HealthyGamerGG - How To Make Life Easy

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

In today's episode, we discuss how to make succeeding in your life easy, how the way you identify with yourself can hinder your ability to make meaningful change, and how sometimes all you really need to do is change your perspective. Learn more from Dr. K in his Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/3U5UK0F Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're going to talk about how to make life easy. Now, if you're listening to this, your first reaction to that is probably this is ridiculous, right? This guy is telling me that there is a way to make life easy. And how do we naturally respond to that? We say that this person does not understand my life. This person may think life is easy, but that's because their life is easy. Some people out there have easy lives, if they have money, if they have power, if they have security. And then there are people out there who have hard lives.

and it's no use for people who have easy lives to tell people who have hard lives, it's possible to make your life easy. So when we have this kind of reaction to this statement, hey, it's possible to make your life easy, what do you think that actually does? The first thing that it does is if someone has actually figured out how to make life easy, we end up muzzling them. We end up canceling them because you're not allowed to say that.

And if we live in a society where people who have figured out how to make life easy, how to make life easy, can't talk about it, what does that mean for the rest of us? That means that the rest of us will continue to live hard lives because the people who have figured out we're canceling in the first place. And the most bizarre thing is that one of the reasons that life has become harder and harder and harder and harder is because we've started to rely on science more and more and more. And the more we rely on science, the harder life becomes. Now, this may sound really confusing because doesn't science make a lot of our lives better. It's very easy. I can get food delivered to my door. I can get grocery delivery. I can work online. Science makes my life easy in so many different

ways. Well, yes and no, because if we look at science, sure, there's a lot of technological advances, which will make my life more convenient, but something paradoxical is happening. Even though my life is becoming more and more convenient because everything is at my fingertips, right? Especially this guy that can do everything. Somehow we're seeing a unprecedented mental health crisis, despite the fact that we have a ton of technological advancement. So what's going on? So it turns out that science is really good at advancing technologies and building convenience, but science is actually quite bad at teaching you how to live your life. But you may say, but hold on, Dr. Kay, we have all of these studies about happiness and this and that, and let's tunnel down

into that. As it turns out, those studies don't make things easier. They actually make things harder. So we can have as many studies as you want about what makes people happy. And people will say, okay, you need $100,000 a year, now probably $125, you need a healthy, stable relationship, you need social support, you need access to green space. This is the way that you get a happy life, right? This is science's answers. Just do all of these things, and you will be happy. The problem is that science tells you what the goals are or what correlates with happiness,

but it doesn't actually tell you how to get there, right? So they don't teach us the how, they just teach us in general what correlates with people being happy. Now, let's understand what I mean by that. science is very good at teaching you population-based stuff. Science can't tell you what will work for you. Science is the study of what works for the average person. So we can look at scientific studies on happiness, for example. And science can look at 100 people who are happy and 100 people who are unhappy. And science will tell you, okay, the way to be happy is to make $125,000 a year, to have a strong friend group, to have someone who loves you in your life, access to green space, a pet, and to

meditate every day. So science is like, this is the way to happiness. And then if you try to apply that knowledge to your life, it becomes very, very difficult. Because you can't just wake up one day and say, hey, I'm going to go find someone who loves me. Hey, I'm going to create a friend group. Because this is how science works. Science is a population-based approach. So science doesn't give us answers for you as an individual. It gives us answers for what works on average for most people. So a good example of this is something like SSRI or antidepressant medication. So we can do randomized controlled trials that show us that 100 people who are depressed can start on an SSRI. And on average, we will see a 30% improvement. But this doesn't mean that if I give you an SSRI, that you

will get 30% better. It means that if we take 100 people, a third of them will get 80% better, a third of them will get maybe 40% better, and a third of them will have no benefit at all. But when it comes to applying the science to your life, which of those things do you fall into? Science has no way of knowing. And this is why despite all of our advances in science, we still require clinicians to administer medicine. So let's understand precisely what a clinician does. What a clinician does is takes all of this information that science has provided, these evidence-based techniques, like, let's say, motivational interviewing for addictions or dialectical behavioral therapy for borderline personality disorder. It takes all of these like scientific things and then we actually apply it to an

individual. You require a human being to take all of science and translate it into something that will work for you. And this is why when we look at the outcomes for problems that are hard, right? Like problems like addictions. We require clinical support. And this is what we discover is that science is good at providing population-based answers, but the application to a human being still requires a lot of specificity. So science can't give us all the answers for our individual life. So in order to understand how to make life easy, we have to understand what is the difference between easy and hard. And this is very simple. So if you know how to do something, it's easy. And if you don't know how to do something, it's hard. Right? This is very, very simple. If you know how to change a

tire, it's relatively easy. If you don't know how to change a tire, it feels very hard and feels very impossible. And this is true of things that we view as objectively hard as well. So I'm an addiction psychiatrist, which means that I work with people who have addictions. And if we look at the definition of addiction, it's something that's very, very hard to deal with. We have aspects of your physiology, your biology. We have, for example, an opioid addiction. We have these mu receptors, these little receptors all over your body, that if you ever stop taking an opiate, they will start exhibiting pain signals. They'll amplify all of the pain in your body.

They'll give you withdrawals. You'll start having diarrhea. you'll feel awful, you'll start shaking. Everything will be very, very difficult. Your body will punish you. Your brain will punish you if you ever stop opiates. And so this is something that is objectively hard to deal with. And yet, through the practice of clinical medicine,

we will do something really cool, which is that the majority of my patients feel like managing their addiction is now easy. Right? They don't even think about it anymore. It used to be hard, but then they learned the knack of it. then they figured it out and then suddenly it becomes easy. So let's take the example of something that is objectively hard, like an addiction. So if I have something like an opioid addiction or marijuana addiction,

this is something that is objectively difficult to overcome. Because I have all these receptors in my brain and my body, these mu receptors in opioid addiction, that if I ever stop taking opiates, they will punish me. They will create pain. They will create diarrhea. I'll start aching all over. I'll feel chills.

I'll feel so physically bad. my body will punish me if I ever stopped taking the opiate. And so as someone struggles with opioid addiction, they will say this is really hard to overcome. It is impossible to overcome. But as they practice and as we use certain techniques like motivational interviewing, as they engage in things like narcotics anonymous and peer support, as they do all this stuff, they get the knack of it, right?

And suddenly what became impossible becomes very difficult but doable. And then it becomes hard, but actually not that big of it. deal. And then eventually you get to this point where a lot of people who are sober will get to will say, oh, I don't even think about it anymore, right? Even now when I go to a barbecue, I don't even think about having a beer. I don't want the beer. Suddenly that which was so difficult to control becomes a natural impulse. I don't even want to drink. Like, it's disgusting. I'm done with that stuff. And the question is, what the hell? How did this happen? Because this is objectively difficult, right? Science will tell you, oh my God, overcoming addiction is

objectively difficult. So what's going on here? You know, so it's very simple. If we're We want to understand the difference between hard and easy. It's one very simple thing. If you know how to do something, it's easy. And if you don't know how to do something, it's hard. Right? So until we learn how to manage our addiction, it becomes hard or even impossible. And once we learn how to manage our addiction, it becomes easy.

And this is not just true of addiction, right? So you can say, oh, my God, I just built my first PC. And it was so hard. It's so hard to build a PC. I have no idea how to do it. And then you have people over here at PC Master Race who are like, don't worry about it, bro, it's easy. Like, I'll help you out, right? So as soon as you learn how to do something, it becomes easy. And if you don't know how to do something, it becomes hard. Very simple.

We spend a lot of time learning to do hard things. So let's take the example of calculus, okay? So if we're studying calculus, we study calculus for one year, about two semesters. So the semester is about 12 weeks. And then over the course of, let's say, one week of calculus, let's look at what our actual studying program is. If you want to learn calculus, you go to class for three hours a week. And for every hour that you're in class, you should study for two. hours a week. So we're spending nine hours a week studying calculus. We're studying calculus over two semesters that are 12 weeks each, right? And so this ends up 12 weeks times nine is 108. So I'm spending 108 hours for one semester of calculus. And over the course of the year, I spend 216 hours

of dedicated study to learn calculus. Now, when it comes to living your life, how many hours of dedicated study do you have? Do you go to class where you learn certain concepts about how to live your life and then spend two hours applying those concepts for every hour that you learn? Do you spend nine hours a week practicing how to live life with intention where someone is teaching you what the principles are and then you practice? Absolutely not. The reason that life is hard is because we don't spend time learning how to live life. Right? You just kind of get bodied by life. You're sort of struggling over here and then this thing happens and you try to manage, you're managing, managing, managing, coping, coping instead of ever intentionally learning. And as long as you are

not doing that, if you don't know how to live life, of course life is going to be hard. And so until you've spent 216 hours of dedicated study trying to live life, of course it's going to be hard. So today, we are going to teach you the most fundamental building block of how to make your life easy. This is a concept that was discovered by the yogis thousands of years. years ago. And it turns out that if you understand this concept, a lot of your life will become easy. And there's another problem here, which is that a lot of the things that we try to do to make our life easy are actually making our life harder. And the number two culprits are motivation and willpower. Everyone is out there looking for motivation and everyone is out there

for looking for willpower. And they think, the more I'm motivated, the more my willpower is strong, the easier my life will be. Actually, the exact opposite. Motivation and willpower are the wrong. direction. You shouldn't even be moving in that direction if you understand this one yoga concept. That concept is the concept of something called a guna. So guna means quality, basically. And what the yogis essentially discovered is that there are three states, three qualities that all things can be in. There is a fundamental quality of tamas, which is inertia. There is a fundamental quality of rajas, which is activity or passion. And there is a fundamental quality of satvas, which is balance. So if you look at anything in the universe, we're going to talk about people for a second,

you'll notice that there are two forces. There is an inertia force and there is an activating force. And when these two forces are in balance, things will be easy. And when they are out of balance, things will become hard. So let's understand this in the body and mind. So there have been days in your life where things are easy, right? You had some days where things are easy. And if you really look at those days in your life, you may say, okay, I'm like kind of motivated, but it's not actually technically that you're very motivated. You don't wake up and you've got, I've got a fire in my business. Let's go to. You're like, okay, like, I got to do this stuff today. So let me just go ahead and do it. Okay, let me just take care of this stuff. Let me take care of this.

There's a certain casualness to it. There's a certain ease to it, right? And on these days, you're also not pushing yourself because you're not like, oh my God, I need a ton of willpower. I got to do it. I got to do it. Oh my God. It's so hard. It's so hard. You kind of wake up in some days. You know what I'm talking about. You've had some of these days where like the stars align and you don't know what is going on. And like suddenly, like, things are a little bit easier that day. You wake up one day, you brush your teeth, you have some breakfast, you sit down, you do a couple hours of work. And suddenly like, oh my God, you did so much, you were procrastinating so hard. And in three or four hours, you kind of got everything done. What the hell is going on? Like,

how did that happen? And then you wake up on other days where you're like, oh my God, it's so hard to get out of bed. I don't want to get out of bed. Man, I need a cup of coffee. Man, I need two cups of coffee. Oh my God. And doing everything is so difficult. You have to push your body. This is thomas because your body and your mind are inert pushing your mind to focus on something it's inert it doesn't want to move pushing your body it's inert right and when we get an abundance of thomas we even get a clinical diagnosis of something like major depressive disorder in a depressive episode there's a part of that that is psychomotor retardation which means that moving walking down the street is like moving through mud instead of moving through air there's a lot of resistance in inertia this is

Stamas. On the flip side, we have Rajas. Rajas is activity or passion. And you may say, okay, but like inertia is bad, so Rajas is better, right? No, equally bad. Just bad in a different way. So when we have an overabundance of Rajas, we get a ton of passion, right? So we get super excited about stuff. And this is your problem too. It's not just that you're inert some days. It's that you're way too passionate other days. Oh my God, I got so excited about this. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to order all this stuff. I'm going to buy a guitar. I'm going to buy all this stuff. I'm going to learn to play guitar. You have this overabund. of activity or passion, you get super excited about a video game. Your mind gets super excited about

something, oh my God, we're cooking now. Let's go, baby. Let's go. And what ends up happening after an overabundance of rages? You run out of steam. Or the other problem is that you should be focusing on thing number A, but your mind is so active or passionate about thing number B that you don't focus on what you're supposed to be focusing on. So in both cases, this is not the right state of mind. Instead, what we want is a balance for things to be balanced, right? I'm not overly excited, but I have enough energy or activity to where I can do the thing that I need to do, and my mind is relatively tranquil and calm. Now, let's go back to motivation and willpower. The problem with motivation and willpower is that they are compensations for thomas and rajas. So if we really think about

motivation, why do we want motivation? So we want motivation because if my body or mind is motivated, then I don't have to force it, right? So motivation is a natural inclination to do something. And we all go seeking out motivation because if we're motivated, oh, thank God, then I don't need willpower. My body will naturally want to do it. But I want you to think a little bit about how insidious and devastating this truly is. Because what you're trying to do is create a state for your body or mind where it does what you want it to do. It wants to do it, right? The mind, once it's motivated, it naturally wants to do something.

But that still means you're not in control. If the mind is motivated towards doing something, you're breathing a sense. eye of relief, but it's not that you are telling it to do it and then the mind naturally follows your orders. It's, thank God the mind actually wants to do it because I have no fucking control over my mind to begin with. So on the days that it wants to do what I want it to do, thank God. And so we end up chasing this idea where we want the mind to do what we want it to do, but we are fundamentally not control of it. This is what makes life hard because motivation waxes and wanes. So what motivation is is to try to channel the sense of Rajas.

We want a natural passion in the direction that we want it because we don't control the mind. So we hope that the passion is in the direction that we want. Well, what about willpower? Willpower is our antidote to thumb us, right? So when our body or mind is inert and we don't feel like doing something, what is our solution? Our solution is willpower. So even though it's sluggish and slow, I'm going to force it. I'm going to push it.

Push, boy, push. Willpower, like, let's go, let's go, let's go. But if you live a life where things are, there's a large exertion of willpower, your life will not be easy. You may accomplish particular things, but it'll be fucking exhausting. Because we know that there are three major things

that drain our mental willpower. And drain our cognition, actually, is really a better way to put it. Drain our cognitive energy. And willpower is one of them. Forcing your mind to do something or your body to do something is very, very difficult and very draining.

And here we are, chasing motivation, which is actually tricky because motivation means you're not in control. You cross your fingers and you hope that your body and mind want to do something because they're the boss and you're just along for the ride. And on the flip side, we're draining ourselves trying to push this inert body. And then on the flip side, there are these days where you're in Satvas. And in Satvas, your mind is relatively balanced. You're not overly excited. So you've got some stamina. You've got some staying power. And you can say to your mind, okay, today we're going to do this. So, and then your mind is like, okay, let's just get it.

done. And on these days, life is easy. So now the question is, all right, so if I'm in a Rajsik or Tham sick state of mind, how do I cultivate Satvas? So there's one really simple trick that you can do, and we'll teach you all some more details. So first is, on a day that you are passionate, you need to do things that will make you more sativic tomorrow. So anytime you have a overabundance of Rajas, the goal is not to give in to the Rajas, but to do things that will make you have a balanced mind tomorrow. So good examples of this are, first of all, food. So there are certain foods that will lead to passion and certain foods that will lead to inertia. We all know there are foods that will lead to food comas, right? So these are things that are highly calorically dense, a combination

of carbohydrates and fats together. So all desserts fall in this category, pizza falls into this category, processed foods that will cause things like inflammation and stuff like that in the gut. Well, there's all kinds of science. We're not going to get into that now. You can check out all of our other videos. But we know that when you eat processed foods, it increases inflammation. Inflammation then causes a low level of brain fog in your brain. We'll make it hard for you to focus on things. We'll make it hard for you to have willpower. Everything gets screwed. So how do we create this balanced mind? So let's just think about it for a second, right? How do we create balance in our body? How do we create balance in our mind? What we put into the body and mind will determine its function.

So if we eat particular kinds of food, the body will be slow. If we eat other kinds of food, the body will be activated, right? If I get drunk on liquor, suddenly I'm filled with passion. And the same is true of the mind. Certain foods will slow down the mind. Certain foods will speed up the mind. This is true of all psychoactive substances as well. These are the things that affect the mind in a particular way. So food that is light and nutritious doesn't weigh down the mind, but also doesn't overly activate it. The second thing that we can do to create a balanced body or mind is to stretch it, right? So we want to engage in exercises that will sort of clean out the mind, purify the mind, as well as stretch the mind, focus the mind. So this is where mind-body practices are very, very powerful. So if we look at practices like yoga or Tai Chi, how do

these things work fundamentally? So when I engage in a yoga posture, it's not about becoming a human pretzel. It's that if I try to balance on one leg with my arms above like this, what's it going to do to my mind? It is going to force my mind to focus, right? Because I can't stand like this on one leg, unless my mind is focused. This is the point of yoga, is to induce, to literally practice the focusing of the mind. And since you are telling the mind to do something, and it is maintaining that state, despite the fact that it is hard, you are training the mind to listen. And the more you engage in this kind of stuff, the more balanced the mind will be, the more pliant the mind will be. It'll become supple, easy to kind of listen to you. So these are the two things

that we really want to focus on. So the first thing is we're going to eat light, nutritious food. So high amounts of fiber, but not processed fiber or anything like that. Don't have any of that metamusal crap or anything like that. Eat vegetables, eat fruits, cook yourself a nice nutritious meal. Second thing that we want to do on a day of Rajas when we feel pretty good is we want to do some kind of yoga or Tai Chi. Ideally, not even exercise, but we want a mind-body balancing practice. So you can do suria namascar or something like that. The third thing that we really want to be careful about when we are trying to create a sativ mind is to avoid all psychoactive substances. Now, this is a big one that a lot of people will struggle with. So let's understand

psychoactive substances for a second and how they affect our mind. Let's take caffeine. So what does caffeine do? Caffeine counters thomas, right? So if I wake up in the morning and I feel very sluggish or if I'm having an afternoon, oh my God, I'm kind of sluggish, let me take caffeine. It artificially boosts my energy. But caffeine doesn't increase your energy. All you're doing, is taking an advance on your future energy. So if I drink caffeine now, I'm going to have a crash later. This is true of all stimulants, right? So once the stuff wears out, all of this artificial stuff that you've been kind of suppressing

through the caffeine. So if we look at technically the way that caffeine works, it blunts our ability to detect our fatigue. So the way that our brain knows how fatigued we are is we detect this chemical called adenosine. And the more adenosine we have in our brain, the more we feel type. And so that one ends up happening when we take caffeine doesn't actually give us energy. It just blunts our ability to detect our tiredness.

So once the caffeine wears off, there's this pile of adenosine, and suddenly you feel very tired. Okay? So caffeine doesn't give you energy. You're just taking it advance from the future, and then you're going to have to pay it back. Other psychoactive substances like alcohol or marijuana or things like that, these two are problematic, because what these are going to do is going to calm us down. Oh my God, I have anxiety. This is an overabundance of activity.

of the mind. And so then what happens, I take the substance and it induces a thamsic state. We are making our mind inert, which, by the way, is true of our psychiatric medications as well. If you look at these medications like antipsychotic medications, they're all sedating because they literally slow down the activity of the mind. Even SSRIs are somewhat sedating, right? We can feel sleepy, sluggish. We're inducing a thamsic state because in psychiatry, when there is an overactivity of the mind, we just sedate it. Literally. That's what we do. That's the neurochemistry of our psychiatric drugs. So this is the problem is as long as you are ping ponging back and forth between a Rajsick mind that is chemically not even balanced, but overcome with something that's thamsic, right?

We're sedating a passionate mind. Or on the flip side, we have a sluggish mind that we're artificially boosting with stimulants. In both of these cases, the state of our mind is unhealthy. It's not balanced. It's not easy. So you must cut out as many psychoactive substances as you can. And you will hear this. You may even experience this yourself that if you take a break from all alcohol, all marijuana, caffeine doesn't have to be any, all of these substances at the same time.

Every patient I've ever talked to, if they can cut out a psychoactive substance, after 30 to 60 days, they feel better. It may come back after a while. You may need to use it. I'm definitely in that camp for caffeine. But this is the kind of thing where once you actually detox off of the substance, everyone says they feel better. So what we want to do is create a sativic moment. mind. And the more sativik our mind is, the more balanced our mind is, the better we will be. So we want to eat light, nutritious foods that are nutrient rich and ideally not too calorically dense. It's not so much about whether you eat 2,000 calories or 1,800 or 2100. That's not that important. The main thing is that the food should not be psychoactively dulling,

right? So we want food that's light and nutritious, some kind of mind-body practice, and some kind of restriction on as many substances as you can, of, manage to restrict. If you can do these three days on a day that you are Rajsick, right? Because remember, there are going to be some days that you're overly active, some days that you're, sorry, inactive, and some days where you're balanced. So you take an overly active day, which is going to happen at some point. And then you do as many sativic things as you can. As you do more sativic things, what are you actually doing? You're actually setting up for a healthier tomorrow. So when you wake up the next day, all of that stuff in your gut, the mind-body practice that you've done, the

reduction in substances means you're going through less withdrawal, okay? Or maybe you started the process of withdrawal. But since you're eating healthy and stuff like that, you're not very sluggish. Your gut bacteria isn't out of whack. The next day when you wake up, your mind will be 1%, 5%, 10% more satvic. And as your mind becomes more sativic, it'll be a little bit easier to get it to do what you want to do because it's balanced. It's not overly sluggish and it's not overly excited. So now you've added 10% balance. And so then if you tell it, okay, today we're going to eat healthy again. Today we're going to do a little bit more yoga. Let's try yoga today. Let's skip that second cup of caffeine in the afternoon. And by the way, a great way to avoid afternoon caffeine is just to nap.

Okay, so if you guys are struggling with caffeine, fine, have your cup in the morning, but in the afternoon, just nap, right? Because you're tired. So listen to your body. Instead of ignoring your body, just listen to it and take a little bit more rest. And then when you wake up, you'll feel probably not even refresh. You'll feel a little bit more sluggish mentally. But your body will get that rest, which will help you tomorrow. Hey, all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health. It combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a choose-your-own-adventure format.

So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. So this is the key thing to understand about how to make your life easy. The first thing is that you must balance your body. As your body and mind are balanced, life will suddenly become a lot easier. Second thing to understand is that this balancing takes time. And the main thing to do is you should invest in whatever you can today that will make your mind more sattvic tomorrow. The third thing to understand is that if your mind is more sattvic, it is easier to do more sattvic things. So it's kind of like a string of dominoes where if I can eat healthy and meditate one day, do mind, body practices, whatever, tomorrow in some way it'll be easier to do it again.

We're not saying that you have to be perfect. It's not about perfection. It's about a trend in the right direction. And the last thing to understand about making your life easy is that in order to make your life easy, you must be willing to live a hard life today. There are two kinds of people in life. The people who want an easy life,

so they seek an easy life, and they avoid a hardness. And their life becomes hard, right? So when you're sitting here and you're avoiding the work that you have to do when you're not exercising, you're not doing yoga because you want an easy life, you want an easy life. In search of an easy life, you create an easy life today, a life of indulgence, a life of lack of effort, a life where you screw yourself over tomorrow. Then your life will be hard. Paradoxically,

the ones who embrace a difficult life today will have an easier life tomorrow. And the more that you embrace difficulty, the easier your life will become until you reach a point where you are relatively satv. And as you're relatively sativ, something magical. will happen. Your body and mind will start to listen to you. And if your body and mind listen to you, you don't need motivation. You don't need willpower because it is compliant. It is a well-trained animal. When you tell the horse to go this way, it goes this way. And then your life will truly become easy. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit

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