HealthyGamerGG - Psychiatrist Explains Why Life Isn't Fun (Anhedonia)

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

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Here's a mouse. Here's a phone. There is no dopamine in these objects. There's no dopamine in here. There's no like dopamine entering my brain from a mouse. What happens is when I engage in certain activities, those activities activate my brain. That's where the dopamine is. Today we're going to talk about anhedonia, which is the primary reason why I think a lot of people's lives feel really empty. We have this idea that life should be full, right? It should be enjoyable. There should be. a lot of positive emotion. We should look forward to the future. We should be able to enjoy our day-to-day activities. We should be proud of who we are. But for many people today, we struggle with all of those things. We struggle with motivation. We struggle with pleasure. Our emotions feel incredibly flat. And the reason for that is something called Anhedonia. I know it sounds almost like too unbelievable, right? Is there one concept or one thing going on in our brain that is responsible for all of these problems. This is a paper called Understanding Anhedonia, a qualitative study exploring loss of interest and pleasure in adolescent depression. So what we're going to do is just jump

straight to like what Anahedonia actually is and how it manifests. And this is what we're going to talk about today. So adolescence experience of Anahdonia involves experiencing a loss of joy in a flattening of emotion, struggling with motivation and active engagement, losing a sense of connection and belonging and questioning sense of self, purpose, and the bigger picture. So feeling less positive emotion and experiencing a cycle of boredom, feeling dampened emotions, feeling unmotivated but maintaining long-term aspirations, right? You want to achieve all these things, but you're completely unmotivated to actually do them. Feeling unable to gain momentum or engage in effortful activities.

Like, wow, everything is a slog, right? Like it's so hard to gain momentum. Every day when I wake up, it's so hard to like motivate myself. And then even if I manage to motivate myself today, tomorrow it's a slog again. Feeling disconnected from others. Feeling detached from the present reality. Reflecting on feelings, reflecting on feelings, identity, and purpose. Losing a sense of purpose.

Reflecting on experiences and how they view themselves, figuring out experiences or living with uncertainty. Experiencing a lack of agency and a narrow. narrowing perspective. So lack of agency means not having control in life. So like, I know it's insane, but this is a paper that describes what Anhedonia feels like subjectively. And the wild thing about this is that Anhedonia is the cause of all of these problems. Because right now in society, we have a fundamental problem. Our dopamine structure has been altered. And with these alterations of our dopamine structure, this is the result. So in order to understand how to correct this, because you can actually fix all of these problems if you address the underlying cause,

which is the anhedonic brain. Okay. So like, we'll get to that. So let's take a step back and start to understand, you know, where does this concept of anhedonia come from? How did we discover? Anhedonia was first discovered in schizophrenia. So what like these old like people like Freud and and people in like the 1800s and 1900s, discovered that people who suffered from schizophrenia were incredibly unmotivated. So even though we can sort of, we can stop their hallucinations and delusions and paranoia, so we have a lot of good medications that do that. These are things called antipsychotic medications. Even though we can stop the hallucinations, for some reason, people with schizophrenia just don't seem motivated. So even if we can stop their hallucinations,

they quit their jobs, they're not able to engage in work, they don't seem ambitious. at all. They kind of just exist from day to day. These are called negative symptoms of schizophrenia, and a primary negative symptom of schizophrenia is Anhedonia. The other place that we discovered Anhedonia was in major depressive disorder. So we noticed that when people were depressed, they no longer derived pleasure from activities that they used to find pleasurable. So life for people who are depressed just is in shades of gray, right? Like they just don't enjoy doing things anymore. So eating doesn't feel good. playing games doesn't feel good, going to work doesn't feel good.

Literally, their brain's capacity to experience or derive pleasure from activities became diminished. So we sort of noticed that Anhadonia existed in schizophrenia. We noticed that it existed in major depressive disorder. And as we investigated these two disorders, we noticed that this is actually a common construct. So originally it was like a motivation in schizophrenia, but that all of these circuits are related. And what we discovered when we sort of studied schizophrenics is we asked them, why don't you feel like doing anything? And the answer that we sort of ended up with is when they do things, they no longer experience any pleasure from them. And so this is what Anhadonia is. It is the inability to experience pleasure,

which results in a motivational problem. And so this is kind of what we're talking about today, okay? Hey, y'all, if you're enjoying today's video, check out HG memberships. If you don't know what Vassana and Glistha are, you're trying to figure out your attachment style, or want a deeper understanding of your mind, H.U memberships may be a great fit for you. We offer monthly streams and live Q&A on topics chosen by you, the community. We're also building a platform

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if you find that it's not a great value. So check us out at Healthygamer.g.g. slash members. Now back to the video. So let's look at this. Anhedonia and trauma exposed individuals, functional connectivity and decision-making correlate. So Anadonia also has to do a lot with our decision-making. So there is also a growing literature indicating that anhydonia symptoms and reward processing deficits are outcomes of traumatic stress among individuals who do not meet criteria for PTSD. So what we're starting to discover, childhood trauma is associated with elevated anahedonia and altered core reward circuitry in major depression patients and controls. So we used to think an hedonia was restricted

to people who had mood disorders or people who had schizophrenia, right? So most of us dodge the bullet. But there is a growing body of research that suggests that an hedonia is possible if you're a quote and quote healthy control who experienced adversity in childhood, like that's super scary. If you've gone through traumatic or difficult experiences and even if you don't have PTSD, PTSD, it can alter your brain to make your brain more anhodonic. So this is actually what we're seeing so much. I will get to technology in a second because that certainly doesn't help. But this is kind of what I'm seeing is like when I look on the internet, what I see is two

groups of people. There's a group of people who seems to enjoy life. And it seems like so unfair because they have it all. They work hard. They make a lot of money. They have fulfilling relationships. And they work out. And they develop creative like pursuits.

They're like learning how to play the fucking violin, right, at the age of 35. And I remember there was a guy in my med school who was like this. Like, so I had a friend in med school who was just better than me in every single way. So he had better grades than me, ended up doing neuroradiology, which is insane. He, we both played games. So he was a gamer, but he was like better than me at video games. He was a workout warrior. He ate incredibly healthy.

He was like a good looking dude. He was very social as well. And I was like, this is not fair. This guy is better than me in every single dimension. And then they're like other people like this is what I used to be, right? Which are people who struggle every day to be motivated. They struggle every day. They don't even enjoy the things that they should be enjoying.

I'm procrastinating all the time. I'm not doing any of my work because I'm not motivated at all. But even when I procrastinate, it's not like I'm living the life of my dreams. And this seems so unfair, right? It's so unfair that some people seem to have it all. And some of us struggle to do the bare minimum. And what's the difference? The difference is in Hedonia.

For the people who have it all, this is what I want you all to understand, their brain naturally motivates them to work out, to learn creative pursuits, to even enjoy video games, to study. It motivates them very naturally. They derive more pleasure from all of these activities. And if you're someone who's always wondered, like, why can't I grind in real life, the way that I grind in a video game, the reason is anhodonia. If you fix your anhedonic circuitry, your ability to derive pleasure and motivate yourself towards IRL stuff will drastically improve.

And we're going to show you research to that effect. So like, remember, Anhedonia was discovered like a hundred years ago, right? So we discovered that people were a motivated. We discovered anahdonia in depression, which is the inability to experience pleasure. But now because of advances in neuroscience, we've literally figured out how Anhedonia was. works through a combination of different like studying people who have strokes in certain parts of the brain looking at diseases like dementia parkinson so park Parkinson's is the loss of dopaminergic neurons in a particular part of the brain and we've also started to do things like deep brain stimulation so now when we have like a parkinson's patient will literally like not cut open their skull but cut open their skull and will insert electrodes that will stimulate certain parts of the brain and so now we have this very very robust functional neuro and anatomy as well as understanding Anhedonia from all of these different conditions. So we understand it from the depressive perspective, from the schizophrenic perspective, from the deep brain stimulation perspective. So we basically figured out anhedonia. The problem is all of these advances have not

translated to like everyday Joe Schmo people like me and you. And so instead what we have is a gigantic culture of people who are trying to dopamine detox and they're trying to optimize their performance and they're taking all these supplements. And this is, this is because they don't understand the fundamentals of how our dopaminergic circuitry in the brain works. So once we understand these fundamentals, which we're going to lay out for you now, it'll help you like understand, like, you'll understand the basics, right? So this will be like, you know, the best analogy I can think of is that there are some people who use a lot of fancy ingredients when they cook, right? I'm going to use truffle oil and ghost peppers and all this really

fancy crap. But then there are some people who are just good at making food, right? I'm really good at making a simple grilled cheese sandwich. I need three ingredients. I need bread. I need cheese. I need butter. I don't need anything special. I don't need anything fancy. Or I'm really good at making a steak. Give me salt, give me pepper, give me meat. That's all I need. I'll make a hamburger. Give me salt, give me pepper, give me meat. That's all I need. So today what we're going to teach you all is instead of all this fancy stuff about neutropics and psychedelics and all this crap, we're going to teach you the basics of how dopamine circuitry works. We're also going to show you all a couple of very important papers. And then we are going to discover what is the difference between people who

are motivated for all kinds of stuff and enjoy every aspect of life and people who are completely unmotivated, have disconnections from reality, have aspirations but don't work towards them and don't even enjoy wasting their time. Here is the nucleus accumbens. The nucleus accumbens gives us dopamine. Okay. So dopamine in the nucleus accumbens does three things. It gives It gives us pleasure. It gives us cravings and it gives us behavioral reinforcement. So if I think about my life, when I eat, I don't know, like a slice of pizza, it gives me pleasure. What do I want tomorrow? I want pizza. And what do I do tomorrow? I eat pizza. Right. So it gives us pleasure. This is something called hedonics. Cravings are wanting. So this is also like the future orientation.

What does that mean? So craving is about wanting that thing again tomorrow. And then the last thing that it does is it reinforces a behavior, right? So it causes us to act again. So I don't know if this makes sense, but these are three fundamentally different things. Okay? This is pleasure. This is wanting to do it again in the future.

And this is actually like taking the action. So the wanting to do it and the actual act are like two different things. Right. So we got to be subtle, but you all have to understand that. You can want to work out, but actually working out and wanting to work out are two incredibly different things. So what do we see?

in anhadonia. What we see is a problem with the dopaminergic circuitry. Okay. So when we see a problem with the dopamine energetic circuitry, we are not able to engage in pleasure. We aren't getting cravings towards those things. And we don't have behavioral reinforcement. So all of these three things become X's. So if you look at like the O.P. people in life, right? These are the people who work out and play games and or better MMR than you have higher rank than you and are more social and are more professionally successful and are healthier. What's the difference between them and you? Okay. Or I'll say them and us. So their dopaminergic circuitry gives them pleasure from working out. If it gives them pleasure from work out, they crave working out. And if they crave working out, they are going to

work out tomorrow. Now, you may say, Dr. Kay, that's absurd. How do we actually achieve this? So we're going to show you. So this is what's wild. There's a bunch of neuroscience research, bunch of clinical research. But this is a paper about the computational structure of consumatory anhedonia. So what does this mean? Okay. What processes determine how intensely reward is experienced. Okay? I want you all to understand what I'm about to show you because it's going to blow your fucking mind. See, we think that certain activities are pleasurable, right? We look at things like, like technology, video games, porn, drugs, whatever. And we say, this thing contains more pleasure than another thing, like exercising.

There is an intrinsic amount of pleasure in these activities. This is false. So I don't know if this makes sense. Bear with me. Here's a mouse. Here's a phone. There is no dopamine in these objects. There's no dopamine in here.

There's no, like, dopamine entering my brain from a mouse. What happens is when I engage in certain activities, those activities activate my brain. That's where the dopamine is. And what we know from studies on deep brain stimulation and schizophrenia and depression and Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease, right? Because each of these diseases gives us a different understanding of the engine of dopamine. Okay, this is where the oil goes. This is where the gas goes. This is where the pistons are.

This is where the combustion happens. We've figured out what all the pieces are. And the cool thing that we discovered is that the dopamine reward that you get is determined by the brain, not by the activity. And I know that sounds insane, but let's remember there are the O.P. people and the rest of us. And how are the O.P. People so O.P. Because all of the activities, the healthy activities that they do, give them large amounts of dopamine. So it's not in the activity itself. It is actually in the brain. And we know that because if you get Parkinson's, that part of the brain will become busted, and if that part of the brain becomes busted, you no longer derive pleasure from it, you no longer get motivated to it. We also see that in major depression.

So when someone is depressed, one of the key diagnostic features of depression is the inability to experience pleasure from activities that you usually find pleasurable. So I want you all to think about that for a second. In depression, what we discovered is this thing, playing video games is pleasurable, but something can change in my brain that takes away the pleasure that you normally get, which means what is the determining factor for the pleasure? It's actually in the brain. And today, we're going to show you how to increase the dopaminergic response, which will result in more pleasure, more craving for the activity, as well as more behavioral reinforcement, okay? So not only do we understand like the anatomy and all the neurocircuitry and all this kind of stuff, right? So this is like,

this is a great paper that talks about, you know, neurophysiological basis of anhedonia, genetic studies, prognostic value, treatment of anhedonia. So we've figured out all that stuff. And now we have the next level of research, which is what processes determine how intensely a reward is experienced. What that means is that what determines how much dopamine you get from an activity. I don't understand too much of this paper, right? So it's quite complex, but then they did this. Like, I don't even know what this means. But this is the level of dopaminergic theory, because this is an opinion, it's a hypothetical

paper, but it's based on good data. Okay? So we can like calculate, like, I don't know what this is. Like, but we can literally like calculate or we have some equations that calculate the amount of dopamine that we get from things. But we don't need to understand that because this is the, this is where the money is. A new model of subjective hedonic experience. So this is what I want y'all to pay attention to.

And I'll explain this in my own way. So here's the key thing to understand. We have two people, okay? Person Purple and Person Yellow. And person purple and person yellow do the same thing. So this is self-care. Okay? So this is a study where person purple in person yellow engage in the same amount of self-care.

So they do something like, I don't know, I guess eat a hamburger, which I guess qualifies a self-care. What they discover is that. Even though the two people eat the same burger, the amount of pleasure that these people experience is different. The same burger results in this much pleasure. Value change. Here's the value change. So it results in this much pleasure for the yellow person and this much pleasure from the purple person.

Okay. So do you all get that? Like this means that a different amount of pleasure is experienced for these two people. We'll get to this in a second. Don't worry about this. Look at the pleasure that this person gets. and the pleasure that this person gets. This is O.P. This person is enjoying things a lot more. Even though in self-care, so this is kind of how they're ranking self-care, this is zero self-care,

this is seven self-care, both people are moving from two to seven. Now, the question becomes, if the pleasure is in the burger, why don't both people experience the same amount of pleasure? What's different between these people? And the difference is so broken is the level of career attainment. So if we rank career attainment from one to seven, or I guess one to six, what we find is that if you're at the top of career attainment, the purple person is up here. So they're at a six out of six for career attainment. They have an awesome job. This person is at a four out of six on career. They have a good job. What we discover is that the higher you are on career, the more pleasure a burger gives you. So this is what's OP. This person has a better job. This person makes more money. Not only do they have a better job and they make more money and feel more fulfilled in their career, but feeling fulfilled in their career allows them to derive more pleasure from a burger, right? So I want y'all to think about that. The better my life is, the more pleasurable everything becomes, which is broken, right?

And also explains why so many people are struggling in so many dimensions. Because the further down on the totem pole you are, the crappier everything is. If I don't have a good job, I don't have a good relationship, I'm lonely, my health isn't good, playing a video game doesn't even give me as much pleasure as playing a video game if all of those other things were fixed. People experience all of these things together, a flattening of emotion, struggling with motivation, losing a sense of self and connection and belonging, and questioning sense of self-purpose, in the bigger picture. All of that comes together. So now what I'm going to do, I know it's insane, but now we're going to understand why this happens. And once we understand why it happens,

then we're going to understand immediately how to fix it. So here's what the brain does. So our brain says, I have health. This is important to me. I want to have fun and I have a career. Let's say we've three dimensions, right? So in this paper we saw two. Remember? This has two dimensions, the career dimension and the self-care dimension. So let's say that I have a, scale of one to 10 in each of these things. So let's say that I am at a one out of health. I'm at one out of fun and one out of career. And this goes up to 10. So this is how our brain literally calculates the level of experience, the level of pleasure we get. So it says we're at a one out of 10 for each of these things. This means our total score that we want to achieve is 30. We have a lot

of progress that we need to make. Right. So I have to move up nine points in each of these. So I am at three out of 30, which means that I need to do 27 units. I need 27 units of progress to fix my life. So if we look at this person, this person needs two units of career improvement and one, two, three, four units of self-care improvement, right? So they need a total of six units of progress to end up over here. We want fulfilling career and we want fulfilling self-care. This person, by contrast, is already maxed out on career and they just need four units. Okay? Does that kind of make sense?

So what this means? So I want you all to think about this. So if I need 27 units of progress and I go to the gym, which is plus one, what this means is now I'm at 4 out of 30 and I need 26 units of progress. So how much have I gone up? I have gone up by, let's say, about 3%. So technically it's a little bit more, three to 4%. So my brain is looking at all of the things that I need to do. And as I make one step of progress, literally what it does is it looks at the total amount of work that has been accomplished.

And what it does is gives me a commensurate amount of dopamine. So if I need to do 27 units of progress and I make one unit of progress plus one, it gives me one 27th of dopamine because it's like, hey, bro, we're not done. We have so much left to do. So I'm going to just give you a tiny reward for a tiny amount of progress. So in your life, I want you all to imagine that you're in a class. When do you derive the most pleasure from being in a class? So at the beginning of the semester, you've got three tests and a final. When you finish the first test, you get some pleasure.

Hey, that test is over. But you've still got these other things looming in front of you. When you walk out of the final, how do you feel? You're done. You're finished. Hell yeah, son. Let's fucking go. Let's celebrate.

Let's party. But if you look at it, taking that final is, let's say, two hours of work. You've done 200 hours of work over the semester. Why is it that the first two hours, I studied for two hours, the first week of class? Was I like, hell yeah, let's go. Pumped. Yeah, I studied for two hours. I've 198.

time to fucking go, son? No, of course not. You don't experience a ton of pleasure. In fact, the opposite. Oh my God, I just did two hours of work. I have 198 hours of work left. The pleasure is not from the work that you do. It's not from the activity.

It is from your brain's calculation of how much more work there is to do. And that's what this shows us. When someone has one thing maxed out, the amount of pleasure that they get, get because the total amount of stuff they have to do is less. The amount of pleasure that they get is way higher. Okay? So what this means, I'll kind of think it would tell you all this way. So we get 127th of dopamine because, you know, we just made one point of progress. So we got 127th. Now, let's say that my career was maxed out. I was at a 10 out of 10 out of career and I was a 10 out of 10 of

health. I work out six days a week and I make $270,000 a year because that apparently is the new standard for being like maximum income that leads to happiness. I saw a study about that recently. And then I'm one out of 10 for fun. So now I go on vacation, okay? And I get, I start to have fun on vacation. So I get a plus one. So my brain says I have 10 total units of fun to have.

I'm going to do plus one. Now I'm at a two out of 10. And I'm at 20% dopaminergic signal as opposed to three to four percent of a dopaminergic signal if I have a ton of stuff to do. This is what we learned from the research on Anhedonia. Right. And it kind of makes sense because when you, you know, when you're done with something or the closer that you get to being done, the more fulfilled you are, the more fulfilling things are. Right. So who experiences the most pleasure in life, right? So let me give you all another example. Let's say that I have a great career. I'm healthy. And then I fall in love. And now my life is

perfect. So if my life is perfect because I'm checking all. of the major boxes, then how much pleasure do you think I experience? I experience so much pleasure because everything is going well in life. Versus if I have nothing going on and even if I fall in love, what does that feel like? Y'all know what I'm talking about because we fall in love all the time, right? Even if our life is shit. I have this one bastion of hope, but the rest of my life is a smoldering mess. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know who I am. I'm not having any fun. I'm not taking care of myself. This is the one thing that I've got. Doesn't bring us maximal pleasure because everything else is falling apart, duh. Now the question becomes, if this is true, how do we fix this? Right? So are you,

are you telling me, Dr. Kay, that what I need to do is put together every dimension of my life in order to experience pleasure? No, not at all. So I have three dimensions that I need to level up in. And I'm over here, I'm over here, and I'm over here. So this is, this box represents all of the progress that I need to make. Because Anne Hedonia and the dopaminergic reinforcement, that we get is percentage-based. Satisfaction divided by total wants. So there are two things that we can do. You can say, Dr. K, are you telling me that if I'm out of three out of 30, I need to gain 27 points? No, I'm not. There are two ways to get to 100%. This is one way. Three out of 30 plus 27 out of 30 equals 100%. What's the other way, math geniuses? Oh, that's right. Three out of 30, we can turn that in

into three out of 10 and then we'll be at 30%. Or we can even turn that into three out of three and then we'll be at 100%. That's the other thing that we can do. What are you saying, Dr. Kay? Are you saying that I should want less? You're damn right. I'm saying you should want less. And it's not just me. Because there was this guy named Gotham Budda who is like, you know what? This is going to be whack.

But I'm going to teach you all something really cool. The less that you want in life, the more bliss that you will find. would the figure this crap out like 3,000 years ago? He discovered this fundamental principle that the less that we want, the more happy we will be. Now, there are a couple of important things about this. This doesn't mean that you should overall total want less. We're going to talk about the specifics of it, right? So this is what I've learned from clinical focus.

There are three ways to think about taking a test. I can think about a test as I'm just focused on the test. I'm not focused on the final. I can also think about focusing on the class as a whole. So I'm thinking about the three-month span. So one case is a one-month span. One case is a three-month span. And one case is not even a three-month span.

It's a four-year span. Because, oh, my God, my GPA, my GPA over the course of four years. Which person experiences less the least pleasure? The person who's worried about all four years? Because think about it, right? Even if you do well on one test, you have not guaranteed yourself a 4.0 GPA over four. years. So you can't relax because the scope of the problem that you have in your mind is so big. And this is what we see. We see that people who are very anxious, people who are very depressed, what kinds of words

do they use in terms of time? I'm always going to be alone. I'll never find a boyfriend. I'll never find a girlfriend. Is this what the rest of my life is supposed to be like? So I don't know if y'all have seen these posts or you experience this stuff, but I see all these posts about people saying, is this all that life is. I go to work from 9 to 5, I commute for half an hour, I do laundry, I work out a little bit, and then I go to sleep. And then it's rinse and repeat for 40 years. Is this what life is? So think about the timescale that they're operating at.

Think about in their brain, what is the target that they're setting? They're thinking about a huge, they have a gigantic denominator. I have to do this, and I have to do this, I've do this, I've do this, I've do this, I've do this, I've do this, I've do this, I've do this, I've do this. And what do we sort of tell people to do, right? What are the people who are sort of happy in life? What do they do? They sort of focus on one thing at a time.

And it's not just that focusing on one thing at a time. It's not like a productivity thing. I mean, it does become productivity thing. We'll get to that in a second. But the key thing that they're doing is reducing their denominator. So the more that you reduce your denominator, the more pleasure you will experience. Now, people say, but Dr. K, if I reduce my denominator, does that mean that I lose ambition? No, this is the most OP thing.

So when you reduce your denominator, what is actually happening to your dopamine urgic circuitry? When you're reducing your denominator, you are getting more dopamine, right? So if we're getting a 20% dopamine signal, instead of a 3% we are increasing our pleasure, we are increasing our behavioral reinforcement. If you do a 50% bump of dopamine by reducing your denominator, you are going to get more pleasure, more craving, and more behavioral reinforcement. Right? So as you advance, you will start to do healthy things more and more and more. And this is what's kind of weird about this is that we're also increasing behavioral reinforcement.

So this is what's sort of weird. It flips around our dopaminergic circuitry. So I wrote a book. It's good. Y'all should check it out if you've got kids. It's called How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. When I wrote a book, I felt fulfilled. And it took me a grand total of 34 days before I started writing my second one. Because now I drive pleasure from it. Now I crave it. I want to fucking do it again. Let's go. This is how I work seven days a week.

It's Thanksgiving tomorrow. And I'm working and I'm hyped. Look at my face. This is awesome. I love doing this. I'm so lucky. So if you guys are struggling with this, let's take a look.

Experiencing a loss of joy and flattening emotion. Struggling with motivation and active engagement, losing a sense of connection and belonging, questioning sense of self-purpose in the bigger picture. all of these things are related to your dopaminergic circuitry fundamentally. And what do we want to do? We want to focus on one thing at a time. We want only one axis.

So you guys can do one axis or what you can do is shrink this way. So you can focus on a three by three cube instead of a six by seven cube or a two by two cube or a one by one cube. If you want to become an O.P. person and you want to be more motivated, enjoy life, have a sense of who you are, have purpose, and actually work towards your aspirations, you need to shrink. your wants. So don't worry about all the crap that you want. Don't worry about all the crap that you need to do because all that stuff overwhelms us mentally. Right? We think about all these things. And here's the experience of it. It's wild. I went to the gym today and what does my mind tell me? Oh my God. I have so far to go. Oh my God. It's so hard. Oh my God. I should have started a long time ago. Technically, you made progress. But there's no pleasure. And when there's no pleasure with progress,

what do you expect? So there are two other subtle things we have to talk about. First is let's talk about technology. So when we have all of these things that we need to do, when we've got a gigantic denominator, this is why we become addicted to technology. Because the things that we normally would give us pleasure are not giving us a large amount of pleasure

because our denominator is huge. And so if activities like studying and working out and cooking for yourself are not giving you pleasure, then what we need is a strong, source of dopamine. So remember how I said that there's no dopamine in the hamburger. It's not that there's no dopamine in the hamburger. It's that the majority of dopamine is actually in here. And at the same time, if we're not getting a whole lot of dopamine from life, we become dependent on crappy sources of dopamine like technology, video games, drugs, whatever, take your pick. Right. So this creates a

vulnerability because regular life is not dopaminergically reinforcing. So now we become vulnerable to these spurts of dopamine from these like from things like TikTok or YouTube shorts or Instagram Reels or whatever. So that's something we also have to keep in mind is that we want to sort of reduce that kind of behavior, but also our dependency on that behavior depends on the amount of pleasure that we get from other activities. So I don't waste 12 hours a day on Reddit. Why is that? That's because this is actually more fun for me than Reddit is. And all I'm thinking about today, I'm not thinking about the 300 videos that I have to make over the next year. I'm just thinking about this one, which brings us to the second point, which is how do you reduce your wants?

But this is where I encourage you all to focus on shrinking that box as much as possible. So notice in your mind how when you study, your mind sort of says, oh, I have to do all of this stuff. And literally, that is the moment that you get robbed of the pleasure of your achievement. So catch that moment. Be like, okay, I'm going to set those thoughts aside. I did this. This is what I'm going to focus on. Right. And if there's a ton of stuff that you're missing in life, let it go. Don't worry about a relationship right now. Focus on one thing at a time. Right. So this is all, we've already figured these answers out. But we haven't understood how it works or why it works. And what I want y'all to understand is when I'm telling you to focus on one thing at a time or reduce your desires as much as possible, it's like, oh, Dr. Kay, we've tried that. Well, this is what I want you all to understand now. Here's what I hope is different. I want you all to understand what the price of that is. When I

have all of these unfulfilled desires, it makes it very difficult for me to progress in any of them. And so as you think about all of these wild ambitions you have, tone it down, tone it down, tone it down, tone it down, tone it down. Catch your thoughts of ambition and I want this and I want this and I want this and I want this. No, tone it down. Shrink the box as much as possible. And as you shrink the box, your pleasure will increase. And don't worry about ambition. The ambition will come, right? As you get that behavioral reinforcement, and you get that pleasurable activity, you will crave more of the action. That is the switch that you need to flip. Hey, y'all, hope you enjoyed today's video.

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