Transcript & Summary: How to Reset Your Dopamine (And Change Your Life)

[00:00] so dopamine is this chemical in our brains that we figured out how to hijack in the modern [00:08] [Music] world things like our phones and social media fast food and alcohol all of these things Spike our dopamine and give us instant feelings of reward and pleasure but the big problem is that we are increasingly becoming addicted to these factors that cause these huge surges of dopamine so now we find it really hard to actually do more of what actually matters to us and so many people in the modern world just struggling to take action towards what they're seeking for they strugg they have dreams in their [00:34] mind with their careers or yeah I really want to be healthy and they get a little bit motivated for a second and then it crashes and Society really needs to understand that operating and getting this chemical into balance is what's going to enable you to actually get focused and stay consistently motivated this is TJ power he's a neuroscientist who runs the dose lab which specializes in understanding the four main brain chemicals that influence our day-to-day lives that's dopamine oxytocin serotonin [01:00] and endorphins we're going to be exploring each one of these in this four-part video series and there's going to be actionable tips in each of them to help you increase these brain chemicals in a healthy way to completely level up your life fingers crossed so in this video which is episode one of the four-part series we are talking about dopamine Let's Go part one the law of dopamine so dopamine has lots of different functions in our brain but in our reward system dopamine is the major currency that motivates us to do stuff [01:25] as we evolved as Homo sapiens dopamine was the chemical that motivated us to do things that kept us alive which is very different to how we live today our brain spent 300,000 years developing them for an entirely different lifestyle a lifestyle where to wake up hunt for food build shelter connect with each other fight one another that's what they're designed for and dopamine was this chemical that lived deep within us that enabled us to take action toward these challenging things that would Keep Us [01:49] Alive in our modern world we basically figured out how to hack that feeling that hunting or connecting with people or building shelter and we'd hack it with things like porn and Tik Tok and cigarettes alcohol whatever it may be and then it goes on to create very big challenges within our dopamine system specifically with our dopamine baselines so dopamine is made inside nerve cells called neurons in our brain we start off with an amino acid called tyrosine which then gets converted into L Doopa L Doopa [02:17] then becomes dopamine and this dopamine is stored in these vesicles which are at the end of our neurons so the dopamine is ready to be released at synapses which are basically the Junctions in between the neurons and our brain and how they communicate with each other but the really cool thing about this whole manufacturing process is that we make dopamine when we do hard things and the harder the thing is the more dopamine we [Music] make effectively the chemical evolv within us to be earned so the whole way [02:45] in which it operates is that if we do something that is effortful dopamine will begin to generate in our brain and dopamine actually operates in little bubbles they're called vesicles and any kind of activity that requires hard work will literally manufacture these vesicles in the brain so so if the first thing you do in the morning after waking up is go on your phone and scroll through Instagram or Tik Tok then your stores of dopamine are going to get used up and you won't feel motivated to do anything with the rest of your day it's [03:09] like bursting all of these bubbles whereas if you start your day for example by doing something like exercise or making your bed or going outside then you'll build up your reserves of dopamine instead of depleting them and you'll have so much more motivation to work towards the stuff you actually want to achieve and this is basically the law of dopamine the law of dopamine is to take action when you wake every day and what I mean by that is as soon as you open your eyes in the morning the most important thing you can do is get moving [03:35] effectively doine is literally involved in movement there's actually this really big phenomena on Tik Tok at the moment called rotting which is where people literally can't get out of their bed and particularly teenage girls call it rotting where they like cannot move they can't get out their bed to do anything and the reason that's happened is because dopamine is so low from The Tick to and the sugar and so on that they can't take action at all if you wake up in the morning and you just immed medely [04:00] get the system moving even if it feels horrible actually the more horrible it is the more dopamine you're going to generate cuz it operates in terms of that pain pleasure type balance and if you start adopting that kind of principle take action when you wake every day it just means dopamine is on a very good path from the moment you begin now there are two really good questions you can ask yourself to find out if something is good for your dopamine or not number one how quickly does the thing give you pleasure so things that [04:25] are naturally pleasurable are going to slowly increase your dopamine levels and you won't have this massive crash afterwards but if something gives you a massive hit of dopamine straight away and that feeling of instant gratification then it's unlikely to be a healthy way to increase your dopamine because it'll just come crashing back down again and you won't feel great if you suddenly get super high Tik Tok Spike of dopamine you then put the Tik Tok down and you're suddenly like I feel like you're apathetic you can't [04:49] take action towards anything and it's because your brain is just so confused by the unnatural Spike that it crashes out effectively and then question number two is is this going to benefit me or someone else in the future if the answer is yes then this is healthy dopamine things like cooking dinner instead of eating out going for a walk with a friend or smashing the like button for the YouTube algorithm but if the answer is no then is generally not a good healthy way to increase your dopamine levels and this might include things [05:12] like scrolling on Tik Tok for hours or smoking or vaping or drinking alcohol I'm not saying that you're only ever allowed to do things that contribute to personal development in some sort of way but if we're interested in how to take back control of RA dopamine if you'll finding yourself struggling to focus getting distracted all the time then it's worth appreciating the role that dopamine plays in this whole system and maybe like nudging your balance away from instant gratification things that just let you experience joy and reward [05:34] in the present moment more towards slower things that actually can help improve your life in the long term if you want I'm not telling you how to live your life these are just some suggestions feel free to take them or not by the way singing with a group of people or doing exercise with a group of people or working with a group of people makes whatever you're doing feel much better and that is where the sponsor of this video comes in which is actually me because this video is sponsored by our own product productivity lab if you're [05:55] the sort of person who works from home a lot maybe in your day job or maybe on your side hustle or your book project or your Memoir or your YouTube channel or whatever and you find yourself sitting at the computer and then not actually doing the thing that you intended to do then productivity lab is going to be absolutely perfect for you essentially productivity lab is an online platform and community of entrepreneurs and creators and professionals and we all get together and we work together through Focus Labs we do reflective [06:18] workshops each week where you reflect on how your week has gone and set goals and plan your next week so it's sort of serves as an accountability mechanism and I like to think of it as like CrossFit or pelaton for productivity you're joining a zoom co-working session with other people I join these for 3 hours each morning because I just get way more work done when I'm in a focus lab session knowing that other people around me on screen virtually are also doing their work and doing this stuff every day pretty much doubles my [06:41] productivity and we've had so many success stories from students in productivity lab who've said things like hey you know I've been procrastinating on starting my YouTube channel for ages and then I joined Focus lab sessions and now I've actually done it or things like you know I've spent 5 years planning to make this new IOS app that I've been planning to make and then I never actually did it but then I joined a few Focus lab sessions and now I've built my minimum viable product and so students in productivity lab are getting a lot of [07:02] good results there's a link down below you can check out productivity.com and you can see if it's a sort of thing that might be right for you and who knows maybe I will see you in one of our co-working sessions or in one of our reflection workshops or in one of our planning sessions or in one of our book clubs or maybe in one of our in-person meetups as well part two four ways to control dopamine okay so now let's look at four actionable ways that we can take back control of the dopamine in our brains what I love about these tips from [07:25] TJ is that anyone can start putting them into practice as pretty much as soon as you finish watching this video action number one phone fasting yeah so with dopamine the first thing to understand the most effective thing we've seen in all of our research and training is this concept we developed called phone fasting which is just having agreed times with yourself where you will Fast quote unquote from your phone the most important time in your whole life to fast from your phone is when you wake up [07:49] in the morning your brain wakes up it's seeking for dopamine it's seeking to attack the day if it goes straight into the phone you're really setting yourself on a much more difficult Journey so if you for example unlock your phone as soon as you wake up then probably the best thing to do is to put your phone on charge somewhere outside of your room and use something else as an alarm clock and then you might want to do these three things straight away when you wake up number one go and brush your teeth I [08:10] hope you're doing that every day anyway so you might as well do it first thing when you wake up number two Splash your face with cold water that helps you wake up and three make your bed and all of this is aligned with the law of dopamine because we are physically taking action and you're immediately increasing these stores of dopamine in our brain instead of immediately depleting them ideally we want to be phone fasting for at least 15 minutes every single morning and then ideally in the evenings we would have 60 [08:32] Minutes of time before bed where we're not on our phones I struggle to do this which is why I have an app called opal they are not affiliated with me in the slightest I wish they were I wish I owned the app or invented the app or something but Opel is a great app that I've been using for several months now and it essentially blocks social media apps from 10: p.m. to 9:00 a.m. then it's like if I'm on my phone I just read on my Kindle and then I go to bed easy it's just massively improved my Quality [08:53] of Life by not being physically able to access these offending apps at nighttime now something else I find really interesting about dopamine is that we we build up our stores of dopamine when we're bored but we normally don't let ourselves experience boredom because we're always reaching for our phones or whatever device we happen to have on our present actually in a state of boredom your brain will be generating dopamine it goes into this like restorative state where it's sitting there thinking oh [09:13] I've got a break right now so it's going to build some dopamine if you conly just crash your dopamine during your moments of boredom it's not great for the brain chemical and this is why TJ recommends that we try and do a 2hour phone fast on Saturdays and on Sundays and to try our best to embrace this feeling of boredom instead of always running away from for me the way I apply this is when I go on walks I try and avoid having my phone where I'm listening to Audi books or podcasts or music or whatever and I keep [09:36] my phone with me my airpods with me just in case and like a little pocket notebook type thing uh and a pen and so if I chill in a cafe or a coffee shop or something or a park bench I can do some little pen and paper journaling and I I like to think that that helps increase overall my dopamine levels over time action number two find your flow okay so I'm going to quote psychologist Mii chick sent mihi here our most rewarding activities are not natural they demand demand and effort that initially one is [10:01] reluctant to make but once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person's skills it usually begins to be intrinsically enjoyable now here chick s meh high is describing the flow state which is something that he came up with in the 1970s so when we're in our Flow State we are hyperfocused on that one thing that we're trying to do and in general to get into this Flow State there needs to be a match between our skill levels at doing the thing and how challenging the thing actually is so if [10:25] something's too easy then you're likely to feel bored rather than being in the Flow State but if something is too different difficult that you might feel anxious and stressed and so if you want to get into this Flow State we want to be trying to find that balance between Challenge and skill level and sometimes even artificially adding in a challenge if we feel like something is too easy or trying our best to reduce our anxiety and stress associated with something if we're putting too much pressure and [10:45] importance on the thing now what's really cool is that researchers have done studies where they scan people's brains to see which areas are the most active when they're in a flow State and these studies tell us that our reward system and dopamine pathways are heavily involved when we enter this Flow State experience it builds dopamine in crazy crazy amounts because our brain's like wow they obviously need me right now you want to think of this dopamine chemical as your friend and when you're trying to [11:07] engage in something that's challenging it's like oh he needs support he needs support help him Focus so we know that flow is really common in athletes and artists and scientists because their work is highly skilled and challenging but we can all experience flow in the more mundane things in our everyday life like cooking and studying and cleaning if we find ourselves in these optimal conditions and on average it takes about 15 minutes to get into a flow state so recognize that the first 15 minutes of [11:30] doing something that might seem a bit boring are always going to be the hardest because that's when your dopamine will be at its lowest a good example is something like cleaning a bathroom because that's a particularly annoying task in our home what you'll find is the first 5 minutes pretty annoying and gradually you begin to what's called gain momentum effectively after 10 minutes you might start getting more and more into it and then what can happen is the opposite can occur rather than thing you can't really bothered to [11:51] do this you actually get more into it than you even expected to and that's because you're effectively entering cleaning Flow State I find this to be a really useful insight like the starting bit of anything that you're trying to do is always the hardest it's like procrastination is generally a difficulty in getting started with a thing rather than in doing the thing when I'm filming for example this is like my my job these days to film these freaking videos and the first hour I always spend just like uh [12:15] procrastinating looking at the scripts and thinking oh it's not good enough and thinking oh it's not going to get any views thinking why does anyone care think why I why am I even qualified to talk about this one and then when I hit record and just start filming I you know slly the dopamine builds up over time it becomes kind of fun I start like having a bit of fun with it I start feeling a bit more animated and like right now I'm enjoying filming this video it's a fun thing to do I recognized this was Al [12:37] also the case when I was in med school it was really hard starting to study for the exam but then once I got into the flow of it I had my study with me music playing in the background with Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and the whole bang it starts to become fun so if you struggle with starting stuff recognize that is completely normal your dopamine levels are low and over time they will increase all right let's move on to action number three which is cold water immersion and [12:59] this has actually been shown to cause a somewhat similar increase in dopamine as cocaine but the key difference apparently is that cocaine spikes a dopamine very quickly in about 9 minutes but then it quickly falls down afterwards but going into cold water increases a dopamine more gradually over a 2hour period a brilliant psychologist back in 1998 called ceramic discovered for the first time that cold water emerging can raise our dopamine levels by 250% 2.5 times and when you get into this cold water immersion conversation [13:28] it's really important to understand this concept called the pain pleasure balance this pain pleasure balance comes from a really interesting Theory published in 1980 by a behavioral psychologist Richard Solomon called the opponent process theory of acquired motivation this basically says that Pleasure and Pain are opposite emotional states and we need to keep them balanced on either side of a seesaw so when you eat your favorite food for example and it makes you feel great the Seesaw tips towards [13:51] the pleasure side but then afterwards an opposite emotional reaction kicks in like guilt if you're like me and you ate a whole mango sticky rice with ice cream today and that guilt tips the Seesaw back into more of a neutral position in theory now Dr Anna lmy is a psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine and she talks about this in her book called dopamine Nation finding balance in the age of indulgence she writes I tend to imagine this self-regulating system as little gremlins hopping on the pain side of the [14:17] balance to counteract the weight on the pleasure side the Gremlins represent the work of homeostasis the tendency of any living system to maintain a physiologic equilibrium and things actually get really interesting because as Dr writes with repeated exposure to the same or similar pleasure stimulus the initial deviation to the side of pleasure gets weaker and shorter and the after response to the side of pain gets stronger and longer a process scientists call neuro adaptation that is with repetition our Gremlins get bigger [14:46] faster and more numerous and we need more of our drug of choice to get the same effect and obviously this drug could be anything that we find addictive like fast food or alcohol or Tik Tok or whatever but then the opposite happens when we experience pain first like going into to cold water as TJ suggests we do to increase our dopamine at first it's really hard and uncomfortable to stay in cold water like having a cold shower or doing an ice plunge or whatever but then in response to the pain our body [15:08] activates reward Pathways so the Seesaw tips back into balance towards the pleasure side and the more you do this the less intense the initial pain will be but those feelings of pleasure will happen much sooner afterwards and might even be more intense the most sustainable way to do this is just to every single time you have a shower have 30 seconds of cold at the end and that will provide a good natural increase in this dopamine chemical to create a rise in motivation and your capacity to focus and then the final action action number [15:35] four is what TJ calls my Pursuit and this comes back to the importance of a human always having a very clear Mountain that they're climbing in their life and this was huge for me I actually was someone that struggled a lot with all of the different addictive behaviors our modern world has to offer and I had to go through the CL the clarification of what am I going to chase instead of all that quick dopamine and this is where the whole idea of my Pursuit came from that if you are someone that is addicted to all these different things [16:03] really the only way to get off of them is to have something else that you're chasing that you're willing to sacrifice for if you are doing stuff without a clear Mission or purpose or goal in mind eventually you're just your brain just going to sabotage itself because the brain is very good at recognizing when we are doing something that feels fundamentally pointless whereas if you're working towards something you know if you're building something or like supporting your family or like whatever the goal is that you're trying [16:26] to go for if you have that goal firmly in your mind it means that all of the stuff you have to do to get there it feels very directed and it's it becomes quite like fun to do the thing when you know that you're working towards a particular goal now a question I often get asked is well okay but how do I figure out what my purpose is what my mission is what my primary Pursuit is this is a whole thing I have a whole threp playlist about this that talks about how to figure out what you truly value how to sort of connect it with [16:49] your own life experiences how to turn that into goals that'll be linked up there or down there or something so you can check it out but TJ's solution to this which I agree with is to start spending at least 60 minutes in nature every day without your phone without music and without a podcast now at first you'll probably feel bored and frustrated but once you push past those uncomfortable emotions it becomes a lot easier to answer that question of what is my primary Pursuit what do I really care about pursuing in my case I [17:14] personally feel most creative when I'm going out and about on walks in Regent Park in London or something or if I'm just walking to a local coffee shop and just sitting there alone with my thoughts and the more you ask yourself this question the better you'll get at working out what your goals are and figuring out the plans and systems youve got to put in place ways to achieve them this is the whole philosophy called the productivity GPS GPS stands for goal plan and system this is like a productivity method that I've been [17:36] cooking up over the last couple of years if you're interested in finding out more this is something I teach as part of my productivity lab linked down below but I'm planning to make more videos about it here on this YouTube channel as well if you enjoyed this video then you'll probably like the others in the series that are about oxytocin serotonin and endorphins and those will be in this playlist when those videos come out thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video [17:54] bye-bye