DOPEamine

I've personally had quite the challenge of facing the fear that comes from staring at a blank canvas. What do we want from this blank page? Why is it so intimidating? Is there a problem with me? Where am I going to get the motivation to create?

This episode focuses on that topic of motivation and how or why we should simply start creating and giving back to reality. 

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Every day new creators are born from the ashes of their difficult pasts. Some of the best songs written are expressions of triumph or expressions of love for the teachers in their lives. Creativity, to me, is the desire to give back to reality. What we're giving back is a remix of all of the lessons we've learned, the entertainment we've enjoyed, and the challenges we've had to face in our lives. At some point, we start to appreciate and see the value more and more in what reality has given us and instinctively want to give back to that reality. 
Each of us has this call to create, our collection of influences and lessons that we're wanting to translate into an expression. So, what is your call to create?
Sign up for my free class called Press Start on Your Brand Messaging, a class designed to help you figure out your X to Y statement that you can take with you to parties or events when you meet new people to quickly explain what you do. It's a great class that has changed a few perspectives and I hope you'll join us!
http://www.bit.ly/startmessage

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Desperation is a difficult to shake feeling. You need something to change and you need it to change now. But what strategy is the best for managing desperation? On this episode I talk about desperation in 3 different contexts: personal finance, relationships, and selling. Each one comes with its own challenges but by the end we land on a few common behaviors that we can watch out for when we're in that place of desperation. bit.ly/dopeintrototype

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These days, it's a challenge to be proud of being a man. If you're caught in the whirlwind of political and religious social media drama it can be easy to feel like being a man is an inferior trait. It could even feel like being a man today means to be less of a man to make room for others. I would beg the opposite of you.



The world needs more grown-ass men than ever. Strength, protection, perseverance, honor, reliability, creativity, and growth are all amazing traits that men can bring to the table. What does it mean to be a grown-ass man? Well, for me, it's a few simple concepts.

Join our community or Press Start on Your Brand Messaging

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I've just come out of one of the most difficult mental health spikes I've experienced in recent memory. The depression side of things wasn't so bad, as I've learned to manage my mental energy with gratitude practices, mediation, and overall giving myself fewer expectations during those difficult times. Mania, however, is a completely different story.
Hypomania, which comes along with my Cyclothymia, is a state of being in which I crave a "hit" of some sort. I need a high to keep me going and usually that comes in the form of overspending, over-drinking and an accelerated, and sometimes frightening, sex-drive. The mania sides of things hasn't been easy to manage. So much so that I spent most of my mental health spike in bed trying to stave off these horrible feelings by watching Dragon Ball Super on my phone. But the truth is, in order for me to work through it I've had to spend more time focusing on my emotional difficulties in order to get through mania. 
In either case, I need to continue to look at my mental health as an opportunity to grow. What is my mental health telling me that I need to work on? Am I putting too much value on negative emotions? Am I putting too much value on positive emotions? Am I not giving myself enough of an opportunity to breath and remove expectations of myself? Or am I working on my mental and physical health enough in my every day life?
This podcast episode explores those ideas of using our mental illness as an opportunity to check-in with where we are, check-in with our mortality, analyze how we feel about ourselves and face the honest difficulties in which we need to face.
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We now have a community in which you can leave comments, questions, and share your story with us over at http://www.dopeamine.life/community
We also have a free brand messaging course available at http://www.bit.ly/startmessage

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Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/happychemicals/message

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It's been a challenge to become comfortable with my brand of thinking, my brand of identity and how I can bring that to the world. Recently, on an episode of Personality Hacker titled "How To Become an Influencer" I was inspired to think about how connective energy is what leads to someone becoming entertaining. Whether you're an educator or motivator, if you've got that spark of identity, with purpose, and it's focused...you can become connective, and therefore, entertaining. This episode is here to break down this concept.
This episode is also inspired by "Your Mess is Your Message" by Personality Hacker
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You can read the article version on our website:
4 Keys to Become Entertaining
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Press Start on Your Brand Messaging

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The mind is a tricky thing, so much so that it is very easy for us to convince ourselves that bad things are good for us or that good things can have consequences. Secondary Payoffs is a concept tied to this mental trickery. A secondary payoff is the continued feeling of getting rewards from bad behavior. Sugar tasting good, cigarettes calming stress, or alcohol taking away our worry. Conversely, secondary losses are the feeling that changing our behavior will lead to rejection, bad feelings, further stress, greater problems, or self-loathing. 
This episodes covers the breadth of excuses that we make for ourselves to continue living a life of secondary payoffs. We also discuss secondary losses and how to get yourself back on the right track.

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From reality TV to that loud neighbor yelling at her cats, why do we find toxic people to be interesting? Could it be that we're hoping to feel better about ourselves by surrounding ourselves with difficult people? Do we not feel worth of love from healthy people? Do we not think of ourselves and healthy and feel we deserve to be surrounded by toxic people?
There's a myriad of reasons why toxicity is so interesting to us and why it keeps our attention. We study toxicity, we live in it, and we can create it to make life just a little more interesting. Because sometimes we create toxic environments simply because we're bored. A lack of gratitude for the moment could be another reason. 
In this episode, we break down all of the potential reasons that we're attracted to toxic behavior and how some simple mental reframes can pull us out of these toxic situations.

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Stress is a feeling we are all very familiar with. We often put it on ourselves more than we need to and much of it comes from some sense of magical thinking. Magical in the sense that we're trying to predict the future or make the future come sooner. There are other kinds of stress that are healthy, mechanisms that warn us of actual danger, but if we're dealing with such intense stress in our daily lives that we can't see the difference between chronic stress and acute stress, then we might be in for some trouble. 
This episode is meant to help differentiate what is acute stress and what is chronic stress that we tend to put on ourselves. I've also got some tips on how to mitigate that long-term stress and stay present. This episode was inspired by Art of Manliness Podcast Episode #525: How to Stress Proof Your Body and Brain
I also recommend going to back to listen to How to say "No" episode and Personal Narratives to help manage that chronic stress.
It also helps to learn about personality typology to know what brings you the most stress in your life.


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Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" in Psychological Review. This theory is used by many psychologists and personality typology coaching in their trainings and research to help diagnose a person's stage of needs and development. The hierarchy focuses on 5 key areas: Physiological Needs, Safety and Security, Love and Belonging, Esteem, and Self-Actualization. This model helps a person to see which needs of theirs may be going unmet in their day to day lives. And while a person can jump between levels depending on life circumstances, it typically is a fairly linear progression up the pyramid of needs. This model can be particularly powerful when supplemented with other models to assess personal status, relationship disparities, and a personal sense of forgiveness for life circumstances.
Today on the show we're talking about how Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs can be used in assessing one's level and place. I share a bit of where I'm at and how this model is useful in navigating relationships, as most relationship conflict occurs because a need is going unmet. Everyone has their own challenges and this model is a great way of seeing how our desire for basic human needs can affect our behavior in day-to-day life.
Sign up for the FREE Myers-Briggs course at http://www.bit.ly/dopeintrototype 

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Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/happychemicals/message

Get full access to DOPEamine at dopeamine.substack.com/subscribe