HealthyGamerGG - Stop Trading Your Time For Nothing

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K deconstructs the societal "scam" that hard work alone is the cure-all for your problems. He explains that true progress isn't found by simply pulling the "effort lever" harder, but by shifting your internal understanding to turn high-resistance struggles into effortless actions. What to expect in this episode: The Effort Paradox: Why "successful" people often exert less effort than those struggling with depression or ADHD, who must work significantly harder just to perform basic tasks. The Board Game Metaphor: How reorienting your approach—like fixing a tilted box lid—allows you to stop "powering through" and start moving forward without burnout. Incongruent Regret: An analysis of how the mind sabotages your progress by telling you your wins are "not enough" or "too late," effectively turning every "W" into an "L". The Help-Rejecter Trap: Why the ego often makes us reject professional help because we feel we should be able to "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps" alone. Avoiding the "Debt of Exhaustion": Why sustained effort is about staying within your capacity rather than dipping into reserves that lead to total burnout. Reclaiming Power: Practical advice on listening to internal signals and making small, 1% shifts to regain a sense of choice in your life.Something sexy is coming to HG! Join the waitlist: https://bit.ly/3PGdmUAHG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey y'all, just a reminder that in addition to these awesome videos, we have a ton of tools and resources to help you grow and overcome the challenges that you face. We've got things like Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health, personalized coaching programs, and things like free community events and other sorts of tools to help you no matter where you are on your mental health journey. So check out the link in the description below and back to the video. Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Ocinoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you.

So let's dive right in. I'm back because I failed again. Dr. Kay, please give me some closure if you can. Earlier times, I can't handle things. Maybe I should try harder. I can do this. Other must have worked hard too, even if I can't do anything or handle anything. I must keep doing.

I would eventually learn how to deal with stuff. I should try harder. Everything will be fine, right? So you kind of force yourself to work hard. After a long time, I kept fooling myself. I thought things would work out. I knew something was missing within me. I couldn't even do the simplest stuff.

I took so much stress on simple stuff. I couldn't even begin to live. I'm a waste who can't do anything properly. I just want to be a parasite. I'm wrong. I failed at everything. Money, time myself. Nothing but a walking corpse.

Bleak. So I think one of the biggest scams that we propagate in the world today is that hard work will fix your problems. Right? So we live in a culture where like, you have one lever that theoretically you can pull to improve your situation, which is that you can expend more effort, right? If you get a B in a class, if you just study more hours, you will get an A. And it's like sort of true, right?

Like in the examples that I provided, if you do study more, that is correlated with getting better grades. If you do work more hours, it is correlated with making more money. So it's kind of this like simple cure all for your problems. But I think there's like a basic, basic, basic problem here, which is that the people who are very successful in life, and I've worked with, like, degenerate gamers living in their parents' basement, I've worked with, like, literal billionaires. The difference is not in the amount of time they spent productive.

The difference is actually in their effort. The degenerate gamer, I think, actually spent, is far more effortful than the six. successful entrepreneur. And I know that sounds weird, but like, I'll give you all an example, okay? So, you know, I'm a psychiatrist. So I work with people who have depression. And when people have depression, basic things require a lot of effort. Getting out of bed requires a lot of effort. Cleaning your room requires a lot of effort. And then also when we got ADHD, I was talking to a colleague of mine who's a professor. And my colleague was telling me that, you know, he's got

two students in his class with ADHD. And he was like really surprised by this. because he's like, you know, they're able to carry on conversations. They participate well in class, all this kind of stuff. So he's, like, confused by the diagnosis. And he's not, like, trying to suggest that they don't have it. He was genuinely trying to learn about this. So he's like, can you explain this to me? Because it seems to my perception of what ADHD is is different, right?

So I thought, like, people would struggle, but they seem to be well engaged. And so I explained to him that one of the key things about ADHD is not that you can't do something, but that the effort required is way higher, right? So when a neurotypical person has, participates in a conversation in class, the cost to them is pretty low. Like I can participate in conversations for eight hours a day without a problem, right? Maybe I feel tired at the end of it, but I can do it. The problem with ADHD is that the effort is way higher. So we live in a society where we tell people work hard, right?

So especially in America, lift yourself up by your bootstraps. This is the land of opportunity. the harder you work, the more successful you will be. There's a lot of research that shows that this is probably not true. And this is something that I realized as a psychiatrist, like, you know, everyone talks about, I was in residency. And residency is like hard. It's a lot of work.

You work 80 hours a week, basically every week on average in psychiatry. If you're in surgery or neurosurgery, it's like 100 110. There are these other, you know, professions like investment banking or big law or things like that where you just work crazy amounts of hours. And so like I had this kind of perception that, you know, I'm successful because I work hard. Like I'm working 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week. And then I realize like I have some patients who actually work way harder than I do. I have patients who have three part-time jobs because a single employer like Walmart won't give them full-time hours because then they have to pay for benefits. So they work like 24 hours at three companies because no one's willing to pay them benefits.

That's the most that they can get. And so this concept of hard work, I think like this. this idea that if you have this idea in your mind, that hard work will fix my problems. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't be productive and you shouldn't be effortful, right? This is what's really hard about this. If hard work doesn't fix your problems, like, what are you advocating for? You know, I work six to seven days a week. We'll get to that in a second because when I talk about that, a lot of people get upset, or not upset, but they're like, is Dr. Kay becoming a hostile culture, bro? Not really. And we'll get to that in a second. But the key thing here is that

effort is usually not what we want to do, actually. Effort, I think this is sort of this scam that this idea of, I just need to work harder, I just need to work harder, I just need to work harder. And when I work with patients who have things like addictions, right, there's this idea that I need more self-control, more willpower, more effort, more effort, more effort, more effort. I don't think that's the right way to live. I think actually, so this is something is so silly, my daughter and I were playing a board game. This was like two years ago.

And I don't know if you guys have ever had this issue where like, you know, you have like a box for a board game and then you put the lid on top. And she didn't understand this because if the lid is slightly tilted, you can push really, really, really, really, really hard and the box will never go down. Whereas if you reorient the box just a little bit, it goes down effortlessly. And this is what I think life is like. Right. So when I work with people, when we have like coaches and stuff working with people, the goal there is not to get them to just work. I think that's actually a mistake because when you just work harder, this is how you end up, right? You end up in this situation where you have all of this hard work that you've expended, all of

this energy, and then you're absolutely burnt out. And then we get into this like pendulum of, I just want to be a parasite. I just want to take it easy. I'm tired of working hard. I want to do nothing, right? So I've done everything and more for a long time. And now I want to do nothing and even less. I want to be a degenerate. I just wish I had money. I wish I had money. I wish I wish I won the lottery. I wish I had participated in that Starcraft tournament 20 years ago where third place was 300 Bitcoin and first place was $250. I wish I had done that. I wish I could just be a parasite because we're tired. Our relationship with effort is all messed up. And so I think the first thing to understand is that like, you know, if my problem is not solved by a certain

amount of work, we have this idea that like, okay, more work, right? So how do I build more motivation, how do I build more discipline? How do I do I do this stuff? And I've worked with people like that. So I'd say I've worked with a lot of people who are, let's say, between the ages of 27 and 45. And this group of people is classically successful. So they have early life crises and they have midlife crises. They've got stuff like imposter syndrome. They force themselves to work really hard. They end up getting promoted and then like they're doing stuff that they don't really want to do and it never really gets better. And they kind of find themselves sort of like trapped where they've worked really hard and now they find themselves high up on a mountain that they don't like.

So this is where I think a fundamental thing that is missing for a lot of these people is actually understanding that if you are working really hard and things are not working for you, what you need is better understanding, right? You need to shift that box just a little bit. You need to understand what is the source of resistance. And instead of powering through, shift a little bit. in a shift of your efforts will drastically change the yield on the energy that you put in. And this is something that it's like, it's so silly, but, you know, I sometimes think we can learn a lot from gaming.

And I think like any sort of ranked multiplayer game, this is a really good example of, where if you understand one or two additional mechanics, that's worth like a rank or a metal. It's not mechanical skill. It's not effort, right? it's not necessarily being locked in. It's like, okay, if I learn how to creep pull from Dota 2, or if I get a little bit better at last hitting, or if I learn how to do this, if I learn, you know, so I remember seeing this post from a Dota 2 player that if you're a carry and you're on the other side of the river and two people are missing, you should leave the enemy's side of the map.

It's like really simple stuff. And the climb from low rank to high rank is not playing more games, right? This is why we have people who played 10,000 hours of League of Legends, Valorant, Dota, 2, take your pick. And they're still like hard stuck at bronze or whatever. So this idea that working hard will improve your life, I think is like fundamentally incomplete at best and wrong at worst. Like it's wrong.

Now, should you invest your energy productively? Absolutely. But we'll get to that in a second. So what you need is more understanding. And what I want you all to notice about this post is what are they learning from the friction, right? This is a person that eventually I'll learn how to deal with stuff. I should try harder. Everything will be fine.

Their body, their brain, their life is sending them signals that this is not working. And they are ignoring those signals. So this is something that like, you know, this is a problem. This is a classic problem in our community. When I developed the coaching program, this was the problem that was designed to sort of target. And the way that it works, I'll just share this with y'all, and we'll sort of walk y'all through this a little bit, is understanding first. So really simple.

If a patient has, if I have the wrong diagnosis for a patient, this medication doesn't work, this medication doesn't work, this medication doesn't work, I can keep on increasing the doses on medications, I can try additional medications. They have this treatment refractory problem. I can increase the intensity of treatment that I provide, but it's not going to work if I'm misdiagnosing the problem. Simple, right? You can play a thousand games of Dota 2 or whatever, Fortnite, whatever. But if you don't learn from your mistakes, if you don't understand why the effort is not translating into improvement, it's never going to work. So here's what's kind of interesting. We were looking at some quality improvement data. And a lot of coaching out there is about action and accountability. And our coaches are trained in that too. But the interesting thing is I think our coaches work slower. It takes them longer. So we see optimal changes in 12 to 16 weeks, not four to eight weeks. But we see larger changes because it's focused on

understanding your problem. So let's talk about what your problem is. So here's the first thing that you've got to do. This is kind of weird. But if you think about this idea of hard work, okay? Think about where you learned, hard work will improve your life. Basically, you learned it from the outside, right? Because if you look at your own experience like this, hard work is not working. If you're someone who has worked really hard, and this can include things like someone who's got ADHD or someone who's got depression, where a ton of effort gives you a tiny little yield. So we've been taught all of this stuff on the outside. Everyone tells you just keep working hard, keep working hard, keep working hard, eventually you'll figure it out. That's what you

learned from the outside. And that works for some people. But if it doesn't work for you, what you need to do is do a better job of understanding yourself, understand what the diagnosis is. So what I find when I work with these people is they ignore their internal signals. Just ignore them. So when something doesn't feel good, I need to power through. And they kind of get stuck. Like part of the reason that they sort of ignore their signals is if they listen to themselves, they end up just numbing, oh, what do I feel like?

What does my body feel like? What does my brain feel like? My body and brain feel like doing nothing. So I'm going to do nothing. Well, that's not working. So then I have to ignore what my body and brain do. You'll kind of get that, right? So if I've, I learn to ignore my body or brain because listening to my body or brain doesn't work.

And then I have to push myself. But then that doesn't work either. So this is what I recommend you all do. This is a bit hard. Pay attention to what leads to contentment. And we have to define contentment precisely here. Contentment is the opposite of regret. Okay.

So the first thing is contentment is after the fact. The action is completed. And if you are at peace, great. If you are not at peace, what is the way and what? which peace gets destroyed after you're done, it's basically what we call regret. Oh, I should have done things differently. It's not enough. I should have done things more. So pay attention to what leads to peace and what leads to regret. And here's the interesting thing. Even if you want to be a parasite, if you want to waste your time, you know, if you're like, oh, I'm exhausted, all I want

to do is play video games all day. I don't want to work anymore. I'm tired of working. That will lead to numbness. It will not lead to peace. You will wake up the next day and you will have regret. Okay. So then we get to another problem, which is that if you work, if you are moving in the right direction, there's still a chance that you will have regret even when you shouldn't have regret. Here's the options. I feel like doing nothing. And now I have regret. Okay? So that doesn't work. Do something. And I have regret. And what is the nature of this regret? Now here's the fundamental problem. So look for peace, but these people have difficulty finding peace. because it's not enough. Should have done it sooner. Okay. So this is what you need to look for. So look for when you move in the right direction,

what are the ways in which your mind turns a W into an L? This is what happens. The other thing is that there's one really, really, really key clue, right? So it's kind of hard, but so this is going to be oftentimes related to the Aham Gata or ego. So earlier, I talked about coaching. And so I would venture that there's a lot of people in the audience who resonate with this idea. And then when I say, okay, like, you know, you can work with somebody else. And the reason, you know, I'm a psychiatrist.

So I saw firsthand the value of the impact that a professional can have on somebody's growth. Like, that's what I do in my day job. It's a model that works really well, super evidence-based. But there's a problem, which is that I don't want to work with somebody else. Right. So the problem with blind spots is that you're blind to them. That's why it helps to work with somebody else. But you don't want to work with somebody else. You want to be able to do it on your own, right? And so what I find with these people, it's really subtle, is that there are many things that they are unwilling to do because they have this idea that there's like lazy people and then there's the hardworking people. And I want to be this. I don't want to be this. So oftentimes these people will reject help. So this is beautiful. There's a great paper taking care of of the hateful patient. So Jim Groves, absolute, brilliant man, works at MGH, had the privilege of

studying with this guy briefly. So he talks about manipulative help rejectors. So these are people who will ask for help. They actually seem the opposite of entitled. They appear to feel that no regimen will help. Appearing almost smugly satisfied, they return again and again to the officer clinic to report that once again, the regimen did not work. Their pessimism and tenacious naysaying appear to increase in direct proportion to the physician's efforts and enthusiasm. So sometimes, I'm not saying that everybody who, you know, falls into this category is a, is in the hateful patient. But oftentimes, these people are very, what we call help seeking, help rejecting. They ask for help and when someone says, okay, here's what you should do, they don't want to do that. Because they have a model of,

I want to do it in this way. I want to do it without help. I want to be the kind of person who pulls myself up with my bootstraps. Now, some of y'all may fall into that category. Some of y'all may not. That's the challenge of trying to talk about this, right? Because this, this is my whole point, is that this pattern has a lot of different reasons internally. So the patterns that we can look for, this is why it's useful to work with people, right? So I'm sharing some of the patterns that I see frequently. So one pattern is that when you engage in effort and you make progress, something in your mind tells you that it's not good enough. So even though you're moving in the right direction,

instead of feeling peaceful about it, instead of feeling proud or positive about it, your mind adds something else. Look for your mind adding insufficiency. It's not enough. It's too late. I've fallen behind. I should have started this a long time ago.

You're moving in the right direction and your mind is punishing you for it. Not going to work. Second thing to look for, if you are theoretically moving, in the right direction, is that impacting your ego in some way? Is moving in that direction, make you feel like you're someone that you don't want to be? I want to do it that way. I want to do it by myself. I don't want to show people how pathetic I am. I don't want to have to say, oh, I went and

saw a therapist and they helped me with my stuff. I want to be able to do it myself. I want to be the thing that the rest of the world taught me about, which is like the hard worker who conquers adversity. Look for ego. That'll be your second clue. And the most important thing, so this is where, you know, sometimes in India, they, like when I went to India and, you know, you hear these stories about people going to places like monasteries and stuff and they're, you know, transformed by it, which is great. Let's transform people all for it. What is it that accounts for the transformation? One of the most important things that I learned in India is getting data from here instead of out there. What is it that works for you, right? And that's where there are certain things like,

speaking of like effort and working hard. So I'll just explain this very simply. So there's a lot of people who say that you should work really, really, really hard and expend a bunch of effort, right? Hustle culture people, you'll find these people on LinkedIn and they're like, I work seven days a week, bro. You got to go hard and like, going hard is the way to go. Like, oh my God, let's go hard. That's not what I'm talking about. So I want y'all to ask yourselves a question. Do yogis in the Himalayas take weekends off? The answer is no. Every day is the same, right? And this is where you can say rightly so. That's easy to do because they're in the fucking Himalayas and they don't have their boss emailing them at Friday at 5.38 p.m. telling them that they need something done by

Monday. They're not existing in the world. And exactly, that's why they don't exist here because this world is a mess. But here's the key thing that I learned in residency. And now when I work a lot, here's the key thing to understand. Being able to engage in sustained effort is about not going into the negative. Right. So this is the problem with people who work really hard and get burnt out. is they work harder than they have the capacity to work. That's the key problem, right? Is the moment that you dip into reserves to get something done, you are signing up for a debt of exhaustion.

And this is where people will say, but Dr. Kay, I don't have a choice. My boss demands this of me. I have to do it. In my circumstance, I have no choice. I have no choice. I have no choice. And that may be true now, right?

And this is the hard thing about this is crafting your life to where that is not true a year from now. Being very intentional about, okay, if I have to do this now, so be it. But how can I make things better six months from now? And this is where there are people who do this. There are people who will, you know, job hop every two years because that's what optimizes, you know, income and things like that. But it's not so much about necessarily optimizing income. It's about improving the basic state of your life. Right. So building that sustainability is the goal. I'm not saying that it's easy to do right the second, but that's what you should strive for. And put your effort in a direction that reduces the burden of your effort, reduces the demands of your environment over time. That's hard to do, right? So that's why like oftentimes the details of your situation. I mean, generally speaking, I think there isn't generic advice that works for this. So this is where you really have to understand what your situation is and try to improve things by one.

to 2%, move the needle a little bit at a time. And there's all kinds of stuff from going to bed on time and fixing your sleep, which by the way, have a great lecture tomorrow on. You know, so it's hard to do, but I think it's doable. And like this is the hardest thing as a psychiatrist is, see, I have so many patients who don't have power in their life. And I can't, like, they genuinely don't have power. But just because you have power today doesn't mean that you don't have power today, doesn't mean that you won't have power tomorrow. And the hardest thing to do, I see this most often and people who have or in abusive relationships is helping them reclaim the power.

I understand that you don't have a choice in this moment. How can you get a choice tomorrow? Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.