The Science Of Screen Addiction & How To Stop - Dr K Healthy Gamer

What we're starting to see is that like individuals are losing control of themselves and they don't even realize that it's happening. All they really see is that like this is not exactly what I want to be doing on a day-to-day basis. I have goals, I have aspirations, I have things that I should be doing, but I can't seem to get away from a screen. Dr. K, welcome to the show. It's an honor to be here, Chris. It's been very requested. You are one of the most requested guests I've had on the show. Really, really looking forward to this. I'm looking forward to it, too. I I love your podcast. Love the you know, blend of science and sort of like personal experience that you really put forward here. So, huge fan. Thank you. Honored to be here. What What do you say when you meet somebody at a cocktail party and they say, "What do you do?" Uh so, you know, my stock answer is actually like I'm a physician by training or um Yeah, or I say I work in digital mental health. So, I Digital mental health. I I imagine I imagine that everybody knows what that is. Well, so that's the thing, right? Is it's it's like enough buzzwords to where it kind of like people don't usually ask questions after that. So, I think it kind of depends on, okay, what am I really looking for? Like, do I want to talk about myself right now? Um sometimes I'll just say I'm a psychiatrist. That's true. But you've updated yourself. You are a uh clinically trained psychiatrist who has brought himself into the 21st century. I guess you could say that. I I I think maybe the the 21st century has brought me into it is maybe a better way to put it, but yeah, I I think we're both kind of evolving together at the frontier. Yes. So, you spend an awful lot of time working with gamers, people that use screens a lot in a variety of capacities, getting them to improve their mental health, getting them to better understand what it is that their motivations are, why their brain works the way that it does, challenges they're facing, uh explanations about mindfulness. From an outsider's perspective, what is it that most people don't understand about gamers and screens and mental health and the relationship of how that all works together? Yeah, so I think let's start actually with like screens and technology. So, if we look at technology, technology tries to engage us, right? But if we look at which organ does technology interact with? Primarily, it interacts with the mind. And so, what I I think what a lot of people don't understand is that our mind is being accessed or activated or triggered basically constantly all day, every day in a way that we just haven't evolved to deal with. So, if you sort of look at like the natural environment in which the human brain evolved, it's like a low stimulation environment. Like, go for a walk somewhere, right? And that's actually the baseline that we grew up in, that we evolved in. And so, all of this high stimulation is is working on us in some way. And the thing about our our our minds is that if you really think about this principle of engagement, what does engagement mean? What are they engaging? They're engaging your mind. And as platforms get better and better at this, as video games get better and better at this, what we're starting to see is that like individuals are losing control of themselves. And they don't even realize that it's happening. All they really see is that like this is not exactly what I want to be doing on a day-to-day basis. I have goals, I have aspirations, I have things that I should be doing, but I can't seem to get away from a screen. There's something very ruthless about the fact that the more enjoyable and the better that screens and technology get at satisfying our uh desires, the more addicting they become, which means that although the felt present sense of how good it was may increase, the after-the-fact remembered sense of how much to intrude on our lives and our other goals outside of the screens, the worse it gets. It's kind of this sort of double-edged sword. Yeah, I mean I I I think that captures it really well, Chris. So, like that that too, if you want kind of want to take a step back, like most technology and especially video games are designed to be fun, right? But the human brain's capacity to have fun, like why do we have fun? So, if you look at human beings and animals, we have fun, we engage in play, and we engage in play to practice the skills that are useful for survival. And so, what happens with video games is is developers sort of figured out, okay, like here's a game like a role-playing game, like an RPG, and you know what we can do to make it more fun? We can make a persistent universe with thousands of other players. And so, what video games I what developers actually stumbled upon is like another sort of psychological need, this need for community. And over time, exactly what you described is happening is that as games become more and more fun, how do they become more fun? It's because developers figure out, okay, we can scratch like another psychological need. And so, if you think about games like now there's like appearance and cosmetics, right? So, we all want to look good. And since it triggers that sense of fun, what that sort of means is it's activating that circuit, the circuit that we have to want to be respected, to want to look good. Except now we can sort of satisfy it within a video game. And what we're starting to see is that like we can kind of satisfy some of these psychological needs in video games, although they're not like a complete satisfaction, but it's kind of enough. And so, what what's sort of happening is people are like starting to live their lives more and more like in the virtual world. And as they do that, they start to kind of get disconnected or fall behind in the real world. What are the mechanisms that screens are working on and is there any difference between the kind of triggers that video games are having compared with the triggers of other stuff like, let's say, social media? Yeah, so I I think they're very different. So, I think if you look at why does someone get addicted to a particular thing as opposed to another thing? And there even studies that sort of bear this out. Like, so for example, people on the autism spectrum are more likely to get get addicted to role-playing games. And there's even data that shows that the more role-playing games you play, if you're on the autism spectrum, the more likely you are to have behavioral meltdowns. So, within video games, we know that there's actually personality analysis, like University of Toronto has done a lot of really good research here, where they've sort of figured out depending on your personality style, you're more likely to gravitate towards a particular game. And then once you move beyond games, if you start to think about social media, you know, people who are more sensitive to body image issues may gravitate towards platforms like Instagram and things like that. Um and so, what we're starting to see is that, you know, everyone's brain is a little bit different. Everyone's brain is a little bit vulnerable. Um we all crave to have certain psychological needs fulfilled, and there's certain pieces of technology which will sort of fulfill those in a very shallow, but kind of neuroscientifically important way. And those are the ones that we get addicted to. Can you remember any of the other associations between the type of games that you like to play and the kind of personality that you have? Oh, yeah. I mean, so like there there's some people who like to explore things, right? So, there are people who if we kind of think about it this way, let's say you're you take four trips over four years. Do you go back to the same place over and over and over again, or do you like to check out new places? Right? And there different kinds of people. Some people are like, "Hey, I really liked that, you know, I I love visiting the beach or like every time I go, I'm going to go to the beach. I'm going to go to the beach. I'm going to go to the beach. There's a new beach." And so, some people are more exploratory, and and so there are certain kinds of adventure games where you're kind of exploring open world stuff, they'll kind of get more into that. Other people are like optimizers, so you have these games like Factorio and things like that, where like people are really they they derive a lot of pleasure out of taking something that's at 70% and bumping it to 71, 75, 78, 80, 81. And these same people, by the way, like, you know, companies like Google and Netflix will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to do that thing for their job. How can we optimize this particular widget on this particular app? So, the depending on what your mind is interested in or excited about. Some people also seek adrenaline, which is why they'll play games like first-person shooters like Fortnite. Um so, different brains want different things, and that'll absolutely determine what kind of games you end up playing. What happens to your brain if you use video games excessively? Um So, it In a nutshell, not good things, but I I think a lot of people will wonder, you know, what is excessive? So, this is where we have to understand that the reason games are fun are because they fulfill particular psychological needs. They like scratch certain niches. And what the biggest problem that tends to happen, I know everyone talks about dopamine, and we'll get to that in a second, but the biggest problem that we see is that once you start fulfilling needs in the game, then your brain sort of has this really tricky kind of situation because if you try to fulfill that need in the real world, it's going to be harder. What's an example? So, let's say I want to be number one. The problem is like in school, there's only one number one. But in a video game, and if y'all have played video games, you'll you'll sort of realize this. Like, when you come back from let's say you're down and you're losing in a particular game, and then you come back and you win. There's this adrenaline rush and you love it. It's like one of the most exciting things in the world. And the problem is like the like getting that feeling of being like on the verge of losing and then coming back and winning, very hard to do in the real world. Incredibly difficult to do. And so these are all these kinds of experiences that we crave, this sort of like, you know, hero's journey of like the deck is stacked against you, but you're going to triumph. And this is what we love to see in our media, but like we can't experience that in our everyday life, right? Because I've got to study for calculus today. And there's no like triumph, like even if you sort of think about reward circuitry, and this is what game game developers are really good at. So even if I get an A on the test, there's such a gap between taking the test and getting the grade back that that behavior doesn't get reinforced. Whereas what we know from Pavlovian conditioning is that the faster you give someone the reward, the more likely you are to, you know, um reinforce behavior. And people wonder like why is it hard to study? It's because there's no reward that you experience. And and so I'm sort of I even forget what your original question was, but I well I think that point's really smart that you eat [ __ ] now with the presentation for work, with the studying for the exam, which is in a couple of weeks time, and then at some point down the line that one module of that one particular course will finally contribute to the degree that you get in two and a half years, or it'll it'll get you the job right raise that you need or the promotion that you want in a couple of years time, and maybe at a different company. So I think that's something that's very important. Uh what I asked was what happens to your brain if you use video games excessively? You said what you're doing basically is um you can create a feedback loop of satisfaction in the virtual world, which is incredibly difficult to replicate in the real world. I think that's what the point was. Yeah, and and and that's kind of I think the core point is once you start using it excessively, it becomes harder and harder to engage in the real world. And that's what we see when it rises to the level of true addiction. And then there are all kinds of other like neuroscience-based effects that we kind of see. So we'll see, for example, alterations of like dopamine reinforcement. So people who play a lot of video games will start to become a little bit more anhedonic, which means that their ability to experience pleasure sort of goes down. So if you play a bunch of video games, reading a book just won't keep your attention. It becomes harder to like do sort of IRL stuff. Is that the some kind of dopamine set point or dopamine sensitivity that's being tuned down? Yeah, so that that's probably what's happening. We don't we, you know, we have a lot of inferential data on this, but no one is like doing brain brain biopsies brain biopsies of of video gamers and seeing how much dopamine is in the synaptic cleft. eyes yourself, guys. Come on, this is a science. [ __ ] hell. But what we tend to see is all the clinical features. So if you work with a gaming addict, you'll see like a lack of motivation. And motivation is primarily governed by like dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. Um we'll see anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy particular things. And then other things that we tend to see is that a lot of addiction is not actually due to dopamine um sort of making things fun. So if you talk to gamers, and I don't know if you've ever binged video games, but, you know, people can play games, I certainly have, for 8 12 hours at a stretch. But if you ask that person hour five, hour six, hour seven, are you having fun? They're not going to be having fun. If you watch them, they're not going to be like smiling and laughing and triumphing. In In fact, quite the opposite, what you're going to see is that they're tilting more, they're getting more frustrated, shorter fuse. Tilting is when you basically like get really, really angry and lose your focus in a video game. Okay. So in in competitive sports, you know, people will like if you lose lose a point or something, you'll go and you'll be angry, and then people they'll start to play poorly because you're not like focused. Oh, it's like getting the yips in a normal sport, like baseball or whatever. The guy just can't hit. Yeah. Can't can't can't hit the Right, okay. So we have this scenario in which supernormal stimuli have been able to create a overclocked environment for our brains to exist in. We are uh unfit for purpose. We have a an adaptive pro We have a a mismatch, an evolutionary mismatch as it would be called, that what we're able to enjoy virtually is difficult to deliver to us in the real world. That means that the more time that you spend online, the more and more uh unseductive and unattractive, I suppose, the real world looks. Now, some of this is uh physiological in terms of the adjustments that we've got with dopamine sensitivity and stuff like that. But I imagine as well that a good chunk of it is just the story that you tell yourself about the kind of things that you can do, the um the capacities that you believe that you have, the habits that you've got, the routine that you're in. It's more than just physiologically what's happening. It's like uh existentially what it's doing to you. So given that that's what's happening with video games, video games, you know, created to be compelling, uh I I think people kind of understand that there's a degree of entertainment there. Something that probably even more people have problem with would be social media. Is there something diff- different happening to the brain, to our compulsion with social media? Is it right to even say that social media is an addiction? Is it a compulsion? How do you parse all of this apart? Yeah, so I I think social media is similar in some ways and different in other ways. Like I said, no surprise, right? So if we once again the the the what's similar? So the most similar thing is that platforms are developing things that are more engaging. It's just what they engage with varies depending on not only the specific type of game, but games versus social media. And even within social media, you'll see different kinds of engagement. So generally speaking, social media engages with a couple of things. The most important thing that social media engages with is emotional activation. So if you think about why does a human being switch from, let's say, Twitter to Reddit or Reddit to Twitter or Twitter to TikTok or Reddit to TikTok? What you tend to see is that if you're emotionally engaged, you're going to stay on. And if you get bored, that's when you switch. But what does boredom usually mean? People may think it's dopamine, but it's not actually dopamine. Because a lot of people will use a lot of social media even though they feel really bad. And the best example of this is some people will like break up with their ex, right? And then like late at night, you're feeling bad about yourself, and you start stalking your ex. That doesn't make you feel good. That's not dopamine. Then you see your ex out with someone else who's more attractive than you or maybe has a nicer car or something like that. And so a lot of people will actually, if you really tunnel down, and there's research into this that shows that what is the emotional experience of engaging in social media? It's not always positive. So if you really look at like what kind of social media crosses your your feed, it's stuff that's emotionally engaging. We're hearing about war, we're hearing about climate change, we're hearing about something. And some news organizations even like play into this, right? Where like fear-mongering is a thing. And and so what we start to see is it's really emotional engagement that social media like really captures. Um and so the people who are kind of vulnerable to being emotionally engaged will will sort of get caught up in social media. Another thing that we tend to see is that the human identity, and you kind of alluded to this existential point. So like social media allows us to create a virtual identity. And we can start to get reinforcement of like these years of millions of years of evolutionary circuitry through the internet. So I want to be well respected in psychiatry, or let's say in in in a society. So I became a psychiatrist or medical doctor. And then even then, as a medical doctor, like there were times in my life where I was kind of thinking about, well, like is psychiatry, like is that being a real doctor? How will I feel if I say I'm a neurosurgeon? Which my my wife was like, you should be a neurosurgeon. And like, what does she care? She wants to introduce her husband who's a neurosurgeon. And I was like, well, I've decided to do something close. It's in the same ballpark, but it's a little bit different. So we all crave the approval of other human beings. And now social media quantifies that. Right? Do people like me? Like normally, the human mind doesn't really know. Like there's no way to measure it, right? You sort of feel it. But now I get 100 likes and someone else gets 200. And so what social media really does is captures a lot of that identity-focused kind of people who are concerned about being something, self-esteem. Now we have filters, which sort of fix the problem and make the problem worse, which is oftentimes what we see in in social media. So the more that I use filters, the better I feel about my presence on the internet, but each time I use a filter, I'm not accepting the way that I look in real life. And so it'll make the problem worse, which is why I think we see some of a lot of this like extreme filter using uh usage that almost doesn't, you know, seems like it isn't real, and people can kind of tell. Why do people do that? I think it's cuz they kind of go down this rabbit hole. The comparison between are you having fun now and are you still using the technology now is so interesting because, you know, I I think about when I do get stuck dr- doomscrolling through something. And if I was to ask myself that question, you know, after 15 minutes, probably, or 20 minutes on any social media, I'm no longer having fun. Mhm. I spoke to Huberman about this, and I I thought this was a very interesting reframe. I'd love to get your thoughts on this. He sees social media usage more as a compulsion than an addiction. In your opinion, is there a meaningful difference between the two? Do you believe that this is the case? Does it even matter whether it's the case or not? Well, I mean what what what are you what How are you defining the word compulsion? He said that it was more like a compulsive action to pull the phone out to look at it and to scroll, to cycle through all of the apps, because I can't remember his definition of addiction. I want to say it is uh continuing to use a stimulus long after the satisfactory nature of the stimulus has been completed, something like that. I'm going to guess that you'll know the the definition that I'm using. Yeah, so let's let's talk. Let's define things, okay? So, let's start by defining what is an addiction. So, the features of an addiction, first of all, is that it impairs function. So, it causes you some kind of damage. And the problem with addictions is that they're solutions that fix a short-term problem, but damage things long-term. So, if you we look at a lot of features of addiction, like let's say I'm addicted to opiates. And what opiates do is they make me feel good temporarily, but they cause me problems because let's say I'm stressed about work and I use an opiate or I use marijuana or something like that. My stress goes away, but it doesn't fix any of my problems. And if I let's say get high today and then I don't work on this project or whatever, like I I've one less day to work on it. So, an addiction is is usually a behavior that we engage in that despite the damage that it does to us, we continue to engage in it. Now, why do we engage in addictions? Usually, it's because they provide some kind of relief or reward. And if we look at social media and video games, they're sort of very similar to addictions in the sense that they suppress negative emotional circuitry, which by the way is why it's more than dopamine. So, even if you play game for 8 hours, let's say I'm ruining my life and this is an experience that I had first hand, right? Was failing out of college. And like, how could I forget failing out of college? I could play video games. So, it's not even at the game is fun at 8 or 9 hours, but that's the suppression of the amygdala and the limbic system is like kind of there. So, we know that a lot of what makes video games addictive is like the fact that they push problems away temporarily, which is very similar to all these other substances. Like if I get drunk, right? I'm not worried about anything. So, in that way, you know, that's what an addiction is. Now, a compulsion, at least the the technical term of like a clinical term, right? So, if we're talking about obsessive-compulsive disorder, in that way, a compulsion is usually a behavior that we engage in that has some kind of effect on our cognition. So, so it like it I have to do something to make me feel a particular way. And what I would say is there's absolutely like a habitual, that's maybe what I would use. There's absolutely a habitual or a conditioning aspect to technology usage, which they're very good at. And I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but this happens to me all the time where I will realize that I am not liking what I'm using like a particular device for and then what I'll do is close the app and then open it right up again. So, we are absolutely being conditioned. But and this is also where if you kind of look at it, the circuitry is a little bit different. There's habit circuitry, there's dopamine reward circuitry, there's like suppressing our amygdala, and all of that stuff is active when it comes to technology usage. So, I think it's kind of like all of the above. We'll get back to talking to Dr. K in 1 minute, but first I need to tell you about Element. I've taken Element every single morning for probably 3 years now. It is my favorite way to start the day. It tastes fantastic, it optimizes my hydration, it makes my brain work more effectively, and it really wakes me up. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no gluten, no colors, no artificial ingredients, no fillers, and no BS. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting and relied on by tons of FBI sniper teams, special forces, Navy SEALs, and high performers all around the world. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue whilst optimizing brain health and regulating your appetite. On top of all of that, they've got a no-BS, no-questions-asked refund policy, so you can buy it and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Head to drinklmn.com/modernwisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box. That's drinklmn.com / modernwisdom. Presumably, that's what makes it so powerful, the fact that you have all of these different networks all coming together into this perfect uh blend. Yeah, absolutely. And why is it coming together so so profoundly? It's really interesting because there's like there's almost this Darwinian slug match going on right now between platforms. So, if you look at like TikTok versus YouTube Shorts versus Instagram Reels versus whatever Google's going to come up with at some point. Or I guess they've got YouTube Shorts. Um you know, so what are all these platforms doing? They're actually competing for your attention. The prize that they get is like your mind. And so like whether Google wins, TikTok wins, or Amazon wins, or whoever wins, the one guaranteed thing is that there's definitely going to be one loser, and that's actually you. You are going to lose control of your mind, which is exactly what happens. And even then, I don't think the platforms are evil. I mean, maybe they are, but that's hasn't been my experience. I think it's just they have a product, right? And everyone wants their eyes on their product. And so, what they're figuring out is how can I engage people by tapping into a different, you know, circuit of the brain. How can I help condition someone to use my app? So, it's not just about dopamine, it's not just about it's emotional engagement, it's dopamine, it's habit formation, all that kind of stuff. Even pings and notifications, they're good at that. Given that we are hopelessly outgunned up against billion-dollar companies with machine learning algorithms, some of which are the most powerful ever designed in human history, and an entire team of software engineers behind every single button press, how can people set healthy boundaries around gaming and social media? So, I think thankfully, we've we've got a lot of good answers. So, I think this is where prior to going to medical school, I spent 7 years studying to become a monk. And the cool thing is that like what the monks, if you look at sort of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions and like meditation and mindfulness, they really figured out like how the mind works and in a different way from like the West. So, in the West, we sort of looked at a thousand different minds and we sort of said, "Okay, if we average them all together, like what floats to the surface?" But in the East, they had sample sizes of one. So, they're like, "Okay, how can I understand where my desires come from? How can I get control of my desires?" So, a lot of that stuff is kind of baked in. And what I actually find is the most effective is starting with some of those principles. So, understanding first of all that all of technology really causes one problem, causes you to lose awareness. So, anytime you get sucked in. And in fact, this is why we want to use technology, right? I want to go into a video game and I want to get sucked into the video game. I want to binge-watch shows. So, if you look at like HBO and Netflix or whatever, right? They're they like really want us to binge-watch and we love binge-watching. So, if you look at the common element to all these things, it's a loss of awareness. So, the more that we can cultivate awareness of things, the better off we'll be. And there's there's good evidence from this from the world of psychiatry as well. So, if you look at like addiction psychiatry, what we find is that if you ask someone who relapses, they'll say, "Yeah, I was sober for 6 months and then I don't know what happened. I just relapsed." But what you really discover and and we sort of see this is that people who are vulnerable to addiction have a lack of awareness of their internal emotional state. And as emotional stressors rise and rise and rise, they like reach a particular threshold that causes them to relapse. So, a big part of what we do clinically when we work with people is just raising awareness. And so, I'd say the first thing if you want to set a healthy boundary is like be aware of yourself. Why do you reach it for it in the first place? Like are there particular times of the day that you reach for it? Stuff like that. Is there an emotional state that you find yourself in that causes you to get your phone out or to open up social media on your laptop or to start watching Netflix or to start playing a video game? Absolutely. So, a simple example of this is like if you think about 30 years ago, if I was trying to study, I would get distracted, right? I wouldn't be able to focus on the textbook. And that's okay. I would get distracted for like a couple minutes. I'm sitting in a library. I don't go anywhere. I don't do anything. My mind wanders. I lose 5 minutes. I lose 10 minutes. And then I come back to the text. I'm like, "All right, time to get back to work." Now, what happens is even a 30-second distraction, I'm studying, I pull out my phone, and I click a button, and then my mind is sucked into this like, you know, pipeline of like attention-grabbing behavior, and 5 minutes becomes 3 hours. And so, even a, you know, 30-second attentional lapse now costs me an hour of time. Okay. Does that mean therefore that we just need or the most robust solution to stop yourself from using computers and social media is to go places where you don't have your phone and you don't have video games? Is that the is that the most robust tactic? Well, so I I mean, I think it's kind of like a lot of different things, right? So, we we um I think it's first of all cultivating more awareness of of the present and how you feel and what your triggers are. And then at at the other end, there are absolutely environmental aspects. So, one thing that, you know, I'll tell people is that if you're trying to get work done, it's a good idea to silence your phone or even move it to the next room. Um I I I'll tell people also like, for example, if I'm working with patients who are having trouble with sleeping at night, to tell them, "Hey, keep your phone like at the opposite end of the room or even outside of your room." And then everyone sort of asked me like, "But what if there's an emergency? What if I get a phone call in the middle of the night?" And then I turn around and I ask them, "How many times have you gotten a call in the last 2 years that someone has needed your help within 5 minutes?" Right? And the answer is almost always zero unless I'm working with a doctor, in which case like, you know, we have pagers still. Um so I think there are absolutely kind of conditioning things or environmental things that you can do using grayscale, being really aggressive with notifications, um but also like the physical location of your phone. And this is the other thing that that platform developers are really good at getting good at. So if you think about biometrics, the thing about biometrics and Face ID is that actually reduces the time to access your phone. So now even like the 3 seconds that it used to take or 2 seconds to put in your code, now you just have to pick it up and it it knows it's you. friction has been removed. Yep, that's what they're doing. Removing all the friction. Okay, so we have understanding your triggers, understanding the mental states that you get into, the emotional states that you're in, um whether it's been a hard day at work, whether this is some sort of coping mechanism because things are stressful or you're just tired or whatever. What are the precursors that happen before you then descend into using technology in a way which after the event you reflect on and wish that you hadn't done. There are some environmental and factors that we can use, uh distance being one of them in that you can't use a screen that you can't put your hands on or see. Uh so keeping it away, sleeping with your phone outside of the bedroom. Is there anything else when it comes to good boundaries? What are the other longest levers? Yeah, so I I think the other thing to consider is that so we think about this is like a problem that has a solution. We don't think about boundaries as skills that are built up. Right? So if you think about like a muscle, like how do I lift more weight? I need to maybe do more weightlifting. And if you kind of think about how do I hold a boundary against a technology that is becoming more and more invasive, you get stronger at holding boundaries. So what I'll do is I'll also give people exercises and this largely comes from the meditative tradition. So you can like formally sit down and meditate, but there's a lot of exercises that you can develop based on the theory of meditation. My favorite thing to have people do is no more phones in bathrooms. Mhm. everyone takes their phone to the bathroom now. And if you just like think about it, like if I like say that and people are listening to that, the instinctive reaction is going to be like, "Oh my god, don't take that thing away." But like what are you going to lose? What am I going to do while I'm pooping, Dr. K? You're just You're going to do what human beings have done for millions of years prior to the development of technology. the poop. Just be with it. So so what's happened in our society as a whole is we have become intolerant of boredom. Yes. So if you want to get control over every bit of technology in your life, you have to learn how to not fear boredom. And give yourself small doses of boredom. You know, don't take an audiobook the next time you go for a walk or don't listen to music or something like that, right? And and just start to like pick particular discrete things. Don't watch things while you eat. Um so so there are all kinds of things that you can sort of set kind of cer- certain lines and then really practice those. And then your mind will literally become stronger. So your ability to restrain your attention and tolerate boredom will increase. Is that something that you see reflected neurologically, psychologically? Is this something that actually shows up in the literature somehow? Oh, absolutely. So so one simple example in so many ways. So let let's talk about literature in different ways. So the first thing is let's talk about let's say psychological literature. So we know that for example people with ADHD have difficulty restraining their impulses. And they tend to get highly distracted. So we know that meditation for example helps people with impulsivity and improving focus. That we kind of know. If you sort of think about it, what is the practice of meditation? It's like literally practicing focusing. On a neurological level, we know that there are brain correlates with things like ADHD, like frontal lobe dysfunction. So the frontal lobes are our master control parts of the brain that they can sort of restrain and direct our attention. And so what happens when we do things like meditate or some of these practices is that we learn how to like it strengthens our frontal lobes. And there's even data that shows that it it strengthens sort of the inhibitory circuits of the brain. So our frontal lobes can go and put the brakes on a particular impulse. And then even if we're talking about old old old literature, so we're talking about the Sanskrit literature from like 5,000 years ago, there's this this one thing there's this one principle called ekatva abhyasa, which means focusing on one thing at a time. And thousands of years ago there were like, "Hey, here's a technique to focus on just one thing at a time." And you can kind of practice just doing one thing at a time. And so there's a lot of scientific stuff from everywhere from clinical literature to basic science literature to even like old stuff. A lot of the work that I've done, a lot of the conversations that I've had, um Adam Alter who wrote uh Irresistible, um one of the ladies who is a lead researcher and I want to say it's uh cybernetics. Is that computer brain interfacing stuff like that? Um but from a psychological side. And every single person I've spoken to about attention says, "People believe that they can multitask." First off, you can't. Secondly, what you think that you mean by multitasking isn't multitasking, it's parallel processing. And you definitely can't do that. You can maybe task switch and lose a ton of focus whilst task switching, but you definitely can't parallel process. You can do one thing that you're focused on. You can drive and talk, but you're not thinking about driving. You're passively driving. One of the things I've considered throughout this conversation so far is uh we've spoken about the fact that social media and video games are very compelling. They cause people to be um incredibly motivated to continue to do them, which can make the real world less attractive. One of the solutions to that, presumably, would be to take some of the principles of video games and move them into the real world, to gamify some of the things that you want yourself to do in the real world. You may have read Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson. I I haven't. Good book. Very very simple uh idea which is that after you do something that you want to do more of or that gives you in the real world a uh little uh trigger of happiness. You go for a walk, you complete a workout. Today I managed to get my email inbox down to zero. I got to inbox zero and it's been in three figures for months, for [ __ ] ages. And we are tempted to immediately just go, "Right, well I I brilliant, that's done now. On to the next thing. What have I got to do next?" His advice is to sit for about 1 to 2 minutes and just allow yourself to kind of marinate in, "Wow, I I did a thing. That was good. That was really good. I completed the workout. I went for the walk. I got up on time. I did the meditation. I got my morning routine. I got rid of 120 emails. Huh. That's nice. And then you can go about your day. So his he comes from a neuroscience background. His argument, and he was the guy, I'm pretty sure, that coined uh neurons that fire together wire together. So if you want to do more of a thing, allow yourself to feel the reward from it. Yet we do I notice it in myself. I finally complete a task and it's it's kind of like relief, but it's almost like bitter relief. I'm like, "Right, thank god that's done. Now on to the next thing." You go, "No, no, no, you've just earned this period where you can sit and and be all self-righteous and and up on a high horse for at least a couple of minutes. Uh so that's one tactic that I'm trying to use a lot more at the moment, which is allowing myself to kind of genuinely sit with a good experience uh and feel that for more than a nanosecond. Okay, how's that working out for you? Um I need to do it more, but it is good. Uh I've certainly been able to make myself feel more pleasure in advance of completing something that I usually don't want to do. So let's say that I am uh going to go and do a hard workout or I'm going to go do zone zone two cardio, right? It's the most boring thing in the world. I know that at the end of that I'm going to feel good. And because I've spent a good bit of time sitting with that good feeling, it almost feels like I've started to bring that feeling before I begin to do it, that I associate the activity of doing something, even though it sucks and it's kind of boring, because I know at the end of it it's going to be good, I've managed to bring that feeling from the end to the start, which has reduced the activation energy to go and do the thing. Yeah, so I think it's it's really useful to try to do stuff like that. I think we see that a lot for example with like practicing gratitude, where a lot of people will skate over their wins and focus on their L's. I think a big thing that people don't really realize is we're not wired to do that. So if you kind of think about you know, people who sit and relax after getting a W don't get to where you and I are, Chris. The people who say, "I got to inbox zero today. Good job. What's next?" That's what actually correlates with like material success. Right? And I see this a lot cuz I work with a lot of people who are like very high functioning like entrepreneurs like CEOs, people in finance and medicine and neurosurgeons and whatnot. And it's the people who drive themselves relentlessly forward that actually correlates with a lot of success, which is where this whole like sigma grind set kind of stuff comes from. Is right? Like it's about grinding grinding grinding grinding grinding. And that's also where we need to kind of stay take a step back and really ask ourselves what is our brain wired for? It's not wired for contentment. It's wired for survival. And so what what it's kind of interesting, right? Cuz you're working so hard to be like to be able to enjoy something that you should do. And so it's kind of like you're in this relentless pursuit of like better. Right? So like okay, I why do I need to exercise to be better? And now I'm not happy with being better. So what do I need to do? I need to get better at being better. I need to learn how to be better. And so it's kind of bizarre, but sometimes I'll see this with a lot of the really successful people I work with. It's like now even happiness is something that I need to grind towards. And I'm going to read books and I'm going to understand neuroscience, but if you really kind of take a step back, it's actually a manifestation of the same thing. You're going to grind your your way to enlightenment. People even use the rest and recovery days as part of their productivity. Oh well, I'm going to take I'm going to take this day off because it means that tomorrow I can come back harder and I can work even harder. Hang on a Hang on a [ __ ] second. That That is not That is not what a day off is supposed to be. A day off is not supposed to be part of your productivity system to allow you to come back to work harder. There's this really awesome example of this and someone emailed me and said that I got it right. I thought I got it wrong and this guy emailed who'd studied classics and told me that I got it right. In ancient Greece, the ancient Greek word for work translated as not at leisure. So work was seen as an aberration. It was something that you did when you weren't doing the leisure thing. Roll the clock forward now, leisure is the thing that facilitates work. It's not even the thing that you do when you're not at work, it's the thing which allows you to do more work. I think that that's I would tend to agree. Right? So I think that what we tend to find is like if we look at productivity, having your internal values, having even like a cognitive fingerprint that fits your work work {quote} {unquote} lifestyle is like a huge part of getting all of it. So when I even think a little bit about like my day, so one of the things that I found is that I tend to get bored easily. So rather than just seeing patients over in my office like over and over and over again day after day year after year, I do different stuff throughout the day. And so this doesn't feel like work for me even though technically it's work. This is fun. And and I think this is a big challenge that a lot of people face right now is they're struggling with this sort of idea of like they think about work and leisure as like two different things. And then this is why we see burnout because as you said, you know, leisure is what allows you to work. Great. But when you don't have that, then you can grind and grind and grind and you're going to burn out. And burnout is like an epidemic level like levels right now just in basically every field that we're talking about. We'll get back to talking to Dr. K in 1 minute, but first I need to tell you about Manscaped. If you are a gentleman who needs to trim his sensitive areas and you are still using an old face shaver from five Christmases ago, what are you doing? Join us here in the modern world. There are purpose-built tools for the job and the Manscaped Lawn Mower 4.0 is the greatest ball and body hair trimmer ever created. 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They're the most online people on the planet. What have you learned from speaking to them? Um Wow, so a couple of different things. The first is it's not nearly as fun or easy as they make it look. So often times and I've worked with a lot of people, so you know, was in Boston for a while and working with people out of startups and stuff out of MIT and Harvard and just really really hard working people. I work with people at like Goldman Sachs and Google and and whatnot. And and like there are a lot of people who work really hard. I don't think people really appreciate how hard the people who are at the top are. And I don't think people really appreciate the balance of skills that's necessary to achieve that. So it's some amount of spontaneity and being able to have fun on command. So these are people who are in the business of friendship. And I think the biggest thing that people don't understand is the level of sacrifice it takes to get there. So what we see is someone who's huge and recognized and has all these sponsorship deals and presumably has all this money and things like that, but the levels of sacrifice because what they really have to do is sacrifice just about every dimension of their life. So what we sort of think about even when I compare them to bankers is like bankers get to go to work and have their professional relationships and they get to go home and they get to have their friends. But what we really see with streamers is they sacrifice on every dimension. So your friends will invite you or not invite you depending on what the collab will get them. Right? And then if you turn something So like even friendship becomes a part of your job like the the the other thing that I think people don't really appreciate is that the human brain is not designed to deal with criticism from millions of people. So if we think about like tribal structures, you know, if I grew up in a tribe of 300 people, how often am I going to get criticized? And we have these different biases that people don't really think about, which is that even if 99 people tell me that they like me, if one person tells me that they don't like me, that's the thing that my mind is going to clue in on. So now you take these people who get millions of points of feedback. And their brain is literally designed and I've seen this as a streamer myself, where I can see tons of messages scrolling past faster than I can read them, but my brain can pick out the one thing that is actually damaging. It actually enters into my conscious thought. And this is where the brain is processing all kinds of information that we're not aware of. And so I I think people don't really get how hard it is. And the beautiful thing is that the people who are successful are the ones who are able to find some kind of balance. Otherwise you just can't sustain it and you're like you'll burn out and then doesn't work. So they're amazing resilient individuals. It's almost like a battle of attrition in that way. Absolutely. And most people don't can't make it to the finish line. It's like a marathon that never ends. There's a quote from Jason Pagel in one of my favorites that says your heroes aren't gods, they're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else. Yeah, I think that that's probably true. I think but what I what I see at the highest levels of performance is that you usually have to be good at a lot of things and you can't neglect too much. Because it's going to come and catch up with you eventually. Absolutely. Your health will catch up with you, yeah. But that's So there's a a guy in the UK who is a weightlifting coach. Sorry, a powerlifting coach. Can't get that wrong. And one of my friends started working with him. He works with people for free. He's this savant programmer, unbelievably smart. He's 78 or something, sort of an old guy and he gets unbelievable results for the athletes he works with. He doesn't charge anybody. He's already made his money. He retired. He works with people on invite only and the programming is ruthlessly hard. What I realized was he was getting around about two to two and a half years of progress within one year of programming. But the reason that he was doing this was because he was absolutely battering his athletes into the ground. Now, what you end up with is a scenario where the athletes who end up surviving this, who don't get injured, who don't get burned out, who don't get too tired, who don't lose passion, obviously are going to have made unbelievable progress because the programming's brutal. It's more volume, it's more frequent, it's higher weights, it's higher RPEs. And survivability bias or survivorship bias means that the only ones that do make it to the end, by virtue of the fact they've made it to the end, have unbelievable progress. What you don't get to see are the attrition rate. It's how many people fell away. What's your churn? How many people got injured? How many people gave up on their passion? And this is a lens. I need to come up with a name for it. I need to meme this. This is a lens through which I see a lot of very difficult pursuits that basically it does come down to a battle of attrition. And if there is somebody that can out suffer you, if there is someone for whom they can go seven days without seeing sunlight, but you can only go half a day without seeing sunlight, in some regards they have a competitive advantage. Yeah, so I you know, I'd express a little bit of pushback on that. So, I think that's a commonly accepted view. That the people who sacrifice the most get the most. But honestly, Chris, in my experience with lots of people and even myself, like so, you know, I did pretty well in medical school. I didn't study over 2 hours a day. Like I had caught like I tried it for the first month where everyone else was like, you know, we're going to go to class and we're going to stay in the library at 10:00 at night, 11:00 at night. And I was like, I just can't do that. So, I studied 2 hours a day and I did fine. And and I think that there's this idea that being successful requires sacrifice. But I think there's a huge selection bias there. Usually the people who are talking about the sacrifice they made to succeed or like there's a selection bias there. The people who are like, yeah, it was actually pretty easy for me. You don't actually hear from them. And so there's something almost like psychological where I see that you know, if you succeed and you made a sacrifice, it's very psychologically difficult to swallow that you didn't need to make the sacrifice in the first place. So so Oh, wow. It's it's really interesting. There's there's like data behind this too. So, the way that people value what they get correlates with the price that they pay. There's a study that was done, I don't remember exactly where I'm slipping on the reference. But people actually asked people who joined fraternities in university. How good is your fraternity? And what it what really interesting variable is that the more the fraternity demeans you, the higher the value of the fraternity. Even though by some objective measures, like some people have really good connections, but one of the worst fraternities on campus, people were like, this is the best fraternity. And what was their hazing process? They stripped them down naked, tied them all to trees, and then were urinated on by other people. And when you go through that sacrifice, you can't psychologically say, yeah, I didn't get anything for that. I just sacrificed a ton for nothing and I didn't need to. But really, the work that I do with people is all about, hey, actually you don't need to sacrifice that much. Build a healthy balanced lifestyle. Get yourself into the flow state more often. And you can actually achieve just as much by paying half the the cost. With nowhere near as much suffering. Absolutely. This is a really really important insight. I absolutely love it. I love the reframe. I love everything about this. I think as well, there is something around an incentive or there is a disincentive for people to talk about things not being hard on the internet. First off, if it wasn't difficult, then that means that it's less of a costly signal to you. So, the achievement that you have is less impressive. Secondly, there is so much more criticism on the internet for you. If it doesn't look like you had to go through thing Oh, easy for you to say. Must be nice for you to say because if somebody else does find it more difficult or can't have theory of mind to understand that it could be done just through more of a flow state or less grinding or whatever, that means that you're going to get criticized more. There's another lesson that I learned when I was on Rogan's show and I memed it into Rogan's value difficulty conflation. Look at the car he's driving. Look at the watch he's wearing. Look at the girl he's with. That's unattainable to many people, so it seems like it's valuable, but then you attained it and you realized, oh, this isn't valuable. This is just difficult to get and there's a difference. There's a big difference. What's valuable is something that fulfills you intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, lovingly. Most smart people realize that there is value in stepping outside of the comfort and on the other side of discomfort is something valuable. We're told that things are difficult to attain because if they weren't We're told that worthwhile things are difficult to attain because if they weren't difficult to attain, they wouldn't be worthwhile and this is how non-valuable but difficult things get slipped into our desires without us noticing. Attaining something worthwhile is often going to be difficult, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's worthwhile. Absolutely. And I think the other thing there is that you've got to also think about the audience, right? So, what resonates with the audience? What resonates with the audience is, hey, if something is hard for me and you tell me it's super difficult and you achieved, that fits with my worldview, so I'm going to watch you. Whereas if someone says, hey, this is pretty easy, this guy is taking stuff for granted, just like you said, I'm going to click off onto something else. So, there's abs- absolutely a selection bias towards validating the difficult experiences that most people have. I think the big irony is that often times and if you just think about something that you've struggled with yourself, often times once you figure it out, it's actually pretty easy. Right? But people kind of ignore that and they just think that, oh, like you know, it's it's kind of bizarre, but like they just think like, oh, this stuff is hard. But once you figure out, let's say, how to talk to girls, like you just kind of know and it's actually pretty easy. This is just I suppose the the current trend of sigma grindset, monk mode, uh suffering online as well plays into this. Absolutely. Right? Because people think like cuz what what do people want? People want a guaranteed way to get to the top. They'll pay a sacrifice if you can guarantee success. That's why it's like sigma grindset. You just sacrifice everything you've got and then you'll get to the top. Uh Uh this is the same as the dude that coaches people. That look, that the you're either going to give up or you're going to succeed because the level of effort and discomfort that you're going through is inevitably going to bear fruit at some point in the future. However, the cost may be your sanity and health and longevity and and well-being along the way. Yeah, I mean so I I don't like that's a perspective, but I think honestly like I love being a clinical doctor because medicine teaches you some really hard lessons. And the top of which is, you can fight really hard and you can still lose. Like I've seen people die of cancer. I've seen people, you know, and that has not like This is the thing that I think a lot of people don't get is that sometimes people are just going to lose. Like not everyone can succeed. Not everyone can be a billionaire. Not everyone and and you know, I I it's kind of bizarre, but I think those people can absolutely be helped. They can absolutely move forward. But I I I think this sort of idea of like, you know, you you can either give up or you can succeed, but my question is, can you succeed in like 10% of the time if you do it smarter? How do you square the fact that even people that try incredibly hard will sometimes lose with not wanting to disempower people from uh or disincentivize people from trying hard and from starting things. Well, if I try hard and I'm going to lose, what's the point in even starting? Yeah, so so my my thought is first of all, don't try hard. Can you try easy? So, if you really look at it, like most things most human beings who struggle with something, it's actually like a gap in understanding. And and so like even in the ancient, you know, Hindu and Buddhist texts, they say that avidya, which is ignorance, is the cause of suffering. Like if you just don't know how stuff works. Right? So, like I had a kid the one of my kids the other day tried to open a pill bottle like for the her gummy vitamins. And there's just a technique to open pill bottles. And she can try as hard as she wants to until she understands the technique. And once you have the the technique, it becomes easy. And there's even stuff with with things like studying and things like that where there's a certain there's a science of spaced repetition. There's a science of concentration. There's a science of like health. Right? If you take particular things and you facilitate your gut microbiome, it's like it's crazy. I've had some patients who have had inflammatory bowel disease for like 15, 20 years. And no one has ever talked to them about like controlling their diet and and supporting their their gut microbiome. And they'll like do this stuff, so they went through like 6 months of treatment and then they're like they're cured. Right? They have no no symptoms now. And so I I think the the biggest thing that that human beings really struggle with is not that like you need to try harder and in fact, I think that's it's such a If you really think about I'm not trying to throw shade on anyone. But you either give up or you succeed, that can be a really toxic mentality. Because if you're doing things wrong, what is that person going to tell you to do? Try harder. And if you're still doing it wrong, try harder, try harder, try harder. Right? I I've seen this once again, I'm not trying to throw shade on anyone who's religious, but sometimes people are like, yeah, you didn't pray hard enough. That's the reason it's not working. And so you you create a situation where it's like an unfalsifiable hypothesis that that creates a value judgment on the person. That, hey, if this isn't working, you gave up. You're a loser. There are quitters and there are doers and you fall into one category. And and the reason those things work is because it's really validating cuz that's how those people feel about themselves in the first place, which is why they're listening to a life coach. Cuz if they're happily married with like two kids and like, you know, I mean, maybe they're sort of into this success stuff and things like that, but like a lot of those people just don't listen you know, cuz they're out too busy living their lives. And so there's a lot of stuff going on here that we've just got to be careful about. And sometimes I mean, I'm not saying that this stuff is bad. We'll encourage people to work hard and don't give up and stuff like that and sometimes you got to try. But I think there's like a differential diagnosis here where it's not that, you know, you didn't try hard enough is just one of the reasons why things may not be working out. I have a friend, Aaron, and every time that we're in the gym, he's very well trained in movement and we were doing holding some Copenhagen plank, which for me absolutely wrecks. It wrecks my lower body, it wrecks my upper body. And he shouted from the other side of the room, "What would this be like if it was easier?" That was his cue. His cue to me was cuz you're tense and everything's hard and you're sweating and it hurts and I'm breathing heavily and [ __ ] I hate this position and [ __ ] my adductors are so weak. And he just shouted from the other side of the room, "What would this be like if it was easier?" And I think that's a a cue and a question. Uh Greg McKeown talks about it as well in his second book. Just what what would it be like if it was easier? What would this challenge that you're facing be like if it was a little bit easier? I think that's a lovely cue. And and if you kind of think about, you know, like weightlifting, right? What's the point of a spotter? How much help how much energy does a spotter actually provide? When you're on that last rep and you can't push it any higher, right? And the spotter just gives you like two fingers. Just a tiny bit. And and that's honestly what we've seen is that people don't need to try a whole lot harder. What they really need is usually a tiny bit of help. I can't stop thinking about a video from BroScienceLife. You know, Dom Mazzetti? He's like a comedian, does YouTube stuff. This channel's been around for forever. Yeah, I think I've seen a little bit of his stuff. He did he did a breakdown of all of the different gym archetypes. I can't stop seeing it. That he basically realized that sigma gym bros, he said, is gym emo. That sigma males are gym emo. And I was like, "Oh my god, I can't I can no longer unsee that." Um so, coming back to what we spoke about before, we were talking about dopamine. What are your thoughts on dopamine fasting? Is there any evidence for this? Um so, I think that there is some evidence for it. I think some of it is pretty good, but the amount of bad explanations out there are really really high. What's the landscape of dopamine fasting then? What's hot and what's not? the first thing is like, okay, you can't fast from dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, okay? So, this is the other thing is like people I don't think people get this, but you know, Parkinson's disease is a deficiency of dopamine. It's the death of dopamine neurons in your substantia [ __ ] You couldn't move. You can't move if you're out of dopamine. So, we don't want to get rid of dopamine. Dopamine's not bad. It does all kinds of stuff for us. It's a neurotransmitter. So, a neurotransmitter is just a chemical signal. It's like a letter of the alphabet. And people are like, "We're going to remove the letter D." And it's like, "Wait, hold on. That destroys a lot of things besides dopamine, right?" So, so you can't really fast from dopamine, first of all. Secondly, I do think that there's a lot of good healthy stuff that comes out of dopamine fast. So, like I think it's useful, right? So, like taking a break from technology is good for you in all manners of ways. But the whole point about technology is you can't I I I I mean I actually wonder about this. There's some studies on naltrexone and stuff like that, but I don't think you can give someone a dopamine blocker and like cure them of their addiction. You can do it a little bit. So, there's some evidence that even naltrexone and some of these things that interfere with dopamine signaling can help with addictive behaviors, but it's not like a one-to-one. Right? So, the other thing that I think people really need to understand is that technology affects all kinds of other circuits in your brain. So, the the habit circuitry in the brain is like governed just as much by the endocannabinoids as it is by dopamine. So, I think that like a lot of the science stuff is kind of crap. Um I think that if you implement some kind of dopamine restriction, which usually means technology. Like I don't think people are sort of saying like you can't have dopamine. Like stop laughing, right? And and don't the most extreme version of dopamine fasting where you're not allowed to look at the people in the eyes? Uh right? So, this is the people that Here's Here's your value difficulty conflation. conflation again, right? Because hey, if it's harder, it has to work. And then the you're also engendering so much placebo there because it's like, "Wow, I like did this really thing and I must be amazing now if I succeeded." But so I I think a lot of the like the scientific stuff is sort of BS. Um and and then the other thing to really remember about the science is most of the science is like extrapolated. So, so it you know, like I said, no one's measuring dopamine concentrations in the synaptic cleft in the nucleus accumbens. Like no one's doing that. Everyone's doing cross-sectional studies or observational studies. And so, a lot of what I base my stuff on is clinical stuff, which is also not really, if you think about it, data, right? We work with real human beings. And the reason that we need clinicians is because you can do a scientific study about whatever you want. Like you can do a cross-sectional study, but when it comes and when it translates over into like application with human beings, it becomes a lot more complicated. So, generally speaking, I think that a lot of like technology restriction for extended periods of time is probably really good for you. Um I think that there is probably a lot of principles of like dopamine tolerance and like we mentioned anhedonia and stuff. I think the the data behind that is pretty good. So, I think the the biggest thing that restricting yourself from technology does is probably does help you reset that tolerance some. Um and you know, mixed bag about whether people go through withdrawal or not. So, you know, some of it could be like more of a real neuroscience or physiological withdrawal, but some of it may just be like, "I'm used to not being bored and my tolerance for being bored is so low now." Mhm. happen, right? We don't get bored anymore. Everywhere we go, we pack, you know, I I remember seeing someone on an airplane who was on an international flight and they didn't bring anything. They just didn't bring anything. They were there for 8 hours and just staring at the wall. Which by the way is a great exercise that people in our community do. We tell them, "Just stare at a wall for an hour." It's one of the most powerful meditations that people in our community do. What are the outcomes that someone that looks at a wall for an hour get? Man, it spans the whole range of things. Some people will like break down and cry, some people will have catharsis. For some people, it'll be complete torture with no benefit. It's like a whole thing. Right? But it's just learn to be bored. You thought that running a marathon was hard? Stare at this wall for an hour. Yeah, I mean, at least you've trained your muscles to run the marathon. Have you trained your mind to be bored for an hour? And the beautiful thing about that is once you can train your mind to tolerate boredom, you no longer fall into the pull of these things. Right? Cuz then you don't need to play video game because boredom's okay. What have you learned about porn use amongst young men and how they feel about it? So, I think porn use is one of the most misunderstood things from This is just my opinion, okay? From a clinical perspective, from a psychological perspective, from a neuroscience perspective. So, you know, we we've done a lot of work with pornography usage, pornography addicts. So, I think the first thing to understand a lot of interesting stuff came out from our internal research. We're hopefully going to publish a paper on this within the next year or so, but hasn't really been formulated yet. So, the first thing that's really interesting is that people who are addicted to pornography often times get exposed at a very very young age. We're talking about first exposure to pornography like pre-pubescent most of the time. Second thing is that pornography usage has nothing to do with sexual perversion. So, a lot of people will think if someone is really really addicted to pornography, they must be like really horny or like depraved in some way or things like that. Generally speaking, my experience has been that pornography usage is really just a very powerful emotional coping mechanism. So, pornography usage will suppress a lot of negative emotions. And if you talk to people who use pornography, especially in an addictive way, what leads to usage is like feeling bad about yourself. And this is the big problem with pornography usage, which is that once you start to use it, it sort of engenders more shame and guilt. And in order to deal with the shame and guilt, you have to use it again. Right? And and it's just the kind of thing where if you like think about the societal stigma, if someone's like, "Yeah, you know, like I grew up and and I was addicted to alcohol like and now I'm sober for 20 years." And it's like, "Good for you, man." And it's like, "Yeah, I'm a recovering pornography addict." And it's like, you know, you're not going to get the same you know, if you're dating someone and and you let's say you you have a brother or sister and like, "Yeah, I'm dating someone who's like been sober for 10 years." They're like, "Cool." Right? Like that's probably good, like not bad for your life. I'm dating someone who's like been addicted to pornography for 10 years and they're they're, you know, like there's a lot of stigma associated with a lot of shame associated with it. I think it's really about emotional regulation. This is really interesting. There's research that shows that um so, it really has nothing to do with sex, basically, which is what's weird. I mean, it can have sexual consequences and stuff and create problems in relationships. But there's a research that did a multivariate regression analysis on people addicted to pornography, which means they looked at which variable associates the most with pornography usage. And the number one variable was meaninglessness. So, the more meaningless your life is, the more likely you are to be addicted to pornography. And so, what we've actually kind of found, which is really interesting, is when you work with people like that, helping them develop like purpose helps them actually Like you have to have a reason to stop watching pornography. It's got to be like some kind of you know, you have to go through that withdrawal for some greater good. And so, helping people find purpose is like one of the biggest things that apparently helps with pornography. What do you think it says that porn use doesn't seem to be actually that massive of a sexual trigger. It doesn't seem to be triggered all that much by it's triggered by things outside of sex in a way. It's triggered by life circumstances, meaninglessness. Yeah. So so I think it's this comes down to the neurochemistry. So if we think about addictions, why do we get addicted to stuff? Because of the effect it has on our brain. And so if we think about from an evolutionary standpoint, there are a couple of different things that will suppress our negative emotions and will also give us like a rush of like let's say euphoric neurotransmitters. So orgasm is one of these things. So why does orgasm feel really good? Because it's required for the procreation of the species, right? So evolutionarily, when orgasm feels really good, we're going to have more sex and that'll result in the continuation of the human race. The interesting thing is if you look at actually ancient yogic literature as well, they say that there's this, you know, state of bliss called samadhi, which is sort of the purpose of meditation. And there are a couple of interesting ways that you can get temporary samadhi and orgasm is one of them. So this also is like one of the reason that tantric sex is a thing and and things like that, which is a maybe a conversation for a different day, maybe a conversation for today. But I think we've known for a long time. So why is pornography like this? Because orgasm has very specific like activation within the brain. And so now if you kind of think about it, let's say I'm feeling worthless about myself, I'm not doing anything in life, I'm kind of like sitting around not doing anything. I'm tired of feeling this way. What is a switch I can flick in my brain that lets me forget everything, pushes my negative emotions away, and actually gives me a spurt of positive neurotransmitters, which I'm not sure exactly what happens with people orgasm in the brain. But you know, and and that's why pornography addiction exists. So it's not really about sex. That's so interesting that you have all of these different coping mechanisms, whether it be binge eating, whether it be alcohol, whether it be cannabis, social media, video games, porn. What we what we've done is increase the variety of ways that you can hide from your feelings. Absolutely. Uh pick pick your flavor of ice cream for today. What is it going to be? Yeah, right? And and there's there are people have drugs of choice, which may be due to some amount of genetic vulnerability, but if you really think about it, I think about pornography addiction is the closest to substance use because of its hard-hitting like effect, right? So if you think about getting high, there's discrete like chemicals that enter into your brain and like activate certain receptors. Whereas video games are like a little bit more global, but pornography is really especially that arousal stuff and stuff like that is a very targeted way to activate your brain in a particular way. More closely resembles a substance. Downstream from pornography use, have you seen sexual dysfunction? Is this associated? Absolutely. So okay, so how is it that porn use isn't all that sexual and yet downstream from porn use you get sexual dysfunction? For a couple different reasons. So first let's understand that sexual means multiple things within one person. So there's a physical aspect to it, there's a neuroscientific aspect to it, there's a psychological aspect to it. So one thing that you tend to see is something that you know, a term that I coined on stream one day, death grip syndrome, which is if you look at men especially who masturbate when they use pornography, the physiologic stimulus, for lack of a better term, that men will use actually does not approximate the physiologic stimulus of intercourse. So to put it bluntly, I'm trying to avoid saying this, but you know, not using lube and using your death grip hand feels different from a vagina. Like that's just how it works. And and so what happens is the the body can acclimatize to this, right? Like that's like literally what happens. So you get used to you need a particular kind of stim you get conditioned to require a certain kind of stimulation to achieve climax. And so then sometimes what can happen when when people engage in sexual intercourse is that they can't get that kind of stimulus to achieve climax. They detrained themselves from being stimulated by real physiological interaction with somebody else's body. Yeah, absolutely, right? So they may be have a very very strong grip. Right. So so mentally and so there's interesting things cuz I've literally worked with patients where like the process of this is deconditioning. So we'll sort of say like, you know, loose grip, lot of lube. And and that'll be frustrating for I'm I'm serious I'm not I'm you know, I know it's funny, but like seriously, cuz you have to do that physiological deconditioning and you have to try to approximate you know, things like that. And there's all kinds of stuff that you could do with your partner and things like that, too. So you can fix this. Sometimes you'll see like erectile dysfunction just kind of straight up. Um and then there are also like neuroscience and psychological impacts, right? So sometimes people will have so much shame for pornography that there's you know, they have difficulty performing, they feel so guilty. Uh there's all kinds of stuff like does your partner know that you use pornography and things like that? So that can lead to um you know, a difficulty with sort of forming and maintaining erections, which is different from reaching orgasm. Right? So there's a whole physiologic chain of things going on. And and so we'll we'll definitely see that kind of stuff. And then in some cases what you also tend to see is that there's this principle called online drift on the internet where since the goal is emotional engagement, how does a platform keep you emotionally engaged? They do it by serving up more extreme content. So if you look at your platform algorithms, if there's certain things that you search for, it'll serve you like tons of extreme stuff in that way. So if you watch one cute cat video, then you need to see cats doing cuter things to stay on the platform. And then cats are doing cuter stuff and cuter stuff and cuter stuff. We see this with pornography usage as well. Where there there's like a gradual like movement towards like hardcore pornography use because you require more stimulus to your eyes and ears and things like that to get that same level of arousal. And if you do that and if you require that really high level of stimulus, of of you know, just like more, brighter, bigger, whatever. And and then when if you if you have sexual relations with a regular human being, like the stimulus is just different. Yeah, if you're not able to recreate the zero gravity acrobatics that you've just seen on porn. Yeah, Mary Harrington calls that the law of fap entropy, which is whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more intense over time. Beautiful. Yeah. It's this it's her second law of pornodynamics, I think actually. Um I I really like the introduction of the framing in the story that you tell yourself around your porn use is massively contributing to what is going to happen out the other side of it. And I think that again, you know, um what would this be like if it was easier? Um what would There is a a trend online at the moment that demonizes porn use and it's because there is a non-zero number of people for whom porn use is destructive and can't control it. That has been used to cover all of porn use as if you're using porn, this makes you susceptible to a whole suite of problems that are going to occur even if you do have a healthy relationship with it because there are a whole host of people that are able to use porn and have a healthy relationship with it and at least not have dysfunction on the other side of it, whether it's healthy or not may be a a little bit of a different discussion. But for the people who see their porn use as something which is worthy of shame, which is worthy of guilt, which is worthy of making them feel like less of a man, less of a appropriate partner, I can guarantee that you are somebody who does have a problem with porn use. Porn use is not good for you if that is the story that you tell yourself about your porn use. And it's so recursive and and self-reinforcing, it's brutal. Yeah, absolutely. I mean I I think that, you know, it's interesting because when when people sort of demonize porn use, I think I'm seeing this trend more and more where if something if I have a problem with something, our society is moving more and more towards that thing needs to go away as opposed to I need to get better at handling it. And so the really scary cycle that I see is that the more that we remove things, the less tolerant we become and then smaller and smaller things can set us off. Concept creep, yep. And it's really bizarre because it's literally the exact opposite of what we do in exposure therapy, right? So when someone has a phobia, like we literally have a clinical intervention, which has been scientifically sort of like the standard of care for phobias, is exposure therapy, which is, "Hey, this thing bothers you and we're going to expose you to a tiny tiny amount of it until we can decondition that physiological response and then we're going to go up and then we're going to go up and we're going to go up until you can tolerate it." But on the flip side, with and I think it's okay to cancel some people. I'm not like against cancel culture, but I think it's important to understand what are the consequences of cancel culture and how can we sort of buffer against those? We needed to train ourselves to be able to handle difficult stuff a little bit better. I even saw a meta-analysis recently that offering trigger warnings actually increases anxiety and doesn't actually help people in any sort of way. Yeah. Yeah, if you snowplow out of the way anything that could be even mildly objectionable to people, what you do it you don't change the fact that people are going to find things offensive. What you do is you adjust the level at which their offense begins. People are going to find and this is you know one of my great friends Gwenda Bogel he speaks about the fact that there is a community of people out there for whom finding racism in the world is their job. It is their job to go out there whether this be due to status, due to speaking gigs and and engagements, writing books. Their level of racism, the amount of racism that they find is going to stay constant. If racism decreases, that means that they need to find more and more things to be racist in order to maintain there is a supply and demand problem with regards to racism. And if the supply of racism decreases or the supply of anything decreases, offense, objectionable content, whatever it is, there are some people out there who are just going to adjust themselves down the whatever the price demand curve to find more and more things that Yeah, and I think you know if if you're on a crusade, let's say, and I think there's like a good reason to do that, right? Let's let's say that I'm against you know, I I don't know like sexual assault. And even if I make sexual assault 50% better, my work isn't done. Right? Like and and so I think there are good reasons to do that sort of thing. But what what kind of bothers me and and this is when I like literally when I work with patients and stuff, right? Who have narcissistic or abusive parents or siblings or things like that. And and we sort of talk a little bit about okay, this person says these words, right? But like really the goal when I work with patients is how can you let their words no longer control you. That's like the point of therapy when someone has had an abusive parent. Right? You get to it it's not easy, but over time you can develop the resilience and fortitude to kind of acknowledge that hey, like even though this person is upset with me, they're upset with me, I don't have to take that in. Or I can learn how to set a boundary around it. I can draw a line. I can understand even in the best cases that my parent was abused, which is why they learned how to talk about this stuff, and I can have compassion towards them. That's like literally what we try to do in therapy. And then on a macroscopic level, we're almost moving in the opposite direction. Where where we're sort of training ourselves to be like mentally less tolerant. And I'm not saying that that's the solution. Like I don't think we should I think we should be mentally more tolerant, but if people are doing bad things, we should absolutely hold them accountable. So someone is out there spewing racist BS, there should be consequences for that. And at the same time, I can enact those consequences without being mentally disturbed, which is a big part of what being a psychiatrist is. If someone assaults me, I can enact a consequence about them and still go home. I'm talking about in the scheme of work, right? So if you're working in the emergency room, someone's high on cocaine and they like lash out at you. Like sometimes you psychiatric professionals get assaulted a lot at work. And so we can still hold them accountable and change the system, things like that, but we don't have to be as upset about it. And there's actually training involved there. That's a perfect conception. Going back to one of the first things that you said, one of the best predictors for pathological porn use is the age at which you first become exposed to it. Why? How does porn use impact a developing brain? What is it about this? Which direction is the arrow of causation going in? Yeah, so so a couple of caveats about that. So that's like a observation we've made of people in our community. I don't know if there's actually research on that, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was. Yeah, that's true of all the other addictions, okay? So we sort of know why. And so we know that when you have a developing brain, adding a substance to it makes us more vulnerable to it long term. So there's even studies that show that early marijuana usage leads is more likely to lead to addictions of other kinds. And it's because when you use marijuana at a young age, it actually alters how your dopamine circuitry is formed and leaves you vulnerable to other addictions. So my guess is that pornography has some similar neuroscientific mechanism where something is going on where even if you're cuz these people are pre-pubescent usually when they're exposed, which means that they don't get aroused. Like usually, right? So so they don't even understand what they're seeing, which is the most common thing when I talk to people who are addicted to pornography. Most common thing is I was like seven and my 15-year-old brother like showed me this thing. And him and his friends were watching it and it was super cool. I didn't understand what was going on. But we do know that adding stuff to the developing brain, whether it's a particular kind of stimulus, let's say like abusive parents, right? So that's not a substance, or a substance alters its formation. And that those effects are let's say not quite permanent, but sticky. And then require some time to be rewired. And so probably it has something to do with the way that our dopamine circuitry, our emotional circuitry, the those things kind of get laid down. Well, that perfectly shows why porn use is at least in part not sexual. Because you have you have this coping mechanism for an individual who is as yet not sexual. And and that I think is the the weirdest thing for pornography addiction is that like a lot of it honestly in my clinical experience is like not very sexual in nature. It's really about some weird emotional suppression, you know, mentally checking out, getting that spurt of relief. Um and and that's also why you'll you'll see so much usage. It's not like people are they feel compulsions as opposed to feeling horny. Yeah, they're not they're not aroused for 8 hours straight. Right. It's not like, you know, we're going to jerk off all day and it's going to be great. It's like I feel terrible about myself. I don't know what to do. I feel a compulsion to watch the stuff, do this thing for a while. If I get into a fight, I need to do it again. I'm procrastinating. I wasted the whole day. I feel ashamed of myself cuz I've done this for the last 4 hours. I need to do it again. That's honestly more of what it is. I think that taking it out of the realm of sex, which, you know, the world still has massive problems talking about openly. It's something that's kind of very shameful and guilt-ridden and private and all the rest of it. Taking it out of that and just saying, look man, for you it's fapping. For the girl that lives next door, it's binge eating. For the guy that lives down the street, it's video games. For the dude that lives next door to you, it's marijuana. Coping mechanisms all the way down. Yeah. I think that takes away a lot of the shame, which is pretty cool. One of the other um considerations that I imagine must happen an awful lot is around bedtime routines, sleep, sleep hygiene generally from your community. If you're talking about people that use screens an awful lot, people that use social media, porn, video games, etc. Why is it that we get so motivated in the middle of the night instead of first thing in the morning? Why did nature decide that it was going to curse us so that our brains can't shut off when we're about to go to sleep and yet when we want to wake up first thing in the morning, our brains don't want to start? So I think there are a lot of different answers to this. Um I think a big part of it is that so a big a big part of what we do if we look at the staring at a wall exercise, for example. So a lot of that real solid positive motivation comes from within. And if we really look at our society, what's going on right now is we are being told what we want all the time. So we've lost touch with ourselves. Right? So like there's a notification, oh this game is coming out, there's this new movie coming out, there's a Super Mario movie, there's this movie, there's that movie, there's this kind of thing, and by the way, there's this kind of thing that you can do to be healthy. You should be healthy. You need to be healthy. You need to be more motivated. This is how you grind. This is how you be productive. Be all of these things. And so what's happening in our society is we are gravitating towards stuff outside of us all the time. And the people are getting better and better at getting us get getting us gravitated towards them, right? So Oreo is figuring out okay, what color can we put the package, you know, how can we make it crinkly like so that, you know, there's some kind of Pavlovian conditioning. Like everyone's getting better at this. And so oftentimes if you kind of think about it at night, a couple of things happen. The night is the only time you're with yourself. Right? And maybe you're and and I guarantee you the people who are getting motivated are not sitting there doomscrolling on their phone until they pass out. They're usually like sitting down quietly or something like that. Like what happens? You doomscroll, you doomscroll, you doomscroll. You get tired. You put the phone away. You put your head on the pillow. You don't fall asleep and then you start having all these ideas. So it's really the only time that in the shower, right? Cuz we haven't we don't have we don't have waterproof phones perfectly yet. So that's why like all these profound thoughts happen in the shower. It's not like the shower is magical and has some neurochemical that you're inhaling that makes you more creative. It's the only time that you have with yourself. And there are studies that show that meditation improves creativity and things like that. Why is that? It's because you're with yourself. So that's one reason. There are a couple of other reasons though I think that some people have a different circadian rhythm and their creative time is really late at night. If you look at basically religions across the world, they sort of have this convergent evolution of mental work at like 3:00 to 6:00 in the morning. So depending on how late you stay up, you may actually be tapping into that what's in Sanskrit called Brahma Muhurta. It's also the time of like matins. So, there's like this window of time that based on circadian rhythm where your mind is actually very, very active. And that's how I ended up studying 2 hours in med school. I just studied during Brahma Muhurta. I was like, "Hey." And everything just sinks in. It's like getting up Were you getting up early or staying up late? So, what Getting up early. So, I'd wake up at like 4:00 a.m. I'd do like yoga and meditation. I'd study for 2 hours, and I'd go to class. And then I'd finish class, and I'm done for the day. Which is great. Um So, I I So, I I think that, you know, you you have to be a little bit careful about your circadian rhythm. That just could be your time. But, a lot of it is just that's the time that you're with yourself. And so, got to just spend more time with yourself. Like, you're a cool person. You don't need something else to entertain you. What about if people are constantly dealing with brain fog? This is something that a bunch of people that I've worked with over the years have complained about that throughout the day their thoughts always feel a little bit muddled. I get the sense that this will probably correlate with people who are also sleeping quite poorly. They're also probably using phones late at night. But, what is brain fog? Have you ever looked at this clinically? Oh, yeah, a ton. So, so uh uh we had a YouTube video about this that that went really well. So, I I I I think the the tricky thing about brain fog is as a clinician, like, we see it front line. And people don't really know what to do. So, this is where so it's interesting. I'm I'm I mean, I guess at this point I'm an expert in in technology usage, but my my actual like historic expertise is in evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine. And and so, what we're really seeing when in brain fog, first of all, I think we've got to understand that your brain exists within a body. So, and we're seeing this more with like gut microbiome research and things like that. But, for the longest time, at least in Eastern medicine, they didn't separate out mental health from other forms of thing. Like, it's all one thing, right? Cuz the brain is connected to the body. So, I think what we we We're also seeing a lot of brain fog as a symptom of long COVID. So, that further um demonstrates the kind of like immune, autoimmune, inflammation-based results of brain fog. So, I I think that brain fog, in my opinion, is really probably some kind of low-level inflammation that is going on. So, usually when I'm trying to help people with brain fog, it's kind of weird, but it's not much psychological stuff. Like, I don't think it's like problems with your emotions or psychotherapy. It's usually more physiologic stuff. So, anti-inflammatory diet, even when it comes to stuff like sleep, I think a lot of people don't realize that, you know, especially if you use like marijuana or like edibles or CBD to help you sleep, it affects your REM cycles. It affects your, you know, sleep stage architecture and things like that. So, a lot of times people will use things to fall asleep, but don't really recognize or acknowledge that the quality of sleep that they're getting is pretty low. Um I have a kind of a personal theory, which I've implemented with a couple of patients, which, you know, none of this is medical advice, but uh you know, I've I've tried using and when you talk to patients, you have to consent them appropriately and stuff, right? So, I'll I'll teach them shirshasana, which is a headstand, which seems to help with everything else. So, even in potentially increasing blood flow to the brain could help. Um but I but I think really sort of focusing on anti-inflammatory measures, turmeric, things like that can can really help people with brain fog. Do you know what's happening with brain fog? What what what is it? Like, what what's going on inside of the brain? So, my guess is that there's just low levels of inflammation and/or and that sort of correlates with immune activation within the brain. And it could be coming from other places, too. And the felt sense of that is slower thoughts, more confusion, less clarity, less precision, etc. Right. So, if you look at it, the first thing that we sort of know if we re-review our, you know, neuroanatomy and stroke architecture is that we know that certain psychological and physiologic problems are focal. So, that's one part of the brain. But, with brain fog, everything is messed up a small to medium to even severe amount. So, it's a global effect. So, what kind of We're talking about global effects, the sources are probably going to be stuff like inflammation or hormones or things like that. Stuff that affects all of your brain. And so, I I think a lot of that stuff also with the COVID, it sort of suggests that there's some kind of ongoing immune reaction or even hopefully not damage, which I I don't think we really see with COVID in the brain. You can. You can get strokes and stuff, but that's more clotting stuff. But, you know, so I I I think it's probably low-level in- inflammation is my best guess. One of my friends has just started working with a new glucose monitor company. And when you get your always-on glucose monitor and you put it on the back of your arm, it comes with uh I think four muffins. So, you get it delivered, you get your glucose monitor, and with your glucose monitor are four huge, super sugary, high-calorie muffins. And on one of the days that you don't have anything to do in the morning, you have to wake up, and immediately upon waking, you eat two of these muffins. And you track what's happening. Are you watching your your glucose shoot up through the ceiling, but you're not allowed to train. You're not allowed to eat anything else. You can't exercise. You can't do stuff to to try and get that off. And the lesson to learn, apparently from this, apart from the fact it's how does your body respond to glucose? How quickly is it able to clear it whilst it's not training? Whilst it doesn't have other things, etc., etc. Is also the felt sense of this is what tons of sugar in your bloodstream feels like. And then for lunch, you have another muffin. So, you've had two for breakfast, and then you have another one for lunch. And um again, it's just one of the most interesting things beyond this is how my body is able to metabolize glucose and get it out of the bloodstream and all this stuff that he learned. One of the other things was he had a number that he was able to now attach to his felt sense of what high blood sugar felt like. And everybody knows if you've had a huge binge one evening, you end up having a ton of cookies or something else. And I can sometimes feel it in my joints. I can sometimes feel it. It's like throbbing. My entire body is throbbing because I'm just so [ __ ] inflamed. And I wouldn't say that I'm hypersensitive to this, but, you know, everyone can push it. If you get a bag of Haribo Tangfastics in front of you or something, and you go, "I've just eaten 100 g of sugar there." That's an awful lot. Yeah, I I think something that people don't really appreciate is that we have symbiotic bacteria. And the bacteria that grow in our gut, so a lot of people will like eat will take probiotics every day. Whereas, like, I I think it's science without understanding. So, if we think about, okay, what determines the bacteria in your gut, it's what you feed it. So, some bacteria are able to digest complex carbohydrates. Some bacteria are able to digest simple carbohydrates. The ones that we've sort of learned are friendly, which trigger less of an immune response, are the bacteria that have been in our guts for thousands, tens of thousands, millions of years. And those are the ones that eat like root vegetables. They help us digest those things. And now what's started to happen is we see all this how does food cause inflammation? Like, we know that fast food causes inflammation, sugar causes inflammation. It's because when we when we eat these kinds of foods, it selects for We're fertilizing another kind of bacteria that normally doesn't belong there because, like, Twinkie-eating bacteria did not We're not symbiotic. So, now our immune system is like, "Hey, this guy this bacteria doesn't belong here." But, those are the ones that we keep feeding. And so, a lot of this inflammation that we're kind of seeing I've seen a lot of stuff around gluten recently where there's a guy in Austin, actually, who uses this strain of gluten that's like 800 years old. Doesn't trigger celiac problems for people and things like that. No way. Yeah. [ __ ] that's cool. It's really interesting, right? So, I There's no scientific studies on it yet, but I I think we're really starting to see that a lot of this stuff like diet and things like that, which is usually how we manage brain fog. I myself had really bad brain fog after COVID and went through this whole Ayurvedic regimen and was back to normal. And so, it was it was, you know, I think that we really inflammation-oriented. You've mentioned a good bit today about gut microbiome and the relationship between mood, body, general health, and what's going on. Not just in terms of eating, diet, but microbiome, too. Let's say that somebody hasn't ever been introduced to the concept of microbiome and how the food that they eat interacts with that. Where would you start somebody who says, "I think that I might be suffering with some brain fog. I think that my energy levels should be a little bit improved." What would you eliminate first? What would you try and add in first? This is not medical advice. Yeah. So, I I think the first thing to understand is that if you're So, there are meta-analyses that have been done on diet. And basically, what we know is that all of the healthy diets share a couple of things. High amount of fiber, high amount of fruit like fresh fruits and vegetables, a certain amount of protein, and then ideally healthy carbohydrates. Now, for any individual person, some combination of that may be like better for you. So, like, low carb, intermittent fasting, like, whatever. But, if you look at meta-analyses that compare all these things that different people are doing, that's kind of what it comes down to. So, the first thing to understand about gut microbiome, if you've got brain fog or anything else, is that in order for your brain to function, it needs nutrients. The nutrients that you get are not just about what you eat, but about how you digest and how you metabolize. So, there are two bacteria, for example, if you look at people who have mood disorders, there are two bacteria that are low in people who have mood disorders. If you look at people who do not have mood disorders, there are two bacteria that are high. So, what do we know? So, if I'm I'm a medical doctor and if a patient comes to my office with depression, I can prescribe an SSRI, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, boost the level of serotonin in their brain, in their synaptic cleft. Now, the cool thing is that where does our body's serotonin come from? It's made from tryptophan, which is created by a gut bacteria when we eat particular kinds of food. So, there are some gut bacteria that give us tryptophan serotonin precursors. And what I've found as a clinician is that when people follow the right diet recommendations, I can pull them off of their SSRI within a year. But when they don't follow the diet recommendations, they need to stay on the SSRI. This has just been clinical experience. So, you really have to understand that if you want your brain and body to function correctly, you need to feed it the right kind of nutrients. And it's not just the nutrients themselves, it's the fact that half of your nutrient processing comes from the bacteria in the gut. And so, it's almost like you're creating a garden that is going to give your body nutrients. The even this I cannot make this stuff up. There's a kind of bacteria called Ruminococcus, which is associated with anxiety. I think it's inversely correlated. So, people have low levels of Ruminococcus have higher levels of anxiety. And they've even done stool transplants, which is like when you take poop from one human being and you put it in another human being, and it will improve mood disorders. I have a friend who lives here in Austin who is a stool donor for that precise reason. So, he had to go through three layers of qualification, rigorous testing, lifestyle questionnaire, phone interview, tons of insights around tracking food and stool sampling and stuff. And he is now selling his poop. He is now a poop creator. Your your friend shits gold. Literally does. We mentioned this when we saw him. It's like, "Dude, you've managed to monetize the one thing that everybody could make a business out of." Yeah, some high-quality poop you got there. It's kind of said it as well, yeah. It's like, "Do you do you do any for free? Can I get a mate's rate discount?" Um yeah, it's fascinating. Okay, so that's that's what's going on inside of us. Uh foods that people should be more aware of, foods that you've found in your clinical practice that uh people tend to be deficient in. Okay, so this is where we got to take a step back and understand digestion. So, I before I went to med school, I studied Eastern medicine for a few years and a couple of things that I took away from there, which I believe and I think we're moving towards, is there's not a food that is good for a condition. The people's digestion is different, people's absorption is different, and so certain foods work for certain people. So, even when I'm working with patients with depression, if I'm trying to get them off of an SSRI, I will give them different diets depending on what their like constitution is and like what their gut microbiome is doing. So, I think that this is where unfortunately, like I wish I could say eat these three things, because that's what people do now. They're like, "Okay, what are the three things that I need to eat?" But if I got to be straight with you, that is the problem with population-based medicine. So, when people come and they say you should eat these three things, what do they do? They look at 10,000 people and they say, "Okay, on average, these three foods help 10,000 people." But if you really look at that, those three foods don't help a third There's a massive variance in there, yeah. They don't help they help a little bit in the middle and there's a third of people that they help a lot with. So, if you look at population-based medicine, if we did if we sort of said, "Okay, what should you wear?" we're going to average together what everyone wears. So, everyone the right thing to wear is like a gray smock. Right? That's not how it works. So, I think one of the biggest things things that we really need to understand about recommendations is that recommendations really should be personalized. And that different people may need to eat different things. So, if you've got an anxiety disorder, like you need more Ruminococcus or less. I'm forgetting if it's directly correlated or inversely correlated. And there are certain foods that Ruminococcus can be found in. But at the end of the day, like everyone's looking for a like a oh, just eat these three things, whereas I'd say unfortunately, it's like and this is why we sort of find the meta-analysis shows healthy fruits and vegetables, complex carbohydrates, and like, you know, low-processed foods is is the most important thing. Okay, someone does that. Does that mean in your view then that it is important for people to cycle through a bunch of different food different foods, different diets based on those principles? So, we have some things that are likely to be unchanging. There will be different flavors and versions and whatnot on top of that. Absolutely. So, so I think that just eating healthy doesn't work ideally for like half the population. So, that's where you really need to learn and make, you know, I I think this is a topic of a whole other conversation, but if you look at sort of the Ayurvedic system of diagnosis, the Chinese system of diagnosis, what they do is they'll diagnose you as having like a particular kind of constitution, and there's certain foods that will balance out that constitution. And and that's stuff that, you know, when I was struggling with brain fog, I went to the Ayurvedic doctor that I see and I was like, "Hey, I'm having this problem. It's a lot of What are you Are you Are you a fire person? Uh I am predominantly wind and secondarily fire. Mm, interesting. So, I I like to say that my mind is like the wind. So, I blow really hard in one direction and then I change directions very easily. So, I struggle with consistency. Even if you all are like watching this, so I use my hands a lot when I move. The veins on the back of my hands are very visible. If you guys like kind of see that. Um and so, there are other features like there's physiological features and and things like that that are kind of correlated with this stuff. One of my friend's wife's is one of my friends my friend's wife, not one of my friend's wives, uh is a Ayurvedic um teacher / doctor, and it was the first time 6 months ago was the first time that I ever heard about the classification for people in that way. I found it absolutely fascinating. Yeah, it's a it's a little bit unfortunate that I think the data behind Ayurveda is is not the best. So, there were some initial studies that show that it tightly correlates with genetic like alleles and things like that, but some of that research is, you know, I think they want it to be true. Um but but the the scientific validity is not the best. Clinically, you know, I use it myself and I think you all should talk to your doctor about it if you want to try stuff. One of the other, I guess, common themes that we've spoken about today is purpose. You mentioned earlier on that it is a prophylactic against uh certain dysfunctions that people can encounter. Why is finding purpose so difficult in the modern world, in your opinion? So, I think it comes back to something that we talked about. Like so, purpose really does come from within. So, people can give you responsibilities, but then those become shoulds. And the beautiful thing about purpose is that that's what makes doing hard things easy. So, everyone's out there trying to make everything easier, but if we can easily do the hard thing, then life becomes very easy. So, if you kind of think about, okay, like I I worked 20, you know, I'm I'm up for 18 hours of a shift. I have 6 more hours to go. I want to go to sleep. I don't want to be here. Why do I keep doing it? I do it because I care about my patients. I do it because if I work a 24-hour shift, I get to see my kids more. So, there's a 3-year-old at home that like unless I work these 24 hours, like we're not going to make, you know, either I work and anyway, so as a parent, you make sacrifices for a good reason. So, purpose is what allows us to make sacrifices. And we're becoming a world that it it's becoming harder and harder to make sacrifices. In fact, we want the opposite. We don't even want to sacrifice and tolerate 5 minutes of boredom boredom while we're taking a poop. You know, I need that constant dopaminergic stimulation. And so, the more the less purpose we have in life, and if we think about, you know, people who are fighting today in in Ukraine or like people who like people who do difficult things have a reason for it. And so, now what's happening in society is like people can't do hard stuff because like why do you wake up in the morning? There's like an existential nihilism, like anti-work and wealth inequality and climate change. Like, what's the point? And so, you can take as many supplements as you want to to boost your motivation, but if you don't have a reason to get up in the morning, like There's something I learned as an addiction psychiatrist, you can't give someone a reason to quit. They have to want to quit themselves. You can't make someone sober. They have to want to do it. And so, what makes purpose hard? I think it's because society externalizes our attention. So, in nature, our attention is like halfway within us and halfway directed towards the external. But now with notifications, with dopamine, with with, you know, colors and everything being bright and stuff, we don't we don't know what it is to be ourselves. We don't even know what we want. All we know about {quote} what we want is what we've been told to want. And I'll see this a lot cuz I'll advise people who want to go to med school and I'll ask them, "Why do you want to go to med school?" And they give me some BS answer about helping people. And they're like, "I want to help people." And it's like, "Why don't you go work in a soup kitchen? You don't have to go to school for 4 years for that. You can help people today." They're like, uh And then when it's like, "Why do you want to go to med school?" They're like, "I don't know." You want to do it for the prestige and the money. And to make your parents proud. Let's be honest. And they're like, "Yeah." And then you can work from there, right? Okay, so like that's not going to work, dude. You're going to burn out. So, I think why it's hard to find purpose is literally this is more from a yogic perspective, but our attention is no longer directed internally. So, what we end up with is a life of shoulds. And where does a should come from? A should comes from the outside. It comes from the expectation of other people. And then our purpose actually comes from within. And so, the more that we spend and the more our attention gets pulled into things outside of us, the more we lose sight of like what we want. Crowdsourcing your sense of self-worth to the world around you is a sure-fire way to be miserable. Yeah, absolutely. And directionless. Okay. But we are inevitably intertwined with the world around us. We are going to be exposed to screens and expectations and societal norms and social media and what our parents wanted us to do and the way that we've dealt with past traumas and our fears of insufficiency and the fact that Sigma grind set gets lots of hashtag love on TikTok. How are we to silo ourselves or to separate ourselves out so that we can actually find our desires, find our wants? So, there's a there's a interesting exercise that I'll give people. If you're trying to find your purpose in life, you need to reach the end of thought. So, if we look at where thoughts come from. So, thoughts come from two places, the indriyas, which are the sense organs, and the memory of indriyas or indriya experiences. So, if you kind of think about, okay, like if I want a hamburger, what causes me to want a hamburger? I'm walking down the street, I smell a hamburger cooking, then I start to think about hamburgers. So, thoughts usually come from the outside. So, I want to see this movie, I want to play this video game, I want to watch this show. Thousand years ago, did people want to play that video game? Of course not. They never had a single thought about it. Why do we think about it? Because we get bombarded from our sensory organs. Advertisers figured this out, too. The yogis figured it out, advertisers figured it out. Brand awareness. So, if you want to find your purpose, but the thing is that stuff will con- continue bombarding you as long as you keep on inputting it into your senses. So, this is where a simple exercise to reach the end of thought. So, if you go for a walk, your mind will have lots of thoughts. You'll think about your calendar, you'll think about this, I want to do this. But then as long as you don't feed your mind, it'll run out of those thoughts. Then you'll have this period of boredom. And boredom, by the way, is your mind's way of trying to trick you into getting dopamine. It's like, "We're starving here. Give us something." And so, it bludgeons you and bullies you into giving it more dopamine. We see this with like binge eating and stuff, too. It's going to make you feel terrible because your brain has figured out, "If I make this person feel terrible, they'll eat something." So, you just have to reach the end of thought. And you just keep walking until the thoughts are run out. And then sit down, hopefully on a park bench, and then just ask yourself, "What do I want to do?" Ask yourself. And then if all the thoughts are gone, you'll start to get something floating from the surface. And the more that you do this kind of exercise, and meditation is a shortcut to kind of do this, by the way. I think the more you'll you'll discover your purpose because you can't get it, as you said, from crowdsourcing, especially internet and Google ads and cookies and stuff like that cuz it's not even crowdsourcing with your best interests at heart. Trying to separate ourselves out from just how intertwined we are with everybody else. How intertwined everybody else is with us. Uh is an incredibly difficult feat. And one of my favorite blog posts of all time is What Do You Want to Want by Kyle Eschenroeder. And it's precisely about this question that you're asking here. And um he he has this bit where he says, "If we don't step into our wants and learn to program our desires, then the best that we can hope for is to become a rich or famous slave. The cleverest rat in the room, basically, allowing the entire world to tell us what it is that we're supposed to want. Asking yourself, what do you want to want is such an unbelievably powerful question. Not what you want, cuz what you want is informed by all of those things. Societal norms, past traumas, parental expectations, blah blah blah. What do you want to want? What do you want to want in life? When I work with people like in once again, like when we work with like a lot of these high-performing people, right? They have a lot of wants. But I'll ask them, "Where did that want come from?" And or why do you want that? And I I think you know, when you start to really ask that question, that's when you really discover, "Oh, I actually don't want this." Like, "Why do you want that? I want this to make my parents happy. I want this to be respected. I want this because I don't feel good about the person that I am on the inside." So, if I accomplish this thing, it'll be like an antidote to my low self-esteem or my doubt. Or my desire to prove yourself. Like, "Prove yourself." What is there to prove? You're you, you're always going to be you. You've always been you. There's nothing to prove. Dude, I love your work. I I I absolutely adore this blend of modern, western, ancient, eastern. I think you're an incredibly impressive individual. I think that the the work that you're doing is is very much needed. I wish that there was 10 of you out there or 100, perhaps. But for now, we're just going to have to do with one, I think. Uh Chris, likewise. I'm amazed by your encyclopedic knowledge of just all these different things and and being able to pull from all kinds of stuff. And I I don't think we need 10 of us. I think one of us is enough. And I think what we probably need is nine other people who have what they bring to the table. Right? You have what you bring to the table. I I have what I bring to the table. We don't need more of me. Like this is all we're going to get. Maybe maybe if we maybe if we double the subscriber number, maybe that would be good. Yeah, maybe. But I I think that there's probably nine other people who are listening to this podcast at some point who are going to be the people that come after. I agree. Who are going to be grown up in your community and maybe they go pursue a PhD or something like that. And and I I I appreciate the positive sentiment. I'm I really appreciate the feedback. You nailed it, dude. You really really nailed it. I I very very much appreciate the intersection of everything that you do. If someone that's listening has been blown away by what they've learned today, where should they go to keep up-to-date with the stuff that you do, to find out more, to take some of your courses? Yeah, so um www.healthygamer.gg is like our, you know, core website, but I think a lot of people usually watch our YouTube content. So, HealthyGamerGG is our primary YouTube channel. We also have a Discord server where we help people practice, you know, skills that have socially atrophied in the digital age. Like we on Valentine's Day, we had this um we had 300 people practicing how to ask each other out. And and as as you mentioned before, Chris, we were just talking about this. I forgot exactly what you said, but I thought it was brilliant. If you want to just Yeah, the the the opportunity if we have VR in future to be able to create a sandbox game, I suppose, that correctly programs in somebody else's preferences, a guy or a girl's preferences, and allows you to be able to practice chatting up an AI bot that would be able to understand flirting and banter and humor and maybe even body language and that went too far. And you know, this would be great for all sides as well because you would be able to hopefully train men to be safer with women. Not only safer, but more charismatic and more humorous. It's There is there is no apart from if anybody has to ever review the game tape of all of these poor people failing forward with their terrible punch like chat-up lines, there is no loser. There is no loser unless you believe that the AI has got consciousness, in which case maybe maybe the AI does a little bit, but even then, it's pretty good. Absolutely. And I I I think that's kind of what we're sort of devoted to, not necessarily AI, but what we really try to do is help the digital generation understand their mind better and how to how can we equip you to understand this thing called your mind? And sometimes that involves helping your body and things like that. But to really face the challenges that like people face in a digital world. What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.