#768 - Dr K HealthyGamer - How To Control Your Emotions & Become Mentally Strong
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Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is dr. Kate is a psychiatry harvard medical school instructor, co founder of healthy gamer G G twitch streamer and a youtube humans face that has never been seen before, a massive overload of stimulation, the effect of constant exposure to social media, video games and porn is not good. But thankfully, dick has developed a ton of powerful ways to finally take back control of your attention.

Expect on what social media is doing to our brains, how much we can attribute the mental health crisis to screens, why anxiety and depression are so prevalent, how to let emotions into your life, more White therapy so often sucks for men, why high profile youtube is acquitting, how to separate yourself worth from your accomplishments, and much more. I love dr. kay.

He has got this awesome blend of western and eastern practices. He's funny with the way that he communicates things. It's strategic and simple. It's empathetic, can he? I love, I think he's one of the best mental health and mindset advocates on the internet the moment.

I'm really, really glad for this to be the first one, the first episode from that huge video world production thing that i've been hoping on about for a little while now and it's beautiful. But and giving me a listen to this just on audio you want to feel any difference is just going to be nice, Normal conversation with some buttery quality audio sounds coming three years. And if you do want to check out what you look like, can head over to youtube.

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So navigate spotify impressed the follow button in the middle screen or the plus in the top right on corner on apple podcasts. I thank you very much. But now, ladies and gentleman, please welcome doctor cay.

You spend a lot of time thinking about our interaction with screens. How would you describe what technologies is doing to our brains?

Uh, I think the short answer is not good. So I I think technology has a lot of benefits. So IT has a lot of benefits for our lives, but specifically what is what is IT doing to our brains, I think is generally speaking, not very good.

Um so just as one example, if you look at basically social media, video games, pornography, most of the technology that we use that is not directly work related is going to have impressive effects on our like negative emotional circuitry. So anytime you're feeling bad, if you raw social media or you play video game like it's going to shut off your negative emotions, which can feel good in the short term. But in the long term, it's really not good.

right? So IT is a anesthetic. Yeah, people used to sell of bada. I i've seen a number of girl friends who if there is a if if they are feeling a little bit uncomfortable, get on the phone and like self suit by scrolling.

Yeah I mean, I think everyone does that. So yes. So I think if if you really pay attention, what i've noticed is you watch yourself in a transition.

So anytime there's a transition, anytime you're getting into the elevator, you're waiting in line somewhere, you're even getting up from, like your work a desk to walk somewhere else, people will just automatically pull out their phones. So where so we become so hooked to these things. And I think um APP designers, phone designers have also tried to capitalize on that impulsivity. So if you think about IT, like even things like face I D like that shrinks the time between an impulse up here and engagement in your phone.

what does chronic, long term hiding from feeling feelings resulting.

I think, IT prom? I say the biggest problem that IT creates is like being stagnant in life. So if we understand, like, let's think about this, right?

So everyone thinks we have good emotions and bad emotions. So we have these emotions that are good, like excitement, joy, curiosity, love. And then we have bad emotions like anger, sadness, shame, fear.

And we don't want the bad emotions. We want the good emotions. But if you stop and think about IT for second, every human being on the planet has evolved to experience bad emotions. It's a feature. It's not a book.

And then the question is why? And if we look at our negative emotional circuitry, IT is very close, like anatomically, our olympic system is very close to our hip campus, which is where learning and memory take place. So they are like sitting right next to each other.

A lot of strong connections. So negative emotions are powerful sources of information and motivation. So if you kind of think about anxiety, we all want to conquer anxiety.

But if we stop and really think about IT, anxiety helps us realized like what to avoid. Um you know IT IT drives us in a particular direction. If we look at emotions like shame, shame actually is supposed to be a powerful motivator to drive corrective action.

So I feel ashamed for fAiling a test. I want to study really hard. So I never feel that shame again. And so, paradox x ics, what happens when we shut off our negative emotions is we lose the motivation to actually fix our problems. And this is why I think we see a generation of people who are like, stuck.

JoNathan height was on the show recently talking about his newbould, the anxious generation, how much of the modern optic in anxiety, depression, the persistent feelings of listlessness and the hopelessness, how much of that do you think actually should be laid at the feet of social media?

I think a fair amount like I don't know how to give IT a percentage maybe somewhere between thirty and fifty percent, but I I think that what what what I really see, what technology is, that IT propagates problems. So technology in some ways that are actually IT create some problems that are also propagate tes problems.

So in my kind of clinical work, what I see a lot of is that if you're depressed about something in life, social media or video games will propagate that problem way worse. So what what I see a lot of is, like, you know, I say, i'm a fifteen year old kid. I'm overweight, i'm going through puberty.

My voice is cracking. I don't feel great about myself. I don't have a whole lot of friends, and when I was growing up like, I had no choice but to overcome that in some way because I had no escape.

So I had to learn how to make friends, even though was painful. Now what we're seeing as a generation of people who can use technology to run away from their problems. So I would say that what I really see is, is whatever direction you're moving in, in life, technology will amplify that. So if you're moving in the wrong action, it'll make IT worse. But if you will get people like yourself and maybe me, we use technology to amplify the work that we're doing.

Yeah, I think it's still even with all of the millions of plays and all the rest of the stuff, technology is pretty close to like a net zero for me overall, I have a very negative relationship, I think, with my phone and with social media. Um a lot of shame around being so fragile and fickle that I can't control the compulsion to take IT out to check IT.

You know you see from a front seat all of the minutes and hours that you fried away, all of the time that you open up another tab, and then you try then bring an additional technology to try and constrain this. Have been using open for iphone and using cold turkey for mac, which lime websites within particularly schedule throughout the day. And just I don't feel proud of my of my phone and technology and social media use, even though it's something that I created a life I very much enjoy. I think a lot of people feel like that.

So I have kind of a weird answer to that, which is like, so what came first? The shame or the problem with technology? Probably the shame. Yeah, right. So I think this is what we tend to see is that so if if you have and this is kind of the sun scrip concept of something called a some Scott, which is like a ball of undigested negative emotion, and and even in psychoanalysis, we kind of have this theory that's like fyz, and you kind of came up with, right, that we have stuff living in our subconscious.

And then what happens is that feeling of shame will find some manifestation in your life, and unless you heal that feeling of shame, so why is that that you feel shame in relation to technology, instead of anger, instead of paranoid, that, oh my god, because of i'm so addicted to technology, everything's is going to fall apart. It'll all get messed up or you pissed at yourself or your pistol iphone makers or whatever. So the manifestation, your manifestation of how you relate technology comes in part from you. And so I I think when I work with people, usually what I find is the entitle to that is get to the root of that shame and where that shame is kind of lingering from coming from um and you know I I can even see in your life that you've become so amazing and I would bet money that your search for being an amazing human being, physically fit, successful, proud, emotionally connected with yourself, has been to run away from a version of Chris that was ashamed .

of himself or absolutely correct yeah and the emotional connection thing i'm glad that you're here. This is something pretty obsessed by at the moment, trying to feel feelings and and work out how emotions work. Before we go into that, let's say there is someone listening that's like I I think I feel shame.

I think that does arise in me perhaps that something that there doctor cages spoke about, you get to the root of IT and kind of luck at IT and stuff. What does that mean? Like, how do people deal with shame through south in korea? How do people deal with shame at all?

So I mean, I have a couple of different answer. So one is like, based on this yogi e tradition. So I spent years studying to become among and I think that's incredibly valuable and then also from like a psychiatric perspective of being a psychiatrist and doing psychotherapy, I think both directions kind of meet, by the way.

Um so i'd say we have to start by understanding that OK. So what? Let's think about emotions, right? So if I am walking down the street and let's say, I reach out to pet a dog, and if I pt a dog in the dog, like NIPS at me, I feel fear.

And then if i'm a kid, I may start crying. And then mammie daddy picks me up, and then five minutes later, I feel totally fine, because mommy or daddy is distracted me, gives me ice cream, whatever. But then if you sort of look at IT, the next time I see a dog, I will have a physiologic response. I will be, feel afraid of the dog, even the dog is across the street. So on a very, very simple sense, if we look at the way that we learn in the way that with the trauma work, so we have a negative experience, and often times we do not process that experience IT simply goes dormant until the next time that I I see the dog, the fear comes rushing back because it's living in my mind.

What does processing experience mean?

yes. So let's say that you were walking down the street as a grown a dog. Do you like dogs? yes.

And if you get, if you try to pet a dog and IT NIPS IT you in the first, second or less than a second, you will have the identical physiologic response. As a five old, your sympathetic nervous system will activate your panic. You, you, you're got a birth of a drinkin. And then what would you say to yourself after the dog tries to .

bite you that dogs are dick a? What caused that to happen was the something that I did is IT because of.

there you go, right? So what happens in a five old's mind? Not that did I do something to cause this whats going on with the dog? Maybe I should be a little bit more careful. So what you do, what you literally do, is you take that emotion, and then you look at IT from different perspectives. This is also what we do in psychotherapy.

When someone has a, let's say, they have a bunch of shame, will ask the question, okay, where does that shame come from? How do you feel about that? What are the different ways that you can look at IT? And if you sort of look at at the other thing that happens with shame, as we start to develop identities of ourselves, there's the emotion of shame, and then we start to form conclusions about herself, like I feel ashamed in this moment.

And then that becomes, I M A terrible human being. I am a loser right now. This becomes a statement of fact that has a life that is independent of the shameful experience.

So when we talk about processing shame, there is some out of emotional work, but then there is also work on the ego level, or the a hum goa is what it's called in sunscreen. T where are emotional experiences result in conclusions that we form about ourselves? And so those conclusions need to be reexamined.

And the most damming thing is that when we are emotional, we form very powerful conclusions. But since we are emotional, they are more likely to be wrong. And if anyone has gone through a break up, you know exactly what I am talking about.

Because you go through all these conclusions in your head, this person is terrible. Women are terrible, are terrible. I'll never find love again. You form all these conclusions from an emotional state, but those conclusions don't go away when literally the emotional circuitry of our brain reaches homeostasis of eliza. Um those learnings stay with us.

So we have the bowl of unprotected motion from the eastern side. What you looking at from a western equivalent, what's the the viewpoint that yes.

so I would say and the western equivalent, how do we process shame? My how do we handle shame? Let's say it's divided two couple things. One is that there are certain techniques that you can do to literally reduce the activity of your negative emotional circuitry so you can do things like breathing exercises. We know that each emotion is correlated with a certain pattern of breathing.

So we can even do a quick demonstration where i'm just going to breathe at you, and you tell me if you can tell what kind of emotion i'm feeling, right? so. Go absolutely right now so it's going to seem similar. But .

arrow, yeah.

So both have them more deep breathe.

I like the second right. I can't help IT.

I have to add a little bit of facial expression to IT and and so you can just listen to someone's breathing. And there's also.

what do you think that is? Nova.

absolutely like. And think about that. You're not trained as a psychiatrist. This stuff is baked so deeply. And to your mind, our empathic circuitry is wired this heavily where you and anyone is watching or listening to that can tell.

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

And as you breathe particular way, IT will alter your emotions. If you feel a certain emotion, IT will all deliberate. So we can work on that level.

Then the second thing that I kind of mentioned is that we have once we have emotions, then we have kind of like these conclusions that we draw. We have impact on our identity, which is are like our humble AR or ego. And then once we have those kinds of conclusions about the world and about ourself, those then form the basis of our logic, which then influence .

our behaviors.

So and I think sort of dealing with this deals with author, so we want to reduce the emotion in the moment, and then we want to critically look at the conclusions that we've drawn about the world. And then the last thing that we really want to do is pay attention to how do these conclusions become automatic behaviors.

And then if we want to change those behaviors, then we need to look at our sense of our identity as well as our emotional experience. I don't think I answered your question though, because you asked, what is the western equivalent of a some scar? Okay, so this is where I kind of map IT out.

So in in the east, what we would say is there is this ball of undigested emotional energy. This is what I would call a trauma that lives in your subconscious. And then in the west, so that's what we'd called, like a trauma, and that that lives in yourself, be conscious in some way.

And then this generates something called the schema, which is like a way of thinking um so we can have these sort of automatic thoughts from cognitive behavioral therapy or a narcissistic defense mechanisms when we're talking about ego or hom god. And then we also know from cvt that both of these things will influence behavior. So on cognitive behavioral therapy, we're looking at the relationship between our thoughts, our feelings and our actions. So IT all maps out .

like pretty much one to one. Yeah, 哎呀， i'm fascinated by the assumptions that we have about the world and the fact that I spoke to doctor paul county, a traumatic y and he gave me this really great story where he said I was in A A car crash. I was like, twenty, twenty years old, and I was fine, but I could have not been fine.

Yes, he said that when you encounter something that a highly drama tic event, your memory after that can color your memories before, that based on that experience, I never thought about this that I could tell myself because of, let's say, I have travel xiety, which I didn't. I have traveling anxiety is IT because of the car crash. Well, no, i've never like driving.

I've always been scared of driving even before that thing happened. I've know. And it's just part of the baked in assumptions and physics of your system and just how you see the world hundred percent. And that's terrifying because to me, you have been robed of your ability to fact check what is true and what is false by your own mind.

And that's intended that's that's a that's not a bug. That's a feature. That's a survival feature.

So i'll give you a simple example. So let's say I go eat a restaurant five times, right? And it's my favorite restaurant. The six time I go, I get food poisoning. So we look at like what happens if you get food poisoning once your brain does not think, calculate, okay, fifteen percent of the time we get food poisoning, so we should be able to eat there. All that takes one negative experience to bias all of our recollections of the past.

And that's a survival mechanism, right? So let's think about, like when we were evolving, let's say, I go to a watering hole to get water, but the six time I go a crocket, i'll jumps out of me IT is of a lot of benefit for my survival. If I go back in question, the last five, did I get lucky? Was that actually safe? Who knows? So one of the things that we know, and there's there's a fascinating field of science which is emerging now called neuroeconomics and neuroeconomics is fascinating because IT looks at all of these cognitive bias that we have, especially around negative experiences.

And one of the things that we learned is that the human brain doesn't want to perceive reality. IT wants to perceive IT wants to adjust reality for the benefit of survival. And I will give you just a really interesting and terrifying example of that. So our brain, when we look at, let's say, i'm i'm going to ask a girl out on the date, okay, so our brain, when I think about asking the girl out on the date, the document logic centers of my brain, the nuclear accumbens place that I feel pleasure so I ask her out and he says, yes, I feel an exhilaration of pleasure. The dope energy c circuits of my brain in a hypothetical, yes, do not activate, but the the negative emotional circuitry in my brain can activate and actually make me suffer based on a hypothetical.

So if you've ever been in the situation and you think about how things go wrong, that's not a hypothetically, you can feel the pain of a future loss today, but you cannot feel the the pleasure of winning in award are getting a trophy today. Like literally, hypotheticals can activate your negative emotional circuitry in the present, but they do not activate your dopa energia circuit tree. Wow, and this is one of the reasons why we're so .

biased towards the night is a fundamental neuroscientific, a imei a .

hundred percent. And we didn't know this even ten years ago, because now we know so much about human behavior, we know so much about neurosis, that we can actually look at some of these behaviors that people have, where people are very risk averse, right? And we know what the neuroscience of IT is.

That is crazy. I have this idea of anxiety cost, which is the longer that you take to do the thing, the more times you think about having not yet done the thing. So you wake on the morning, you've to meditate.

And you have to thought, I still need to meditate today five times. How do you just meditated first thing in the morning? You would have not needed to have those.

And it's a way to, um I guess, justify front loading stuff that needs to be done. And also IT brings a cash value to inaction. A lot of the time, we believe that inaction is a an impartial strategy. It's not really doing anything I think good, not bad, but there is a cash value in attention. But IT seems like there's an even more important cash value of ruminating about this particular thing can cause you to embed a uh circuit and the story and an identity about the sort of person that you are because if it's a negative uh, experienced you're going through, you in very many ways are living IT over over over one hundred percent.

And that's why I think about IT for second, if you don't meditate in the first thing in the morning, do you remind yourself once or do you remind yourself five times? And the reason is because, so if we think about, okay, sitting out to meditate require some willows, right? And then if I start to feel anxious, that negative anxiety circuit uy activates.

Now what I literally have to do is the whales wer that I would have used to sit down to meditate, is now focused on raining in the anxiety. So my will power drops. I can't force myself to meditate, which is why you feel anxious again in a third time and a fourth time.

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

Why is anxiety, depression and attention, or a lack of focus? Why does IT seem like those three? Maybe some others, but largely those three are the emotionally pressure of the modern world. What is IT that activating those particular pathways? Anxiety, depression, attention deficit?

Um so i've got kind of two answers. One is like an eastern answer and one is a western answer. So let's understand a couple of things.

So I personally think from the if you take an eastern for I have this all rooted in a lack of attention. So we look at, let's say, depression or anxiety. So big experience of depression is shame or regret.

So people are not usually depressed about the future. They're usually depressed about the past. And even if you think you're depressed about the future, the reason you're depressed about the future is because of the conclusions about yourself that you draw from past behavior, right?

So I I am hopeless about the future because I am a loser. Well, where did that that conclusion of i'm a loser come from? I came from past experiences.

So we look at IT from an eastern perspective. The mind has three places. IT can be, IT can be in the present, IT can be in the past, or IT can be in the future.

And one of the things that we kind of know is that if my mind is stuck in the past, that's where we have depression, where there's a regret in their shame about past actions, anxiety IT has to be a future focused. You can't be anxious about something in the past. So when our mind goes to the future, we are prone to anxiety.

When our mind goes to the past, we're prone to depression. So what that means is that the fundamental problem, if you think about run away anxiety, what does that mean? We give people, you know, medications like benzo o dies are seaton erga medications.

And what do these medications do? Benzo o dies, activate the gather receptor in the brain. They increase gloried flow across our our channels, and they hyper polarized our neurons.

They essentially doll us out. So one of the treatments for anxiety is to literally, like, turn the brain down to fifty percent function. That is a treatment.

Okay, series energy c medications work in some similar ways. So what that means is we are trying to literally like doll out the brain. And why is that? That's because the brain has got out of control.

We cannot control our anxiety. We're stuck in the thought loop. There's a panic attack, whatever.

So if we really look at what's the root of the problem, if you can stop thinking about IT, then the anxiety goes away. Enter addiction. This is where technology comes in.

Because, hey, what is the best way to stop thinking about something? Let me watch some pornography. Because when i'm watching pornography, when i'm playing a video game, i'm no longer worrying about tomorrow.

So now what's happened as we we bring our attention to the present, because when i'm playing a video game, I am thinking about the future. That's the whole joy of IT, right? I'm playing in the sky.

I'm going to own him in the game, right? So brings our attention to the present, which is why it's so addictive. Now this creates a problem though, because once I use a video game as a crutch to bring myself to the present, then my frontal lobes s weaken. I cannot control my mind anymore.

So the second I stop playing a video game, my mind will return to anxiety.

Che, so it's like we're taking the later instead of the stairs every single day in our mind. And so we become d condition. So this is where if you look at, even if you look at, like, you know, evidence based mindfulness techniques and things like that for depression and anxiety, it's all about attentional control.

If you can control the attention of your mind, the anxiety and the depression will melt away. And this is what i've seen in my clinical practice as well. So I would say in wise depression and anxiety getting worse, I think I really believe the root of IT is attentional.

And if you look at the biggest impact of all technologies, they're all attentional. They're all trying to keep us glued in. And then once we're glued, there can be other downstream effects, like when everyone is using filters that we can have low the steam and that can make us feel depressed and things like that. There is absolutely those effects as well, but I think attentional problems are actually the root.

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because they they give you dying in failure. So here's the beautiful thing. Okay, think of us.

So the whole problem, if if video games did not offer dying in failure, people would be wave Better off. So here's what happens in the medium. M, you die. You feel what happens next ribbon, absolutely.

And then what do you do? You try again. Now think about this.

right? So the beautiful thing about a video game is that gives you this illusion of failure. The reason it's an illusion to failed because there's no consequence. The game is designed for youtube eventually win. It's designed to give you the illusion of failure, not real failure.

Now in the real world, if you if I fail a class and I get an a next time around my G P, A, my transcript is screwed forever. There's no reduce in life, right? Like, that's the whole problem.

So now what we have is we have this virtual world where failure comes at no cost. And we have the real world where failure comes at an astronomic cost. And then your brain sees failure in both places.

And it's, by the way, the denial of reward that results in, like more doping being released. So this is where like if you play competitive games online, like losing one game is what makes winning the next game so much more satisfying. But it's all artificial.

And so it's that denial reward, that artificial sense of failure. And it's really it's not even artificial failure. It's safety with failure.

There's always safety in the video again. But in the real world, there's no safety. There's permanent consequences. If you ask a girl out and he says, no, I don't know why I keep on going to that example.

You ask her out and he says, no, everyone in school is going to hear about at the next day. That doesn't happen. So video games are a safe place to fail.

How can people Better alone to feel and integrate their emotions? IT seems to me that everyone wants to be more rational. Everyone would like to have a the perfect due tilt arian rationalist view of the world. But that emotions kind of A A second string um both indicator a assistance, a signal of what we should do. How can people Better learn to use fuel, integrate their emotions?

This is a great question. I think that depends on who the people are. So I think the answer is somewhat different for men and women.

So we know, for example, that like estrogen makes us more aware of our internal emotional state. So this is part of the reason why women will have fluctuating emotional experience. I don't think this is Better bad.

It's just what happens. Um so I think for man, the answers a little bit different because we are condition to experience emotions in a certain way. So for men, I think the best way to reconnect with your emotions through your body in interestingly enough, through your rational mind.

So there's a fascinating study and I can send you all the reference where a group of um researchers basically looked at they they had people map out physical sensations when they are feeling and emotion. So if you think about butterflies in the stomach, allum in my throat, you know IT feels like I got kicked in the balls, heart ache, right? So we actually have a systematic map when any time we have an emotion, remember, an emotion is not mental, is nothing is just mental.

Everything is physiological to. So one of the best things that you can do, and this is like the literally sequence that I go through, is often times we as men don't know that we're feeling emotions. Like even when we're feeling, we don't feel them, but they're active.

That's the way I put. So what i'd had people do is asking to pay attention to your body. What do you feel in your body? Where do you feel tightness? Where do you feel discomfort? What do you feel jittery? Do you feel like wiggling around or H A zone into that? And is beautiful.

How good manner is the second question that write IT down? Really pay attention to what you're feeling and then ask yourself a hypothetical, if another person were feeling these things, what emotion do you think they could be feeling? If someone's feeling butterflies in the stomach and and pain in their chest and tightness in their throat, what emotions do you think those could be? And this is where our rational mind kicks.

And maybe that's sadness, maybe that's anxious, maybe that's worry, maybe that's love. And then something beautiful happens. Do you think you could be feeling those things? And then people will say, oh my god, yeah, i'm feeling all of those things.

And this is what makes IT so hard, is that if we don't know, if we haven't been trained in our emotions, what makes IT hard to isolate emotions is that frequently we feel many of them at the same time, and many of them in ways that feel conflicted, right? So when I feel, when I get dumped to what do I feel, I feel love, I feel grief, I feel sadness, I feel hopeless. I feel relieved, right? There's all at least it's over now, but we're not aware because it's so complex. So i'd say, start with your body, really ask yourself some of these questions, then you'll be amazed at how far you can get.

What's that alexa xi.

yeah um so alex thier is a is A I guess clinical term that means um color blindness st here internal emotional state. So this is exactly I am talking about, is what if you ask to do? Like, what do you feel like any time you ask a dude? Like, what do you feel they're gonna say piece, right? So i'm getting bullied.

How do you feel all men like screw that guy? If you ask someone out, they say, no, i'll screw her. Like the only, uh, emotion that we're really aware of, that we're aware that we're feeling.

And if you ask guys where how's life going go, it's frustrated, a agitation, frustration. So is men. We are kind of condition to feel one emotion, which is anger.

And there's all kinds of other emotions underneath anker. So what we call an inability to detect your internal emotional state is something called alex thier. Now there's even research on something called Normative male alex ahma.

So Normal ative, meaning IT is Normal. Why is IT Normative male lexow mia? Because this is actually the most men or lexow mic. This is what we've discovered, and it's because of the way that we're raised, maybe because of testosterone.

Who knows? I mean, who knows how much of IT is nature nurture, but most men are not really aware of what they are feeling. And so then they'll say, I don't feel a whole lot emotions like i'll talk to people who say, like, i'm a robot or they strive to have ice in their veins.

Yes, right? So we even like glorify these, the lack of emotional experience. The problem is that being done to something does not mean that IT doesn't exist, right?

So if I give you lie a cae and I give you anesthetic, you can't feel anything. And I literally cut into your belly, your belley is open. Just because you don't feel IT doesn't mean that IT doesn't exist.

And this is also where we see technology because now what we're seeing is an evening out between men and women for a lexie ia, primarily due to technology is my belief. So technology, all forms of technology, will suppress our negative emotional circuitry. So we're all becoming moral ex ot mic as we become a ex aahed mic now we're in huge problems.

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

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

It's so interesting. It's like A A vicious cock tail where a people first, I don't want to feel emotions because IT feels bad for a lot of the time.

Secondly, we now have the tools to be able to hide ourselves away from them and then thirdly, there is this glorification of the rational robot uh so almost a looking upon emotions as being second class signal vulnerability weakness um like a lack of sophy cation as well as I think i'm too i'm significantly to sophistic ted to act on something idiotic and basically emotions yeah I tweet this while ago. I got to turn a stick for IT. I don't basically saying that um not opening up about your vulnerabilities doesn't make you any less vulnerability, just makes you less truthful. But if you're feeling a thing not opening up about IT, to me, there's no additional strength. Like best soto, that person and in many ways the person that is able to open up to the right like not just necessarily to twitter um well is the person that is able to talk about the thing which is difficult to them weaker or stronger than the person who isn't able to talk about IT.

So I I think it's good to talk about negative emotions and we have to understand even the mechanism of so here's something to understand. So anything that is left in the mind will compound. So if you take a patient who has been traumatized, right?

So let's say we have i've had patients have been abused in, they are upbringing. And what happens is often times what happens in abusive relationships and abuse households as their secrecy. So what does secrecy do? What secrecy does is that compounds whatever is on the inside.

So in trauma, what? What we see is an incredible healing ability. If we ventilate what is in there, we're kind of let IT out.

And then literally, the energy in the mind decreases. Anytime you say something, IT gets taken out of your mind and like, gets vented to the either. Now the really interesting thing is this is true positive things as well.

So I don't know if you know people who talk big, right? So they have all the excitement about all the stuff that they're gonna do. They have this great idea for a start up.

They have a great idea for a book. I would do this, I would do this. I would do this. I would do this. Their full of hot are.

And what's happening is they have all of this energy, and they are venting IT out, and then they never accomplish anything. So even if you look at this, this deep spiritual tradition of mantra tetra, mantra tetra. So month has meant to be cap secret and what a month a really is. Here's my kind of understanding of IT is it's the same principle as a trauma c capp c great accepted to positive. So when you have something that is positive that is within you, that you keep within you and you do not vent to the world, IT can be incredibly motivating.

Ryan holiday says, talking about the thing and doing the thing by, for the same resources, allocate yours appropriately.

hundred percent. And fraud d said that too. So fraid made a really interesting cover. That language is a substitute for action. And what we know from psychotherapy is, if you have someone in your office who has homicidal, they want to a kill another human being.

Literally, what happens is if they're able to share their feeling about wanting to kill another human being, that actually reduces their homicide. Something about speaking about IT substitutes for action in your brain. So the two become interchange.

But this is discriminated in a particular direction, which is, talking about the positive thing may decrease the likelihood you doing the positive thing, which is probably negative. But not talking about the negative thing doesn't release the pressure internally, which causes IT to build up, which is the opposite of you.

absolutely. So whatever you want to cultivate within you, keep within yourself.

What a lovely summarizing. How should people deal with having lots of self awareness or being a deep thinker? I heard A A guy asked Peter in this question.

The depth of my conscious ness causes me to suffer, is IT a blessing, or occurs to feel everything? So very deeply, I thought, is a really great question. What's your opinion on that? And how can people with high self while .

still so it's funny because um you know there's uh someone once told me that you know I think my problem is that I have too much self awareness. And so here's the main thing to understand. If you have a bunch of self awareness, this is neither a good thing or a bad thing.

The question is who's in control? So the problem with people who have corn quote too much self awareness is that they're not in control of where their awareness goes. So if I become hyper aware, so we even see this in cases of people who have, uh, psychosomatic illnesses.

So if you look at people who have things like erdal balls syndrome, h less so inflammatory balal disease, fibre ogc, what we know is they have something called visceral hyper sensitivity. So any tiny signal in their body, like you and I are sitting down right now, our body is sending us lots of signals about us being uncomfortable, but we are able to suppress those. But some people are hypervigilant and hypersensitive to their internal signals.

And this is the basic problem with awareness, is that if you have too much awareness, it's not that it's good or it's bad. It's that is out of control. So we kind of think about, let's say, a raging river. Is a raging river good or bad? Well, that depends.

What is that exactly?

Is that part of A A damn where where harnessing hydro electric energy? Then IT is amazing, which has been my experiences, is that when I can take these people and teach them how to harness their awareness and focus their awareness, because most people who have too much awareness, it's like a light that is directed and spread everywhere.

Instead, what you need to do is focus light, just like a laser beam, at which point, instead of being defused and wasted all over the place, because your mind is hyper aware of this. And now i'm thinking about this, and now i'm aware of this, and now i'm aware of this. You need to be able to focus your mind like a laser beam, and then I can cut through things. And IT is an amazing tool. It's about who's in control, not that is good or bad.

What are the strategies that are most definitions for controlling?

Uh so I like a couple of specific practices. Um so the two like very simple introduction, tory ones that attend to teach people who want to something called the aca.

So I love your indian accent, every every word that you say in india. I want to do the whole podcast in india.

OK 是 we can do forecast。 There is no problem. okay? So first one is the attacker.

okay? I can focus the market.

You can focus. I will teach you practice, right? interesting.

You are talking about that. Okay, don't worry, don't worry. I will help.

I will help. Okay, okay, you can focus. No problem.

laugh. What is problem? See, laughing is not, is not.

Lack of focus. Let yourself laugh Better. Come on, let IT out.

Let IT out. Let IT out. right? What is the problem? enjoy. Focus fully on the left and see. This is what I mean.

Doing this in front of a jungle background is going to get someone.

No, it's okay. Don't fear the cancellation free than your way. Okay, okay, your choice.

I can go. Let's take this one for now. I don't enjoy .

so so one one practice is something that I called the arctic, which is or not I that's what is called, it's fixed point gazing. So what I tend to fine is that so fixed point gazing is usually when you look at something like a candle flame or like a yan thru, which is like a spiritual symbol, and you gaze at IT for maybe thirty seconds, sixty seconds and ninety seconds, you work your way up slowly.

And it's best to learn this from a teacher without blinking. So over time, what literally happens is you tell yourself that i'm going to look at this without blinking and then over time, your body will send you signals. You're like, hey, we want to blame.

This is uncomfortable. Let's move. Let's move. Let's move. And so what you're literally doing is your training, your attention to not do this thing. I also like thoratec because there is a certain bad ashes to IT, right?

Like you feel yeah like like .

i'm going i'm going to control this and you feel strong and powerful when you do this this kind of theta practice. So we'll do a kind of fix point gazing at a candle IT. Also there's also some cool stuff that happens in the practice which keeps people engaged. Like our photo captors tend to get exhausted with pigments and then you have kind of psychedelic .

experiences and stuff yeah right.

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

That's one practice. And the second practice that I really like is something called die stem, which is perfect stones. So it's just to sit in a space that has and just be perfectly still. And over time, what will happen is that will become increasingly uncomfortable as your body cries out to you. We want to, we want to relax, we want to move, we want to do this, we want to do that.

And then, and then usually, what what becomes beautiful about that is that as your body cries out with more and more pain, what starts to happens is what a lot of people will discover is that breathing becomes amazing. Because as your body becomes uncomfortable, the only solace that you have is the breath. While you're focused on the breath, while you're breathing in and out, then you feel amazing.

Like, but the second that you stop concentrating on your breathing, the body becomes a flame of discomfort. And so these two practices is interesting, how how much astana can be derived from the breath. And then the other really brilliant thing about this practices, you begin to realize that it's really weird and and maybe we should have done IT, but you begin to realize that like they're so much joy, Justin breath.

And then hopefully people who do this practice long enough will start to realize something really insane, which is that a lot of your happiness in life is not dependent on the things that you think Normally bring you happiness. Even the breath can be so pleasure, so intoxicating, so relaxing. And you do this all day long, and you just have no awareness of IT.

And then hopefully what tends to happen. And this is my experience with most people, is they start to realize that, okay, a lot of my life, the joys actually created on the inside. It's about how I live. It's about how I receive things and and then they start working on the inside, which is when the magic to happen.

How long should people look to do the star of the candle? Sit still for for a introduction tory session. yes.

So I would say for something like that ah its best to learn from a teacher and many like yoga, meditation, schools, the stuff. But your photos, I would say, like go to the point of discomfort, but not to the point to pain. There are some medical contract dictation.

You need to like talk to your doctor about IT if you've got things like block home or other like pressure related problems in the eyes. But journalists being, I said you can start with thirty to sixty seconds and gradually work your way up to like two minutes, three minutes, four minutes um and then that's usually enough. And there's another the cool thing is with throttle there, there's a different practice that you can do called on third throttle a which is kind of the next phase.

So um and this is where you know you kind of said you get the tunnel vision. So the cool thing that happens in in the in the eyes, once you exhaust your photo factors, in your pigments, in your eyes, if you close your eyes, you will see the after image in negative. So then what you can do is, without risking any problems in your eyes, you can close your eyes and you'll actually see a blue candle flame if you're gays and get a candle. And it's the opposite. That's just how our eyes work and then you can continue to throat uh like in your mind, like looking in your mind at at the negative image of the candle flame and then you can do that practice .

for like fifteen twenty minutes. Is this when you got your inspiration for the make people stare wall for thirty minutes exercise?

No, actually. So that's a different, that's a different practice. But the make people share in the wall, which has been evolutionary practice in our in our community, is the joy of that practices. See, we're so distracted from ourselves and so many people come to me and they're like, I don't know what I want to do, right? So someone doesn't know.

They are like, should I major this? Or should I major this? Should I break up? Should I not break up? Should I change jobs? Should I stay jobs? Should I pursue my passion? How do I find my armor, my duty? You know, no one knows what to do in life.

And so as we become clues about what to do, we turn to the outside world. And then we look at influencers, and then influencers say, you should do this and you should do this and you should do this. And then before we had influencers, we had the original influencer, which, which is our parents.

And our parents say, I look, beat, come doctor, you're going to be good doctor, right? Those are the original influencers, and they give us the set of conditions that we have to fulfill. And so the main thing that happened is, if you literally look at our attention, our attention is always outside of us now, because I want to be efficient, right? So what am I going to do? I took a shower this morning.

I put on this is great podcast called modern wisdom by Christal liam's. And i'm going to on this episode because then when i'm in the shower and i'm taking a shit, can I use language? Yes, okay.

When i'm taking a shit, when i'm shaving, like i'm going to be learning during those moments. And then this is something that I did during medical where I was like constantly like input, input. And so we don't spend time with ourselves.

And when we don't spend time with ourselves, we lose sight of our internal compass. And no wonder we have no idea what to do because we're listening to all these different people. And then this person says this one day. This person says this the next day. And then like, so I keep changing .

my programs chizen .

hania sort of yeah and so the staring at a wall practice is sit at a wall and we just going to look at a wall from hour, and then at the beginning you'll be bored. But then you have all of this crap that has piled up inside you, all these some scars that are dormant, all these negative experiences of hurt, that the second you felt hurt, you flipped open your phone to distract yourself for the pain, and then that pain sunk into you and lived in your subconscious. So what we're going to do is just stare the wall and just let whatever there come up.

What are some of the strangest trip reports that you ve heard from .

your community? So like even um someone in our uh like one of our employees, the practice and he was kind of describing what happened. And like people will have all like people start crying.

They like feel all these things that they're never felt before. Usually the first five to fifteen minutes or like complete bodow, people with A D H D will struggle to pay attention, their mind will bounce all over the place. And then some of them will actually like end up having a very like calm and rested mind after IT bouncers around for all over the place.

But I think some people, the lucky, I say maybe ten to twenty five percent, will really like learn something or get some kind of emotional karis is I think a longer a larger number of people start to realize they do not need to fear being with themselves. And that's really powerful. You don't need something else to to entertain you.

You can take a flight to europe that is eight hours. You don't need a book, you don't need a phone, you don't need anything. You can sit and oh my god, it's like so terrifying, right? And then and so it's amazing what you can learn if you sit with yourself. The chAllenge for a lot of people is that there is so much negativity in there that you can feel overwhelmed.

Sitting with yourself is an unbelievably uncomfortable experience.

And there is a beautiful um sort of a poker's story, like a ethology story in in the hindu tradition about this turning of the ocean and that the bottom of the ocean there was like some kind of nectar and brother or some sort of divine substance. But the whole point is that when they started turning the ocean to try to get to IT poison came up first. And so there is a really cool kind of perspective from the this like the yoga tradition, that any time you want to find gold within you, are you any time you want to find nectar ump, um you're going to find poison first. So the pathway to finding inner peace involves going through poison.

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IT is made by actual shift and IT is ready in less than two minutes right now can get fifty percent of your first month and twenty percent of your second months by going to the link in the show nuts below or heading to fact meals stock come flash M W fifty and using the code M W A check out that factor meals dotcom such M W fifty and M W fifty a check out I had a an insight when I started doing self inquiry five or six years ago that um forever is kind of like being in a garden and looking for stuff underneath stones. And you know every so often underneath the stone you find something really beautiful that you're proud about yourself for to is a realization that you feel whole but that one out of twenty and the remaining nineteen have something terrifying and disgusting and awful hiding inside eath. And I think that's around about the right proportion as well.

yes. So i'll let me ask you this has that changed over your five or seven year?

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

So as you are getting Better at looking within yourself, what what has changed about what you're finding?

Uh, originally, I think I was just trying to sort of lay down a path that was really struck. I remember the first time when I first started reading, you know, all of my twenty years, I sent, I sent him received like ten million what sap messages over a decade as a club promoter, right mostly on my phone.

This wasn't what's up web so kind of impressive, kind of terrifying um and then I I remember when I first before even start meditating is going to read and i'd looked at a book, and as I was SAT down, my body would like twitch and move, presumably because I was trying to down regulate to this much lower lever of Simon. There was no beings bones, no banners coming down, no nothing. That was a peaced paper.

So the first five hundred sessions of meditation that I did, I think, just learning to be able to have a slightly still mind in a slightly steel body, then the next five hundred were probably a little bit more about noticing thoughts when they rise. And the next stage where i'm trying to get to now is where are these coming from? Like what is the motivation for this story that I tell myself? This is why my current obsession with emotions and feelings is coming from.

Also doing therapy um to try and see. Okay not just can you sit with IT, not just can you notice, but why is that there? Why is this a pattern that you are seeing more increasingly? So it's kind of hard for me to say um like am I becoming is the proportion of things changing? Because I like each time I move to a different it's like a computer again, I moved to a different garden.

Yeah so so that's that's wonderful. And I think you know being obsessed about emotions, i'm sure not the first obsession you've had, right? So so one day you're going to have to ask, where does the obsession of .

things come from?

The the question. Absolutely right. So that and when you get to that level, by the way, all of your obsessions will fall apart. That's that's the good thing. So I think so for a lot of people, and this is, I think, what we see in therapy, right, is that the negativity comes first and then the positivity comes forward.

And so for a lot of people who, and this is what so hard about internal work is that, see, the reason that there are so much crap underneath the rocks is because our garden has been intended for such a long time. And so the negativity piles up. And I realized this actually very interesting.

Ly, I was I was working with someone who was uh an immigrant and was from an aboriginal kind of tribe. And I realized that in their life, in the Normal humans life, we had so much time for emotional processing. We're going to go out, is hunt or gathers.

We're going to hunt, right? What is there to talk about? You can talk a little bit, but then for hours, you with yourself. And that's how our brains evolved. Our brains evolved with a minimum of external stimulation, which means the default mode of where our attention goes.

Like so much of at eight hours of the day with internal visited, all these road tasks, like turning butter and like turning butter, like, you know, what is, what do you think about when you turn Better? Like, you just so are our brain defaults to so much time for emotional processing? And now what started to happen? As we lose that time, this negativity piles up.

Then as you start to look within yourself, there is a bunch of negativity, which is why we need therapies because most people can't handle that on their own right. We're not trained to do that. And so over time though, I think you're going to find a lot of positivity and you'll find that, that negativity unless you continue to feed IT, IT will start to dissolve.

let's say, to someone who is thinking about starting therapy and wants to do therapy well, do therapy right? Be a good therapy patient, not a, please, the theriere, but get the most out of IT. How do people do well in therapy?

What a beautiful question. And I think this is a question that everyone should learn, uh, are the answer to. So I have a couple of thoughts.

The first is that remember that therapy is a partnership and so we are so conditioned to do well, right? So like if you think about a child from very Young age, there's A, B, C, D and apps. There's in the united states, we have veracity and junior versa.

And we have know the a team and the b team. So we start segregating everybody up, we start measuring people up, and we assign a like you, you, you do right or you do wrong. So therapy isn't about that.

It's a partnership between you and your therapy. So the first thing that I would say concrete piece of advice, one is that if you don't like working with your therapy, work with someone else. So there is a certain amount of, like, idea that, okay, I must not be doing this right, or I need to try harder.

What we know from something called common factors research, which is like we did a bunch of research on theri, because all these different types, right there are psychoanalysis and psycho dynamic and cognisable al therapy, and so people SAT down and world like which one is the best. And what we discovered is that all of its about the same. There are some exceptions to that.

Basically, it's all roughly the same. And the question is like, how could that be? Because psychoanalysis and talking about dreams is so different from mapping out your thoughts, your behaviors in your emotions. And so what we discovered is that what really matters is fit.

So you need to find the right person to be your so I would I recommend to like friends of mine who wanna get therapy, as I say, be prepared to make three appointments. And I even tell them that they get go to make three appointments for three different people, like two weeks apart. And then you can cancel if you really like one, but do the network don't try one.

And then like you know, then start the process of finding the cycles. I say make three appointments, ts up front, two weeks apart. So you have plenty of time to cancel if you want. If you really try me all out and then pick the one that you like the best.

what does that mean?

You will feel a difference. So there are some people where you're gonna to like walk out of the office and you're like, H, I only know if I like enjoying that or like if that was good or that was bad or whatever.

But I I think a lot of people um you know I ve had so many therapy patients walk into my office and like when the hour is up, they don't want to leave, right? And especially for intakes, sometimes I would schedule my intakes at the end of the day and like we'd have like a solid two hours of like let's get into this and then other people kind of come in, they can ask some questions. I do are somewhat of an assessment, and I feels like we're have done at the hour mark.

So I think I think people will feel the difference. So just gravity as well yeah just just in listen to yourself, right? Like, so which one do you like? The best second thing is that if something is not working for you in therapy, make that the therapies responsibility.

So this is where a lot of people will just switch therapies. If you can say to something like if you're like i'm not getting a whole lot out of this or I feel like i'm stock share all of the problems that you see in therapy with your therapy. This where everyone is so sad, but patients are so worried about disappointing therapies, right? And so the best thing that you can do for your therapy and for your therapies, this is say, hey, this is working for me, or this is not working for me.

And sometimes we'll even get to something really beautiful, which is that okay? Like you think this therapy is not working for you, let's examine the cognitive bias. You have been doing this for six months.

Here's where you started. Here's where you are. Now, when you call this progress, why aren't you able to see the progress in your life? Holy shit.

because the moment that you realize something about the .

patient is absolutely right. So often times, solving the problems in therapy that you have with your therapies will be kind of like the best way to accelerate the therapy. Half of the breakthrough that i've had with patients and twenty percent what's percent come from a period of difficulty in therapy and because it's a breeding ground for the .

patterns outside of absolutely right.

So this is where the the concepts of transference and counter transference.

I learned about this .

in my book last week um and and so I would say talk to your therapies to things aren't going well and then I would say the third thing is yeah, I think actually that's the number one. Number two.

I think that's that's the very good yeah yes, I found opening the door a little bit. One of the patterns that I have, his people bleezing specifically, are not upsetting women. Have a big thing about not upsetting women. I see them as something that is psychologically fragile. I must be protected like a professional White night, basically. Yeah um and what that LED to was I was a unprepared to say if things could is a female therapies unprepared to say if there were things during therapy that made me little bit upset or that made me angry or that made me frustrated and you're totally right that I had to and I still am having to overcome the pattern that exists outside of therapy, inside of therapy not about anything in my life but about the therapy of relationship itself yes.

So that's what so cool about a therapy of relationship. So I think the main thing to understand about therapy is it's the one place where you don't have to worry about the consequences of what you say. So it's so it's really a wonderful practice ground for certain things.

I think there are certain things you shouldn't do, and that's the therapy responsibility to like let you know. So if you say things that are abuse of, not respectful or unethical and the therapy should let you know. But you know, i've had patients know yet at me and call me a fucker and like all this kind of stuff and like, right at the end of that, like what to say? Like, okay, like how does that are we done? right?

So like often times that'll come out and i'll be kind of unexpected and it's like, are I cool? So like, you think i'm a fucker, what are we going to do about that? Does that mean you're never coming back or we're onna work through that and and figure that out.

And so I think that IT can be incredibly beneficial and there's just no environment like IT because even when we look at emotional support, I was looking at research today about you know, part of the chAllenge. So men have A A four times increase in risk of suicide after a breakup. yes.

And and so one of the reasons for that is that often times men will rely on their partners for like emotional support. And the chAllenge there is that there is always a dual relationship with your partner because you want to like, lean on them for emotional support, but you also want them to respect you. You want them to love, you want to feel proud of you. The cool thing about a therapy relationship is it's the one place where you don't have to care about what the other person thinks, and that can feel so liberating. And you can examine things that you can't examine anywhere else.

petty things, that sexual .

things, you know, like all kinds of stuff, that we are really, really scared. Like I had some dream where I was having sex with one of my parents and it's like, oh my god, that you can tell that to anyone, right? And therapy is the one place that you can say, like whatever is in you. And hopefully your therapist will treat IT with compassion.

Why does therapy so often suck for men?

So a couple of reasons for this. The first is that I think we have a misunderstanding somewhere along the way. We got the impression that talking about our emotions is the best way to handle them.

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

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

Both have good of exercises. But there are two. I think there's a selection vice because even if you're looking at success and therapy, you're not counting all the people who left.

They didn't go to the erthe .

because talking about emotions do not work for them. There's even a really interesting um paper uh so there's a lot of exploration into this and in one paper actually points out that they're two kinds of therapy that you can give. One is what we call emotionally support of therapy where you talk about your emotions.

And the second is something called instrumental support, which is like problem solving. And what we tend to find is that men prefer problem solving. But if you look at therapy training, we are actively distance and dives to problems solve our patients. We're not there to solve your problems.

So when I was like um A A A second ear psychiatry resident and and I had this sixteen week therapy course where I am learning the basics of therapy and you know one of the teachers came in and was like if a patient walks in and says, can you help me find a girlfriend? What's the right answer and then the right answer is that help me understand why you think you can find one helps me understand why you want one lets talk about IT the answer is not yes right? So so as therapies were not very good as as a whole profession at like helping people solve problems.

And I think especially if you look at man, there's there's a lot of disturbing data on diseases of despair. So between I think like two thousand nine and two thousand eighteen um suicide related diagnoses in people under the age of eighteen went up by two hundred and eighty seven percent. So what's happening right now, especially if you look at male mental health, is we're starting to realize that there's there's another study, for example, that there are couple cities that show that somewhere between thirty seven and sixty six point seven percent of men who commit suicide, some origin, thirty seven and sixty six percent have no history mental ilus.

So we're starting to realize that there is a very troubling signal that we're seeing that people who kill themselves may not be mentally ill. They may actually have a life that they've just mentally checked down on theyve, looked at their situation, they've tried to fix IT and they just have nowhere to go. And we're seeing this especially as we see things like a changes in our economic situation, changes and employment or under employment.

There's a lot of economic forces that are affecting men. And so now the problem is that especially when I work with my male patients, what I see is sometimes when they come in, we'll say, okay, I feel suicide. I've low office team, okay, I dig me to the depression, tell me about your life.

Thirty years old, I have no job. I ve never been in relationship. And so like, what would this person look forward to? right? And so a big part of helping them is not just talking about your problems. A big part is helping them build a life. And that's not something we're trained in as therapies.

Does this require an entire new type of therapy? And is almost, to me, based on what I know about the definitions of therapy. Almost sounds like he gets into some kind of coaching in a way.

Yes, yes. So I I think that that's why coaching has emerged as a field, right? So I think that what started happening at some point is therapists stopped focusing on material outcomes for their patients.

So if you look at how we judge the quality of a therapy, it's the reductions in their depression scores, anxiety scores. What do this is completely reasonable, right? That like makes sense because that's what our job is.

But we certainly don't measure things like promotion or what percentage of people get married and things like that, which is if you really look at like what makes people's lives worth living, it's those kinds of achievements. And even if we look at so they really fascinate anything as if we look at the evidence based methods of therapy for diagnoses. That are predominantly men.

We see more action. So a great example of this is something called motivational interviewing. So if you look at addictions, the majority of people who have addictions are men.

And if we look at what is the best evidence space, that may be not best, but one effective evidence, spaced technic, something called motivated interviewing, which is all about getting people to do shit. It's not about talking about your feelings. It's not we're not gna examine your dreams or things like that.

It's like you have this goal. How can I interview you in a way that increases your motivation and moves to action? So we actually see that where there are some diagnosis that are predominantly men, where that the technology that we use, the therapy of technology that we use is action oriented, is instrumental.

And we talk about emotions and stuff, but the emotions is not the end, is a means. How can we understand how these negative emotions are impacting your actions and preventing you from achieving what you want? So we absolutely see that signal in therapy.

I was talking to adam lin smith, ux psychotherapist, now turn sort of coach attachment expert guy, and he was talking about the way that the male brain, actually, this a sex difference in how IT sort of moves in this lindy emotion between seeing something and then moving toward action. Where's the female? And works in a slide different way.

I know that mrs. Are able to detect male brains and female brains at ten years old with the ninety percent accuracy, which is almost exactly the same as you can detect faces, the sex of faces. So a machine is basically as good as a human when IT comes to looking either just the brain or just the face.

And yeah I I think i'm i'm pretty interested by this is my shiny new toy and i'm trying not to sort of apply IT to everything um but certainly when I compare my time you know maybe between one thousand and fifteen hundred sessions of meditation, maybe five hundred two thousand sessions of network, maybe fifteen hundred days of journal, something like that ish may be two thousand days of journey. Six months of therapy has provided me with insights that I would have never got. I didn't get um at all uh IT identified patterns in me that I just did not have the perspective to be able to see.

IT showed the origins of where particular behaviors and thought loops and assumptions and neurosis about the world where they came from. And IT began to give me a timely that helps me to understand who I am and why I behave the way that I do, not just noticing that behavior or comes up, but you also helped me to do so. Hey, you keep on saying this sort of thing.

This is a term that keeps on being used and the best thing the best thing that he said is pay attention to fleeting thoughts. That's the cool est thing that i've learned um almost I wonder whether people that are very practice meditators you know what you're doing the equimed ity that you're looking for. You notice the thought arrives inside of you see here, feel note IT and IT sort of goes away.

But by doing that you never actually investigate. Okay, where did that come from? Like why did that particular thought that the fifth time I had that thought this morning? And that's A A A rumination I have about myself or whatever. And IT seems to me like um therapy therapy type practices help to hold on to that.

absolutely. So so so many things. I I love everything that you said, Chris.

So let's go through a couple things. One is that going back to why? So therapy is awesome, and you had a good experience.

I am a theriere. I love doing IT. I work with a lot of man and women. Let's understand a couple things.

The first is that, see, when you look at meditation or journal, you're the only one in the room. So if you you just think about the people in your life, right? So how easy is IT for you to know what mistake someone in your life is making?

It's so much easier to see mistakes in someone else. And so the real value of working with another person like a therapies is that they can see your problems way clear than you are, and they have a pile of training to really tease apart with the information that you give them really whats going on. So so IT is not i'm not surprised at all that you've ve had an overwhelmingly positive experience in a short amount of time with therapy.

I also think that other people's mileage may vary because generally speaking, the harder working you are IT introspection, the more mileage you'll get out of therapy. So I think the big irony is that a lot of men who are very independent and focus on journal and meditation and want to improve their own lives, they will get so much benefit out of therapies. Theyve done so much internal work.

And the two really combined, and that's part of the reason why I we'll combine a meditator practice with therapy, because IT enhances the effect size of therapy when I help people train their minds. Second thing is that i'm with you one hundred percent, that there are something so action, orientation and instrumentally improving our lives like that, the reason we built a coaching program. So having worked as a therapy, and I had an awesome mentor who told me about this place called the institute, coaching at mclain hospital and harvard medical school.

And he is like, you should really go checked out because I think this is the kind of work that you do. And I was like, my mind was blown away. And then I realized that what people need right now is not just talking about their feelings.

I think a lot of people need therapy, but that a lot of people don't know how to accomplish their goals. And we were talking a little bit about creators, right? So like we created a creator coaching program, which has had now five hundred coaches go through IT. And what we discovered is that, like teaching them some of these skills and helping them understand why is that that you you know you you can't afford to take a break from content creation, but you're so burn doubt that your content is crap.

And so like they get stuck in these cycles and helping people understand how to actually achieve their goals, which is sort of what what if you look at some of these organizations, like the international coaching federation and stuff like that, it's all about like helping people achieve and accomplish what they want. This is why you have coaches that are employed by like google and and youtube and suffer that everyone is seeing that there's a lot of value to that. The other thing that I kind of want to say, just one more point about gender is that.

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earlier that s gen makes you more aware of your internal emotional state. And so talking about emotions is easier um for women, but potentially because of estrogen. And there are even studies that show that the reason that men are reluctant to go to couples counseling is because they feel out gund. So any time a man.

absolutely.

because your your female, assuming a had an enormous of relationship, your female partner knows how to articulate their emotions, they know what they are feeling, right? I feel, I feel sad. And when this person does this, because that makes me feel unloved.

And then female therapies, seventy percent of the time, is also like this. They can, they both speak the language. It's like .

going on doing.

And and so what IT feels like to men, what one person told me, is when I go to a couples counselling, IT feels like i'm playing basketball, but I have no arms and I can't drop so they can't part in their studies on this which show that mando can't participate in that way in there be yeah I mean.

you know, I wonder how many men the first interaction introduction to therapy is in coupland's counselling. And that would be ruthless, especially, especially if your, this is, are trying to save this thing. Maybe kids may be, does not. I love this woman. I want to make IT work.

And yet the messiness getting used to not bringing sentences into land a needy and not having a great take away, you know, bAiling out of sentences, half I thrown going actually I don't even know what i'm talking about that I don't think that's right. I was about to commit. I mean, you're laughing because presumably this happens in a lot of your other future.

I am laughing because this sounds .

like it's coming from experience to break the foot. Um I have a pattern where I can spend me with you on about you know winston churchill on his first day in office on a ba ba and he did this thing and bring into land with this nice sort of flourish at the end and watch someone's eyes light up and eyes isn't that cool and I get this little cake of dope me i'm like that's podcasts and podcast is doesn't get to come in and try and show off to his therapist about how good of a communicator is about this cool fuckyou story that he found out or whatever whatever and ah it's one of the reasons I was really glad I did IT in person uh and oddly, I do way more podcasts, uh, not on a sound stage in front of a huge video wall. H and not even in person.

I do most move with the internet which means that when I get on a call, I try and bring things into land in pogis mode, need to not be in poca mode, and learning to be messy with sentences, to be a attention to fleet thoughts, to bail out when you realize that you've started a thing. And you were going na say this thing, but actually it's not that true. All of these these skills and and trying to craft a very beautiful sentence in many way, which is something that I love to do much of the time.

What you are doing is sacrificing accuracy for because it's not always the absolute truth of what you're trying to say. Probably doesn't end with a flourish, get nicely boxed up in a bow, poised across the table IT probably does veer off a little bit and use some slightly improved SE language and then IT just sort of arrive a crush lands on the desk of of whoever is you're talking to. That's been a real um allowing myself to be massive with my speech has been a real skill.

Yeah and I think it's so chAllenging because like you said, we're we're not fluent with communicating our emotions and talking about our internal experience. One thing that i've learned as as a therapist is that you know some people think in order to talk and some people talk in order to think and you don't have to make sense the whole job of the therapist is to piece put pieces of the puzzle together for you.

I think the last thing that i'll say though is we're talking about how important talking is, but it's now my belief and there is some interesting data to support this, that this presumption that emotional healing has to come through words I don't think is correct. So I think that that part of what's happened, part of White therapy is not great for men. So as research on things like instrumental support being useful for men, there is research, john, men not being able to dribble on the basketball court.

And there is a couple of other things. So the other thing that, you know, a big fan is like some amount of emotional healing through spirituality. And if you look at some of these spiritual traditions of emotional healing, like there are, there is ritual, there are people like shades or shamans and things like that.

You have some of these like we'll do in the hindu culture, like baja zz, to alleviate curses and things like that. We have all these like religious ritual, which can be very emotionally healing. And there's research that, that stuff works to.

The other really interesting thing is we're looking at we're learning more and more about the physicality of emotion. So there's this one thing called ef t called emotional for freedom technique, which I dismissed as sdu science. About ten years ago, someone I knew sent me an email about IT and he was like, what do you think about? This is called tapping.

And basically, people have been traumatized. People will come in the tap on various parts of their body and release the emotions. I'll be off from us like, this is B S.

Um and and I was like a research assistant, harvard at the time and I was like this sounds absurd. And and like you know, over the last ten years, we've seen some some studies that this appears to be somewhat effective in there. Now a couple of met analysis. Arguably, there are some methodological problems and things like that, that showed that this is effect. So I think we're starting to learn that. And if you look at a lot of this like kind of mental matic experience work that a lot of people are doing, that emotions are so physical and IT may not be that we need to use words like i'm all for proficiency of speech and understand alleviating alex ethie a but i've seen the power of, just like you, physical experiences, especially format.

Do you know conner beton? He does a man talk, uh, also rote man's work, OK men's work, the book, uh, phenomenal guide married to a, uh, also pythias and his therapy informed for man's work. Group coaching really, really good, does huge retreats with thirty guys.

Group work of breath work, all the rest of stuff, both sides, both hemisphere informed. And he was saying something like grieve over dinner on monday, and he had it's it's really, really interesting this whole sort of movement. And well, to me, I I genuinely think I hope this is what we were about talking about on monday.

I think that this is the next frontier, hopefully, for guys to move into. I think that we've kind of gone through the first two phases of the manual here, like first wave manufacture, pick up IT was the game. IT was mystery.

IT was neil strows. IT was nagging and and and like pulling and stuff like that. Second wave was red pill. IT was mike to and in cells and black pill and cocks and soy boys and simps and beat and semma so and so for.

And i'm hoping that we get to some like transcending include version now, which is a much more full stack holistic version of of what masculine ity means because I don't think like no matter what you say, if so much of the advice for men coming out of wherever you say, whether it's like the cocked new york times or the massage, gently tic red pill, the bottom line is that I don't think the men in any of those communities are massively flourishing. And if I was to look at what I was missing, IT was an emotionally informed technique even if somebody that had already done like some of the more, uh, progressive meditation breath work that's pieces like that. So I know i'm really excited about, and this is why I was so fascinated, speak today about IT really, really excited about.

This is being a new frontier to kind of encourage guys. Okay, like how about just for a moment, we think about emotions? How about we think about feelings, feelings? How about we know just what a rises inside of us and opposed to cope with that, or push IT away, we actually spend a little time with that?

Yeah, I think I think I agree one hundred percent h you know there is a couple of things that i'll add. The first is that I think we already so is is man, we kind of figure this out, right? So even within these red pill communities, what do they say if you're having trouble in relationship lift, bro, right? That's the answer. Lift you need to like hit the gym like that's .

where you start that's .

and and yeah and I think part of the reason is I think it's kind of sad. It's almost like I I am hesitant to use this word. But all of the research on red pill ideology is so negative, like I remember doing, like a literature search on IT and like there's a lot of like papers that are published and like feminist to journals and and there is a lot of negativity in red pill.

Don't get me wrong in my sergente and in abuse of women and things like that, i'm not advocating that is good. At the same time, I think that if you look at something that that's really cool, if we we have cultural psychiatry and what we do in cultural psychiatrists, we look at a group of people, and instead of saying pretty n alister ally, we know what works for you based on the science, ask them what works for you and help us understand your culture. And I think if we do that with red pill culture, what will discover is that there is a very physicality that they deal with emotions.

The other thing that i've sort of found with red pill cultures, one hundred percent are people that I have work with who are insults, red pillars, alphaeus ales call, whatever is whatever you want. They have A A pretty severe trauma, usually related to women at some point in their life, and that's when they get off into us. So I think part of the reason that they are so reluctant to do the emotional work is because they're so call est against this.

So you talk to any red piller that'll be some kind of like negative experience with a woman heartbreak. This person took advantage of me, this person to this. This person LED me on there. There is the seed of resentment and hatred towards women. And and then I think it's really sad because once that never gets healed and we already talked about how trauma can shape our memories of the past.

I ve this is always yeah right. And but the .

thing is there's there's such a big cognitive bias in your head. So it's not that all women and then the the other more, more crippling thing that that happens is once you adopt these attitudes of disrespect of women is human being .

self fulfilling profession?

absolutely. So you're like all women just want money. And then in your subconscious or conscious mind, even if you don't say IT out loud, if it's in your subconscious, you are going to create a transactional relationship with people.

And then what will happen is when you approach things transact, I just think you want money, I will trade. I'm going to buy you dinner, and you're going to give me sex. When this is the way that you approach of human being, one of two things will happen.

If the human being is OK with transactional relationships, they'll stay. If they're not OK with transactional relationships, they'll leave. And then what happens is the only people that I end up in relationships with our transactional.

So that absolutely becomes a soulful filling propac's. And once again, Chris, i'm amazed by, you know how good you are, the stuff to you like. I don't know how you figured that shit out, but I did IT by reading a thousand research articles.

But I I got to speak to people that have had a thousand research articles of which which help I I I appreciate that I am fascinated by did I really am um you mentioned that you on about crea burn out some of the chAllenges that people have seen. We've seen a great quitting of youtube over the last six months. I think a lot of high profile youtube is really stepping back. You've been working at the forefront of the team for a long time. What do you make of the great resignation of content creators that happened country recently?

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

Um and and so I I told him something that I didn't quite appreciate, which is that I I haven't had a day off in four years, in half years now. I literally not had a day off, so I will go on vacations. But if you're a content creator, any time you go on a vacation, the uploads need to continue.

So you have to do whatever work needs, like you have to do that. I have to do that work I had a time or or after so you never get a break. That's number one.

Um and that's very different from medicine like so in medicine, when I go on vacation, I sign out my pager. I have someone who covers from my patients. And they literally take care of everything when i'm not there.

So the work gets done in your absence. But once you're a content creator, I think it's one of the few professions where you truly never get a vacation. So I I think there is a lot of chAllenges with content creation.

I think the second reason why people will quit is that I don't know this kind of make sense, but um so the human brain is not designed for the level of toxicity that most content creators experience. So our human brain doesn't think prolifically. So if I have ten thousand comments on a youtube video, very positive.

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

you. So, so there is this weird thing where the way that our brains have evolved make IT very chAllenging and emotionally like dangerous to be a content creator. So there is a very high level of burnout.

Often times, as content creators grow, they feel there's like the sense of like sand and the hour glasses running out where like someone else will come along. There is a gravy train. I like, if I, if I, if you, if you slow down, your as good as dead, right? So it's a growth, growth, growth, growth, growth.

And then you're going to be a husband because the internet has a short attention span. And so people will kind of flag late themselves and continue going. There's all kinds of other problems that arise, which is that as a content creator, at the very beginning, you get to experiment a fair amount, but once you get known for something, you get kind of locked into that and then you can't really experiment anymore because the numbers go down and things like that.

So there's a lot of like psychological problems. Um we work without five hundred content creators and and we actually had a there's a third party organization called stream hatchet that was measuring the outcomes of our program. And they saw a one hundred seventy one percent increase in like subscribe account um without increasing the number of hours worked by a single hour.

So one of the big ironies of content creation is as you become burnt out, IT becomes harder to make good content. And as your content starts to go down, you emotionally become worse. And as you become emotionally worse, IT becomes harder to make good content.

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

So these particular people, like I don't have relationships, I think, with many of them. And even if I did, I won't be able to publicly comment. But I think for a lot of them, it's like it's just hard to keep that going.

It's really hard. And you'll see this even in content creators who don't quit, which is we'll burn out and y'll like take a break for a month or two month or whatever. And then making a comeback is so hard, you which means that people can afford to take breaks. But I I think that there are unseen mental health costs to the content creation industry, which even will work like so we worked with twitch, where we supported like one hundred of their top content creators, and we saw really good outcomes from that. And I think people don't realize how mentally like .

straining IT is. Isn't strange. I think the number one and number two jobs that primary school children want is like influencer ing. Youtube a the the two most popular in the west. And yet from I do not make maybe from the outside IT seems like it's all sort of funny games. And I guess because of the selection effect of what appears on youtube most the time people are breaking the fourth wall about what what the actual experience is like that they going through IT. And then also, it's very easy to criticize, but I champagne problems look at this winning from a chattering class, all of the privilege.

And so and so and certainly there's been people who who have made this point in an indelicate way and stood on a turn of land mines and then trended like fog for IT, I think has now be uh really sort of put foot in IT a couple of weeks ago and like, uh, that's not great. But the sentiment don't in a more delicate manner with a some more emotional vulnerability and openness like, hey, this is how i'm feeling like this is something that's hurting me. Anyone that looks at another human that genuinely saying that this is that they are hurting and has any response other than sympathy for them is a piece of shit. But if you don't put IT across in the right way because optics are everything right, the medium is the message.

yes. So I just think about what what you're saying like so this this is crippling. So the first thing is you're right that IT literally is all funding games.

That's what kids see. They see the literally the content is like funding games and pranks. They don't see people that are like dying from the pranks. And like there are some stupid like as fixation chAllenge or something on tiktok that I I remember.

There are some like medical articles about IT where they were like, I think it's it's bad, but you don't see that, right? So there's a huge selection bias. The second thing is that one of the worst things that you can do to a human being is remove the right to say i'm hurting.

So like we don't let content creators complain. They're not allowed to complain. And so you sort of think about IT like these are the one the slice of human beings like celebrities, content creators, people who are privileged or powerful.

They don't get to complain because we get so infuriated. But this is where I I hate to break IT to all. But at one of the things you learn as a medical doctor is like, i've had rich people.

I've had poor people, i've had billionaire, I had ceos. Have a heads of state flying over from the midday east to come to massage his general hospital for this kind of care and that kind of care like, you know, and like, everyone's got a brain. That brain is roughly the same.

Everyone's got in a middle. And and what so terrifying that people don't understand is that content creators are incredibly isolated, incredibly, incredibly isolated. Even their friends will abandon on them at the first sign of drama.

So you can make friends anytime you are just sharing. Just a simple example. But like once you're a content creator, i'm sure you have had these thoughts.

If someone approaches you in the back of your mind, you're always wondering, okay, is this really about this person getting ahead or they looking to collapse? Do they like me or do they like the face? Yeah right. And you never really know. So it's an incredibly isolated experience.

We do not really allow those people to complain um you know which means that they end up suppressing a lot of this stuff uh and thankfully, like one one of the the things that i'm proud of is that we will talk to content creators. And the reason we built this program is because we were able to have conversations with them where we treat them like human beings. And then the beautiful thing is that you see that these are human beings just like you and me. They're not some mythical creature .

that is equates absolutely right.

And I think all human beings deserve compassion, even the ones that are the most hated. And and that's hard. I've said that was .

definitely something I realized last couple of weeks have been emotionally tty difficult for me, especially when your feeling emotions very closely IT showed me. I was acutely aware of how completely fucking dehumanising most of the other behavior to each other is on the internet.

You know, a good example of this loving my hate IT doesn't matter of Jordan Peterson, a guy who went through hot core benza withdraw for folia and people were like mocking his daughter for trying to help, uh, making jokes like who is this guy to teach us anything when he's addicted to benzo s and opium and all of this stuff and you go you do understand that on the other side of this experiences is someone going through fucking academia and hard call benzo withdrawal at the same time, like he doesn't. You don't need to like his message. You even think that is mesage about thing, but like that's just straight up suffering.

And for someone to look at, you pick anybody else that's been pick someone from the fucking in left to pick someone from like whatever side of the political spectrum you want. Get really highlighted to me because I was feeling my emotions like so in such a romana. So I god, if I was going through this in a more public way, which is one of the reasons that I think keeping your private life private is an incredibly good tactic for anybody that's online.

Going through difficult emotional things is hard. Going through difficult emotional things with a few million people having their opinion IT to IT IT must be fucking impossible. Um and he made me think about the who was the dude that was in um john hill he was in like some story like therapy speak and he say this IT came out last year heisn't some uh Opera story and his entire sort of breakup got exploded onto the internet.

I was like looking by every had an opinion, myself included, as like, hey, hey, hey, this isn't like a plaything. This isn't like this is somebody y's life. This is an experience like a hot call, emotional phenomenon, logical experience that are going through. You don't get to fucking and kick this around .

like it's a football. yeah. So I mean, I I I think I I agree that he just a couple of points. The first is that see, I think that just talking about them or with raw for second.

So I don't think people know how bad artificial i've had patients who have literally jumped out of third floor windows because they're acaai sia, so bad. So for people who don't know, academia is like a sense of restlessness that is so severe that IT can lead to suicide behavior. And most human beings have no reference for how how babies.

Just just imagine an you being uncomfortable, right? Like you want to move, but then any time of us Normal humans move, we feel more comfortable. Just imagine that IT is impossible for you to get comfortable and that that feeling persists forever.

I mean, acap sa is one of the most debilitating side effects that i've ever seen as a psychiatrist. I think the second thing to keep in mind is that you keep on talking about optics, right? So this is what's so terrible about being a content creator.

You don't get to live a Normal life anymore because your life is always under a microscope and everything that you do is judged. I've had patients who are psychotic, and what I mean by psychosis is this is the clinical term. This doesn't mean that they're crazy.

Anything like that psychosis is the presence of delusions or fluctuations or persecutions. I've had patients of persecutor delusions. So what that are illustrations, what that means is that as they walk around and live their life, we, they have the voice of the devil constantly telling them that they are a piece of shit.

And now what we've created for content creators, that's a reality. Like, literally, you go, you post a picture of you eating a toko. And people are like, this is cultural appropriation against mexican people, right in the way that our brain filters this information.

There's no compassion for these people and and this is where, like you mentioned, Jordan Peterson and john a. Hill and stuff like that. And i'm with you like, I think that we should have compassion for all human beings.

Let's give him the benefit of doubt. I think that you can up you can disagree with someone. And even if you think someone is like toxic, like i'm not supporting the work that they do or things like that.

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

I mean, if we look at the if we look at the data, peer support, alcohol is anonymous is the best intervention for overcoming addiction statistically. Now I don't think it's actually the best. But just in terms of numbers, the majority people actually get over without anything.

But so so who is he? He's the one who's lived through IT, right? And why is that? That I get applauded for overcoming in addiction and becoming faculty at harvard medical school.

And this guy is called the hydrant, right? He has experience. And i'm not saying that everything he says is good. The one thing, and I tend not comment about people that I am talk to, but we've had people on stream who have been in jail for murder.

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

Yes, is designed till let you see such a slice of the person we remove. You know I don't know too much about Jordan Peterson, but like, you know, I know and he gives goes and gives talks, right? All like talk for two hours.

And what do we see? We see some sixty second clip and that's what happens. We don't get the actual person.

We get an inflammatory slice of the person without any context. And so I think it's it's brutal on people and I think that's why people quit. And everyone's confused, why wire celebrities like look at people like Michael Jackson, right?

Substance use problems, arguably suicide. Like, I mean, this shit happens all the time. IT happens to musicians.

That happens to celebrities. It's gonna happening more to content creators, thankful fully. They're burning out and quitting.

right? Instead away save fucking life. yeah. I I mean, you know, even if you're not last fifteen minutes, even if you're not a content created, everybody is in one former another. Very few people aren't putting parts of their life on the internet. And to be honest, if it's not your job, if this isn't your day job and you are still choosing to expose yourself to this level of criticism from, again, mostly random people or maybe even friends like that, maybe even worse for you like yeah, your identity isn't wrapped up in IT, but you're still subject to all of the uh, problems and you're electing to just drop yourself into this yeah I mean.

it's so I going back, you know john is hate.

He doesn't and and uh so so .

I I think that's where we we see some of these very clear negative impacts from social media use, which is that yeah everyone is a content creator and so everyone experiences this to some level, right?

So even if I post a picture of myself and IT gets two likes, if I post picture myself tomorrow and gets four likes, I feel really good if I post a picture of myself the next day and I get four likes, then I feel, and constantly moving goal posts, you can never win. And this is what so hard about being a content creator. As you start at one million and a huge celebration, two million is half the celebration and twice the work. And that just gets worse and .

worse and worse. Yeah I have a story about when we hit a thousand subs. I think me in my edit to one out for food, when we hit ten thousand, we did something else as well.

When we had one thousand, we got, uh, helion balloons and we got a cake and we did all the rest of IT. When we hit a million, we got a five, five, five minute phone call and then I went back to to the ground and were about to hit two probably before this even comes out. Ah and I D I don't know whether we got anything planned.

Um so yeah, James Smith has this really good insider. He says all wins feel the same. This point being that the first time you buy yourself your first car maybe even more enjoyable than when you buy your three hundred thousand dollar dream car, yeah.

The first time that you move out of the house and go into a rental apartment maybe Better than when you buy your dream home, that you're going to spend the rest of your life with all wins s feel the same. There is no uber surcharge for you having achieved something that text x worth of that. The point being that just wins are good and that's wins in the therapy room.

That's wins with hitting a meditation street that wins with sticking to your word, having a difficult versac with someone. And I think we'd stripped away because of the comparison game. Anything IT feels a fragile and nazis' stic and shameful to take pleasure in something which isn't grand because so much of our life is performative.

And look at, oh yeah, good workman, like if I can to hurry for waking up on time today is like, no fuckyou. Like this is a thing. I did a thing yeah.

I, I, I agree in a completely. So I I think there a couple of things to keep in mind, as I think IT is important for anyone who has any kind of win to have gratitude, right? So I think that if we look at all wins, feel the same.

The interesting thing is that we control a lot more of how we feel about a win than we realize. And a big part of the work that I do with creators as helping them appreciate, you know you you say that you have nothing planned for two million, which is cool. We didn't have anything planned for two million um and and also like you know the joy that you create in your is partially created by you.

And so for creators, it's like helping them appreciate that they got to two million, which is a lot of win, which they can see because the way that their brain is structure and also it's people who are depressed, twenty five year old gamers who have trouble getting out bad, who feel ashamed of their wins. And that's so devastating. Just think about that, right? If you're someone who's struggling to get out of bed every day, and you get out of bed on the fifth day after struggling, and you are ashamed of your win, how the fuck are you ever gonna do anything?

Now, I mean, did intimately familiar with this. That would be, I, I, I thought, had depression in my twenties. I think IT was chronic, are interpreted sleep from being in the nightlife industry, and may be a disposition toward the low mood and ruminated thought, but I wouldn't leave basically bed, bathroom in the front door to grab b breeds for two days.

At the time, curtains will be drawn. I Spike my blood sugar with the turn of junk food and then fall back to sleep and then wake up. And it's so much shame and guilt around being like, who am I to be defeated by a sensibly nothing whats going wrong, not things going wrong in your life and yet you're still unable to get out of bed. And then when you finally do the shame around what a small thing to do to consider a win, how pitiful are you that this is something that you consider Victorious? Like what is sorry excuse for a human?

So that is, by the way, the shame. Remember, we talked about.

you've got the shame somewhere that there IT is problem.

And and I think that's so crip, that's what I see is so sad is that see the moment that you take your wins and you turn them in the losses and beat yourself up because you should be able to accomplish more bad is the moment that you take the poison in your life, right? Because now, and we see this, so there's research on people with posters sync me.

And one of the key features cognitively of people with imposture sync me is any time they have a win, they attributed to luck or circumstances or effort. And anytime someone else swings, they attributed to hard work. It's like .

inverse fundamental attribution era, if you know what that is. Yes, yes.

And this is it's so crippling and that's why like it's so terrifying that you kind of mention comparison is a huge problems. That's why like a lot of the work that we do is about dissolving your ego. Because ego is what makes comparisons.

If we understand, why do we compare? In order for me to think your tolerance and I am shorter, there has to be me and there has to be a you and and what i'm really an advocate for, and this is where, like, oh, here I am. You are crying on the behalf of people like Jordan Peterson who are so successful or whatever.

And i've seen enough successful people who are strugling on the inside. And I ve also seen enough homeless people who are content. And it's amazing like that's when you really learn about life, is when you work with the spectrum of everybody.

And I think the main thing that we've got to do is I think it's about comparison. Like if you think about what why do you not celebrate your win? It's because you're comparing against another person.

But you can look at some of the work of people like I think Robert a. poleski. He's no neuroscientists.

And he sort of beliefs in biological reduction, uh, determinism and and one thing that i've understood is that everyone has truly unique lives. No one has the same level of genetics. No one has the same IQ.

No one has the same circumstances. I am where I am today because I had so many advantages, so many advantages. And so people will sometimes be like, oh, dr.

Care, exceptional. I don't think i'm that way. I understand that from an objective standpoint, you can make that argument. But I think it's like, you know, I didn't do anything to deserve not being born with cerebral poli. I didn't do anything to deserve having parents that could have paid my bills.

I spent seven years starting to become a monk in like india, in south korea, in japan, and like I had parents who could pay for that, right? And in the majority people don't. So so all of us are just products of our environment.

And I think the more that we recognize that human beings each have their own unique journey and everyone has chAllenges, everyone has advantages, and the more we compare IT doesn't work because we work for this person may not work for you because you have a different brain, you have different circumstances, you have a different life. And so our approach has always been to understand yourself first, don't worry about success from other people and what they did. I think there's a lot of useful lessons to learn from people who've been on your podcasting and a lot of good stuff in there.

But at the end of the day, the whole reason that there's a whole self help industry is because one person doesn't have all the answers, because not all human beings are the same. And so you have to take all of this advice that worked for a thousand different brains and a thousand different lives that are different from yours. You have to translate a tears IT doesn't translate one to one.

Every person has to walk their own individual journey. Do self exploration figure out why you have the thoughts that pop up in the way that you do, right? And I think that's why you you become so successful, because you didn't. I am sure you have learned from lots of other people, but IT looks like what you've really done as take all of this information from people who read a thousand research articles or wrote a thousand research articles and apply them to your life. And that's when things get really good, when you start applying things and looking specifically at your life and recognizing that you are completely unique individual that is never existed in the history of humanity, and that the answer to you advancing your life is not, can we found anywhere else biomes get information, but everything has to be translated down to you.

How can people separate the sense of self work from their accomplishments?

Um I mean, it's a great question. So I i've got two or three different answers. The first is.

See if you can, if you can absolve yourself of your failures, then you can have, you can get rid of the self ford from accomplishments. And that make sense. no.

So see if I fail at something. I'm a crat p person, right? And then if I succeeded at something, i'm a good person.

So both of those have to be separate. This is where a lot of people will focus on one but not the other. So they'll say like in in both ways, right?

So if i'm working with someone who's depressed, they're like i'm trying to help this person not feel depressed because they have failed at something. We're trying to separate the ego from the action. So if you want to separate your accomplishment from yourself worth like, you just have to untie both of those things.

Fundamentally, there are two ways to to do that kind of make sense. Okay, there are two fundamental ways to do this. The first is to recognize, I know that sounds kind of wear, but you are actually accomplish anything, like literally, IT is impossible for you to accomplish anything.

So you can plan to seed, you can water IT, you can do all the right things, but you can't make a plant grow. So as a human being, there is a very fundamental principle that a lot of people don't understand. And I know this, this is so crazy, you cannot. All you can do is the action. You cannot achieve any result.

Give me example.

I can study at harvard medical school. I cannot save a life. IT is not within my power to save a life like I can be the best doctor on the planet, but like I do not.

Nowhere does training give me the power of life over death, or that, like, you just can't do that. And this is where, like another example, I can be the best boyfriend on the planet, on the planet. But I can't make someone follow up with me.

I just can't do IT right. And this where some people will disagree. I really think that if you stop and you do this very simple practice, close size, what can you control us?

My movements.

What else?

My thoughts, sometimes.

What else? My breath. Can you control me?

no.

Can you control who watches this? no. Can you control how many music c gets? no.

Can you control what sponsorships you're gna get or who's going to reach out to you? Can you control the comments in the comments section? Definitely like what the fuck, right? So here we are.

You have a successful video, and you don't control that. All you control in life is what you do. And this is, paradoxically, how you become successful. So IT is the people who focus on the outcome of their actions that gets screwed by IT.

Because understand this, if my, if myself worth is focus is dependent on my outcomes, then even if I achieve what I want, then like often times that people don't feel great even if they live up to their expectations, right? It's like one million, and then I need two, and then I need three, then I need four. If you were relying on accomplishments to determine yourself worth, IT will never be enough, right? As you.

There's always another promotion. There's always there's a hundred thousand dollar car. There's a three hundred thousand dollar car. So if yourself worth is tied to something external, it'll never be enough. This is what we call a move in the goal post.

And it's why human things, like if that were are the case, then anyone who makes one hundred fifty thousand dollars would just be chill. But that's not how IT works. The reason we think that is because we've been conditioned.

We are our self worth. But other people's worth other i'm sorry about other people's judgement of our worth, is dependent on our accomplishments. No one gives a shit about who you are.

They care about what you do. Oh, like you get this award because you got a four point. That's why we get condition to this. So then we adopt their view, but that doesn't work on long term.

So I think separating out and really recognizing that if you stop and think about IT, all you control is like what you feel that is the only thing if you cannot feel that you cannot control and literally show me someone who can control anything outside of themselves. And this is where people will say, and this is, you know, but I can say particular things. I can work harder. Yeah, you can do all that, but you don't actually control what happens. So all you can do is take the right action.

And then, like, you know, I remember red, like I I learned this because one hours in the emergency room and a patient came in with three gung ounds, this person's dying, right? And it's like we're gone to do everything that we can but holy shit, like we don't know this person's going to liver that like just can't do IT and this is like the one of the best hospitals on the planet, right? amazing.

And attending this brilliant trauma surgeon. And like we just can't save this, like we don't know. And think about how advances medicine is.

Think about all these tools we have. We have antibiotics and we have memorized and city scans. And we literally like we can take we can take someone's heart out of their body.

We can give him somebody else's s heart. And we we can replace your heart, we can place your kidneys, but we can't save life there. Maybe grapes is host disease, like you never know. That's the number one. Second thing is just dissolve the ego.

The moment that you dissolve your ego, which is if we look at things like either even studies now of psychiatric, for example, in psychic ox and trauma, and if you look at the studies of people who use psychedelic for the healing of trauma, you can measure, you can predict whether there will be a therapist improvement based on the type of psychedelic experience they have. So if I see cool colors and patterns, I won't be healed. If I have specifically an ego death experience, that's what correlates with healing. So a lot of of this is also what the yokes in the budgets, people, and but the all these people figured out is the more that you dissolve your ego, the more content you will be.

What do you mean? Resolve the ego.

What are you .

person?

What does that mean?

I guess my experience of me as thoughts and identity.

What is identity?

I sense himself a story that I tell myself.

So those are two different things. Which one are you really? So I want to ask, who is Chris Wilson? S, and what would you say?

Person, pakistan. okay. So this is .

where they're certain specific features of the ego. So Chris Williamson is dot dot dot is a factor of your a hum gara ego podcast, man, chat, save or loser, whatever all of those. But the truth of the matter is, scientifically, those are not real things, right? I can't buy up you and find a podcast.

These are abstractions of the mind. Loser, winner. What does that mean? One person has a trophy, one person doesn't have a trophy.

That's what makes them a winner or loser. But what does someone cheats? Is a cheater or winner? No, there are two different things.

But hold on a second, I thought we said winners have trophy, right? To these are all abstractions of the mind. And your first answer was the correct one, which is that you are that which experiences this person's life.

You are a sense of experience that's IT. The rest of IT is like glob on. And if we sort of think about IT, right? So even if we think about the things that we think of is our identity, so a man having an identity is a man can change nowadays.

So i've always been all look sort of, but I wasn't always a doctor, I wasn't always a father, but I was still me. So if you really look at the true essence of what you are, IT is not any attribute that you can put on a piece of paper. IT is you are the bund le of sensory experiences that lives your life, and that's all you are.

The rest of IT can change. The rest of IT is fluctuating. The the rest of IT is an abstraction.

You cannot X, Y someone and find a winner or a loser. That is a judgment by someone else's mind and a judgment by your mind. And this is where I hate to break IT to you.

But a judgment by your mind is not reality. A judgment by somebody else's mind is not reality. If IT was, then people could judge and say, oh, this person's, I judge.

I think this person's a millionaire. E does that put a million dollars in your bank account? fuck.

No, their thoughts. Thoughts are not reality. It's crazy. But we all live in this world where we think thoughts are reality. They're not.

And this is where people will say, but what about what about the the africans? Like, you know what? Where people treat you a certain way that will affect your life.

That stuff is true. There is a reality of how people will treat you, but that doesn't make you who you are. How people treat you is how people treat you.

Does that kind of make sense? Like even the language that we use, there is a difference who you treated a certain way and what you are. And the more that you look at IT, this is where like you can take a shit.

You can be president of the united states, you can be a dictator, you can be hit lu r, you can be an influencer, you can be a child, you can be a bomb. We all take shots. We are all human at the end of the day.

And so there are certain practices like suna is like the the sunscreen word for knoll or zero avoid. There are some practices that you can do in meditation that like you literally dissolve your your sense of identity. And the more that you do IT, it's liberating because if you really think about IT, who is the person that suffers, it's the ego.

So i'm a medical doctor today, which means that if one day someone takes away my medical license, then I will suffer. I will get pride for my medical license, and I buy myself some degree of suffering from losing my medical license the moment that I become A A father. I get some joy in life from that identity.

And I also opened myself up to suffering if my kids ever say hate me or something bad happens or whatever. So we don't realize that if you really pay attention, the majority of people suffering in life comes from their sense of identity because all i'm number one, the moment that you become number one, you open yourself up to becoming number two. And the suffering that goes with IT, right?

So you have to get rid of the pride, and you have to get rid of the shape, get rid of all of IT. And then people like, but then what am I going to do? And this is what I I chAllenge you, Chris.

Think about the best moments in your life. The best moments in your life is when you're, you really need to take a piss. You really need to take a piss.

You really need to take a piss. And then you run into the bathroom and all the journals are occupied and then you're like a shit. And then someone finishes up that, god, you take a piss.

Boss, what difference is that make whether you have one millions subsidies to two millions subscribers with the fuck cares? You needed a year nal. You ve got to take a piss. That pleasure is the same for you.

It's the pleasure of someone who has a homeless person, the pleasure of eating food when you're hungry, the pleasure of walking down the beach with, a pleasure of sitting down and relaxing, the pleasure of being able to close your eyes. Now, some material benefits that come from that. But, and this is really what IT means.

So you have to separate, you have to realize that all you are is that which you can feel. You're just you, the body that's IT. And I mean, you can make all this stuff.

Who knows? Maybe there's A A nuclear fallout or something crazy happens in media hits this. And then, oh my god, all your effort is down the drain.

You can control that. All you can control is what you do. And so then something beautiful happens. This, i've seen this so much with excited. A lot of mental health work for doctors. And what I saw as some doctors tour themselves apart because they attach themselves to the outcomes of their patients. I learned this on pediatric college because in pediatrics on college, you have kids have cancer, and sometimes they die.

And the only way you can sleep at night is not about whether the child lives or dies, because these are highly aggressive, like my omas and lucas and things, I got bad cancers. The only thing way you can sleep at night as if you did the best you can. And so specifically with that person, with a three gunshot woman like that was my moment of, like discovering, like, am I going to sleep at? Could I have done anything else? no. And so then you can sleep a piece because you did everything that you could do in, and you have the power to do.

What if you could have done something else?

That's the beauty of IT. So if you could have done something else, the beautiful thing about ego, and you eliminate ego, you ask yourself that question, and there's no ego that has to protect itself from the answer. So once eliminate, you say, I could have done something else and then you suffer for a moment with the next day when you wake up, you fuck and do Better.

And then the next day you wake up, you fuck and do Better. Next day you wake up, you fuck and do Better. So in my case, IT was failed at a college, went to india, learn this principle.

I woke up is fucking embarrassing. So I was a kid who would graduate with a two point five G. P.

A. When I graduated from medical school. I did not go to the awards ceremony because IT never dawn.

I never looked at my grades because I can give a shit about my grades. I was like, i'm going to learn medicine. I'm going to try to be a doctor.

This is what I can do. I want two words. I even show up because I never done on me that I could have won anything because i'm the loser.

I'm the guy who barely I am a guy who got rejected from one hundred twenty medical schools. And so like, absolutely, if you can do Better, you look at that. But that remember, doing Better is in these hands.

So you should a one hundred percent do that, do everything you came with these hand. So one hundred percent don't shy away from the fact that you could have done Better. And that's how you sleep at night.

But it's not a comment on yourself worth as an individual how you do the things that you do.

Ah so so that's where I mean, I would say that in a weird way that is a comment, right? So if you are unhappy with your actions, then bio means think less of yourself. The beautiful thing is that once you reach the eagles kind of state and you think less of yourself, IT becomes very easy to .

correct that because .

it's control absolutely. But yeah, and I think you should feel some amount of shame and disappointment then you wake up the next day and it's in these hands .

shame and disappointment in your actions, not shame and disappointment in the outcomes.

Both all of the bug.

I think it's I thought you didn't have control over the outcome.

You don't have control of IT, but but you do have control of your actions, right? So so in that what I think it's a little bit tRicky.

but you why people get stuck along at the time they confuse actions and outcomes. Could I have done bad IT? Well, maybe I could.

I could IT more. I would. yeah. So that's what I would say in my experience, as you notice the shortcomings in your behavior, that's what you should correct.

But even if you had done that, it's not clear that the outcome would have changed, right? No one can look at alternative universes and actually collect data. That's what your mind may tell you. That's why I say I still focus on yourself. And if you're not happy with your actions.

by all means correct that compassion, man, compassion for ourselves, compassion for the people. It's so funny. I think for a long time, I wanted the damascus in, urged to be seen as a competent, hard working, achieving sort of guy in a compassion.

Seems like weird and fluff. Y and in fact, in week and you shouldn't really play around with that. But i'm pretty quickly going to believe I think it's like it's a genuine strength and is something that i'm trying to cultivate more for myself and for other people as well.

Yeah and I think there's there's a beautiful wisdom in what you just said. What um so I think he said, I I used to want to be seen if you pay a ten language that's ego. Ego is about the way that you you seen, not about who you are.

And the beautiful thing about compassion is if you think about people who are ego uh or concerned about ego and southworth, their attention is on themselves. How do other people see me? I'm always looking at this and how this will be perceived.

The moment that you focus on compassion, you stop looking at here and you start looking at actually another human being. That's why compassion also eliminates ego. So if you look at all of these religious traditions is super cool because there's psychological neuroscience support for a lot dies like religious and the spiritual traditions.

And why did jesus say, like, do good to other people? In in, in hinduism we have a hisar, and we have that wood dsm, too. So it's all why compassion, because compassion actually eliminate the ego.

Because what is that that makes IT hard for people to be compassionate is because i'm so caught up on this, I can't afford to care about someone else because mine needs are not being my and and when I look at all these people who are adversely judging Jordan Peterson or jonah hill or whoever tailor swift, take your pick me, you. What I tend to fine is that the people who hate other people on the internet often times cannot afford to be compassionate because of something going on in their life. right? Who is that? That is spending the time to just make random toxic comments on the internet.

These are not h many of these people, I don't think, have fulfilling lives. That's been my experience. And I, so compassion is beautiful IT IT dissolving.

You go talk to k ladies and gentlemen, I do. I love your work. I think the more that I get exposed to at this blending of east and west, I think it's it's very much needed. I can see a resurgence and what everyone to call IT like rational spirituality as well, which I think you you're helping to push for d you both to get a new book as well.

So I have a new book is a parenting book up how to raise a healthy gamer. So one of the things that I kind of noticed was um so many the problems of technology that we see today or because our parents were ill equipped to help us understand how to develop healthy relation to .

right turn from generation to generation .

absolutely so we learn about parenting from our parents and so our parents didn't understand how to deal with technology when we were grown up. Um and the other thing that I actually want to take a second to talk about because I think it's more relevant to our discussion today is we have a guide to trauma that's coming out. And I think just this is what we're talking about today.

So I think the one thing to keep in mind is a lot of the concepts that we talk about, or how experienced shape us, how they shape our physiology, how they result in things like a lexie mia. And in our trauma guide, we actually go into a lot of detail about understanding how experiences shape a human being. And the reason i'm talking about IT now is because we talk about emotions, we talk about biology, we talk about identity, we talk about self worth um and and even like this, this whole cross of experience goes dormant, makes emotions, make schemers, make an identity and then controls your actions in your destiny and you feel powerless.

That's what we really dig into people get .

them um hopefully the time this epo de comes out IT will be out. But healthy game or or G G is where they can get that. And it's something that i'm very proud of because I think that really stitches together a lot of east meets west stuff.

Where where where should they go? What else do you want to direct people to youtube?

Um so we have a healthy game or G G youtube channel um and people can find us there.

Did I really appreciate you? Thank you for coming through. thanks.