Self Loathing Man of Inaction
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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.

It's the state of limbo where you're in your head, you know what you need to do, but you can't bring yourself to do it. You've given up on life, but there's a part of you that wants to keep trying. The action that you take creates the life that you live. And you get so caught up in wanting, wishing, all this kind of stuff that you don't act. You have to have a whole scale transformation of your life, which is surprisingly easier than people think it is.

So today, we're going to talk about the self-loathing man of inaction in your late 20s or early 30s.

The only things he does are the things he used to do, and he does them less and less. He's built an entire worldview around his neuroses. I need some time to think. Constantly revisits increasingly skewed memories of the past, wondering what he should have done instead. Fixated on things no one actually remembers. Probably not even to him at this point. I can't do anything. Defeatist who can never quite give up. This is beautiful, right? A defeatist who can't quite give up.

Only boring people get bored. That's me. Slowly becoming actually the R word. So let's call it cognitive decline. It was always going to be like this. Closest thing to fun or new experiences are elaborate fantasies where he reimagines redoing his entire life centered around girls he barely knew in middle school. Family are the only thing that's keeping him alive. Knows what a schizoid is. Doesn't know if he is one. If I could do it, I would have by now. No one chooses this.

Yeah, I was thinking about doing that. No, it knows it's not too late, but wishes it was. It only hurts when I laugh, goes months at a time without laughing or sincerely smiling in constant pain, either neat or wage slave, both equally hopeless. It's not like things can get worse.

Um, accidentally once felt a moment of relief has been upset about it since. And it's not like things can get better. Developing healthy problems, justify crappy lifestyle, developing health problems, but justify a crappy lifestyle. Why should I do anything? Cannot accept what he's done. Nothing does nothing in response.

He exists in a state of living death, thinking the same thoughts over and over, day in and day out. Even as he understands that thinking doesn't help and that he needs to just act instead, he is completely overwhelmed by inertia while life passes him by. He has lost everything but can't let go of anything. No reason to live, no reason to die, no reason. Okay? And then haunted by vague, dusty delusions of megalomania.

the self-loathing man of inaction. So I really like this part, defeatists who can never quite give up, right? I think this speaks a lot to the self-loathing man of inaction. There are a lot of people out there who struggle with this, who view themselves as people of inaction. For whatever reason, it's always framed as a man on the internet. And so they're stuck in their head. They can't move on, but they can't let go.

So you're kind of always like it's the state of limbo where you're in your head, you know what you need to do, but you can't bring yourself to do it. You've given up on life, but there's a part of you that wants to keep trying. And so it's this weird like balance of like, okay, I'm hopeless. And then one day I have hope, but you actually become afraid of hope because hope means trying and hope means attempting and hope means hoping that

And then if you try and if you attempt and if you hope, when those things don't work out, that leads to more hurt. So you kind of get stuck in this like longing for limbo, right? A desire for numbness. Because if you're numb, then there's no hope. And if there's no hope, there's no disappointment. And if there's no disappointment, there's no hurt. And at the same time, even when you're numb, you long to feel things. Occasionally there'll be like,

A ray of sunshine through the clouds where you have a little bit of hope, you smile a little bit, you feel a little bit of relief. But then you're scared because you don't know how to create that consistently. And so you view yourself as a person of inaction. So we're going to approach this. I mean, there were two or three ways that I could talk about this. My first thought was I would go through and address each of these like sentences and explain the mechanism behind that. Maybe we can do that.

But I want to start sort of in a different place. So the first thing I'm going to say is that this is not a man of inaction. This is a man of an intense amount of action.

See, this is the first and largest and most catastrophic mistake we make. When you look at your life and you think to yourself, I never do anything, this is categorically wrong. The reason your life is the way that it is is because you are doing things all the time. It may not make sense, so let's dive into it and be a little bit more technical. So this is one of the biggest things that the theory of karma teaches us, right? Actions have consequences.

This is a scientific truth. There is a cause and there is a fact. This isn't spiritual. This is science. So the life that you have created around yourself is not a result of inaction. It is a result of action. So, for example, if I wake up today and I log onto the computer and I play video games for eight hours, that's not inaction. That's action for eight hours. And that will have an effect.

If I wake up today and I do not apply for a job, I will not have a job tomorrow. So that every day when I wake up in my life, what the truth of the matter is, is this life is not a result of inaction. And this is why it's so hard to fix.

Because it's not that you've done nothing. Moving from neutral is not hard, right? Very easy. A small amount of acceleration in the positive direction, if I am at neutral, will result in a positive velocity, right? If I start walking forward and I was standing still, I will start covering ground. That's not what happens with the man of inaction, right?

Positive acceleration results in a negative velocity. How is that possible? That's because they are moving in the wrong direction. So it's not a man of inaction, it's a man of wrong action.

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So these people are taking actions literally, literally, literally, literally. They are taking actions every single day. You don't just sit in your bed all day. You get out of bed. You do particular things. Those are actions. Maybe you get high. That is an action that has a consequence. And maybe you say, but Dr. K, I do lay in bed all day. That too is an action. Laying is a verb, right?

Right? Like, technically, I am sitting right now. This is an action I am taking. Your whole life, you have no choice but to take actions. And so if you look at your life and it has completely fallen apart, this is not a result of inaction. This is a result of wrong action. And you know this.

Because you look back in your life and you said, I should have done this. I should have done this. I should have done this. I should have done this. What did you do instead of the things that you should have done? You did something else. You didn't ask that girl out. You didn't apply. You didn't do the extra credit. You decided not to go to school. You stayed home. So this is one thing that y'all have to understand. The biggest thing that you have to understand, you are always acting. There's no such thing as inaction.

Arguably there is, but very few people on the planet truly engage in inaction. If you guys want to understand that, we can talk about it at the end. So here's the thing that I want you to understand. The life that you live today is a consequence of your actions. So it's not that you need to act more. It is actually, here's the big irony, it is that you need to act less. What you actually want...

is inaction. And this is why these people are fundamentally stuck, because what they try to do is they try to do more, and instead what they need to be doing is doing less. Doing less of the wrong thing will move you in the right direction. So most of these people are running in the wrong direction in life. The right way to stop

You know, if you're at minus 100 and you want to avoid getting to minus 200, the first thing that you need to do is learn to sit still. Just stop moving. Stop doing the things that you are doing. Don't even try to do the right thing. Stopping doing the wrong thing is sufficient. And this is what's really weird. This is what confuses people. See, if you want to lose weight, you don't need to eat anything. You need to stop eating.

If you want to recover from any addictive substance, the solution to addiction is inaction, right? It's kind of weird. So there's one other layer that we have to add on, which a lot of people don't really think about, which is that we assume that actions are physical. So this is the other big thing you have to understand. 95 to 99% of the actions that a human being takes are in their mind. I'll give you all a really good example of this.

So there is something called obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, in which someone has obsessive thoughts. So they will think something that feels really overwhelming, like unless I turn on and off the light switch seven times, the plane that my family is on will crash and everyone will die.

This is what we call an obsession. An obsession is a thought that is repetitive and usually intrusive and causes distress. That is technically what an obsession is. Then what happens is the compulsion is the action that you take in response to the obsession. So when I think these thoughts, I will act in some way.

But when I act in that way, it reduces the emotional energy of the thought. The only way I can get the thought to disappear is by taking this action. So when I flick the light switch on and off and on and off and on and off, when I do it seven times, then the thoughts are calmed. So now I am taking a physical action to reduce a mental action. And if we kind of think about it,

Thoughts lead to other thoughts, right? So this is why I like this principle of karma, because in the English language, when we use the word action, it has an implication of physicality to it. But when we say karma, karma is an action. But the key thing about karma is it's anything that is a cause that has an effect.

That is a karma. And so if you have a thought, does that have an effect? Absolutely. So this is what we do in psychotherapy. If someone has, for example, a destructive schema, a worldview that is negative, right?

We can alter their mind so that one thought does not lead to another thought, does not lead to another thought. Each thought you have is an action. There's a great lecture over on the membership side that we have about mental karmas, which all should definitely check out. There's also something, I think, in the trauma guide about it as well. So if you all are really interested in understanding and mastering this idea that each of your thoughts is of itself an action,

Right. Because each thought has a consequence in a panic attack. What do we what happens in a panic attack? I have one thought that leads to another thought that leads to another thought that leads to another thought that leads to another thought. And then these thoughts over time become overwhelming. They activate my physiology. My I go crazy for a little bit and then my brain short circuits. My heart can even short circuit for a little while and then the whole system shuts off.

And even I want y'all to really understand this. If you think that your life has fallen apart because you are a self-loathing man of inaction, think for a second. What are the causes of your current life? Self-loathing. So when you view yourself, when you literally have this thought, if we can inject these thoughts into any human brain, they will have a similar consequence.

Self-loathing is an action. It is a mental action. It is a particular kind of thought. And those mental actions will lead to physical actions. And this kind of makes sense, right? If I think about taking a sip of water, that is what results in taking a sip of water. So this is where, and if you kind of think about it, right, if you're one of these people, what you find is that you're very drained at the end of the day, even though you've done nothing wrong.

What's draining you if you've done nothing? You've done a lot. You've done a lot of thinking. You've actually done a lot of physical action too. And this creates an inertia in the mind. It creates all kinds of effects in your mind and in your life that make it hard for you to act in the right way.

So it's not that you have inaction, it is that you have an overabundance of wrong action, right? You've created a really problematic life and you've created a very problematic thought process. A really good example of this is if I have a thought of suffering, if I feel some degree of suffering, what do I do? I reach for numbness, right?

I feel hopeful. And if I feel hopeful, this hurts. My mind attaches. Be careful now. Be careful here, okay? When you feel hopeful, your mind attaches a fear to hope. This is an association. When I feel hopeful, I have learned to fear hope. And since I now fear hope, I need to shut off hope.

And so then I reach for a numbing agent. Take your pick of whatever suppresses the limbic system. Video games, pornography, social media, marijuana, alcohol, whatever. Take your pick. And then we numb ourselves. We numb the fear. And along with it goes the hope. But then we create a huge problem because when we begin to numb ourselves—

We shut off the part of our brain that motivates physical action. One of the most powerful motivators are our emotions. But there's too much negativity, right? So we have to numb it. And therein lies the problem. The more that we numb the negativity, the more of the negativity builds up. So the first thing that we have to understand is that we are not men of inaction. We are men of an intense amount of action.

And if you really stop and think about it, what does it take to screw up your life as much as you've screwed it up? Right? And I say this as someone who screwed up my life. Like, it took a lot of effort to screw up my life the way that I screwed it up. It took struggle day in and day out. The amount of avoidance that I had to engage in was astronomical. The amount of, like, I used to sneak out to my mailbox every

in the morning to steal my transcript so that my parents would not find it. Because if they found it, there would be consequences. And if there were consequences, then I would change. And if you really look at these self-loathing men of inaction, they work really, really, really hard to protect themselves of the consequences of their inaction.

I'm going to avoid these people for the holidays. I'm not going to show up. I'm just going to ghost. You work really, really hard to avoid the consequences of your life. When you shut off your emotions and you shut off the consequences of your life, what ends up happening? You propagate along the same path, right? You're removing the things that stimulate what you would call action. Make sense? So this is not...

In action. This is an immense amount of action. A lot of action. Very difficult action. That's why it's so hard. That's why it's so draining. And the more that you numb yourself, the more that your trash can starts to overflow, and then you have to cover it up with all kinds of things. Now I'm going to fill a whole room of my house with trash. I'm going to open the door, and I'm going to throw trash in, and I'm going to close it up. So if you really stop and think about it, what you will discover is that you are taking all kinds of mental actions.

You are running away from things all the time. All the time. You're running, running, running, running, running. You're so busy running away from everything that you can't have anything to run towards, right? So achieving goals, building a life worth living is about running towards something, not running away from something, for the most part. And then you end up with this life. So what do you do about this? The first thing is to do less. So in my case, I went to India for three months and did a whole lot of truly nothing to receive what the world sends your way.

to start to respond to it. Don't try to steer the course of your life anymore. Let the fruit that you have been cultivating harvest it. See, as you start to do less, the consequences will start manifesting and you have to absorb all of those consequences. It feels like it's too much, but it's not too much, right? All you have to do is actually nothing. Just let it come.

In my case, you know, my parents would call me and I would avoid answering the phone because I didn't want to talk to them. Answer the phone, right? See, ignoring a phone call is an action. Ignoring a text message is an action. You look at the thing and you literally shut it off and then you turn to something else. You do something to distract your mind, okay? So if you want to know why people get stuck, I want to show you all a paper.

So this is from a section on recovering from trauma, right? So if we look at someone who, let's say, is a self-loathing man of inaction, there are all kinds of events in the past that have scarred them. These people are essentially traumatized. So let's look at how we go about recovering from trauma. So here will be eye-opening, okay? Identified three factors that are associated with both natural recovery from trauma and reduction of PTSD severity via exposure therapy.

The first factor is emotional engagement with the trauma memory. In natural recovery, emotional engagement refers to fear activation that occurs when one encounters a trauma reminder in the natural environment. Fear activation has been found to be positively associated with treatment outcome.

we hypothesize that a lack of emotional engagement would be associated with poor natural recovery following a traumatic event.

Dissociative symptoms, such as feelings of derealization, depersonalization, during or following trauma, or amnesia for information related to the trauma, have been conceptualized as strategies that reduce emotional engagement, right? So when we dissociate, we are reducing emotional engagement. So reduction of emotional engagement. Several studies have found that peritraumatic dissociation is associated with more severe PTSD. The more you dissociate, the worse you get.

Okay, now here's what's really interesting. Consistent with this hypothesis, individuals whose peak symptom severity occurred within two weeks of the traumatic event were less symptomatic 14 weeks later. So the more it hurts and the faster it hurts, the better off you will be. Individuals whose symptoms peaked between two and six weeks after the event had more severe symptoms.

You all understand? The more it hurts, the better you get. And our self-loathing man of inaction is still delaying the emotions from middle school. You all see that? Interesting, no? So if you want to heal, you must stop. Whatever thoughts come, whatever emotions come, let them come. They're just thoughts. They're just emotions. They are not truth.

This is another big problem that self-loathing men of inaction have. They believe that their mind is connected to the real world. This will happen, and this will happen, and this will happen. This is just a thought. It is an emotion. It's not reality, right? And you get so caught up in wanting, wishing, all this kind of stuff that you don't act. There's something that's messed up in the dopaminergic circuitry.

Where wanting normally stimulates action. But in these people, something interesting has happened. So there are a couple of big problems that happen with self-loathing men in action. And one is that their dopaminergic circuitry gets miswired. Okay? And it has to do with this kind of suppression. But let's understand this. So normally we have this thing called the nucleus accumbens, which releases dopamine. Okay?

And then dopamine does a couple of things, okay? So we've got to understand this. The first is that it induces cravings. Now, here's what's really interesting. If we look at our dopamine over time, when we have a craving, we actually get the craving itself increases dopamine. There's one really interesting reason for that. So I don't know if you all know this, but Parkinson's disease is a disease of movement.

So they have things like cogwheel rigidity. They have difficulty walking. And the treatment for Parkinson's disease is something called L-DOPA. So we give these people dopamine. L-DOPA crosses the blood-brain barrier. That's why it's L-DOPA, and it's converted to dopamine. And then their ability to move increases. So dopamine not only triggers cravings, it also triggers movement. So then what happens? So now I'm triggering movement.

And then this will result in action, and then dopamine will start. And then once I act or my action is completed, then I will get a big spike of dopamine, right? So I want something that initiates a behavioral change. And then once I engage in that behavior, I'll get a big spike of dopamine. Now, for people like this, this is what I've sort of observed as a clinician. There is another thing that starts to happen. For some reason—

When I get a craving, when I get a wanting of something, right, and then I want dopamine, there's another kind of neurological thing that sort of happens. So something about this wanting through associative learning also triggers an emotional response. And this is usually a negative emotion. So now our limbic system gets activated. So when, so if we go back to our

Man of learning, right? So it hurts when I smile. Things can only get worse. A little bit of hope is a dangerous thing. So as this person strives for something, right? They have a wanting, a parallel circuit. Some kind of association has been created in the brain where they have a negative emotional response. Hopeless.

Now, your brain looks at this situation and says, we are wanting dopamine and we have hopelessness. So the brain, remember, the brain is not working against you. It's just trying to do what it knows how to do. So it says we want some dopamine and we're feeling hopeless. What should we do? Then we get driven towards inaction. But this is not inaction. We're going to do something like play vidya.

So vidya is going to suppress our limbic system and it is going to give us dopamine. You understand? You get two for one. So I want a girlfriend. I want a job. The absence of these things is going to trigger shame. And now our brain is like, okay, we need dopamine and we need to shut off our emotional circuitry. So we're going to do this. And now I've taken an action. Instead of

actually resolving these problems. I've taken an action. Now what started happening is I recruit the endocannabinoid circuitry and I'm forming a habit. Now my brain has learned. So the next time that I want something, this becomes a behavioral cue that triggers a neurological response and

which then triggers an action, which then satisfies the issue. And so over time, these habitual men, these men of inaction are habituated, right? They have a habit of waking up every day and doing the same thing, right? Every day feels the same. Late 20s, early 30s, what's the difference?

Six years, seven years, it's all the same. Every day your life is the same because you repeat the same actions over and over and again. It's not inaction. It's lots of action. And now you have built up an immense amount of karma because you have been engaging in this habitual cue response, dopaminergic emotional suppression. You've engaged in this stuff day after day after day after day after day after day after day.

And remember that your brain, when neurons fire frequently, they strengthen their connections. This is associative learning. And so now your neurons are very well grooved.

It's like when you have a game trail, right? So you have a field of grass and then a mouse runs across and flattens some grass. And then you have a rabbit that looks at the grass and sees, oh, there's some flattened grass here. Let me run across it. And then the rabbit goes on that slightly flattened grass, flattens it more.

Then you get like a deer that walks down there. And then you get a bison that walks down there. And then suddenly you have a game trail. And it becomes really, really, really easy to walk down the game trail. This is what happens in these people. So how do you change? So we're going to do a couple of things. So there are two modes of changing if you want to fix this. One is the more classic way, right? You take small actions, go to therapy,

Work on yourself, start journaling, meditate, whatever. But honestly, with the people that I've worked with, there is a degenerate way to transform your life. And I would call this going unga bunga. See, small changes for people like this are hard because there's such a weight of like habit and all this kind of stuff. Like you got to go unga bunga.

So you got to go like all in on one strategy. I'm not saying this is the best way. It's just what I've seen. And people are talking about monk mode. Like literally that's what I did, right? I became, I mean, I didn't become, I tried to become monk, but I went through monk training. You have to have a whole scale transformation of your life, which is surprisingly easier than people think it is.

So what I would say is you start to become a little bit more ascetic. Not a little bit more. We're going to go unga bunga. We're going to put all our points in strength. We're going to wield two great clubs. No cosmetics. No fucking flask. No fucking buff. None of this, like, optimize your life kind of thing. And, like, none of that stuff. We're going to go hard. And the reason that we need to go hard is because we do not want to trigger those behavioral cues. So what I would...

consider, right, a couple of things. So the first thing about going unga bunga is that you need to go see a doctor and you need to make sure that something about your life is not like problematic. So I would start with a medical evaluation. You may need things like mental health treatment if you've got a mood disorder or things like that. Going unga bunga requires no like significant medical debuffs. So

I would go get a full physical and get some kind of mental status exam, get evaluated for whatever illnesses. Now, this is where we got to be careful because I want you all to pay attention to what your response to that is. So when I say go do this thing, what a lot of people will do is their mind will have a response. I can't do this thing because of this. I can't do this thing. I can't afford a doctor. I can't do this. I can't do this. It's hard for me. Blah, whatever.

I'm not saying that any of those things are true. This is where we have to like understand something else about the mind. Where do thoughts come from? So when we have a circuit that gets dopamine, right?

and suppresses emotions and has habits and I tell you to do something else, these circuits of the brain will then go and create thoughts. This is what happens in an addict's brain, right? So I want y'all to understand this. The thoughts in your head are not correct or they're not incorrect, but the thoughts in your head, like where do the, I don't know if this makes any sense, so I'm going to try, okay? So just like bear with me. This is fucking weird, but like y'all got to think, okay?

Where do the thoughts in your head come from? People will say, oh, the thoughts in my head come from truth.

But think about it for a second. I'm talking about the mechanism. Why does your, so there are times in your life where you've had good experiences and you've had bad experiences. Why do you think about the bad experiences? Why is it that that's the thing that floats from the unconscious into your conscious mind at a particular moment? Do you understand that a part of your brain is making that selection? A part of your brain is choosing what to open up on your desktop.

The biggest mistake that we make in life is we assume that the things that our brain produces are because they are true. This is factually false. You can look at psychological defense mechanisms. You can look at cognitive biases and depression. You can look at trauma. You can look at associative learning. You can look at all kinds of conditioning. It has nothing to do with truth.

It has to do with which part of your brain is running the show because your brain is trying to motivate a behavior. Remember, there's no inaction. There's only action. Everything you do is an action. Even sitting still is an action.

So which part of your brain is running the show? That part of your brain will float whatever thoughts are necessary to get you to create the motivation to move you in the direction that that part of the brain wants to go in. And this stupidity of the brain

is evolutionary. So a great example of this is falling in love. So when we fall in love, there is a part of our brain that goes to the risk assessment portion. There's a part of our brain that calculates the risk. The part of our brain that falls in love goes and shuts that down. So when you start dating someone and you are madly in love and your friends and family are like,

I kind of see some red flags here. You're like, I don't see red flags. You're wrong. And then when you look back on it, oh yeah, there were red flags. I don't know why I didn't see them. You didn't see them because that part of your brain was shut off because there was another part of your brain that is running the show. So you have a thought, but don't for a moment think that your thought correlates with truth. And there's a really simple way to understand this.

A hopeless man of inaction, the self-loathing man of inaction, looks in the future and sees no hope. I am blown away by this. They're like, yeah, nothing will ever get better in my life. Holy shit, this is amazing. They're like, what? What do you mean? I've never met a human being that can see the future. Wow. You should use your power for good if you can see the future. No one can see the future. It's just thoughts.

Now, those thoughts are there for a reason. They will give me justifications. You will say, well, this happened, this happened, this happened. The past happened this way. Therefore, the future happened this way. If it worked like that, the stock market would be easy. And this is the really crazy thing. So we take a karmic perspective. The past happened that way is not deterministic. I mean, in a sense, it's deterministic. But the past happened that way because of what you did.

Your actions created that past. You did not ask that person out. That is why you hold on to the regret from middle school. So the future that lays in front of you is not determined by the past. It is determined by what you do now. If you want a different future, take a different action. And people will say, but I can't. Well, now we're...

doesn't work. Where does that thought come from? Which part of your brain is producing that thought? I can't change. Because here's the thing. You guys want to know if we're talking about a map hack, not an app, Mac, Mac hack and aim hack the part of your brain that is addicted to video games.

has one trump card to play, it'll convince you that you cannot change your life. And the moment that your addiction convinces you that you can't change, what does it get to do?

One hundred percent. I worked for a couple of years in addiction psychiatry. The most common cognitive pattern that I saw was an addict's brain convincing them that they can't change because the moment it convinces you that you can't change, do you just sit on your ass and do nothing? No, you get high.

Do you see? So this is what y'all need to understand. Don't look at the content of your mind. Look at the direction of your mind. Look at your mind and ask yourself, if my mind says this, what does this mean?

What does this drive me toward? What direction is it pointing? And what you will see if you are a self-loathing man of inaction is that all of your thoughts point in one direction, which you think is inaction but is not inaction. Because you're not actually sitting on your ass, you're sitting on your phone. Or you are sitting on your ass, which is an action. It is all of the justifications that allow you to act in an inert manner.

And if you pay attention to yourself, you'll find there are poles for you to move out of there. The other parts of your brain are screaming at you. Let's do something else. Let's do something else. And the other parts of your brain, they try. They try to be angry with you. They try self-love. They try listening to a Buddhist podcast. They try so many things. All of these, there's 99 people in your brain that are screaming at you to do something else. The problem is that only one person has the megaphone.

And so you continue to create this life every day that you live it because you act and these have consequences. So what do you do about this? So good news is that even the revelation of this is actually sufficient. If you guys want to know what the real answer is, the awareness, the how can I say this? The zealousness.

My emphasis on awareness is enough to crack this cycle. If you sit and you look at yourself and you look at all these thoughts, the more that you study them, these patterns will disappear. Okay? I know a lot of people don't believe that, but I really believe that to be true. There's one really simple reason for this. Remember that a lot of your actions and thoughts are habitual. Okay?

So the thing about the endocannabinoid circuitry, the habit circuitry, is the habit circuitry is not active when you are aware. The whole point of habitual action, it is action done without awareness. It is put on autopilot. You can't be autopilot and be aware at the same time. So if there's any autopilot behavior you have...

The more you increase awareness, literally a separate part of your brain activates. The endocannabinoid circuitry is your habit circuitry. The awareness circuitry involves your anterior cingulate cortex.

And your anterior cingulate cortex is also where willpower comes from. Awareness and willpower come from activation of the same part of the brain. And if you kind of think about it, that makes sense, right? So if I have a habit, it requires no willpower and has no awareness. The moment that I start exerting willpower, you cannot exert willpower without awareness. Does that make sense too? I want you all to stop and think about that for a second.

Anytime you exert willpower, you are aware. It's like, I want to pick this up with my right hand, but instead I need to force myself to pick it up with my left hand. Awareness and willpower not only go hand in hand, they are neuroscientifically the same thing. Staggering. Yogis have known this for thousands of years. You don't need to fix your problems. You just need to be aware of them.

There's a great, we have a video all about that too, about how willpower and awareness are one and the same thing. Okay? So awareness is sufficient. But we're going to talk about unga bunga mode.

So what I would do is first go to a doctor and then your mind will come up with all kinds of problems. That's fine. It's not that those problems don't exist. Those are just problems to be solved, right? So if you say, oh, I don't have a doctor. Well, like then you should Google search something in your area and sign up. Well, I don't have insurance. I can't afford a doctor. Well, then you should Google search. How do I get medical care if I have no insurance or I have no money, right? So each objection...

that your mind raises is a task to be completed. And watch what happens, okay? I'm going to tell you all what will happen. Each thing that happens, once your mind, once your brain learns that you're doing this, it will start to pull out other tools, right? So it's like you're playing SF6 and you're blocking all the time, so your brain is going to use a throw. So then suddenly you'll notice something very interesting. You feel tired. You'll do it tomorrow.

See, the first, and watch, okay? Because your brain in this way is going to be kind of like the liquid thing in Terminator 2 that changes shapes, right? It's like the mimic tier, where once you start doing this, your brain will adapt. It'll say, oh my God, this guy isn't...

When I tell him it's not going to work, it's not working anymore. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to create energia. I'm going to reduce his energy level because it's running the show. It's going to places like your reticular activating formation. It says, make this guy tired. And the reticular activating formation says, aye, aye, sir. We are now tired. We cannot do this today. And it will tell you this. Look at the direction.

Look at the direction. You'll feel all kinds of things, all sorts of stuff. And then that won't work. You force yourself to do it. And then what will the mind do? The mind will be like, oh my God, why didn't you do this a long time ago? Now that we're moving in the right direction, you should have done this. If only you'd done this eight years ago, then you wouldn't be here. It twists and it turns. It changes shape. And it always wants you to move in the wrong direction. Watch it. It'll happen. This is why you need to be stirr.

stable, steady. You will win. This is a war that your brain cannot win. All it can do is get you to surrender. If it fights, it will lose 100% of the time. All it can do is trick you into surrendering, and it will try time and time and time again. So this is enough, honestly. We'll give you more. So once you look at all the different things, just notice what happens.

And the conception that I would even offer is like, think about it like an external object. Think about it like a demon that is trying to tempt you away from fixing your life. And it will use your brain against you. So what you need to do is just notice these things. Notice as much as you can. Notice the direction.

Now, the reason we say start with a doctor is because there could be certain things that are physiologically not working for you. If you have anemia, if you have obstructive sleep apnea, if you have vitamin D deficiency, if you have a thyroid problem, there are many common things that will lead to low mood and low energy. We have to deal with those things. If you have something like a full-fledged mood disorder, you may need some kind of pharmacologic treatment, psychotherapy, whatever. So engage with that. That's step number one.

Step number two, find yourself some duct tape and duct tape out a square that is maybe anywhere from six feet by six feet to eight by 10 or whatever. Create a space that is going to be your temple. Take a sleeping bag, take a pillow, lay down there. That is where you sleep from now on. That is where you exist from now on. Spend as much of your time as you can in this six by six square.

Okay, we'll talk about leaving the house. But in your home, look at all of the places you go that result in your quote-unquote inaction. We're going to stay away from these places. I really like a patch on the floor. So I'm going to study there. I'm going to sleep there. I'm going to do calisthenics there. You're going to exist in that space, right? You're going to leave the place. If you need groceries, you need to use the bathroom, you need to shower, you need to go to work, like whatever. If there's a fire in the building, get out.

But as much of your time as you can, you are going to exist in that square. And this is where you have to be kind of careful because your mind will want you to get out of the square. Oh, I need to do this. I need to do this. I need to do this. I'm bored here. So be it. The action that we are going to take is developing a resistance to boredom. We're going to tank that boredom damage. So in my case, what I did was I slept there. I exercised there. I did yoga there. I meditated there.

So you start to exist. I even read there as much as I could. I also had a small table without a chair, so I moved out of there and I would do my work there. This is also where you got to go hard on the devices. So it's time to do it. Uninstall all of the extraneous things. Watch the direction of your mind as it tries to tell you, oh, we need this for work. So I'd say anything that can be done on a computer should not be done on your phone. If you absolutely need it on your phone, that's one thing. Remove everything else.

Change your phone to grayscale. Uninstall all of the extraneous software off of your computer. Install an app that blocks whatever websites you waste your time on. Do all of these things, right? So these things can be done within 30 minutes. That's all it takes. Fixing your tech is going to be 30 minutes. That's it. Now notice all the rebellion that will happen in your mind. You're worried about cracking and all that kind of crap. Whatever. Now we're going ungebunga. 99 points in strength. Nothing else.

No cosmetics, no this, no, don't worry about that. Next thing that we need to do is fix our diet. Ungabungas don't eat that trash that you eat. They eat ungebunga food, simple food, poor people food, rice, beans, vegetables, maybe some seasoning if you want it. Food is no longer a source of pleasure. Food is sustenance. You're eating for survival. You are eating. You're no longer living to eat. You are eating to live.

So it should be nutritious. Rice, beans, veggies, fruits. Ideally nothing processed, right? So you don't need Twinkies. You don't need chips. You don't need frozen food. I mean, if you need it, that's a different story. Frozen veggies. You know, seasoning is like fine if you want to do some of it, but you don't usually need seasoning. There's some good micronutrients and stuff in seasoning. If you want to use herbs and stuff, whatever. People are asking about meat. Ideally less so. Some meat is okay. Eggs are okay. Don't really need cheese.

Milk, I guess, is okay. This is the unga bunga mode. And then it is the tolerance of these things. That's it. If you have to go to work, you go to work. People say, but what about goals? What about this? What about this? What about this? Well, that stuff will come. You do this for a weekend. Do it for a week. Do it. I mean, if you need to go to work, that's a different story. If you need to go get groceries, go get groceries. But when you go to the grocery store, it's not about pleasure.

And what I want you all to do when you enter Oonga Bunga mode is just notice your mind. And your mind will get desperate. It'll use all kinds of techniques to get you to stop. It'll twist and turn. If you develop your good awareness, you will see it panicking. And when it starts to panic, you know you're winning.

You've always been winning. You can always win. The only time you lose is when you surrender. And then people will ask, this is another tool the mind will use. They'll say, for how long? Until you're done, right? So this is another technique that the mind uses to foster inaction. It adds the dimension of time.

I should have done it a long time ago. This is never going to work. How long do I have to keep this up? I can't keep this up forever. And all of those things, what is the direction? Abandon your efforts. One direction. You look at the direction. It's one way, right? Now, you want to make sure your diet doesn't have things like nutritional deficiencies and stuff like that. So be safe, be healthy. But this is something that you can do today. Find your six by six square. Learn yoga.

Do asana every day. Do pranayama every day. Sit and meditate. Get yourself a set of prayer beads and do om chanting for 108 rounds. Very simple. Chant om 108 times every single day. Now, when you do this kind of stuff, this is really important. The reason that we go in this drastic way is we want to remove all of our cues. So do whatever you can to remove the cues that lead to bad behavior. Uninstall Discord. Log out.

of the extraneous stuff. Go to a different grocery store. Very important. And then your life will be different. You want to transform your life into a temple devoted to you. Now, this word devotion is important. See, devotion is done towards someone else. So all of the actions that you take, the actor is going to receive zero dopamine, zero benefit from it.

Someone else will receive the benefit of it. That's what we mean. It's almost like fragmenting yourself into the object of your devotion. And if we really think about it, the self-loathing man of inaction is the other way around. Every action that is taken is for the benefit of the doer. So I'm going to skip school today so that I can stay home and play video games. That benefits the me. Doesn't benefit future me. Devote yourself to your benefit.

and recognize that you will never see the benefit of this, right? The person who is the actor gets nothing. This is what gurus were really good at teaching that we've lost. We've become so selfish. See, when we have a society that advocates for me first, how is your brain supposed to know which part of me first is good and which part is bad?

If it's all about me, me, me, me, me, then video games, dopamine, pornography, drugs, whatever. That's me. My benefit. Now. Here. Now. We're all short-term and we're all about me. So what do we expect? There's no sense of community. There's no sense of the greater good. Right? And why do we say this? Well, that person over there doesn't give a shit about the greater good, so why should I? Why should I do something that benefits someone else if it doesn't benefit me?

If they're not going to do the same, there's no reciprocity, so I'm not going to do it. Absolutely. That's the nature of the world. You're prioritizing yourself. You're doing the same thing that they're doing. We're all doing the same thing. That's why the world is in the shitty state that it's in. Do something for someone else. There are studies that show that people who are depressed, who offer support, feel better.

What do we see in our mental health spaces today? Venting, venting, venting. It's all about my problems, my problems, my problems. I am hurt. I am wounded. I am a victim. I need help. Just fair enough. Like it's my job as a medical doctor to help people who need help. I get it. I think it's good to help people who need help. And also just because you need help doesn't mean that you can't give help.

I learned this doing Boston Street Team and working with homeless people. The most giving people on the planet are homeless people. Crazy. You give one homeless dude five bucks, instead of buying two things for themselves, they'll buy one thing for themselves and one thing for their buddy. Most charitable people on the planet are homeless people. So going back to unga bunga mode, you do this for a week, and then you'll discover something, that the action that you take creates the life that you live.

See, we think that our identity determines our actions. Those people are successful because they are winners, and I am unsuccessful because I am a loser. Our identity narrows the scope of the actions that we're allowed to take. That's the truth of it. So the actions that you take determine who you are, not the other way around. So if you are a self-loathing man of inaction, that can change today.

Through your action. The self-loathing man of inaction became that way because of their actions. The self-loathing man does not determine their actions. It's the other way around. And you propagate it through your actions every single day. And this is why, like, a lot of people, you know, some people think I'm prideful. Some people think I'm humble. I'm neither, I think. Maybe that's prideful to say. Who knows? So I don't know if you all noticed what I just did there. I'm aware.

Right? So I don't know. This is a statement from ego, not ego. I don't know. Let's just be aware of it. Maybe that's a statement of utter ego. Maybe that's the most egotistical. I am neither humble nor egotistical. I'm transcended. So I notice. Hopefully you all can notice with me. And then I just, just to be on the safe side, I make fun of myself a little bit. Let's just be aware. So I'm neither of those things. I'm just me. I'm the same guy who failed out of college and I'm the same guy who was faculty at Harvard Medical School.

Got an award of academic achievement when I finished medical school. Same kid, same guy, same human. The only difference is the actions. That's the only difference. So if you're a self-loathing man of inaction, take different actions and then you will become something else. 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.