Hey, it's your friend Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast You know, I've just noticed lately How many of you are writing in and you're saying that you don't?
feel like yourself you're just not as motivated or as energized as you used to be and You know, you're a high performer You know kind of what you need to do or what you want to do But it's like there's just something missing and you can't quite put your finger on it Well, I want you to know I see you
and you're not alone What you're feeling is so common right now and it's not unique to you and there's something you can do about it.
And so I searched high and I searched low to find the Perfect person to come here to our Boston studios and help both you and me because it's really Frustrating to feel like you are a race car that is stuck in neutral That you are trying to hit the gas pedal, but the car is not going anywhere See, I
don't want you to just show up in your life.
I want you to feel like you are actually Living it and that's what our expert is going to teach us to do today.
Dr. K is here and you're going to love Everything he is about to teach you and me about motivation and what dr.
K says is this that right now?
You're probably in a battle with yourself because you don't even understand the way your brain works Well, you and I are gonna change that today.
I cannot wait for what is going to be a profound Masterclass on motivation dopamine and even deeper than that how you can tap back in to that thing that's missing and Start getting where you want to go in your life Hey, it's your friend Mel.
Thank you so much for being here with me today It is always such an honor to spend some time with you and I want to acknowledge you I want to acknowledge you for taking the time and choosing to listen to something that could help you create a better life That is so amazing that you're doing that for yourself
And I just considered an honor that I get to spend this time with you If you are a brand new listener or somebody that you love forwarded you this episode I want to personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family.
I'm Mel Robbins I am on a mission to empower and inspire you with the tools and expert Resources that you need and deserve that are gonna help you create a better life And I am so thrilled to be able to introduce you to dr Alok Kanojia also known as dr.
K and if that name sounds familiar It's because he is now back on the Mel Robbins podcast.
You loved him when he first appeared several months ago Dr.
K is a Harvard trained psychiatrist specializing in modern mental health and the impact that technology is having on your brain and What I love about dr.
K is well, there's a lot of things I love about him I love how he explains these really heady topics and I also love the fact that he is a super impressive and diverse skill set First of all, he did his medical and psychiatric training here in Boston at Harvard And he's also been studying integrative
health and Ayurvedic mental health for over 20 years He's the co -founder of healthy gamer, which is a huge mental health platform and training company They've got over a hundred and seventy -five employees who are dedicated to helping people overcome addictions to technology And they also train clinicians
in dr. K's methodology his YouTube channel healthy gamer GG has over 2 million followers and he's the author of the new book how to raise a healthy gamer Dr.
K is one of the leading authorities online on unlocking motivation Dopamine how to tap back into that get up and go inside of you.
I'm so fired up. He is here.
Dr. K. I'm so Incredibly thrilled that you're here.
Thank you for jumping on a plane.
I'm so excited. Could you tell the person listening?
How their life might change if they take everything that you're about to share with them to heart I think the way that they live life would be very different and I think their outcomes in life would also change immensely so I think the basic thing to keep in mind is that We don't learn how we work.
We have a fundamental educational system that teaches us mathematics history marketing Finance, but no one teaches you.
This is how your mind works.
This is where desires come from This is how you get motivated and we assume that there's no formal education in this But there absolutely is a formal education in this and once we sort of dig into that like what I tend to find with the patients That I work with people who watch my lectures and stuff
like that is we just teach them how they work And once you understand how you work once you understand the buttons of the controller that is you then you can direct Your character in life wherever you want to go.
Dr. K I have been so looking forward to this because I know that you are going to deliver a master class today I mean you're followed by millions of people online your Harvard trained psychiatrist who can help us unlock the secret to motivation and meaning in life You're a really interesting story.
So can you just tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are now?
Sure Yeah, so my parents moved here from India.
I'm the child of immigrants.
I was born in the United States both my parents were doctors so growing up I was supposed to be a doctor and Really didn't have my heart in it.
So I wasn't motivated Basically failed out of college like I had less than a 2 .0 GPA after my first year of college was on academic probation Well, did you just not go to class like a less than a 2 .0 that actually takes some work Yes, I was very addicted to video games Oh played a bunch of games basically
failed out of college would play for 16 18 20 hours a day And then my parents like tried everything so they tried like punishment they tried like being very like supportive and they just didn't know what to do because Even today we don't quite understand how technology affects our brains and it affects
us so profoundly So after about two years My dad said you got to go to India and I went to an ashram which is like a monastery and I stayed there for three Months and decided to become a monk.
I'm at the age of 21.
My teachers told me that I was too young They told me you need to go back to school.
You need to get a doctoral degree and then you can take your vows at 30 I was like, you know I want to give up my life and one of my my teachers was like you don't have anything worth giving up so if you want to become a monk you have to go build something in the world and Then give it up like rise
to the top of your profession Get a doctoral degree at a minimum and then give it up right now.
You're running away.
You're escaping. There's nothing worth giving up they Ended up sending me back So I would travel for about back and forth for about seven years and learn more advanced practices and stuff like that Ended up meeting my wife.
So it turns out my teachers were very wise So the whole monk thing was not gonna work out Decided to go to med school Partially because she wanted to be married to a doctor and my teachers had said you have to get some kind of doctoral degree So I was like, why not medicine that seems like a big commitment
to try to impress somebody that you're dating You know what I mean?
Like I'll go to medical school if you like me Yeah, so, you know, it's it's interesting because that's how it would seem right?
So we all we have all these ideas about you know You shouldn't craft your life based on someone else's preferences and stuff like that But I think it's you know, if you're internally okay with it, I knew I had to get some kind of doctorate degree I'm very interested in how human beings work.
That's what I loved about India So I learned in India is like this is how a human being works from the inside not research but the challenge with scientific research is that it's hard to apply to an individual and What I love about sort of this Eastern perspective on spirituality It's like I mean if I
tell you your desire comes from the nucleus accumbens You can't do anything with I would be like what it comes from the nuclear humma hum.
Exactly, right? So there's some neurotransmitter floating around in your brain, but it's not actionable information.
Yes so what I learned in India was an actionable way to change myself and Then came back graduated with a 2 .5 GPA after like five and a half years of undergrad Okay, and then it took me about three years to get into med school.
I got rejected from 120 med schools 120 med schools you applied to over over the course of three years.
Yeah, like 40 year Wow, and you kept going though Yes, so that's speaking of motivation, right?
So I think when your motivation comes from the right place You are impervious to the circumstances around you affecting your motivation.
Oh Whoa, okay. I know we're gonna dig deep into that.
But I want to make sure is you're listening to dr.
K You really just got what he just said when the motivation comes from the right place You're impervious to all the external things that are going on.
Absolutely 100 % So ended up, you know getting rejected a lot after two years of applying to med school and not getting in people in my family We're like, hey, maybe you should think about something else like your GPA is set in stone, right?
Ended up getting into med school went to Tufts from med school and then also had decided to do psychiatry So originally I was going to do like holistic cancer treatment So I had studied a lot of Indian medicine in India and alternative medicine yoga meditation all that good stuff but did psychiatry because my
favorite organ was the mind and Really noticed a lack in the West of our understanding of the mind because we do things based on population based studies, right?
So we can say Motivation comes from this part of the brain.
But as a human being how do you take that fact and apply it to your life?
That is what was missing in the field for me.
Yeah ended up Doing my psychiatry training at Harvard down the street at Mass General Hospital and McLean Hospital was an awesome experience And then a couple years in I had a pretty large group of people coming to me wanting like holistic mental health treatment, so how can I Conquer this depression or anxiety
or narcissism or sociopathy Worked with a lot of CEOs and in kind of high performers and like finance and places like that And then I realized that there's like no shortage of people Trying to help this group of people right people who can pay a lot of money for like really high quality Support and to
really unlock their potential or maximize their potential or whatever But there were a bunch of people who no one was helping and those are the degenerate gamers These are like the 22 year olds who finish college and never get a job These are people who drop out of college These are people who are 25
years old living in their parents basement and like no one's helping them They can't pay anything so I started streaming on Twitch and doing mental health content on Twitch and Was stunned when we became the fastest growing stream on Twitch for a period of about three months Wow So for the person listening
who does not know what Twitch is Could you kind of explain what you mean when you're giving mental health content on Twitch?
Yes, so Twitch is a live streaming platform that usually streams games So what I noticed is that in my office, I was having gamers come in and I was like teaching them certain concepts I wasn't actually doing therapy.
I was like, here's how your mind works Here's the effect of dopamine on your brain and your motivation and things like that And so I just had the same conversation over and over and over again So what I started doing was streaming conversations on Twitch So I would talk to people and I would start teaching
some of these principles Almost like a podcast where I just like some random person would call in and I do like Q &A or they'd be like, you know I struggle with motivation.
I'd say okay, like let's understand the neuroscience of motivation So we kind of dig into that and what I really discovered is that if you look at like people today, right?
So we're being so shaped by our environment other people decide what kind of thoughts we have So we're seeing, you know companies get better at advertising.
We're seeing short -form content Other people are shaping your views about yourself.
They're shaping what you think will make you happy in life So we're bombarded with all of these images of what it means to be happy, right?
Then what happens is there's a deficit so our brain notices.
Oh, look at all those happy people over there I am NOT doing those things and I am unhappy and then they try to sell you something There's a lot of very like intentional shaping of people's unhappiness and then selling people solutions So as all of these kinds of effects are going on, we don't know
how to fight against that It's so true and we'll say like, okay, just cut back on technology use but it's become a part of our work It's how you keep track of like I get emails from my kids music teacher to tell them classes cancel So you have to stay plugged in and so we're not equipped with the tools
to fight against this external environment shaping us That makes a lot of sense.
And so it's almost as if there are two pieces that we need to really dig into and the first one is the Internal and really understanding you go to school and you learned all of these subjects But you don't learn how a human being or how you operate from the inside out And so I think we're all scared
of the way that our environment and tech is shaping us and where I want to start Especially given the number of people that are following you online and the kind of advice that you're giving on YouTube I mean millions and millions of people dr.
K. What are we getting wrong about motivation so much?
So in the West what we call motivation, there is no motivation center of the brain Motivation is an internal drive that comes from emotions comes from what you should be doing comes from issues of like ego and identity Comes from issues of comparison, right?
So there's so many different things that motivate us So this is the first thing is that motivation is not a thing.
It is lots of different things the biggest mistake we make with motivation is that we try to increase it and I know that sounds weird, but let's understand what motivation is.
So let's say you're motivated to do something.
Is it easy for you?
Yes, that's a problem.
That's not a solution.
It's a problem Why is it a problem if something's easy for me because you are not in control?
So if you feel motivated you're trying to make your life easy instead of being in control of yourself So an alternate solution is imagine if you could act independent of motivation Even if you didn't feel like it is everyone's trying to increase their motivation because we're so burnt out all the time
We don't have the energy for it.
I'm looking to make it easy for myself When my body my brain and my mind are sending us signals don't do this I don't feel like doing this and we're ignoring that and so then what we try to do is we try to create Situations that make it easy for us to act but this creates a fundamental flaw How so because if the situation changes
and your motivation changes then you're screwed So you're basically saying just take the simple thing of getting out of bed in the morning The second the alarm rings most of us have some sort of emotion that we feel About the act of simply getting out of bed something we've done thousands of times in our
lifetime We know how to do it is relatively simple set of actions to roll out of bed and stand up and start your day but we so many of us are relying on this feeling of motivation which is I guess the way that I would describe it is this emotion of wanting to do something and Feeling like it's going
to be easy And if that feeling is there magically in the morning, I get out of bed, but if it's not I Don't take the action.
So is that a good example?
So let's like play that tape through right?
So that means that if the motivation isn't there Yes, the first thing that happens your alarm rings Yeah, and then your cognitive willpower starts to drain because you already have to overcome something.
Yes, right So you start waking up and getting out of the bed tired.
Yes, because you don't feel motivated Correct if you think about it What that means is that what I want to do controls my life because those are the things that I do So now the question becomes what's better for you to be in control of your wants or for your wants to be in control of you I think I just
got something So you were addicted to video gaming.
It's what caused you to fail out of college It's also in many ways what drove you and inspired you To speak to all of us about the brain and about understanding your internal drivers and yourself And if you look at it in the negative all addiction Begins with wanting to do something and allowing your
wants to be in complete control.
I want to eat that thing I want to drink that thing.
I want to play that video game I want to just have sex with somebody that I don't even know I want to ignore that obligation I want to do this and so when you start to live a life Where your wants and your desires in the moment are controlling what you do and what you don't do You're out of control.
Is that what you're saying?
100 not only are you out of control you'll be unhappy So first thing is if we look at addiction We know that there are uniform pathways of addiction in the brain and all addictions do two things One is they give us pleasure and the second is that they take away pain and this is true of opiates heroin and social
media video games They activate this part of our brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is where our dopamine reinforcement circuitry is that gives us pleasure When we get something and it also gives us craving So if you think about like eating a cookie, it's delicious Let me have another one.
The second thing that all addictions do is they suppress our negative emotional circuitry So if you look at eating a cookie if i'm having a bad day and I eat a cookie I feel a little bit better.
I'm feeling burnt out.
I'm feeling tired. Let me hop on my phone Let me browse social media for a little while and it pushes the tiredness away For a time, but when you get off of your phone, or do you feel energized?
Do you feel like now it's time to like now?
I have the energy to go and cook a meal and go take care of this stuff and send an email to my boss No, all you're doing is delaying your tiredness Dr k my head is spinning because as i'm listening to you I'm not only learning about what I need to do, but there are about five people that come to mind
immediately That I want to share this episode with like right now And so let's take a quick break so we can hear a word from our amazing sponsors because of their support We can give you dr k at zero cost and all this life -changing information And please take a minute and share this share this with your
kids share this with your partner Share this with family members because we all need to understand this and we need to know what to do about it And don't go anywhere
