HealthyGamerGG - I Am Not Actually Living a Life

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

Dr. K talks about how to start living your own life, struggling with lack of support, instilled values, how high school is the start of self-regulation, and more! 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

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So what on earth is going on? And like, how do we get out of this? So, I don't have a life. Warning, this text probably, this text probably the most pathetic thing you've ever read. I'm a 24-year-old woman. I'm a high school dropout. I don't have a job. I don't have any friends.

I never had a relationship and all that. Loneliness is indescribable. I've always felt out of place. And I've always been a weird kid. I wasn't the brightest in the school. I used to skip school for much. I just waited until my parents went to work and then came back home and spent time in my room. I basically wasted all my life being isolated. Stuck inside my room due to my depression and severe

social anxiety and I was just indifferent about my future. Although I did have some plans or whatever, but that was stupid. I don't have good memories. I have never had some amazing adventures with my friends. I wasn't happy and I'm unhappy now. All I do every day is just scroll the internet or watch dumb videos. Nothing happens in my life. I tried to find a job, but I usually just chicken out and go back to my room, trying to escape sheer anxiety. My family is so upset with me. I don't even want to start with this one. I don't see a future for myself. I did go to a therapist. She gave me antidepressants and told me to find a job, but I'm still rotting in my room. I don't know what's wrong with me. It's not a life. I feel so hopeless and defeated. I don't think I'll ever catch up on life.

And the most painful thing is that I'm actually a fun person and there are things I'd love to do. I want to see places. I want to travel. I want to have a healthy social life. I want to have a life. But I simply can't do even a small step. So sometimes we find ourselves in a situation where we're in our 20s and we've got nothing going for us. High school dropout, didn't even finish school, don't have a job, don't have a friend,

never had a relationship. So romance isn't working well. Professions isn't going well. Academics aren't going well. And furthermore, our health isn't good, right? Because there's like crippling depression and anxiety, like really bad anxiety. And so we find ourselves in the situation where like nothing's going our way. There's like literally not a single point of light in our life.

And we're 24. We realize this. and like we don't even know like where to start like where do you even start in this kind of situation and this is what's like especially crippling about this is that if we look at this what's the tone right like who does who do you think this person blames who is to blame here i simply can't do one step we feel defeated and the challenge here is that sometimes when we're in this situation, like we have depression and anxiety, the internet or people will tell us, like myself included, go get therapy, right? So we'll say like, oh, like, this is a problem,

like what's the diagnosis here? You're depressed. Oh, right? So you're like, you do to depression and anxiety. Okay, great, go to therapy. And then we do that. And you get antidepressants and you're told to find a job, and then you're still rotting in your room. So like the challenge here is that when you're faced with the situation, like there are some things that are supposed to be. And you're supposed to, be the right answer. And what on earth do you do if you do the right answer? And it still doesn't work. Like then what? Then the real hopelessness sets in. Right? Then it's like, then I want you all think about what effect this has on the mind. If someone tells you, oh, look, this is the right answer. Like you need to go see a therapist and find medication. You go go to a therapist, you find medication.

You do the right thing. And it still doesn't work. Who's to blame? Even more. You're you, right? Because this works for so many people. Therapy and antidepressants help people who are depressed, but they don't help me. So now you're like, S-O-L, right? Like, now it's like, now you're busted on such a fundamental level that even, like, medical professionals aren't able to help you. And so when you're faced in this situation, you're kind of screwed. Like, you don't even, like, you don't know where to start. You don't know how to make friends. You don't have social skills. You don't know how to put together a resume. Like you haven't even finished school.

And then what's really painful about this is that despite the fact that you're struggling with all this stuff, you still want what life has to offer. Right. Like you recognize that life is supposed to be more than this. You want to have a healthy social life. You want to have a relationship. You want to travel. You want to do fun things.

You want to do more than just spend all day on the internet. But where on earth do you even start? And it can feel so overwhelming. Like, it's a really challenging problem to solve. But if you're going to therapy and you're getting antidepressants anyway and you're still stuck, then it really feels bad. So this is where, like, if we really want to understand this, we've got to kind of start by kind of start at the top. So the first thing, we're going to share a little bit of research, okay? First thing to understand is that if you are defeated in your mind, the chances of success are going to.

to be very low. Right? So like basically, like, it's been my experience that you fail when you give up. That's the most important variable in terms of whether you succeed or you fail. Now, what does success mean? What does failure mean? Like, that's a whole separate philosophical question. But in essence, if you give up, then it's very hard to win.

Now, the challenge is that telling you that doesn't actually fix anything, right? Actually, if you pay attention to what happens is you blame. yourself even more because, oh, all I have to do is hope. And if I could hope, then I would be successful. But busted me, I can't even hope. My despair is so bad. Like, I can't even hope. I can't be motivated. I can't stay positive. Like, because my, I'm so busted, I can't even do that. Right. So, like, do you see how, like, no matter what we say, like, you're always going to be the problem? Like, it's always going to be a deficiency in you. That's what your mind is going to tell you. That's what we have to get rid of. Now, if I tell you, you have to get rid of it,

Then you can't get rid of it, just get rid of it, right? Just have a positive mindset. And it doesn't work for you. Then you despair even further. So what on earth is going on? And we're like, how do we get out of this? You'll see this. It's like a really tricky thing that the mind does.

So let's understand a couple of things. So I'm going to ask you all a question. Who, what, what has to happen for a child to drop out of high school, right? Like, look at this. I just waited until my parents, I used to skip school for months. What has to be? possible for a child to skip, skip school? No, bullying, bullying doesn't work. Bullying is not what allows a child to drop out. Lack of support. Right. So like, I don't know, I mean, like, I was,

I don't know if this applies to y'all. I don't know, it depends on your upbringing, but this should tell you the difference. There's no way that I would have been able to drop out. There's no friggin way that my parents would have allowed me to drop out of school. So the first thing to understand is that if you're going nowhere in life, you've got to start by distributing the responsibility and really attributing stuff to where it belongs. So I'm going to give you guys just a simple example of this. If I accept all of the blame for everything in my life on me, let's acknowledge for a moment that like there's got to be some stuff that I can't control, right? But when I accept responsibility for that, I'm accepting responsibility for something that

I have no control over, therefore I'm doomed to failure. Like, you know, if I accept responsibility for the fact that there's only one moon in the sky, I'm setting myself up for despair and failure because I'm fundamentally, the things in your life that you can control and things in your life that you can't control. And the first thing to understand if you are in a despairing mindset is actually like correctly attributing where the blame goes. Because then what happens instead of blaming yourself for everything, you can only, you're only going to blame yourself for what you're truly responsible for.

So this is a kind of situation where if you're abusive to yourself, you have to learn like self-love. And what's the first step of learning self-love? The first step of learning self-love is like acknowledging that other people may have had a hand in this too. Because if you're beating yourself, if you're snatching away all of the mistakes of other people and taking them, oh, no, it's all me, it's all me, it's all me. my parents aren't responsible at all. If you're snatching away all of that responsibility, it's going to take your, it's going to like elevate your despair, right?

Because then you've screwed up your life in so many different dimensions. So the first thing to recognize is that, you know, if you skipped school for months, like, how did your parents let you do that? If you dropped out of high school, like, you can't drop out of high school without your parents being okay with it in some way. And that's just the start of it. Second thing to consider is like how many friends did you have growing up? What did your parents teach you about meeting new people and making new friends?

Did they teach you how to make friends? Did they demonstrate how to make friends? Did you all go and socialize as a family with other people and meet new families? Did you meet new kids? Right? So you look at the rest of the world and you look at all the people who are the haves and you're a have-not. And I think what we don't realize, we attribute these things to like motivation. But the truth of the matter is, like, how does a human being learn anything?

It's through, like, observation. Even the language that I'm using, how did you learn to speak English? Like, you didn't try. Like, people around you just started speaking English. Well, maybe English is your second language because we have a large international audience. But take your language of choice, right? Spanish, Dutch, whatever. And so, like, we just learn this kind of stuff.

And this is the thing that a lot of people don't realize is like social skills, even things like discipline, waking up on time, showering every day and things like that, we're like, we're taught, right? This kind of behavior is modeled for us. It's part of the reason why religion is so, like, inherited, right? So, like, if you grow up in a particular region, religion, if you have, you know, if your entire social circle or Southern Baptists and you grow up in that household, you don't have a random chance to end up as any religion.

It's not like the all random mode in a video game. Like you're going to grow up Southern Baptist. There's a decent chance. Right? You're not going to grow up Baha'i. So this is where the first thing that you've got to realize is that a lot of the things that you struggle with are things that people are explicitly taught or modeled. One of those two things. So was there good modeling about forming new relationships?

Did your parents expose you to new social situations and new people? Did you go to parties with people that you didn't know? Did you go to barbecues? Did you go to picnics? Did you go to church events? Did you go to these things where you met new kinds of people? Did they show you? Did your dad or mom meet people?

And then like, because I remember like this happened for me, right? So we used to travel a lot growing up. And I saw my dad make small talk with people. he would make small talk with randos right and i would feel super awkward and he'd be like this is my son i'd say hi i'd feel super awkward but i saw him do it over and over and over again and then sometimes the parent the person that they would talk to would interact with me there's all kinds of stuff that we're supposed to be taught like how do you put together a resume how do you apply for a job like you know even think about your own parents and did your parents where they sort of

motivated? Did they like go through a series of negotiations when they got a job offer? How many jobs did they consider? How often did they move jobs? Were you taught was it intrinsic in your household that if a job is not good, you should go search for something better? There are all kinds of things that we are instilled with. And this is why you get sort of like, you know, I went to medical school. I want to say 20% or higher, 30%, 40% of my class in medical school had at least one parent who was a doctor. Do you think we're genetically better at medicine? Of course not. There's no such thing. It's all upbringing. So the first thing that you've got to do is acknowledge that all this isn't your fault. Not all of it. Like, are you responsible for some of it? Sure. But especially like if you're, if you were six years old and you didn't have any friends, that has nothing to do with you. That has everything to do with your circumstances. Every year that goes by, you take a little bit more

responsibility and a little bit more responsibility. But even then, the people who have a vivid social life at the age of 24 were the ones who were taught how to socialize and modeled socialization. Right. So if you weren't taught those things, it's like you're blaming yourself for not speaking English and you grew up in like, you know, India where there's Sri Lanka, where there's like no one speaking English and then you're beating yourself up for not speaking English. The problem is that we don't really like think about this, right? So especially when depression starts to kick in, it inflates self-blame. So, like, what does this do?

So the first thing is that if you can actually go through this and acknowledge this for yourself, it's going to change the way that you talk to yourself. And this is where there's, like, one or two, like, things that I kind of want to point out to you all. But my family is so upset with me. So I don't even want to start with this one. So this is the kind of thing where sometimes we have to be super careful because our family will teach us our self-talk. Where do we get our self-talk? We get it from the way that we're talked to. So if your family blames you for this situation, if your family is like you need it, just fix it, just fix it, just fix it, just fix it without how can we help?

You know, that's very, very dangerous. So what you've got to essentially do is start by acknowledging that all of this isn't your fault. Is some of it your fault? Absolutely. But if you weren't taught how to make friends, if you were allowed to drop out of high school, that in turn, like going to high school is where you start to self-regulate in terms of sleep, going to sleep on time, making your assignments get done by a particular time, you know, like it's where you learn how to be an efficient procrastinator. You learn all these things, you're forced to learn these things through high school. And if you don't have that opportunity, like your brain just doesn't put through that exercise regimen.

And you're not going to learn some of these fundamental skills. Because, like, the whole point of high school is they force you to do it. Book reports aren't optional. You got it. The book reports do on Friday. You got to do it. You start on Thursday at 2 p.m. Sure, you read through the book, you get the cliff notes, and then you start writing at 10 p.m.

And then you finish at 2 a.m. And you turn it in the next day. That's how you learn how to do, like, the, you know, a decent. minimal kind of job. That's a very important skill at life, right, is being able to do good enough. And if you were deprived of these opportunities, if there wasn't enough parental structure and support for you to go to school, then, like, you know, you're not going to learn this stuff.

It's not like we're, you know, if you think about human beings, like human beings aren't born with the instinct of productivity. Like animals are born with the ability to, like, instinctually swim and run and stuff like that. Like, you know, you give birth to an impala or. on the Sarengetti, and then Paula knows how to run. It's like out of the womb for 30 seconds and it's running. Human beings, we're not taught, like, we have to be taught this stuff. Like, a six-month-old isn't capable of anything.

It can't put together a schedule. It doesn't know how to go to work on time. It doesn't know, like, how to set healthy technology. Like, think about it. It's completely, can't even feed itself. And so the whole point is that all this crap that we assume is intrinsic about human beings is not actually intrinsic. It's taught.

Once you realize that, you don't deserve quite as much blame as you give yourself. That's a really important piece. And once you realize that, that sure, some of this is my fault, but a lot of it isn't, then your self-talk can change. Right? Did I do a bad job? Yes. But let's be honest, I kind of did okay, but I was dealt a crappy hand of cards in life. Once you're able to say that to yourself, that's where forgiveness comes in, the ability to forgive yourself.

And once you start to forgive yourself, once you start to cut yourself some slack, and once you start to put less pressure on yourself, then a lot of things can change. And this is where I want to just show you all kind of flash to another post real quick. Dr. Kay, what exactly, exactly what actions do I take to change my life? And this is where we get caught up in the actions. Right? I would like to change the following. Not having friends, not being independent, staying shy, not having freedom, being in the house, etc., etc. Not having much power.

Oh, my parents being controlling. Exactly what actions do I take to change these? Most people would say, just get a hobby or go out. But what if I'm terrified of it? This is the key thing. Logically, I know it won't be that terrifying, but I just can't do it. The problem here is not what actions you take. The problem here is the mind that takes the actions.

So when you look at your life and nothing is going well, you don't have friends, you don't have a job, you just dropped out of high school, you've never been in a relationship. Fixing each and every one of these problems is absolutely overwhelming. You get there's like, how are you supposed to catch up? Can't. So what do you actually do about it? What you've got to do is change your mind, change your thinking. How do you change your thinking? That's what we just walk through.

So oddly enough, the first step is blame. So depression is anger turned against the self. That's a very old, I think, Freudian conception of depression. All of your anger is directed. You pull it away from your parents and you all point it in here. So now, first thing that you've got to do is like, accountability needs to be like more evenly spread. spread because you're not responsible for everything. Like, it's crazy. Like, you can't be responsible

for everything in your life. Dropping out of high school only happens with parental support. They have to allow it. Being able to skip school for months, like what, there was never a parent teacher conference. They didn't see your grades. They didn't, like, realize. They never asked you, how's your homework going? You know, parents have to be, and that too may not necessarily been their fault in the sense that if they had to work or had other kinds of problems or had health issues or whatever. Like, we're not necessarily blaming them for them. We're not blaming in terms of like, oh, you did this to me. So we're not sort of saying you need to be resentful and angry and stuff like that. We just need to acknowledge that sometimes like crap happens in life. And that's because

there's a confluence event where something kind of slips through the cracks. And if your parents were too busy to do this stuff, or if they were never taught how to do this stuff and they had to kind of muddle through and struggle and stuff like that, that's actually all okay too. But it ain't your fault. So the first thing is a distribution of responsibility, acknowledging that not everything in your life is actually your fault. And once you start to do that, you can start to change a little bit of your despair. You can change the way that you think. You can change the way that you talk to yourself and about yourself. Because then, if you were never taught social skills, suddenly, if you go out and you try to socialize and you literally don't know what to say, it's not because you're stupid. It's because, like,

hey, oh, you don't know how to play the game of socialization. Maybe that's because you never had the tutorial. It's like, like some of us are playing life as if we're playing the Eldon Ring enemy randomizer, and we've never played a video game in our life. Like, no, there's no tutorial. We're just dropped in. Because remember that life is more like the enemy randomizer. Like, it's not crafted for us to do level one and then level two and level three.

It's not crafted for us to succeed like a video game. It's just RNG. And sometimes, like, the first person that you date is a level 100 narcissist. It's not like life gives you the level one narcissist first so that you learn how to deal with them and then the level two and then the level three and then the level four and the level five. And then eventually you can deal with the level 100 narcissists. That's not how it works. It's like RNG. So you've got to, like, cut yourself some slack.

Acknowledge that if you struggle, is there more you can do 100%. But were you taught how to socialize? as you had social difficulties or when you dropped out of high school did your parents ever come and talk to you about it and be like, hey, now that you've dropped out of high school, we should probably do something to make sure you get your social activity

and you can continue to make friends. Right? So I see this with parents who homeschool where they'll like intentionally and actively enroll their kids in extracurricular activities because they acknowledge if they homeschool they're not going to get any social development. So we've got to make sure we do that. As you start to change the way that you think about yourself

and the way that you talk to yourself, mistakes will be less devastating and the future will be more bright. You'll be able to do more things. The last thing is that I do think that therapy and medication can have a good role here. That's where we also don't know how long this person is on medication, but just a reminder.

A couple things about medication. The first is that antidepressants tend to take about eight weeks to become a, effective. So if you started the medication a week ago, it's not going to do anything yet. That's the amount of time that it takes to become effective, eight weeks. So for two months, not going to see a whole lot, potentially. Some people that happens earlier, some people you'll get benefits within two weeks or one month, but give it at least eight weeks. Second thing to consider is that if you are in a depressive episode, if you actually have a clinical diagnosis of major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder,

or some kind of other mood disorder, that these things are generally speaking temporary. So we know that depressive episodes, generally speaking, last from anywhere from a few weeks to a month to about one year. And so as long as you stay on medication, hopefully it'll reduce the frequency and severity of those episodes. Next thing is if your therapist says, here's a medication, go find a job, Gigi, go. and they're not supporting you in that process, you should probably find a different therapist. And that's where most therapists don't prescribe medication, so I don't know exactly what you mean by therapist.

So that's where like give yourself a little bit of slack, give yourself time for the medication to work. By the way, all this stuff is in Dr. K's guide to depression, where we explain some of these core concepts and how psychotherapy works and how medication works and some of these things like that. So the other thing you should absolutely do is educate yourself. but at the end of the day, if every dimension of your life seems to be falling apart, the most important thing is not to fix this thing over here, this thing over here, this thing over here, this thing over here, and this thing over here.

It's actually to fix the common element, which is here. It's to fix the tool with which you play the game of life. And fixing the tool starts with a very, very subtle thing of distributing responsibility. Because chances are if you're going nowhere in life, at the age of 24, you weren't taught how to go somewhere. And this kind of cognitive reframing, and this is also why we started career coaching, by the way, because we realized that there's all kinds of skills.

There's a connection between emotions, behavior, self-understanding, and self-judgment, and even like a certain how-to. So if you look at our coaching program, our coaching program, is actually designed to address these kinds of issues. So even in career coaching, it's like, how do you put together a resume? How do you talk to your boss? In general coaching, it's going to be like more about, okay, let's understand the thought patterns of your mind.

Let's understand how the thought patterns of your mind where they come from and how they interfere with what you do. Let's also give you a space where if you need to vent off negative emotional energy, you can do it in a healthy manner, in a coaching sort of, in, environment so that when you go for your job interview, like you're not carrying those negative emotions around. Right? So you could definitely do that in therapy as well, but therapy is going to be more clinically focused. And generally speaking, your therapists will say things like it's important for you to find a job, whereas they're not, most of us are not formally trained in like helping

people find jobs. We're formally trained in diagnosis and treatment. Right. So that's why we have a career coaching program because we hear this kind of crap entirely too much. I went to therapy. They told me to find a job, but they didn't tell me how. So that's where, like, at the end of the day, you've got to challenge your mindset. You have to shape your mindset because that's the instrument that you use for everything. Your mind is going to be the thing that determines your social interactions, whether you apply for a job, whether you get a GED. All of that requires your mind.

So the mind is the first thing to fix. Questions. So Pixie K is saying so many therapists are not qualified, I swear. I'd like to be a little bit more optimistic than that. I think a lot of therapists are operating in a system that does not allow them to succeed. I think a lot of the way that therapy is delivered is, I think, not the fault of the therapist. We have a medical system that overemphasizes particular problems, which is entirely why coaching has cropped up. If therapists were great at this stuff, there would have been no market for this, bluntly.

but over time what's happening is therapy is becoming more protocolized. It's becoming more generic and it's becoming more medical legal. You have 45 minute appointments. Sorry, I have to see like six people to like make my RVUs and meet my productivity quota. So I don't have an extra half hour for you. I'm sorry that the insurance provider does not pay for a 75 minute appointment. The most they'll pay for is a 50 minute appointment. And that's because there are all these studies that show that 50-minute appointments are effective medical treatments for depression.

So that's not additional time I can give you. There's a lot of how therapists also, some of them will assess for suicidality on every visit with every patient. Right. So I'd like to cut my colleagues a little bit more slack and sort of like I acknowledge that, you know, if they operate a particular way, is it that they're underqualified or undertrained? I don't think so. I think they're squeezed. Just like everyone else's.