How to Cure Your Anxious Mind - Dr K HealthyGamer (4K)

you spend a lot of time thinking about our interaction with screens MH how would you describe what technology is doing to our brains uh I think the short answer is not good so I I think technology has a lot of benefits so it has a lot of benefits for our lives but specifically what is it what is it doing to our brains I think is generally speaking not very good um 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 rated 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 that people use to Salve bad I I have seen a number of girl friends who if there is a if they're feeling a little bit uncomfortable get on their phone and like self soothe by scrolling yeah I mean I think everyone does that so so I I think if you 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 your work desk to walk somewhere else people will just automatically pull out their phones so we're we're so we 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 what does chronic long-term hiding from feeling feelings result in I think it pro 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 em 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 like anatomically our lyic 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 um you know it 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 H Jonathan height was on the show recently talking about his new book The anxious generation yeah 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 I think that what what what I really see with technology is that it propagates problems so technology in some ways so there actually I it creates some problems but it also propagates problems so in my kind of clinical work what I see a lot of is that you know if you're depressed about something in life social media or video games will propagate that problem way worse so what what I see a lot of is like you know 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 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 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 amp the work that we're doing yeah I think it's still I it even with all of the millions of plays and all the rest of the stuff it technology is pretty close to like a net zero For Me overall I I have a very negative relationship I think with my phone and with social media um a lot of Shame around being so uh 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 yeah so I 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 sscar which is like a ball of undigested negative emotion and and even in psychoanalysis we kind of have this Theory that's like Freud and Yung 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 going to 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 I I think when I work with people usually what I find as the antidote to that is get to the root of that shame and where that shame is kind of lingering from coming from um and and you know I 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 I think I feel shame I think I 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 H how do people people deal with shame through self-inquiry or how do people deal with shame at all so I 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 um 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 be feel afraid of the dog even the dog is across the street so in 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 often times we do not process that experience it simply goes dormant and so the next time that I 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 5-year-old your sympathetic nervous system will activate you'll Panic you know you're you're you 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 uh what caused that to happen was there something that I did is it because of the there you go right so what happens in a 5-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 you 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 will'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 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 aamar 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 reex examined and the most damning thing is that when we are emotional we form very powerful conclusions but since we are emotional they're more likely to be wrong and if anyone has gone through a breakup you know exactly what I'm talking about because 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 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 let's divide it into a couple 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 going to breathe at you and you tell me if you can tell what kind of emotion I'm feeling right so absolutely right now so it's going to seem similar but arousal absolutely right both of them are deep breaths I like the second right and and and I I can't help it I have to add a little bit of facial expression to it and 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 that when we have our igdal in our lyic system that's active there are certain physiologic changes and we can engage in certain techniques to essentially reduce those and this is why Brea is 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 impact on our identity which is our like our humar 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 sucar okay so this is where I kind of mapped it out so in 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 that lives in your subconscious in some way and then this generates something called a schema which is like a way of thinking um so we can have these sort of automatic thoughts from cognitive behavioral therapy or narcissistic defense mechanisms when we're talking about ego or humar 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 um I was in a a car crash when I was like 20 20 years old and I was fine but I could have not being 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 know and it's just part of the baked in assumptions and physics of your system and that's now just how you see the world 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 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 there's a fascinating field of science which is emerging now called neuroeconomics and neuroeconomics is fascinating because it looks at all of the 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 I'm going to ask a girl out on a date okay so our brain when I think about asking the girl out on the date the dop energic 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 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 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 it's a fundamental neuroscientific asymmetry of 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 uh anxiety cost which is the longer that you take to do a thing 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 Justus by front loing 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 uh 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 to 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 attention lack of focus why does it seem like those three maybe some others but largely those three are the emotions dour 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 I I'm hopeless about the future because I'm a loser well where did that that inclusion 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 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 you know medications like benzodiazapines or serotonergic medications and what do these medications do benzodiazapines activate the Gaba receptor in the brain they increase chloride flow across our our channels and they hyperpolarize our neurons they essentially dull us out so one of the treatments for anxiety is to literally like 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 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 we bring our attention to the present because when I'm playing a video game I'm not 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 loes 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 butress and reliant on the technology AB 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 e 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 why is depression and anxiety getting worse I think it I really believe the root of it is intentional 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 momentus you might have heard me say that I took my testosterone from 495 to 1006 last year and two of the supplements I used throughout that were FID doio aestus and tonat Ali I first heard Dr Andrew hubman talk about these really impressive effects which sound great Until you realize that most supplements don't actually contain what they're advertising momentus make the only NSF certified fed doju orestas and tonat Ali on the planet that means they're tested so rigorously that even Olympic athletes can use it and that is why I partnered with them so if you're not performing in the gym or the bedroom the way that you would like this is a fantastic place to begin to naturally improve your testosterone and there is a 30-day moneyback guarantee so you can buy it try it for 29 days and if you do not like it they will give you your money back plus they ship internationally right now you can get 20% off everything sitewide by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Liv mous.com wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's Liv m o m n t us.com wisdom and code modern wisdom a checkout given that computer games involve a lot of dying and failure why do you think so many people are struggling to deal with difficulty in rejection in the real world if they are spending a lot of time facing it in the virtual world because they they give you dying in Failure so here's the beautiful thing okay CHR think about this so the whole problem if if video games did not offer dying in 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 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 you 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 going to hear about it the next day that doesn't happen so 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 uh the perfect utilitarian rationalist view of the world but that emotions kind of a a second string um both indicator uh assistant uh 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 um 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 um researchers basically looked at they 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 heart AE right so we actually have a sematic map when anytime we have an emotion remember an emotion is not mental it is 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 often times 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 or 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 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 dump to what do I feel I feel love 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 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 Alexi Alexa Alexi so Alexia is a is a I guess clinical term that means um color blindness 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 going to 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 Alexia now there's even research on something called normative male Alexia so normative meaning it is normal why is it normative male alexithymia because this is actually the most men are alexithymic this is what 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 yes 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 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 Alexia 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 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 hard working 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 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 Rob uh so almost a looking upon emotions as being a second class signal uh vulnerability weakness um like a lack of sophistication as well as a thinker I'm I'm I'm too I'm I'm significantly too sophisticated to act on something as idiotic and basic as emotions yeah uh and I I tweeted this a while ago I got a ton of steak for it but I don't care uh basically saying that um not opening up about your V V abilities 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 I I think it's good to talk about negative emotions and 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 we have a I've had patients who've been abused in their upbringing and what happens is often times what happens in abusive relationships and 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 what we see is a an 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 going to do they have this great idea for a startup they have have a great idea for a book I'mma do this I'mma do this I'mma do this I'mma 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 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 with 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 buy 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 feelings 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 uh a guy asked Peterson this question the depth of my Consciousness causes me to suffer is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so very deeply I thought it was a really great question what's your opinion on that and how can people with High self-awareness deal with it so it's funny because um you know there there's uh some someone once told me that you know I 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 cases of people who have uh psychosomatic illnesses so if you look at people who have things like irritable bowel syndrome infl uh lesso inflammatory bowel disease fibromyalgia what we know is they have something called visceral hypers sensitivity 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 hypervigilant 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 is it raging exactly is it part of a 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 defract 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 uh so I like a couple of specific practices um so the two like very simple introductory ones that I tend to teach people one is something calleda so I love your Indian accent every every word that you say in Indian I want to do the whole podcast in India okay sure we can do podcasting no problem okay so first one is tataka okay I can't focus go back go you can't focus I will teach you practice right interesting you're talking about not being 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 fly 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 way let's stick with this one for now I did enjoy that though so so one one practice is something that I call thoa which is not I 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're you tell yourself okay I'm going to look at this without blinking and then over time your body will send you signals they're like hey we want to 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 thoa because there's a certain badassness to it right like you feel awesome Budd yeah like like I'm going to I'm going to control this and you feel strong and powerful when you do this this kind of thoa practice so we'll we'll do kind of fix point gazing at a candle it also there's also some cool stuff that happens in the practice which keeps people engaged like our photo receptors tend to get exhausted with pigments and then you have kind of psychedelic experiences and stuff which kind of fun you kind of get Tunnel Vision on the outside 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 gash theum 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 want to we want to relax we want to move we want to do this we want to do that and then and then usually what what 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 like 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 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 and maybe we should have done it but you begin to realize that like 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 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 introductory session yeah so I I would say for something like tra you know it's it's best to learn from a teacher and many like yoga and meditation schools will teach this stuff but you know fortica I would say like go to the point of discomfort but not to the point of pain um there are some medic contraindication 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 2 minutes 3 minutes four minutes um and then that's usually enough and then there's another the cool thing is with tra there's a there's a different practice that you can do called Ana which is kind of the next phase so um and this is where you you kind of said you get the tunnel vision so the cool thing that happens in in the in the eyes is once you exhaust your photo receptors 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 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 throa like in your mind like looking in your mind at 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 so that's a different that's a different practice but the the make people stare at a wall which has been a revolutionary practice in our in our community it is the joy of that practice is see we're so distracted from ourselves and so many people come to me and they're like I don't know what I want to 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 you know 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 which is our parents and our parents say I look be doctor 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 the main thing that's happened is if you literally look at our Attention our attention is always outside of us now because I want to be efficient right so what am I going to do I took a shower this morning I put on this is great podcast called modern wisdom it's by Chris Williamson and like I'm going to put on this episode because then when I'm in the shower when I'm taking a [ __ ] can I use language yeah okay when I'm taking a [ __ ] when I'm shaving like I'm going to be learning during those moments and then this was something that I did during med school where I was like constantly like input input input over CL yeah and so 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 the staring at a wall practice is sit at a wall and we're just going to 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 s 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 rep reps 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 did the practice and he was kind of describing what happened and 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 5 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 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 longer 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 to entertain you you can take a flight to Europe that is 8 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 um sort of apocryphal story like a mythology story in in the Hindu tradition about this churning of the ocean and at the bottom of the ocean there was like some kind of nectar and brosia 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 the this like the yogic tradition that anytime you want to find gold within you or anytime you want to find nectar or umut um you're going to find poison first so the pathway to finding inner peace involves going through poison we'll get back to talking to Dr k minute but first I need to tell you about facta meals eat stress-free this spring with Factor's delicious ready to eat meals every fresh never frozen meal is chef-crafted dietition approved and ready to eat in Just 2 minutes choose from a weekly menu of 35 meals including popular options like calorie smart Protein Plus keto or veggie and vegan also discover more than 60 add-ons every week like breakfast on the-go lunch snacks and beverages to help you stay fueled and focused throughout the day no fuss no mess eating Factor meals eliminate the hassle of prepping cooking and cleaning up factor is your solution for fast premium meals without the need for cooking if you're struggling to get enough protein into your diet this is a fantastic solution because you don't need to prep it it's already been prepped it is made by actual chefs and it is ready in less than 2 minutes right now you can get 50% off your first month and 20% off your second month by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to factor meals.com mw50 and using the code mw50 a checkout that's factor meals.com mw50 and mw50 a checkout account I had a uh an Insight when I started doing self- inquiry 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 you know every so often underneath the stone you find something that's really beautiful that you're proud about yourself for it's it's a a realization that you feel whole uh but that's one out of 20 and the remaining 19 have something terrifying and disgusting and and and awful hiding underneath 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 complex not complexity but like the level of dexterity and and uh 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 what has changed about what you're finding uh 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 I remember when I first before I even started meditating I was wanted 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 downregulate to this much lower level of stimul 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 uh 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 is the proportion of things changing because I'm like each time I move to a different it's like a computer game or I move to a different Garden yeah so so I and I that's that's wonderful and I I think you know being obsessed about emotions is I'm sure not the first Obsession you've had no true right so so one day you're going to have to ask yourself where does the obsession of things come from right The Meta matter question yeah absolutely right so that that's when and when you get to that level by the way all of your obsessions will fall apart so that that's that's the good thing so I 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 I was working with someone who was uh 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 right 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 like so much of it eight hours of the day was internal we used to do all these rote tasks like churning butter and like churning butter like you know what is what do you think about when you turn butter like you just so your our our brain defaults to so much time for emotional processing and now what started to happen as 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 uh please the therapist but get the most out of it how do people do well in therapy what a beautiful question and I I think this is a question that everyone should learn uh or the answer to so I 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 Fs there's in the United States we have varsity and junior varsity and we have you know the a team and the B team so we start segregating everybody up we start measuring people up and we assign a like you 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 um 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 all these different types right there's psychoanalysis and psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral therapy and so people sat down 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 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 I what I recommend to like friends of mine who want to get therapy is I say be prepared to make three appointments um 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 leg work don't try one and then like you know then start the process of finding the second one so I say make three appointments UPF front 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's some people where you're going to 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 that was bad or whatever but I I think a lot of people um 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 intakes 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 some somewhat of an assessment and it feels like we're kind of done at the hour mark so I I I think people will feel the difference so just grav choose well yeah just 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 some 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 to say hey this is working for me or this is not working for me and sometimes we'll even get 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 6 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 [ __ ] because the moment that you realize something about the patient as well absolutely right so often times 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% let's say 30% 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 um and 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 number one and number two I think that's that's the two very good tips yeah I found opening the door a little bit one of the patterns that I have is people pleasing specifically uh not upsetting women I have a big thing about not upsetting women I see them as something that is uh psychologically fragile and must be protected like a professional White Knight basically yeah um and what that led to was I was uh unprepared to say of 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 it's yeah so that's what's so cool about a therapeutic relationship so I 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 the it's a wonderful practice ground for certain things I mean there's certain things you you shouldn't do and that's the therapist responsibility to like let you know so if you say things that are abusive or not respectful or unethical then the therapist should let you know but you you know I've had patients you know yell at me and and call me a 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 often times 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 what are we going to do about that does that mean you're never coming back or we going to work through that and and figure it out and so I I I think that it's a 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 you know part of the challenge so men have a a four times increase in risk of suicidality after a breakup yes and and so one of the reasons for that is that often times 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 is 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 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 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 talk 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 just a therapist we don't really segregate between our male patients and our emotional on 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 um paper uh uh so there's a lot of exploration into this and 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 prti patients we're not there to solve your problems so when I was like um a a second-year Psychiatry resident and 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 so is therapist not very good as a as a whole profession at like helping people solve problems and I think especially if you look at men there's there's a lot of disturbing data on diseases of Despair so between I think like 2009 and 2018 um suicider related diagnoses in people under the age of 18 went up by 287 per. so what's happening right now especially if you look at male mental health is we're starting to realize that uh there's there's another study for example that there a couple studies that show that somewhere between 37 and 66.7% of men who commit suicide so 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 diagnose the 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 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 so I I think that that's why coaching has emerged as a field right 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 right that like 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 four 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 Tech maybe not best but one very effective evidence-based technique is something called motivational interviewing which is all about getting people to do [ __ ] it's not about talking about your feelings it's not 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 that the technology that we use the therapeutic technology that we use is action oriented is instrumental and we talk about 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 sort of Coach attachment expert guy and he was talking about the way that the male brain actually there's a sex 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 almost exactly the same as you can detect faces the 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 I think I'm I'm pretty interested by this 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 1,00 and 1500 sessions of meditation maybe 500 to 1,000 sessions of breath work uh maybe 1500 days of journaling something like that is maybe 2,000 days of journaling uh 6 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 Neurosis 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 which you also help me to do like 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 uh 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 equinity that you're looking for you notice the thought arise inside of you see here 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 a a rumination I have about myself or whatever and it seems to me like um therapy therapy type practices help to hold on to that absolutely so so so many things I I love everything that you said Chris so let's go through a couple things one is that going back to why so therapy is awesome and you've had a good experience I I'm a therapist I love doing it I work with a lot of men and women let's understand a couple 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 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 uh 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 mlan 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 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 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drink LM nt.com modern wisdom that's drink LM nt.com 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 um for women but potentially because of estrogen and there are even studies that show that the reason that men are reluctant to go to coupl counseling is because they feel outgunned so anytime a man unfair fight absolutely because your your female assuming a heteronormative relationship your female partner knows how to articulate their emotions they know what they're feeling right I feel I feel saddened when this person does this because it makes me feel unloved and then female therapist 70% of the time is also like so they can they both speak the language it's like going on two adults in the room with one child yeah and and so what it feels like to men what one person told me is when I go to couple's counseling it feels like I'm playing basketball but I have no arms and I can't dribble so they can't part and there's studies on this which show that men don't can't participate in that way in therapy yeah I mean you know I I wonder how many men the first inter interaction introduction to therapy is in coup's 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 blah and uh yeah the messiness getting used to not bringing sentences into land uh neatly and not having a 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 therapeutic I'm laughing because this sounds like it's coming from 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 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 a communicator he is or about this cool [ __ ] story that he found out or whatever whatever and uh it's one of the reasons why I was really glad that I 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 we going to say this thing but actually it's not that true all of these they're skills and and trying to craft a very beautiful sentence in many way which is something that I love to do much of the time what you are 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 nice language and then it just sort of arri it crash lands on the desk of of whoever it is that you're talking to so that's been a real um allowing myself to be Messier with my speech has been a a real skill yeah and I I think it's so challenging because like you said we 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 M 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 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 sha shamans or shamans and things like that you have some of these like you know will do in the Hindu culture like buas 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 free Freedom technique which I dismissed as pseudo science 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 and 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 um and and I was like a research assistant at at Harvard at the time and I was like this is SS absurd and and like you know over the last 10 years we've seen some some studies that this appears to be somewhat effective and they're 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 and if you look at a lot of this like kind of men's sematic 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 ayia but I've seen the power of just like you know physical experiences especially for men do you know Conor beaten mm he does a man talk uh he also wrote Men's Work men men men Men's Work the book uh phenomenal guy married to a uh also psychotherapist 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 it's it's really really interesting this whole uh sort of movement and world to me I I genuinely think or I 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 manosphere like first wave manosphere uh pickup it was the game it was mystery it was Neil Strauss it was negging and and and like pulling and stuff like that second wave was red pill it was mtow and incels and black pill and Cs and soy boys and simps and beaters and sigmas and so on and so forth and I'm hoping that we get to some like Transcendent include version now which is a much more full stack holistic version of 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 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 um even as somebody that had already done like some of the more uh Progressive meditation breath work bits and pieces like that so I'm I know I I I'm really excited about and this is why I was so fascinated to speak to you today about it uh 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 oppos to cope with it or push it away we actually spend a bit of time with it yeah I mean I I think that I agree 100% so so you know there's a couple of things that I'll add the first is that I think we already so as 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 very true and and yeah and I think part of the reason is I think it's kind of sad it's almost like I I 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 and there is a lot of negativity in red pill don't get me wrong in misogyny and and abuse of women and things like that I'm I'm not advocating that it's good at the same time I think that if you look at something that that's really cool is if we we have cultural Psychiatry and what we do in cultural Psychiatry is we 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 cultures 100% of people that I have worked with who are incels red pillars alpha males column what betas whatever you want they have a 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 callous against this so you talk to any red pillar there'll be some kind of like negative experience with a woman heart heartbreak this person took advantage of me this person did this this person led me on there there is this seed of resentment and hatred towards women and 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 and but the thing is there's there's such a big cognitive bias in your head so it's not that all women and then the the other more more crippling thing that then happens is once you ad 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 it's 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 when you approach things transactionally I just think you want money I will trade I'm going to buy you dinner and you're going to be 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 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 [ __ ] out but I did it by reading a thousand research articles but I I I got to speak to people that have read a thousand research articles a few times which which helped no I I I appreciate that I I'm fascinated by it dude I really am uh you mentioned earlier on about Creator 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 YouTubers 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 I think the first thing is that um I think that content creators have a a much harder life than many people realize um I I think you probably understand this and it's not that we're not grateful but I I was you know 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 um and and so I I told them something that I didn't quite appreciate which is that i' 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 any time you go on a vacation the uploads need to continue so you have to do whatever work needs needs like you have to do I have to do that work ahead of time or or after so you you never get a break that's number one um 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 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 um 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 comments that are going by literally faster than you can read but if there a negative comment your brain will surface that to you yeah so 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 there's there's a very high level of burnout often times as content creators grow they feel there's like this sense of like sand in the hourglasses running out where like you know someone else will come along there's a gravy train I like if I if I if you if you slow down you're as good as de Deb right so it's growth growth growth growth growth and then you're going to be a hasb because the internet has a short attention Spin and so people will kind of flatulate 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 um we worked with 500 content creators and 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 um 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 mhm 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 in 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 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 yeah which means that people can't afford to take breaks but I I think that there are unseen mental health costs to the content creation industry which even will 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 isn't it strange I think the the number one uh and number two jobs that primary school children want is like influencer and YouTuber are 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 what the actual experience is like that they're going through it 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 uh made this point in an indelicate way and stood on a ton of landmines and then trended like [ __ ] for it I think Hassan ABI uh really sort of put his foot in it a couple of weeks ago and like uh that that's not great but the sentiment done in a more delicate manner with um some more emotional vulnerability and openness like hey this is how I'm feeling like I 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 [ __ ] 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 what you're saying like so this is this is crippling so the first thing is you're right that it literally is all fun in games that's what kids see they see the fun literally the content is like fun in games and pranks they don't see people that are like dying from the pranks and like there was some stupid like asphixiation challenge or something on Tik Tok that I I remember there was some like medical articles about it where they were like I mean it's 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 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 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 fly 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 amydala and 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 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 um you know which means that they end up suppressing a lot of this stuff uh and thankfully like one of the 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 uny of sympathy absolutely right and I think all human beings deserve compassion even the ones that are the most hated and and that's hard I've that was definitely something I realized last couple of weeks have been emotionally pretty difficult for me and uh especially when you're feeling emotions very closely uh it showed me I I was acutely aware of how completely dehumanizing most of the our Behavior to each other is on the internet you know uh 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 fure 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 you go you do understand that on the other side of this experience is someone going through athesia and hardcore benzo withdrawal at the same time and it doesn't M 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 being pick someone from the 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 impossible um and it made me think about the who was the dude that was in uh 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 uproar 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 an hardcore emotional phenomenological experience they're going through you don't get to kick this around like it's a football yeah so I mean I I I think I I agree with you so let's just a couple of points so the first is that see I think that just talking about benzo withdrawal for a second so I I don't think people know how bad aath is I've had patients who have literally jumped out of third floor Windows because they're aath is so bad so for people who don't know athesia 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 how that is just just imagine an you being uncomfortable right like you want to 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 athesia is one of the most debility ating side effects that I've ever seen as a psychiatrist I think the 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 pers patients who have persecutory delusions so what that or hallucinations what that means is that as they walk around and live their life we they have the voice of the devil constantly telling them that they are a piece of [ __ ] 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 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 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 interview with people who are bad and and I overcame a technology addiction and everyone's like yay go Dr K right but Jordan Peterson is struggling with azo addiction which I think who is he to talk about it like that's who he is I mean if we look at the if we look at the data peer support alcoholic synonymous is the best intervention for overcoming addiction statistically now I 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 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 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 poly substance use and have particular political affiliations and and that people don't like and then I 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 and he gives goes and gives talks right so he'll 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 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 [ __ ] 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 May save their 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 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 uh problems and you're electing to just drop yourself into this yeah I mean so going back to you know Jon is it hate or height height height he's tall he doesn't hate you and and uh so so I I I think that's where we 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 um when we hit a th000 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 uh helium balloons and we got a cake and we did all the rest of it when we hit a million we got a five hour a five minute phone call and then like went back to to the grind and we're about to hit two probably before this even comes out uh and I I don't know whether we've got anything planned um so yeah James Smith has this really good Insight where he says all winds 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 yeah the first time that you move out of the house and go into a rental apartment may be better than when you buy your dream home that you're going to spend the rest of your life with all winds feel the same there is no Uber sech charge for you having achieved something that's 10x worth of that the point being that just winds are good and that's winds in the therapy room that's winds with hitting a meditation streak that's winds 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 performa and look at how why you oh yeah good work man like hoay for waking up on time today and he's like no you like this is a thing I did a thing yeah I I mean I I I agree in completely so I 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 win to have gratitude right so I think that if we look at all wins feel the same the interesting thing is that we control a lot more of how we feel about a win than we realize and a big part of the work that I do with creators is helping them appreciate you know you you say that you have nothing planned for 2 million which is cool we didn't have anything planned for 2 million um a and also like you know the the the joy that you create in your 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 it's people who are depressed 25-year-old Gamers who have trouble getting out of bed who feel ashamed of their wins 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 are you ever going to do anything yeah I mean dude I'm intimately familiar with this there would be I I thought I had depression in my 20s I think it was chronic uh interrupted sleep from being in The Nightlife industry and maybe a disposition toward a 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 would be drawn i' 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 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 got the shame somewhere that there it is it's probably number of other places but yeah that's one of the places and 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 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 a me and there has to be a you and 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 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 and I think the main thing that we got to do is I think it's about comparison like if you think about what 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 uh I think Robert spolski he's a you know neuroscientist and he sort of believes in biological reduction I mean uh determinism and and what one thing that I've understood is that everyone has truly unique lives no one has the same level of gen 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 you know I didn't do anything to deserve not being born with Cerebral policy 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 and the majority of people don't so 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 a 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 there 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 own individual Journey do self-exploration figure out why you have the thoughts that pop up in the way that you do right and I think that's why you've you've become so successful because you didn't I 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 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 going to be found anywhere else bi means get information but everything has to be translated down to you how can people separate their sense of self-worth from their accomplishments um I mean it's a great question so I I've got two or three different answers so the first is see if you can if you can absolve yourself of your failures then you can have self you can get rid of the selfworth 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 in both ways right so if I'm 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 want to 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 a planet 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 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 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 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 if my self-worth is focus is dependent on my outcomes then even if I achieve what I want then like often times I people don't feel great even if they live up to their expectations right it's like 1 million and then I need two and then I need three then I need four if you are relying on accomplishments to determine your selfworth it will never be enough right cuz you there's always another promotion there's 's always there's a $100,000 car there's a $300,000 car so if your selfworth 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 selfworth but other people's worth other PE I'm sorry not other people's Judgment of our worth is is dependent on our accomplishments no one gives a [ __ ] 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 I learned this because one day I was in the emergency room and a patient came in with three gunshot wounds and so this person's dying right and it's like we're going to do everything that we can but holy [ __ ] like we don't know if this person's going to live or die like we we just can't do it and this is like one of the best hospitals on the planet right amazing attend attending This brilliant trauma surgeon and like we just can't say 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 we can take someone's heart out of their body and we can give them somebody else's heart and we can we can replace your heart we can replace your kidneys but we can't save life there may be graph 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 you there are even studies now of psychedelics for example 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 of in this is also what the yogis and 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 disolve 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's certain specific features of the ego so Chris Williamson is dot dot dot is a factor of your a hum God or your ego podcaster man Chad savior loser whatever all of those but the 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 him 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 is our identity so a man having an identity as a man can change nowadays so I've always been Allo 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 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 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 what about the the EIC like you know what 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 [ __ ] 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 bum we all take shits we're all human at the end of the day and so there are certain practices like shuna is like the the Sanskrit word for null or zero or void so there's some practices that you can do in meditation that like you literally dissolve your 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 of suffering from losing my medical license the moment that I become a 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's 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 going to do and this is where I 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 and then you run into the bathroom and all the urinals are occupied and then you're like oh [ __ ] 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 subri who the 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 and I mean you can make make all this stuff who knows maybe there's a 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 this 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 attached 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 it's these are highly aggressive like myomas 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 going to 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 have done something else and then you suffer for a moment but the next day when you wake up you do better and then the next day you wake up you do better next day you wake up you do better so in my case it was failed out of college went to India learned this principal I woke up is embarrassing so I was a 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 [ __ ] about my grades I was like I'm going to learn medicine I'm going to try to be a doctor this is what I was going to do I won two Awards and 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 a 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 100% 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 selfworth as an individual how you do the things that you do uh so so that's where I 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 egoless kind of state and you think less of yourself it becomes very easy to correct it because because it's in your control absolutely yep but yeah I mean I think you should feel some amount of Shame and disappointment then you wake up the next day and it's in these hands but it's 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 but you do have control over your actions right so so and that's where I think it gets a little bit tricky but you could 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 could yeah so 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 uh so funny I think for a long time I wanted the the masculine urge to be seen as a competent hardworking achieving sort of guy uh and compassion seems like weird and fluffy and weak and you shouldn't really play around with that but 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 I think there's a there's a beautiful wisdom in what you just said mod wisdom 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 you are seen not about who you are and the beautiful thing about compassion is if you think about people who are ego and 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 in Hinduism we have a himsa 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 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 often times cannot afford to be compassionate because of something going on in their life right 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 at dissolving ego Dr K ladies and gentlemen I 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 it's very much needed uh I can see a Resurgence in whatever whatever you want to call it like rational spirituality as well which I think you're 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 yep how to raise a healthy gamer so one of the things that I kind of noticed was um so many of the problems of technology that we see today or because our parents were ill equipped to help us understand how to develop healthy relationships right turn from generation to generation absolutely so the we learn about parenting from our parents and so our parents didn't understand how to deal with technology when we were growing up um 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 Alexia 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 selfworth um and and even like this 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 healthy gamer. 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 um so we have a healthy gamer G YouTube channel um and people can find us there dude I really appreciate you thank you for coming through today thanks a lot