The 4 Chemicals Secretly Controlling Your Motivation and Mood

So what if your mood, your motivation, even your memory wasn't just based on your willpower, but on 4 powerful chemicals inside of your brain? What if the anxiety, the burnout, the distraction that most of us are battling right now actually comes from— they're symptoms of a dose deficiency? Welcome back, Kwik Brains. I'm your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Today's guest is here to change the way that we think about our mental health and mental performance. He is a neuroscientist, educator, bestselling author of The Dosed Effect. In this episode, we'll decode how dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins shape your brain, and most importantly, how to activate each one naturally using small daily habits. We always talk about S3s, right? Small, simple steps. You'll learn TJ's protocols, why your phone may be stealing your dopamine, and what a dose-optimized day really looks like. So whether you're feeling burnt out or just want to take your brain to the next level, this is the conversation you don't want to miss. So let's jump into it. Welcome, TJ Power.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, our audience loves brainy conversations, so I love to geek out, and I'm sure this conversation could be hours long. I was mentioning that, you know, before we started recording. Our audience knows I love acronyms as a small little quick mnemonic device. Maybe you could share the meaning behind the dose effect. Yeah.

So as you've shared, it's unbelievably convenient that these 4 chemicals that have such a massive impact on the experience we have in our lives happens to spell DOSE. And each of these chemicals has a very specific function for us in our day-to-day. Across the internet and social media, it's quite easy to see these neurotransmitters as kind of happy hormones, but they're much more than that. They have very specific requirements and benefits to us. Dopamine, the D in DOSE, is all about our motivation and our ability to get ourselves to do hard things. Oxytocin connects us and enables us to experience the beautiful emotion of love. Serotonin really lifts our mood and also helps with our energy levels. And then endorphins is this fantastic chemical that can de-stress our brain. And collectively, each of these brain chemicals is suffering as a result of the modern sedentary digital lifestyle that we now lead. And there are a lot of very useful actions we can add into our day-to-day that are going to help rebalance things.

All right. So right up, our audience is quick brain, right? It's short because everyone who's listening, their time is their most valuable asset. And we teach accelerated learning for the other stuff so people could learn faster and be able to save that time. Why don't we go into some of the protocols? Maybe we could give one protocol for each. And then I want to talk to you about Because we have a private Facebook group of 150,000 of our podcast listeners. People could just search, you know, my name on Facebook, and this always comes up where they feel like they're spending— they know they're spending too much time on their smart devices.

Hmm.

They're very concerned, or their children are. So I definitely want to go into that. But before we do, can we just do maybe one enhancing habit for each dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Definitely as a way to achieve that.

For sure. So when we come to the dopamine, initially, as described, dopamine wants us to do hard things that feel rewarding when we're doing them and after we've done them. In comparison to, as you shared there, social media, whilst it entertains you, it doesn't feel deeply rewarding after you've done it. What does feel really rewarding is accessing flow state. I'm sure you know a great deal about flow state, as do your audience. Deep moments of being in focus for prolonged periods of time is amazing for our dopamine. And one of the things we now do across schools and colleges and universities and adults is actually something called finding your flow state using your feed. And what I mean by that is if social media and technology disappeared today, Over the next few weeks, we'd all get pretty bored without our TVs and phones to entertain us in our downtime. And it's very likely we'd actually begin to engage in different activities like art or drawing or sewing or cooking or cleaning. And what's happening now in this technology era is we're spending a huge amount of our time watching other people in what could be our flow state on our social media feeds. And it's very likely the reason those videos keep reoccurring of people in nature or the ones cooking or the sport is Because it's something your brain would actually love to engage with itself. So a simple activity would be today, look at the feed, find an activity that you could actually do in real life, and that would be something that could get you into flow state and elevate your dopamine.

And it requires a little bit of effort. Yeah. Because dopamine right now is very, as you mentioned, it's kind of very inexpensive in terms of time and energy and effort when people could just pick up their phone. Or take something.

It's passive. And our dopamine wants active effort. For hundreds of thousands of years, life was so much effort. We can't even comprehend the effort to survive as our hunter-gatherer ancestors did. And these simple switches are so significant. One of my friends recently was at dinner and he was scrolling his phone. And I was thinking, oh, it'd be nice if he wasn't scrolling his phone while we were out at this restaurant. And I asked him, what does he love scrolling? And he said, He loved watching cooking videos, watching them buy the food, cook the food, chop the food, eat the food. And I asked him, does he ever kind of put a lot of effort into his cooking? Like, he's watching on his phone. And he responded saying, no, I just buy microwave meals from the supermarket. And that's an exact example of us choosing to passively get dopamine by watching, but not actively engage dopamine by doing the cooking. And a simple switch in your head. The more active effort you put in, the better your dopamine baseline becomes.

Yeah, that motivation molecule. Let's go to oxytocin. What's one way, maybe a habit or some kind of protocol people could use for that?

Yeah, oxytocin is this connection chemical. It wants us to feel love. And one of the simple and unique ways we can do this is by experiencing more love within the local area that we live in, via what's called fleeting connection. And there are brief moments now that are being lost as a result, again, by maybe technology, maybe a variety of things whereby you're in a supermarket and you just go straight to the self-checkout and you scan your stuff and you leave. You got your headphones in, you're locked in in your own life. And then there's another moment where this evening you go and go to the grocery shop to buy some food and you go to a till with a human there and you ask them how their day's going and you make eye contact and you show genuine interest in that human being. Those brief moments of fleeting connection are very, very good for our oxytocin. And there's something that was just a given 10 or 20 years ago, or even more recently than that. And now our world is getting much more self, like, kind of locked in on our own experience. And bringing your eyes up on dog walks, smiling, nodding, saying hello, asking a barista in a coffee shop how their day's going, a cashier in a supermarket. These brief moments of connection in your local community are powerful for that chemical.

I love it. Let's move on to serotonin.

Yeah, serotonin. I would have to lean towards the quantity of daily sunlight exposure we're getting. I think it's become much more talked about in recent years, which is great. The research is so clear that sunlight is very crucial to how we feel. And it's such an obvious thing like, oh yeah, I know when I go outside in the sun, I feel a bit better. Despite it being obvious and despite the research being clear, The vast majority of us are still spending 10 to 12 hours inside a day. We're still spending very brief moments of time outside. And I have progressively become much more conscious of this, of just little moments where I leave the house, walk 5 minutes down the road and come back just so I'm consistently topping up this serotonin chemical. Serotonin is so important for our mood to stay stable, our energy level to remain good. And you can kind of think of it as like when you go outside, effectively like charging yourself like an iPhone being charged by the sun, recharge the battery and come back in. And without intentional effort, it's very easy to sit at your desk from 9 till 6 o'clock and never see the outdoor world. Looking through a window doesn't count for our serotonin. So increased sunlight exposure. I like a basic rule of sunlight before social media in the morning. So I have to have gone outside and seen some sunlight before I'm allowed to go on a social media app. That's quite a nice simple rule to live by.

Fantastic. And then finally, endorphins.

Yeah, the endorphins is a great chemical. Originally, as humans were going through our extensive period of evolution, when we experienced intense stress, it wasn't kind of little micro stresses that we have now. It was things like being chased by animals and starving to death and having to run and fight and hide and climb. And in these moments of extreme physical exertion, endorphins would release into our brain and have an incredible capacity to de-stress. our thought process and calm us down so that it would increase our chance of survival. Nowadays, we're kind of getting stressed out. We're almost swallowing it into our sedentary bodies because we're not physically getting it out of us. This is also a big thing for kids with their iPads and stuff like that. They might scroll an iPad for a few hours staying dead still, have the iPad taken away from them, and suddenly this kind of eruption of frustration and anger comes through them. But that's because they don't have enough endorphins in their brain to help them manage that feeling of frustration of not being allowed on their iPad anymore. They need more endorphins as a result of physical activity. I think a great base rule, obviously having a gym program is great, cycling, running, swimming, everything exercise is great for endorphins. But I actually think having a rule where every single day you commit to either 20 press-ups or 20 squats when you wake up and never missing a day. You could do them in sets of 5, you could do 20 in a row if you can do that. But having it as a non-negotiable where every single day you always do it, I actually think will lead to more consistent endorphin activation across your life. So 20 press-ups, 20 squats every morning, I think is a great baseline.

Yeah. And it requires effort, right? It's not that easy reward where you get the reward without the work. You mentioned technology and I have a video with Simon Sinek. Must date at least like around 10 years ago on Facebook, has 37 million views.

Wow.

And even back then, it was— I was— my message was don't touch your phone the first hour of the day or the last hour of the day.

Ah, okay.

What's your relationship with, with technology? Obviously you use it. You have a, you have a huge, uh, social media, uh, imprint and, and platform there. You know, I know there's a difference between natural dopamine and the And the dopamine hijacks from tech, from sugar, doom scrolling. Is there— what's your relationship with technology? Um, you put— do you put borders and boundaries around that? And can we really retrain our brain to crave what's good for us instead of what's, what's easy?

You definitely can train your brain to orient towards the more effortful path in life. I definitely believe that's possible to do, and we can go down that lane. There's great stuff on the anterior midcingulate cortex, the AMCC, that I love. In terms of my general relationship with technology, I was about 8 years old when I saw an iPhone for the first time and I thought, wow, look at that. I was sitting at a family occasion, I saw an iPhone and my brain was just like, whoa, that thing looks good. And by 11 years old, had an iPhone myself and have basically spent almost my whole life that I can remember inside this technology. So for me, it really has been such a big part of my life and something that for many years I was so addicted to. I remember the first time I experienced Instagram and getting like 10 likes on a photo from like girls in my school or something. My brain was hooked on validation, content consumption. And then obviously as these platforms innovated, it became harder and harder to manage the addiction to it until about 4 years ago. I decided, right, I have to get this under control. I have to find a way to be able to utilize the incredible benefits that technology can bring, to share a message, to connect, to learn, to educate, to have fun, but without frequent usage and frequent dopamine hits. Because I think the greatest challenge isn't just engaging with it, but it's the frequency of engagement that's really causing disruptions to our dopamine pathway. So for me, I do have really specific boundaries. I've had to, because I have a very addictive personality, I've had to put really kind of strong restrictions in place. So I have what's called social media moments. My fiancée and I both have this at the same time, whereby the only times we're allowed to use Instagram are at 10:00 AM, 3:00 PM, and 8:00 PM. And there's a simple app called Roots. It's like one of those screen time blocking apps that can help us to block the apps out so we don't have the temptation. And then at these times, I'll allow myself 10 minutes at each of those windows and I'll watch a few videos, send some messages, post. Like, just before this, I posted a piece of content. And 30 minutes a day total for me is the max my brain can take and still feel good. If I get lost in the doom scroll world of short videos, my mental health just really suffers. My motivation goes down, and then I don't work as well. I'm not as creative. I can't be bothered to go to the gym. I can't be bothered to cook as healthy food. And it's so important to me to keep my dopamine as topped up as possible. And with that, I have to be pretty careful with the consumption of content.

I'm curious, if someone's wearing a wearable that had a real-time dashboard for like a dose dashboard, where would you see the most surprising spikes or dips in the average person's day? And then my follow-up question, as I'm thinking about this in this thought experiment, is would there be a 5th A kind of bonus brain chemical that you'd want it to track also as well.

Definitely there's a 5th, and I'll come to that. Intense spikes with each phone check, even if it's just sort of checking notifications and having a quick click through your WhatsApp and email, that kind of thing would lead to a spike. And any spike will lead to a subsequent crash. When any information can be incredibly good or incredibly bad, it creates more volatility within the dopamine pathway. So say, for example, our email. all pretty hooked on our email. And email is actually not too dissimilar to slot machines and gambling in the sense that sometimes you open your email and you might have had some kind of big win. It might be that you're an entrepreneur and you've made some kind of sale. You might have had good news from your boss. You might have had a client said something that's great and you get this really positive experience. The anticipation of what might be on the email and then seeing it creates this big increase in dopamine. On the other side, just as in gambling, you can lose. Sometimes you get negative news. You've lost a client, your boss is frustrated at something, you've lost money on something. And that would lead to significant crashes. So the phone has this unique capacity to spike and crash our dopamine with extreme nuance between the different things that we're doing on there. Would you also like to explore the different chemicals as well? What could impact them?

Yeah, I was, I was curious if maybe we could just even mention one outside of the 4 that we're focusing on, if that wearable could also track a 5th one.

What I think is so fascinating is this glutamate chemical, this chemical that enables humans to make decisions. In each moment that we make a decision, a glutamate molecule will cross a synapse and enable that decision to be made. Even as I sit here now and I'm deciding what to say to you, a couple glutamate molecules are crossing the synapse in order for me to make these decisions. And we are making a lot of decisions in the modern world with our phones. Specifically, when you're on your phone, you are rapidly making minor decisions at all moments with what you look at, watch, comment on, think about, email, WhatsApp, Snapchat. And it's very overwhelming and building too much glutamate in our brain across the synapses. And you're seeing this effectively some kind of traffic jam across the synapse where a load of glutamate is sitting there because too many decisions have been made and therefore your thoughts can't actually process quite as effectively. And sometimes you'll reach that moment in your day where your brain feels so foggy, you're actually struggling to even make easy decisions. You feel super overwhelmed. And we're underestimating that this is because there's too much glutamate sitting in our synapses. So maybe the wearable might show like glutamate overload, glutamate overload. And in that moment, now I really consciously think about it. For about 6 months, I've been running this as an experiment and I'll think, okay, I can feel my brain isn't working at the level of performance I'd like it to. I may feel a bit annoyed or overwhelmed and I'll think, okay, I've got to try and lower my glutamate. And that could include a nap. A nap is unbelievably good for getting the glutamate out of your brain. It could be walking to the local park and taking my shoes and socks off, just walking around on some grass for 10 minutes. It could just be lying on the sofa and just looking out the window and dealing with the boredom and being okay with the boredom. But having moments where you're making very few decisions is very important in a world where we're making so many.

Yeah, that was good. This is amazing. In my mind also, I'm thinking about what another acronym could be for 5 letters. Yeah, I know.

I don't know if the book would have quite hit if it was called called like the dose effect. So I don't, I don't know where it fits, but it could come.

I'm curious, you mentioned the workplace. If, if you could redesign like a workplace or a school around dose optimization, you know, for lack of a better term, would there be like 1, 2, 3 changes you'd make to protect, you know, our wellness, our brain, and improve our performance?

Yeah, that's a great question. So the first thing I would do is I would have an actual location for phones to be put in at the office. I'd have like— and it could be nicely done, it could have names and little areas or whatever is required, but I'd have a location where the phones get put when you enter the office, optionally. But I would definitely educate the office as to why that'd be so awesome for their own mental health and performance. And I would have pretty collaborative desks that enable you to easily have conversations with one another. If you need to put your headphones in and get in flow, you can. But I think it's great if humans have the opportunity to have a moment where something's confusing to them and they look up and they actually communicate with someone about it rather than think, oh, this is difficult, I'm just going to go on LinkedIn for a bit and distract myself. I think that collaborative nature, that oxytocin is important. I would have a lot of plants in the environment. I'd have as much nature as you could possibly get into that indoor environment, I think is powerful. I know NASA is a big proponent of putting plants in environments to help with employee wellbeing and performance. And then I would have anything— I'm kind of journeying through the chemicals here, but I would have anything that would promote getting out of your chair. So of course, standing desks would be good, but also table tennis tables and foosball and snooker tables, pool tables, anything that would lead to breaks being physically active and connection-based rather than isolated and on your own, I think is so different for the brain. If you look at the average break now, it's probably spent working from home with some food, sitting in front of a computer with YouTube on whilst you've also got Slack open and you're still kind of working and you're kind of eating and you're kind of on your phone. That is just not great for our brain. Our brain likes moments where it really focuses on one thing at a time, and an environment that was conducive to making that a reality would be pretty cool.

Yeah, I believe, you know, our external world kind of reflects our internal world.

It does.

In a big way.

It does. And one of the things just on that that we really promote in Dose and with all the people that come through our kind of training intervention is how they treat their environment in terms of cleaning their environment. And it seems like the most basic thing ever, cleaning your environment, but we train the NHS here. It's our big National Health Service in the UK. And there are a lot of people in the NHS that are really struggling with their mental health. And we see a lot of people with depression and intensive low mood. And we'll suggest to them in the first week they're going through this intervention that step one is to try and get their house clean. And when you say that to someone that's got depression, it's like hell to them. They're like, I can't clean this house. That'll be a nightmare. And we get them to always start with literally their bedside table in their bedroom, just try and get the glasses off their bedside table and clean that tiny little zone. And then that in itself, you are done at that point. Then we'll pick a next spot and the next spot. The effort of cleaning your home and the satisfaction creates immense amounts of dopamine. And a lot of depression is rooted in our dopamine being so low that we can't get ourselves to actually do anything that would heal us. And that simple act of sorting out your outer environment just seems to transform them. And so many come back 7 days later like, okay, I've made some progress, I've got some momentum. What's the next thing you need me to do? But that cleaning as step one is so huge.

And it gives you a sense of certainty and control.

Yeah.

You know, especially when it comes to habits, right? You know, prime directive is really control your environment so you don't have to use willpower. It's a lot easier to not touch your phone first thing in the morning if your phone's in a different part of your home, right?

Yeah, for sure.

Without a doubt. You mentioned mental health, and I'm curious, is— does there— and we talk about In our limitless model, it's— we could control 3 things: our mindset, our motivation, and the methods that we're using, right? And when mindset, uh, these are the set of assumptions and attitudes you have about something, and there's some lies out there. And here's an acronym: LIE— a limited idea entertained, right?

Okay.

So I talk about these lies that keep us stuck, and I was wondering, is there a piece of outdated mental health advice that we all hear very often that actually goes against the dose effect, you know? And so like some outdated misinformation that most people believe about something in this area that goes against, you know, what the research says. And then if there is an outdated belief or assumption, what would What would you replace it with? What would the truth be?

I think one of the mentalities towards general kind of physical health and mental health has been for a very long period of time, the idea of moderation and balance. And my grandpa, he lived a great life to like 95. He was cognitively sharp and physically did great until the end. And he was a great proponent of the idea of balance. He'd have a small little kind of yogurt pudding in the evening after each dinner and a tiny bit of dark chocolate. He was really good at this balance thing. And whilst I think that's great and it worked really well for him, I think the modern environment is getting so good at hijacking how our brain chemistry works that I actually don't think balance is a very achievable idea with certain aspects. Like with something like ultra-processed food, I think it's incredibly hard to achieve balance with ultra-processed food because it's so strategically designed to hack our hormones, our ghrelin and our leptin, our hunger and satiation hormones and our dopamine, that when we consume a little bit of ultra-processed foods, it completely controls us and drives us for mass consumption. The same with alcohol. I think the idea of balance with alcohol is a very, very hard thing to achieve, especially if you have a brain that likes dopamine. The idea of like, oh, just have a little bit occasionally, I think it's very hard to successfully achieve over a long period of time. And then again, with watching lots of reels on the reels tab or the TikTok tab, I think similar to alcohol and ultra-processed food, I think you're better off, say for example you're using Instagram, staying on the normal feed and seeing a few photos and then the occasional video. But I think when you get stuck in these scrolling loops, it's very hard to control your brain because these systems have become too powerful. So I think potentially what isn't as possible in the modern world is the idea of balance. And I think For many people, their best life might be the other side of letting go of things like ultra-processed food and alcohol completely. And maybe there's a world for them where they don't consume these things, they don't touch these things, and their craving for them diminishes. And suddenly there's this really peaceful life the other side of it.

I love it. Real quick, as you feed and fuel your mind with this information-rich podcast, it's just as vital to feed and fuel your brain and your body with high-quality nutrition. You know, I'm always looking for the best, simple, quick ways to optimize my energy and my mental performance. Nourishing my cells is something I take very seriously because we are only as healthy as our cells. It's where your energy, your strength, and your focus comes from. If your cells aren't working, nothing else works. So I started taking Timeline's MitoPure every day, and I noticed a huge difference in my recovery after workouts and also my focus, my productivity, and my performance. It comes in soft gels, gummies, powders. Our favorite is really the gummies because they taste great. MitoPure is backed by gold standard clinical trials shown to improve muscle strength, enhance mitochondrial function, and support your brain so that you can think, focus, and age better. Our friends at Timeline are giving you 20% off just for listening. Head over to timeline.com/kwik to get started. That's timeline.com/kwik. Now back to our episode. We have, uh, TJ, like, uh, our own community, uh, where we have our app and there's a lot of conversation. I mentioned that we would be having this, uh, upcoming podcast interview and it seemed like, uh, based on people's, uh, questions or their the challenges they're dealing with. If someone is listening and they're dealing with— it was low motivation, high stress, mental fatigue— and you're talking to that person, which I think a lot of people fall in one or more of those categories, where would you recommend they start? Like, what's the minimum effective dose for getting back on track neurologically?

So that was low motivation, high stress, And mental fatigue. So I tackled 2 parts of this. One is the brain is getting overly exerted with the high stress and mental fatigue, and the low motivation might be that we're consuming too much of this dopamine that's breaking our motivation system.

Yeah.

So with the low motivation, I would be laser focused on your nighttime routine, ensuring that your phone no longer charges on your bedside table and you start going to sleep As early as is humanly possible for you in your life, depending on your kids and your family and your setup and your work. But I think a late night is really what's killing us because we have the late night, we wake up fatigued, we're then more likely to go for the phone and the sugary breakfast. We then consume the quick dopamine and we break our motivational system. So an early night is just magic. You're going to wake up with more discipline and willpower. You might make some smart decisions around, say, sunlight before social media when you wake, or maybe just simply having a shower, getting ready for your day, making your bed before you go into the phone. So the motivational component, I would say it sits there in that decision at nighttime to when you wake. On the other side of it, high stress, mental fatigue. I really think we need to think about what rest actually is for our brain because, and I've had a real battle with this, I have such a deep addiction to technology, which has led to me having to make so many changes to my lifestyle to try and manage my mental fatigue. And I've really struggled myself with kind of moments of intensive burnout and just doing too much with my work. And then what I would find is whenever I needed rest time, it was always spent on the sofa watching YouTube. And I thought, okay, it's longer form content. It's all right. It's better than me watching social media. But I was never giving my brain actual rest where it wasn't having to do anything at all, where it was just chilling out. And over the last 8 days, we're now 8 days into this, my partner and I have attempted 8 days without a TV. So I carried the TV out of my lounge, which has been a really challenging thing to do. And this isn't something I say everyone else needs to get rid of a TV, but this is more of an experiment to see how it impacts me. And it's meant that in my downtime, when I come off these calls or I'm eating my lunch, I've just got to sit there and do nothing. I've just got to chill out and look at the wall or look out the window. If my partner's here, I could chat to her. And the impact it has had on the intensity and fatigue and stress in my brain from just having moments where my brain sits in nothingness has been really powerful. And I think I did this viral social media post recently called Meals, Bedroom, Bathroom, where someone had to attempt to not look at a screen when they were eating a meal, when they're in their bedroom, and when they're in their bathroom for a day. So it seems pretty basic, like not when I'm eating, not when I'm in the bedroom, not when I'm in the bathroom. And it's amazing how many people find it so difficult, myself included, to have the downtime off the tech. And I think if you have it, you might discover that whilst it's boring and sometimes you have some thoughts that worry you and you think, oh, it'd be nice to switch off these thoughts, in that downtime is where you'll restore the mental fatigue and where the stress level will actually come.

With technology, I've always looked at technology as a tool that we use, but if technology is using us, then we be Then we become the tool.

I think we are the tool as humanity right now, en masse. I think it's rare that people are really strategically using it. And it's just like, even I just came back from London on a train, and the train used to, even just 5 years ago, be a chance where you would just chat with people on your carriage. Everyone would be talking, how's your day going? Everyone would be like eating or drinking like a bottle of water or whatever it might be. And now it's just like 50 people on their short video feeds, headphones in, just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And I look at it thinking, no one knows this stuff. The mass of the world don't know this stuff. And they're all going to get home and be in a bit of a bad mood and not feel that good and can't bother to cook dinner. And they won't know that the short video feed has just absolutely rinsed their dopamine chemical. And then they're not going to have any dopamine for their evening. And it's just like in these moments, whether we could talk or even if you could read a book, it's just these tiny, what seem like insignificant decisions are actually massive for how we feel.

I saw a post on social media. I don't know who to credit to, but it was a photographer that took Uh, photos, stills of someone.

Oh, I think I saw that yesterday.

And then they digitally removed the phone, uh, from their, from their hands, right? So they're in bed or they're on the train, but you could see them. And it just, it was, uh, it was disturbing to me. They all look extremely depressed. Um, but it was, uh, yeah, it's interesting when we, we don't have the— when we're not conscious and aware, and sometimes we're going on our programs and our routines. I'm curious, with everything that you know about, uh, this, this subject matter, um, and you kind of touched on some of the things, but just, uh, in your current state, um, what does your personal morning or evening and/or evening routine look like knowing all you know on how to activate dose, you know, and how can someone listening build their own in something that's not incredibly time-consuming?

Yeah. So if I start with the evening one and then I'll flow to the morning one because it sets it up. The evening one, the small decisions I'm making are moving my dinner to an earlier time is really significant because then it moves your whole wind-down period earlier. I used to always eat dinner at 7:30, then I'd finish washing that up by 8:30, say, and then it would be like 9:00, I might have a shower, and then I'm sitting down on the sofa at 9:00 to watching TV, which leads to a 10:30, 11 bedtime. Then you get into bed with the phone and it would delay it all. So if the dinner comes forward, everything comes forward. So that's a simple thing I do. I make sure my phone charges in this room I'm in here on this shelf behind me. It never would enter my bedroom. I almost see my bedroom door as like a force field that a phone literally cannot cross no matter what. And it's tough to get to that point. Like, it's a process getting comfortable with not having your phone in your bedroom. You have all these thoughts and justifications of alarms and all these emergency calls that you think you might get that never come. And it's really important just to gradually experiment with it and see, okay, maybe I am safe without the phone in my room. So that's the evening routine to me, is just earlier dinner and phone out the bedroom. Those are the crucial steps. In the morning, I would always wake up. I always immediately go brush my teeth as soon as I wake up because it's one of those annoying, boring tasks. And anything annoying and boring is good for my dopamine. I'll splash cold water on my face. I then sit down on the sofa and do like a 10-minute breathwork activity. I find those really impactful on my mental health. I find just sort of like gets any tension out of me. Sometimes it gives me cool ideas for my work. And then depending on how much time I have, if there is available time to go for kind of a short walk outside or do some kind of workout, I will. And then the most crucial part of my morning routine is my first engagement with technology every day is my laptop, not my phone. And I'll always open my laptop as my first piece of technology. I'll open my WhatsApp and my email and I'll manage it on there. I can respond to everything much quicker. I can download the information much quicker. It's less overwhelming and there's less chance of me kind of getting tempted by clicking on all the random things phones have to offer. And it just creates much more intentional usage of tech. At that point, I normally just begin my work and it will maybe get to 10 o'clock and I'll have seen communication because I've got WhatsApp on my computer, but it gets 10 o'clock and I'll be like, oh, my phone is still on that table. And it's not that I've been tech-free, but I've just been phone-free. And that morning routine really makes a difference for me.

That's powerful non-negotiables.

Yeah. And it's a gradual process.

Well, what would our world look like if everyone knew how to activate their dose naturally?

I think everyone has a a dream within them that is hard to fulfill because it requires such immense effort to actually achieve your dreams. And I think if your dopamine system specifically is in balance, your likelihood of accessing your dream by being able to do the hard things that can get you there is much more likely. And I think a world where people are actually living in a life that is the one they dreamed of, they're probably going to be pretty satisfied and fulfilled and calm and happy. And I think a world where you have this guilt running through you of like, I know I'm not quite living the life I should be, but I'm stuck in all these addictive loops with all these different components, that's a tough world for the mind. And I think that a world the other side of your brain chemistry being in balance is a pretty nice one for society.

Yeah, we have a similar mission, reminding people that they're the pilot of their brain. They don't have to be the passenger. Yeah.

And more than ever, This is our time to nail it because technology, as amazing as it is, my whole life is enabled because of technology, social media, laptops, computers. But technology is going to become much more addictive for us when eventually we move towards augmented reality glasses and the phones continue to improve. Social media becomes more addictive with AI. This time right now is the time for us to be like, okay, let's get a really good relationship with this stuff. so that we can use it for all it has to offer us and live a life that's amazing. But there are going to be some people in the future that get a bit stuck by technology and they live quite lethargic consumption lives, and that's not going to be the one you've been dreaming of. So it's such a great time now to start making a difference with it.

That's the message. Before we wrap, I always like to ask our guests, ultimately our podcast is all about learning, right? And I'm curious, is there one thing that you're currently learning about or you're studying that has— outside of this conversation topic— that has you particularly excited, that lights you up, something that you're learning and studying?

Yeah, I mean, it is outside of this, but I am currently 5 months away from becoming a dad for the first time. And my partner and I are fascinated by that whole world of birth and how we bring a human into this world. And how we're going to manage that kid's relationship with food and technology and nature and the whole birthing process itself and all the brain chemistry side of it. So we're having a magical time investigating how we figure out how to be a mom and dad in the future.

Congratulations from our community.

Thanks.

There's going to be a lot of learning there.

Yeah, it's going to be a whole new world for me.

All right. Where can people— I'm holding a copy of The Dose Effect: Small Habits to Boost Your Brain Chemistry by TJ Power. Where can people go deeper with your work or connect with you?

Yeah, so The Dose Effect is on all the platforms— Barnes& Noble, Amazon, Waterstones. Takes you on a cool journey of all 20 of the actions that embed this stuff into your life. And then @TJPower on Instagram is where I teach how to rebalance your brain.

Well, TJ, thank you so much for, for being on our show, sharing your time and your talent. This was a very powerful conversation with TJ Power, the one that I hope you'll dose yourself with again and again. I mean, just remember that while I was labeled the boy with a broken brain, your brain is not broken. It could also be just undernourished. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins are not just chemicals. They could be keys to unlocking your clarity, your creativity, your Your sense of connection, your calm. And so, my question for everybody here is what's one thing you learned from this conversation that you can implement today? And, I would encourage everyone to actually screenshot wherever you're consuming this, tag TJ, tag myself so we get to see it and post that aha or that one thing that you're going to do based on this because we know knowledge by itself is not power. It has the potential to be power when we apply it. And then, by sharing with your Online, you know, your, your family gets to see it, your, your friends, your fans, your followers. Uh, then we get to maybe be able to make it more of that world that, uh, TJ was talking about. And so maybe it's 30-second gratitude practice, a sunlight walk, you know, a little, uh, some borders and boundaries around your, your smart device. Um, whatever it is, commit consistency, right? Little by little, a little becomes a lot. So, uh, again, if you know someone struggling with their mood or their motivation, uh, Share this episode with them. Make sure you tag us there. And until next time, remember, you are not your brain, but you're the operator of your brain and you have the power to rewrite it for peace, power, and performance. This is your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Until our next episode, be limitless.