HealthyGamerGG - How To Process Negative Emotions

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

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The world that we lived in is not the world in which our brains were developed, right? So our brains evolved for a particular kind of lifestyle. And I think what we're actually seeing is that as humanity has progressed a lot, we've lost sight of like particular things that our brain used to rely on. So let's talk a little bit about emotional processing. So I want to start with a story. So I was once working with someone who was in the field of finance. And they came to my office and they were concerned that they were going to get fired.

And so they were say, they came in and they said, I'm really anxious. And I said, okay, well, what are you anxious about? They said, well, I'm paranoid. I'm going to get fired. And so as we kind of dug into it, what we found is that, you know, this person's anxiety was sort of turning into a vicious cycle where they were, you know, they were afraid that they were going to get fired, which in turn means that any time they were presenting. So once a week, they would kind of present to all the partners and stuff like that about the work that they were doing, the deals they were working on things like that. And so the more anxious they became, like the more they would stumble over their words. like, oh my God, like the partners are all listening, like, oh, like, I can't screw this up, I can't screw this up. And since their mind is not on what they're actually supposed to be presenting, but it's so focused on not wanting to screw everything up, what would happen? They would screw up, right? They would stumble over their words. Their presentation wouldn't kind of come out clear. And so they were just really concerned and terrified. And they just had to get a control of this anxiety. So they kind of came to my office and they're like, you know, can you help me like with the anxiety? And so we talked about lots of different stuff.

It was really interesting what ended up happening. We'll sort of share what happens at the end of our talk today. So we started working on that. And I think one of the key things that I sort of noticed as I was talking to him is that things seem to be getting harder, right? If we kind of look at people today, like I talked to a lot of people and it just seems like things are just getting harder. I get the sense that we're getting more kind of wrung out, right? As we go through life, I'll talk to people who are teenagers in their 20s and their 30s. like life seems to just be squeezing everyone dry.

And even if you look at some of these like things like the kind of anti-work movement or dating, like life, there just seems to be like more suffering. Like I get the sense that people today are going through life trying to take as little damage as possible. Because every time you like do something in your life, like it's not going to go well and you're going to like lose a piece of yourself. Like in online dating, for example, everyone's like every single date I go on. It's like I lose like this tiny part of myself, right? Like I went on another date. I dug real deep.

I, you know, match with 5,000 people. I went on one date and things didn't really work out. And now it's like, am I going to be alone forever? And so it's kind of like life just, the more you go through life, the more like battered and bruised you get. And there's this kind of idea that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But I get the sense that when I talk to people, like they're just getting kind of, it's like death by a thousand cuts.

As they try to move through life, they're just getting more and more shriveled and kind of patched up and defunct and like, it just seems like we're not able to recover from things the way that we used to, right? And so I was kind of thinking about this because is life actually getting worse? Like, you know, if we look at it, humanity is advancing in so many different ways. Hopefully we'll have human beings on Mars soon. You know, medicine is advancing. Technology is advancing. Like, we have commercial flights into space now. Like, you know, we have cell phones, right? So we can do all kinds of stuff like video games are super cool there's like VR technology we developed a COVID vaccine in two years you know like cancer treatments are improving like if you look around like things seem to be

getting better right if you look at the humanity is progressing but why does it feel like we're getting worse right why is humanity as a whole progressing but it feels like every person i talk to who's trying to go through life is just getting like worse and worse right it almost feels like you start life with some amount of happiness and each negative experience you have, like, takes away some happiness and it's never to be gained again. I get the sense of a very limited resource that people are kind of like getting rid of as they try to go through life. And so I think we have some terms like burnout, for example, which is at an all-time high. So why are like so many people burnt out when we have so many things that make our life

convenient? So if we think about what used to, what should burn us out? Like, what should burn us out? It's like, you know, effort. But now I can get food delivered to my door. I don't have to have to sit up to work or be entertained. Like, I can now do all my work or entertainment at my fingertips. You know, I can watch Breaking Bad on the toilet if I want to. Like, there's all kinds of stuff. I can take off my switch off the dock and, you know, walk into the bathtub and then, like, play switch. Like, there's so much convenience. Nothing should be getting easier. But it feels like things are getting harder. Hey, chat. Subscribing to our YouTube channel allows us to help more people with their mental health. Thanks to your support so far, we've already reached

thousands of people from across the globe. So help us out and hit subscribe. Wait, they have to hit subscribe and click a bell now. And so if we want to understand, okay, like, what's going on here? So are we just wrong? Or we like, you know, some of the people from the older generation are like, young kids nowadays are so ungrateful that are so lazy? Like, you know, is that what's going on? Is this generation have we just gotten kind of, you know, lazy? Like, what's happening here? What's changed? Has anything changed? Is this just a perception? And what I kind of realized is that the world that we lived in, is not the world in which our brains were developed, right? So our brains evolved for a particular kind of lifestyle. And I think what we're actually seeing is that as humanity has progressed a lot,

we've lost sight of like particular things that our brain used to rely on, took for granted so easily that now that we sort of lost it, we're kind of really confused about what we even lost because we weren't even aware of it. And in essence, I think that's emotional processing. And as a society, what we've lost sight of is the ability to emotionally process. In fact, it was so easy to do before that we don't even think about it necessarily like a skill, right? Like, we kind of took it for granted. Because now we have all these, like, resources around emotional processing, right? Go see a therapist.

But like 10,000 years ago or 20,000 years ago, there weren't therapists, and it's not like human beings were having trouble with emotional processing, right? They were just kind of going about and living their lives. So I want to share with y'all an interesting perspective from like evolutionary psychology. around how the brain processes emotions. And what we will discover is, okay, once we understand how the brain processes emotions, we'll see how society has changed. And if we see how society has changed, we'll maybe be able to detect have we lost the ability to process emotions. And then the question kind of becomes, okay, if we figured out that we have lost the ability to process emotions, what can we start to do differently? How can we reclaim the lives that we used to have

so that emotional processing becomes easier? Okay. So let's start with kind of how society used to exist. So the first thing is that we used to live in communal groups, right? So there's like a group of people. And so there was a limited amount of stuff to get you excited on a daily basis. There was like a like a little like the scope of conflict was like narrow, right? You maybe live in a village of, let's say, somewhere between like 50 and 500 people. And so there are only so many people you can have beef with. Whereas like now if you look at the world today, like I can post something on Twitter and the 10,000 people that disagree very strongly with what I said can attack me on Twitter from all across the globe, even though it's a tiny fraction of the world, right? They can still pile on and attack me.

So the first thing to understand is that we used to live in kind of a communal society. And if you look at how human beings managed conflict, so let's say, look, we have some kind of conflict. And then like, what would happen after the conflict? Let's say I get into an argument with someone in my town or in my tribal group, okay? What happens after? after that emotional exchange. So I'm kind of ramped up emotionally, right? Like, what do I do? So let's say I go like out foraging.

And so I'm walking through the wilderness and I'm sort of physically paying attention to things. But mentally, like, what am I doing? Like I'm just sort of like my mind is kind of doesn't have anything to do, right? And so my mind is kind of in idle mode. Like there's not, I'm not engaged in an argument then, but I have lots of time where my mind is idle and I'm sort of doing some physical things. We also see this with humans in terms of rote labor, right? So humans used to do a lot of like rote labor that was mentally like idle. So let's say I'm repairing fishing nets or, you know, I'm making a fire right, which

used to be like an hour long endeavor. Or I'm like sharpening a spear or I'm maintaining, I'm tanning leather or something like that. Like there's all kinds of like tasks that human beings used to do all the time, which required physical effort, but essentially gave idle time for the mind. And what's kind of interesting about that is if you allow yourself. to have idle time in your own mind, what you'll discover is that that's when you actually do a lot of processing. So if I have a conflict with someone and then I go for a walk and I give my mind the chance

to think through it, I'll sort of feel better at the end of the walk. Or in a communal society, maybe I'll go for a walk with a friend or I'll go foraging, right, with a group of people. And then we kind of talk a little bit about what happened. And then I'll kind of like process it, even in terms of the rote labor. where like if I'm sitting there repairing fishing nets and I had a conflict with my, let's say, wife last night, that's a good chance for me to kind of like think through things. And so one of the key things is I kind of look at really study, I remember reading about

anthropology and some of these tribes in New Guinea and sort of the psychological impact or what their psychological lives were like. And I was struck by the amount of idle time that they have to essentially like process stuff because there's nothing else to do. And now if we kind of think about it, How is modern life different? And what we discover about modern life is that we essentially have no time to process. That processing is actually like a subconscious or relatively automatic activity that happens over long periods of time. So we sort of know this, right? So there are some theories in psychiatry about dreams and stuff as methods of emotional processing that essentially like a lot of these thoughts and stuff will be active in our unconscious.

But we sort of know that emotional processing to a certain degree like takes time and takes like spin. And if we really look at what's changed in our society, it's been a loss of time and space. Because we don't have idle time anymore, right? Now when I'm taking a walk, what am I doing? I'm listening to an audiobook, listening to a podcast, listening to music. Now when I have a conflict with someone, what happens? Do I go for a walk afterward? Do I have time to think about it while I'm repairing my nets?

No, of course not. I create mental distraction. So what we're starting to see is that as we accumulate these negative experiences, let's say I have a bad date. What I end up doing immediately after the bad date, it's not like I've got idle time in my mind. In fact, what I want to do is distract myself. And then what happens is as I distract myself, I don't process any of those emotions. They kind of just go dormant, right? Because after a bad date, you kind of want to distract yourself from those emotions.

But then when you wake up the next morning, what's waiting for you? What's waiting for you is those emotions. And so the second you wake up, you're like, oh my God, like that date was so terrible. And then what do you do? You pull out your phone and you distract yourself from that processing in the most. moment. And as this goes on again and again and again, what we tend to see is that our life is filled with negative impacts that we don't allow ourselves time to actually process. And even in the history of humanity, we have some events like funerals are a good example of this, where we sort of have

active participation without any sort of intellectual goal. Does that kind of make sense? Like when I go to a funeral, it's not like we're there to do anything. We just kind of communally gather and we just sort of share random thoughts about the person. And some, something about that experience. It's not like we're there and we're going to be like, okay, what are the 16 ways in which this person impacted your life? Let's think through them. Let's think about how you're going to replace each of these things that this person did for you. That's not actually what funerals do for us. That's not how they help us process grief, right? They just sort of create this time and space that sort of has this intensive participation

without actually a whole lot of like mental work. And so our mind is allowed to almost be on autopilot and sort of process that grief in these funeral kind of situation. And if we look at life, essentially what we've lost is all of that kind of time. Because now we're doing something constant. We'll also, this is also why I think that memes are so telling, right? Because after I've been through traumatic dating experiences, why do I love the memes that I love? I think the reason we love the memes that we love is because we've got so much buried emotion that it takes some kind of humorous single image to evoke that emotion.

And it resonates with us, right? That's why we love memes. So I don't even think it's a coincidence that we've seen a rise in memes correlating with the lack of emotional processing. And the more we love memes, because it speaks to what we struggle with in life, right? Because those things are things that we hold on to. We have all these negative experiences. Each date that I go on, each time I send out a job application in this massive pool, each time that someone gets back to me after I've applied to a job, and they're like, hey, can you upload your resume into our specific portal and retype everything. And it's like, that's why I sent a resume, right? Each of these

tiny little traumatic experiences we have. And then what do we do as soon as I'm done uploading my resume into the 16th, you know, corporate portal because they want it formatted in their way. What do I do after 16 of those? I'm so exhausted that I'm going to go play a video game. I sure as hell I ain't going to stop and think about it, right? I'm not going to like be idle. I need to get the hell away from this. And so our society has given us so much space. to distract ourselves from our emotions that we never end up processing them. And this is why it feels like as we go through life, we lose a piece of ourselves with each negative experience.

Because we do lose a piece of ourselves. The difference is that in the past we knew how to find those pieces. We could get them back because we had this process of kind of emotional healing. And the lack of this also kind of explain some of these like emotional interactions and some of these things like trauma dumping on the internet, where like now I've got this like, like gigantic pile of emotion that subsurface has been buried down with dopaminergic distraction. And then occasionally I'll like explode on someone on the internet.

Or we'll see people who get really, really caught up, right? Or very, very angry. We'll see so much tilt and anger on the internet. Why is that? It's because none of this stuff gets processed. And sometimes what happens is people will go into like vomit in some corner of the internet, right? They'll make some rant. But even if you think about the rant, what happens to that person after they type out their rant?

They just go back to the distraction. So what we're almost seeing is like these surface level emotional managements. It's not like that person is getting to the root of the issue, right? They're just ranting for a little while, and then they go do something else, and then the emotions pile up again, and then they kind of like overflow and rant again. So what we're seeing is that our society, this sort of natural emotional processing, has been replaced by this very like surface level distraction and sometimes even this like verbal diarrhea kind of stuff, which we call like venting.

But venting is not the same as emotional processing. All it does is get rid of the stuff on top. And then what we really have to think a little bit about is, okay, so like, what do we do do about the stuff down below? How do we actually process our emotions and start to feel a little bit better about life? How do we recover from the damage that has been done? And that's where I think that what we've really lost sight of is some of this deeper emotional work. And if we think a little bit about the deeper emotional work, what are the attributes of it, right?

So the first is that it requires time. The second is it requires space. The third is it requires something like exploration. And so what we've managed to actually do is create a system of professionals that in a certain amount of, in a restricted time and in a restricted space, can go deeper than you normally would, right? These are what we call therapists. In the case, there are even other kinds of professionals, right, like coaches.

If we think about life coaches or career coaches or things like that, like we have a pretty robust coaching program, what we've really found is that coaches are really good at understanding those kinds of problems and then helping you do that emotional work so that you can actually like move forward and achieve your goals, which going back to our original case at the beginning. So here's just a prime example of that, right? So this is a person who came in and was really, really concerned about losing their job. And so what ended up happening is we talked about it. They're like, okay, like, well, why are you so stressed out about losing your job? And what they sort of told me is that, you know, I'm really a team player. Like I like working on teams.

they were a professional athlete and had done a lot of team-oriented sports. And so what they were really looking for is like a team. And what they really hated the most, the root of all their problems at this particular financial institution, was that it was like really competitive. It was sort of like a dog-eat-dog kind of world, right? So what would happen is if they were working on a deal with a couple of colleagues, the colleagues would try to make themselves look good by like taking the credit. And as they started taking more and more credit,

the person I was working with started to feel really, really anxious. because now they're losing credit for their work. People are going to think that they're a waste of space. People are thinking that they're not carrying their weight, and that triggers all the anxiety. And then they're afraid they're going to get fired, and why are they going to get fired? It's because they can't advocate for themselves in a room

the way that other people can, right? They can't sort of like take all the credit because that's just not who they are. They're like a team person, not like a competitive, like, I'm going to, you know, take everybody else's credit. And so 18 months after this person came into my office, requesting help with anxiety

so that they wouldn't get fired, they actually decided to quit. And this is exactly the value of emotional processing. Once you start to figure out, we have these surface-level emotions that we deal with. But once you actually start to do that deep emotional work, you start to figure out, okay, what is it that I dislike about this place? How are these experiences actually affecting me? How are these experiences changing the way that I look at myself?

How do I want to look at myself? How do I want to live in this world? What kind of stuff do I actually want? And once we start to do that deep emotional work, and once we actually figure out, okay, this is deeply how I feel about it. Once I give myself time and space and keep in mind that this person worked with a professional for 18 months, discover what you actually want. Process each of those events and how they made you feel about yourself.

And then ultimately, what you're going to be able to do is quit. You'll be able to be free of it. You'll be able to actually manufacture your own destiny. You'll be able to actually make decisions that are aligned with who you are. But we've lost sight of who we are because we're so busy distracting ourselves. and having these emotional volcanic eruptions without ever actually getting to the root of it. So people may be wondering, okay, practically, like, what does this entail? Right? How do I do this? This sounds great.

So let's remember that there are a couple of things that if we kind of look at anthropology, we can sort of look at what human beings used to do to process. And we can try to create those in a sort of targeted way. So the first thing at the top of my list is journaling. And journaling is a little bit tricky because people say like, oh, like you should journal. But then I don't know if y'all are like this. I'm kind of like this, where I didn't know how to journal. Because everyone says you should journal, but no one teaches you how to journal, right?

Because even journals are like private. It's not like if I started journaling at the age of 12, no one's supposed to read it. So how am I supposed to get feedback on whether I'm journaling properly or improperly? And that's where some people say there's no proper way to journal. It's for you. But this is what's really frustrating is if you're kind of like me, where you're kind of like a logical, scientific person, if people are in touch with their feelings, they can figure out how to journal on their own. But I don't know how to journal.

I need to understand what's the point, What am I trying to do? And they're like, that's not the point of journaling. No, BS, it can be the point of journaling, right? So no one teaches us how to journal. So I'd love to do with you all today is just teach you a little bit about journaling. So there are a couple of different ways you can journal. The first is that you can write about experiences that are emotionally charged for you.

This is the simplest way to journal. And the cool thing about journaling is that it doesn't have a particular endpoint, right? So when you say, well, what am I supposed to write about? You know, how do I know when I'm done? It kind of doesn't matter. Because the journaling itself, it's not about doing the journaling, the right? way or the wrong way, it's that the journaling is going to be a substitute for that sort of idle work and giving your mind time to start processing. And then your mind will do the subconscious

processing on its own. So I would say just write about experiences that are emotionally engaging for you. And what does that mean emotionally engaging? It means things that made you feel good or feel bad. Now, sometimes people may be kind of confused and they're like, okay, but like, I don't want to journal about that. Right. So sometimes people run into resistance around journaling around emotionally active experiences, which makes perfect sense. Because they're emotionally engaging, and sometimes we try to avoid that crap. And since we want to avoid that crap, that's how we end up in the dopaminergic crap, right? That's how we end up in video games and social media and Twitter and Reddit and memes,

because we're trying to avoid it. So then the other thing that you can do, if that's even too emotionally charged for you, you can write about what happened or this week. You can just jot down thoughts that you have, things that you want to think about, things that you want to jot down, right? And you may say, but then what's the point of that? Like, I don't need to recap what happened this week or what happened today. That doesn't do me any good.

And that's where, once again, I think you're kind of missing the point, which is that the goal is not cognitive. The goal is not to logically decide at the end, like pros and cons lists. That's not what the goal is. The goal is to actually remember what we're missing in society is time and space. Idle time for our mind to kind of digest what's happened to us. So all you need to do is engage in some kind of activity that, gives your mind that time and space. It actually doesn't need to be very goal-oriented.

So you can write about emotional experiences, you can write about your day, you can jot down thoughts or ideas or things that you're interested in. So sometimes when I journal, I'll kind to make notes about philosophy or science or what I think is wrong with the world. And all of those things can be incredibly productive. Because what we're really trying to do is give our mind some more of that time and space to actually do that deep emotional work, which it'll do on its own. You don't have to speed it along. Now, a couple of other things that people will do, to sort of help with emotional processing. So you can, of course, work with a professional.

So especially depending on the kind of processing you're trying to do, I'd say a therapist is a really good idea. If you're the kind of processing you're trying to do is to try to figure out, okay, what do I want to do with my life? Am I looking for direction or am I looking to unburden myself from the past? If your primary goal is to unburden yourself from the past, I'd definitely recommend therapy. If your goal is to try to figure out what you want from this life, I think coaching or

spirituality is actually like a better fit. So there are other things that I think are really, really conducive to this. So remember that the requirements that our ancestors used were sort of wrote physical activity with mental idle time. So any activity like that, I think will sort of help you emotionally process. So my personal take is like, I love hiking. And we sort of know this, right? We know that when people go hiking for three months in the mountains, they come back as

different human beings, right? Like they're like, they know what they want from life. They like found themselves in, you know, the Himalayas after a six-month hike. And they, like, just become different people. And if you kind of think a little bit about that, well, hold on a second. How does that work? Well, essentially what they did is gave themselves a steroid shot of emotional processing. They gave themselves so much idle time and physical activity that they processed a bunch of stuff.

And it all happened somewhat subconsciously that they come back as transform people. So nature, I think, absolutely helps. But it's really those couple of components that you have to have some amount of physical demand with mental idleness. without a clear mental goal, because that's not really emotional processing. So these are a couple of tips that I'd really suggest if you're someone who feels like going through life just takes more and more out of you. What I've really found is that people really struggle with this because every experience becomes, has to be perfect, because you can't afford the loss.

Does that make sense? You can't waste your life dating this one person because if you've wasted two years on this person, what are you going to, like, those two years are gone and you're never going to be able to get them back. And we've lost the ability to recover from our injuries in life, which is part of the reason that we've become so miserly with actually making commitments. And if I can't recover from the emotional damage, if I'm going to be traumatized by dating this person, I have to be so much more hesitant to date them in the first place. As I become hesitant to date them in the first place, I stop actually living life because I'm afraid of making mistakes. And so I think what we've really

lost more than anything else is the ability to emotionally process. And as we get little pieces of our soul clipped away by the experiences of life. And as we turn to technology, we don't really allow ourselves to heal and recover from it because technology is so good at distracting. And so if you find yourself in this kind of situation, I'd strongly recommend you take a look at emotional processing. You start to do some of these activities like journal or meditate or go see a therapist or coach. Or if you've got the time, go find yourself in the Himalayas for six months. Like, that's fantastic. Go do that. But in the absence of that, hopefully this has been a little bit helpful. And if you want to start somewhere to start with journaling.