Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K)
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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 that means that everyone should be doing them, right?
So now what we're doing, so I don't know if this kind of makes sense.
This graph, we're going to do Science 101, looking at a condition.
So for treatment-resistant depression, here's what psilocybin shows.
Here's what ayahuasca shows.
I think this graph, I think, is more important in some ways or better.
So now we're looking at, if we look at psilocybin, here's what we find for the antidepressant effect.
If we're looking at psilocybin, here's what we find for the anxiolytic effect.
Not exactly.
Here's what we find for the suicide prevention effect.
And if we're looking at LSD, here's the antidepressant effect.
Here's the anxiolytic effect.
Here's ayahuasca.
So when I hear people talk about the excitement of it, what I oftentimes find is that there is a very, there's just a huge lack of sophistication about understanding how psychedelics work and like really what they do.
Here's the antidepressant effect.
Here's the anxiolytic effect.
So now we're looking at and y'all can just sort of see like how far to the left these are.
So you can sort of see, relatively speaking, like this is looking at psilocybin.
You know, is psilocybin effective for is it more effective for depression?
Is it more effective for anxiety?
So here's a negative, which means symptom improvement.
So this is basically looking at each of the psychedelics and looking at which effects they have.
This is looking at the conditions in which psychedelics are effective for the condition.
Do you all understand the difference?
And then we also have studies on things like alcoholism, where you'll notice that when we look at something like LSD for alcoholism,
And psilocybin for alcoholism, what we start to see is that these are a lot more crossing the midline, right?
So this doesn't seem to be as effective for substance use disorders as it is for something like treatment-resistant depression.
So the key thing here is here's LSD for alcoholism, and it crosses the midline, which means it's not very statistically significant.
Here's psilocybin for alcoholism.
This one crosses the midline.
These two don't.
So this appears like psilocybin is more effective for alcoholism than LSD is.
And then we can look at MDMA for PTSD.
So this is super exciting as well because we don't have great pharmacologic agents for PTSD, right?
We have to do a lot of physiologic rewiring.
We sort of walk you all through that process in Dr. K's Guide to Trauma.
If you all want to know like how to rewire your brain and identity and physiology, like we go through that process.
So this is what's really cool because we don't have like great drugs for PTSD, but MDMA seems quite promising, right?
We're seeing a lot of reductions that are not crossing the midline.
So it seems like psychedelics do have very promising efficacy for things like treatment resistant depression, PTSD, alcohol use disorder.
Not all psychedelics are the same.
And the key thing to remember is that the way in which we use them seems to be responsible for the benefits that we get.
OK, so if you're super depressed and traumatized and you're just get using psychedelics in your house at home, it's not clear to me that that is going to be safe or effective.
So now let's move on to safety.
Here's where things get spicy.
So table three summarizes adverse reactions reported in 44 out of 70 total articles.
So the first thing to understand is that if we look at 70 studies on psychedelics, in 44 of those 70 studies, something bad happened, right?
So just to give you all a couple of examples.
So what are the adverse reactions?
So in 37% of studies, we see no serious adverse events reported.
Most common one is headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, fatigue, transient anxiety and delusions, transient increase in blood pressure.
So as a medical doctor, you know, if you ask me, hey, does this treatment work?
So if we look at the safety profile implied by this awesome meta-analysis, which looked at 70 studies, it's like, hey, transient increases in blood pressure, like transient delusions.
None of this traumatizing crap that Dr. K is talking about, PTSD, anxiety, panic disorder, like none of those found permanent panic disorder.
So what's up with that, Dr. K?
This meta-analysis that looked at 70 studies contradicts what you just said.
And this is why we need to have a sophisticated and nuanced approach.
So let me ask you all a question.
Let's say I did a meta-analysis.
There are all kinds of questions we ask, like what is the dose?
In the early stages, right, so these are like FDA trials, phase one, phase two, phase three clinical trials of benzodiazepines.
If I looked at Xanax, Valium, Lorazepam, Ativan, Oxycontin, opioid medication, what do y'all think?
the early trials when before this stuff hit the market and everyone started using it widely, what do you think the side effects were that were reported for these kinds of medications?
which psychedelic are we talking about?
A little bit of dry mouth, a little bit of fatigue, a little bit of maybe sleepiness.
We didn't see the terrible potential for addiction with these medications, right?
So this is something that's really important to understand.
There is a huge difference between
between the side effects that we see in a trial and the side effects that we see in real life.
Are all the psychedelics the same?
Because in a trial, you have someone who goes to a clinic.
They get seen by a doctor for 14 weeks in a row.
They're very carefully monitoring what is going on.
You've got therapists, if you start to feel a little bit anxious, if you have a bad trip, you have therapists there with you when you are bad tripping, and you have therapists there to help you process or metabolize or fix whatever goes wrong.
Do different doses of different psychedelics produce different effects?
This is one of the key reasons why I think the danger, my personal opinion, is that the danger from psychedelics is far greater than what the trials suggest.
And this is true of basically all medicine, right?
So you can look at basically any clinical trial, not, I mean, not all, but a lot of clinical trials and a lot of studies and a lot of FDA approvals will show that medications are generally speaking safe.
And then we will start using them in the general population.
And it turns out, oh, it's like way worse than we thought.
The safety and efficacy profiles of medications, generally speaking, after they get widely used, the efficacy goes down and the safety risks actually get worse.
Which ones are effective for addictions?
So I'll give you all just a couple of examples.
So thalidomide was a great anti-nausea drug that we used for cancer treatment.
Awesome, looked wonderful, things like that.
People started taking thalidomide when they had cancer and then it worked really well.
So then some doctors were like, oh, cool, like this is such a powerful nausea drug.
You know what other group of people?
gets nauseous a lot?
Which ones are effective for trauma?
Pregnant women.
So we started giving thalidomide to pregnant ladies.
And guess what happened?
They started giving birth to children without arms or legs.
How effective are they?
Like legit, that's not an exaggeration.
I'm not using this for clickbait.
That's like literally what happened.
So it is a huge teratogen, really, really dangerous.
Now thalidomide is not available on the market anymore because of safety concerns.
We see that a lot with other kinds of medications as well.
So another good example of this is antidepressants.
The efficacy of antidepressants is probably way less than we originally thought.
How long does the efficacy last?
And furthermore, we're now starting to see things like SSRI withdrawal syndrome.
We're seeing permanent sexual side effects in small cases of antidepressant usage.
We weren't aware of those dangers when we were looking at the original trials.
So my point here is that you have to be really careful
about the safety profile that is found in a clinical trial.
And the key thing is, if you want that safety profile, you need to duplicate the structure of the trial because they're safe when a pharmaceutical person, when like a lab is making a precise milligram amount, which is administered to you, not some crap that you ordered off of the internet or grew in your backyard.
If I use psilocybin, does it help me for a year?
I have never seen a single person who uses psilocybin, even when they grow it, who is measuring the concentration of psilocybin in the magic mushrooms that they're growing in their garage, right?
Does it cure me for life?
So the safety profiles that we're seeing from the trials are very different from real world use.
So now we're going to get to two fun things, okay?
Next thing we're going to talk about is microdosing.
So microdosing is like all the fad nowadays.
I've met a ton of people who really love to microdose.
Does it help me for a day?
So microdosing is when you take, you know, a small dose of psychedelics.
And this also is where, like, we have to get technical because what is the dose of microdosing, right?
So there's no clear consensus.
What about microdosing?
So if we're asking, is microdosing effective?
Is it safe?
The question becomes, which psychedelic are we talking about?
And at what dose are we talking about?
I don't hear this level of precision.
So we can't say it is safe or unsafe or effective or ineffective unless we actually specify those things, okay?
That's the first problem.
So second thing is that in my experience of microdosing, in the sense of the people that I've worked with, what I tend to find is that microdosing gives a lot of subjective benefit.
So there's a bunch of details around psychedelics that
So when people microdose, they feel a lot better.
They feel like it has a very large impact.
But that is generally speaking, I think, kind of sus, TBH.
And the reason for that is because a subjective experience of feeling better does not necessarily tightly correlate with an actual clinical improvement.
And the best example of this is something like Adderall or stimulant medication.
which people don't usually talk about.
So if you take someone with ADHD and you give them Adderall, what many of them experience is that they are non-functional without Adderall.
Without my Adderall, I can't do anything.
And with my Adderall, I become a completely different human being and I can accomplish a lot.
So the subjective benefit of Adderall seems to be very high for people.
But if you look at studies, how much does Adderall improve your actual concentration?
On average, if you do meta-analyses of studies, it leads to a 30% improvement in ADHD symptoms.
But if you want to make an informed decision, you need to understand all of those things.
Compare that.
with psychotherapy.
So psychotherapy over the course of one year, if you really stick with it, improves ADHD symptoms by about 69%, right?
So it is more than twice as effective as stimulant medication.
But if you ask someone, how much does psychotherapy help you?
How much does Adderall help you?
There is a subjective difference in how much people think it helps them.
So if I give someone a year of psychotherapy, they're going to be 70% better in relation to their ADHD.
If I give someone Adderall, they're going to be 30% better with their ADHD.
But if I ask someone, how much better are you?
So this is how I think about them as a psychiatrist.
The Adderall person will say, I am way better.
I'm like 100% better.
And the psychotherapy person will say, I'm about maybe 50, 30, 70% better.
They'll say something like that.
And that's because we have this bias in our brain where the speed of something working increases the magnitude of the effect.
So since Adderall works right away, since I notice a difference, that sort of my brain sort of changes the calculation.
I don't need to get more into that, but I hope that sort of makes sense.
The more immediate effects are, the more we think something is effective.
And I'd like to share this information with you, which I think honestly is not that complicated.
This is why things like Xanax and opium and opioid medications feel like they're amazing because they hit us really fast.
And if they hit us really fast, the brain confuses that with being very effective.
So our brain confuses onset of action and speed of effect with magnitude of effect.
This is basically what I think is going on with microdosing, where a lot of people feel like they're doing better.
But if we look at a lot of the data that looks, if we look at studies that look at long-term effects, there seems to be a very small effect.
So let's take a quick look at a few studies.
So here's a study that's a systematic study of microdosing psychedelics.
So the first thing that we've got to get into is what do we mean by psychedelics?
So analyses of pre and post study measures revealed reductions in reported levels of depression and stress, lower levels of distractibility, increased absorption and increased neuroticism.
Notably, the effects believed most likely to change were unrelated to the observed pattern of reported outcomes.
Now, what does this sentence mean?
This means that what people believed changed is quite different from what actually changed, okay?
So let's take a look at another study.
So this paper is from 2019, so I thought I'd pull something up from 2024.
Because psychedelics are actually a class of compounds.
So perceptible drug effects were reported at doses of 10 to 20 milligrams, but not 5 milligrams.
This is an LSD microdosing study.
No serious adverse effects were reported.
Repeated doses of LSD did not alter mood or cognition on any of the measures studied, right?
This is what's really interesting.
The findings suggest that low doses of LSD are safe and produce acute behavioral and neural effects in healthy adults.
So y'all can look at these papers yourself and draw your own conclusions.
But what I kind of read from this is kind of what I already said, which is that when people microdose, they feel like they do better.
They include things like ayahuasca, they include LSD, psilocybin, DMT, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca, also things like the peyote cactus, ibogaine.
They feel like there are daily, if you microdose every day, there are going to be reductions in your subjective experience of mood and anxiety.
But generally speaking, over time, your trajectory will not improve.
So what my experience has been as a psychiatrist who works with people who microdose is it really becomes a crutch to help you feel better on every single day.
It's almost like an opioid medication where it helps you feel better every single day, but it doesn't actually improve your health very much.
There are going to be a ton of people who will disagree with me and fair enough because the research on microdosing is not very extensive.
I'm sure that there's a variability of people who absolutely love it.
I'm not saying that y'all don't love it.
I'm not saying that it doesn't feel great.
What I'm saying is that in my experience, it doesn't sustainably improve things over time.
And in the worst cases, what it actually does is masks, right?
Because you're taking this psychedelic that is like changing your mood, your anxiety, your feeling of your connectedness with the world.
But the moment that the psychedelic goes away, you're back to where you started, right?
And so what that sort of means is that it doesn't lead to a sustainable improvement.
You're not actually fixing the problems of feeling disconnected from the world without a psychedelic.
The last thing that I want to talk about is something that's kind of fun, which is more of a subjective experience of how psychedelics work.
So remember that we talked about the 5-HT2A receptor, we talked about neuroplasticity, but there's one other really interesting mechanism which seems to be responsible for psychedelic healing.
Now, this mechanism is subjective.
So what I mean by that is that we can look at things like receptors, right?
But then there is the actual trip.
And it seems like there is one kind of trip that correlates with healing over time.
So there's a lot of these different compounds, and they're actually each different.
And that is a trip that involves ego death.
So if you have a psychedelic experience that involves just looking at colors, this does not appear to cure depression or treat PTSD.
The trips that actually involve healing are ones where your sense of identity starts to crumble and fall apart, where your sense of connection to other people increases.
And there's actually studies on this.
So I want to show you all this is super cool.
So someone did their thesis specifically on ego death.
So prescribed ego death, the therapeutic effects found in the psychedelic-induced absence of self.
Now, the reason that we kind of classify them together is because they do have certain shared mechanisms of action.
So some researchers hypothesize that the therapeutic effects of psychedelics come from their acute subjective effects, specifically ego dissolution.
By reviewing five studies that examine this correlation, this review found that the majority of the studies could present a moderate correlation.
So what this means is that there is a particular kind of trip that leads to healing.
which is ego death.
And the really fascinating thing about this is one of the most common questions that I get is, what is the connection between psychedelics and meditation?
Because in meditation, we also have improvements in PTSD.
We have neuroplasticity.
We have increases in BDNF.
We have improvements in depression.
We have improvements in treatment-resistant depression.
We have improvements in addictions.
So meditation does a lot of the things that psychedelics does.
And if you practice esoteric techniques of meditation, you will oftentimes have psychedelic-like experiences.
You'll travel to other dimensions.
So the primary neurotransmitter that we're sort of focused on or the primary receptor we're focused on is the serotonin 2A receptor.
You'll feel connected to all of humanity.
And we know that one of the things that happens in meditation is that our ego starts to dissolve.
There are some techniques that we'll specifically teach.
Y'all can check out Dr. K's guide where we do techniques like shunya meditation and stuff like that, which are sort of designed.
These are specific techniques to trigger this ego dissolution process.
So it seems like ego dissolution is really important.
And this is where I think that this is where meditation and psychedelics really overlap.
And I think it's really cool that there are some techniques in meditation that induce ego death and psychedelic trips that induce some amount of ego dissolution are responsible for healing.
So let's understand why that is.
So if we look at mental illness, mental illness has a lot to do with me.
So when I experience PTSD, I feel broken.
I feel traumatized.
I don't feel traumatized.
I am traumatized.
I feel broken.
I feel unlovable.
When a child is abused by their parent, they develop an identity of being unloved.
Even if we look at something like depression, what is going on in depression?
In depression, we have a hyperactive ego.
Now, what do I mean by that?
This is why I'm being technical.
I'm talking about the sense of self.
So if I ask someone who's depressed, I say, tell me about yourself.
They'll say, I'm a loser.
I'm pathetic.
It doesn't mean that they're egotistical in the sense that they think highly of themselves, but their identity is very, very robust and concrete.
So that's the 5-HT2A receptor.
I'm pathetic.
I'm a loser.
I'm worse than everyone else.
Everyone would be better without me.
We also see very, very hyperactive ego in things like the incel population, right?
I'm a beta, other people are alphas.
I am this, I am this, I am, I am, I am.
So if we sort of stop and think about what's really going on there, in a lot of our mental illnesses and the ones that are, it's really interesting, right?
Because we're...
They're very effective for the mental illnesses that have a large part of ego.
And so if we want to understand what separates psychedelics from other drugs, we have to understand what that receptor does.
We don't see a huge ego in schizophrenia.
We don't see a huge ego in OCD.
We see huge egos in addictions.
Oh, yeah, I'm a loser.
I'm pathetic.
I'm an alcoholic.
I should be able to control myself.
I'm undisciplined.
I'm lazy.
So these three mental health diagnoses, depression, PTSD, and alcohol, these are the statements that when I'm a psychiatrist sitting with a patient in my office, they make a lot of I am dot, dot, dot statements, right?
These diseases relate to our sense of identity.
And so it's really cool that like,
Since ego dissolution happens and what happens in ego dissolution is, you know, who you are, you don't feel like you're bounded by this.
Like I'm over here and you're over there, right?
So I exist over here.
This is the boundary of me.
I have a physical body and you have your life and I have my life.
These two things are not connected.
But when we have an ego dissolution experience, my sense of self dissolves.
I just exist.
I exist in a neutral way.
I begin to realize I'm not the body like like I am that which exists transcendently beyond the body and all this kind of stuff.
Look, we talk about all this crap and a ton of other content that we'll try to link down below if you guys want more details on this stuff.
I think it's just really cool that ego death seems to be responsible for this healing.
And so ego death seems to be the kind of trip that you need to have if you want to heal in these ways.
So the first thing to understand is that there needs to be no outcome from small talk.
And when I work with psychiatrists and psychotherapists who do psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, what I find with them is that oftentimes that reintegration stuff, right?
So you have this sense of connectedness.
And then once you have this experience, helping yourself live in a way that includes that experience, integrates that experience, like, okay, if you're connected with all the other human beings, how are you going to be more compassionate towards your ex?
How are you going to be more compassionate towards your colleagues, towards your kids, towards your boss?
So it seems like ego death is really critical.
And I don't think it's surprising at all that as we engage in ego death experiences, even through the process of meditation, we see similar clinical improvements.
This is a vasana too.
So I hope that this has been a useful video for y'all.
We've been wanting to talk about psychedelics for a long time.
We've talked about it before, but I think this is... So the TLDR is, do psychedelics work?
Your mind is vasanas all the way down.
Are they healing?
Chances are the answer is yes, but under very specific circumstances.
Are they incredibly powerful?
Absolutely.
But don't go playing with fire unless you're ready to get burned.
So at the end of the day, are psychedelics effective?
Are they safe?
And the answer is it depends.
It depends on the set and the setting, right?
What is the approach that you're having when you're inducing this neuroplasticity?
So if you ask me at the end of the day, Dr. K, should I do psychedelics?
The answer is probably not unless you can find the right circumstance to do them with the appropriate guidance.
So the key thing about detachment is not that you don't have wants, it is that your wants do not control you.
so that they don't actually mess you up.
So Dr. K, are psychedelics safe and effective?
The answer is it depends, right?
It depends on the way that you're using them, the mindset that you're in, and who is with you when you are engaging in the psychedelic.
And should I use them, Dr. K?
The answer is with the appropriate guidance, whether that's a medical profession or part of a religious tradition.
And I strongly recommend y'all don't do anything illegal.
And so Dr. K, should I do psychedelics?
The answer is with the appropriate guidance, right?
So with the right kind of medical profession, or if you are a part of a spiritual tradition where someone can appropriately guide you, then that's something to be considered, assuming it's legal.
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.
If you're interested, you can sign up for 10 bucks a month at healthygamer.gg slash memberships or click the link in the description below.
Hope to see you there.
So the 5-HT2A receptor does a couple of different things in the brain.
The first thing that it does is it affects things like mood and anxiety.
So the 5-HT, the serotonin receptor, is also what we're sort of focusing on with antidepressant medication.
So we know that if we alter the serotonin transmission in your brain, it will affect things like your mood and your anxiety.
So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today.
Now, generally speaking, when we boost serotonin transmission, mood, like depressions, feelings of sadness and things like that go down, feelings of anxiety go down.
But this is where things get fun with psychedelics.
Because psychedelics, when we're talking about the 5-HT2A receptor and particular patterns of activation, there are also other things that this particular receptor does.
The first thing that it does is that it increases things like neuroplasticity and neurogenesis.
So what this means is that it changes the way that our brain wires itself or is wired, actually can cause stimulation of something called BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which actually causes an increase in the growth of our neurons, causes new neurons to be born.
So we start to see lots of changes in the connectivity of the brain.
So let's look at that in a little bit more detail.
So here we have MDMA, ayahuasca, psilocybin, and LSD.
These are probably the four most well-studied psychedelics.
Here's the serotonin receptor.
And what we see is that we can see mood disorders and other mental disorders.
Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast.
They have antidepressant effects.
anxiolytic effects, also reduce suicidality, and can alter things like alcohol usage and PTSD.
So now let's take a look at what the serotonin receptor actually does.
Psychedelics are serotonin 2A receptor agonists, including LSD, ayahuasca, DMT,
and psilocybin, also MDMA.
So the 2A receptor and specifically psychedelics also increase the functional connectivity of the brain.
So psychedelics are different from traditional antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications because they do a couple of other things.
I'm Dr. Alok Kanuja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.
So they have those mood reducing effects just like antidepressants.
But what we also know about psychedelics is that they increase neuroplasticity, which is the ability for our brain to rewire.
They increase neurogenesis, which is the ability of our brain to grow new neurons, like basically reproduce neurons.
That's mediated by something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is something that stimulates neuronal growth.
And then they also increase the way that our brain or change the way that our brain talks to other parts of our brain.
So they change the connections between different parts of the brain.
So we see neurogenesis, we see neuroplasticity, and we see functional connectivity changes.
What psychedelics do is change our brain into edit mode.
So this is something that I want y'all to understand.
So when I work with people with psychedelics, I've seen two things, okay?
I've seen a lot of people will use psychedelics and in clinical settings and certain like shamans and things like that, they will have positive transformative experiences that lead to significant improvements in their mental health.
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.
But I have also seen a ton of people who have used psychedelics and really screwed up their brains.
I've seen psychedelics not only be used to treat PTSD, but I've seen plenty of people who have used psychedelics and have traumatized themselves through bad trips.
So they'll trip so hard that it'll basically be like a PTSD inducing experience.
Their physiological wiring changes to where they're constantly anxious, their adrenaline is pumping, their cortisol levels are high.
And remember, we're putting the brain and body, the physiology, into an edit mode.
So when the psychedelic trip ends, they're control-S-ing, and they're basically locking their nervous system into a highly stressful state.
I've seen the development of PTSD.
I've seen the development of things like panic disorder, which are also like the reason that you develop a panic disorder is because your physiology has been locked into a highly anxious state.
And so if psychedelics can be incredibly damaging.
and they can be incredibly healing, how does that work?
And if we understand that what they basically do is allow us to edit our brain, this starts to make sense, right?
Because if I'm editing my brain, but the experience that I'm having is incredibly negative and traumatic, then I will sort of wire my brain in a traumatized way, wire my physiology in a traumatized way.
So let's dive right in.
But if I have a positive experience with psychedelics,
then I will have a sort of positive, you know, wiring, if that kind of makes sense.
So what psychedelics basically do is turn our brain into edit mode where we can start editing the source code.
So what that means is that the kind of edits that we make are ultimately what makes psychedelics potentially therapeutic or potentially harmful, right?
So really all they do is allow us to edit.
Then the code that we put in is ultimately what's important.
And this is what the studies show.
So just to give you all an example of like, you know, what studies on psychedelics actually look like, what we'll do is we'll take like a patient or a set of patients.
And for 12 to 14 weeks, we'll have like a 14 week study on psychedelics.
What these people will do is they will go to a medical clinic where they will work with a therapist for the period of 14 weeks.
They'll do some amount of therapy for like three or four weeks.
Hello, Internet.
where they kind of say like, okay, like, what do you want to work on?
Tell me about your trauma.
So the therapist knows what your triggers are, what you're trying to focus on, what your goals are.
They also know what to protect you against.
Today we are going to talk about the most important things you need to know about psychedelics.
So for three or four weeks, you'll kind of do this kind of therapy, and then you'll have your first psychedelic dosing.
You have a psychedelic dosing, and this is what's really crazy, okay?
So in some of these studies, you'll have a dyad of therapists, one male and one female, who will sit with you for eight hours over the course of the psychedelic trip.
Very safe location with two trained professionals for eight hours, making sure that everything goes okay.
After the psychedelic trip ends, you then have three or four more weeks where you take all of these revelations and you start to integrate them into your life, into your identity.
You try to process, you sort of get rid of the bad, lock down the good, and then you'll have a second dosing.
Just as a quick background, my name is Dr. Alok Kanogia.
where you go through the same process, then you kind of sort of integrate that into your life.
Sometimes people will have a third dosing, and then in the last few weeks of therapy, what you'll do is you'll sort of take all these psychedelic experiences, like I met my ancestors, and I discovered the nature of the universe, and I felt connected to all human beings, and this is what's really important.
Then the therapist will be like, okay, that's really cool.
How are we going to take those revelations
I spent seven years studying to become a monk where I did weird esoteric spiritual practices in places like the Himalayas.
and integrate them into long term change in your life.
How are you going to deal with people differently?
What are the choices you're going to make?
How are you going to relate to your job?
How are you going to talk to your kids?
How are you going to repair your relationship with your ex-wife now that you feel super connected to all people and you realize that she wasn't a bad person?
She was just doing the best that she could.
So there's a very important integration component.
And this is very different from I'm depressed and doing psychedelics at home.
So here's what I've sort of found.
Set and setting become really important for figuring out, are the psychedelics going to screw me up and give me panic disorders and PTSD?
Or are they going to be healing?
Because what we also know about psychedelics is it's not just clinical trials that they figured this out, right?
So most psychedelic substances...
have been used in safe spiritual traditions.
So, for example, ayahuasca has, you know, particular shamans who will train with the medicine.
You know, I've worked with people like this who will go for like one month and they'll be like in the Amazon rainforest guided by...
And then I went and became a psychiatrist, trained at Harvard Medical School where I served on the faculty for a couple of years.
Like shamans who you have a very restricted diet, they'll give you ayahuasca.
Sometimes you'll take it every day for about 30 days.
Sometimes you'll eat very little and you have a lot of people who will sort of guide you through the process.
And in cases where your mindset is good, positive, you know, you're kind of focused, you're ready to do something and you have enough support structure, whether that's a shaman in a spiritual tradition or someone like a medical doctor, like a psychiatrist, those become really, really important for a sort of
creating the healing effects and protecting you from the negative effects.
And what I've seen is that there are a lot of people who think, oh, psychedelics can cure me of my PTSD, but they have no idea that the studies that show that are 14-week trials where therapists are sitting with you for eight hours during the trip, where someone is sort of there and sort of protecting you and keeping you safe.
And today I'm going to explain to you all what I think you need to know about psychedelics.
And then what they'll do is they'll think, oh, I'm super depressed.
I need to feel better.
Let me take this high dose of LSD because they've heard about the heroic dose or psilocybin.
And what it'll actually do is induce a state of neuroplasticity where you have no guardrails.
You'll get even further traumatized.
The depression will get worse.
And then when your brain you'll edit your code in kind of a random way, right, because you're not controlling anything there.
And then when you hit control S, you end up more screwed up than before.
The main mechanism of action is that they induce neuroplasticity, but what happens when your brain is in the neuroplastic state becomes incredibly important.
So everyone's super excited about psychedelics.
So next, let's see which kind of psychedelics have what effects on which diseases, right?
So if you guys are like wondering, this is a great paper.
It's called...
efficacy and safety of psychedelics for the treatment of mental disorders, a systematic review and meta-analysis.
And by the way, like, you know, when we say, oh, psychedelics are healthy for you and people are like swearing by them.
There are studies that show that in treatment-resistant depression and PTSD and even addictions, psychedelics have therapeutic potential.
I don't think that most people understand this level of data, right?
This is when I prepared this video, this is just one of the papers that I looked through, right?
So you got to really be like informed y'all.
Like I know that people are talking about things on podcasts, but that's not the same as this.
So let's take a look.
So if you look at this, right, this shows a bigger improvement than this.
Does that make sense?
This shows a greater reduction in symptoms than these.
If it crosses the middle, by the way, that means that there's not a statistically significant result.
So it basically doesn't show a benefit.
So what this means is that if we do one measurement, so if we do a single post measurement, so here you are before the psychedelic, here you are after the psychedelic, we see larger effect sizes.
But the moment that we add a placebo, what happens to this curve, right?
So we start to see that things shift to the right.
The value of the treatment goes down the second that you add a placebo control.
So this is a really good example of people will say, like they'll look at this study and they'll see, oh my God, it leads to 50% improvements, but half of that could be placebo.
But more than that, there are Netflix series about psychedelics.
As we get to more sophisticated trials,
The value of psychedelics seems to be going down.
So this is LSD.
Here's MDMA.
Here's psilocybin.
So what's really interesting is that once we add placebo control to psilocybin, it seems like it actually the effect sizes increase.
Ayahuasca, MDMA.
Here's MDD.
So this is depression.
So it seems like psilocybin is like quite effective for depression.
Here's MDMA seems to be not as effective for depression.
Ayahuasca is not effective for depression.
So this is the other point that I'm sort of making is that like when we say psychedelics are good for your mental health, which psychedelic and which problem you have with your mental health actually becomes really important.
And all of the podcast bros are talking about psychedelics.
So if you're going to, you know, the Amazon and you're doing ayahuasca because you're depressed, you may not get much benefit from that.
Whereas if you have major depressive disorder, psilocybin is sort of like the right medicine to use.
And now here's what's really cool.
So if we're talking about treatment resistant depression or recurrent major depressive disorder, this is where we start to see some cool stuff.
So the first thing is that if we're talking about simple depression, ayahuasca seems to be not very effective.
And everyone in Silicon Valley is using psychedelics.
But if you have treatment resistant depression, now we're seeing larger effect sizes.
And we're seeing effect sizes as well for psilocybin.
So this is what's actually really cool about psychedelics.
And I think this is why people like myself who are psychiatrists get really excited.
So we have this entity called treatment-resistant depression.
And the whole point of treatment-resistant depression is that it is resistant to treatment.
And everyone is having transformative and healing experiences.
So if I try to treat treatment-resistant depression, it doesn't work.
So there's a class of patients that I've absolutely worked with who have depression that doesn't seem to be treatable by things like antidepressant medication.
The really cool thing is that some of these psychedelic medications or some of these psychedelics seem to help the people who have difficulty benefiting from other sorts of treatments.
That's why it's really exciting.
So we're going to take another look at another table.
So this is a table that's looking at comparisons of the effects of psychedelics under different evaluation systems.
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And then she starts to panic.
And she's like, you can't land on an aircraft carrier upside down.
The wheels are pointing up.
The plane is open on the top.
And if you turn the plane upside down, we're all going to fall out.
Like you can't land on an aircraft carrier upside down.
And so she starts to panic.
She's afraid that her kids are going to fall out of her plane.
So what she ends up doing is she like reaches behind her with her two hands.
She kind of straps herself in.
She's like barely like not falling out of the plane.
And she holds her kids' heads.
She like pushes up against her kids' heads to hold them in the plane.
And somehow the plane lands, right?
So dreams are not like logical.
Like you can apparently land planes upside down in dreams.
And so we were sort of like talking about this and I was like, okay, what is the significance of this?
So I went to my supervisor and I kind of asked her, I was like, hey, I've got a lady who wants to talk about her dreams.
Like, how do I deal with this?
And this is where she taught me kind of a methodology to work with dreams, which I think is like really, really effective and ties to what is really happening in your brain.
So I know that sounds weird, but like, hear me out.
So the first thing is that the symbols in the dream.
are relevant to your life.
So the key question that you need to ask yourself is what is this?
What is the significance of this thing to me?
So I don't really buy as much that these archetypal symbols that losing your teeth means death for everybody.
So when I was at HMS, I'm like, I studied to become a monk and was super into like mindfulness and things like that.
It may be a sign of mortality for some, but like,
The symbology in your dream is your brain's way of trying to communicate a concept to you.
So here's what happened with the patient.
So it turned out that her husband was in the process of had just found a buyer and was trying to like exit the company.
So he's like really, really stressed out.
Work is really hard.
And so like he's like stressed out.
And so she sort of realized that, OK, he's like flying this plane.
It's messing up our personal life.
And the kind of conclusion that we came to is like, if I can support him in the best way, if I can take care of shit, even if things get bumpy and if even if things get like really, really bad, my job is to make sure that our kids are taken care of.
It's going to be hard on me.
I'm going to let him deal with the plane and I'm going to deal with our family.
And the aircraft carrier was sort of a symbol of like this gigantic company that is acquiring them.
And if they land on the aircraft carrier, which they did, then there was a big celebration and everything kind of works out.
So I got kind of like two kinds of patients.
So she we had this interpretation of the dream and she like sort of went into her life thinking, OK, next six months are going to be bumpy.
Have faith.
My husband's got it under control.
Like he needs to handle his shit.
I'm going to handle my shit.
And if we sort of do this together, everything will work out.
And so that attitude allowed her to bring that energy into the relationship, just handle things for her kids, right?
So one sort of patient was like someone who was like in tune with their chakras, like doing tarot, like communicating with their guardian spirit.
Didn't stress him out more, was trying to be supportive.
She's like, don't worry about it.
You focus on you.
I'm going to focus on me.
If you didn't get me a president for my birthday, like I'm not going to be passive aggressive, whatever the fuck.
Key thing is everything worked out.
Ended up selling the company for a ton of money.
They did great.
Everything was fine.
Everything was fantastic.
So I'll give you all another example.
So I did a lot of addiction psychiatry.
And what I sort of found was that I had one patient who had this, once again, recurring dream where there's like a snake.
And what happens is like the snake eats them.
And then the snake has like an opening in its belly.
So like, it's really terrifying.
The snake kind of clamps down, swallows them whole.
They're scared.
They're scared.
They're scared.
And they sneak, they basically like slip out of a hole in the snake.
And they feel safe for a while.
But then they do something really dumb.
They walk up to the front of the snake again and the snake eats them again.
They're terrified, terrified, terrified.
They slip out of the belly.
And then like sometimes the snake tracks them down and eats them.
And sometimes they walk in front of the snake and it eats them.
But the couple of recurring pieces are that they always get eaten by the snake.
And then like they end up escaping eventually.
And so what we sort of discovered is like, okay, what does the snake mean?
The snake is a threat, right?
So the snake is something scary.
And they loved talking about like the deep symbolism of dreams.
I don't want to be eaten.
It feels really unpleasant.
And then the more that we tunnel down into it, like the eaten part feels really scary.
But once they're inside the snake, it feels warm.
It feels safe.
It feels kind of comfortable.
And then they start to wake up and they panic.
We sort of got more out of the dream as we started talking about it.
And then they end up slipping out.
And if y'all haven't pieced things together already, right?
And which, by the way, if you've already pieced things together, that's kind of weird, right?
Do y'all see that?
So if you've already pieced together what is going on in this person's life, like that's really interesting from like a logical standpoint.
I haven't told y'all what's going on.
But if you're able to piece it together, that means that dreams have a like logical interpretation even by your ass sitting at home listening to this on the internet, right?
A really good example of this is I had a patient and then one of my supervisors recommended this book called The Cat by Marie Louise von Franz, which is a tale of feminine redemption.
So this turns out to mirror this person's struggle with addiction.
The snake represents their addiction.
They always, even when they relapse, they end up coming and it feels really good.
It's really scary when they're relapsing, right?
So then I started asking questions like, what's it like when you relapse?
They're like, I'm terrified of the alcohol.
They're actually addicted to opiates, but I'm terrified of the opiates.
I'm terrified of the opiates, but like, I can't resist.
I have to walk back and it's scary.
I know I'm making a mistake when I relapse.
And then it feels amazing for a while.
And then I start to panic.
Everything starts going wrong again.
I'm running into problems.
And then I escape my addiction.
And sometimes when I escape my addiction, I run far, far away and I think I'm done with it.
And the snake shows up again.
And there are some times where I've escaped from my addiction and I circle back around and I choose it.
Key thing here is that this dream relates to this person's struggle.
gives them insight into their struggle.
And then I sort of ask them, okay, let's talk about this.
Tell me in your real life, what is walking around in front of the snake look like?
How do you know when you're making these mistakes?
And this is where all the subconscious information starts to come up.
And they say like, holy shit,
I know like the moment that I start texting my ex again, that's me walking in front of the straight.
Then my cravings come up.
They still use sometimes they were sober for a while, but I know that they're going to like relapse and we love relapsing together.
So Marie Louise von Franz is like one of Carl Jung's contemporaries.
So then we started to see like, okay, the brain actually has a lot of information about your patterns, which aren't well formed.
They're not like,
They haven't been processed yet, which is why it doesn't know how to serve you up this information.
But it is serving it up in a way that it kind of knows how.
So when you start to make these mistakes, like on a Monday when you text your ex, your brain serves you this dream.
And it's like, hey, bro, you're making a fucking mistake, but I don't know how to tell you that.
Why doesn't it know how to tell you that?
Because it's a defense mechanism.
If you tell yourself, and I don't know if this makes sense, I may be losing you or maybe y'all are going to get it here.
When you text your ex on a Monday because there's a subconscious part of you that craves opiates and relapse in that relationship again, if it tells you, don't do this, this is a mistake, what will you do?
So this is a book that like talks about like the cat symbolism and dreams and like has all these like tale of the cat and the journey to the Virgin Mary and cat and mythology and all this weird like archetypal sort of stuff.
Will you actually listen to it?
Absolutely not.
You know you are making mistakes every fucking day.
And when you know you make a mistake, when your brain tells you, hey, bro, hey, girl, this is a mistake, what do you do?
It's not a mistake.
I'll be able to handle it this time.
It'll be okay.
So you have all kinds of intuitions, all kinds of knowledge.
And if your brain tries to serve it up to you in a concrete way, you will reject it because you, like all other human beings, have psychological defense mechanisms.
Your brain experiences more emotion than you can process in a given day.
That is what I think the function of dreams is.
Dreams, like the reason that we have dreams is because we experience all these emotions that get suppressed by our logical mind, get suppressed by our defense mechanisms.
We're focused on data and then our brain is left with all this activation, right?
So just because you are suppressing an emotion doesn't mean that your limbic system and your amygdala are not active.
Blood is flowing there and then your brain is like trying to bury it.
So that needs to be processed in some way.
And this is why the more logical you are, the more useful dream interpretation is because your brain is pushing aside all of this stuff.
Now, how do you work with your dreams?
So the first thing that I would recommend is that you get a dream journal, okay?
So a dream journal can be like a notebook.
I like pen and paper, strongly recommend it.
I don't know why.
It seems like it accesses the dream better, but you can use like a notes app on your phone.
Leave it by your bed at night.
If you wake up in the middle of the night with a dream, write down as many details as you can.
When you wake up in the morning, just write down as many details as you can.
Some people that I've worked with who do a lot more dream work will sort of say that like it can be useful to literally talk to your brain before you go to bed.
So you can have some like weird, I know this is woo-woo, but like people who work with dreams say that this works pretty well, right?
And my supervisor sent me this stuff and I was like, look, this stuff seems like complete BS.
So you can tell your brain like, hey, bro, whatever you want to tell me tonight, like I'm open to it.
So like open yourself up to receiving the dream.
Just cognitively like tell yourself whatever dream comes, I'm going to be ready for it.
Grab your pen, grab your notebook.
you know, set it by the side of your bed, go to sleep.
So if you wake up in the middle of the night, jot down the dream.
When you wake up the next morning, jot down the dream.
This is important.
Write down as many details as you can.
So that's the first step to working with your dreams.
Now we get to like the more scientifically valid part and the less scientifically valid part.
So the next thing that you need to do is when you read your dream,
You should write down the emotions that you feel in those moments.
This is what is more likely to be like true.
So these people who love dream interpretation and tarot and all this kind of stuff, that's not actually who I found it really useful for.
OK, so we know that REM sleep involves emotional processing or we know that sleep involves emotional processing.
We know that your emotional centers of the brain are active in your dreams.
OK, so the reason we know this is because I don't know if this makes sense, but when you are in a dream, the terror that you feel is real.
Like the experience of fear in emotions in the dreams, the logic is not real.
The money you make isn't real.
Most aspects of the dream are not real.
The one aspect of the dream that is real is actually the emotion.
That's why I really believe that dreams are a way of emotional processing, emotional like information gathering, things like that.
So write down the emotion.
So if you've like written down several lines of a dream, what did you feel when you were first in the plane?
What did you feel when the plane turned upside down?
What did you feel?
How did you like, you know, what did you feel as it landed?
What did you feel afterward?
So write down your feelings for each step of the dream.
The third thing that we want to do is ask ourselves, OK, for these feelings, how do these feelings, how do I feel these in the real world?
And this is a key thing that a lot of people like, I think, get wrong, in my opinion.
I found it really useful for C-suite executives, developers that I was working with, esports professionals, and all kinds of pragmatic people.
They may be more knowledgeable than I am.
So I don't think dreams are about your past, okay?
Dreams, unless they're pathological, are really about your present and about your future.
So if we sort of think about it like, you know, the emotional, like the dream that I have today is,
isn't tied to what i was feeling when i was six years old unless there is something like a trauma which takes that emotional energy at six and still brings it into the present does that kind of make sense so you get traumatized the energy from a six-year-old all oak will still exist in the 42 year old all oak which is why it's a trauma which is why i still have persistent clinical symptoms
So the emotions that you experience in the dream are tied to your now and tied to the concerns that you have about the future.
So take a look at those list of emotions and then ask yourself, where am I feeling this in the real world?
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.
Do I feel trapped?
Do I feel terrified?
Do I feel like I can't afford to screw up?
Do I feel amazing?
You know, there's all kinds of things, but like try to tie the emotions to the real world because that's what the brain does.
It takes the real world, the suppressed emotions, and has them show up in a dream.
That I feel really confident about.
That in and of itself is sufficient insight to help a lot of people with decision making.
And I'm talking like big decisions.
Do I go through with this merger?
Do I sell this company?
Do I hire this person?
Do I marry this person?
And it's been amazing, like the number of like people who love Excel spreadsheets and make decks in investment banks.
logical, hyper data based people, people who are like, show me data, show me Excel, show me sources.
That's what they do, investment banks, PE.
The number of people who've decided to break up with their partner because we do a dream analysis and it really brings to the surface everything that they're feeling is astronomical.
Then we get to the third part, which I think is the most woo-woo part, but I still think is pretty valid, which is the symbolism of the dream.
So the objects that your brain creates in your dreams are tied to,
your relationship to those objects.
So a snake for one person may be a dangerous addiction.
And for another person could be like, maybe you're a Slytherin and you love snakes and it's a great pet.
So I don't really believe that, right?
So human beings have differential responses.
And if your brain, and that's kind of why we go back to that first point.
I don't know if you'll remember the second point that I made, not the first point.
was that your brain is like bounded by, I mean, your dream is bounded by your experience.
You don't have dreams and languages that you don't understand.
You don't have dreams with like objects that you've never seen before, right?
I want the scientific approach.
So your brain is like, okay, like how do I process fear?
How do I represent fear?
Okay, like let me use a snake because this person is afraid of a snake.
So there's something in your brain that is an association between an emotion and an object.
So as you look at the different objects in your dream, try to ask yourself, what do these objects mean to me?
These were the people who came to me wanting to learn yoga and meditation and evidence based like clinical psychiatry to optimize their performance so that they could make effective trades and make like a billion dollars over the course of three months instead of half a billion dollars.
Like when I think aircraft carrier, what do I think?
So what I think about aircraft carrier is scary, power, safety, badass, out in the middle of the ocean, all alone.
But, like, if you can land on the aircraft carrier, you're, like, you're safe.
It is the one spot, it is a bastion of power and safety and an endless expanse of fucking places that you cannot land.
So these are the kinds of associations that you need to form.
If you're not used to this stuff, it takes a little while, but you'll kind of get better at it, right?
And when I explain this stuff from an aircraft carrier, it should kind of make sense to you.
The key thing to remember is that a symbol may not have a concrete meaning.
It may have a meaning that is tied to you.
And once you do these steps, write down, invite the dream, write down the dream,
Write down the emotions of the dream.
Think about the emotions in your real life.
Write down the symbols.
What do the symbols mean to you?
And then try to extrapolate it to your real life.
And then put yourself in a tarot-loving, guardian spirit-connected human mind.
And then ask yourself, when I put all this together, what is the dream trying to tell me?
Because that's what your brain is trying to tell you.
Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.
And that may sound kind of weird because like how would dream interpretation help these people?
But this is one of the key important things we need to understand.
So our brain has a ton of information, okay?
And the more that we become hyper-logical, hyper-data driven, the more the emotional and intuitive parts of our brain literally get suppressed because they're not useful.
And the more that they get suppressed, the more that we lose access to really important information.
So that may sound weird because these people are hyper logical and hyper pragmatic, but it turns out that the more data driven you become, the more your brain suppresses certain sources of information like emotions and intuition.
And for these people that I was working with, what I sort of found is that if you're a programmer working at a job, like sure, there's a lot of like pragmatic code that you need to write, but that there's an emotional component, an intuitive component of like,
oh, even though your boss says that like, oh yeah, it's totally fine.
Like we'll give you an extension if you need it.
So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today.
There's an intuitive part of your brain that is kind of like warning you like, hey, this is not really like a great environment.
Like there's something is wrong here.
And what I sort of found is that connecting these people with their emotions and their intuition allowed them to achieve flow states more and make better decisions.
So the first thing that we've got to understand is that our brain has a ton of information that we do not have access to.
So the best example that I can kind of think of is the other day I got out of my car and I brought groceries in and then I was like, oh, where are my keys?
And I looked around for my keys.
I looked everywhere.
I couldn't find my keys.
And then my brain, like after 10 minutes of searching is like, oh, by the way, your hands were full with groceries.
So you set the keys down on top of the car.
And then I went back and I walked and I grabbed my keys and sure enough, there they were.
But this is kind of weird if you think about it, right?
My brain had access to this information all along, but like it chose some random time.
It's not like even though the brain had the information, I had access to it, which is why I spent 10 or 15 minutes looking.
So let's start with a couple of scientific facts about sleep and dreams.
The first thing that we have to understand is that evolution doesn't waste any space.
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We don't have anything in the body or the brain or the mind that doesn't serve some kind of function, okay?
And the first really weird thing is that dreams are highly conserved in animals and humans.
So basically mammals, all mammals dream, and we sort of know that they dream because there are certain signs of it, and we all dream.
So there must be some utility to dreams, otherwise we wouldn't dream.
Second thing that we know is that REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, which is the last phase of sleep,
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Tends to be the most restful for human beings.
So when human beings get their REM sleep interrupted or they don't get sufficient REM sleep, their mental health, their physical health, their stress levels, their cortisol levels, like the body and brain don't function well unless we get sufficient REM sleep.
We also know that REM sleep is when dreaming happens.
So there's clearly a correlation between dreaming and health and fitness of the human being.
So that's like the first thing, that dreams exist, they happen in animals, they happen in humans, and there's some reason.
Now the question becomes, why though?
What is the function of dreams?
What do they do?
And this is where we get to another really interesting scientific kind of observation, which is that dreams are not really random.
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Now back to the video.
So if you sort of think about it, dreams are always constrained to the experience of the human being.
You don't dream in languages you don't know.
You don't see things in dreams that you've never seen before.
Everything within your dream has to be
Anchored in some way to your experience in life.
Now, that doesn't mean that there's clearly a meaning to it.
It could all be random, right?
Because like it would just be like random images that don't mean anything.
But I do think it's an important scientific point to sort of notice that it is anchored in some way with like things that you've encountered in real life.
And then the third thing is like the significance of dreams.
And we actually have good evidence that what happens in your dream is tied to in a very tight way what happens to you in real life.
And the best evidence of this comes from nightmares and PTSD.
So when a human being has a traumatic emotional experience, a traumatic experience, let's say,
So let's dive right in.
One of the diagnostic criteria of PTSD, when you get traumatized and then like that affects you in a way that debilitates you and you have a clinical diagnosis that interferes with your life, one of the key clinical features of PTSD is actually nightmares.
So if you have a trauma and you have persistent nightmares, those two things are related.
And we also know they're related because as you treat PTSD and the symptoms of PTSD go down,
their nightmares actually start to go down as well.
And when the nightmares disappear, then the people are feeling well.
So we actually have a really concrete piece of evidence that what happens to you in life, especially emotionally, it manifests in some way in your dreams.
Now, just because there is an evolutionary reason why we dream, that doesn't necessarily mean that the symbols or archetypes that people describe in dreams are actually correct.
Today we're going to talk about how your brain tells you what it wants using things like dreams.
Like, I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but just because scientifically we know that all people dream and that if you have PTSD, you have nightmares.
You have a lot of like psychoanalysts, people like Freud, right, who said, okay, if your teeth are falling out in a dream, that means you are afraid of death.
If you have a dream of a phallic object, that means you're in the phallic phase and penis, penis, penis, anus, anus, anus, phallus, phallus, phallus.
So you have all of these like texts by psychoanalysts and therapists about archetypes and symbolism where they say like this is true.
I don't really buy that on a scientific level.
I think that it's fine to make that interpretation.
It's fine to have that as a hypothesis.
But there's a gap for me between the science of dreaming and all of these psychoanalytic interpretations.
But we sort of know that there is some connection, right?
So how do we understand what that connection is?
So it turns out that your brain has all sorts of information that you are not aware of.
And that's where we have to get to literally how the brain and how the mind work.
So the first thing that we have to understand about the brain is that it processes a lot more information than you are consciously aware of.
So like my favorite example of this is if you look at these like spy movies, right?
Where it's like someone is training to be a spy.
There's like the senior spy, like the mentor spy and the junior spy.
And they like go, they like walk down the street and they sit in a cafe.
And then the mentor spy is like,
Okay, which person had a yellow handbag?
And then the trainee spy is like training their mind to recall this little bit of information and who's sitting over there and which person was on their cell phone and what language was the person who was talking on the cell phone speaking.
Like there are all these like, there's like all this like training, right?
This like spy training.
But that's actually like kind of true.
Like our brain works like that.
We have, we process a ton of information every single moment, right?
And one of the major mechanisms it uses to talk to you, which I know sounds weird, is actually by using dreams.
And our brain basically like doesn't know what's useful and what isn't.
So it stores that information subconsciously.
And then oftentimes what I'll find when I work with my patients is like, OK, let's say someone's dating and they're in the honeymoon phase of the relationship.
And in the honeymoon phase of the relationship, they didn't realize that there were certain red flags.
They always had like, oh, they had a second cell phone and they said, oh, yeah, this is my work cell phone.
And they like would never let them see that cell phone.
We kind of ignore all these red flags, right?
Because of the honeymoon phase.
But stop and think about that from like a cognitive perspective.
What that means in order to ignore something, you have to know it.
So your brain is actually like processing a ton of useful information that for some reason you are not consciously aware of.
And then what happens after you inevitably break up is you go back and you re-examine the information and you're like, holy crap, all of the signs were right there.
There were so many red flags that I ignored.
And it turns out that it's not just that our brain is ignoring red flags, but that's what's really important for like C-suite executives.
So hi, I'm Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, and when I was in my psychiatry training at Harvard Medical School, I thought all this dream interpretation stuff was absolute BS.
when I work with them on this kind of stuff, they realize like, okay, the more in, the more I get in touch with my intuition.
So I worked with someone who was a serial startup founder and they would find CEOs and like what they would sort of notice is that all, you know, CEO may be like really qualified on paper, but their gut, which is basically what is your gut?
Your gut is a lot of
Information that your brain is actually receiving, which it doesn't know how to process, package and serve up to you in a meal like so.
So basically, like working with these people and getting in touch with our intuition, intuition is not like I mean, you can make an argument that it's from divine or whatever.
I've made that argument.
But really what intuition is scientifically is it's like a bunch of unprocessed information that hasn't been packaged appropriately yet.
So getting in touch with this unprocessed information allows you to make really good decisions and avoid making really bad ones, okay?
So first thing is brain has information that you are not aware of.
Second thing that we have to understand is why aren't you aware of it?
Why does the brain suppress important information?
And this is where we have another pillar of science, evidence-based psychology, which is defense mechanisms.
So we know that the brain suppresses all kinds of information because you can't handle it.
So I want you all to go back to this idea of, I met my partner.
I'm in the honeymoon phase.
I'm so in love.
I've been waiting for love for so long.
And my brain is like, you know what?
If I tell this person, oh my God, this person is so great.
If I tell the human body that I'm inhabiting, if I tell this dumbass all oak that...
This person, these are all red flags and you shouldn't be in love with this person that this is going to end badly.
Completely unscientific, and I still sort of believe that.
They just would not.
They would be so devastated.
They would be so crushed.
All Alok wants is to be in love with someone who looks like this and also plays Dota 2 and like they would just be absolutely devastated.
So if we look at defense mechanisms, these are things like narcissistic defense mechanism where I'm suppressing information about literally the mistakes I am making all the time that screw up my relationships and make my work relationships more difficult.
I'm suppressing that because I can't handle it.
So we have narcissistic defense mechanisms, we have things like intellectualization, but we know that there are actually very real ways where we take emotions and information and suppress them in our brain, okay?
But it turns out that if we take a truly scientific perspective, which I hope to walk y'all through today, we will see how useful dreams can be.
And the problem is when we suppress this information, it still comes out in other ways.
So a really good example is like people who are passive aggressive, right?
So people who are passive aggressive are that way because oftentimes they suppress their aggressive tendencies.
So instead of actually like...
fixing like addressing the problem and fixing it hey i'm pissed at you because you forgot my birthday instead of like allowing myself to be pissed and i let i bury that aggression and then i'm fucking passive aggressive with you and it creates toxicity in our relationship because when when you ask me oh look what's wrong are you upset with me i'm like no everything is fine i'm
whatever, right?
So like, it's so fucking toxic.
Even when we suppress emotions and we have a bunch of access to like good information, our brain still like knows this and it tries to deal with these emotions and even serve you up important information through dreams, okay?
So this is where I think the next step that we got to do is I got to just tell you about a couple of cases of patients that I've had, the dreams that I, that they had and how we sort of like learn things from them.
Then we'll explain how it works.
So I had a patient who was married to the CEO and founder of a very large company.
And so she had this dream.
So she's like, you know, I have like this recurring dream and I'm like, okay, like, tell me about it.
And the weirdest part about this is that the people who think
Like, whatever lady, tell me about it.
So she says that in the dream, my husband is flying an airplane and I'm sitting next to him in an airplane and our kids are in the backseat of the airplane.
It's a propeller plane with an open top.
So they're flying over the ocean.
They're in this airplane.
And then there's an aircraft carrier.
And so my husband has to, like, land the plane on the aircraft carrier, which is fine.
So it turns out that her husband is actually a pilot, right?
So he, like, in his free time, he, like, likes to fly planes.
dream interpretation is BS are actually the people that benefit the most from dream interpretation.
And sometimes they go on family planes.
And so he's going to land on the aircraft carrier.
And then as he's descending to land on the aircraft carrier, he turns the plane upside down.
Now I have a positive association with putting myself out there.
So a week later, I go out and I do it again.
And the same sequence will happen.
My distress will actually rise again.
But I have to learn how to tolerate that distress.
Now the door opens for pleasure.
Now I will engage with the people around me.
Now I will experience some kind of pleasure.
And then this gets reinforced.
So when people say this, you should put yourself out there, they have subconsciously figured out this strategy.
And the main reason that it's easy for some people to figure out and some people it's hard to figure out is the difference between their baseline distress tolerance.
So I relate to this so much.
So if you were wired in a way where
the signals are really, really high, then it's really hard to get used to it.
I feel like I'm improvement-gooning since years without progress.
Whereas if you are wired, if you're more extroverted, if you're more open to, if you have a higher degree of openness, depending on your temperament, you can put yourself out there more easily.
And this is why people will tell you to put yourself out there and they make it sound so simple because it is simple for them.
Because their experience of it is way easier than yours.
That's why they can tell you, and it happens automatically.
They don't even understand these phases.
It happens automatically for them.
So they just tell you, hey, just like do what I did, right?
It's like, just do a cartwheel, bro.
So I can understand people's frustration.
with putting yourself out there as advice because it doesn't work for some of us and at the same time it is still what you have to do but we can explain to you what the steps are and then you can put yourself out there now there's one really important caveat to this which is in the phase of distress tolerance one of the key things that you don't want to do is engage with your anxiety
I've been watching self-improvement content like Reels, YouTube videos, advice subs for the last three to four years, but I feel like I haven't made any real progress.
so when you have anxious thoughts there are two things that can happen you can tolerate the thoughts or you can engage with them and here's what engaging looks like if you all have experienced anxiety you know it oftentimes doesn't it's not just one thought one thought oh my god like i'm gonna fail this test and then what happens is there's another thought if i fail the test
I'm going to fail the class.
If I fail the class, I'm going to drop out of college.
I'm going to fail out of college.
If I fail out of college, I won't be able to find a job.
If I can't find a job, I won't be able to find a partner.
If I can't find a partner, I'll be alone for the rest of my life.
So you see there's this cascading chain of thoughts.
So here's the problem with anxiety is with this cascading chain of thoughts, our anxiety actually intensifies with each step.
And as the anxiety intensifies, more thoughts will come.
So distress tolerance when you are engaging in anxiety means literally shifting your attention away to something else.
Every time I see a motivational video, I feel inspired, but I never take action.
So my favorite example of this or my favorite, like my kind of go-to is breathing, right?
So what we want to do is focus our attention on breathing.
Take 60 seconds to breathe three times.
So we're going to count to 10 as we breathe in and count to 10 as we breathe out.
My save later list is just piled up with years of videos, Reels, which I probably won't be able to watch.
What do y'all notice about my affect, my emotion?
What has happened to you?
Now, here's the reason why it's important to do 10 seconds in and 10 seconds out.
If I tell you to breathe in and breathe out, just deep breathe.
This is what the advice that people give.
Just take three deep breaths.
Because three deep breaths in an anxious state will still be shallow.
You'll go... You'll do three deep breaths.
But those deep breaths are not... You kind of run through them so quickly that there's enough momentum in the mind for the anxiety to continue.
I'm 27 now and I got into self-improvement after being rejected by a girl I liked.
The goal of 10 second breaths in and out is that it demands your attention.
You must focus on it to succeed.
It doesn't happen automatically.
So what we want to do is give ourselves a task that requires and demands cognitive attention.
The reason that we want to use breathing as opposed to other things is that when we have very slow exhalations and we have slow breaths in and slow breaths out, what will actually happen is our respiratory rate is normally 12 to 14.
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Once we decrease our respiratory rate to three, it will change our oxygenation level.
It'll change our carbon dioxide level.
And as these things change, it will activate our nervous system in a different way.
Since then, I've been single and trying to improve myself, but I feel like I'm collecting information instead of actually applying it.
So you're sort of triggering vagus nerve activation, which is going to slow you down.
So then that sort of works on the physiological level.
So there is a cognitive level where if I am concentrating, I can't be anxious anymore.
And we also want to use a technique, ideally, that will trigger our physiology.
But if you don't like breathing or breathing makes you anxious, you can just concentrate on something for 60 seconds.
Now, if you're anxious, you're going to think, oh my God, this is going to make me look so weird.
You can go to the bathroom to do it, you can step outside to do it, or you can just breathe quietly to yourself for 60 seconds.
I can almost guarantee you that if you're in a social interaction, you breathe for 60 seconds, unless you're like, you know, people can usually talk about themselves for 60 seconds without a problem, right?
So like, if you feel weird about it, do it anyway, and then build that distress tolerance.
Okay, so that's number one.
Breaking the loop of I'm addicted to self-help content, but I never do anything involves understanding what the origin, what the driving motivation for the self-help content is, and recognizing that social media fixes that problem without any kind of improvement.
Improvement has nothing to do with this.
For example, I'll watch a video reel saying, don't worry about what others think, stop comparing yourself to others.
Now, let's move on to part two.
Now, let's actually talk about the improver.
Currently learning a new language, reading 50 books.
Quit drinking, will quit smoking, doesn't care about everything, just anything wants to just improve themselves.
I'm proving does nothing all day, only improves.
Why are people so addicted to the 24-year-old improver?
So I think self-improvement is good.
I strive for self-improvement.
I think it's good to improve.
I'm working on a couple of things.
But one of the most dangerous things that can happen is when improvement becomes the goal.
So this is where if we think about the nature of improvement, improvement is a means to an end.
So why do I want to improve my communication?
It makes sense in theory, but the moment I go out and try to interact, those same thoughts of self-judgment and comparison start kicking in.
Because I want to get better in my relationship.
Why do I want to learn a new language?
Because I want to be able to travel to that country or whatever.
So like this is where we have to understand something.
Generally speaking, the reason that human beings, the way that your brain is wired to improve is to accomplish a certain goal, right?
I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but like if I have trouble running a mile,
my body will sense that physiological stress, will increase my cardiovascular capacity, my muscles will start to grow and strengthen.
So we have this very simple, anytime you go to the gym, if you lift heavy weights, why do your muscles grow?
Because your brain and your physiology recognize that if I'm trying to do a task and I'm not good at it, I need to get better at that task.
So our brain and our body are trying to adapt to ideally succeed in various situations.
That's why improvement exists, okay?
What happens with some people is that improvement becomes associated with some kind of psychological
Has anyone else been in this loop?
deficiency so here's what i mean by that so let's i'll give you an example so when i work with patients with body dysmorphia this is what tends to happen they have an abstract idea of beauty right what does it mean to be beautiful there's an abstract idea that is not clearly definable then what happens is this idea of beauty becomes associated with certain measurable things like thinness
How do you actually break out of this?
Be honest, I don't need another just put yourself out there response.
So men with body dysmorphia who are bodybuilders, they want these huge muscles, right?
And now I don't know what beauty is.
I don't know what ugliness really is.
And I am associating that with certain parameters like thinness or musculature.
Let's just use thinness and talk about anorexia and body dysmorphia, okay?
So then what happens is I think to myself, I am ugly and pretty is thin.
Therefore, let me increase the thinness.
But once again, the problem is that within you,
you have a psychological injury that is not corrected by being thinner.
So there's something that you, I feel ugly.
But this doesn't get healed.
So then what happens is we wind up in a situation where people are getting thinner and thinner and thinner, but they never feel beautiful.
Currently learning a new foreign language.
The origin of feeling ugly is separate from thinness, but our brain connects these two things and relentlessly pursues one.
This is what happens with 24 year old improvers.
You live in a world where you are told
The world is competitive.
You need to be an entrepreneur.
You need to be six feet tall.
You need to make six figures.
The world tells you that you are inadequate in a thousand different ways.
And so especially if you're a man,
Men are something called external problem solvers, which means that if we feel something bad on the inside, we correct that by fixing something on the outside.
If my wife is mad at me, I'm going to get her flowers, I'm going to get her a piece of jewelry, therefore she will not be mad at me.
Trying to run 4 kilometers in 20 minutes.
I'm not going to bother learning how to deal with her anger, how to manage her anger, how to manage my own sense of guilt when my partner is angry with me.
So I'm going to correct the circumstance outside that makes me feel a certain way.
I'm not going to manage my own feelings.
I'm not going to be stoic about it.
I'm going to shape my environment so that the environment sends me no more bad signals.
This is how men get manipulated all the time because the moment that someone figures out
Oh, if I get angry at him, he will buy me jewelry.
You're just reinforcing them getting angry with you.
So then they will create emotions for you over and over and over again.
They will push your buttons so that you become a machine and you offer certain behaviors.
Now, in the case of the 24 year old improver, you are given a ton of anxiety and uncertainty about the world.
You won't be able to date.
You won't be able to make money.
You won't be able to live this beautiful fitness influencer life.
And this is what you want.
And instead, what you need to do is improve.
Doesn't care about anything.
Just wants to improve himself.
So there is a certain anxiety.
There is a fear of uncertainty.
And you think to yourself, OK, if I get better, if I get better, if I get better, if I get better, if I keep on getting better, then my chances of more money, more sex and more everything improve.
So you just start relentlessly chasing that.
And the reason that it's never satisfying is because there isn't a particular goal.
If your goal is to be better so that the future is less risky, when does that end?
When do you feel accomplished?
When do you feel content?
And then what happens is the 24-year-old improver says, ah, I know what I need to do.
I need to increase my competency at being peaceful.
The number of improvement chads that have crossed my...
you know, professional space because they're like, hey, Dr. K, can you teach me how to be at peace with myself?
I'm always unhappy with myself.
So there are two things here.
Let me level up the skill of contentment, which is always a fun journey.
So the key thing, if you're someone who's kind of addicted to self-improvement, is you got to really like spend some time thinking about where is the driving force for this coming from?
The first is there's the person who's actually like addicted to self-improvement and improving all the time.
Second thing that you can do is learning how to feel content and just sitting with yourself.
So this is a little bit harder, but like it's harder to explain.
It's not so hard to do, but...
Really stop and reflect about like just really look at yourself.
Like where is this desire for improvement coming from?
When I improve, how do I feel about myself?
And even if you feel better every time you go to the gym, this is also now we get to like one advanced point.
So you may notice, OK, there is an emptiness within me or there's something that is unhappy within me.
And every time I go to the gym, every time I learn a language, I feel better.
So then you keep doing it, right?
Because you have an emotion of something missing, you improve yourself, and then it feels better.
So this cycle repeats over and over and over again.
And then the question that you need to ask yourself, the second level question you need to ask yourself is, why does... So what you'll notice is that the feeling of relief from improvement is temporary.
And then there's the person who wants to improve, watches a bunch of improvement content and doesn't actually improve.
I need to go to the gym again.
And I need to go to the gym.
Now I need to learn a language.
Now I need to read 50 books.
Now I need to do all this stuff.
So if the feeling is temporary, hold on a second.
How do I ever make this feeling go away forever?
Or am I going to be on this endless treadmill of improvement?
So this is also a scenario where people sort of discover that improving makes them feel better on the inside, but only for a time, which is why they become addicted to the improvement itself.
I'm not saying you shouldn't improve, but you shouldn't mindlessly improve.
You should improve with intention.
And then the other thing that you can learn how to do, and this is beautiful, so now we'll go to step three, is spend a day doing nothing.
intentionally doing nothing.
And watch as the feelings of inadequacy start to arise.
And as the feelings of inadequacy start to arise, practice distress tolerance.
And so if we want to understand these two things, like this is what's, you know, the person says, look, I don't want just another put yourself out there advice, which is great.
Just watch them breathe in and breathe out until the anxiety goes away.
And then you will start the path of being free from self-improvement.
Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.
So I think this is a really classic example of not understanding the different pieces of the puzzle.
So what we're going to do, I'm going to go ahead and go back to this for a second.
let's understand a couple of things.
What we're gonna do is go through this line by line, or not line by line, but paragraph by paragraph, and understand a couple of different mechanisms that are going on why people get addicted to self-improvement, okay?
So the first is, I'm 27 now, and I got into self-improvement after getting rejected by a girl that I liked.
Since then, I have been single and trying to improve myself, but I feel like I'm collecting information instead of actually applying it.
So now we have to understand a little bit about neuroscience and psychology.
so what is the motivation behind self-improvement if the motivation behind self-improvement is emotion right so we have a temporary emotion of feeling rejected if you feel rejected and you think to yourself okay now that i am rejected i'm gonna go improve what that means is that the driver for your improvement is an emotion which means that your brain is going to try to
Fix your emotional state, right?
That's what the driver is.
The goal is to not feel hurt.
It's a really simple example, right?
So if I feel hungry, I'm not going to go drink water.
If I feel hungry, I'm going to eat something.
If you are trying to improve because you feel hurt in some way, that is going to be a very, very dangerous way to improve.
If I feel thirsty, I'm going to drink something.
If I feel dejected, what I'm going to try to do is feel accepted.
So our brain understands that when we have a signal of like, I'm deficient in some way, we correct it by fixing that signal.
Changing your life isn't easy.
When I was flunking out of college, I had to travel all the way to an ashram in India to begin a seven-year journey to put my life back together.
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That's why I've taken most of what I've learned, distilled it into the most important points, not just from India but also my years of training as a psychiatrist, into our coaching program.
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If our driver for self-improvement is to change our internal emotional state, what is the brain going to do?
It's not actually going to improve.
It's going to try to change our internal emotional state.
So the moment that you feel inspired by watching some kind of self-improvement video, then you have fixed the problem, right?
The whole goal is to change my emotional state, right?
That's what the driving force is.
And so now we also see why this sort of essentially creates a loop.
Because that once the inspiration goes away, so you save it for later, right?
But once the inspiration goes away, the next day I wake up, I still feel dejected.
Now my brain asks itself, okay, when we're feeling dejected, what helps us feel better?
Okay, so this is the key thing that has changed in the technological age.
Because watching self-help content inspires you.
And your brain is like, we feel bad, let's feel good.
I'm hungry, let me eat something.
And then it learns, oh, you know what works really well?
Watching inspirational, motivational content.
So then it goes and watches inspirational, motivational content again.
And as you repeat that cycle over and over and over again, this behavior gets reinforced.
Let me go to the well and get water.
Let me go to the well and get water.
Let me go to the well and get water.
So this is why if you are trying to improve because you feel hurt in some way, that is going to be a very, very dangerous way to improve.
But that's where we have to reinterpret the past.
OK, so this is the key thing that has changed in the technological age.
In the past, when I got rejected by someone and I said to myself, OK, I don't want to feel rejected anymore.
Okay, so why do I see this as I am a loser and I need to fundamentally fix myself as opposed to this was just one rejection.
The problem is that 100 years ago, there were no shortcut dopaminergic tickets to feeling inspired.
I couldn't just like sit back and watch something on the Internet and feel inspired, feel better about myself.
Inspiration was not at our fingertips.
And that's not even inspiration.
If we wanted to correct our emotional state, we had to go and accomplish something.
So I actually had to go to the gym to fix my emotional state.
So now the world that we live in is one where since we have such an easy emotional inspiration at our fingertips, which corrects our original emotional driver for improvement, fixes it, right?
So if I'm improving because I feel dejected and I no longer feel dejected, I don't want to improve.
And what has your brain learned is the primary way to deal with dejection, watch an inspirational video on the internet.
So this is in this person is spot on because now what's going on is there's this.
I want you all to understand this really, really well.
OK, so this person is saying, OK, I'm frustrated.
Don't just tell me to put myself out there.
We're not going to just tell you to put yourself out there.
The first thing that you need to understand is this cycle is completely independent and has nothing to do with the process of improvement.
We could substitute with this with, I feel unloved in the morning and I need my partner to tell me I love you, right?
So if we have an emotional, if something is missing in us emotionally, we need some kind of emotional reinforcement.
So then what happens, this person even says, look, this person says,
I'm 27 now and I got, for example, I'll watch a video, stop comparing yourself to others.
If your goal is to be better so that the future is less risky, when does that end?
And it makes sense in theory.
But the moment that I go out and try to interact, those same thoughts of self-judgment in comparison to start kicking in, right?
So this is like, this is literally what happens.
Because the moment that you go and try to interact with someone, the feelings of dejection arise again.
Because watching inspirational videos on the internet does not process feelings of being a loser.
It just makes them go away temporarily.
Then you go out into the world and these feelings will come up again.
So I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but if you go out and interact in the world and there's a feeling that always comes up, I feel anxious, I feel concerned, I feel worried, I feel uncomfortable.
I'm Dr. Alok Kanodja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.
If this feeling is always coming up, it lives within you and must be dealt with directly.
As long as that feeling is there, it's going to keep popping up and no amount of watching inspirational videos is going to change that.
So this is not even about self-improvement.
This is about managing your emotions internally.
So there are two or three different methods that you can do to fix this.
The first is that you can go back to the original insult.
So these are like sort of techniques of like trauma processing.
We go into a bunch of detail in this in Dr. K's guide if y'all want more like info.
When do you feel accomplished?
There's like 10 hours of this stuff in there.
But here's the basic idea, okay?
So in that moment where you get rejected by someone, there is one experience that your brain forms conclusions based off of.
So if I get rejected, that is just a rejection.
But if you're not careful, your brain will learn from that rejection.
It will say, oh, it tries to understand this rejection.
It concludes that I am a loser.
Now, even though that event is one time, the feeling of loser lives within you and it'll keep popping up when you start to go out and you do things.
So one of the techniques that you can do is go back in time and try to ask yourself, how did I form this conclusion from this single event?
And your mind will give you lots of logical reasons, which is why this is hard to do on your own.
But that's where we have to reinterpret the past.
OK, so why do I see this as I am a loser and I need to fundamentally fix myself as opposed to this was just one rejection?
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.
Maybe they were having a bad day.
Maybe they're in a relationship.
Maybe they're not attracted to my gender, like whatever.
There are all kinds of reasons that this person could say this.
But why do we make a conclusion about it?
So we have to go back and reinterpret the conclusion.
The second thing that we do, and this person says, just put yourself out there.
So this is going to be how you just put yourself out there.
Because a lot of people will say, just put yourself out there.
And we hate, we hate, hate, hate just being told to put ourselves out there.
But no one ever tells us how to put yourself out there.
What is the purpose of putting yourself out there?
It'll just get better if you put yourself out there.
Here is literally what you want to do if you have trouble putting yourself out there.
When you expose yourself to a particular situation, there is an environment that will evoke feelings within you.
Those feelings will feel uncomfortable,
You'll have comparisons in your mind.
You'll have self-judgment in your mind.
So this is where we need to learn a skill called distress tolerance.
If you improve your distress tolerance, you will be able to put yourself out there.
People who can put themselves out there, there's a big difference, right?
Their capacity for distress tolerance is way higher.
Putting yourself out there is not about putting yourself out there.
It is about staying out there.
So once I expose myself to this environment, which evokes these negative emotions in me, if I'm not careful, what I will then do, what I will then do is retreat, right?
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.
So if I feel anxious, my brain is sending me signals and says, run away, like Monty Python, run away.
And if we retreat, then we're doing something incredibly dangerous.
We are training our brain that when I feel anxious, the right response is running away.
Now, that may be the correct response when we're living in the jungle and we're being hunted by a tiger.
But in today's world, that becomes maladaptive.
So our brain is not designed for the modern world we live in.
It's designed for a world that existed like 600,000 years ago.
So putting yourself out there is, and this is what people get like really confused about.
They think like, okay, if I just mindlessly put myself out there enough, then I will get better.
What you need to do is put yourself in situations that make you uncomfortable.
Second thing is learn to tolerate that discomfort.
Don't force yourself to engage.
And what will literally happen is our subjective sense of distress will gradually decrease.
Sometimes it intensifies first and then it goes down.
Right, so a great example of this is like if I jump into some cold water, it'll feel really cold for the first few seconds and then my body acclimatizes, my brain literally acclimatizes.
So even if you are feeling anxious in a social situation,
As long as you don't keep feeding your thoughts, and we'll get to that in a second, you will acclimatize and then the anxiety will go away.
So check out the link in the description below and back to the video.
So now what you've managed to do is tolerate a difficult situation.
Now you are in a social situation.
You've done the first half of putting yourself out there.
Then what you need to do is engage.
This is what putting yourself out there is.
It is tolerating your distress without avoidance, step number one.
And this is the cool thing is that you don't need to like, you don't need to solve anything.
All you need to do is tank the damage and your brain will acclimatize on its own.
Then what we wanna do is the second phase of putting yourself out there.
Now you wanna engage, right?
So now that you're in a social situation, you have less discomfort.
Try talking to people, try engaging with people.
You know, like, what do you think about today's lecture?
Like, whatever is going on.
Have you played this board game before?
Ask some inane question about the circumstance that y'all share.
It's a way of opening a conversation.
Then we engage in the behavior.
And as we engage in the behavior without anxiety, this is really important.
See, once we're anxious, our dopaminergic circuitry gets disabled.
OK, so if I'm like being hunted by a tiger, I can't like play D&D at the same time.
So our amygdala goes and suppresses our dopaminergic circuitry.
So we have to disable our amygdala and then something cool will happen.
Once we are in a situation that we're no longer distressed in, then our capacity for enjoyment increases.
So as our capacity for enjoyment increases, I enjoy being at this lecture or whatever.
Now I get a little bit of dopamine.
Then I will also induce some craving and behavioral reinforcement.
So then once I go home at the end of the day, there's a part of my brain will start to want to do that again.