Transcription
What I'm about to tell you is a secret to how I've structured my entire life. It's a strategy I've been following for the past 20 years, and it served me well. As a Harvard doctor with three Ivy League degrees, I'll share with you some of my most essential practices.
First up, you are being set up to fail. Society's underlying message is this: wake up, shut up, consume. Trade your life, money, and energy for quick hits of instant gratification. Giant corporations are spending billions of dollars to make you as mindless as possible. They're reaching to your brain, ripping out the controls, and plugging a direct line into your reward systems. They say, "Scroll." You ask, "How far?" They say, "Buy." You ask, "How much?"
That's why your life stays the same, why you're always broke, why you doom scroll into the night. You try your best to change these behaviors, but it's not surprising why it doesn't work. Because these things are all just symptoms of something far more problematic. Your brain is rotting. You're feeding your brain what I call the Happy Meal digital diet: convenient, artificially processed packets of instant gratification. Eat McDonald's all day, and what happens? You become a fat guy and die in my ER from a heart attack. Give your brain the same mental fast food, and what happens? You die in some distant future filled with regret, your forgotten dreams littering your dark room like the empty syringes of some heroin addict.
To start fixing this, you need to understand the difference between simple and complex dopamine. Take carbs, for instance. Simple carbs, like sodas and candies, get metabolized quickly with huge spikes in sugar in your bloodstream. Sure, it's great for quick boosts of energy, but you end up crashing later and, in the long run, suffer diabetes so advanced your leg gets amputated. Simple carbs give you high sugars with zero nutrients. But complex carbs, like quinoa and whole grains, are chock-full of nutrients that get slowly broken down. With this gradual increase in blood sugar, you get an extended-release nutrient capsule that gives you energy over time, even when you aren't eating.
That's the secret to the entire sauce. Complex dopamine is like that, too: the extended-release type of dopamine you want, not the ultra-fast, rapid-onset, rapid-decline version of simple dopamine. Because what does that sound like? Drugs, right? Each time you blast your face with another dose of TikTok, you take a hit of the juice, the most temporary of rewards. Hence why you always want more, why you're never truly satisfied, why you withdraw when you stop. The only solution is to keep on scrolling to get more hits of that digital fentanyl.
When you think of it this way, it's clear what you must do: get rid of all Happy Meals from your life. No one does fentanyl recreationally on the side and lives an enviable life. To figure out if something is a Happy Meal, do what I call the one-minute test. How long does the joy from this activity actually last when you stop? If it's only a minute or less, then clearly it's not worth your time.
What is worth your time? Sustained-release complex dopamine. This happens when you have a meaningful conversation, when you're out in nature, maybe when you have a breakthrough moment during a session of deep focus. Take working out, for example. Not only do you get a quick high in the moment, the positive effects of the workout carry forward into the future too, as your brain gets flooded with a soup of positive, feel-good chemicals, boosting your overall mood and energy. Not to mention, later, when you check yourself out when no one's looking, you get another rush of feel-good chemicals. Or even later, when everyone's old as crap breaking their hips from sneezing, you carry forward like that 70-year-old boss that you've become. All these activities clearly pass the one-minute test.
I'll let you in on a huge secret, though: you can still partake in the pleasures of simple dopamine. In fact, you should. This secret is the first cheat code of life. You just have to convert it into complex dopamine first. Let me explain how.
There's this annoying phone game I'm addicted to. I used to waste hours every day playing it instead of using willpower to not play. My rule was this: I can play, but I have to play in the plank position. No exceptions. And like a switch, something amazing happened. Not only do I play less (as the pain of the plank limits the amount of time I can play), one, when I do play, it's guilt-free. And two, I now plank a lot more. A lot more. I've planked now over 1,000 hours of total time. 15 minutes a day, every day, for the past 15 years. Adds up real fast. Even more weird is the fact that I crave planking like Pavlov's dog. The mere thought of planking gives me an instantaneous boost of simple dopamine because the game is so strongly associated with the plank position.
Even cooler is the fact that stopping the game is incredibly easy, too. I'm not telling myself, "Just one more game" to try and avoid the withdrawal because my brain gets a natural bump in dopamine the moment I release my body from the pain of the plank. I'm literally dying to stop playing. Hours later, my reward centers are still buzzing from the natural boost in energy and mood from such a high-intensity exercise. And throughout the day, random spikes of dopamine keep on coming: the feeling of pride from such an accomplishment, feeling good every time you get naked, never worrying about core strength, back pain, or posture issues ever again. The list goes on and on.
I'll give you a few more examples of how to convert simple to complex dopamine. Take video games: instead of playing Call of Duty with 10-year-olds who say not very nice things about your mom, only play if your college buddies are on. Relish in the complex dopamine that comes from bonding with your buddies when you blast them in the face. Want to drink more water? Only have water at home. You only get to drink something else when you go out and intentionally celebrate something with a friend.
One of the best ways I give my brain complex dopamine is with Skillshare. I've been looking to get better at Procreate, the animation app I use in my videos. Before Brooke Glazer's class, I was pretty clueless, doing random things to get the effects I wanted. Thanks to her "Intro to Procreate: Illustrating on the iPad" class, I now know how to use masks and other cool new features I never knew existed, speeding up my workflow like a pro. And that's just one class. With Skillshare, you actually get the largest online learning community at your fingertips, with thousands of classes led by industry pros, from writing, filmmaking, entrepreneurship, to even productivity and more. I especially dig their learning paths: curated, sequential classes meant to help you master a specific skill from the ground up. First 500 people to use my link in the description will receive a one-month free trial of Skillshare. Get started today.
Maybe Netflix is your problem. Instead of binging a show, how about you only watch if you're eating a healthy meal? The moment you finish your salad and start chewing a tasty doughnut, you stop watching.
Speaking of which, this doughnut concept is actually the second cheat code. I call it dopamine bridging. The idea is, if you do find yourself stuck in a simple dopamine binge, you should always have a figure of "doody" ready to escape with. Because this way, when one pool of dopamine ends (i.e., Netflix), you have another pool of dopamine to look forward to (i.e., the donut), minimizing the negative withdrawal you feel when stopping. This gives you something to look forward to, making the transition a lot easier. The trick is to pick a second pool of dopamine with a finite source. A donut is the perfect example because after a few bites, that delicious circle of gooiness is gone.
An even more advanced trick is to only give yourself permission to start the second pool of dopamine when you start something productive. In other words, you cannot take the first bite until you start work. This way, the instantaneous gratification of the donut only comes when you start being productive, incentivizing you to start as soon as possible. This is how you creatively kill procrastination. And when you start, a third pool of complex dopamine starts dripping pleasure into your reward centers. You feel good because, holy crap, you just skipped the most painful part of work: starting it. Five minutes in, when you take your last bite and the donut's simple dopamine ends, you don't even care. You now have momentum. You're about to enter a flow state and enjoy the fourth pool: an almost infinite source of complex dopamine.
See what just happened there? Without a dopamine bridge, going from an exciting Netflix show to boringly sitting at a desk with nothing but work to look forward to is doomed to fail. This is what I call going cold turkey, which, I'm sure you know, is incredibly painful. It's incredibly painful because you haven't optimized your brain chemistry. Remember those giant corporations? They don't care. They want you addicted. They built their stuff so you never want to stop. That's the whole point. The consequence of all this is, of course, procrastination, feeling crappy, looking for other ways to numb the pain. You only start when the guilt of not starting is worse than the withdrawal. But with the second cheat code, you break the system. An infinite simple dopamine source bridges to a finite simple dopamine source, which bridges to a finite complex dopamine source, which bridges to an infinite complex dopamine source.
You are now ready for the final, most ultimate secret cheat code of them all: passive dopamine. The easiest way to make money in today's society is to trade time for money. Whether that's $15 an hour or $300 an hour. The truly wealthy, though, they play a different game entirely. They divorce their time from money and build money-making machines. Instead, this is a concept of asset dopamine. Is no different. Most people trade their time for dopamine on a one-to-one scale. That's what you do when you watch TikTok videos. You're investing your time in inefficient, instantaneous gratification-type ventures. The moment you stop watching is the moment that dopamine stops coming in. Why not build a passive dopamine asset that continually pumps dopamine into your brain irrespective of what you do?
I call this concept a dopamine pump. For example, I am a hip-hop dancer, but when I lived in Boston for residency, I started taking salsa and bachata lessons. Not only was it fun and opened up new sources of dopamine I never would have imagined: instant new community, new friends to go out with, a sense of belonging, a skill to enjoy every Friday night with, which compounds as you get even better and make even more friends. A skill that made you feel good about yourself. Even your brain benefits. There's a 2003 New England Journal of Medicine study that looked at 11 different types of physical activity like cycling, golf, swimming, and tennis, and found only dance lowered the risk of dementia. Get good enough, and you become recognized. You start teaching others and feel good when people start to look up to you. Even going to parties and weddings becomes a completely different experience when everyone's fighting to dance with you. It's boosted my love life in ways you can't even imagine. Dancing is now part of my core identity, something I'm proud of and enjoy deeply. My life is infinitely richer because of it. The man of complex dopamine that has been generated with this pump over the years has compounded to a ridiculous amount. You never come close to matching simply scrolling through TikTok. And that's just one dopamine pump. Add a few more pumps, and your life becomes unrecognizable. Once you've tasted it, the simple dopamine rushes society wants you to consume, to get addicted to, simply pales in comparison.
With that said, building a pump can be hard. It's an investment, just like it's easy to blow your next paycheck on a new pair of shoes rather than invest it wisely. We often make the same mistake with our dopamine. And then there's the insecurity of trying something new. I almost didn't even start dancing because someone told me I sucked at it. Luckily, if insecurity is what's holding you back, I've already made a video addressing that very problem. Check it out next. And if you want more from me, links to my newsletter, Patreon, and other stuff in the description. Until next time, my friends. Smile, you later.