HealthyGamerGG - Dr. K's Approach To Meditation

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

In today's episode, Dr. K discusses meditation, how to practice it safely and effectively, and the use cases for doing so! Check out more mental health resources here! https://bit.ly/3xsk6fE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recently, I've been invited on a bunch of podcasts, and so Dr. K has been exposed to a lot of different people. So we're seeing a lot of new people come into our community. And what I'd love to do today is share my perspective on meditation, which is a core part of who we are at Healthy Gamer, and help other people understand how to make meditation easy and effective for you. So today we're going to talk a little bit about why it's hard for most people to meditate and my approach to meditation. So I think the biggest thing to understand, the biggest mistake that most people, people make is that we have to remember that every human being has a unique cognitive fingerprint. We all know that different people have different preferences for color, for cuisine, for the

way that they like to do their recreation. Some of us like some kinds of games. Some of us like to read. Some of us like to read romance novels. Some of us like to read horror novels. We all have different preferences up here. We also have different aptitudes. So some of us are very artistically gifted. Some of us are very like mathematically gifted. So there are a lot of different brains out there. And so the biggest mistake that we make in teaching meditation is that we try to use one technique for all of the different brains. So I'll give you all an example of kind of why this happens. So let's say that someone wants to meditate. They join a meditation class, usually taught by someone like, let's say, a Buddhist monk, who went and studied a particular technique from a particular master. So in the meditation

class, there are about 10 students. And five of the students, let's be honest, don't really stick around, right? They show up at the class. They kind of give it a shot. They don't really stick with the practice. It's not really for them. A couple of the students continue to stick around, and one person really falls in love with it. Man, this technique really works great for them. So they stay with the teacher. They get advanced levels of certification and they spend years studying this stuff. And eventually they become a teacher as well. Now, when this teacher has students that come into their class, what do they know? Right? So they know the specific technique that tended to work really, really well for them. The vast majority of our meditation teachers have studied

primarily one tradition. And that didn't work for me. So at this point, I've studied meditation in five different countries from over 40 different teachers. And I spent about seven years studying to become a monk. And basically, I went to different places because I never found my guru. And as a result, I learned lots of different kinds of meditations. The next thing that kind of happened that was really formative for me is I became a psychiatrist. And then I started working with a lot of different patients. And what I discovered is that many of these meditation techniques can be specifically applied to particular people. So we know that in the meditative tradition, we have a ton of teachers. There's one text called Vigyan Bairav Tantra, which includes 112 techniques on meditation. This text is from

the tantric Hindu tradition. But then we also have Buddhist traditions of Mahayana, Vajrayana, all of these different kinds of mindfulness-based techniques, Zen-based techniques, and there are all of these different spiritual traditions out there. And what makes it hard to meditate is that usually when we go to a teacher, they don't make referrals like we do in the medical world, right? They don't say, oh, based on your cognitive fingerprint,

based on your goals of meditation, based on the way that your mind works, I think, Thanthric meditation is not the right move for you, and instead you should go do Zen meditation. I've never heard a meditation teacher say that, like in my whole history of studying meditation for about 20 years, I've never heard a meditation teacher make a referral to a different tradition. The answer is always, if you keep practicing, you'll figure it out.

Keep practicing, keep practicing, and it'll work for you. That's not how we work in the clinical field, and that has really informed the way that I teach meditation. When a patient comes to me and they've like got a gunshot wound, I'm a psychiatrist, and I say, hey, maybe you should go see a trauma surgeon because based on your specific needs, this is the kind of meditation that will work for you. And so my approach to meditation is to take a collection of these different techniques and pick the one that fits your cognitive fingerprint. Pick the one that fits your particular goals.

And what we tend to see when we do that, and I even started some clinical research that then I abandoned about making meditation regimens for particular diagnoses, which we'll go into. But basically, if you sort of pick the right technique for you, meditation will be easy and you will see a way, larger benefit. And the benefit can be very drastic from what most meditation teachers even realize. We all watch videos on the internet because we want to change. The problem is that even though we keep watching them, we don't necessarily change. I want to talk to you all about our coaching program.

And if you're not interested, just jump forward 20 seconds and get straight to the video. But if you're someone who is ready to actually make change, if you want to see outcomes in six, eight, 12 weeks, if you guys are struggling with problems like career stuff, burnout, stuff, social skills, low self-esteem. If you're trying to struggle to motivate yourself to actually act, that's what we built a coaching program for. Check out the link in the description below to see how coaching can help you. And now on to the video. So let's say that this is all of the meditation techniques. And we have a lot of different traditions. We've got the thantheric tradition over here. We've got the Zen tradition over here. We've got all

these different traditions, right? We also have like the more devotional things like prayer is over here, which is like a form of meditation. You can argue that. And then there's lots of different, you know, things over here. So we've got Hindu tantra. We've got Buddhist tantra. So this is like Vajrayana is Buddhist tantra. And then we have even things like modern tantra. So you have modern tantric gurus who will sort of teach their own version of tantra. So the point is that there's a lot of different kinds of techniques. And so let's just go through a couple and understand like how these techniques are very specific to how these techniques can specifically help a certain kind of mind and for a certain problem. Okay, so let's start with like a very simple technique from the yogic tradition.

So there's one technique called pranayam and specifically some kinds of pranayam. So let's call it Nari Shuddi and Kapal Bhati. I mean, when I say let's call it, these are what these two techniques are. So these are breathing techniques. This one is alternate nostril breathing. And this one is a rapid, forceful exhalation. So you basically exhale very rapidly. And as you exhale very rapidly, your CO2 levels actually drop. And then what this ends up doing

is this reduces your respiratory rate. So basically we're going to forcibly hyperventilate. And if you do that for a few seconds, you'll start to feel lightheaded and then you stop. And what you'll notice is that your breathing is very, very calm at the end of the. the practice. So physiologically, what's going on when we do a practice like Kapal Bhati is we are decreasing the activity of our sympathetic nervous system. So this is where our adrenaline system,

our cortisol system, our stress system. So what we find is that these techniques will actually activate this thing called the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve will slow our heart rate down, will chill us out, will suppress cortisol and adrenaline production. So it, physiologically de-stresses us. And what I find is that these techniques are very, very useful for people who have very active minds and things like anxiety or panic. Because remember that anxiety and panic are not just in the mind. There's a whole physiology that goes with it.

So if you're someone who wants to use meditation specifically to calm your mind and you want to physiologically induce a state of chill in your brain, and you trend towards the more anxious, more panic-oriented kind of mind. If you deal with stress, not by getting isolated and withdrawn, but by panicking and your mind kind of flies in a thousand different directions, I need to do this, I need to do this, you just need to chill the fuck out. If you need to chill the fuck out, this is the right technique for you. Now, here's the problem. If you go to a Zen teacher who just simply tells you to observe your thoughts, right?

Just observe your thoughts. And you're someone who's prone to panic. It's like, oh my God, I'm going to die. Everybody's going to die. You can't just observe them because the moment that you let them run free, it's like, oh my God, I'm going to die and then everyone's going to die and then. You let it run free and it's like a bowl running around like hopped up on cocaine in your house destroying everything. That doesn't work, right? And if you go to a Zen teacher, they're like, just keep fucking doing it, bro.

Just keep fucking doing it. And all the while you're like inducing a panic attack. So no, no, no, no. We don't want to do Zen meditation in this kind of situation. I'm not saying that it can't help. And there are studies that show that Zen or mindfulness techniques are actually. effective in anxiety disorders. But in my experience, my personal take, right? And that's what this is. This is my personal take. This is not nearly as effective as using meditation techniques that

physiologically activate the parasympathetic nervous system and calm you the fuck down. That's just one example. So let's take another example. So sometimes we also have people who are, let's say, depressed. So in this case, so these are people who, why do you want to meditate? Well, my main problem is that like, I'm sluggish. I'm slow. I have no motivation. It's hard to get out of bed every morning. I don't care about anything. I just feel lethargic and sluggish. Maybe I have a clinical diagnosis. Maybe I don't. So that's where we're going to take something from the Buddhist tradition. I don't know where this is. I'm going to put Himalayan up here. Okay. So there's another super cool technique called Tumo. So Tumo is the name of a tantric goddess of fire and passion. So there's

a specific group of Buddhist monks that live in Nepal that worship this goddess of fire. She's like the goddess of fire. And the cool thing is their techniques are completely different from Kapal Bhati and Nadi Shuddi. These techniques are designed to energize. Okay. So these techniques are designed to cultivate your inner passion in fire. And the physiology of this is fucking fascinating. So there have been studies done.

There's one study from 1982, okay? And this study found that monks who are practitioners of this can increase the temperature of their digits. Okay, this is fingers and toes by eight degrees Celsius. Think about eight degrees Celsius, right? For those of y'all that are, what is that in, I don't know how much an eight degree. I guess it's like 15 degrees Fahrenheit is close to what it is. in terms of like a change. What this kind of means is like, think about that.

This is an actual technique that people do in the Himalayas. And it energizes them. It allows them to stay in the Himalayas without like sweaters and other kinds of things. I imagine it must increase our brown fat production and some of these other things. We don't quite know what the physiologic method is. But people have literally done measurements that this kind of meditation technique will literally energize you. And it doesn't, it's not just a technique to increase. the temperature of your peripheral digits.

It also has a similar cognitive effect, a very similar energizing effect. I teach a variant of Tumo when I was working in Maine in the United States. I was working at a drug rehab in Maine. So it's cold outside. And what I would do is take a group of patients. We would go outside with very light sweater. And then I tell them, we're going to take off our sweaters. We're just going to wear our shirts.

And it's like 40 degrees outside. And we're going to do this meditation technique together. And we're going to be outside in 40 degree weather. Okay. You can wear a jacket if you want to, but you won't need one by the end of the practice, and it's beautiful. It's incredibly energizing. So it's a completely different tradition, completely different technique, completely different effect. And so think about this as well.

So if your mind is overly anxious and a meditation technique calms you down, that's great. But if your mind is sluggish and slow and you have no energy, you don't need a technique that's going to calm you down. You need a technique that will do the opposite. And on the flip side, if we have anxiety and we want to slow down our mind and we do a technique, that increases our passion, increases the energy within the mind, it may have the opposite effect. But it doesn't end with just these two. Okay? So the next thing that we're going to talk about is let's say we're over here.

We've got Shunya meditation. So if you look at studies on meditation, one of the things that we know is that studies on meditation show that it will dissolve the ego. Okay? And we also know from studies on psychedelics that if you have a. ego dissolution experience during something like MDAMA or psilocybin, that correlates with healing trauma. So if you just have, if you take a psychedelic and you just like see cool colors and stuff, we don't see a whole lot of clinical improvement with that. What seems to correlate the

most with clinical improvement in psychedelics is actually dissolving the ego. Okay. And this is the other cool thing is that if we look at, for example, you know, the mechanism of action of ketamine, which is the fastest pharmacaceutical treatment we can give for someone who has major depressive disorder. It works incredibly fast. Ketamine is literally a dissociative agent. So ketamine was not developed as a psychiatric treatment. Ketamine was developed as anesthesia. So when we're like cutting into someone on the operating table, we're going to infuse them with ketamine so that they dissociate and they don't feel the pain.

So the interesting thing that we know about ketamine is that this too causes a dissociation, a separation from the ego, which can be really healing if you have depression. Why is that? Because in depression, we're beating ourselves up all the time, right? I'm a piece of shit. I suck. All these people would be better without me. Everyone is better than me.

I have low self-esteem. So if you kind of think about it, you're so caught up in your own head about who you are. And so we want to unplug that. So ketamine does it. Hopefully psychedelics do it. I don't recommend y'all using either of those unless it's the guidance of a licensed professional. The cool thing is that there are safe forms of meditation like Shunya practice. So Shunya practice is, Shunya is the Sanskrit word for void, null, or zero.

And if you kind of like look at our sense of identity, there's a set of practices that help you connect with the void within you. And whatever kinds of ego-oriented crap you have, you can kind of dump into the void within you, and it'll kind of disappear. And then you'll be kind of neutral and you'll be chill and you'll be kind of like egoless, right? You'll start to, it's super cool. Like I love Shunya practices. It's a big part of my personal practice. It's what helps me keep my head on straight. because even as I become successful, I remember I'm just the same piece of shit that I used to be.

And then on the flip side, I also remember that even when I was this piece of shit, I'm the person that I am now. So I'm neither good nor bad. I'm just me. I'm doing the best that I can. Other people can judge me if they want to. But I'm not going to judge myself. I'm going to just try to be the best human that I can be. Right. So notice that when I say I'm going to try to be the best human that I can be, I'm not saying I'm a good human or bad human. Because at the moment that I say, I'm a good person, I open myself up to ego, disappointment. because if I become a good person, that means one day I may be a bad person, right? Because being a good person means I got to check all these boxes. And even if I think I'm a bad person, that's going to cause all kinds of problems because

if I try to go do something and I believe I am a bad person, right? So we see this a lot with like, for example, people who struggle with dating and they'll think to themselves, I'm ugly, no one would ever want to date me. And then they go on a date. And then that kind of mental energy sabotages the date and creates the same, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. So what we really want to do is some of us need to dissolve our ego so that we can just be like neutral versions of ourselves who are not beating ourselves up, who are not narcissistic. So I'll use this technique in my patients who have narcissistic personality disorder. And it works

incredibly well, right? Because the whole point with NPD is that people are raging narcissists and they have no empathy and they have all these like high ideas of ourselves. Just dissolve it all. And it'll help a lot. Key point is that this kind of technique is that this kind of technique is, is not very physiologically active. That's not where it works. It doesn't increase our core temperature by three or four degrees Celsius, doesn't increase the temperature of our toes by eight degrees Celsius, does not recruit the vagus nerve, does not chill us out.

What it is is a more mental technique. It is a technique that affects things like our ego. And the last technique that I'm going to talk to you all about, and you'll notice that I'm kind of pulling things from the yoga tradition because that's what I've studied the most, is yoga nidra. So yoga nidra is a very interesting relaxation practice. it has benefits for things like anxiety and stuff. But the real point of Yoga Nidra is that it induces our mind into a auto-suggestive or hypnotic state.

So it's a very specific practice where we put our mind in such a scenario where whatever we implant in there will kind of bubble up. Now, I know this sounds kind of weird, but I want you all to understand this. So if you're walking around, random thoughts will bubble up from the bottom of your mind. And if you think about it, like, what kinds of thoughts are these? They can be like, I'm a loser, I'm great, oh, no's, or I really want a game right now. So if you kind of think about it, I'm not saying that these thoughts are good or bad or whatever, but if you look at the mechanism of mind, something within your mind populates your mind with all kinds of thoughts. And if we look at a lot of psychiatric medications, what we literally try to do is dull these fuckers out.

Right? So what we do if someone has an OCD or an anxiety disorder is we'll give them an SSRI, a selective serotonergic re-uptake inhibitor. And what we know that SSRIs do, or benzodiazepines and anxiety disorders, is they literally slow the activity of our mind. They kind of emotionally numb us out so that we produce fewer toxic thoughts. But the key fact remains that these thoughts are still coming from somewhere. So when we do something like psychotherapy, we're going in there and we are annihilating the source of these negative thoughts through something like psychotherapy. So this is what's super cool. Psychotherapy is a discipline where we go down there and we clean out the bad stuff. But what Yoga Nidra is, let's say there's something bad down here, something bad down here.

Okay. And in psychotherapy, we're trying to heal it. What yoga nidra is is the ability to implant stuff down here, whatever you want. And so when I work with people and we do yoga nidra, there's this part at the end of the practice called Sankalpa or resolve. So you implant a resolve into your subconscious mind. And when you implant a resolve into your subconscious mind, cool stuff will happen when you start to face adversity, right? So like, for example, I worked with one patient who was like, you know, as long as I give up, I can do this. I mean, as long as I don't give up, I can do this.

As long as I don't give up, I can do this. As long as I don't give up, I can do this. And what used to happen is anytime they would get some setback, they would, like, throw in the towel, right? They'd be like, oh, man, like, this isn't going to work. This person is going to break up with me anyway. I might as well break up with them. I'm not going to get this promotion. My boss doesn't like me.

So they'd like, they sabotage their life in so many ways. And this is what's super cool. As we did this practice over the course of weeks and months, this thought, started implanting itself into their brain. And you can't just do like auto suggestion. You can't just repeat it to yourself. There's a lot of like details about what sinks into the mind, right? You can't just tell yourself, I'm a good person and it'll sink in. Stuff that sinks into your mind, your mind needs to be in the right kind of state. This is why traumas can be so devastating. It's because that negative experience shapes your mind in a certain way and it sinks really deep inside. And then if you get

traumatized or abused, then that low self-esteem lives down there for a very long. time. So in psychotherapy, we're really good at getting rid of the negative, but we're not very good at implanting the positive. And that's where Sankalpa comes in. So as this person starts to do the sunculpa, and then when they get setbacks, this thought bubbles up to the surface. As long as I don't give up, I can do this. And they're like, okay, fine, I'm not going to give up because I can do this. It changes the way that they think, and it changes the way that they live their life. So this is just four examples of different kinds of meditation techniques that I use, this is kind of my approach, is to remember that, first of all, not every person is the same. Different people have different preferences,

right? So different color preferences, different cuisine preferences. All of us have unique brains that have unique cognitive fingerprints. And the purpose of meditation is, the point of meditation, is to help our mind move in the direction that we want to, and ideally even transcend mind conversation for a different day. So if you're struggling with meditation, it's not because you suck at it or it's not for you. I don't believe that. Generally speaking, I would say that 80 to 90 to 95% of people that I work with, I can teach them a meditation practice that works for them. And I would say fully half of these people or more were not super into it.

They're like, yeah, I gave it a shot, right? And so this is where we teach it. I think it's all about teaching the right kind of meditation. So this is kind of like saying, like, you know, I don't like to exercise. Well, like, you may not like playing basketball, but have you ever gone rock climbing? or people who are going hiking and they're like, oh, I think hiking is incredibly boring. Have you ever tried like competitive racquetball? You know, like there's all kinds of different things that qualifies exercise.

We just have to find the right thing for you. So our approach to meditation here at Healthy Gamer is to try to understand who you are, understand what your goals are, and then try to find a specific practice that works for you. So you'll find this all throughout our YouTube channel. Generally speaking, we don't teach meditation quite as much on live streams anymore because we've taught a lot of it, but we also have a lot of resources like Dr. K's Guide to Meditation, where we go through the basics, but basically in every single guide that we have, guide of depression, guide of anxiety, guide on ADHD, soon-to-be guide on trauma, we go through particular practices

that are designed to do everything from calm down your nervous system to dissolve your ego. So I hope that's been helpful to you. You don't have to learn meditation from us, by the way. Just please don't give up on it and try to find the right teacher for you.