TJ Power is making an argument that most people intellectually understand but rarely act on: the four neurochemicals at the center of human happinessâdopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphinsâaren't produced by scrolling, snacking, or stimulus-seeking. They're produced by the same conditions our ancestors lived inside every day. Sunlight. Cold. Physical challenge. Deep social bonds. The practices we call "wellness protocols" are just modern names for ancestral defaults.
What I find compelling here is TJ's framing of dopamine not as a reward, but as a drive. Dopamine isn't what you feel when you succeed. It's what pulls you toward the fire, the hunt, the effort. When that system gets hijackedâby pornography, alcohol, endless YouTubeâyou don't feel better. You just feel the absence of the real thing more acutely. The absence of dopamine, as the transcript puts it, is the presence of addiction.
This maps cleanly onto what Huberman has documented. In the discipline breakdown I've read through in our knowledge base, cold exposure generates a 250% elevation in dopamineânot a spike, but a sustained plateau lasting hours. That's the distinction that matters. Digital stimulation creates spikes and crashes. Cold creates a slow, stable rise that leaves your baseline intact, even improved over time.
The Huberman heat exposure data adds another layer. When you're in a sauna past the point of comfort, your body releases dynorphinâa dysphoric signal, genuinely unpleasantâwhich then sensitizes your mu opioid receptors. When you emerge, your endorphin system hits harder than it would have otherwise. TJ is describing the same mechanism from a different angle: endorphins trained through repeated discomfort aren't just analgesia. They're a recalibration of your baseline capacity for pleasure.
There's near-universal agreement on dopamine and cold. Where things get more nuanced is oxytocin. TJ points toward shared challenge as a bonding mechanismâa group that suffers together, connects. This shows up in blue zone research too: the common thread isn't diet or exercise protocol. It's social cohesion. But oxytocin is fragile. It's proximity-dependent, context-dependent. A cold plunge alone gives you dopamine. A cold plunge with someone else might give you both.
If you're going to take one thing from TJ's framework: audit your dopamine sources before adding protocols. Cold plunges layered on top of a high-stimulus lifestyle are noise reduction at the margins. The real work is removing the cheap sourcesâphone in the evening, passive consumption, low-effort scrollingâand letting the natural systems rebuild their sensitivity. Then the cold, the movement, the morning light land differently. They land the way they were designed to.
TJ mentions that he fell into cigarettes, alcohol, and pornography as a teenager before studying neuroscience. That trajectoryâlived experience before formal understandingâis more common than people admit, and it matters. The most credible voices in this space aren't the ones who optimized from birth. They're the ones who broke themselves first and had to rebuild. That personal archaeology gives TJ something clinical researchers often lack: he knows what the absence of these chemicals actually feels like in a body. Not in a dataset. In a life.