HealthyGamerGG - COPIUM

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

Dr. K talks about using technology to cope with what's going on around you, how to change your behavior to spend less time with technology, resisting cravings, and a whole lot more about struggling with technology addiction. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And so for those of y'all that are in our community and doing okay, you've still got a lot of work ahead of you. I don't mean that to think is the work is fun. It's fantastic. It's so rewarding. But there's a lot. All right. So is it okay to use technology and media is a safety net slash coping mechanism? Hi, Dr. Kay.

I was recently listening to your discussion about improving sleep. And you mentioned that as we humans, as humans, we tend not to give ourselves enough time to mentally process our thoughts. And that we usually will use distractions such as gaming, social media, Twitch, YouTube, to repress certain thoughts. I'm someone who does this almost all the time, and I want to know how I can break away from this mindset and allow myself to be able to sit with and process my thoughts. A bit of information about me, I'm a 24-year-old man currently living at home on a small island in the UK after completing unity degree and working the office for a year. I now only work three days a week for a couple hours doing takeout deliveries with

the rest of my week being free time. I've struggled a lot with anxiety in the past, having had multiple panic attacks with the last couple of months developed into generalized anxiety disorder. My anxiety mainly revolves around thanatophobia and worrying about inevitable events in the future such as loss. I find it difficult to stay within the moment with my thoughts and not get scared, especially when I'm by myself without distractions. I've recently started. I've recently started CBT therapy and have a good support network around with family and friends. Awesome. I'm able to do normal things such as eat properly, go to the gym and socialize. Double awesome. I also don't smoke or do drugs and I rarely drink. Triple awesome. But because of my anxiety, I'm only able to stay

mentally strong in these situations when I have some kind of distraction. This usually comes in the form of having my phone close by and being able to check social media or watch Twitch or YouTube videos are just distracting myself by having a task to do. Even when trying to fall asleep, I'm only able to fall asleep if I have a video or stream on in the background. I've tried limiting screen time and making sure I spend a lot of time outdoors,

but even when the gym, driving stores, et cetera, I feel like the need to listen or watch videos and streams. I'm planning to go to Japan for a year in September on a working holiday, and I hope this will help me as I will be a lot busier and be able to distract myself more naturally,

but I'm still worried about that in my downtime, I will feel scared and lonely. If I'm not connected with other people in some kind of way, the question I want to ask is, is this a healthy way coping mechanism to deal with anxiety? And what are some techniques, alternatives that someone can use to be able to stay calm by themselves and be able to process their thoughts

without worrying in the need to feel connected to stay calm? Thank you if you take your time. to read this, I'm a long time lurker, and I listen to a lot of content on Spotify while working. And it has really helped me improve my view on certain aspects of life. Okay. So this is interesting because sometimes we do a lot of stuff right. We go to therapy. We're careful about substances.

We exercise. We socialize. We've got friends and support groups. But we still kind of feel anxious. We still sort of struggle. to get away from technology. And we're not really sure, right? Because, like, if my life ain't fallen apart,

is it okay to use technology? And how do we know how much of it is okay? Because a lot of times when we talk about things like technology and social media, we're like, er, we got our pitchforks and we're like, no, bad, stop playing video games, stop doing this, stop. It's so bad and toxic, toxic, toxic. And then we also have this sort of idea of someone who's, like, addicted, right?

It's like living at home, doesn't leave their forewheres. walls and stuff like that, right? And sometimes we'll even talk to our community as if all of y'all are like that. But the truth of the matter is that most people within the H.E. community are kind of like this person. Some stuff they're doing really well, some stuff they're working on. So how do you know if I'm not like a degenerate technology user, right? Like how do I know what's a healthy way to manage my anxiety with technology and what's kind of like unhealthy? So there are a couple of different principles that we can sort of look at. The first thing that we've sort of talked about in the past before is that generally speaking,

if it causes a problem, it is a problem. So the first threshold to understand, so I'll get parents who will ask me, okay, how do I know if my kid is addicted to video games? And my answer is pretty simple. If you look at all of the diagnostic criteria for disorders, psychiatric diagnoses that relate to addiction, the most common element is impairment of function. So how do you know if you've got a drinking problem? Well, if it causes a problem, it is a problem.

So if your alcohol is affecting your physical health, if your alcohol is affecting your mental health, if your alcohol is affecting your professional work, if it's affecting your academic work, if it's affecting your relationships, i.e., if someone is threatening divorce because you drink, then it is a problem. So that's when we sort of diagnose something as a disorder. But beyond that, there's a whole range of healthy norms or unhealthy norms even. And so what we really start to got to do is understand how do I know whether this technology is a problem or not. And more importantly, there are some things I've noticed in my life around technology and like, how do I stop doing those? So what I'd love to do today is help you all navigate this question of even if I'm, doing pretty okay. And my life is not falling apart.

Is it okay to use technology? And like, how do I start to distance myself from it? And in doing so, what we're going to do is go through a couple of really, really basic principles of addiction that even matter when people aren't addicted. So this is some basic stuff about the brain and how our brain sort of does behavioral reinforcement so that we can understand how to change our behavior if we want to spend a little bit less time with technology. Okay? What we're going to start with is this. Okay. So I'm able to do normal things such as eat properly, go to the gym and socialize. I also don't smoke, et cetera.

But because of my anxiety, I am only able to stay mentally strong in these situations when I have some kind of distraction. So this is actually the wrong way to think about it. We'll explain a little bit. So what we're going to do, by the way, if you all want to learn about neurobiology of addiction, Nora Voltao is brilliant. The best researcher that I have encountered in terms of the neurobiology of addiction. And what we're going to do is look at a couple of interesting principles here. So let me try to find this. Yeah, okay.

So there's a lot of stuff that. we sort of know about the preoccupation or anticipation stage and stuff that we know about cravings from addiction. So we're going to talk about this for a second. So if, so these are the three things that we kind of need to focus on if you're trying to figure out, first of all, whether technology and social media use is a safe thing to do or whether it's causing problems and how to use it less, even if you aren't necessarily addicted to it. Okay. So the first thing is to understand the process of what it does for you. So, when I feel anxiety in a particular situation and I turn to a device, what does that do to my anxiety?

In the moment and in the future. Let's start by answering these two questions. What does it do to my anxiety in the moment? Numbs it. Excellent. What does it do to my anxiety in the future? What do you all think? Gets worse, compounds.

At best, it stays about the same. So there's something important to understand here. If you are in a social situation, so now I'm going to ask you all, very good, good job. So here's the more advanced question. If I'm in a social situation, so what a lot of people will do, actually, let me take a step back. Once they realize this, they're like, oh, So if I distract myself from my anxiety, it's not actually going to get better. Okay?

So therefore, what I need to do is stop distracting myself and muscle through the anxiety. So if I go to a social situation and I resist the impulse to use the phone, and I resist the impulse to use the phone, and I resist the impulse to use the phone, and my anxiety rises and rises and rises, and then I crack. and I use the phone. What does that do to my ability to resist the anxiety down the road? Did I level up some? What do you all think? So if I resist my phone for the first 15 minutes and then I give in. So some people are saying it weakens it.

Some people are saying it improves things. Some people are saying it's staying the same. So this is where it gets a little complicated, but let me give you all another example. So let's say that my kid walks in and the kid says, Daddy, can I please have watch something on, can I have some screen time? And if I say no, and then they start crying, and then I say no, and then they throw a temper tantrum, and I give in, what does that do for their, what kind of behavior does that shape for them next time around? What is the child more likely to do? What have I reinforced? I've reinforced the tantrum.

So this is what's so devastating for a lot of parents is their kid gets out of control and they give in. And then they come to me and they're like, the more I try to fix this problem, the worse it gets. I've tried everything and nothing works. And they're getting worse and worse and worse. It's because the more that you try to do things, the more that what you're reinforcing for your kid is, the only way I'm going to get this is temper tantrum. Because we're trying this other BS stuff for a little while. that's not working, that's not working. What is the one message the kid gets? Every time you try aromatherapy or listening to this kind of music or we're going to meditate or we're going to do this, all this crap doesn't seem to work. But what is the one thing you're reinforcing throughout all that, which is temperate and jamb, gets you the game? So interestingly enough, resisting cravings and then giving in can sometimes teach our brain that if I really want this thing, I just need to hit him with a level 10 craving. Level one craving won't do it.

Level two, craving won't do it. Level three, craving won't do it. I'm just going to slam this person with this craving that's so hard because that's what gets it to me. And we sort of see this in people who struggle to be sober. Is that the cravings seem to be getting worse and worse and worse over time the more that they fight them. You all get this? So even when it comes to staying strong in a social situation, the only way I can manage my anxiety in a social situation, The only way I can stay strong, which is the phrasing that this person used.

I'm only able to mentally stay strong in these situations when I have some kind of distraction. This is not staying strong, my friend. This is actually breeding weakness. I don't mean that. I mean to realize that was a mean thing to say. But like, really, what you're doing is you're reinforcing the craving and the usage of the thing. Now, this isn't your fault. It's how our brain is designed.

So you're not doing anything wrong in a sense. be expected to know. Right? I'm sorry, that came off as harsher, but that's the truth. You're not actually mentally staying strong because you're using the thing to keep you strong. It's artificial, right? So this is like addiction, craving, behavioral reinforcement, super basic stuff. If you give in to the phone, the phone is what you will be giving into more and more and more and more.

So the first thing is decide ahead of time. Either give into your phone right away. Don't even try to resist it. It's okay to sometimes resist it. I mean, sorry, not even resist it at all. Just give into it completely. Oddly enough, that's the right way to set up healthy technology habits with kids. Dad, can I please have the iPad?

Absolutely. Just take it. Dad, can I have the iPad? No. You don't want to say no all the time. but if there's a no, it's a no. And it ain't going to become a yes, no matter what happens. And since you can't fight all the time,

it's actually healthier to say yes five times and no once, as opposed to struggle to say no every single time and then cave into a yes. Does that make sense? You all get that? You can try to spend your energy and lose six battles, or you can give up five of those battles and win one. Do you all get that?

So I can try to fight with my, kid about the screen and I can fight again and then they throw a temper tantrum and I give in. Then I fight the next time they throw a temper tantrum and they give in. Instead, it's actually better to just say, yeah, you can go ahead and have it. But the one time that I say no, no amount of temper tantrums is going to work. And I may not have the energy to do that every single time. That's the key thing. That's why I have to take a couple of L's to get a couple of Ws. When it comes to your social media usage in social situations or phone usage, that's where you've got to decide before you walk in the door,

is today a day that I'm going to absolutely be off my phone, or is it today going to be a day where I'm allowed to use my phone? And you decide ahead of time. You don't have to beat yourself up. There's a part of you that will say, every time I'm going to never use my phone again. And then you get into this situation where you're going to lose all those battles

because you're spreading out your willpower amongst each of these things. So you have to let yourself use the phone and don't let yourself use the phone. at particular times. Just be very clear about it ahead of time. You can alter that reinforcement circuitry in your mind. So today is a day that I'm going to be technology-free.

It's going to be tough. That's principle number one. So don't give in to the craving. That's the worst thing. The thing is you can satisfy it right away before even a craving even happens. Or resist the craving to the bitter end. But don't give in to a craving, especially as it ran. ramps up. Okay? That's issue number one. Issue number two. Even when I'm at in the gym,

stores, driving, et cetera, I feel the need to listen to podcasts or watch videos and streams. So second thing that our good friend Volkow discovered is that there are six discrete neuroscientific deficits and people who have addictions. One of those deficits is a lack of awareness of your internal state. So here's how to understand this. If you talk to people who relapse, you ask them, how did you relapse? And they're like, I don't know what happened.

I was doing great until I lost it. So as people have studied the brains of people who struggle with relapse, what we sort of discover, and you can do this like when you do therapy with someone, what you actually discover is you weren't fine for the month beforehand. Actually, there was tiny insolapse,

after tiny insult, after tiny stress, after tiny stress, after tiny stress. And this thing happened, and this thing happened, and this thing happened. And then your emotions got to be too much for you. And then you use the only coping mechanism that you could in that moment. But what there actually is is a blindness to your internal emotional state when you struggle with addictions. And so their experience of it is, I was doing fine, and then it happened. which is not oftentimes how it is.

It's actually, there's a bunch of stuff that's going on. It's all like under the surface. And so I don't see it happening. And so this is really, really important. If you ever want to alter your behavior, you have to understand, I still feel the need. Then the question is, what is the need? So you have to tunnel down further into awareness of the self.

So if you want to over it, overcome the behavior, you have to know, okay, what is this need? What am I feeling in this moment? Why do I need to listen to a podcast? Right? And here's like, why do I have to listen to a stream right now? Like, what's going on? What would happen if I didn't do that? How would I feel? What would I think? And that's where you'll discover all kinds of things jumbled together. So, let's just pick two. One thing you'll discover is that unless your mind is distracted, especially if you have a diagnosed anxiety disorder, that the more you're distracted, the less space the anxiety has to come into your mind. So if you lay awake at night in bed without any kind of distraction, all kinds of dark thoughts

will come up. That's why when I was struggling with addiction, I couldn't go to bed unless I passed out the second I hit the pillow. The most painful part of my day was trying to go to sleep. Because first of all, I couldn't fall asleep. And secondly, that experience of not being able to fall asleep was such mentally awful. Like it was like torture for hours. The worst part of my day. All of the ways that I was screwing up my life came bubbling up. And I had no defense, no distraction, no shield.

So you may discover that all your anxious thoughts come up. But if you really pay attention, you'll discover all kinds of other things. like let's be productive. Like, oh, like if I'm listening to a podcast while I'm falling asleep, then I will learn something. And learning things is good. And I will be making progress in life. And it won't be, you know, I'll be using my time productively because it's important

for me to be productive. And if I feel productive, then I won't feel so much like a failure. And so let me go on doing this productive, productive, productive stuff, which, by the way, isn't may not actually move your life forward. So you're going to discover all kinds of other stuff in there. That's not just distraction from anxiety. I have to use my time wisely. So that's something also that I went through.

I was like listening to audiobooks about development all the time. And then I was like, wait, why am I doing this? What is this actually? I'd become a self-help junkie. You all heard of this term? Self-help junkie. They're still junkies. You're just addicted to something else.

Right? So you may discover some amount of like, oh, I need to feel productive. Because the more productive I feel, I'll feel better about myself. I'm learning something. I'm growing. Here in my garage, I read 300 books a day or whatever. Right? There's this idea that like, if we're productive, like hustle culture, like I got to be like,

you know, I saw some video where someone was like, cooking is the worst ROI investment that you can have in your life. which is like, I guess technically true. You know, I wonder, and so it's like, I never cook at home. It's like, you know, the only thing that may be a equally bad ROI is pooping, I guess. So do you outsource that too? So there's this idea that like knowledge is like growth in some way. And we sort of give in to some of these feelings that are positive in nature, right?

I want to feel good about myself. The key thing, though, is that you have to have awareness as to what's driving the behavior. And as we develop this in a clinical setting, it helps. people overcome addictions. As we understand it about ourselves, we'll understand where that need comes from and we'll be able to hopefully address the need at its root and therefore get rid of the leaves and the stem and the fruit. You know, we'll get rid of that behavior at the end of the road by sort of addressing the root need down below. And at a minimum, we'll raise awareness of it and awareness proceeds control. So that's something that's in ancient yoga we've understood for

a while, which all you have to do is ever go get dental work, and you'll understand that when you're numb, they can't control anything. Right? That's how, because you can't feel anything, so you can't control anything. If you're like me and you chain lose games of Dota, it's probably because you're not aware of what's happening. And once I have awareness, oh, like maybe as a support, I should actually buy support items. Maybe keeping my carry alive who's got a damage item is better than me. having a damage item. So you have to be aware. That's number two. There are actually neuroscientific deficits in people in terms of awareness of internal emotional states when it comes to addictions. Third thing is. But I'm still worried that in my downtime, I will feel scared and lonely.

The way we lose control of our lives is by trying to protect ourselves or avoid negative emotion. The quickest way to lose control of your life is to try to craft a life with no negative emotion. So when I start to live my life in a way to avoid anxiety, avoid fear, and avoid sadness, what does that result in? What does my life become? How do I stop feeling anxious? Don't go to the party. Easy.

How do I stop? How do I avoid sadness? How can I never be sad? Well, you can't ever be sad if you, if getting dumped makes you sad, the only way to never be sad is to never enter a relationship. So this is something that like we need to understand as a society. What's happening in our society is we are valuing positive emotion over negative emotion.

And what we try to do is cultivate positive emotion, positive emotion, positive emotion, and try to get the hell away from negative emotion, negative emotion. First thing that does that is a drug of abuse. We're going to take that frown. We're going to flip it upside down. Let's get us some artificial euphoria. But then what really starts to happen is when we are no longer able to experience, accept, or even embrace negative emotions, it cuts off slices of our life. Things become no longer possible.

Because this person is doing actually pretty well. Huge respect for them, by the way. they're still going to Japan and they recognize they're opening themselves up to that experience. Whereas if this negative emotion was stronger, they were giving into it more, they wouldn't even go to Japan in the first place. Because there are people out there, I'm sure, who are listening to this right now, that have things that they want to do, but they don't do them because they're afraid of what could happen. I want to go to Japan, but I'll be lonely for a year. What if I don't meet anyone? So I'm not going to go.

So if your life is moving in the wrong direction, there's a really good chance that it's through the avoidance of negative emotion. And building a life that you want to involves accepting and embracing that experience. I'm going to tell you all the story. So the first night I was on call, I had finished medical school. I was a newly minted medical doctor. I started on something called night. float. So there are doctors that work at the hospital during the day. And when the doctors are

done working, because they're not usually there are 24 hours, right, they have to go home. And the second team of doctors comes in and takes care of the patients overnight. So usually most of the people are sleeping and there all the medications and stuff all being changed. So night float, you know, during the day you may cover like 12 or 15 patients. At night you'll cover like 60 because most of them are kind of what we call tucked away. Some things you have to, they're like, okay, like this person had, you know, an asthma attack at 7 p.m. So make sure you check their, you know, O2, your, their oxygen level at midnight. So there's some stuff that you have to do, but generally speaking, most people are like doing okay. So I got a page. Page said rapid response,

room whatever. Rapid response is something that's right below what a code is. So code for those of you, you know, when you see a medical show and they've got the paddles, they're like, clear, that's a code. That's when someone's actively dying. Before that, there's this thing called a rapid response, when someone's in distress, but it's not like an all-hands-on-back situation. So rapid response got called in a particular room. I go into the room. Someone is having a seizure. This is my first day, mind you, as a medical doctor, working in a hospital where I am

responsible for this person. So I get the page, because the nurse is like, page the doctor, because patient is having a seizure. I run into the room. I remember it was like two or three doors down from where I was, so it was very easy. I was there within 15 seconds. A few seconds later. So I asked the nurse, I'm like, okay, who's this patient?

What's going on with? Then they started seizing about, you know, 15, 30 seconds ago. Like, okay, cool. Seizure started then. Okay, like, what's going on? What's their medical history? So about 30 seconds later, my senior resident comes in. The second year resident.

This person has been a doctor for 366 days. And I've been a doctor for one day. He comes in, he stands a, so the patient is seizing. I'm on one side. He's on the other side. Or the bed. he stands there with his arms crossed. And so immediately, like, what do I do?

I was like, okay, like, thank God, he's here. I start telling him, this is the patient. He started seizing at this point. The patient started seizing in. They're on this medications. There's like this. And then he's like, he looks at me, nods. And he's like, okay.

And I'm like, Dan, what are we going to do? Patient is seizing. What are we going to do? And he's like, yeah, looks like the patient's seizing. What should you do? He's like, I don't know. Give him out of hand? it's like, okay, how do you want to give him at a van?

I don't know, IV, the patient's seizing. You can't take a medication by mouth. It's like, okay, so IV adivine. How much do you want to give? I'm like, I don't know, like, one milligram, two milligrams? It's like, sounds good to me. And I was like, okay, two milligram IV adivand push now. It's like, sounds good.

Patient gets the adivant, seizure stops. I'm terrified. I'm like, wait, wait, what's going on? So at that moment in time, I've got a choice. Do I want to come back tomorrow? Because this is what I'm in for. Dan, brilliant doctor, amazing teacher, made me part of the person that I am today. Let me swim in those terrifying waters.

First day. He knew what he was doing, right? So he's not going to let me make a mistake. But like, the instinct as a medical student is like, oh, the doctor's here. Right? Like, let him, like, oh, thank God. the senior is here, like, ah, off my plate. I don't have to deal with it.

Dan's like, uh-uh. Dan, seriously, brilliant doctor. Fantastic person. And so you've got a choice in life of, like, what you do the next day. Because I can never be in that situation again. I can do it. Right? I can be, hey, you know what?

This ain't for me. Should have become a monk? Screw this whole medical thing. I'm going to go sit in a cave in the homlaise and like that's what I'm going to do. I don't ever have to be in the situation again if I don't want to. The question is, are you going to let your negative emotions shape your life? Because there are situations that you can put yourself in in which you will feel fear, anxiety, loneliness,

and you can put yourself not in those situations. And the moment that we start letting our negative emotions control what we do, and that's where when you're experiencing the negative emotion in the moment, sometimes you can't control it, which is okay. The moment we let the anticipation of the negative emotion restrict what we put ourselves in, that's when you lose control of your life. So we started this talk about what about a technology usage is okay, right? So may not even be an addiction, which is totally fine, because actually the majority of people who struggle with technology right now, I don't know if they're clinically addicted or not. Like it doesn't seem like it, right? Everyone's

struggling with this. So how do you manage this? The first is to understand cravings and behavioral reinforcement, and that resisting the impulse for a time and then giving in actually reinforces the strength of the craving. Just like if a kid throws a temper tantrum and then I give them the iPad, what the kid is going to learn over time is I need to throw a temper tantrum to get what I want. And paradoxically, I give them the iPad to stop the temper tantrum. And what I do is, myself up for a temper tantrum the next day. So my ability to try to control the craving actually exacerbates the craving. Very important principle from addiction. Absolutely applicable here. So decide ahead of time like, do I get my crutch today or do I have to walk by myself? Is it a

training wheels day or is it walking by myself? When I go into the ocean, am I going to have floaties or am I going to go into the ocean and need to swim on my own? Right? Because having floaties in the ocean doesn't teach you how to swim. It does the opposite. Now, see, there's a graduated level, right? You don't want to jump straight into the ocean without a floaty if you don't know not swim.

But it's an analogy. So be careful what you're reinforcing in terms of cravings and giving into those feelings. Second thing is awareness. Right? So we know that people who struggle with addiction. And this may be by virtue of the fact that oftentimes social media technology and things like that suppress our emotional circuits, which is how they numb us out. But then what happens is we have these needs and feelings and stuff like that and we give into those.

But we don't really understand what they are or where they come from. But if we really want to get rid of the behavior, we have to address the underlying stuff. We have to address the root of the problem, which is I just, I feel like I need to be on my phone right now. Okay, wait, what is that? Is that like hunger or thirst? You need to eat. You need to drink water. You may need to use the restroom.

You may need to sleep. There is not a need. There's not a physiologic need to browse Twitter. It's not a need. There may be some kind of emotional drive, right? We can even call it a need. You can use that term. So understand what that is.

Like, what are we satisfying here? What are we getting away from? What are we doing? And especially for some of this like, you know, podcasts, the podcast junkie, it may not be something as simple as, okay, I'm using this technology to suppress my numbness. It may be actually deeper than that, that right now I'm not as successful as I want to be. And every time I listen to a podcast, there's a part of my mind that believes that I'm moving in the right direction.

And it's really important for me at this point in my life to feel like I'm moving in the right direction. still whether you listen to the podcast or not is actually separate from in this point this point is about wow it's like that's a really important thing to understand about yourself because then the conversation then becomes okay if if i really need to be moving forward in life what can i seriously do because the other thing that happens is when we satisfy that need with a podcast we don't satisfy it in other ways and then we stay stuck at home listening to podcasts all day without actually changing our lives.

What am I actually going to do to fix that need? Because podcasts ain't cutting it. So there's all kinds of stuff that you can discover once you look within. The last thing to consider is in general, what is the relationship between you and negative emotion? Is it something to be avoided at all costs? Do you try to avoid it? You want to conquer it?

You want to make it go away? Because the truth of the matter, like, I hate to break this to y'all. But we have, like, there's like literally a part of your brain called the amygdala. And the primary function of the amygdala is to experience negative emotion. It's the survival center of our brain, too. The primary function is to survive. Help you survive. But the way that it does that, it makes negative emotions in your head.

Like, our brain has dedicated machinery that makes you feel anxious and scared. Why? It's because it's a part of life. It's actually advantageous. Otherwise, it wouldn't be there. So once you stop avoiding situations that had negative emotion, you'll start to, like, really be in control of your life. Why do you procrastinate? So I was reading something that's kind of tragic about looking at a bit of crypto forum of people who haven't told their spouses that they've lost all of their savings in crypto. why do you think they don't tell them? What are they afraid of? Right? And what is that doing to their marriage? One thing to lose all the money is another thing to not tell me. So if you really want to be in control of your life, stop avoiding the negative emotion. Go to Japan. There's a chance you could be lonely. It's not the end of the world. Because negative emotion too is temporary. Beautiful thing. This is a

revelation that oftentimes we miss because we're so busy avoiding it that we never get to. to become familiar with it. Think about negative emotions. It goes away too. Our amygdala is wired to turn off after a while. So if you're struggling with technology addiction, I know it's kind of not even addiction. If you're trying to figure out, okay, is it okay to use, not use? I realize this conversation became a little bit bigger than that. But I think that the better you are, if you're not really struggling with an addiction, the deeper you have to go in order to really understand yourself and move forward. That's what the path is. Right. So if you have a clinical diagnosis, or if you're in the ICU, it's pretty simple, what needs to be done.

But the healthier you get, the more nuanced you have to become, the more thoughtful you have to become, the more you have to understand yourself. And like, it gets in a sense, not harder necessarily, but like the work becomes deeper. So someone has like a severe depression. It's pretty simple. Like we need some kind of medication. Right. And there's other stuff.

But that other stuff becomes more and more important, the further you go. Those of y'all that are in our community and doing okay, you've still got a lot of work ahead of you. I don't mean that to... The thing is, the work is fun. It's fantastic. It's so rewarding. But there's a lot. So RZB-125 is asking, what about being addicted to people online?

I have a friend who depends on a few micro-celebrities and dedicates all his free time to them. How can I help him? So this is a story that we're hearing more and more, unfortunately, that we have friends and sometimes even romantic partners that are very, very obsessive. Hopefully I can use that word without it being inappropriate. But obsessive, I'm almost using it in the clinical sense where like obsessive compulsive disorder is like persistent thoughts that won't go away. So that's kind of what I mean by that. Anyway, very, very preoccupied with particular people. They're almost addicted to, as he put it, a microcelebrity.

So what can you do? So that's where the first thing to understand is that, like, you can't cure someone of an addiction without their help. So very practically, what I would do is start with open-ended non-judgmental questions. So if you all caught the pre-contemplative talk earlier today, day, that's a good example. So you start with like challenging assumptions and asking questions. What do you think about how much, tell me about these people. Like what do you, what do you think about them? What do you think about the amount of time that you spend with them? You can also ask them

lots of questions that have nothing to do with them. So how are you doing nowadays? How do you feel on a day-to-day basis? Eventually you can work your way up to like, what's the direction of your life? and if they're unhappy with the direction of your life, the next question is, what do you think is, why is your life moving in the wrong direction? I mean, you don't want to ask it like that. That's going to be judgmental.

But what's getting in the way of you building the life that you want? How can I help you build the life that you want? Those are the kinds of questions to ask. Now, the tricky thing here is that in the back of your mind, you may be thinking, no, no, no, no, this is one problem. It's the microsel. Whereas once again, I think this is the kind of thing where you can look at the behavior, but most, generally speaking, you can look at all addictions. And they share one thing in common, which is that they offer some kind of emotional relief. And that's where if you really want to conquer an addiction, you have to deal with the underlying root of the problem. You can do, I mean, that's a piece of it. So what does this person get when they spend time with these microcelebrities, as you put them? What do they get? How do they get? How do they get? How do they? do they feel about themselves? What is that thing in them that's hungry for this kind of

interaction? And until you understand that and start to replace it in other ways, like they're going to stay stuck. So it's not, you can't just get sober. You have to have alternative coping mechanisms or go to do something like therapy where you deal with the underlying work that causes you to reach for some kind of substance. Good question, but very challenging. weird question, but when things like meditation also reduce anxiety, why don't we get addicted to them? Really good question. Streamer loves me. So it's because reductions of anxiety happen in two ways.

They can happen temporarily and they can happen. So you can deal with the symptom or you can deal with the cause. So one is that when we look at most addictive symptoms, substances, they don't deal with the cause. They don't deal with the roots of anxiety. What they do is symptomatic relief of anxiety. So, for example, if you prescribe someone a benzodiazepine class of medication, like Xanax is a very good example, that's not going to cure anyone of an anxiety disorder. It'll help them manage the anxiety in the moment, but it's not doing anything long term. So substances or other kinds of things that deal with short-term problems will actually reinforce

that behavior, right? So if I make something numb, but I don't actually feel it. fix it, what I'm going to do is need to engage in the behavior over and over and over and over again because the problem is never fixed. The second the numbness wears off, the anxiety comes right back and I need to reach for the substance again. We explain this concept in a lot of detail and rebound anxiety and the anxiety module, by the way. There's a whole video about it. So how is meditation different? So meditation is different in a couple of different ways. Actually, before we go to meditation, let's look at psychotherapy. So in the purpose of treating psychotherapy. So psychotherapy, one hour a week of psychotherapy doesn't fix someone's anxiety

tomorrow when they're feeling anxious. So that's why like Xanax, if you pop a X, you're going to feel anxiety relief almost immediately. Whereas psychotherapy, we don't start to see a clinical change for weeks. So it's a completely different mechanism of action of reduction of anxiety. So what you're dealing with is the root of the anxiety. it's an oversimplification. You can deal with more than that. And so that's why we start to see, you know, Xanax will work in minutes, whereas therapy will take weeks. And then what happens is people don't get addicted to therapy.

I mean, they can. So if therapy starts to become a way where they like offload their emotions and they don't do any of the deeper work, they'll be sort of kind of stuck in therapy. And you'll see that as well. Patients who come in and they basically emotionally offload, but then don't change anything about their lives. to prevent that emotion from building up again. Right? So I can come into a therapist appointment and I can offload some frustration

about my partner who doesn't listen to me. But unless I have a conversation with that partner and change my relationship, I'm going to be coming in every single week and offloading the crap from my interpersonal problems, which can be a good use of therapy, by the way. Sometimes that's just what people need. But then people don't get addicted to therapy.

Why not? Because once you fix the problem, you no longer need to go, the root is taken care of. You're no longer feeling nearly as anxious on a day-to-day basis, and you stop coming. So how does meditation work? Generally speaking, meditation does both. Right? So meditation is going to, in the short term, depending on the kind of technique that you do, will balance your physiology, and you can use it as a

coping mechanism and even become, quote, dependent on it, which is what a coping mechanism is. So people do, in a sense, get addicted to meditation. The thing is, there are also other principles that involved with addiction, like, you know, the euphoer. and dopamine and stuff like that, meditation doesn't really cause that kind of stuff. So it's not independently reinforcing that way. Because remember, drugs of abuse don't just numb you. They also artificially make you feel usually euphoric. So meditation can manage that sort of as a coping mechanism and as people meditate

and they start to have realizations and things like that. They will start to discover the root of their anxiety. And then as they do that, they'll sort of like the anxiety will get better, you know, hopefully even like in sustained remission or permanently. Great question. Ultimately has to do with reduction in anxiety is not, has multiple mechanisms.