HealthyGamerGG - My Professional Tipping Point... (Life after video game addiction)

Episode Date: February 4, 2023

In this episode, explore the moment when work becomes overwhelming and affects our mental health. 🤯 Learn how to recognize the signs and make positive changes with expert advice from Dr. K. 💭 Tune in to hit the reset button on your career and well-being. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every time you play a video game, it doesn't end with the video game. Right? You're going to be thinking about the match and you're going to be molding because you had some noob and they had some person who was a smurf. And so for the next hour after your match, you're thinking in a negative space and then there's no room for creativity. There are many people who will offer solutions for life. Do this and you will be happy. Do that and be happy. It is my opinion that you must understand yourself first. That is why we made Dr. K guide. Check it out. I want to talk to you all today about something that I call the professional tipping point, which is the point at which your natural impulse to be productive actually outweighs your natural impulse to like procrastinate or waste time. A lot of people will ask me questions like,

why is it that I can spend hours and hours and hours like grinding towards a useless virtual goal, whether it be likes on social media or an achievement in a video game? But I can't actually put my mind to like being productive in life. And it's really confusing for them because anytime they are productive in life, they feel so satisfied, content, and proud. And even when they spend all this like waste this time kind of grinding for useless goals, they kind of feel empty inside. And so it's a really confusing experience for people about why they can't be productive. So I used to take call at McLean Hospital. And if you all aren't kind of familiar with what call is, you usually have one doctor who's like responsible overnight for some amount of stuff. Now McLean is a

freestanding psychiatric hospital which means that there are you don't really need like there aren't medical emergencies and stuff. So there's one doctor who's on call and this happens to be me maybe once every two weeks or so. So I'm on call at McLean and the thing about being on call is that it could be a busy night or it could be a quiet night. So sometimes things are like your, you know, luck is in your favor and everyone's kind of asleep and you don't really have to worry about much or you're kind of getting paged constantly, hey, this person's having trouble sleeping, this person is agitated, this person is hallucinating.

And so your night can be everything from, yeah, I slept six or seven hours and never got interrupted to I was constantly getting called to different units and having to, you know, restrain people sometimes or dealing with hallucinations or psychosis or whatever. So it's really kind of like a crapshoot in terms of, you know, is it going to be a quiet night or a good night? And so what most people do to prepare to be on call

is they'll like get their entertainment. ready. So you can sort of think about being on call, like kind of like being a flight where you know you're going to have to be stuck in this situation for some amount of time. So you want to set up your entertainment. And I remember one night in particular, I was getting like pretty frustrated because I set up these shows that I wanted to watch. And like every like five to eight minutes, I would get a page. It wasn't so much work to where like I could continue working. But, you know, I deal with a page. I make a phone call and then I'm waiting like five minutes or six minutes. I'm like, all right, It seems like the work's done, like everything's totally cool.

So then I like will pull out my iPad and I start watching something and two minutes into the show, I get another page. And so this kind of start-stop thing happened a lot and I got incredibly frustrated because like I wanted to be entertained, but like I wasn't getting entertained. And I just wish like, okay, if you guys need me to work, I can totally work. I totally fine like taking a thousand pages. But this whole like being in the middle of being busy and being entertained was just incredibly frustrating. So I decided to do something a little bit unusual, which was like, okay, if I can't, get into a show, let me try doing some work instead. So what I did instead was journal. And specifically this particular day, what I ended up doing was writing fiction. So I started writing some fiction and then

worked on some nonfiction stuff. I was kind of working on some stuff like around video game addiction and stuff like that, just jotting down thoughts. And it was a really interesting moment for me because what started out as a lose-lose situation sort of turned into a win-win situation where if I didn't get interrupted and I worked for half an hour, I felt like pretty productive and was like pretty like happy about that. And if I did get interrupted, I didn't feel this sort of like frustration about not being able to get into the show. At least I was able to write like two or three thoughts about a particular project I was working on or write a paragraph around fiction or something like that. So it sort of became cool because like in the span of a few moments, like I got some work done

and I felt pretty productive. So that experience kind of stuck with me and I sort of took a key. take away from that experience, which is to really try to capture my creative impulses. And if you want to reach this professional tipping point, one of the first things that I would strongly recommend that you do is actually capture your creative impulses. So start jotting things down. If you want to work on something, if you have an idea, whether it's business-related or fiction-related or creative or artwork or whatever, like even doodling, to start capturing your impulses. And this becomes really important because normally when we have a creative impulse, we don't really reinforce it in any kind of way, right? I have a particular idea and I don't

really capitalize on it. I don't really turn it into anything. So the idea comes and goes. So the first step to reaching your professional tipping point is simply to capture your creative impulses. And this becomes important for step two, which is to reflect on the work that you've done. So this is kind of something that I've noticed that people aren't really good at in real life. So if you play video games, you'll kind of know that like playing a lot doesn't. necessarily make you better. Right? So you'll have people who are playing a particular video game who will be stuck on bronze rank for like five years. And we sort of know this in real life as well, where sometimes you'll have people maybe that you know or maybe you kind of fall into this category where you've been like sort of professionally stuck for a while.

That putting in more and more and more time doesn't necessarily lead to advancement. And there's even data on this. People have done research studies on physicians, for example, I just know this research the best, right? that actually shows that the amount of time you practice as a physician doesn't actually make you a better physician. That you can practice medicine for 30 years and you will still underperform someone who's been practicing for five years. That essentially once you become a physician, you get kind of lumped into a particular quartile. Either you're in the top quarter of physicians, you know, top half of physicians, bottom half of physicians or bottom quarter. And that that is actually determined within

the first couple years of practice and stays true for the rest of life. Essentially, you get put into platinum, gold, silver, or bronze, and you stay there. And so as people started to explore this, what they really discovered is what determines where you end up is how you deal with learning, how you actually improve. So the reason you stay hard stuck in bronze is because you don't actually do any replay analysis. If you actually want to get better at a game, you have to, you can't just practice. You have to intentionally look at what you did wrong. and try to intentionally improve it. And what they basically discovered is that there are some doctors who do that,

which is why they start out at platinum and stay platinum. And there are other people who are just sort of like do the status quo and just queue up every day, see patients, and they don't really learn very much. And so what we want to do is leverage that principle into our own life. And what we actually want to do is reflect on the work that we've done. This reflection step also really applies to that night at McLean Hospital. So when I used to write things down, they would kind of, get written down and then nothing would happen to them. Sure, I jotted a couple things down,

but then, like, they'd sit in a notebook somewhere and be ignored for a few years, and nothing came out of my creative impulse. I realized that what I really needed to do was actually reflect on what I had written. So the next time I was on call, I had that same notebook, and I flipped it open, and I tried to see where I, you know, I left off. So I kind of noticed something pretty cool when I did that, which is that as I read what I had actually jotted down, it's sparked new ideas. And even if I didn't feel like writing, all I really had to do is read what I had already written to sort of help me feel productive, and then I was inspired to write again. And there's a really interesting yogic concept that kind of relates to this, which is simply

understanding our indrias. So our indrias are our sense organs, and one of the really interesting things about our sense organs is that they cultivate our thoughts. So what the yogis essentially discovered was that my sensory input is going to shape the thoughts that I have. And this concept of Indria's cultivating particular thoughts also explains a little bit about why we get stuck in unproductive things. So when I spend my time playing a video game, watching a video game, reading discussions about a video game, what do you think I'm going to think about? And it's not just video games, right? So I see so many people engaged in political content without ever doing anything productive, right? So I'm reading tweets from people who are political trolls, and I'm agreeing with tweets that I love.

I am crapping on tweets that I dislike responding to them, trolling with them, and I'm not even voting, right? So this is like people engage in politics in such an unproductive way. And then what do I end up doing? I end up having conversation. about it. I end up getting into fights with my family members over holidays because all in my mind I have these political thoughts, political thoughts, political thoughts, political thoughts. And where all those political thoughts and argumentative thoughts, those divisive thoughts coming from, they're coming from my indrias. Same as true of video games, right? So whatever we bombard our senses with are going to be what we naturally think about. If you're interested in that concept, by the way, we, that's a huge

part of Dr. Kay's guide to ADHD and doing stuff, and you all can kind of check that out, where we really explore the relationship between Indria's and generating thoughts. Going back to the professional tipping point, though, what I realized is that on any given moment, I have a choice between cultivating a particular kind of thought that will be unproductive or a particular kind of thought that will be productive. So the next time I was on call, I have a choice. If I open up my iPad and I start watching something, it'll trigger a particular train of thoughts. And if I open up my notebook and look at that, that'll trigger a different train of thoughts. And this process of which train I want to board really comes down to dealing with bored. So I want you all to understand this. So when I'm

bored, my mind is looking for a particular kind of stimulation. Usually what my mind reaches for is something that's very, very dopaminergic. And in that moment, if I actually lean into a dopaminergic thing, what will actually happen is I'll reduce my creative impulse. Because what I'll actually be doing is resolving the boredom through some kind of dopamine hit. And then my brain is going to learn that when I am bored, I need to take a hit of dopamine to make that boredom go away. If I'm able to resist that boredom, it's not even that I need to really conquer it. And this is the really key thing. I just have to kind of procrastinate on the boredom and not reach for the dopaminergic thing. And then something very special will happen. If you stay bored long enough, your mind,

will actually start to think creatively. So a good example of this is like shower thoughts or going on a hike because if you go on a hike for four hours, what are you doing? Your mind isn't really like doing anything. You're not like watching anything. You're not listening to anything. There's no podcast. Maybe you're listening to music, who knows? But you're not really bored, right? And oftentimes when you do things like go on hikes or even take showers, all kinds of creative thoughts will start to arise. So another key part of reaching our professional tipping point is actually like surviving some amount of boredom. And if you can survive some amount of boredom, then what will naturally start to happen is that creative impulse will arise. Now, how does this reach a professional tipping point?

And what do we even mean by that? So the reason I call it a professional tipping point is because for a couple years of my life or the majority of my life, being productive was a temporary thing that would always end. So I'd have these bursts of productivity. And this bursts of productivity, I get so excited. I'm like, man, I'm productive. Man, I'm productive. This is great. This is great.

I wish I could do this all the time. In the back of my mind, I knew that it wouldn't last. In the back of my mind, I knew that at some point, the desire to play a video game would win in the end. It almost felt a little bit like one of these, like, zombie survival kind of games where like the waves keep increasing and the zombies are growing and the zombies are growing and the zombies are growing and they'll eventually overwhelm you. Or maybe it's kind of like Lord of the Rings where the orcs are invading and the armies of Sauron are always going to win. My relationship with productivity was that even though I can win a battle today, eventually

my degenerate gamer mind would win, right? And I would stop being productive. I would fall into this stuff. And the beauty of the professional tipping point is something weird happened a couple years into residency. And when I started this process of being productive, or not even being productive, forget about that term. Capturing my creative impulses, jotting them down, then reflecting on my creative impulses. And the third thing that I would actually intentionally try to do is ride out boredom, ride out the urges that come with boredom. And when I rode those out, I started to think creatively, and then I started capturing the impulses. And what I sort of noticed was this kind of like snowballing avalanche effect. So just to walk you through it, so now like every time I go on

call, I'm not really doing anything entertaining. What I'm actually doing is like, I'm sitting there and I'm like, okay, like, maybe I want to watch a replay of like a esports game that I missed or something like that. But instead of doing that, what I did was just wait, wrote out the impulse, and then I started to think. And I was like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if I made some jotted down some thoughts about, let's say, the lazy man's road to success, which was the project that I was working on at the time. And so I started jotting down those thoughts and that was pretty cool. So like I felt pretty good about that. and then the next time around I would read those thoughts, and the more that I would read those thoughts,

I would trigger more ideas. And the more that I triggered those kind of ideas, something cool started to happen. The amount of resistance to boredom that I needed started to shrink. And now if I could resist the impulse for 30 seconds instead of 60 seconds, a creative idea would start to pop up. It's almost like my brain realized, oh, we're not going to do that dopamine thing anymore.

Let's go straight to the creative impulses. And what starts to happen is a cycle. So the more creative I got, the more I jotted things down, the more I jotted things down, and the more I spent time thinking about them, then there was more stuff to read. And now my ideas are really starting to come together. And that would reinforce my indrias, right? So now I'm bombarding my mind with like productive kind of thoughts and creative kind of thoughts. And the more that I bombard my mind with that, something magical happened about two years and three years in, where for the first day I woke up one day, like on a weekend and I was like, I actually don't feel like playing a video game. I have some free time. I pulled out my notebook and I started being productive. And it was like bizarre. And I think that honestly, if this had not happened, I would not be here telling you this today. Because this is like literally how I started Healthy Gamer. For three or four years during residency, I was just jotting down thoughts and refining them and working on them and things like that. I was being productive instead of wasting my time playing video games. I started Healthy Gamer or started thinking about it, but I started doing other

stuff in residency like other projects and things like that. And I started to become kind of like more and more productive. And then I stopped wanting the dopamine. And you may be listening to this and feeling like a little bit skeptical, but like there's there's no way that this would work for me or like what about, you know, are you telling me that I should grind all the time? And this is where there's an important distinction to be made. I'm not saying that you need to work, right? So I'm not saying if you've got some dead end job that I'm not saying that you should avoid dopaminergic activities and just grind for the sake of your boss. What I'm saying is be creative and be productive.

And in fact, the more that you do that, the better things will become. So it's kind of weird, but it's because I capitalized on those productive impulses that I eventually decided to kind of become an entrepreneur. That's not even how I think about it. I didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. What actually happened is I was like, hey, this is really cool. Like, let me think about this and let me do more and let me do more. Let me start streaming on Twitch.

Let me start sharing my thoughts with people. and I got such positive feedback, I started working on it more and more and more and more. And that's what I mean about the professional tipping point. The professional tipping point is the point at which you no longer have to resist the dopaminergic urge and you tip into your natural impulse being productive. But that doesn't mean grind for your boss. That means actually if you're at work and you're thinking grind for your boss, don't grind for your boss. When you're at work and you have some kind of idea, like wouldn't it be cool if I spent some time thinking about this?

or this seems like a cool idea, or I love to write a book about this. That's what you should be capturing. We're not talking about grinding for the sake of your boss. What we're talking about is capturing your creative impulse. As you capture it, reflect on it. As you reflect on it, you're feeding your Indria's information that will then start populating thoughts. It's like you're planting seeds. And once you plant enough seeds, eventually what you'll grow is like a grove.

And that grove will start to have lots of fruit-bearing trees, and those trees will start to bear fruit. Whereas right now, if you really pay attention, what are you cultivating in your mind? Every time you play a video game, it doesn't end with the video game, right? You're going to be thinking about the match, and you're going to be molding because you had some noob

and they had some person who was a smurf. And so for the next hour after your match, you're thinking in a negative space, and then there's no room for creativity. So the reason that we're stuck is because we have this avalanche snowball process in the wrong direction. And in order to change that and start to actually like harness the creative energy of your mind to be productive, we need to hit that professional tipping point.

After you hit the professional tipping point, being productive becomes easy. It becomes the natural impulse that you want to do. And hitting that professional tipping point involves three major steps. Capture whatever fleeting creative impulses you have. Even if you find a single piece of fruit, don't let it go and harness those seeds. Second thing is to actually reflect on the work that you do. Not only does reflection positively reinforce the energy investment that you've made, it also feeds your indrias and makes you more prone to engage in that kind of work again.

And the last thing to do is to understand that a key part of this is going to be riding out boredom. And the better that you get at riding out boredom, just don't slip into the dopaminergic track, the creative or productive stuff will naturally start to arise. So I hope that this is helpful for you. And for me, it's been absolutely revolutionary to, like, hit my own professional tipping point. Now that I've hit it, not only do I want to work and I've cultivated this kind of, like, attitude of, like, wanting to be productive.

I've also, like, started to enjoy, like, the dopaminergic activity more. So if you, the last kind of thing that I kind of noticed is that now when I sit down to play a video game, I still, like, I really enjoy playing the video game. But the interesting thing is that I have so much indria momentum from my, reflection on my productive tasks that as soon as the video game ends my mind is filled with thoughts of wanting to be productive and once you hit that point life becomes easy