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50% of people under the age of 30 still live with their parents.
70% of people in their 20s are going through something called a quarter life crisis.
He's a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who specializes in modern mental health.
Meet Dr. K, the man behind Healthy Gamer and the voice helping millions navigate the digital world.
What does someone do with the feeling of feeling being left behind?
People who feel like they're not enough.
That feeling comes from trying to make other people happy and failing.
Humans need to grow.
We need to pursue something.
We need to move in a certain direction to stay alive.
True or false?
Chasing growth is not the same as growing.
A lot of people get focused on doing, but they don't pay attention to what's happening.
What does it even mean to be a man right now?
A lot of masculinity right now is men trying to become as manly as possible in the alpha sense.
And that doesn't translate over into happiness, and that doesn't work.
When you look at people who are growing up right now, people in their 20s and 30s, why is it that they're confused lonely hurt, when externally, everything seems to look okay?
Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier and more healed.
I'm so grateful because today's guest is someone that I've been really, really looking forward to talking to.
I've watched a ton of his interviews, watched a ton of his videos.
He's got millions and millions of subscribers, millions and millions of views online.
He's the author of How to Raise a Healthy Gamer.
If you haven't got a copy of the book, make sure you grab one after today's conversation.
I'm talking about the one, the only, Dr. K. Dr. K, it is great. to have you on On Purpose.
I've genuinely looked forward to this.
I find your reflections to be poignant, powerful, direct.
There's no BS.
And you're so well-informed and well-studied in research that it's pretty hard to debate and argue with you in a good way.
So thank you so much for all the work you've done.
I mean, thank you so much for having me.
I similarly really appreciate the work that you do.
I'm so curious about you, actually, because I see a lot of the work that you do.
And I think it was your first book.
And so I think we may have a little bit of a shared history, which I'm super curious about.
But I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and would love to support the mission of your podcast.
Oh, well, thank you so much.
And yeah, we should definitely dive into that.
I'd love to learn.
Tell me about some of the shared history that you know.
So I understand that you grew up – I don't know if you grew up or you have some sort of spiritual training or you grew up with spiritual training.
I'm really curious about how you made the decision to walk away from that and sort of where – what kind of spiritual tradition you come from.
Yeah, of course.
I see the way that you embody some of these concepts and it's sort of – it's baked into the – assumptions that you have when you approach the world, even just meeting you, and some of the stuff that we just did.
You know, I think you live some of this stuff.
But I'm super curious about you.
Know how you got to be where you are?
Okay.
Well, we'll get into it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll get into it.
Yeah.
But yeah, I think the place I wanted to start with you is.
I find it so fascinating that you focus so much on young people and young men in general.
And I feel that when you look at people who are growing up right now, when you look at people in their twenties and thirties, why is it that they're secretly confused lonely hurt, when externally everything seems to look okay?
So a lot of the people that I work with, I think externally things don't look okay.
I think that was more true a few years ago.
I think now we're starting to become more and more aware that things are even externally not okay.
But I'm totally with you.
I think you know I was just reading a paper about this guy named Eric Erickson who sort of talks about the stages that we go through in life.
He was a psychologist or psychiatrist.
And so he said that a lot of people are going through something called a noiseless crisis, right?
Explain that to me, yeah.
A lot of people that you look at are going through a crisis that you will never see.
So we're sort of familiar with this idea of a midlife crisis.
This is when men like me and you, we maybe hit our 40s, maybe hit our 50s.
We're maybe paying a mortgage.
We don't get to do what we want.
We'll maybe dye our hair, buy a convertible, and start driving really fast.
Yeah.
But what I think is happening way more – and there was an interesting study on LinkedIn that found that 70 of people in their 20s are going through something called a quarter-life crisis.
So this is a time when you're sort of like – you sort of took all the right steps.
You did what you should do, but you wake up one day and you realize this is not the life that I want.
So I think we're seeing a ton of that.
And I think that one of the main reasons for that is that the answers that the generation before gave us used to work.
So like when I was growing up, my parents were like super like, oh, look, you have to be a doctor.
And then this sort of idea of going to college, getting educated, you'll get a good job, and then you'll be able to buy a house and happily ever after, kind of stuff.
But I think that formula doesn't work anymore.
I think our institutions have started to fail us, not in a negative way.
But I think if you look at the way that psychiatry develops, you know we'll do research for 20 or 30 years before we figure something out.
And there's still studies being published on Facebook today.
And I don't mean meta.
I mean Facebook.
So this was a trial that started like eight years ago that they're like publishing the results now.
So the rate of change in the world is rapidly increasing.
And we don't really know how to deal with it.
And young people are getting absolutely crushed.
And is that affecting, are you saying it's affecting our identity?
Like you said, before there was almost a path that was laid out.
Yep.
And so you had these milestones effectively.
I go to college, I graduate, I'll get married at a certain age.
I'll buy a house at a certain age.
I'll retire at a certain age.
There were these milestones that were laid out for you.
And now, whether you go to college or not, There's basically no milestones, because the goals have changed, the targets have changed.
Yeah, so I don't even know if I think the targets have changed, but I think the bigger problem is the targets aren't meetable anymore.
So, just as a simple example, when I went to college it cost about 5000, a semester 6000 I think.
So, you know, college cost, it took me five and a half years to graduate.
So it cost me somewhere around $30,000 to get an undergraduate degree.
I mean, that's the cost of one year now.
So costs are increasing a lot.
They're like 50% of people under the age of 30 still live with their parents.
So if you sort of think about how does that cascade.
Say that again.
50% of people under the age of 30 who are adults still live with their parents.
Oh, I didn't know that.
In the United States?
In the US.
That feels like India.
And it's an economic thing, because it used to be that you can like, I mean, think about you know, we're here in New York like rents are crazy.
Like you can pay like $3,000 for like a closet, you know?
So now it's just not, people are finishing college.
They have a ton of debt.
There's inflation.
People are not able to get jobs.
And then if you think about the cascading effect, if I want a date, And I'm like a 27-year-old dude.
And then if the date goes well, it's like, do you want to come back to my place?
And then we go back to my place and my ba is there.
And then it's kind of like, you can't really do that.
So we're seeing sort of this epidemic of loneliness.
We're seeing this dating and mating crisis amongst men and women.
And a lot of young men are struggling.
A lot of young women are struggling too.
And so I think the world that we lived in has changed and we need new answers.
We need new paths to navigate this world.
Yeah, I love what you said about how the targets are just unmeetable.
Yeah.
Because that's why people feel behind.
It's why they feel late.
It's why they feel they'll never get there.
Now we're all using ChatGPT, but a couple of years ago, when I was writing my second book, I started it off by talking about how, if you type in on Google, The first thing when you type in, will I ever, which is obviously a question about your future and possibility the first thing that comes up is will I ever find love?
Wow.
And the second thing that comes up is, will I ever be enough?
Wow.
Those are the top two questions.
Wow.
And when you look at that and you think wow, love and self-worth they are right up there as the top two most Googled things at that time.
Now on ChatGPT, I'm sure we'll get so much more data But I love what you said about unmet needs.
What does someone do with the feeling of feeling late, of feeling behind, of feeling being left behind?
So this is why I was excited to come here today.
Because you didn't ask me why. you asked, what does someone do, right?
And I think that's what sort of exemplifies what I appreciate about you is that you're always focused on what to do, not necessarily why things happen.
So I think if you have that feeling, There are a couple of important things to do.
The first is that that feeling has to do with your sense of identity.
So where do you get these expectations?
Who do you think you are?
And I don't mean that, it sounds so bad, but like really, who do you think you are?
How do you understand who you are?
And this is what we see in people who have a quarter-life crisis is that they are too busy with identification that they don't understand identity.
Now, I know that's kind of confusing, but if we think about identification, what does that mean?
That means that I'm going to look outside of me and I'm going to find a group of people and I'm going to say my identity –.
It's like I'm one of these people now, right?
Like I'm a goth kid or I'm super into football or I'm a gamer, right?
Or I'm an incel.
Like there are all kinds of ways that we can identify.
We can identify with a political party.
But identification and identity are two different things.
And I think that when people feel like they are behind, they have this expectation.
They're looking outside and they're saying, this is what I should be.
But their information about who they are comes from what they see outside of them.
And the most important thing that you can do, I know it sounds kind of generic, is to look within.
And I mean, really think about, you know, how do I feel about myself?
What do I want in life?
I oftentimes find that people who feel like they're not enough, that feeling comes from trying to make other people happy and failing.
So if my parents want me to be a doctor and I don't go to medical school, which is what happened in my case, then you've let them down.
And we get so much – our core sense of identity, the way we're socialized, usually comes from people outside of us.
So there's a lot of research on things like attachment theory, where a child knows what they feel based on reflection from people around them.
And my favorite example of this is like I remember when I had a two-year-old daughter and she was like running around and then she would fall.
And then, in a moment, what she would do is look around And if everyone else is like oh my God, are you okay?
She'd start crying.
But if everyone is laughing, she'd get up and start laughing too.
So we learn so much about ourselves from the people around us.
I think the problem is that the expectations that everyone places on us are no longer meetable in the same way.
So what you really need to do is ask yourself, who am I living for?
What do I want?
What are the expectations that I've internalized that form my value?
And then I also tend to use a lot of meditation practices.
So I really like, for people who have identity problems, people who have narcissism or low self-esteem, I'll do a certain kind of meditation practice called shunya, which is – shunya means void or nothingness.
And so they sort of – you cultivate this experience of like complete emptiness.
And when you cultivate that experience of emptiness, there's a part of your brain called the default mode network.
And this is the part of your brain that thinks about you.
So like, you know, your brain thinks about all kinds of things.
I'm paying attention to you.
But sometimes when we reflect on ourselves, what do I think of myself?
The really interesting thing is that the default mode network, the self-reflective capability is hyperactive when you're very depressed.
So when people are super depressed, what are they thinking about?
A lot of people think that they're thinking about how the world is falling apart.
They're really thinking about themselves.
I'm a loser.
I'm pathetic.
I've had patients who will come in and say, my family would be better off without me.
I'm hurting my kids by existing, so I'm going to kill myself.
They think so negatively, and you can't get them to stop.
Right.
And so the interesting thing is as we treat depression, the default mode network deactivates.
As you do meditations – and I think Shunya is a specific meditation that I suspect activates this pretty quickly – you stop thinking about yourself.
And when you stop sort of hyper-focusing –
Then I know it's kind of paradoxical, but when we think about ourselves, what we're really doing is we're internalizing expectations.
Then you start getting data from within.
That's not the same as thinking about yourself.
It is actually paying attention to yourself.
And then you start to get these internal signals and you get some amount of quietness, some amount of stillness, some amount of groundedness.
And then people start to move in the right direction.
They start to feel better.
Talk to me about that difference between paying attention to yourself and thinking about yourself.
What are the different thoughts and emotions and feelings that are connected to each?
Ah, beautiful.
So thoughts, emotions, and feelings are all thinking about yourself.
When I think about myself, I'm literally having thoughts.
Alok is good.
Alok is bad.
Alok is beautiful.
Alok is ugly.
That's all thinking about yourself. getting information from within is not thinking about, right?
So if I think about something, I am over here and the thing is over there.
So the object of what I'm thinking about happens to be me, but the thinking is happening over here.
I am using my mind to think about myself.
So it's kind of like if you look at your reflection in a mirror, you don't see yourself.
You are seeing a reflection of yourself.
What you're really seeing is a mirror, right?
So What?
I think people and people get stuck in this right because they're thinking about themselves a lot.
Instead, what they need to do is pay attention to themselves.
Now, paying attention means observing, not thinking.
Just watch.
And something really interesting happens.
So I work with some patients who have schizophrenia and they become psychotic.
And it's really interesting.
So when I was back at Harvard, I was trying to develop meditation protocols for particular mental illnesses.
So if you suffer from depression, what kind of meditation do you do and anxiety and stuff?
And I turned that all into a guide.
But when I have patients with psychosis –
So these are people who are having hallucinations and delusions.
And what I would really focus on with them is they would get so caught up in it, right?
And in psychiatry, we try to make the hallucinations go away.
That's a good treatment.
That can be a very good treatment.
But the other thing that I would add to medications and things like that is – let's learn how to just watch it without getting pulled into it.
If they're there, like, so what, right?
Can you just continue to focus on this?
Can you shift your attention away from it?
So simply observing gives us distance.
So there are other patients that I have that will get so caught up in something.
And maybe you know your listeners have situations where, like someone gets dumped and then your friend comes to you.
They're like, oh my God, like my life is over.
My life is over.
No, like take a step back, like get some perspective, right?
So as we observe things, the bite comes out of it.
We start to gain a little bit of distance from it.
And so you can just witness, okay, I'm feeling anxious today, right?
So this is very different if I say my life is falling apart, versus saying there's a part of me that feels like my life is falling apart.
That doesn't make it true.
Thoughts aren't facts, right?
So that observation is a little bit different.
It's actually a skill used as a different part of the brain.
And as people start doing that, they get some distance, they get some perspective.
And the really interesting thing is when that part of the brain activates, it's like your anterior cingulate cortex.
The part of your brain that experiences emotion, like your amygdala.
This is like your threat center, your survival center that actually starts to calm down.
So people will literally, as you turn this part of the brain on, this other part of the brain will naturally turn off.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's almost like thinking has an element of you attaching your story and prediction and projection onto yourself and observing is just watching the story.
It's almost like there's not even a story, actually.
You're just watching.
You're just seeing.
It's a beautiful way to put it.
Yeah.
So you're right that your mind attaches a lot of stuff.
And this is why I'm curious about your background.
But in Sanskrit and in the Eastern spiritual traditions we have this concept of detachment or vairagya.
And what we sort of notice is if you really think about what the source of your suffering is –
There can be pain, but usually what really messes people up are the implications of what happens right.
Oh, if this person doesn't return my text within the hour, what does that mean?
That means they don't like me.
That means they think they're better than me.
That means there are more important people.
We attach all kinds of things and it happens really rapidly.
It happens subconsciously.
That's really where our suffering comes from.
Yeah, well said.
Yeah, the Buddha called it the second arrow.
Like the first arrow, it hurts, it stings.
And then the second arrow is the meaning, the story, the implication that you have not even checked.
You've not fact-checked, you've not observed, and there it is.
Yeah, so I'm glad you brought up that example because I was reading that text recently.
I didn't realize.
I think so we talk about the second arrow a lot in psychiatry, which is this concept that life sends you the first arrow.
You can't control whether you get dumped or not.
But it is the implication that you attach, right?
So if I get dumped, that's a fact that there's some amount of pain, some amount of grief.
But then you start to tell yourself, I'm a loser.
I'm not good enough.
I'm not good enough.
I'll always be alone.
Those kinds of thoughts are what you add to the equation.
The really fascinating thing about how to stop doing that.
So this is, I was blown away.
I recently read, I realized I'd never like actually looked at the teachings of the Buddha.
Yeah. what I had done is everyone talks about the teachings of the Buddha, right?
But it's like other people talking about the Buddha.
Commentaries.
Yeah.
So what I didn't realize is the Buddha actually says the second arrow.
So we, in psychiatry, we talk about, this is how you avoid pain and negative emotions.
The Buddha says that the problem with the second arrow is also your positive emotions.
He says, you should stop attaching that to your positive emotions as well.
Yes.
So when something good happens to your life, we get excited about it.
He says, don't do that.
Hmm.
So if you get a promotion, that means I'm gonna do this, and that means I'm gonna do this, and that means I'm gonna do this.
Stop doing all that.
Promotion is, that's all it is.
It has no implications.
And the really fascinating thing is, this is why it's so hard for people.
Everyone wants the associations of the good stuff, but nobody wants to give up the associations of the bad stuff.
That's not how the brain works.
If you wanna decouple those two things, Take something in your life that is good and look at why you're excited about it and then let go of that excitement.
It happened.
That's it.
Observe it.
It's in the past.
It doesn't mean anything about your future.
And if you train yourself on both sides of that coin, then your mastery will increase way more quickly.
Yeah, absolutely.
As you know as well, it's the definition of equanimity in the Gita, of that idea that one's not disturbed by happiness or distress.
And that's a really interesting use of words.
It's like, how could you ever be disturbed by happiness?
But that's how you are, because you created so much additional meaning which now, when it didn't happen, the promotion didn't even make you happy anymore.
Because you believe the promotion was your right towards happiness some bigger, greater thing.
And now you can't even experience the joy of that moment.
Absolutely.
And that's what I see.
I have kind of like a couple different buckets of patients.
And the interesting thing is, I have people who are like 29 years old living at home in their mom's basement playing video games and watching pornography all day.
And then I also have like executives and CEOs and startup founders.
And they do exactly that.
They attach a lot of things to their happiness.
So they end up moving the goalposts.
One promotion isn't enough.
Now I need another one.
Now I need another one.
Now I need another one.
And it's beautiful the quote from the Gita that you said, because I think what does it mean to be disturbed by happiness?
Literally the way that I try to work with these people is a disturbance is anything that creates a change in your mind.
So your natural state is to be still.
Think about when you watch a sunset, you know, or you're just like completely peaceful, like you're just there with yourself.
And even when you get a promotion, that creates a disturbance.
And the moment that you create a disturbance, you're no longer still, you're no longer at peace, and you may be signing yourself up for future disappointment.
What I'm really intrigued by is how do you kind of factor that thought in with growth?
Because it's almost like humans need to grow.
We need to pursue something.
We need to move in a certain direction to stay alive.
True or false?
I think that's the most common way.
Right.
So what's a healthier way or what would be the better way?
Healthier or better is a tricky language.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So what's... So I think that... So this is really confusing.
I'm glad you asked this because I think chasing growth is not the same as growing.
Mm-hmm.
A lot of people get focused on doing, but they don't pay attention to what's happening.
So I see this all the time in patients with addiction, where they're doing something like a substance or pornography or something like that, but they're not really paying attention to how does pornography or the substance rewire my brain?
If I crush up opiates and snort them right now, What am I signing myself up for tomorrow?
What is the human I am creating?
What is the life I will inherit if I take this action today?
And the interesting thing there is, once you start paying attention to that, it's not really about growing.
It's not about getting anywhere.
It's just what do I want to inherit tomorrow?
That's a great way, I think, to think about it, right?
Think like actually super short term.
So I think wanting growth, ambition, goals, growth.
These are wonderful motivators, but they won't bring you happiness, right?
So you can get satisfaction of the ego through achievement, but then you've done something really sneaky, which is that you've made the lever of satisfaction in your life gratification of the ego.
So I want to chase this.
I want to get promoted.
But that's really tricky.
Like sure, you can get promoted and you can feel really good, but now you are training your brain To feel good when you get something.
And so this is something that no amount of promotions will ever be enough.
It's less about what's happening and who you're becoming and what you're inheriting, and more about what you're doing.
And that's why we get addicted to doing.
Yeah, absolutely.
So we get addicted to doing because we want our internal state to change.
Yeah.
Right?
So if I'm like, if I'm not happy, if I do something about it, then my circumstances will change.
If I get her flowers one more time, she'll say yes when I ask her out on a date.
But what we're really doing is we're putting the control of our life.
We're putting our internal happiness or contentment based on how the world responds to me.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So I'm not saying that you shouldn't act, which a lot of people will say like should you not act?
Which actually, if you do this right, will be where you end up.
And that's what happened to the Buddha, right?
So he said like I'm going to walk this spiritual path, walked away from his wife, walked away from his son.
And so I think that there is a certain part of this path that is not – conducive to life that you will start to change so much.
You will start to stop caring so much about the things that everyone around you cares that it can become really difficult.
Yeah, and that's what I was going to say that even if we go back to the simple idea at the beginning, where you said, if you know who you are, you can start to choose your own values, almost your own metrics, your own milestones that aren't based on your parents society, the things around you.
But the challenge with that is you're fighting against decades and decades of wiring.
That is encouraging you to move at these milestones, to move at this pace, to be married by this age, to have kids by this age.
And so it's such a struggle.
Sometimes it can feel because you're like, wait a minute, I'm trying to follow my, whatever it is.
But over here there's this chart that feels like it's ranking me constantly.
That doesn't just disappear.
How do we hold on to our values and a new vision in a world that has a very clear script you should follow.
So it's a great question.
I guess this is where I'd like to just share my experience, which is really weird.
So I think that I got to where I am by making a series of terrible decisions.
And I strongly encourage everybody else to consider doing the same.
So I spent seven years studying to become a monk and then decided to walk away from that, right?
So this is like abandoning this path that I spent so much time putting into.
Decided that I fell in love and the whole – met my wife and was not super interested in brahmacharya celibacy.
And so did that and then ended up going to medical school.
Towards the end of medical school I was going to do holistic oncology and do like evidence-based complementary alternative medicine for cancer treatment.
My dad was a cancer doctor.
So I was like – I learned all this stuff in India and I was like let's cure cancer with like herbs and yoga and meditation.
Right. and chemotherapy.
And then towards the end of it, I fell in love with psychiatry.
And even my family was like actually super against it.
They're like, this is crazy.
Like my mom, who's a doctor, was like you're going to go crazy if you spend time with crazy people all the time, right?
Why don't you like be a real doctor?
Like do cardiology.
Wife was watching Grey's Anatomy.
She wanted me to be a neurosurgeon.
I was like, same organ, but maybe in a different way.
And so I sort of walked away.
I'd done a bunch of research and things like that.
And so I sort of walked away from that path and, like at the 11th hour, sort of tried to apply for psychiatry, ended up getting lucky.
And then I wound up at Harvard and I was like faculty at Harvard Medical School and was, like you know, working on these meditation protocols and stuff like that.
And then I kind of started streaming one day talking to like broke gamers on the internet because I realized like no one's really helping them.
And so like walked away from like that academic career, And then the weird thing is like that sort of picked up in a weird way.
So I think that what a lot of people don't realize is that.
So here I am.
You're kind of saying okay, so how do I?
The world wants me to be this.
This is what I want to be.
And there's a fundamental mismatch.
Even if I'm going to do this, I'm going to piss off the world.
And what I've seen, not only in myself but also my patients, who I encourage this path for.
I was really worried because I realized that About 40 of my patients, within 18 months of coming to see me, will make a career change.
Wow.
And I was like worried that I'm biasing them in some way.
Like, am I like shaping them?
But I think once you start to realize, okay, this is the direction that I want to move.
Once you cast some of those things off and you start moving in your direction, you get so much positive internal feedback.
Like, yeah, people around you are upset, but you are grounded.
Yeah.
And if you really think about when you feel the most out of control in life, it's because you let the opinions of other people disturb this.
But as long as you are secure in what you're doing, if you really lean into that and there's so much positive feedback.
The first time I started streaming on Twitch and there were five people there.
It felt so good to talk to them.
It just felt right.
It felt right in here.
And the biggest thing getting in the way of that in today's society is we use technology to dull what's going on in here.
I'm feeling anxious.
Like I'm on the subway.
I'm bored.
I don't like feeling bored.
Let me pull out my phone.
I'm feeling anxious.
Let me pull out my phone.
Oh my God, my boss just told me like, ah, let me pull out my phone.
So we do so many things with technology that dull our sense of self.
We don't like to be with ourselves anymore.
I saw a super scary study.
People are spending so much time on the toilet with their phone, it's increasing the risk of hemorrhoids by about 65.
Oh, gosh.
And they're not even pushing.
They're just sitting there.
And if you stay in that position in your body, it puts pressure on the blood vessels.
And sitting on the toilet with your phone is giving people hemorrhoids.
Oh, my God.
It's super scary.
And it does something similar to your mind, too.
I don't know what, but...
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As I'm listening to you, I'm just thinking like, that's really the core of all of it.
And you talked about the ego self at the beginning.
It's almost like the reason why we're so obsessed with what everyone thinks about us is because of the ego.
It's right there.
So if I was to ask you, what does someone do to truly stop caring what people think?
Because there's usefulness in caring what people think.
Absolutely.
It's what helps the world stay sane to some degree.
But at the same time, there's a part of you with what you're saying which I love is this idea of.
I loved the explanation you gave between hey, when I was live on Twitch for five people.
It felt right here.
And then the opposite to that, which is I don't feel good right here, so I'm going to numb myself with technology.
Or you said dull yourself.
How do we even get to that clarity that I like doing this right now?
Because I think we've all become so clouded and I'm sure you see this with the people you help and serve and the millions of people online all the time that even when you encourage someone to move in a direction of noticing what's true to them, it becomes a really difficult concept for people because they're like I don't know what's true for me.
I'm kind of I like these all these things and I like this, but then, but now I'm distracted by video games.
I'm now distracted by porn.
I'm now just like.
Those pulls are so strong that even if you're close to knowing oh, I really like this five people on Twitch, the distraction of oh, I wish I had a million subscribers is so strong that you get pulled away from that sense.
How does someone truly know something that feels right for them to pursue in a world where they're either clouded, so they don't know themselves well enough, or they get distracted?
I think the answer is sort of in the question.
And I think this is why it's fun to talk to you, because you ask questions with certain concepts in mind.
So I think, you know, I don't know what I feel.
So let's understand that first, right?
I'll see, you know, now that I'm in like whatever room I'm in, I make comparisons, right?
Oh, this doctor is doing this.
This influencer is doing this.
So the first thing to understand is that Where you spend your attention is going to be where you get information.
So literally, like if I numb your tongue, like if I'm doing dental surgery, like you can't talk, you can't chew.
So one of the key concepts is awareness precedes control.
And you kind of pointed this out that if we look at what's happening in our world, where is our perception going?
Where is our attention going?
It's always going outside of us.
When I was in med school –
I started med school at the age of 28, which was behind.
And so I was like, oh my God, like I have to be efficient.
I have to be efficient.
Everyone is so concerned with productivity and efficiency.
I think it's one of the most damaging things in the world, because now I'm listening to a podcast on the way to the train.
I'm reading on the train, listening to a lecture on the way to the lecture hall, paying attention in the lecture hall.
Like every moment I can be productive.
I can be efficient, but my attention is outside of me.
So I get bad.
Basically, the other thing to understand about the mind is the mind never wears out.
It rusts.
The faculties that you do not use, you will lose.
This is why we forget languages that we don't practice, right?
So –
Our attention is going outside of us, getting pulled away by things like technology.
And then, once we start to, if I spend all of my time thinking about what everybody else is doing, I will not have a good sense of myself.
So the first thing we need to do is internalize our awareness.
The second thing to understand is that internalizing our awareness, why don't we do that?
Because it's usually painful.
So I don't know why the world is designed this way, but when a patient comes to me and sits in therapy, they don't have a breakthrough first and then cry a lot at the end.
They cry a lot.
They face their trauma.
They face their negative emotions.
And then the good stuff is at the end.
So the reason people don't like to look within themselves, we actually try really hard to never look within ourselves.
Because there's usually a lot of pain in there.
Like I remember when I was at the height of my video game addiction, I was like 18 years old.
And for a whole year, I never went to sleep.
I always passed out.
If I got into bed...
And what would happen if I was idle, thoughts would start to flow.
Like, you're screwing up your life.
A month has gone by.
You haven't gone to a single class in a month.
You're screwing everything up.
I could see that I was destroying my life, and I was powerless to stop it.
So shame and guilt would flood my mind, and I hated that.
So I would play until 5.30 in the morning, 6 in the morning.
So I was so exhausted that I would just pass out immediately.
Because if I was awake for even five minutes, my mind would turn on and I would be awake for hours in absolute torture.
So we don't like to look within ourselves because looking within ourselves is painful.
This is where there has to be this ugly part.
And from a neuroscience perspective, what's going on is we are doing so much emotional suppression through technological devices.
That's what they do, right?
So if you're feeling anxious and you pull out your phone and you like laugh at cats, then like, suddenly you feel better.
So it shuts that stuff off.
So as we shut off these circuits of the brain, we have to reawaken them.
And this is probably from an evolutionary perspective.
I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but Negative emotions keep us alive more than positive emotions.
So our brain has a bias to experience the negative over the positive.
So the first thing we have to do is move our attention away from the outside world.
Spend some time with yourself.
No music, no headphones, no podcast, nothing like that.
I mean, I love podcasts, love this podcast, but spend some time, you know, after you listen to this episode.
Sit in silence, let yourself absorb.
Second thing is if you sit with yourself, what's going to come up is a lot of negativity.
But that negativity has to come out before it disappears.
So when I'm sitting with a patient who has a history of trauma, the trauma is like stuck inside them and they use so many defense mechanisms to bury it.
We want to bring that stuff up.
We want to have you crying and stuff like that and then let it go.
Mm-hmm.
And then, underneath all the negativity, you will find that voice, that internal sense of really what you want.
When you have a good cry.
At the end of that, you'll have a sense of peace and you'll be like okay, this sucks.
Now that I've sat with it, what am I going to do about it?
And it's amazing how it happens.
You don't have to do it.
All you have to do is create the right circumstances.
And in the same way that your body.
The moment that you swallow a piece of food, your body takes care of the rest.
If you give your mind the right environment, it is designed to heal just like a cut on my arm.
It will get rid of those negative emotions.
You just need to stop getting in the way.
That is a really brilliant explanation.
Never heard it put that way so well.
I love the idea that your mind is already designed to repair and heal itself.
And if it's given the right parameters and the right set up in the right environment, it will naturally find its way.
But the key part that you put there is the pain, and the discomfort is the prerequisite for a breakthrough.
And our ability to sit in.
That is the part that makes it contingent as to whether we'll actually rise above from it.
Yeah.
So I think just one other example.
So I want you all to think about when you get food poisoning, what does your body do?
It feels nauseous.
I'm going to vomit.
The nausea and vomiting doesn't feel good, but it is healthy.
Mm-hmm.
And so sometimes what I'll also do, like when my kids get food poisoning is I'll wait.
I won't give them anti-nausea meds unless they're in risk of dehydration.
So there's times where you have to stop what the mind naturally does.
But generally speaking, we want the mind, like think about it for a second.
Every time you stop, if anxiety arises, your mind is trying to like get rid of it.
It's trying to vomit it out.
Why does your mind keep doing that?
Why does it keep going there?
Because that's the problem it's trying to solve.
Yeah.
Let's go back to the ego now.
Sure.
Because you didn't want to, I didn't want you to miss out on that part.
The ego I raised because I was saying that we were saying that a part of us has to stop caring what people think in order to even pursue this path.
I'm assuming, when you were studying to become a monk for seven years.
Where was that intentional desire coming for you?
Where was the intention to be a monk coming from?
It was coming from the ego.
Right.
Talk to me about that.
Because that doesn't make sense to the outside person.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, here's what happened in my life.
So, went to college.
So, growing up, I was like kind of gifted.
Um, so never really like learned how to study.
And then my parents, you know, were like, oh, you have to be Dr. Alok.
And then I remember when I was 15 years old.
I was at a party one day and some, some adult asked me like what do you want to be when you grow up?
And I said, I want to be a doctor.
And they were like, like, wow, like you're going to be a doctor.
Like, that's so amazing.
Right.
And so my ego loved that.
I was like, oh my God, I just say I'm going to be a doctor and people are going to be like wow, you have so much potential.
I loved hearing that.
But my heart really wasn't in it.
It was like ego.
So then when I got to college, I was like, whatever.
And so then, what started to happen?
Something weird happened is I started to fail, fell into video game addiction.
I started to feel a lot of shame.
And then all of my friends left me behind.
I remember I went to a Christmas party where there was a friend of mine from high school.
And I hadn't seen her in a few years.
And I was like, what are you doing?
And she's like, oh, you know, I just finished med school.
Like, I'm going to start ophthalmology residency in like a month.
She's like, what are you up to?
And I'm like, I'm applying to medical school for the third year in a row.
I've been rejected 180 times.
What ended up happening is my ego was so low, or like it was so bruised, that I pulled a really interesting trick that happens in spirituality where I said I'm going to be not material anymore.
All of these materialistic people are chasing these material.
You want to be a doctor for money and fame and pride and all of this.
I'm going to be better.
I'm going to let go of materialism.
I'm going to rise above you.
I'm going to be Swami.
I'm going to be Yogi.
I'm going to be great.
But it was really ego.
So that's the original.
So I fell in love with it in a genuine way.
But also what kept me there was like, this is the way that I win.
This is the way that I catch up.
This is the way that I impress people.
So it took a lot of-
That sort of happened for a while.
Thankfully, I had some really excellent teachers.
I did a lot of meditation practice and I kind of discovered that years later that oh, this is actually like my ego.
So that was my journey.
And then I actually like let go of the ego quite a bit.
I stopped caring about my grades and we'll get to that in a second.
So I like ended up getting into medical school and I tried to take my vows.
So When I was 21 years old, I went to my guru and I said, you know, I want to become a monk.
Like, can I take my vows?
And his response was really interesting.
He said, becoming a monk is about giving up your life, but you don't have a life worth giving up.
Your life is empty.
Like you haven't done anything.
What are you giving up?
Nothing.
It's an escape.
So he said, go back to the US, get a doctoral degree.
And if you still want to do it when you're 30, we'll take you.
You can come back every summer.
We'll continue teaching you practices.
You can continue learning.
You can walk that path, but we're not going to let you take vows.
So I said, okay, fine, deal.
So I went back, focused on getting a doctoral degree.
So I decided to go to medical school.
That's a little bit silly because my wife wanted to be married to a doctor.
I was like dating her.
So I was like, all right, might as well.
Which is like so funny because you know everyone thinks like oh, like you have some deep.
No, I was just like I got to get a doctoral degree and like this chick that I like wants me to be a doctor.
So like, let me do that because she's going to think that's hot.
So, I mean, it was so like simple, right?
So as I start really focusing on the work and then I think I sort of let go of my ego.
And so you kind of talked about, you know, how do you stop caring?
So, and like you said, you should care.
So I care a lot about what people think, but I don't let it determine my identity.
So people say negative things to me all the time.
I got reprimanded by the Medical Board of Massachusetts.
I think that's a good thing.
I think that's a healthy thing.
I think that sometimes in life, I make mistakes.
And I think sometimes in life, I behave in a non-perfect way.
And so I value what people think, but I also accept that I'm not perfect.
Right?
So of course I'm going to make mistakes.
I try not to let it affect my sense of me.
And that's the key differentiator.
Because what a lot of people do.
This is.
The biggest mistake I think you can make is, if you're, this is what happens, right?
People are like, I care so much what people think.
So how do I fix that?
I stop caring what people think.
And then you turn yourself into an asshole.
And then that causes lots of problems.
And so the problem is either end of the pendulum is a bad idea.
Mm-hmm.
So receive what people think.
Also add some context to it.
Don't just take it at face value.
Where is this person's criticism coming from?
90% of the criticism I get is projection, right?
They see in me something that they don't like, but that's not really who I am.
So accept the criticism and then also recognize that just because someone says something about you, even if it's true, that's not who you are right.
It's an attribute of you.
But at your core, you're just a regular human being trying to navigate this world, doing the best that you can.
And the moment that you accept yourself as that, nothing great, but also nothing terrible.
Things become way easier.
Yeah, it seems like for most people following, whether they call it ego or whether they call it something that gets them the result they want, ie.
I get to marry the girl I want or the guy I want, or it gets me a promotion, gets me some more money, helps me move to the city.
It almost feels like that's a base level motivator that pretty much all of us function on.
Yeah.
It's almost like the general operating system of the world, which is I need to get this to get this.
And it either serves you because you get there and you get the girl, or it doesn't serve you because you don't get it.
And then that's where people turn towards depression and other things as well.
It's almost like when your ego is not fulfilled for what it may think it may end up moving towards being disheartened, depressed and lonely.
Absolutely.
So I think ego opens the door to those things.
And there is a ton of evidence for that.
And I love your observation that this is the default way.
I think that's how far physical evolution got us.
So if you look at how human beings evolved, we evolved to care what people around us think.
So exodus from the tribe, ostracization from the tribe, meant death when we were growing up and couldn't take care of ourselves and things like that.
So we lived in these very tribal communities.
I think society has changed so much because in those tribal communities we cared a lot about the judgment of other people but we also had a lot of baseline connection.
You know, I remember I had a friend who was like one of the earliest streamers and I asked him why he quit.
And he said, well, because people on the internet are assholes.
And he's like you know when I used to play games in arcades like if you're mean to everybody, no one's ever going to play with you.
But on the internet, you can be mean to anyone.
There's no consequence.
Yeah, yeah.
So we used to have this.
Our brain evolved for some amount of like caring what people think, but some amount of default connection.
People just don't give up on you.
In today's world, people are so replaceable.
So those things worked when they were both there.
Now we have an imbalance where people are so replaceable.
Everybody ghosts everybody.
Online dating is like I can keep on – I don't have to choose between 10 people, 100 people, 1000 people.
The number of options, Jay, is infinite.
I can keep scrolling, keep scrolling, keep scrolling until I find what I want.
So that sort of thing has really changed.
And so now what we have to do is learn a new way to relate to people, to form our identity.
And then arguably you can talk about like this is the limit of physical evolution and there's a whole weird spiritual perspective on spiritual evolution.
But I do think that like this is a skill and this is why we're seeing an explosion of mindfulness.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, it was transformative for you, transformative for me, that these concepts are what you need to survive and thrive in today's world.
Yeah.
Generally, if you were decent, people would crowd around you and watch and cheer you on.
If you were bad at something, maybe one person would walk past and laugh or make fun of you.
And now, of course, that's escalated and that's what leads to loneliness, because people are like well, I don't want to put myself out there.
I don't want to go on that dating app.
I don't want to make a video.
I don't want to chase my passion because actually, if I do that, there's going to be hundreds of thousands of people or forget that, there's going to be just the 10 people around me, my own family.
That disagrees with what I'm doing.
And so if someone's in that state right now where they're like, I'm scared about putting myself out there from a let's choose dating because you brought up dating.
I'm scared of putting myself out there from a dating perspective because I think I'm replaceable.
I'm actually scared of even believing that real connection exists.
I don't even know if there's someone out there for me.
How do I even begin to work against the math and the algorithm which feels like it's set up against me?
This is the first time I'm going to say I don't know.
So I think dating is the one thing I've been focused a lot on over the last year.
But in terms of what I understand and what I know, I got lucky.
So I found my hopefully life partner before things got really, really hard.
Yeah.
And I think if you're not someone... So this is the one area where I kind of feel like I don't know.
So some of the things that I'll do and this is why I kind of make the content that I do is I made this guide to meditation.
And the best answer I have is...
Start to use some of these concepts.
Start to internalize some of these skills.
If we look at the way in which dating in today's world scars you, that involves hits to your ego.
That involves these things like samskaras, and we have a trauma guide to where we kind of go into that.
But if we kind of think about, like, why is dating so hard?
This is the Sanskrit concept of something called a samskara.
So this is kind of like a trauma.
So if you kind of think about every person that you date, you're not just dating that person.
You're carrying the emotional baggage of all of your experiences.
And this is why online dating is such a mess.
Because if you go to date someone online, they're not judging you based on you.
They're judging you based on all of their past experiences.
And yours.
And yours, right?
So when someone doesn't text you back, your mind attaches associations to that.
Like, oh, this means they're ghosting me.
Well, why do you interpret that as ghosting?
Because I've been ghosted before and it hurts so much.
So as we go through life, we start accumulating baggage.
And then what happens is we're not dealing with a person.
We're interpreting that person.
And I'm sure there are people in the audience who have felt this where people don't judge you for you.
They look at some tiny fraction of you and they inject all of their negative experiences with people like that.
All men are dangerous.
All women, you can't trust women, right?
So where do these generalizations come from?
And we see this so much.
Get this kind of indoctrination using social media, but the root, the psychological injury, is there.
And so the best thing that I know how to do is teach people, let's give you a course in yourself.
This is how you work.
And that's really what I learned in India.
When I was here in the United States, they'll teach me about physics.
They'll teach me about chemistry.
No one could explain to me, I want to wake up at 8 a.m. but I never do.
I want to stop playing video games, but I can't control myself.
And so as we teach people, It's interesting because we have a lot of incels that have been coming into our community for the last few years and they're starting to get better.
As you teach people, this is how I work.
This is where my ego comes from.
I want a relationship so bad that I'm going to tolerate abuse because I'm scared of loneliness.
I would rather be abused than alone.
What is the emotional baggage that you carry around that sabotages all of your interactions?
And the way that you know this happens is because the same crap keeps happening to you over and over again.
This person takes advantage of you.
This person takes advantage of you.
This person takes advantage of you.
That's because you are sending out a signal that they are picking up on.
Because they test boundaries.
They'll treat you a little bit inappropriately and you'll take it.
Or they detect that you're a people pleaser and that you can't tolerate someone being upset.
This is one of the huge, one of the biggest things that I think people we've trained people to do is tolerate.
People have now become intolerant of the dissatisfaction of others.
If somebody doesn't like me, I can't handle that anymore.
And so as you start to realize some of these patterns, then I think you form yourself into a better human being.
And then fingers crossed, it's up to karma or God or the universe or whatever, or the algorithm.
But I think the best thing that I know how to tell people is turn yourself into the healthiest human you can.
And then the rest of it is kind of out of your control.
Yeah.
I actually find that approach quite refreshing.
And I think it's true.
You just get a better radar.
You get a better ability to spot frequency.
And I don't mean on a spiritual level.
I just mean on a general human level.
Like you just said, you set up your boundaries better.
You have better barriers.
You have better filters early on.
You don't allow someone with bad behavior to last longer than they should.
Absolutely.
And all of those things save you from wasting time and energy.
And I think one of the biggest things is you don't allow your old kind of Hollywood romance Disney version that was programmed into you to rerun the program every time it feels that way.
So I think so much of this goes back to that same thing.
It's like, how do you not let that old circuitry take over again?
Even if you've learned all these new principles and you're meditating and you're mindful and all this stuff, but it can just flip back because it's so hardwired.
And that ultimately, sometimes you see people are doing all the right work, but they meet someone that they found attractive traditionally, and then everything's gone out the window.
Yeah, so I think it's really uncomfortable.
It's a beautiful example, because you kind of do everything that you're supposed to do, but you never do the one thing you need to do.
I see this all the time in my patients.
And you offered, I think, the best example, which is you find someone that you're attracted to.
And what a lot of people need to do is start looking at people they're not attracted to.
Don't just accept that attraction, because when you follow that kind of attraction you It gets you back into the cycle.
I'm going to meditate and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this.
But then this kind of person shows up and I'm going to make the same damn mistake again.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
So, and it feels so counterintuitive.
I think another thing like so sometimes my patients will come in, we'll talk about, you know, dating and relationships, and they'll be like you know.
But it sounds like Dr K, you're saying I shouldn't be myself.
And I'm like, yeah, you shouldn't.
I think being yourself, I know this sounds kind of weird, but let me explain.
Being yourself is one of the worst things that you can do.
Like what created this version of you?
A lot of unconscious programming, a lot of social conditioning, a lot of trauma, right?
All of these things have turned you into the current version of you.
So I think the real you is way more formless and egoless and all that kind of stuff.
We actually need to dismantle.
Don't just be this set of patterns.
That's what they oftentimes mean.
They say like, you know, if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best.
So I'm going to continue acting at my worst.
This is what we tell people nowadays.
I think that's a terrible idea.
And we wonder why there's such a dating and mating crisis when everyone's like I'm just going to be me.
If you don't like me, you can move on.
I'm going to move on too.
Everyone is replaceable.
I don't need to change.
So I think we need to take a step back from that and try to really turn yourself into the best human being that you know how to be.
And then I think things will turn around, which is what I see pretty consistently.
Yeah, yeah.
At least you have the tools.
Yeah.
Like you said, it may not solve all your problems, but at least you have the tools to know what to do with it.
What do you think it means?
You talk so much about masculinity, which I really appreciate because I think it's an area that the country as a whole that we both live in is dealing with right now.
Yeah.
The world's dealing with it for sure.
What does it even mean to be a man right now?
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I mean, I don't... Yeah, what's confusing people, I guess, is the question.
Yeah, so I mean, I don't prescribe So masculinity, my understanding of, like the scientific or literature definition is like it's like the set of, you know, behaviors and expectations that we put on men.
That's not the lens that I work.
So if you ask me about masculinity, I'd say like, go ask someone else.
I mean, I'm going to talk about it, but like, just to be clear, you know, I'm a clinician.
Yeah.
So my...
I'm zoomed into one person at a time.
So what I think is going on right now.
You know I had a really interesting video come out recently that got a lot of controversy about why women prefer beta males.
So this is like a big thing where everyone's like, I'm going to be alpha.
And there's so much weird science that people don't understand.
So as one simple example of like a lot of what masculinity, like everyone wants to be ripped.
So there's a great study that looked at something called drive for muscularity.
So this is not how muscular you are, but how much you want to be muscular.
So the higher your drive for muscularity is, the lower your likelihood of entering a long-term relationship.
You can enter short-term relationships.
Higher likelihood of divorce.
And I think there's a lot of cross-talk where a lot of women are saying what we want is safety, not some dude who's super cut.
And so there's a lot of confusion about what it means to be a man.
I think one of the reasons why there's confusion is because of sort of the way that men and women operate.
So there's a part of... that focuses on intramayal competition.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about animals and I don't think that translates over 100, so big caveat there.
But if you look at sort of like, you know, a lion pride, right?
The males will fight amongst themselves, and then one male will rise to the top, and then he becomes the male of the pride.
So there's this idea that, like, men will fight amongst each other.
They'll create a hierarchy, right?
And then that'll make them attractive to women.
And I certainly know that it was really weird.
Once I got married and started wearing a wedding ring, I got way more female attention.
So I think there's some element of that's true.
But I think that having spent a lot of time working with female patients, everyone's an individual.
We're not just like products of our biology.
And I think this is what really confuses men is that we can fight amongst ourselves, but that's not actually what women want.
That's not what they actually make their selections based off of.
So I think a lot of masculinity right now is men trying to become as manly as possible.
In the alpha sense.
In the alpha sense.
And I think that people get super confused because like that doesn't translate over into happiness.
And if it doesn't translate over into happiness.
You know, these dudes, like I've worked with so many men who like, are super into transactional relationships, because they really think that human females, that these general principles of how lions select mates, will translate over to an individual person who has unique genetics, unique history, and that doesn't work.
So they approach this relationship transactional.
They'll think like, oh, all women want is like money.
So if I approach a relationship from a transactional perspective, if I see a woman as just a biological uterus, The women who want a partnership will run away.
The women who have enough confidence will be like, this guy is an asshole.
They'll leave.
And so all you'll be left with is women who also view relationships in a transactional way.
And then that will sort of feed into giving you this idea of like okay, this is all women want, because all the women who don't want that will never date you in the first place.
So I think we're seeing a lot of these mechanisms at play.
I think a lot of this masculinity is because we expect a lot from men.
But as men are failing those expectations because I think they're unreasonable, we're not really giving them an alternative.
So I think research shows that most women still want to date a man who makes more money than they do.
But 60 plus percent of people who go to college are now women.
So what's happened is men are in this really tough spot where the expectations from men have not changed.
But society has changed.
So we can't meet those expectations anymore.
And so there's this really interesting gap.
And when people feel crushed, when they feel rejected, the ego activates.
We fall into all of these, like unhealthy behaviors, like pornography and drugs and video games and stuff like that to soothe our internal environment.
We don't teach boys or men emotional regulation skills.
And so I think there's like just a confluence of a thousand things going on and men are getting like crushed and squeezed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, and I appreciate, I know you're a clinician.
I just find your perspective on some of these more societal challenges to be, you know, great observations.
And I feel similarly, it's almost like, it's what we talked about.
We talked about there were targets.
Somehow some of those targets have remained, but they feel unmeetable.
Yep.
And then there are moving targets, which you keep trying to place.
I need to get more buff.
I need to get more ripped.
I need to get more money, whatever it may be.
And they become arbitrary, abstract targets.
What's happening for women on the other side?
Because society has also changed and their desires.
Yeah, I think they're getting equally screwed.
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As society is changing.
Women are facing particular challenges.
Men are facing particular challenges.
And one of the beautiful things we've seen in our community is the more that we understand that, I think, the better off things get.
That's the conversation that needs to be heard.
Yeah, so it's beautiful.
I remember a post that someone once made.
So there was a woman who's very attractive who said you know, I'm an incredibly attractive, physically attractive woman.
I feel so incredibly alone.
Every time I meet someone, they don't see me.
They don't care about me.
They just care about the way that I look and things like that.
So there are people always around me, but they're like using me constantly.
And then the really funny thing is like there was an incel in our subreddit who was like wow, like the way you're describing loneliness, that's exactly how I feel.
I never imagined that like a 10 out of 10 attractive woman could feel the way that I feel.
And it was like a really beautiful moment, like a weird connection over the internet.
Yeah.
I think one of the key things that women are struggling with right now is, first of all, safety.
So I think that men are getting very aggressive.
Men are getting very angry, and there's some reasons for that.
I think that's a problem, but I think it's the only card men have to play in today's society.
So I think their safety is kind of the number one priority or like the number one danger that a lot of like women face.
And I think it's something that a lot of men like can't understand.
So I remember getting frustrated because I was like walking behind a woman.
And we were walking.
So I was walking down in New York city actually.
And she like turned ahead of me and it was nighttime, but I'm like walking behind her.
We're walking at the same pace.
And then you know, later on someone kind of tells me like oh, you shouldn't do that because it seems like you're following her.
And so then they're like, what you should do is like pass her.
So then I started walking really fast and someone else tells me like you should never do that, because now you're, like it seems like you're walking fast.
You're, you're getting, you're getting closer to her.
So then it's like, what am I supposed to do?
And they're like, you should cross the street.
And then I crossed the street, but then like, then you got run over.
I didn't get run over, but then there's another woman on the other side of the street.
It's like, because it turns out that I'm just like zigzagging back and forth.
But I think the reason that they feel this way is because things are unsafe.
Yeah.
And a lot of men feel like women don't give them a chance.
And it's kind of like imagine that a third of the people that walk into your store are going to steal from you.
How would you relate to that?
I think a lot of men just don't understand the statistics around how easy it is to become a victim if you're a woman in this world.
You can become a victim as a man too.
I don't think we take cases of male sexual assault victims, even by women and teachers and things like that.
We don't take that seriously, which is a real problem.
Yeah.
But I think that's one thing that they're really struggling with.
I think another thing that they're really struggling with is that there is a lack of good men, that women are looking for partnership, they're looking for companionship, and a lot of men have become angry.
And this is where people will say we blame them.
I think that's the big mistake that we make.
I think the reason that so many men are struggling right now is because they're the one demographic that we as a society don't help.
So the one thing that hasn't changed this is maybe the most damaging thing is we expect men to solve their own problems.
So 60% of people who go to college are women.
Where are the male-only scholarships?
We don't need those because men have privilege.
And I think this is what's really scary is.
I see this a lot because I'll have CEOs come into my office and then I'll go and work in a jail.
And most of the people in jail are men.
And so when we talk about male privilege, which is real, the key thing is it affects some men a lot, but it doesn't affect others.
So the majority of workplace injuries, things like that, those are all men.
And so I think that we need to sort of stop thinking about yes, male privilege exists, but it may be insufficient to compensate.
And this is how people think.
They think that if there's privilege, that means that there isn't hurt, right?
But things don't even out, right?
One thing I appreciate about medicine is things are very multifactorial.
So there's a lot of variables here.
And just because you're rich doesn't mean that like that has great advantages.
But if you get cancer, you still have cancer.
It's not like being rich cancels out cancer.
It may help in a very significant way, which unfortunately I've seen.
There's some degree of like connection there, but one doesn't replace the other.
Yeah.
No, and I think you took it to the higher ground there, which I really appreciate, which is that's the conversation.
And that's why I asked about both.
The conversation that needs to be had is how do we just understand each other better?
Because generally what we find and it's easier because it's clickbait, gets more views, gets more attentions is the small echo chambers of one or the other.
Like we could be sitting here as a conversation as men, having a conversation about how women have let us down, or we could be having a conversation about how men are terrible, because then that makes us look like better men.
And both are not helpful for society, because we're just going to sit on the opposite sides of the bridge and just point fingers.
Yeah, I'm with you.
So I think that you know that's what happens, is like that's literally what we see, is like then you know, male only spaces will highlight how women are saying that men are all trash and then- is, or whatever.
Yeah right so so, and everyone's just pointing the finger at each other, and i think, i think, you're spot on that.
What we really try to do is just understand yeah, sort of recognize that every human being doesn't matter if you're a man, it doesn't matter if you're a woman.
You have a unique set of advantages, you have a unique set of challenges.
Let's understand who you are, let's give you this basic set of skills of, like self-understanding, dissolving your ego, emotional regulation and, if you like, work on this stuff.
I think that's the best way.
Is you become a healthy human, an independent human?
I think that sets you up for the best kind of relationship.
I think that speaks to a big issue right now.
I'd love to know how you work with people on this, because it's a big part of self-understanding is there's such a challenge we have with raising the mind from judgment to understanding.
It's so much easier to judge blame, point fingers, shift responsibility, to make sense of someone through very little amounts of information to have a projection on them.
How do we encourage, how do you encourage your clients?
How do you encourage your patients and people you meet to rise from judgment to understanding in a world where we don't have time, we don't have energy for that?
It requires so much more effort.
So I don't know about time.
But it does require more energy and it does require more effort until you learn how to do it.
So I once had a patient who I was in training at the time.
They were an adolescent and they had all kinds of behavioral problems.
So this was a kid who would start fights, would smear feces all over the bathroom at school.
And like what everyone does, this is so sad, but when someone does something really crappy, what we want to do is punish them.
But if you want to stop that behavior, what you really need is compassion.
So if you sort of think about judgment, judgment is like a narrowing, right?
So I'm saying like you are bad.
So there are a couple of things that create judgment in the brain.
The first is activation of negative emotion.
If my adrenaline is high or if I feel angry or afraid or anxious, this does something really interesting.
It narrows our peripheral vision from 180 degrees to 30 degrees.
Wow.
So literally, if I were angry with you right now, I would be zoomed in on you because you were the threat.
You were the danger.
The really interesting thing is that it does that psychologically too.
We stop seeing context.
When this person dumped me, I didn't think about what's going on in there.
Not even dumped.
When this person said, no, I don't want to go on a date.
I didn't think about what's going on in their life.
I didn't think about the way I smell.
I didn't think about any of those things.
All I see is that hurt and it causes me to see red.
Wow.
And then I will snap into judgment.
And this is evolutionary, by the way.
Hmm.
So when a tiger – when I'm like working the fields and a tiger shows up, I don't want to be like hmm, I wonder how that tiger is feeling today.
Like is the tiger hungry?
Is it not hungry?
So this is evolutionary.
Fear and anger cause us to zoom in, see black and white and act before we think, which is the only way that we survive.
So what we really need to do to stop judgment is to lower those emotions.
And we see this so much with Israel, Palestine.
Democrats Republicans liberals conservatives men women, right.
Everyone is angry.
Everyone is fighting for survival.
And when you fight for survival, there's no room for compassion.
There's no room for empathy.
There's no room for understanding.
So what we need to do is two things.
One is if someone is coming at you really hard, try to be compassionate.
And this is what's really interesting.
It's weird being trained as a psychiatrist.
We get trained in this stuff formally.
It's really hard to do.
But when a patient comes into my office, you know like you're terrible and psychiatrists are all terrible.
And like, you know, like I hate being here and I don't need to be here.
And all y'all, you're just trying to scam me.
Like Big Pharma's paying you to fill people up with meds.
The natural reaction is like, no, they're not.
No, I'm not.
You know, no, no, no, no, no.
But I'll be like, okay, hold on a second.
I can see you're really upset.
But tell me like why you hate psychiatrists so much.
Like what have been your experiences I'd really like to understand.
And when someone comes at you with hard emotional energy, if you sort of make yourself like water, if you kind of give them that space, they kind of deflate.
Right?
So if I come at you like – I argue with my wife all the time.
And if I come at her hard, like she's done an awesome job recently of like really handling my anger.
Where I would come at her hard and she would fight back, right?
And if she comes at me hard, like I'll fight back.
We've done a really good job of like giving each other space.
Like I get you, you're pissed.
Like tell me more.
Let me understand.
Help me understand.
So don't respond to that negative energy with like a negative emotional energy.
It'll narrow your view.
And for those that you judge.
So if someone is coming at you, I think you got to cool off a little bit, right.
And then if someone is coming at you, try to be compassionate towards them.
Now this is where a lot of people get tripped up, because they think compassion means giving them what they want.
So sometimes people will come in and will be like, I need Ritalin.
I need Adderall.
I need it.
I need it.
I need it.
Don't you understand, doc?
If you don't give me this, everything's going to fall apart and things like that.
And I'm like, okay, look.
I already prescribed you once.
I told you that if you lose your medication, I'm not gonna prescribe it to you again.
I totally feel that these consequences are there.
I'm not gonna give you more meds.
But I recognize that doing that is going to put you in a really tough spot.
I'm going to hold my boundary, but with compassion.
What else can I do?
Do you want a non-stimulant medication?
Do you want to do some other things?
Do you want me to write a letter to your professor telling you that your ADHD is particularly bad right now?
I don't have to include details of your clinical history but say can you please give him an extension for medical reasons?
I'm happy to work with you.
I'm going to hold my boundary, but I'm going to be as compassionate as possible.
Mm-hmm.
And what a lot of people think is that compassion means letting people run all over you.
That's not what it means.
So you want to be compassionate, but you want to be stable.
Now, if you are feeling judgmental I think take a step back, take a breath.
Also pay attention to the way that you are indoctrinating your mind, right?
So if we're spending a lot of time on social media, if we're like watching, like spending time in echo chambers, your judgment is gonna be through the roof.
And oftentimes, if you are judging someone else, Sit down and let them add their human context to your projection.
You think this person is doing this and they're doing this and they're like this and they're like this, and all women are like this, all men are like this.
I don't know about all men or all women, but this human being is not all of those things.
There is unique human being.
And as you train yourself and it ain't easy.
We have a guide to meditation that's all about that kind of stuff.
But I'm sure you're familiar with alternate nostril breathing and things.
So as you do those kinds of things and you emotionally regulate as you calm down, then you'll be able to do that.
But that requires a lot of energy and effort.
You're spot on.
Reacting is really easy.
One of the most... draining thing.
So if you look at willpower as a battery, one of the top drainers of willpower is regulating your emotions.
It is the most emotionally taxing thing you can do.
So it's hard, but then you'll get better at it.
That's a brilliant answer.
The idea that anxiety, anger and fear narrow your viewpoint and therefore don't give you the ability to see everything else in the context around it is such a such a useful lesson to know why that's happening and how to regulate it.
And I'm thinking about talking about your wife.
I was thinking about something with my wife.
She sent me an idea recently for a new venture that she wanted to start.
And in my head, all the fear and anxiety went off.
And I messaged back and I was like, yeah, no, but I don't think it's going to work.
Like, you know, she just shared an idea.
She's like, I'm really excited about this.
And my response was like, yeah, I don't think that's going to work.
And here are all the reasons why it's not going to work.
And maybe we could do it in like five years, like all this stuff.
And then...
Again, yeah, my wife's amazing at this.
And she just called me out in the most compassionate, loving way.
And she was just like, hey, I was just sharing something I was excited about.
I wasn't saying we have to do it.
I wasn't saying we need to do it.
And I would have just loved for you to just at least hear my idea out.
Yeah.
Right?
To just give me the space to say, oh, tell me about your idea.
Tell me what you're excited about.
And it's so interesting because, even though I would generally naturally do that, in that moment the reason why I didn't I'm now reflecting back was my anxiety, my fear, my there wasn't any anger, but my anxiety and fear were high.
And therefore, my response was not helpful.
And therefore, if my wife had not been as evolved as she is, then we would have just had a full-blown argument about nothing.
Yeah.
The one thing that really shocks me is how much yogic training and psychiatry training Don't prepare me to be a good husband.
That's great.
Like being a good husband and a father, actually.
But it does prepare you.
It's just we're not.
I mean, so that's the crazy thing, man.
I think like I thought I was like, oh, I got this stuff on lockdown.
You know, like I'm yogi and I'm doctor.
Like great.
It's going to be.
No, it's like it's really hard.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like my wife brings out like some of my worst tendencies and I really have to work on it.
Yeah.
And she's awesome.
It's like I turn into a different person around her in like not a good way.
Yeah.
You know?
And so I think that's also healthy in a sense because she's not a patient of mine.
She's not like a client or someone in a meditation class or whatever.
And when I go into psychiatrist mode, it pisses her off a lot.
Yeah, of course.
Like, oh, tell me how you feel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think it's, it's, it's hard for everyone, myself included.
And it's been shocking, like how much you really have to train.
Like I have to train myself like every single day to try to be a better husband.
Yeah.
Well, I think, because that's I think it's so common that the person that you love the most in the world sadly gets to see the worst of you.
Absolutely, man.
The totality of you, the 360 degree view of you.
And And there's a beauty to that too, because you feel you can show it to them.
You can't show that to anyone else.
And obviously we don't want again.
I'm not encouraging or condoning physical verbal abuse in any way.
And that's not what I mean.
But there's a beauty in being able to show your full self to someone with the vulnerability of it, as long as it's not harming them.
Yeah.
And for them to help you with it and for you to help them back.
That's why I think that is that one relationship.
I don't think anyone knows me better than my wife.
Yeah.
It's the only person who knows what you're doing at 6am and what you're doing at midnight, and you know everything else in between.
And so it's beautiful.
But I wanted to touch on something with you that I wanted to talk to you about actually, because I've watched so many of the interviews and I've been today's.
My intention and my focus has been to really mine that spiritual, clinician side in you and to find some of that maybe more ethereal stuff which you're such a deep expert in as well, because I think the two complement each other so wonderfully in your expertise.
What is that spiritual evolution that's being demanded of humanity right now?
When you mentioned it earlier, you were like we've kind of reached the peak of our material evolution based on ego development.
What is the spiritual evolution that we're being invited to?
Yeah, so I think this is where I got to start with a big disclaimer.
So I think this is where we're talking about spiritual evolution, which is not clear whether this stuff even exists from a scientific perspective.
So I may touch on studies and things like that on neuroscience and meditation and brain changes.
So there's some evidence of this stuff, but there's a lot of stuff in the spiritual traditions which there's no scientific evidence for.
So before I even started med school, I was in a... Yeah, yeah.
I was in a Tai Chi lab, a neuroscience Tai Chi lab at Harvard.
And so we were trying to understand this concept of chi or prana or life energy.
And so the really interesting thing about this kind of stuff is that there's no scientific evidence that it exists.
But...
When you do a practice that supposedly activates this stuff, it outperforms physical exercise like yoga, for example.
Or Tai Chi.
So we were studying Tai Chi.
And so there seems to be like something where like, the health benefit is greater than physical exercise, but we can't really detect.
What are you measuring to know that it's greater than physical exercise?
I mean, it depends.
So you know, one of my early mentors was Dr Wong.
Has a great paper in the New England Journal of Medicine on Tai Chi and arthritis.
So she's just measuring the improvement of arthritis if I give Tai Chi, if I do exercise, and Tai Chi is superior.
So I was trying to study the mechanism of that.
And the mechanism is super interesting.
So I was in a chronic pain lab.
And the really interesting thing about chronic pain is that it locks your brain into like one part of your body.
So someone who has chronic pain, they're always thinking about what hurts.
Yeah, that's so true.
Right?
And and then.
What happens when we do yoga or Tai Chi is that we're putting our body in different places, to where, if I'm like, if I'm standing on one leg and twisting myself into a pretzel, my brain is focusing on other parts of my body.
And that trains my brain to move away from the hurting part.
And then once I move away from the hurting part, then I feel it less.
And so the pain actually feels better.
Yeah.
And this is also what we do mentally with yoga and stuff.
It's like, let me move away from this ruminative thinking.
Let me return my attention to the breath.
So you're literally training your brain to do what you tell it to.
Well, it's just what you said right at the beginning, which was thinking about yourself versus paying attention.
Absolutely, right?
So the beautiful thing about yoga and Tai Chi is that they force you to observe yourself.
Mm-hmm.
Because once you stand on one leg so you can do a simple like.
So I'll challenge everybody in your audience to just raise their arm.
That's it.
I just want them to raise their arm.
And we're just going to continue talking.
Okay?
We're just going to have a conversation.
And over time, what's going to happen, you don't have to do it.
Because I want to converse with you.
You won't be able to converse.
Right?
So people are going to pay attention if they're still doing it.
And then the longer we go, they're not going to be able to hear anything we're saying.
We are forcing our attention over here.
So the change of our attention becomes really, really important.
Mm-hmm.
Anyway, I was talking about Tai Chi and chronic pain, but you asked a question about physical and spiritual evolution.
So the first thing to understand is why have we stopped physically evolving?
Because we started shaping our environment.
So evolution happens in order for us –
To adapt to our environment.
But once I start building cars, creating air conditioning, having cell phones, what we are doing is we are shaping our environment to let whatever I am now continue to exist this way.
I don't need to grow, right, if I shape my environment around me.
If I'm a narcissist and I surround myself by people who will say yes, you're great, you're great, you're great, I will never need to conquer that narcissism.
So I think there's a couple of things going on in terms of spiritual evolution.
And those things are somewhat reliable to completely crazy.
So like take this with a grain of salt.
So I think the first thing is that first stage of spiritual evolution is that, since we're shaping our environment in this way, our environment is making lots of changes to our brain and lots of changes to our mind.
So this is why we have a mental health crisis.
Like it's so weird, right?
Science is progressing.
We have more neuroscience papers than ever before.
We have so many fMRI labs and things like that.
Our understanding of the brain and the mind is increasing, but people are getting worse.
So the next stage of evolution that we need in your own life I use the word loosely, but maybe not so much, but is actually like evolving your mind, right?
And I know that sounds kind of weird like evolving your brain, like learning how to change yourself, which is what evolution is to survive and thrive in this level of the world around us.
So this starts with stuff like ego, like we talked about emotional regulation, not letting these some scars or emotional baggage pile up.
You have to do a ton of mental training to survive in today's world.
Then there's like other weird things going on.
So like the other weird stuff is like when you start to talk more about these spiritual traditions.
So weird stuff.
There's a study that was done on DMT that 92% of DMT users will encounter otherworldly beings.
Hmm.
Now we have no scientific evidence of this, except I think this is kind of could be argued as scientific evidence.
I'm not saying it's complete evidence.
But now what we have is we have something like a telescope where if I look through a microscope, if I look through a microscope, and I see a lot of bacteria, you can't see that with the naked eye.
But if I use this technology, I can see something that my normal perception cannot allow me to see.
So I think what we're starting to do with meditation is this is a spiritual technology.
And there are some meditation techniques that will give you insight into your past lives.
That has been very helpful for some of my patients with trauma that they have this trauma that doesn't come from this life.
It actually seems like it sort of comes from past life.
I can go into detail.
I know it's unbelievable.
But there's a great researcher out of the University of Virginia who's been looking at past life research.
Occasionally, some crazy scientists will get into the stuff.
So I think that we are sort of being able to detect things that are kind of beyond it.
And I think this is where things get kind of weird, but like it's so strange.
But if I was talking to a bunch of my friends who are neuroscientists or neurologists and I was asking them what proof do we have that thoughts exist from a scientific perspective?
We have none.
We can't detect thoughts.
What does an fMRI or an EEG detect?
EEG detects electrical activity in the brain. fMRI detects blood flow.
Neither of those things are thoughts.
So it's kind of weird, but we have no proof of the existence of thought.
So I was trying to figure out, okay, what's going on then scientifically?
Some people think it's like imagination.
I think what's going on is that there's a certain realm of human experience which we can't detect with an instrument.
So this is subjective experience.
It's consciousness.
It's thinking.
And so I think that –
We don't have a measurement of consciousness, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
This is where a lot of people, I think, disagree with me.
So some people say since we can't detect it scientifically, that means it doesn't exist.
I think that human beings can observe it.
It's a conserved human experience.
Everyone can observe their own thinking.
I think it exists.
We just haven't developed the ruler for consciousness yet.
Mm-hmm.
So the other area of spiritual evolution is to evolve your consciousness.
So, to take your conscious experience, use some of these more esoteric meditation techniques which is usually how this is done like Kundalini, sadhana and stuff like that.
So as you do these weird kind of like chakra sadhanas and stuff like that, you will start to have –
It's hard to describe a change in your subjective experience of the world.
So as I move through the world, I try, but I also start to see, okay, bad stuff happens to me.
I'm not so worried about it anymore.
This is a negative karma.
That's sort of the logical way to explain it, but that's not how it feels on the inside.
Yeah.
So I recognize that there are periods of my life where negative karmas are manifesting.
So I'm like, let them come, let them come, let them come.
I'm going to work through it.
I have to work through this stuff.
There's some kind of bad energy out there, and I realize how indefensible that is.
But I really think that's what's going on.
And so a lot of people are needing to evolve.
They're hungry for this evolution.
They're hungry for like this world around me.
Even if we talk about growth and goals and ambitions, this is not satisfying.
They need to grow in a different dimension.
And I don't mean that like, oh, there's like alternate.
I mean like there is material growth, there is professional growth, there is academic growth and there is growth just within you.
To be able to experience different kinds of things, to be able to understand, like how you connect to other people.
That's a level of spiritual evolution.
And when I work with my patients, what I oftentimes will start with is like meditations to help them treat depression.
But eventually it's like okay, if you're depressed because you think you're a loser, let's see if we can cultivate an experience of – cosmic connectedness.
And if you have that experience and this is also what we know from psychedelics you can use a psychedelic.
That's not healing.
Specifically, you can ask someone what happened to you when you were using psychedelic.
If they had an ego death experience.
That correlates with improvement in treatment of refractory depression.
That correlates with improvement in trauma.
But if all you see is colors and synesthesia and stuff like that, clinical symptoms don't appear to get better.
And this is what we know from our traditions, right?
As you have these higher senses of consciousness, the ahamkara, the ego starts to dissolve.
Your atman blends with the cosmic soul.
And we can sort of duplicate that in a lab now, at least the subjective experience of it.
Then that gets to the question of, is that subjective experience real or not?
I think it's absolutely functionally useful.
We can detect the change.
We can detect the health benefit in it.
So I think that spiritual evolution that we're seeing is like, at the level of consciousness.
And hopefully I've tried to explain that in a somewhat mechanistic or technical way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, it's fascinating.
I also think this is where I get really weird.
I think it's weird, but if you look at the world, we're all moving in this direction.
Like meditation is exploding, right?
We have like, you know, champions of it like you and you've spread a lot of knowledge about it.
I think that makes sense.
But I do feel like we're all being called to meditate more.
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It goes back to that same point that you brought up earlier.
We're all being called to do this, but then we struggle to do it.
And we can't.
We try once, we let go.
We know we need to work out.
Everyone knows they need 10,000 steps a day.
We don't get 10,000 steps a day.
Everyone knows they need to eat better, but we're still making all the fast food companies rich and wealthier.
What's the disconnect there?
So I think the biggest disconnect is information doesn't change behavior.
So, like you know, I had a patient once.
This is bad, but I had a patient once who was I was a medical student.
And so they come in and they smoke.
And I try to tell him, hey, so like smoking will give you lung cancer.
Smoking will give you heart disease.
And he's like, yeah, doc, I know.
And I was like, I'm a medical student.
He's like, yeah, I know, but you're a doc basically.
He's like, yeah, doc, I know.
He's like, I'll stop.
I'll quit.
I promise.
Comes in a month later.
How's your smoking?
Oh, yeah, I know.
I'm supposed to.
It's not working.
And I was like, OK, maybe you want some medication for that.
And he's like, sure, doc.
Give me the medication.
Comes in a month later.
Are you taking the medication?
Not really.
OK, let's give you, like, let's try nicotine gum.
Like, let's try this.
He's not doing it, not doing it, not doing it.
So I was, you know, working with my preceptor.
And I read some about addiction and things like that.
And I realized, like, you have to motivate him.
And so the next time he comes in, I take a different approach.
I'm like, so tell me about yourself.
Tell me about what you're excited about.
And he's like, I love being a father.
I have three daughters.
And I'll die happy the moment that the last one is married, because I know they're being taken care of and it's going to be such a great day.
My oldest daughter is married.
It was awesome.
Walking her down the aisle was one of the best experiences I've ever had.
And I ask him oh great, when your second daughter gets married, do you want to be wheeling an oxygen tank behind you?
And do you want to be pushed in a wheelchair when your third daughter gets married?
And he was like, no.
I said something that was so mean.
I was like, that's what's going to happen if you don't stop smoking.
And so that was brutal.
I wouldn't recommend it.
I was still learning.
I was still a medical student.
But I think a lot of behavioral change comes from like motivation within.
You have to have a good reason to do it.
Not in like an intellectual, like, oh, this is like, I'm not going to get cancer 40 years from now.
Your brain doesn't understand.
So this is what people don't get.
When I tell you like, do this or you'll get cancer.
How does your brain know what cancer feels like?
So if you touch a hot pan, your brain knows.
They're like, okay.
And then it's hard to touch a hot pan.
Mm-hmm.
But how does your brain know this hypothetical thing?
It doesn't.
So information goes into this one part of our brain that really doesn't shape our behavior.
What shapes our behavior is emotions.
So if you think about when you get angry, then everyone's telling you not to act.
Mm-hmm.
Stop, slow down, don't act.
When you get angry, you feel like acting.
So the first thing is that we need to focus more on finding the right emotional reason.
What is the reason for your change?
What really drives you to change?
The more you connect with that, then the information will become useful.
There's another really interesting… Such a great answer, man.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
So great.
One other thing that I would say is a lot of people don't realize.
I don't know if this makes sense, but there's something called ambivalence, which is when we're internally conflicted.
And anytime somebody wants to change, there's a part of us that wants to change, but there's a part of us that doesn't want to change.
Yeah, yeah.
So when we want to change, I tend to think about the benefit.
So in this moment, my brain is telling me like, oh, like we want to get – let's get healthy.
But – so you're thinking about the benefit when you start.
But as you start, you see the cost.
So when I go to the gym, all it is is suffering.
And so then what happens is like the cost gets really big in my mind because I'm reaping the cost now.
I'm feeling the cost now.
This is really hard and the benefit is far away.
So when I get started, I think about the goal.
I think about the benefit, but I'm not really appreciating the cost.
When I actually do it, I feel the cost, but don't think about the benefit.
So one of the biggest mistakes that you can make is thinking about the benefit when you want to do something.
Interesting.
So instead, what you should do is actually focus on the cost.
Tell yourself, okay, this is going to be hard, right?
Like it's going to suck going to the gym and accept the cost upfront.
Do I want this thing?
Yes, but you need to balance it.
So when we have high expectations, we're going to have low follow through, right?
And when we have low expectations, if you say to yourself look, this is going to suck, I'm going to do it anyway.
That's the approach you should take.
Now, a lot of people will say like, but I don't do it anyway.
And that's where you need to really dig for a reason.
Yeah, that reason being...
That idea that emotion shifts behavior and figuring out what that emotion is, is so critical.
Like I'm thinking about most of my spiritual aspirations come from a deep sense of gratitude.
Like that's the emotion.
It's like a gratitude to my teachers, the people that have invested so much time into my life when I didn't deserve it, people that are far more enlightened and far more well-read, and people who've actually dedicated their life, who found it useful that I found so useful and were so kind to give me time and energy.
That's kind of what it carries from because I'm like, yeah.
And then there are certain other things which, coming back to health yeah, knowing that Hey, all my friends are getting cancer at 40 or 50 years old.
Oh my God, is that actually happening?
A lot of them are, sadly.
Oh my God, that's terrible.
Yeah, really sad truth.
To recognize, oh yeah, I would like to, if I can, avoid that.
What's that going to take?
What does that mean?
What do I need to shift?
What do I need to, you know?
And so then there's certain motivators, like gratitude, that are like these beautiful, wonderful feelings.
And then, like you said, with the oxygen tank example, and the wheelchair, there's certain emotions that are much more fear-based and worry-filled.
And both are useful for different things.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wouldn't rely on fear.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's a good one to get going.
Yeah.
Good one to get going.
But yeah, I mean, I think it's so interesting.
I wonder if, like so this is.
You know, when I work with people, I find first of all, that that's really common, that there's some things, some emotional valences that they can really connect to, that get them moving.
And so usually what we try to do is connect that.
So is there some way to tap into gratitude about you've been given this body and what do you owe with this body, or something like that?
So I think, if you sort of think about the emotions that really get you going and for a lot of men like, for example, it's anger, which can actually be good right.
Channeling that anger.
Oftentimes that will help people bridge the gap of if there's one thing that does get you going, can you tie that to a thing that you want to do.
Yes, yes, yeah.
Yeah, I've always broken it down as the-
In the Bhagavad Gita, the modes of material nature are there.
And so you have mode of ignorance, mode of passion, mode of goodness, and pure goodness.
So tamas, rajas, and sattva.
And I've always seen that anger is like a tamas motivator.
Yeah.
It's like, it's not ideal, but it gets you going.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then rajas is more of a mode of passion, is kind of like having a goal, having a desire, having an ambition.
Like, I want to get a six pack.
I want to be a millionaire, whatever.
Yeah.
But then, above that is goodness, and pure goodness, which is more like love gratitude, all these emotions that are overall have a much more healthier impact and have more longevity to them.
Yeah.
They don't die when you get there.
The really interesting thing is that I think, if you use sattvic emotions, your material success could be way lower.
Yeah, for sure.
Right?
So, as you start operating from love and as you become a little bit more detached, you may not achieve as much, but you'll be happier.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Whereas if you have a lot of motor passion in your life, you'll be much more successful.
Yep, you'll also have ulcers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
I really like the idea about just going back to that mental training piece around.
Yeah, the emotion.
What's at the root of our addiction to pornography right now?
Like what's at the root of that from a core point of view?
The root is meaninglessness.
So this is what a lot of people don't realize.
They think that pornography addiction is about sexuality.
They think it's about being horny.
They think it's about lust.
It's not lust.
So-
One of the top variables for addiction to pornography is lack of purpose, lack of meaning.
So when I was designing our coaching program, I was seeing that there's a lot of new problems, but they have these roots that are a little bit different.
So in psychiatry, they don't teach us how to find purpose.
But our initial pilot study of 1453 people found a 68 increase in purpose and direction in life at 20 weeks.
So that's also where you got to stick with it for a while.
It doesn't happen overnight.
So I think what's going on is, to be blunt about it, when you are addicted to porn, you got to have a reason why to not watch.
So what happens with pornography addiction?
A lot of people don't realize what this looks like.
They think it's like automatically associated with lust and masturbation.
Oftentimes it's on the second screen.
So we're seeing a big explosion of it.
With, like work from home, people will really use it to regulate their emotions.
That's really the number one reason.
So if we think about sex and what it does to our brain, if I'm feeling anxious, if I'm a man, biological male, and if my testosterone is intact and stuff like that, you know we will oftentimes, if we get sexually activated, all of our negative emotions go away.
And it's such a powerful activator.
It's like the most powerful biological way to shut off your negative emotional circuitry.
Happens immediately.
Like once you get horny, right?
And a lot of guys, and sorry if this is a bit vulgar, but you know we'll experience this post, not clarity.
And literally what happens in your brain is when these sexual circuits activate, they suppress everything else, including our risk assessment circuitry, which is why we make really bad decisions.
They shut off everything else.
They shut off your reasoning.
They shut off your logic.
They shut off your risk assessment.
They shut off your anxiety.
They shut off your fear.
So what we're seeing is that, as people become more directionless and as their capacity to handle negative emotions decreases, they get addicted to pornography because it's the most accessible – biological tool that you can use.
And it doesn't involve, you know, opiates and spending money and things like that usually.
Yeah.
And what are the negative effects of pornography anyway that we're seeing?
Because if someone's watching this and going well, it's not that bad.
Anyway, it switches off.
Helps me emotionally regulate.
Yes.
So I think the scariest one for me is the rise of erectile dysfunction under the age of 30.
So erectile dysfunction under the age of 30 used to be 5%, right?
So as men, we're in society, we tend to think like, as you get older, right?
Like once you have kids, once you have grandkids, like then it doesn't work the way it used to, right.
But actually what we're starting to see is the rate.
Some studies suggest a rate of 20 of people under the age of 30 boys, men will have erectile dysfunction.
And the reason that happens, it's kind of also a little bit vulgar, but it's medical.
So the hand grip strength, the PSI, the pounds per square inch of your hand can be like 120, 130.
The vagina has a PSI of like 15 to 30.
So literally, the way you define erectile dysfunction is it is the inability to maintain erection until the completion of the sexual act.
So what we're seeing is that when boys start using pornography and masturbating at a very young age, without lubrication and stuff like that, their body gets trained for a certain kind of stimulus in order to complete the sexual act.
And when they engage in a sexual relationship, their – penis doesn't know how to handle it.
It's just not enough.
And then eventually, they'll go at it, they'll go at it, they'll go at it.
They'll lose the erection, which is physiologic.
And then what happens is we have all kinds of shame associated with it.
And then, once the shame kicks in, that shame can be so powerful that the sexual drive cannot shut that down.
And then you have anxiety around sex and things like that and it can really mess up people's relationships.
What's the mental training for someone who's saying, okay, well, I wanna disconnect from porn.
I wanna detach, but I'm not gonna find purpose tomorrow.
So what's the stopgap?
There is no stopgap.
And you have to stop thinking about things happening tomorrow.
Honestly, that's where you start.
So our approach to pornography has three major pillars.
And I think you have to tackle all three.
So the first is a very standard addiction-oriented structure where if you're trying to quit alcohol, you've got to stop going to bars.
So from a structural standpoint, what I recommend to everyone is that they...
You know.
Log out of all their devices, use only one device for pornography and restrict your pornography use to like one or two hours of the day.
So it has to like stop infecting every part of your life.
That's the first part.
We're going to kind of restrict it.
The second thing is emotional regulation.
So as long as your brain requires pornography to manage your emotions, you're never going to be able to quit.
So you need to develop alternate skills to manage your emotions.
These can be things like meditation practices, even going for a walk, stuff like that.
One thing that I also really recommend to people is that they – give themselves time to think before they go to sleep.
So spend an hour of idle time.
I love pacing.
We need a lot of time to process emotions.
You can also do things like dream journals.
So dreams are one of the main ways that our brain processes emotions.
So the emotional regulation is number two.
And the third thing is finding meaning or purpose.
So watch more episodes of On Purpose with Jay Shetty.
So as you develop that purpose, you're right.
It's not going to happen overnight.
We see that it takes about 20 weeks.
That's when people- 20 weeks is amazing.
Yeah.
So it's focused, right?
So what we did is we took some of these like clinical things that used to be used to treat depression and we shift those the same conversational techniques, exploratory techniques to finding something like purpose.
And that works incredibly well.
And then we can go into the details of what that involves.
I was going to ask you, that was my next question.
How do you define purpose?
What are you looking at in the 20 weeks?
What are you trying to get people to do?
So the funny thing about purpose is like, it's not what everyone thinks it is.
So-
The way you find purpose is like really kind of counterintuitive.
So it actually involves, I don't know what purpose is.
Maybe we can ask you.
But what we know is what are the scientific mechanisms?
So if I take someone who has no purpose in life and I take someone who has purpose in life, what do they do differently?
Yes.
That's what we try to change.
Great question.
Yeah.
So the first thing is self-direction.
So people, as long as life is happening to you and you are not making choices, if you are forced to make choices, you will feel out of direction.
So this is kind of counterintuitive, but the first thing I tell people to do is start making choices.
And then the first question that they ask me is, how do I know what's right or wrong?
That's not actually, doesn't matter.
What matters in your brain is that you choose.
And the whole point, this is really insidious.
If you think about right or wrong, if you figure out right or wrong, you're not making the choice.
The world tells you this is right and this is wrong.
That's the world making the choice for you.
This is right and this is wrong.
So forget about right or wrong and just make a choice.
I don't care what it is.
Choose matcha instead of coffee.
Put your left shoe on first instead of your right shoe.
Start brushing with your left hand.
So you need to start making choices.
There's a beautiful element about anxiety that we can talk about there.
It'll also drastically help your anxiety.
Second thing that you need to do is stretch your capacity.
So we feel like we have purpose in life because it's not purpose.
But this is like literally what the scientific makeup of purpose is stretching your capacity.
So we always feel overwhelmed.
I don't want to do it.
I want to do the bare minimum.
We're a society of people who do the bare minimum.
We're a society of people who companies use chat GPT and AI to review applications.
Now everyone is using AI to apply for jobs.
It's just AI talking to AI.
We're trying to...
Do as little as possible.
And we're seeing an epidemic of purposelessness.
We're seeing an epidemic of pornography use.
That's because in your brain, these two things are connected.
The moment you stretch your capacities, once again, it doesn't matter what you're doing.
If you swim 10 laps, swim 11.
If you wake up at 7 o'clock every day, wake up at 6.59.
This is the beautiful thing.
The content of what you do is completely irrelevant.
Not completely irrelevant.
That's not wrong.
That's wrong.
But the key thing is that you stretch your capacities.
I didn't think I was capable of this.
You don't even have to succeed.
You just have to stretch it.
I didn't think I could do this.
Turns out I was wrong.
At least I tried.
When you start thinking in this way, right?
When I ask someone you know if I like a quick thought experiment we're always afraid of giving it our all and failing.
But when you give it your all, how do you usually feel?
You can usually sleep at night, as long as some of the stuff like ego and stuff doesn't get in the way.
At least I tried my best.
That can give you a good sense.
That's a hard lesson I learned in med school because – or in residency is like.
What helps me sleep at night is not whether the patient lives or dies.
Did I give it my all?
Did I do everything within my power to try to help this person?
And if I did, the rest is out of my hands, right?
So you have to stretch your capacities.
The third thing, and this is the hardest one.
So people have to be able to see you and respond to the real you.
It doesn't necessarily have to be positive.
A certain amount of accepting that person is good.
But other people have to be able to see who you are.
And that's really hard because people don't have the attention for that.
Everyone's on their cell phones.
So I think if you cultivate these three things, your sense of purpose will increase in life.
That's fresh.
I like that.
I like that you've used what you'd see as the difference between a purposeful person and someone who doesn't have purpose to find what paths to travel.
Yeah.
So I think the really confusing thing is when people think about purpose, like if I were to ask you Jay, what is your purpose?
How would you answer that?
If you ask me what is my purpose yeah, so my purpose would be to make ancient wisdom accessible, relevant and practical for the modern person.
Perfect, right?
So that's what most people think it is.
They think it's like this goal.
Yeah, for sure.
Right?
But this is what I want people to understand.
If you really think about it, how do you know that you have purpose or you don't have purpose?
Yeah, it's not that.
It's an internal feeling.
Like I wake up every day, like my guess is you wake up and you're like, I have purpose.
Yes.
It's an internal feeling.
So how do we cultivate that internal feeling with these three things?
Yeah.
I love that.
I think it's beautiful.
I really, really like those three things.
And they come closely to some of the things I've thought about before as well in...
I think there's a need and your people get it because they're part of your community.
But I think belonging is such a first step in purpose.
Like even you know, recently I took up pickleball and I feel like I'm part of the LA pickleball scene.
And I'll just walk up to a court and I can just go play with anyone.
We don't have to know each other's names.
I don't know what job they have.
They don't know what I do.
And you're playing pickleball together, and there's a sense of belonging which makes me feel automatically linked to something bigger than me.
So belonging isn't a sense of I have friends.
Belonging is I feel connected to something that is beyond me and beyond this person.
And I think that's such a part of purpose.
The second one which aligns with what you're saying to me is learning, but really it's what you're saying.
It's that challenge. to stretch my capability, to try something new every day.
That idea of curiosity is so key to it as well as a habit.
The third, this one's really important for me.
It's people who feel independently useful.
So now you're a part of this bigger thing, but you know what you do.
So I'm the guy who brings the pickleballs.
I'm the guy who like puts the net out, right?
Like I have a use that is unique to me.
Yeah.
So you know, what's really fascinating is I love and I'm amazed that my guess is that you did not like read a bunch of scientific literature to come up with these things.
I've read enough, but I didn't use it to, but I have.
I'm always reading and learning.
I know you're quite well read and stuff.
Yeah, I enjoy reading.
But I'm not a scientist.
But it's not like you're like, let me read a thousand papers.
That's how I came up with my answer.
Right?
And so what I think is really beautiful is your things can be mapped onto my things and what the data shows.
Yeah.
Yes.
Your independent exploration.
Sure, you're reading a lot.
You keep up with science and stuff like that.
But you're looking at your experience and you have belongingness, which is correlated with relatedness.
Yeah.
Right?
You have this curiosity, which causes you to stretch.
Yeah.
You have this independent usefulness, which is autonomy, which is making choices.
I'm going to go ahead.
No one needs to ask me.
And you find a utility.
And so I think it's really beautiful.
I love hearing that because that shows me that if people pay attention, if they do what you did, Which not to devalue what you did, but I think is easier than what I did.
You don't have to read a thousand papers on purpose to understand what it is, right?
You can pay attention to yourself.
You can do some amount of reading.
You can listen to a few podcasts.
And that is enough for you to find the right answers.
And it's crazy because you hit all three.
You didn't come up with four.
You didn't come up with two.
You came up with three.
And it's all the same buckets.
Yeah.
Really amazing.
I have two more.
Oh, really?
Okay.
So that's actually really cool too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because if you've got two more, I wonder if we're missing something.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'm not saying you are.
This is just my own reflection.
No, no, no.
But I mean, I would bet money we are.
So tell me what- The fourth one is service.
Okay.
So having a sense of give back, having a sense of- being involved in other people's wellbeing, which goes back to, it's really beautiful because I've heard that idea before, but not as strongly and concretely.
This idea of you explaining what it means to not think about yourself today has just like really cut through for me, which is so powerful because it's been explained in a clinical way, I think.
And that's what that service element is.
It's like all those first things were still about...
And once belonging was beyond you, it's thinking about something bigger than you.
But this one's a key part.
It's like, how are you doing things for things which are not about you?
I'm not thinking about how I'm useful.
I'm not thinking about this.
I'm trying to think about someone else.
So service.
And then the fifth one comes back to our point earlier on detachment, which is surrender.
I use the word surrender because it falls into my five acronym that I have.
But the last is surrender, because there's such a need for ultimately, that detachment from what you just so beautifully said that at the end of the day, I can't decide whether I'm going to save someone's life or not.
The only thing I can be satisfied is I gave it my all, and that, to me, is what surrender really is the ability to say I did everything and now I'm holding my hands up and I'm living with the results, because I can't control what's going on exactly.
And I think there's plenty of science for your last two, I think the interesting thing is the scientific literature doesn't Thus far has not tied that to the concept of purpose.
Yeah.
But I think especially like, you know, service is really interesting.
There's a study that found multiple studies that found that people who suffer from major depressive disorder and are depressed, one of the best things they can do to improve their depression is help other people.
Yes, yes, yes, yeah.
Right?
So there's something really special there about being a part of a community.
Giving back in some way has profound positive effects on our brain.
And it's so great for self-esteem.
It affects all the.
I think we used to argue this stupid debate over can something ever truly be selfless service because you're doing it for yourself.
And I'm actually not interested in that question.
It's more interesting to me the fact that if you were useful, you'd feel more useful where you'd be more useful and you do more for others.
And that is a positive cycle for people who have depression or are struggling with feelings of not being worthy enough or not mattering.
That idea, when you look at it through suicide, it was like, I didn't matter anymore.
I didn't feel like I was needed anymore.
Absolutely.
You know, it's like, you don't want people to go through those feelings and emotions.
I love what you said.
And let me know if we're like pickleballs going back and forth too much.
But I love this concept of service because I think many of the questions you asked me, I think this is the answer.
So when you engage in service, that dissolves your ego.
So people are wondering, how can I stop caring about other people?
Give yourself in service, right?
Don't do what they want.
That's not really service.
Service is not giving someone what they want.
It is...
Doing what you feel like for the benefit of others.
It comes from you.
And you're saying like, this isn't for me.
This is for other people.
And if you kind of think about, how do I stop caring about what other people think?
That is a selfish selflessness right.
I'm trying to make other people happy so that they'll leave me alone.
They'll treat me with respect.
They'll tell me I'm great.
That's actually selfish.
But service is giving without expectations.
And that's the whole point, right?
And so I think service is a beautiful way to decrease the ahamkar because it's not about me anymore.
And there's a really interesting neuroscience to this, which is literally, when you are engaged in service, the minutes that your brain are not thinking about you increases.
And for so much of our life, social media and all of this kind of stuff.
We are constantly thinking about ourselves.
Yeah.
So literally to spend time to give your brain a break from thinking about you, worrying about you, just focusing on somebody else, is profoundly helpful for your default mode network and your ego.
Dr. K, I could talk to you for hours.
I'm going to need to book you in again, because this is like.
This is so much fun and we didn't even.
There's so many things we can talk about.
But we end every On Purpose interview with a final five.
These questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum.
Okay.
So Dr. K, these are your final five.
Okay, let's do it.
Question number one is what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?
Or given.
Best advice I've ever heard or received or given.
Can we go to the second one while I think about that?
The second one's harder usually.
What is the worst advice you ever heard, received or given?
The thing that is top of mind for me right now is be yourself.
Yeah, I agree.
It's fully bad advice.
I'm so glad you said that, because I was on tour earlier this year and I literally said that on stage.
I was like, if anyone ever tells you to be yourself, it is the worst advice ever.
That makes me happy.
Question number three, what's something that you used to believe to be true that you don't anymore?
I'm great.
That's a good answer.
Yeah.
That's a great answer.
I'm really not.
That's it.
I can relate to it.
I'd put my hand up for that.
That's a great answer.
Question number four what's something that other people don't agree with you on, but you'd fight for till the end?
I don't know that I would fight for this, but I think the biggest thing is, like some of my like, I think that this consciousness stuff is real.
I think there's a whole dimension of like human existence that science cannot – I get one word.
One sentence.
I think that there is a whole – I believe there is a layer of reality that can only be experienced subjectively.
Mm-hmm.
Great answer.
Fifth and final question.
If you could create, we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show.
If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
I would never do that.
I really wouldn't.
I'll edit it for you.
If you could create one habit that you wish everyone in the world would follow, what would it be?
I understand you're trying to help me out here.
But you're not going to answer.
I am so averse to doing one thing forever.
Everyone.
Interesting.
Right?
Like I just don't think.
Don't believe in it.
Yeah.
Interesting.
But I think I really think like, I mean, I've learned this the hard way.
It's a great answer.
Yeah.
I love that.
Do you want to give the best advice again?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, so best advice I would give is focus more on what is happening and less on what you're doing.
Focus more on what is happening and less on what you're doing.
Yeah.
I like that.
Observe, focus on the observation, focus on the experience.
Yeah, so just to explain a little bit, right?
I know we touched on it.
So I think a lot of people don't realize what the consequences of their actions are.
Mm-hmm.
So just to give you a really simple example, we have a bunch of kids that are on iPads right now.
And so a lot of times, what parents don't realize is like when your kid throws a temper tantrum and you give them the iPad to calm them down.
You're just training them to throw a temper tantrum.
For kids that are slightly older.
A lot of parents will be like hey, come down for dinner, come down for dinner, come down for dinner.
Kid doesn't show up for dinner.
They're 15 minutes late.
You go up there.
You unplug the PlayStation, and you're like, no PlayStation for a month.
So what you're actually training your child to do is ignore your words –
And until you unplug the PlayStation.
Does that kind of make sense?
Yeah.
So like the first six times you say something, you're not reinforcing that at all, right?
So you're actually training them to ignore what you say, which is why you have to and then you have to take a drastic action to get them to listen.
And parents feel insane because now I'm having to go up and yell at you all the time in order to get you to do anything.
That's because when you speak gently, there is no consequence.
Mm-hmm.
So tie the consequence to the gentle, not the consequence to the yelling.
Because if you tie the consequence to the yelling, you'll have to yell again.
That's how the way they'll get trained.
So pay attention to what is happening, not what you're doing.
That's a great explanation.
I love that.
The book is called How to Raise a Healthy Gamer.
End Power Struggles, Break Bad Screen Habits and Transform Your Relationship with Your Kids.
Dr. K, subscribe on YouTube as well if you don't subscribe to Dr. K's channel already.
Dr K, you're going to have to come back and do a bunch more episodes, because we didn't even talk about kids today.
Yeah, we didn't talk about kids.
And I still want to hear so much.
I mean, it's amazing, you know, your background with the Gita and stuff like that.
So I'm super curious because you seem super grounded in that and and i haven't even read the whole thing so i want to learn about that more than happy to now.
We're now we know each other so yeah, we should connect offline as well.
Absolutely, dude.
Yeah, such a pleasure man, you're amazing.
If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with dr gabor mate on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds, to start moving on from the past.
Everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable.
So a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it?
It grows where it's soft and green and vulnerable.
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