HealthyGamerGG - Broke and Almost Broken | Dr. K’s Best Realistic Advice

Episode Date: October 25, 2025

Dr. K responds to a listener on the edge facing eviction, job loss, and deep self-loathing with a grounded look at what it takes to rebuild when life falls apart. He explains how chronic stress hijacks the body and mind, making it impossible to think clearly or connect with others until basic stability is restored. Through a mix of neuroscience, compassion, and lived experience, Dr. K shows how to move from helplessness to small, concrete steps that restore control and dignity. Topics include: How survival stress blocks motivation and emotional regulation Why material stability (food, sleep, shelter, income) must come before self-work The “Housing First” principle and what it teaches us about recovery Practical job-hunting tips: resume polish, in-person networking, showing up How walking helps discharge anxiety and unlock mental clarity Turning abstract negative thoughts into actionable, contextual steps Why burnout makes empathy—and social connection—feel impossible HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3Szt HG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQJump Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey y'all, just a reminder that in addition to these awesome videos, we have a ton of tools and resources to help you grow and overcome the challenges that you face. We've got things like Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health, personalized coaching programs, and things like free community events and other sorts of tools to help you no matter where you are on your mental health journey. So check out the link in the description below and back to the video. Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Ocanogia, but you can call me Dr. Kay. I'm a psychiatrist gamer and a psychiatrist gamer. and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

If you're facing eviction, if you're looking for a new job, if you're working on self-acceptance, self-love, whatever, if you're trying to make new friends, being exhausted, run ragged, etc., is like not going to help you over the course of 30 days. You're walking around, you feel terrible, you don't know how to social, or you're struggling to socialize. And like, yeah, it's going to be very hard to empathically connect with other human beings because you're burnt out. You know, as long as your material situation is problematic, it is very hard to achieve mental peace.

Hello, Dr. Kay. I have a question about feeling accomplished at the end of a long day. I am currently trying to find a steady source of income until my employer puts me back to work. My bills are coming up and I face eviction. I can only control what I can control and yet I still feel extremely. me disappointed in myself and like a constant failure. I have carried his self-hatred in me for a very long time and I also feel like I will never be good enough for myself nor anyone else. It has gotten so bad that I no longer feel comfortable inside my own house and I either ride my bike or walk around aimlessly

until nightfall. I can only describe this as hell on earth for me. Is there any general life advice you can give me about making money or meeting new people would be beyond appreciated? Yeah. So this is like, first thing is like this is brutal, man. So, you know, this person is describing living in what they describe as hell on earth. And, you know, I think there's so many things going on here. I think it's a great voicemail because it highlights like how many dimensions are involved when our life becomes, as he puts it, hell on earth, right? So the first thing is, I think this is like something that we generally speaking grossly underestimate in the field of psychiatry, just how bad some, or how someone's mental state is influenced by their circumstances.

So generally speaking, I'm a pretty lucky guy. I've had things go my way most of the time, but I have had some rough patches in life. And one of the things that I still remember, I was, when I was about to start medical school, I had talked to some people who were like also starting in the class. And I had found, they'd sort of found a place. And I had, I had, I had, sort of found roommates like two other first year medical students and sort of like, you know, they felt really confident and they sent pictures and things like that. And I was like, you know, I'm glad you guys found a place. I don't want to sign a lease until like I've seen the place. So I went to go see the place and I noticed that there was something really weird, which is that there's like

two, there were three bedrooms and one of them was tiny and the other two were like pretty big. And so I was like kind of confused about the rent split and things like that. So like things just sort didn't work out. We weren't, we weren't able to come to an equitable solution. And I'm starting med school in like three days and then suddenly I don't have a place to live. And I remember like not being able to eat also wandering around like anytime I would eat food, I would feel incredibly nauseous. Here I am like this is my shot. Like I finally made it in med school. I'm like working really hard and and like I don't have a place to live. And the thing that I really learned there was just physiologically like all of the yogic training and all that stuff kind of went out the window.

when your physiology is running ragged. So my cortisol level was through the roof. I was unable to eat. I was unable to eat sleep. I was like incredibly restless. And so the first thing that I kind of noticed is this person said, I'm looking for some way to make money while my job is like, has me on hold or something.

And if y'all are struggling in life, if you feel really bad about yourself, the first thing that we have to understand is that if you are in a chronically high stress state, right? Where like your job has you on hold, you're being threatened with eviction and you're scrambling to like make money, that in and of itself is going to be a gigantic stressor. And one of the things that I think we've got to be really careful about is in assuming that if this is the situation that we're in, if this is what our life actually looks like, if we have very real material threats that our mental space is not is going to be very difficult

to fix while these threats exist. And that's just because of the effect of those threats on our brain and our body. Motivation comes and goes, but sometimes it isn't about pushing harder. It's about finding the right support. That's why we developed HG coaching. Coaches will help you turn thoughts into actions, actions into habits, and habits into a different life than the one you're living right now. People who go through our coaching program experience, on average,

a 58% improvement in the sense of direction and purpose in life, and also experience reductions in feelings of stress and anxiety. Real change doesn't happen overnight, and it rarely happens alone. So if you all are interested in getting unstuck and moving forward, check out the link in the description below and give HG coaching a shot. So when we have a high level of cortisol in our system, when we have sympathetic nervous system activity, it does the following things.

The first thing that it does is activates our reticular activating formation. This is a little part of our brain right at the brain stem. This part of our brain governs wakefulness. So this is the part of our brain when it turns on, it wakes us up. Right? So when you're asleep and then when you wake up, like, you know, something in your brain is telling you like, hey, it's time to wake up.

So cortisol hyperactivates the reticular activating formation, which means that sleep. is difficult. So sleeping is difficult. The second thing that's going to be doing is messing with your blood sugar. It's going to be causing you to release a bunch of like glucose into your bloodstream in preparation for kind of this fight or flight response, which can also explain why like we walk around so much because we feel incredibly restless. And the problem with these stress states is that they're designed to help us sacrifice long term health for immediate survival. Right. So why does our brain keep us from sleeping. It's because when these systems evolved, we were trying to avoid

tigers in the jungle or being eaten by lions or hyenas or whatever. Right. So what the body sort of says is that it's really important for you to not sleep over the next 24 hours or sleep very lightly, don't get restful sleep, so that we don't get eaten in our sleep. The problem is the problems we deal with in today's world are long term. They're chronic, right? So if you're facing eviction, facing eviction means that the threat persists for like 30 days. And then we run into a really interesting problem, which is that since we're facing this threat for 30 days, our body gets run ragged.

And as our body gets run ragged, our capacity to deal with our problems becomes impaired. Because if you're facing eviction, if you're looking for a new job, if you're working on self-acceptance, self-love, whatever, if you're trying to make new friends, being exhausted, run ragged, etc., is like not going to help you over the course.

of 30 days. So this is where like the first thing that I got to say is that, you know, as long as your material situation is problematic, it is very hard to achieve mental peace, mental healing, mental growth, take whatever you want to put it. And this is where, you know, you're kind of saying, okay, like my job has me on hold. Like this kind of stuff really scares me. So on the one hand, I have no idea what your situation is. I have no idea what your opportunities are. But I think a lot of young people get trapped in a work situation which they feel like they can't get out of, and they're at the mercy of their job. And so the first thing that I would consider is like, you're looking for some way to make ends

meet until your job kicks in, but I would also start looking for another job, right? So as long as like material stuff, if you don't have a roof over your head, mental health is very hard to achieve. And there's a really great study that sort of talks about this. There was a program in New York called Housing First. And what used to happen is that if you had some form of addiction, you had to be sober in order to get public housing. Right. So if you wanted like the state to give you a place to live, like you have to pass drug tests. The problem is that without having a place to live, it's really hard to get sober.

Without having a place to live when you apply for a job and there's this really simple part of the application, name, address. When you don't have an address for correspondence, it's really hard to get a job. When you're sleeping on the streets, it's really hard to resist some degree of comfort through substance use. So this was kind of like this really interesting kind of perspective, which is you have to be sober first. And if you can become sober, if you deserve it, then we'll give you housing. But what housing first essentially found is that it works the other way around. If you give people housing first, even if they're using, their ability to engage in mental health care, their ability to get a job, their ability to like not be on the fucking street. so they have a roof over their head, helps them with substance use.

And what we know is that substance use is very, very context dependent. So this is really challenging. And the first thing that I would say is, you know, we have a lot of resources through the healthy gamer community around career-related stuff. We've got an awesome career coaching program, which is probably the most stable, consistent, and successfully growing part of the services we offer at H.G. Started pretty small, maybe about 50 spots, and like it's gradually grown. people find immense value out of it.

That may not be something that's accessible to you right now if you're between jobs and facing eviction. But that's why we also have a lot of like free resources, videos, things like that about getting a job, etc. But I think don't mistake fixing the external things in your life. That has to be done. Otherwise, your brain is just going to be running ragged. So that's sort of like one piece. And in terms of concrete advice, there are simple things.

First of all, polish up your resume. you know, do some research on how to polish up a resume. Second thing is I think, like, networking is really undervalued. So we're reaching the state in the world right now. We're like, applying for a job is a total mess, right? So you have these companies that they sort of did it first where they started using AI. So, like, they started using AI and they started using like these mega websites, like Indeed and Monster.com or whatever, right?

So like, like you had all these employers that are like filtering thousands of applications. And now employers are really upset because the people who are applying for jobs are also using AI. So you have some like automatically generated email where they ask you to upload, you know, you submit your resume and then they have like 15 pages where they want you to manually input your resume. So in a world like this, employers are really unsatisfied. Employees are really unsatisfied. And that's why I think networking becomes really, really important. Right. So go to job fairs.

Go to events or professional events of things that you're interested in. go to conferences, meet people, grab business cards, introduce yourself to all the people at booths, you know, like go to all these booths and just ask people, hey, are you all hiring? Are you all looking for someone who's, you know, are y'all hiring? Just ask, meet people. Go to these networking events and introduce yourself and things like that, right? And I think, like, people are starved for, like, real human beings in a world of AI. So I'd say that, you know, polish up your resume, start meeting people.

You'll be amazed at how many job opportunities arise. Like everyone's like, I'm applying for a thousand jobs a day because that's how it's done nowadays. And meeting an actual human being who's like a decent human being who seems motivated, capable, like showed up, right? Which is what 50% of a job is will be a huge leg up over like all of these faceless, thousand AI generated applicants who are like drafting emails and asking chat GPT to build them a resume. And it's becoming more and more and more generic. Okay. Now we get to the psychological stuff. And this I think is really interesting.

So the first is I'm a huge fan of aimless wandering. And I have had literally years of my life where I used to do that. So when I was in Boston first moved there, didn't really have a job, didn't really have a way to pay my bills and things like that. I used to walk a lot, like hours and hours and hours. I think it's a really great way to process emotions. I used to also like walk to the grocery store, like carrying pounds and pounds and pounds of groceries.

And it would be like a 45 minute trip each way. and I think like that really helped me. So I think that when I hear someone is like wandering around, right, you want to be safe. But I think generally speaking, like that's a form of emotional processing. It's a form of getting rid of all of that excess glucose that your body is dumping into your bloodstream because your cortisol levels are really high. It can actually be really good. So I think that's something that you're doing that sounds really good. For those of y'all that feel stuck, I think walking is a great option.

Now, the last thing that we have to really talk about is you say that you have to walk. and you know you're wandering around because you hate being at home and this is where I think there's a really important bit of work so and that's like what is it that you experience when you're at home what is it that you're actually literally walking away from running away from biking away from because oftentimes when you wander I know that's how it was for me like I had to just get out like I could not be here and for me it was like this this flood of like negativity that would just dominate my mind and like, you, I would think about it and think about it and think about it and nothing would ever get better. So I just had to get the hell out. I had to escape these four walls.

And I'm not saying that you should go home and sit in that mess. But I think a great place to start is when you're running away from your four walls, in the middle of your walk, sit down somewhere and let some of those thoughts come. Let some of that stuff come. Right. So usually when you're in these four walls, you get bombarded with too many thoughts at the same time. And when you get bombarded, you can't really deal with them. But when you walk, something really cool happens. You start to get exhausted. So as you start to walk a lot, your blood sugar starts to drop, right?

Because you're using your muscles, biking, whatever. You start to breathe more heavily, right? So your respiratory pattern changes. You start to take more deep breaths. Your exhalation, your rate of exhalation may increase. You start to physically exhaust yourself. That's why we walk. because when we're physically exhausted, we become mentally calm, right?

So then if you sit down, you'll notice that there is a dullness to your mind. But that dullness is amazing. Rather than having hyperactive thoughts that are like looping, looping, looping, looping, now that you're exhausted, now that you've walked, your parasympathetic nervous system kicks in. You're running out of blood glucose, right? So then you're starting to calm down, sit on a park bench somewhere, and let whatever thoughts come, let them come.

and just try to pick one or two things to work on, right? You may notice that something floats to the surface, because while you're walking, your brain is doing a ton of processing. And this is where whatever floats to the surface, there's one really critical mistake that a lot of people make, which is that when problems arise in their mind, they view them abstractly.

Okay? So this is a great paper on rumination. And if you look at people who get stuck in their own heads, right? This is rumination. They use an abstract processing style for their thought. and this is a huge problem. So if you're someone who ruminates, who gets one problem stuck in your head,

and you can't solve it no matter, you have a bunch of useless thinking about it. You can't stop thinking about it. You're thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, but it never gets better. One of the reasons it never gets better is because the way that you view things is abstract. Okay?

There is now extensive evidence that there are different processing styles during rumination, each with distinct, helpful versus unhelpful consequences. The processing style characteristic of the phenomenology of depressive rumination, especially the most pathological brooding style, is abstract and analytical. I want you all to understand what this means. If you are abstract and analytical, it will cause problems for your mental health.

Okay. This processing involves general, superordinate, de-contextextualized mental representations that convey the essential meaning causes and implications of goals and events, the why aspects of an action. In contrast, there is a more adaptive processing style, which is more concrete that involves a focus on the direct, specific, and contextualized experience of an event. This processing mode addresses the details of goals, events, and actions that denote the feasibility mechanics and the means of how to do an action. Now, I know that that's a lot of different information, so let's explain what that means. Some of us are abstract thinkers. And what we know is if you study people who ruminate, who think over and over and over again,

what we find is the ones who think abstractly when they ruminate run into all kinds of problems. These are people who generalize things way too much. They also decontextualize things. So they form meta-level conclusions, usually about themselves. that are independent of context. I'm a loser. All women are bitches, right? Now that I've never dated anyone,

I'm never going to be able to date anyone. These are general, superordinate, abstract meta-constructs. I'm screwed. I'm a loser. They're not contextual. It's not that I lost in this situation because of these three or four different things,

and then I lost in this other situation because these three or four different things. or like they don't they remove all context they remove all concrete information and they focus on why right why is the world this way why am i alone why why and they think in big picture oh yeah like there's like all of the elites are now ruining everything in the world and i'm not an elite and there's the elites and i'm a pleb and like they think in these ways and it's not that that stuff isn't true let me be very clear about this this is not about whether that is true or not true. It is about whether it is useful or not useful. And there's research on this, right? The research

on rumination shows that people who brood and think in an overly abstract way, this is not actionable. If I'm a loser and the elites have all the power, what do I do when I wake up on a Wednesday morning? What action do I take? And what's way more useful is a concrete processing, a concrete way of thinking. What is a concrete way of thinking? What is that? the context that put me here? What are the individual circumstances that are contributing to this situation? Because the cool thing is if you think about the context of a particular failure or problem, if you change that context, the outcome of the problem can change, right? If the reason that I failed this class is because my bipolar disorder was way too active, that doesn't mean that I'm

going to fail forever. That means that if I adjust this bipolar variable, right, if I get appropriate treatment for bipolar disorder, then I can pass. So the moment that you add context to your situation, I'm a loser, that's not something that you can fix, right? That's like, what do you do about that? I don't know. So be very concrete. Focus on how. And this is what people with rumination, people who ruminate, who get stuck in their own head. This is what people really struggle with. They have a lot of difficulty thinking in this way. And this is really important to understand. It doesn't mean that you can't think in this way. It just means that it's difficult. So oftentimes what these people will also do is if I ask you what is the context that is creating the situation, they say, I can't think of anything.

And then they conclude that means that there is nothing. Huge mistake. Okay. Just because you can't think of something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And this is exactly where they have difficulty because their brain is not able to see contextual variables. It requires way more stretching. of their calculative function to be able to find these concrete variables. Their brain is very tuned to abstract, big picture,

meta, superordinate kind of ideas. Right? They're deep thinkers, big thinkers. But they have a lot of difficulty thinking about how,

the mechanism, the concrete stuff, the contextual stuff. So what I do is take a long walk, sit down for a little while, let something float through to the surface,

and then focus on the context that is creating your problems. If you have some negative thoughts about yourself, think about the context of your various failures that allow you to form this meta-level abstract conclusion about yourself. If this variable had changed and this variable had changed and this variable had changed and this variable would have changed, what would have changed? In this third instance, if these two variables changed, what would have changed? And then you have your road forward.

Now the goal is going to be focusing on changing those variables. Right. So here you are in a situation where you're lost, you're walking around, you feel terrible, you don't know how to socialize, you're struggling to socialize. And like, yeah, it's going to be hard to socialize. It's going to be very hard to empathically connect with other human beings because you're burnt out. The first sign of burnout is a lack of empathy for other people.

In empathy, if you don't have empathy, it's very hard to form an organic connection with another human being. Doesn't mean you're a loser. Doesn't mean you're an in-cell. Doesn't mean that you're a beta. If you are burnt out, it's going to be hard to connect to other human beings

because your brain is like we don't have time to think about other people's perspectives. We don't have time to feel what other people are feeling because we're way too busy dealing with the excessive amount of feelings that we have.

So it's completely ordinary to be in the situation. Okay, doesn't make you loser or anything like that. But let something float to the surface and think about How can I make this concrete? How can I make this actionable?

What is the context to my situation, which is creating this particular scenario? How can I alter my context to hopefully change in a positive way? Right? So what are the variables that I need to change? That's the way that you need to start thinking. And I remember when I was, you know, wandering through the streets of Boston and feeling really terrible about myself and nauseous, you know, I would sit down at places and I'd be like, okay, like what is like one thing that I need to do? And it started, I still remember to this day,

I said, okay, I need to like get some food in my body. And then I sat down and I like tried for like the course of a day. I tried all kinds of things. And what I settled on was plain yogurt and choking down a bagel. So I could eat yogurt. I could eat bananas. And I was like, I forced myself to eat a tiny bite of like a bagel like one bite at a time. And it took me an hour to eat a bagel because I felt chronically nauseous. Those are the kinds of steps that you need to take because now at least my body has some food. Now it's got some calories because I'm burning through calories. How do I get to bed? Fell in love with audiobooks. Right. So I'm going to listen to an audiobook and I'm going to lay down and it'll help distract myself. Eventually I'll fall asleep and

it's like I like reading anyway. So let me just go ahead and do that. So it's really concrete actions to start to turn your life around. And I think it's incredibly hard to be in the situation I think it's tragic that so many human beings are in the situation that this person described. People are just getting screwed. They're getting like ground down. And hopefully this helps. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life.

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