Ever wonder why modern life feels increasingly overwhelming, despite all our technological advances? Why motivation comes and goes, why genuine connection seems harder to find, or why stress feels more difficult to shake?
Leading neuroscientist TJ Power reveals how our modern environment disrupts four key brain chemicals that evolved over millions of years to help us thrive. His research shows how our phones, processed foods, and sedentary lifestyles are creating chemical imbalances that affect everything from our mood to our relationships.
In this fascinating conversation, TJ shares insights from his Sunday Times bestseller The DOSE Effect: An Inspiring Self-Healing Guide About the Mind-Body-Hormonal Connection. You’ll learn practical ways to work with your brain’s natural chemistry rather than against it, including:
β’ Why your phone might be depleting your motivation and how to restore it
β’ The surprising connection between gut health and mental wellbeing
β’ Simple, free techniques to boost feel-good chemicals naturally
β’ How nature exposure changes your brain chemistry within minutes
β’ Ways to harness technology while protecting your neurological health
This isn’t about rejecting modern life. It’s about understanding how your brain actually works so you can thrive in today’s world while maintaining the deep satisfaction, genuine connections, and natural energy your brain is wired for.
The solutions TJ offers are refreshingly accessible. No expensive supplements or complicated protocols required. Just practical insights about working with your brain’s natural chemistry to feel better, connect more deeply, and navigate modern life with greater ease.
You can find Tj at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript
If you LOVED this episode:
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Episode Transcript:
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] So have you ever noticed how, after scrolling through social media for an hour or so, nothing else seems interesting or exciting anymore? Or why that quick dopamine hit from your phone feels amazing in the moment, but leaves you feeling oddly empty and unmotivated later. There is a fascinating reason for this, and it has everything to do with how our ancient brain chemistry collides with modern technology. These questions sparked one of the most eye-opening conversations about what’s really happening in our brains when we pick up our phones and also just live our lives today. Why nature instantly makes us feel better. How singing out loud in a car might be one of the most powerful stress relievers you’re not using. Not theoretical ideas, but practical insights about how four specific brain chemicals shaped nearly every aspect of how we feel and function, and how sometimes they get hijacked by modern life. My guest today is Tj Power, a lead neuroscientist at the Dose Lab and author of the Sunday Times bestseller. The dose effect. An inspiring self-healing guide about the mind, body, hormonal connection. And through his research and the dose framework, Tj has trained over 75,000 people at institutions like Harvard, Amazon NHS, building a community of more than 800,000 followers who are discovering how to work with their brain chemistry rather than against it. And what really caught me off guard in this conversation was learning that 90% of our feel good chemical, serotonin is actually produced in our gut, not in our brain. And what do you hear? What Tj shares about how a simple walk without headphones could dramatically shift your state of mind, and why? Like what’s actually happening under the hood? We explore practical ways to harness these natural chemical processes that make you feel more alive, more connected, and yes, happier even in our hyper digital and fast paced world. So excited to share this conversation with you! I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
Jonathan Fields: [00:02:01] You make sort of a bold claim, which maybe isn’t so bold. Maybe we’re all feeling this in a lot of different ways. And it’s this notion that modern life is disrupting the way that our brains work, especially on a neurochemical level. Take me into this.
Tj Power: [00:02:16] Yeah. So thank you for having me. Our brain chemicals are a fascinating world to investigate. We have these four that I’m particularly focused on in my research lab. Dopamine, which is super famous. Oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. And they very conveniently spell the acronym Dose. These chemicals evolved over a huge period of time for our pre hominin ancestors, 2.5 million years for our Homo sapiens ancestors, 300,000 years. And they really evolved for a very different experience in life, one that was deeply connected with nature. Tons of sunlight, tons of movement. Tons of effort. Our environment now is very different to the one that humanity grew up in, and it’s causing disruptions to the balance of these chemicals.
Jonathan Fields: [00:03:01] What is that disruption doing to us? How is actually showing up in our lives.
Tj Power: [00:03:05] With each of these chemicals? And our whole goal with those is to really demystify these, rather than just seeing them as sort of like quote unquote happy hormones. They have very specific functions. So, for example, how it may show up for us is if our dopamine level was very low, we’d find it really hard to take action towards any form of goal. So if you were like, I need to work hard on a project, or I need to get myself to go to the gym, or I need to spend longer cooking so that I can eat healthier. If the dopamine is low, it’s very hard to get momentum. Oxytocin is much more about the love and connection we feel. If you’re feeling lonely and disconnected and potentially struggling with your confidence about who you are. That could be oxytocin. Serotonin explores our energy levels and the stability of our mood. If your mood is very fluctuating, you’re thinking a lot in your brain. You’re very worried and you’re very tired. That would be serotonin. And then endorphins really help us to tolerate stress through physical action. If you’re feeling a lot of tension inside you stressed out, angry, frustrated, it’s going to be tricky there. And the useful thing about understanding your own dose is that if you end up not feeling good for whatever reason, you’re then going to be able to create a game plan. As we’ll explore today as to how you could alleviate that challenge.
Jonathan Fields: [00:04:16] Here’s my curiosity around this. The symptoms that you just listed out, which so many of us have felt we moved in and out of, sometimes stayed in for a long windows of time. Sometimes it’s sort of like passing, you know, a lack of motivation, a lack of energy or a feeling of disconnection or isolation, stress, mood fluctuations. We live in a world where we can. It’s really easy for us to point to all of these things happening around us as, oh, this is why it’s happening. So we have all these external circumstances, these external stimuli that somehow we can look at and say, this is why I’m feeling this way. This is why I just can’t get up out of bed. This is why I can’t motivate to go and move my body or eat healthier. This is why I’m feeling disconnected. And we can point to all these different things that exist outside of us. And what you’re offering is. I want to wrap my head around this. You’re not necessarily saying all those things aren’t true, and all those things are not, in fact, contributors, but it’s a yes. And and maybe we’re actually not looking as much about what’s happening internally in our brain.
Tj Power: [00:05:15] Yeah. I think it’s great to have awareness, for example, understanding that the food system is a complicated one and it can really disrupt the chemical balance within our system, or the phones could disrupt us. Awareness and understanding is an amazing first step. So you can understand oh okay. So this is causing that. But what we’re really trying to do is provide really achievable actions that people can take. So they can actually get themselves out of these states. And when we learn about these brain chemicals as well, it’s not necessarily just about learning what happens if the chemical is not in balance. And if we’re not feeling good, it’s really about learning what happens if the chemical is really, really thriving? And I think in general with mental and physical health, rather than kind of the mindset of running away from feeling bad, I think learning to chase feeling really, really good is actually often something that will lead to better results. So once you understand, okay, so if my dopamine is charged up, I’m going to feel super focused and driven towards my goals or oxytocin. I’m going to feel a lot of deep love and fulfillment and safety within my life. Once you chase feeling really good on these chemicals, it can be pretty profound.
Jonathan Fields: [00:06:19] What about modalities that are often pointed to as a way to sort of like fix all the type of things that you just listed? Because we talk about behavioral modification therapy of just have discipline, change your environment, your structure. Technology. Can we harness technology to do this? And of course pharmaceutical interventions and medication. These are things that for all the things that you just listed out, people generally turn to these different modalities, these interventions to try and fix them or feel better or get into the state of mind that you listed out. How are these working and how are these also not working in the context of what we’re talking about?
Tj Power: [00:06:53] Yeah. Interesting. There’s a variety. You mentioned that 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 line of behavior change can be powerful. It needs to be very deeply rooted with an internal motivation, though. It can’t just be like, oh, I heard on Instagram that this is good for you, so I’m going to do it too. It needs to be something that feels truthful to you and feels genuinely important to the direction you’re wanting to head to head towards in your life. I think therapy is magical. I think I’ve personally I’ve navigated a huge amount of grief. I grew up with OCD, which has been super tricky in my brain. I’ve had some great therapeutic interventions. I think it serves an important purpose, but without significant behavior change, I don’t think therapy can solve the entire thing. Like if you’re going through significant grief, but you’re having fantastic therapy, but you’re also drinking a lot every day of alcohol. Then you really disrupt the capacity for that therapy to be successful. Technological interventions. I think Sam can be great, I think. Things like wearable devices can be motivating. I think they can also be complicated. I think they can actually dissuade you from how you’re, like feeling. They can always convince you or not feeling good when maybe you were. So I think there’s nuance with these different approaches. I think really it comes down to deeply learning to listen to your own intuition. Like, I see these brain chemicals as almost like our friends that live within our system, and they’re simply trying to guide you towards your greatest experience of life. And if you make them unhappy, they’re going to create some tricky symptoms within you. They’re going to try and get you away from that state. And if you make them happy, they’re going to say, good job, keep heading down that lane. And the more you build a relationship with them and almost a conversation with them, I think the better you can feel.
Jonathan Fields: [00:08:35] Let’s talk about technology a little bit more because it is this really interesting double edged sword, right. On the one hand, we’ve got technology that gives us almost any information we want at the blink of an eye. Yeah. And on the other hand, like you just shared, sometimes that technology gives us singles that contradict how we actually feel at any given moment. Like I wear different wearables. And there will be times where, you know, I get up in the morning. I feel like I had a solid night’s sleep. I feel pretty good, I feel energized, I feel ready for the day, and then I’ll check my tech and I’ll be like, oh, you slept terribly. Your readiness level is really low. Take it easy. Just chill. Make a recovery. I’m like, but I don’t feel that’s actually like my felt lived experience is not giving me the same data.
Tj Power: [00:09:15] Yeah, I think this is definitely something we need to be super aware of because interestingly, I was actually listening to my mom and dad on the weekend. I went to see my mom and dad, and they were laughing because my mom will say to my dad, like, how did you sleep last night? Just like general conversation. And he’ll say, oh, I don’t know. I haven’t checked yet. And that sentence in itself, like, I actually don’t know how I slept until I see the data. It’s tricky because it’s just Outsourcing our intuition to a device effectively. So for me, I’ve also used wearables a lot over the last 3 or 4 years. I think going through periods where you don’t wear them is actually quite useful, and I definitely think the time in the day in which you check them is important. Like, it’s really important to me that I don’t check my data as soon as I wake up so that my body can actually feel into what sort of state it’s in. Then like normally around like 11:00 or something, I’ll just have a quick look and see like, oh, okay, cool. I got a pretty decent sleep score. I’ll look at my steps or whatever it might be, but I definitely don’t think opening your eyes and looking at your data is a good path to having a good sort of intuitive connection with your system.
Jonathan Fields: [00:10:18] Yeah, I agree with that. It’s interesting also. I mean, you bring up this notion you mentioned outsourcing, you know, like sort of like how we’re feeling to technology. And I wonder sometimes what happens whether if we keep doing that over time that our own inner ability like our interception, like our ability to actually sense what’s happening within us diminishes over time, it certainly becomes untrained, and we become less and less able to actually understand how we’re feeling at any given moment. If we get used to just habitually outsourcing. Sort of like all these metrics to technology or to something outside of us, we get to a point where if one day we woke up and that tech was gone, or the battery failed and we were like, without it for a month or something like that, we literally would struggle to get a beat on how we feel.
Tj Power: [00:11:04] I think that’s rapidly occurring. I think that really is happening very quickly. And aside from wearables, I think humanity’s connection with our body is reducing in general. Like we’re just not like a physical being that’s always like moving and deeply interconnected with our body. Like often and definitely. In my early journey into meditation, when someone told me to do a body scan and feel my body, there was nothing there to be felt like I had no connection with it. And I think we’re just in a world I like to call our world dopamine land now, where we’re so in our heads and so focused on more and more, and more and digital stimulation. And I think our general relationship with having a good feeling and connection with what’s going in our body is reducing. And I think wearables on top of that is outsourcing it even further. I then think with our with the advent of, of AI and how much we’re utilizing that, I think also outsourcing our capacity to think deeply is a challenge. And I’m someone that’s very pro tech, like, I love tech, but I do think there’s a really specific balance to strike with it. In order for humanity to thrive and live and live in harmony with it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:12:09] Yeah, I’m right there with you. I’m not a Luddite by any means. I surround myself with technology all day, every day. And yet I’m also deeply aware of the fact that, you know, on any given moment, it can both give and take from you. Yeah. When we talk about the chemicals that you mentioned, like that shorthand as dose dopamine, oxytocin, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphin, those are not the only four chemicals that exist. We focus just on those four.
Tj Power: [00:12:35] Yeah, these are the ones that I went deep into throughout my time at university. So I was just learning a huge amount about them. Dopamine really was the beginning for me of understanding more about our neurochemistry very conveniently with the acronym. And this is just by chance, dopamine is really the first chemical to work on, because it’s the motivational chemical that will enable you to have the desire to do things with the others. So dopamine, because it’s just getting so significantly influenced by the modern world. It’s the only chemical we’ve learned how to hijack and alter artificially oxytocin. Because I actually believe our greatest goal in humanity as humans is actually to acquire oxytocin and not dopamine. And I think currently we’re in the pursuit of the wrong goal as a species. And I think oxytocin is very important to pursue. How do we create more love in our life and more connection both with ourself and others? Serotonin, because it’s so influenced by food, nutrition and time outdoors and they are integral factors to the circadian rhythm and a huge variety of areas. And then I’m fascinated by endorphins because of how deeply they influence our ability to tolerate stress. And I think the modern mind is stress. I think our ancestors minds were also stressed by getting chased by bears and all kinds of things. But those forgers seem to encapsulate a really great insight into how to approach living in this world today.
Jonathan Fields: [00:13:58] That makes sense to me. You know, if you think about if we shorthand dopamine as motivation, we shorthand oxytocin as connection. We have shorthand serotonin as mood and energy and endorphin as sort of stress or de-stressing. Those four qualities are just massively, I won’t say entirely determinative of our experience as human beings, but they play a huge role. So if we have some neurochemical that is directly associated with our ability to experience them at a level which is nourishing to us, it makes sense that we would really want to try and do that as much as we can.
Tj Power: [00:14:32] Definitely. And you’re right, it definitely doesn’t encapsulate the whole experience of being a human. It’s arguably quite reductionist to think of us as just for chemicals. Yeah. But I think, uh. And some people say that to me, and I think that’s a fair opinion for sure. But I think it provides a great foundation and building blocks to consider how our behavior is influencing how we feel. There are other chemicals. You’ve got adrenaline and cortisol and testosterone and estrogen. A lot of other chemicals have a have a significant influence. The interesting thing with these chemicals that live within the human body is they’re not working alone. They’re all in conversation with one another. I think these four are a great starting point to make significant change.
Jonathan Fields: [00:15:11] To me, the whole notion of the paradox of choice, right. It’s like, okay, so sure, there may be hundreds of different things that we could look at within the human system, but the more that we add to the menu, at a certain point, it just becomes paralyzing to us. We end up. It’s so confusing. We just take no action at all. So in a way, it’s almost like being intentionally reductionist and saying, these are four things that we want to focus on influencing. It creates a, um, like a doable, a digestible menu. Yeah, to focus on rather than just looking at the universe of things and saying, I don’t know where to start. There’s just too much here.
Tj Power: [00:15:47] Yeah. I mean, I would always prefer if Netflix just had four options for me rather than, uh, thousands that I can never pick from. So go down that lane and then once you’re inside the chemicals, it can really open back out once you’re inside the four. There’s a multitude of ways in which we could consider influencing them.
Jonathan Fields: [00:16:05] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. So I want to go through your methodology, which you shorthand is a dose effect. And each one of these different chemicals, before we talk about some of the ways that we can influence them. Also one of the curiosities for me is are these four different chemicals, things where there is endogenous version of them, a pill, a shot where you could literally take it and in a in the blink of an eye, get what you need. Or are these things that are actually much harder to control then, or they’re risk factors and doing that even if it was available.
Tj Power: [00:16:39] Yeah. So dopamine and serotonin would be the main ones you could influence endogenously through medication and things like that. We have all kinds of medication like Adderall and Ritalin that will influence your dopamine pathway. We have selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs like citalopram and sertraline that will influence serotonin. And those are definitely paths that can support these brain chemicals. I think it’s always I didn’t pursue the psychiatry route. I pursued more of the behavioral change route. So I think whether you’re taking a medication to support them or not, I think behavioral change is very useful for all. On the oxytocin lane in research, you can utilize intranasal oxytocin. You can inhale oxytocin to check how things are operating. In different studies. We can go into different things that can occur there. In our conversation in Dolphins, you can’t really do that. You need to physically push the body in some way to get those to rise. And typically I feel the behavioral influence on them is is the best way to go. They’re built in abundance inside our body, and we can just expand and increase how much it can do.
Jonathan Fields: [00:17:44] So yeah. So these are four things that we have the ability to manufacture inside of us. And we don’t actually need them externally. Um, although as you were just describing oxytocin intranasal like as a nasal spray, I’m thinking, isn’t that sort of like the classic love potion that’s been like the, you know, fabled in so many different ways because effectively, like, if that is the feel good I want to be around other people, like I feel a deep sense of connection. It’s kind of an interesting way to do it. And fraud too.
Tj Power: [00:18:11] Yeah. I mean, I’m pleased that it hasn’t hit the like market as like a product that everyone can take because like humans are low in oxytocin. So I think if it came out as like a pharmaceutical drug, I think it would be a big thing, so I’d rather humans desired it through actual connection with humans. From a research point of view, it’s interesting to see what happens with different scenarios. But yeah, I’m definitely in general, like in in my true nature, just more on the natural path to, to getting these chemicals up where it’s possible.
Jonathan Fields: [00:18:40] And I love that approach also. Let’s kind of jump into the four different ones in more detail and explore some of the ideas, some of the things we might do to harness them. So starting out with dopamine, you mentioned that this is the neurochemical which is really connected to motivation. Take me a little bit deeper into what dopamine is and what it does to us.
Tj Power: [00:18:57] Yeah. So dopamine is definitely super famous now. It’s probably the most famous of the four chemicals. And whilst now we kind of hear the word dopamine and we might think about social media, dopamine hits like that’s a classic thing. Oh yeah. Apparently you get dopamine off social media. That’d be something that maybe in someone’s mind, we might also think about things like cold water exposure that’s got very popularized, the ice bath and stuff. That’s another thing that can influence dopamine right at its core. It evolved within our brain to ensure that we would enjoy the experience of pursuing hard things for our ancestors. And I continue to refer to our ancestors because the brain did that for hundreds of thousands of years. And then for the last 30 years, we started massively changing the human experience. Like, even if you go back a hundred years, life was still a lot more effort, a lot more discipline, and a lot more natural in terms of food, a lot more social connection, better sleep, like humanity really changed about 30 years ago. This is called the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis.
Tj Power: [00:19:56] Originally, we had to scratch rocks together for five hours to make fire. We had to hunt for days, build shelter to survive cold winters. Dopamine would come into our brain and give us the desire to pursue survival. And then it would would reward us when we were aligning ourselves to that. So when the fire did eventually get created, when we were building the heart and nearly finished building the heart when we found the food and it really wants us to experience long term success. So even something as basic as tidying your house is an example of slowly building dopamine in your brain. It’s boring. It’s not particularly fun, but it creates a feeling of satisfaction. The real thing that has got dopamine. I was about to say almost a swear word there, but has really got dopamine held is the phone. The phone has given us this capacity to attain the feeling of hunting an animal for three hours, but within one second of getting a phone in our hand. And that’s very confusing for how this chemical operates.
Jonathan Fields: [00:20:54] Yeah. So it’s almost like, you know, we’ve evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to have this chemical to that both motivates us to do hard things largely, probably historically based on, okay, that’s how we survive and then gives us a really good feeling when we do it so that we want to do it again. And then what you’re saying is, more recently, the phones is basically hijacking this impulse and giving us that flooding sensation, but in a very different way. And I would imagine a dysfunctional way.
Tj Power: [00:21:21] To take this further. Just so you can visualize in your, in your brain exactly what’s happening here. We have an area of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. It’s called the VTA. And you can think of this as like your dopamine factory, where your brain is literally manufacturing dopamine vesicles like little dopamine bubbles, tiny little things, but it can manufacture them. You then have something called your nucleus accumbens, which is your reward center in the brain a little bit further along from the VTA, from the factory. In that scenario there I was talking about tidying your home. Or you can think about this with anything the hunting, the building, the making, the fires. What’s happening in your brain is your brain is putting in effort. So your factory starts to generate dopamine because it’s thinking, oh, okay, this human’s putting in effort. It’s going to need its motivational chemical. And occasionally it will ship these dopamine vesicles, these bubbles towards the reward center in order to create a feeling of satisfaction whilst we’re in the pursuit of the goal. So as you were building the shelter, you’d be like, oh, it’s looking pretty good, this is looking pretty safe.
Tj Power: [00:22:14] And you get little hits of dopamine, just like going towards the reward center. And during the effort the factory would be replenishing, we’d get a nice bit of reward in the reward center. Great. In the phone, when we open the phone, there’s obviously no effort involved to experience the pleasure in our brain. Once you start scrolling one of those short video feeds, you’re experiencing deep experiences of pleasure with no effort. So what happens is the factory starts mass shipping the bubbles towards the reward center going, oh, nice, this is really good. This is really good. After a period of time, if you look back at the factory, there’s not been anyone working on generating more dopamine. So suddenly the factory gets very low in that resource. And when we’re in that kind of apathetic state, we can’t concentrate, we can’t be bothered to do anything with our computer, and we’re just clicking around on loads of different things and not really actually doing the hard tasks that we know we need to do. That’s because this factory is very low in this chemical. The phone is the sole source of reducing the quantity of dopamine within that.
Jonathan Fields: [00:23:08] If that’s happening inside of us, is there a risk that over time, I think a lot of people are familiar with the concept of insulin resistance these days. Is there a phenomenon which is similar, like is there a sort of like a dopamine resistance type of thing where, you know, the nucleus accumbens just gets flooded and flooded and flooded because we’re scrolling on a phone for hours and hours, an hour and seeing the quick hit on the video and this and that. And then do we get to a point where the same volume of dopamine no longer gives us the same feeling of satisfaction or joy or elation, and we just need more and more and more?
Tj Power: [00:23:38] Yeah, it really does. And from a scientific perspective, there’s not yet a name for insulin resistance in dopamine in the dopamine world. I think one will come in time for sure. What effectively happens is you have a baseline level of dopamine production in that factory. Your brain is producing a certain amount of dopamine each and every day, and that’s based on your genetics. And it’s also very heavily based on the lifestyle you’ve had. If I took a 14 year old hunter gatherer that’s in the Hudson right now in Central Africa, his brain would be manufacturing a ton of dopamine because he’s expected to do so much. If I took a 14 year old in a local school near here that might spend all day scrolling social media, not doing lots, his brain wouldn’t need to manufacture much dopamine. And effectively, you can imagine if the brain is getting super exhausted by shipping so much dopamine to the reward center and not manufacturing much of it. What it starts to do in response is just goes. Can’t cope with how low we’re getting in dopamine because of how much you’re sending to the reward center. So I’m just going to produce less for you. Very similar to what happens in terms of insulin as well. So then the dopamine starts producing less and less. And then when it’s a bit of a downward spiral because reward stops feeling as good, we’re not generating as much of the motivation chemical. So then we want to do less hard things keeping our home tidy, exercising, working and connecting. And we pursue more and more of the quick hits. And it’s like this, this journey towards very low levels of dopamine, which huge amount of humanity is now there. The good thing is this system can respond fast. So if you start taking the right course of action, the brain again will begin to regenerate dopamine in a healthy way.
Jonathan Fields: [00:25:12] Yeah. So can that can that crash? And I want to talk about some of the ways that we can regenerate. But I kind of want to come full circle on the crash side of it. You know, when you hear stories about people who are in a military theater, who are in battle for years at a time, and I’ve heard it described as your brain, literally, it’s it’s extreme effort. It’s extreme, extreme action. And you’re being flooded with dopamine and manufacturing dopamine non-stop so that, like the level of dopamine in your brain is just persistently higher, then they come home and you know their day to day suburban life and oftentimes experience a real crash. Can that cause or be a factor in things like depression, anxiety, things like this where your brain just becomes wired over a long period of time to have experience, a very high level of this, you’re manufacturing it because you need it, but then you come back to an environment where you really don’t need it anymore. And so it’s not being produced, but your brain has kind of like the setpoint has changed and now it’s like you need it.
Tj Power: [00:26:12] The baseline production would change significantly in that scenario. Their brain would be expecting immense levels of dopamine to keep them laser focused and motivated in that sort of scenario, and it’s very based on kind of the level of stimulation we’re experiencing. So they would get very used to a high level of slightly natural stimulation. It’s a bit complicated military scenarios, obviously quite an extreme scenario for the brain coming home. Their dopamine every day. They would wake up and think, right, I’m ready to go. I’m ready to really get a lot done. And if it was just sort of like taking the dog out for a week and coming back inside and like doing a little bit of work on the computer, it’s just going to feel comparatively very under stimulating. It could change over time and begin to counterbalance itself. But the tricky thing is, is in the scenario like that, when suddenly life is feeling under stimulating and kind of like an underwhelming experience, then our brain starts going, okay, so how could I get my dopamine up instinctively. And then it goes. Alcohol, sugar, pornography, social media. And then we really break the system. If you got home from a scenario like that and you were coming into a slower pace of life, if you really manage to like create a game plan where you’re like, okay, so I’m going to get my nutrition really dialed in, I’m still going to exercise. I’m going to have a goal to do a ten kilometer in this exact time, and you gave yourself a new environment of gold. Your dopamine could nicely come down and stabilize. But if you suddenly go in the pursuit of quick dopamine, then you’re going to burn the engine out hard. And that’s typically what might happen.
Jonathan Fields: [00:27:37] Yeah. So it’s like there’s a process of slowly recalibrating over an extended period of time.
Tj Power: [00:27:42] Yeah. Acclimatizing almost.
Jonathan Fields: [00:27:44] I would imagine this also happens. You take somebody who’s just a long time triathlete or runner and their competitor, and they’re training all the time doing it. And, you know, all of a sudden they just the lifestyle changes, they get injured, they get sick or something like this, and they can’t do that thing anymore. I would imagine it’s probably a similar phenomenon. That was probably a much more common experience.
Tj Power: [00:28:03] Yeah. And the the pursuit of a goal in itself is very important. We think of dopamine primarily as a reward chemical. That’s kind of how we’ve been taught to understand dopamine. Dopamine is core is much more about just being in the pursuit of something rather than just receiving reward. And this is why the phones are so disruptive. And a chap called Schultz from Cambridge University had a huge discovery about 20 years ago where he found that dopamine levels are actually at their highest. Not once we achieve the thing we’re looking for, it’s actually just before that. And that would make sense evolutionarily, if I were trying to actually catch a deer or like an antelope in the wild, I don’t need the most opening in my brain. Once I’ve got it, I need it just before. So I’ve got the peak level of focus and motivation. And in a scenario like that where suddenly you can’t pursue the goal that you had been pursuing for a long period of time, and you can’t get that reward from it. It’s very tricky. The brain can crash. And this also happens when people win the lottery. When celebrities reach the pinnacle of success, people crash hard because there’s no longer a place to go and setting a new goal and doesn’t have to be a career goal. It doesn’t have to be a financial goal. Loads of things can be a goal, but your brain always wants to be looking forward to try and attain something in its environment.
Jonathan Fields: [00:29:11] And this is one of the things you write about. Like the role of pursuit and the role of goals as a mechanism to effectively harness or regenerate dopamine so that you can get the feeling that you want to have. So this is one of the techniques that we can think about. You also explore the the notion of flow states and the relationship to dopamine. Take me there.
Tj Power: [00:29:32] Flow state is this idea of a really deep emotion in a task. And it was initially really understood and conceptualized by a chap called Michelle MRI. And he discovered through watching athletes and musicians and a variety of different domains, people entering really deep states of high performance and focus. And you see this primarily within the sporting environment. If you’re watching the Wimbledon final, you might see the player is just in this deep, deep state of flow. You might see an NFL, baseball, all kinds of things in that state. Our dopamine level rises a lot in a really nice, healthy and natural way. And for humanity, originally for our ancestors, flow state would have just been a daily occurrence. Hours and hours of flow state. Like I love watching this show called Primal Survivor, where this guy goes and visits these different tribes that are still here today, and the different genders and different age roles have all different functions from creating tools to building to hunting. But regardless, they spend hours on end just focusing on one thing. A really deep state of focus. Not really thinking about anything else. In the modern world, we’re really entering deep flow state. You and I, in this conversation, throughout an hour, as our brain gets more and more immersed in this, that’s that’s almost a flow state type experience, because our brains aren’t currently clicking on our email and WhatsApp and checking Instagram and all kinds of things in our day to day life when we are just working on our computers. Typically, flow state is far from the reality of what happens. Like if I were trying to write my book, for example, if I write one paragraph and then go on. What’s that one paragraph gone. What’s that one? I’m never getting anywhere close to flow state, and getting into this deep state of emotion in work or in personal creative activities is really important.
Jonathan Fields: [00:31:09] I think on a day to day basis, it is one of those things that that is increasingly hard to access, especially as we have technology all around us and notifications turned on. 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 regular basis, without just completely isolating ourselves from humanity?
Tj Power: [00:31:27] Yeah, I think I’m actually going through this now or in the process of my next book. So I’ve really got to get dialed in on entering flow state. And the sort of considerations I’d be taking is if you’re working with other people, if you have colleagues or teammates or maybe even people in your family, like you need to make sure people are aware that you’re about to try and enter this state so that they can understand that interruptions are really not particularly conducive to you getting there. If you’re in a working environment where people are expecting you to reply every two minutes, it’s important for them to know I’m just about to get in flow state. It’s going to be beneficial to my work if I get that. And you don’t have to do this all day. Like, I wouldn’t expect myself to be in ten hours of flow state, but it’s just like a nice 60 minute block or like a 30 minute block. It takes about 15 minutes for the brain to get into a deeper state of focus. So at the beginning, it’s hard. Your brain is battling for distraction. Eventually, your brain starts coming to terms with the fact that your brain wants to be isolated on just one thing. Typically, our brain is scanning an environment, just scanning, scanning, scanning. Then eventually, if the brain’s like, okay, I’m going to go into deep focus, it really can. It just takes a bit of warm up time to get there. So I’ll make sure that my phone is not in this room.
Tj Power: [00:32:29] If my phone is in this room while I try an inflow state. Zero chance. I’ll make sure things like WhatsApp, LinkedIn, email, everything is shut so that there’s no opportunity for me to just when I get bored or something’s challenging just to click. Because if it’s open, you’re going on at 100%. Then once that’s done, I’ll typically start a stopwatch from zero minutes on Google. So I just go on like a stopwatch, just like a basic one, and I’ll start it. Then I’ll begin the task and Eventually I will find myself desperate for something else. Like desperate for distraction, desperate for stimulation and a quick feeling of dopamine before I let myself do, I’ll always go back to the stopwatch and I’ll just see where I’m at. Like, am I at eight minutes? Am I at two minutes? Am I at 20 minutes? And I’ll always know that beyond 15 minutes, proper focus is coming my way. And I’ll use it to motivate me. Like if I get to 14 minutes and I click on it, then I think, well, if I go on LinkedIn right now and get some crappy dopamine out of there, I’m just resetting back to zero minutes. So that’s pointless. So I’ll kind of utilize it to motivate me. When I first started doing this on my first book, I literally had no attention span at all. Gradually, as you gamify this and train this over time, you can get into deep states of focus. It’s just practice and strengthening the muscle.
Jonathan Fields: [00:33:35] Yeah, I love that. And I’ve done some of those same things I have on my calendar, which my team has access to their blocks of time where they’re just a whole block, which is just you see, in my calendar, it just says maker mode. And that’s a signal to everybody else that says, basically it’s like, okay, so I’m either deep into writing or I’m deep into creating something. I really you know, that’s my telegraphing to everybody else that I’m trying to really drop into a flow state in this time. And unless, you know, unless there’s a real fire burning that needs attention, you know, like this is an uninterrupted window for me and for me as a writer as well. I have found that at times, similar to you, I kind of have to leave a device outside of the room. Even on my computer, though, I don’t have the willpower often.
Tj Power: [00:34:16] Yeah, for sure.
Jonathan Fields: [00:34:17] It’s tough and I will. I’ll use apps like freedom or they’re they’re other similar apps which basically completely disable all connectivity. Like you can’t open any other windows or platforms or apps for a fixed amount of time. So the only thing you can do is sit there and do the thing.
Tj Power: [00:34:34] That’s a classic example of tech that is useful. Like I have the same on my phone. I have really useful blockers that enable me to reduce my social media usage and stuff like that. And tech is such a different dopamine addiction to anything else, because if you wanted to quit smoking, you obviously wouldn’t put a pack of cigarettes on your desk and then like, expect yourself to not smoke. But tech just doesn’t work like that. Like, we have to use it. And setting up parameters like putting like almost a padlock on a pack of cigarettes is almost what we, uh, we have to do, to be honest. And with the social media, for example, I have a blocker that enables me to only go on Instagram three times a day so I could use all my three times when I wake up if I wanted to, but that would then mean I couldn’t have Instagram for 24 hours. So I then have learned to study it at 10 a.m., 3 p.m., 8 p.m. is my moment to go on, go on Instagram, on my phone. And I think, uh, systems like you’ve shared there, like freedom or whatever it is that you can utilize to block your computer or your phone are almost just essential. They have to be used.
Jonathan Fields: [00:35:31] Yeah, that’s actually a great idea. I need to actually set up some sort of blocker for my social media too.
Tj Power: [00:35:36] Oh, it’s so good. And also then when you go on it, it’s actually much more enjoyable because social media gets really boring if you go on it all the time. But when I go on it like tonight, 8 p.m. will come and I’ll be like, no, I haven’t been on Instagram for five hours. Quick checks and messages, whatever it might be. Watch a few videos and social media in small bursts like that is absolutely fine. We can tolerate it, but it’s the social media checks in every moment of boredom that are creating massive disruption.
Jonathan Fields: [00:35:59] And I think one of the things we struggle with also is for us to actually say, I literally need a mechanism on my device that stops me from being able to do this. You know, with the exception of these, this agreed upon window, it also makes us have to admit that we failed at being able to do it ourselves. And we don’t like that. We don’t like to actually sit there and say, okay, so it’s me against the device, and device is winning and I need, I need help, like either from person or technology to actually make this happen. It’s sort of like a prerequisite. You have to acknowledge the fact that I need help with this thing, and I think we’re all there.
Tj Power: [00:36:34] As a species. We need help to manage tech. Tech is a monumental force that we have to manage, and it’s going to make humanity better in so many ways as it already is. But I think it’s the number one thing for a human being to be focusing on. Is there a relationship with technology because we’re only in tech’s infancy as well. Like over the next few decades, I will evolve rapidly, will get glasses, headsets, all kinds of things are coming our way, and though some are just going to end up in doomscrolling consumption distraction land, and that’s going to be really hard to live a life like that. Whereas some will utilize its assets for good and also prioritize connection and stillness and creation and so on. And I think it’s very, very important to, uh, to make it a massive priority in your life.
Jonathan Fields: [00:37:18] So great. And we’re not far away from a time where, you know, like glasses will be readily available at reasonable prices for everybody that will project whatever it is on your device into the lens of your glass. So it’s not even a matter of taking out your device anymore or looking for it. It’s literally going to be in your field of vision, and that freaks me out a little bit.
Tj Power: [00:37:36] I’m nervous for that day, and I watched all the latest, uh, tech events. I always watch the tech events because I’m in this weird position where I, I love tech, like I’ve watched every Apple keynote since I was about 13. Like, I literally cast them on my TV on YouTube and I watched them. I love it. But I also just feel the massive disruption it’s causing and the glasses is going to take things to a whole new level. If you can sit with your partner and have your Instagram Reels feed to the right of their face whilst you’re talking to them, that’s a new world for humanity to navigate. And I think whilst it’s somewhat manageable now, it’s time for us to individually take action and start taking control of the relationship.
Jonathan Fields: [00:38:12] Yeah, and we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. And I think that also kind of brings us to the, the, the O and dose or the second neurochemical oxytocin. Take me into this a little bit more.
Tj Power: [00:38:26] In neuroscience we like to call oxytocin the great facilitator of life. It really is that it creates the desire to bond with humans, to care for humans, to procreate, to build a family, to love people. And it’s a chemical that is underwhelmed and low as a result of this dopamine land that I like to call it, that we’re living in. Because in simple terms, in a moment where you’re lying in bed with your partner and you’re both scrolling your phones rather than talking to each other or cuddling. Dopamine is winning in that moment the same as when you’re with your kids, your family, your friends, and a huge amount of the time in moments where oxytocin has its opportunity to be like yes, connection, love, eye contact, questions, listening. In those moments, dopamine keeps winning. And originally, for our ancestors, dopamine was just a prerequisite to then experiencing oxytocin. And what I mean by that is if you watch these tribes, they spend all day hunting and they have a good time. They’re laser focused. They get a lot of like accomplishment and reward and achievement from the hunting, but their real joy comes from when they get home from the hunting, and they all laugh around the fire and connect and have fun and tell stories and bond. That’s really the aim of life for them. And the hunting enables it to occur. The modern environment has flipped that whereby we quote unquote, hunt all day on our computers by looking for dopamine down that lane. Financial reward and so on. It gets to the evening when we’re like, okay. Now, originally it would just be laughter and chat and conversation and love, but in reality it’s Netflix and scrolling and sugar and just more and more dopamine. And dopamine is designed in our brain to never provide the feeling of satisfaction and true fulfillment, because our brain is programmed just more and more and more dopamine to help us survive. Oxytocin is a very fulfilling, nourishing chemical that if it’s prioritized, you feel way more full and way more satisfied with your experience of life.
Jonathan Fields: [00:40:15] Is there almost like an inverse relationship between dopamine and oxytocin?
Tj Power: [00:40:19] There are times where they would increase together. If you were having sex with someone that you’re feeling of love with, both of them would rise together. If you are intimately connecting with someone that you had no emotional connection with, then it would just be purely dopamine and no oxytocin. There are times when they interconnect, but in the modern environment, Dopamine is distracting us from oxytocin massively, and one of the big parts of oxytocin is feeling love for what you do have in your life, like a deep feeling of gratitude. Everyone’s aware of gratitude is important. We lack as a species a consistent approach to how we engage with gratitude. I think for many of us. But oxytocin is this nice feeling. Oh yeah, I love my life a lot. I’ve got what I need, I’ve got safety, I’ve got comfort, I’ve got people and so on. Dopamine is I need more, I need more, I need more, and I think a lot of us spend more time in our brain than the I need more than I love what I have.
Jonathan Fields: [00:41:10] Yeah. What about group or team activities? And this can be in work that can be as a family or doing something together. It can be sports when you’re in pursuit of something, but also you’re kind of working together really intimately and maybe really enjoying the quality of the relationship along the way. And that facilitates the pursuit of the goal, too. Would that be potentially an example of where they’re both rising together?
Tj Power: [00:41:33] That would be a perfect example and cohesion within a group and contribution to a group outside of yourself, just for the sake of contributing to that group is magic for oxytocin. Then, in the pursuit of a goal, it’s going to be the additional rewarding sensation of dopamine rising as well. And interestingly, I played on the weekend. On Sunday I played a sport called rounders. I don’t know in the US if you know rounders, but it’s basically like a mini version of baseball. Effectively, if you think about the difference between England and the US in terms of country size and population, it’s like that. But for rounders and baseball, we play in groups of eight. Oh, it’s a little bat with one hand rather than a big bat. And, uh, you just hit it and run around some, some area. And it was unbelievable how a group of strangers were suddenly best friends in our separate teams, and how they. So everyone was high fiving and connecting and bonding. And that experience is so rewarding as a human. Like, it was like everyone was saying, it’s the most fun I’ve had in ages. I’ve loved today. It was so good. It was so good, and it was just like a family come together of like random different families and not an activity that any of us do regularly. And it was so amazing. Just like, because me, I’m always observing people’s state and like people all show up, be exhausted but socially awkward but isolated. Like, that’s just like the modern humans, a little bit like that. By the end of it, everyone is literally buzzing, so happy. And that’s because of that group cohesion towards a goal.
Jonathan Fields: [00:42:56] Yeah. And this is one of the things that you talk about under oxytocin also is the role of socializing in actually consistently creating more oxytocin.
Tj Power: [00:43:04] Yeah. Need to socialize. We are a deeply social species. It’s what’s brought us as humanity to this point is how well we work as groups and how much we want to be around each other. There are some species in the animal kingdom that thrive alone. If you take a polar bear, for example, they’re really isolated species. They can cruise around on their own. They can thrive like that. Humans are not like that. Like we did not survive in the jungle unless we were in a group. If you were isolated on your own, you were terrified and very, very anxious because you’re not physically capable of taking on the animal kingdom as a human, as a group, obviously. We’re super smart, very good at coordinating together. Socializing is reducing massively in the modern world because we’re falsely satisfying it through our phones. And what I mean by that is, if you spend all evening looking at people, hearing their voices, hearing their laughter on your social media feeds, your brain doesn’t quite understand. Like, obviously, it is very hard for our brains to comprehend that we’re looking at a glass electric panel that’s a video feed of another reality. Like, that’s so confusing for our natural brain that we have within us. And if we just deleted all the phones and technology, everyone would be out there trying to socialize because we’d all be so, like, bored of just being in our own company. And I think the more discipline you have with your phone to scroll social media, less, the more your brain instinctively. And this comes back to the intuitive relationship we have with our system. The more the brain starts going, okay, so I’m not getting it via social media. I’m going to have to get it from actual social. And it makes you much happier if it’s from the real thing.
Jonathan Fields: [00:44:31] Yeah, that makes so much sense. You also talk about the role of giving or generosity, which we’ve kind of been touching on because in a way, when you’re socializing or like, you know, when you’re playing rounders with all these other people, in a weird way, it’s almost like you’re especially in a group activity. It’s like you’re giving to everybody else by like your participation and shared pursuit of something, but just more broadly. Talk to me about how generosity or giving influences oxytocin.
Tj Power: [00:44:53] The brain is so hardwired to not be selfish at its core, because if we were a selfish species again, it would have just really harmed our potential for for survival. If I was to go on a walk and find a load of food and think, F the tribe, I’m just going to eat all this myself, that’s not going to be very useful. Like our brain has to be programmed like I found food, take it to the group, take it to the group, contribute to the group and the same with all the hard activities making the fires. It was all about group survival and the modern environment is a bit more self-focused. We spend a lot of time in our own head thinking about our own experience of life. We’ve got social media profiles. We’re constantly looking at pictures of ourselves. Videos of ourselves. Our own name. It’s very self-focused in comparison to what humanity was a long time ago. But even if you go back 50 years, there was more of a community type focus. And when you look in family environments, the West has become pretty isolated in terms of family based contribution to our parents and elders and stuff like that in comparison to the East. And we all know, like when you do something nice for another human, it just feels good.
Tj Power: [00:45:53] And that’s just useful. The fact that that’s a reality, it doesn’t mean contribute to others just to make yourself feel good, but it’s very useful that doing something kind for another human helps. And you can think about this in loads of minor scenarios, like even this morning I got home from my walk and I live on a like a street in a town, and there were a number of there were like four of the bins from the different apartments here where I live. And it’s not my duty to take all those bins into everyone’s houses. I could leave them on the road. It’s not I don’t have a responsibility to do that. But in my brain, I then look at the bins and I think that’s a contribution that would help them out. And I don’t do it just for me. But I also know in my brain are that will have built oxytocin. That makes me feel more connected, more like I’m contributing and consciously thinking am I contributing? And also just recognizing the contribution you’re making to your kids, your family, your partner, your work? Acknowledging it within your own mind is important.
Jonathan Fields: [00:46:41] I love the idea also that when you take the bins in for somebody else where they didn’t expect it, it wasn’t your job. You just did it. It makes you feel good. And at the same time, if somebody comes out and they’re like, oh, I got to go take the bins in and they’re like, wait, somebody did this already? And it almost, I would imagine it creates a little bit of a flip in the switch of the way that you feel about society writ large. It’s sort of like like there’s a lot of bad stuff happening around, like maybe I don’t agree with a lot of people, but there’s kindness around me too. And this is just like a little tiny reminder in a way that I didn’t see coming.
Tj Power: [00:47:11] Yeah, your brain wants to feel like it’s in a group that’s working together. It doesn’t want to feel like a super isolated species. And that’s I used to live in central London, and it’s really tricky because there were so many people around. But I was like, way more isolated than ever because no relationship to all the neighbors in the coffee shops. No one knew who I was. And because it’s too many, it’s just so many people. And for me, that was tricky. And in that scenario with the bin, I didn’t knock on the doors and say, hey, by the way, I took a bin in, thank me. Like, they’ll never have an idea who it was that took the bin in. But it’s useful for them and it’s beneficial to me to contribute.
Jonathan Fields: [00:47:44] Yeah, I love that serotonin. Next up on our list.
Tj Power: [00:47:47] Yeah. So serotonin is fascinating. 90% of the serotonin within our system is generated in the intestinal lining within our gut. Literally in the lining of our gut, in our intestine. Our serotonin is built. 10% is then generated in the brain. The serotonin in the gut doesn’t directly cross the blood brain barrier straight into the brain. But you have something called your vagus nerve, which is reading the state of the gut and then relaying that information towards the brain. And our gut really wants a nice, calm, life like moments of deep calm and presence. It wants lots of great nutrients in there. It wants lots of good sleep. It and once lots of sunlight throughout the day. Unfortunately, that’s quite far from the reality of what it gets. It gets a lot of unnatural nutrients coming into it. Poor sleep, a lack of sunlight. And this is the chemical that just wants us all to be running around in the nature, in the sunshine. Like eating fruit, basically. And the more we can lean towards getting moments like that, the better.
Jonathan Fields: [00:48:43] So it’s sort of like the good mood, good energy, um, chemical. And I think a lot of us have heard of serotonin. Like, you know, there’s a huge category of drugs, SSRIs, Snris, which are which effectively, from what my understanding, they don’t actually produce more serotonin. What they do is they stop the brain from taking it more quickly so it sticks around longer so we can experience the effects of it longer. But the effect is calm, relaxed, feel good, like good energy. And it probably is going to be a big surprise for a lot of people listening that so much of this is actually produced in the gut and not in the brain itself. So gut health has got to be really important part of your serotonin balancing.
Tj Power: [00:49:23] Yeah. Crucial. And if I was picking two things that were the most important things for us to focus on for our brain chemistry, it would be food and phones. I think if we get the phone right and we get the food right, I think those can be two big levers that have a big impact. And for our gut, we have a great clinical nutritionist that does lab that’s really deeply studying this. We’re writing a cool paper on it at the moment, and we have gut lining within our gut that’s enabling us to hold the nutrients that are entering our body, that are entering the gut. Specifically, when the ultra processed food type ingredients turn up. I know America is having loads of conversations about ultra processed food at the moment. I see headlines on that. They begin to disrupt the gut lining effectively because they’re very harmful to the gut. They’re very toxic, and they create little gaps, effectively, little tiny micro holes within our gut that then cause a huge amount of inflammation to happen within the gut. And then our serotonin system, that’s the last of its priorities at that point, building serotonin, it begins to focus on detoxification of the challenge that’s happening within the gut. And our gut really wants all these natural foods. Could be a vegetarian diet, could be a meat diet, but it wants foods that were here on Earth before we got here as humanity. When those foods turn up, they break into break down into a variety of amino acids like tryptophan. Tryptophan is a key building block for serotonin. And there is a life where you only eat natural foods. I really believe it to be possible for many people that are within our dose lab process. They’ve come from lots of UPF diets to diets where there is literally zero UPF, and that could seem almost extreme. It could seem like diet culture, but it’s really not like it’s not dieting to only eat natural foods. It’s really just what the body has wanted for a long time. And the longer you go with just natural foods, the more you’re craving for this modern diet begins to reduce.
Jonathan Fields: [00:51:09] Yeah, that makes sense. And UPF for those who don’t know that acronym ultra processed foods, what we’re talking about.
Tj Power: [00:51:14] Is ultra processed food. And there’s a lot of stuff in ultra processed foods that’s very intentionally designed to really impact how our body connects with food. We have these two hormones within the gut ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin makes us really hungry. Leptin makes us full. The ups are quite strategically designed to make our ghrelin go crazy. So we’re super hungry and our leapt into switch off so we’re not full at all. And when you eat like a bag of Doritos, for example, you can just nail the Doritos. Nothing really changes in your satiation. Whereas when you’re eating some chicken or steak, salmon, fruit, nuts, your brain begins to go cool. I’m pretty satisfied with that. That was great. That’s the sort of feeling you’re wanting to create with food.
Jonathan Fields: [00:51:51] Nature and sunlight are also things, and you kind of reference this like, like for us to be out in nature and to be out in the sun. And I know for me, just intuitively, this has been my go to. If I’m kind of cranky, if I’m kind of low energy, I’m incredibly fortunate to, you know, live in Boulder, Colorado. I can walk out my front door and be surrounded by breathtaking nature and often a lot, a lot of sun different than the UK where there’s not nearly as much sun. But but these are like, I’ve just I’ve seen within a matter of minutes. These just have a profound effect on my, my mood.
Tj Power: [00:52:22] Yeah. And that really is serotonin in action. If the mood stabilizes or improves its serotonin that’s coming into play there. And a lot of the cool research comes out of Japan around nature and serotonin. The Japanese created a concept called forest bathing, which has been really powerful for Japan over the last 20 years. They created this term called Kurosaki, which is someone that’s really burnt out from intense experiences within urban environments with work and technology and people that are very burnt out and mentally exhausted. And they started prescribing all the way back in 2008, something called Shenron yoku, which translates to forest bathing, just to see if it would have any impact on their mental state rapidly. You see what’s called serum serotonin rise within the brain and body. And a great scientist called Doctor Keeling has looked into this. If you’re interested in that real deepening into nature, if you search his name and forest bathing, it’s pretty cool. And it’s just really important to understand that we literally spent millions of years walking around in a forest, and then now we’re not doing that. Like we could never even get away from it. Like it.
Tj Power: [00:53:23] Nature was all there was. When we’re in a forest or any form of nature mountains, rivers, parks. The brain effectively is getting this signal that it’s home. It basically thinks I’m at home now, like I’m in a safe environment. The serotonin rises, the nervous system regulates, and one of the big benefits in the modern world is we get very hyper stimulated by these computers and phones. And then sometimes if you go and try and sit on the sofa and chill out, like if I told you to just go and sit on the sofa and do nothing after this, your brain would be like, right? Like really rapidly operating, it’d be quite hard to just sit and chill. Nature of is such a perfect way to calmly stimulate the brain so that then you can properly relax. After these calls this evening. I’ll always go and get a bit of nature to chill me out so that when I relax, I actually relax and I’ll be able to be off my phone. If you just go from tech to tech to text tech, it’s very hard to ever enter like a nice, peaceful, high serotonin state.
Jonathan Fields: [00:54:16] I mean, I’ve experienced that so many times. Oftentimes I’ll actually I’ll hike in the middle of the day because I’ll have an intense morning. Maybe we’re recording. Maybe we’re just, like, doing something. And then I know that from my brain to actually be able to function the way I want it, maybe I want to drop into a writing mode in the afternoon. I’ve actually got to get into nature because I need the reset. Yeah, I should be able to be dropped back into the mode where I’m like, okay, so now I can like I have this new window where I can feel good, I can drop in and do really good work again.
Tj Power: [00:54:42] I was just going to add that one of the big recommendations I would have is to really create a framework in your brain where headphones don’t come with you into nature anymore, and that can’t seem unusual because I understand, like podcasts are really cool. Definitely a given that we’re having this conversation, but I think there needs to be time where it’s just you and your brain, even if it feels uncomfortable for me, actually feels quite uncomfortable at first when I go into nature without stimulation. Those thoughts have their moments to come through different challenges and worries. Eventually, though, once they’ve had their moments be heard, a nice peaceful state can arise and a lot of creativity can come from there. A lot of gratitude and love and goal planning and direction can come from there. So nature headphone free heaven for the serotonin.
Jonathan Fields: [00:55:24] Yeah. So agree with that. Let’s drop into last one here.
Tj Power: [00:55:27] Endorphin I briefly mentioned at the beginning that stress really evolved as something that was designed to be supported with physical action. And what I basically mean by that is in the modern world, we have loads of what we call micro stresses that are stressing us out. You might see someone’s political opinion and you think, oh, I hate that. That’s really annoying, that stress me out. And then something with your bank account and then like ten emails come through and then something happens with your wife and it’s just like lots of tiny little things stressing us out. Originally, the main things that stressed us out were starving to death or chased by an animal, and those would have equally been extremely stressful. But in those scenarios, your body is doing one thing. It’s moving hard and fast. It’s going to be moving a lot in order to tolerate the experience that’s coming its way, to find the food, to survive the threat. And endorphins basically evolved. Is this chemical that an intense stress? They would come in when our body was physically taking action to take the stress back out of our mind so that we could survive. So they didn’t run away going, oh my God, I’m going to die. Your brain just got locked in. Similarly, when you’re hungry, you weren’t like, oh, I’m so hungry, I’m so hungry, I’m gonna die. You just got locked in to try and find the food. Nowadays, with all those micro stressors that I mentioned before, what typically happens is things stress us out and our body remains dead still. And it just swallows more and more and more stress. And you’ll notice when you exercise, you get this stress relief experience. Or when you go for a walk or when you hike. And our body really wants us to physically release the stress from our body through movement by activating endorphins.
Jonathan Fields: [00:56:58] So movement is one of the key things to activate endorphins, which then helps us sort of like de-stress or release the stress.
Tj Power: [00:57:04] Yeah, definitely. Like after work, you never want to go straight to the sofa. You always want to move your body first, get a bit of an endorphin release whenever you have the the energy and the motivation to to work out or walk up a hill or even just like go to the park and sprint like 20m. Just anything that will really get the body to activate. It’s going to be super, super beneficial. Then there’s a variety of other ways we can activate the body. Things like stretching. Super powerful. That could be things like yoga. If you’re quite committed down that lane, even just a few minutes of standing up, stretching your body in between tasks, in between calls, really powerful for me. I’ve also started making a conscious effort to actually have calls with headphones in. Ironically, after I just mentioned headphones there, but just walking around like I literally walk around my town here. So that’s not necessarily one of my nature experiences. But if ever a work call could be done on the move, definitely do it on the move because your body needs more movement, more stretching, and then we can explore another few lanes if you want to.
Jonathan Fields: [00:58:01] It’s funny, I for years I have. My default has always been to take calls with headphones on and being outside walking, and this is a pre-pandemic time. And then pandemic comes and everybody switches to video as the primary mode of meetings and conversations. And I still when people want to meet with me, I’m like, look, if there’s an important reason why we need to be on screen, then let’s do video. But if there’s not, I’m going to default to the phone, I’m going to have a headphone on, and you’re probably going to hear a little bit of outside noise when we’re walking. And people are kind of like for a hot minute, they’re like, oh, that’s weird, because everyone’s so defaulted to being in a chair in front of a screen now and then. They’re kind of like, you know what? I’m going to do the same thing. I’m putting on my earbuds and I’m going to go out and walk around. I want to talk to you, too. And it’s a little jarring to have that reset. But then I find it’s so much better for me. I think so much better when I’m moving my body. I’m just tuned in a different way, and I also feel like I can connect better to people when I’m moving. In a weird way.
Tj Power: [00:58:55] 100%. You can have great conversations in those environments. Like even this afternoon I had a really important conversation with the director at Harpercollins about my new book, and that would be one of those pressure conversations where a year ago I would have thought, it has to be on the computer, I’ve got to be locked in. But the knowledge of what you’ve shared there, like if I go for a walk whilst I have that call, like I’m going to actually probably communicate in a really effective and clear and creative way. And she also chose to do a walk as well at the same time, which is really cool. And so we were both walking around chatting about this and that’s a great approach to take. Obviously sometimes you’ve got to share your screen and present or whatever it might be, but if the opportunity presents, take it. We need 10,000 steps a day, and it’s actually quite a lot of effort to get there.
Jonathan Fields: [00:59:37] Yeah, that’s so great. Music is also one of the modes that you talk about that affects endorphins, which I thought was really interesting. Yeah, there’s no doubt. Music for me is one of the great joys. It’s one of the the mood changers for me. If I’m kind of tired of I’m kind of stressed out and I just put on my favourite playlist and then I go walking and listen to the playlist, or even if it’s just lie down with headphones on, it just completely transforms my experience and the way that I feel, but I never really thought about it as something that would affect endorphins.
Tj Power: [01:00:03] Yeah. It’s interesting. There’s kind of two chemicals that can be at play with music. If you were kind of lying on the sofa listening to some music that you really like, and you were just passively listening to it and it was calming you and it was regulating your nervous system that could have a big impact on serotonin, that could help bring your brain into present, where endorphins really come into play with music, and how it can be so effective for de-stressing you is when you sing or dance to the music, because the body really wants physical activation. If you just sort of like hum to it one day in the car, just hum to a song, then one day really sing to it in the car. And you don’t have to be good at singing. It’s relevant how good you are. I’m not a good singer, but I sing a lot now and you’ll notice that if you really sing, it creates a very euphoric experience. It’s not just calming, it’s actually like euphoria to sing. There might be a time in your life where you have really sang with your friends, or on your own, or in the shower, or in the car, or at a silent disco at silent discos when people have their headphones on, because suddenly they feel like there’s confidence to sing in front of others because no one can hear them. And real euphoria can come from singing. For hundreds of thousands of years, singing and chanting was a big part of humanity, and a lot of the religious practice involved a lot of singing as well. And singing out loud is something that you might think in your head. Wow, it’s been like a week since I sung out loud. Maybe long. It could be a year since you sang out loud. Singing out loud to music. Walking in the car at home. Super powerful for the endorphins.
Jonathan Fields: [01:01:27] Okay, so you just give me permission to strap on headphones when this conversation ends, go out in my neighborhood, walk around and sing at the top of my lungs to my neighbors. Might not love it all that much, but I’m good.
Tj Power: [01:01:39] They might not be sure about it. They might ask you, what the hell are you doing? And you can say, it’s my endorphins. You got to do it too, right?
Jonathan Fields: [01:01:44] Exactly. I’m tuning my brain. I’m giving it what it needs. It’s it’s therapeutic.
Tj Power: [01:01:48] 100%.
Jonathan Fields: [01:01:49] That’s beautiful. So and again we shorthand that as dose right. You know we have these four different chemicals. And what I love about this is there are so many different things that we’ve talked about here. It’s not something where you have to go somewhere where you have to buy something, where you have to like. These are just accessible interventions. These are things that almost anybody can do. They can customize it. They alert to whatever it is that fits their abilities or limitations, their lifestyle. So nobody is excluded from the invitation to actually drop in and really experience this dose effect that you describe.
Tj Power: [01:02:20] Definitely within the dose within the book, what we basically did was we made it into 20 actions. These are 20 behaviors we study, many of which we’ve chatted through throughout this. And as you say, there’s no cost in any of them. They’re all just natural things that humans are deeply, deeply craving and not quite getting enough of. Some of the things you might be nailing. Like you mentioned, you might already be hiking loads in beautiful nature. That’s amazing. And for those, it might be really affirming and help you think, cool, that’s great that I’m doing that for others. Things like with the phones for example. More discipline when you wake up in the morning, more breaks in the evening. These can be really useful things to add in love.
Jonathan Fields: [01:02:54] That feels like a great place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up.
Tj Power: [01:03:03] To live a good life? I would say to really contribute to your family, to a really good job of being there for your family to find a way to create instead of consume all the time. I think humans are such an amazing creative species and I think it’s getting reduced by our consumption. So I’d say create over, consume deeply, contribute to your family. And I really just think we need to spend as much time in nature as we possibly can. I think that’s the goal. The way to live in harmony with tech is to spend a lot of time in nature balancing it out.
Jonathan Fields: [01:03:38] Thank you.
Tj Power: [01:03:38] Thanks for having me.
Jonathan Fields: [01:03:41] Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, Safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we have with Julia Hotz about social prescribing using movement, nature, art, service, and belonging as potent prescription-strength remedies. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by, Alejandro Ramirez, and Troy Young. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music, and of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring. Chances are you did, because you’re still listening here. Do me a personal favor. A seven-second favor is share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that’s awesome too. But just one person, even then, invite them to talk with you about what you’ve both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time. I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.