Dr Iain gets to introduce this bit…
So there I was on a dog walk in the middle of a wood, lost, at dusk, when Dulcie called me posing the idea of using DOSE (Dopamine – Oxytocin – Serotonin – Endorphin) as a selfstyled, self-help pharmaceutical palate. The more we talked the more merit and credence we could see in it as a useful model to help others. My dog and I found the path out of the wood and Dulcie’s mind continued to work on producing the 4-quadrant palate.
This was a matter of weeks before Dulcie’s Christmas grateful sofa chat (you’ll find more about that in the book) with Jamie that was the genesis of The52Project. This was a fateful pairing of thoughts and discussions that were foundational in what has become The52Project.
There are two important aspects that we would like to acknowledge here.
Firstly, it turns out, like many an idea, that others have also found and used DOSE as a useful model. Dulcie might say “great minds”, I’d say “convergent evolution of thought” – both of us would say: “There is nothing (nowt) new under the Sun”.
We’d just like to acknowledge some of our kindred thinkers, speakers and providers who we have only recently discovered online as we have come to complete converting The52Tips blogs into the book:
• The Marshall Skills Academy: www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/get-your-daily-dose-happiness
• Mind My Peelings: www.mindmypeelings.com/blog/daily-dose-of-happiness-chemicals
• Kaia Roman, author of The Joy Plan: www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/trigger-happy-chemicals
• Nicole Lazzaro on Clark Bucker’s B2B Nation’s technology Advice podcast: https://technologyadvice.com/blog/information-technology/activate-chemicals-gamify-happiness-nicole-lazzaro/
• Wellington Multiple Sclerosis (supporting people with MS) https://mswellington.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Your-Daily-Green-DOSE-V1.pdf
If you have also ‘found’ / ‘thought out’ DOSE as a model for yourself, or found it elsewhere, do connect with us – we’d love to see this as a model that can help as many as possible together.
Secondly, to paraphrase the great British statistician and thinker George Box: ‘all models are fallible, some are useful’. The amazing and enormous complexity of the brain’s biology means that such chemicals (neurotransmitters and hormones) are only some of the ones in play, and each has very specific local actions (sometimes counterintuitively so), as well as more global brain or body ones too. This is also before we even consider the multitude of chemical receptors and their different functions.
To be healthy some chemicals require balancing rather than an ever-long pursuit of more i.e., more is not always better. So, as a self-pharmaceutical-styled model, DOSE can only ever be part of the ‘answer’. To really help ourselves and others to greater happiness requires the concurrent and strategic neural ‘rewiring’, and ‘maintenance’ of that wiring, that occurs by doing such #Tips, consistently and stacking them.
This is the real ‘power’ of the approach and what we are advocating in The52Project and the book.