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0:00 A few years ago, my screen time was 5 hours a day. People that I worked with screen times have been as high as 17 hours. But over the past couple years, I've discovered a handful of hobbies I call dopamine [music] hobbies that have cured mine and my clients screen addictions. Getting our screen times as low as just 2 hours a day on a consistent basis. In this time, I've also realized the cure for screen addiction isn't just having more willpower or following another productivity hack. It's really about finding more love and joy and happiness in the everyday moments in your [music] life. My name's TJ Power. I'm a neuroscientist and I wrote a number one Sunday Times best-selling book about dopamine. [music] And in this video, I'm going to show you the dopamine habits you can use in your
0:45 life to quit your screen addiction. But first, let me tell you about why most hobby lists are failing and how to actually stick with them without relying on discipline. [music] Cuz the real reason we're not sticking to hobbies anymore isn't about our willpower. It's really about what fast dopamine has done to our poor brains. There's a study I love by this lady called Dr. Volkow that found when you flood your brain with fast dopamine. This is just dopamine that gets delivered immensely quickly. Like for example, when you're nailing short-form content, you notice this like rapid rise of stimulation and pleasure in your brain. It forces your brain to start dialing down these dopamine receptors. So life itself begins to feel more and more dull. Your brain just cannot cope with the level of stimulation it's experiencing. It's like, "Wow, if I
1:30 can't cope with this anymore, I'm just going to give you less dopamine to access in the first place." That state then makes us apathetic and demotivated. And all these great hobbies we've come up with where like, "Yeah, I should definitely do all that stuff." We just can't be bothered to actually execute on them cuz we've burned out this magical resource in our brain. But when you put effort into something and then you slowly experience reward, dopamine begins to naturally generate in your brain at the pace that it loves and was designed to do over hundreds of thousands of years, which begins to reverse that receptor issue that's being caused by the fast dopamine. This then makes life start feeling really fun again and exciting and you're like, "Yeah, I really want to do loads of cool stuff." This is what we call slow dopamine and the hobbies we're going to
2:15 explore are exactly how we're going to access it. You see, what makes a hobby dopamine positive is it something you have to do for a while and when you first start doing it, you don't instantaneously feel amazing. Like when you read a book, for example, basically the hardest habit in the world, you don't open the first page and think, "Wow, I feel amazing now. I feel so good now that I've read two sentences of this book." In comparison to when you open Instagram, you might instantly feel a level of entertainment and joy. But then as you read the book, after 10, 20 minutes or so, you'll notice, "Wow, I actually feel kind of satisfied now I'm reading." What's occurring there is this dopamine is slowly generating. This is what a dopamine positive hobby actually looks like. You start, you begin engaging in the activity, it takes a level of focus and concentration, then gradually you're left with this real deep feeling of satisfaction. In
3:01 comparison to when you scroll, I doubt you've ever sat and just sort of doom scrolled your phone and then finished your doom scroll and thought, "That was just such a good doom scroll. I feel so satisfied by that doom scroll." Quite the opposite happens. You feel this sense of like guilt and like, "Ah, such wasted time." Whereas a dopamine positive hobby leaves you with this feeling of like, "Ah, yeah, that was that was good time spent." This is seen in a ridiculously cool study in the Journal of Nature where across 16 countries and 93,000 people, they found people that are regularly engaging in hobbies have significantly better health, much higher life satisfaction, and significantly less depressive symptoms. For me personally, I've struggled a lot with these things. I've struggled like crazy with my mental health, with big waves of depressive episodes and anxiety. I've
3:47 spent weeks, if not months and years of my life feeling really dissatisfied and this journey of like reintroducing these hobbies into my life has offered the cure to a habit that I thought was almost unwinnable. Along with this at my research lab, we've gone deep into hobbies. And there are some big brain benefits that are going to occur as a result of engaging in these. The first is neuroplasticity. This is all about your brain learning new skills and literally forming new neural connections, which makes your brain way more adaptable and way sharper instead of living stuck in this kind of passive scrolling loop. There's an additional benefit that's going to occur there where obviously our world is changing like crazy right now with AI. And I think building an adaptable brain is crucial. By learning some new skills in some of the ones I'm going to recommend,
4:32 you're actually training that adaptable nature of your brain, which may end up serving you in a multitude of ways in your future to come. You then with some of these hobbies actually just end up spending more time with yourself, more time in the quiet, which activates a part of your brain called the default mode network. This is where you have self-reflection. actually build a good relationship with yourself. There's an unbelievably cool effect that occurs when you intentionally activate your default mode network, which is called self-projection. Where your brain, when it spends a lot of time just chatting away to itself, begins to strategize your future and think about how you could make your future better. Now, if you're someone like I was that somewhat hates the quiet, like I really struggled with the quiet. I remember when I was at university once and my phone had run out of charge. And I was so scared to walk 20 minutes in silence back to my home
5:18 actually carried my laptop in my hand with my headphones plugged into it cuz I didn't want to listen to that voice in my head. If you're someone that does struggle with the quiet, maybe falling asleep in the quiet or just spending time kind of off your phone, de-stimulating, the relationship with yourself can build and it can improve. Just like a relationship with any human, you have to really spend good one-on-one time with them to build a loving, kind relationship. And in these hobbies, you're going to get the opportunity to activate this great part of your brain and begin communicating with yourself in a more positive way in time. And then with those positive thoughts, great ideas about your future will arrive. And then finally, of course, you have your dopamine resensitization. This means your dopamine receptors begin working better again. That means your motivation for life starts coming back, your excitement for life. Dopamine's also
6:04 responsible for your attention span. Right now, as you sit and watch this video, you might be thinking, "Oh, how do I possibly keep watching this when I could just bang through short-form content?" In these moments, your brain is tested. Can you sustain your attention? By resensitizing your dopamine with these hobbies, that capacity to just sustain your attention on something is going to grow and grow. So, this then brings me to the first category of hobbies that are probably easiest to get started with. These are nature hobbies. These are things like going on phone-free walks, going swimming, looking for wildlife, and definitely my favorite, grounding, which is where you get your bare feet on the ground. I've actually got so into this recently, where I looked deep into of how grounding, where your bare feet make contact with the ground, actually begins
6:49 to neutralize the electronic charge in your body, which lowers inflammation. It begins to regulate your heart rate. Unsurprisingly, after 300,000 years of running around with our bare feet on the ground, there's somewhat of a connection and benefit that occurs there. And nature hobbies can become a central part of your life. For me, falling in love with nature again, as someone that spent a lot of time in the city just losing touch with it, has been transformational. I almost think of nature as the opposite of technology. Technology is like the greatest, most immense innovation humanity have created, and nature is like the most ancient, wise component of Earth. And I found the more I spend time there, the more I love it. And specifically with those phone-free and headphone-free walks, what I typically find is for the first 5, 10, 15 minutes, my brain's kind of quite loud and buzzy. Your brain's often in these things called beta brain waves, so it's very stimulated from
7:35 life. And then it begins to settle. The more I walk, the calmer my thoughts become, and the more I begin to pay attention to the animals, the birds I can hear, the feeling of the ground on my feet if I'm doing the barefoot at the time, that aspect of nature can become a central daily hobby in your life. But then if you live in a city and you think nature's actually quite hard to access at the moment, that's okay. That's where I would say people hobbies should be a go-to. This includes things like meeting up for coffees more with your friends. We make this a massive priority in our life, like getting to know local people in the area, actually having conversation with people on the table close to you. This is what humanity used to do. We used to be this much more socialized, open-hearted species, and obviously in the digital individualism that we now live within, we're all very
8:21 isolated into our own life. You go for a coffee, maybe you meet with a friend, maybe you go for a coffee on your own, you even say to someone, "How's your day going?" That experience of having coffees as a central hobby might actually just be something that takes you out of the screens. This could also include things like going to exercise classes or very simply just making spending time with your family a bigger priority again. Because the screen addiction is so intense, and the fast dopamine is burning out our dopamine resource in our brain. So many of us can't actually be bothered to do the things that would be beneficial. And something like going and seeing your family is magic, because when you see your family or someone that you really love, you generate oxytocin. Oxytocin is a great chemical, it's your connection chemical, it's what fills you with the
9:06 feeling of love. And what's fascinating with people hobbies is back in the 1970s, they started doing these studies on rats. They would put a rat in a cage and give it access to morphine-laced water, effectively super fast dopamine water. And very sadly, in a few days that rat would kill itself by consuming too much of that water that its heart would stop. If you then put rats, meaning multiple rats, into what they call rat park, where it's a cage where they all have friends, and they still have access to the morphine-laced water, they begin to progressively not even touch the water because they're experiencing social connection and fun and friendship. And that is big for the modern world cuz I spent a fair bit of my life feeling lonely and a bit disconnected. And whenever I'm lonely, that's when my phone addiction skyrockets. And I recently moved out to
9:52 Australia, didn't know anyone out here, and I've had this experience of having to resocialize myself. Like, literally have the awkward experience of going up to people in coffee shops and being like, "Hey, how how you doing?" And it's [laughter] like, kind of cringey when you think about it. And then once you actually get used to it and like resocialize yourself, that starts filling you up. I would say now I'm spending, I don't know, 30, 45 minutes a day speaking to other humans in my local community instead of being on a screen. And these are the subtle tweaks. And then because of how that research works, the more you fill yourself with love and oxytocin, the less you actually want the dopamine. And then suddenly it's easier to manage. And this is what I mean by you're not managing your screen addiction through willpower. You're managing it through intelligent hobbies that fill up the deeper parts of you that are very unsatisfied with modern
10:38 life. Then one that has had the most monumental impact on my own kind of doom scrolling addiction are mood hobbies. These are the ones you do for how they make you feel. These have been things like making videos, volunteering my time, learning to play a musical instrument, or even something like watching old movies. Watching old movies has transformed my life. Out of all the things I tell you in this video, things like phone-free walks would probably be right there at the top. But trust me, if you want the easiest hack that is genuinely going to make a difference, it's going to be to start watching old movies again. Whenever I have that craving in the evening for, "Oh, I just want to nail content," I go and I like check online like, "What's a good old movie?" I look at IMDb, try and find one. Recently I found Good Will Hunting.
11:23 My partner and I sat down to watch this movie. And the huge difference with that form of screen time is it's low dopamine. It's not fast dopamine. You sit there and you watch these unbelievably well scripted scenes and your brain slowly experiences reward. You don't finish watching an old movie and think, "Ah, I just like feel so like awful after that." The opposite occurs. You think, "Wow, that was a great movie." And as the modernization of even movies has occurred, they've begun to more rapidly increase the dopamine within our brains to try and keep our attention. But if you, for example, this evening, fine, just go with Goodwill Hunting. You'll love it. And you just put your phone in a different room and it's like a bit of anxiety cuz you're like, "Oh, but my phone, like I need it near me." But you don't and you have to retrain yourself that you are safe without your phone right next to you. Then you put on an old movie, maybe
12:08 you're on your own, maybe you're with someone you love, and you just sit there. And when you feel a bit bored, you just think, "That's okay. It's all right. I'm fixing my screen addiction. I'm finding a new hobby." Maybe old movies could actually be something you become really passionate about loving. And then finally, we've got learn hobbies. These are the best for training your brain to do new things and access that neuroplasticity that trains our brain more adaptable and it's so good for the longevity of your brain. These are things like knitting, getting really into cooking, getting really into nutrition and studying how nutrition works, things like learning a new physical skill, calisthenics. I've been getting super into like body weight training, that's been magic. The interesting things about cooking or knitting or calisthenics is you're physically doing things with your hands whilst learning a new skill. And my
12:54 partner's mom, she's in her 50s, was chatting to me about how much she struggles with her phone addiction like all of us. One of the biggest difficulty she has is like she's got so interconnected with it that she needs something to do with her hands. So then she started getting really into knitting. And that means her hands are now occupied. So if she wants to try and learn to de-stimulate to the point to watch a movie, if that does feel really hard, you could knit whilst watching a movie and then suddenly you're not accessing fast dopamine. Knitting is slow dopamine. It's probably the slowest dopamine. And then I just shared on my Instagram how my parents have come to stay with me in Australia at the moment. And here we've really set up our house for this dopamine hobbies type lifestyle where So, we don't have a TV, we don't have Wi-Fi. And it feels almost like you're in like the 1980s when you're in this house. But then of course, we have our laptops and our phones we can go on
13:40 when we need to connect and work and have a life and then use all the immense benefits that technology provides. And my dad's 2 days into this dopamine detox. We were playing cards last night and he was stressing out without the dopamine. He was like, "I need to watch YouTube shorts on the TV." We got out some kind of game that we could play, we could learn to do something again. And these kind of like subtle decisions of how can I pick an activity where it's a hobby where I engage with people or I engage my brain? Then I can just reduce the total quantity daily screen time. My parents are laughing cuz they're saying like they feel like they're in some kind of technological rehab our house. It's not like we're intentionally trying to make them do that. My partner and I we've had a little daughter and we just really care about how can we raise her and not be addicted to screens? How can we ourselves reduce our addiction to them? So, you've got a few different categories here. You've got nature
14:25 hobbies. You might feel connected to the nature part. You've got people hobbies. Maybe that people is a great thing for you and you've been deprioritizing people in your life [music] recently. Maybe you've got the mood hobbies, the ones that just make you feel good. Instruments [music] watching old movies, making videos. And then you've got those learn hobbies, the one where you're literally physically entertaining your hands with a skill while learning something new for your brain. But if this feels like a lot of hobbies, you of course don't need to start them all to see an effect on your screen time. [music] You just need to pick one and then stick with it for a period of time knowing that if you start engaging with it and it feels a bit boring or a bit effortful or a bit slow, [music] that's the exact state we want to train your brain to recover in the modern world. I'd honestly [music] consider just getting started maybe right now. You could go on a phone-free
15:10 walk. Maybe right now you could put on an old movie. Maybe right now you could head outside and go for a coffee and see if there's anyone to chat to and engage with. Or maybe you could even go and get your bare feet onto the earth. The most crucial thing to remember that [music] has crashed my screen time and those that I work with is that you have to break the pattern today [music] or the cycle will repeat tomorrow.
