Modern Wisdom - #768 - Dr K HealthyGamer - How To Control Your Emotions & Become Mentally Strong

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Dr K is a psychiatrist, Harvard Medical School instructor, co-founder of Healthy GamerGG, Twitch streamer and a YouTuber. Humans face a predicament that has never been seen before, a massive overload of stimulation. The effect of constant exposure to social media, video games, and porn is not good, but thankfully Dr K has developed a ton of powerful ways to finally take back control of your attention. Expect to learn what social media is doing to our brains, how much we can attribute the mental health crisis to screens, why anxiety and depression are so prevalent, how to let emotions into your life more, why therapy so often sucks for men, why high profile YouTubers are quitting, how to separate your self worth from your accomplishments and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to 32% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 50% off your first Factor Meals box by going to https://factormeals.com/MW50 (discount automatically applied at checkout) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. K. He's a psychiatrist, Harvard Medical School instructor, co-founder of Healthy Gamer GG, Twitch streamer and a YouTuber. Humans face a predicament that has never been seen before, a massive overload of stimulation. The effect of constant exposure to social media, video games and porn is not good, but thankfully Dr. K has developed a ton of powerful ways to finally take back control of your attention. Expect to learn what social media is doing to our brains, how much we can attribute the mental health crisis to screens, why anxiety and depression are so prevalent, how to let

emotions into your life more, why therapy so often sucks for men, why high profile YouTubers are quitting, how to separate your self-worth from your accomplishments and much more. I love Dr K. He's got this awesome blend of Western and Eastern practices. He's funny with the way that he communicates things. It's strategic and simple. It's empathetic and caring. I love him. I think he's one of the best mental health and mindset advocates on the

internet at the moment. And I'm really, really glad for this to be the first one, the first episode from that huge video wall production thing that I've been harping on about for a little while now and it's beautiful. But given that you're listening to this just on audio, you won't feel any difference. It's just going to be nice nice normal conversation with some buttery quality audio sounds coming through your ears and if you do want to check out what it looked like

you can head over to YouTube. Also don't forget that we have three more of these huge episodes to release with Dr Peter Atiyah, Tim Ferriss and Mr Ballin. The only way that you can ensure you won't miss those when they go live is by pressing subscribe and it's free and it supports the show and it makes me happy so navigate to Spotify and press the follow button in the middle of the screen or the plus in the top right hand corner on Apple podcasts I thank you very much but now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Dr. K You spend a lot of time thinking about our interaction with screens. How would you describe what technology is doing to our brains? I think the short answer is not good. So I think technology has a lot of benefits. So it has a lot

of benefits for our lives, but specifically what is it doing to our brains, I think is generally speaking, not very good. So just as one example, if you look at basically social media, video games, pornography, most of the technology that we use that is not directly work related is going to have suppressive effects on our like negative emotional circuitry. So anytime you're feeling bad, if you browse social media, or you play a video game, like it's going to shut off your negative emotions, which can feel good in the short term, but in the long term, it's really not good. Right.

So it is a anesthetic. Yeah. People use to salve bad humor. I have seen a number of girl friends who, if there is a, if they're feeling a little bit uncomfortable, would get on their phone and like self soothe by scrolling. Yeah. I mean, I think everyone does that. So I think if you really pay attention, what I've noticed is, you know,

watch yourself in a transition. So anytime there's a transition, anytime you're getting into the elevator, you're waiting in line somewhere, you're even getting up from like your work desk to walk somewhere else, people will just automatically pull out their phones. So we've become so hooked to these things.

And I think, um, app designers, phone designers have also tried to. Capitalize on that impulsivity. So if you think about it, like even things like face ID, like that shrinks the time between an impulse up here and engagement in your phone. between an impulse up here and engagement in your phone. What does chronic long-term hiding from feeling feelings result in? I think it, I'd say the biggest problem that it creates is like being stagnant in life.

So if we understand, like, let's think about this, right? So everyone thinks we have good emotions and bad emotions. So we have these emotions that are good, like excitement, joy, curiosity, love. And then we have bad emotions like anger, sadness, shame, fear, and we don't want the bad emotions, we want the good emotions. But if you stop and think about it for a second,

every human being on the planet has evolved to experience bad emotions. It's a second, every human being on the planet has evolved to experience bad emotions. It's a feature, it's not a bug. And then the question is why? And if we look at our negative emotional circuitry, it is very close, like anatomically, our limbic system is very close to our hippocampus, which is where learning and memory take place. So they're like sitting right next to each other, a lot of strong connections.

So negative emotions are powerful sources of information and motivation. So if you kind of think about anxiety, we all want to conquer anxiety, but if we stop and really think about it, anxiety helps us realize like what to avoid, you know, it drives us in a particular direction. If we look at emotions like shame,

shame actually is supposed to be a powerful motivator to drive corrective action. So if I feel ashamed for failing a test, I want to study really hard so I never feel that shame again. And so paradoxically, what happens when we shut off our negative emotions is we lose the motivation to actually fix our problems. And this is why I think we see a generation of people who are like stuck. Mm. Jonathan Haidt was on the show recently talking about his new book, The Anxious Generation.

How much of the modern uptick in anxiety, depression, persistent feelings of listlessness and hopelessness, how much of that do you think actually should be laid at the feet of social media? I think a fair amount. Like I don't know how to give it a percentage, maybe somewhere between 30 and 50%. But I think that what I really see with technology

is that it propagates problems. So technology in some ways, actually it creates some problems, but it also propagates problems. So in my kind of clinical work, what I see a lot of is that, if you're depressed about something in life, social media or video games will propagate that problem way worse.

So what I see a lot of is like, let's say I'm a 15 year old kid, I'm overweight, I'm going through puberty, my voice is cracking, I don't feel great about myself, I don't have a whole lot of friends. And when I was growing up, like, I had no choice but to overcome that in some way, because I had no escape, so I had to learn how to make friends,

even though it was painful. Now what we're seeing is a generation of people who can use technology to run away from their problems. So I would say that what I really see is, is whatever direction you're moving in in life, technology will amplify that. So if you're moving in the wrong direction, it'll make it worse.

But if you look at people like yourself and maybe me, we use technology to amplify the work that we're doing. Yeah, I think it's still, even with all of the millions of plays and all the rest of the stuff, technology is pretty close to like a net zero for me overall. I have a very negative relationship, I think, with my phone and with social media, a lot of shame around being so

fragile and fickle that I can't control the compulsion to take it out, to check it. You know, you see from a front row seat, all of the minutes and hours that you fritter away all of the times that you open up another tab. And then you try and then bring in additional technology to try and constrain this I've been using Opal for iPhone. I'm using cold Turkey for Mac, which sort of limit websites within particular schedules throughout the day. And, uh, it just, I don't feel proud of my, of my phone and technology

and social media use, even though it's something that I has created a life that I very much enjoy. I think a lot of people feel like that. Yeah. So I have kind of a weird answer to that, which is like, so what came first, the shame or the problem with technology? Probably the shame. Yeah.

Right. So I think this is what we tend to see is that, so if, if you have, and this is kind of the Sanskrit concept of something called a samskara, which is like a ball of undigested negative emotion. And even in psychoanalysis, we kind of have this theory that's like Freud and Jung kind of came up with, right? That we have stuff living in our subconscious. And then what happens is that feeling of shame

will find some manifestation in your life. And unless you heal that feeling of shame, so why is it that you feel shame in relation to technology instead of anger, instead of paranoia that, oh my God, because of I'm so addicted to technology, everything's gonna fall apart, it'll all get messed up, or you're pissed at yourself, or you're pissed at iPhone makers or whatever.

So the manifestation, your manifestation of how you relate to technology comes in part from you. And so I think when I work with people, usually what I find is the antidote to that is get to the root of that shame and where that shame is kind of lingering from, coming from, coming from. And I can even see in your life

that you've become so amazing. And I would bet money that your search for being an amazing human being, physically fit, successful, proud, emotionally connected with yourself has been to run away from a version of Chris that was ashamed of himself. Oh, absolutely correct.

Yeah. And the emotional connection thing, I'm glad that you're here. Uh, this is something I'm pretty obsessed by at the moment, trying to feel feelings and, and work out how emotions work. Um, before we go into that, let's say there is someone listening. That's like, I think I feel shame. I think I, that, that does arise in me. Perhaps that's something that's there. Dr.

K just spoke about you get to the root of it and kind of look at it and stuff. What does that mean? Like how do people deal with shame through self inquiry or how do people deal with shame at all? So, I mean, I have a couple of different answers. So one is like based on this yogic tradition. So I spent years studying to become a monk and I think that's incredibly invaluable.

And then also from like a psychiatric perspective of being a psychiatrist and doing psychotherapy. I think both directions kind of meet by the way. So I'd say we have to start by understanding that, okay, so what let's think about emotions, right? So if I am walking down the street and let's say I reach out to pet a dog, and if I pet a dog and the dog like nips at me,

I feel fear. And then if I'm a kid, I may start crying and then mommy or daddy picks me up. And then five minutes later, I feel totally fine because mommy or daddy has distracted me, it gives me ice cream, whatever. But then if you sort of look at it, the next time I see a dog,

I will have a physiologic response. I will feel afraid of the dog, even if the dog is across the street. So on a very, very simple sense, if we look at the way that we learn and the way that the trauma works, so we have a negative experience, and oftentimes we do not process that experience.

It simply goes dormant. And so the next time that I see the dog, the fear comes rushing back because it's living in my mind. What does processing and experience mean? Yeah. So let's say that you were walking down the street as a grown adult. Do you like dogs? Yes.

And if you get, if you try to pet a dog and it nips at you in the first second or less than a second, you will have the identical physiologic response as a five year old. Your sympathetic nervous system will activate. You'll panic, you know, you're, you're, you'll get a burst of adrenaline. And then what would you say to yourself after the dog tries to bite you?

That dog's a dick. What caused that to happen? Was that something that I did? Is it because of the- There you go, right? So what happens in a five-year-old's mind? Not that. Did I do something to cause this?

What's going on with the dog? Maybe I should be a little bit more careful. So what you do, what you literally do is you take that emotion and then you look at it from different perspectives. This is also what we do in psychotherapy. When someone has a, let's say they have a bunch of shame, we'll ask the question,

okay, where does that shame come from? How do you feel about that? What are the different ways that you can look at it? And if you sort of look at it, the other thing that happens with shame is we start to develop identities of ourselves. So there's the emotion of shame, and then we start to form conclusions about ourself.

Like I feel ashamed in this moment, and then that becomes I am a terrible human being. I'm a loser. Right? Now this becomes a statement of fact that has a life that is independent of the shameful experience. So when we talk about processing shame, there is some amount of emotional work, but then there's also work on the ego level, or the ahamkara is what it's called in Sanskrit, where our emotional experiences result in conclusions

that we form about ourselves. And so those conclusions need to be re-examined. And the most damning thing is that when we are emotional, we form very powerful conclusions, but since we're emotional, they're more likely to be wrong. And if anyone has gone through a breakup, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Cause you go through all these conclusions in your head. This person is terrible. Women are terrible. I'm terrible. I'll never find love again. You form all these conclusions from an emotional state, but those conclusions don't go

away when literally the emotional circuitry of our brain reaches homeostasis or equilibrium. Those learnings stay with us. So we have the ball of unprocessed emotion from the Eastern side. What are you looking at from a Western equivalent? What's the viewpoint there? Yeah, so I would say in the Western equivalent,

so how do we process shame or how do we handle shame? Let's say, let's divide it into a couple of things. One is that there are certain techniques that you can do to literally reduce the activity of your negative emotional circuitry. So you can do things like breathing exercises. We know that each emotion is correlated with a certain pattern of breathing.

So we can even do a quick demonstration where I'm just gonna breathe at you and you tell me if you can tell what kind of emotion I'm feeling, right? So, what do you? Anger? Absolutely, right? Now, so it's gonna seem similar, but. Arousal?

Absolutely, right? Both of them are deep breaths. I like the second. Right? And I can't help it. I have to add a little bit of facial expression to it. And so you can just listen to someone's breathing. And then there's also, what do you think that is?

Nervousness, fear. Absolutely, like, and think about that. You're not trained as a psychiatrist. This stuff is baked so deeply into your mind. Our empathic circuitry is wired this heavily where you and anyone else who's watching or listening to that can tell. So our emotional energy,

when we have our amygdala in our limbic system that's active, there are certain physiologic changes and we can engage in certain techniques to essentially reduce those. And this is why breathing is really helpful because if you change the nature of your breath, everything in the body has a homeostatic, so there's a feedback loop.

So you can start breathing a particular way, and as you breathe a particular way, it will alter your emotions. If you feel a certain emotion, it will alter your breathing. So we can work on that level. Then the second thing that I kind of mentioned is that we have, once we have emotions,

then we have kind of like these conclusions that we draw. We have impacts on our identity, which is our like our humcar or our ego. And then once we have those kinds of conclusions about the world and about ourselves, those then form the basis of our logic, which then influence our behaviors. So, and I think sort of dealing with this deals with all three. So we want to reduce the emotion in the moment, and then we want to critically look at the conclusions that we've drawn about the world. And then the last thing that we really want to do

is pay attention to how do these conclusions become automatic behaviors. And then if we want to change those behaviors, then we need to look at our sense of our identity as well as our emotional experience. I don't think I answered your question though, because you asked what is the Western equivalent of a subscar? Okay.

So this is where I kind of mapped it out. So in the East, what we would say is there's this ball of undigested emotional energy. This is what I would call a trauma that lives in your subconscious. And then in the West, so that's what we'd call like a trauma and that lives in your subconscious in some way. And then this generates something called a schema, which is like a way of thinking. So we can have these sort of automatic thoughts

from cognitive behavioral therapy or narcissistic defense mechanisms when we're talking about ego or hamkar. And then we also know from CBT that both of these things will influence behavior. So in cognitive behavioral therapy, we're looking at the relationship between our thoughts, our feelings and our actions.

So it all maps out like pretty much one to one. Yeah. I, uh, I'm fascinated by the assumptions that we have about the world and the fact that I spoke to Dr. Paul Conti, a trauma guy, and he gave me this really great story where he said, I was in a car crash when I was like 20, 20 years old and I was fine, but I could have not been fine. Yeah. He said that when you encounter something that's a highly traumatic event, your memory after that can color your memories before that based on that experience.

And I never thought about this, that I could tell myself, um, because of, let's say I had travel anxiety, which I didn't. I have travel anxiety. Is it because of the car crash? Well, no, I've never liked driving. I've always been scared of driving even before that thing happened. I've no, and it's just part of the baked in assumptions and physics of your system. And that's just how you see the world.

100%. And that's terrifying because to me, you have been robbed of your ability to fact check what is true and what is false by your own mind. And that's intended. That's, that's a, that's not a bug. That's a feature. How so? That's a survival feature.

So I'll give you just simple example. So let's say I go eat at a restaurant five times, right? And it's my favorite restaurant. The sixth time I go, I get food poisoning. So if we look at like what happens, if you get food poisoning once, your brain does not think, calculate, okay, 15% of the time we get food poisoning,

so we should be able to eat there. All it takes is one negative experience to bias all of our recollections of the past. And that's a survival mechanism, right? So let's think about like when we were evolving, let's say I go to a watering hole to get water, but the sixth time I go, a crocodile jumps out at me. It is of a lot of benefit for my survival.

If I go back and question the last five, did I get lucky? Was that actually safe? Who knows? So one of the things that we know, and there's a fascinating field of science which is emerging now called neuroeconomics. And neuroeconomics is fascinating because it looks at all of these cognitive biases that we have, especially around negative experiences. And one of the things that we learned is that the human brain doesn't want to perceive reality.

It wants to perceive, it wants to adjust reality for the benefit of survival. And I'll give you just a really interesting and terrifying example of that. So our brain, when we look at, let's say I'm gonna ask a girl out on a date, okay? So our brain, when I think about asking the girl out on the date, the dopaminergic centers

of my brain, the nucleus accumbens, the place that I feel pleasure. So if I ask her out and she says yes, I feel an exhilaration of pleasure. The dopaminergic circuits of my brain in a hypothetical yes do not activate. But the negative emotional circuitry in my brain can activate and actually make me suffer based on a hypothetical. So if you've ever been in this situation and you think about how things go wrong, that's not a hypothetical.

You can feel the pain of a future loss today, but you cannot feel the pleasure of winning an award or getting a trophy today. Like literally hypotheticals can activate your negative emotional circuitry in the present, but they do not activate your dopaminergic circuitry. Wow. And this is one of the reasons why we're so biased

towards the negative. So it's a fundamental neuroscientific asymmetry. 100%. And we didn't know this even 10 years ago, because now we know so much about human behavior We know so much about neuroscience that we can actually look at some of these behaviors that people have where people are very risk-averse Right, and we know what the neuroscience of it is. That is crazy. I have this idea Anxiety cost which is the longer that you take to do a, the more times you think about having not yet done the thing.

So you wake up in the morning, you've got to meditate and you have the thought, I still need to meditate today five times. Had you just meditated first thing in the morning, you would have not needed to have those and it's a way to, uh, I guess, justify front loading stuff that needs to be done. And also it brings a cash value to inaction. A lot of the time we believe that inaction is a, it's an impartial strategy. It's not really doing anything either good nor bad, but there is a cash value in attention. But it seems like there's an even more important cash value

of ruminating about this particular thing can cause you to embed a circuit and a story and an identity about the sort of person that you are. Because if it's a negative experience that you're going through, you're in very many ways are living it over and over and over again. 100%. And that's why I think about it's a negative experience that you're going through, you're in very many ways are living it over and over and over again. 100%.

And that's why I think about it for a second. If you don't meditate in the first thing in the morning, do you remind yourself once or do you remind yourself five times? Five times. And the reason is because, so if we think about, okay, sitting down and meditate requires some willpower, right?

And then if I start to feel anxious, that negative anxiety circuitry activates, now what I literally have to do is the willpower that I would have used to sit down to meditate is now focused on reigning in that anxiety. So my willpower drops, I can't force myself to meditate, which is why you feel anxious again and a third time and a fourth time.

And the more anxious you feel, the harder it becomes to meditate, which is why I think it's beautiful that in your example, you didn't say, I feel anxious twice. You said, I feel anxious five times. And then what ends up happening is we get so frustrated with ourselves that eventually if we're lucky, we'll sit down to meditate, but absolutely there's a huge cost to even experiencing anxiety.

Why is anxiety, depression and and attention, or lack of focus? Why does it seem like those three, maybe some others, but largely those three are the emotions du jour of the modern world. What is it that's activating those particular pathways, anxiety, depression, attention deficit? Uh, so I've got kind of two answers. One is like an Eastern answer and one is a Western answer. So let's understand a couple of things.

So I personally think from the, if you take an Eastern perspective, this is all rooted in a lack of attention. So if we look at, let's say depression or anxiety. So a big experience of depression is shame or regret. So people are not usually depressed about the future, they're usually depressed about the past. And even if you think you're depressed about the future,

the reason you're depressed about the future is because of the conclusions about yourself that you draw from past behavior, right? So I'm hopeless about the future because I'm a loser. Well, where did that conclusion of I'm a loser come from? It came from past experiences. So if we look at it from an Eastern perspective, the mind has three places it can be. It can be in the present, it can be in the past, or it can be in the future. And one of the things that we kind of know is that if my mind is stuck in the past, that's where we have depression,

where there's a regret and there's shame about past actions. Anxiety, it has to be future focused. You can't be anxious about something in the past. So when our mind goes to the future, we are prone to anxiety. When our mind goes to the past, we're prone to depression. So what that means is that the fundamental problem, if you think about runaway anxiety, what does that mean? We give people medications like benzodiazepines

or serotonergic medications. And what do these medications do? Benzodiazepines activate the GABA receptor in the brain. They increase chloride flow across our channels and they hyperpolarize our neurons. They essentially dull us out. So one of the treatments for anxiety is to literally turn the brain down to 50% function.

That is our treatment, okay? Serotonergic medications work in some similar ways. So what that means is we're trying to literally like dull out the brain. And why is that? That's because the brain has gotten out of control. We cannot control our anxiety. We're stuck in a thought loop.

There's a panic attack, whatever. So if we really look at it, what's the root of the problem? If you can stop thinking about it, then the anxiety goes away. Enter addiction. This is where technology comes in because, hey, what is the best way to stop thinking about something? Let me watch some pornography because when I'm watching pornography, when I'm playing a video game, I'm no longer worrying about tomorrow. So now what's happened is we bring our attention to the present because when I'm playing a video game, I'm thinking about the future. That's the whole joy of it, right? I'm playing against this guy. I'm going to own him in the game, right? So brings

our attention to the present, which is why it's so addictive. Now this creates a problem though, because once I use a video game as a crutch to bring myself to the present, then my frontal lobes weaken. I cannot control my mind anymore. So the second I stop playing a video game, my mind will return to anxiety or depression. Because it's been so buttressed and reliant on the technology to stepping. Absolutely, right? So it's like we're taking the elevator instead of the stairs

every single day in our mind. And so we become deconditioned. So this is where if you look at, even if you look at like, you know, evidence-based mindfulness techniques and things like that for depression and anxiety, it's all about attentional control. If you can control the attention of your mind, the anxiety and the depression will melt away.

And this is what I've seen in my clinical practice as well. So I would say in wise depression and anxiety getting worse, I think I really believe the root of it is attentional. And if you look at the biggest impact of all technologies, they're all attentional. They're all trying to keep us glued in. And then once we're glued in, there can be other downstream effects,

like when everyone's using filters, then we can have low self-esteem and that can make us feel depressed and things like that. So there's absolutely those effects as well. But I think attentional problems are actually at the root of it. We'll get back to talking to Dr. K in one minute, but first I need to tell you about

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because they give you dying and failure. So here's the beautiful thing. Okay. Chris, think about this. So the whole problem, if, if video games did not offer dying and failure. So here's the beautiful thing, okay? Chris, think about this. So the whole problem, if video games did not offer dying and failure, people would be way better off. So here's what happens in a video game.

You die, you fail. What happens next? Reborn. Absolutely. And then what do you do? You try again. Now think about this, right? So the beautiful thing about a video game

is it gives you this illusion of failure. And the reason it's an illusion of failure because there's no consequence. The game is designed gives you this illusion of failure. The reason it's an illusion of failure because there's no consequence. The game is designed for you to eventually win. It's designed to give you the illusion of failure, not real failure. Now in the real world, if I fail a class and I get an A next time around,

my GPA, my transcript is screwed forever. There's no redos in life, right? Like that's the whole problem. So now what we have is we have this virtual world where failure comes at no cost. And we have the real world where failure comes at an astronomic cost. And then your brain sees failure in both places.

And it's by the way, the denial of reward that results in like more dopamine being released. So this is where like, if you play competitive games online, like losing one game is what makes winning the next game so much more satisfying, but it's all artificial. And so it's that denial of reward, that artificial sense of failure. And it's really, it's not even artificial failure, it's safety with failure. There's always safety in a video game, but in the real world, there's no safety. There's permanent consequences.

If you ask a girl out and she says no, I don't know why I keep on going to that example. You ask a girl out and she says no, everyone in school is gonna hear about it the next day. That doesn't happen. So video games are a safe place to fail. Video games are a safe place to fail. How can people better learn to feel and integrate their emotions?

It seems to me that everyone wants to be more rational. Everyone would like to have the perfect utilitarian rationalist view of the world, but that emotion's kind of a second string, both indicator, assistant, signal of what we should do. How can people better learn to use, feel, integrate their emotions? This is a great question. I think it depends on who the people are. So I think the answer is somewhat different

for men and women. So we know, for example, that like estrogen makes us more aware of our internal emotional state. So this is part of the reason why women will have a fluctuating emotional experience. I don't think this is good or bad. It's just what happens. So I think for men, the answer is a little bit different because we are conditioned to experience emotions in a certain way. So for men, I think the best way to reconnect with your emotions is through your body. And interestingly enough, through your rational mind.

So there's a fascinating study, and I can send you all the reference, where a group of researchers basically looked at, they had people map out physical sensations when they are feeling an emotion. So if you think about butterflies in the stomach, a lump in my throat, you know, it feels like I got kicked in the balls, heartache, right?

So we actually have a somatic map when anytime we have an emotion, remember an emotion is not mental. Nothing is just mental, everything is physiological too. So one of the best things that you can do, and this is like literally a sequence that I go through is oftentimes we as men don't know that we're feeling emotions.

Like even when we're feeling, we don't feel them, but they're active. That's the way I would put it. So what I'd have people do is ask them to pay attention to your body. What do you feel in your body? Where do you feel tightness? Where do you feel discomfort?

Do you feel jittery? Do you feel like wiggling around? So zone into that. And it's beautiful how good men are at this. The second question that you write it down, really pay attention to what you're feeling. And then ask yourself a hypothetical. If another person were feeling these things,

what emotion do you think they could be feeling? If someone's feeling butterflies in the stomach and pain in their chest and tightness in their throat, what emotions do you think they could be feeling? If someone's feeling butterflies in the stomach and pain in their chest and tightness in their throat, what emotions do you think those could be? And this is where our rational mind kicks in. Maybe that's sadness, maybe that's anxiety, maybe that's worry, maybe that's love. And then something beautiful happens.

Do you think you could be feeling those things? And then people will say, oh my God, yeah, I'm feeling all of those things. And this is what makes it so hard is that if we don't know, if we haven't been trained in our emotions, what makes it hard to isolate emotions is that frequently we feel many of them at the same time and many of them in ways that feel conflicted, right?

So when I feel, when I get dumped, what do I feel? I feel love, I feel grief, I feel sadness, I feel hopeless, I feel grief, I feel sadness, I feel hopeless, I feel relieved, right? There's all, at least it's over now, but we're not aware because it's so complex. So I'd say start with your body, really ask yourself some of these questions, and then you'll be amazed at how far you can get. What's that alexithymia? you can get. What's that alexithymia?

So alexithymia is a, I guess, clinical term that means colorblindness to your internal emotional state. So this is exactly what I'm talking about, is if you ask a dude, like, what do you feel? Like, anytime you ask a dude, like, what do you feel? They're gonna say pissed, right? So if I'm getting bullied, how do you feel? Oh man, like, screw that guy. If you ask someone out and they say, no, oh, screw her. You know,

like the only emotion that we're really aware of, that we're aware that we're feeling. And if you ask guys, how's life going? Oh, it's frustrating. Agitation, agitation, frustration. So as men, we're kind of conditioned to feel one emotion, which is anger. And there's all kinds of other emotions underneath anger. So what we call an inability to detect your internal emotional state is something called alexithymia. Now there's even research on something called normative male alexithymia. So normative meaning it is normal. Why is it normative male alexithymia?

Because this is actually the most men are alexithymic. This is what we've discovered. And it's because of the way that we're raised, maybe because of testosterone, who knows? I mean, who knows how much of it is nature nurture? But most men are not really aware of what they're feeling. And so then they'll say, I don't feel a whole lot of emotions. Like I'll talk to people who will say like, I'm a robot

or they strive to have ice in their veins, Right? So we even like glorify these, the lack of emotional experience. The problem is that being numb to something does not mean that it doesn't exist. Right? So if I give you lidocaine and I give you anesthesia and you can't feel anything and I literally cut into your belly, your belly is open. Just because you don't feel it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And this is also where we see technology because now what we're seeing is an evening out

between men and women for alexithymia, primarily due to technology is my belief. So technology, all forms of technology will suppress our negative emotional circuitry, so we're all becoming more alexithymic. As we become alexithymic, now we're in huge problems because just because you're not aware of the emotion doesn't mean that the emotion doesn't act.

And this is why people are so confused about why their life is a certain way. Why can't I get up in the morning? Why can't I just apply for a promotion? Why can't I set limits with this person? And what's literally going on is you have a huge inferno of emotions that are restricting your behaviors that you're numb to.

And so you don't realize what's going on, but what people feel is just paralyzed and stuck. And they don't realize why they can't be like these other people that are disciplined and hardworking, like, why am I not like this? Why can't I just get out of bed and do what I need to do? Well, there's something else that is motivating you to not do that. And that's usually an emotion that you're blind to.

It's so interesting. It's like a vicious cocktail where, uh, people first off don't want to feel emotions because it feels bad for a lot of the time. Secondly, we now have the tools to be able to hide ourselves away from them. And then thirdly, there is this glorification of the rational robot. Uh, so almost a, uh, looking upon emotions as being, uh, second class signal, uh, uh, second class signal, uh, vulnerability, weakness, um, like a lack of sophistication as well as a thinker. I'm too, I'm, I'm significantly too sophisticated to act on something as idiotic and basic as

emotions. Yeah. Uh, I tweeted this a while ago. I got a turn of stick for it, but I don't care. Uh, basically saying that, um, not opening up about your vulnerabilities doesn't make you any less vulnerable. It just makes you less truthful. That if you're feeling a thing, not opening up about it to me, there's no

additional strength, like bestowed to that person. And in many ways, the person that is able to open up to the right person, like not just necessarily to Twitter. Um, well, is the person that is able to talk about the thing which is difficult to them weaker or stronger than the person who isn't able to talk about it? So I think it's good to talk about negative emotions. And we have to understand even the mechanism of it.

So here's something to understand. So anything that is left in the mind will compound. So if you take a patient who has been traumatized, right? So let's say I've had patients who've been abused in their upbringing. And what happens is oftentimes what happens in abusive relationships, in abusive households, is there's secrecy. So what does secrecy do? What secrecy does is it compounds whatever is on the inside. So in trauma, what we see is an incredible healing ability. If we ventilate what is in there, we kind of let it out and then literally the energy in the mind decreases. Anytime you say something, it gets taken out of your mind

and like gets vented to the ether. Now, the really interesting thing is this is true positive things as well. So I don't know if you know people who talk big, right? So they have all this excitement about all this stuff that they're gonna do. They have this great idea for a startup.

They have a great idea for a book. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. They're full of hot air. And what's happening is they have all of this energy and they're venting it out and then they never accomplish anything. So even if you look at this deep spiritual tradition

of mantra, tantra, mantra, tantra. So mantra is meant to be kept secret. And what a mantra really is, here's my kind of understanding of it, is it's the same principle as a trauma kept secret, except it's a positive thing. So when you have something that is positive, that is within you, that you keep within you

and you do not vent to the world, it can be incredibly motivating. Ryan Holiday says, talking about the thing and doing the thing vie for the same resources, allocate yours appropriately. 100%. And Freud said that too. So Freud made a really interesting discovery, that language is a substitute for action.

And what we know from psychotherapy is, if you have someone in your office who has homicidal ideation, they want to kill another human being. Literally what happens is if they're able to share their feeling about wanting to kill another human being, that actually reduces their homicidality. Something about speaking about it, substitutes for action in your brain. So the two become interchangeable. But this is discriminated in a particular direction, which is talking about the positive thing may decrease the likelihood of you doing the positive thing, which is

probably negative, but not talking about the negative thing doesn't release the pressure internally, which causes it to build up, which is the opposite of what you want. Absolutely. So whatever you want to cultivate within you, keep within yourself. What a lovely summarization. How should people deal with having lots of self-awareness or being a deep thinker, I heard a guy asked Peterson this question, the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. Is it a blessing or a curse to feel think my problem is that I have too much self-awareness. And so here's the main thing to understand.

If you have a bunch of self-awareness, this is neither a good thing or a bad thing. The question is who's in control. So the problem with people who have quote unquote, too much self-awareness is that they are not in control of where their awareness goes. So if I become hyper aware, so we even see this in control of where their awareness goes. So if I become hyper aware, so we even see this in cases of people who have psychosomatic

illnesses. So if you look at people who have things like irritable bowel syndrome, less so inflammatory bowel disease, fibromyalgia, what we know is they have something called visceral hypersensitivity. So any tiny signal in their body, like you and I are sitting down right now, our body is sending us lots of signals about us being uncomfortable. But we are able to suppress those. But some people are hyper vigilant and hyper sensitive to their internal signals. And this is the basic problem with awareness is that if you have too much awareness, it's not that it's good or it's bad, it's that it's out of control. So if we kind of

think about, let's say a raging river, is a raging river good or bad? Well, that depends. Why is it raging? Exactly, is it part of a dam where we're harnessing hydroelectric energy? Then it is amazing, which has been my experience, is that when I can take these people

and teach them how to harness their awareness and focus their awareness, because most people who have too much awareness, it's like light that is diffracted and spread everywhere. Instead, what you need to do is focus light just like a laser beam, at which point, instead of being diffuse and wasted all over the place, because your mind is hyper aware of this,

and now I'm thinking about this, and now I'm aware of this, and now I'm aware of this, you need to be able to focus your mind like a laser beam and then it can cut through things and it is an amazing tool. So it's about who's in control, not that it's good or bad. What are the strategies that are most efficacious for controlling? So I like a couple of specific practices. So the two like very simple introductory ones that I tend to teach people, one is something

called dractica. I tend to teach people. One is something called Dhrataka. So I love your Indian accent. Every, every word that you say in India, I want to do the whole podcast in India. Okay. Sure. We can do podcasting. It's no problem. Okay.

So first one is the Dhrataka. Okay. I can't focus. Go back. You can't focus. I will teach you practice. Right. Interesting.

You're talking about not being good. Okay. Don't worry. Don't worry. I will help. I will help. Okay. Okay. You can't focus. I will teach you practice. Right? Interesting. You're talking about not being good. Okay. Don't worry. Don't worry. I will help. I will help. Okay.

Okay. You can't focus. No problem. Laugh. What is problem? See, laughing is not, is not lack of focus. Let yourself laugh better. Come on, let it out.

Let it out. Let it out. Right? What is the problem? Enjoy, focus fully on the laughter. See, this is what I mean. Doing this in front of a jungle background is going to get someone canceled. No, it's okay.

Don't fear the cancellation. Breathe and you'll be okay. Okay. Your choice. I can go either one. Let's stick with this one for now. I did enjoy that though. So, so one, one practice is something that I call Trataka, which is not like,

that's what it's called. It's fixed point gazing. So what I tend to find is that, uh, so fixed point gazing is usually when you look at something like a candle flame or like a yantra, which is like a spiritual symbol, and you gaze at it for maybe 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, you work your way up slowly, and it's best to learn this from a teacher without blinking. So over time, what literally happens is you tell yourself, okay, I'm gonna look at this without blinking. And then over time, your body will send you signals.

They're like, hey, we wanna blink, this is uncomfortable. Let's move, let's move, let's move. And so what you're literally doing is you're training your attention to not do this thing. I also like therataka because there's a certain bad assness to it, right? Like you feel awesome. Fuck you, buddy.

Yeah, like I'm going to control this and you feel strong and powerful when you do this kind of therotica practice. So we'll do kind of fixed point gazing at a candle. There's also some cool stuff that happens in the practice which keeps people engaged. Like our photoreceptors tend to get exhausted with pigments and then you have kind of psychedelic experiences and stuff which is kind of fun. You kind of get tunnel vision. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. So, so that's how you know, you're doing it right. So there's a lot of good things in the practice. You got to be careful with it. You don't want to damage your eyes or anything. So don't, don't do it excessively. So that's one practice.

And the second practice that I really like is something called Gaiash Theorem, which is perfect stillness. So it's just to sit in a space that is and just be perfectly still. And over time, what will happen is that will become increasingly uncomfortable as your body cries out to you. We wanna relax, we wanna move, we wanna do this, we wanna do that. And then usually what becomes beautiful about that

is that as your body cries out with more and more pain, what starts to happen is what a lot of people will discover is that breathing becomes amazing because as your body becomes uncomfortable, the only solace that you have is the breath. While you're focused on the breath, while you're breathing in and out, then you feel amazing. But the second that you stop concentrating on your breathing, the body becomes a flame of discomfort. And so these two practices, it's interesting how much ecstasy can be derived from the breath. And then the other really brilliant thing about this practice is you begin to realize that,

it's really weird and maybe we should have done it, but you begin to realize that there's so much joy just in breath. And then hopefully people who do this practice long enough will start to realize something really insane, which is that a lot of your happiness in life is not dependent on the things that you think normally bring you happiness.

Even the breath can be so pleasurable, so intoxicating, so relaxing, and you do this all day long and you just have no awareness of it. And then hopefully what tends to happen, and this is my experience with most people, is they start to realize that, okay, a lot of my life, the joy is actually created on the inside. It's about how I live. It's about how I receive things. And then they start working on the inside, which is when the magic starts to happen. How long should people look to do the stare at the candle, sit still for, for an introductory session?

Yeah, so I would say for something like Thraktika, you know, it's best to learn from a teacher and many like yoga and meditation schools will teach this stuff. But, you know, for Thraktika, I would say like, go to the point of discomfort, but not to the point of pain. There are some medical contraindications, so you need to like talk to your doctor about it if you've got things like glaucoma or other like pressure related problems in the eyes. But generally speaking

I'd say you can start with 30 to 60 seconds and gradually work your way up to like two minutes three minutes four minutes and then that's usually enough. And then there's another the cool thing is with Trataka there's, there's a different practice that you can do called Antarthrataka, which is kind of the next phase. So, and this is where you kind of said you get the tunnel vision. So the cool thing that happens in the eyes is once you exhaust your photoreceptors

and your pigments in your eyes, if you close your eyes, you will see the after image in negative. So then what you can do is without risking any problems in your eyes, you can close your eyes, you will see the after image in negative. So then what you can do is without risking any problems in your eyes, you can close your eyes and you'll actually see a blue candle flame if you're gazing at a candle. And it's the opposite. And that's just how our eyes work. And then you can continue to the thoracic, uh, like in your mind, like looking in your mind at the negative image of the candle flame, and then you can do that practice

for like 15, 20 minutes. Is this when you got your inspiration for the make people stare at a wall for 30 minutes exercise? No, actually, that's a different practice. But the make people stare at a wall, which has been a revolutionary practice in our community, is the joy of that practices. See, we're so distracted from ourselves.

And so many people come to me and they're like, I don't know what I wanna do, right? So someone doesn't know, they're like, should I major in this or should I major in this? Should I break up? Should I not break up? Should I change jobs? Should I stay jobs?

Should I pursue my passion? How do I find my dharma or my duty? No one knows what to do in life. And so as we become clueless about what to do, we turn to the outside world, and then we look at influencers. And then influencers say, you should do this, and you should do this, and you should do this.

And then before we had influencers, we had the original influencer, which is our parents. And our parents say, alok birkam, doctor. You're going to be good doctor, right? Those are the original influencers. And they give us this set of conditions that we have to fulfill. And so the main thing that's happened is

if you literally look at our attention, our attention is always outside of us now, because I wanna be efficient, right? So what am I gonna do? I took a shower this morning. I put on this great podcast called Modern Wisdom. It's by Chris Williamson. I love it.

And like, I'm gonna put on this episode because then when I'm in the shower and I'm taking a shit, can I use language? Yeah. Okay. When I'm taking a shit, when I'm shaving, like I'm gonna be learning during those moments. Yeah. And then this was something that I did during med school

where I was like constantly like input, input, input. Overclock. Yeah. And so we don't spend time with ourselves. And when we don't spend time with ourselves. And when we don't spend time with ourselves, we lose sight of our internal compass. And no wonder we have no idea what to do, because we're listening to all these different people.

And then this person says this one day, this person says this the next day. And then like, so I keep changing my mind. Programmed schizophrenia. Sort of, yeah. And so the staring at a wall practice is sit at a wall and we're just gonna look at a wall for an hour. And then at the beginning, you'll be bored,

but then you have all of this crap that has piled up inside you, all these some scars that are dormant, all these negative experiences of hurt that the second you felt hurt, you flipped open your phone to distract yourself for the pain. And then that pain sunk into you and lived in your subconscious.

So what we're going to do is just stare at a wall and just let whatever is there come up. What are some of the strangest trip reports that you've heard from your community? I mean, it's, it's wild. So like even, um, someone in our, uh, like one of our employees did the practice and he was kind of describing what happened. Like people will have all, like people start crying. They'll like feel all these things

that they've never felt before. Usually the first five to 15 minutes are like complete boredom. People with ADHD will struggle to pay attention. Their mind will bounce all over the place. And then some of them will actually like end up having a very like calm and rested mind after it bounces around for all over the place. But I think some people, the lucky, I'd say maybe 10 to 25% will really like learn something or get some kind of emotional

catharsis. I think a larger number of people start to realize they do not need to fear being with themselves. And that's really powerful. You don't need something else to entertain you. You can take a flight to Europe. That is eight hours. You don't need a book. You don't need a phone. You don't need anything. You can sit and oh my God, it's like so terrifying.

Right. And then, and so it's amazing what you can learn if you sit with yourself. The challenge for a lot of people is that there is so much negativity in there that it can feel overwhelming. Sitting with yourself is an unbelievably uncomfortable experience. Yeah. And there's a beautiful sort of apocryphal story, like a mythology story in the Hindu tradition

about this churning of the ocean. And at the bottom of the ocean, there was like some kind of nectar or ambrosia or some sort of divine substance. But the whole point is that when they started churning of the ocean and at the bottom of the ocean there was like some kind of nectar or ambrosia or some sort of divine substance. But the whole point is that when they started churning the ocean to try to get to it, poison came up first. And so there's a really cool kind of perspective from this like this yogic tradition that anytime you want to find gold within you or anytime you want to find nectar or amrut, you're gonna find poison first. So the pathway to finding inner peace involves going through poison.

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the link in the show notes below or heading to factor meals.com slash MW 50 and using the code MW 50 a checkout. That's factor meals.com slash MW 50 and MW 50 a checkout. I had a, uh, an insight when I started doing self inquiry, about five or six years ago that, um, for every, it's kind of like being in a garden and looking for stuff underneath stones. And every so often underneath the stone, you find something that's really beautiful that you're proud about yourself for.

It's a realization that you feel whole, but that's one out of 20. And the remaining 19 have something terrifying and disgusting and awful hiding underneath. And I think that's around about the right proportion as well. Yeah. So, so let me ask you this, has that changed over your five or seven year?

I would say so. Uh, but in some ways the level of attention and the sort of, uh, complexity, not complexity, but like the level of dexterity and finesse with which I'm looking at stuff has now increased. It's always getting more. It's always getting more. It's always getting more.

So as you are getting better at looking within yourself, what has changed about what you're finding? Originally, I think I was just trying to sort of lay down a path. It was really struggling. I remember the first time when I first started reading, you know, all of my 20s, I sent, I sent and received like 10 million WhatsApp messages over a decade as a

club promoter, right? Mostly on my phone. This wasn't WhatsApp web. So kind of impressive, kind of terrifying. Um, and then I remember when I first, before I even started meditating, I was wanting to read and I'd look at a book and as I was sat down, my body would like twitch and move, uh, presumably because it was trying to down regulate to this much lower level of stimulus.

There was no bings bongs, no banners coming down, no nothing. It was a piece of paper. Um, so the first 500 sessions of meditation that I did were, I think just like learning to be able to have a slightly still mind and a slightly still body, then the next 500 were probably a little bit more about noticing thoughts when they arise. And the next stage where I'm trying to get to now is where are these coming from? Like what is the motivation for this story that I tell myself?

This is why my current obsession with emotions and feelings is coming from also doing therapy, um, to try and see, okay, not just can you sit with it, not just, can you notice it, but why is that there? Why is this a pattern that you are seeing more increasingly? So it's kind of hard for me to say, um, like, am I becoming, uh, is the proportion of things changing? Because I'm like each time I moved to a different, it's like a computer game where I moved to a different garden. Yeah, so I think that's wonderful. And I think, you know, being obsessed about emotions is I'm sure

not the first obsession you've had. True. Right? So one day you're gonna have to ask yourself, where does the obsession of things come from? Right, the meta-mata question. Absolutely, right? So that's when, and when you get to that level,

by the way, all of your obsessions will fall apart. So that's the good thing. So I think, so for a lot of people, and this is, I think what we see in therapy, right? Is that the negativity comes first and then the positivity comes afterward. And so for a lot of people who, and this is what's so hard about internal work,

is that, see, the reason that there's so much crap underneath the rocks is because our garden has been untended for such a long time. And so the negativity piles up. And I realized this actually very interestingly, I was working with someone who was an immigrant and was from an Aboriginal kind of tribe. And I realized that in their life, in the normal human's life, we had so much time for emotional processing. We're going to go out as hunter-gatherers, we're going to hunt. What is there to talk about? You can talk a little bit, but then for hours you're with yourself.

And that's how our brains evolved. Our brains evolved with a minimum of external stimulation, which means the default mode of where our attention goes, so much of it, eight hours of the day, was internal. We used to do all these rote tasks like churning butter. And churning butter, what do you think about when you churn butter? Our brain defaults to so much time for emotional processing. And now what started to happen is we lose that time, this negativity piles up. Then as you start to look within yourself, there's a bunch of negativity, which

is why we need therapists because most people can't handle that on their own. Right. We're not trained to do that. And so over time though, I think you're going to find a lot of positivity. And you'll find that that negativity, unless you continue to feed it, it will start to dissolve. Let's say there's someone who is thinking about starting therapy and wants to do therapy well, do therapy, right?

Be a good therapeutic patient, not please the therapist, but get the most out of it. How do people do well in therapy? What a beautiful question. And I think this is a question that everyone should learn or they answer too. So I have a couple of thoughts. The first is that remember that therapy is a partnership. And so we are so conditioned to do well, right?

So like if you think about a child from a very young age, there's A's, B's, C's, D's and F's. There's in the United States, we have varsity and junior varsity and we have the A team and the B team. So we start segregating everybody up. We start measuring people up and we assign a... You do right or you do wrong. So therapy isn't about that. It's a partnership between you and your therapist.

So the first thing that I would say, concrete pieces of advice, one is that if you don't like working with your therapist, work with someone else. So there's a certain amount of like idea that, okay, I must not be doing this right or I need to try harder. What we know from something called common factors research, which is like, we did a bunch of research on therapy

because there are all these different types, right? There's psychoanalysis and psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral therapy. And so people sat down and were like, which one's the best? And what we discovered is that all of it's about the same. There's some exceptions to that. But basically it's all roughly the same. And the question is like, how could that be?

Because psychoanalysis and talking about dreams is so different from mapping out your thoughts, your behaviors and your emotions. And so what we discovered is that what really matters is fit. So you need to find the right person to be your therapist. So what I recommend to like friends of mine who wanna get therapy is I say,

be prepared to make three appointments. And I even tell them at the get-go to make three appointments with three different people, like two weeks apart. And then you can cancel if you really like one, but do the legwork, don't try one. And then like, you know, then start the process of finding the second one. So I say, make three appointments upfront, two weeks apart.

So you have plenty of time to cancel if you want. If you really try them all out and then pick the one that you like the best. What does that mean? You will feel a difference. So there are some people where you're gonna kind of like walk out of the office and you're like, eh, I don't really know if I like enjoyed that

or like if that was good or that was bad or whatever. But I think a lot of people, you know, I've had so many therapy patients walk into my office and like when the hour is up, they don't want to leave, right? And especially for intake, sometimes I would schedule my intakes at the end of the day and like we'd have like a solid two hours of like, let's get into this. And then other people kind of come in,

they kind of ask some questions. I do sort of somewhat of an assessment and it feels like we're kind of done at the hour mark. So I think people will feel the difference. So just grab it. Choose well. Yeah, just, and listen to yourself, right? Like, so which one do you like the best?

Second thing is that if something is not working for you in therapy, make that the therapist's responsibility. So this is where a lot of people will just switch therapists. But if you kind of say to someone, like if you're like, I'm not getting a whole lot out of this or I feel like I'm stuck, share all of the problems that you see in therapy with your therapist.

This is where everyone is so sad, but patients are so worried about disappointing therapists, right? And so the best thing that you can do for your therapy and for your therapist is so sad, but patients are so worried about disappointing therapists, right? And so the best thing that you can do for your therapy and for your therapist is to say, hey, this is working for me or this is not working for me. And sometimes we'll even get to something really beautiful, which is that, okay, like you think this therapy

is not working for you, let's examine the cognitive bias. You've been doing this for six months. Here's where you started, here's where you are now. Would you call this progress? Why aren't you able to see the progress in your life? Holy shit. Because the moment that you realize- That tells you something about the patient as well.

Absolutely, right? So oftentimes solving the problems in therapy that you have with your therapist will be kind of like the best way to accelerate the therapy. Half of the breakthroughs that I've had with patients, that's not 20 percent, let's say 30 percent, come from a period of difficulty in therapy. And because it's a breeding ground for their patterns outside of therapy. Absolutely. Right. So this is where the the concepts of transference and counter-transference kind of come in. I learned

about this in my book last week. And so I would say talk to your therapist if things aren't going well. And then I would say the third thing is, yeah, I think actually that's number one and number two. I think that's the book. Two very good tips. Yeah. I found opening the door a little bit,

one of the patterns that I have is people pleasing, specifically not upsetting women. I have a, specifically, not upsetting women. I have a big thing about not upsetting women. I see them as something that is psychologically fragile and must be protected, like a professional white knight, basically. Yeah. And what that led to was I was unprepared to say if things, because it's a female therapist, unprepared to say if there were things during therapy that made me a little bit upset or that made me angry or that made me frustrated.

And you're totally right that I had to, and I still am having to overcome the pattern that exists outside of therapy, inside of therapy, not about anything in my life, but about the therapeutic relationship itself. Yeah, so that's what's so cool about a therapeutic relationship. So I think the main thing to understand about therapy is it's the one place

where you don't have to worry about the consequences of what you say. So it's really a wonderful practice ground for certain things. I mean, there are certain things you shouldn't do, and that's the therapist's responsibility to let you know. So if you say things that are abusive or not respectful or unethical, then the therapist should let you know. So if you say things that are abusive or not respectful or unethical, then the therapist should let you know. But I've had patients yell at me and call me a fucker and like all this kind of stuff. And like, right, and at the end of that,

like we'll kind of say like, okay, like, how does that, are we done? Right? So like oftentimes that'll come out and it'll be kind of unexpected. And it's like, all right, cool. So like you think I'm a fucker, what are we gonna do about that?

Does that mean you're never coming back or are we gonna work through that and figure it out? And so I think that it can be incredibly beneficial. And there's just no environment like it, because even when we look at emotional support, so I was looking at research today about, part of the challenge, so men have a four times increase in risk

of suicidality after a breakup. Yes. And so one of the reasons for that is that oftentimes men will rely on their partners for like emotional support. And the challenge there is that there's always a dual relationship with your partner because you want to like lean on them for emotional support but you also want them to respect you.

You want them to love you. You want to feel proud of yourself. The cool thing about a therapy relationship, it's the one place where you don't have to care about what the other person thinks. And that can feel so liberating and you can examine things that you can't examine anywhere else.

Petty things, repetitive things. Petty things, yeah. Sexual things. You know, like all kinds of stuff that we were really, really scared. Like I had some dream where I was having sex with one of my parents and it's like, oh my God, like you can't tell that to anyone, right?

And the therapy is the one place that you can say like whatever is in you and hopefully your therapist will treat it with compassion. Why does therapy so often suck for men? So there are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that I think we have a misunderstanding. Somewhere along the way, we got the impression that talking about our emotions is the best way to handle them.

So I think we have a bias about our understanding of emotions. We think, first of all, they're primarily mental. Secondly, we think that talking about them is the way to go. And therapy is the best evidence-based approach that we've got basically historically of dealing with your emotions. But I think there are a couple of biases. The first is that the majority of therapists are women

and the majority of patients are also women historically. Which means that if you're looking at a population and you say talking about emotions really works for my patients, if you're looking at a population and you say talking about emotions really works for my patients, if you're just a therapist, we don't really segregate between our male patients and our emotional, our female patients. We sort of like look at this and we say like, this is what works. Now there are lots of trials that actually show the opposite of that. So we'll have trials on cognitive behavioral therapy that look at 50% men, 50% women, both

of them have good effect sizes, but there too, I think there's a selection bias. Because even if you're looking at success in therapy, you're not counting all the people who left. That didn't go to therapy in the first place. Because talking about emotions did not work for them. There's even a really interesting paper, so there's a lot of exploration into this. And one paper actually points out that there are two kinds

of therapy that you can give. One is what we call emotionally supportive therapy, where you talk about your emotions. And the second is something called instrumental support, which is like problem solving. And what we tend to find is that men prefer problem solving, but if you look at therapy training, we are actively disincentivized

to problem solve with our patients. We're not there to solve your problems. So when I was like a second year psychiatry resident and I had this 16 week therapy course where I'm learning the basics of therapy and you know one of the teachers came in and was like if a patient walks in and says, can you help me find a girlfriend? What's the right answer? And then the right answer is that help me understand why you think you can't find one, help me understand why you want one, let's talk about it.

The answer is not yes, right? So as therapists, we're not very good as a whole profession at like helping people solve problems. And I think especially if you look at men, there's a lot of disturbing data on diseases of despair. So between, I think, like 2009 and 2018, suicide-related diagnoses in people under the age of 18 went up by 287%. So what's happening right now, especially if you look at male mental health, is we're

starting to realize that there's another study, for example, that there are a couple studies that show that somewhere between 37 and 66.7% of men who commit suicide, somewhere between 37 and 66% have no history of mental illness. So what we're starting to realize is there's a very troubling signal that we're seeing that people who kill themselves may not be mentally ill. They may actually have a life that they've just mentally checked out on. They've looked at their situation,

they've tried to fix it, and they just have nowhere to go. And we're seeing this, especially as we see things like changes in our economic situation, changes in employment or underemployment. There's a lot of economic forces that are affecting men. And so now the problem is that, especially when I work with my male patients, what I see is sometimes when they come in,

they'll say, okay, I feel suicidal. I have low self-esteem. Okay, I diagnosed with a depression. Tell me about your life. I'm 30 years old. I have no job. I've never been in a relationship. And so like, what would this person look forward to?

Right? And so a big part of helping them is not just talking about your problems. A big part is helping them build a life. And that's not something we're trained in as therapists. Does this require an entire new type of therapy? It almost, to me, based on what I know about the definitions of therapy,

almost sounds like it gets into some kind of coaching in a way. Yes, yes. So I think that that's why coaching has emerged as a field. So I think that what started happening at some point is therapists stopped focusing on material outcomes for their patients. So if you look at how we judge the quality of a therapist,

it's the reductions in their depression scores, anxiety scores, which I think is completely reasonable. That makes sense because that's what our job is. But we certainly don't measure things like promotion or what percentage of people get married and things like that. Which is if you really look at like what makes people's lives worth living,

it's those kinds of achievements. And even if we look at, so the really fascinating thing is if we look at the evidence-based methods of therapy for diagnoses that are predominantly men, we see more action. So a great example of this is something called motivational interviewing. So if you look at addictions,

the majority of people who have addictions are men. And if we look at what is the best evidence-based technique, maybe not best, but one very effective evidence-based technique, it's something called motivational interviewing, which is all about getting people to do shit. It's not about talking about your feelings. We're not going to examine your dreams or things like that.

It's like you have this goal. How can I interview you in a way that increases your motivation and moves to action? So we actually see that where there are some diagnoses that are predominantly men where the technology that we use, the therapeutic technology that we use is emotions and stuff, but the emotions is not the end. It's a means. How can we understand how these negative emotions are impacting your actions and preventing you from achieving what you want? So we absolutely see that signal in therapy. I was talking to Adam Lane Smith, uh, ex psychotherapist, now turned to the medical profession, and he said, well, you know, I'm going to be able to

do this, but I'm going to be able Smith, uh, ex psychotherapist now turned sort of coach attachment expert guy. And he was talking about the way that the male brain actually, there's a sexed difference in how it sort of moves in this linear motion between seeing something and then moving toward action, whereas the female brain works in a slightly different way. I know that, uh, MRIs are able to detect male brains and female brains at 10 years old with a 90% accuracy, which is almost exactly the same as you can

detect faces, the sex of faces. So a machine is basically as good as a human when it comes to looking at either just the brain or just the face. And, um, yeah, I think I'm, I'm pretty interested by this. I, I, it's my shiny new toy and I'm trying not to sort of apply it to everything. Um, but certainly when I compare my time, you know, maybe between a thousand and 1500 sessions of meditation, maybe 500 to a thousand sessions of breath work, uh, maybe 1500 days of journaling, something like that ish. Maybe 500 to a thousand sessions of breath work. Maybe.

1500 days of journaling, something like that ish. Maybe 2000 days of journaling. Uh, six months of therapy has provided me with insights that I would have never got. I didn't get, um, at all. Uh, it identified patterns in me that I just did not have the perspective to be able to see. It showed the origins of where particular behaviors and thought loops and assumptions and neuroses about the world, where they came from. And it began to give me a timeline that helps me to understand who I am and

why I behave the way that I do, not just noticing that behavior comes up, but you also helped me to do say, Hey, you keep on saying this sort of thing. This is a term that keeps on being used. And, uh, the best thing, the best thing that she said is pay attention to fleeting thoughts. That's the coolest thing that I've learned. And, uh, almost, I wonder whether, uh, people that are very practiced meditators, you know, what you're doing, the equanimity that you're looking for, you notice the thought arise inside of you, see, hear, feel, note it, and it sort of goes away.

But by doing that, you never actually investigate, okay, where did that come from? Like why did that particular thought, that's the fifth time I've had that thought this morning and that's a rumination I have about myself or whatever. And it seems to me like therapy, therapy type practices help to hold onto that. Absolutely. So, so many things. I love everything that you said, Chris. So let's go through a couple of things.

One is that going back to why, so therapy is awesome and you've had a good experience. I'm a therapist. I love doing it. I work with a lot of men and women. Let's understand a couple of things. The first is that, see, when you look at meditation or journaling, you're the only one in the room.

So if you just think about the people in your life, right? So how easy is it for you to know what mistakes someone in your life is making? It's so much easier to see mistakes in someone else. And so the real value of working with another person like a therapist is that they can see your problems way clearer than you are, and they have a pile of training to really tease apart

with the information that you give them, really what's going on. So it is not, I'm not surprised at all that you have had an overwhelmingly positive experience in a short amount of time with therapy. I also think that other people's mileage may vary because generally speaking, the harder working you are at introspection, the more mileage you'll get out of therapy. So I think the big irony is that a lot of men who are very independent and focus on journaling and

meditation and want to improve their own lives, they will get so much benefit out of therapy because they've done so much internal work and the two really combine. And that's part of the reason why I will combine a meditative practice with therapy because it enhances the effect size of therapy when I help people train their minds. Second thing is that I'm with you 100% that there are some things, so action orientation and instrumentally improving our lives, like that's the reason we built a coaching program so having worked as a therapist and I had an awesome mentor who Told me about this place called the Institute of coaching at McLean Hospital in Harvard Medical School And he's like you should really go check that out because I think this is the kind of work that you do and I was

Like my mind was blown away and then I realized that what people need right now is Not just talking about their feelings. I think a lot of people need therapy, but that a lot of people don't know how to accomplish their goals. And we were talking a little bit about creators, right? So like we created a creator coaching program, which has had now 500 coaches go through it. And what we discovered is that like teaching them some of these skills and helping them understand why is it that you, you know, you can't afford to take a break from content creation, but you're so burnt out that your content is crap.

And so like they get stuck in these cycles and helping people understand how to actually achieve their goals, which is sort of what, what, if you look at some of these organizations like the international coaching federation and stuff like that, it's all about like helping people achieve and accomplish what they want. This is why you have coaches that are employed by like Google and YouTube and stuff like that. It's all about like helping people achieve and accomplish what they want. This is why you have coaches that are employed by like Google and YouTube and stuff like that. Everyone has seen that there's a lot of value to that. The other thing that I kind of want to say, just one more point about gender is that in other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. Stop having coffee first thing

in the morning. Your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but your adrenal system is and salt acts on your adrenal system. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium that helps to regulate appetite, curb cravings and improve your brain function. You've probably heard me talk about it a million times and that's because I love it. It tastes fantastic. It's got zero sugar, no junk, no colours, no artificial ingredients or any other BS. And it's how I start every single morning. Best of all, there's a no BS, no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration so you can buy it 100% risk free. If you don't like it for any reason, they will give you

your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you love it. Right now you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to www.drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's www.drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. So remember we said earlier that estrogen makes you more aware of your internal emotional state. And so talking about emotions is easier for women, potentially because of estrogen. And there are even studies that show that the reason that men are reluctant

to go to couples counseling is because they feel outgunned. So anytime a man- It's an unfair fight. Absolutely. Because you're a female assuming a heteronormative relationship, your female partner knows how to articulate their emotions. They know what they're feeling, right? I feel saddened when this person does this because it makes me feel unloved. And then female therapists, 70% of the time,

is also like, so they both speak the language. It's like going on to- Two adults in the room with one child. Yeah, and so what it feels like to men, what one person told me is when I go to couples counseling, it feels like I'm playing basketball, but I have no arms and I can't drive. So they can't part. And there are studies on this, which show that men don't can't

participate in that way in therapy. Yeah. I mean, you know, I wonder how many men, first interaction introduction to therapy is in couples counseling. And that would be ruthless, especially, especially if you're, this is, we're trying to salvage this thing. Maybe there's kids, maybe there's not, I love this woman. I want to make it work. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And, uh, yeah, the messiness getting used to not bringing sentences into land neatly and not having a great takeaway, you know, bailing out of sentences halfway through and going, actually, I don't even know what I'm talking about. That's, I don't think that's right. I was about to commit. I mean, you're laughing because presumably this happens in a lot of your therapy. I'm laughing because this sounds like it's coming from experience. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, all, but that's something, you know, again, to, to sort of break the

fourth wall, um, I have a pattern where I can spin you a yarn about, you know, Winston Churchill on his first day in office and a blah, blah, blah. And he did this thing and bring it into land with this nice sort of flourish at the end and watch someone's eyes light up and, ah, isn't that cool? And I get this little kick of dopamine. And I'm like, no, that's podcast Chris. And podcast Chris doesn't get to come in and try and show off to his therapist about how good of a communicator he is or about this cool fucking story that

he found out or whatever, whatever. And, uh, it's one of the reasons why I was really glad that did it in person. Uh, and oddly I do way more podcasts, uh, not on a sound stage in front of a huge video wall, uh, and not even in person. I do most of them over the internet, which means that when I get on a call, I try and bring things into land in podcast mode, need to not be in podcast mode. Um, and learning to be messy with sentences, to pay attention to fleeting thoughts, to bail out when you realize that you've started a thing and you were going to say this thing,

but actually it's not that true. All of these, their skills and, and trying to craft a very beautiful sentence in many ways, which is something that I love to do much of the time, what you're doing is sacrificing accuracy for beauty because it's not always the absolute truth of what you're trying to say probably doesn't end with a flourish and get nicely boxed up and a bow pushed across the table. It probably does veer off a little bit and use some slightly imprecise language

and then it just sort of arrives, it crash lands on the desk of whoever it is that you're talking to. So that's been a real, allowing myself to be messy with my speech has been a real skill. Yeah, and I think it's so challenging because like you said, we're not, we're not fluent with communicating our emotions and talking about our internal experience.

One thing that I've learned as a, as a therapist is that, you know, some people think in order to talk and some people talk in order to think, and you don't have to make sense. The whole job of the therapist is to piece the, put the pieces of the puzzle together for you. I think the last thing that I'll say though, is we're talking about how important talking is, but it's now my belief,

and there's some interesting data to support this, that this presumption that emotional healing has to come through words, I don't think is correct. So I think that part of what's happened, part of why therapy is not great for men. So there's research on things like instrumental support being useful for men. There's research on men not being able to dribble on the basketball court. And there's a couple of other things. So the other thing that you know, I'm a big fan of is like some amount of emotional healing through spirituality.

And if you look at some of these spiritual traditions of emotional healing, like there are, there is ritual. There are people like shamans or shamans and things like that. You have some of these like, you know, will do in the Hindu culture, like pujas to alleviate curses and things like that. We have all these like religious ritual, which can be very emotionally healing. And there's research that that stuff works too. The other really interesting thing is we're looking at, we're learning more and more about

the physicality of emotion. So there's this one thing called EFT called the emotional freedom technique, which I dismissed as pseudoscience about 10 years ago. Someone I knew sent me an email about it and he was like, what do you think about this? It's called tapping. And basically people have been traumatized.

People will come in, they'll tap on various parts of their body and it'll release the emotions. They'll be healed from trauma. I was like, this is BS. And I was like a research assistant at Harvard at the time and I was like, this sounds absurd. And like, you know, over the last 10 years we've seen some studies that this appears

to be somewhat effective. And there are now a couple of meta-analyses, arguably there's some methodological problems and things like that, that show that this is effective. So I think we're starting to learn that, and if you look at a lot of this like kind of men's somatic experience work that a lot of people are doing, that emotions are so physical. And it may not be that we need to use words, like I'm all for proficiency of speech and alleviating alexithymia, but I've seen the power of just like, you know, physical experiences, especially for men.

Do you know Connor Beaton? Mm-mm. He does a man talk. He also wrote men's work. Okay. Men's work, the book. Phenomenal guy, married to a also psych therapist and he's therapy informed for men's work, group coaching.

Really, really good. Does huge retreats with 30 guys, group work, breath work, all the rest of the stuff, both sides, both hemispheres informed. And, uh, he was saying something like really similar over dinner on Monday. And, um, yeah, it's fine. It's, it's really, really interesting. This whole, uh, sort of movement and world to me, I genuinely think. All right.

Hope this is what we were both talking about on Monday. I think that this is the next frontier, hopefully for guys to move into. I think that we've kind of gone through the first two phases of the Manasphere like first wave Manasphere. Uh, pickup, uh, it was the game. It was mystery. It was Neil Strauss. It was nagging and, and, and like pulling and stuff like that.

Second wave was red pill it was make towel and incels and black pill and cocks and soy boys and simpson beaters and sigma's and so on and so forth and i'm hoping that we get to some like transcend and include. Version now which is a much more full stack holistic version of of what of what masculinity means, because I don't think like, no matter what you say, if so much of the advice for men coming out of wherever you say, whether it's like the cooked New York times or the misogynistic red pill, uh, the bottom line is that I don't think the men in any of those communities are massively flourishing. And if I was to look at what I was missing, it was an emotionally informed technique.

Even as somebody that had already done like some of the more progressive meditation, breath work, bits and pieces like that. So I'm, I know I, I'm really excited about, and this is why I was so fascinated to speak to you today about it. I'm really, really excited about this as being a new frontier to kind of encourage guys,

okay, like how about just for a moment, we think about emotions? How about we think about feeling feelings? How about we notice what arises inside of us and opposed to cope with it or push it away, we actually spend a bit of time with it. Yeah, I mean, I think I agree 100%. So, you know, there's a couple of things that I'll add.

The first is that I think we already, so as men, we kind of figured this out, right? So even within these red pill communities, what do they say if you're having trouble in a relationship? Lift, bro, right? That's the answer, lift. You need to like hit the gym. Like that's where you start.

That's very right. That's very true. And yeah, and I think part of the reason is, I think it's kind of sad. It's almost like, I'm hesitant to use this word, but all of the research on red pill ideology is so negative. Like I remember doing like a literature search on it and like, there's a lot of like papers that are published in like feminist journals. And there is a lot

of negativity in red pill. Don't get me wrong. And misogyny and abuse of women and things like that. I'm not advocating that it's good. At the same time, I think that if you look at something that's really cool is if we have cultural psychiatry and what we do in cultural psychiatry is we look at a group of people and instead of saying paternalistically, we know what works for you based on the science, we ask them what works for you

and help us understand your culture. And I think if we do that with red pill culture, what we'll discover is that there is a very physicality that they deal with emotions. The other thing that I've sort of found with red pill culture is 100% of people that I have worked with who are incels, red pillars, alpha males, column, what are betas, whatever you want, they have a pretty severe trauma usually related to women at some point in their life. And that's when they get off into this.

So I think part of the reason that they are so reluctant to do the emotional work is because they are so calloused against this. So you talk to any red pillar, there'll be some kind of like negative experience with a woman. Heartbreak. Heartbreak. This person took advantage of me. This person did this.

This person led me on. There is this seed of resentment and hatred towards women. And then I think it's really sad because once that never gets healed, and we already talked about how trauma can shape our memories of the past. I've always been like this, women have always been like that, this is all women.

Yeah, right? But the thing is there's such a big cognitive bias in your head. So it's not that all women. And then the other more crippling thing that then happens is once you adopt these attitudes of disrespect of women as human beings. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Absolutely.

So you're like, oh, women just want money. And then in your subconscious or conscious mind, even if you don't say it out loud, if it's in your subconscious, you are going to create a transactional relationship with people. And then what'll happen is that when you approach things transactionally,

I just think you want money, I will trade, I'm gonna buy you dinner and you're gonna give me sex. When this is the way that you approach a human being, one of two things will happen. If the human being is okay with transactional relationships, they'll stay.

If they're not okay with transactional relationships, they'll leave. And then what happens is the only people that I end up in relationships with are transactional. So it absolutely becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And once again, Chris, I'm amazed by, you know, how, how good you are at this stuff, dude. Like, I don't know how you figured that shit out, but I did it by reading a thousand research articles, but I got to speak to people that have read a thousand research articles, which, which helped. No, I appreciate that. I I'm fascinated by it, dude.

I really am. You mentioned earlier on about create a burnout. Some of the challenges that people have seen, we've seen a great quitting of YouTube over the last six months. I think a lot of high profile YouTube is really stepping back. You've been working at the forefront of this scene for a long time. YouTube over the last six months, I think a lot of high-profile YouTube is really stepping back. You've been working at the forefront of this scene for a long time. What do you make of the great resignation of content creators that's happened kind of

recently? So, I think the first thing is that I think that content creators have a much harder life than many people realize. I think you probably understand this. And it's not that we're not grateful, but I was talking to a family member of mine and he's like, how do you like it, right? Because I don't do a whole lot of clinical practice anymore.

And so I told him something that I didn't quite appreciate, which is that I haven't had a day off in four years, four and a half years now. I've literally not had a day off. So I will go on vacations, but if you're a content creator, anytime you go on a vacation,

the uploads need to continue. So you have to do whatever work needs, like you have to do, I have to do that work ahead of time or after. So you never get a break, that's number one. And that's very different from medicine. Like, so in medicine, when I go on vacation, I sign out my pager,

I have someone who covers for my patients, and they literally take care of everything when I'm not there. So the work gets done in your absence. But once you're a content creator, I think it's one of the few professions where you truly never get a vacation. So I think there's a lot of challenges

with content creation. I think the second reason why people will quit is that, I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but so the human brain is not designed for the level of toxicity that most content creators experience. So our human brain doesn't think probabilistically. So if I have 10,000 comments on a YouTube video

that are positive, and if I have one comment that's negative, my brain will literally pick out that comment. So if you live stream, you understand this, where there are comments that are positive and if I have one comment that's negative, my brain will literally pick out that comment. So if you live stream, you understand this, where there are comments that are going by literally faster than you can read. But if there is a negative comment, your brain will surface that to you.

So there's this weird thing where the way that our brains have evolved make it very challenging and emotionally like dangerous to be a content creator. So there's a very high level of burnout. Oftentimes as content creators grow, they feel there's like the sense of like sand in the hourglass is running out where like, someone else will come along, there's a gravy train.

Like if you slow down, you're as good as dead, right? So it's growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, and then you're gonna be a has-been because the internet has a short attention span. And so people will kind of flagellate themselves and continue going. There's all kinds of other problems that arise, which is that as a content creator,

at the very beginning, you get to experiment a fair amount, but once you get known for something, you get kind of locked into that. And then you can't really experiment anymore because the numbers go down and things like that. So there's a lot of like psychological problems. We worked without 500 content creators and we actually had a, there's a third party organization called Stream Hatchet that was measuring the outcomes of our program. And they saw a 171% increase in like subscriber count

without increasing the number of hours worked by a single hour. So one of the big ironies of content creation is as you become burnt out, it becomes harder to make good content. And as your content starts to go down, you emotionally become worse. And as you become emotionally worse, it becomes harder to make good content.

So if you really look at what makes the best content, it's creators who are inspired. And then as the burnout sets in, the inspiration goes away and then you're in the grind and then you're repeating things over and over and over again. And it's amazing how far a little help goes. So with these particular people,

like I don't have relationships, I think, with many of them. and even if I did, I wouldn't be able to publicly comment. But I think for a lot of them, it's like, it's just hard to keep it going. It's really hard. And you'll see this even in content creators who don't quit, which is they'll burn out

and they'll like take a break for a month or two months or whatever. And then making a comeback is so hard. Which means that people can't afford to take breaks. But I think that there are unseen mental health costs to the content creation industry, which even. We'll work like we, so we worked with Twitch where we supported like a hundred of their top content creators and we saw really good outcomes from that. And I think people don't realize how mentally like straining it is. comes from that. And I think people don't realize how mentally like straining it is.

Isn't it strange. I think the number one, uh, and number two jobs that primary school children want is like influencer and YouTuber. Uh, the, the two most popular in the West. And yet from, I don't know, maybe from the outside, it seems like it's all sort of fun and games. And I guess because of the selection effect of what appears on YouTube, most of the time people aren't breaking the fourth wall about what the actual experience is like that they're going through.

And then also it's very easy to criticize, oh, it's champagne problems. Look at this whining from a chattering class, all of the privilege and so on and so forth. And certainly there's been people who have made this point in an undelicate way and stood on a ton of landmines and then trended like fuck for it. I think Hassan Abi really sort of put his foot in it a couple of weeks ago and like, that's not great. But the sentiment done in a more delicate manner with some more emotional vulnerability and openness, like, Hey, this is how I'm feeling.

Like this is something that's hurting me. Anyone that looks at another human that's genuinely saying that this is, that they are hurting and has any response other than sympathy for them is a piece of shit. But if you don't put it across in the right way, because optics are everything, right? The medium is the message.

Yeah, so I mean, just think about what you're saying. Like, so this is crippling. So the first thing is you're right that it literally is all fun and games. That's what kids see. They see the fun, literally the content is like fun and games and pranks. They don't see people that are like dying from the pranks.

And like there was some stupid like asphyxiation challenge or something on TikTok that I remember. There was some like medical articles about it where they were like, I mean, it's bad, but you don't see that, right? So there's a huge selection bias. The second thing is that one of the worst things that you can do to a human being is remove the right to say, I'm hurting. So like we don't let content creators complain. They're not allowed to complain. And so if you sort of think about it, like these are the one,

the slice of human beings, like celebrities, content creators, people who are privileged or powerful, they don't get to complain because we get so infuriated. But this is where I hate to break it to y'all, but one of the things you learn as a medical doctor is like, I've had rich people, I've had poor people, I've had billionaires, I've had CEOs, I've had heads of state flying over from the Middle East

to come to Massachusetts General Hospital for this kind of care and that kind of care. Like, you know, and like, everyone's got a brain. That brain is roughly the same. Everyone's got an amygdala. And what's so terrifying that people don't understand is that content creators are incredibly isolated. Incredibly, incredibly isolated.

Even their friends will abandon them at the first sign of drama. So you can't make friends anytime you, I'm just sharing just a simple example, but like, you know, once you're a content creator, I'm sure you have had these thoughts. If someone approaches you in the back of your mind, you're always wondering, okay,

is this really about this person getting ahead? Are they looking to collab? Do they like me or do they like the face? Yeah, right? And you never really know. So it's an incredibly isolating experience. We do not really allow those people to complain, you know, which means that they end up

suppressing a lot of this stuff. And thankfully, like one of the things that I'm proud of is that we will talk to content creators. And the reason we built this program is because we were able to have conversations with them where we treat them like human beings. And then the beautiful thing is that you see that these are human beings just like you and me.

They're not some mythical creature that is unworthy of sympathy. Absolutely. Right. And I think all human beings deserve compassion, even the ones that are the most hated. And that's hard. That was definitely something I realized last couple of weeks have been emotionally pretty difficult for me. And especially when you're feeling emotions very closely.

Uh, it showed me, I was acutely aware of how completely fucking dehumanizing most of the, our behavior to each other is on the internet, you know, a good example of this love him or hate him. It doesn't matter. Jordan Peterson, a guy who went through hardcore Benzo withdrawal for a full year and people were like mocking his daughter for trying to help, uh, making jokes like who is this guy to teach us anything when he's addicted to benzos and opiates and all of this stuff.

And he go, you do understand that on the other side of this experience is someone going through fucking akathisia and hardcore benzo withdrawal at the same time. Like, and it doesn't matter. You don't need to like his message. You can even think that his message is a bad thing, but like, that's just straight up suffering and for someone to look at, pick anybody else that's been picked someone from the fucking left or pick someone from like whatever side of the political spectrum you want it really highlighted to me

because I was feeling my emotions like so in such a raw manner, it's like, God, if I was going through this in a more public way, which is one of the reasons that I think keeping your private life private is an incredibly good tactic for anybody that's online, uh, going through difficult emotional things is hard going through difficult emotional things with a few million people having their opinion on it too. It must be fucking impossible. Um, and it made me think about the, who is the dude that was in, uh, um, Jonah Hill. Uh, he was in like some story, like therapy speak and stuff. Do you see this?

It came out last year. He was in some, uh, up raw story and his entire sort of breakup got exploded onto the internet and I was like, looking back, everybody had an opinion, myself included, I was like, hey, hey, hey, this isn't like a play thing. This isn't like, this is somebody's life. This is an experience, like a hardcore, emotional, phenomenological experience they're going through.

You don't get to fucking kick this around like it's a football. Yeah, so I mean, I think I agree with you. So let's just, a couple of football. Yeah, so I mean, I think I agree with you. So let's just a couple of points. So the first is that, see, I think that, just talking about benzoyl withdrawal for a second. So I don't think people know how bad akathisia is.

I've had patients who have literally jumped out of third floor windows because their akathisia is so bad. So for people who don't know akathisia is like a sense of restlessness that is so severe that it can lead to suicidal behavior. And most human beings have no reference for how that is. Just imagine you being uncomfortable, right?

Like you wanna move, but then anytime us normal humans move, we feel more comfortable. Just imagine that it is impossible for you to get comfortable and that that feeling persists forever. I mean, akathisia is one of the most debilitating side effects that I've ever seen as a psychiatrist.

I think that the second thing to keep in mind is that you keep on talking about optics, right? So this is what's so terrible about being a content creator. You don't get to live a normal life anymore because your life is always under a microscope and everything that you do is judged. I've had patients who are psychotic. And what I mean by psychosis is this is the clinical term.

This doesn't mean that they're crazy or anything like that. So psychosis is the presence of delusions or hallucinations or persecutions. I've had patients who have persecutory delusions. So what that, or hallucinations, what that means is that as they walk around and live their life, they have the voice of the devil constantly telling them that they are a piece of shit. And now what we've created for content creators,

that's a reality. Like literally, you go, you post a picture of you eating a taco and people are like, this is cultural appropriation against Mexican people, right? And the way that our brain filters this information, there's no compassion for these people. And this is where like, you know,

you mentioned Jordan Peterson and Jonah Hill and stuff like that, and I'm with you. Like, I think that we should have compassion for all human beings. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. I think that you can disagree with you. Like I think that we should have compassion for all human beings. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. I think that you can disagree with someone. And even if you think someone is like toxic, like I'm not supporting the work that they do

or things like that. But I think that like my overwhelming experience and we've had a couple of, you know, I've done a couple of interviews with people who are bad and I overcame a technology addiction and everyone's like, yay, go Dr. K, right? But Jordan Peterson is struggling with a benzo addiction, which I think who is he to talk about it?

Like that's who he is. I mean, if we look at the data, peer support, Alcoholics Anonymous is the best intervention for overcoming addiction, statistically. Now, I don't think it's actually the best, but just in terms of numbers, the majority of people actually get sober without anything. But so who is he? He's the one who's lived through it, right?

And why is it that I get applauded for overcoming an addiction and becoming faculty at Harvard Medical School, and this guy is called a hypocrite, right? He has experience. And I'm not saying that everything he says is good. The one thing, and I tend to not comment about people that I haven't talked to, but we've had people on stream who have been in jail for murder.

We've had people on stream who have polysubstance use and have particular political affiliations and that people don't like. And then I think the main thing to understand is that when you get to it, everyone is a person. Everyone is a person. And something about the way that the internet is structured is it's actually designed to not let you see the person.

Yes. It's designed to let you see such a slice of the person. We remove, you know, I don't know too much about Jordan Peterson, but like, you know, I know he gives, goes and gives talks, right? So like talk for two hours. And what do we see? We see some 60 second clip.

And that's what happens. We don't get the actual person. We get an inflammatory slice of the person without any context. And so I think it's it's brutal on people and I think that's why people quit and everyone's confused. Why do why are celebrities like Look at people like Michael Jackson, right? Substance use problems arguably suicide. Like I mean this this shit happens all the time It happens to musicians. It happens to celebrities. It's going to be happening more to content creators. Thankfully they're burning out and quitting, right? Instead of worse.

Maybe save their fucking life. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, even if you're not the last 15 minutes, even if you're not a content creator, everybody is in one form or another, very few people aren't putting parts of their life on the internet. And to be honest, if it's not your job, if this isn't your day job, and you are still choosing to expose yourself to this level of criticism from, again, mostly random people,

or maybe even friends, like that's maybe even worse for you. Like, yeah, your identity isn't wrapped up in it, but you're still subject to all of the same problems. And you're electing to just drop yourself into this. Yeah. I mean, so I going to, you know, John, is it hate or height? Yeah. He's tall. He doesn't hate you. And so I think that's where we see some of these very clear negative impacts from social media use, which is that, yeah, everyone is a content creator. And so everyone experiences this to some level, right? So even if I post a picture of myself and it gets two likes, if I post a picture of myself tomorrow and it gets four likes, I feel really good.

If I post a picture of myself the next day and I get four likes, then I feel, eh. Constantly moving goal posts. You can never win. And this is what's so hard about being a content creator is you start at 1 million and it's a huge celebration. 2 million is half the celebration and twice the work. And it just gets worse and worse and worse.

Yeah, I have a story about when we hit a thousand subs, I think me and my editor went out for food. When we hit 10,000, we did something else as well. When we hit 100,000, we got helium balloons and we got a cake and we did all the rest of it. When we hit a million, we got a five-minute phone call and then like went back to the grind. and we're about to hit two probably before this even comes out.

Uh, and I don't know whether we've got anything planned. Um, so yeah, James Smith has this really good insight where he says all wins feel the same. His point being that the first time you buy yourself, your first car is maybe even more enjoyable than when you buy your $300,000 dream car. The first time that you move out of the house and go into a rental apartment, maybe better than when you buy your dream home that you're going to spend the rest of your life with all wins feel the same.

There is no Uber surcharge for you having achieved something that's 10 X worth of that. The point being that just wins are good. And that's wins in the therapy room. That's wins with hitting a meditation street. That's wins with sticking to your word, having a difficult conversation with someone. And, um, I think we've stripped away because of the comparison game, anything. It feels, uh, fragile and narcissistic and shameful to take pleasure in something which isn't grand because

so much of our life is performative and look at how, why are you, oh yeah, good work, man. Like fucking hooray for waking up on time today. And it's like, no, fuck you. Like this is a thing. I did a thing. Yeah. I mean, I, I agree in a completely. So I think there are a couple of things to keep in mind is I think it is important for anyone

who has any kind of wind to have gratitude, right? So I think that if we look at all winds feel the same, the interesting thing is that we control a lot more of how we feel about a wind than we realize. And a big part of the work that I do with creators is helping them appreciate, you know, you say that you have nothing planned for 2 million, which is cool.

We didn't have anything planned for 2 million. And also like, you know, the joy that you create is partially created by you. And so for creators, it's like helping them appreciate that they got to 2 million, which is a lot of win, which they can't see because of the way that their brain is structured. And also it's people who are depressed, 25 year old gamers who have trouble getting lot of win, which they can't see because of the way that their brain is structured. And also it's people who are depressed,

25 year old gamers who have trouble getting out of bed, who feel ashamed of their wins. And that's so devastating. Just think about that, right? If you're someone who's struggling to get out of bed every day, and you get out of bed on the fifth day after struggling, and you were ashamed of your win,

how the fuck are you ever going to do anything? Yeah. I mean, dude, I'm intimately familiar with this. There would be, I thought I had depression in my twenties. I think it was chronic, uh, interrupted sleep from being in the nightlife industry and maybe a disposition toward low mood and ruminative thought. But I wouldn't leave basically bed, bathroom, and the front door to grab Uber Eats for, you know, two days at a time, curtains will be drawn. I'd spike my blood sugar with a ton of junk food and then fall back asleep and then wake up.

And it's so much shame and guilt around being like, who am I to be defeated by ostensibly nothing? What's going wrong? Nothing's going wrong in your life. And yet you're still unable to get out of bed. nothing's going wrong in your life. And yet you're still unable to get out of bed. And then when you finally do the shame around what a small thing to do to consider a win. How pitiful are you that this is something

that you consider victorious? Like what a sorry excuse for a human. So that is, by the way, the shame, remember we talked about, you've got the shame somewhere. There it is, right? It's probably in a number of other places, but yeah, there the way, the shame, remember we talked about, you've got the shame somewhere, there it is, right? It's probably in a number of other places, but yeah, that's one of the places. And I think that that's what's so crippling,

that's what I see, which is so sad, and is that, see, the moment that you take your wins and you turn them into losses and beat yourself up because you should be able to accomplish more, that is the moment that you take the poison in your life, right? Because now, and we see this, so there's research on people with imposter syndrome. And one of the key features cognitively of people with imposter syndrome is anytime they have a win,

they attribute it to luck or circumstances or effort. And anytime someone else wins, they attribute it to hard work. It's like inverse fundamental attribution error, if you know what that is. Yes. Yes. And this is, it's so crippling. And that's why like, it's so terrifying

that you kind of mentioned comparison. It's a huge problem. So that's why like a lot of the work that we do is about dissolving your ego because ego is what makes comparisons. If we understand why do we compare? In order for me to think you're taller and I'm shorter, there has to be me and there has to be a you.

And what I'm really an advocate for, and this is where like, oh, here I am, you know, crying on the behalf of people like Jordan Peterson, who are so successful or whatever. And I've seen enough successful people who are struggling on the inside. And I've also seen enough homeless people who are content.

And it's amazing. Like that's when you really learn about life is when you work with the spectrum of everybody. And I think the main thing that we gotta do is I think it's about comparison. Like if you think about why do you not celebrate your win, it's because you're comparing against another person. But you can look at some of the work of people like I think Robert Sapolsky, he's a neuroscientist and he sort of believes in biological reduction, I mean, determinism.

And the one thing that I've understood is that everyone has truly unique lives. No one has the same level of genetics. No one has the same IQ. No one has the same circumstances. I am where I am today because I had so many advantages, so many advantages. And so people will sometimes be like,

oh, Dr. K, you're exceptional. I don't think I'm that way. I understand that from an objective standpoint, you can make that argument, but I think it's like, oh, Dr. K, you're exceptional. I don't think I'm that way. I understand that from an objective standpoint, you can make that argument. But I think it's like, you know, I didn't do anything to deserve not being born with cerebral palsy. I didn't do anything to deserve having parents

that could have paid my bills. I spent seven years studying to become a monk in like India and South Korea and Japan. And like I had parents who could pay for that, right? And the majority of people don't. So all of us are just products of our environment. And I think the more that we recognize that human beings each have their own unique journey

and everyone has challenges, everyone has advantages. And the more we compare, it doesn't work because what worked for this person may not work for you because you have a different brain, you have different circumstance, you have a different life. And so our approach has always been to understand yourself first. Don't worry about success from other people

and what they did. I think there's a lot of useful lessons to learn from people who've been on your podcast and it's a lot of good stuff in there. But at the end of the day, the whole reason that there's a whole self-help industry is because one person doesn't have all the answers because not all human beings are the same.

And so you have to take all of this advice that worked for a thousand different brains and a thousand different lives that are different from yours. You have to translate it to yours. It doesn't translate one-to-one. Every person has to walk their own individual journey, do self-exploration, figure out why you have the thoughts that pop up in the way that you do. And I think that's why you've become so successful because you didn't, I'm sure you've learned

from lots of other people, but it looks like what you've really done is take all of this information from people who read a thousand research articles or wrote a thousand research articles and apply them to your life. And that's when things get really good. When you start applying things and looking specifically at your life. And that's when things get really good. When you start applying things and looking specifically at your life and recognizing that you are a completely unique individual that has never existed in the history of humanity.

And that the answer to you advancing your life is not gonna be found anywhere else. By all means, get information, but everything has to be translated down to you. How can people separate their sense of self-worth from their accomplishments? I mean, it's a great question. So I've got two or three different answers.

So the first is, see, if you can absolve yourself of your failures, then you can get rid of the self-worth from accomplishments, does that make sense? No. So, see, if I fail at something, I'm a crap person, right? And then if I succeed at something, I'm a good person. So both of those have to be separated. This is where a lot of people will focus on one,

but not the other. So they'll say like, in both ways, right? So if I'm working with someone who's depressed, they're like, I'm trying to help this person not feel depressed because they have failed at something. We're trying to separate the ego from the action. So if you wanna separate your accomplishments from your self-worth, like you just have to untie

both of those things fundamentally. There are two ways to, does that kind of make sense? Okay, so there are two fundamental ways to do this. The first is to recognize, I know it sounds kind of weird, but you don't actually accomplish anything. Like literally, it is impossible for you to accomplish anything. So you can plant a seed, you can water it,

you can do all the right things, but you can't make a plant grow. So as a human being, there's a very fundamental principle that a lot of people don't understand. And I know this is going to sound crazy. You cannot, all you can do is the action. You cannot achieve any result. Give me an example.

I can study at Harvard medical school. I cannot save a life. It is not within my power to save a life. Like I can be the best doctor on the planet, but like I do not, nowhere does training give me the power of life over death or death. Like you just can't do that. And this is where like another example, I can be the best boyfriend on the planet, but I can't make someone fall in love with me. I just can't do it. Right? And this is where some people will disagree.

off of me. I just can't do it. Right. And this is where some people will disagree. I really think that if you stop and you do this very simple practice, close your eyes. What can you control? Chris, my movements, what else? My thoughts sometimes. What else? My breath. Can you control me? No. Can you control who watches this? No. Can you control how many views it gets? No. Can you control me? No. Can you control who watches this? No. Can you control how many views it gets? No. Can you control what sponsorships you're going to get or who's going to reach out to you? Can you control the comments in the comment section?

Definitely not. Like what the fuck, right? So here we are, you have a successful video and you don't control that. All you control in life is what you do. And this is paradoxically how you become successful. So it is the people who focus on the outcome of their actions that get screwed by it. Because understand this,

if my self-worth is dependent on my outcomes, then even if I achieve what I want, then like oftentimes people don't feel great, even if they live up to their expectations, right? It's like one million and then I need two and then I need three, then I need four. If you were relying on accomplishments to determine your self-worth, it will never be enough.

Right? Because there's always another promotion. There's always, there's a hundred thousand dollar car, there's a $300,000 car. So if your self-worth is tied to something external, it'll never be enough. This is what we call moving goalposts. And it's why human beings, like, if that were the case,

then anyone who makes $150,000 would just be chill. But that's not how it works. The reason we think that is because we've been conditioned we are not our self-worth, but other people's worth. Other people, I'm sorry, other people's judgment of our worth is dependent on our accomplishments. No one gives a shit about who you are.

They care about what you do. Oh, like you get this award because you got a 4.0. That's why we get conditioned in this. So then we adopt their view, but that doesn't work long-term. So I think separating out and really recognizing that if you stop and think about it, all you control is like what you feel.

That is the only thing. If you cannot feel it, you cannot control it. Literally, show me someone who can control anything outside of themselves. And this is where people will say, and this is, you know, but I can say particular things, I can work harder. Yeah, you can do all that stuff,

but you don't actually control what happens So all you can do is take the right action and then like, you know I remember like I learned this because one day I was in the emergency room and a patient came in with three gunshot wounds And this person's dying right and it's like we're gonna do everything that we can but holy shit Like we don't know if this person's gonna live or die Like we just can't do it and this is like one of the best hospitals on the planet, right? Amazing attending this brilliant trauma surgeon and like we just can't save this.

Like we don't know. And think about how advanced medicine is. Think about all these tools we have. We have antibiotics and we have MRIs and CT scans and we literally like we can take someone's heart out of their body and we can give them somebody else's heart and we can replace your heart, we can place your kidneys, but we can't save a life. There may be graft versus host disease,

like you never know. So that's number one. Second thing is just dissolve the ego. The moment that you dissolve your ego, which is if we look at things like, there are even studies now of psychedelics, for example, and psychedelics and trauma. And if you look at the studies of people

who use psychedelics for the healing of trauma, you can measure, you can predict whether there will be a therapeutic improvement based on the type of psychedelic experience they have. So if I see cool colors and patterns, I won't be healed. If I have specifically an ego death experience, that's what correlates with healing. So a lot of, and this is also what the yogis and the Buddhist people and Buddha and all these people figured out is the more that you dissolve your ego, the more content you will be. What do you mean when you say dissolve the ego?

What are you? Person. What does that mean? I guess my experience of me is thoughts and identity. What is identity? A sense of self, a story that I tell myself. So those are two different things. Which one are you really?

So if I were to ask, who is Chris Williamson, what would you say? Person, podcaster. Okay, so this is where there are certain specific features of the ego. So Chris Williamson is dot, dot, dot is a factor of your ahamkara, your ego, podcaster, man, Chad, savior, loser, whatever.

All of those. But the truth of the matter is scientifically, those are not real things, right? I can't biopsy you and find a podcaster. These are abstractions of the mind, loser, winner. What does that mean? One person has a trophy, one person doesn't have a trophy. That's what makes them a winner or loser.

But what if someone cheats? Is a cheater a winner? No, those are two different things. But hold on a second. I thought we said winners have trophies, right? So these are all abstractions of the mind. And your first answer was the correct one, which is that you are that which experiences

this person's life. You are a sense of experience, that's it. The rest of it is like glommed on. And if we sort of think about it, right? So even if we think about the things that we think of as our identity. So a man having an identity as a man can change nowadays. So I've always been all Oak sort of,

but I wasn't always a doctor. I wasn't always a father, but I was still me. So if you really look at the true essence of what you are, it is not any attribute that you can put on a piece of paper. It is you are the bundle of sensory experiences that lives your life and that's all you are. The rest of it can change.

The rest of it is fluctuating. The rest of it is an abstraction. You cannot X-ray someone and find a winner or a loser. That is a judgment by someone else's mind and a judgment by your mind. And this is where I hate to break it to you, but a judgment by your mind is not reality. A judgment by somebody else's mind is not reality. If it was, then people could judge and say, oh, this person's, I judge, I think this person's a millionaire. Does that put a million dollars in your bank account? Fuck no. They're thoughts. Thoughts are not reality.

It's crazy, but we all live in this world where we think thoughts are reality. They're not. And this is where people will say, but what about the efficacy? Like, you know, if people treat you a certain way, that'll affect your life. All that stuff is true.

There is a reality of how people will treat you, but that doesn't make you who you are. How people treat you is how people treat you. Does that kind of make sense? Like even the language that we use, there's a difference between treated a certain way and what you are. And the more that you look at it, you know, and this is where like, you can take a shit, you can be president of the United States, you can be a dictator, you can be Hitler, you can be an influencer, you can be a child, you can be a bomb, we all take shits.

We're all human at the end of the day. And so there are certain practices like shunya is like the Sanskrit word for null or zero or void. So there are some practices that you can do in meditation that like you literally dissolve your sense of identity. And the more that you do it, it's liberating. Because if you really think about it, who is the person that suffers?

It's the ego. So I'm a medical doctor today, which means that if one day someone takes away my medical license, then I will suffer. I will get pride from my medical license and I buy myself some degree of suffering from losing my medical license. The moment that I become a father,

I get some joy in life from that identity and I also open myself up to suffering if my kids ever say they hate me or something bad happens or whatever. So we don't realize that if you really pay attention, the majority of people suffering in life comes from their sense of identity because, oh, I'm number one.

The moment that you become number one, you open yourself up to becoming number two and the suffering that goes with it. Right? So you have to get rid of the pride and you have to get rid of the shame. Get rid of all of it. And then people are like,

but then what am I gonna do? And this is where I challenge you, Chris. Think about the best moments in your life. The best moments in your life is when you're, you really need to take a piss. You really need to take a piss. You really need to take a piss you really need to take a piss You really need to take a piss and then you run into the bathroom and all the urinals are occupied and then you're like Oh shit, and then someone finishes up. Thank God you take a piss ah bliss What difference does it make whether you have 1 million subscribers or 2 million subscribers who the fuck cares?

You needed a urinal you got to take a piss that pleasure is the same for you It's the pleasure of someone who has a homeless person, the pleasure of eating food when you're hungry, the pleasure of walking down the beach, the pleasure of sitting down and relaxing, the pleasure of being able to close your eyes. There's some material benefits that come from that, but, and this is really what it means.

So you have to separate, you have to realize that all you are is that which you can feel. You're just a body, that's it. I mean, you can make all this stuff, who knows, maybe there's a nuclear fallout or something crazy happens, a meteor hits this, and then, oh my God, all your effort is down the drain. You can't control that. All you can control is what you do. And so then something beautiful happens. I've seen this so much with, so I did a lot of mental health work for doctors. And what I saw is some doctors tore themselves apart

because they attach themselves to the outcomes of their patients. I learned this on pediatric oncology because in pediatric oncology, you have kids who have cancer and sometimes they die. And the only way you can sleep at night is not about whether the child lives or dies because these are highly aggressive,

like myelomas and leukemias and things like that, bad cancers. The only way you can sleep at night is if you did the best that you could. And so specifically with that person with the three gunshot wounds, like that was my moment of like discovering like, am I gonna sleep at night?

Could I have done anything else? No. And so then you can sleep at peace because you did everything that you could do and you had the power to do. What if you could have done something else? That's the beauty of it. So if you could have done something else,

the beautiful thing about ego, and when you eliminate ego, is you ask yourself that question and there's no ego that has to protect itself from the answer. So once you eliminate, you say, I could could have done something else and then you suffer for a moment but the next day when you wake up you fucking do better and then the next day you wake up you fucking do better next day you wake up you fucking do

better. So in my case it was failed out of college went to India learned this principle I woke up is fucking embarrassing. So I was the kid who had graduated with a 2.5 GPA when I graduated from medical school I did not go to the award ceremony Because it never dawned I never looked at my grades because I didn't give a shit about my grades I was like, I'm gonna learn medicine. I'm gonna try to be a doctor. This is what I was gonna do I won two awards. I didn't even show up Because it never dawned on me

That I could have won anything because I'm the loser. I'm the guy who barely, I'm the guy who got rejected from 120 medical schools. And so like, absolutely, if you can do better, you look at that. But remember doing better is in these hands. So you should a hundred percent do that. Do everything you can with these hands, 100%. Don't shy away from the fact that you could have done better. And that's how you sleep at night.

But it's not a comment on your self-worth as an individual, how you do the things that you do. So, so that's where I mean, I would say that in a weird way, that is a comment, right? So if you are unhappy with your actions, then by all means, think less of yourself. The beautiful thing is that once you reach this ego list kind of state state and you think less of yourself, it becomes very easy to correct it. Because it's in your control. Absolutely. Yep.

But yeah, I mean, I think you should feel some amount of shame and disappointment and you wake up the next day and it's in these hands. Is it shame and disappointment in your actions, not shame and disappointment in the outcomes? Both, all of the above, I think it's fine. I thought you didn't have control over the outcomes. You don't have controls over, but you do have control in your actions, not shame and disappointment in the outcomes? Both, all of the above, I think it's fine. I thought you didn't have control over the outcomes. You don't have controls over it,

but you do have control over your actions, right? So, and that's where I think it gets a little bit tricky, but you can- I think this is where people get stuck a lot of the time. They confuse actions and outcomes. Could I have done better? Well, maybe I could, I could have done more, I should have, would have done better.

Yeah, so that's where I would say, in my experience, as you notice the shortcomings in your behavior, that's what you should correct. But even if you had done that, it's not clear that the outcome would have changed. Right? No one can look at alternate universes and actually collect data. That's what your mind may tell you. So that's why I say like, still focus on yourself. And if you're not happy with your actions, by all means, correct that.

Compassion, man, compassion for ourselves, compassion for other people. It's so funny. I think for a long time, I wanted the masculine urge to be seen as a competent, hard working, achieving sort of guy. Uh, and compassion seems like weird and fluffy and, and fucking weak. And you shouldn't really play around with that, but I'm pretty quickly coming to believe, I think it's like, it's a genuine strength and it's something that I'm trying to cultivate more for myself and for other people as well.

Yeah. And I think there's a, there's a beautiful wisdom in what you just said. Um, so I think you said I, I used to want to be seen if you pay attention to your language. That's ego. Ego is about the way that you were seen, not about who you are. And the beautiful thing about compassion is if you think about people who are concerned about ego and self-worth, their attention is on themselves. How do other people see me?

I'm always looking at this and how this will be perceived. The moment that you focus on compassion, you stop looking at here and you start looking at actually another human being. That's why compassion also eliminates ego. So if you look at all of these religious traditions, it's super cool because there's psychological neuroscience support for a lot of these like religious

and spiritual traditions. And why did Jesus say like, do good to other people? And in Hinduism, we have ahimimsa and we have that in Buddhism too. So it's why compassion? Because compassion actually eliminates the ego. Because what is it that makes it hard for people to be compassionate? It's because I'm so caught up on this. I can't afford to care about someone else because my needs are not being met. And when I look at all these people who are adversely judging Jordan Peterson or Jonah Hill or whoever, Taylor Swift, take your pick, me, you,

what I tend to find is that the people who hate other people on the internet oftentimes cannot afford to be compassionate because of something going on in their life. Who is it that is spending the time to just make random toxic comments on the internet? These are not, many of these people, I don't think, have fulfilling lives.

That's been my experience anyway, I don't know. So compassion is beautiful at dissolving ego. Dr. K, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I love your work. I think the more that I get exposed to it, this blending of East and West, I think it's very much needed. I can see a resurgence in whatever you wanna call it, like rational spirituality as well, which I think you're helping to push forward.

And you've also got a new book as well. Yeah, so I have a new book. This is a parenting book, How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. So one of the things that I kind of noticed was so many of the problems of technology that we see today are because our parents were ill-equipped to help us understand how to develop healthy relationships.

Such a right turn from generation to generation. Absolutely, so we learn about parenting from our parents. And so our parents didn't understand how to deal with technology when we were growing up. And the other thing that I actually want to take a second to talk about, because I think it's more relevant to our discussion today is we have a guide to trauma that's coming out.

And I think just this is what we're talking about today. So I think the one thing to keep in mind is a lot of the concepts that we talk about are how experiences shape us, how they shape our physiology, how they result in things like alexithymia. And in our trauma guide, we actually go into a lot of detail about understanding how experiences shape a human being. And the reason that I'm thinking about it now

is because we talk about emotions, we talk about physiology, we talk about identity, we talk about self-worth. And even like this whole crux of experience goes dormant, makes emotions, makes schemas, makes an identity, and then controls your actions and your destiny. And you feel powerless. That's what we really dig into.

Why can people get that? Um, hopefully by the time this episode comes out, it will be out, but, uh, healthygamer.gg is where they can get that. And it's something that I'm very proud of because I think it really stitches together a lot of this East meets West stuff. Hell yeah. Where else should they go? What else do you want to direct people to?

YouTube. So we have a Healthy Gamer GG YouTube channel and people can find us there. Dude, I really appreciate you. Thank you for coming through today. Thanks a lot. Oh, offense Yeah, oh yeah Offense