TJ POWER: PHONE ADDICTION IS REAL & HERE'S HOW WE BEAT IT

Summary

Summary of "TJ POWER: PHONE ADDICTION IS REAL & HERE'S HOW WE BEAT IT"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Great Company with Jamie Laing
• Host/Producer: Jamie Laing and Jemima Pj
• Guest: TJ Power
• Episode Title: TJ POWER: PHONE ADDICTION IS REAL & HERE'S HOW WE BEAT IT
• Release Date: August 5, 2025

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Introduction and Guest Welcome

The episode begins with Jamie Laing and his producer, Jemima Pj, engaging in humorous banter about their own phone habits, setting a relatable and light-hearted tone. [00:02] Jamie jokes about the podcast being accessed primarily through phones, leading to a playful discussion about their high-end gadgets. [01:12] They formally introduce themselves and warmly welcome listeners back to "Great Company," emphasizing the podcast's focus on meaningful conversations. [01:45] Excitement builds as they announce their guest, TJ Power, commending his wisdom on phone addiction and its effects on mental health. [02:00]

Background and Personal Stories

Jemima shares a personal anecdote about losing her phone during a previous episode, highlighting her own struggles with phone addiction. [02:39] This experience made her more aware of her dependency, and she credits TJ Power’s advice with helping her feel genuinely calmer. Jamie adds that both he and Jemima found the episode profoundly impactful, particularly regarding dopamine addiction's role in various life aspects, including dating and mental well-being. [03:15]

The Science of Dopamine and Addiction

TJ Power delves into the biochemical aspects of addiction, focusing on dopamine's role as a motivator. [07:05] He explains how our ancestors relied on dopamine for survival-driven activities like hunting and building shelters, resulting in natural dopamine boosts throughout the day. In contrast, modern technology offers artificial and excessive dopamine spikes through smartphones and social media, leading to addiction and decreased dopamine production over time. [18:23] TJ emphasizes that this imbalance results in insatiable cravings and diminished capacity for natural rewards.

Impact on Relationships

Jamie discusses how constant dopamine stimulation affects romantic relationships, making stable, oxytocin-driven connections seem less exciting. [23:07] TJ elaborates on the biochemical differences between men and women in experiencing love: men often remain stuck in the dopamine-driven excitement phase, while women transition to oxytocin-based deeper connections. This divergence can lead to misunderstandings and strains within relationships as the initial excitement fades. [25:15]

Strategies to Overcome Phone and Porn Addiction

Personal Journey and Mindset Shift

TJ shares his personal battle with addictions, including alcohol and pornography, highlighting the difficulty and long-term commitment required to overcome them. [36:31] He emphasizes the importance of changing one's mindset from viewing addictive behaviors as pleasurable to recognizing their negative impact.

Practical Solutions:

1. Phone Management:

   • Remove Phones from the Bedroom: Charging devices away from the bedside to reduce nighttime and morning usage. [44:08]
   • Use Traditional Alarm Clocks: Eliminating phone alarms to avoid early morning distractions.
   • Implement Screen Time Limits: Utilizing apps like 'Roots' to restrict usage and enforce boundaries.

2. Reducing Social Media Use:

   • Limit Frequency: Decreasing the number of times one checks social media daily.
   • Focus on Meaningful Interactions: Prioritizing interactions based on shared values rather than superficial attributes.
   • Use Screen-Blocking Apps: Employing tools to limit access during certain times.

3. Overcoming Porn Addiction:

   • Shift Perception: Viewing porn as detrimental rather than pleasurable to reduce its appeal. [33:25]
   • Open Conversations: Discussing porn use with partners to ensure mutual understanding and support.
   • Mindfulness and Self-Reflection: Recognizing the negative impact and making conscious efforts to quit.

4. Boosting Serotonin and Endorphins:

   • Spend Time in Nature: Engaging in activities outdoors without screens to enhance serotonin levels. [65:33]
   • Physical Activities: Incorporating exercises like yoga, cycling, or swimming to release endorphins.
   • Maintain a Healthy Diet: Consuming natural foods to support gut health and serotonin production.

The Role of Other Neurochemicals

DOSE Model:

TJ introduces the DOSE model, detailing the roles of four key neurochemicals in mental health:

1. Dopamine (D): Drives motivation and the pursuit of pleasurable activities but can lead to addiction when overstimulated.
2. Oxytocin (O): Facilitates deep connections and love, essential for long-term relationships and family bonds. [52:27]
3. Serotonin (S): Stabilizes mood and emotions, largely produced in the gut. [58:09]
4. Endorphins (E): Manage stress and pain, released through physical activities like exercise. [65:47]

Practical Solutions for Listeners

Implementing Balance:

• Morning Routine: Avoid immediate phone checking to prevent setting a dopamine-driven tone for the day.
• Nature and Stillness: Regularly spend time outdoors without digital distractions to boost serotonin.
• Physical Exercise: Engage in regular physical activities to release endorphins and manage stress.
• Healthy Eating: Adopt a diet rich in natural foods to support overall neurochemical balance.
• Sleep Hygiene: Prioritize uninterrupted sleep by avoiding screens before bedtime to enhance serotonin production.

Case Studies and Personal Experiments:

TJ shares his own experiment of turning off his phone for seven days during a holiday in Greece. [49:03] He describes the initial anxiety (FOMO) but quickly realizes the benefits of being present and disconnecting from social media, reinforcing that life continues uninterrupted without constant digital engagement.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

TJ Power articulates his vision of helping humanity maintain its human essence amid technological advancements. He emphasizes the need for balance and disciplined choices to nurture oxytocin and manage dopamine effectively. [72:26] Jamie Laing expresses deep appreciation for TJ's insights, acknowledging the actionable strategies he plans to implement in his own life. [73:06]

Notable Quotes:

• TJ Power [07:05]: "I effectively provide modern humans that are struggling with the intensity and overwhelm of technology and work and money and how challenging the modern world is to navigate with a very clear game plan as to how to chill your brain back out, get you feeling connected in your relationships, calm, energetic and healthy."

• TJ Power [17:42]: "Dopamine is effectively this chemical that lives within us just to motivate us towards doing hard things... we've now created ways to artificially increase dopamine to a very high level... it's very strategic."

• TJ Power [25:15]: "Lessons from our ancestors, we used to spend time in the daytime, just like lying on the grass, looking up at the sky, chilling out."

• TJ Power [36:31]: "Breaking the porn addiction is one of the hardest things. It's so hard to quit porn because it's so private, so secretive."

• TJ Power [43:47]: "Podcasts are a good thing... they're slower dopamine."

• TJ Power [52:39]: "Oxytocin enables the woman to go through the whole process of childbirth naturally... they have higher oxytocin levels."

• TJ Power [61:03]: "It's very basic and it's like, oh, well, the mental health is easy, but unfortunately we need to go back to the basics."

Key Takeaways:

1. Understanding Neurochemistry: Recognizing the roles of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins can help manage mental health and relationships effectively.

2. Discipline Over Duty: Adopting disciplined habits, born from love and self-care, rather than self-punishment, leads to sustainable changes.

3. Nature and Physical Activity: Regular engagement with nature and physical activities enhance serotonin and endorphin levels, reducing stress and improving overall well-being.

4. Balanced Technology Use: Implementing practical strategies to manage phone and social media usage can reclaim control over one’s life and improve mental health.

5. Repairing Relationships: Focusing on meaningful connections and shared values rather than fleeting dopamine-driven excitement fosters deeper, more fulfilling relationships.

6. Long-Term Commitment: Overcoming addictions and maintaining neurochemical balance requires ongoing effort, self-reflection, and support.

Conclusion

In this insightful episode, TJ Power provides a comprehensive exploration of how modern technology disrupts our natural neurochemical balance, leading to addiction and decreased mental health. He offers practical strategies to mitigate these effects by fostering natural neurochemical processes through discipline, meaningful connections, and a return to nature. His actionable advice aims to empower listeners to reclaim control over their technology use and, consequently, their lives.

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Tune in to "Great Company with Jamie Laing" for more engaging conversations that inspire and connect. Don’t forget to subscribe and share your thoughts on social media or via email at [e-mail].

Transcript

[Jamie Laing]

Hello, everyone. My name is Jamie Laing, and this is great company. Well.

[Jemima Pj]

Sorry. So let's start again.

[Jamie Laing]

No, we're going to keep that in.

[Jemima Pj]

No, that sound like a burp.

[Jamie Laing]

Everyone's just picked up their phone. Yeah, that's how they listen to it.

[Jemima Pj]

Yeah. I actually do listen to my phone at my ear when I'm brushing my teeth.

[Jamie Laing]

You do that?

[Jemima Pj]

Do you do that?

[Jamie Laing]

I don't.

[Jemima Pj]

I. Because I have an electric toothbrush.

[Jamie Laing]

Right.

[Jemima Pj]

Fancy.

[Jamie Laing]

Yeah, very fancy.

[Jemima Pj]

I'm burning the big bucks.

[Jamie Laing]

I'm burning the big bucks.

[Jemima Pj]

I'm burning them big bucks.

[Jamie Laing]

Is that what you said? I'm burning.

[Jemima Pj]

I'm burning the big bucks. And I have an electric toothbrush. And sometimes I'll listen to a little something while I'm getting ready for bed.

[Jamie Laing]

What do you do through your toothbrush?

[Jemima Pj]

No, but through my side is a good business.

[Jamie Laing]

Could be a toothbrush that can play music.

[Jemima Pj]

Yeah. Because it's very loud when it's on in my head. So then I have to hold my phone right to my ear.

[Jamie Laing]

Interesting.

[Jemima Pj]

I think lots of people do that.

[Jamie Laing]

Okay, well, that's right in.

[Jemima Pj]

If you do write in where to? This address.

[Jamie Laing]

Look it up right into our P.O. box.

[Jemima Pj]

We should get a P.O. box.

[Jamie Laing]

I would love a P.O. box. Hello, everyone.

[Jemima Pj]

Hello.

[Jamie Laing]

I am Jamie, the host of the show, and this is my producer, Jemima pj. Yeah, she is. Yeah. Welcome back to Great Company.

[Jemima Pj]

Welcome back.

[Jamie Laing]

The podcast, which is full of fun, laughter, ups and downs, lefts and rights, north, east, south and west.

[Jemima Pj]

South, south and west. Jamie's in a really weird mood. We also just came up with a small handshake before we did.

[Jamie Laing]

I think everyone should do that in life. If you haven't come up with a handshake with your friend, do it today.

[Jemima Pj]

Come up with a handshake. It involves a dab slash bow.

[Jamie Laing]

A dab bow, which is quite exciting. Hey, listen, we should probably tell who we have on the episode today.

[Jemima Pj]

Ugh, I'm so excited. We have TJ Power on today. And TJ Power, we like this episode so much. So TJ Power actually DMed us and was like, I'd love to come on the show. And I listened to him on other podcasts.

[Jamie Laing]

Yes.

[Jemima Pj]

Don't listen to those. Listen to this one. But I heard him on Fun, Gotten to Happy Place. And like, I. He's just full of wisdom and he talks all about phones and how addicted we are and kind of all our brain chemicals.

[Jamie Laing]

Yeah.

[Jemima Pj]

And this episode I found actually deeply profound, and I have changed my life.

[Jamie Laing]

Since listening to it, have you?

[Jemima Pj]

Yeah, big time.

[TJ Power]

Wow.

[Jamie Laing]

Okay, this is interesting. Cause halfway through, Jemima was. Jemima and I communicate through this iPad that we do, and she can type in some different things in it. That's how it works in the show. And Jemima wrote halfway through. I'm loving this episode.

[Jemima Pj]

It's so good.

[Jamie Laing]

So what have you implicated within your life?

[Jemima Pj]

So he talks about our phone, like, how addicted we all are to our phones. And I've been really, really aware of it. So when you did your run, I don't know if anyone remembers that episode I told you about how I'd lost my phone and I had to turn up to watch you with an iPad.

[TJ Power]

Remember that? Yes.

[Jemima Pj]

And losing my ph made me realize how often my reflex is to go and.

[Jamie Laing]

To go and check your phone. Yeah.

[Jemima Pj]

So I've been really, really aware of how addicted I am to it. And TJ gives some really, really good tips.

[Jamie Laing]

Amazing.

[Jemima Pj]

And I've actually been doing them, and I feel genuinely calmer.

[Jamie Laing]

Yeah, it's insane. We talk about dopamine addiction. We talk about dating. Dating.

[Jemima Pj]

That explains so much.

[Jamie Laing]

Huge amounts. We talk about oxytocin. We talk about endorphins. We talk about serotonin as well. Serotonin as well. We talk about so many things. We talk about porn. We. We talk about how actually social media is shrinking our brains. This episode is one of those episodes that you truly, really cannot miss. With tj, I literally couldn't believe afterwards some of the things that he was telling me that is happening to our brains, to our bodies, to our minds. And this episode may help you a lot.

[TJ Power]

It's helping me.

[Jemima Pj]

It's helped me.

[Jamie Laing]

So I really hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did recording it. I can't wait for you to listen to it. Before you do, if you haven't clicked that subscribe button on the show, please do. It does us wonders. And if you want to get in touch, you can via social media, reat company podcast, or send us an email. Greatcompanyampotproductions.co.uk. all right, before we get to the episode, we're going to take a quick break. You ready for this, Jemima?

[Jemima Pj]

I sure am.

[TJ Power]

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[Jamie Laing]

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[TJ Power]

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[Jamie Laing]

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[Joe]

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[Jemima Pj]

Lovely adverts. Love to hear them.

[Jamie Laing]

Okay, you ready for this episode?

[Jemima Pj]

I cannot. I actually cannot wait for people to hear this.

[Jamie Laing]

Okay, enjoy this episode of Great Company with TJ Power.

[TJ Power]

Hi, I'm TJ Power and I'm in great company.

[Jamie Laing]

For anyone who is listening to this right now and they've clicked on it, maybe by mistake or maybe on purpose. How would you describe you and what you do?

[TJ Power]

Yeah, I effectively provide modern humans that are struggling with the intensity and overwhelm of technology and work and money and how challenging the modern world is to navigate with a very clear game plan as to how to chill your brain back out, get you feeling connected in your relationships, calm, energetic and healthy.

[Jamie Laing]

It's a great answer. You were telling me how many talks have you done the past year?

[TJ Power]

In the last year, about 200. I've done like 600 over the last three years and it's super fun. People seem to enjoy learning about this stuff. I love delivering it.

[Jamie Laing]

Are you tired at the moment. Are you alright?

[TJ Power]

I am alright in this moment. I go through waves where I do get quite tired, but I'm having to live the kind of lifestyle I'm suggesting in order to manage it myself effectively around good relationship with my phone and all these different aspects. Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

Because I suppose that's the thing. Right. Which is when I find when we get tired and exhausted, that's when bad habits start to seep back in 100%. Because it's much easier to do the bad habits than it's to do the good habits.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. And you require a certain amount of dopamine in your brain to make smart decisions effectively. So if you get completely run out and exhausted of dopamine and we can speak into how that operates, then eventually it's, I can't resist my phone, I can't resist the sugar, the booze, whatever it might be.

[Jamie Laing]

What is tiredness? Do you know what it is? What is it lacking when we get tired? What does that mean? Because people don't really understand tiredness, do they? Or sleep? Or is that fair for me to say? Am I talking nonsense?

[TJ Power]

I think people feel it, but maybe don't necessarily know, like biochemically what's happening in their system. It's really your nervous system running on overdrive for too long. You know how fast life can feel from when we wake up. It's like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, all day, all day. And our bodies aren't designed for that. For hundreds of thousands of years, they used to spend time in the daytime, just like lying on the grass, looking up at the sky, chilling out. And now we just run on overdrive and our heart effectively wears itself out and then we get very tired.

[Jamie Laing]

But we're living longer.

[TJ Power]

Yeah, we are living longer. There's like an element, obviously medicine plays a big part in that. They didn't have medicine, but our ancestors didn't live till like 30 years old. Like, we're kind of led to believe they actually, a lot of them lived to like, 80s, 90s. It's just that the life expectancy was really low in childbirth. So when you. We used to lose a lot of babies at like, 1 years old. So it's cut the number in half.

[Jamie Laing]

Whoa.

[TJ Power]

But there are a lot of people that used to live a very long time.

[Jamie Laing]

So it's not about. So life expectancy was only. That's why it got brought down, because of childbirth. So people died in childbirth, Their babies died early?

[TJ Power]

Yeah, the infant mortality rate was super high because obviously giving birth is a dangerous process and For a baby, like they actually had physical danger, animals and all that kind of stuff in their environments. So then cuts the number in half. But if you watch shows on, like there's a show called Primal Survivor and he goes and visits different tribes that are still in the world today and there's loads of old people cruising around, they're pretty fit as well. Sounds ideal.

[Jamie Laing]

Where did you grow up?

[TJ Power]

I grew up in Farnham in Surrey. It's like an hour or so away from here.

[Jamie Laing]

And what were you like as a kid? Were you inquisitive? Were you healthy?

[TJ Power]

Wasn't healthy, kind of inquisitive. I was just. I really just didn't connect with the whole school thing at all. I was just a nightmare. Moved schools lots and really struggled with authority as a kid and thought of myself as like a really dumb person until I was about a few years ago, I actually started to maybe try and change that belief. To be honest. Like, I've always thought of myself as an idiot. And then at 18, 19, found psychology and finally found something that actually connected for me.

[Jamie Laing]

It's funny how that happens. I had the same thing that as a kid, like, I, I, for so long I just thought I was naughty and dumb.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

Because I wasn't good at school, I wasn't. I was great at sporting, but I wasn't not good in. Not good at working, not good at lessons, not good at education. And I was a troublemaker.

[TJ Power]

Yes.

[Jamie Laing]

And so then you fit. Then you. That sort of. That narrative sticks with you and you just constantly. It's on repeat in your mind and you just think you're a bad kid.

[TJ Power]

It was pretty fun though, at the time I enjoyed. I just wasn't very good at the grades thing, but at the having fun with my friends thing, I was good at that.

[Jamie Laing]

The thing that I read that you said you lost five friends.

[TJ Power]

Yeah, I lost. It was five people in my family over the course of five years, from like 16 to 21. And that was just a nightmare. Like at 16 you got no idea what to do with that sort of information. And what happened initially, the first person I lost was when I was 16. My cousin passed away. She was like 27, so she was super young. Got like a really rare cancer and that was just hell to go through. My whole family really crumbled around that. It's just so hard, especially when someone's really young. And then over the next few years we had uncles pass away and just like people very close to us pass away. And I went pretty, I just I used to not be able to cope with it at all, the emotion. I was just like, what do I do with this? How do you grieve? Like, I couldn't comprehend it at that age. So I'd basically just get super, super drunk because I was like, let's get super drunk. And then I'd do that thing where you, like, cry when you're drunk. And that would be, like, nightmare, because I get super, like, deep when I was drinking.

[Jamie Laing]

And a lot of people resonate with that.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

When they. You cover up with alcohol and then when you. And then you wake up the next day having had that emotional spurge.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

And you're like, why have I done that? Like, I didn't really. Oh, no.

[TJ Power]

And it's like, towards the end of the night when it's not as, like, good vibes and stuff. So I did that for years and years. And then that just got me super into, like, quick dopamine, as I describe it. Like, all the smoking and partying and alcohol. I just went as hard as you possibly can down that. I went, everything you can do to have a lot of fun. That's where I went.

[Jamie Laing]

Wow. Because you're just covering up everything.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. And I was describing, like, how we were as kids. Like, I also just wanted to have a lot of fun. So there was an element of just, I want to have loads of fun, be social, like, have loads of friends. But then there's also an element of, like, loads of shit buzzing through my head that was just, like, so much easier just to, like, smoke and ignore it or whatever it might be.

[Jamie Laing]

Do you know what's funny is, like, I'm relating to so much of this, and I know so many people listening right now will be relating to it. When I remember when, man, as a kid, anything that was exciting.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. I loved it.

[Jamie Laing]

Okay. To be. It was like climb to the top of the tree, like. Like with the chance I might fall off. That was exciting. Then when I remember when I first drank a Bacardi Breezer and I felt like this, man, like, the first time I drank alcohol and I read the statistic, right? Which is like, loads of alcoholics actually start drinking from an earlier age because they suddenly. I remember when I first drank our alcohol, I couldn't believe this nectar existed.

[TJ Power]

Yes.

[Jamie Laing]

I couldn't believe it did this to my brain. And it made me feel this. And then I remember the first porn mag that was, like, passed around at school, and I remember seeing this pornographic magazine and being, like, so excited about that. And then it was like girls, that was so exciting and kissing and this. And it was always chasing that dopamine the whole time. Whatever that dopamine was, I wanted it.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

Because it just fed me.

[TJ Power]

And there are some brains that are just more inclined to chase the dopamine. You have some brains that naturally produce a little bit less dopamine as your baseline, like the natural amount of production. And it means when you engage with something like porn or sugar or booze or drugs, the difference with where your dopamine goes is greater. So more dopamine floods your brain. So it's like, holy, this is the real deal. And then if you have that from super young, like I remember seeing porn, like so young, probably 9, 10 years old or something. I just watched porn for the first time, which is crazy. I think I remember like as ridiculous. This is like Googling because my brain was so young, Googling on my mum's computer. A teacher that I fancied her name with like the word boobs or something, thinking that my brain would be able to find that person on the Internet because obviously I was like a nine year old kid. And then suddenly I was like, whoa, there's a whole world on the Internet. I had no idea. I didn't even know what sex was. And then suddenly you're like 9, 10 years old. And this what I feel so worried about. That was whatever, 17 years ago or something, whereas now kids can get it like even younger and stuff with the phones. There were no smartphones then. So I worry for the young people because it wasn't necessarily great for my brain.

[Jamie Laing]

So how do you get yourself out.

[TJ Power]

Of that, out of the whole thing of just addiction to anything or specifically dating or.

[Jamie Laing]

Well, I suppose I want to start here first. Is how did you get yourself out of it?

[TJ Power]

I had a moment at a festival when I was about 22 years old where I went super hard, as hard as you can go. And then it was still quite early in the evening, probably like 10 o', clock, and I was really not feeling good. I kind of just like almost became conscious after three hours of really not knowing what the hell was going on. And it was like 10pm And I remember thinking like, shit, I've got to leave this festival. I'm going to have to just like walk back. And it was like a 45 minute walk back or something to where we lived. And I just remember on that walk thinking, wow, like I'm really not going to have a very good life if I just like nail this for the next few Years, because I was leaving university at this point. And I knew based on, like my schooling, that getting a job wasn't really going to be like the path for me because I just wouldn't do that well in that environment. So then I was like, so I've got to find a way to make money and build a career. And with this current lifestyle, which is basically drinking, smoking, partying every day, there was no way that I was going to get any success. I also was just super anxious and stuff like that. And then that night, I remember sitting in bed, it was like 11 o'. Clock. I remember making a smoothie. I never used to do things like that. And I remember sitting there with a smoothie like, oh, that's probably what healthy people do. And I know, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

So many of us have done that.

[TJ Power]

Sit there like, super coming down and just remember, like chatting to myself, just thinking, okay, I'm really trying to change from today. This is going to be like the change day. And then I went to live with my grandpa because he lived out in nature and I hadn't really spent that much time in nature, had no interest in nature. And I thought if I just live there, away from my friends for a bit and try and like work on all the light booze and stop drinking for a bit and all that sort of stuff, maybe I'd be able to change things up. And I spent a lot of time walking in the nature on my own without my phone, just like chatting to myself. And eventually, I think if you spend enough time out there in the quiet, like, the truth of how you should live your life comes through. I just think we're always too distracted from it.

[Jamie Laing]

That's a really great hack.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. Because you can almost think of these brain chemicals as like friends within our system that are trying to guide us all the time just towards our optimal life. And they've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years, just guiding us towards the food and the shelter and the connection and the sex and the caregiving, the birth, everything. And a lot of the time when you're in a deep dopamine addiction life, you get like an uncomfortable feeling. You feel a little bit depressed or anxious or stressed about a girl or whatever it might be. And then you just think, oh, don't like that straight. Stick to it. Just like bang some videos or watch some porn or eat some sugar or drink some alcohol and it just silences it. But if you provide your brain with enough time to not have the opportunity for it to be silenced, like it will always tell you the truth. And I just think for the vast majority of people, there's not spending enough time listening to it.

[Jamie Laing]

So explain to me what is dopamine.

[TJ Power]

Is effectively this chemical that lives within us just to motivate us towards doing hard things. So for our ancestors, they had to hunt and make fires and build shelter, and they needed this chemical that made doing that a desirable activity, and then something that was really rewarding. So if you found food or you built the shelter or the fire finally lit and it was like, yes, okay, and they got this dopamine hit for them, they might have got 3 or 4 increases in dopamine. Like, big natural increase in dopamine per day. In the modern environment, We've now obviously created the phones and all these other things we're talking about, and we're experiencing like 3 or 400 of these dopamine rises a day. And effectively, the engine that creates dopamine can't cope with how much we're over burning it.

[Jamie Laing]

So does it. So what is a dopamine hit for someone who doesn't know what can give us that dope? So back in caveman times, what was giving us our hit and what is currently giving us our hits now?

[TJ Power]

So in caveman times, anything that was advantageous to your survival. So if you found some food or you saw some, like, honey in a tree, like, I'm going to get some honey, or you built some shelter, anything that was okay, now this is rewarding, and our group are now going to survive more. That meant that you were getting some kind of increase in dopamine. Now it's just anything that provides you with pleasure to your brain. So if ever you're eating, like, if you compare drinking alcohol is drinking a glass of water, obviously the pleasure is very, very different in your brain. Unless you're super, super thirsty because you haven't drunk in like five hours, then you'd get some dopamine off water, but just sipping water, very little dopamine, drinking alcohol, it's like, bang. And we've just created ways to artificially increase dopamine to a very high level. And it is very strategic. Like, the people that are creating all the products use neuroscientists like me to figure out the optimal way to get dopamine super high. Because if dopamine goes super high, you literally, it becomes irresistible. So I need more. I need more, like vaping, for example, super hard to manage.

[Jamie Laing]

So is dopamine the chase or the.

[TJ Power]

Reward is actually the anticipation of what might be is what really, really drives us. Like you'd actually get your biggest dopamine here out of the thought of something that you could do. Like say for example, you take that dating example. Yeah. You're in a stable relationship and it's like, okay, stable, you're actually moving at that point to oxytocin, towards that love and connection. But then your brain is like, nah, I need dopamine. And then the thought of like Dming someone on Instagram or replying to someone's story, or like going around their house and getting with them, whatever it might be, the thought of it is actually what makes our dopamine go crazy. And then it drives you towards that decision. And that's what's then like very, very enticing.

[Jamie Laing]

Wow. That's why what happens is that when you, let's say you have a one night stand or you sleep with someone, let's focus on dating. Right. Once you've done that, or if you talk about masturbation. Right. Once you've done it, there's that sense of like deflation, deflation afterwards. Because it's actually the chase rather than the actual achieving what you want to achieve. It's the chase of it.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. Only things that are deeply, deeply rewarding feel good for a prolonged period of time. Some things in your work, for example, you might think, oh, it's actually really rewarding or like the whole like baby thing, having a family, that's going to be like long term rewarding. Whereas when you sleep with someone or you masturbate, especially if you sleep with someone you don't care about necessarily. But it's just like a chase. Your dopamine just goes bang, bang, bang, bang. As you anticipate the experience of the pleasure and then you get it and it's like douch. And then that feeling is what so many of us have. We just think, oh, I can't bother for life, feel kind of depressed and flat. And that brain rot type vibe.

[Jamie Laing]

If we're constantly having dopamine hits the whole time and our brain can't keep up with it.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

Does that mean at some point we get a dopamine, we're flooded with dopamine, where actually then that's an issue where we have too much dopamine going on that we actually can't reach those certain highs, so then we become addicts because we're constantly chasing that dopamine.

[TJ Power]

Exactly. And effectively you can imagine dopamine as like little like bubbles in your brain. So it's literally your brain has an area called the ventral tegmental area. And it's like a dopamine factory. And it can create these bubbles and it then has another area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is like a reward center. And say, for example, you're doing something that's effort. Like you go to the gym, you go to the gym and you don't, like, walk in the gym and think, oh, fuck, I love this. So amazing. I feel amazing, I feel amazing. But gradually throughout the workout, you'll notice, oh, it's kind of good that I'm doing this. And you get a nice reward at the end. Effectively, what happens is the factory builds the bubbles because, oh, this human's doing something that's effort. I'm going to build some bubbles to help motivate them. And then it sends a few of these bubbles towards the reward center to mean you enjoy doing it and you keep doing it and it's something you'll enjoy. In a situation where you're like going on pornography, for example, what happens is the factory just starts flooding the bubbles towards the reward center and it's not regenerating any because there's no effort involved when you're like watching porn, for example. So just flooding the bubbles, loads, loads to the water and then suddenly the factory of dopamine just gets empty. And then your brain, like lose the ability to produce any because it just used it all up and it's like, I can't make more. I've just given you all the dopamine on the porn. And then you get into that state where you're super low in dopamine. And then when you're in that state and you've got no dopamine.

[Jamie Laing]

And what happens when you're in that low dopamine state, what happens then?

[TJ Power]

You basically just can't bother to do anything like yours. Your zest for life just disappears. So, you know, sometimes you're like walking to work and you've got your music and you think, I love life. Life's so good at the so vibey. And then other days, maybe on a Monday morning, it's a bit like, I hate life. Life, shit. Yes, that's really your dopamine level that's deciding that feeling within your brain. And when it is very low, it's just very hard to get yourself to do anything. That's effort. And our happiest lives are the other side of doing lots of things that are effort, like effort with your partner, of connecting with them, effort with your work, your exercise, your Health, your food effort leads to happiness for the human brain. And if you get very low in dopamine, you can't bother to do anything.

[Jamie Laing]

Wow, man. Because I had for so long and I spoke about this for so long. I, I, how do I explain this? The reason so, so for so long that lots of my relationships didn't work right is because when it became what I would call still when it would became become normal, when it become quiet.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

I thought that wasn't exciting. It wasn't right. I wasn't having that rush of excitement towards the other person. And then what happens? When I met my wife Sophie, it was exciting, exciting, exciting, exciting, exciting. But we were also best friends, so that was something interesting about that. And I remember I went to a therapist and therapist said, you just have to learn to be still. Being bored or being quiet is a good thing.

[TJ Power]

Very good.

[Jamie Laing]

It's a really good thing to be. And I said, what do you mean that's not fun. I want everything to be exciting, though. I wanted everything to be chaotic because that brought real excitement. And actually what you're saying is, no, that's just my brain chasing a dopamine hit the entire time. And actually when you're still and relaxed and calm, especially in a relationship, in life, that's a good thing.

[TJ Power]

It's a very good thing. And your greatest moments by assumption. But you can tell me whether this true with Sophie, might have been more of the oxytocin than the dopamine. And what I mean by that is the moments where you really lay together and thought, how do you think I'm like, falling in love with you? And when you decided to like, start trying to have a kid or however that worked. And then when you found out you're having a kid, none of that is dopamine. That's all oxytocin. It's all calm, steady, falling in love. The initial phase of relationships are pure dopamine. It's very interesting because women's brains actually move towards oxytocin faster than men, so it will both start dopamine. It's, oh, this is really exciting. Going on a few days, I hooking up whatever it might be, a woman's brain, naturally, because of the whole childbirth process, they have more oxytocin in their system, will begin to move towards a deeper connection, Karma, steadier quite fast. And a male brain, especially a male brain that's quite hyperactive, will then get really stuck in the dopamine. Then there's this imbalance between like a steady person is quite like, just like chilling out on the sofa, like watching, watching a movie, cuddling. And then there's like, we need more, we need more. We need loads of fun. And the more you can move towards oxytocin being the priority, the calmer your brain begins to become.

[Jamie Laing]

Holy man. So the dopamine part of our brain is tricking us. So when we're craving something, desiring something, when we need that thrill or that chaoticness, that's just our dopamine level saying, no, we know that's good. When I'm hungry or whatever and I reach out for sugar, that's because I just want a quick hit.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. And these mechanisms never had all this artificial stuff to try and manage of like, oh, I can Instagram DM that person, or I can eat the sugar, I can get the alcohol or the drugs or the vape or whatever it might be like. Naturally, these systems all worked in harmony. Bit of dopamine to motivate you, then connect with someone, oxytocin and so on. Whereas now it's like there's so much temptation, so it's getting harder to manage.

[Jamie Laing]

Let's talk about the relationships. Because that I had this and now I get it, you know, in relations and I'm generalizing here. Right. But I feel like men and women, as you said, are different in relationships. At the beginning of a relationship, a man typically. And I've been one of those people, I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. This is the best thing ever. Oh, my God, I can't wait. I just. This is. I've never been on a date like this. Oh, my God, I love you so much.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

And I've been winning situations with when the partner, the woman has been like, hang on a second. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Relax, relax. And then what happens is, is because the man is in the. Your dopamine. Dopamine. Dopamine, Dopamine, Dopamine. All the time.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

And then what happens is that dopamine naturally becomes less and less and less because the excitement of being in this brand new relationship, kissing, having sex, whatever it is.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

Goes off because you're not being hit with the same dopamine hit for sure. And then what happens is the oxytocin comes in for women. And that's why women then start to fall in love. And that's when the man goes, well, hang on a second, I'm not in love. And he said, well, hang on a second, you were in love here. So that's when the confusion happens.

[TJ Power]

Can you explain that in that initial phase, you weren't actually in love right at the beginning? It wasn't like, I'm falling in love with you, nice and, like, calm. It was like, I love you, you're the best. I can't wait to spend our lives here. Let's travel the world and, like, go on boats and, like, do loads of fun, exciting stuff. That's all dopamine. Just driving excitement. And the words of love aren't necessarily real at that point. It's just the excitement of what might be. It's like, wow, imagine this is the girl I imagine I'm going to fall in love with that. And for the woman, they might be slightly more cautious. They're programmed to be a little bit more cautious with men because men are programmed to just, like, hunt, hunt, hunt. Women are programmed to make very smart selections so they can have good caregivers for their families and babies. Like, women are programmed to be much smarter decision makers than men with that kind of thing. So you're effectively going against each other. Like, one is going, no way is he in love yet. So I'm going to ignore that for now. And begins moving towards oxytocin slowly. And you just break your dopamine system and it desensitizes effectively in a very similar way to if you keep taking drugs, they stop working as well. The exact same thing happens if you just, like, keep getting too excited about relationships. You just, like, burn out that desire for them. And a relationship works extremely well. When a man begins to realize that oxytocin is something that is important. And there's a huge shift that happens then. And I imagine at the point you're in your relationship now, oxytocin is a priority for both of you. Not necessarily that terminology, but slower, calmer, grateful, loving connection where you contribute to each other and you're very thoughtful to one another. That's really what the male and female brain wants in the long term.

[Jamie Laing]

But someone listening to this right now.

[TJ Power]

Right, yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

Who is constantly going into relationships and they're constantly failing because they find them boring or unexciting. And the initial phase of the relationship is the best thing in the world. How does someone break that cycle?

[TJ Power]

I think going on less dates is probably step number one. Less frequency is important. Like, the dating apps have obviously made it insanely frequent and Instagram DM has made it insanely frequent. So it's just like burning the excitement of dating in itself stuff. So I definitely slow down the frequency and I'D be very selective over who you choose to even bother to go on a date with. Purely really, of course, on attraction. Attraction is important, but based on similar values because oxytocin and love is really based on value alignment within a relationship. And if you make your selections on whether you're going to go on dates to people and continue to date someone purely based on does it seem like our values and what we want for our lives and our futures and our families are connected, then that's a good person to pursue. If it's just someone you think is cool or popular or hot or rich, none of those things are necessarily. It's going to fulfill you long term. So less frequent dating and more focus on alignment of values would be the key.

[Jamie Laing]

So values is the key to a successful relationship 100%.

[TJ Power]

Because eventually all the excitement and the sex, it just does begin to reduce. You can still have a great sex life long term, but it's not going to be that like super crazy bit at the beginning because the dopamine just begins to cool down for both of you. And then it's like, do we want to have a similar life? Do similar activities, raise kids in a similar way? That's the stuff that's actually going to lead to a long term successful one. And ultimately, as a human, all we're looking to experience is love. We think we're looking to experience dopamine. We think all we want is to get rich and have the house and the car and the perfect kitchen and all these things that our brains transfixed on because of Instagram. But in reality, everything you get, your brain just goes, more, more, more. Never is going to find satisfaction in that because dopamine is designed to never fill us up. So the hunter gatherer has always kept chasing for more. Better hunting, better shelter, better fires. And that's what brought us here. All we're really looking for that actually slows us down is oxytocin and love families, contributions to our parents, good relationships with our friends, good contribution to our partners.

[Jamie Laing]

How do you keep the dopamine up.

[TJ Power]

In a long term relationship you continue to have? Novelty is really important. Novelty is great for dopamine.

[Jamie Laing]

Explain that.

[TJ Power]

So that's just new experiences together. So if, for example, you decided, oh, we've never gone on a big hike in Richmond park, that would be a novel experience. Maybe you've done that a million times, so then it wouldn't be a novel experience, but you really want to just continue to create new adventures together. Effectively. That would be the key to Maintaining dopamine because dopamine loves new, and that's why it loves Instagram, because it's like, new stuff, new stuff, new stuff. And when you tell someone something really exciting on Instagram, like when you shared about your baby to everyone's brain, it's like, wow, new thing. And then it's really exciting to people. This is novelty. And in a relationship, it's really just important to maintain novelty and not let the relationship get boring.

[Jamie Laing]

And you know what? And the reason why we're not having sex in relationships is because we're constantly getting dopamine hits from our phone from other places, and so we don't need that extra hit when we're with each other. The reason why people were having sex in bed at night is because you would finish your day of work, which was long and laborious, come home, eat your food, chat with each other, and then have connection, hold each other's hands, and then have sex.

[TJ Power]

Definitely.

[Jamie Laing]

Everything else is distracting us from having sex, because it's all much easier. Because the act of sex is effort, effort.

[TJ Power]

It is effort. So much more effort than watching porn. And Georgia and I did this challenge the other day that went really viral on Instagram. We called it Meals, Bedroom, Bathroom, where we had to, for seven days, try and not look at a screen when we're eating meals. When we're in the bedroom. When we're in the bathroom and you discover it's actually really hard to do this. To always eat just, like, either together or looking out a window is hard. To never take it to the bathroom is hard because it's boring to sit there now and then. And then in the bedroom, it was, like, actually challenging to get into bed and be like, okay, now he's gotta lie here. And what we discovered, and I didn't put this bit in the video, but I can share it now, is you lie there, you talk, you chat about your day, and eventually you just get bored of chatting away, and boredom's fine. Then you get bored enough where you just start having sex with each other because you're like, oh, what should we do? Because we've got nothing to do in there. And then you just start. And our sex life transformed by just getting the screens out of our bed because your brain then looks for natural dopamine rather than getting it artificially in the device.

[Jamie Laing]

I want to focus just quickly on porn for a second.

[TJ Power]

100%.

[Jamie Laing]

How bad is porn?

[TJ Power]

For us, porn is, like, top three worst things in the world right now. Like, if we. In terms of our Brain. And if porn got deleted overnight, we would see a tremendous change in society. Get out of here. A massive change in society because it's completely destroying the male brain. Like men are becoming weaker because of porn. Like less capacity to chase their dreams and do good things with their life and contribute to their family. So it's really just zapping you of the one thing that gives you the willpower to do anything good.

[Jamie Laing]

And just let me just go on that. Because what happens is, let me just try and explain, let me see if what I think it is and then correct me, definitely is because that, that drive comes from that dopamine, right? So when you drive for success or family, when you go out to hunt, right, that's that dopamine. Because once you get it, great, you get it. Yeah, because porn is so accessible. You go on, you watch porn, you masturbate, you climax, Done. That's it. Then you've depleted, you don't want to do anything again.

[TJ Power]

You use up all of that resource that gave you the will to do anything. So when you wake up in the morning, you've got to do stuff, you got to work hard to build a good life. That's just how humanity works, works. And if you, the night before have watched load of porn, you're going to wake up with very small amounts of that chemical sitting in your brain. So then the chance of you actually doing anything, that's effort is much lower. And there's huge variation even in masturbation with porn versus without porn. Because porn itself has that whole novelty, novelty element that I explained earlier. And especially as you get more into porn, you start watching more weird stuff because your brain is like, how do I get the dopamine? How to get the dopamine? You're like watching Instagram one day, then you get the thought of, oh, I could watch porn. And then that like what might be thing that we talked about earlier, the anticipation thing, is like, wow, I'm gonna go on porn. Then you start scrolling it, your dopamine is just going completely mental. Then you finish and your dopamine just plummets super, super hard. If as an experiment, you masturbate without pornography, you'll notice that the high is less, but also the low is less. And that's a really significant difference because it's not bad to climax as a human. Orgasms are great. It's porn that is the bad thing for humans. And you have that motivational component which just gives you less will to do anything. And then it's also completely destroying your Capacity to actually go out there and find partners to be with. It's really killing that because I have a lot of people messaged me on Instagram and of course wouldn't share who they are, but they'll message me saying, like, I'll go on a night out and, like, I'm really wanting to find a partner. But I get this thought process in my head where it's like, I can't even really be bothered because I know I could just go home and watch porn. So then I just, like, give up on the idea of, like, trying to talk to a girl in the bar or whatever it might be.

[Jamie Laing]

They're using the easiest route.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. I have this very simple theory for men, and this is all men in relationships and all single men, that the more boobs you see on a screen, the less boobs you're going to see in real life. And it's a very simple framework. But if you consistently see loads of boobs on a screen, your will to go and find them in real life is going to reduce. If you're single, it means you're not going to date as much because you're going to lose the will. And then if you're in a relationship, your partner's probably going to begin to realize you're probably watching a lot of porn, and lots of men are watching a lot of porn in their relationships. Then your sex life is going to reduce and you're not going to be as connected to them. So whether you're single or in a relationship, the porn thing is so huge. And for me, breaking the porn addiction is one of the hardest things. Like, I watched it, like, my whole teenage life, and then it was like, okay, now I've got to get rid of this thing that just had become a part of my life. Porn is also very different to other addictions because it's so private, so secretive. Like, if you start, like, really drinking. Yeah, if you start drinking hard, smoking hard, eating really bad, like, people begin to notice. They're like, you're right. You're, like, always drunk. Whereas porn is, like, super silent. So it's very hard to get rid of it, but doable.

[Jamie Laing]

How did you break it?

[TJ Power]

I initially thought of it from, like, a will drive perspective. Like, I wanted to build a good career. I really wanted a nice life and a nice home and a good job and all that sort of stuff. And I thought, this is just completely killing my desire to do anything that's hard. So that was, like, an initial motive. Okay, I'm going to try and have less of it. And that was a similar motive to why I wanted to drink less alcohol, for example. It's like I wanted more motivation as a human. And I always knew when I was motivated, my mental health was just much better because I was making smarter decisions. Then I started to try and think of it as, like, not nice activity. Like, I started to create a framework in my mind of, like, really observing what I was observing and trying to step out of the, like, real dopamine hit and thinking like, this is a bit weird. Like, it's a bit rank.

[Jamie Laing]

You change it from pleasure to pain.

[TJ Power]

Yeah, almost change it.

[Jamie Laing]

You change it. That's how you do. You change your brain when you think something's pleasure. You go, no, that's not pleasure. It's bad for me. And you swap it around.

[TJ Power]

Yeah, 100. And I. Especially after you finish, I'd be like, oh, that's a bit rank, actually. Like, I've done this. And so that began. And this, this was. Honestly, it took me like, five years to quit porn. It's really not easy to quit it. And I found other things a lot easier. And then ultimately, what worked, once I realized the motivation thing, started to think it was a bit gross. Then when I became connected to my new partner, Georgia, like, start last year, I talked to her quite a bit about it. And also because I talk about porn on Instagram, she has to start, like, dating someone that looks like some, like, weird porn addict. So for her it's like, okay, and I'm not some weird porn addict. I'm just like, every single guy in the whole world, effectively. And we had this headline in the Times this month, like, this year, where it was like, like, neuroscientist porn addict. And it was like, my face right at the front of the times. I thought, oh, great, that's such a nice thing to be known for.

[Jamie Laing]

I've had worse titles, don't worry.

[TJ Power]

But this was my worst. And I talked to her about it, and she actually described to me that it wouldn't be nice for her that I was watching porn. And I'd never really thought about that from a woman's perspective. She was like, you watching loads of, like, naked girls have sex, like, isn't actually a very nice thing for me. And she described to me, and this might not be the common perspective that she sees it as, like, a cheating type activity. She was like, you watch how the girls have sex. Like, isn't you being deeply immersed in this relationship? That's you being curious about other women and I have a huge amount of love home for the first time in my life. I was like, oh, if we're gonna see it down that lane, then I'm not gonna watch it at all. And I would say that was the final thing that really made a difference.

[Jamie Laing]

But someone sitting here would say, no, hang on, I'm just focusing on a dopamine head. I mean in the relationship. Maybe someone's in a relationship right now where the partner doesn't want to have sex or doesn't want to engage for whatever reason. And so that, so then the partner's thinking, well, hang on a second, what am I meant to do? I'm just going to go and watch porn because if my partner isn't giving me what I want, then I go and find it somewhere else.

[TJ Power]

And I would argue they're not giving you what you want because you're watching porn. It's like a spin round situation. And the re a lot of the time like that a woman particularly wouldn't want to connect and have sex and be intimate is because their oxytocin satisfaction in the relationship is so low. And for a male brain, we can go from like watching TV to watching porn in 30 seconds, super aroused, bang, straight into it. Like our dopamine system fires so fast. Whereas for the female brain, you see in the research that it's like there's a warm up period for them to decide that intimacy is something they desire. In that moment, there's cuddling on the sofa, there's kissing, there's holding hands, there's like lying next to each other in bed and there's this big warm up period. And if we lie in bed together, choosing dopamine, AKA scrolling our phone, she's like, bang, bang, bang, bang. Wear our dopamine system out and then finish and then turn over to a partner and like have sex with me, she's gonna be like, what are you talking about? Like you haven't done anything to get me to a point where I would like that. So then you're gonna think, oh, my girlfriend's so annoying, I need to go watch porn. But there's like a pre process that's required for the brain.

[Jamie Laing]

If porn is one of the top worst things for us, what are the two other things?

[TJ Power]

The phone is 100% number one. Definitely the phone is number one. It's really important. Humanity learns to manage the phone. The only time that mental health change in our society is the advent of the phone. We were fine before the phones and we had the alcohol and the Sugar.

[Jamie Laing]

Talk to me about the data on that.

[TJ Power]

The data is just so clear that our brain, when we overuse a smartphone, is actually beginning to shrink in key areas. There are specific regions of our brain. You have a component in psychology and neuroscience called gray matter, which is like the volume of certain areas. And then you have different areas, like an area called the insula and the temporal cortex and the hippocampus. These kind of things are responsible for our ability to regulate emotions, to make good decisions, to be able to memorize things. These areas, for the first time in human history, are literally devolving. They're getting smaller because of mass consumption of low value content on our phones, is just burning our brains to pieces. And then suddenly our ability to manage our emotions, make good decisions in our life is plummeting. And then suddenly our mental health is declining a lot. And the insane, like, addictive scroll, the short video feed, that is definitely number one, like, if that just is. That's when we all started feeling really bad, is when that thing got invented in Covid. When the short video feed came, humans started to struggle because it just depletes the molecule in us that makes us feel like good and motivated for life. And when you change the phone addiction, your whole life transforms. Relationship, work, health, exercise, everything transforms because it's just killing our desire to do the things that we know we need to do.

[Jamie Laing]

This is scary.

[TJ Power]

Scary, but definitely there's a solution.

[Jamie Laing]

So talk to me about the solution. What do we do?

[TJ Power]

Because it's really important to preface that, because I don't think humanity is screwed by any sense. Like, I think we now have the greatest opportunity to be the happiest and healthiest and most connected we've ever been. Because we have abundance in terms of we can get to nature and we can exercise and we can eat food. Even if you're in a central city, you can get to park. So we have abundance of the things that are important for a human human, but unfortunately, we're choosing all the bad things. Whereas if you live in a world where you can use all these, like, things like a phone to enable you to, like, work and make money and stay connected and things like that, but you focus on lots of healthy stuff. Humans can thrive. In terms of breaking the phone addiction, you have to, like, win back control over the phone, because currently a lot of people will feel like it's almost out of their control, their compulsive checking of it, like the amount of times you just pointlessly check your phone, even though there's absolutely no Purpose for it, because you're just a little dopamine. Very similar to hitting a vape. It's basically identical in the brain. So you have to win back control. And when our brain wakes up is when it's, like, time to win the beginning of the day. Like if, for example, you did an experiment where for the next seven days, you woke up and you drank a glass of red wine every day, obviously you drink a lot of red wine that week. Like, I'm sure at some point in your life, you drank alcohol in the morning. And you know how that day goes, because alcohol then just like, boom, drives me towards the behavior. Alcohol and phones. If you have to put someone in a brain scanner, you wouldn't even know which one they were doing. Whether it was alcohol or phones, it would look exactly the same. And when we wake up and go on the phone, the brain's like, oh, nice, this is where I'm gonna get dopamine today. So then it just, like, primes us all day to continue the obsessive checking. So if in the morning we wake up and even if we manage to beat it for five minutes and we like Matt, and then we build this up, then it's like, okay, so now I'm starting to be in control of this device. And then a big shift can begin to come. And we take people all the time from eight hours a day on their phone to like, two hours a day based on a set of decisions we can go through.

[Jamie Laing]

So people are listening right now?

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

Right. Firstly, listening is a good thing. So podcasts are a good thing?

[TJ Power]

They are. They're slower dopamine.

[Jamie Laing]

Slower dopamine. So, dude, put your phone down right now watching this and listen to this, rather than watching this. Get off your phone right now.

[TJ Power]

Definitely do that.

[Jamie Laing]

Yeah. What practically can our listeners do to get past this to help them with it?

[TJ Power]

So step one is you don't charge your phone on your bedside table anymore. You start either charging it at the end of your bed just so there's some tiny distance. And you work on a journey whereby in the future it doesn't charge in your bedroom. And you can gradually get there all the excuses of alarms and emergency calls. You can buy an alarm for £2 and ask yourself how many of those emergency calls you're actually answering it in the night. They're never happening. If people have an emergency, they call the ambulance. So that initial bit is just try and get the phone out. And there are important caveats here because people then say, oh, I need sound at night. To fall asleep. Because, like, we've got really uncomfortable with the thoughts in our mind. You'd be better off having an iPad in your bedroom that plays a podcast that you listen to to go to sleep than scrolling before bed and whatsapping and Snapchat.

[Jamie Laing]

Like, great company.

[TJ Power]

Yeah, great company would be the perfect one. After you've listened to great company and fallen asleep, had the best sleep of your life, after the best conversation you've ever heard, you then wake up in the morning and you've got to do something that's effort for your brain. So your brain starts to learn the effortful path is better than the easy path. Because there's that simple phrase where it's like, easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life. And if you make the hard choice, when you wake up and you go and brush your teeth, splash cold water on your face and you make your bed, it's going to take you like a few minutes. Your brain is like, okay, I'm on the hunt now for healthy dopamine. I'm not going to live inside my phone all day. Then throughout your day, you have to find a way to break the compulsive checking of open opening Instagram because. Or TikTok or Facebook, whatever it is, your app Instagram is probably the one. Because the compulsive checking, they're like, oh, just a quick hit. Just a quick hit. Just a quick hit is what is burning our brain to pieces. So you need to create some kind of framework in your mind called social media moments, where these are going to be moments you commit to and you never break as to when you're going to go on social media, it's hard, super hard. There are a lot of screen time blocking apps that could help you.

[Jamie Laing]

That Opal is amazing.

[TJ Power]

There's a really good one called Roots and you could download these apps and you could put it. So it only gives you a certain amount of parameters. Like my Instagram will only let me open it three times a day. So something like that is really good. Definitely not going on Instagram before 10am is super important so that you have the morning. It's okay, I'm gonna do F. F. Like I posted about the having a baby yesterday on instagram at like 3pm and then my brain as a dopamine addict could literally get obsessed, read comments, read the likes and completely take away from the fact it's actually beautiful having a baby and just get obsessed with dopamine. So I haven't even seen that post yet. I haven't opened Instagram since I posted at 3pm yesterday, because I know it'll fuck me if I. If I go in there and get stuck in it.

[Jamie Laing]

That discipline is amazing, but it's gradually.

[TJ Power]

Learned because I've discovered that my happiest life is the other side of not being addicted to my phone. So now I'm very, very motivated. So when I'm like, I want my phone, I'm like, but do I want to be depressed?

[Jamie Laing]

And then again you change it from instead of pleasure, you say, no, that's painful, that's a negative. So you swap it around again and.

[TJ Power]

You keep swapping it. And the more you speak truthfully to yourself about the reality of if I'm reading my phone, I feel like crap. And that's not a nice life. It's so nice when you feel good in life and then you begin to motivate yourself through the desire for happiness.

[Jamie Laing]

Because I have it a lot of the time right now where, like the fridge analogy or whatever is. I go onto my phone, I don't even know what I'm looking for. I scroll through TikTok and Instagram. I'm endlessly looking for something. I don't really know what it is.

[TJ Power]

It's never going to be found.

[Jamie Laing]

And now what's happening, I find, which I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way, is it's not as rewarding as it used to be. And so I'm doing more of that, but to get more of the reward, because the dopamine isn't hit. It's like taking a drug.

[TJ Power]

Yeah, it's desensitizing. Your brain can't cope. The modern human brain in general can't cope with these elevations in dopamine. So it's actually starting just to produce less for us, because then it doesn't spike as hard if it's producing less. It's like, oh, well, I can't get the that high anyway. Anyway.

[Jamie Laing]

But then give it to me. How long does that. Does it take to break the habit? How long does it take in terms of days, hours, weeks, months, years to try and break a habit of being addicted to a phone, porn, vaping, whatever.

[TJ Power]

It is, you could begin monumental change within 72 hours. Big changes could occur. Like if you, if you had three days where you didn't watch porn and you didn't go on like social media for 72 hours, you'd see massive shifts, specifically in dopamine and serotonin. Big study came out about this recently where they got people to have 72 hours without going on any social media apps. Rapidly you see change in their motivation, their mood, how calm they feel. 72 hours would be the beginning, then you'd move towards seven days. Gradually, if you spend 30 days in a new kind of lifestyle, big habitual changes would occur. But I want to go back to the beginning of this conversation. You have to continue to go back out into nature in the choir and talk to yourself about the decisions you're making, because otherwise you'll just get lost back in the dopamine. And it's like, ah, fuck it, Like, I'll just live in this dopamine land because, like, that's what feels kind of good in the now. Whereas if you go into nature and you get really bored and you talk to yourself, then you start going, it was good, actually, when I did that period where I went on social media less. Maybe I should keep doing that. And you find the motivation through the friendship you build with yourself in the choir.

[Jamie Laing]

Man. But we're so worried we're going to be fomo, we're going to miss out on something. We're going to not see something happen. We're going to be left behind.

[TJ Power]

That's like a genuine feeling. And FOMO is scary. We feel like this needs of, like, acceptance and belonging within the group, the massive group we now try and belong to inside Instagram. But all you have to do is run the experiment and see it. Because I went to Greece, like, three weeks ago with my partner and I attempted seven days with my phone actually turned off. I just wanted to see if I could do it, so I turned it off. My team knew exactly how to manage the business with me doing seven days off to run it as a see what would happen. And it was good. It was hard. It was like I had that anxiety of, like, what's going on my Instagram? In my head, I thought, like, my Instagram's being deleted. I was like, what if it's been deleted? My whole career's gone just because, like, I couldn't check it. And I told my team to tell me nothing so that I would really experience all the emotions of being offensive.

[Jamie Laing]

What happened?

[TJ Power]

And very quickly, within a couple days, I was just like, well, that's. Thank God that's gone. Like, I can have a break. And I actually enjoy this holiday. And I loved the fact I wasn't trying to get photos for my Instagram story and stuff of this holiday, like, because I wasn't making any content at all. So I'm just going to actually be on this holiday, which was super calming experience to come to the FOMO thing. Seven days comes, it's now Saturday morning, I'm going to the airport to get back on the fly. And I was like, right, phone's coming on, need it for the flight and everything. And I think, wow, the world is going to be so eventual. Like when I come back in here, Instagram is going to be huge. I'm going to have missed loads of and you open it and life is just exactly the same. You've missed all the irrelevant crap that we're all consuming on social media all the time. Anything that's really important is going to be at the top of your feed anyway. And then you're just like, oh no one missed me. And like even with us as creators you realize like, oh no one even really noticed that you were gone. And then you come back and they're like, oh yeah, that guy, like I follow him, who's he? And it's a very good reality check as to how life doesn't change if you go off.

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[Jamie Laing]

Did you talk to me about dose yeah. What is dose?

[TJ Power]

So obviously we have dopamine. Talked about that motivation. Oxytocin is this connection chemical enables us to feel love. That's the O in dose.

[Jamie Laing]

I underrated that one.

[TJ Power]

That's the one humanity is all really looking to find. But we're lost in dopamine land. Oxytocin is actually the answer. Your best life is when oxytocin is.

[Jamie Laing]

Give me examples of oxytocin.

[TJ Power]

Oxytocin is physical touch. It's socializing with your friends. It's feeling deeply grateful for experiences you get to have. It's celebrating your own progress and not focusing on what you haven't got. But what you have. Those kind of experiences where you feel a deep love for the experience of life you're getting to have. That's oxytocin. And I was chatting to this guy yesterday. I went to this like nature thing yesterday evening and they had these people from Nairobi who had been like crafted these stones and they lived in like mud huts, these individuals and they'd craft these stones that were getting sold at this like nature fair thing. Random thing for me to go to. But I was speaking to these people and they live in mud huts in nature and they are like the happiest people you'd ever meet. And they have nothing. And they're not addicted to dopamine. They're addicted to contributing to their group, to being in nature, to connecting, to love, to singing, to contribution. That's really what oxytocin wants. It wants deep relationships. And in our pursuit of dopamine we're sacrificing oxytocin effectively. Like even when you go with your friends, like it's all about just getting yourself as drunk as possible, not necessarily connecting with the friends.

[Jamie Laing]

Why don't we just have loads of oxytocin?

[TJ Power]

Well, you can't artificially spike it. That's the big difference. Like we learn as humanity how to hack dopamine initially with like cigarettes and alcohol and brothels. Those would have been like the early dopamine hacks. Then we've got really fine tuned to the point of now Tick tock where it's like just like artificial bang in our brain. And oxytocin can't be hacked. There is in research something called intranasal oxytocin where you like inhale oxytocin. But luckily that's just not something, something that's hit the market because that would do a terrible thing. That's a bad idea. That's a terrible thing.

[Jamie Laing]

That's A bad idea.

[TJ Power]

The world, what it is.

[Jamie Laing]

But you can inhale oxytocin.

[TJ Power]

Yeah, you can inhale oxytocin and there's oxytocin components in, like, inducing child labor and stuff like that. But it's not hit like the world as a drug, effectively, that's consumed heroin would have an effect on oxytocin. So obviously that's a percentage of society.

[Jamie Laing]

You have oxytocin. It.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. Oxytocin really enables the woman to go through the whole process of childbirth and then enables the initial bond to take place with the. With the baby itself. And you'll experience oxytocin, like when you hold the baby on your chest, that's going to be like super oxytocin. There's going to be no dopamine. It's just going to be oxytocin.

[Jamie Laing]

Explain that more to me because lots of people, there's this whole idea and look, I mean, we're going through this whole process, different types of births, right. C sections, this vaginal birth, all those different things. And someone said that, that when you go. And again, I might be hit with a lot of different things here. But I'm just saying, from what I understand.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

When it's a natural birth.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

That's when oxytocin really hits in. Is that fair to say or no?

[TJ Power]

Yeah. Oxytocin enables us to cope with pain. So it will really help that process of giving birth naturally. Like, totally. Like, if something is not going to plan, like a cesarean might be what you have to do, but the world, like the human brain and body, loves nature to run its course effectively. And there's also a huge component when you give birth naturally, where we as a human have a microbiome, all these bacterias that live within us that really impact the serotonin chemical that we can come to the s in dose. When you get given birth to naturally, a huge amount of microbiome stuff goes into your body as you exit the vagina effectively. And that's actually really good for a baby to experience ingesting all that. So. But that's not to say, like, if you have to do cesarean, that's just part of life. Like, that's okay, but it would be cool.

[Jamie Laing]

Why? Why does oxygen get released? Like, where does it come from? You know, when you're touching skin, skin, what happens?

[TJ Power]

Effectively, it's within your brain and it enables you to care for the thing that you're making contact with. If you had no oxytocin in your brain, when that baby is born, you'd feel nothing for it. You'd just be like, oh, there's a.

[Jamie Laing]

Baby, there's a baby there.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. And.

[Jamie Laing]

And that's why you potentially can't connect with other kids. I find it sometimes where I can't connect with another baby because I go, well, that's just a baby.

[TJ Power]

Yeah, for sure. So that's. That's an element. There's also something to really understand here, though, about dopamine and having a baby, because it's good for you to prepare your brain for this and. And your partner, which is postnatal depression, is a real thing where you don't feel good when you have a baby. And it can happen for women, of course, but then men can also have a bit of a dip. Our dopamine system works a lot on expectation, reality. And what I mean by that is, say, for example, your birthday was coming up and you said to yourself, this is going to be the best birthday of my life. Can't wait for all my friends are coming. Oh, my God, it's going to be the best birthday ever. And then it was just like a pretty good birthday. Even though it was a pretty good birthday, because you expected so much, the dopamine is actually lower than the reality of what you were wanting. So your dopamine actually crashes. So your pretty good birthday becomes shit in your head because you had too much expectations with a baby. And this is what Georgia and I are really preparing us for. Just in case this is the case, you can create this massive anticipation in your mind. It's like, when I have that baby, I'm gonna feel loved like I've never felt before, like all these sentences and like, George is going to be so bonded to it and we're going to be so connected, and I'm just going to feel such a deep connection with this baby. And then sometimes, similar to how relationships work, relationships take a little bit of time to form and bond. And if, particularly with a woman's brain, if it goes in with hyper expectation that this baby is going to change their life and then doesn't deliver, their brain can dip and not feel too good. So it's actually quite good to go in quite steady. Like, this is going to be a beautiful time, but it might take time for us to really enjoy this process and feel a deep connection. And if you go in with low expectations, your mental health is going to be much, much better.

[Jamie Laing]

That's such great advice.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

What's going on with anxiety.

[TJ Power]

Hangxiety is that message from these chemicals that are our friends saying, this really did not make your gut feel very good. Serotonin, the third chemical in this dose thing, is predominantly built in your gut. 90 of it is generated in your gut, literally in your intestinal lining. Your body has the capacity to stitch together these little serotonin molecules. You then have a very clever system called your vagus nerve. It's one of your 12 cranial nerves that connects your brain and body together. And if there's a good abundance of serotonin in the gut, sends a message to the brain. It's like, oh, nice serotonin. Now we feel nice and steady and calm. And the opposite, if there's not much serotonin when the booze comes in, we obviously get this massive dopamine hair. It's like, yeah, alcohol, alcohol. Then it comes down into the gut, and the gut's like, holy shit, what is all this? So this is going to be hard for me to process this, to detoxify it from the liver, and it begins breaking that the priority, and serotonin just plummets because we don't have any time to build serotonin in here right now. We got to try and get this alcohol out of us and to the gut, it's this poison that it's got to try and get through. And when the serotonin dips hard, the vagus nerve then sends a message to the brain and we start going, oh, I'm so anxious. I'm so anxious. I don't know why I'm so anxious. And that's anxiety.

[Jamie Laing]

T.J. you're blowing my mind. So serotonin is the S of dose, is the S is serotonin, that gut feeling that we have?

[TJ Power]

Yeah, definitely. It's very interconnected with that gut feeling. Gut feeling is interesting. Gut feelings also connects to our hearts.

[Jamie Laing]

But gut feeling I sometimes don't think is true.

[TJ Power]

Okay.

[Jamie Laing]

And I'll tell you why.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

Okay. Because if you're going through an anxious period, if you're feeling doubt in your mind, if you've been drinking too much, living a life of too much dopamine the whole time, your body's going to be out of skew. It's not producing enough serotonin. So you're going, well, I don't know. The gut feeling doesn't quite work. And I've had that occasionally where my gut has gone, well, I'm not sure it's right. And then I've actually gone and done it, and it's been actually really great.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. I would Say, am I wrong? If the gut isn't functioning because you've just done a lot of damage to it, your gut feeling should just be, don't listen to my gut, because it's not actually going to.

[Jamie Laing]

That's what I was doing.

[TJ Power]

Work very well at the moment. A good thing to do with your. It's really the difference between the brain and the body. Like, you can think of oxytocin, serotonin as quite like heart, body, gut, these things that are within us that, like, really intuitive and wise. And dopamine is more like the playful psycho in our brain. It's like, give me loads of fun. When you have to make big decisions, it's really important to just ask yourself, like, what does my heart want in this situation? And then what does my brain want? And what you'll notice is the answers are often quite different. Georgia and I are navigating conversations. She's from Australia. So it's like, okay, so do we bring this baby up in Australia? Like, how does that work with my career? All that kind of stuff? So I have to sit down, like, in the choir and really think through, like, what does my thoughts want? That's, like, logical and, like, what's best for my career or finance? And then what does my heart want for Georgia and this baby? And if in any situation you navigate, whether you're dating someone and you're wondering whether you like them, for example, if you say to yourself, what is my heart one? It will give you a much more truthful answer.

[Jamie Laing]

Yeah, great way, man. That's so good. Because also, life is about discipline.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

You have to be disciplined. And. And that moment of, like, having that moment of quietness to make a decision is discipline. Not going on your phone is discipline. Not looking at not vaping as discipline. Not looking at porn as discipline. Just got to be disciplined in those areas. That doesn't mean removing fun, it just means being disciplined.

[TJ Power]

And I think the best discipline in life comes from actually a place of love, not from being hard on yourself.

[Jamie Laing]

Yes.

[TJ Power]

Like, when I try and force myself to not go on my phone through, like, hard discipline, I almost get annoyed at it and I, like, want to fight it. Whereas when I don't go on my phone from a loving place of like, that would actually be a kind thing to do for myself because then I won't feel anxious or depressed and I'll work well and be happy with my day. If a decision comes from love, it just seems to be much easier to listen to.

[Jamie Laing]

So what is serotonin?

[TJ Power]

It's this molecule that effectively is here to just steady our nervous system. We've got this nervous system that either lives in sympathetic nervous system, like stress fight, or it lives in parasympathetic nervous system where it's nice and calm and naturally as hunter gatherers, it was perfectly balanced, like bit of sympathetic. When you're, like running and hunting and stuff, and then sit by the fire and chill and dance and sing and laugh, goes into calm parasympathetic. And serotonin really helps with that balance. Nowadays we are just sympathetic overdrive. Like we live in cities and we wake up, it's like, bang, bang, bang, bang. And our serotonin system just gets, like, disregarded effectively. Your serotonin wants you to take a nice healthy picnic to nature with some friends and lie on the grass and chat and listen to music. That's what your serotonin wants. Whereas our dopamine wants us to, like, get rich and famous and successful and make loads of money and, like, chase success. So they're very different experiences. And if they're balanced, you can be nice and successful, but also nice and calm. But if you go dopamine obsessed, your serotonin's like, oh, what about me? And then you get anxious.

[Jamie Laing]

What is so interesting, man, is like how you said to me before that we spent 3,000 years as cavemen, 300,000, 300,000 years as cavemen, living this life of balancing serotonin with dopamine and oxytocin, all these different things. And in our current state, we've lived about 30 years with these screens.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. 30 years ago, we start to really change things. Even though our grandparents, whilst they weren't living like hunter gatherers, their life was still way more effort. Everything was more effort. Washing, cleaning, effort is so good. We literally survived outside for 300,000 years. You can't imagine the effort of, like, scratching a rock together for five hours to make one tiny bit of fire to survive a cold night. You can't imagine the effort we used to put into life. Now effort to us is like taking out our phone and beeping as we go through a tube station. It's awesome. So much effort. It's like perspective. We got to realize, so. And our brain just used to live in such, like, nice natural harmony. Thirty years ago, we moved everyone indoors. That was huge. All work began to be very predominantly indoors and we basically now spend all day indoors. For context, we used to spend 85% of our time as humanity outdoors. We now spend 7% of our time outdoors. So we've just like completely killed our relationship with the outdoors. So we live indoors, our diet has changed and we're on our computers and technology all the time. And that's not good for our brain chemistry. And I don't want to say this from the view of like, oh, we're all screwed. There's a nice life where you can balance these things out, but you have to reprioritize the outdoors. Reprioritize getting off the screens, reprioritize how you eat, what you eat.

[Jamie Laing]

How do we up our serotonin in 2025?

[TJ Power]

Definitely step one is going out into natural environments without screens and without headphones. And we're now afraid of the quiet. Like, you know, when you go outside for a walk without the headphones, it's like, oh my God, like, what are all these voices in my mind? Outside in the choir listening to your mind, even if it's a little bit anxiety inducing at first, Everyone that we recommend does this immediately begins to see by the end of the walk that, oh, I'm actually a little bit more chilled out. So nature is step one. Gut health is a humongous component. There's this whole ultra processed food thing that's obviously now massive. And when we eat nice natural foods, we build an abundance of serotonin in the gut. And then the final one is our sleep. And the biggest thing with sleep is there's this concept now called revenge bedtime procrastination, which is where you know you should be going to sleep and everything, everything inside you is saying, go to sleep. But you feel like this almost need to fight that reality because you deserve the long scroll that you're currently doing. We all do that, we all do that and like beginning to realize that the nicest thing you can do to yourself at night and the best thing you can do is just like letting yourself go to sleep.

[Jamie Laing]

How? Simple nature, stillness, good diet, sleep.

[TJ Power]

It's very basic and it's like, oh, well, the mental health is easy, but unfortunately we need to go back to the basics. It's very important of dose.

[Jamie Laing]

What is the E?

[TJ Power]

E is endorphins. Endorphins effectively help us manage intense stress and frustration in our minds. We all have those moments where we think, ah, life's really annoying. And I feel really stressed, overwhelmed or frustrated. And people experience emotions differently. Some go towards stress, some get angry at annoying situations. For humanity, throughout that period of time, for hundreds of thousands of years, we didn't get stressed by what's called micro stresses. Now, like lots of little things Niggling at us. We just got stressed by things. Like a bear chasing you would be really stressful. Starving to death, super stressful. When we were extremely stressed, one thing would always happen and that would be intense physical movement. We'd have to run, fight, climb, hide, whatever it was in that moment of intense physical movement. When we were under stress, endorphins then flood our brain and body and take all the stress out of our mind so that we can be laser focused on surviving that situation so we're not like running away like, oh my God, a bear is going to eat me. Which is like bang into survival mode. And nowadays we get very stressed at little things on email and work, and effectively we sit dead still. So we just swallow it into our body and our body never gets the opportunity to release it. And from a brain chemistry point of view, the key is understanding that when you're stressed, you need to physically get it out of you you through whatever kind of movement or activity we can describe it.

[Jamie Laing]

Where do our endorphins come from?

[TJ Power]

They're both within the brain and the bloodstream, so they're in both. And they love hard things for the body exercise. Like the dopamine system likes effort, even if it's reading a book. But endorphins love hard exercise. They love stretching and yoga. They love cold water. The cold water, hot water thing is interesting. Or like cold versus hot, because if you're in a really deflated mood, cold water is going to activate the dopamine and give you motivation to do stuff. If you're on the opposite scale and you've been doing so much that you're actually burnt out and physically exhausted and mentally exhausted, Heat from like saunas and baths and steam rooms is actually going to activate the endorphins and de stress you and calm you back down. So you want to use cold and hot strategically. Like if you're burning hard in your career, cold water is actually not necessarily super advantageous to you because you're already doing so much, which cold water is very useful if you're just like chilling, doing nothing. But if, if you're going super hard at the moment, you want baths and saunas and steam rooms, that's joy for everyone to realize. You don't have to do the cold water.

[Jamie Laing]

Yeah, you don't have to do that much. Prefer to sit in a sauna.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. But then you just have to be honest with yourself. Like if you are having a really lazy period, you're like, okay, I need some oomph. The cold is need.

[Jamie Laing]

So upping your endorphins helps you deal with stress better.

[TJ Power]

Much, much better. And we think the answer to stress, and there's truth in it, is just about calming down, like going on a walk and stuff like that. And that's really good. Serotonin is really good. It is going to help. But first we've got to get it out of us. Like, it literally sits within our system. Like, for example, you see kids with iPads, and that's something that would be good for you to consider how you're going to approach that world because you want your kid to thrive. And the problem is now is the intensity of the modern world and having, like, double working families, mom and dad both working. It's like people are exhausted. So, like, tech is an easy, easy out. But when a kid, for example, is on an iPad, this comes back to the endorphins. Sometimes you take the iPad away and the kid literally, physically goes crazy. Like, there's like, videos and stuff where kids go nuts hitting things. And the reason is, is because they're, like, chasing dopamine as if their brain is out there in the wild, like, running after their friends or whatever it might be. That's what their brain thinks they're doing when they're inside the iPad, because it's like chasing dopamine in the iPad, but they're not simultaneously releasing the endorphins to de stress them back down whilst they're chasing the dopamine. So suddenly they're chasing dopamine, chasing dopamine. Mom says, iPad's gone. The kid goes mental. But it's because they've got no endorphins to cope with the stress and the anger that's coming through their system. And if you struggle with intense stress and anger, you always need to think, shit, I've been super stressed or pissed off today. I've got to get this out of me. Through running, climbing, gym, weights, Pilates, yoga, cycling, swimming, anything that's just like, get the shit out of me is really important.

[Jamie Laing]

What do you want to achieve in life? Why are you doing all this?

[TJ Power]

I.

[Jamie Laing]

Because this is a battle. Like, I'm sitting here right with you right now.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

And I'm loving every single second of it. I'm so excited to implicate some of these in my life. I'm going to get off this podcast right now and phone my wife and say, either she's got to meet you.

[TJ Power]

Okay.

[Jamie Laing]

She's got to listen to or see all of your work.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

Or she's got to Just trust me. And this is what we're going to go and do.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

And I promise you that will be better. But I. But I want to change my life. I want to make myself. But I believe, because I'm, you know, my 30s now, I. I've done all of what you're saying, all of that dopamine, I'm a dopamine add. I've done all of that and it hasn't made me incredibly happy. And so I know all that other stuff will. What are you trying to achieve in life? Because it's a battle.

[TJ Power]

It is an immense battle. And I think about this all the time. Like, I very, I'm very ambitious and like, hope to have a good dent on a very complicated problem. But to put it really simply, we have been a pure natural species for a very, very long time. And throughout our lifetime, we're seeing, and we're already observing now, a significant merge with technology. And that really is going to scale up when it's like augmented reality glasses and neuralink head brain chips and that whole world. And I'm studying it very carefully to understand exactly what's to come for us. And effectively, as humanity goes through this merge with machine, I just really want to help us hold on to what makes us human. And if I can really inspire lots of young people, lots of adults to just make sure we remember all the things that brought us up until this point, I think we'll manage this merge with technology a hell of a lot better.

[Jamie Laing]

Because you have your books and you have everything.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

So someone who's listening to this right now.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

And you've said loads of things that you do. Where should they go and find everything that they need to about you and all your stuff and everything that you're doing? Because, man, people are going to be running to it right now because we're crying out for this help.

[TJ Power]

We need to make smart decisions.

[Jamie Laing]

We are crying out because we are, man, we are drowning at the moment in all of this.

[TJ Power]

I would start. I've written a book called the Dose Effect, and it takes you on this journey of 20 actions, five in each chemical, and it progressively helps you integrate this stuff. It's also written for people that don't necessarily love reading because reading is quite hard now and it's just very easy to journey through and it'll create huge, huge change within 30 days as to how you're approaching your life. And then I share content on Instagram @tjpower. And if you want to learn how to like, build a Healthy relationship. With all this technology on there, you'll discover how to do so. How do you.

[Jamie Laing]

Man, dj, I honestly. You've blown me away. Let's go, man. It's. It's so. Just great. You're so articulate. You explain it to make it understandable. You don't make it scary. You make us realize that we can change. And you're also putting into practice what you're preaching.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

Which is the most important thing.

[TJ Power]

I'm working hard to do that.

[Jamie Laing]

And it is hard. I think that's a big thing. It is hard.

[TJ Power]

And hard is good.

[Jamie Laing]

And for anyone who's watching this, it's going to be hard. But if we do it together, we'll get to this amazing place.

[TJ Power]

There's a magical world for humans. In this modern world, we've got so much abundance, so much help. In order to live a beautiful life, we just need to make smarter decision.

[Jamie Laing]

This was what great companies was all about. It was all about connecting and feeling things together. I feel like as a nation, we've become disconnected. And so this is about connecting people back together. And this is why this episode is so important. Man. I've loved every minute of them. Not even kidding you. I have eight final questions for you. Are you ready for this?

[TJ Power]

Hit me.

[Jamie Laing]

What's the saying or phrase that you'd want people to come away from this interview with?

[TJ Power]

Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.

[Jamie Laing]

I've taken that one. Best compliment anyone's ever given you for your work.

[TJ Power]

The most beautiful thing is when a young person comes to me that's like 12 or 13 years old, and they say, I'm out in nature building forts with my friends. We do this thing called forts with friends, and they have to go and build forts in nature instead of playing Fortnite all the time. And when a kid says that, to me, that's just magic.

[Jamie Laing]

What scares you most about your work?

[TJ Power]

Oh, the unbelievable challenge I've got ahead of me to try and help humanity realize that we really need to get disciplined with the technology. And some are going to have a beautiful life where they do it, and some are going to get really stuck in a challenging world.

[Jamie Laing]

When was the last time you cried and why?

[TJ Power]

I cried on Sunday. Why I. We had some fear with the baby and had to go in for, like, quite a sudden scan, and everything turned out to be pretty good. But in that moment, I. When we got the relief and saw the scan and the heartbeat was there because they had worried us, I really discovered in that moment just how much I want this baby. And I was really surprised. Like, I just started crying and I thought, wow, I'm ready to be a dad.

[Jamie Laing]

Man. It's.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

That got me in the feels.

[TJ Power]

That's oxytocin.

[Jamie Laing]

It means a lot.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

And you just want your partner to be okay.

[TJ Power]

Yeah. You just want to be safe. And I was worried about what she might journey through.

[Jamie Laing]

I have that all. Like, I didn't even talk about that with. So if I had that every day with her.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

And you just have to stay strong.

[TJ Power]

All the time and you want to be like a machine. And all day, up until we saw the heartbeat, I was just like a machine. Like, this is going to be all good. Don't worry. Like, we're all okay. But then once I had the relief that everything was o okay, I was like, thank God.

[Jamie Laing]

It's gonna be okay, man. I promise you. Yeah, it's gonna be amazing, dude.

[TJ Power]

Definitely.

[Jamie Laing]

What's something you can't let go of?

[TJ Power]

My phone. I can't like that. I kind of wish I could just completely let go of it, but I have to keep it in my life.

[Jamie Laing]

What's a guilty pleasure?

[TJ Power]

YouTube. I love YouTube. Watching YouTube videos is education, everything.

[Jamie Laing]

It gives you everything.

[TJ Power]

Yeah, there's some YouTube channels I just love. There's this like guy called Marco that does. He's like goes up to strangers and says, can I paint your bedroom? And then he's like this insane artist in America and it is just heaven. Like watching one of those videos, that's definitely my guilty pleasure.

[Jamie Laing]

I'm not gonna get me into that. I can't wait. What turns you off?

[TJ Power]

What turns me off? People not asking me any questions when I see them and only chatting about what's going on in their life. And it's something I actually turn myself off about myself is sometimes I'll talk to someone and it might seem a bit self focused and I should be like, shit. I haven't asked how their life is going. So I really work on that myself and I don't like when it happens.

[Jamie Laing]

It's a really good answer. What turns you on?

[TJ Power]

Someone just being like really passionate about whatever their thing is just like being really fired up and caring about something. Whatever.

[Jamie Laing]

Whatever it is.

[TJ Power]

Yeah.

[Jamie Laing]

What do you like most about yourself?

[TJ Power]

I'm extremely determined. I really believe I can put a huge dent on society in this technology management thing. And I like that.

[Jamie Laing]

Tj, this has been beyond amazing. We're going to put every link to every book, to everything that you have in all the show description. So everyone please go and check it out. Man, it's been amazing. I'm full of oxytocin because of that.

[TJ Power]

Thank you so much.

[Jamie Laing]

You're the greatest, man. DJ really appreciate. Thank you so much. That was insane, man.

[TJ Power]

That was insane. Let's go.

[Jamie Laing]

Okay. What do you think?

[Jemima Pj]

Loved it. As I said, it has changed my life. Do you want me to tell you what I've started doing?

[Jamie Laing]

What?

[Jemima Pj]

I have started leaving my phone in a different room when I go to bed and I will try not to look at it for 10 minutes when I wake up in the morning.

[Jamie Laing]

So I've just ordered myself an alarm clock.

[Jemima Pj]

Oh, I've got one.

[Jamie Laing]

And I'm now going to leave my phone outside my bedroom as well.

[Jemima Pj]

Yeah, yeah. I wake up. The thing is, I have my alarm clock wakes me up to radio 3. So my towards the end of my sleep, it just feels like I'm in a film because it's like classical music. It doesn't really wake me up. It's actually music. You go to sleep too. I just wake up really calm, like.

[Jamie Laing]

But it's amazing. Dopamine, porn. So many different things which I had no clue about. About.

[Jemima Pj]

No, definitely. I had like inklings, but not to like that extent. Fascinating.

[Jamie Laing]

Fascinating. And just the great advice around childbirth and.

[Jemima Pj]

Oh my God. So good.

[Jamie Laing]

I actually spoke to Sophie about that.

[Jemima Pj]

Did you?

[Jamie Laing]

Yeah. I did not expect the best, but actually probably expect the worst and then the only best can happen.

[Jemima Pj]

That's encouraging. Yeah, it was good, Sophie. Let's just expect the worst.

[Jamie Laing]

Expect the worst because then only the best can happen. We really hope you enjoyed this episode. Remember, if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do. And also get in touch. Let us know what you think of the show, what guests you want us to have on next at Great Company. Podcast on Instagram or greatcompanyamproductions.co.uk and we're going to see you next week for.

[Jemima Pj]

Another episode of Great Company.

[Unknown]

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[TJ Power]

You hear that, right? You don't? That's what it's like to order food for your workplace with EasyCater. No hold music while you wait to place your order. No tap tapping as you type in special dietary instructions or long, complicated searches for options in your budget. No crinkling of paper receipts.

[Jemima Pj]

Just dang, these are some tasty sandwiches.

[TJ Power]

EasyCater the better way to order food for work order [e-mail].