Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How To Gain Control Over Your Mind, The Healing Power of Discomfort & The True Essence of Happiness with Dr Alok Kanojia #561

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

In a world that’s never been more comfortable, why are so many people struggling?   This week, my guest is Dr. Alok Kanojia, medical doctor, psychiatrist and one the world’s foremost authorities on mental health for the gaming community. He is known online as Dr K and is the co-founder of Healthy Gamer, a mental health platform that provides content and coaching to help young people take control of their wellbeing and he’s also the author of the bestselling book: How to Raise a Healthy Gamer: End Power Struggles, Break Bad Screen Habits, and Transform Your Relationship with Your Kids.   One of the things I like the most about Alok is his competence and expertise in both western medical and eastern philosophies: he has both trained to be a monk in India and he has a Western medical degree and practices as a psychiatrist.   During our conversation, you will learn: Why comfort might be the greatest threat to our mental health and how the brain and mind “rust” without regular use How technology is rewiring our attention and what ‘doom-scrolling’ is really doing to our brains Why our emotional regulation is weakening and how simple acts like taking the stairs can recondition the mind The difference between the brain and the mind and why understanding this could transform how we approach mental illness Why meditation isn’t a one-size-fits-all and how finding the right technique for your brain can make all the difference The true meaning and essence of happiness The link between ancient wisdom and modern psychiatry, and why you may be the only person that is truly qualified to heal your mind. Ultimately, this episode is an invitation to not only think differently, but to live differently, as well. Alok reminds us that healing doesn’t always require a prescription or a therapist, but it does require courage, awareness and a willingness to face discomfort.   Whether it’s choosing to take the stairs, sitting in silence for five minutes or resisting the urge to reach for our phones, each of these seemingly small acts are actually powerful tools that can help us feel calm, connected and in control. I hope you enjoy listening.   Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com.   Thanks to our sponsors: https://drinkag1.com/livemore https://thriva.co http://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://airbnb.co.uk/host   Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/561   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

I'm really excited to share that I've been selected as one of the very few Apple podcasts, Creators We Love, a campaign that celebrates leaders and trailblazers in podcasting. Thank you to everyone who has listened and shared the show with their family and friends over the years. And if you have discovered the show for the very first time through the Creators We Love campaign, welcome, and I hope you enjoy listening. The whole problem in life is that whatever we do to make us happy has diminishing returns. We're teaching ourselves that the only way to be happy is to fulfill our desires, which is technically not right.

If you have a desire for happiness, you will never be happy because it is the very thing that is blocking your happiness. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. In a world that's never been more comfortable, why are so many people struggling? This week my guest is Dr. Alok Kanodja. Medical doctor, psychiatrist and one of the world's foremost authorities on mental health for the gaming community. He's known online as Dr. K and is the co-founder of Healthy Gamer, a mental health platform

that provides content and coaching to help young people take control of their well-being. And he's also the author of the best-selling book, How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. End power struggles, break bad screen habits, and transform your relationship with your kids. Now, one of the things I like the most about Alok is his competence and expertise in both Western medical and Eastern philosophies. He's both trained to be a monk in India and he has a Western medical degree and practices as a psychiatrist.

A quite wonderful and unique combination. During our conversation, you will learn why comfort might be the greatest threat to our mental health and how the brain and mind rust without regular use. How technology is rewiring our attention and what doom scrolling is really doing to our brains. Why our emotional regulation is weakening and how simple acts like taking the stairs can recondition the mind.

The difference between the brain and the mind and why understanding this could transform how we approach mental illness, why meditation isn't a one-size-fits-all, and how finding the right technique for your brain can make all the difference, the true meaning and essence of happiness, and the link between ancient wisdom and modern psychiatry, and why you may be the only person that is truly qualified to heal your minds. Ultimately, this episode is an invitation to not only think differently, but to live differently as well. Alok reminds us that healing doesn't always require

a prescription or a therapist, but it does require courage, awareness and a willingness to face discomfort. Whether it's choosing to take the stairs, sitting in silence for five minutes, or resisting the urge to reach for our phones, each of these seemingly small acts are actually powerful tools that can help us feel calm, connected and in control. Why is it in a world where people are more comfortable than ever before, have more material things than ever before, are so many people struggling and unhappy? Well, so it's a great question, right?

So the first thing I would ask is, what is the correlation between having material things and comfort and happiness? So I think I basically have kind of three answers for you, okay? The first answer is we have to understand that the human body and the human mind don't wear out with usage. They actually rust without being used.

So if you look at comfort, right? So if I start taking the elevator every day instead of the stairs, what will happen to my body? It'll actually start to get deconditioned. So I think what we're seeing in society is a whole scale Deconditioning of certain neuroscientific circuits, so we have all of these technological tools all of these Comforts that make things easy for us all of these comforts that make things easy for us. But if you're sitting at home on your couch, you're getting food delivery, you're working on your laptop

and you never have to physically move, even though everything can be brought to you, that actually makes you worse, not better. So there's a really interesting mechanism here, which is if we look at serotonin production and increased serotonin transmission is associated with improvements in depression and anxiety, we're not quite sure if deficient serotonin production causes depression or not. There's some debate in the academic community.

But generally speaking, if your serotonin levels are high or your serotonin transmission is high, you feel better. So then the question becomes what results in serotonin production and actually overcoming adversity, doing hard work, accomplishing something is what causes a serotonin improvement. So I think what we're starting to see a lot of is that people, technology is basically deconditioning us mentally.

We're taking the elevator every single day. We're becoming sort of mentally kind of weak, honestly. That's one of the reasons why we're seeing everyone feels like they've got ADHD. ADHD is kind of on the rise. And so as our brains are becoming more deconditioned, we're starting to struggle more. Yeah.

So one reason is because this lack of usage is rusting our minds. Absolutely. So not just our minds, our brains too, which are two discrete things. Okay. How do you distinguish the brain and the minds? So your mind is the subjective experience of thoughts, emotions, and things like that. Your brain is a lump of tissue, neurons, blood vessels, astrocytes, myelin, all this kind of stuff. So oftentimes people think that the brain and the mind are the same, but that's not true. So if you sort of think about it like, we can measure your brain, I can do something called an fMRI study, which measures blood flow to different parts of the brain, I can

do something called an EEG study, which measures electrical activity across the brain, but there is nothing that I can do to measure a thought. Right? Like, every person who's listening to this podcast right now is probably having a thought, but the existence of thoughts is not measurable because they have no material. So the brain is sort of the material side, like it's like matter, right? It's like stuff that you can touch,

it can be physically injured by a traumatic brain injury. And the mind is the subjective experience of like being human or part of it anyway. And those two things are different. And they connect, they talk to each other. So if you think in a certain way, it will alter your neuroscience. And if you alter the neuroscience,

it will change your thinking. So there's a two-way street there. Yeah, no, I love that. Now, Giamatta's idea that our bodies, our minds, our brains are rusting. I think we intuitively understand that through the lens of physical health, okay? Because that drum has been beat for many years that we need to be more physically active. And you know, the truth is, is that movement has been engineered out of our lives. So we've become more physically comfortable,

but I think it's really interesting that we've also become more mentally comfortable as well. Now, as you were talking there, I was thinking these ideas of comfort are really, really interesting, aren't they? Because, I mean Because I wrote about this recently, that I was on a train to London, I would say a couple of years ago now. So I live in the Northwest of England, high speed, comfortable train to London. And the person I was traveling with got really, really frustrated because the app that basically allows you to order your drink from the cafe four carriages down wasn't working. And I thought, this is remarkable.

Ten years ago, a service like this did not exist. You know that if you want a drink and you don't have it with you, on the train, you have to get up, walk three or four carriages, choose your drink, pay the money and walk back to your seats. Okay? No one had a problem with that back then. But now the knowledge that there is an app that can make your life easier and then the app not working caused a friend of, quite an intense degree of frustration. Right? Yeah.

Which is fascinating, isn't it? Absolutely, right? So I think you're touching on so many things, Rangan. So the first is like, expectations have changed. So sort of like a spiritual side to this and a neuroscience side to this. So let's talk about neuroscience first. So what are the ways in which we are, we have become mentally deconditioned. So the first thing that has become mentally deconditioned is our attention. So in the past, what would happen is when I went to school,

right, I would have to force my mind, my mind wants to wander. It wants to wander over here. It wants to wander over there. I would have to force it to focus on something. I have to force it to focus on a textbook.'d have to force it to focus on a textbook, I have to force it to focus on something at work. So most of the hours of the day,

we had to kind of harness or rein in, we'd have to put our mind on a leash and tell it where to go. So if you look at technology, do you have to force your mind to be on TikTok? Do you have to force your mind to be on TikTok? Do you have to force your mind to be on YouTube? No. So the way that what technology has done is it has created so many natural pulls for our attention that we no longer have to force it to do anything. In fact, what's happened is we now have a mind that has been off the

leash for so long. So when I'm on pick talk and I get bored of something, all I have to do is just swipe up, right? And now YouTube shorts has a swipe function. I'm sure Instagram reels has a swipe function. So now the second I get bored, I don't have to force my mind to do anything. It gets to run over whatever it wants to. If it gets bored over here, we're going to switch over to YouTube. If it it gets bored over here We're gonna switch over to YouTube if it gets bored with YouTube We're gonna switch over to Instagram So the mind does not need its attention to be directed and this is what people experience, right? So anytime you're using technology you tell yourself

Hey, this is a waste of time. I need to stop but you can't control your mind waste of time. I need to stop. But you can't control your mind. It's like your mind has become this bear that is off the leash and runs wherever it wants to. This is why we create doom scrolling, right? So like people are just sitting there scrolling on their phone for hours and hours. The average cell phone use is somewhere between four and a half hours to up to eight hours a day. Like this is like really common for people now. And that's because our attention, the ability for us to tell our mind where to go, which is what attention is, right?

Pay attention, shift your mind from this distraction over to what you need to focus on. Our capacity to restrain attention is literally becoming weakened or atrophied. Yeah. Primarily through technology use. That's one of the things. Second thing that we're really getting, this is terrible, is emotional regulation.

We are losing the capacity to regulate our emotions, which is literally what we saw in this example. So this person can't get a drink delivered because of an app. In the grand scheme of the 75 years that they're on this earth, what difference does that make? They can get their asses up and walk a couple of carriages or not. And it's like not that big of a deal. But what's going on in this person's brain is the emotional centers of their brain have

become hyperactive. And the reason they become hyperactive is because we've relied on technology to do our emotional regulation for us. Anytime you use basically a technological device, it can be video games, it can be social media, it can be scrolling on your phone, it can be pornography. All of these technologies basically suppress

our emotional circuitry. So when we have something from the outside shutting off something in our brain, our brain loses the capacity to regulate itself, right? A really good example of this is it's not just our brain. So let's say that I'm used to air conditioning and climate control 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I'm in perfect weather all the time.

If I go into an environment that's a little bit hot or a little bit cold, I will feel uncomfortable. And on the flip side, there are people who live in countries where there aren't air conditioning, there isn't heating, and their capacity to tolerate higher or lower temperatures is way better, because their body can regulate their temperature in a subjective way more effectively. So we're all losing our capacity to emotionally regulate. We're seeing this a ton with parents.

Kids are throwing temper tantrums when you take away their video games. Like, you know, everyone's kind of getting more frustrated with each other. a ton with parents. Kids are throwing temper tantrums when you take away their video games. Everyone's kind of getting more frustrated with each other. So we're losing the capacity to emotionally regulate. And when we lose the capacity to emotionally regulate, we would predict increases in depression, increases in anxiety. And we're absolutely seeing that. Yeah. It's absolutely fascinating. We think about this relationship with comfort or discomfort and our physical and mental well-being. A couple of things came up for me there. Number one, you mentioned temperature controlled houses, okay? Air conditioning or central heating,

whatever it is. This idea that we no longer need to tolerate differences in temperature. Okay. And then the first thought that came into my mind was the modern, what's the word? The modern kind of trend for cold plunging. Now, to be clear, I know there are benefits of cold plunging for some people. It can be an incredible practice. But it's interesting, isn't it? That as we've got to these more temperature controlled lives, there is a desire with many people to experience the cold. Do you know what I mean? 100% Rangan. And I think that's not a coincidence.

So, along with the rise of cold plunging, we're also seeing a whole scale interest globally in meditation. Yeah. Right? So, I think just like when the body is thirsty, it craves water. So what I think a lot of people are discovering, they don't necessarily understand the neuroscience and the physiology behind it,

but what they're discovering is, as my mind becomes deconditioned, if I do things that are mental conditioning, my life will improve. So now what's starting to happen is people are living lives of comfort, they're living lives where their mind is easily distractible, hard to pay attention,

difficulty with emotional regulation. And when people stumble into practices that fix these problems, they love it, they absolutely love it. Right, so if you're someone who takes the elevator, it feels a little bit uncomfortable to take the stairs. But even after you, if you go work out or you go take a walk, you kind of come back and you're like, wow, I like, I feel so much better.

Even though I feel tired, even though I feel achy, there is some part of me that feels better because something feels a little bit more balanced. Yeah. It's interesting. I internalized this rule a few years ago. Basically, I was thinking a lot about comfort and my own relationship with comfort and discomfort. I thought, okay, Rangan, you need to, or not you necessarily need to, you might benefit from putting some things in place that allow you to experience discomfort more regularly. And a very simple one that was transformative for me and has been for many of my patients in the past is this idea that I'm always going to take the stairs, barring exceptional circumstances.

So it was a one-time decision, a rule that I internalized. I've got to say for about five years or so, it's been life-changing. And I think the reason it's been life-changing is not just for the physical benefits. Sure, if I'm going up four flights of stairs to get to the supermarket car park with my bags, of course there are physical benefits, hormonal benefits, insulin sensitivity, et cetera, et cetera. But I honestly think Dr. K for me, the main benefit or the biggest benefit is psychological. This idea that I chose discomfort when I didn't need to. A hundred percent.

So it's more than that. So not only is it psychological where you chose discomfort, it's neurological too. So when you do that, there's this part of your brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is kind of like where willpower comes from. It's where internal conflict is managed in your brain. So when you feel like taking the elevator and you choose to take the stairs instead, the anterior cingulate activates, you fight a war within yourself, and then you end up hopefully taking the stairs. So when you do that,

and I see this all the time in my clients as well, when they start embracing discomfort instead of avoiding it, their life becomes way better. And the reason for that is not just because, as you mentioned, there's physical health benefits of taking the stairs, but you are training your capacity to do the right thing which feels bad

instead of the wrong thing which feels good. And there's another really interesting manifestation of your anterior cingulate being boosted, which is in your language. So earlier when you were sharing that example of people rewind, they will hear you say, it's a rule that I made myself do. You said something like, I need to take the stairs and you immediately

caught yourself and you said, I don't need to, it's something that I would like to do or something like that. Or choose. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right. So what you did right there is... And I saw you smile as I reframed that as well, which is interesting for me. Right. So what's happening that in real time is you have this habit formed in your brain

of pushing yourself, because you're a doctor, right, Dr. Chatterjee? And if we're doctors, good Indian doctors like ourselves, push ourselves really hard, right? We have to be successful, we need to work really hard, we're sort of trained in this way, it's not just Indian doctors, right? A lot of people push work really hard. We're sort of trained in this way. It's not just Indian doctors, right? A lot of people push themselves really hard. I need to do this. I need to do this.

And then the anterior cingulate comes in and first of all raises awareness to some of these like toxic productivity kind of habits where we beat ourselves up. And then also in real time, what you're doing is like reprogramming yourself. I need to take the stairs. No, no, no, I'm gonna choose to take the stairs.

It's good if I take the stairs. And so that mental reprogramming, reprogramming your habits also comes from the interior cingulate cortex. So it's kind of really fascinating, but the simple decision to choose to take the stairs on a daily basis unless there's some kind of emergency or something like that can actually help you program all kinds of other habits because we are leveling up our brain's capacity to change our habits. Yeah, yeah, I love that.

And I love this idea that wherever you choose to embrace discomfort in your life, it's not only that your ability to do that thing improves. So me doing that doesn't just improve my ability to keep choosing the stairs, it has knock-on benefits into other aspects of my life as well. Yeah, so this is where things get a bit technical, but there are three or four things that are

called transdiagnostic categories in psychiatry. And these are things that contribute to basically all mental illness. So that what people sort of figured out the way this research worked is they were looking they noticed that a lot of people have depression also have anxiety. And they were like, why is that? Is there a root cause for both depression and anxiety? Is there a root cause for both depression and addiction? And what they discovered were three or four things

that are basically the root causes of all mental illness. And one of them is distress tolerance. So your capacity to tolerate distress, if you have a high distress tolerance. So your capacity to tolerate distress, if you have a high distress tolerance, your likelihood of developing an addiction, your likelihood of developing an anxiety disorder goes way down. Your ability to set boundaries gets way stronger

with distress tolerance. So if you can handle discomfort, because I work with a lot of people who are addicted, and their big problem is they can't handle discomfort. If I feel anxious, I'm having trouble sleeping, I feel like I've got insomnia, let me get high so I can fall asleep. If I'm anxious, I need to get high.

If I'm going and socializing, I have social anxiety, let me take a couple of drinks of alcohol to calm myself down. So literally their capacity to tolerate distress is low. And when your capacity to tolerate distress is low, you lean on things outside of you to manage your internal environment. Like YouTube, like TikTok. When we're, when we've had a hard day and we're feeling frustrated, what do we,

what does our brain crave without even realizing it? After you have an argument, no one goes and sits quietly and ponders the nature of the argument. Everyone walks out of the room, pulls out their phone and starts scrolling. And that's because our brain knows that this is going to regulate my emotions, it'll calm me down. But that's harmful over time. Right? So you're developing distress tolerance. It's fantastic. Yeah. It's kind of interesting that you mentioned root cause there. And one of the things that I guess I love about your online content and your videos is this blend of East and West. Okay? So you're a Harvard trained medical doctor.

You've also spent time training to be a monk in India, right? And I think there's this beautiful balance and combination between West and East, something that I very much lean into and for much of my career, I've very much tried to integrate those two philosophies together in a harmonious way. I think you do that so beautifully well. When you said about the root causes of various mental illnesses, I kind of, I thought, okay, well, there's a real issue here, isn't there, between the way we look at illness in the West and in the East. These are very, very broad terms. Okay. But Western medicine, allopathic medicine tends to be, in my experience, quite reductionist and looks

at all these diseases as separate things. We give them labels and you know, depression is different from anxiety, which is different from, you know, something else. And the same thing with physical health. Oh no, you you've got, those gut symptoms are this condition or this condition or that condition. Whereas Eastern philosophy, and I guess things like traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine would be very much more holistic and go, well, what, you know, this symptom is a sign of some kind

of systemic imbalance in the body. So through the lens of Western medicine, yeah, great. We're looking at those different mental illnesses and you're saying, yeah, there are some root causes. One of them is distress tolerance. And I guess we could apply that same principle to a lot of physical health issues where we could say, well, the root cause is actually chronic unresolved inflammation. So instead of treating these conditions as separate things, we could actually get to the root cause and go, okay, what's

pro-inflammatory in this patient's life? How can I reduce that? How can I increase the anti-inflammatory nature of their lifestyle, for example, and I would similarly see downstream benefits in a variety of different conditions. Does that all make sense so far? 100%. Right? So we know that there's an inflammatory hypothesis for depression as well. So whether someone has IBS, whether they've got seasonal allergies, whether they've got depression, reducing their inflammatory burden absolutely improves all of those things. Yeah.

So it's interesting that, you know, I think you said there were three, did you say there were three root causes of mental illness? Three or four. So one of them is distress tolerance. What were the others? Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Nutrition can often seem really complicated. We get confused about what exact diet we should be following and which supplements we might benefit from taking. And that's one of the many reasons that I love AG1 and have been taking it for over six years.

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There's debate over, so there are a couple that I've seen, those are the two biggest that I think have the strongest level of evidence is distress tolerance and perfectionism. There's debate over what the other two really are. So we're not 100% sure, but some people, and this has to do with factor analysis. So, I mean, this gets a bit technical, but when you do factor analysis,

you'll basically come up with like four major factors. I think distress tolerance and perfectionism I think are the two that are the most significant. And those two are of course the two that we can make a quite simple and logical case that the modern world and the way we live today is ramping up, right? We no longer need to face discomfort or that boredom, which for many people is intolerable. And of course, perfectionism has been on the rise. You know, when I looked at the research of this, I thought, oh, this must be down to social media. But the research suggests it's from the 1980s that perfectionism has been on the rise. Certainly

the research I've been looking at, which is really interesting. This idea that, you know, where are these cultural ideas coming from about what it means to be a successful human? You know, the billboard idea of success and happiness, those two things are being ramped up in the modern world. And of course, that will be linked with all kinds of different mental illnesses. Yeah. So I think it's great that you mentioned,

you know, this sort of perspective on physical health of being reductionist versus holistic. If I can talk about that principle of East versus West in mental health for a second. So when we're talking about physical versus mental health, you know, you mentioned inflammation. So I think there's one huge difference in the way that the West approaches the mind

and the East approaches the mind, okay? So in the West, our system of medicine is me doing something to you or you doing something to me. Right, so our idea of health or the practice of medicine in the West is like a doctor prescribing a medication. And we do this in psychiatry too, where if you are mentally unwell, the right answer is for an expert to come and fix you through something like psychotherapy or psychopharmacology.

The big difference between West and East when it comes to mind is in the Eastern side, they were do it yourself, DIY, right? So all of the Eastern interventions for the mind or a lot of the Eastern interventions of the mind, what we call yoga and meditation, are designed to be done by the person who has the mind. So they're designed, all the interventions of the East are for you to do for yourself.

And all of the interventions of the West, literally we have these gigantic research RCTs, randomized controlled trials on this kind of psychotherapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, motivational interviewing. We have all these trials on different psychotherapies to help human beings with their mental problems.

The big problem with all of those things is they have to be done by a therapist. Whereas if you look at yoga, you look at meditation, what they did is they said, hey, if there's something going on in my mind, I know it sounds kind of bizarre, but no human being can read my thoughts, right? So this is a huge weakness that we have in psychiatry.

This is one of the reasons why I think mental illnesses getting so much worse. Because if we look at physical medicine, I can understand what's going on in your body even better than you can. I can X-ray you, I can do a CT scan of your brain and see if there's a mass in there. I can measure your blood and detect things. I can detect a CT scan of your brain and see if there's a mass in there. I can measure your blood and detect things.

I can detect an iron deficiency that you may not be able to detect. But when it comes to the mind, we have no way of measuring the mind. The only way to detect the mind is through your own observation, which is why one of the reasons that, I'm a psychiatrist, but I do so much of meditation and yoga

and we can talk about that, by the way. We can talk about how to find happiness and comfort and all those kinds of things in a way that anyone who's listening to can apply themselves, right? You don't need an expert to apply it because you're the only one who can observe your mind. You're the only one who can change your mind, right? So when it comes to the level of mind, the individual is the one who actually has the

most power. And in the East, their interventions of mental health have you fixing your own problems because it is technically impossible for someone else to do it for you. Yeah. And I love that distinction. I'm totally on board. And I guess one of my biggest frustrations throughout my medical career, particularly in the early days when you're trying to fit in and you're

like, you know what, I've been told to practice like this or this RCT, this randomized control trial tells me for a patient like this, this is the treatment I need to give. I've always thought, yeah, but I'm not sure that is the right thing for this individual with their life experience and their preferences and their culture. You know, it's, it's, and I think that's one of the reasons why I like your work so much is it's, it seems to very much have this grounding in both because it's very easy to go, Oh, you oh, all Western medicine is not as good or all Eastern medicine is not so good. And it's like, well, hold on a minute.

They've all got strengths, they've all got weaknesses. In fact, let me put it to you, Dr. K having sort of studied both sides of this, what would you say are some of the strengths and weaknesses of both Western medicine and Eastern medicine. Speaking broadly, the basic problem with Eastern medicine is reliability. So if I go to an Ayurvedic doctor, what can I expect?

I have no idea, right? So if treatment, let's say that treatment is, you're saying like treatment is highly individualized, right? Which means that what I need to do, one specific treatment for you, one specific treatment for your friend, a third specific treatment for your spouse, let's say. Now, if I'm a doctor and I do three different treatments for three different people, and let's say none of them get better, is the problem that their diseases are really, really

hard to treat or that I'm a bad doctor? How will we ever know? Right, so the problem with individualized treatment is that it becomes incredibly hard to measure efficacy. It becomes incredibly hard to measure reliability. So as a simple example of this, I gravitated towards certain things. I'm a Reiki healer, I'm an energy healer,

I'm a trained energy healer. It's not energy healer. I'm a trained energy healer. It's not something that I do as a part of my practice. And the reason for that, I almost never refer people to energy healers because in my experience as a clinician, I've seen some energy healers who can do, I think some medically impossible things. And I've seen the majority of energy healers

who are not able to do that. So there's, anytime we are super, super individualized, reliability becomes a problem. And this is why allopathy has dominated the world, right? So the reason that we have allopathic medical schools in basically every country on the planet is because there is a minimum level of reliability with medicine.

If I give you a statin and I give someone else a statin or something like that, we've even calculated, the number needed to treat for a statin is somewhere between like eight and 40, I'm rusty on the statistics. So we know exactly, we can look at a large population. So even though there's a difference between a population and you,

we can make broad predictions, which generally speaking are correct on the allopathic side. The problem is that those the answers that allopathy gives us will never perfectly apply to an individual. Yeah. Right. So allopathy is a population-based medicine. It's like we're gonna do what on average works for everybody.

So what that means is it's great because, you know, if I give a bunch of kids Adderall, on average their school performance will improve. But the problem is that it's not individualized, so it will never be ideal to an individual patient. Yeah. I think that specifically when it comes to psychiatry, like I said, I think that Western medicine is missing something very crucial, which is that if you look at therapists,

how does a therapist know what's going on in your mind? They ask you questions, right? And as I ask you questions, you give me answers. And then I use those answers as ways of trying to understand what's going on in your mind. But for you and anyone else listening, what is the difference, what is the gap between your thoughts and your words?

It's huge. Yeah. So the basic weakness in psychiatry between your thoughts and your words, it's huge. So the basic weakness in psychiatry is that we're working on the mind, but no one else knows your mind as well as you do. So when I practice clinically, you're spot on that I combine the two. I mean, I have seen sustained remission because we don't, the word cure has all kinds of problems

when it comes to mental illness. But 70% of my patients who come in on pharmacologic medications will be off of them and stable within 12 to 18 months. So I think there are so many things that we don't understand about how to create a healthy mind that if you teach people these techniques, the need for medication goes away.

Yeah, yeah. And even when we talk about like technology use, like, you know, we're a healthy gamer, which means that we're not saying you need to stop using technology. What we're saying is you need to understand how technology affects your mind, how it affects your brain,

understand what's going on within you so that you can make some intentional changes and then the like addictive technology usage will fall away on its own. Yeah. Right, that's what we see time and time again in our community. Yeah, no, I love that.

It's really interesting because of course, if we think about these broad terms allopathic medicine versus more, I guess, holistic Eastern medicine. Yeah, you know, allopathic medicine has more kind of robust trial saying on average for this population, we're going to see this, right? So that has, that's a pro. Again, that same fact can also be a weakness because if you're not one of those averages, that same thing is no longer a strength, it's a weakness. Vice versa, you're a holistic practitioner, you're paying attention to the story, the

unique life experiences, you understand that that trial that was published in Nature last month may or may not be relevant for the individual in front of you, yet you can't prove it. So on a kind of wider scale, when we're trying to analyze outcomes for let's say, insurance or here in the UK for the National Health Service, then it becomes slightly problematic. So these things can be both strengths and weaknesses, the same thing, depending on through which lens you look at it. At the same time, I would say one and the other, sort of through the lens of mental health and psychiatric conditions, if you, if the only way that you can feel good or get better is with that pill from that doctor, right?

There is a reliance that then is created, right? So there's a dependency, which is one of the weak, for me, one of the weaknesses of, I can't say allopathic medicine as a whole, but the way it's often practiced, I should say, is that we don't always give our patients a sense of agency, right? It's like, no, no, no, you've got the same,

let me tell you what's going on, and this is is what you take or this is the person you see, which sure may work temporarily, but in the long term, I mean, you know, I've been a, what is it now? 23, 23 and a half years since I qualified as a medical doctor. I would probably say that the number one thing I've learnt and I've experienced is that you have to give that patient a sense of agency before they walk outside that door. For me, that's always been one of the most important things. So, a few things there. I don't know if you have any comments on what I've just said, whether you agree, disagree, but I'd love to hear your perspective.

Yeah. So, I mean, I love what you said. I think I would add some nuance to it. I don't disagree. So let's start with this idea of like, medication doesn't fix anything. So generally speaking, I agree with that. And we also know that, for example, SSRIs, which are a very common treatment for depression or mood disorder, trigger the, basically all treatments of depression have one common route, which is they trigger

the increase of BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor. So one of the reasons why SSRIs, they take four to eight weeks to work. You don't feel them right away. So it's not that you're becoming dependent on a pill. It's that the pill is triggering growth in your brain in some way. So BDNF causes remodeling of the brain, it causes growth of astrocytes and microglial cells and things like that.

So it's almost like stimulating growth. And a lot of people who get started on SSRI can actually be pulled off very successfully given certain circumstances. So I think that there is some evidence that some medications in psychiatry you can use for a limited amount of time and then you no longer need them. The problem is that for many people and many practitioners,

they end up in the scenario that you described, which is that once you get started on a pill, they're just gonna keep you on it, right? And there isn't this drive to sort of fix things at the root. And a really good example of this is like stimulant medication for ADHD, which shows that basically like the problem

with stimulant medication, like methamphetamines like dextroamphetamine and things like that are methylphenidate is that these medications make people feel way better, but their symptom improvement with ADHD is only 30%. So they feel like they're non-functional without the medication and the medication changes their lives. There's a great meta-analysis that just came out, maybe in BMJ actually, that showed that basically the symptom improvement from stimulant medication for ADHD is about 30%. And if you do cognitive behavioral therapy

for 26 to 52 weeks for ADHD, the improvement is 69%. And the improvement is 69%. And the improvement from cognitive behavioral therapy lasts two years or longer, whereas the benefits of stimulant medication lasts for about six months. So we absolutely see this scenario where people will take medication, they subjectively feel way better, but they are not nearly as functional

as they think they are. And if they go this more permanent route through something like psychotherapy, if they start meditating things like that, then they will get substantially better. So in general, I agree with your point. The one thing that I know sounds so crazy, but the one thing that I may disagree with is you're saying empower your patients, which I'm all for. So patient empowerment is great. But if you work with a population of people who have ADHD and love their stimulants, empowering

patients by giving them lots of stimulants is sometimes not the right idea. Yeah. Well, just to be clear, when I say empowering patients, it's not about empowering them necessarily with drugs or stimulants. It's this idea that actually, I have this belief, the strong belief that when a patient leaves a patient, a client, depending on what profession you're in, right? When they leave your door, when they walk out of the consultation, they have to believe that there's something they can do in their life that makes a difference.

And this goes back to what you said before about things like yoga and meditation and other things that we can do to process our thoughts, to experience our mind in a variety of different ways. We have to believe surely as human beings that we have some degree of agency over our lives. And that's certainly one of the things, I say one of the biggest things I have tried to give patients throughout my clinical career is that sense of agency and empowerment. Yeah. You know, when patients come into my office wanting stimulant medication for ADHD, the whole problem is if they don't get it,

or if they do get it, when they walk out the door, they don't believe that there's anything else that they can do, right? They believe this is the only thing. So even if they get the medication or don't get the medication, with the way that you clarified, in either case they feel completely disempowered when they walk out the door, even if they get what they want. Okay. So how do you handle that? So let's take that as a scenario. Okay. You've got this patient who wants that stimulant medication. And I know there's, it depends on the patient and a whole host of different things, but are there any sort of principles there that you kind of

go through that can help us understand how in that scenario, empowering that individual may not be the best approach. Yeah. So I think the empowerment, the way you define it is great. I think that's good, which is like helping this person understand, hey, there's something you can do. So I think it's, I'm a little bit lucky this way because generally speaking, people come to me because they want to do more than medication.

I'll absolutely get what we call medication seeking patients who want stimulants. And I'll tell them straight up, like, you know, I'm happy to prescribe stimulants, but as part of a treatment plan, like a comprehensive treatment plan, and if that's what you want, I'm the right doctor for you. If you're looking for someone

who just is gonna prescribe you medication and you're gonna walk out the door and that's the kind of for you. If you're looking for someone who just is going to prescribe you medication and you're going to walk out the door and that's the kind of treatment you want, that's also okay. There are many millions of people on the planet who don't want to do psychotherapy, don't want to meditate, don't want to do yoga. I just don't think I'm the right doctor for you. I want to talk about some of these practical techniques that you've sort of hinted at. Before we get there, just a couple of words you said before, which sort of stuck in my head, sustained remission. I thought that was really interesting. This idea that many of the patients in your practice with mental illness, you and your team are able to put into sustained remission. You said we don't use

the word cure. I thought that was quite interesting and I just wanted to get your thoughts on that. And I guess it's probably is partly to do with the difference between physical health and mental health. But let's say, I don't know, let's say you had a pneumonia. Okay. So you go see a doctor, you're diagnosed with a pneumonia. It's put on your records and you get a given antibiotics to treat your pneumonia. At the end of that course of antibiotics, on the assumption that your cough and your fever and your sputum has gone, we don't say that your pneumonia is in remission. Okay? Right.

Right. So the point I'm trying to get to is, is it different or do you see it differently with mental illness? For example, if someone, for example, when they were 19 years old, because of a variety of different life experiences, ended up being diagnosed with depression by their primary care physician or their psychiatrist. And they did a series of things. They were empowered by their practitioner and they meditated, they did yoga, they didn't use technology for the first hour of the day and they got to know themselves better. And they never ever had another episode again that would be classified as depression. Is it still fair to say that's a sustained remission? Today's episode is sponsored by Vivo Barefoot.

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Find a co-host at airbnb.co.uk forward slash host. So when I say people are in sustained remission, let's understand the time point that I'm at. So someone comes into my office, right? Happened all the time, right? I was in Boston, so I'd get kids from Harvard or MIT or Emerson or whatever, a huge college town. 19 year old comes in with an episode of depression. Three years later, there's no depression, right? So I work with this person for three years. They're now 22.

Have they been cured? Are they gonna get another episode when they become pregnant? Are they gonna get an episode after they give birth? Are they gonna have an episode when they have divorce? We don't know. So if they never have another episode for the remainder of their life, could we call it a cure? Maybe. But the whole point is that we don't know, right? So the nature of

mood disorders is that they are episodic. They're not there all the time. So they come and they go. Now, the example that you use for pneumonia is also fantastic because we know the pathophysiology of pneumonia. We know what causes pneumonia. Pneumonia is caused by a certain kind of bacteria. If we eliminate the bacteria, the pneumonia will never come back. The problem with depression is that we don't know what causes it. Agreed.

We know the pathophysiology of pneumonia. At the same time, there are some patients who are more susceptible to getting regular pneumonias, right? So yeah, the bacteria goes away after taking the antibiotic, but they may be the type of patient who gets two a year, right? Whereas someone else might get one every 10 years. Totally with you, right? And that's where now we get into the shades of gray. So let's forget about pneumonia for a second. If we want to go further, let's talk about asthma.

Yeah. Right? So asthma that, you know, is somewhat controlled, let's say on like an inhaled glucocorticoid or something like that. And then even if they stop the getting the glucocorticoid, let's say they're off of everything, but they don't have an asthma attack for one year, does that mean that they're cured, not cured? The pathophysiology of the smooth muscle reaction

that happens in their lungs is still potentially there, right? So there's all kinds of shades of gray and in mental illness too. Let's take the case of trauma, okay? So we have a whole guide to trauma where we kind of go into this. But so we look at trauma, okay? So we have a whole guide to trauma where we kind of go into this. So we look at trauma.

Trauma has effects on every dimension of your being. The first thing that happens is your physiology becomes rewired. Your sensitivity to threat and danger increases. So there are situations in life that are not really dangerous, but your nervous system is so ramped up that it looks at a normal thing and it sees danger there. So a good example of this is, I did a lot of work with veterans and you know,

if a door slams, their nervous system is wired to pick that up and think, oh my God, like there could be a bomb going off or that's a gunshot. So there is a nervous system change, okay? So one thing that we can do is we can rewire the nervous system and that's what sustained remission even from PTSD looks like.

One piece of that is your nervous system has been wired in some way and we can rewire it. Now, once we rewire it, there's no need for like medications like Prozosin or anything like that, right? So once we like altered the wiring back to the way that it should be in a healthy range, we don't need medication anymore. It's not just that.

In trauma, we also have problems with emotional regulation. So this is not the central nervous system and you know, our heart and lungs and adrenaline and cortisol. This is like our amygdala becomes hyper reactive. So this is the part of our brain where we experience fear and anxiety. So we can also do certain kinds of meditation techniques, yoga, cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive reframing

to literally increase the strength of the connections between our frontal lobe and our amygdala. to literally increase the strength of the connections between our frontal lobe and our amygdala. So this is strengthening the part of your brain that allows you to calm down. So once we've done that rewiring, this is basically speaking a permanent change or can be hypothetically a permanent change.

And then it moves up to one level. So now that my threat perception has been normalized, I'm not seeing danger in every every corner. Now that my ability to regulate my sadness and my anger has improved. Now my relationships will start improving. Yeah. Right. So now when I'm when my partner doesn't text me back, instead of getting paranoid because my amygdala is hyper reactive, there's adrenaline pumping through my system, I'm able to chill out and then I can learn particular ways to relate to someone else.

So trauma also changes the way that we connect to other human beings. If we're traumatized by our parents, the people who love us, we get all messed up honestly. That people that we love are hurting us in this way and then we start to fear those that we love and hurting us in this way. And then we start to fear those that we love and our brain forms that association. So then we start working on that.

And then finally, what we end up working on, and there's other dimensions to this, but the other big one is our sense of identity. So trauma changes the way that we see ourselves. Now, this is a persistent mental pattern that when people, when someone is physically or sexually abused as a child, they believe they are at fault.

Yeah. Right, and that's a belief that gets formed as a child that you carry with you. But once again, through things like psychotherapy and meditation, we can alter our, we can change our perception of ourselves. And once you do all of those things, you rewire your physiology,

you increase your ability to suppress your amygdala reactions, you alter your relationship patterns, and you alter your sense of identity. I think these people are, from what I've seen from a clinical perspective, their problems are gone. Like, unless there's some other kind of trauma,

maybe I'm wrong there, maybe, because I don't know the benefit of the future, maybe 10 years from now, the stuff will come back. I don't know. But isn't that the same for most things in life? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 100%. So this is the answer, right?

So here's what people don't understand in psychiatry. So if we're, see, the biggest mistake people make is they'll start on an SSRI and then six months in they say, I'm feeling better. I'd like to come off of the medication. I don't need the medication anymore. And then what oftentimes happens if you pull off of the SSRI in under a year without certain circumstances, which we can get into if you want to, there's basically like a serotonergic

diet and things like that, that you can start that will allow you to. There's basically like a serotonergic diet and things like that that you can start that will allow you to come off of an SSRI. But, so someone says, okay, now I'm ready to stop because I feel better. Oftentimes the depression can come back. And what a lot of people don't understand in psychiatry is your mental health today, just like your physical body,

is a product of what you put into the mind. So if I sit on my ass all day long, I eat processed food, I'm gonna get back pain, I'm gonna get fetal edema, I'm gonna get all kinds of problems. If the body is responsive to its environment, if I go and inhale toxic fumes, I'm gonna have a lung problem. If I go breathe fresh fumes, I'm gonna have a lung problem. If I go breathe fresh air,

I'm not gonna have a lung problem. So this idea of a disease as being independent of your environment is wrong. Yeah, agree. This trips people up so much in psychiatry because now that I feel better, I'm gonna stop meditating. Now that I feel better,

I'm gonna stop going to therapy. Now that I feel better, I'm gonna stop going to therapy. Now that I feel better, I'm gonna stop taking medication. And in doing so, they recreate the circumstances that led to their system being out of balance and manifesting as a particular mental illness. So sustained remission, is it gone forever? I think there's a certain amount of, and this is where things get a little bit tricky

because I think there's a certain amount of rewiring, which is semi-permanent. Yeah. So once you correct the physiologic wiring of PTSD, it doesn't just come back if you stop eating healthy, but there are all kinds of things. If you enter into a bad relationship, if you go back into a literal war zone,

all of that stuff can get re-triggered. Yeah. And so the big mistake that a lot of people make is that they think, oh, I'm cured. So therefore I can open the door to all of my bad habits again, because this problem is geared. Yeah. And that's what separates people who get chronic pneumonia

from people who get one-time pneumonia. So for anyone who's listening to this, your audience, I think, is quite health-focused, right? So how do you understand your health? I think, think about it like a karmic perspective. It's not, I don't think it's just a technical discussion between doctors. I think it's like, how do you approach your health

is cure possible? And it's kind of like, depending think it's like, how do you approach your health, is cure possible? And it's kind of like, depending on what you reap, I mean, you're gonna, depending on what you sow, that's what you're gonna reap. There's some amount of buffer you can buy yourself, right? If you're very healthy and you've lost a lot of weight and you exercise every day and you no longer have type two diabetes,

you can have a piece of cake or two, it's like no big deal. But if you start engaging in those wrong behaviors again, those health problems will re-emerge. Yeah. No. Okay, in terms of practical things that people can do, you mentioned meditation and why it can be such a powerful practice for a whole variety of different conditions,

whether it be mental or physical for that matter. And I think there's lots of misconceptions about meditation. So a lot of people hear, Oh, I should meditate. They try. They often say, Oh, it's not for me or it didn't work or a whole host of other things. So Dr. K from your perspective, what is meditation and how can people start to engage with it in their lives? It's a great question. So this is where I think the biggest problem with meditation is that we use one word

to describe what is up to eight different Sanskrit states or more, probably, there's probably 20 or 30, maybe even 100 words for meditation in the Sanskrit language. And they each describe different mental states or states of consciousness. So here's the most important distinction. There are two words that loosely get translated

as meditation. One is dharana and the other is dhyana. So dharana means focusing technique. So dharana is a verb. So when I say I sit down to meditate and it doesn't work for me, there are two things we're talking about. One is an action and one is an effect.

Does that make sense? Yeah. So when some people sit down to meditate and say it doesn't work for me, what are they talking about? They mean my mind is scattered. I have no peace. Everyone's talking about peace.

Everyone's talking about stillness. Everyone's talking about no mind state. I can't do any of that. It's not working for me. So not working is an effect. Yeah. It's different from an action. So the best analogy for this,

so Bhan is a state of mind of a certain state of consciousness, which is very, very positive. We'll get to that in a second. But dharana is sitting down to meditate and bhyan is the state of consciousness that if you are lucky, you achieve while you are meditating. The best example of this, so you're a doctor, right, Dr. Chatterjee? Correct.

I'm having difficulty with sleeping. Can you teach me how to sleep? Yeah, it's a great one. No, of course I can't teach them how to sleep, but I can teach them. I'm confused. Have you never slept before? Yes, I have slept before. Can you teach me how? I can teach you some of the things that you may want to focus on some actions that you can do, which may lead to the outcome of sleep, but I can't actually go and take you directly to sleep.

Great. So what are some of the actions? Okay. So again, it depends on you as an individual, but it could be that I start off in the morning and talk about the importance of natural light. First thing in the morning to help you with your circadian rhythm. I may talk to you about when do you stop drinking caffeine? Okay, you enjoy caffeine. Great, but there's a long half-eye.

Maybe you want to just stick to it in the morning. I may talk about your mind being overly stimulated in the evening and help you understand is there some sort of shut off time where you can move from work time to relaxation time. Light exposure, the time you have your last meal, etc. Great. And if I do all of those things, will I fall asleep? I can't say that for sure, but it's going to increase the probability. There we go.

Right? So that's the first thing to understand, is that meditation is not about sitting and breathing. I can wake up at 5 a.m., I can stop caffeine, I can have zero caffeine during the day, I can meditate, I can exercise, I can have no blue light exposure to my pineal gland before, a couple hours before sleep,

and then I can still not fall asleep. So first thing to understand is meditation is the same way. There's the action that you take, and then there is the state of consciousness that you achieve. When people say meditation doesn't work for me, they are not able to attain the state of consciousness. They're not able to fall asleep.

They can do all the right actions, but they don't get the result. So this is the first thing to understand. Second thing to understand is as you beautifully said, when you're trying to help someone sleep, it depends on you. So the biggest problem in the world today with meditation teachers is that we've started having

trained meditation teachers. We've started offering certifications for meditation. Do you know historically how many years it took to become a meditation teacher? I don't, but if I was to guess, I might even say 20 or 30 years. Excellent. It's 30. That's the average, the average amount of time to become an accomplished meditation teacher, to become a Zen master, to become a Swami is 30 years. Right? So I know you're Indian, but if y'all are familiar with Indian culture, you know, there used to be this cast of people who were priests, they would start training at the age of like

five. And then by the time they're 30, that's when they graduate. It's a 25 year education. Is this similar with yoga, where people are doing a weekend course and becoming yoga experts? Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. So, so now what started to happen is we have very poorly trained teachers because our system of training is like very like factory oriented. The other thing, and this is what really is wild. So what used to happen in the Zen tradition is you could train for 30 years,

but if you have not achieved the right states of consciousness, you don't become a Zen master. There are some people who will go to Swami training, not everyone graduates. Whether you graduate or not depends on your spiritual achievement. But the idea of doing a 30 year PhD and then not getting your degree at the end is completely foreign. I paid my $600.

I want my damn certificate. So we have very poor quality meditation teachers. The other reason that we have very poor quality meditation teachers. The other reason that we have very poor quality meditation teachers in my opinion, is that people are not taught the roots of meditation, they're taught a technique, right? So what happens is I'll train with this person, I became a certified teacher in this tradition,

which means I know one technique. There was a guru or a spiritual master who like understood a lot of meditation and then they taught their disciples, who taught their disciples, who then taught their disciples. But the tradition is dead. It's basically copy pasted, right?

And so think about this as a doctor, like if there was someone 150 years ago who treated a patient with pneumonia with this medication regimen, and then they taught this medication regimen. And then they taught that medication regimen to the person after them, who taught that medication regimen to the person after them

who taught that medication regimen to you. And then you give this person a treatment and they don't get better. What do you say as the meditation teacher? You say, try harder, keep practicing, keep practicing, keep practicing, it'll come. Because meditation teachers are not trained in a variety of techniques.

They're trained only in their tradition. So if you look at this ancient Indian Hindu text called Vijnan Bhairav Tantra, it's a conversation between Shiva and Parvati, which are two gods, we don't have to get into that. Just a conversation between a meditation teacher and a meditation student. And the meditation teacher says that there are 112

fundamental types of meditation. And for every person on the planet, their brain will resonate with one of these types of meditation. And these types are very, very different. So the other problem that I have, and this is what I found is, I mean, people arguably, I'm a successful meditation teacher.

You know, I've taught literally millions of people how to meditate. And the reason that I'm effective is because I don't just teach one technique. What I try to do is understand, at least with my patients, what is your diagnosis? What is going on in the mind? What is the right technique for you?

A simple example of this is when I have patients, everyone tells patients with ADHD, slow down, slow down, your mind is moving too fast. It's a terrible idea. With ADHD, we want to have the mind move as fast as possible. So their meditation involves intense cognitive activity. Because I don't know if you have kids or not, but I'll offer something that I think most parents will agree with, which is if you want your kid to sit still, tell them to run around,

right? Go get your energy out. Go run around, play at the playground for 15, 20 minutes. Go do jumping jacks. If we want, if there's a hyperactive mind, there's too much energy in the mind. How do you get something that is hyperactive to calm down? You engage it. So what I'll tell my patients to do is go outside. There's a hard one. It doesn't work

for most people. There's an easier version of this. Go look at a tree and count the leaves. Count the leaves as quickly as you can. Count every leaf on a tree. So the mind is moving incredibly rapidly. The cognitive strain is a lot and then the mind becomes exhausted and they enter a meditative state. Another really good tip for people with ADHD, everyone says meditate with your eyes closed. Terrible idea with ADHD. People with ADHD require some degree of stimulation to achieve stillness of mind. So if you tell a kid to close their eyes and sit still, if they have ADHD, they'll start wiggling.

They require some kind of interoceptive stimulation. So meditate with your eyes half open or open, meditate listening to music. It all depends on matching the technique to the brain. So if meditation doesn't work for you, you need to figure out, try to find a competent teacher and try to find an array of techniques. Yeah. That's just so interesting.

I guess we draw an analogy with movement, right? We would never say, oh, movement doesn't work for me. We'd understand that we need to find the right form of movement that we enjoy doing, right? Whereas as you say, we think meditation is this kind of one thing. Oh, I tried it. It doesn't work. Which, yeah. And it also makes me think of this again, bringing up this kind of broad terms East V West, right? This idea that we've sort of weaved in throughout this conversation, this idea that actually the allopathic model, the randomized control model, tells us what is the best thing for the average person, for

most average people, right? So we then try and apply that to everyone and it works for some and it doesn't work for others. Diet is a prime example, right? Whereby, again, if you think about this through an Ayurvedic medicine lens, they have understood for thousands of years that actually there are different constitutions in individuals. And depending on your constitution, you are going to benefit from a different flavor, a different balance in your diet. And it's the same kind of principle, isn't it? In meditation, it's like you're saying there's 108 or 112 different forms. I don't think that is, not I don't think,

I know that is not common knowledge with most people, certainly in the UK and the US. Yeah, people think they understand meditation, but I mean, it's very deep, right? So there's literally hundreds, thousands of texts. There's lots of different spiritual teachers, lots of different techniques. And I think if someone says meditation doesn't work for me,

I think that's actually okay. That doesn't mean that you're doing it wrong. Because this is the other thing that I find is crazy is like, you know, when there's a teacher and a student and the student is struggling, it's usually the teacher whose responsibility is to like get the student, you know, to succeed. And so if meditation doesn't work for you,

I would say find a different teacher. And this is what we try to do. So understanding this, right? So we'll have, you know, I've taught probably over a hundred different meditation techniques. It's not, it doesn't map onto the 112 by the way, but I've taught over a 100 different meditation techniques. It's not, it doesn't map onto the 112 by the way, but I've taught over 100 different meditation techniques, if not more, you know, in various YouTube videos,

guides, whatever. And what I've sort of found as a psychiatrist is like, this is the research that I was doing at Harvard, is I was developing meditation programs for particular mental illnesses. So there's a particular regimen for trauma, there's a particular regimen for anxiety, there's a particular regimen for anxiety, there's a particular regimen for depression.

And the really wild thing is like, you know, trauma is a really good example of people will say like empty your mind, right? Like people will say do mindfulness. I think mindfulness is terrible for trauma. So in trauma, we have a mind that has employed all of these psychological defense mechanisms to keep things suppressed, to keep things walled off. And when we create a vacuum in the mind, the trauma comes rushing up and then can oftentimes overwhelm us. Which is why even if we look at evidence-based protocols for treatment of trauma. They do not have mindfulness in its traditional sense.

They have something else called grounding techniques. So a really good example of this is something called ice diving, where you take a bucket of ice, you fill it with water, and then you dunk your face in. So these are the kinds of meditation or grounding techniques that people with a history of trauma will use, because their problem is not that they're... You know, they don't need to empty their mind, they need to shut down their mind, they need to sort of achieve some degree of peace or

balance. They need to break the cycle of like a panic attack or a thought loop or something like that. On that point, when you said mindfulness, can you just clarify what is it you mean by the term mindfulness in that context? Yeah. So oftentimes, that's a great question, but oftentimes when people say mindfulness, they just mean like, just observe your thoughts, right?

So there's a great definition of mindfulness by John Kabat-Zinn who's like, you know, it's non-judgmental awareness in the present moment, I think is what he calls it. The problem is that non-judgmentalness for people with anxiety or history of trauma is like not really achievable early on. So what I find works way better is particular meditation techniques that activate the parasympathetic nervous system in a very, very focused way. So once you activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the mind will be more calm and non-judgmental and this will then be possible. But you can't just like sit and not judge your thoughts. If you have a history of trauma becomes incredibly difficult.

Yeah. One of the practices I've heard you talk about before is where you sit in complete stillness for, I think, five minutes. And one of the things I love when I've heard you describe that practice in various conversations and interviews that I've seen is that you talk about this idea that at some point it gets so uncomfortable that the most luxurious and pleasurable thing in the world becomes your breath. And I thought that was a really beautiful and evocative concept for people to get their heads around the kind of the beauty of the breath as it were. In the sense that a lot of the time, you know, we get told to focus on our breath, but it's like, oh yeah, I don't want to focus on my breath. Like, you know, it's a bit of a pain, but I know I heard it in a podcast that they said focus on my breath, but it's like, oh yeah, I don't want to focus on my breath. Like, you know, it's a bit of a pain, but I know I heard it in a podcast that they said focus on my breath.

But you kind of flip it with this sort of practice where actually you get to the point where you want to focus on the breath. So I wonder if you could explain what that practice is. Does it come under the umbrella of meditation or is it separate to meditation and who might want to consider trying it out? Okay, great question. So the practice is something called Gaia Stereom, which means like holding the body still. So when you hold your body perfectly still, it's going to be okay for a little bit and then it's going to quickly become not okay.

So when you say still, do you mean literally you're not moving a muscle? Well you're going to have to be respirating. But try to keep that to a minimum as well. But if you have an itch, don't itch it. If you feel like shifting your leg because your leg is falling asleep, don't shift it. So over time, what'll happen is you're not used to sitting still, and you won't be sitting perfectly balanced. So over time, muscles are contracting to hold you in place, right?

That if we have to sit up, we're contracting our back, we're contracting our trapezius, our shoulders. There's all gonna be all kinds of sensations that over time get worse. This is the point. So don't do it to the point where you're like, you know hurting yourself, but It'll feel uncomfortable intensely uncomfortable and as it becomes more intensely uncomfortable. You'll be sweating It'll require your full attention to hold it, right? So a good example of this is if you sit against a sit on the wall I don't know if you you know what that means where you're kind of just sitting against the wall.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right? So it's a good abdominal exercise, but like if you hold an uncomfortable position, it becomes painful. And the way that I was taught meditation is by understanding the principles. So people say focus on the present, focus on your breath.

These are things that you don't have to focus on. You can do a certain practice where you have no choice, but to be in the present. As you engage in Kais theorem, the longer you are still at the beginning, you can think about, oh, I'm gonna eat. I have this meeting tomorrow. But as you continue being perfectly still

and the itch on your nose becomes so unbearable, you will literally not be able to think about anything else. And then the only relief that you will have is your breath. And then you will start to breathe because it's all of these sensations, your somatosensory cortex is gonna be going wild. It's gonna be sending you all of these signals to move, move, move.

The only way you can distract yourself from those signals is to breathe. Some people figure it out, some people don't. I'm kind of giving you all the answer, but you'll sort of figure it out on your own. It's the only way to tolerate it is to breathe. And the more deeply you breathe, the more you will be able to tolerate. And then you will fall into the breath. Breath will feel like it is like you're, you know, it's like you're, you're starving

and then you're getting this, this one breath of air that is bringing you some degree of peace. And the feeling is truly ecstatic and it'll take five to 10 minutes. Your only refuge will be the breath. And so the beautiful thing about this practice is everyone says meditation is hard. I can't focus on the breath.

I get bored. I get distracted. I can't be in the present. My mind is running all over the place. That's because no teacher has taught you what to do so that these things come naturally. They're not to be forced. Yeah.

Right, so it's about figuring out a technique that naturally puts you in the present, naturally has you focusing on the breath. And this is the cool thing, just like we talked about over an hour ago, this carries over. So once your brain knows how to find relief in the breath, it will start automatically finding the relief in the breath, it will start automatically finding the relief in the breath. When you feel anxious, when you have difficulty sleeping, when you feel sick, you will take a deep breath and you'll be able to work a little bit better.

You may notice that my voice is a little bit hoarse right now. I'm sick. And yet some of the practices that I engage in on a daily basis, you saw the meditation cushion at the beginning, allow me to be more functional because now my body knows, right? Like I know how to maintain focus and things like that. So all of this being present focused, all of this stuff about sort of finding relief in periods of hardship will increase your distress tolerance and

will allow you to tolerate the difficulties in life, manage the difficulties in life way easier. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Secondly, with respect to that practice, it's a really thought-provoking practice, I think, for many people listening right now, I imagine, because you're right, too much of the attention is on, you know, it's like what we said about meditation before, you know, we think meditation is going to give us a clear mind without understanding that it's an action. You take the action, you may get that secondary outcome, you may not, but take the action. And I love this practice whereby instead of saying, oh, I must focus on the breath, I must focus on the present moment,

you will be left with no option but to do so within a few minutes. With that in mind then, and with what we said earlier in mind, this idea that many of us now have been conditioned for comfort or conditioned away from discomfort, it feels to me as though that is a practice that could be applicable to anyone. I mean, I'm already keen to go, well, I want to try that tomorrow morning. I want to actually give that a go and see what happens when my muscles feel tense or my nose wants to be itched or whatever it might be. Is there anyone who shouldn't do a practice like that? Or do you think it's quite a fun or useful experiment for most people to try at some point?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's useful for most people to try at some point, right? So generally speaking, Gaius theorem should be done sitting up straight. So if you've got spinal problems or back problems or things like that, like we don't want to trigger like muscle spasm or things like that. So you always want to be careful, talk to your doctor. But generally speaking, I think Geish theorem is a great practice for someone to try and go into it. It's beautiful.

It's like so easy to just go into it, recognizing this is going to suck for me. Let's see how far I can go. Now you have to be a little bit careful there because ego can come in and you can be like, oh, I'm going to go longer. I'm'm gonna go longer, I'm gonna go longer, I'm gonna go longer. If that's what happens in your mind, you're doing the practice wrong. Because now think about what's happening in your mind.

It's about going further, going further, achieving, achieving. You're not paying attention to the present. You're not focusing on your breath now. The breath isn't a relief. It's very like there's a conquering energy to it of I wanna be hardcore. That'll lead to ego.

So you have to be a little bit careful about that. And there's all kinds of nuances, but generally speaking, I'd say, you know, if you're listening to this, find a safe place. If you don't have any health conditions or anything like that, and try to sit still for 10 minutes without moving a muscle. If you fail, it's okay. Failing or succeeding is not the point. Even if you fail or succeed, the issue is that during the practice itself,

there will be such an intensity of experience. Your brain will be doing all kinds of stuff. Even if you fail for the three minutes that you were suffering and succeeding, your brain is wiring for distress tolerance. The next time you don't get your drink on the train because the app is broken, you've managed this sky-ish theorem for three minutes and that was torture. You're going to have no problem with not getting your drink.

Life will literally become easier. Yeah. One of the practices that I was taught a few years ago now, I mean, there's a chap called Erwin Lacour who founded Move Nat, a natural movement guy. And he has this thing called breath hold work meditation. Okay. And, you know, he, to be clear, he's not, you know, he doesn't attach it to any religion or spiritual practice. He's like, no, he just, he teaches this as a standalone practice. And I did his course and it's basically a breath holding practice, but it doesn't have hyperventilation like the Wim Hof technique, for example, which I know comes from thousands of years ago anyway from

It comes from thousands of years ago anyway, from other traditions. But in essence, without doing any prep work in terms of hyperventilation, you hold your breath and you just take a breath in and you hold your breath. From day one to four weeks later, and it was just a course that was twice a week, I was able to increase my breath hold time from one minute to four minutes and 20. And my physiology did not change. My carbon dioxide tolerance did not change to that degree in three to four weeks. What I learned on that course through his guidance was that the quieter I could make my mind, the stiller I could become internally, the longer I could hold my breath for. So I'm summarizing a lot of teaching from him, but in essence, the point I'm trying

to get across and share with you is that I learned through that practice and I do it regularly still today, that when your body is screaming for you to breathe and you learn how to control and quieten your mind and then suddenly you can go for a minute longer. You literally think I have to breathe now or I'm going to explode and he helps you understand how you quieten everything, your muscles, your mind, your thoughts. I said to my wife, you know, I think a few weeks after that, like, if you can master your mind, when that primal urge to take oxygen is, is overtaking your body, most things in life are easier than that. It's a similar principle, right?

Yeah. So there's so much that you're touching on. So first is this idea of, oh, I need to breathe, I need to breathe. No, you don't, not necessarily, right? So my favorite example of this, I don't know how things are in the UK, but here in the United States, we have long distances that we drive.

And then we sometimes need to go to the loo, as you call it, right? So you stop at a gas station, you go to the bathroom. And it's really interesting because, you know, when you feel like you need to pee, you pull over, you walk into the restroom and you're ready to pee. But if you walk into the restroom

and you see that there is a line and you can't go to the bathroom right away, the intensity of needing to urinate becomes so strong. You're like, oh my God, you start to panic. The moment that you walk into the restroom, your intensity, your desire to urinate shoots through the roof. And if there's a line, then it becomes torture,

it becomes absolute torture. But if the gas station were five minutes further away and there was no line, you'd be totally fine. Does that make sense? Yeah for sure. So it's not it's not a physiologic signal. You're a hundred percent, right? It is in your mind So now the question becomes how do we understand that right? So you're saying if you train this so I'm gonna give y'all So I know you mentioned a technique that I've taught elsewhere. I'm gonna give you a fresh one Okay, it's never been taught before. Okay. This is a really fascinating technique that I've taught elsewhere. I'm gonna give you a fresh one. Okay. It's never been taught before, okay? This is a really fascinating technique

that can be used to erase any bad habit. It's so simple. So, if we understand what a habit is, a habit is a desire or a natural inclination to move in a certain direction, right? I have a habit for caffeine, I have a habit for caffeine. I have a habit for alcohol. I have a habit to, I don't know, pick my nose, whatever.

We have all these kinds of bad habits. So I know this is going to sound kind of weird Rungan, but like if I want to stop drinking alcohol, what do I need to do? Okay. Well, there's a number of ways you could tackle this. Okay. Oh, there's a number of ways she could tackle this. Okay. Oh, okay.

Very simply. All you have to do is not put the alcohol in your mouth. Perfect. If I want to stop picking my nose, how do I do that? Just never ever put your finger in your nostril. Perfect. Right? So, here's the crazy thing.

What skill is that? How would you group together all of those things? You set an intention and you take action. You say, I'm no longer going to pick my nose and you no longer do it. You say, you're always going to take the stairs and you always take the stairs. That's an alignment between your intention and your action. Certainly that's one way I would look at it. Yeah. So it is a way of looking at it is right in one sense and a hundred percent wrong in the other. Because what we're talking about is not taking action. Right? How do I not

pick my nose? It is practicing inaction to break any bad habit. Right? So a bad habit is an action. Right? So you're right. That is very similar. Right? So if you're trying to build a good habit, then you set an intention and you take an action. If you're trying to break a bad habit, you set an intention and you don't take an action. Like literally. Very simple. So now the question becomes, how can we practice in action?

Okay. So can I just work this through with an example? Yeah. Okay. So let's say snacking, right? Because snacking is something that a lot of, or sugar, people struggle with this, right? So let's say someone's sitting there or I'm sitting there and I have an urge to put a cookie in my mouth.

Okay. And I've decided that this is a habit I want to break. Okay. So, okay. So I feel an urge to pick up the cookie. But as you've just illustrated with that needing the toilet example, all these urges are temporary. They don't last forever. They come and they go. When I get that urge, I'm practicing inaction. At that point, I'm

going, no, I'm going to sit with that urge. I'm not going to pick it up and put it in my mouth. And I guess through a process of observation, you'll find that actually, after a short period of time, that urge actually vanishes and it's no longer there. That is fantastic, right? A couple of things. One is we use this technique in addiction psychiatry called urge surfing. Which is this idea that urges will come and go, right?

So the whole problem with human beings is that things don't last forever. My happiness from my wedding day does not last for the rest of my life. Right? Like we don't need a perfect wedding day because it's only one day, but a lot of people get caught up in it. I completely agree with you. And I've said that many times as well. I'd rather have a poor wedding day and a great marriage. Right. Okay. So urges are temporary. There's a problem though, Rangan, which is that since I have trouble with snacking, when I get the urge to eat a cookie, I can't control it.

Right? That's the whole problem. Very simply. So now the question becomes, how can we practice inaction? And when an urge comes, sometimes the urge is overwhelming. This is a struggle that everyone has with their vices every single day. And we usually fail. Okay.

Before you give me the answer then, can we keep working this through? Cause this is really interesting for me. Yeah, absolutely. So here's another way that I'd be looking at it with patients for years. So people who tell me, Dr. Chow, you know I'm really trying to cut out sugar.

And they say I'm really in inverted commas good in the day. But I have my dinner and the kids then go to bed and then I'm in front of the television in the evening on my sofa and I feel like having ice cream. Okay, so I came up with this exercise that I used to call, well, I do call the three F's, the freedom exercise. And I'm gonna share it with you because I suspect you'll have some comments on it.

And the three F's are feel, feed and find. So I said, okay, next time you feel an urge to have Ben and Jerry's at 9pm in the evening, I want you to just pause and before you get up from your sofa and go to the kitchen, I want you to ask the first F, what am I really feeling? Is this physical hunger or is this emotional hunger? Okay? And I won't go into all this in detail, but essentially just try and get them to have a little pause and start to create an awareness of what is actually really going on internally here that's making me feel, oh, you know, I've had a row

with my partner. Oh, the kid's bedtime went on too long. Oh, I've been on zoom calls all day and I feel a little bit frustrated. Okay, great. Then go and have it if you want to. Then I say the next time, do the first F and then go to the second F, which is, okay, now that I know the feeling stress, how does the ice scream feed the feelings of the second F is feed? Okay. Oh, the ice scream helps me at least temporarily feel less stressed. Okay. And you can, you know, there can be all kinds of other things that it does, but let's just use that as an example. Then the third F is find. Now that I know what the feeling is, internal stress. Now that I know how food feeds the feeling, temporarily reduces stress.

Now can I find an alternative behaviour to feed that feeling? And I found it very helpful for many patients, at least in the short term. 100%. Okay, so as a psychiatrist, I love it. There are so many mechanisms that you have stumbled into, like creating a gap, raising awareness, finding cognitive reframing, finding alternatives. It's brilliant. As a psychiatrist, as a meditation teacher, I'm asking you a simple question. So on a simple sense, this is why meditation is so transformative, because it's not a tailored

solution to a specific problem. It is a fundamental that once it clicks for you, it will change the way that you live your life. So how do you practice inaction? Sitting there in stillness and observing. That's it. That's it. So here's the thing. When the cookie is there, it's like trying to learn to swim in the ocean. Terrible idea.

The urge is so strong. This is exactly the problem that people have. They try to fix their problems, which is not how you do it. If your goal is to swim in the ocean, you don't practice by swimming in the ocean. You practice by swimming in a swimming pool. Yeah.

So literally to sit still and to practice sitting still. Just sitting still, just sitting still, that's it. Don't say anything, don't do anything. Even if you want to do Kais theorem, you can do that. If you want to wiggle a little bit, that's fine. But to cultivate the ability to not act is one of the most powerful techniques to break any habit. The strength of a bad habit controlling you

depends on your capacity for stillness. And the crazy thing about this principle is that there is overwhelming scientific evidence that this works. If we look at treatment for OCD, if we look at treatment for trauma, if we look at treatment for trauma, if we look at treatment for anxiety, what we find is literally the evidence-based treatments, techniques like you did, which I love, 3Fs

are fantastic. So, in OCD, there is literally something called exposure and response prevention. That is the treatment for OCD. We expose ourselves to the thing that triggers our OCD, and then we prevent the response. That is the cure for OCD. The cure for OCD is to sit still and do absolutely nothing. In trauma, we have two examples of this.

We have something called EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization retraining, which is when we discuss the trauma, we are focusing on something else, we're moving our eyes. So the trauma is not triggering. So once again, we are training non-responsiveness. Literally, these are the evidence-based treatments that we do.

We teach people to sit still in clinical protocols that are specific to a particular thing, which is what your three F's is. Yeah. So literally, if you practice just sitting still, practice in action, what you will discover is that bad habits will become way easier to manage and something really cool happens,

which is that most of the problems that you have in your life are going to be because you react. Yeah. I love that. I absolutely love it. You say it's the root cause of a lot of mental illness. It, to me, it seems to be the root cause of everything. The root cause of, you know, much of our habits that lead to physical health problems,

mental health problems, and unhappiness, right? When you can sit still with yourself, certainly this has been my experience and imagine yours as well, or I don't want to assume, the better you are at solitude or just sitting there doing nothing without the need for stimulation or distraction, the easier every aspect of life becomes. Would you agree with that

statement or would you frame it slightly differently? Absolutely. So let me say, now we're going to go back to East versus West for a second. Let's understand something. The more specific the problem, the more effective a targeted technique is. That's what Western medicine is really good at. You've got pneumonia, take this antibiotic. This Eastern perspective is much more global, but is way harder to implement in the moment. Requires a ton of investment. You need to practice sitting still every single day.

Right? So it's a great example contrast of, one isn't better or worse. It's do you want a global benefit that is because it's a great example contrast of one isn't better or worse. It's do you want a global benefit that is because it's so simple is actually way harder to do. I said it works. I didn't say it was easy. Yeah.

I don't know if this is a relevant example, but it feels, you know, let's say people, I'm sick with food because that's just something we're talking about. And of course, something that many people struggle with. One way to reduce your consumption of sugar or snacks or ultra processed foods, one way, or one thing that can be helpful is to not keep that stuff in your house, right? So when you're tired and stressed one evening, you come back from work and your willpower is low and you're like, I just feel like something, if it's there and easy, you're going to have it. If you have to get in the car, drive 10 minutes somewhere to go and get it, it's just a little bit of friction between you and that behavior. At the same time, that's not the root, right? That is a management

strategy that is helpful. Really, you want to get to the point where you're not dependent on your external environment being a certain way in order for you to engage in helpful practices. And I think you're right with that. This sort of East West perspective. I love that because it's not easy, but it's much more effective, long lasting and beneficial for a variety of different things than the short term. And so for me, and presumably for you as well as a clinician, it's what does that patient necessarily need at this moment in time? Or what do I believe is the most helpful thing?

I need a strategy to help them reduce it right now. 100%. And so sometimes you do a short term recommendation whilst, like you say, sometimes you'll give the stimulant or you'll give the medication as part of a wider program. That I think is the best strategy. Agreed. There's a long term, more permanent permanent change and then there is the immediate thing that you need, which totally makes sense. Now let's go to happiness. So what is happiness

Rangan? Inner peace. What does that mean? Okay. Okay. There's two ways I'd like to answer this. Okay. The first way is that I believe that happiness is a skill that can be cultivated. That happiness is not something we directly go for. The model that I use for happiness or have used is there are three components. There's alignment when your inner values and your external actions start to match up, contentment and control. Okay? A sense of control. Not controlling the external world, things that you can do that give you a sense of control. Okay?

So if you work on those three things and there are practices you can do to work on those three things, the side effect is that you're going to be happier more often. Okay? So that's the practical way that I view happiness. But when you asked me what is happiness, because I think about this all the time. I can tell. I think this is a state, I say in a piece, but I guess to expand upon that a little bit more, I mean the state of minimal reliance where I am no longer or not dependent on the world around me, the people around me, the comments

around me to be a certain way in order for me to feel a certain way. So it's this minimal reliance on the external world. And I guess in many ways, maximally reliant on myself. It also echoes with what you're saying about this ability to just sit in stillness. Inner peace to me is if you can sit in silence for an hour and not get frustrated and not necessarily need to distract yourself, I would argue that you are, you know, quite a bit on the way to getting that inner peace. Okay, great. So here you are with these like three things like alignment, autonomy, agency.

So the key thing is that you figured out a method that if you apply this method and you cultivate these skills, you will get some result, right? But here's the thing. The skills are not the happiness. The happiness is the result of the application of the skills, right? Yeah. Okay. So let's get rid of all the skills because that's not what happiness is.

I asked you what is happiness, not how to achieve it. You're already giving me how to achieve it, which I don't disagree with at all. There's a ton of research that I'm sure you've done. If you haven't, I can back up everything that you said with piles and piles of research about why it's effective, how it's effective, what happens in your brain, what happens in your psychology. It's a fantastic methodology, I mean that.

But that's not what happiness is. What is the end result of all of that? Ideally happiness. So let me ask you a different way. How do you know you're happy? I love these questions. Okay. I absolutely love them. How do you know when you're happy? Okay. Yeah. Okay. But okay. A lack of desire. Okay, great. So now let's look at desire. So the moment that I have a desire, I want to eat a cookie. Am I still happy if I'm ordering something from the train car app and I'm not getting

it? Am I happy? No, no, I have a desire that is unfulfilled. Therefore I am unhappy, right? Yeah. Okay. So people go through life wanting things and not getting them and they are unhappy, correct?

Correct. And this is what we see with technology, right? You said that in the 80s, perfectionism was on the rise. So in the 80s, we started getting these billboards, beautiful, these billboards of people who have stuff that we don't have. The advertising industry wants to teach us that there have stuff that we don't have. The advertising industry wants to teach us that there are things that we don't have

that if we got those things, we would be happy, right? Body dysmorphia is on the rise because of social media and fitness influencers. There are all kinds of unhappiness that is, we're literally as a global population becoming more unhappy. And our unfulfilled desires are going up. So when a human being has a desire, how do they achieve contentment again?

So the dude at the train wants the cappuccino or whatever, beer, whatever he's drinking, water. How does he, what does he think will lead to his happiness? He thinks that getting that drink is going to lead to happiness. Right, and why does he think that? One of the reasons he thinks that is because he's thirsty. So therefore I have the drink, I'm no longer thirsty.

So that's- There we go, right? So what percentage of human beings chase their desire? Hundred percent. Yeah, right 100% this is not bad societal conditioning I would argue that when 100% of human beings and basically every animal on the planet Chases its desire The reason for that is because the satisfaction of our desires brings

us happiness. So this is the key thing. The reason that everyone chases desire is because chasing desire works, right? That's why we do it. Now here's the key thing to understand. When you, when you satisfy a desire, what happens to your internal state? It changes from discontent to content. What is the nature of contentment?

How do you know your content? Because you no longer want for that thing. I did want that thing. I got it and I no longer want for that thing. I did want that thing. I got it and I no longer want it. Okay. So let's say I'm sitting in a state of contentment. How do I become discontent? Your internal state changes.

And what is the nature of that change? Some internal dis-ease. What was the nature of the disease? Oh, you get a feeling. You have a emotion, you have an urge, like something internal comes up for you. So would you argue, so let's say I am walking down the street

and I am content and I see you eating a cookie. And then suddenly I'm discontent. What do you think the nature of my discontent is? In that scenario, envy, comparison? Great, whatever, right? Something, there's some activity. Yeah. Inner peace is stillness.

Inner peace is a lack of activity. The moment that I have a desire, there's activity in the mind. I want it, oh, I shouldn't eat it. If I eat it, I'm gonna get fat, right? So there's activity in the mind. Oh, there's an advertisement for a video game I don't own. Now I'm, now my mind has activity and it is grasping for things.

When the mind receives what it grasps for, the mental activity disappears, right? Now I'm content. So happiness, here's the crazy thing. So here we are, but our default state is actually happiness. Our default state is when there's nothing going on, when there is a complete absence of whatever. And this is why people love sleep. This is why people love drugs.

Drugs give us neutral mental activity. They remove mental activity. Hetamine is so addictive, it's a dissociative agent. It allows us to unplug. So this is the crazy thing. Happiness is actually our default state. Desire comes and ruptures our connection to happiness by creating some kind of activity.

And then when we satisfy the desire, the desire goes away. And once the desire goes away, we're back to happy. Does that make sense? Yeah, 100%. Right, so this is where a lot of people think that fulfilling your desires is the way to happiness, but it's not fulfilling it, it's restoring your original state of balance.

I really need to use the restroom. What would restore me to balance that urge going away, right? Yeah. So the way that I, this is, it's kind of a, it's an interesting shift and I encourage everyone to think about is that instead of thinking that fulfilling your desires causes you achieve to happiness,

your desires interfere with your connection to happiness. Because even if I have a desire for a cookie and I see you eating a cookie, the moment my desire for a cookie goes away, whether I satisfy it or not, the moment the desire goes away, then I'm happy again, agree or disagree? Yeah, agree.

So it's not that you, and the only, the thing is that the simplest way for us to make a desire go away is to satisfy it but as you astutely pointed out it only goes away for a little while and Now what we've done is trained our neurons to deal with desires in a particular way Which is to satisfy them and then we have a huge problem because our brain develops tolerance.

So no amount of indulging our desires will ever bring us lasting happiness because the first hour of video game I play, I enjoy it a lot, hour number five, hour number six, the whole problem in life is that whatever we do to make us happy has diminishing returns. So the more we do that crap, it stops working. And then we're kind of stuck to square one.

That's why fulfilling the desire of the cookie never really works. And then there's the other problem, which I kind of alluded to, which is that we're training our brain to seek, we're teaching ourselves that the only way to be happy is to fulfill our desires, which is technically not right. The reason that our fulfilling our desires makes us happy is because it removes the desire. It is the removal of desire that makes us happy

and fulfillment removes it, right? It's just one of the ways to remove it. You with me? 100%, yeah. And now we get back to where we started which is technology so what technology does is We have a disrupted state of mind I don't feel good about something and then when we when we get bored with one tick-tock. Why do we swipe?

The moment we get bored. There's an increase in mental activity. Now I'm thinking about this. Now I'm thinking about that. Now I'm thinking about this. Why do we love binge watching a show? Because when we're binge watching a show, we become absorbed in it. When we become absorbed in it. When we meet when you met your wife and you guys went on your first date, and you were just with her, and you guys went on your first date and you were just with her and you guys lost all track of time. Why does that feel so blissful? Because there may be some degree of mental activity, but the key thing is that

there's like kind of one pointedness of the mind. There's peace within you. There's not a longing for anything else. Yeah. Now, one last thing that I wanna mention is you mentioned emotion. Emotion does not destroy our happiness. So I don't know if you know this, but there are movies that are sad.

Did you know that? I did know that. Yeah. Isn't that wild? Why would someone pay money to feel sad? Yeah. So when I am caught up in a sad movie, I love it feels so good to cry But once again, that's because of the state of peace. I'm absorbed in it. It is one-pointed

Emotions don't destroy our happiness. It is the associations with emotions that destroy our happiness The reason sadness destroys my happiness is why am I sad? Oh, I'm sad because I don't have a girlfriend. I don't have a boyfriend. I'm alone. There's a desire with your emotion. Anytime you experience desire with an emotion,

the emotion will be painful. But otherwise, when we're watching a movie, we're crying, oh my God, I'm so sad. It's heartbreaking. And I'm loving it because there's no sad, it's heartbreaking, and I'm loving it because there's no desire. There's no wanting with the emotion. This is what so many people miss out on.

And so the cool thing is that as you develop a sense of inner contentment through practices, through sitting still, whatever you want to do, whether you're meditating with your eyes open, whatever, as we start to recognize that your base default state is happiness, and the more time that we spend sitting in that space, even negative emotions will no longer touch us. We will be able to feel the full breath of emotion that life has to offer, and we will be peaceful. And once we are peaceful in the face of negative emotions, our reactivity goes down. We can see things clearer.

We are happier. We can lose a loved one and recognize that their life was a beautiful thing. We can feel that grief and that loss. The problem with grief and loss is that we want them to be alive again. It's not that we lost them. Pay attention very clearly to yourself. You'll discover all of these things. And so the problem with technology and mental illness today is that it is moving us towards

more desire, more desire, more desire, more activity of the mind. What is boredom? Boredom is your brain trying to calm itself down. Boredom is so painful. I'm thinking down. It's boredom is so painful. I'm thinking this, I'm thinking this, my mind is all over the place. When we're bored, we're not still, we're the opposite of still.

We are seeking stillness through some kind of activity that will quiet me down. Are you happy? So this is what I would say. I have periods where I'm connected to my peaceful self and periods where I'm not connected. And even in the periods where I'm not connected, the more I can look at that and say, you know what?

I'm unhappy right now. The more peaceful I become. So what? Of course I'm gonna be unhappy at times. What was I expecting? So this unhappiness is part of my life, whatever. If I'm unlucky, there'll be a ton of it and I'll have a ton of suffering.

So be it, that's my karma. It's some amount of random chance or my choices or whatever. Whatever crap life sends my way, whatever amount of discontent, whatever amount of failure, whatever amount of crap I deal with, that what was I expecting? If it sucks, it sucks, so be it. Do you have less desires today than you did 10 years ago?

100%. And way less, I have 1% of the desire that I had when I was a freshman in college and decided that I wanted to be, I have 1% of the desire that I had when I was a freshman in college and decided that I wanted to be, I was pre-med and I was gonna be one of the best doctors on the planet. I wanted to go to Harvard Medical School and promptly failed out of college. And then let go of all of that desire,

went to medical school, it was embarrassing. One of my mentors called me at 7 p.m. on a Friday and said, where are you? We're at the award ceremony. I'm here to present an award for you. Like no one's seen you. And I was like, I didn't realize I was getting an award. I didn't even check my grades.

I didn't, I mean, I knew I hadn't failed because someone would have told me, but I never even looked at my grades in med school. So the really paradoxical thing is as we let go of our desires, we become more productive, we become more content, our best self comes forward. We're able to apply an undisturbed mind to the problems of our life. Yeah. Now I, I, I mean, I love it. I mean, I'm in total agreement and the, the, the reason I ask is just out of pure interest. The reason I answered your question on what is happiness,

a lack of desire is because I've thought about this a lot over the last couple of years. How do you, how do you know when you're happy? Cause I know that I've thought about this a lot over the last couple of years. How do you know when you're happy? Because I know that I've never felt this content and calm and connected in my life. I haven't and I've shared that journey on this podcast for a number of years now. So I don't need to repeat all the things that I've necessarily done over that time period. But one of the things I've noticed is I just, I don't have a desire for things anymore. I live quite a simple life. Yeah, sure. I like spending time with my wife and my children and going to see my elderly mother and recording my show each week and you know, I enjoy these things, but I can't put my finger on one, you know, the

internet wants to know what was the one thing you did that got rid of your lack of desire? Well, it wasn't, certainly for me, I can't put my finger on one thing. So you asked me, am I happy? And what was my answer? How would you describe my answer? Well, you said some version of I have periods where I feel connected with my inner peace. Other times where I'm taken away from that, but even when I'm taken away from it, I'm able to, I guess, be a little quite detached

and observe that and not sort of get caught up into it. Luke Farris On a good day, I'm content with being unhappy. Yeah. Luke Farris You with me? Because the moment that you are okay with being unhappy, you don't have to chase happiness. Now, here's the problem with everyone who asks you that question. What is the one thing you did to be happy? That in and of itself is a desire. Their desire for happiness.

Remember, desire gets in the way. If you have a desire for happiness, you will never be happy because it is the very thing that is blocking your happiness. Yeah. And it relates to what we said before about discomfort, right? A lot of people find the feeling of unhappiness uncomfortable, but you just said, I'm on my good days. I'm okay with being unhappy. I'm okay with the discomfort, with the uncomfortable emotions that are there within me. And it's a subtle difference, but very, very important. I'm in a really introspective space at the moment. I've just come off a crazy six months

that I chose. I've launched a new book, a book I'm very content with and I believe to mean my best work yet. I've then done a national theatre tour around the UK talking about a lot of these ideas. And I'm now in a period where I've realised, actually, you know what? The last six to eight months have been very outward focused. Some elements of my life, I felt pretty content throughout it to be fair, but now I want, not that I want, I'm now looking forward to a few months off, more structure and routine and not traveling and just, you know, getting deep into my movement practices and things that I enjoy doing, not that I don't enjoy my work. Okay. And what was really interesting is that, you know, you do all these tours and you know, you meet all these

these other influences, right? When I was preparing for this conversation, I noticed that you've been on some of the big podcast shows and it's very clear watching that some, certainly from the way I could see it, have this insatiable quest for more, which you picked up on and you sort of unpicked with some of the hosts, which I found really interesting because it feeds into this, I think, one of the kind of seductive lies of the modern world that many people and many children growing up today in this digital world end up believing in such a big way that more things, more downloads, more so-called external validation driven success is what's going to make me happy.

Whereas, like, I don't know, it was quite interesting to see how many hosts probe you on that because these are a lot of the time the people that people are looking up, so you're thinking, I want that life. But it's like, are you sure you want that life? You may not want that life, that insatiable quest for more, which I've been there before, right? So, I know what that feels like and I certainly feel like mostly come out the other side. Any comments on what I've just said? Yeah. So I think, so a couple of things. One is your spot on that this is what our society values.

Yeah. Okay. And are you sure you want that? I think the answer is yes. Because you can be chasing small desires and be financially not so successful, or you can chase big desires and be financially very successful. Right, so I think that people aspire for these things, because I think if you are rich and powerful

and good looking and have an impact on the world, if you have autonomy and agency and power and can, there are the things that you talked about earlier. I think many of these very successful people align with that. So if you're someone who is full of desire and unsuccessful, is it better to be someone who's full of desire and successful and rich and powerful? Sure, why not? And you are settling on something else, which is what I found.

So I work with broke gamers and I work with billionaires. And the reason that I work with both of these people is because there are some fundamentals of the human condition about the nature of desire, the nature of contentment. Yeah. Are these lessons that can be learned without having gone through it, right? Do you have to, you know, I love what you said about, you know, satisfying all those desires first before you come out the other side. You know, I mean, how do you think about that with your own children, for example, if you're willing to share?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So why would you want to get to the other side without the experiences? I wouldn't. Right? How would you want to get to the other side without the experiences? I wouldn't. Right, so I think that the problem once again is in the question. So why do we place so much value on the other side? So the experiences in my case were really difficult. So there's this natural idea of, okay, can I jump ahead?

Can I avoid all this pain and suffering, right? And get to where I am now. And what I've come to realize is there's no pain and suffering and pain and suffering. You can't know that until you go through the pain and suffering, right? I don't know if that kind of makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But like, I mean, there is pain and suffering and pain and suffering too, but I think that this idea, and if you think about it, there's a grasping. That's the problem is that you want your life to be different. You want your life to be optimized You want to skip steps that thinking in and of itself will never get you there The quick fix the hack that yeah, all that stuff is like all this bypassing and People can try to bypass and I'm like all fine.

If you want to be efficient, be efficient, but except what comes except that. So what I do with my kids is I'm not their guru. I'm no one's guru and I'm not sure I'm an influencer or whatever, but like I'm their dad. So my dharma, my duty to them is to be their father, to pass along what I have to share, but they're not my students. I've tried to make them my students. They're not interested.

So then I realized, oh, this is about me. This is like, here I am, you know, you get watched by 15 million people a month and my kids don't wanna learn from me. Like people will come from all over the place to like learn meditation from me and my kids kinda don't wanna learn meditation from me like people will come from all over the place to like learn meditation from me and my kids kinda don't wanna learn meditation from me. So be it, like that's fine.

I'm gonna spend my time playing Dungeons and Dragons and teaching them how to play Monster Hunter on PS5. That's what they want from me, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna pay their bills, I'm their dad. Right, there's thousand other people, they can watch your podcast, let them learn from you. That's fine. Yeah, I love that.

And at various times throughout this conversation, you mentioned these documents that you've created, these, for trauma, you mentioned, I think you mentioned for something else. I think you may be new to a lot of my audience. And first of all, your YouTube channel is just phenomenal and full of wisdom, brilliant videos about a whole variety of different topics. I would tell people to don't get distracted with the name healthy gamer. It is, to me at least, it is for everyone. There's, you know, I can't imagine anyone will go on there and not learn something about life and themselves, but for people who want to learn more from you, where would you have them go?

Yeah, so I think the YouTube channel is a great place to start. So basically what they're going to find on YouTube is exactly what they heard here today. You're right, it's not so much about gaming. It's about weaving together the modern problems of the digital age, understanding them through neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and spirituality. And then, you know, so go to the YouTube channel is great. The other thing that I did mention is we do have so I built certain guides to mental health, which is my take on common conditions like depression, anxiety, ADHD, and they're full of basically similar stuff

to even what you described. So there are all kinds of meditation techniques in there, my understanding of these conditions in a way that we discuss this stuff, right? So it's like, it's not just these are the diagnostic criteria, it's like, what is depression? Is depression normal for some people because their life is genuinely bad?

What are the different ways in which trauma shapes your physiology, shapes your brain, shapes your psychology, shapes your identity, shapes your relationships? So we kind of go into a lot of depth and detail on those kinds of things. And then the last thing, since we talked about kids some is it's interesting because I wrote a book that was not for my target audience. I wrote a book about parenting so that we can equip parents with the skills to teach their children how to develop a healthy relationship with technology. So I wrote it's kind of weird, but I wrote the book that I thought the world needed,

which is that there's a whole generation of kids who are spending way too much time on screens. Parents are struggling because parents are up against like Google and Meta who have all of these engineers that are designing all of these applications to get your kid to be on a phone. How can you compete with that? So if people are interested in parenting stuff

and sort of helping their kids, it's the most common problem I hear about. So definitely check out How to Raise a Healthy Gamer, which is a book. And where, and these guides, where do they find them? Is it on your websites? Yeah. So you can just go to healthygamer.gg and then it'll be, it'll be there. Yeah. Amazing. Hey, I can't say how much I've enjoyed today's conversation. It was so much fun. And just finally, for that person who has been listening and they've heard something that's just sparked something inside of them. It sparked something where they feel, you know what, I'm kind of, I have been feeling lost, I have been feeling a little unmotivated, I have been feeling

as though I'm someone who's full of desires and I can never satisfy them all. And they're looking for some kind of final words of wisdom from you. What would you say to them? So if someone's listening to this conversation, you feel a spark of this resonates with me. I'm too full of desires. I'm uncontent. I'm I can't control my mind. What should I do? Nothing in the past. When you've had this feeling and you've chased this feeling, where has it gotten you? See, the moment we feel discontent and we feel a longing to act, and then the discontent goes away

and then we no longer follow through. So oddly enough, what I'd encourage everyone, like, I mean, so if you're listening to this, examine your own life. And when you feel a little spark of something, what do you usually do? You usually chase it. And then it fizzles.

So don't live your life based on these sparks. I mean, should you pursue something? By all means, go and learn, read a book, whatever. I'm not saying practically don't do anything, but don't do it reflexively. Take a moment and just do nothing. And interestingly enough, that may help you, because if chasing your sparks has not led you to where you want to go, try not chasing them.

Try being still. Try doing absolutely nothing and see where that leads you. I love it. Dr. K, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. And I really hope we get to do this in person at some point in the future. Yeah. Looking forward to it, man. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information.

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