Exploring Oxytocin and Human Connection

Alright, so oxytocin is known as the love hormone and I recently spoke to a neuroscientist all about why we need to understand how it works in our brain. This is the chemical that is completely designed to connect humanity together and it has a big effect on both our relationships but also our confidence and how we connect with ourselves. So this is driving the experience of love as a species. That is TJ Power, a neuroscientist who runs the Dose Lab which specializes in understanding the four main brain chemicals that influence our day-to-day lives. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. And very excitingly here on the channel we are exploring each one of these in this four-part video series. So this video is all about oxytocin and five ways we can boost our oxytocin levels so that we feel more connected with others and with ourselves so that we can ultimately become happier. Part one the law of oxytocin. I would say at the human core oxytocin is actually the most desirable chemical. In order for humans to procreate and survive, oxytocin has driven us to have relationships. And as much as we all seek for finance and wealth and things like that, a lot of what we're really seeking for is love and a family and relationships. And if you satisfy your oxytocin, your brain is going to be much calmer. It's going to be much more confident. It's going to be a happier experience within your mind. And you are generally going to feel much more fulfilled in your life if your oxytocin is high. Now oxytocin is known as the love hormone because it's involved in bonding with others and one of the best ways to increase oxytocin is through what TJ calls the law of oxytocin. The law of oxytocin is to make someone else in your life happy every day and any time in which you're helping someone else to feel happy oxytocin doesn't just rise in them because they're experiencing human connection we fundamentally feel way happier as a human when we contribute to their life. Part two, five actions to increase oxytocin. All right, so if we're thinking of actionable ways to increase our levels of oxytocin so that we feel more connected to ourselves and to others and so we become happier overall, the first is directly related to the law of oxytocin, which is acts of kindness. Okay. So in 2007, a bunch of researchers wanted to find out more about what made humans do generous things. Generous things like helping a stranger in need or volunteering for a nonprofit organization or going on Amazon and leaving a nice review for Ali Abdaal's book, Feel Good Productivity. So to investigate this. spirit of generosity, they randomly split a group of people into two groups. Now one group was given oxytocin in the form of a nasal spray, so the oxytocin reached the brain directly, and the other group, the placebo group, was given a spray that did not contain the chemical. And then they all played some computer games which involved giving money to a stranger, and this is what the results show. So this is the placebo group, and this is on average how much money they gave away to a stranger, but this is the oxytocin group, and this is how much money they gave away to a stranger. As the researchers said, those on oxytocin were 80% more more generous than those given a placebo. So together with being more generous, we'll form better social relationships and release more oxytocin in this positive feedback loop. And so boosting our oxytocin levels in the first place all starts with random acts of kindness. There's this really good episode of Friends, the TV show, where Joey says to Phoebe that there's no such thing as a selfless good deed. Look, there's no unselfish good deed, sorry. Yes, there are. There are totally good deeds that are selfless. And in this episode, Phoebe tries to do kind things for other people. So we. without feeling good herself. So she, for example, goes and rakes someone's garden leaves without them knowing, so they have a good deed done. But what she ultimately discovers in this episode is it's fundamentally impossible to do something for someone else and not feel good yourself. And it's very important to, on a regular basis, just have that in your mind. Like, how am I serving other people? Family, friends, colleagues, kids, whatever it might be. Because the more you serve others, the happier you will feel as a result. In my case, one of the things that I realized when I was working as a doctor in a previous life is that it would just be a- An uplift to my own day if I offered to make the nurses a cup of tea. So a few times throughout the day, you know, I'd be doing my like paperwork or whatever, and I'd take a break, I'd go make myself a cup of tea, and then on the way I'd stop off at the nurse's office and ask if anyone would like a cup of tea. They mostly would say yes. And it wasn't much skin off my own back to make a few extra cups of tea. Because either way, I was going to make the tea for myself. So I might as well make three extra teas. One with sugar, one with coffee cream, all that kind of stuff. But when I would give the nurses the tea, they would feel really happy. And I would feel really happy. as well. I'd be like, oh, I just did a nice thing for someone. It's like, it didn't cost me anything. It was super nice, super easy to do. And I found that it just lifted up my energy and lifted up my mood. So that especially during the dark days of the pandemic, when everything was all miserable and depressing for people who worked in hospitals and everyone else, it was a real difference in the energy and the approach that I took to my work. This is something I talk about in my book, Feel Good Productivity. Basically the idea that is super backed up by science, that if we can do nice things for other people, People are a source of energy. And so we can turn our work into a source of energy by doing these random acts of kindness or by trying to connect whatever we're doing to the impact it might have on someone else. Even if it's something as small as making someone a cup of tea. Okay, so we wanna be asking ourselves these two questions. Firstly, at the start of the day, you can ask yourself, what can I do to make someone else happy today? And then at the end of the day, you could ask yourself, what simple contribution have I made today? And this is a way of connecting the stuff that you've done with the impact it has on other people. And in theory, that should boost your oxytocin levels. and help you feel happier. By the way, singing with a group of people or doing exercise with a group of people or working with a group of people makes whatever you're doing feel much better. And that is where the sponsor of this video comes in, which is actually me, because this video is sponsored by our own product, Productivity Lab. If you're the sort of person who works from home a lot, maybe in your day job or maybe on your side hustle or your book project or your memoir or your YouTube channel or whatever, and you find yourself sitting at the computer and then not actually doing the thing that you intended to do, then Productivity Lab is going to be absolutely perfect for you. Essentially, Productivity Lab is an online platform and community of entrepreneurs and creators and professionals, and we all get together and we work together through Focus Labs. We do reflective workshops each week where you reflect on how your week has gone and set goals and plan your next week. So it sort of serves as an accountability mechanism. And I like to think of it as a way to think about how you're going to be able to it as like CrossFit or Peloton for productivity. You're joining a Zoom co-working session with other people. I join these for three hours each morning because I just get way more work done when I'm in a Focus Lab session, knowing that other people around me on screen virtually are also doing their work. And doing this stuff every day pretty much doubles my productivity. And we've had so many success stories from students in Productivity Lab who've said things like, hey, you know, I've been procrastinating on starting my YouTube channel for ages. and then I joined Focus Lab sessions, and now I've actually done it. Or things like, you know, I've spent five years planning to make this new iOS app that I've been planning to make, and then I never actually did it. But then I joined a few Focus Lab sessions, and now I've built my minimum viable product. And so students in Productivity Lab are getting a lot of good results. There's a link down below, you can check out productivitylab.com. And you can see if it's the sort of thing that might be right for you. And who knows, maybe I will see you in one of our co working sessions, or in one of our reflection workshops, or in one of our planning sessions, or in one of our book clubs, or maybe in one of our in person meetups as well. Action number two is the hug habit. So obviously during the pandemic, we all had these social distancing regulations in place and we couldn't see people in person and we couldn't hug or high five or shake hands. We had to do those weird like, you know, elbow bumping knee type situations. And the lack of all these things probably contributed to the unhappiness that we saw a lot during the pandemic, even outside of the health effects of the pandemic. Because for example, we know that physical touch reduces short-term stress. It improves immune system functioning and physical touch like massages have been found to have a positive impact on depression as well. And there's this interesting survey, the longing for touch question. questionnaire and they found that during the pandemic 86% of people desired more physical touch and then after COVID that number is still pretty high at around 80%. When I'm on stage I explain this idea that humans really need physical connection and I get the entire audience to rate how many hugs they think they're averaging per day. On average of all 50,000 people we're at 1.6 hugs a day is what we've seen in our data and when you look into the research it's very clear that we need much more like five hugs a day. Now when we hug someone we release oxytocin in our brains. And I think I read somewhere that if you hug someone for six seconds, that's sort of like, you know, the optimal oxytocin release. Which feels like kind of long. And I would, you know, when I first read this a couple of years ago, I started giving really long hugs to some of my friends. And I would, you know, they'd be like, huh, that was unusual. And I had to be like, oh, I read this thing, you know, saying that oxytocin, six seconds, blah, blah, blah. And I sort of felt a bit embarrassed about it. And I've sort of lost the habit. But it's something I should probably reinstate in like a non-weird way. Action number three. three, eyes and ears. Now there are unfortunately certain things in our life that stop us from connecting with others in a meaningful way. And these things stop oxytocin levels from rising in our brain. And as you can imagine, the biggest culprits of this are firstly our phones and secondly, social media. And these things are bad for oxytocin levels for three main reasons. So firstly, the phones and social media reinforce individualistic behavior. So instead of us being more outwardly focused, we're always thinking about our own profiles and how many likes we've got and posting about our own lives and comparing our lives to other people. which is not good for our mental health and certainly not good for our oxytocin levels. Secondly, phones and social media have been shown to make us feel pretty lonely. The challenge I have with this, I think it's actually creating a lack of desire to pursue meaningful oxytocin because we're moderately satisfying this deep human need to connect with one another. If we spend a lot of our time moderately satisfying this chemical, eventually the chemical begins to kick back and it will actually... increase feelings of loneliness within our brain because it's trying to create a greater desire to actually pursue meaningful connection. And thirdly our phones act as this sort of barrier between us and the people that in the outside world that we're trying to connect with in real life. They stop us from making eye contact with others which obviously we know is a good thing for social bonding but they also prevent us from actively listening to what the other person is saying. The way to know if you're actively listening is when you're listening to someone And I've struggled with this a lot. It's very easy to actually spend your time formulating your response in your head to what they're saying whilst they're talking. So you're not actually really listening. You're just in your mind creating something that you're going to say back next. Active listening is just taking the time to listen and then respond, taking the time to listen and then respond. And so one tip that people often say for improving your social skills, boosting your oxytocin levels, helping yourself be happier, making yourself... feel more connected to the people around you is to think eyes and ears, making eye contact with a person, the eyes and then ears in terms of actively listening to them. And I really shouldn't have to say this, but you know, I fall into this trap myself. Sometimes the phone is on the table, the watch pings with a notification from Slack or from WhatsApp or something. And it's like, someone's trying to talk to me, but then I'm like, should I look at the watch? It's like, would it be rude? And it's like, my mind is now on the notification or on that thing that's just happened rather than on the human being who's literally in front of me. And yeah, something I need to work on and. you know, maybe you might get some value from that little tip eyes and ears as well. All right, next up, we have action number four, which is to celebrate the wins. About a year ago, year and a half ago, I spent some time in Austin, Texas. And I was hanging out with Chris Williamson, who you might know from the Modern Wisdom podcast. And Chris very kindly invited me along that day to go on a boat with a guy called Bill Perkins, who's a mate of Chris. And Bill Perkins is a guy who wrote a book called Die With Zero, which I'd actually done a book club video about at some point. And so Chris connected me to Bill Perkins. And so I spent the day with these two really cool dudes, Chris and Bill. And I asked Bill a lot of questions because, you know, he's in his 50s. He's like a billionaire. And me and Chris were similar ages and Bill is sort of like in his 50s. And so we were asking him for some life advice. He said two things. The first thing he said was that the single most positive return on investment he has ever made in his life was in getting a relationships therapist. You know, relationship therapy is given a bit of a bad rep. It's something that couples only go through if they're going through a hard time. But actually, we should be thinking of it more as like a personal trainer at the gym. And that like, it's not someone you go to when you're injured it's someone you go to to prevent yourself getting injured while you're doing the exercises and so he was like fully recommending a relationship therapist even if especially if you don't have problems in your relationship and so i decided the following week i was going to book a relationship therapist and me and my wife izzy who's now my wife um have been seeing this relationship therapist regularly for the last 12 months thanks to the tip from bill but the second thing that bill said is that we should celebrate more wins and that is action for celebrating the wins and this has two big big impacts on us one is that it creates much more positive experience in our brain and our confidence will then increase as a result of us talking to ourself in a much more positive way. The other is it actually really impacts our capacity to succeed on whatever we're seeking to attain. If you're watching this channel, you're probably a bit of a high achiever. You probably care about productivity. You're probably very good looking. You are probably like me in that we collectively don't have much of a tendency to celebrate the wins. We tend to, you know, people with our form of neuroses tend to, you know, goal, you go towards the goal, you achieve the goal, you're like, all right, cool. Maybe you like give yourself a bit of a thumbs up for like three seconds. And then it's onto the next thing and onto the next thing. And the hedonic treadmill of like goal achievement. And it's all fun. We can enjoy the journey along the way, but the hustliness means that. we have a tendency to not celebrate the wins. At least I do. I don't know about you. And so celebrating wins is a key way of keeping up the connection and relationship that we have with ourselves. And also apparently, according to TJ, of boosting our oxytocin levels. Obviously, there's all the room for constructive criticism and negative feedback and all that kind of stuff. But generally, we want that voice in our head to be kinder to ourselves and to celebrate our own wins. Whereas we are often the most mean people to ourselves. Like the way that you probably talk to yourself, you wouldn't talk to any of your friends like that because they wouldn't be friends with you anymore. more but we talk to ourselves in that way and so focusing on celebrating more wins and giving ourselves a pat on the back you know that kind of thing is just a nice way of nudging our brain towards speaking to ourselves in a more positive fashion the best thing i can recommend is when you are just about to fall asleep as your last thing at night you've had your entire day you simply review your day and you think what is my primary achievement it really is important to understand this doesn't need to be a massive thing And then finally, we come to action number five, which is thoughts of gratitude. Now, this is another way to boost oxytocin by working on being kinder to ourselves. Because when you connect with other humans, it does create oxytocin, but we also all have the capacity to connect with ourself. And when you go into this, a lot of us do really struggle with the relationship we have with ourself. Some of us are super critical of ourself in our mind. Some people are really tough. They're really judgmental of their appearance, success, whatever it might be. So it's again, the point around this negative voice in our heads. We have We make these negative comparisons with where we are compared to where we want to be or where we are compared to other people around us. And whenever we make those negative comparisons, we are essentially causing ourselves unhappiness. And the opposite of this is gratitude, when we can express and feel and think gratitude for the things that we already have in our lives. I mean, actually, there was a study I read a few years ago. I can't remember where it was, but it's found that just doing... five minutes of gratitude journaling every day, just like writing down things that you're grateful for, had the same impact on your levels of happiness as doubling your salary. So think about your salary, think about how happy you feel if it was doubled. And I think that you can probably have that same effect according to this study. I don't know how replicable it was, but you get the idea. You can probably have that same effect by just writing down things that you're grateful for. This gratitude journaling is something that I weave into any sort of journaling that I do. I have a sort of morning manifesto, which is a morning thing that I do as part of my productivity system. And part of that is like, what am I grateful for? which is always a nice thing. And one thing that I've been trying to do again on TJ's recommendation is when I'm brushing my teeth for two minutes, I can habit stack that with thinking grateful thoughts of like, oh, I'm grateful for the cup of coffee I've just had. I'm grateful for the fact I'm about to have a shower. I'm grateful for the fact that I have a roof over my head, all of that kind of fun stuff. That's a lot easier to do when you pair it with an existing habit like brushing your teeth. So you might find that to be interesting as well. All right, so I hope you enjoyed that little look into the chemical oxytocin. And if you'd like to see the other videos in the series about dopamine, serotonin and endorphins, you can find them in a little. little playlist just for you over here. Thank you so much for watching. Bye bye.

And very excitingly here on the channel we are exploring each one of these in this four-part video series. So this video is all about oxytocin and five ways we can boost our oxytocin levels so that we feel more connected with others and with ourselves so that we can ultimately become happier. Part one the law of oxytocin. I would say at the human core oxytocin is actually the most desirable chemical.

In order for humans to procreate and survive, oxytocin has driven us to have relationships. And as much as we all seek for finance and wealth and things like that, a lot of what we're really seeking for is love and a family and relationships. And if you satisfy your oxytocin, your brain is going to be much calmer. It's going to be much more confident.

It's going to be a happier experience within your mind. And you are generally going to feel much more fulfilled in your life if your oxytocin is high. Now oxytocin is known as the love hormone because it's involved in bonding with others and one of the best ways to increase oxytocin is through what TJ calls the law of oxytocin. The law of oxytocin is to make someone else in your life happy every day and any time in which you're helping someone else to feel happy oxytocin doesn't just rise in them because they're experiencing human connection we fundamentally feel way happier as a human when we contribute to their life. Part two, five actions to increase oxytocin.

All right, so if we're thinking of actionable ways to increase our levels of oxytocin so that we feel more connected to ourselves and to others and so we become happier overall, the first is directly related to the law of oxytocin, which is acts of kindness. Okay. So in 2007, a bunch of researchers wanted to find out more about what made humans do generous things.

Generous things like helping a stranger in need or volunteering for a nonprofit organization or going on Amazon and leaving a nice review for Ali Abdaal's book, Feel Good Productivity. So to investigate this. spirit of generosity, they randomly split a group of people into two groups. Now one group was given oxytocin in the form of a nasal spray, so the oxytocin reached the brain directly, and the other group, the placebo group, was given a spray that did not contain the chemical. And then they all played some computer games which involved giving money to a stranger, and this is what the results show.

So this is the placebo group, and this is on average how much money they gave away to a stranger, but this is the oxytocin group, and this is how much money they gave away to a stranger. As the researchers said, those on oxytocin were 80% more more generous than those given a placebo. So together with being more generous, we'll form better social relationships and release more oxytocin in this positive feedback loop. And so boosting our oxytocin levels in the first place all starts with random acts of kindness.

There's this really good episode of Friends, the TV show, where Joey says to Phoebe that there's no such thing as a selfless good deed. Look, there's no unselfish good deed, sorry. Yes, there are.

There are totally good deeds that are selfless. And in this episode, Phoebe tries to do kind things for other people. So we.

without feeling good herself. So she, for example, goes and rakes someone's garden leaves without them knowing, so they have a good deed done. But what she ultimately discovers in this episode is it's fundamentally impossible to do something for someone else and not feel good yourself.

And it's very important to, on a regular basis, just have that in your mind. Like, how am I serving other people? Family, friends, colleagues, kids, whatever it might be. Because the more you serve others, the happier you will feel as a result. In my case, one of the things that I realized when I was working as a doctor in a previous life is that it would just be a- An uplift to my own day if I offered to make the nurses a cup of tea.

So a few times throughout the day, you know, I'd be doing my like paperwork or whatever, and I'd take a break, I'd go make myself a cup of tea, and then on the way I'd stop off at the nurse's office and ask if anyone would like a cup of tea. They mostly would say yes. And it wasn't much skin off my own back to make a few extra cups of tea. Because either way, I was going to make the tea for myself. So I might as well make three extra teas.

One with sugar, one with coffee cream, all that kind of stuff. But when I would give the nurses the tea, they would feel really happy. And I would feel really happy.

as well. I'd be like, oh, I just did a nice thing for someone. It's like, it didn't cost me anything.

It was super nice, super easy to do. And I found that it just lifted up my energy and lifted up my mood. So that especially during the dark days of the pandemic, when everything was all miserable and depressing for people who worked in hospitals and everyone else, it was a real difference in the energy and the approach that I took to my work. This is something I talk about in my book, Feel Good Productivity.

Basically the idea that is super backed up by science, that if we can do nice things for other people, People are a source of energy. And so we can turn our work into a source of energy by doing these random acts of kindness or by trying to connect whatever we're doing to the impact it might have on someone else. Even if it's something as small as making someone a cup of tea.

Okay, so we wanna be asking ourselves these two questions. Firstly, at the start of the day, you can ask yourself, what can I do to make someone else happy today? And then at the end of the day, you could ask yourself, what simple contribution have I made today? And this is a way of connecting the stuff that you've done with the impact it has on other people.

And in theory, that should boost your oxytocin levels. and help you feel happier. By the way, singing with a group of people or doing exercise with a group of people or working with a group of people makes whatever you're doing feel much better.

And that is where the sponsor of this video comes in, which is actually me, because this video is sponsored by our own product, Productivity Lab. If you're the sort of person who works from home a lot, maybe in your day job or maybe on your side hustle or your book project or your memoir or your YouTube channel or whatever, and you find yourself sitting at the computer and then not actually doing the thing that you intended to do, then Productivity Lab is going to be absolutely perfect for you. Essentially, Productivity Lab is an online platform and community of entrepreneurs and creators and professionals, and we all get together and we work together through Focus Labs.

We do reflective workshops each week where you reflect on how your week has gone and set goals and plan your next week. So it sort of serves as an accountability mechanism. And I like to think of it as a way to think about how you're going to be able to it as like CrossFit or Peloton for productivity.

You're joining a Zoom co-working session with other people. I join these for three hours each morning because I just get way more work done when I'm in a Focus Lab session, knowing that other people around me on screen virtually are also doing their work. And doing this stuff every day pretty much doubles my productivity. And we've had so many success stories from students in Productivity Lab who've said things like, hey, you know, I've been procrastinating on starting my YouTube channel for ages. and then I joined Focus Lab sessions, and now I've actually done it.

Or things like, you know, I've spent five years planning to make this new iOS app that I've been planning to make, and then I never actually did it. But then I joined a few Focus Lab sessions, and now I've built my minimum viable product. And so students in Productivity Lab are getting a lot of good results.

There's a link down below, you can check out productivitylab.com. And you can see if it's the sort of thing that might be right for you. And who knows, maybe I will see you in one of our co working sessions, or in one of our reflection workshops, or in one of our planning sessions, or in one of our book clubs, or maybe in one of our in person meetups as well. Action number two is the hug habit.

So obviously during the pandemic, we all had these social distancing regulations in place and we couldn't see people in person and we couldn't hug or high five or shake hands. We had to do those weird like, you know, elbow bumping knee type situations. And the lack of all these things probably contributed to the unhappiness that we saw a lot during the pandemic, even outside of the health effects of the pandemic. Because for example, we know that physical touch reduces short-term stress.

It improves immune system functioning and physical touch like massages have been found to have a positive impact on depression as well. And there's this interesting survey, the longing for touch question. questionnaire and they found that during the pandemic 86% of people desired more physical touch and then after COVID that number is still pretty high at around 80%. When I'm on stage I explain this idea that humans really need physical connection and I get the entire audience to rate how many hugs they think they're averaging per day.

On average of all 50,000 people we're at 1.6 hugs a day is what we've seen in our data and when you look into the research it's very clear that we need much more like five hugs a day. Now when we hug someone we release oxytocin in our brains. And I think I read somewhere that if you hug someone for six seconds, that's sort of like, you know, the optimal oxytocin release. Which feels like kind of long.

And I would, you know, when I first read this a couple of years ago, I started giving really long hugs to some of my friends. And I would, you know, they'd be like, huh, that was unusual. And I had to be like, oh, I read this thing, you know, saying that oxytocin, six seconds, blah, blah, blah. And I sort of felt a bit embarrassed about it.

And I've sort of lost the habit. But it's something I should probably reinstate in like a non-weird way. Action number three.

three, eyes and ears. Now there are unfortunately certain things in our life that stop us from connecting with others in a meaningful way. And these things stop oxytocin levels from rising in our brain.

And as you can imagine, the biggest culprits of this are firstly our phones and secondly, social media. And these things are bad for oxytocin levels for three main reasons. So firstly, the phones and social media reinforce individualistic behavior. So instead of us being more outwardly focused, we're always thinking about our own profiles and how many likes we've got and posting about our own lives and comparing our lives to other people.

which is not good for our mental health and certainly not good for our oxytocin levels. Secondly, phones and social media have been shown to make us feel pretty lonely. The challenge I have with this, I think it's actually creating a lack of desire to pursue meaningful oxytocin because we're moderately satisfying this deep human need to connect with one another. If we spend a lot of our time moderately satisfying this chemical, eventually the chemical begins to kick back and it will actually...

increase feelings of loneliness within our brain because it's trying to create a greater desire to actually pursue meaningful connection. And thirdly our phones act as this sort of barrier between us and the people that in the outside world that we're trying to connect with in real life. They stop us from making eye contact with others which obviously we know is a good thing for social bonding but they also prevent us from actively listening to what the other person is saying. The way to know if you're actively listening is when you're listening to someone And I've struggled with this a lot.

It's very easy to actually spend your time formulating your response in your head to what they're saying whilst they're talking. So you're not actually really listening. You're just in your mind creating something that you're going to say back next. Active listening is just taking the time to listen and then respond, taking the time to listen and then respond.

And so one tip that people often say for improving your social skills, boosting your oxytocin levels, helping yourself be happier, making yourself... feel more connected to the people around you is to think eyes and ears, making eye contact with a person, the eyes and then ears in terms of actively listening to them. And I really shouldn't have to say this, but you know, I fall into this trap myself.

Sometimes the phone is on the table, the watch pings with a notification from Slack or from WhatsApp or something. And it's like, someone's trying to talk to me, but then I'm like, should I look at the watch? It's like, would it be rude? And it's like, my mind is now on the notification or on that thing that's just happened rather than on the human being who's literally in front of me.

And yeah, something I need to work on and. you know, maybe you might get some value from that little tip eyes and ears as well. All right, next up, we have action number four, which is to celebrate the wins. About a year ago, year and a half ago, I spent some time in Austin, Texas.

And I was hanging out with Chris Williamson, who you might know from the Modern Wisdom podcast. And Chris very kindly invited me along that day to go on a boat with a guy called Bill Perkins, who's a mate of Chris. And Bill Perkins is a guy who wrote a book called Die With Zero, which I'd actually done a book club video about at some point.

And so Chris connected me to Bill Perkins. And so I spent the day with these two really cool dudes, Chris and Bill. And I asked Bill a lot of questions because, you know, he's in his 50s. He's like a billionaire. And me and Chris were similar ages and Bill is sort of like in his 50s.

And so we were asking him for some life advice. He said two things. The first thing he said was that the single most positive return on investment he has ever made in his life was in getting a relationships therapist.

You know, relationship therapy is given a bit of a bad rep. It's something that couples only go through if they're going through a hard time. But actually, we should be thinking of it more as like a personal trainer at the gym. And that like, it's not someone you go to when you're injured it's someone you go to to prevent yourself getting injured while you're doing the exercises and so he was like fully recommending a relationship therapist even if especially if you don't have problems in your relationship and so i decided the following week i was going to book a relationship therapist and me and my wife izzy who's now my wife um have been seeing this relationship therapist regularly for the last 12 months thanks to the tip from bill but the second thing that bill said is that we should celebrate more wins and that is action for celebrating the wins and this has two big big impacts on us one is that it creates much more positive experience in our brain and our confidence will then increase as a result of us talking to ourself in a much more positive way. The other is it actually really impacts our capacity to succeed on whatever we're seeking to attain. If you're watching this channel, you're probably a bit of a high achiever.

You probably care about productivity. You're probably very good looking. You are probably like me in that we collectively don't have much of a tendency to celebrate the wins. We tend to, you know, people with our form of neuroses tend to, you know, goal, you go towards the goal, you achieve the goal, you're like, all right, cool. Maybe you like give yourself a bit of a thumbs up for like three seconds.

And then it's onto the next thing and onto the next thing. And the hedonic treadmill of like goal achievement. And it's all fun. We can enjoy the journey along the way, but the hustliness means that. we have a tendency to not celebrate the wins.

At least I do. I don't know about you. And so celebrating wins is a key way of keeping up the connection and relationship that we have with ourselves. And also apparently, according to TJ, of boosting our oxytocin levels.

Obviously, there's all the room for constructive criticism and negative feedback and all that kind of stuff. But generally, we want that voice in our head to be kinder to ourselves and to celebrate our own wins. Whereas we are often the most mean people to ourselves.

Like the way that you probably talk to yourself, you wouldn't talk to any of your friends like that because they wouldn't be friends with you anymore. more but we talk to ourselves in that way and so focusing on celebrating more wins and giving ourselves a pat on the back you know that kind of thing is just a nice way of nudging our brain towards speaking to ourselves in a more positive fashion the best thing i can recommend is when you are just about to fall asleep as your last thing at night you've had your entire day you simply review your day and you think what is my primary achievement it really is important to understand this doesn't need to be a massive thing And then finally, we come to action number five, which is thoughts of gratitude. Now, this is another way to boost oxytocin by working on being kinder to ourselves.

Because when you connect with other humans, it does create oxytocin, but we also all have the capacity to connect with ourself. And when you go into this, a lot of us do really struggle with the relationship we have with ourself. Some of us are super critical of ourself in our mind.

Some people are really tough. They're really judgmental of their appearance, success, whatever it might be. So it's again, the point around this negative voice in our heads. We have We make these negative comparisons with where we are compared to where we want to be or where we are compared to other people around us. And whenever we make those negative comparisons, we are essentially causing ourselves unhappiness.

And the opposite of this is gratitude, when we can express and feel and think gratitude for the things that we already have in our lives. I mean, actually, there was a study I read a few years ago. I can't remember where it was, but it's found that just doing... five minutes of gratitude journaling every day, just like writing down things that you're grateful for, had the same impact on your levels of happiness as doubling your salary.

So think about your salary, think about how happy you feel if it was doubled. And I think that you can probably have that same effect according to this study. I don't know how replicable it was, but you get the idea. You can probably have that same effect by just writing down things that you're grateful for.

This gratitude journaling is something that I weave into any sort of journaling that I do. I have a sort of morning manifesto, which is a morning thing that I do as part of my productivity system. And part of that is like, what am I grateful for?

which is always a nice thing. And one thing that I've been trying to do again on TJ's recommendation is when I'm brushing my teeth for two minutes, I can habit stack that with thinking grateful thoughts of like, oh, I'm grateful for the cup of coffee I've just had. I'm grateful for the fact I'm about to have a shower.

I'm grateful for the fact that I have a roof over my head, all of that kind of fun stuff. That's a lot easier to do when you pair it with an existing habit like brushing your teeth. So you might find that to be interesting as well.

All right, so I hope you enjoyed that little look into the chemical oxytocin. And if you'd like to see the other videos in the series about dopamine, serotonin and endorphins, you can find them in a little. little playlist just for you over here. Thank you so much for watching. Bye bye.

Transcript for:Exploring Oxytocin and Human Connection

Transcript for:
Exploring Oxytocin and Human Connection