HealthyGamerGG - The Lie of "Positive Thinking"

Episode Date: August 8, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K tackles the popular self-help myth of "thought control" and positive thinking. Disagreeing with top athletes who claim they can fully master their minds, he explains the actual science of attention, emotional regulation, and cognitive conditioning. Drawing on the metaphor of a garden, he breaks down how to stop painful thought spirals, why arguing with your own brain fails, and how to transition away from the trap of black-and-white thinking. What to expect in this episode: The Myth of Thought Control: Why Dr. K strongly disagrees with high performers like Eileen Gu on "controlling" your thoughts, and why your brain actually generates thoughts automatically, much like a TV playing different channels. The Anatomy of a Thought Spiral: How a single negative event—like getting dumped—can trigger an automatic, exhausting chain reaction that drains your self-esteem and wastes hours of your life. The "Tip of the Nose" Hack: A simple, powerful, and immediate secret meditation technique that instantly shuts off background brain chatter and grounds you in the present moment. Logic vs. Emotion: Why your logical brain is actually controlled by your emotional circuits, and why trying to "argue" with yourself logically when you're angry, ashamed, or depressed never works. The Dopamine Deception: How scrolling through social media and watching funny videos merely suppresses your emotional circuits rather than actually regulating them, leaving you in a worse state once you put the phone down. Mental Gardening: Why your mind is like a wild, unmanicured garden, and why high performers succeed not because they are perfect, but because they commit to the daily grind of "weeding" unproductive thoughts. The 20-Week Rule: Why it takes about 20 weeks of consistent mental training to finally get your "mind garden" under control, and why giving up after a month is the biggest trap of self-improvement. Weeding Out Black-and-White Thinking: Understanding the direct link between extreme, binary thinking and severe mental illness, and why the most important step you can take today is shifting your mind toward the gray. Dr. K's NEW Guide to Love, Sex, & Relationships is here! Order now: https://bit.ly/4dO3x0VHG 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

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Whether life serves you an ace or an unexpected backhand, the high-protein yogurt, Oikos Pro, is there to feed your strength and help you turn every challenge into a smash.

Oikos Pro helps build strong muscles and support muscle recovery with high protein and contains no added sugar. Because true strength isn't about being able to take the hits. It's about being able to bounce back. Oikos Pro, feed your strength. Visit Oikos.Ca for more details. Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Aunoja, but you can call me Dr. Kay. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, 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. Today, we're going to talk about how to control your thoughts. So the interesting thing about this is if you look at people who are incredibly successful, like Eileen Gou, She says the coolest thing about the mind is that you can control your thinking. And this is something that I actually technically hard disagree with. I think that you can't control your thinking.

Even more interesting is that she's not the only one who disagrees with me. In fact, if you look at people who are incredibly successful across all kinds of industries, so here's a clip of Lewis Howes. Howe's how much of our thoughts do we control? None. We don't control our thoughts? No, the mind generates thoughts. You find that most people who are incredibly successful believe that they can control.

their thinking. And I'm on the other side saying, technically, you can't. So what's the deal here? Why is there so much disagreement between people who are incredibly successful at the top of their field and me over here who's insisting that it can't be done? What we're going to tunnel into today is how these people end up shaping their mind in a way that gives them the idea that they can control their thinking. And this is work that I do like literally in my day job, right? As a psychiatrist, my job is to take people who are moderately successful and help them become incredibly successful. In my day job as a psychiatrist, my goal is to help people shape their thinking in the correct way. And the blunt, unfortunate truth is that I've learned you can't control your thinking.

And I'll give you a simple example, okay? So let's say I've got a patient who's got OCD. This is by definition an illness where you can't control the thoughts that pop into your head. You have intrusive thoughts, which we call obsessions. you think about it over and over and over again. And then you have compulsive behaviors to reduce the obsessions. But it's not just OCD, right? We can think about someone who's struggling with depression.

So let's say this is an actual, you know, case of someone that I've worked with, someone who built a very successful company, sold it, right? So they did the miraculous thing, the founder exit at the age of 42. And then they became incredibly depressed. So this is another situation where there are lots of negative thoughts that pop up in their head. they don't want to think this way. They try not to think this way. They may even do things like stand in front of a mirror and say positive affirmations to themselves every day. But if you kind of pay attention, the struggle with the mind, the basic problem with the mind is that you can't tell

it what to think. Right. You can't go to bed tonight and say, tomorrow when I wake up, I will be confident. And I will think positive thoughts. And I will believe in myself. And I will understand that the world is a good place. I won't have existential depression about the nature of how AI is taking everybody's jobs and there's wealth inequality that's increasing at an astronomical rate, there's inflation, I can't buy a home anymore because of private equity. I'm not going to think that way anymore. And if you try to do that, it simply doesn't work. The cool thing is that there are a couple of things that you can do. And when I work with someone, my goal is to teach them the skills that high performers basically have internalized, what they've learned how to do,

what they can control. So let's start with this example, from Lewis. Do we generate a thought or is a thought generated automatically? What are you thinking? I'm thinking you're touching my leg. Did you have control over that? I can think a different thought when it happens. I can shift the thinking. So this is a key thing to understand. You can't control what pops into your head, right? So when I'm touching Lewis's foot, like he can't control like, oh my God, this guy is touching my foot. And that's like the problem in life, right? So you text a friend of yours and then they don't text you back. And you can't control the thought that pops into your head. But what you can do is shift your attention away from it. And this is one thing that is huge. Separates people who are

like broke from people who are billionaires, the ability to shift their attention away from something. So I'll give you all kind of a simple example of this, right? So I can't control what is on the different channels on TV, right? There's a news channel. They're going to play this. on a particular day. There's a murder mystery channel. There's the discovery channel. Like, whatever. I can't control what's on the channel. All I can control is which channel I choose to watch. And this is what's really important. This is what athletes learn how to do, really successful people learn how to do. They learn to shift their attention away from an unproductive thought line. Now, what happens when we don't do this? The classic example is a thought spiral. So I've worked

with people who will say, let's say they get dumped. So they get dumped by their significant other. Now they feel lonely. to myself, I have been dumped. And then their mind jumps to the next thought. Since I have been dumped, that means I am unlovable. Since I am unlovable, that means I won't find anyone else in this life. And since I won't find anyone else in this life, that means I'll be alone for the rest of my life. I think a better example of that second thought, I don't like I am unlovable. I've spent so many years with this person. I've been in this relationship with this person for 10 years. I haven't been on a first date in 10 years. I'm so behind in life. Therefore, I will remain behind in the rest of my life.

So if you really look at this damaging kind of thinking, it isn't one thought that is damaging. It is getting stuck in this loop, right? This spiral where now we've boarded the train of negative thinking and we think this for an hour. And each of those negative thoughts piles up, reduces our self-esteem, makes us feel worse about ourselves. What's the difference between people who basically don't do very well in life and people who do really well, what is the clinical work that I do? I help them shift from having a thought chain to shifting their attention to something else, right? Because if we think about what's the real problem with the thought spiral, it's not an individual thought. It's the fact that they all

chain together and then we think them again and then we think them again. And then we've lost two hours of our life, right? And we feel terrible about ourselves. This is also why the most basic skill that we have to train the shifting of attention is meditation. I keep seeing comments. Dr. K, how do I apply this to a situation in my life? That's literally why we created a coaching program. Our coaches are certified on an evidence-based curriculum designed to help you get unstuck. This involves analyzing your patterns, increasing your understanding, and working with you week to week to help you develop a plan to create lasting change. So if y'all are interested, check out the link in the description below. So I can give you all a really simple example right now,

so really simple practice. I want you to close your eyes and just pay attention to the tip of your nose. Just concentrate on the tip of your nose, right? If you're driving or something, don't do this. Just the tip. Put all of your attention there. So notice what happened when you focused on the tip of your nose. Actually, this is like sort of like a secret meditation technique because it is so powerful

in that you can do it immediately and it'll shut off your mind and you will stop thinking all things. So literally, I want you all to think about 30 seconds ago. Your mind was thinking about what I was saying, right? you had maybe all kinds of skepticism or this guy doesn't know what he's talking about or oh maybe this will fix me right you have all kinds of thoughts happening but when i tell you to shift your attention you concentrate on the nose and all of those thoughts go away so the first key skill that athletes develop is the ability to shift their attention away from unproductive thoughts to other things there's a second thing

that is very important for athletes to learn how to do which is to regulate their emotions now this is why this is so important because a lot of people don't realize this. See, we tend to think that logic and emotions are like separate, right? So like, oh, I'm not very emotional. Like, I'm a logical thinker. I'm a critical thinker. But if you've ever seen a debate about politics, both sides believe they're perfectly logical, even though for some reason they're not able to see logic, right? You can look at problems like, you know, dating or the manosphere versus like the feminist circles or pink pill versus Red Bill or whatever. There's just a lot of people who think that they are completely logical, but they're not. So here's the key thing to understand. Our thinking is controlled by our emotions,

like literally, okay? So if you look at the emotional circuits of our brain, they are so potent at shaping our thinking. And if you've struggled with a negative emotion before, you kind of like know what I'm talking about, right? So once you get angry, once the anger turns on, the thinking is like, a torrent, right? Like, oh my God, they did this and they did this and they did this and they did this. And so if you sort of look at it, like the emotion, as long as the emotion is fueling your brain, if that's what's dominating your brain, there will be lots of thoughts that are generated from this. Not just anger, right? Once you feel ashamed about yourself, if you look at someone who feels like they're a loser or an in cell or whatever, they have a lot of negative emotion. What they really feel is a lot

of shame. They feel a lot of a regret. And that shame and regret are like little factories that produce thoughts that pop up into your head. And so as long as the emotion is present, it will shape your thinking. What we learned in cognitive behavioral therapy is that if we can manage someone's emotions, if we can teach them emotional regulation, if you can calm down the anger, then the thinking will change. Okay. There's a big difference between the way that most athletes manage their emotions and the way that we manage our emotions. The biggest problem is that we have access to this. And this is a really good tool to shut off our emotions. But shutting off our emotions is not the same as regulating them.

The problem that we have with this is when I look at funny cat videos on the internet, right? Or I look at like, oh, my God, there's this hilarious thing that happened in a video game that I like. Or there's this funny short about how the World Cup is dominating or Scottish people are in Boston. And they're draining all the pubs dry. And everyone, there's no beer except for Bud Light left in the city of Boston, right? Which is, oh my God, like people outside of the America can't drink but like another tangent. You see how I shifted away? So here's the problem with this kind of stuff is that when we, when we engage with things on the internet like social media, it artificially suppresses our emotional circuitry.

But we're not learning to regulate it. We're just like turning the TV off, right? We're like stepping away from it. And then the problem is once we stop doing that, once we let our mind be free again, once we start thinking about things, that emotion comes rushing up. Oftentimes, with an additional amount of regret, because now I've wasted an hour on my phone and I should have been working, right? So my emotional picture is actually moving in the wrong direction. Whereas what many successful people learn how to do is to regulate their emotions. They do this oftentimes very physically, right?

So a lot of these athletes will learn techniques like deep breathing. And by the way, breathing is probably the best way, best in the sense that is very accessible. and very effective, very easy to do, very natural. I teach this to literally four-year-olds because your breath and your emotional state are connected. Okay, so if you think about, if I breathe like this, what emotion am I feeling, right? You can tell. There's a particular neurophysiologic pattern of respiration with a particular emotion, which is why we tell people, hey, you need to calm down, take a deep breath.

So this is a two-way street and athletes will learn deep breathing, but this is where we want to decompress or regulate our emotions. Oftentimes, regulating our emotions is an important skill that we will do with other people. So this is where, like, in our coaching program or as a psychiatrist, right, we will teach these techniques which are learned over time. So that's a really great way to learn them. But deep breathing or breathing in general is the fastest way to immediately regulate your emotions. So another thing that athletes tend to do that we don't do is argue with themselves. So oftentimes when we have these negative thoughts in our head, our response, is to try to logically argue against them. So if you think to yourself, I have low self-esteem.

And then people will say, okay, like, so no, but I don't have low self-esteem. Like, let me make a pro-con list. Let me try to convince myself. And oftentimes, athletes do change the way that they talk to themselves, but that kind of convincing is very hard to do on your own. You guys may have noticed, right? You've tried to do it. Some people are able to do it, in which case it's no longer a problem. but many people will look for logic to combat logic. But what we've learned sort of, what I've learned as a psychiatrist is that as long as the emotion is fueling those thoughts, arguing against yourself, really doesn't change your self-esteem very much. And that's a big trap that people fall into that oftentimes, I don't know if this just makes

sense. If you look at someone who's incredibly successful, what they're doing is not like sitting at home, spending four hours arguing with themselves. And literally, I've worked with, I can think of a couple of e-sports, athletes that do do that. They spend time hours at home after practice thinking about how they should be different and this and that their mind is once again out of control and their performance doesn't actually get better. That actually holds them back a fair amount. So oddly enough, logical argument is not something that works. Another really important thing to understand is where our thoughts actually

come from. So sure, we can't control them. We can shift attention away to a different channel, a more productive channel. We can regulate our emotions. But the other key thing to understand is that that our thoughts fundamentally come from our sense organs. This is also something that people who produce advertising and propaganda very clearly understand. Why does propaganda work? Because if I can give someone enough sensory input, if we look at the way that political campaigns are run, I'm going to bombard people with images, with music, with sound bites, with clips. And if I can do this enough, I can literally change the way that they think.

So the weird thing about this is that other people are actually more empowered to control your thoughts than you are. Really scary, but it's absolutely true, right? Your wife has certain thoughts in her head. She's upset. And you can do things to alter the pattern of her thinking. You can say, oh, tell me what's wrong. I love you. We as human beings can affect the human beings around us.

It can affect their thinking. Yes. Which means by definition, her thinking is being shaped by who? Me. So as we saw in this clip with Lewis, his wife's thoughts are actually controlled more by him. And his wife controls more of his thoughts than we want to give ourselves credit for. And depending on how you've existed in the environment, you may have noticed this as well. Like if you're spending some time with your boss and your boss like gives you a negative performance review or they, you know, give credit to one of your colleagues.

This environmental influence can trick. all kinds of thinking. And this is the other thing that athletes and professionals are really, really good at. Think about their environment, right? So if I'm a professional athlete, I wake up in the morning, I'm eating some kind of healthy food that is determined by my nutritionists. I go into work. I spend time with my coach. I spend time with my peers. I get a massage. I do a cold plunge. My environment is feeding me a certain kind of thinking. They're not spending eight hours a day watching how their competitors are working harder than they are, doing better than they are. Oh my God, they have this coach and they have, I only have a cold plunge, but they have an infrared

sauna. That's not actually how they're spending their time. This is really important. The environment that highly successful people have is very controlled. And that induces a certain kind of thinking. A good analogy to sort of stitch this all together is a garden. So if we look at a garden, can you control? what grows in a garden. Now, you can look at a well-manicured garden. You can say, like, yeah, like, they

kind of control that, right? There's rose bushes, there's lilies, there's a crate myrtle, there are no weed. So clearly they can control it. But if you sort of stop and think about it technically, like, I can plant a seed, I can water, I can add the fertilizer, but I cannot make it grow. What I can do is take certain actions to cultivate a particular kind of growth. And the other really important action that we take with gardens is that we're we do weeding right so when they're negative things when they're negative plants are growing i remove them i remove them i remove them i remove them i remove them but technically you can't like stop weeds from growing you can only do the work of weeding them on a daily basis and this is ultimately the difference between what i would call high performers

the thinking of high performers and the thinking of low performers which is that high performers they weed on a daily basis. When they have a negative thought, they shift their attention. And they fertilize themselves in the right way. I'm going to spend time with my coach. I'm going to spend time away from social media. I'm literally spending my days doing things. I'm doing things like deep breathing.

Each of these things that we do will start to shift your mind in a particular direction. And when we look at someone like an Olympic athlete, they have a well-manicured garden because many of them from the age of five or six or even younger started this process of mental cultivation. The problem that we run into is that we will do these things for a little while, right? We'll say, okay, I watch this Dr. K video. I'm going to shift my attention. I'm going to concentrate on the tip of the nose. I'm going to do all of these things. We do it for a week. We do it for two weeks. We do it for three weeks. We do it for four weeks. And then we think to ourselves, oh my God, it's not working. And even as you guys are listening to this, you may be

thinking these thoughts like, oh my God, what is Dr. Kay saying? He's saying, just stay off your phone. Is that basically what you're saying? Like, sure, if I'm a pro athlete and I have a coaching staff, I have an infrared sauna, I have all these things, then it's easy to do what you're saying, Dr. Kay, but my life is different. I can't afford to stay off of this. My boss sends me emails. I have to check Slack. I have to check Instagram DMs for my job, right? I have to do all of these things. And I want you to notice what you just did, right? I want you to notice. I want you to notice, what thought popped up into your head when I said, this is what we need to do. This is exactly the problem, right?

So you can't control your negativity in response to this. But if we look at this is a key thing that separates people who are really successful from people who are not, which is that when they have a negative thought pop into their head, what is the shift that you are making right now? Are you making the shift of, and this is the shift that they make, this is an obstacle. how do I overcome it? That is the difference between a high performer

and a low performer's thought. Low performers thought is this is an obstacle, therefore I can't do it. Right? You see this? And there's so many people in our community

is why I'm doing this work, right? Because you all think, okay, it won't work because of this. It won't work because of this. I'm different. There's another thought. There's another weed

that has grown. I'm less than everybody else. What works for other people doesn't work for me. These people have advantages I have. Therefore, I can't accomplish what they can't accomplish. And I'm not one to say that advantages don't matter, right? I said from the get

goes, many of these people, they are this way because they were trained from the age of five. You were not trained from the age of five. I was not trained from the age of five, right? There's no question that they have advantages that you don't have. The question is, how does your mind respond to that discrepancy? Do you say, therefore, I can't do it? Notice how it's happening right now in your head. Even as I point this out to you, what is your mind's reaction? Is it finding some way to twist in turn to reject what I'm saying? Or is it actually starting to shift a little bit? Maybe I should think about how to apply this instead of finding the five obstacles that I need to wipe away before I apply it.

And this is the key thing. See, if you're struggling with this, it's completely normal because if we go back to the garden, the issue with the garden is if we have a garden that we have not manicured, right? for 10 years, 15 years. The garden is overrun with weeds. How many weeks of tending the garden? How many weeks of weeding does it take for the garden to become a rose garden? We have to start planting the right thoughts and we have to do a lot of weeding.

And this is what's so hard. This is why I like working with people, right? And if we look at like our coaching program, it's really interesting because we see really good outcomes. So people start to get better within four weeks, but we see really good outcomes at 20 weeks. And that's because it takes about 20 weeks to get a garden under, control. You can put in a lot of effort for four weeks, eight weeks. You can do all of the right things, but you will not notice a difference. And it's just like a garden because you're working,

working, working, working, working, working. And then if you go four weeks in and you're like, oh my God, I've been working every day for eight hours in the garden is still an absolute mess. And even though you're expending effort, you don't see a result. But then something magical happens at eight weeks, 12 weeks, 16 weeks. And this is another dangerous thought that people have. I'm putting forth effort, therefore, and I don't see a result, therefore, this is a waste of time, therefore this will never work. But with a garden, the key thing is at some point, the effort starts lessening. The more you do it, the more you cultivate, the easier it becomes.

But it still requires that maintenance on a daily basis. I want to leave you all with one super concrete thing, which is, what is it that I need to weed in my mind? So by all means, you can focus on the tip of your nose, learn to train your attention. That'll help you a lot. But the last thing that I want y'all to notice, this is the thought that you need to weave. Any thought that is black and white. So in the world, nothing is black and white, right?

Or maybe some things are black and white. That's a black and white thought. Right? So let's weed that out. Maybe something is black and white. Most things are not black and white. And if you look at athletes, they're really good at this. So I recently heard a clip from a tennis player who was saying they unexpectedly lost a tournament

where they were, you know, favored to win. And they're like, I never want to play tennis again. That's a black and white thought. And do you think that this person is going to quit tennis? I would be really surprised if they do. They have the black and white thought, but they shift away from it, right? How do you shift away from I never want to play tennis again? You shift away by saying, look, I had a bad week.

It was a bad game. Everybody has tough times. Here's what I did well. Here's what I did poorly. And what I found literally you can measure the level of black and white thinking with the severity of mental illness. And what you will find is that the more severe the black and white thinking is, the more likely they are to be severely mentally ill.

So in borderline personality disorder, one of the diagnostic features is black and white thinking. When people have psychotic depression, it's black and white thinking. So notice any time you think in terms of black and white and you have just one task, shift towards gray. It doesn't have to be all the way from black to white. Even white is bad. I've worked with many people. We talk about psychotic depression. Other example of white thinking is all white thinking terrible? Absolutely. And we call that mania. So shift away from black or white to gray. That is the most fundamental weeding you can add. Thanks for joining us today.

We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair.

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