Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Kanodja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.
Today, I want to teach you how to be happy. Now, that may sound insane because is happiness something that can be taught? Because normally when we think about happiness, we think about a fulfilling life. Oh, yeah, the future is bright.
But there's climate change, there's war, there's inflation. We think, oh, happiness is finding the person that you love, right? Oh, if I could just get this person to love me back, then I would be happy. But oftentimes those people succeed in entering a relationship and it doesn't lead to happiness.
Divorce rates are 50%. People change. The relationship turned out not to be what you thought it was. And then we think about happiness as goals. Like, I want to achieve all of these things. And if I achieve all of these things, then I will be happy. But y'all know better than I do, all kinds of crap gets in the way.
So how on earth are we supposed to be happy in today's world? Well, it's actually pretty simple. The problem is that we have forgotten or lost what it means to actually be happy. We have lost our technical understanding of what happiness is, right? So if you ask someone, oh, what is happiness to you? First of all, that question is stupid because...
Happiness to you is irrelevant. There is no happiness to you. It's not like we're asking the question, oh, what is sadness to you? What is pain to you? What is feeling anxious to you? No, like these are common things.
technical, neuroscientific definitions of the human state of existence. And we have lost our understanding of, first of all, what the definition of happiness is. And since we don't even know what it is, we can't consistently create it.
But here's the crazy thing. We actually know exactly what happiness is. That's what I'm going to teach you today. And once we understand what it is, we will understand how to create it. I know this is going to sound nuts, but basically irrespective of the circumstances of your life.
Now, if you're listening to this, the first thing that you're going to say is this is bullshit, right? Like this is insane. You can't just make a video about learning to be happy or how to be happy and then everyone becomes happy. If it was that so simple, someone would have done it. Well, hear me out and let's pay attention and then we'll see, right? Because I get that. I get how insane it is, but just bear with me. So the first thing that we got to understand is that happiness does not come from objects, right? So this is the biggest mistake we make. And it's a tragedy that this is true, by the way.
So we go our whole lives thinking that a particular thing will make me happy, right? So, oh, if I have a burger today, I will be happy. If I can get this person to fall in love with me, I will be happy. I'm a virgin. If I can get laid, I will be happy. If I get promoted, if I make more money, all of these things will bring me happiness.
Now, why do we believe this stuff? Because in our experience, duh, duh, it's true. I wanted a burger. I got a burger and I ate it and now I'm happy. Dr. K, what the hell are you talking about? This is how it works. Except it doesn't work that way. I
way. I know. I know. Just hear me out. Because if the burger is where the happiness is, every time you eat a burger, you would be happy, right? And I was addicted to video games. This is the big tragedy, is that the happiness is not in the object. If it was, I wouldn't be here. I would be super happy being a degenerate gamer playing video games 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That's what I'd be doing all the time.
But the whole problem is that chasing that object doesn't consistently bring you happiness. And y'all know this, right? Because you can have your favorite show that you want to, oh, I really want to binge watch a show. And then it's just not enjoyable.
You really want to play this video game about Path of Exile 2 just came out and everyone's really excited. You load up Path of Exile 2. Or you do finally get that person to go out with you on a date. You do finally get laid. And then it turns out that this is not what you thought it was. So the first thing that we have to understand is that if the happiness is in the object of
Every time we engage with the object, we would get the same level of happiness, right? Like that's just how it works. If the weight of this pen is in the pen, when I pick up the pen, I feel the weight. That doesn't change no matter how many times I pick it up, what my mood is, what the weather is. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The quality is intrinsic in the object, but that's not how it works for happiness. So
So how does it work for happiness? So once again, we're going to pay attention to our experiences. So there's this saying that comparison is the thief of joy. And I've been seeing this posted on all of the Instagrams. Comparison is the thief of joy. Don't compare. Don't compare. Don't compare. So we can learn a lot from this. The problem is that comparison is not the only thief of joy, right? So we can go through our lives not comparing. And there are all kinds of other things that can take away our happiness.
And this is really important data because if we understand the mechanism of how comparison takes away our happiness, we will understand what happiness truly is. So let's say that I get
A toy. Okay. I get some present for Christmas and I'm really happy. I'm like, fuck. Yeah, I got this toy. And then I, I call my friend and my friend who, you know, also got Christmas presents. Like, yeah, I got that same toy and I got this other toy. And now suddenly I was happy, right? I was really happy with the toy. And then this other, this bit of information, this bit, tiny bit of information for my friend enters my brain. And then suddenly I,
I was so happy with this. Oh, wow. I'm so happy. And then suddenly this happiness disappears. Like, what the, isn't that weird? Like, think about that for a second, right? Isn't it really strange that you can be perfectly happy with something and then something happens and the happiness is robbed? Oh, I got promoted. Yeah, I'm making $100,000 a year. Oh, your bonus was 100 and you're making 120. Suddenly I'm unhappy. So,
So, kind of weird, right? And now let's look at our other example of playing a video game or binge watching a show and not enjoying it. What is it that makes you not enjoy binge watching a show? Why do we even long for things like binge watching shows, playing video games, drugs, sex, even sleep? I work with people who are suicidal and they long for death. What are they longing for with all of these things?
They are longing for a peace of mind, right? So I want to get lost in a show. I want to be so engaged with the show that the rest of the world disappears. I want to turn that TV on at 6 o'clock, and I want to watch all through the night
Fuel myself, and then when dawn comes, I'm going to pass out. It's going to be amazing, dude. I've done LAN parties, guys. We know what we're talking about if you're a LAN party person. You want to obliviate your mind. You want to be lost with drugs. You want to be completely outside of your own head. And that brings us to another point as well, which is that everyone is doing mindfulness now.
But mindfulness is a scam. That's not really what it is. The point of mindfulness is not to fill your mind with things. It is actually the exact opposite, to empty your mind. The actual practice is mindlessness, right? That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to empty our mind. And when we enter this empty mind state, we end up being relatively content and happy.
People who do mindfulness meditation for about an eight-week period, their quality of life increases. They become objectively happier. So how can we kind of distill all of these examples to understand what the nature of happiness is?
So when I'm enjoying, I got a pen for Christmas. Yay, I'm very happy. So at this moment, my mind is focused on this. I am absorbed in this. This is why we love drugs. So if people who, you know, are dancing while they're drunk or eating, getting the munchies while they're high, what is so fun about that?
It's that you are completely absorbed within the activity. This is also why orgasm is so much fun because when you are having an orgasm, you are not thinking about anything else. So the nature of happiness is very simple. The nature of happiness is a one-pointedness of the mind.
Anytime we are absorbed within one activity, we are happy. The problem that we fall into is that we become dependent on external objects to create this one-pointedness of the mind for us. Since I don't know how to make my mind one-pointed, I'm going to rely on a video game or drugs or a TV show. And we don't watch boring shows, right? We're going to rely on this object to
to make our mind one-pointed. The problem is that as we rely on this external object to force one-pointedness of the mind for us...
then our mind becomes weak. We are not capable of making our mind one-pointed. Now, there's a really, really interesting term to describe a mind that is not one-pointed, a mind that is fractured in a thousand directions. And as a psychiatrist, the thing that my patients consistently hate the most across every patient that I've worked with, the thing that people dislike the most is something called
When people hear about our coaching program, their first response is usually, why would I work with another human being when I can watch YouTube videos all on my own? Working with a coach is about amplifying your time and effort. We're great at wanting things and even making some progress, but we usually struggle with follow through or have some kind of setback.
And that's exactly where working with a coach can help. Coaches provide personalized support to help you set appropriate goals, make progress, and even work through setbacks. Just let us know what your goals are, what kind of support you're looking for, and we'll match you with the best coach for your unique needs. Check out the link in the description below to see if coaching is right for you. So what is boredom? What happens inside you when you are bored?
Your mind is all over the place. You want to do this. You want to do this. You want to do this. You feel restless. You feel like fidgeting, right? There's nothing to occupy the mind. So when we're bored, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but a couple of days ago I was bored. So I loaded up a video game. I played it for five minutes and I was like, ah, this is not fun for me. So I closed the video game. I started browsing Reddit for a couple of minutes. Then I closed Reddit and I was like, this is not fun for me. And then I loaded up a second video game, Star Sector and then Path of Exile. And I played that for five minutes and I was like,
"Ah, this is not doing it for me." What human beings hate more than anything else in this world is boredom. Happiness and sadness are not opposites. Happiness and boredom are opposites because happiness is a one-pointed mind and boredom is a mind that's all over the place. Why is it that we watch TV when we eat something? Because when we eat something, instead of focusing on this, our mind is running all over the place.
So instead, what we want is we want an artificial way to focus our mind so that we're not bored when we eat. And now if we look at all of the things that destroy our happiness, we will see that there is one very, very, very simple pattern. I used to be one-pointed.
And now an external thought enters and shatters my one-pointedness. I used to be, oh, look it, I have this pen. And then the moment that this external thought, this person has more. The moment that that thought enters, my happiness is destroyed. The reason that video games no longer become fun is because we get bored while playing them. We can be very, very excited about the future, but the moment that the thought arises,
of climate change, the thought of inflation, the thought of a dating crisis enters our mind, we are no longer happy. And this is the cool thing about a one-pointed mind. All the things that you think of as making you unhappy will no longer make you unhappy. Really good example is something called work. So I've seen so many posts about people saying, oh, is this just life where we're working from nine to five and then we commute and then that's it? I can't do this for 30 years, right? I can't.
slog away for 30 years. And then on the flip side, we have this thing called the flow state, which is this mythical creation of this time when people are like, they're working really hard, being really productive, and it feels really good. Like that sounds completely OP.
What's the difference between these two states? When you are grinding 9 to 5 and you don't like your job, what is happening in your mind? Are you absorbed with your work? Of course not. Your mind is wandering. Your work is boring. What is boring? It is a many fluctuations of the mind all at once.
This is the nature of suffering. My work is so boring, so then I have to distract myself. I can tolerate work if I listen to an audiobook, if I listen to a podcast. Why do we do that? Because when I listen to a podcast, it creates one-pointedness of the mind and makes the work more tolerable. But it's not the podcast itself. It is simply the one-pointedness of the mind that becomes tolerable. And this is true from a clinical perspective as well.
If we look at any mental illness, whichever one you want, we're going to go through a bunch of them. What we will see is that all of these mental illnesses share one thing, which is many fluctuations of the mind. When someone is depressed, they're thinking, oh, life is hopeless. There's no point. No one likes me. I'm failing. I'm terrible. I'm a loser. So many thoughts.
When we look at something like a panic attack or anxiety, that's even worse. Oh my God, this is going to happen and this is going to happen and this is going to happen. And then you engage with those thoughts, you feed those thoughts and you work yourself from anxiety into a panic attack. What is the difference between anxiety and panic attack? The number of thoughts that you're having per second.
We can even look at things like obsessive compulsive disorder, which is literally the definition of obsessive compulsive disorder is to have intrusive, obsessional thoughts that will never go away. The reason that we engage in compulsions is to shut off our thoughts.
Literally, this is what happens in OCD. People are like, unless I flick the light switch up and down seven times, I will keep having thoughts of everyone in my life dying in a car accident. So in order to shut off the thoughts, they engage in the behavior.
This is the really sad thing if we look at the world today. We all have a very mild form of OCD. We don't really have OCD. But the analogy still holds because what are we doing? I have a negative thought. What do I do? I engage in a compulsive behavior to make it go away. I'm bored.
What should I do? Play a video game. Makes the thought of boredom go away. I feel terrible about myself. What should I do? Watch some porn. Makes the thought of feeling terrible about myself go away. So if you want to create happiness in your life, irrespective of your circumstances, and I know this is what's really going to rub people the wrong way because we all think that the circumstances create happiness.
But we know that's not true. There are plenty of billionaires out there who are still struggling to be happy. And I've worked with homeless people who seem oddly content. You may have met some of these people in your life where you're like, how is this person so happy despite having so little?
Or you may look at another person and say, how on earth is this person so unhappy when they have so much? So sure, there is a correlation between the amount of security you have, the amount of money you have in your happiness. That correlation absolutely exists. But what we're talking about is a technical definition of happiness. What is happiness within you? So now the question becomes, how do we create it?
So the first thing that we've got to do is talk about meditation. And I know, oh, meditation is the answer. Meditation is the answer. Meditation is the answer. No, meditation is not the answer. We're going to talk about it. You decide whether meditation is the answer. Meditation is not going to make you happy. Okay? Okay?
Let's understand how meditation can make you happy if you do it the right way. What does meditation train us to do? Meditation trains us to have a one-pointed mind. That's it. Observe your breath. Keep on observing your breath. But I'm bored. I don't give a fuck. Keep observing your breath. Keep observing your breath. But I'm bored. I'm not doing anything. There are no video games. There's no titties. It's just meditation. I'm bored, right? Meditate on a titty. I don't know.
I don't know if that's going to be edited out or whatever. Okay. So what's the purpose of meditation? So if you want a one pointed mind, meditation is simply the easiest way to practice entering a one, a one pointed state of mind, right? So this is why meditation is also an evidence-based intervention for anxiety, for depression, for schizophrenia, for OCD, like cool how that works, right? It relieves all of these things because it, it,
It counters the basic problem with those, which is too many thoughts, thoughts all over the place, really chaotic thoughts. And y'all know what this is like. You know what it's like to be have thoughts full of your head and you don't know what to do and you're spiraling and all. It feels terrible. It's so much suffering. Instead, we want peace. We want peace of mind.
Okay. So meditation is the first thing that will train you to do that. If you want to do that. The second thing that we can do, and this one is going to be even a crappier answer than meditation is learn to tolerate boredom. So this is what I would recommend for y'all. You guys, if the weather is decent, you're not going to like get frostbite or anything. So I think a grounding practice works really well. So go outside, make sure your shoes are off and hopefully you can step on grass or dirt or something natural and,
Make sure your head is uncovered and your feet are touching the ground and spend 30 minutes with your eyes closed outside, focusing on each foot and then the top of your head. So we're going to do this rotating meditation, I guess, of focusing on one foot, focusing on the second foot, focusing on the top of our heads. Just rotate your awareness between these three things. Take a deep breath in and feel yourself just plungeing.
pulling in the energy from the ground and the sky, okay? The purpose of this is just to create the tolerance of boredom.
So the other thing that we can do to help us be happy is just to learn how to tolerate boredom. So I think this grounding practice is really, really good because it gives us something to occupy the mind, but it's something that on purpose, I'm not giving you something that's going to be very occupying, right? I don't want you to be very occupied. I want you to be bored. You can also, if you're, if you've got balls of steel or ovaries of steel, you can also try free balling travel. So this is something that's really dangerous, right?
You could try going on a plane or going on a bus or going on a car and like not doing anything. Like don't take anything to do and just free ball it. Just like go for it. Like raw dog that stuff, you know, like it's not just give it a shot. You're like, oh my God, Dr. K, that sounds terrible. But we'll think about it. Like, what are you really losing? I mean, you have thousands and thousands and thousands and hours of playing video games and watching shows and stuff like that. What, like four hours of not watching something is going to kill you? Yeah, Dr. K, it's going to kill me. Oh my God.
So learn to tolerate boredom. The better you are at tolerating boredom, sitting with boredom, letting those thoughts arise and letting them pass, the more happy you will become. And now we get to the third and arguably the hardest thing and the thing that will actually
Make everything else that I said completely false, okay? So now I'm going to torpedo my whole argument. So if you really want to be happy, if we look at ourselves when we are in a moment of happiness, the cause of disruption is something called a lingering thought. So you're sitting there, maybe you're at Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever, and you're having a good meal, and then a thought creeps in, right? So we already said that one pointedness of the mind is what creates happiness, fair enough.
But if we look at when we try to be happy, we have these persistent lingering thoughts that will enter our mind. They come from somewhere. And these lingering thoughts are really, really dangerous because there are all kinds of desires that we have that are unfulfilled. There are all kinds of goals that we set for ourselves. There are all kinds of worries that we have about the future. So the last thing to really consider is that you cannot be happy
It's going to be very hard to be happy as long as those lingering thoughts are there. Now, I'm not talking about depression. I'm not talking about comparison. I know it's kind of weird because like it's hard for me to define this, but hopefully I'll know what I'm talking about.
There are some thoughts in your life that keep coming up about things that you should do. That's what a lingering thought is. It's persistent. It's not a random fluctuation. It is a persistent fluctuation. And it's not something that is necessarily like depressive, right? It's not a thought that makes you feel really, really terrible or really, really anxious. There are thoughts that connect and come from your heart and things that you know you should do. Things that make you feel good.
sad and disappointed, more disappointed with yourself than sad, right? It's like, I should really do this thing. And the last thing that I'll tell y'all is that in order to make these lingering thoughts go away, you've got two options. You can either become a level 100 yogi or you can do the fucking thing. And what I want y'all to understand is when we struggle with these thoughts, these lingering thoughts, we struggle with procrastination. I should do this. Oh, like, oh, it's so hard. That's not what I'm talking about. Should shouldn't enter the equation. There's a different way to look at this. We're
which is do you want to have a peaceful mind? If the answer is yes, you will never have it as long as that karma is incomplete. As long as that thought is lingering, it is incomplete, you will never be happy. You can level up to 100 level yogi and then gain complete detachment and be perfectly happy.
but you can do it that way. That's way harder. What's way easier is actually doing the fucking thing. So when you're quiet, when you're got some moment of happiness, when you're one pointed and that thought pops up, the way that you need to approach that task is, do I want peace of mind? I know this is going to sound insane for the rest of my life. If I want peace of mind for the rest of my life, it has to start with this lingering thought.
Because if you always wanted to be a painter and you've wanted this for 15 years and it keeps coming up, keeps coming up, this will haunt you. It has haunted you for your entire life. So then you must do the thing if you want a mind at peace. Now, you may say, but Dr. K, does this mean I should just do whatever, you know, like, should I just work really hard and fulfill all my goals? No.
I want you all to understand very clearly what I'm saying. What I'm talking about is the state of happiness and what shatters the state of happiness. I'm not telling you to fulfill your goals so that you have a happy life. I've worked with billionaires who have tried that. Doesn't work. The fulfillment of the goal is not what brings you happiness. The fulfillment of the goal makes the lingering thought go away and allows you to be one pointed for a moment in time.
Focus, Dr. K. Focus. Focus your mind. The one exception could be the insertion of certain body images could bring us happiness. I don't know. Anyway. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.