Dhru Purohit Show - The Self-Control Shift That Changes Everything + A 5 Minute Meditation You Can Start Today

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Branch Basics, Momentous, and Cowboy Colostrum. When it comes to self-control, most people think willpower is the key to success. Today’s guest offers powerful insights into brain health and psychology—and shows us that real success comes not from fighting harder, but from building awareness. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, we’re revisiting one of our most talked-about moments with Dr. Alok Kanojia. Dr. K dives deep into self-control, where it originates in the brain, and how it’s connected to internal conflict. He breaks down the concept of urge surfing and explains why true success comes from being aware of our discomfort rather than resisting it. Dr. K also shares his personal journey with addiction, what inspired him to study self-control, how he learned to tolerate discomfort, and what he believes real happiness looks like. Dr. Alok Kanojia, known online as “Dr. K,” is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist specializing in the intersection of technology and mental health. As the co-founder of Healthy Gamer, a mental health platform designed for the digital generation, Dr. Kanojia has inspired millions with his content while overseeing the mental health coaching of thousands of young people. Widely regarded as the leading expert on video game addiction, he is also recognized as one of the most prominent mental health authorities for the younger generation. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. K dive into: The mindset shift that unlocks real self-control (2:09) Urge surfing: the surprising trick that stops mindless snacking (5:00) The split-second gap between impulse and action (10:01) How to build self-control by getting comfortable being uncomfortable (14:59) What drew Dr. K into the science of addiction and self-mastery (18:39) The meditation habit that changed everything for Dr. K (24:28) The big takeaways that can transform your daily choices (30:16) Also mentioned: Full episode with Dr. Alok Kanojia This episode is brought to you by Branch Basics, Momentous, and Cowboy Colostrum. Right now, Branch Basics is offering 15% off the Premium Starter Kit; just go to branchbasics.com and use the coupon code DHRU. Make 2025 your cleanest, healthiest year yet with Branch Basics! Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the purest form of creatine, made by and used by the best, now available in convenient and tasty lemon lime chews. Head to livemomentous.com and use code DHRU for 35% off your first subscription. Right now, Cowboy Colostrum is offering my listeners 25%. Just go to CowboyColostrum.com/DHRU and use code DHRU to save 25% today.  Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone, Drew Prode here. You know when it comes to making changes in your life, whether it's health-related or working towards any kind of shift in your lifestyle, we tend to mistakenly think that willpower will be the key to our success, which is why I'm really excited to share today's featured moment with you about one of the most misunderstood topics in human behavior, self-control. Now, most of us think that self-control is all about fighting harder, using more restraint, or just sheer brute force to make better choices. But what if real self-control has nothing to do with fighting?

and everything to do with awareness. Today, I'm talking about this exact idea in a segment from my incredible conversation with Dr. Alok Canozia, also known as Dr. Kay. Dr. Kay is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist specializing in the intersection of technology and mental health. He's the founder of Healthy Gamer,

a mental health platform designed for the digital generation. Dr. Kay has inspired millions with his content while overseeing the mental health coaching of thousands of young people. You know, he's widely regarded as a leading expert on video game addiction. Probably not something that my audience is dealing with, but just good to know. He's also recognized as one of the most prominent mental health authorities for the younger generation,

and now also, too, for people of all generations. Dr. Kay explains a neuroscience behind self-control and how the same part of your brain that helps you resist temptation also monitors your internal conflict. In today's segment, you'll hear why we lose self-control the moment we stop paying attention to our inner conflict. And how stretching the time between impulse and action rewires the, the brain. While you don't need to conquer your cravings, you just need to watch them. It's a powerful idea. And Dr. Kate will also share a powerful five-minute meditation practice on the segment that you can use to build awareness and emotional resilience. This is one of those conversations that changes

the way that you look at your mind. It's so simple and yet so many of us are not doing it. I promise you just listen to it and you'll walk away understanding a little bit more about awareness and how the power of awareness, not willpower, is the superpower that we're all looking to grow inside of ourselves. Let's dive in. You put out this video on self-control. I know this conversation is so much bigger than self-control, but one of the things I really liked about that video is you talked about this framework of ways to improve self-control by basically not suppressing ourselves, not suppressing stress, not suppressing emotional regulation, and then most importantly, not losing this idea of the internal conflict that relates to, you know, us wanting to do something good

and us being pulled towards our sort of bad habits. Can you talk about that framework in the context of this conversation? So self-control is fascinating because I don't think most of us really understand what it is. So if we look at where self-control comes from in the brain, it comes from probably this part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex and other parts of the frontal lobe. But what's really interesting is that part of the brain is also the same part of the brain that monitors internal conflict. So I want y'all to think about a moment where you are trying to exert self-control. When you try to exert self-control, you are conflicted. You can never be trying to exert self-control unless you are conflicted.

Does that make sense? Yep. Right? So, and then there's a couple of other subtle things, right? And this is what's fun about, like, doing addiction psychiatry work, because we really tunnel down into, like, what's subjectively happening. And I would ask my patients, you know, how do you know whether you're going to, like, win or lose your battle with, like, an addiction?

And oftentimes what happens is they stop thinking about it. So what happens is you kind of know, like, okay, like, I'm going to give in. I don't know if this makes sense, but you kind of know that you're going to give in before you give in. And what's, what starts to happen is. is that you stop monitoring the conflict. You stop paying attention to the conflict. Because the conflict goes on and on and on

until it's over and you think one side wins. But it's not that one side is winning. It's that you stop paying attention to it. And if you look at most of our behaviors where we struggle with self-control, it's when we're behaving on autopilot, right? I ate one potato chip. And then the next 99, I struggle with the first one,

but the next 99 are on autopilot. So self-control and, awareness. We think that these are two different things. I have to be aware of the conflict and then I have to control it. But it turns out that these are actually the same. And as long as you are aware of your internal conflict, you will, that's actually the same thing as self-control. And what kind of happens is we like lose sight of it. I don't know if that kind of makes sense. It slips away from our mind. And then we're like, ah, scre- like whatever. Right. That's what we do in our head. We stop thinking about it. We stop focusing on it. And there's a really interesting technique.

called urge surfing, which we use in addictions, where if you think about like an impulse to use, that's not going to last forever, right? So the nature of the human body is that, you know, when I get hungry, if I don't eat, the hunger goes away, and then it'll return and it'll go away, and then it'll return, it'll go away. What happens is any time I have a desire to do something, that desire won't last forever. So really, the war, this is where a lot of people get messed up because they think I have to conquer this. You don't have to conquer it. All you have to do is watch it and wait it out. You don't actually have to win. You just need to focus on inaction. All you need to do is sit still for long enough and then it'll go away on its own.

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Yeah, I mean, I think feeling this comfort is huge. So if you think about people who spend 30% of their calories snacking, they are not aware of what they're doing, right? So you, like, board the train, and then the train takes you to wherever you end up. That's their experience. So you may be aware at the very beginning, but they're not usually aware of the whole journey. So what I would strongly recommend is that, first of all, you don't make it easy for yourself to snack automatically. So in tech platforms are really good at this.

We have things like biometrics so that we can auto log in. It saves our login. They make it super easy for us to engage in technology, right? So if you have an impulse to like watch a TikTok, TikTok, is designed to help you satisfy that impulse within a second. Because if they can get you started, they can hook you for 15 minutes. So all of the tech platforms are trying to reduce the time between you having an impulse and you engaging in the technology.

And what we've learned, and this is actually really fascinating, so even if you look at the research on suicidality, so most people, everyone thinks that people who kill themselves are like planning for months in advance. the research shows that 60 to 70% of people who decide to make a suicide attempt do so within five minutes of the attempt. 40% within 60 seconds. So people have this impulse to kill themselves and then they act on it. So what we really need to do if we want to control our behaviors is stretch out the time

between impulse and action. So don't carry chips around. Make them far away from you. make it so that you have to get in the car and drive to the corner store and then like pick up a, so then you have 15 minutes to like overcome that impulse.

That's the first thing. And usually within that process, what happens is we have space for awareness. Because when you're driving there, and I've done this, we're like, I'll drive to like a fast food place, but on the drive there, I'll turn around and go home.

I'll be like, I don't want to do this. Right? So you need space for like the part of you that wants to be healthy to like get a say. it's like, you know, saying like, oh, hey, we're going to have an election. The election is in 30 seconds and whoever's here right now gets to vote. That's not how it works. So you need to give yourself time.

That's number one. Second thing, and there was actually, it's funny you talk about snacking because I had a teacher, a guru, who was addicted to potato chips and they were a monk. And so their teacher, they were like, I'm addicted to potato chips. And so they would like try to control their addiction and they were living in a monastery and stuff. And it like worked for a while, but they'd always relapse. They'd always relapse. So they went to one of their teachers and they're like, how do I overcome this?

I'm trying to become a monk. I'm trying to become desireless and conquer all my whatever's. And so their teacher said, so don't resist the addiction anymore. Instead, what you should do is be aware of it. So actually carry potato chips with you wherever you go. Keep a bag in your room. Keep a bag in your backpack. Everywhere you go, you should have access to potato chips.

But when you eat the potato chips, you need to be fully aware before you eat them, when you eat them. and after you eat them. So what is this desire for potato chips? Where does it come from? Where does the desire exist within you? Pay attention, really look at it. As you eat the first chip, what happens to the desire?

How many chips does it take to end the desire? And after how long does the desire return? How long do you feel satisfied? What is the satisfaction of the first chip, the 30th chip, the 50th chip? And as this person engaged in this practice, now this person had some meditative training, which I think is kind of necessary

before you do this, but it works really well. I've used this with my own addictive tendencies. You'll start to realize that, you know, your addictive behaviors don't actually satisfy anything. All they do is create more problems. And once that realization sets in that, and no matter how many potato chips I eat,

I will always want more chips. This is an exercise in futility. I only buy myself temporary enjoyment. And then I want more later. It's like it's never ending. Once that understanding really settles into your brain, once your frontal lobes understand what the real advantage and disadvantage are, then the addictive behavior will start to melt away more and more and more. You know, two different approaches. One, in your instance, you're talking about creating friction and having space between you and the snack, right? You got don't keep it in your house. You often hear people who run this podcast talk about that.

And another one, which is like, hey, what does it look like to fully live in it and be fully aware the whole way through? I'm guessing for the majority of people, but I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Probably the first framework is probably going to be the framework that's going to be more useful for a lot of individual who are listening today because they don't have that meditative training. And is that your sort of sense of things? Yeah. So I don't think it's more useful or less useful. I think it's more accessible or less accessible. Let's understand the problem with the first method.

The first method will help you resist, but it won't change the craving. We're basically setting up in an environment to bypass ourselves. We're assuming that we're always going to lose, right? Does that kind of make sense? We're not actually conquering anything within us. We're just shaping an environment.

It's like we're not learning how to swim. We're just putting on floaties and jumping in the water. We're doing, having the external environment, do the work for us. So that's a great place to start and your instinct is right there. And when I'm working with an alcoholic or someone who's suicidal, one of the best evidence-based things that we can do is remove the suicidal means from the home. So get rid of your gun. So we absolutely need to do that. But even that's what I do with my patients the first day. Let's get the noose and the gun out of your house. Good job. That will, that's only, that's going to help some, but it doesn't really change you as

person. It doesn't really allow you to be conquered, but conquer the addiction and be free of it. And long term, that's our goal. Like long term, it's not that we need to structure our environment so that you're like a robot who's like, you know, responding to this environmental stuff and you're not really in control. Long term, what we want is I want you to be surrounded by potato chips. And I want you to be able to control yourself because you understand yourself. And in the patients that I work with that are suicidal, you know, we'll get to the point where even when they're happy, they'll have suicidal thoughts, but they're truly centered and like in control. So they'll even tell me, right? A lot of times psychiatrists freak out. And they'll say like,

oh, you know, I'm having suicidal thoughts and I'll just ask them a couple of years. And I'll be like, is that something we need to worry about? And they'll be like, no. Like, it's okay. And so what we're really talking about is what do you want to shape? Do you want to shape the outside to make things easy on yourself? Or do you want to shape yourself so that like easy and hard is the same difficulty? for you. I'd love a chat about your personal journey. You're not just a clinician and an educator on these topics. You actually suffered with some addiction in your journey. And you've used a lot of these tools at various stages of your journey to put your framework out there that you talk about through your healthy gamer platform. So talk a little about the origin story, being in med school,

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And don't forget to tell them our show sent you. You know, I grew up the son of Indian immigrants who were both doctors. And so, as I said earlier, I was genetically pre-med. And so I went to college, but I didn't really care about. The only thing I cared about for being a doctor was like the prestige that comes with. So I was like, I was 18 years old. I went to the University of Texas at Austin. I was going to be a doctor, not just any doctor, best doctor.

I'm going to go to Hardward, right? Because that's what good Indian kids do. So like that's what my goals were. But like I had no actual motivational drive. So I played a bunch of video games, started in high school, started to become a problem there. But then I basically failed out of college. So my first year in college, I had less than a 2.0 GPA. Half of my transcript was literally F's.

And then so I was on academic probation and barely made it through my second year. So it was on the verge of getting kicked out and like had all I had to do is get higher than a 2.0 GPA. And so I had managed to get like a 2.1 or something. So two years of college in, I've got like an average of less than one. So I had a 2.1 my last semester. And before that it was like a 1 point something. And so, and my parents tried everything. They tried to like, you know, punish me and they tried like tough love and love and like,

they just didn't know what they were dealing with because I was really addicted. So I went to India. I spent three months at an ashram studying yoga and meditation and like fell in love with it. So my whole life, like I wanted things, but I could never get myself to do them. So I had like desires, like I had goals, but I couldn't motivate myself. And on the flip side, I was like a slave to my desires when it came to. to video games. And I was playing video games for like 16 to 20 hours a day, like seven days a week. Like just wasn't going to class for like a month at a time. So I would I would like order

fried rice by the pound and fuel myself with like two liter bottles of soda and like pounds of fried rice at like 20 hour stretches. And so what I loved about India is I discovered like a system of learning that teaches me about myself. So in the way that we can learn algebra like we learn about desire. Where does desire come from? What happens if you satisfy it? All that kind of stuff. So decided to become a monk. Spent the next seven years studying with different like teachers in India, went a little bit to South Korea and Japan. And I was going to become a monk. My teachers at the age of 21, I tried. They said, you need to come back when you're 30. And then if you still want to do it, we'll take you. But they still continued teaching me. Ended up meeting my wife, decided that the

Monk thing wasn't necessarily the path that I wanted to be on. And then I was kind of stuck because, like, I graduated from college, had a 2.5 GPA, but then, like, what am I going to do? So, um, decided to apply to med school, got rejected from 120 med schools over three years before I finally got accepted to one. And then, uh, went to med school, was going to do oncology, but then fell in love with psychiatry because I loved the mind. Um, so ended up training, uh, doing myself.

psychiatry training at Harvard. Big irony that I wound up there. And the interesting thing is when I went back to med school, I didn't care at all about going to Harvard or anything like that. I didn't even look at my grades. So it was really super embarrassing. But I didn't go to the award ceremony like when I graduated. And I won two awards. And one of my mentors are like, where are you? Like I wanted to present this award. And I was like, I didn't know I was going to win anything. I never looked at my grades. Because I didn't care about grades. I was just like, I'm going to learn medicine. That's what I'm here for. So ended up training at Harvard and then started this whole healthy gamer thing. So when I was there in 2015, I went to one of my mentors and I was like, tell me about technology addiction.

Like, what are we doing there? And no one really knew anything because everyone was focused on the opioid crisis. So I started getting interested in as a second year resident. Started working on technology addiction in 2015. And then I started streaming on the internet and streaming on Twitch, which is a gaming platform and started teaching gamers about video game addiction. And someone was once like, isn't that kind of like holding an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a bar? And I was like, yeah, that's probably where we should hold AA meetings because that's where the people who have alcohol problems are. And was stunned when Healthy Gamer grew.

We were the fastest growing stream on Twitch for about three months and really discovered that people like want to learn about themselves. And was really surprised because when I started streaming, I was thinking like, okay, I had done neuroscience research at Harvard for a couple of years too. And so I was like, okay, I'm prepared with like my neuroscience stuff, my psychiatry stuff, my clinical stuff. Like, this is what people are going to want to learn. And what I discovered was a gigantic appetite for the spiritual stuff, all the stuff that I've learned in India over the course of seven years. All these things about meditation and purpose and the soul and like all this other weird

stuff. And so now what we try to do is like combine both of those. So what is the neuroscience of enlightenment? How do we understand addictions from a karmic perspective? and a neuroscience perspective. And so something about using both of those methodologies has been very, very helpful for people. One of the things he talked about was like a turning point for you.

And I'm also curious about how you ended up there, whether it was your parents pushing you, whether you had the motivation, but you ended up in this ashram. And a big part of that was meditation. What is your advice for people who are listening to the conversation right now and are feeling like, you know,

that feels like a vehicle that I could be using to step more into who I am and sit with the discomfort that's there in life, to actually step deeper into my purpose and ask these bigger questions and see what kind of answers show up for me. If somebody wants to get started with meditation, it's such a broad spectrum, what are your recommendations? Because I'm sure you get this question all the time.

What I would recommend is that people actually try a practice. I don't usually do this, right? I teach meditation on a podcast, but I feel inspired today by the direction of your questions. So I would tell them to do a practice called Kayash Tirum. So Kaayshthiram means stillness of the body. The practice is super simple. All you do is sit still and don't move anything.

You can breathe, but you don't move anything. So usually what we want to do is sit in a way that your spine is straight, your neck is straight, your head is straight. So the spine should be straight. You can even do it lying down, but I think it's better to sit. If you want to sit in a meditated posture like Lotus posture or something like that, sit cross-legged, You can sit with a small pillow underneath your hind quarters so that you're a little bit elevated and you can sit up straight more easily. So if you want to sit up straight naturally, by the way, all you need to do is have your knees lower than your hips and you'll naturally sit up straight. So you just want to elevate your hips, keep your knees low, cross your legs if you can.

And just sit still. That's it. That's it. For about five minutes. Perfectly still. There's a beautiful introduction to meditation because it's really, really hard. So 60 seconds will go by And then like you'll start to have an itch and then you'll start to feel uncomfortable your muscles will ache and then by the end of about five minutes your body will be in in an absolute state of torture

It's going to feel terrible And then something beautiful happens when I teach Kajsh theorem What people discover is that the breath that they take for granted becomes blissful So as long as they're concentrating on their breath all of the sensation of the body will, like, be tolerable. But if you're not concentrating on the breath, then, like, the body lights on fire.

Like, it's so uncomfortable. Now, if you have, like, a slip disc or a medical contraindication or something, like, then don't do this practice. Always talk to your doctor if you've got a medical condition. Like, that's really important. But it's a beautiful practice because what you learn is, like,

to be with yourself. Like, you're here in the present. You're not going to think about anything. You're not going to worry about paying your mortgage. You're not going to worry about what you have to do for dinner today. all of the thoughts will leave as you struggle to just survive this moment. And a lot of beautiful things happen with Gai Shther.

One is that you start to fall in love with your breath. And then you start to realize, like you learn a very important lesson, which is that no matter how much pain I'm in, I can concentrate on the breath. And for three breaths, for a few moments, I can find solace. I can find peace. And that is transformative. So the ability to find a few moments of peace when everything is full. falling apart will change the way that you live in the world. Now you no longer need the world

to give you peace. The basic problem that we have in life is we become dependent on the world to give us peace, happiness or unhappiness. Oh, I want this promotion. If I don't get the promotion, I'm going to be devastated. And if I do get the promotion, I'm going to be grateful. Right. So my happiness becomes dependent on anything except for you. Does this person, and love me or not love me, do they say yes or do they say no, do they forget my birthday, remember my birthday? So we're going through life and our happiness is outsourced to everybody else. And no wonder we're unhappy because we're not in control of our own happiness. And we think that controlling our happiness means achieving our goals. It isn't.

Because what happens when we achieve our goals? We move the goalposts and we have new goals. It doesn't work. It's not like you, you know, work for your eighth year and you're like, oh, this is the final promotion. Now I'm done. That's not what happens. We always. always want more. So Kaish Theorem is a beautiful practice that shows you that your happiness and your contentment in this moment is dependent on, of all things, your breath, and there can be other things, too. But you will find some way to find solace, which is like beautiful. And then you can use that technique any time you're like struggling. You can tap into your breath and be still. And then does all kinds of other things, right? So it teaches you to tolerate discomfort. It teaches you,

how to be in the present. See, this is where a lot of people struggle because I say, well, meditation is about being in the present. I don't know. How do I be in the present? The way you be in the present is by engaging in a practice

that forces you into the present. You don't have to try. Another great example of being in the present, stand on one leg. For how long until you're in the present? It's not going to take very long. You can't think about anything else. Maybe for 15 seconds you can do it,

but then your mind is forced to the present. That's the way that meditation should be learned. Meditation is not about trying to get your brain or mind to do anything. When you have a competent teacher, they will show you how to swim. And the swimming will be automatic as long as you stick with the practice. And then you will learn how to be in the present. You will learn how to tolerate the discomfort. All that stuff will happen automatically.

That's the beauty of it. So I think that's where I would say people should start. Now, where do they go after that? I mean, you can get a nap or whatever. But I find that going to a real meditation teacher is really good. because these apps and stuff are like they're great in a lot of ways like they can make it easy for you to stick with a practice and stuff they're not bad but they really are based on you know they're not based on spiritual growth which is really what this like tradition offers and really like mastery of the self right i've never heard of anyone becoming enlightened from using an app so it's a great place to start and then find a teacher and you could do that meditation yeah once a day sure as a starting place sure right That's a great place to start. Or once a month.

Or once a month. Or just once and never again. All of those are acceptable. I hope you found this featured moment, this featured segment from a past conversation, as powerful as I did in terms of reframing self-control. It isn't about pushing harder. It's about staying aware.

And when we lose awareness, we go on autopilot. But when we bring awareness back, we give ourselves a chance to choose. That's Dr. Kay's message. Whether that's a bag of chips that we don't want to eat, your phone, doom scrolling, a reactive thought, the real self-control begins when we pause, breathe, and notice what's running our minds. And if we really actually want it to run our minds in the first place. And you know, Dr. Kay's message is, the more you practice self-awareness,

the less power your impulses have over you. So if you like this conversation, I really encourage you to check out my full-length interview with Dr. Kay, where we explore how addiction start, how social media impacts the brain, the relationship with dopamine and serotonin, and how they're impacted by these addictive behaviors, top lifestyle behaviors that rob us of serotonin, and so much more. You can find the link to that in the episode of the show notes for today's featured moment episode. And as always, if today's episode resonated with you, I encourage you to share it with a friend or family member who's working on breaking a habit or building more self-discipline in their life. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.