Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Kanojia
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
So I'm going to be clear about what I mean by this.
Be perfectly still for five minutes.
It'll feel like torture and it'll feel amazing.
So first step is, like, online radicalization is happening, right?
Put yourself in situations that make you uncomfortable and learn how to survive.
And why is volunteering uncomfortable?
Is it because you're around a bunch of poor people?
Maybe, but then something scary will happen.
If you start volunteering over and over and over again, people will start appreciating you.
Oh my God, it's so painful.
If you have such low self-esteem, you should go and volunteer.
Fascinating studies of depression show that one of the best things that you can do to alleviate your depression is to help another human being.
So you cannot become tranquil by watching a YouTube video, by watching a live streamer, even the great Dr. K, who teaches you so much.
Now we're going to talk about mentalization.
I will give you the secret.
Let's understand that watching some dude talking on the internet will only get you so far.
All I can do is point the direction.
So this is going to be really challenging.
We've been at it for three hours and ten minutes.
I hope y'all enjoyed today.
Any thoughts on polyamory under duress and codependency, alexithymia, I made the mistake giving my consent for my girlfriend to see someone else, monogamy, eight years.
Yeah, can you post about it anonymously on the subreddit so we can get more detail and I can dive into that?
It's going to be so fucking simple, but it's going to be really challenging.
How do I tell a narcissistic person to shut up without them getting angry at me?
So in life, we can choose to act or we can choose to avoid consequences.
If you're going to tell someone to shut up, you've got to deal with the consequences.
Or you can keep silent and then they won't be angry with you.
So many people live life because they're trying to do something without the emotional consequence.
The moment that you accept the emotional consequence, the action will be easy to do.
They're going to be angry, so be it.
You get the emotion or you get the action.
You get to be free from one of those two.
Now here's the interesting thing.
Thank you all very much for coming today.
Hopefully nothing I said today was out of line, but if you all really do feel like I spoke out of turn with all this caller gate stuff, please let me know.
I'm genuinely open to feedback about it.
I also genuinely hope that nothing I said today creates shit for Hasan or anybody else, XQC, whatever.
I don't wish any bit of ill upon them.
When I make this video, at the end of this video, there's a really, really, really good chance.
And also people from their community.
I know we had some Hassan supporters in chat today that seemed pretty positive with what we were saying.
You know, if y'all are members of some of these communities and you still think that we're out of line or not still, you think we're out of line, like, please let us know.
So this is where I'm open to dialogue about it.
And thank you all for coming today and good luck.
So I think Collargate is a great example of a lot of very interesting psychological dynamics that are at play in the world today.
Thanks for joining us today.
We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life.
If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe.
Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.
Actually, not even at the end.
Already, there's a good chance that if you're a pro-Hassan person, you dislike what I'm saying.
If you're an anti-Hassan person, you dislike what I'm saying.
By the end of this video, there's a really, really good chance that people on both sides of the conflict will really, really dislike me.
And we're going to understand why.
I'm going to explain why right now.
Because I'm not saying that he's good or he's bad or anything like that.
And yet both people will dislike me.
And we're going to understand why right here and right now.
And let's say for a moment that you are not abusive to your dog.
Let's just assume this for a moment, okay?
So Hasan loves Kaya, which is not mutually exclusive with abuse, by the way, which we can talk about if y'all want to, but is kind to dog.
Let's just assume for a moment that this is true.
Now, the first thing that I want y'all to do is notice your reaction to this.
So here's what I've learned.
Here at Healthy Gamer, we've worked with over 500 creators.
And one of the craziest things that we encounter time and time and time again is like once the internet starts to believe something,
First of all, how little information they have.
And let's understand, like, why this happens.
A week ago, if I upload a clip of Hasan being nice to his dog, what do y'all think happens to that clip?
A positive, heartfelt clip of Hasan chilling with his dog, having fun with his dog.
What do y'all think happens?
This gets fucking downvoted through the roof.
Okay, now let's understand why.
So what does the internet love more than anything else?
The first thing that the internet loves is a delta, is a change.
So why is Collargate such a big deal?
It's because Hasan is not known as an animal abuser, right?
And I'm going to talk about Collargate from the perspective of those psychological dynamics, not the individuals involved or anything like that.
So Hasan's like platform is about minorities.
It's about supporting the people who are like, you know, he's like a leftist.
Like, so he's like, you know, people, we got to like look out for the underdogs and we got to take care of everybody.
And like the people in power, the bad guys, I may be misrepresenting it.
I'm trying to just summarize and move on because I'm not so interested in the platform.
But what the internet loves more than anything else is a delta.
So anytime you have someone who's perceived as good, who does something bad, the internet is going to love it.
And anytime you have someone who's bad, who does something good, the internet is going to pay attention.
And that's just the way that our brain works.
And any kind of change is important.
So I'm going to show you all a paper real quick.
The Effect of Adaptation on Differential Brightness Discrimination.
Like, back when there was just a Journal of Physiology.
Not like Cardiac Physiology, not like Kidney Physiology, like... Okay?
this paper talks about how human beings are more sensitive to changes.
It's going to be like this is what then I'll talk a little bit more about why I decided to do this.
So, like, basically this paper is looking at the eye, okay?
And it basically says, like, look, when the eye is used to seeing darkness and it sees light, it, like, notices a lot more.
So there's this really interesting principle in human beings where, like, basically if you...
If there's some kind of change, that's something we're really sensitive to.
So if I'm in a relationship with someone and they suddenly stop responding to my texts, I'm going to be hypersensitive to that.
If like there's a very, very loud room where like everyone's like laughing and like hanging out and whatever, and suddenly things go silent, I'm very sensitive to that.
So human beings, our brains are wired to be sensitive to change.
Okay, but let's get back to this other Hassan thing.
But it's not about like demonizing Hassan or defending Hassan or anything like that.
On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you.
Now, he says his story is it's not a shock collar.
It's part of her training, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, what happens is that there's two groups, one that believes this and one that disbelieves this.
It's not about the specifics of Collargate.
It's about don't you guys think it's weird that this one thing happened?
So now like now we're in an interesting situation because if you're close to Hassan and you know the guy and you know that like this is true, right?
I'm not just basing things on a 37 second clip from the internet.
I've known this guy for years.
I see the way that he treats Kaya.
People like Ray showed up and they're like, this is the most loved dog in the world, right?
And so they're saying things like this.
So then like then what happens is like his friends are like, yo,
Like, people, like, defend him.
And it's not even clear, like, I don't think that they're necessarily, like, defending him.
And then for the last two weeks, this is the only thing that anyone on LSF is talking about.
I think they're just saying, hey, people on the internet who watched a 37-second clip
We've spent hours, days with him and his dogs.
This is a poor representation.
Now here's the really important thing.
Don't worry, we'll get to all the loaner box videos and all that kind of stuff.
I'm not worried about truth at the moment.
What we're talking about right now is mentalization.
We're talking about mentalization.
So let's say, let's define what is mentalization.
So here's the key thing that we need to learn.
So when a human being does something, there are reasons they do something.
There are psychological drivers.
There are emotional drivers that lead to the behavior.
So mentalization is the process of understanding when a human being does something, what are the psychological drivers that are actually driving them?
Like what on earth is happening on the internet and in our lives where this is happening?
And then even within ourselves, when I do this thing,
What is psychologically driving me to engage in this behavior?
This is something that we become so fucking decrepit at.
And I'll give you all an illustrative example.
OK, so let's say I'm someone who has a very high level of insecurity.
I'm somewhat narcissistic and I'm getting married.
And then my BFF, who I haven't seen in two years, shows up a month before the wedding for her bridesmaid fitting.
And I've noticed, oh crap, she has lost so much weight and she looks so great.
And in the meantime, I've been in a steady relationship for the last five years.
I've let myself go a little bit.
A few years ago when we were in college, she used to be a little bit overweight and I was like a regular weight.
And now she's really kind of gotten her shit together.
And like I've kind of let myself go and then I feel bad.
Our positions have reversed.
That's what we're going to talk about.
And so if I'm not careful, what I will do is I'll say, oh my God, she lost weight to make me look bad.
And then I start coming up with all of these excuses for her to no longer be a bridesmaid.
But if I do not have insight into these driving factors, like it doesn't make sense, right?
So, and this is where there's a failure of mentalization because this person in this situation, I don't think for a moment about why would this person lose weight?
Second thing, we've got two lectures prepared that I'm super excited about.
I don't consider that they have all kinds of reasons outside of what my mind automatically produces.
That there are actions, and then there are reasons for those actions.
But my mind produces some hypothesis like, oh, she's trying to make me look bad, which, by the way, is emotional.
But there are all kinds of reasons why people could be doing this.
And what I see in Collargate is a whole-scale failure of mentalization, okay?
And we're going to explain that.
I'm going to walk you all through it, okay?
Now, yo, this isn't true, friends of Hassan, right?
They're the people who believe Hassan, who are like, yes.
They look at this and based on their mentalization, they sort of accept this.
And then we have the people who are the disbelievers.
And the disbelievers look at this in this very simple action.
They don't think like, oh, these people actually have spent thousands of hours with Hasan and Kaya.
Maybe they know more than we do.
gets interpreted by two groups of people in a completely different way right because these people are they're just like hey like this is not who he is right and this is where we got to talk about something for a second and if it sounds like i'm defending us on i'm really not right we're going to get to like all the people who criticize him and stuff in a second
But I just want y'all to know, like, so there is a perspective where it's like, okay, like, I'm not abusive to my dog.
But then let's think about Hassan's perspective.
Let's just imagine for a fucking second that he is not abusive to his dog.
Okay, so then we get to these clips of, so this is like, I think this is Loner Box.
Right, so then a day later, Hasan shows the collar, and he's like, look, here's the collar that I used.
Of the charging port, and the texture of the... Okay, and then Lonerbox shows up, and he's like, look, this looks like this model.
He examines it, and he's like, basically, this is a shock collar.
So this is what Lonerbox says.
Now, remember, we're trying to mentalize here.
So we're trying to put ourselves in Hassan's shoes and we're assuming, because we don't really know, right?
If you think this is sufficient evidence to crack the case, that's totally fine.
But my point is that like, if you're Hassan,
and you're not using a shock collar, what are you supposed to do, right?
Like what action can you take?
And this is what we've learned working with so many streamers is that like when you get railroaded, like there's really not much you can do because people are, even some of this stuff where people are like, okay,
You know, people are coming out and quote unquote defending you, but someone saying, hey, this guy didn't do this gets interpreted as like, oh my God, this guy is like, he's like bullying all these people into defending him.
Do you all see what I'm kind of like?
So we're going to be talking about that nighttime anxiety.
You'll see what I'm kind of getting at here is that there is one piece of evidence which based on your narrative interpretation gets like put into one area or the other area.
So like someone coming out and actually saying, hey, this is not a shock collar.
Like I hang out with the guy.
And then the believers are going to say yes, and the disbelievers are going to say no.
They're going to say he's whipped.
So my point is not whether this is true or not true, okay?
the differential reactions based on the narrative that is already in our head.
And then we're going to talk about how to love the grind.
And now we get to a really, really scary issue, which is that if this is true, if true, right?
If you don't want to believe it, that's okay.
Just listen to what I'm saying.
Don't worry about this particular thing.
If this is true and the disbelievers are discounting it, then what do we do?
And this is what we see not just here.
We see this in politics all the time.
This piece of data does not fit with my narrative.
Therefore, I am going to say that this data is invalid.
And once I say this data is invalid, how is anyone ever going to change their mind?
Do y'all see what I'm saying here?
This is like, I kid y'all not, this is why there is war, strife, and problems, political unrest, male-female dynamics.
Okay, so let's talk about Callergate for a second, okay?
Like, this is the most dangerous thing on the planet.
If I'm a dude alive today and I say, hey, I'm struggling, and people say, I am discounting that because you are privileged, that's why men have a super high suicide rate.
If I'm a woman today and I'm saying, hey, it is not safe for me to walk around and we say, oh, it's safe.
And if you get raped, it's your fault.
It is fundamentally, it's not, I'm not anti any of these views or anything.
I'm not trying to take a side here.
What I'm trying to point out, and this is why I'm talking about this in the first place, is like the biggest problem in the world today is when someone speaks up with something that is contrary to what we believe, we just discount it.
So, some time ago, I don't know if you guys have been following, there's a creator named Ahsan who had this video where he... Oh, okay.
So we, each of us, like, you know, I'm saying,
And instead of like talking and discussing and understanding, I'm not understanding why you think it's bad.
Wait, why do you think this is bad?
You're not trying to understand.
Instead, what we do is we talk to our base and then we end up moving in this direction.
But the other scenario is that Hasan uses shock collar.
You know, you have to make your own judgment on the evidence.
Like this, like I watched this 51 second clip and I was like, damn.
And then it's like, looks like Lohnerbach cracked the case.
Like even the framing of the video seems really, really like damning.
And then there's all kinds of other problems.
Like one problem is like, and then there's this kind of contextual stuff.
Where we see him doing things like this.
There's this creator named Ahsan, and he had this video.
So this builds a narrative of like like he's just you know, he seems to get mad at his dogs a lot, like pulling a dog by the tail.
That's like part of their vertebrae, if I remember correctly.
But like this, this is like looks really bad.
So this is like this is kind of scary stuff.
And the way that he reacts to her in that clip where he's clearly frustrated with her, right?
And this is where, like, so there's, I mean, there's really strong evidence, quote unquote, right?
This, I think, was the original thing that kind of started Callergate, where he was... I believe he was streaming.
I don't know if this is, how abusive this is.
I can't, I can't, I'm not, I don't know about the treatment of animals from a professional sense.
I think it's, I mean, it scares me when I see that.
I would never, I had three German Shepherds growing up.
I would never do that to my German Shepherds.
Like, I wouldn't do that to a dog.
And if you all know more about dogs and you want to form a judgment on that, that's totally fine.
Then there's things like the loner box.
Who's like looking at the shock collar.
And then we get to one of my favorites.
So then what happens, and this is really where there's like
Narrative really creates real problems.
So people are saying, okay, so Cutie said this.
Okay, so be a little bit careful.
She said, oh, my God, like it's had the shock collar prongs removed.
Someone else is saying, oh, my God.
I don't know how this audio is yet, so let me just make sure.
There were never shock collars.
There was never prongs on there.
Somebody else is saying this.
Somebody else is saying this.
And when people see mixed messages, they, once again, remember, there's a narrative interpretation based on what you already believe.
So when two human beings offer different stories to a particular thing, your interpretation is that they're lying.
But I think what's far more common is that human beings and people are like, oh, why didn't you just show the caller then and there, right?
People will say all of these things on the internet.
They're like, why didn't they do this?
Okay, let me ask you all something.
When you're like doing your day job and something weird happens that you don't expect and you're kind of frustrated, right?
You're clearly not in a good mood and then you kind of lash out and then you're like, you don't think it's that big of a deal, right?
So I don't think he thought it was that big of a deal, right?
Like, do you all know, like when you make a mistake, do you immediately know how to correct it?
Or does like a day go by, two days go by and you're like, oh shit, I should have said that.
I should have, I didn't realize in that moment, like I should have really done this.
And my favorite example of this is when I was in school growing up, kids would make fun of me.
And then like 36, they would say, oh yeah, Alok is such a fucking loser.
Like go back home and play your Nintendo.
Can't catch a ball, butterfingers.
And then I'd go back home and 36 hours later, I'd be like, man, I've got the perfect comeback.
So in that moment, we don't think properly.
In fact, we think improperly when we're stressed.
But when people see that, OK, he's showing the collar the next day and like in that window, could it have been doctored?
I'm not saying that it couldn't have been doctored.
It is a shock collar, isn't shock collar.
What I'm saying, and this is what's so hard for human beings, there is a differential diagnosis.
See, when a patient comes into my office and I think one thing, the whole point of medical training is like, I think this is what happened, but I could be wrong.
Like, I think you've got COVID, but maybe you've got cancer.
Maybe it's an autoimmune disease.
So we are formally trained to think through multiple possibilities.
This we do not see on the internet.
Depending on what your narrative is, you jump to a conclusion.
You just jump to a conclusion.
So people say like, oh, there's mixed messages and people are lying.
So I want y'all to think about fucking the last time you and your roommates argued about the dishes.
Right, so this is the clip that started Collargate.
If I were to go and interview all three roommates, who did the most dishes?
I'd get three different answers.
Does that mean that people are lying and trying to do a cover-up?
No, people just have their own individual flawed memory, their perception of things, they're representing that.
It doesn't mean that there's some kind of conspiracy or that people are lying or trying to cover up or anything like that.
I think human beings sometimes, I know it sounds insane, human beings sometimes make contrary statements.
Keep in mind that even though I'm saying all this stuff, I'm not commenting on whether Hasan used a shock collar or didn't use a shock collar.
And so you can you're allowed to believe what you want to believe if you think that all of this evidence against him that, you know, people are saying this and like you like the loaner box video, like this is what the shock collar is, that he has this historic narrative of like being at least callous towards animals, if not abusive.
He gets frustrated with his dog.
And that's when we get to another issue, which is selection bias.
So when these things kind of happen, so I don't know if y'all, I once had a patient that got accused of not really sexual misconduct, but was like harassing one of the female employees.
But the moment that happens...
The moment that happens, everyone is like, oh yeah, like they were such a creep.
His dog yelps and goes back to the bed or whatever.
There was that one day in the break room where like, you know, they sat next to me and they like started sneezing and then they like dropped their phone and like maybe they were taking a picture of like what was under my skirt or something like that.
Like the moment that there's a narrative that gets formed, we start populating all of these clips, right?
So how many hours of material is there of Hasan interacting with Kaya?
And are any of the positive things going to get upvoted?
What's going to get upvoted is the most damning clips.
Now, just because what's going to get upvoted is the most damning clips does not mean that those clips aren't true.
And the first thing that I want y'all to notice is that this has 78,000 upvotes.
I'm not saying it isn't true.
What I'm saying is like, remember, this is not about Hassan.
This is about the world that we live in.
What gets upvoted to the top?
The stuff that tends to fit our narrative.
Now there's one other thing that I want to talk about, which is like all kinds of weird stuff.
I say one thing I want to talk about.
So why is there so much dislike for this guy in the first place?
So this is where, this is where I feel really, anyway, so let me summarize with mentalization first.
So I think this is a really good example of
of why we should mentalize more, right?
Instead of just jumping to a conclusion, we should try to put ourselves in Hassan's shoes and ask yourself for a moment, if this was not a shock collar, what is he supposed to say or what is he supposed to do?
So like what on earth is going on here?
would alleviate the the suspicions of the people who think he's bad is there is there any option and this is an interesting i sometimes will have political discussions like not often but you know and one of the things that i will ask people one of my favorite questions in politics is what would have to happen for you to stop supporting this person right what would actually change your mind
So today what I want to talk about, I want to talk about Collargate not in the details, and let me just like disabuse y'all of some notions from the get-go.
And that's why I want the answer to that question is why I think politics is like has a serious problem, because the truth of the matter is that very few things like if you ask someone what would actually change your mind, you realize how far radicalized they become.
That it would take something incredibly monumental once a narrative forms in your head.
So if you're someone who hates Hassan, what would it take for you to like him?
What would it take for you to think he's a good guy?
And on the flip side, if you're a Hassan stan, what would it take for you to dislike him?
See, this is something that you have to do ahead of time because each step of the way, it doesn't work.
Like, cause you'll rationalize, you'll rationalize.
If you're on a particular team, you'll rationalize away the behavior of that team one step at a time.
And you'll end up, when you started at zero, you'll end up at like a hundred.
You should really stop and ask yourself critically for a belief that you have, for someone that you like, for someone that you dislike.
What would it take for you to change your mind?
So the first thing is that this is not going to be like an anti-Hassan kind of thing.
This too, I mean, this is where there's like claims that Kaya didn't have the shocker during the incident.
Like this, I mean, it's clear that she did.
And this too is like, okay, and this is where I know that there's a differential diagnosis here.
One is that he's mistaken, which I mean, he's mistaken, I think.
I think there's plenty of evidence of that.
But the second is like, I can just attest to this, y'all.
When people are under huge amounts of stress, their mind like thinks in a very black and white way.
This is not going to be a defending Hassan kind of thing.
And they just sometimes make mistakes.
So just because he's having some doing some mental gymnastics in his head, like a week into the shit when he's getting hammered, like just because he makes a mistake doesn't mean he was originally lying.
I'm not like I'm not saying that.
I'm not I'm not trying to like support him here.
I'm just saying I want you all to think about.
When you're when when you're one week into a period of stress, is your mind producing thoughts that are 100 percent correct?
This is about understanding what is happening to us on the internet.
OK, so here's the other part about mentalization that I want to talk about, OK?
So this too is unironically what I think is C.
Critical thinking in this moment, in my opinion, is when you have a 40 month subscriber who says, hey, oh, actually, hold on.
We got to listen to the rest of the clip.
And the reason that I want to talk about this, so generally speaking, we have this ethos here at Healthy Gamer that we talk to people, we don't talk about people.
So here's where we're going to talk about critical thinking for a second.
who's been around from the beginning, thinks that this is sus, I think a huge opportunity for critical thinking is for you to take a step back and think about how does this person arrive at this conclusion, right?
And this goes back to like this diagram over here, which is like, if there's like a 40-month subscriber who's over here and doesn't think that what you're doing is like okay,
Welcome to another Healthy Gamer GG stream.
Telling them to exercise critical thinking is fine.
But this is, I think, a great opportunity for critical thinking.
Because how is it that someone who has been here, right?
The key question for me in this scenario is how is it that this person who has been here for so long comes to this conclusion?
So this is not going to be about Hassan and whether he's guilty or whether he's a narcissist or whether it's real.
Because they are ending up in one place and I am ending up in a different place.
And Hassan talks about this a lot.
He says like, you know, the best way, I don't know how to fight against observable reality, right?
So he'll say like, I don't know how to fight against observable reality.
And like, that's really, really, really, really, really important to think about.
Because the whole point here is that the reality that you are observing is not the same as the reality that the other people are observing, right?
And until you understand the reality that other people are observing, how do you know that your reality is more correct than their reality?
And this is where the mind will come up with whatever answers.
Hasan will say, well, I was there.
But your mind is going to be plagued with cognitive bias as well.
I'm not an investigative journalist.
Your mind is going to look at things like this and say like,
You know, your mind is going to look at things like this and say, like, this is not a problem.
It's not my place to try to determine truth of something.
This is a clip of someone who's telling him that, you know, he's like choking his dog with because the collar is too tight.
His mind is going to look at something like this and it will very prone to dismiss it.
People are leaving out the context.
People are leaving out this.
People aren't considering this.
People don't see all the great stuff that I do for my dogs.
So like this is where I'm not and I'm not trying to like zero in on him.
I'm saying any human being will do this.
The moment that you get defensive.
So think about when y'all get criticized.
And you will think, oh my God, these people are ignoring the reality of the situation.
They're ignoring the reality of the situation.
They see a different reality.
And this is the problem with the world today, is we are all living in our own realities.
And how on earth can we coexist when we are living in different realities?
When a 40 month subscriber says, hey, man, I think this is sus.
What I want to focus on today is why this blows up and the way in which it blows up.
That's where you and I realize I'm sort of calling out Hassan now, but I mean this more generally.
So I apologize for the structure and the way that this is coming out.
So like any time, like if someone has known you very well and I see this all the time, let me just use a different example.
So someone knows you really well.
And like, you know, I've had patients who have struggled with things like alcohol addiction and then their friends come to them and they're like, hey, man, I've known you for 40 months and this is not like you.
And then my patient's response will be like, oh, my God, you don't understand my situation.
You're not looking at things clearly like you don't understand what the reality of the situation is.
But when you're under attack, I want you all to think about when people attack you, do you think critically or is your default response?
Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast.
Man, I wish they would think more critically.
And this is what's happening right now because we're talking across each other.
We're not actually listening to each other.
We're just like getting pissed at each other, blaming each other, and then like inviting the rest of the world to be less stupid, right?
And that is not working, y'all.
Because, and this is what's kind of wild, I think I'm really starting to believe that the most dangerous thing on the planet
This is why dialogue, as we've seen a decline in dialogue, we see more things like this, where it's shots fired, followed by defenses, followed by tribal thinking, followed by defense versus attack.
There's no like, hey, can we sit down and try to figure out what's going on?
What do you think about that?
And then we get to, I think, the weird stuff.
Now, this is where there's something weird in the air that is hard for me to describe.
But I think there's a lot of projection.
And the reason, like, when I look at this, when I look at this, like, you know, this 78K, like, this blows my mind.
And Hassan is like, hey, there's a genocide going on, right?
There's all kinds of problems in the world.
And it's not just a genocide.
There's like, you know, American, like rural hospitals in America are closing down.
Like there's still conflict in Israel and Palestine.
Just a reminder that although I'm a psychiatrist, nothing we discuss on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice.
There's a lot of like weird stuff happening in the U.S.
There's a war between Ukraine and Russia.
There are problems in the EU.
You know, was it not Indonesia?
Had like a revolution where they elected somebody on Discord.
I'm forgetting which country it was.
And they fucking dragged their finance minister through the streets and whipped him and stuff like that.
There's all kinds of stuff going on.
And this is what we get really focused on?
So for the people who are hammering Hassan, why is it that it is so important to see that this guy is brought to justice about this issue?
is the psychological dynamics that we see happening in Collargate.
Do you all get what I'm saying?
intense desire to see this outcome resolved in a particular way do y'all get like that's a little bit weird like what is our investment as a community in this are we suddenly like super pro animal rights or like what's going on here we're going to try to like protect the like why are we so invested in this
And this is where I think there's a lot of projection.
The reason I want to talk about Collargate is not because I'm invested in shitting on Hasan or supporting Hasan or anything like that.
There's a lot of displacement.
I'm not quite sure what this is.
I'd really have to sit down and talk to a lot of people to really understand what's going on.
So this is the part that I think is like the sketchiest part of what I'm going to say.
And now that resentment is coming out.
I would say that this reaction is disproportionate.
Maybe I don't understand people's values and we're really pro animals or whatever.
But I would say that this reaction is like disproportionate to the size of the thing.
Right now, I want to say, like, can we I'm going to just check in with chat for a second.
I have nothing against the guy.
So for the people who are saying no, what are y'all saying?
I've had one interaction with him.
I think he's got a mission in life.
But there's, like, all kinds of animal abuse going on all the time.
There's like all kinds of animal abuse going on all the time.
What bothers us so much about this instance of animal abuse?
More so than everything else.
He's doing the best that he knows how to do, which is what I think about most human beings.
And I'm not saying I'm right.
I'm not saying y'all are wrong.
I'm genuinely trying to understand why for the people who do not think this is disproportionate.
I think most human beings are good people with flaws.
So I didn't feel super confident in what I was about to say.
For the record, I have undoubtedly better relationships with many of the people who are Hasan's critics.
So remember when I said up here, there's pent up resentment.
Are there people in today's world that escape responsibility?
Can y'all think of anyone who is escaping responsibility for their actions?
So, like, you know, I've had a chance to hang out with people like Asmund Gold.
So there are people, and can we do anything about it?
Are there people out there abusing animals?
Can we do anything about it?
Are there people out there who keep getting away with it?
Can we do anything about it?
People like XQC, we've had several conversations.
Do we know someone who we're waiting for them to expose their true colors?
Are there like people in your life that you know, like that you see on TV or you see on the internet?
Are we like kind of as a society, are we frustrated with people being fake?
Are there people around us that are very hypocritical?
Say one thing, do something else.
Can you do anything about it?
We'll sometimes hang out at streaming events.
Are there people who deflect, who when they have some kind of problem, say, oh, but there's something, they're really good at whataboutism.
They're like, stop looking at my problem.
People like Ludwig or whatever.
There's so many worse problems going over there.
Are there people out there who are gaslighting us and can we do a whole lot about it?
Are there people who have double standards?
Does the world treat some people very well and some people treat very poorly, right?
The CEO of Twitch, is he a fan of any particular political streamers?
Like, I have a more positive relationship with them than I do with Hasan.
I know there's a perception of a double standard, but this is what's crazy.
I know this is crazy, but hear me out.
I've been on the receiving end of this.
The prime example that I can think of is I once worked with a Dota 2 team.
And man, working with that Dota 2 team and seeing how it runs on the inside and what the real problems were and seeing what Reddit's understanding of what the problems were, they were like night and day.
No one on Reddit had a fucking clue what was going on inside the team.
But everyone is judging and everyone is sure that they're right.
That's a disclaimer that I'm tossing out from the get-go.
That being in the room and knowing what is actually happening is very different from watching clips on the internet and believing you know what is happening.
about my biases, but I've got nothing against the dude.
There's so many things that we hate Hasan for.
The things that y'all are talking about, for those of y'all that are like really, really not, don't think that this is inappropriate, right?
And I'm not saying that y'all are right or y'all are wrong.
Remember, the goal of this is not to pass judgment.
It was an event with the Surgeon General.
I think we as human beings need to understand what the fuck is going on in our society right now because we are tearing each other apart.
This could result in biological weapons.
It could result in nuclear weapons.
It could result in all kinds of problems.
Seemed like a totally cool guy.
People, the world is fucking falling apart because of stuff like this.
Because of the fundamental way that human beings have started interacting with each other and because of a lack of the way that we've stopped interacting with each other.
I respect the work that he does, like nothing against the dude, okay?
So we have all of this pent up emotional energy and it's got nowhere to go.
And so where does it end up?
Someone shows up and holy shit, y'all, the evidence is good.
Did you see him yanking by his tail?
Everything is for educational or entertainment purposes only, especially that bomb that I just dropped right there.
The loner box video, XQC is doing this.
All these people are lying about it.
Like, oh my God, this guy, this fucking guy, this fucking guy, double standard, hypocrite, privileged, pretends to be pro-minority while he has $3 million houses and $300 shirts, right?
This is not about determining whether he's good or bad.
A champion for the underprivileged.
Gets to dodge bans all the time.
Other people get banned for all kinds of stuff.
And then now, like, it comes out onto him.
And this guy's like, what the fuck did I do?
And oh my god, I want y'all to think about this from Hasan's perspective.
It's not about psychoanalyzing him or anything like that.
What is this disproportionate reaction?
Because people can't get upset at anybody else.
People can't tear down anybody else.
Because I know this sounds insane, y'all.
I've worked with a bunch of creators.
A creator's power is a house of cards.
Is a fucking house of cards.
And if public sentiment turns against you, there's very little resilience.
There's no institution to prop you up.
Like this guy's like, what did I do?
And by the way, it's not even illegal.
What I want to talk about today is what happens on the internet.
Hey, he talks about like the tent.
Like I've had a TENS machine.
And by the way, he's correct here.
So TENS machine, I think, delivers way more.
TENS machines are things that are used to help people in physical therapy.
They deliver an electrical shock that is way higher than a shock collar.
But here's the key thing to remember.
A TENS machine is used on muscle.
If I punch you in the throat and I punch you in the arm, the amount of pain you will experience will be very different.
Just because the force is the same does not mean that the pain is the same.
And we're going to be talking about mentalization.
That this is what's happening.
And when the mob gets angry, and it's angry at 15 people, and one person fitting the description of the other 14 show up, they tear him apart.
We're going to be talking about online radicalization.
Now, there are a couple of other complicating factors here, which I think really, really, there's a lot of pent-up
stuff i think that's specifically towards hassan so i know for example that and i'm not saying this is true or not true i'm just saying that in the with the creators that i've worked with one of the things that they're they're a handful of communities that they're really scared of and hassan's is one of them i'm not saying that that's justified or not justified i'm not saying it's true or not true but just from
For whatever reason, right, and when people say, I'll ask them, like, why, right, what concerns you about?
And we're going to be talking about a host of psychological things, including displacement, projection, etc.
And I think it has something to do with his size, his rigidity, and the tribalism of his community, right?
There's like a, there's an us versus them.
And another example of this, and I think this is why the Ethan Klein Hassan thing got so bad, because there's a lot of tribalism in both of those communities, right?
There's not a whole lot of like dialogue or trying to understand or things like that, at least that I can perceive.
And if that's incorrect, remember, I'm making these judgments based on very limited stuff.
It's not like I watch these guys a whole lot.
It's just when I, the parts of them that I do see, which there could be a selection bias for, there's like, you know, there's not a whole lot of like, let's understand why the right is the way that it is.
That's not usually what they say.
Let's try to understand the perspectives of the Palestinians.
Let's try to understand the perspectives of the Israelis.
I haven't seen them talk about that.
There is rigidity, there is tribalism, and there is righteousness.
And so I think that when you add tribalism, rigidity, and righteousness, when you add that with clout, power, and size, this is what you see.
So I encourage y'all to think about communities, how open they are, how understanding they are, how convinced they are that they are right and somebody else is wrong.
So if y'all are here looking for some drama farming kind of stuff, I think basically the drama is over.
And how do those communities behave?
Don't even think about LSF or the Twitch sphere or the streamer sphere or whatever.
Because I think we need to understand that this is happening.
I'm not saying he's a good dude.
I'm not saying he's a bad dude.
Not my place to be judge, jury, or executioner.
The reason I'm sharing this with y'all is because we as a society need to understand these dynamics because as long as this stuff keeps going, the world will literally keep moving in the direction that it's moving.
It's about winning, not understanding.
I have reasons and we can get into those if y'all want.
And this is where, like I said something earlier that that I think is like, you know, sometimes has gotten me in trouble.
But I want you to really think about this.
There are there are groups historically.
Like, why do people try to do genocide?
It's because if I can wipe everybody out, then I win for sure.
We've seen this historically.
There are so many people that will try to ethnically cleanse.
They're trying to wipe people out.
There's no sense of understanding.
That's the direction we are moving.
I think basically Collargate's done, I would hope.
There are groups of people who are trying to systematically wipe out other groups of people.
There's no attempt at understanding.
So when we started streaming or when I started streaming.
We used to have these like really powerful conversations with people and.
And so that's why I want to talk.
Then what would happen is people would start pressuring other streamers to come and talk to us.
And then we made a decision several years ago at Healthy Gamer that we were growing.
We used to have 20,000 to 40,000 concurrence.
I didn't want to talk about, I didn't want to open my mouth and get embroiled in this stuff while it was live.
Now we're sitting at a whopping 1,500.
We made a decision some time ago that the kind of audience that we were attracting was not there to get better.
They were there for voyeurism.
We're here to talk to people to try to help people.
We're not here to try to be a show for other people.
This is not... You know, the entertaining part is not someone else's struggles.
The entertaining part is me doing accents.
There have been many times where I've been tempted, and sometimes we'll reach out to people if they're going through shit.
Tons of people reach out to us.
We try to support them in the best way that we can.
So I think dialogue is important, but...
But I think it's a really, really great example of like something that is really dangerous.
This is where I want y'all to understand.
I feel like I have to talk about this.
This is framing is really important.
I, I struggled with something that I'm going to share with y'all.
So when all this shit was going on, I struggled thinking about whether I should message Hassan or not be like, Hey dude, are you doing okay?
Sounds like you're going through a ton of shit.
I don't have a relationship with him.
So if there's someone I have relationship with them, I'll almost always try to DM them.
If they're going through something, try to be supportive as a friend.
But then I was thinking about, and this is what's so hard.
He says, no, dude, I'm good.
Now Dr. K is like talking about me because I turned him down.
Do y'all kind of get what I'm saying?
It puts him in a weird position.
And we usually like, I'm open to having conversations on stream with people with things about this, but there's a certain ambulance chaser mentality to that that I don't like.
It's not really what we're doing, but that's really tricky.
And then the other problem is now that I've had this conversation, I'm sure that people will show up in his chat.
So there's a failure of mentalization, which we'll talk about what that is.
Hey, Dr. K is talking about you.
Like, do you want to talk to Dr. K?
Please, guys, don't do that.
Do you guys realize, let's mentalize for a moment, what kind of position that puts him in?
It puts him in a lose-lose situation.
If he doesn't want to do it, right, it makes him look bad.
And if he does do it, then it's really scary.
Like, y'all get what I'm saying?
Like, this is where I think dialogue is important.
There's profound online radicalization.
Think for a moment about what his experience of this is going to be.
And I genuinely hope that nothing I said today will cause him or anybody else, Cutie Cinderella, Ludwig, Asmongold, XQC, like whatever.
I don't wish anyone to troll on any of these people.
I think, please, y'all, listen to what I'm saying here.
The world is fucking falling apart and we need to start having dialogues.
And I think Collargate is also a really good example of how people have stopped talking to each other.
So I'm sort of open to doing that in some way.
It's kind of what I try to do, but I don't want to be like, okay, like Dr. K is saying, hey, like y'all should come and talk, right?
Do you guys see how manipulative that is?
So I'm trying to sort of not do that, but also say that, hey, we need to start talking to each other.
Do y'all kind of get what I'm saying?
Because I'm really not trying to call anyone.
I don't think that that is good.
To be like, oh, hey, do you want to come talk?
And if they say no, oh, yeah, fucking he didn't want to talk.
There's a frame of like, hey, do you all kind of get what I'm saying?
Because this is really important to me.
That we don't want to put him in an unfair position or anybody else for that matter.
And at the same time, I want to signal to y'all that this work needs to be done.
So if we look at the fundamental structure of Collargate, what is it?
And if this work needs to be done, I am somewhat willing to do it because I don't know what it looks like.
There's so many other considerations.
We need to start talking to each other.
That I believe more than anything else on the planet.
This absolutely needs to happen.
And this particular instance doesn't need to happen with this particular person about this particular thing because there's so much crap loaded into this.
If Hasan and I have a conversation,
This happened with fucking poor Thor.
I had a conversation with Thor and I think the guy really tried to understand.
He showed up with the right intention.
I showed up with the right intention.
I even asked y'all, please don't clip it and ship it.
We took the worst parts of the conversation and they blew to the top of the LSF.
A lot of people make judgments based on the clip.
Yay, Dr. K is back at the top of LSF showing narcissists how they're such assholes.
This world that I know you guys love, oh my God, love to blame Hasan.
Love to blame all these hypocrites and everyone escaping responsibility and everyone who deflects projection.
Do y'all take accountability for your part in this?
This is a 37 second clip that causes this explosion.
And this is where people go, you guys, y'all be like, yeah, fuck yeah.
I wish I could have done more.
But what I want y'all to really understand is that in a relationship, which this is a parasocial relationship, there is the way that I behave and there is the way that y'all behave.
What gets created between us has contributions from both sides.
And I think especially with, just talking about Thor for a second,
So I know that everyone loves to burn him and things like that.
But the number of people that we got so much positive feedback, they're like, oh, I'm like this too.
Can you please help me change because it's fucking up my relationships?
I'm not saying that he's bad or anything like that.
We do this to try to help people, not to try to tear people down.
And unless we start talking to each other and if we keep talking across each other and having these like, you know, literally like I'm going to react to this and I'm going to react to this.
I saw the title of the stream and I was like, oh my God, I'm doing it too.
And maybe this is me trying to not be hypocritical.
There's unclear levels of critical thinking.
This is me trying to notice, hey, like I'm part of the problem too.
Like, I'm not perfect in this by any means.
Today may fuck up people's lives in ways that I really don't intend.
And I really do think that it's over, y'all, which is why I'm kind of talking about it now.
But, like, it's just such a good example of what is wrong on the internet.
Yeah, so people are saying, Hasan just needs to say, I'm sorry, I won't do it again.
But I want y'all to imagine for a moment that he didn't do it.
Are you 100% sure that that was not a shot caller?
And if, like, then what is he supposed, do y'all see the position that he's in?
And then what happens is everyone starts reacting to it, right?
So if you're, I don't know, but I think that in the differential diagnosis, one option is he, let's assume that he did it for a moment.
So we've got the original Hasan gate and then like, oh, sorry, collar gate.
And then he probably can't afford to admit that he did.
Or he doesn't know how to do it in a way that will be received well.
So in that case, it's like, once you dig your heels in, you cannot give an inch.
Imagine he did it, how would he act?
I think if he did use a shock collar, the behavior that he has exhibited is completely consistent with using a shock collar.
I also believe that the behavior he is exhibiting is completely consistent with him not using a shock collar.
That's my whole fucking point.
If all criticism of things online can be just dismissed and boiled down to your own pent up anger and resentment, how is any accountability ever in anything?
So this is important to understand.
So if I'm like, ah, nothing wrong.
And then we've got clips like this one.
It is your pent up resentment that is displaced onto him and he has grit, right?
How will there ever be accountability?
How about we give the appropriate amount of accountability to the people who deserve it?
So does Dazon deserve accountability?
Should we hold him accountable?
Should we hold me accountable?
All I'm saying is when there is this pent up resentment and displacement, and I'm betting y'all money that you have been on the receiving end of this.
I've seen this so much when you're the black sheep of the family, when you're the person who people don't like at work, when you are a racial minority and you get a displaced amount of hatred.
So I'm not advocating for an absence of accountability at all.
What I'm saying is let us have an appropriate amount of accountability for people and what they did.
I have too much hope for people?
So here's the last thing I'm going to say.
I think most people do the best that they know how to do.
Honestly, most people kind of do the best that they can.
And sometimes that's pretty bad.
But I don't I don't I think that like, you know, when I've worked with people who are streamers, there's there's a certain narcissism that is like a necessary developmental piece that comes with streaming.
So I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but.
See, when you get criticized by one person, it hurts.
When you were a gigantic streamer and you get criticized by 10,000 people, 100,000 people, your brain doesn't view that criticism probabilistically.
That's not how our brain works.
Our brain doesn't do a calculation of, okay, 99% of people like me, 1% of people hate me.
It just looks at the 1% of people that hates you or the 10,000 people who hate you or the 100,000 people who hate you.
And that's very psychologically traumatic.
That's just our brain is bad at probability.
There's all kinds of studies about this.
You can look at things like the Monty Hall problem and things like that.
It's why human beings play the lottery.
And it's why human beings gamble because we suck at probabilistic thinking.
And so when you're a streamer, it requires, right, because some people are going to hate you no matter what.
And how do you protect your psyche from people who hate you no matter what?
There's a series of defense mechanisms that we'll use.
The narcissistic defense mechanism is one of the biggest ones.
Because I can't receive that person's opinion.
Because if I receive that person's opinion and the 9,000 other people with them, like, I won't be able to wake up tomorrow morning.
I don't think it's the healthiest thing that you can do.
Does it create sort of narcissistic patterns of thought?
Do those kinds of patterns of thought encourage people to avoid accountability, to be a little bit gaslighting towards themselves and the people around them?
But it's a feature of the profession.
There's other details and nuances there that we can kind of go into.
So if you guys think, you know, I'm full of shit or whatever, like, ask.
Okay, nobody listens anymore, not even your chat to you.
At least many people who I now see are incapable.
How then to transfer this message or intention at this age and time?
Okay, nobody listens anymore, not even your chat to you.
I respectfully disagree, right?
So this is black and white thinking, and maybe I'm not listening to you.
But I think y'all are listening.
Some people are listening and some people are not, and that's okay.
So at least the person who made this comment I think is hearing what I'm saying.
I think a lot of y'all are hearing what I'm saying.
A lot of y'all may not be, but that's okay.
So if y'all have... But seriously, this is for educational or entertainment purposes only.
How to then transfer this message or intention at this age and time?
By living it as best as you can.
By doing the listening yourself.
And you will be amazed at how well this works.
So I can't change the world.
I can maybe have some tiny impact on you.
And then you hopefully can start to live your life in a slightly different way, which will then have a cascading impact in your life.
And maybe you can affect another human being.
The only way this works is dominoes.
And the reason someone said, you know, I have a lot more faith in people than y'all do.
Maybe it's like the scam of Dr. K. I mean, maybe it is.
I'd have to think critically about that.
But I think honestly, when you practice psychiatry, like psychiatry has restored my faith in humanity, man.
And I think we see it on this channel.
Like when we do interviews and stuff like that, like these are like good people.
Like these people are like, you know, life is hard, but people get better.
I want to show you something.
This is why I have faith in humanity.
I get faith in humanity from the community.
This is why I have faith in humanity.
Thanks for getting me laid, Dr. K. Because people do better.
It sounds like they had difficulty getting laid.
They go on a couple of dates.
So at the end, when we arrived, I've just asked her instead what she thought about the past two day.
I remember the friend's own video where this guy was just supposed to ask what to do with these feelings.
He has in a relaxed setting, probably not going any further.
In my mind, I was just thinking about what to do when I drop her off.
Maybe just wave goodbye or a hug at the most.
I remember the friend zone where the guy was supposed to ask, what do I do with these feelings?
Hey, I have feelings for you.
So when we arrived, instead of just asking what she thought about the past two days, no hard feelings, how does she feel about this whole thing?
Want to meet again, not really feeling it, want to keep this on a friendship level.
She said that she enjoyed it and liked me, and then things escalated.
This is why I have faith in humanity.
I've had people in my office who are just like suicidal, man, like the world is ending.
Oh my God, I want to kill myself.
People on the autism spectrum end up getting married and hopefully live happily ever after.
People with addictions will become sober for years and years and 10 years of sobriety, 20 years of sobriety.
People with trauma who are in repetitive toxic relationship patterns will get better.
Right, so there's all this business about the collar.
And let's remember that when we're dealing with mental illness, these are not like
high probability scenarios in a positive direction, right?
This is complex PTSD, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, double depression, both dysthymia with a depressive mood disorder on top.
So they're chronically depressed with acute periods of depression on top of that.
And these people get better.
Your past life does not determine your future.
That's why I have faith in humanity.
Not because I'm like, oh, I'm Dr. K, and I'm going to be like, oh my God, everyone's so great, and I have to believe in people.
No, I didn't believe in people, and then people taught me to believe in them.
There's all this business about the collar.
So when I kind of turned my life around, I was like,
And then I started to wonder, can this be reproducible?
Can other people get better too?
Does it happen all the time?
But I think like, I don't know if this makes sense.
You know, if y'all have struggled, if you've been like really stuck in life,
How much effort from somebody else does it take to really help you out?
And this is what I think is crazy, right?
So when you do it yourself, it feels like, oh my God, it's impossible to do.
A little bit of help goes a long way.
A little bit of help goes so far.
So if someone has been mentally ill with double depression for 10 years, I had a patient like this.
And then I worked with them for like 18 months.
To start to turn around a decade of moving in the wrong direction.
42, 40, 50 hours, let's say.
No, I mean, if you guys want to be mad at Hasan, be mad at Hasan.
Like I said, I'm not... I have no horse in this race.
There's all this stuff about the collar.
If y'all want to be mad at him, be mad at him.
And then, like, people are doing... I don't know what this one is.
I was bottom of the pile, bullied at school.
I lashed out at the world, then I looked inside and healed.
Honestly, you rule, Dr. K. Like, thank you so much, and you rule too.
I'm not, like, the lone champion of goodness out there.
Like, I think the reason that people, you know...
I don't know if this makes sense.
If I was truly special, then I wouldn't be anywhere.
The whole point that the only reason I'm somewhere is because what I say matches y'all on some level, right?
Like, y'all are really great.
I just think y'all need a little help.
So whether you need help or not, I don't know if you need help.
And then there's, like, clips like this one, okay?
General question, how can accountability be proportionate when more than one person is passing judgment, internet or not?
So what I would say is if you're in a position where you feel like they're... I think one of the best things that you can do is try to hold people accountable for stuff that they do.
If y'all have a medical concern or question, please go see a licensed professional.
So if you're frustrated about...
something in your family and there's a lack of accountability by someone in your family, like do something about it, right?
Where then people are, like, defending Hasan.
Don't just pick some random streamer and then like offload everything onto them.
If there are other people in your life or politicians or whatever, take action.
In all of those dimensions, like that's, it's going to be so good for you from a psychological perspective, right?
Give you purpose, give you direction.
Now I'm fucking doing something about it instead of just whining about it on the internet.
Go and do something in the world.
So Hassan is literally a proponent of political violence, defends terrorists, and people only get triggered when he shocks a dog.
So first of all, I can't comment.
I haven't watched enough of his stuff.
I don't really understand what his political beliefs are.
I mean, I have some sense, but I would be the first person to say that I think before you form a judgment, you should thoroughly understand what someone's views are.
And ideally, I try not to form judgments without actually sitting down and talking to people.
So I don't know if that's correct or not.
But even if it is, I don't think humanity is utterly lost.
Because even if that's true, there are people like you who are like, hey, this is a problem.
And as long as it's not just that someone has a set of political beliefs that are pro-political violence, humanity is utterly lost when people stop having a problem with it.
Depression isn't the problem.
The problem is when you give in to depression, when you start to say, okay, there's nothing I can do.
That's what's so devastating about depression is that it makes you think that way.
Oh, by the way, do y'all understand?
Let me ask y'all one last question before we move on.
So whether is there a caller, is there a caller, are the prongs removed, are they not removed?
You remember earlier when I said people who like Hasan and people who dislike Hasan, both of them are going to hate me.
I'm curious whether you guys...
It's a read my mind question.
So I had a particular hypothesis about that going in.
Do y'all remember, do y'all get a sense of what I was talking about then?
Because I rode the fence, so I didn't... Y'all are sort of spot on.
It's not that I rode the fence.
I'm just not... Yeah, I guess you could say it's riding the fence.
I was thinking critically about mentalizing and... Okay, you can call it that.
So I think that I had enough ambiguity to where, depending on your narrative, you can slot me into either side.
So there's, like, a lot of people, like, talking across each other.
So, like, I said enough anti-Hassan things where people who like Hassan will be like, oh, my God, Dr. K is the enemy.
And I said enough pro-Hassan things to where if you're anti-Hassan, you'll be like, oh, my God, this guy is defending Hassan.
Do you all kind of get that?
And the reason that I'm talking about this is because this is not the only place this is happening.
So it's not about sitting the fence.
And this is the key thing to understand.
The whole point about the narrative is once you have an idea in mind, you're going to filter what someone says through that narrative.
I have an opinion based on what I've seen of whether the caller is shocking or not.
I do not think that that opinion belongs in this conversation.
I do not think that opinion belongs in public.
I think sharing that opinion is not my area of expertise and I should keep my fucking mouth shut.
If we look at the world we live in, the amount of people talking across each other is increasing exponentially.
I do not think sharing that opinion makes the world a better place in any way, shape, or form.
All it does is encourages narratives.
So people like, oh, so Hassan is cooked.
This is exactly what I mean.
I didn't state which direction it was.
And so what people are going to do, like, just notice your reaction to that statement.
Are you making an assumption about which way I fall?
And you guys may be right, because since I have an opinion that may bleed through right subconsciously in the way that I speak.
Like, I'm not perfect, but it's not something I'm trying to share intentionally.
Intentionally, I'm not trying to share because I don't think it helps.
What I think about, Hasan, is not what's wrong with the world today.
What's wrong with the world today is that we don't talk to each other.
And I'm really starting to believe that that is one of the core reasons why we are seeing so much strife and conflict in the world.
What's wrong with the world today is we're getting radicalized to both sides.
My analysis has nothing to do with my opinion as hard as I can try, but I'm flawed.
My brain is biased just like everybody else's.
There's zero chance that my opinion does not affect the lecture that I just offered.
I've done my best to remove it, but I'm human.
So I apologize if that came through and really I don't intend to hurt anybody.
So someone said, I strongly disagree with Hasan, and I understand your point and mostly agree with you.
Underlining the problem does not get solved, though.
It is so hard to reach people in those communities because of their bias.
So I'm glad that you shared your opinion in what I think is a productive and dialogue-forward way.
And I'm not saying it's hard.
I also think it's very hard.
I think if it was easy, the world wouldn't be going to hell in the way that it is right now.
And also just because it's hard doesn't mean that we shouldn't try.
So I think it's a huge problem.
I think it's a problem that humanity has never solved before.
And I think it's going to take a lot of mistakes in order to solve it.
Let me find, I'm going to pull up a couple of papers, chat.
So if you look at, like, politics...
There are a lot of people who have anxiety.
And for many of these people, this anxiety gets way worse at night.
So this is like my favorite example of this, where it's like, okay, when you're awake, you kind of push down the anxiety, you suppress it.
It's like you manage to survive and distract yourself through the day.
But then when you lay down, the anxiety spreads and now it's in your brain and it causes you problems.
And that's something that a lot of people will experience, right?
So why does my anxiety get 10 times worse at night?
We don't have places where people sit down and actually have a conversation.
During the day, I can usually manage.
But the second it's nighttime and things quiet down, my brain turns into the loudest thing in the room.
Every worry I shoved away all comes back.
Bills, relationships, future plans, regrets.
I'll try to go to sleep, but instead I toss and turn until 3 a.m.
I'll sometimes jump into calls with friends or even play around on my...
on my prize so i just don't feel alone but the anxiety still lingers does anyone deal with this why is anxiety so much worse at night and how do you comment so it is fascinating but anxiety is way worse at night and that is because that is the way that we have evolved there are all kinds of neuroscience mechanisms that make anxiety worse at night
And the really scary thing is that one of the reasons, probably one of the biggest reasons why anxiety is worse at night that is not evolution is that the way that we deal with anxiety is
Even in politics, we have these debates where it's like you get three minutes with a 90-second rebuttal and three minutes with a 90-second rebuttal.
So a lot of people will go through there during the day and they will occupy themselves to distract themselves to ignore the anxiety.
And the really scary thing is if you are distracting yourself from the anxiety during the day, there's a really good chance that you're actually making it worse at night.
So sometimes as a psychiatrist, I work with patients who come up with solutions to their problems.
The problem is that sometimes their solution creates another problem.
And the moment that your solution creates a different problem, now you're stuck.
Because if your solution is making a problem, then you're kind of like, you're winning over here, you're losing over here.
let go of your solution, then the original problem kind of comes back.
So let's understand why nighttime anxiety is worse, okay?
So this is going to be a more neuroscience-heavy lecture.
If you guys are having trouble following, please let me know, okay?
So the first thing that we're going to talk about is circadian rhythm.
So when we... So this is a paper about night shift work.
But the first thing that I want to show you all is we have this hormone called cortisol, okay?
We have all kinds of people who are no longer talking to each other, right?
And this is the normal level.
This is the normal curve for cortisol throughout our body.
I'm Dr. Alok Kanodja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.
So cortisol is at an all-time low at midnight.
It spikes in the morning, and then it decreases throughout the day, and then it's low at night, okay?
This is about night shift workers, but it sort of relates to anxiety.
So we're going to talk about this for a second.
They're talking to their base.
Actually, it's maybe about 25 hours, but 24-hour biological clock.
So our body is not the same at every hour of the day.
And one of the key things that changes is cortisol.
So we saw that cortisol curve, right, where it
It kind of peaks around maybe like 7 a.m., and then it decreases throughout the day, and then it's low by like 6 p.m., okay?
I'm talking to my base over here.
This is what a normal cortisol curve looks like.
Cortisol is a stress hormone.
You're talking to your base over there.
It increases blood pressure, increases heart rate, increases immune activity.
So there are studies that show
And we're just talking across each other.
that people who have anxiety disorders have a disrupted cortisol curve.
They have something called a flattened cortisol curve.
So this is the normal cortisol curve, but their cortisol curve looks more like this.
Actually, that's probably not correct.
So their cortisol will peak, and then it'll go down like this.
So their cortisol curve doesn't have highs, doesn't have lows.
So this is the first reason.
And so it's sort of like there's no direct like dialogue.
Because literally there is a hormone in your body that is keeping you awake.
Now this becomes important because if we want to alter our cortisol levels, one of the best ways to alter cortisol levels is our psychological stress.
So the way that we deal with stress will increase cortisol or decrease cortisol, okay?
So people do have circadian rhythm problems for sure.
Second thing, incredibly fascinating.
So if we look at studies on narcolepsy, okay, so here's one thing to understand.
If you want to understand how something in the brain works, the best way to understand it is by looking at a disorder or disease where that part of the brain is messed up.
So if I want to understand how a car works and I remove, I don't know, if I take all the oil out of the car, I will very quickly discover what the role of oil is.
And so we've got like, you know, you can look at things like Gaza and stuff like that.
If I want to understand how a wheel works, if I remove a wheel, I will see changes in the car that tells me what the wheel is doing.
So when we look at disorders like narcolepsy, which is when people fall asleep, and cataplexy, which is when they get paralyzed and fall asleep, that's when we will see a couple of very important things about how the brain works.
I'm not an expert in it by any means.
So there are two circuits that we're going to talk about.
The frontal lobe and the amygdala.
The amygdala is our negative emotional center.
of the brain, it is also our stress and our survival center.
And maybe it's a can of worms just to even mention it.
So this gives us anxiety and fear.
When we're afraid and anxious, the amygdala is lit up.
So why is this our survival center of the brain?
Because if we think about what's the role of fear, when I'm walking through the woods and I see a grizzly bear, fear is what keeps me alive, right?
But like, I think one of the things that I also saw with like this whole Ethan Klein Hassan thing, right, is like they fucking make videos about each other.
So the amygdala is there to keep us alive.
Now, here's what's really, really, really interesting.
When we go to bed, our amygdala activity increases naturally.
Now, this is what's really fascinating.
Why does our amygdala become hypersensitive when we go to bed?
There are two or three reasons for that.
When we go to sleep, I'm going to ask y'all a question.
When you sleep, do you experience emotion?
When do you experience the most intense?
When do you experience the most intense emotion?
When do you experience the most intense emotion throughout the day?
I don't know if they just don't sit down and have a conversation.
So nightmares, the whole point of a nightmare is that it's like terrifying, right?
So now I want y'all to understand this for a moment.
If a nightmare is terrifying, which part of your brain does that terror come from?
Like we, that's when it turns on, we feel fear.
That's, it's like one to one, literally the point.
So there's a good chance that the reason that we dream and the reason that we have nightmares is to process our emotions.
Maybe they did, you know, and we'll talk about ignorance in a second.
And in order for us to process our emotions, they have to be, they can't be in read-only mode.
They have to be in edit mode.
We have to work through them.
And one of the ways that we do that is through nightmares.
So as a clinician, when I have a patient who has a lot of nightmares, as we work through their nightmares, their emotional state gets better during the day.
And as their emotional state, if we work on their anxiety during the day, the nightmares decrease at night.
Okay, this is why Freud and Jung were so into dreams.
There's another huge problem.
Memories, Dreams, and Reflections by Carl Jung.
So back in the day when we had these like psychoanalysts and they started like discovering emotions...
They figured out really early on, they stumbled into this idea that the dreams we have correlate with the emotions that we experience.
No one says I don't know anymore.
And one of the ways that our brain deals with emotions is through dreaming.
So amygdala becomes hyperactive, therefore anxiety is going to increase.
No one's like, I'm not sure what happened.
So when I'm awake during the day and I'm like, I start to feel anxious, there's a part of my brain that's like, we ain't got time for that.
We got to read memories, dreams, and reflections.
We got to get through 50 pages of this today because they're going to talk about it in class tomorrow.
So there's a part of your brain that controls your emotions.
The frontal lobe also suppresses the amygdala, shuts it off, says, hey, calm down.
But the frontal lobe gets drained.
I don't really know what's going on.
So if you've done a lot of emotional suppression, you feel exhausted at the end of the day.
If you've exerted a lot of willpower, you run out.
What happens on the internet, and this is important to understand.
Willpower is actually a diminishing resource that your frontal lobes start with.
So the frontal lobe can't be active for 24 hours a day.
And we need it when we're awake.
Which means that as we go to bed, the frontal lobe shuts off.
But as the frontal lobe shuts off, our ability to suppress our anxiety decreases.
This is why nighttime anxiety is so much worse.
Because the part of our brain that experiences anxiety turns on more.
And the part of our brain that reduces anxiety is like, hey, brah, I need to rest.
And if you think about what happens to your willpower if you get a good night's rest, what happens to your willpower if you don't get a good night's rest?
So when we see clips on the internet, these clips activate our emotions.
The frontal lobe recovers when we sleep.
This is probably the biggest reason why nighttime anxiety gets worse.
And why distracting yourself from anxiety is one of the worst things that you can do for your sleep.
I use external stimuli to push away the anxiety.
So there's a great example of this.
During the day, I can usually keep myself distracted, but the second I try to go to bed, my thoughts start racing.
I replay conversations, worry about things I can't control, and imagine the worst case scenario for tomorrow.
Not only is it exhausting, you are already exhausted.
Because your frontal lobes have been suppressing your anxiety all day long.
And when our emotions get activated, whatever thoughts get produced by our brain, we believe are true.
What's helping is giving my brain something light to latch onto before I crash.
Because I don't even know what that is.
Yeah, no one knows what it is, but in two anxiety posts, people just mentioned it towards the end.
I think that's... Should we do some Reddit sleuthing, chat?
If this post has my prize, it's guilty.
Just discovered someone astroturfing for my prize.
So what happens is I feel anxious, and then I distract myself.
Okay, so there's this kind of, you know, clip of... Oh my god, where is this?
I pull my attention away from my anxiety.
But there is a problem with this.
Because when my brain is experiencing anxiety in my amygdala,
What am I conditioning myself to do to regulate anxiety?
I have eyes over here that go to the occipital lobe in the back.
The occipital lobe is actually way better, right?
I have ears which go to my auditory cortex.
So I have eyes and ears and I'm horribly misshapen as a human being, right?
So what I'm training myself to do is when anxious, use external stimuli to reduce anxiety.
Right, so I want to show you all something because this is actually super scary.
So I'm not training myself to regulate my anxiety via my physiology.
I'm not training myself to regulate my anxiety using cognitive reframing.
I'm training myself to suppress my anxiety either through drugs or sensory distractions.
That's what my brain learns, right?
That's the way we deal with our anxiety all day long.
Stay busy, stay busy, stay busy.
Distract yourself, distract yourself, distract yourself.
So if distraction is my method of regulating anxiety and I go to sleep, there is a problem because when I sleep, there is a sensory deprivation.
There isn't external stimuli.
The external stimuli goes away.
So then we've got these kind of memes.
So what I've actually done is I've conditioned myself to use distractions to control my anxiety.
If you put me in a non-distractable state, then the anxiety will come roaring back and will oftentimes come back even harder because you've been suppressing it this whole time, right?
Of like Hassan being fucking Raiden and like shocking Ludwig and Hassan.
It started down here and you're distracting, distracting, distracting, distracting, distracting.
And then there's so much of it that it doesn't just end up in your arm.
And sometimes if you're not careful, it'll fill up all of the head and it'll only be one arm that is not full of anxiety.
So distracting yourself is one of the worst things that you can do with anxiety.
is um a couple of things like actually a couple of things one is melatonin so there are studies that show let me see if i can find the paper modified circadian rhythm oh yeah there's another thing that we need to talk about so there's another part of our brain that activates when we go to bed and that is the default mode network so the default mode network
This is cutie holding this, but there's one of like, you know, Hassan like having Ludwig on a leash and things like that.
Worry about things I can't control, imagine worst-case scenarios, replay conversations.
And if we sort of look at this, I keep busy, I push my thoughts aside,
So I toss and turn bills, relationships, future plans, regrets all flood at once.
So I don't know if this makes sense, but the things that we worry about, oftentimes when we're anxious, relate to ourselves.
So I want y'all to think for a moment.
So the default mode network activates.
And there's research that shows that when we go to bed at night, the default mode network also increases in activity.
So what's natural to think about when we go to bed?
And I'm curious what y'all think.
That's also a feature, not a bug.
So we're trying to think about ourselves a little bit, processing, thinking about what we could do differently.
But this is also why if you have anxiety and depression, this is really, really, really bad.
So people with anxiety, depression, people with anxiety and people with depression will both have problems with insomnia.
When you see a meme like this, what do you think happens in your brain?
And when you have both of them together, it's because of the hyperactivity of the default mode network that really triggers both.
So you start thinking about yourself a lot.
The last thing to talk about is melatonin.
And there are studies that show that people have difficulty with nighttime anxiety.
So accordingly, dysfunctions and melatonin production and rhythms have been hypothesized to contribute to insomnia chronicity.
So melatonin does a couple of really important things for the brain.
One of the things that it does is it increases GABAnergic tone.
What do you think is the effect of this in your brain?
This means that it increases chloride transmission across the neuron.
When you hyperpolarize a neuron, it's kind of counterintuitive.
That means that the neuron is more likely to shut off.
So this is a suppressing neurotransmitter.
Good examples of things that activate GABA, i.e.
suppress things, alcohol and benzodiazepines both work on increasing GABA transmission.
So melatonin also shuts things off.
From a neuroscience standpoint, okay?
Okay, now let's understand how this works.
This is not like, do you guys like it or not?
There's another reason I'm increasing the hypersensitivity of the amygdala, and that's because, remember, so when we go to sleep, this is really fascinating, we want to be in a safe place.
So when we sleep, y'all ever thought about this?
We want to be in a safe place, but our sensitivity to danger increases.
This is like, what is happening in your brain?
That's why we want to be in a safe place.
I want to make sure my alarm is on in the house.
If y'all need medical advice, go see a doctor, which I'm a huge fan of.
But your ability to hear things actually increases.
So we increase our threat perception.
And we create a safe environment to compensate for that so that I can go to sleep, right?
I want my brain to be on, to be able to detect someone opening a door, breaking a window or something like that.
So, okay, so this is what's really scary, right?
But I also want to be in a safe place because if I'm in a normal area, right?
I don't know if y'all have ever tried to sleep in an airport and how paranoid you feel sleeping in an airport.
What if someone steals my stuff?
You pile up all your stuff, you put your legs on top.
Where you're like, when you fall asleep in a public place, you're like extra paranoid that people are going to steal your stuff.
Of course, that's because your amygdala is becoming hyperactive.
So we try to create an environment that is safe, but we actually amp up our threat detection.
Second thing is frontal lobes, which normally inhibit, and this is the sign for inhibition in like physiology.
So we need something to compensate.
That's where melatonin comes in.
Fair enough, I enjoy a good meme.
So melatonin goes over here, increases gabatone, and basically balances things out, right?
So this is going to be suppressive, actually.
So we're going to increase our suppression.
We're going to increase our action, and then everything works out the way that it's supposed to.
Except if you have an anxiety disorder or you struggle with anxiety, this melatonin production gets messed up.
Hey y'all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's guide to mental health.
So now we don't have something that is shutting off the amygdala.
The amygdala is becoming hyperactive.
So how do we deal with this?
First thing, you can go see a psychiatrist, go see a therapist.
So how easy it is for you to fall asleep depends on how you spend your day.
So when your body feels like the day is over, when you've done enough work, we have a whole video about this or multiple.
When you've done enough work, then your body is like, okay, fine.
Your brain is like, we did a good job today.
If you procrastinate it all day, then what's going to happen is your brain is going to say, oh, we were supposed to do all the stuff you were supposed to do that you didn't do.
And so we start by understanding what literally is meditation.
It's going to be like the day can't be over yet because then we're going to have twice as much stuff to do more.
It's going to keep you awake.
Increase your pro sleep signals.
Because if I tell you don't distract yourself from your anxiety, your response is going to be, then how the hell am I supposed to do anything?
I will be completely non-functional if I don't distract myself from my anxiety.
I've had tons of patients who will tell me that.
Dr. K, I can't distract myself.
How does experience shape us as human beings?
If I don't distract myself, then I'm not going to get anything done.
Turns out that that's not the case.
If you don't distract yourself from your anxiety, you will start triggering homeostatic mechanisms.
This means that anytime my body or brain feels an emotion, it automatically starts certain processes to turn the emotion off.
When I feel joy, that joy doesn't last forever.
How do we strengthen the mind itself as an organ?
So when I feel anxiety, this is going to be hard for people with anxiety disorders, but we'll talk about this, right?
It actually automatically expires.
Now, why would people with anxiety disagree with this?
The first is that the duration and intensity of anxiety in an anxiety disorder are both higher.
And so by understanding our mind, we understand a very, very simple tool, a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we wanna build the life that we want to.
The second thing is that technically the anxiety does expire, but you create new anxiety through things like rumination.
Rumination isn't the propagation.
So when I create an anxiety thought, this is what happens, right?
The thought starts, anxiety increases, and then it goes down.
The problem with rumination is in the middle, I start creating another thought, and then this will happen, and then this will happen, and then this will happen.
It's not that you don't have homeostasis.
It's that the process of rumination is creating additional thoughts, which is what creates the spiral.
We must be precise about this.
That's why stopping rumination becomes really important.
We have a whole video about that.
It's a whole topic in and of itself.
The key thing is that the more you distract yourself, the more the anxiety is going to build up and the more of it that you're going to have when you go to sleep.
So for some amount of time, and this is where you can meditate, you can exercise, you can go for a walk and let the anxiety flow, baby.
really good for your anxiety.
Spending time with animals, really good for your anxiety.
So if you work with someone like a professional and you can do some cognitive reframing or a CBT worksheet or something like that, you have to target your anxiety in a direct way.
So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today.
The other thing that you can do to regulate your anxiety, we want to regulate it, not distract from it, is breathing.
You're breathing if you can take deep breaths with particularly long exhalations.
So we'll teach a practice called Kapal Bhati or Nadi Shuddhi Pranayam.
These are the two that I tend to use in my patients with anxiety.
Or Sheetal Pranayam also works really well.
Sheetal Pranayam is really easy.
You just go like this, make a taco with your tongue, and you breathe through it.
Now, why does shital pranayama work?
Because the speed of exhalation and inhalation is automatically slowed down.
When we feel anxious, we are likely to hyperventilate.
We want to slow down the feeling of anxiety.
I mean, we want to slow down the rate of respiration.
Decrease the number of breaths per minute, increase the length of exhalation, and then our anxiety will hopefully get better, right?
Engages the parasympathetic nervous system.
There's a lot of good data behind that.
Third thing, most, not the most important thing.
Everything's the most important thing.
So melatonin can be helpful.
Definitely something you should talk to your doctor about.
Get evaluated for an insomnia disorder, circadian rhythm disorder.
There are all kinds of treatments for that.
You have a window per day in which it is easy to fall asleep.
If you miss that window, it is hard to fall asleep.
See, one of the biggest mistakes that we make is we assume that the more tired we are, the easier it is to fall asleep.
The more tired you are, it becomes harder to fall asleep until you reach a point of critical tiredness that is like passing out.
Do you all understand how subjectively falling asleep and passing out are different?
You can't pass out immediately after you would have fallen asleep.
There's always a big gap between falling asleep and being able to pass out.
These are two very different mechanisms.
And here's the big thing that people don't understand.
I learned this with my kids, by the way.
And this is there's just a ton of science behind this, that the more emotional we get, it doesn't matter what kind of emotion.
So your frontal lobes are responsible for controlling the other parts of your brain and suppressing the other parts of your brain.
So when you go to sleep, it actually requires willpower to go to sleep.
What do I mean by, I mean, willpower is a resource, not like you have to be like a stoic, like willpower dude, but like literally your brain requires energy to fall asleep because in order to fall asleep, you have to shut down the parts of your mind.
So when you go to sleep, if your frontal lobes have some energy left, then they can shut off.
It's basically like I'm shutting down the factory and there's a factory worker who's going around and turning off all the machines.
It takes energy to shut down the factory.
The factory doesn't just shut off on its own.
It takes a lot of energy to shut down the factory.
So we each have a sleep window where our frontal lobes have enough juice to where we can suppress our amygdala.
We can stop ourselves from getting like, we can have the, oh, this is huge.
We can have the willpower to not pull out our phones.
We can have the willpower to not turn on the TV.
We can have the willpower to read instead of turning on the TV.
Going to sleep requires willpower.
So if you sort of think about like whether you believe someone, I want you all to say like, like, imagine for a moment that I'm like, hi, my name is blah, blah, blah.
Sitting your ass down and being bored in bed for 28 minutes while you fall asleep requires a lot of willpower.
So this is why if we reach a critical point of tiredness, what do we mean by tired?
If the frontal lobes become too exhausted, they can no longer suppress the other parts of our brain.
And then we enter into this severe tiredness phase where our only option now is passing out.
Then the fatigue signals need to be so high that we end up passing out.
But then we are even more fatigued and a full night's sleep is not going to recover from that.
A full night's sleep will recover from the right sleep window.
Does that kind of make sense?
Because now we're like extra fatigued.
Now we're like staying up till 3 a.m.
And, you know, even if you wake up at 11, you're still going to be groggy.
So when I was like trying to when I was trying to put my kids to bed, I noticed.
that if i miss this window there's like a window where i'm like okay time to get into bed let's do cuddles let's do a story right and then it's like okay it's bedtime now i'm gonna give you a kiss good night i'll see you tomorrow and then the kid grabs her a little stuffy and she goes to sleep but if it's late if it's like 10 30 if it's past their bedtime it's like okay do we have time for a story let's do a story and they're like and they're like i have to go to the bathroom
And I swear I didn't do anything.
And now, no, I can't like, I need this stuff.
You know, it's in the other room.
There's just one thing I have to do.
Their frontal lobes are completely shot.
I'm like, get under the covers, close your eyes.
They can't close their eyes.
And then it becomes twice as hard to put them to bed.
And then there's yelling and there's crying and then there's frustration and then there's tickling.
And then if you listen, if you listen to that person, right?
Because tickle, tickle, tickle, tickle.
Got to get that energy out of them.
You got the energy monkeys in your armpits.
And self-control is necessary for sleep.
So don't miss your sleep window.
Generally speaking, your sleep window will start about 16 hours after you wake up.
Like you're like, oh yeah, I don't know if I believe that person.
maybe a little bit lower, maybe 14 hours, 15 hours.
And you have to go to sleep when you have enough energy to be able to stay in bed.
Somewhere between 8 and 10 p.m., watching the sunset is a huge part of that.
You know, spending some time outdoors when it's getting dark, after it's been dark, then going to bed.
And you got to go to sleep before you're ready.
That's actually when it's easiest to fall asleep.
If you wait until you're too tired, it will become harder to fall asleep.
And that, boys and girls, is nighttime anxiety.
A really great example of this is like Johnny Depp in his Amber Heard trial.
If y'all want to understand other things like this, like some of these physiologic things, so we have a video on rumination.
If y'all want more stuff on anxiety specifically, check out Dr. K's guide.
We've got a lot of good stuff on physiologic anxiety that people are stunned.
They're like, holy shit, I didn't know this is how anxiety works.
Remember, 50% of your anxiety comes from your body.
There's a lot that you can do there.
Dietary things and things like that.
If you guys watch clips of Johnny Depp and he's like, you know, he's like hilarious on the stand.
Can you fist fight your neighbor to release your anxiety?
First rule of Fight Club is we don't talk about Fight Club.
Is there a good book for understanding parts of the brain and their function?
So I have... Give me a second.
There's a book called Neurobehavioral Anatomy, which is good for psychiatrists.
So I think this is the best book that I've read, but I would not recommend it for non-professionals.
i think this is yeah this one this this is um one that one of my mentors recommended to me but it's like it's a book for psychiatrists and neurologists right so it's it's like a textbook but it i mean it's it's pretty good so if y'all are like if you guys have a high level of oh if y'all have a high level of um understanding and in the basics then it's good
And if you think about the psychological impact that that has on your brain, if someone is funny and entertaining, you are more likely to believe them.
So it does kind of tell you what the, yeah, it does kind of tell you, like it's the best one, but it's not, I don't think it's great for what we're talking about.
It's very, very like anatomy focused.
Yeah, so there are things like hypocretin.
I don't know how to pronounce it.
Orexin is another really important neurotransmitter.
There's a lot of different hormones and stuff that are involved with sleep.
I've been working on a video on those for actually like two and a half years.
Just never really gotten around to like making it click.
Because like a lot of times I think about how to make it applicable.
If I want to go for a walk, can I listen to music?
The question is whether the music helps you emotionally process or whether it distracts you from emotional processing.
That's like a fact, yo, like a fact.
Okay, how can we have proper discourse when people are seeing this kind of situation from their own bubbles?
Okay, that looks like people are not asking questions related to anxiety, so we can still answer them.
Okay, there's a question about emotional processing.
I think that deserves a lecture.
When you mentioned the brain processes emotions, what does that mean?
Let's talk about this for just a second, and then this deserves its whole own lecture.
So I think we do not realize that when we watch things like this, this actually shapes our thinking, whether you realize it or not.
What does it mean to process an emotion?
So an emotion has a neurological component, right?
So emotion is activation of the emotional centers of the brain.
Now, when emotional centers in the brain activate, they communicate with other parts of the brain.
So what happens when we feel emotional is they go to our reticular activating formation, which is at the base of our skull, and the emotion says, hey, don't go to sleep.
The emotion goes to the sympathetic chain ganglia, which is a set of cells along your spine, and turns those on and causes an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, sweating, diaphoresis, things like that.
The emotion travels to your frontal lobes and says, hey, we got to focus on this.
Don't think about anything else.
Now, here's the key thing to remember.
about emotions and the brain in general.
It doesn't just turn on and off like a light switch.
Every time the brain turns on, it changes.
So think about a light switch that every time you turn it on, it alters the electrical wiring in your house.
So if I have a dozen light switches across my house and I turn one on and off every single day,
Imagine that that wiring gets more insulated, gets stronger.
And this is what's really insane.
And if there is a light switch that I do not touch, over time that wiring shrinks.
This is the way that our brain works.
So I'm going to ask you all a question that's really hard to answer, which is when you believe something about Collargate, what is that based on?
You all have to understand that every time you activate the brain, you change the brain.
You're changing your wiring.
So most of the time when we activate our emotions, this creates...
So when I experience intense trauma, it alters the architecture of my brain.
It alters the architecture of my nervous system.
So when I do not process emotions
That activation, which I then suppress, so it doesn't go away, it's just I suppress it, right?
So it's kind of like I wall it off.
I'm just turning down the volume.
It's not the same as hitting the stop button.
So then those emotional signals, even though I'm not aware of them, and a really good example of this is dissociation.
So in dissociation, the part of my brain is still like fucking on fire, hyperactive, but I have no awareness of it.
So if you measure someone who's dissociating, really fascinating.
If you measure like vital signs for someone who's dissociating, oftentimes they're not normal.
So their heart rate will be elevated even though they feel perfectly fine.
The other really interesting example of this is there's a psychiatric state called catatonia.
And in catatonia, I wish I could show y'all.
And we think it's based on evidence, but there's a really, really good chance that it's based on emotion.
If you ask them a question, it may take them minutes to answer.
Now, here's the really interesting thing.
If you ask a catatonic person, what does it feel like?
What does it feel like to be catatonic?
What do you all think they say?
You may think that they say, oh, it feels like time has slowed down.
People who are catatonic, their subjective experience of catatonia is that life is moving incredibly fast.
They're the opposite of lagging.
And I'm not saying that there isn't evidence that is supportive or not supportive.
There's way too much stimulation and it's overwhelming.
So they're frozen when everything is firing past them over and over and over again.
Life is like, it's like they're living in life that's sped up, but they feel like everything is too fast for them, right?
So if someone is slow in life, they feel like life is moving faster.
We see them as slower, but they see the opposite.
Which is why what we use to treat catatonia is benzodiazepines, which are gabinergic.
Benzodiazepines slow down the brain.
Catatonia is also associated with very intense emotions.
We see catatonia in two illnesses, depression and schizophrenia.
We'll kind of get to that in a second.
Both of these are when people are in a very high emotional state.
In severe depression, you will see catatonia.
In decompensated schizophrenia, you will see catatonia.
OK, what does this have to do with emotional processing?
So when we suppress emotions, remember, we're turning down the volume, but it's still playing.
And then all of those emotions are making alterations in our brain.
So after you go through a traumatic experience, you are changed.
But like, I want you all to really, really understand this, that the thoughts that your mind produces are not like super logical.
The way that your brain operates is changed.
So when an emotion is allowed to make alterations in your brain, however the fuck it feels like doing, oh yeah, door closed, have a panic attack, bitch.
This person didn't call you, have a panic attack.
Start to trigger your fear of abandonment.
Boss said that they want to talk to you this Friday, activate depression, start to feel bad about yourself, start to feel bad about yourself, start to dread it, right?
Do you guys understand how this stimulus, boss says, hey, I want to talk to you, triggers a certain pattern in your brain.
And where did that pattern come from?
It came from your emotions being allowed to run buck wild without any kind of control, regulation, or intention.
What is emotional processing?
Emotional processing is regulating that emotion, turning off that emotional circuitry in a way that does not harmfully alter the architecture of your brain.
It is saying, okay, so here's an example.
necessarily like you have to work really hard to have like a logical thought and this is what we see on the internet we know there are tons of studies on online radicalization which is the more time it doesn't matter the more time you spend in a particular bubble the more your thoughts will be shaped in that bubble i've had patients it's fucking terrifying i've had so i had one one friend of mine not a patient whose wife started going down this like instagram
And if I let that emotion run wild, what's going to happen is that it'll create all kinds of changes in my brain.
I'm going to become a black pillar.
I'm going to become an insular.
literally the next time I see a woman, I will be triggered with all kinds of thoughts.
Do you all understand that all those triggers mean that certain neurons are like turning on?
And how did those neurons get wired to turn on, do that at stimulus?
It's because there was an emotion that was allowed to just run wild and make alterations in the brain however the fuck it wants to.
So emotional processing is preventing that process.
It is allowing the emotion to exist and
Getting rid of the emotion without those alterations, without those permanent alterations.
And permanent alterations can be permanently altered down the road, so it's not like you're screwed forever.
But it's changed until you change it back.
So you can think about the brain not like cement, but like clay.
So when I manipulate the brain in a particular way, like it holds that shape.
It doesn't naturally resort to like whatever the shape is.
It stays there until I re-manipulate it.
That's how your brain works.
That's why I can feel like changes are permanent until you change them the other way.
So when we emotionally process, we are going through the process of, no pun intended, shutting down the emotion, disabling the emotion, working through the emotion in a way that does not create alterations.
So if I process my emotions of my breakup, if I sit down and I talk to about it, I'm like, bruh, she dumped me, bruh.
Like that's just life though.
And look, not everyone is meant to be together.
I know it hurts now, but you're still loved.
Like, you know, when you're ready to get back out there, I'll be your wingman.
And Hey, I started dating this girl and she's got a sister and her sister's super hot.
So when you're ready for an intro, like you let me know, bruh.
You know, you do all this kind of stuff and then you kind of feel good about it.
You're not scarred afterward.
The person who ends up, the key thing about emotional processing is that an emotion does not change you.
The more we process emotions, the more we actually stay the same, like sort of.
So if I like if I am good at processing my emotion, I'm generally OK today.
I'm like basically the same.
I'm like the same pretty chill guy.
OK, as we start processing more and more emotions or as we stop processing emotions, I start to become as we stop processing emotions.
I start to become a different person.
And I don't know if you've known anyone who's like built up a lot of resentment.
So the building up of resentment, what is that?
As that human being turns into a different human being, what is the mechanism of that?
Emotional activation, manipulating the clay, changing the electrical wires, changing the way that we react to things, changing the way that we perceive things, changing the way that our nervous system activates when we are in the presence of a girl, right?
That is what emotional processing is.
It is allowing your emotions to dissipate without changing the architecture of your brain.
If y'all are looking for Hassan slop, missed it, bruh.
Can anxiety or unprocessed grief show up as physical pain?
I've been dealing with bodily aches and pains, especially when I'm distracting myself with my hobbies.
Not only can it show up, that's how it does show up.
Your brain and your body are connected.
You can look at studies of people with fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, chronic pain disorders.
Emotional difficulties are a very strong risk factor for all of those things.
That's where we as doctors made a critical mistake.
We started talking in ways and treating patients as if that means it's all in their head.
It is truly a mind-body issue.
There's a psychological problem, which then, remember, psychology happens in the brain.
Neurology also happens in the brain.
And once your nerves get messed up, then your pain fibers and the nerves, because pain fibers are nerves, right?
So then there's like downstream changes.
Does a nap change the sleep window?
How can you avoid drama when it seems to be everywhere?
I don't know what you mean by seems to be everywhere, but the callous response here is if you're surrounded by drama, maybe you're inducing drama.
But I don't think that's necessarily the case.
I'm not saying it's your fault because here's the truth of the matter is that some areas are full of drama.
So like parent-teacher association, certain workplaces, certain places are more drama prone and certain places are more drama free.
girl power, feminist, like toxic femininity, like misandry, like rabbit hole.
Generally speaking, you see more drama wherever there is ego.
So let's understand how ego leads to drama.
So in life, good things happen and bad things happen.
It is the associations that we attach to the ups and downs of life that create drama.
So when something happens and I take it personally, my ego gets involved.
Now it's not just the event.
Something bad happened and then that thing will end, right?
Oh, we had a bad quarter, so no one gets raises.
I don't have to take it personally.
But the moment that I take it personally, how does that create drama?
Because then when the event ends, I'm not done with it.
And I certainly ain't done with you.
Drama is human beings carrying forward conflicts into new interactions.
You can't have drama unless someone is going to bring yesterday into today.
So when relationships fall apart, why do they fall apart?
And then like their marriage completely fell apart.
Because the people in them create drama with each other.
You did this to me yesterday.
I'm going to carry it forward into today.
Now we have, you forgot to pick me up at the airport.
Now I'm asking you to pick something up from the grocery store.
And since you screwed up back then, I'm carrying that resentment forward.
And now when I'm asking you to do something, what?
When you carry something forward.
So oftentimes, if you're in a place where there's a lot of egos, there will be a lot of drama.
There's going to be a lot of territoriality.
So how do you avoid the drama?
I've also had friends whose, patients usually actually not friends, whose like husbands or boyfriends will start to go down the toxic manosphere rabbit hole.
I don't know if you can avoid the drama, but you can try to not get entangled with it.
And the way to not get entangled with the drama is to generally speaking, first and foremost, do not take things personally, right?
Recognize that the reason that someone is an asshole to you is not because there's something wrong with you.
It's because they're an asshole, right?
So it's hard to avoid, but you cannot get entangled in it.
And generally speaking, the right way to get entangled with it is to be neutral, to be of limited and appropriate responsiveness, but not to overcompensate or undercompensate.
So oftentimes neutral will do the trick, but sometimes someone who is very drama prone will put a target on your back and then they'll start bullying you.
And then you can't be like neutral doesn't mean inactive.
That just means like not taking a side.
So defending yourself, setting limits with people, that's like part of healthy neutrality.
So if I set a boundary, it's not like I'm attacking.
I'm not going to counterattack, but I'm going to defend my own territory.
So that requires some art, some subtlety and is difficult to do.
Generally speaking, don't take sides.
And if you're surrounded by a lot of drama, two things you should consider is what is your contribution to it?
And secondly, if your contribution is really not very much, then you should consider finding a different group of people.
So oftentimes, we will get attracted to certain drama-oriented circles.
And then, oh, this is another example.
So if you're saying when drama is everywhere and you mean like things like the internet, well, like, yeah, that's because much like in real life, see, real life has an algorithm just like the internet.
And depending on what you engage with in real life, you will like get engaged with a certain algorithm.
So if I click on some video about, you know, masculinity on YouTube, eventually I'm going to see Jordan Peterson, right?
And we can even look at like Israel and Palestine is a really good example of like people like Ethan and Hassan used to be friends.
So once I get on a pipeline, I'm going to wind up in a particular place.
The crazy thing that people don't realize is that life has an algorithm as well.
Where like there are certain people who like once you, you know, if you have a group of friends who's pretty chill and one like drama llama shows up, like we're going to deselect for that person.
And if you hang out with a bunch of potheads, you're going to enter the pothead algorithm of life.
If you join degenerate gamers, you're going to enter the degenerate gamer algorithm of life.
If you go to a place like an Ivy League institution, you will join that algorithm, not for life, but for that period.
And then if I'm on the Manosphere algorithm and then I click something about comedy or something about StarCraft, my algorithm will be woven together.
I don't know what the nature of the relationship is.
So if you don't like the life that you are living, you should really ask yourself, what is the algorithm that I am moving towards?
If you're sitting at home, not doing anything all day versus, hey, I'm going to start joining a high intensity, a high interval intensity training workout group.
I'm going to start going to spin class.
I'm going to start taking, I'm going to learn salsa dancing, right?
So the algorithm of real life depends on your interactions with it.
And this is what a lot of people who are like red pillars, black pillars, whatever, right?
I have this presumption that they were friends.
So they don't quite get this.
They don't realize that if I'm a red pillar and I believe that all women want is money, if I have a transactional attitude when I go on a date, someone will pick up on that and will either accept that if they're willing to play ball or they're going to not ever see me again.
Now, I'll explain a little bit what this is.
Does that kind of make sense?
So we are selecting for the algorithm of life constantly.
And if I sort of, if I start to have incel-oriented thinking and I'm selecting for my exposures being talking to incels on the internet as opposed to making platonic friendships with women that I'm not attracted to, that will be a very different algorithm.
And then as they get radicalized by these two communities, maybe it's not radicalized.
So there are ways to basically not have to emotionally regulate.
This is a beautiful question.
My point is that they used to be here and now they're here.
So do you always have to regulate your emotions?
Some people may say, yes, I don't think that's the case.
I'm going to give you all an example.
When I was an intern at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Harvard Medical School, I once had a patient, my first patient with K2.
So K2 is a synthetic form of marijuana, makes people psychotic.
So I walked in to evaluate them.
That's I think that's a pretty fair factual statement.
I was like, oh my God, I got emotionally triggered.
Like I got so triggered by it, right?
And I experienced a lot of emotions, right?
Over time, so then those emotions got triggered.
And remember, emotion will alter the way that my brain functions.
If I don't process it in the right way, it'll sensitize me.
The reasons for that I can't really comment on.
There's a certain phenomenon in neurology called kindling.
Kindling is at the very, at the beginning, I require a volume of 10 to elicit a signal.
But over time, I can get sensitive to it.
I can detect it at a five, a two, even a one.
So sometimes the brain develops more sensitivity to things.
My point is we're seeing this online radicalization.
We see that in something like PTSD.
Where PTSD, this thing used to not be scary.
Now, since I'm kindling, now it's becoming scarier, scarier, scarier, scarier, scarier.
But just because I got triggered emotionally the first time when I'm a fourth year resident and I'm supervising other residents and there's someone who's high on K2, I look at this, I get the referral from the ED doc and I say, okay, is this a guy that I need security for?
And they're like, yeah, maybe you need security.
So I will go over to walk these two dudes in the suits.
So as we talk across each other, as we stay in our insular communities, as there's a lack of dialogue, we're seeing in the political space where like, you know, here in the United States, like people don't answer questions anymore.
The fucking security is awesome at MGH.
One of my favorite things about being at that hospital is security is awesome.
Wearing suits, super professional, so good at de-escalation.
A lot of them are former police, former military, just top-notch security.
So I tell these two guys, and you develop a relationship with them.
So I'm like, hey, I've got a guy.
I'm not like, I noticed that the title is reacting to.
ED folks say, like, maybe we're going to need you.
Can you guys hang out outside the door and just keep an eye on me as I go in?
This guy starts yelling, right?
And what does training mean?
Training means that when I get a stimulus,
My response to that stimulus is different.
I recognize this is not personal.
I recognize that I've taken every conceivable safety precaution I can.
If the person attacks me, I'm going to stand in front of the door.
So I'm standing in a very specific area.
I step into the door, the door swings in.
I step one step to the left of the doorway and I lean against the wall.
And I put my hands behind my back.
Or I show my hands if they've got K2.
If they seem really paranoid, I had my hands across my back.
Then I do, I am showing my hands.
I'm like, hey man, what's up?
Now, why am I doing each of these things?
Because each of these things will change the way that a psychotic person reacts to you.
This, I forgot because I haven't been in an ED in a while, is a big, big, big, big, big, big no-no.
Why do you never have your hands behind your back when you're with a psychotic patient?
Because they can't see what you're doing with your hands.
And if they can't see what you're doing with your hands, maybe you're doing something shady.
So instead I'm going to show my hands.
I'm going to show that they're empty.
Maybe I'm going to eat something.
I'm going to pull out some crackers.
I'm going to open the crackers.
I'm going to be like, hey, bro, you want a cracker?
So I'm going to do everything that I can.
So now I don't feel emotion.
I recognize that they're very angry.
I see that stimulus, but my brain has been trained to process that stimulus, right?
So if you take the average human being and their best friend or partner or whatever says, hey, I'm having thoughts of ending my own life, triggers a huge emotional response.
If someone says that to me, does not trigger the same huge emotional response, right?
This has been going on for a long time.
But I'm not emotional about it.
Another great example of this is when we were having our first kid, there were some concerns about the birth.
I know everyone loves to shit on Trump about how he's doing this and he's doing this.
And so there was an amazing...
MFM fellow, maternal fetal medicine fellow.
And since things were not perfect, she was starting to panic a little bit.
She's, I'm guessing, a woman in her like early 30s.
The attending is like an older dude in his late, probably 60s, early 60s is my guess.
Scenario is exactly the same.
Everyone knows, myself included, which is a little bit terrifying and I was dissociating, things are not ideal.
But her emotional reaction and his emotional reaction is different.
So you can absolutely train the way that you respond to situations.
Like we stopped answering questions.
You can adjust the way that you move through life
so that you do not have profound emotional reactions.
Now the question becomes, how?
Politicians stopped answering questions in the United States a very long time ago.
So this is where there's two major buckets.
The first bucket is attitude.
The way that you interpret the things around you will alter your emotions drastically.
When I get an F, what does this mean?
Does this mean I am a failure?
Or does this mean, oh, wow, there is really an area of knowledge that I am deficient in that I need to spend a lot of time learning?
Those are two very different emotional responses.
The way that you receive what the world sends your way will dictate the largest part of your emotional response.
This is what the Stoics said.
This is what the Buddha said.
The Buddha said that there's no protection from pain, but there is absolute protection from suffering.
So we don't talk to each other.
That's not literally what he said.
That's what his message was.
Now, next question becomes, how do we cultivate that?
And this is the kind of stuff that we talk about over on the membership side, so we'll have two-hour lectures about this, but I'll give you all a quick, quick, quick tip.
This is what the Buddha said that's really wild.
And as we don't talk to each other, as we don't really sit and listen to each other, as we consume this online content, we get radicalized into two areas.
So in Western psychiatry, we say,
We acknowledge this now because of DBT and ACT, dialectical behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, these principles of like radical acceptance with borderline personality disorder.
We realize that you can't stop life from hurting you.
So the Buddha said there are these two arrows.
One arrow is the arrow that life shoots at you.
I can't date someone and guarantee that they'll never dump me, right?
If I date, I'm going to get dumped.
I don't think that's really the right word.
The second arrow is the arrow that I shoot at myself.
The second arrow is the arrow that I shoot at myself.
Because I got hit by the first one.
Why did you date this person?
You're so dumb, I threw, I was ahead in that game of Dota and I did something stupid.
It is the suffering that you pile on top.
It is the association that you attach to the event.
Now that I'm dumped, now it means I'm unlovable.
Now it means I'm a loser, right?
Getting dumped doesn't make you a loser.
That is what you attach to getting dumped.
Maybe the reason that you got dumped is because it turns out you're dating a lesbian.
That has no reflection on you.
Maybe the reason that you got dumped is because a person has severe depression and is not interested in a relationship and it has nothing to do with you.
The second arrow is the arrow that we shoot at ourselves.
It is your response to bad things happening to you.
And then it's like, then we get to...
Now remember, we're talking about how to program yourself so that this doesn't happen.
Because you may say, but Dr. K, how can I avoid feeling like a loser when I get dumped?
This is what's so beautiful about the Buddha.
This is what's so scary is because we don't teach the Buddha's teachings anymore.
I don't know if you'll notice this.
We don't teach what the Buddha said.
Because what the Buddha said is not socially acceptable.
We have so many people talking about mindfulness.
No one talks about enlightenment.
What do you all think the Buddha was teaching?
He was teaching for enlightenment.
He said, hey, the reason for all this stuff is enlightenment.
But no one talks about it anymore.
Tons of mindfulness classes, tons of Buddha's teachers.
The stans and the aggressors, right?
No one talks about enlightenment.
Here's the crazy thing that the Buddha said about the two arrows.
The two arrows is not just about pain.
The Buddha said that the second arrow that's just as damaging is when something good happens to us, we feel good.
The Buddha said this is a mistake.
When you win, if you feel like I am a winner, just as bad.
So now it's like, now that the drama is on, right?
When something good happens to you, attach nothing to it.
Let it slough off of you like rain.
In the world that we live in, you should be like a swan where you can swim through a bunch of stuff and never get wet.
A bunch of stuff doesn't just include the pain.
It also includes the pleasure.
The reason this is so hard for people is because we tell everyone, oh, detach from your suffering from all of the negativity in life.
What you really need is to detach from the positivity too.
And this is the beautiful thing.
This is the beautiful neuroscience of it.
When an action affects my identity, that neuronal connection is there.
If the action is good, I feel good.
If the action is bad, I feel bad.
Do you all understand how that connection is the same?
It's like if I flip this switch, if this switch gets flipped up, this is up.
If this is down, this is down.
Like, we have all these people.
The problem is the connection.
That's what the Buddha was saying.
So what does this mean practically?
This means that when something good happens to you, don't take credit for it.
That is going to be way easier to do than the pain stuff.
So when something good happens to me, when someone says, oh, Dr. K, you're so great, man, you work so hard.
Like, there's this loner box video where, actually, we'll talk about that in a second.
And it's like, bro, like I'm a product of my environment.
I'm a product of my parents.
I'm a product, as you guys can see here on the side, of my wife.
I am where I am today, not because I'm hot shit, because I'm lucky AF.
I attach very little importance to my accomplishments because my accomplishments, like what else, you know, it's not my, I didn't do anything to be born without anencephaly.
Anencephaly is when a child is born without a brain.
I didn't do anything to deserve that.
So here's what we're going to do.
I didn't do anything to deserve my IQ.
I didn't do anything to deserve my parents.
I didn't do much to deserve my wife.
I'll take a little bit of credit there.
So detach from the positive things in life too.
It doesn't mean I'm hot shit.
And the moment that I stop thinking that I am hot shit, I will also stop thinking that I am weak shit.
Life is a moment-to-moment experience of what's going on.
Now I'm going to share with y'all.
I said, you guys asked about regulation.
So what is the second way to be tranquil?
Is to simply practice tranquility.
Put yourself in situations that activate emotions and be tranquil in them.
Now we're going to talk about mentalization, okay?
Jump off of the 10-foot diving board when you feel afraid to jump.
Sit and practice Kayashtiram.
It's a practice that I've taught before.
Hey, y'all, just a reminder that in addition to these awesome videos, we have a ton of tools and resources to help you grow and overcome the challenges that you face.
Yeah, that's right.
It's this.
It's technology.
It's drugs.
It's video games.
It's porn.
It's social media.
It's doom scrolling.
All of these are lateral movements, right?
At the end of the day, if you spend a day, a week, or a month doing this, you have not moved forward at all.
Now, a lot of people think, okay, so that's why we just need to stop.
And if we improve someone's serotonin transmission by giving people antidepressants, it'll work great, right?
And this is where a lot of people make a huge mistake.
See, stopping technology usage isn't going to work if you are trying to move laterally.
You will just replace video games with something else that's useless.
You'll sort of force yourself.
into trying to learn a new skill.
Let me just like try to grow by playing guitar.
And then like, at least I'll have a skill at the end of it, but there's no actual passion or joy or anything like that in driving the guitar.
So you won't stick with it.
The lateral movement is a consequence of an absence of forward movement, right?
So the real thing, if you really want to give up technology, there's a bunch of research that shows this.
You have to have a reason to quit, right?
Otherwise, you'll just replace it with something else.
So one other thing that I want to talk about in terms of existential depression, which is the sense of profound desperation.
When I sit with my patients, I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but they're like – like this is sometimes where their suicidality comes in, where they're like –
I don't care.
I just can't live in this fucking life anymore.
Like, I just don't want... It's the same damn day over and over and over again.
So we'll basically be able to treat it.
I've been doing this for years.
I can't do this for 30 years.
I can't do this for 40 years.
So sometimes it manifests as suicidality, but sometimes it manifests as like highly reckless behavior.
I just want to YOLO.
It's not that my patients are oftentimes suicidal.
It's that they long for...
Like, I want to become something or nothing at all.
Like, I want to go all in on something in life.
But there was a really interesting paper that came out in 2022 that basically found that
There's this fascination and love for YOLO, right?
Like, you only live once.
I want to fucking live, even if it comes with negative consequences.
And I think Dr. Schur described this incredibly well.
The depressive desperately wishes to break the sense of hyper-structuring, the preordination toward inevitable catastrophe that gives the sense or actual loss of self.
His problem is how to stop this inexorable, ineluctant flow.
He feels encased in amber and he must break out.
In his lateralizing, he attempts by uncloturing, namely by breaking the rhythmic flow coherently in some magical way, unfix, defreeze his linear progression.
So I know that that's quite verbose.
The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lower serotonin activity or concentrations.
So what do you need to do?
You're encased in amber, right?
So the main thing is you have to break out of this.
You need to shatter this pattern.
You need to do something drastic because right now you're not really moving anywhere.
You're just lateralizing.
Forward momentum ends up in somewhere that you can't really control, right?
So you just need to shake it up, right?
And this is what I see so much when I work with people.
They have this very, very intense sense of like, I just want to leave it all and go to an ashram and find myself.
I want to go to some boot camp.
I want to read.
I just can't tolerate this staticness of life.
This is what existential depression is.
In order to have meaning in life, what we need is we need a past.
to come into our present, and then we need our present actions to help us build a future.
And the future should be full of possibilities.
This is why people get addicted to video games.
And all of these apps now have gamification.
Why?
Because we are so empty with our sense of progress and forward momentum in life that all of these apps have figured out if we give someone XP and leveling up, and if we give them some sense of grinding towards something...
then that scratches that itch of existential depression.
In existential depression, you want to be moving forward, but you don't know how to move forward.
That's why we will grind video games for 10,000 hours.
I want you all to think about this for a second.
Every day you play a video game, it's not even that much fun.
Why do you grind so hard for meaningless things?
It's because you have a meaningless life and the illusion of meaning from something like a video game and the illusion of progress.
So now the question becomes, OK, if this is the case, what do we do about it?
Right.
Because cognitive behavioral therapy may not work.
Antidepressants may not work.
How do we tackle this problem?
So the first thing I'm going to do, we're going to go back to Sher, and we're going to sort of give you all a picture of what the goal looks like.
So the unselfconscious man, that is existential man, moves through the space of his world or worlds pulled upon or altered by the tribe, blah, blah, blah.
He's deeply involved in a future-oriented apprehending of the particulars of existence.
He participates.
He takes in.
He gives out.
And in all of this, he maintains a certain pace, a certain rhythm, a certain flow.
OK, so this is still somewhat up for debate.
There is a flow to life, a movement to it, which is interrupted in its timing or in its direction.
So this is the key thing.
I know that Dr. Sher likes to use a lot of complex words, but here's the key thing.
So if we look at life, life has a flow to it.
It has a rhythm.
It has an exchange, right?
So I have good days and I have bad.
I think that a lot of treatments involving serotonin do help people with depression.
Good days all the time will lead to depression.
Bad days all the time will lead to depression.
It is good days and bad days that make a good life.
If we think about movies, you know, what makes an exciting movie or narrative?
When the good guy is just dumpstering all of the enemies with like one attack, like one punch man.
I mean, one punch man is pretty good, but whatever.
You know, most of the time, like in order for like a game to be fun or a movie to be entertaining, the good guy has to lose and then he has to win at the end.
Right.
There has to be some sense of tension.
There has to be some degree of uncertainty in life.
So that is what we're going to try to recreate.
And now what we're going to do is understand a couple of basic patterns that allow us to recreate this kind of sinusoidal flow.
This this sort of, you know, life is like oscillating.
Right.
And this is the problem in depression is that we feel encased in amber.
But I think that this idea that there's like depression is caused by just a chemical imbalance, that if we correct the chemical imbalance, everything will be fine.
So how do we create that sense of flow again?
OK, so as a human being, like there are three fundamental pieces of your existence.
Now, what we notice about people who are existentially depressed is that there is an imbalance between these.
So I'll give you all an example.
So if I am a thinker.
What I'll find is that I don't feel very much and I don't do very much.
So this person is not going to be happy.
All they do.
And we have this great video on thinkers versus doers.
And all they do is like, think, think, think, think, think, think, think they don't even feel very much.
Maybe there's a depression.
Maybe there's sadness.
Maybe there's some degree of shame or anger, but generally speaking, they're so hypercognitive.
And when someone is hypercognitive, it doesn't work.
Right.
So in order to feel the joy of life, you can't just sit there and think all the time.
That's not entirely true.
You got to go out and like experience things, do things, go in and, you know, ask someone out on a date, go swimming at the beach like you have to do stuff.
The other thing about life is that life requires emotion to be interesting.
So one of the side effects of things like SSRI medication is that it numbs people out and they don't like it.
So in my experience as a psychiatrist, about one third of patients who are depressed will benefit substantially from an antidepressant medication.
Like I've had so many patients who will, you know, they'll prefer, I'd rather have the sadness because it gives me access to the joy.
I just don't want to be like, you know, numbed out.
It happens a lot in bipolar disorder with mood destabilizers.
So key point here is that we have to have a balance of these three things.
Now, I've also worked with people who are, you know, they're in a different way where they feel too much.
So good examples of this are people with, you know, maybe something like borderline personality disorder or emotional dysregulation with ADHD.
There are a lot of people who just their life is just so full of intense feelings and their feelings are so intense that they're paralyzing.
So my anger is so profound that I can't make up with this person at work.
Therefore, I'm never going to get promoted.
Like my sadness is so profound that I can't get out of bed.
So this is where when we're feeling too much.
Or even it's not even just negative feelings.
It's even like positive feelings, like excitement.
I get so excited about starting this company that I don't bother to think through whether it is a good idea.
So my life becomes a series of spurts of motivation followed by a lack of follow through.
And over time, once again, what happens?
The future constricts because I'm not actually building towards everything.
Everything is a project that is half completed.
Now, y'all may say, but Dr. K, what about people who act a lot, right?
Aren't they really happy?
Let's say they think this much and they feel this much.
So this is a great example of my classic high-performing patient.
This is your FANG engineer.
This is your second-year surgery resident at the Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts General Hospital.
The problem is that for those other two thirds of people, it won't help very much because the origin of their depression is a little bit different.
This is your startup CEO who is starting the third company, and they have $100 million.
All they are is action, action, action, action.
And lots of us, we love these people, right?
We elevate these people.
We think, oh, I want to be like this.
Those fucking people wind up in my office, too.
These are the people who are burnt out.
These are the people who will also have imposter syndrome.
These are the people who, despite sweat and toil and they work really hard.
And if you guys look in the world today, you may notice that some very, very wealthy and successful people do not appear to be happy, content or decent human beings.
Right.
Shocking.
So this is where one of the key things that we have to understand is if you want to break out of existential depression, you need to have some balance between action, feeling and thinking.
OK, and I know it sounds like you're all going to say, but how do I do that?
So this is just big principle, big picture.
We're going to get to little things later.
So the first thing that I would say is just look at your life.
Do you spend a lot of time thinking?
Do you spend a lot of time feeling?
Do you spend a lot of time doing?
And whichever one of these is out of balance is something that you should lean into, right?
So if you spend all of your time thinking, and this is where people get really paralyzed, they think, oh, like you need to do more.
And this is where we're going to dive into existential depression.
Now, here's the problem that happens if you're a thinker.
If I tell you you need to do more, you want to find the right thing to do.
What is the right thing to do?
It doesn't matter.
This is what we learn from these explorations of existential depression.
See, what we need to do is activate your body.
Like, we just need to do anything.
It doesn't matter what you do.
I mean, I guess it matters some, but you don't need to find the right thing.
As you start acting more, there will be a genuine balancing of like the crap that is going on inside you and things will get better.
So just to give you all a simple example of this.
If you are physically unhealthy and you're like, what kind of exercise should I do?
So this is what I want you all to think about.
The answer is, it doesn't matter.
The answer is you should do some kind of exercise.
Sure, there are certain ways to optimize the exercise that you do, but generally speaking, some action, any action...
Far outweighs, I mean, that's where the real money is.
And then later on, you can refine what you do.
So this is where if you're not feeling enough, what should you feel doesn't fucking matter.
There are two reasons that you could be depressed.
If you're not thinking enough, if you're just a bot who is grinding at life, you should stop and think, right?
Think about your life.
Think about what you're doing.
Think about where you're going.
It is these actions that will actually move you in the right direction.
Okay, so the first is a balance between thinking, feeling, and doing.
Next, there are three ways.
One is that your life is pretty good, okay?
Generally speaking, the other observation that they made is that if you sort of look at human beings, happiness in life comes from three things.
But you have a cognitive distortion or you have something like a chemical imbalance, okay?
Either I satisfy myself or I satisfy other people.
Or there's some weird dimension of God and spirituality.
That's basically what they found, right?
So I want you all to think about this balance.
So I've worked with a ton of people who are depressed because they spend their whole life making the rest of the world happy.
They achieve things.
They accomplish things.
They're the perfect husband, the perfect wife, the perfect boyfriend, the perfect girlfriend, the perfect son, the perfect daughter, the perfect employee, the perfect boss.
All of their identity is perfect.
invested in making the rest of the world happy.
This is going to lead to existential depression because you're sort of sitting there, you're living your whole life for the sake of other people.
You wake up one day and you're 40.
This is where a midlife crisis comes from.
What the hell am I doing on this planet?
I've done everything that I'm supposed to do.
I've made everyone happy.
I got promoted.
I accomplished a lot, but I wake up and I'm unhappy.
The second version is the person who is prioritizing self-fulfillment.
And if you have a cognitive distortion, if your brain isn't working right and that causes your depression, that is something that we can potentially fix with a medication to restore your serotonin levels.
They're very selfish and
Or they just spend all their time playing video games, getting high, whatever.
They're engaged in a lot of lateral movement, right?
They're not fulfilling any of their worldly responsibilities.
So they're not respected.
They're not accomplished.
They don't get positive feedback from the world, right?
This leads to existential depression as well.
And the third dimension is a little bit trickier.
We're not going to talk too much about that today.
And we talk a bunch about spirituality on the channel.
But the third thing that they sort of acknowledged, right, so these people who are focused on existential depression was that, you know, there's a third category of like something about meaning comes from a dimension that is not you and not the outside world.
They just acknowledge that these two dimensions seem to be insufficient to describe the total amount of meaning.
And so what they observed—I'm not saying this is—I think it's right.
So not that God is real or anything like that, but what they observed is that some human beings derive meaning or purpose from, like, a religious perspective or a spiritual perspective, right?
Some people, it's like, I'm going to do right by my family, I'm going to have some fun, and I'm going to, like, live a pious and not sinful life, and that will give my—I'm striving for heaven, and it gives their life purpose.
So check out the link in the description below and back to the video.
This is just an observation.
It's not saying that it's right or wrong, but I think what is indisputable, or maybe I'm sure it's disputable, but what I think is a fair observation is that a lot of human beings in the history of humanity have derived some sense of meaning and direction from a religious or spiritual pursuit.
Now, I'm a huge fan of this pursuit.
So that's why we sort of advocate for things like meditation.
And I think once you start meditating a lot, you will start to discover meaning and purpose in life in ways that you may not have otherwise realized.
So the next question becomes, do you have a balance of these three things?
Or we can use something like cognitive behavioral therapy to correct your cognitive distortions.
If you spend too much time making the rest of the world happy, make yourself happy.
If you spend too much time making yourself happy, then start being in service to the world.
So there's a couple of fascinating studies on depression that show that, see, when we're depressed, we sort of get help from other people.
But one of the best treatments or one of the best ways to improve your depression is to actually be of service to other people.
When you do something kind for other human beings, when you start volunteering and taking care of animals, it helps your depression immensely.
Okay?
Lots of studies show this.
So that's the second dimension.
Now, the third thing that we're going to talk about is...
is a lack of lateralization.
So this is the key thing to understand.
If y'all are wasting all of your energy in a non-forward direction and you are just lateralizing all of your efforts, there's no way to move forward.
There's basically a problem with the way that your brain is functioning, the way that you're seeing the world, which is why you're depressed.
Challenge here is that if you are lateralizing, chances are you are looking into the future and you're saying there is no point in doing this.
And that's where you should do it anyway.
So one of the key things I found in working with people who are existentially depressed is we want to increase their suite of experience.
We want to give them more data.
We want to expand their horizons.
Try something new.
What is going to be the result of it?
I don't know.
Will it fix your future?
Who knows?
Do it anyway.
Because this is what's really interesting.
When we think about the conclusions that the brain makes, I couldn't resist it.
We're going into neuroscience.
When we look at the conclusions that the brain makes, what you have to understand is that if you're projecting out your future, the calculation is made by your current knowledge, right?
So our brain is making a calculation based on other centers of the brain.
Our hippocampus has a bunch of memories.
Our association cortices have a lot of good knowledge packed in there.
So we sort of have this projection of the future that is based on our current data set.
Logically altering that data set, thinking through certain problems can help some, but the best way for your brain to learn and change its calculation is to give it new experiences.
Things are not actually that bad.
So I'm sure this has happened to you where you're like, oh, like I thought this thing was going to be really bad.
And it turns out it wasn't that bad.
It's just your brain is messed up so you can't see how good things are.
So I can logically explain to you, oh, you know, an injection isn't going to hurt, but it is only through experience that your actual perspective towards it will change.
And what I see in the world today is lateralizing our efforts has become so easy that we've stopped experiencing.
Right.
So many of the problems that I see are going to be people posting about like, are all women, women this way or all men this way?
And what they're referring to is not real life interactions.
They're like ingesting information from the Internet.
OK, that's option number one.
So we need to really reduce our lateral movements, right?
So think about all the things that you do over the course of a day that will lead to nothing.
And instead, shift your work towards anything that leads to anywhere and experience more.
There are two or three other...
Simple techniques that we can talk about because y'all may be listening to this and be like, oh, is this really going to change things?
And that's what a lot of our psychiatric treatment is oriented towards.
It really is.
So here's the key thing to understand.
All of these techniques work by restoring the sinusoidal rhythm of life.
So this is what life is supposed to be like.
There are downs and there are ups and there's stuff in the middle.
There's up, there's down, there's up.
You'll notice that the width of the peaks is different.
We have some peaks that are very narrow and some peaks that are very wide.
This is what normal life is like.
Now, in reactive depression, what tends to happen is we have a prolonged—there's less sinusoidal rhythm, right?
But there is a second possibility, which is that the world is becoming increasingly uncertain.
So there's more variance here, whereas in reactive depression, something bad happens, and then we're locked into this pattern for a while.
We're locked into this pattern for a while.
And then we have endogenous depression, which is way more constant than even reactive depression.
So the key thing—and this is what's pretty cool about this—
The key thing is we just want to restore this normal fluctuation.
It doesn't matter what you do.
The important thing is the variety.
If you've been sitting on your ass for eight hours a day, it doesn't matter what kind of movement you do.
You can do yoga.
You can do stretching.
You can go for a walk.
You can take a bath.
You can even just get up and do this.
It doesn't matter what kind of movement you do.
The key thing is that you move in some way.
Now, the last thing that we're going to talk about are two microscopic techniques.
So these are actual techniques from something called logotherapy.
So I don't know if you all have heard of a guy named Viktor Frankl.
Right.
So he wrote Man's Search for Meaning, was a Holocaust survivor, became a doctor, was I think I guess a psychiatrist.
I'm not sure if he was like neurologist or psychiatrist or what.
But he developed this system of therapy, which was specifically targeting existential depression.
So here's just his characterization.
Patients who fall into this diagnostic category usually complain of a sense of futility and meaningless or emptiness and void.
You genuinely look into the future and don't know what to do.
In logotherapy, this condition is termed the existential vacuum.
The first thing that we're going to talk about, he developed this technique called paradoxical intention.
So here's what he said about it.
In order to understand it, one must consider the phenomenon called anticipatory anxiety.
By this, I mean the response and reaction to an event in terms of the fearful expectation of the recurrence of the event.
However, fear tends to come true precisely that which one is afraid of.
You don't see a whole lot of hope.
And in the same vein, anticipatory anxiety triggers off what the patient so fearfully expects to happen.
Thus, a vicious circle is established.
A symptom evokes a phobia and the phobia provokes the symptom.
The recurrence of the symptom then reinforces the phobia.
I'm sitting here and I'm saying, look, you should go out and act more.
And this is not like you're hopeless because your brain is messed up.
But Frankl figured this out.
When I say go out and act more, he discovered that there is something that's getting in the way of your acting.
That is your anticipatory anxiety.
So if I take someone who is forever alone and I tell them, go out and talk to people, this evokes some anxiety.
Things are not going to go well.
People won't like me.
And then if you push yourself and force yourself out into public.
You will be so in your head and anxious.
This is like a genuine objective assessment.
You will be sending off the wrong empathic energy so that people are going to think you're awkward and you're a creep.
So those social interactions that you force yourself into will become traumatic.
And as they become traumatic, then they will reinforce your anxiety.
Right.
So if I just tell you to go out and act doesn't work.
So if you're someone who is paralyzed by anxiety, right, I'm afraid to ask for a promotion.
Then when you go in and you ask for a promotion, you're stuttering.
You're not confident.
You don't really believe you're afraid of what they're going to think of you.
So you don't project your confidence and then you don't end up getting promoted anyway.
This is the problem.
When we are anxious about doing something and we try to do it, our anxiety sabotages our ability to do the thing.
of your future and discovering that like basically things are not hopeful from like a logical sense.
So there are two solutions to this.
One is we can do an exposure therapy where we engage in the behavior over and over and over and over and over again until our anxiety gets numbed out.
Or we can do what Viktor Frankl called paradoxical intention.
Now, what does this mean?
that you should wish for the thing that you fear the most.
This is Frankl we're talking about, okay?
So he's like, look, if you're afraid of something, just wish for it, right?
Just be like, and I think now in the current society, we talk about acceptance.
So I think this is another version of that.
So right, so from the spiritual tradition, like the Eastern karmic traditions, we talk about like the value of acceptance.
And we kind of say like, look, life is going to happen.
It's going to be your karma.
There's no way to dodge your bad karma.
So just accept it.
Same kind of thing.
The key thing here is that what we're trying to do is disable the anxiety, right?
So if I am thinking about asking someone out on a date or socializing, if I go into it and saying, look, I'm going to go into this social situation.
I'm going to feel anxious.
It's going to be terrible.
So be it.
Bring it on, right?
And if you have this kind of depression, which by the way is skyrocketing, right?
Just because life sucks doesn't mean I'm going to retreat from it.
Let it happen.
Like, do your worst, bitch.
Let's go.
And this is the key thing that Frankl discovered, right?
is that the attitude that we embody when we approach the difficulties of life will ultimately determine how we live our life.
So if you adopt this attitude of, okay, this person, I'm going to ask this person out on a date.
They're going to reject me.
It's going to hurt.
Bring it on.
so be it.
But fuck me, I'm not going to live encased in amber anymore.
Like, even if things go bad, so be it.
I'm going to start living and I'm going to shoot my shot and I'm going to start taking chances in life.
If the worst happens, let the worst happen.
So we see existential depression increasing so much because the world is becoming a worse place.
So be it.
Now, this is the cool thing.
When we adopt paradoxical...
intention and there's a lot of studies on acceptance that show basically the same thing it actually improves our chances right so like now what we've done is we've disabled the anxiety and it's the anxiety itself that is really sabotaging the outcome so when we bring when we have this bring it on kind of attitude it really helps us to disable that anxiety maybe to say not work right away but as you practice it your brain will get better at it and then you'll be able to take chances in life and then something cool will happen things will start to go your way
Right.
You won't be quite as anxious.
You ask someone out.
Turns out they're crushing on you, too.
They say, yes, let's give it a shot.
And now someone has said yes.
Now your life is completely different.
Now you're living life.
Now life becomes sinusoidal.
Now life has ups.
They said yes.
And we went on two dates.
They said, hey, they don't really see me romantically.
And it has a down.
So now the question becomes, are you going to be anxious and paralyzed?
Or are you going to live life again?
Oh, another down, another down, and then an up.
There's a lot of uncertainty around careers, like is AI going to replace your job?
And then you end up dating someone for like a year.
We've seen these kinds of progress in our community.
People post about it all the time.
It does work.
I've seen it in my patients.
So that is paradoxical intention.
Bring it on.
The second technique that we're going to talk about is called dereflection.
So Frankel noticed that when he worked with people who are existentially depressed, they tend to be hyper focused on a particular problem and its implications.
So let's say that someone gets dumped or someone fails a test.
We tend to focus fully on this thing.
Our eyes kind of tunnel down into this thing and the impact in our lives.
Now that I failed this test.
I'm not going to get a 4.0 GPA.
If I won't get a 4.0 GPA, I won't get into college.
If I don't get into med school, then I won't make my parents proud and I won't ever get married.
And like all these things happen, right?
People are buying houses later.
So we look at this one thing in life, whether we get dumped or we get a bad grade or whatever, we become hyper-focused on it.
So instead, what dereflection is, is taking a step back and looking at how even this setback...
which existential psychotherapy does a great job of this.
Existential psychotherapy says that life is full of suffering, right?
So suffering, there's some amount of unavoidable suffering.
People can't afford houses.
Buddha said the same thing.
The key thing is how we respond to it.
So when we have these setbacks, what dereflection encourages us to do is pivot towards something called a transcendental value.
Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast.
So pivot towards something that matters to you that is greater than this problem.
So I'll give you all a couple of examples of how I do this with patients.
In the U.S., a lot of people have crushing amounts of student debt.
So let's say you fail a class, okay?
And now you're catastrophizing.
So when I work with people, what I'll do is I'll ask them, okay, like, so sure you failed, but let's think about this for a second.
How useful do you think it is to be someone...
who is capable of bouncing back from failure?
Is that important to you?
Is picking yourself up when you face the setback an important thing for you in life?
Would you want to acquire that skill, right?
We don't know what the hell is going on with dating, right?
And so now what we're doing is we're taking this setback, which is absolutely a setback, and we're sort of recognizing that, okay, this is a chance for me to level up my damage control skills.
This is a chance for me to acknowledge that even though I got dumped by this person, that I want to be someone who is capable of being dumped and still living a good life, putting myself out there, meeting someone else.
In the grand scheme of things, there is something that is more important to me than this particular thing.
So we don't know what's going on with the climate.
So this requires some work.
Right.
For you to really sit down and think about what are your transcendental values?
What are the things that you want to become?
And for the setbacks in life, what you want to do with dereflection is think about the setback and think about how can you turn this lemon into lemonade?
Right.
How can I take this negative thing that has happened to me and turn it into something that I care about and is positive in life?
We don't know what's going on with the environment.
This is where the thinking comes in.
So I do this all the time.
Right.
So I failed out of college basically.
There's a lot of political unrest.
And like, you know, ended up being a Harvard trained psychiatrist.
And like, that's become an important part of my story.
Like I went through this process myself in terms of growth and it's been like, awesome.
Now I feel like I have meaning and purpose and like y'all should do it too.
It doesn't mean that I'm magical or I'm special or I'm like unique in some way.
It just means that I sort of went through more of an Eastern path.
There are wars.
But like Frankel literally laid this stuff out.
So not only did I go through this stuff, what I saw as a psychiatrist in like 2018 was that this kind of problem is increasing.
So as you like look out into the world, is the future a hopeful place?
People are struggling to find meaning in life.
This is one of the reasons that, you know, I had a choice between opening a clinic or developing a coaching program.
Reason I chose the coaching program, so in our pilot study of our coaching program, I think 1,493 people, maybe 39, it could be a little bit off.
That was our pilot study on almost 1,500 people.
We found a 58% increase in purpose and direction in life.
This is the variable that we were going for, right?
We want to help people find their meaning and their direction.
So our pilot study was also looking at unhealthy technology use.
And what we found is that it improved like depression and anxiety by 20 to 30%, but that's not what we were trying to do.
We developed a program to help people find meaning and direction in life.
And once you have meaning and direction in life, the technology use and the lateralizing behavior goes down on its own.
And for a lot of people, the answer is no.
So in today's video, we've equipped you with some of the big picture concepts, a balance between actions, thoughts, and feelings, a sinusoidal rhythm in life,
dereflection, paradoxical intention, right?
This is how to solve existential depression, or this is what the data suggests, or these are what some of these people suggest, right?
That's what works.
I've seen it as a clinician.
Hopefully it'll work for you.
Other thing is that y'all can absolutely work with our coaches.
The bigger problem is that the standard treatments that we use don't really work well for people with existential depression.
That's why we developed this.
Right.
So the coaching program was developed because I saw that there are like certain problems that are called these trans diagnostic factors like perfectionism.
Right.
Ego, identity issues, purpose, meaning.
These are things that as psychiatrists, we are not there's no medication for that.
That's not what our training is in.
Our training is not about building purpose.
It is about healing pathology.
So if y'all are struggling with that and you really want someone to help you through that so you've made significant progress in 8 to 12 weeks, definitely check it out.
And for those of y'all that aren't interested in that, that's why we make these videos.
That's why we explain things mechanistically.
And hopefully we've given y'all some big picture abstract stuff to focus on as well as two very concrete techniques to apply in your own life.
Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.
I'm Dr. Alok Kanodja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.
This is the second kind of depression, which is almost like a logical reaction to the world becoming a worse place.
Because this idea that depression is caused by a serotonin imbalance, I think is partially true.
It's true in some cases, but not true for everybody.
If y'all want more info on existential depression, we've put together an awesome page that has free resources, links to other relevant videos, and some info on our coaching program.
Check out the link in the description below and back to the video.
Now, the second problem is that if we look at the other sort of gold standard of treatment for depression, it's something called cognitive behavioral therapy.
But I've worked with a ton of patients who have this existential depression for whom cognitive behavioral therapy doesn't work.
So let's take a look at that.
So this is a great paper by a guy named Asir Ghami, fantastic researcher on mood disorders, depressive realism, and existential psychotherapy.
So we'll get to that in a second.
So the second gold standard of treatment for mood disorders and depression is CBT, right?
So this is the cognitive behavioral model.
A lot of people have heard of cognitive behavioral therapy.
It holds that a major psychological mechanism behind clinical depression is the tendency of patients to distort reality through inaccurate cognitive mindsets.
On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you.
OK, so basically the idea behind CBT is that your brain or your mind's ability to see reality is distorted by cognitive bias.
Things are not actually as bad as you thought they were.
And if we can correct those cognitive distortions, then your depression will go away.
And CBT works well for many people.
But there are more and more patients who I've worked with.
A lot of these people end up in my office because they're looking for a different sort of approach because CBT doesn't work for them.
Their cognitive distortions, they don't have a whole lot of cognitive distortions.
In fact, what is going on is actually way scarier, which is something called the depressive realism model.
Many clinicians are unaware of the presence of a completely opposite of model, a model of depression called depressive realism.
What depressive realism basically shows is that those who had some depressive symptoms based on self-report rating scales were more accurate than those without depressive symptoms and correctly attributing errors to themselves as opposed to random errors beyond their control.
Conversely, the normal non-depressed subjects had a sense of greater control than they actually possessed.
Okay, so what does this mean?
So if you look at studies, and we have a great whole video about logic and depression.
If you look at studies on people who are depressed, it turns out that on the one hand, there are some people who have cognitive distortions.
But on the other hand, people who are depressed are actually more accurate judges of reality than non-depressed people.
So let's dive right in.
The default state of existence, if you're a human, is to be cognitively biased in your own favor.
This is why people do things like buy lottery tickets, right?
So their ability to actually assess what their odds of winning are are really, really poor.
Like everyone thinks they're better than average.
There's this group of people who are depressive realists who are better, accurate judges of reality.
So now here's the situation.
you're depressed.
Now you may be looking out into the future and there are a couple of different options.
So you see the world is bleak in front of you.
Okay.
So option number one is that you have a chemical imbalance in your brain.
You can start an antidepressant, take an SSRI, boost your serotonin levels.
And I'd say one out of three people benefits a lot from that.
Okay.
Second option that you've got is you can do cognitive behavioral therapy, but maybe your brain isn't actually like messed up.
Maybe you're not actually having cognitive distortions.
Maybe you are an accurate judge of your bleak future and you are depressed as a result of that.
So this is becoming a huge problem because we're seeing an increase in the rates of diagnosis of things like mood disorders, like major depressive disorder.
And so what we tend to see in cognitive behavioral therapy is that doesn't work for everyone.
And so if you don't have a chemical imbalance and if you don't have a whole lot of cognitive distortions, then what do you do?
This is where we enter into a discussion of existential depression.
Now, today's video is going to be a little bit more detailed and a little bit more abstract, where if you have existential depression, you're probably a little bit philosophical.
So hopefully you'll appreciate this, but this is actually what we really need to look at, right?
So we need to take this sort of philosophical approach to understanding depression.
What is life?
Who are you?
How do these two things relate to each other?
And once we understand how those two things connect, hopefully it will equip you for a way of like living and existing in the world.
That allows you to like be happier.
I know it sounds kind of weird.
I don't know how to say it.
But like basically if you're existentially depressed, you need an existential solution.
And an existential solution isn't going to come from cognitive behavioral therapy or an SSRI.
It's going to come from fucking like philosophically sitting down and looking at your life and really trying to understand like what the hell is going on here.
And the cool thing is if we understand a couple of principles, then we'll sort of help ourselves move in the right direction.
OK, so if you fall into this third camp, this camp where you're looking into the future and things are genuinely bleak, how do we approach this?
But we're also seeing a spike in symptom severity.
So we're going to approach it a little bit like philosophically.
Right.
So you're existentially depressed.
which means that you're a thinker, and you think about life, and you think about the meaning of life, and you think, oh, there's no meaning in life, and fair enough, okay?
So we're going to approach things from that angle.
This isn't as simple as neurotransmitters and serotonin and things like that.
But the good news is that there's been a lot of work that's a little bit older that's been done.
So not only are more people depressed than they've ever been that we're aware of, but the severity of depression seems to be on the rise.
So this is what I thought was really interesting.
So in the explosion of neuroscience—
We've sort of lost sight of these like big picture philosophical approaches to the meaning of life and how to exist as a human.
And so it's really interesting because the more that I try to help people with existential depression, I find that some of these older approaches where human beings were grappling with this stuff in the 40s before science was very sophisticated.
There's a lot of really great stuff there.
And as we dig into that stuff, hopefully it will give you all a road forward, not just in a big picture sense, but also a couple of really specific things that you can do to sort of change your perspective on life.
So let's take a look at what existential depression looks like.
What is blocked or interrupted for the depressive is not the future, but contingency, spontaneity, or openness.
As I see it, the problem with such a patient is not that the future is blocked,
but that it is frozen or determined, that in losing its rhythmical flow and pause, in effect it has achieved a state of disordered perfection or completeness, a situation intolerable in the healthy.
Such an individual with a fixed or frozen future has become an object among objects."
or thing among things.
His loss of the sense of the rhythm of the world and of his life demands that he attempt to reconstitute this sense of interrupted or disordered pause and flow.
The bigger problem, though, is that our treatments for depression don't appear to be working.
Since he feels very foreclosed in terms of the viable future, he feels he must reinstitute, even if by pathologic devices, the disruption of the painful, monadic, unitary closed state he has achieved.
Now, you are probably wondering, what the hell does that mean?
So let's explain.
So here's what Dr. Scher noticed.
Okay?
And then the future is a set of possibilities, right?
And that's what today's video is about.
Right.
So if we kind of think about like what's going to happen in the future, this thing could happen over here or this thing could happen over here.
There's all kinds of possibilities.
What are you going to do with your life?
Oh, I could do anything.
I could study this.
I could study this.
I could move here.
I could go over here.
There's a lot of possibility in life.
So what happens in existential depression is that the future becomes frozen or determined.
Understanding that not all kinds of depression are the same.
Right.
It becomes a disordered perfection or completeness.
So this is kind of what what I see when I when I work with people who are depressed.
Right.
What I sit with is someone who there's no there's no possibility of the future.
The future actually collapses down to one thing.
There's no more possibility.
No matter which road we start walking, we are going to end up in the same spot.
There's no point in effort because the future is foreclosed.
The future is predetermined.
And furthermore, we're going to dive into this concept of existential depression, which is really, really scary in a lot of ways because it doesn't fit the mold of what we think of as depression.
That's where the hopelessness comes from.
So a good example of this is I work with a lot of people who struggle a lot with dating and loneliness.
There's a camp of people who call themselves forever alone.
So if you think about forever alone, what does that mean?
It means that no matter what you do,
The future is fixed.
And when the future becomes fixed like that, it induces this sense of existential depression.
There's no point in life.
What's the point in life if no matter what I do, everything is going to fall apart anyway?
There's no point in investing in a career because my job is going to be replaced by AI.
So no matter what I do, I become powerless because my efforts, whether I do this on a Monday or this, whether I procrastinate on a Monday or I don't procrastinate, makes no difference.
My job is going to get replaced by AI.
Whether I go to the gym, whether I get my hair done, whether I work with a stylist, whether I go to this pickup artist camp, doesn't matter because I'm going to be alone no matter what happens.
So there is a fixed or frozen future.
And when there's a fixed or frozen future, what is the point of acting?
right what's the point this is why people with existential depression struggle day in and day out to find a meaning to find a purpose to find a point it's like i go on existing in this world i become an object among objects a thing among things life has no zest it has no possibility it has no excitement as the depressive initiates his descent to avernus
He begins by feeling bad, that is, dysrhythmic, out of phase, and anxious.
By degrees, the depressive reduces his participation in the world of events of social, personal, and even family contacts.
We've got things like Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health, personalized coaching programs, and things like free community events and other sorts of tools to help you no matter where you are on your mental health journey.
They start to withdraw.
His future consolidates, his present constricts, and his past may not become the center of repetitious and blocked focus.
As he closes linearly or frontally, he seems to open laterally.
So what does this mean?
So the future is full of possibilities, right?
So let's start by like understanding a couple of evolutions recently that we've discovered in psychiatry.
In a normal person.
But as you become depressed, right, your future consolidates, right?
No matter what you do, you end up in the same spot.
There's no point.
So now, if there's no point to you doing anything, you stop moving in this direction, right?
This is a forward.
If we look at this as the x-axis, and this is progress.
So what ends up happening with people who are existentially depressed is that they move laterally.
They start moving in this direction.
Now, what does lateral movement mean?
That means that after you act, here's you, here's action, you end up in the same place that you were before.
So a lot of people think that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance of serotonin.
Right?
There's no sense of progress in your actions.
So what does this look like?
Well, gee, I wonder, can y'all envision anything that a lot of people are doing in the world today that constitutes lateral movement?
Can y'all envision anything that people are doing where at the end of the day, when they spent a whole day doing this, they have not moved forward a single step in life?
Wow.