the moment you begin.
- AAAli Abdaal
Amazing. Okay, so we talked about actionable strategy number one was phone, phone fasting.
- TPTJ Power
Yeah.
- AAAli Abdaal
What are some other things that we can do?
- TPTJ Power
Second big action for dopamine is what we call flow state. Flow state has become a big phenomenon. There's that great psychologist called Csikszentmihalyi who popularized this a number of years back, and flow state is the idea of our brain getting extremely hyper-focused on one thing. It's effectively the opposite of how the modern human is spending their time. We're constantly focused on, like, 10 different things at once, believing we can all multitask. To journey back to our ancestors and what we did for 99% of history was focus on one thing. One time we'd be hunting, then we'd be building, and then we'd be cooking. We would never be, like, trying to build our shelter and hunt a deer at the same time. That's not how we operated. So we would have spent hours and hours every single day deeply immersed in what we call flow state. Nowadays, we spend less. When we enter this flow state experience, it builds dopamine in crazy, crazy amounts because our brain's like, "Wow, they obviously need me right now." You wanna think of this dopamine chemical as your friend, and when you're trying to engage in something that's challenging, it's like, "Oh, he needs support. He needs support. Help him focus." People can enter flow state in a variety of aspects of their life. You might be able to get it in your work. If you're fortunate to work in something you kind of enjoy that is challenging, you might be able to get flow state there. Things like music, art, cooking, cleaning, connecting with humans. Anything that gets your brain hyper-locked in on one thing for a prolonged period of time is gonna create flow state.
- AAAli Abdaal
Video games?
- TPTJ Power
Video games are interesting because how flow state operates is it has to be this perfect balance between the amount of effort you're going to put insi- into something and your skill level, and that will decide for whether you can enter flow state. So if, for example, you did some editing, you might find ... If you did editing back when you were at university, that might have been quite flow statey for you because it was quite challenging and you had to, like, kind of, you were learning the ropes and stuff. So it was a good balance between difficulty and your skill level. If you edit now, you might find that a little bit boring compared to what you used to because it might be a more simple task. So you might not enter flow state. So you're looking for these tasks that are perfect balance of your skill level and the difficulty. Video games are very strategically designed to always make sure you're at that exact spot. So they've made it so that as the levels are upgrading and something like skill-based batch matchmaking in Fortnite and Warzone and all that kind of stuff is designed to constantly y- leave you in this state of skill and challenge balance. So yes, video games could enter flow state. Video games are an interesting topic as well because th- I don't put them in the same camp as all the unnatural dopamine in terms of social media and sugar and alcohol and so on because of the effort required to play some of them. If you looked at a game like Candy Crush on the phone, that is zero effort. It literally draws the line for you and then you put it into the box like a kid basically. So there's zero effort, max pleasure, dopamine crash. If you take potentially that Horizon game, some things that you can do on like a Minecraft type game, some Call of Duty games, they can be extremely strategic and challenging, which means your brain is actually working hard. So it is generating dopamine on a more natural curve than the spike and crash.
- AAAli Abdaal
This episode of Deep Dive is very kindly sponsored by YNAB, which stands for You Need A Budget. Now, for many people, money is a cause of guilt and anxiety. You're never entirely sure where all your money goes, and you're left feeling guilty about purchases big or small. Money is often associated with restriction, fear, and uncertainty. But your money is an extension of you in many ways, and it's obviously not ideal to feel so bad about it. Now, YNAB is an app that's helping millions of people change their mindset around money. It's built on four simple habits which could transform the way you think about money. These habits are, firstly, give every dollar a job. Two, embrace your true expenses. Three, roll with the punches, and four, age your money. Now, these habits are actually really simple. Giving every dollar a job basically just means that you plan out the different things you want to spend your money on after you've been paid. Then all you have to do is stick to the plan knowing that you already have enough to cover everything. Your true expenses refers to those big non-monthly outgoings like trying to buy a car or a holiday deposit. You want to break these down and you want to save in advance so that hopefully you're not hit by a big charge that you were not expecting. And one of the things that I really love about YNAB is their idea of rolling with the punches. Because sometimes life does throw things at you like a piece of tech breaks and you need to have it fixed, or you get your stuff stolen from the back of your car like happened to me, or a pipe burst and you have to call a plumber. YNAB helps you set money aside in advance to help cushion you from life's unexpected expenses. They also recognize that we can feel really guilty for spending money. So if you do spend more than you planned, that's totally okay. Just move your money to wherever it's needed. It's yours at the end of the day. And you can even age your money. Spend less than you earn and have a nice stack of saved money waiting for your bills as they come in, not the other way around. In an ideal world, money really shouldn't be scary or stressful for us, and we actually have way more control over our money than we often think. So if you're interested, you can try out YNAB today and you can see if this approach to budgeting can make a difference in the way that you think about money. So thank you again, YNAB, for sponsoring this episode of Deep Dive. I've definitely found that I get a lot more sustained pleasure from, like, immersive storytelling style video games that require quite a lot of work and occasionally a reasonable amount of grind to, like, achieve something [laughs] Um, rather than the more like... Like this is why I don't like phone games because phone games are, are, they're just too-
- TPTJ Power
Too quick.
- AAAli Abdaal
They're too quick.
- TPTJ Power
To get the pleasure.
- 29:51 – 54:44
The Importance of Oxytocin: Connection and Relationships
- TPTJ Power
number three for raising your dopamine is gonna be immersing our body in cold water. A brilliant psychologist back in 1998 called Szaramek discovered for the first time that cold water immersion can raise our dopamine levels by two hundred and fifty percent, two point five times. And when you get to this cold water immersion conversation, it's really important to understand this concept called the pain-pleasure balance. This was developed by Anna Lembke in America, a brilliant American psychiatrist. And effectively what we discovered was all of these really, quote-unquote, "painful challenging activities" of hunting and fighting and building resulted in a pleasurable experience in the brain afterwards. And again, that was our brain just reinforcing do hard things, feel good, keep doing hard things, survive as a species. And cold water immersion is the pinnacle of this. It's a highly painful, horrible experience having a cold shower or getting in a plunge pool or something like that, that will lead to this massive generation of dopamine.
- AAAli Abdaal
And so should we all have cold showers in the morning or buy an ice plunge bath, or what's the, what's the thing?
- TPTJ Power
It's interesting. I think the ice plunge is a good example of like an extreme version, but I actually don't think it's necessary. I think it's actually almost comical that humans are living so much in a pleasurable world that one of the biggest trends on social media is freezing ourself to death in an ice bath. And it's like that is actually how clever the human brain is at trying to rebalance itself, that everyone's sitting there on social media getting quick dopamine, watching people have horrible experiences in ice plunges, and it's like quite ironic really. And cold plunges, like if, if you have access to one in like your gym or like you're on holiday and you can swim in a cold lake or something like that, that's awesome. But I would say the most sustainable way to do this is just to every single time you have a shower, have 30 seconds of cold at the end, and that'll provide a good natural increase in this dopamine chemical to create a rise in motivation and your capacity to focus. To again, understand with something like flow state, our ability to get locked in, it requires dopamine. So if you had cold water immersion first thing in the morning and then you try and go to a flow state task, you're gonna get into that state easier. So if you can have your normal shower, turn it cold at the end. We found with all our training that if people put music on when they get in the shower and turn it cold at their favorite moment in the song, at the chorus or whatever it may be, people seem to stay in the shower for longer because they're in a slightly more positive vibe as they go through the hell of the cold water.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. What are strategies four and five?
- TPTJ Power
So next strategy for boosting our dopamine is this action we called my pursuit, and this comes back to the importance of a human always having a very clear mountain that they're climbing in their life. And this was huge for me. I actually was someone that struggled a lot with all of the different addictive behaviors our modern world has to offer. I went through a pretty challenging period of loss in my life from 16 to 21, where five people in my family passed away in five years, which was a pretty intense experience as a young man. And during those years, I went very heavily into the world of alcohol and drugs and social media and porn and everything that would kind of distract me from the experience in my mind. At 22, I then decided I like really wanted to create a life that I enjoyed and that would be naturally pleasurable and that would provide like good financial income and everything like that. And I had to go through the clar- the clarification of what am I gonna chase instead of all that quick dopamine. And this is where the whole idea of my pursuit came from, that if you are someone that is addicted to all these different things, really the only way to get off of them is to have something else that you're chasing that you're willing to sacrifice for. Say, for example, not watching porn. Not watching porn is probably one of the hardest things in the world because it's like a secret addiction. Like drinking less is like something that's like, at least it's in public for the majority of people. So it's like if you're constantly getting pissed at the pub, people are gonna start thinking, "Oh, you've got a drinking problem." Porn is this giant secret in society that everyone does but doesn't talk about, and it is one of the worst dopamine behaviors in the world. It's hyper, hyper stimulation and crash, and you feel it like immediately after porn. You do not feel your best self. And quitting porn was then one of the hardest of these things in order to let go. Ultimately, the only way I managed to quit it was by really deeply observing how it was affecting my capacity to take action towards my primary goal the next day. And I began to notice that if I watched porn one evening before going to sleep, there would be this like more of a fuzz and lack of motivation in my brain when I woke up the next morning. And that's why having a very clear pursuit is so important because you're only gonna be willing to sacrifice eating sugary lunches and going on your phone every morning and drinking loads of alcohol on a Friday night if there's a higher goal you're chasing. And we go through this process of really helping people identify what is my primary pursuit? What is the thing I should be chasing down?
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. What is that process? How do we figure this out?
- TPTJ Power
This is where we go to this prolonged period of time in nature without your phone. And I did this largely because I was so addicted to my phone, and I thought, "I need to start spending time off my phone. Sitting around on a sofa bored is hell, so what if I walk in nature?" And I found prolonged periods of time in nature pretty hard without my phone, and you could have it in a bag on airplane mode or ideally just not with you at all. And you need to be in a nature environment that you can spend at least 60 minutes with your mind. And what I found is at the start of these walks, some of your problems come into your mind or some of your like critical self-talk where you tell yourself you're not enough or you're ugly or you're stupid or whatever it might be, and other different challenges you're navigating. And a lot of us experience these little moments of time in silence, and they aren't very, they aren't very enjoyable, so then we're always headphones in, podcast on, distraction, distraction. What I came to discover is that if you spend a prolonged period of time in nature, which is our home as a species, where we spent 300,000 years, eventually after 15 to 20 minutes, that kind of stuff eventually subsides. It has its moment to be heard, those different emotional messages that your brain and body are trying to send you, and then creativity begins to arise. And if you go on a 60-minute walk in nature simply with the question of, "What is the primary thing I'm seeking for in my life right now?" And that might be a relationship. It might be something to do with your work. It might be that you know physical fitness is something you have to pursue harder. It might be your food. But if you spend 60 minutes and then on a regular basis pondering, "What is my pursuit?" You'll find you'll get extremely clear. Once you've identified what it is, on the following walks, you begin to then strategize, "How the hell am I gonna get hold of that goal?" And doing this every morning without my phone, 100% is the absolute main thing that has put me in the situation I'm in in my life right now.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. Yeah, that really vibes with me. Um, I've recently become a big advocate of, uh, goal setting and just like figuring out what you want and taking the time to make a goal towards it, because goals have a, a tendency to focus the mind on a thing. And I remember when I was in school, my primary pursuit was how do I make money on the internet after school? And so that was the thing that I was doing in the evenings when other people were like playing video games or browsing or chatting on MSN Messenger or whatever it was back then. I was like learning how to build websites and coding and stuff 'cause I had this primary pursuit of making money.
- TPTJ Power
Mm-hmm.
- AAAli Abdaal
Similarly at university, [chuckles] unfortunately, my prim- primary pursuit was how do I make money so that I can go part-time as a doctor?
- TPTJ Power
Yeah.
- AAAli Abdaal
And so that was the thing that I was doing, um, when- I had the option of doing other things, but the thing that I was doing was, was, was focusing on that. And I did find that w- at the point where I made enough money and money no longer was the primary pursuit, I felt a bit, like, rudderless. I was like, "Oh, shit, like, what do I, what do I wanna do?" And stuff. And I think one of the things with money is that it's a very easy primary pursuit. Uh, but it's also a bit of a dangerous primary pursuit because then you get it, and then you're like, "Oh, crap. What, like..." You know, filling the void, as Tim Ferriss calls it in, in "The 4-Hour Workweek." Um, and I find that every few months I will ponder that question. Um, I will... I, I tend not to phrase it as, what's my primary pursuit, but that's a really good way of phrasing it. I tend to think, "Why am I doing what I'm... Why am I doing what I'm doing?" In terms of, like, the work or the YouTube channel or the podcast or the books or any of this sort of stuff. Um, but I really like, what's, what's my primary pursuit?
- TPTJ Power
I think it's ridiculously fundamental. When you say it needs to be a clear goal, that is so important. Because if a hunter-gatherer wakes up and they think, "Right, I'm gonna go try and get some food today," they are gonna get very distracted by all the different things they could seek for. Whereas if they're like, "Right, I'm going to only try and make sure I hunt down a deer," they're gonna at least be able to be laser-focused on one thing. When you're trying to figure out the difference between, like, a money pursuit, I've also had a similar thing where you get money and you think, "Maybe that's not, like, actually fulfilling me fully." You really want your primary pursuit to somehow contribute to other people as well.
- AAAli Abdaal
Yeah.
- TPTJ Power
'Cause fundamentally, like, the hunter-gatherer wasn't going out to find a deer to feed themself. They were feeding a group or building shelter for the group. And we're always fundamentally designed to help the group survive, and your most fulfilling pursuits will contribute to a wider amount of people than just yourself.
- AAAli Abdaal
Yeah, one of the questions that I, um, always include as part of, uh... Every, every quarter I do, like, a sort of alignment, quarterly alignment workshop for my, for my audience, where you figure out what you want and figure out... and, and turn it into goals. And one of my favorite questions is, "If I had all the time and money in the world, how would I use my talents to serve other people?"
- TPTJ Power
Mm.
- AAAli Abdaal
And that question really gets at that, okay, money's not a thing anymore, time's not a problem anymore, and you have to use something that you're good at to help someone else. And that question sort of ticks all the boxes of, like [laughs] ... Yeah, usually people's answer to, answer to that question is a good way of figuring out, okay, what should the primary pursuit really be?
- TPTJ Power
I love that. And the interesting thing is, I obviously am only seeing entrepreneurship from the lane that I'm currently living in. But I remember a number of years ago reading this quote from Elon Musk that the amount of income you generate is directly proportional to the problem you solve in the world. And I remember just thinking, if you can find a way to solve some kind of significant problem for society, money may arrive as a result of that. And say, for example, when we started Dose, we primarily only trained companies, and I really wanted to train young people. Financially, it made no sense to go into the school market because obviously a company like Amazon has a lot more money than a state school in London. And I chose to just think, "Okay, we're just gonna pursue it," because it's actually a very important f- problem to solve. And it's very interesting how money is arriving now from that lane because of various ways in which we're managing to do the model simply by just solving an important problem in the world. So if your pursuit can solve a problem, it's probably gonna bring money as well.
- AAAli Abdaal
Yeah. There's a nice quote from MJ DeMarco which is, "To make millions, all you have to do is impact millions."
- TPTJ Power
[laughs] That's true.
- AAAli Abdaal
So yep. [laughs]
- TPTJ Power
That makes sense.
- AAAli Abdaal
Um, okay, finally thing, uh, final thing you mentioned, uh, was discipline. Let's talk about that.
- TPTJ Power
Yeah. Discipline, specifically discipline in your home, is a fantastic way to constantly be raising your baseline dopamine level. And we want, like, a high baseline dopamine so that we constantly have this, like, urge within us to take action towards whatever we're seeking. "I wanna go to the gym. I wanna cook food. I wanna do my job." You just want a high level of baseline dopamine. Any time you engage discipline in your home, you're raising that baseline. So if you, for example, finish your lunch and leave everything around the place, you don't engage the dopamine system. If you bother to just rinse, put it in the dishwasher, you've just put in a little bit of effort and your do- your brain has generated dopamine. And if people go through the process of really working towards maintaining a much more organized and tidy home, it's very interesting the translation that has to their motivation. And one of our biggest, uh, clients that we work with is the NHS, training lots of the doctors there. And many people in the NHS are really struggling with their mental health. There are a lot of people that come to us experiencing a lot of depression in their minds and that, like, real low period where you can't really do anything. Even working is really hard. Showering is hard. Anything that's effortful is hard. And in the first week of Dose, we simply get them to select one room in their home that they're gonna organize and try and get it done. And th- that's, like, their worst nightmare. Like, someone that's depressed, the idea of cleaning a room in their home is hell. And I say to them, like, "We've done this with 50,000 people and this really does work. Please just trust us and clean that room in your house." They'll put some music on. Sometimes we get people to FaceTime someone else and they go both clean their rooms at the same time. They clean a room and they come back the next week, and suddenly they have this more vibrancy in their energy. And suddenly all the other things we need to do for our mental and physical health, to do with food or exercise or whatever it may be, come from a place of higher baseline dopamine so it's easier to actually take action.
- AAAli Abdaal
One of the things that we, um, teach as part of our Productivity Lab is, you know, we have these, like, focus lab workshops where, you, you know, for... We'll, we'll do a few hours Zoom co-working session where we'll get a few hundred people in a Zoom room. And I always recommend to people for the first, like, five minutes we say align and organize. Align, i.e. figure out what you want to do with this next hour, and organize, spend three minutes just clearing your workspace.
- TPTJ Power
Mm.
- AAAli Abdaal
Or, like, getting that coffee mug and putting it downstairs or, like, you know, just taking the shit off of your desk or your surroundings or whatever. And I've found that when I've experimented with that it's really worked.
- TPTJ Power
Mm.
- AAAli Abdaal
But I, I, I suspect there's something about tidying up your environment and to having that discipline around even, like, the workspace that contributes to that higher dopamine baseline which makes it easier to stay focused.
- 54:44 – 58:21
The Importance of Human Connection
- TPTJ Power
simple challenge where he has to try and make sure that he gave his wife like a proper five to ten second hug. The longer you hug for, the more oxytocin will release. Five to se- ten second hug when he left for work and when he came back in from work. And he came in the next week with a very big smile on his face. And I was thinking, "Wow, this guy looks like different from last week. You looked much more energized." And he was pretty averse to the fact he was even receiving the guidance originally. And I said, "How did it go?" And he said, "Not only, like, have we connected and felt like more bonded and talked more," but they had actually reignited a part of their life that apparently hadn't been there for nine years.
- AAAli Abdaal
Oh, wow.
- TPTJ Power
And whether you're seeking for just like normal, natural connection or even like more deeper romantic sexual connection, it's very important to understand that simple human connection of holding hands and cuddling and hugging one another is fundamental to actually achieving maybe the deeper, more romantic goals that you desire.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. All right. What's, what's next?
- TPTJ Power
Okay. So action number two to raise your oxytocin levels is called contribution, and this is any time in which you're in service to another human being, it's gonna raise the levels. This clo- follows very closely to the law of oxytocin to make someone else happy every day, and it's really important to every single day just ask yourself, "What is one simple contribution I have made to somebody else's life?" And we run this simple challenge whereby people have to attempt to, in a coffee shop, buy a stranger a coffee, and that's quite, like, an awkward, uncomfortable thing to do. It's not a particularly expensive thing to do, so you probably can spend £3, like, serving someone else and buying them a coffee. But the experience people have from doing so is actually really surprising. Not only do they bond with this human, the other human is so surprised that a stranger would talk to them 'cause we're living in such an individual world now that you can't even believe that a stranger would talk to you. So that in itself then bridges the gap between humans and creates some oxytocin. And then you discover that this moment of serving someone else actually makes you feel really, really good, and there's this really good episode of Friends the TV show where Joey says to Phoebe that there's no such thing as a selfless good deed. And in this episode, Phoebe tries to do kind things for other people, so without feeling good herself. So she, for example, goes and rakes someone's garden leaves without them knowing, so they have a good deed done. But what she ultimately discovers in this episode is it's fundamentally impossible to do something for someone else and not feel good yourself. And it's very important to, on a regular basis, just have that in your mind, like, "How am I serving other people?" Family, friends, colleagues, kids, whatever it might be. Because the more you serve others, the happier you will feel as a result.
- AAAli Abdaal
No, one of the stories I told, uh, in, in the book, in the third chapter on people, was how, um, I realized that one of the things that made my day job much more energizing and enjoyable was when I would offer the nurses a cup of tea a few times a day. And [laughs]
- TPTJ Power
Interesting.
- AAAli Abdaal
I would be, like, sort of I'd be sitting at my desk doing my thing, and then I'd think, "You know what? I want a cup of tea." And then on the way to the tea station, I'd poke my head into the nurses' office and be like, "Hey, anyone fancy a cup of tea?" And then some of them would be like, "Oh yeah, sure. Thanks." And then over time I learned, like, what the, what the tea order was, like, how strong they liked it, in- individuals-
- TPTJ Power
Didn't mind
- AAAli Abdaal
... how much milk, how much sugar, you know, all that kind of stuff, and I'd bring the tea back. And it's, it's not much skin off of my back to make more cups of tea 'cause I've gotta wait my, for my own one to steep for the two minutes anyway, and it just added a lot of good vibes to the ward. It made me feel really good. I'm sure they appreciate it as well, just having a cup of tea brought to them. Uh, realized for me that acts of service is my love language as well, so it's like there was just something really nice about doing that, and it was such an easy thing to do. I also then reali- like, um, when I was working during the pandemic, uh, the hospital was serving, was, um, was a s- was selling, like, scones for, like, 20p 'cause a local baker would, like, bake all these scones and donate them to the hospital because, like, NHS
- 58:21 – 1:00:07
Contributions and Acts of Kindness
- AAAli Abdaal
clapping, the who- whole shebang, and these scones were 20p. And so whenever I'd go to the, uh, to, uh, to... So, and, and so whenever I'd go to the cafeteria to get lunch or something, I'd just pick up, like, five or six of these scones in, like, just some random order and just bring them back to the ward and just, you know, plop them on the nurses' station being like, "Hey, this is for whoever wants them." It cost me £1.20, but it adds, adds so much, [laughs] so much good vibes to my own life and to theirs. Like, oh, super nice. Um, so I'm al- I am very bullish on just trying to do random acts of kindness for other people, not because you're, like, a saint or a good person, just 'cause it makes you feel good and it makes them feel good, and it's just, it's kind of a no-brainer.
- TPTJ Power
For sure. The more we mo- move towards collectivism of helping other people, the happier our brains are all gonna feel. And we just have to really understand this modern world has made us very self-focused, and it serves you extremely well and the person you support to, uh, put your attention on them instead of yourself.
- AAAli Abdaal
Cool. What's strategy number three?
- TPTJ Power
Strategy number three is what we call social life, and obviously we all know that we need some kind of social life. But it's very interesting when you go deep into the literature of oxytocin how there's fundamental ways in which people socialize that can actually increase or decrease the level of oxytocin when you're in that kind of environment. Obviously, we have this idea of physical connection, so it's always good if you can meet someone to always have a moment of physical embrace first. However, when you're actually socializing with someone, there is two main things, and it's qual- quality and quantity of eye contact that occurs during the conversation and then what we call active listening, which is deeply paying attention to what someone is saying. The way to know if you're actively listening is when you're listening to someone, and I've struggled with this a lot, it's very easy to actually spend your time formulating your response in your head to what they're saying whilst they're talking. So you're not actually really listening. You're just in your mind creating something that you're gonna say back next. Active
- 1:00:07 – 1:01:59
Building a Social Life
- TPTJ Power
listening is just taking the time to listen and then respond, taking the time to listen and then respond. And even in our conversation here, like, it's very easy for my brain to think, "Oh, should I plan what I'm going to say next?" But the more deeply I actually understand what you're saying, the better capacity I'm gonna have to engage in a proper conversation, and oxytocin will then transfer between the two of us.
- AAAli Abdaal
So the action there is...
- TPTJ Power
Social life.
- AAAli Abdaal
Social life with eye contact.
- TPTJ Power
Eye contact and active listening.
- AAAli Abdaal
Oh, okay. Nice. Cool. Um, sweet. So number four.
- TPTJ Power
Number four and number five then go into a different side of oxytocin which explores the relationship you have with yourself in your own brain. Because when you connect with other humans it does create oxytocin, but we also all have the capacity to connect with ourself. And when you go into this, a lot of us do really struggle with the relationship we have with ourself. Some of us are super critical of ourself in our mind. Some people are, like, really tough. They're really judgmental of their appearance, success, whatever it might be. And there's two fundamental actions that leads to a better conversation in your mind about who you are and your experience of life. The first one is what we call gratitude, which is an extremely popular and common understanding in the modern world that we need to action gratitude into our life, but still something we seriously, seriously lack in our day-to-day experience. Like, humans are very aware, "Oh, yeah, you're supposed to be grateful," but many of us don't have, like, a sustainable practice whereby we're a- like, often thinking about this. The reason gratitude is so fundamental to the conversation you have in your head is that We in the modern world are struggling so much with comparison, comparison on absolutely everything, how good our social life is, what our girlfriend looks like, how rich we are, whatever it might be. And effectively, comparison is constantly thinking about what you don't have in your life, and our modern mind is plagued by that experience. "I don't have this, I don't have that, I don't have this, I don't have that," when realistically we l- we have literally everything now in terms of human survival compared to what all our ancestors had. And gratitude, if you think comparison is thinking about what you don't have, gratitude
- 1:01:59 – 1:06:10
Self-Connection and Gratitude
- TPTJ Power
is very simply thinking about what you do have in your life. And if you make sure that in your moment when you wake in the morning and you begin to take action and you go and brush your teeth, which is fundamental for our dopamine, if in that moment you're brushing your teeth, you make sure you have conscious grateful thoughts throughout that period of time, it means that you're constantly t- starting your brain with that style of thinking rather than the more envious style of thinking that many of us can struggle with.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice.
- TPTJ Power
And then our fifth oxytocin action is something we call achievements, and achievements is fascinating. This is our capacity to celebrate the achievements we have in our life, and this then really goes into neuroplasticity and how our brain can adapt and mold and rewire itself over time. Very simple example of neuroplasticity is just learning to drive a car. If you get in a car and you try and drive it, it is an absolute nightmare with the gear stick and the clutch and so on, and someone sitting there saying, "No, just do the biting point." It's a nightmare for our brain. Then over a period of time, we train the skill and we practice the skill, and then in a few months' time you find yourself not even having to think about the ge- gear stick or the clutch as a result of an alteration in what's called your visuomotor cortex, which is the area responsible for that kind of physical fine movement. Our brain can shift and change, and when you look at how you communicate with yourself in your mind, it's very common that there's been a huge amount of critical self-talk that has taken place. And rather than just trying to stop the critical self-talk, 'cause that's actually a really hard thing to do, you just need to learn to drive a new car effectively and learn to communicate with yourself in a much more positive way. And this has two big, big impacts on us. One is that it creates much more positive experience in our brain, and our confidence will then increase as a result of us talking to ourself in a much more positive way. The other is it actually really impacts our capacity to succeed on whatever we're seeking to attain. When we look at the confidence, the first part of this is that if you, say, for example, had two groups of parents and they were both raising a toddler, and one of those groups of parents decided to raise that toddler by constantly telling it everything it was doing wrong, "You're doing this wrong in school, this wrong with your friends, this wrong with us at home," and then the other group of parents decided to raise the toddler by, of course, identifying when it made mistakes, but really learning to celebrate the things that had gone to plan for that kid. "You did this right in school with this subject, and this went right with your friends," and whatever it may be. If you look at the confidence in these two individuals, the first one is gonna be spinning in circles with absolutely no self-belief and n- no belief that it can actually do anything that's of value. The other one is really gonna begin to grow in its level of self-belief purely based on self-talk. If you look at how you communicate with yourself, we're very much like that first set of parents that only judge ourself and very rarely celebrate the achievements we're making. The more often you celebrate the achievements, the more confident you become. Then if you look at this down the lane of your capacity to succeed at what you're seeking to attain, if you had two, uh, women, they were both 35 years old and they both wanted to eat healthier food. Monday to Friday, they both ate great food, and suddenly had loads of healthy whole foods, loads of natural meals. And then on Saturday they both ate a tub of Ben & Jerry's ice cream and a big Domino's pizza. So they've both eaten and done exactly the same thing the whole week. If one of them goes down the lens of communication in their mind of, "Oh, fuck's sake, like, why do I do this? I'm so bad with my diet. I'm fat. I'm really unsuccessful whenever I try and do these things." And the other one goes, "That is annoying that I ate the ice cream and the pizza, but I've actually just achieved six, six days of eating healthy food, and that's a massive accomplishment for me." One of them reinforces the negative behavior, and one of them reinforces the positive. And if you look at the outcome of these two individuals, one of them is going to become much healthier than the other. So fundamentally, having a practice in your mind where you celebrate a achievement every single day is just gonna lead to a more confident and more successful brain.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. Um, any specific practices you recommend or you've found work for people?
- TPTJ Power
The best thing I can recommend is when you are just about to fall asleep as your last thing at night, you've had your entire day, you simply review your day and you think, "What is my primary achievement?" It really is important to understand this doesn't need to be a massive thing. This can be that you ate a healthy lunch, you managed to clean up your room, you submitted an important email to someone. But if you celebrate achievement, you start training this new pattern of thinking in your brain, and it becomes much more natural. Over time, you actually start to communicate and think in that way more often, and then gradually those experiences are created.
- 1:06:10 – 1:12:14
Understanding Serotonin
- AAAli Abdaal
What is the third chemical we should be thinking about?
- TPTJ Power
The third chemical in DOSE is serotonin. This is the chemical responsible for our mood and our energy, and the most important thing to understand about this chemical is 90% of it is being made in our guts. Our brain and body is constantly assessing how healthy our body actually is, and if the body is in a good state, if it's well rested, if it's got sunlight, if it's got loads of good nutrient-dense foods in, it leads to an increase in serotonin in the gut, which then improves how we feel in our mind.
- AAAli Abdaal
Oh, nice. Um, what is it about our modern society that screws up with serotonin?
- TPTJ Power
We've got nutrient-dense food that arrive into our mouth, and then we start eating them, and then immediately our body is like, "Okay, look at all these resources that are coming in from these whole foods," which would be like protein sources or fruit or vegetables or nuts or whatever it may be. As those molecules come into the body, the body literally breaks them down. For example, it breaks it into this chemical called s- called tryptophan. Tryptophan then builds serotonin. The biggest challenge we have in the modern world is we've got all these ultra-processed foods entering our gut. Ultra-processed food has become a massive topic now in the last few years. And as these foods enter our body, our body's capacity to make serotonin is the least of its priority. The priority is then removing these toxic products from it, and then our serotonin levels dip. And so many of us are now struggling with the feeling of exhaustion and low mood, and that is heavily connected to the nutrients in the foods that we're eating.
- AAAli Abdaal
Ooh. So what is the law of serotonin?
- TPTJ Power
Interestingly, the law of serotonin is to make sure you walk headphone-free in nature every day. And that actually goes on to have an impact on all aspects of serotonin, which covers things like our nutrition, our sleep, quantity of sunlight, even down to how our body breathes. Effectively, with serotonin, the whole thing is about getting our system more aligned to nature and how it originally spent its time. I think the biggest disruption we've had to that is the fact that humans no longer spend any time in nature, so we're not actually connecting to the area that made us human. And if we spend long ti- prolonged periods of time in nature without our headphones connecting to it, we see a human then actually become more natural in all aspects of their desires with their food, sleep patterns and so on.
- AAAli Abdaal
What is it about nature that is so good for our serotonin levels? Do we know?
- TPTJ Power
Effectively, a, uh, fantastic psychologist in Japan called Jin Park back in the early 2000s discovered that spending time in forests was extremely valuable for humans. Japan has had a great deal of mental health difficulty. They actually developed a term called karoshi, which basically means an overworked modern human that is struggling with depression and suicidal ideation and whatever it may be. They then knew, given that it's Japan, they have the world's biggest forest, they have the most dense forest of anywhere in the world. They thought maybe we could just test out putting people for prolonged periods of time in forests, because scaling therapy is not particularly easy. They developed this practice called shinrin-yoku, which is effectively walking headphone-free slowly through a forest. And they see huge transformations in stress and sleep and anxiety and depression just as a result of being there. And it's so important to understand, you know, when you've been away for a while and you come home and you feel, like, slightly calm because you've come home and you're in your own little nest, and that's where you feel peaceful? We as a species are only at home when we're in nature. That is humans' original home. We spent 300,000 years nowhere else. That's all there was to spend our time in. Forests, beaches, mountains, whatever it may be. And what you basically see, especially when you put people through a variety of different neuroscience measurement tools, you see as soon as a human is in nature, their heart rate drops, their blood pressure drops, their thoughts slow down, and effectively our brain and body thinks, "I'm home. I can slow the whole system down." And that is why nature is so powerful.
- AAAli Abdaal
What if someone is living in a concrete jungle like New York or London or something like that?
- TPTJ Power
Then they just really... We have this a lot, like with schools we train and stuff, they say, "What about access to nature?" It is really important to understand there is always parks nearby of some kind, and I don't think it's necessarily access to nature. I think it's lack of priority of wanting to spend any time there. Because it's pretty affordable to either walk there, cycle there, get on a tube there, and we just need short periods of time in these parks, preferably as hippy as possible, which means barefoot on the grass in the sunshine. You actually see from this grounding effect, which is where we have our bare feet on grass, that the nervous system calms even more if we're directly in contact with the Earth. And humans really need to return to that prioritization of spending time in these environments, even if it's tiny windows. If it's 10 minutes few times a week, it then begins to build a connection. But so much of society doesn't really perceive that nature has value because they have no relationship with it, because they spend no time there. Just like if you were trying to develop a relationship with a human, you'd have to spend time hanging out with them and listening to them and talking to them, and we effectively don't do that with nature anymore, so we don't perceive there is benefit. But when you spend time there and a relationship grows, the benefits that nature can bring to your life increase a lot.
- AAAli Abdaal
It's interesting you say that. There is this guy I had dinner with a few weeks ago who, uh, travels with a grounding mat.
- TPTJ Power
Cool.
- AAAli Abdaal
'Cause he goes to all these, like, hotel rooms and then these, like, skyscrapers and stuff, and has a grounding mat that has, like, some mud on it or something like that, and apparently helps calm him down. And I was thinking, "How much of this is legit and how much of this is quackery?" But [laughs]
- TPTJ Power
There is some interesting science on it. A human being has an electronic charge, just like anything does, and we have a positive electronic charge, and the Earth has a negative electronic charge. And effectively, when we make direct contact with it, it neutralizes our electronic charge, which then causes a balancing of our heart rate and blood pressure and so on. When someone has, like, a grounding mat, for example, they're tapping into that Earth electronic charge through the plug system. That is a cool solution. Obviously amazing to actually be on the nature if possible. That's a very, like, modern way to do it. But, uh, there is some good science that grounding can have a positive effect on us, for sure.
- AAAli Abdaal
So when I do my daily walks around the park, I should go barefoot and not walk on the concrete path, but walk on, like, the grass next to the concrete path.
- TPTJ Power
100%. It actually would be much better for your body's benefits. In terms of these two different systems we have, our parasympathetic calming system and then our sympathetic, more energizing system. Soon as our body makes direct contact, the parasympathetic fires up. And we are living in very stressful environments.
- 1:12:14 – 1:20:26
The Role of Nature in Well-Being
- TPTJ Power
You take that city example, it's very sympathetic nervous system. It's like loads of loud sounds and buildings. Even in research you see that straight-edge buildings can stress our brain out over what we call fractals, which is, like, the variety that nature has to offer. And if you can get maximum parasympathetic nervous system activation, which is anything that calms the body down, that's what then leads to the body functioning well and maximizing serotonin.
- AAAli Abdaal
Can you think of any other cool studies on serotonin off the top of your head? [laughs] That, 'cause this stuff is just kind of cool.
- TPTJ Power
There's a, a lot of different studies. You then go into the whole nutrient world, and there's a very interesting psychiatrist called Young who has investigated the relationship between antidepressant medications and foods that could boost the bacteria in our gut that could elevate serotonin levels. And it is really important on antidepressant medication to always, obviously, consult whoever guides you towards that path. But there's good things you can do in addition to it or, if you don't take medication, just something to elevate your serotonin levels. And what they basically see is our gut is trying to produce serotonin all the time, and our gut is just a giant microbiome of bacteria. And effectively, when there's a really good, healthy range of diverse bacteria, it functions really well and manufactures a ton of this serotonin chemical. You can then take what's called probiotic strains of bacteria. This is drinks like kombucha, or you can take it in pill form or kefir yogurt, and these then add these healthy bacterias to the gut. They've then done good comparative studies where they've had people taking these probiotic-type formulas and people taking antidepressant medications. The reason there's a connection there is antidepressant medications are called SSRIs, which is S- uh, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and they impact the serotonin pathway to try and make us feel happier. And you basically see very comparable data with increasing the amount of good bacteria in the gut and raising serotonin and artificially kind of medicating the serotonin level up. So that's a pretty interesting new discovery, that if we can elevate our serotonin level naturally, it might have medication-type benefits.
- AAAli Abdaal
Oh, that's cool. Um, what relationship does serotonin have with energy and productivity?
- TPTJ Power
The big one here would be the energy impact of our nutrition and our sleep. And effectively, it is so important to understand that your capacity to feel clear in your mind and think clearly is directly connected to food and sleep. And so many of us now struggle with brain fog, where our brain literally feels fuzzy, effectively. I posted on Instagram recently about a morning routine, and so many people say that they wake up and their brain almost feels, like, blurry, so they can't even take action towards a goal. That is heavily connected to the food you've eaten before you've gone to bed, and then how much sleep, and good quality sleep you've actually got. Any time which we're eating the nutrient-dense food or we're sleeping at night, we're generating the serotonin chemical. We then have a very clever system called the vagus nerve, which is connecting the two together. The vagus nerve is constantly sitting there in the body, in your chest, with your heart, with your stomach, with your throat, reading the state. And if throughout the night, from the nutrient-dense food and the good quality sleep, the brain is like, "Cool, we got a load of serotonin," your brain wakes up the next day much more clear. So the capacity to be productive when you're working and have a sharp focus is gonna be far better. If we do, and I have no judgment for it, but then eat, like, a really sugary dinner late at night, which is tempting 'cause it hits our dopamine system and makes us feel really good temporarily, and then after that we get a bit of a crash, so then we scroll TikTok, and then we watch some porn, and we just annihilate all these systems. Then we wake up the next day, we don't sleep as well, and we get a very foggy brain, which means that we're gonna be way less productive.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. Um, so what are the actionable things that we can do to boost our serotonin?
- TPTJ Power
So first strategy in order to maximize serotonin is what we call sunlight before social media. Specifically, sunlight in the morning is extremely good for elevating the serotonin chemical. We obviously evolved out in nature, and when we had that bright morning sunlight, it was designed to elevate these chemicals to give us a big boost to start our day. So if you can have a framework in your mind whereby you have to earn your social media by first stepping outside and seeing sunlight, that's a good way to make sure you're maximizing this chemical. An important note is that even if it's cloudy, you still get the benefit. You just need slightly longer out there. On a really sunny day, you'd need about five minutes. On a really cloudy day, you would need about 15 minutes of morning sunlight in order to get the system started. The next thing that is extremely good, the second action for serotonin, is then how our body breathes. And there's a lot of research and science into this world, into this world of meditation and breathing. What we see from a serotonin perspective is if the body is breathing very slowly, serotonin levels will rise 'cause the body is getting into a calmer state. So what we try and guide people to do is to get outside for their sunlight before social media, sit down on a bench, and they sit down and go through a pattern of what we call resonance breathing. That's seen to be one of the best methods for this. Resonance breathing is where you're trying to only breathe six times in a minute, and you can therefore gamify it in your head. So it doesn't have to be meditation. Meditation is beautiful if you can do it, but I know many people struggle with the, the kind of agitation in the mind. Effectively, with resonance breathing, trying to breathe just six times a minute. How you do that is you try and make your breathing round take 10 seconds, so then you only do six 10-second chunks. In order to do that, you do four seconds in and six seconds out. So you sit down, you're out there in the sunlight in the morning, you haven't yet seen your phone, so the chemicals are starting off the day in a good way, and then you sit down, in for four, out for six, in for four, out for six. Do that for two minutes. That's the second action that's gonna be extremely valuable.
- AAAli Abdaal
[laughs] Okay, mate. [laughs]
- TPTJ Power
The third action then is what we call gut health. Gut health has obviously become a foundational pillar in the modern world. People are very aware that, oh, we're supposed to eat healthy food. Fundamentally, when nutrient-dense food enters the stomach, you build a ton of serotonin. Nutrition is one of those topics that has got extremely complicated of, oh, how many carbs should I eat? How many protein, fat? Which this, which that? You can actually simplify this from a serotonin perspective down to could this food have been on Earth before humans got here or could it not? And if you actually think through that lens, everything like meat, fish, eggs, dairy, fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, these are all what we call whole foods. They're just one ingredient. All of those foods would be on Earth even if humans weren't here. If you look at a lot of the supermarket that is basically to the left of the first few aisles of those two things, basically 80% of the supermarket, those are all then modern creations. There's obviously some exceptions to this rule, but if you're thinking about the lens of maximize serotonin, you wanna look at your plate and think, "Could these foods be here on Earth without humans actually artificially manufacturing them in factories?" And if that is the case, these whole foods are gonna help you elevate serotonin.
- AAAli Abdaal
Hmm. Interesting. Um, raw versus cooked foods. Does cooking something count as processing the thing? [laughs]
- TPTJ Power
That's a good question. I would say no, it doesn't count as, like, turning it into an ultra-processed food. So if you were looking at the distinction, you would basically have if you turn the food around and on the ingredient list there's like 50 words that you can't say out loud, you're then looking down the ultra-processed food lane. If you turn around and it's yogurt, for example, and it literally just says milk as the ingredient, then you're thinking, "Okay, that's fine." Or if you have to cook your courgette, for example, to make it softer in order to eat, that's just, like, good modern invention that enables some more foods to be eaten. But in general, you're just wanting to look at it and think, "Is there only one ingredient in this specific food?" And you basically want a plate of one-ingredient items rather than things that have loads and loads of different things. Like if you buy a chicken Kiev, for example, and you turn it around, you'll notice that on your chicken Kiev there is actually 20 words on there that you wouldn't expect to see. Or if you buy a Pret sandwich, which we might think could be healthy, again, 20 ingredients that you wouldn't know the names of. But if you're in Pret and you, for example, get a chicken and tuna salad or something like that, and you look through the ingredients, you're like, "Oh, this only says the things that I can see with my eyes." And the more that you eat just whole foods, the more serotonin you build.
- AAAli Abdaal
Interesting. Nice. That's good stuff. Um, four and five
- TPTJ Power
Fourth action for serotonin is nature, and this is spending prolonged periods of time in a natural environment. I actually believe this is the most important thing in all of this dose theory, is spending time in natural environments. The reason I believe that is humans are extremely
- 1:20:26 – 1:24:15
The Power of Sleep
- TPTJ Power
misaligned to our former hunter-gatherer self, and the more you can become a hunter-gatherer in the modern world, the more you're gonna thrive, from a productivity point of view, from a relationship point of view, health, mood, energy, whatever it may be. In order to become a human that deeply, internally desires a natural way of being, so really wants these natural whole foods and wants to get their morning sunlight and sleep loads and have intimate connections with humans, you need to get your brain and body much more connected to our natural form. The way of doing that is to spend prolonged periods of time in nature, deeply connecting with your senses when you're out there, so your brain has something to focus on. So if you're out there, and you get there, and you actually try and intentionally pay attention to what you're looking at, so you're like, "Yeah, I can see a tree over there, and I can see grass, and I can see the sun, and I can see a river," and you start tuning your eyes in, and this is effectively helping you induce what we call, like, nature flow state. Flow state is when we get hyper-focused on something. If we can get our brain hyper-focused on nature, it's gonna be valuable for serotonin and also our dopamine, which motivates us to want to come back every time, which is really, really good. So you tune in with your eyes, you tune in with sound, you tune in with your nose. If you can ever actually physically interact with nature, be a kid and climb a tree. If you start connecting into that original part of how humans spend their time, not only is it amazing when you're out there, but you start desiring a more natural way of being.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. And then final?
- TPTJ Power
Our final one is deep sleep. Deep sleep is, well, I know it's hard to negotiate between these, but it's extremely important for the generation of this chemical. And the biggest point I would put around sleep is what is the content you're consuming is the final content you consume before you go to sleep. There's a lot of different sleep strategies out there in the world, but what I really want people to understand is your brain needs to go through a calming period before it then enters sleep. You don't want to be burning it out with social media as the final thing that you do. Social media is gonna be a part of your evening, for sure, and, like, you'll sit there, you catch up with people, you scroll some videos, whatever it might be. But a lot of people in the modern world are now almost, like, TikTokking or Instagram Reeling their brain to sleep. Like, they're lying there and they're scrolling it. Again, there's no judgment. We're just looking to try and optimize these things. If you can have a rule with yourself whereby the phone can't be used after 9:30, so you have to send your messages, do whatever, the phone can't be used after 9:30. Of course, the optimum would be get in bed and go to sleep. I appreciate that's just not necessarily the path for everyone. For me personally, I absolutely love watching YouTube, so I want to watch YouTube when I get into bed. But if you can get into bed, have some long form content, videos need to be a minimum of 15 minutes long, and get in bed and watch something far away from your eyes on low brightness, that's actually gonna enable your brain to actually go through a period of calming down. Again, to reinforce, if you can get in bed and just do some breathing, that's definitely the best thing. But for everyone else in the world that is gonna want to basically scroll social media, a much better alternative is long form content lying in bed to allow your brain to get into a better state of rest before it actually enters sleep. And then once it enters sleep, it's gonna get into deep sleep much quicker, and the deep sleep is where the serotonin restoration will occur.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. Um, what's the value of Whoops and Oura Rings and the whole shebang, in your view?
- TPTJ Power
I think they're extremely good for making you aware of how your behavior is impacting your experience as a human. I interestingly have taken my Whoop off for the first time four days ago after two years of wearing it, and that's just because I want to see whether, like, it's having a positive or negative impact. I've had it on, and I've meticulously checked it every single day for two years. And for me, it did make me extremely conscious of going to bed much earlier because my scores were much better if I went to bed earlier. Like, even if I had the same amount of sleep from 8:00 till s- let's say 12:00 to 8:00, 8:00 AM, or I had, like, 10:00 till 6:00, I noticed the score was much better. And back in the day, like, my grandpa and stuff used to always say, it was like an old wives' tale, that an hour before midnight is worth two after. There was this old phrase. And when you look into the research, it's really clear that your sleep before midnight is actually much more restorative for your body than your sleep
- 1:24:15 – 1:28:18
Navigating Depression and Mood
- TPTJ Power
after midnight. Because originally, obviously, the sun would have set at 7:00, 8:00 PM. We went to bed. Like, that was actually sleeping hours. We didn't just, like, stay around, hang out, watching porn and going on social media, which is what keeps us awake these days. So if you can get to sleep a little bit earlier, I think these, these things can help. I also personally found it super impactful on alcohol, these metrics. I think these rings and stuff make it very clear that alcohol is pretty disruptive to our system.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. Can we just elaborate a little bit on the link between serotonin and mood?
- TPTJ Power
Yeah. Effectively, serotonin is measuring the state of our body, and it's simply wanting our body to be energetic and healthy. And then it needs some kind of communication system with our brain to tell us whether that's the case. And if our body is in a good state, it wants us to have some kind of positive reinforcement in order to make us want to continue to engage with these behaviors. So you'll notice that if you get some really good sleep, or you spend some time walking out in the sunshine, or you eat a big plate of fruit, for example, a mood elevation will actually occur. And that's our brain simply trying to reinforce the natural way of being as a human, and that's why it's effectively affecting our emotional balance. If, on the other side, you do eat some really unhealthy food, you spend all your day inside, you don't sleep very well, your mood will dip. And effectively, your mood is a really clever communication pathway between your brain and body, guiding us to engage in a more healthy way of being.
- AAAli Abdaal
What's your take on the whole, like, depression equals imbalance of hormones versus depression is... And, and I, I, I think th- there's, there's been a bunch of books about this recently, and obviously in med school you learn some of this stuff. Uh, I think some people feel that if I'm depressed, it's because there is something wrong with my brain and I cannot do anything about it, and other people view depression more, you know, depression is low mood persistently for a very long period of time. Mood is a signal that your environment is a bit shit or the things that you're doing are a bit bad, and therefore it's feels more in your control as to what you can do about it. What's your take or your approach to, to what extent is depression within a person's control? How much impact can we actually have on our, our own mood?
- TPTJ Power
Yeah, this is a fascinating question. I do believe it is predominantly within our control, and I'll take some caveats on that, our experience. And when you look at this, I really believe that the emotions we experience are simply messages guiding us towards our optimal path as a human being. And if depression arises, for example, something is effectively off. When we look at depression, I specifically think it's actually much more connected to the dopamine pathway than to the serotonin pathway. Whilst serotonin, for example, can just elevate our mood so it might take us out of a depressive type thinking pattern, if we wanted to fully alleviate ourself from depression, we would need a lot more dopamine in our brain. The reason depression, for example, is so connected to dopamine is because it enables us to take action towards something. When you're in a depressive state, your brain is just really struggling to pursue anything. And fundamentally, as a human being, you are designed to pursue things. You're designed to contribute to a family, get hold of resources, and like be a high functioning specie in this world. Like all humans were high performers before this modern world. You could not be a high performer, otherwise you wouldn't be here. And when you get an experience of depression, and I personally have really navigated depression, I've got extremely low before for prolonged periods of time. Rather than seeing it as my brain is just broken, it's more, wow, my brain and body is so clever that it's sending me this message that my behavior needs to change. And I really struggled with alcohol and drugs. It was like a really difficult experience for me. And I effectively for a long time just thought, "Oh, these depressive symptoms are just like part of who I am, and I'm just gonna keep taking these pleasurable things because they temporarily alleviate them from me." However, over time, I actually came to realize that it was simply a message trying to guide me away from the things that were creating it in the first place. And the same would be if you suddenly felt anxious on a different lens. Suddenly you feel like nervous and fearful in your body. It's your body guiding you that something is off effectively. So I do believe these are predominantly within our control, these emotions. I do think there are caveats to that in terms of sometimes life throws you an extremely challenging event effectively. So if suddenly a load of people pass away or you go through a really significant breakup or you lose your job, that actually
- 1:28:18 – 1:32:11
ADHD: A Different Perspective
- TPTJ Power
creates like a significant challenge within our brain that we have to navigate. But because we've like mass talked about depression and anxiety, we're now conflating things like grief, for example, from a breakup or someone passing, we're thinking that's depression, but they're actually different experiences within our brain. So the more you can listen to them and align to their guidance, the better you're gonna feel.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. On a related note, what are your thoughts on ADHD [laughs] and the ADHD epidemic?
- TPTJ Power
ADHD is fascinating. I think for a very long period of time, maybe all of human history, some percentage of society may have had ADHD. And when you look at ADHD down this neuroscientific lens, it's really clear that those with ADHD have genetically low levels of dopamine production, which can be seen as a big challenge, but it as also can provide some serious advantages, and we'll go into that. So it can be a genetic experience. And you'll remember back to school, there are some kids that go really hyperactive and then they crash, and really hyperactive when they crash, and they struggle to sit still and focus and things like that. And it's very likely that from the moment they were born, they had slightly low dopamine levels. It's important to understand that even if that is the case, if it is genetic, there's a hell of a lot of stuff you can do to support it. In our modern world, we are now creating ADHD through our behavior because rather than genetically being born with low dopamine levels, we're actually artificially creating low dopamine levels by constantly burning out this machine. If, for example, you got in a car every day and didn't put it into gear and revved the engine, eventually that engine is gonna burn out. And every day that we wake up and we have social media and we have loads of sugar and watch pornography or drink alcohol, we overstimulate this pathway, which causes the amount of dopamine it can produce to progressively reduce. So if you're looking at it, you've basically got genetic, could be born with it, low dopamine, or you've got more behavioral ADHD happening as a result of our modern lifestyle.
- AAAli Abdaal
Ooh, interesting. And so I guess in either case, learning how to harness our dopamine system and figuring out like what are the sensible things we can do, some of which we've talked about in this, in this podcast, in this video series, would just help regardless of what the cause is.
- TPTJ Power
It's fascinating this, because I obviously am always viewing things down the hunter-gatherer lens and because that's just how we spent our time. And if you actually imagine a hunter-gatherer was born with low dopamine levels, so for whatever reason they had low dopamine production in their brain, they would get to, say, 10 years old and they'd be asked to contribute to that group in some way, like, "Help us find the food, help us build the shelter." Those are dopamine type experiences, hunting food, building shelter, contributing to the group in some way. That individual, let's call him Sam, has low dopamine, and he goes out hunting for the first time, and he actually is gonna experience more of a dopamine elevation than everyone else in that group because he's coming from a lower number. Like if they were all coming from five out of 10 and jumping to 10 out of 10, but he was coming from one, he's jumping 10 points when he's doing that hunting, and he is gonna feel insanely good in that pursuit of that goal. So then he's gonna come home and think, "Wow, I love hunting. I'm gonna do loads of hunting." And those with ADHD wouldn't have actually been the ones that were struggling to contribute. They actually likely would have been the greatest contributors and high performers in the group. And you do see a very strong relationship between ADHD and high performance because effectively if you are someone with ADHD, you have more dopamine seeking within your brain because you're coming from lower, so you get bigger elevations. And we actually have been working on this framework whereby we're trying to rename ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, to ADHA, attention deficit hyperactivity ability. And if an individual, like particularly with young people, can find something to harness in their life, doesn't have to be career-based, it could be music, art, creating, whatever it might be. If they can find something to harness, they're actually gonna progressively every single day raise their dopamine in a more natural way. And if you take Sam, the hunter-gatherer, that's been out there hunting, eventually he's gonna do so much hard work out there that he's actually gonna lift a lot of those ADHD symptoms away from him by constantly raising his baseline dopamine. So it might have been that humans originally had ADHD and then actually dissipated throughout their life because of all the hard work they had to do, which raised their dopamine.
- 1:32:11 – 1:50:19
Managing Stress with Endorphins
- TPTJ Power
Whereas nowadays, you get into this modern world, you've got low dopamine, anything pleasurable feels amazing, gaming, social media, sugar, and so on. And then you constantly go on this very volatile journey of ups and downs, and then your ADHD symptoms get extremely challenging. So ADHD individuals that do figure out how to harness something that they like in their life will have a much better experience
- AAAli Abdaal
All right, so we talked about dopamine, we talked about oxytocin, we talked about serotonin. We're just milking you for all the knowledge that you have, and there's like, there's so much more, so much more to tap. Um, what's the fourth and final hormone that we're gonna be talking about?
- TPTJ Power
Yeah, our final chemical here is endorphins. And with endorphins, I'm basically gonna give you an entirely different perspective on how humans should be managing stress. And stress is a huge topic. It's part of being a human. It has benefits, and it has challenges. Like, stress can actually help us to advance as a human and hyperfocus our brain when we're under stress, and it also, if it's too chronic, the stress can be challenging. Most of society is perceiving that stress should only be reduced from just trying to calm ourself down, and that's really good. Like, we really do need to calm ourself down. But if you look evolutionarily at the function of these chemicals, endorphins being the main one that helped us cope with stress, it actually wasn't necessarily about calming ourself down to activate it. So here we're gonna look at how we de-stress the brain.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. So how do we de-stress the brain?
- TPTJ Power
[laughs] The interesting thing about stress is we have all kinds of stress now in the modern world. You have looking at your bank statement, you have an argument, you have whatever it might be. We have a lot of alternative ways of stress. Originally, there was only two stress. One was hunger, and one was danger, and those would put our brain into extreme stress. "Oh, God, we don't have food for the family," or, "Oh, God, someone's trying to kill us, an animal is trying to kill us," whatever it may be. And those would have been the really highly stressful experiences. When you then look at how we would s- respond to those two experiences, one thing is in common that we'd have to do, which is physically exert our body pretty hard in order to get out of the stressful state. So we would have to fight an animal, we'd have to run away from another human, we'd have to deeply try and pursue finding food, but the one thing in common is our body had to physically work pretty hard. And when you look into this, effectively when our body is extreme... e- experiencing extreme physical exertion, in order to help us cope with the experience of that stress, it begins to release endorphins, which will calm our brain down. So that if, for example, in a situation where, oh, my God, there's a bear there, and it's running towards me, instead of being like, "Oh, my God, there's a bear there. It's running towards me"
- AAAli Abdaal
[laughs]
- TPTJ Power
... which is not a very advantageous way to survive, your brain just immediately goes into physical exertion, sprint as fast as you can, pick up a stick, whatever it means to survive. But effectively, we needed something to remove stress from our brain and remove fear from our brain so that we could focus on the task at hand. And what you basically see is if a human is highly stressed and then they physically exert their body, and there are actually five different ways we can physically exert the body, then you're gonna see the stress immediately begin to reduce within the brain.
- AAAli Abdaal
Mm. 'Cause you hear about this a lot where people are like, "Oh, when I feel stressed, I go for a walk," or, "I go for a run," or, "I go to the gym."
- TPTJ Power
Mm.
- AAAli Abdaal
And I've been reading a bunch of stuff on Instagram Reels of like, you know, any, any time you're struggling with your mental health, do something physical.
- TPTJ Power
Mm-hmm.
- AAAli Abdaal
And chances are it will help. [laughs] It's not gonna hurt a- at least.
- TPTJ Power
100%, the endorphins model supports that theory. And we are experiencing two really specific symptoms of low endorphins in the modern world. One is our brain feeling highly stressed and, like, tight and, like, worried, that kind of, like, fast-paced experience in our thoughts. The other is anger and frustration. That's another really clear sign your endorphin system is low. And if you feel suddenly, like, annoyed, you'll notice your body literally wants to move itself. You will... If you're really annoyed, you wanna, like, punch a wall or whatever it may be, and it's because stress and frustration are really natural human emotions, but they used to be reduced down by physical movement, and now we are so sedentary. Like, I think it's amazing that we all, like, have these walks and all this sort of stuff, but, like, comparatively, like, if you go and look at, like, the Hadza, for example, which is a tribe that's still functioning within Africa, they're averaging about nine hours of movement a day. So that's what a human probably did for 300,000 years, was actually physically move their body for nine hours, and now we're really lucky if we get, like, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever it may be. And when people come to discover this, there's a really big shift in how they respond to stress, 'cause typically stress to us means, "Such a stressful day at work. I, like, really need to go home tonight and just, like, have a glass of wine and, like, watch Netflix and, like, scroll my phone" because that's gonna temporarily alleviate all the pain because it's gonna put you into a high dopamine state where no stress can occur. It's only gonna exacerbate the problem, though, in the long term. And if people can start associating that feeling of stress or irritability and frustration with, "Wow, my body is effectively asking for movement," because that's how it originally perceived stress, was movement, then you go down the path of, "First I'm gonna move, then I can go and chill and watch Netflix on the sofa." But if movement is the first response to stress, you're gonna end up in a much calmer mind.
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice. What is the law of endorphins?
- TPTJ Power
The law of endorphins is physically push your body every day. And this is interesting because, like, there's different approaches to, like, how much movement should we get, how many gym workouts, and so on. But if you have a fundamental principle that the body has to work hard every day in some form, that's a great goal. And on days where the motivation is higher, and remember your motivation is only high if your dopamine is in balance, so it's always good to be thinking about getting the dopamine levels naturally high. On the dopamine level, on the high dopamine days where your motivation is high, go to the gym, do your hard 60-minute workouts. And when you're there in the gym, it's important to understand the maximum endorphin release will occur in the moments where you're physically struggling the most. So if you're, for example, running away from a bear, running away, if it starts to run faster, you have to run faster, which means you need more endorphins to cope with that stress. So in the moment where you're in your final reps in the gym, where you think, "I can't really be bothered to do these reps," it's those reps that are gonna maximize the endorphin release within the brain. So hard physical workouts, really, really good. On a day where you think, "Nope, I do not want to do any exercise today because exercise is boring" or, "I hate it," whatever it may be, the most effective [laughs] thing I've seen is to do what we call walk-run, which is... And we get loads of people doing this in our training. You go out for a walk in the park, preferably if you're also trying to boost your other dose chemicals, you're kind of headphone free and so on. And when you're out there, you try and pick three moments in that walk where you're going to effectively artificially run away from a bear. So you're gonna put your brain through that experience. So if you see, for example, a, a small hill, and you have to accept the fact that if people are around, they're gonna think, "Wow, that person is running, and that's weird," and you might get self-conscious about it. Always with those things it's important to realize, like, no one actually cares about you. They're only focused on their own experience of life. They won't even notice you sprinting past them. And in that moment, if you have three mo- so you're on a walk, 20-minute walk, three moments where you just go, "Oh, my God, there's a bear behind me," and you just run as fast as you can, you're then gonna every day be getting this activation of this chemical that's constantly de-stressing your brain.
- AAAli Abdaal
Hmm. That's fun.
- TPTJ Power
And you look like a weirdo, which is just also part of the goal in life
- AAAli Abdaal
It's perfect, yeah. Also trains the anti-self-consciousness muscle-
- TPTJ Power
Yeah
- AAAli Abdaal
... which is a nice thing
- TPTJ Power
Like how Phoebe runs in Friends, you know?
- AAAli Abdaal
Yeah [laughs]
- TPTJ Power
There's an episode where she runs, like she would get way more endorphins running like that 'cause of the extra physical work she's adding in
- AAAli Abdaal
Yeah. Nice. All right, cool. So what are the actionable things that we can then do to boost the endorphins?
- TPTJ Power
So the first endorphins action is gonna be exercise. So any time which you can physically exert your body, walking, running, swimming, hiking, sport, whatever it might be, physical exertion of the body through exercise is gonna be number one. There are gonna be other days where you think exercise just isn't the path that I can pursue, and we have a variety of other ways that you see in the research can also increase it. Action number two is heat. Any time which you put your body in a hot environment, your body experiences this thing called a heat stress response, where similar to running away from the bear, the physical pain that it would get from that, it actually perceives heat, like a sauna or a bath, as a similar experience. It doesn't necessarily know that, that you're not gonna stay in that sauna for hours, so effectively starts preparing itself for physical danger. So that's why when you get in a sauna, you'll notice that you come out and you feel less stressed out, or if you get in a bath, literally as you sit in a bath, there'll be a relaxation effect occur, and that's 'cause of the heat stress response. So on the days that you can't exercise, sauna or even just getting in a bath is really good. The reason those two are better than a hot shower is you need about 15 minutes in the hot environment to get the endorphins to release. You might wanna have a 15-minute hot shower, but typically a bath or a sauna's gonna be a better path.
- AAAli Abdaal
Okay. Nice. Number three?
- TPTJ Power
Number three is music, and this is specifically singing music out loud-
- AAAli Abdaal
Nice
- TPTJ Power
... is one of the most effective ways you see to boost this. And you, again, you look back at the hunter-gatherers, they were chanting and singing. That was a big part of life. If we look back at humans over the last few hundred years, religious practices used to have humans singing much more. Singing does have a very euphoric effect on our brain. And coming back to the rule of physically pushing your body, if you really sing, it actually puts your body through physical work. And you'll notice if you hum a song or if you really sing a song, you'll enjoy singing it much more. From a neuroscientific perspective, that's 'cause the endorphins are releasing as a result of the body going through physical effort. So if you can, and we have this game plan where they have to try and sing for five minutes every day, and that's like a goal. If you're shit at singing like me, that doesn't matter. You can just sing out loud in your car, on a walk, in your bedroom, whatever it may be. But singing, the more you go for it, the better. It's gonna be a good way to activate it and de-stress the brain.
- AAAli Abdaal
All righty. Number four?
Episode duration: 1:50:19
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Transcript of episode ge302sHMFTw
