So like how could... people navigate that kind of wind down at bedtime when the mind seems to become super active?

Yeah.

So again, really relate to this.

I got an iPad Mini when I was about 13 or something, when the iPad Mini came out.

And my sister, as my Christmas present, put 10 seasons of Friends on the iPad Mini.

She had downloaded it or something off some website when the world was doing all that stuff.

And she put them on this iPad.

But what's your thoughts on UPF and dose?

A neuroscientist offers a simple routine to reset.

So allowing yourself to de-stimulate, even if it takes a few minutes for your brains to settle, so powerful.

But neuroscientist TJ Power has a trick for you to rewire your brain, lift your mood, reduce stress, and get you thinking more clearly.

Going for a walk with your phone left at home is unbelievably beneficial to your brain for two reasons.

One is that when you're in a natural environment, you generate a ton of natural serotonin.

Serotonin lifts our mood, it lifts our energy levels.

The second component is it enables you to activate a part of your brain called your default network.

Our default network activates when we're daydreaming and when we're bored and in states of imagination.

Um, how are these working, and how are these also not working in the context of what we're talking about?

Yeah, interesting.

So there's a variety you mentioned there.

I think behavioral change is right at the core of what we're really aiming towards.

I think our behavior is misaligned to what our body is evolutionarily desiring.

So I think anything down the lane of behavior change can be powerful.

It needs to be very deeply rooted with an internal motivation, though.

Um, what are some of the things that we can do to make it easier for us to actually be able to access that state on a, on a regular basis without just completely isolating ourselves from humanity? [laughs]

Um, how are these working, and how are these also not working in the context of what we're talking about?

about?Yeah, interesting.

So there's a variety you mentioned there.

I think behavioral change is right at the core of what we're really aiming towards.

I think our behavior is misaligned to what our body is evolutionarily desiring.

So I think anything down the lane of behavior change can be powerful.

It needs to be very deeply rooted with an internal motivation, though.

Um, what are some of the things that we can do to make it easier for us to actually be able to access that state on a, on a regular basis without just completely isolating ourselves from humanity? [chuckles]

Was it just a normal type of socially acceptable binge drinking, or was it something that went a little bit deeper than that?

Yeah.

So my relationship with alcohol begins quite young because part of ourService to my dad as kids was ensuring that his vodka and tonic would be ready when he got home from work.

And that seemed pretty innocent.

It was just, like, a nice thing to do for Dad to, like, make his vodka and tonic.

But I was making that vodka and tonic at seven, eight, nine years old.

Like, I knew how to put it together.

Let's try sobriety."

Now, I recently interviewed a neuroscientist about how the key to unlocking all of this stuff is the chemical serotonin.

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.

Terms and cashback cap apply

applyall there was to spend our time in forests, beaches, mountains, whatever it may be.

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 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.

Just take us on your journey for a little bit.

Yeah.

So I love that you're also interested in evolutionary biology.

I think a lot of the wisdom to how we can solve the reality humanity are now in is found in that ancient knowledge.

So that's cool.

And yeah, I'm a neuroscientist.

I run this DOSE research lab where we've turned these four chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins into a psychological intervention.

Yeah

Yeah.

Yeah, so the key premise is that dopamine originally had to be earned.

That's the key idea in your head is you're supposed to earn dopamine.

So if you actually imagine you've got a family sitting next to you, little young kids and they're freezing cold and it's pitch black at night and you've got predators around and you have to attempt to scratch rocks together for three hours until it somehow sparks and lights a fire.

The level of effort is just unimaginable, but you have no choice.

You have to just keep scratching the rocks together.

Eventually as it sparked and then it lit and then the fire started, that would have been heaven.

So let's just talk maybe about the main ways that we can kind of reset dopamine and start to gradually build our dopamine levels so that we get what you've just described.

It's that social media makes us feel connected, and we're actually not connected.

Yeah, we're moderately satisfying an incredibly important ancient desire on social media.

And because it's moderately satisfying us, it's reducing our desire to really go out and get it.

Like if, for example, tonight, like, the internet just disappeared, our phones all disappeared, we'd all sit at home and think like, "Oh, this is pretty boring, just like sitting on my sofa doing nothing." And eventually, if that continued for a number of weeks, we would all be back out socializing.

We'd be back out in the nature talking to each other because we wouldn't have something to moderately satisfy that need.

And because it kind of ticks the box, we're just not really chasing deep, deep human connection as much.

Like, my partner and I consistently do different experiments based on these brain chemicals to just see if we can improve our life.

Mmm.

Yeah.

Like, you think how easy our lives are now. Imagine actually coming home from a day of work and then doing that for three hours until you got some fire. Like, it was hard. And we needed a chemical that every single day just drove us to keep making the fire and keep looking for the food even when it was freezing cold outside and so on. And we got here as a species. And just like dopamine evolved as this very sophisticated mechanism to reward survival, activities that promoted survival, I think it has the same capacity to negatively create experiences that are disadvantageous to survival of us and our prospering as a species. And then if you look, rather than having to, like, look on Instagram at a list of what's good for my dopamine, what's bad for my dopamine, if you simply ask yourself the question, is this actually advantageous to my survival as a species, then you will know immediately whether it's pro or not pro for your dopamine. And you look at pornography, if you go further with pornography, a society that only watches porn as an engagement of sex is actually going to be one that doesn't procreate at all. And the brain is only going to send society a stronger and stronger message saying, "Please stop engaging with that path, 'cause that's not going to lead to a prospering society in a thousand years." And if you think of it with when you feel crap after cigarettes or you feel crap after spending a whole day socially isolated from being on your phone all day or the ultra-processed food, all of it is a very sophisticated message from our biochemistry as a result of our brain's desire to prosper for thousands of years.

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

This is where things get so fascinating because with that new c- I th- I would say I started this prayer maybe a year ago. I then about four or five months ago began going to church for, like, the first time in my life. I haven't even told anyone this. (laughs) And, uh, on Sundays I'll go to church and I spend like an hour in there. And I...... my natural kind of inquisitive brain of, like, the neuroscience side of things, it's like observing the whole experience of the prayer and the gratitude and the contribution to one another and the connection and the singing. And, and I'm thinking, "This is like dose." This is a lot of actions that we're kind of promoting in the modern world, but just through a different lens. And I've been sitting here now thinking, "This is the original mental health therapy, basically." Like this is obviously the original model that really helped people's minds to thrive. And I think what's interesting in the church environment, when you look at relationship with God, that is putting you more in the pursuit of oxytocin as an experience of life. It's a very oxytocin dominant moment in the church. It's like, there's thanking to God, it's this contribution to everyone, like everyone kind of shakes the hand and says, "Peace be with you," and connects with one another. It's there's singing. It's this, like, celebration of what has been. And that is the pursuit of oxytocin and love. And I basically believe that for much of the experience of humanity, oxytocin was the driving chemical. It was, how does this group prosper? How does this group survive? And dopamine was required in our brain to make sure we were giving the resources to the group. But I think we're in the pursuit of others, and I think nowadays a lot of us are in the pursuit of serving ourself basically. It's like, "How do I make myself feel good all the time?" Like food, and alcohol, sugar, all this stuff. And I think when I'm sitting in church, I'm thinking, "Wow, this is not about me anymore. This is about a group and God." And that feels like a much better place for the human brain.

When you've worked with people in Dose, I'm sure you've worked with people who've had, like, really deep pornography addictions.

Pornography addiction is fascinating because it's very different to alcohol and social media and sugar because it's very private.

And when you, say, for example, get really into alcohol and you become an alcoholic, or maybe you just slightly over-drink, it becomes very apparent to your family and your friends that you're drinking a lot, whether you're going out and partying a lot, or, like, every time you socialize, you're always requiring wine and beer in order to have a good time.

The same happens with the phone, like, you're always engaging with it.

The same happens with sugar.

Pornography is like this secret addiction that society has, and that's why I think it's being massively underestimated.

And where with these other actions, things like eating chocolate, we know it has 150% increase in dopamine from baseline, causing the spike and crash.

What are they?

What are they?

This is a really interesting area of dopamine.

There's this brilliant scientist I love called Gold that looked into the, the relationship between dopamine and what we call flow state, flow state being when we get incredibly, deeply immersed in a task.

Again, with that hunter-gatherer example, they lived their lives in flow state.

Building, you get so into deep flow state, making fire, hunting, foraging for food.

Big proportions of their day were spent deeply focused on one activity.

Nowadays, we're basically doing, like, 500 activities a day.

[laughs]