Welcome to healthy Ish.
Thanks for joining us on the podcast of From Body and Soul. I hope your new year is buzzing along. I'm the host of Felicity.
Harley.
My guest today came all the way from the UK and has a nifty acronym dose to help us all distress our minds, energize our bodies and restore mental health. Yes, please to all of the above. TJ Power is a neuroscientist and author with a very impressive social following, and he joins me to explain the dose effect. TJ Welcome to healthy Ish, Thanks for having me, and welcome to Australia.
I'm excited to be I.
Feel like we could do a whole separate podcast on the story of why you are in Australia, but we'll.
Leave that for another time.
Now, Happy New Year and give us one healthy is resolution for this year, something that you want to.
Achieve me personally, say I'd recommend to other Well you all right? Say the biggest impact I have on my mind. The biggest factor that has a big impact on my mind is how frequently I open social media apps. I obviously speak a lot about dopamine and I've tested a few times throughout this year, the idea of only being allowed on Instagram at ten o'clock in the morning, three pm, and then eight pm. And it is phenomenal how much it changes my mental health when I stick to it.
And I'll do it for a week or so, and then I'll lose the pattern, and then I'll start going on it more frequently. And twenty twenty five, that's the year I'm going to make that like a really stable part of my life.
So just three times a day. Is there some neuroscience behind the three times a day thing?
Or Yeah? Effectively, Instagram or TikTok or Facebook, whatever your platform might be, is very overstimulating for the dopamine system. It raises it to a very unnatural level, causing it to crash out. When it crashes out, we feel kind of low mood and get really kind of depressed and demotivated. It's not a very nice feeling. If you reduce the frequency of activation of that dovemin system from the quick dove mein of social media, you're not going to burn
out the system as much. You're going to feel a little bit more motivated and positive in your brain. And that's where I want to be in twenty twenty five.
Don't we all? And how do you stick to it?
You just have to be focused on your boundaries and quite militant about it. Really.
Yeah, it's one of those things I like the idea of like balance and not being too ridiculous about these things. However, with social media, for me, if I don't have a really clear structure in place, it then just gets into that loop where you're just opening it all the time. And because of how dopamin works, it drives our behavior. The more you open it, the more you then open it more and more often. So for me, I use an app so that when I click Instagram, it does
take about ten seconds for the app to open. It like comes up with this annoying animation that's smart, which I find really helpful because then it gives me ten seconds to think about is it actually in my slot where I can have my social media moment. And the other part of it is just being really discipline. I've actually found that saying to other people I'm going to do it really helps. Then they're like, you said you
weren't going to go. Like if I say to my girlfriend, I'm doing ten three and eight or if I get them trying to do it with me, then it can help me stick to it.
Well, good luck, hey, and I think you all just made us feel seen. You know, you're an expert in this area and you still struggle with it.
It's so hard. This dove me stuff is so hard for the modern brain. Like our brain has craved dove mean for hundreds of thousands of years. Originally it could only access it from things like hunting and building and foraging for fruit. And now it can just get it that get our finger tips at any moment, and it's very difficult for our brain to manage.
Let's talk more about domain in a minute, but first just set us up with what the dose effect is all about.
What does it stand for?
Yeah, so dose is this acronym for these four primary brain chemicals. We have dopamine, which is the super famous one. It creates all of our drive and motivation.
So hot right now that this one isn't it?
It needs to be hot, Like, it's so relevant to how humans are feeling. I actually think it's the main main factor impacting the whole of society s mental health is the disruption of dopamaine as a chemty. We then have the O, which is oxytocin. That's the one that connects humans together. We have serotonin, which is responsible for our mood and our energy levels. And then endorphins, which is a very useful chemical that can de stress our brain.
And what are the benefits of activating dose into our life?
How can it help us?
For the majority of human history, these chemicals were extremely high and it led to our brain being in a much more positive, motivated, and connected state. And if you look at, for example, hunter gatherer tribes that are still operating today. And the reason I speak into that idea is the whole of our research at Dose Lab is focused on this thing called evolutionary mismatch, which is the idea our brain spent three hundred thousand years running around
in a forest developing these chemicals. We didn't just develop them in the last twenty years when we found out about them. They've been our brain a long time. And if you go and visit these hunt to gatherer tribes and ask them or try and explain to them the ideas of depression and demotivation and poor attention spans and lack of connection, their brain ligy cannot comp this experience
taking place because they're still living. How our brain is evolutionarily designed and we don't have to go back and live like hunting gatherers. But there are certain actions when you learn about the dose effects that you can add to your life that lead to our brain feeling much happier.
I mean, we're kind of stuffed. We've stuffed ourselves in many ways, haven't we.
If you go back to, you know, thinking about how we used to leave versus the world today and surviving and thriving.
Let's talk about dopamine. Tell us more about this chemical.
Effectively evolved in our brain to make us enjoy the experience of hard work. And if you take the example of them having to hunt for hours and hours to find food, like it would have been a hard thing to do to successfully find that food, and this chemical motivated us to do it and then gave us a really pleasurable experience when we successfully access food, so that we think that was fun, so we would do it
again and again and we would survive. As a specie in the modern world, an example of earning your dove mein effectively would be something like changing and washing your bedding, which is a very niche example. But we all wake up in the morning one day and we look at our bed and the sheets are a bit crinkled and stuff, and we think I'd probably washed my bedding today, and then about a week later we're like, oh, yeah, actually,
definitely need to wash my bedding. Now. We go through the hell of unbuttoning that douve do you guys call it a duvet and don dona, So you un button your doner. You go through the hell of jamming all in the washing machine, washing it, getting it dry, putting it all back on.
Eventually, and it's a nightmare to get.
You find yourself that evening, nine ten o'clock at night getting into your freshly washed bed, and you have that really enjoyable experience. You've never got into your freshly washed bed and thought, I really regret the fact I to wash my bedding today. It's this pleasurable experience. And doveman just evolved as a chemical to reward us for effortful
actions that would help us as a human being. We do still do things that are effort in our modern world, but we've now invented a lot of ways to hijack that elevation of dove me through social media and sugar and alcohol and so on, and these are then causing that chemical to break down effectively and not operate as well.
You know what, you just validated that clean shape thing because I have my joy list, as I call it, crawling into clean sheets. It makes me feel amazing, like a nice experience. And it's actually a joke in our family because my sisters are the same. We all love clean sheets and we want to stay in a hotel. We just kind of it can be rustic, but as long as it has clean sheet. So talk to us about the symptoms that lower dopamine or how do we feel and how does low dopmine show up in our lives.
Yeah, so if we were doing the effort for actions, you'd find that you're waking up in the morning, you're super motivated and doing effortful things like making yourself a nice breakfast, a healthy breakfast, going out for a walk, going to work. It doesn't feel that challenging. You just kind of do it with these. If you're waking up and you're pretty low in dove, mean, everything is going to feel super hard. So the idea of even making your bed or trying to stay off your phone, or
cooking food or doing xcess. It all feels like, oh, you can't be bothered. It's so much effort. That's the initial stage of low dose mean is like and I can't be bothered type mind. If we get really really low and dose mean, that's when we can feel quite depressed. Then we get into that state where doing anything feels horrible, even like showering or seeing people, whatever it might be.
So you're saying the main causes of low dopmine in our society today are things like one, social media.
Yeah, social media is definitely number one because of the immense frequency of interaction with it. It's not necessarily like it doesn't spike dopamine more than say alcohol, for example. But we're not all just like sipping alcohol all day every day. We might be, but that's quite rare if you're sipping alcohol all day every day. Whereas social media, it's from the moment we wait, the moment we're sleep. A lot of us are opening these apps at fifty
to one hundred times a day. That over activation through the social media is definitely the number one factor. And then sugar and also alcohol big factors.
And you also said you've got porn in there. I mean, you've got a quite bold I saw on your Instagram where you admitted that you used to watch porn and then definitely you switched it off.
Porn was something like I grew up and I remember googling like a few words when I was like a teenager.
And thinking, like many other men out there, yeah.
I wonder what things like that look like without clothes on, And then came to discover as a teenager, oh wow, you can watch that video versions of these things that were in my imagination. And then for like ten years that was just something I interacted with. I had no idea it was necessarily bad for my brain. All my friends around me were doing it. All my friends around me still do it now. Like I don't know anyone as a man that doesn't watch it.
To be honest, I've got a twelve year old and that horrifies me.
Yeah. I sorry to say, he may have seen the which is sad, or he may in time. I think in the UK at the moment, the average age that a boy has seen its nine years.
Yeah.
It's in Australia, which is wild.
So it is something that you kind of when you're growing up as a boy, you don't think, oh, it's that bad for you. But when I came to really study neuroscience and when deep ins this research, I realized that this is really overactivating the system. And you experience it, particularly as a man like you watch it, it's very pleasurable. During afterwards, you very rapidly feel pretty deflated and almost like a bit of like a shameful guilt feeling just
like comes over you. And it is something that over the last few years I really tried to cut out of my life and it has been phenomen or how big of an impact I actually had.
Yeah, and good on you for speaking out about that.
Thanks. I think it's one of those things that's having such a huge impact that it has to be talked about. Like I didn't grow up thinking, oh, I really want to be that guy that goes and talks about poor and that wasn't really in the game plan, but it feels like it just has to be.
Yeah, no, good on you.
So talk us through some actions, as you call them, things that we can implement in our lives regularly that will help. Now when it comes to open what do we want to do? What's the approach. Do we want to regulate it? Do we want to rise it and fall?
Like?
How do we what's the ideal that we're aiming for.
You want to have in your mind the idea of earning it. Basically, you want to earn pleasure. That example of changing and washing your bed, and you're earning pleasure. None of it is enjoyable until the moment.
You get I might do that every day now, Yeah, just.
Rapidly changing and watching your bed, even if you take something like an easier example waking up and then making your bed really nicely and make sure it is all nice. And if you don't have lots of nice pillows and stuff, like making your bed a nicer thing to make so you have a bit of effort.
I love that example.
That is a good example. The big thing, first of all, though, for doping is this idea of phone fasting. Fasting from food is obviously like a massive phenomena now, and our phone, we really need to develop the relationship with it whereby we find it okay to be separate from it. I think if society could become comfortable with separating from our phone, it's like it would be a massive beneficial thing for
mental health. And when we wake up first thing in the morning, avoiding the phone is like the number one thing if I could change one thing about the world, if I could put like a law in place that everyone had to follow to try and improve mental health, it would be wake up in the morning, not snooze your alarm, as tempting as it is, but that really
depletes the dopamine. And then you get out of bed, You go and brush your teeth, you flash cold water on your face, you make your bed, and maybe you step outside for a few minutes, not even for very long, just so your brain's seen some sunlight, and then go into the phone. That's so different for your dopamine pathway.
What is there any timeframe that you should be off your phone of a morning.
I would say a minimum goal will be fifteen minutes. That would be incredible. If you could wake up that's not.
Very minutes before I was thinking going to stay an hour.
That would be a good thing to work towards over time, Like if it was within your eMate to be able to wake up, do a little bit of that morning stuff, brushing your teeth and so on, and then go for a walk and have the whole walk before you come back on your phone. That would be incredible for your brain. The beneficial effects of also having the nature and the
movement and the sunlight would be phenomenal. But if you started with fifteen minutes and then kind of built from there, that would be the goal.
What do you do in the mornings? How does a neuroscientist approach the mornings?
I do take my mornings like pretty seriously. To be honest, I think how your morning begins has a humongous impact on how the rest of the day is going to go. And it's really clear in the neuroscience that wherever that first source of dope mean is from, it really our brain really craves in that direction for the rest of the day. So if effort is what it gets doping from, it's going to pursue effort. If easy, quick pleasure is what it gets its doping from, you're heading in that direction.
So this morning, for example, like I had this today, I wanted to feel good today. I woke up, I really want to snooze alarms when I wake up, so I kind of forced myself when along goes off to just sit on the side of the bed. My girlfriend finds it kind of weird. I kind of sit there with my head in my hand, just so I don't go back to sleep. I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth, cold water on my face, and then
go downstairs. I step outside for like two minutes, and then when we have enough time, Like we had enough time this morning, so we woke up a bit earlier. We went out for a walk for maybe like an hour or something. We did actually quite a good walk. We actually saw a brown stake as well.
An englishman.
It was very small.
I was imagining this massive show.
She told me even brownsnakes that small can kill you. So I was there stressing good. But I thought, well, this is coming out hunter gathering, so this is actually good to have this experience. We went for a walk, came home with then did a little bit of breath work. I think breath work is really cool. It's very good. I'm someone that struggles with a lot of like overthinking. My brain is very rapid and worries about various things, and I find that deep breathing stuff you can do
is really effective for calming the brain. Then I got ready, went on my computer for the first time.
Do you do any specific breathing techniques.
Yeah, I think there's We have this particular YouTube channel we love following called Breathe as Sandy. That's a nice shower to Sandy. But it's so good and it's so easy to follow, and obviously it's all free, and we go on there and it's just basically deep inhalations through your nose, big exhalations. You do that for about sixty seconds, and then we hold our breath for ninety seconds and
we just kind of cycle around that. And as I say, like my mind is just like quite stressed out, like I just slightly orient towards of mine that's quite like rigid like that, and it gives me this huge release. And for me are someone that was super hooked on a lot of the quick dove mein that's kind of what led me into this world. And the big deep breathwork stuff is the thing that I found closest to the high that the quick dopemin used to give.
Mm Oh, I love breathwork.
Talk to us a bit about flow state because I know you study this, you need to write fasis on it. Yeah.
One of my thesis on this on the interaction between mindfulness.
And flows regulate dopamine.
Flow state is like really at the core of exactly what dove mean is all about. For our four hunter gather ourselves, they spent a huge amount of time in deep states of focus. Like if you were hunting, you were in the zone for hours. If you were foraging for fruit, if you were building shelter, if you were making a fire. It was always activities that had us deeply, deeply focused. And now it's a lot like kind of sitting at our desk working, what's happening, emailing, It's like
so many eating at the same time. It's like so many activities at once. And it's really clear that when our brain enters these prolonged deep states of focus, it builds an absolute ton of dopamine, and evolutionarily that makes sense because the more it builds, the more motivated and focus you'd become. And in our modern world, what's actually happening is a lot of us have things that might
be able to get us into flow state. This could be cooking, it could be making music, it could be in your work life, it could be something artistic or creative. And what we've basically found in our research is rather than people actually engaging with their flow state a lot of the time. Now we're actually watching people on social media engage with our flow state instead. And if you look at your social media feed, you'll notice there's like a pattern or a theme of videos that come up
quite regularly. It might be cooking. Cooking is often one that people like to.
Watch one skiing snow skiing.
At the moment, yes, like those people are dancing dancing, and they're beautiful flow states, and we're kind of vicarious the experiencing flow state, but not getting the dove mean benefits. We're not actually physically interacting with the activity. And if you want to access flow state, if you look at your social media feed and have a thing that what is really coming up quite often, and then ask yourself
the question am I actually engaging in this activity? Like people love watching cleaning videos for example, cleaning is unreal for our dopemin and rather than just like getting a bit of satisfaction as to watching someone else clean, if you can clean, then you're actually building it naturally.
Will be back after the shot break with more from TJ. Power.
One thing I do love about your book, and you've explained on this podcast, is just you know, comparing ourselves back to when we were cave people. And I think that's so important to you know, to get your head around when you talk about this, because that was like thousands and thousands of years.
We evolve like that now modern day society.
I don't know the actual like what if if we looked at modern day it would be what six minutes of one hour or something compared to how we evolve, you know, how there is that.
I don't know what that is.
Honestly, we spent ninety nine point nine percent of human history outside that's yeah, basically all it's so new and we obviously and I hed think, oh no, because we've been evolving over the last few thousand years quite a lot. And we had the advent of farming twelve thousand years ago, so that really began to change things for humans because suddenly, like the pursuit of food wasn't the primary goal for everyone.
It's only meant people could do other things. Then over the last few thousand years, things started to speed up, but still in all of those lifestyles before the advent of basically technology, life was still a much more physical experience. Humans were much more connected, We spent way more time outside, our nutrition was way more clean. And it's really in the last thirty years that we have radically changed things. We've moved to sedentary, digital lifestyles that are spent indoors.
And non community.
I think the other important thing, you know, and you talk about this in your book, is coming to like humans evolved and we exist because we were in tribes and we supported each other, whereas now we're so solo in that it's everything about the self rather than about the community.
One hundred percent. Like for most of human history, we were oxytocin driven, and that basically means we were driven by how every day can I be making sure that group survived so that you could survive as well. But it was all about the team. And as we've evolved in the last eight, ten to twenty years, things have
become very dope being driven. Like our life is very in the pursuit of either success and progress and money that's a big priority for many of us, or is the pursuit of high levels of pleasure from alcohol and stimulation and stuff like that. And we really do need to consider how much community experiences are we having, how bonded are we to the people around.
Us talk to us a bit about the eendorphins, why are these important for survival and perhaps some key principles as you write about.
Yeah, it's super interesting, and dolphins really helped us with like extreme stress in our mind. If we were out there in the wild and you suddenly had like a rustling in the bushes, or you still and it was so small it wasn't wrestling, but I saw it.
Did you get a photo of it?
No phones with us phones. I actually yesterday went out for a walk in the afternoon and I didn't take my phone with me. And I've literally just got tipped to Australia a couple of days ago, and I ended up getting so lost in the bush that I had to go to a round them person's house and knock on their door and then ask them to direct me home because I didn't know.
We've gone in full bush men mode.
Yeah, I actually do live this dose lifestyle away from the phones. Anyway, back to indorphins, back to in dolphins. So in that moment of physical danger, we needed a chemical that could rapidly take stress out of our mind, so you didn't like run away think oh my god, I'm gonna die. You just got in the zone and survived it. And as soon as our body experienced physical activation like running and sprinting and physically fighting, indorphins would flood our brain to take that stress and fear out
of our mind. And whilst we're obviously not running away from bears anymore kind of this morning, it's really useful if we can activate this chemical more often, because obviously there's still many other stresses in our modern world.
So how do we activate it? I mean, obviously exces is a big one. I mean, you know talk twenty runner and we know the runners high. What about because you write a bit about strength versus endurance versus motivation when it comes to activating dolphins, can you talk a bit about the importance of each of these.
A variety is really important, Like humans evolved for both endurance activities and obviously lifting heavy things and moving things about. And it's really important to understand that endorphins activate most when you're putting your body under the most physical pressure it can experience. Like the faster I had to run away from that bear, effectively, the more endorphins I would need. So if you're doing an endurance activity, say you were swimming.
We're at the harbor ESA, and I was told there are sharks in there, so don't swim in that harbor. But if you were swimming, it's in the moment that you decide I'm going to swim as fast as I can. That you're getting the biggest release With the more strength side of things, it'd be if you were in the gym and you were squatting. It'd be in the last two or three reps where you go past your failure
point that you're getting a big activation. And it's really important to utilize that as a motivator when you're exercising effectively. So when you're the end of your swim, for example, or the end of a set, in that moment, if you can say to yourself, like, this final bit of really pushing is going to activate my endorphins, and knowing in your mind that that's going to be the absolutely best scientific way to destress your brain is really useful.
Because I'll have days at work where I think, Wow, I'm like super stressed by a variety of different tasks or whatever it might be. Going to the gym won't be on my priority list. I think, oh God, I gotta go to the gym, but I'll know that if I go there and if I push myself in the evening, I'm going to feel super calm. And for many of us, we think destressing is kind of just sitting on the sofa and like having a glass of wine and watching TV.
That's really just like a dopamine experience that's turning our brain off temporarily, but actually destressing our brain is physically activating the body.
Now, this is a little personal question from me. I don't get the same dopamine hit Like I just ran a half marathon this year. Cool, Well, I have to run further to get the same meat hit.
Now.
Is that what's going on up here?
Yeah? Effectively, you're building tolerance.
To what creates what it's annoying for you.
It is annoying for sure. Sometimes novelty is actually the best way to then get a new dopamine hit, Like it might be that something different could give you a great doping hit, Like if you did a triathlon and you include a cycling and swimming into the mix because of the novelty, you'd get a greater activation of dopamine. In a situation like that, it would have to be something more.
I have to go for the marathon.
You may have to go for the marith that is a long way, or maybe like a goal around pace would be like another thing that would provide a dopamine here as well.
What about told us about how hate can increase in dolphins.
Yeah, so the rule of endorphins is physical activation of the body, and hot environments, particularly something like a sauna, is actually pretty challenging for the body. Like if you're in there, the beginning is normally like, oh, it's not too bad in here, and then once you used to past ten minutes, it's like, well this is getting quite difficult and you very much want to leave. At that point.
In that moment, your body is experiencing physical danger, like it doesn't know your body that it's just a sauna and you're going to get out soon. It might think, well, this is my new environment where I live, and this is going to be hard to deal with, So dolphins will begin to release. We have a very similar experience happening.
Even when we take a warm bath, our body experiences this thing called the heat stress response, where again it doesn't know that that hot bath isn't going to get hotter and hotter, so it prepares for danger and releases.
I mean, what is it? Pretty basic? Really when you think about.
We probably over complicate things, but if we just come back to again evolutionary history, they're pretty basic things.
They are basic things, and I really believe a lot of the solution to the mental health difficulty we're facing in the modern world is actually quite basic. And it's
really interesting mental health. If you were experiencing a lot of difficulty in your mind and you ask yourself the question, have I experienced like a big life event recently that's causing this pain, Like if you'd been through someone passing away, or a divorce or a breakup or something like that, that would be a very natural cause of like a
mental health difficulty. If you're not going through a big life event, but you're experiencing a lot of low mood and depression and anxiety, it's very likely that your lifestyle is actually causing that experience to happen and the brain is just out of balance. And if we add in the behaviors that our brain always utilize to balance it, we can feel a lot better.
Just before we leave endorphins tops a bit about music and laughter, because these are two actions, as you call them, that I think we are just undervalued. We do.
If I start with the laughter one. Laughter is super interesting. In all of our data at dose Lab, we ask people the question how much do you like laughing? From like, over twenty thousand responses, we have a nine point eight average, so as you would expect people like laughing. We then ask them how often do you feel you laugh? And we have a five point one average to that question.
So people love laughing, but they're actually not laughing as often anymore because of technology, because so much of our social chill time is now behind the screen and not with other humans. And just with this idea of physical activation of the body, when you really really laugh, like you actually feel pain within your stomach and that is a huge endorphin releaser. And you'll notice that laughing is like the opposite feeling of being stressed. It's this really free,
calm feeling. And asking yourself the question am I putting myself in enough laughter environments? Am I going to environments where I laugh regularly? Is a really key question.
You know, we did an episode on laughter yoga Christy and it was one of the most listened to episodes, which is in my mind intinctively.
People might feel drawn towards the idea maybe I'm actually like too serious now.
Yeah, and I need to and it's something a bit different, and maybe I need to do it. And I think that maybe the marrying of the yoga with the I mean, I've never done it.
Well, yoga like this whole stretching world is also physical activation of the bodies. You're getting like this double activation of endorphins.
Actually I missed that one because the stretching is really important, isn't it.
Stretching is incredible. It's such a good activator of the chemical If you do yoga, for example, you reach those points we think, I hate this position, You're in a bit of physical difficulty, and it's in those moments again that endorphins are activating like crazy. I also think stretching is such a huge thing for longevity, and it's very clear that science and medicine is evolving a lot. And I really think over the next two to three decades, our capacity to live for longer periods of time is
definitely going to advance as a specie. And if we get lucky enough to do eighteen ninety one hundred, whatever it might be. Being some one that has a physically able body is massive for your quality of life. It's probably number one for your quality of life. And if you can have like a short regular stretching practice in your life now, your last couple decades are going to be radically different.
What are some of the key actions that you implement in your life around the dose idea?
Around the dose I did it? I would say for me, the things I take most seriously is the phone fasting one hundred percent, like it's regular physical separation from the devices they can where it's literally not near me so I can't check it. I would say on oxytocin, like real presence with human beings, so like trying to make sure I really connect and bond with people when you listen carefully, when you make eye contact, when you physically connect with them, it builds it. I would also say
gratitude is massive in my brain. I think gratitude is very calming for our thoughts. Our brains can really orient towards like what isn't going to plan in our life and get super stressed out, And when you really deeply think through what you're grateful you're like, oh, actually, there's quite a lot here that is going on.
What practices do you have around that do you just mentally go, I'm really I'm really grateful for this.
I mean, I think when you feel gratitude, that feeling, and that.
Feeling is like love in your body. It's very calming for our body because it's like so reassuring, like our brain and body can hear these different thoughts and it's like, wow, I've got all this stuff. This is amazing. And in terms of the practice, when I'm back home, I have
this like walk that I do each morning. It's just like a religious practice I have every day, and there's a particular bench I like to sit on and I've kind of pared it to the idea of gratitude, so it like in my head, I see the bench and I know the gratitude is coming. And then I'll think through a few things I think through like some people, my girlfriend, my mom, my house, nature, whatever it might be.
But the most important factor, and my girlfriend actually taught me to do this, is that when I ask myself the question of what I'm grateful for, I then ask why, and then I actually think through like why is it actually useful that I have that thing? Why is it valuable? And how does it make me feel? And going through that protocol regularly is super important. And social media is creating this experience in the modern brain whereby we are
constantly thinking about what we don't have. We see people with better lives, more money, better holidays, better looking, better shopping stuff, whatever it might be. And gratitude is this constant reminder of, oh, I actually do have quite a lot. It's very key, especially if you have teenage kids or young kids. Teaching them to think in that way is crucial.
Doesn't worry you where social media is going to put us as a society and culture.
It's interesting social media because I obviously also see it from the lens of like I get to tell the world about dose because of my social media account. So I'm in this ironic position of saying, like, don't use social media, do much.
My lips, right, We can dream of ski trips that we might want to go on, or see places, or you know, be exposed to things that we probably never would have been without it.
For sure, So I think there's a learning element that is cool. I really think the short video component of social media is the most difficult part. I don't think society was that addicted to social media before COVID. I think COVID is where everything changed for everyone on their phones. Covid is when TikTok was invented. Over the next two years, everyone copied TikTok's form, and it's inside those short video scrolling experiences that we get the most rapid dove mean
increase and it traps our brain inside there. And I think social media is something that definitely is advantageous to society from a learning perspective, but society needs to recognize as also having a lot of detrimental impacts. And this idea of less frequent openings of the apps, I think is the only answer.
To be honest.
Yeah, well, good luck with that, and you might have inspired a few listeners.
We didn't do the singing.
Oh, the singing, Yes, singing is important us.
With the singing, I don't want to add that at the end of it, because it's so good for us singing, and I think lots of people have experienced that moment, like driving in their car on their own and singing a song and actually concluding in the head that they're quite a good singer and like dancing around in their car,
Singing is phenomenal for that endorphin system. And if ever you're pretty stressed out, or if ever you know that you're going to have quite a stressful day ahead with work or whatever it may be, If when you're driving in your car or you're on a walk with music on or something, if you can sing, it's phenomenal for that chemical. The more you go for it, the more beneficially it's going to be. So whether that's in front of people, like if you're confident like that, that's cool.
If you're like me and you're pretty bad at singing, just singing on your own, but really going for it is incredible for distressing.
Your brain a lot more singing this year. Thanks for remembering that one, and sorry were mister it and thank you gratitude for you coming in today.
Thank you on your holiday.
I've loved it.
Well, friends, listeners, fans. If you do want to read more about the Dose Effect, his book is by the same name.
It is out now.
It is actually really good, a great book for twenty twenty five. You can dip in and dip out, learn a bit about all the different neurotransmitters and well how you can harness it to regulate your emotions this year. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode. Thank sure you rate and review it, tell us what you think anything else, head to bodyansoul dot com dot you follow us on socials, grab our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper. If you do have any direct feedback, you
can DM me at Felicity Harley across socials. Anyway, thanks again for listening and until next time, stay hopy.
Hm