HealthyGamerGG - The Optimizer: Productive, But Miserable

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

In this episode Dr. K explains why we often use productivity as a way to hide from our real problems and how to find the root cause of mental health struggles rather than just treating symptoms. He also covers why people with ADHD dive too deep into hobbies and the complicated truth about sharing feelings with a partner. Key Topics: The Productivity Trap: Why "optimizing" your life is often just a way to avoid solving major personal crises, like a failing marriage or career unhappiness. Fixing the "Root Directory": How treating core issues like rumination or internalizing can fix multiple mental health diagnoses at the same time.• ADHD and New Identities: Why people with ADHD don't just "try" hobbies but adopt them as entirely new personalities to find a life that finally "fits". The Truth About Sharing Feelings: Why sharing negative emotions can sometimes make a relationship worse, especially for those with social anxiety. Integrated Partners: Using Jungian archetypes to understand why hyper-polarized gender roles on social media often lead to emotionally unsafe relationships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast, Smart Move. Being financially savvy, smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan.

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Alo Kanoja, but you can call me Dr. K. 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. Welcome to another Healthy Gamer Gigi stream. My name is Dr. Aalu Canoja. Just a reminder that although I am a psychiatrist, nothing we discuss on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice. Everything is for educational and entertainment purposes only.

If you all have a medical concern or question, please go see a licensed professional. Happy 2026, everybody. I know there's a slight echo in the room. We'll hopefully take care of that pretty soon. But really, this is our first stream of the new year. And, you know, I just want to reflect for a moment about how crazy the last, like, I want to say like six years has been? You know, like, here's for hoping that there is not another catastrophic once-in-a-lifetime event

in 2026. So I think the really interesting thing about, you know, so I'm a psychiatrist, if y'all didn't know. And I showed up on the internet a couple years ago to try to help people with their mental health, teach people some things. And the thing that I'm like so shocked by is just how bodied everybody is getting, man. We're just getting, it's just insane, man, with like COVID and wars and economics and the existential threat of AI and dating and mating crisis and like, you know, social media

affecting our brains. I saw a recent study about how Gen Z. is the first generation in the history of humanity that we've collected that has lower cognitive performance than every other generation. So we started collecting, you know, data on IQ, I think maybe in like around 1900. And every generation has basically improved. And Gen Z is like the first generation where like cognitive measure, executive function, focusing ability, memory, these things are actually going down.

And so it's like, it's insane. Like this is, I think a lot of people think like, oh, you know, this stuff is going to blow over. This stuff isn't really that real. Like we're seeing the highest rate of sexlessness. We're seeing the highest rate of, at least in the United States, people lacking independence. So 50% of people under the age of 30, I think still live at home. It didn't used to be like that. So I think it's just like everything is getting harder. And I don't think I have kind of rose-tinted glasses here. Maybe I do. But like things are getting harder.

And, and, you know, I would take just a year where things are just stable. Like, if we can just not, you know, mess up another dimension, like, that would be great. I think there's reason to be optimistic, though, because I think that we also have at our disposal tools that we've never had before. So for those of y'all that are feeling pessimistic about 2026, I feel your pessimism. But let's remember that even though things are not great, it doesn't mean that they can't get better. And so we have things like this, like the internet, where sure social media is rotting our brains just a tiny touch, but we also have things like social media to teach us things, right? We have things like video platforms and live streaming and stuff like that. So I think the challenge that we have is utilizing the tools at our disposal, which so far have been allowed to run wild, right?

People will, like, develop apps and, you know, functionality without sort of thinking about the long-term cognitive consequences. And now we can start to, like, leverage some of this technology for our benefit. And we would love to help you try to do that. We're going to do our piece there. And I'm really hoping good things for y'all in 2026. I'm excited about a lot of stuff that we are really, really hoping to do. We've got, you know, we're going to be making some announcements pretty soon. And just to keep you guys, you know, just to share a little bit, we do have a couple of new things.

So you guys may have seen, I have this mug over here. So this is, we just dropped a new March line, FYI. So these are actually, the characters on our mug are actually our staff here at HG. So each of these characters is in. inspired by someone who works here. We also have a new calendar, by the way. So a 2026 HG calendar, which has various quotes and thumbnails. So if you guys, you know, want to stay positive, we've got that stuff. And then we have a couple of other things that are pretty cool. Let me see. So we talked about the calendar. There's a blanket. There's a hoodie. And there's

There's another hoodie, a comfort zone hoodie. So, yeah, we've got some merch for y'all to tide things over. Yeah, so we're going to do our best to help you this year. How are y'all doing? Everyone doing okay? Anything that anyone wants to share about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, How are things going for you all? How's 26?

Okay, started off strong this year. Strong work. Dyes 3,000. What else? What else you all got going on? Same year, miserable job. New Year, same old miserable job, okay? No, Bueno.

Not well, unfortunately. Someone's mantras kicking in. Last semester of college. Yeah, so I'm just curious. Any membership enjoyers in chat? Speaking of monthrus kicking in, met a new girl. Okay, you're here to listen and learn.

Fantastic. We're going to be talking about optimization today. Just did your advanced meditation. Last night was really good. Okay. Yeah, someone's saving up for coaching training. There was a thread on our subreddit recently about coaching training. I don't know if you guys saw it.

But. Yeah, so I had a quick question for people, it was a recent membership enjoyer. So I did something a little bit unusual yesterday. I taught meditation for a full hour. I just wanted to get a quick temperature check on how did you all feel about like literally an hour of teaching advanced meditation? Did you guys?

Because I don't teach as much meditation on stream anymore, but just curious if you guys felt like that was like an hour of straight meditation instruction is excessive. Because if it's not, okay, so people liked it. Okay. Okay. So we're going to try, we may, I may try to do that on our regular streams and we'll see how a wider audience likes it. Yeah. So, yeah, so for people on Twitch, the, so you guys can sign up for membership.

outside of YouTube. So we tried to, some people will watch on YouTube. So we have a YouTube membership. But then exactly because like there's people on Twitch who have no idea what's going on. So you guys can check out memberships. You can watch all of the previous streams we started about two years ago. So we do about four hours of lectures per month. So there's like over a hundred, I think hours of content on there. But so we'll try. So so the main question that I kind of had is like, are regular chatters going to, would that be a waste to do in, in chat, like teach meditation for an hour? Or would that be something that people will, I know that people who are like interested in,

and attend membership lectures are more open to that sort of thing. But that's why we're sort of, I'm trying to get a sense of how much meditation I want to teach on stream. Okay. So let's get to it. We've got four topics today. One, and I'm just going to, we're not going to do, like, I'm not even going to bother with a poll. Or maybe I should bother with a poll.

I don't know. We'll see. If mods and chat want to do a poll, we can do a poll. So we're going to do four, we're going to cover four things for sure. The first is optimizer. So what is the psychology of an optimizer? I'm going to show you all real quick. Okay.

There's psychology of an optimizer. You know, then there is high empathy people running different simulations to understand why someone acted that way and people running on instincts judging someone's entire bloodline by one mistake. For those of us that try really hard to understand people, should we just give up? Should we just like give up on empathy? Is it just a waste of time?

Because there are people out there who are just yoloing it. And yeah. another thing that we've got, stop sharing my thoughts and feelings with my girl, the relationship improved, and alone again. And then the last thing that we're going to talk a little bit about is making a hobby your entire personality, which is something that we see a lot of people with ADHD

identify with. It's not specific to ADHD. But, yeah. So what are you all feeling? What do you all want to do? And by the way, today's like Friday. So I'm just kind of in a viking mood. So we're going to, like, cover this stuff, but, like, it's not going to be super, like, formal lecture.

What are y'all, what are y'all feeling? Hobby first, optimizer first. Okay. No Dota. We have lives to save, Crow. Okay. Okay. So let's start with optimizer.

So some people are catching us live specifically for Optimizer. So let's do optimizer, okay? All right. Oh, wrong one. Okay. Okay. So something that I'm starting to see more of is people are what I would call relentless optimizers. Right?

So we have a culture right now where we have a bunch of people on the internet, like yours truly, who will tell you guys how to get more. out of life, right? So we're like steering clear of politics, but like we're going to, we're going to use various kinds of products and services to optimize my life. Oh my God, there's this, I did not put this here, but that looks like Stephen. Shout out to Stephen. And so there's just a lot of people who are like, I got to do better. I got to do more. And sometimes these people become what I would like to call an optimizer bot. Okay. And I know that's mean. so let me explain.

Ha, ha, I'm a dick. Okay, no, here's what I mean. So as a psychiatrist, I've worked with a ton of people who want to optimize. I myself also like to optimize. Like this setup over here has been optimized for my streaming pleasure, okay? So optimization is not bad, right? Becoming efficient is not bad. Like doing stuff and doing it better and like all of the,

that is great, right? So if I'm going to work out, like, let me figure out how to work out, let me figure out how to eat properly, like, let me, let me figure out how to, like, manage my energy levels. Like, all that stuff is great. But sometimes what happens is people, people become optimizer bots. And they sort of optimize for the sake of optimization, for the sake of just like, I'm going to do more, because more is better, right? More money is better. More girlfriends, more boyfriends are better. More houses, bigger houses, just more is better. better. Why have one hot dog when you can have to? More is better. And they sort of relentlessly optimize. And so optimization doesn't become a means to an end, which, spoiler alert, that's when

optimization is healthy. It becomes an end in and of itself. And what I've seen as a psychiatrist is when optimization becomes an end in and of itself, it actually masks other psychological problems. So one of the things that I love about being a psychiatrist is that I get to work with a lot of people. Like not all psychiatrists are like this, which is totally fine. You know, many psychiatrists, many of my mentors are like specialists in one area. So there's a guy named Dr. Michalon, who's like, was an awesome mentor of mine is just like one of the world's best experts in depression and in supplementation. So it's like absolute awesome guy, fantastic person to learn from. But what I sort of found when I was training is like, I like, I kind of liked the variety of it.

Okay. So in what I've done is I've seen optimizers of many shapes and sizes. So I've seen people who are like, I'm a CEO. I, I exited my first company. Now I'm optimizing my life so I can be a serial entrepreneur. Or, hey, I'm homeless and I really have to like get my shit together because I'm tired of being homeless. I need my first job.

I'm addicted to pornography. I'm addicted to fentanyl. Like, I need to like fix my life. Okay. So there's like a whole spectrum of people. And what I find is that there's a couple of psychological. So the first thing is there's not. one optimizer. It's not one psychology. There's actually a different set of reasons why people

become relentless optimizers. So I'll give you all an example. This is one that is very common for very successful people. So when I work with someone who's like entrepreneur or CEO or like, you know, senior VP of like sales in North America or something like that, many of these people they're optimizers, right? So they do sauna, they do red light therapy, they do intermittent fasting, they're just amazingly productive human beings. And one of the things, there's a really interesting aspect of psychology, which is that human beings, one of the best ways you can run away from a problem is to solve a completely different problem. So sometimes when I run into relentless optimizers, why do they keep on optimizing?

Because all of these optimizations are running away from the one problem they don't solve. So I had a patient who wanted a divorce. Really what they wanted was a divorce. They were not happy in their marriage. And they were kind of fucked. And the reason they were fucked is because there was nothing wrong with their marriage. So they married someone, were together for 12 years, and they were just like unhappy. They decided not to have kids.

They were just unhappy with their marriage. But their basic problem. So as they got married pretty young, as they grew up, they got married at the age of 23. They'd grown into being 35. They had become a different person, right? So if you think about yourself at 23 and yourself at 35, like you've become a different person. Your partner has become a different person. So here they are fundamentally unhappy in their marriage, but not because their partner is doing

anything wrong. Not because there's something wrong in their life. It's just, this is not the person that I want to marry. They got married out of momentum. We're dating their, they started dating their partner in high school, dated all through college, got married when they, a year after they got out of college. So now this person has a big problem, which is that he's unhappy in his marriage. But what to do about it? I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to solve everything else. And there's a, there's a really great paper. Let me see if I can pull it. up actually. Hey, y'all.

If you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health. And so we start by understanding what literally is meditation. How does experience shape us as human beings? How do we strengthen the mind itself as an organ? And so by understanding our mind, we understand a very, very simple tool, a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we want to build the life that we want to. So check out the link in the bio.

start your journey today. There's a paper that is looking at burnout for software developers. And one of the reasons that software developers burn out is because when there is a task that they don't want to do, when they're procrastinating on one task, what they do is they spend a lot of time doing like little things that are not solving their main problem. And for senior developers, one of the key things that they do is junior code review. So it's like, I've got this big thing that, like this big feature that I have to build, but I don't know how to build it and I don't have the budget and I don't have the time. And management keeps on changing their mind and the feature isn't even going to work.

Oh my God, what do I do about it? I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go into work today and I'm going to do junior code review. I really wish I could find that paper because it explains it really well. So we as human beings have this very fundamental element of our psychology, which is that. we don't like unsolvable problems. When I'm faced with an unsolvable problem, I need to do something about it,

but I don't know how to do something about it. And when we're faced with an unsolvable problem, it feels absolutely overwhelming, right? Because I need to do something, but I can't do something. I don't know what to do. It's psychologically torture. So what we do is shift to things that we can control. There's a saying,

rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Now, I don't even know if this story is right, is correct or not, is real or not. There's this story that when the Titanic was sinking, one of like the senior wait staff was like, oh my God, the deck chairs on the top of the Titanic are out of order. The ship is sinking,

but we have to have the deck chairs in the right order. And you guys may have seen, this, you may have had a parent who, like, is going through a bad situation at work or is stressed out in some way. And they show up and they're like, this needs to be done this way. Like, the shoes need to go in the cupboard like this way. These plates need to be wiped down this way. And they hyper-focused on controlling one thing because they can't control something else. and the reason that you know this is the case is because for the optimizer, it's because we're relentlessly optimizing all kinds of random things and really what we are.

And this is where when I work with some of these executives and stuff, we'll like lean into shadow work, right? So it's like, what is the problem that you are avoiding by solving this other thing? And then solving this other thing and solving this other thing and solving this other thing. because if you can be moving towards something, it gives you a sense that you're progressing. And if you are progressing, if you're progressing over here, it's hard because of this principle called cognitive dissonance to feel stuck over here. Right?

So it's really hard for humans to feel progressing and stuck. This is an element of EQ that needs to be trained. In therapy, we'll call this the dialectic, right? So like, this person loves me and they're angry with me. It's hard to believe those two things at the same time. I recently realized this is hard for me that I have a very close family member that I dislike, but I love them immensely, right? It's hard to hold those two things at the same time.

And so sometimes what the optimizer does is takes advantage of this. Because if I feel crippled and over here, I can optimize all of these. different things. And this is how they become optimizer bots, because I'm going to optimize this, and then I'm going to optimize this, I'm going to optimize this, I'm going to optimize this. It's progress for the sake of progress. And oftentimes, if you're this kind of person, right, the key question that I usually ask in therapy or coaching is like, what is the problem that you are trying to avoid solving? Right. Every time you move towards something, what are you moving away from?

What's that one thing that is not going well in your life that you feel paralyzed in order to solve? So that's the key question. But that's only one kind of psychology. Okay? There are a couple of other things that I see. Another reason why people optimize is because they, this is kind of sad. I'm thinking more also about coaching clients.

So sometimes the reason people want to get better at stuff is because it's their way of measuring their value. So I one time asked someone very successful, what drives your desire for money? And their answer was, it's the best way to keep score. In the game of life, how do you know who's winning? because this person could be happy, this person could be healthy, this person could be sad. There's no way to know if I'm winning. Are you winning, son? And so, enter money.

It's just the best way for me to understand whether I'm better than another human being. So another subtle reason why people are relentless optimizers. And once again, I'm not saying that optimization is bad. Like, it is a healthy part, a very productive part of life. but sometimes people optimize out of ego. They optimize because they want to be the best, right? And be the best for what? Be the best because you just want to be the best?

Because you don't really understand who you are, because you're not content in life, you are not at peace. So there's this idea that if I'm not at peace in life, if I become the best, then that somehow solves that problem. So people want to get better just because they want to get better, because they want to be number one.

And this is also where if we look at the vulnerability here, why does someone want to be the best? It's because they're not happy in who they are. So this is where it's like, you know, the operative question here is what does it feel like to not optimize something? Who do you become when you are not optimizing? And oftentimes this will uncover all kinds of terrible stuff.

So I see this very commonly in people, I'm making them sound like assholes. They're not. So I'll give you an example of what this looks like. So I had a patient once who was bullied a lot in high school. And there was a particular, this is terrible. I don't know if you guys have experienced this, but, you know, sometimes in high school, in your freshman year, one of the worst things that can ever happen to you

is someone can come up with a nickname that sticks and is derogatory. So when everyone's getting to know each other, when you're 15 years old, they slap you with a nickname. And since everybody's insecure and everyone's feeling not confident about themselves, it's really easy to dogpile onto this derogatory nickname, and that's what they call that person. So every time they have the wrong answer in class, when they fumble the football, the nickname comes out. The nickname comes out.

The nickname comes out. Okay. And so once you get branded in this way, you feel like the worst. And so optimization enters the picture because how does optimization enter the picture? Because you're at the bottom of the totem pole. And as long as you are getting better, you will never be at the bottom of the totem pole again. So this group of people sounds kind of like their assholes, right? They're egotistical and they want to be number one.

But the question is why? It's because they used to be number 100. They used to be number 1,000. And they vowed to themselves never again. But then they get into a subtle problem. I don't know if this kind of makes sense. This is hard. But they start to associate and attach meaning to progress.

Because I never want to be this thing over here. I want to be number one. And number one means I'm happy. Why does number one mean I'm happy? Because number 100 meant I was sad. Right? So if I was sad down here and I achieved this, then I will be happy. And so now something really, really, really dangerous happens as they start to tie together

being number one with happiness because they tie together being number 100 with sadness. But it doesn't work like that. Right. The right way to be happy is to not run away from unhappiness. It is to work through unhappiness. If you guys wonder, what does that mean? Watch our video on emotional processing. Turns out was one of the best videos that we made last year because people are like,

I've heard this term, I've heard this term. I don't know what it is. We're starting a deep dive on Monday, by the way, into emotional processing over on the membership side. So if y'all are interested in that, but you can watch the free video on YouTube. If you guys want more, then you can check out the membership one. But the video on YouTube is great. Okay? So, number, second reason to optimize is because better, I want to be number one. And I'm going to be the best. And the better I get at things, the closer I get to number one. Why do I want to be number one? Because I've been number 100. Don't ever want to be that again.

There are other reasons why it can be associated with ego. So once again, this becomes an optimizer bought. You were just relentlessly optimizing for a reason that you don't even understand. The third reason, this is a little bit more esoteric. Actually, I don't know if that's fair. The number three reason why people relentlessly optimize comes down to a fear of death. So how does this work? Okay, so let's understand what optimization is. optimization is getting more per unit of resource expended. Okay, so it's like making $100 instead of 50 per hour. It is, and if we really look at a lot of this optimization, right, let me see if I can find this.

If we look at a lot of this, it's like, okay, like, I want to, I don't want to have I don't want to spend time eating lots of food. I want to just have one drink that will deal with all of my nutrition. Right? Like, I want to learn how to, I want to listen to podcasts while I'm walking around. I want a watch that will measure my sleep. I want to get more out of a fixed amount of resource. That's the fundamental of optimization.

Make sense, right? I want to get more. I want more, more, more. I want more per unit time. And generally speaking, when we think about what we're optimizing, if you really look at the denominator, the top can be whatever. It can be more muscles, more money, more nutrition, more longer lifespan. And then what ends up happening is per unit what?

Per unit time. The denominator is almost always time. Because if you look at what in a human life, what is the most, limiting factor. The limiting factor is time. Oh, I need to do, I need to write, I need to read one book a month. Why? Why can't you read one book every two months? Why do you have to read 300 books a year? Why can't you read 30 books a year? Because time is running out. And so if we really look at fundamentally, this third kind of optimizer, if you want to stop being an optimizer bought, But if you want actual peace and contentment, which, by the way, is something that the first two optimizers don't really get.

Right. So the peace and contentment comes when optimization is a means to an end. The target is already set. And the achievement of the target will bring you hopefully peace, happiness, contentment. Right? This is the, I'm trying to optimize because I want to get a PS5 before this particular game comes out. before the fable remaster comes out, whatever. Right?

And then once you get the fable remaster, hopefully, fingers crossed, you're happy with it. Right. But this third group of people, what they fundamentally are concerned with is a lack of time. I want to do more. Why do I want to date more people? Why am I so interested in Polly Amory? Because this experience is limited. And what I want is I want to get closer to an unlimited experience.

There are so many books. to read. I can't read them all. I want to read more. I want to read more. I want to read more. And what does this boil down to? It boils down to a fear of death. Now, this is one of the fundamental four fears. I think that the Buddha talked about other people in the in the karmic traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism, will talk about the fear of death as being fundamental. Some groups of people believe that conquering the fear of death will conquer all of your fears because it is the most fundamental fear that human beings have. This is also true in Western psychology as well.

There are many, like, psychoanalytic thinkers who will sort of really focus on the fear of death is the root of all anxiety. Because death in the limitation of time is how we as human beings are limited. So conquering that fear, accepting that life on this earth is limited, that you do. don't get to do everything. See, it is the panic to try to do everything that turns you into the optimizer bot. I need to do more. I need to do more. I need to do more. I need to do more. You can't do it all. There's also where FOMO comes from, right? Fear of missing out. Missing out on what, this experience. Why are you not content with the experience that you have? And so you can try to increase the numerator as much as you want to, but that denominator is ticking, ticking, ticking, and it is terrifyingly ticking.

And no amount of optimization will stop the march of time. No way to beat death. And so once you start to grapple with that directly, right, my time on this earth is limited. And so the optimizer will say, but I want to make the most of it. which is good. There's a good logic there, and I encourage you to make the most of it. But here's the tricky thing.

Making the most of it is not necessarily more. Once you understand the difference, then you'll understand. Right. So think on that. Meditate upon that. Existential dread setting in, good. Existential dread setting in, it's not setting in. It's coming up, right?

Setting in implies. it's coming from the outside, no, it's coming up. That existential dread is there. It needs to be worked through. And so generally speaking, when it comes to optimizers, these are the three major psychological patterns that I see for optimizer bots. And for the rest of you who are using optimization

because you already have a goal in mind, which hopefully will lead to peace and contentment, then go for it, right? But optimize with awareness. Don't just do it automatically. I need more, more, more, more, why? Right? Because it's never going to work. Okay, questions.

Hey, Prime, thanks for the raid. Hope you're doing well. I don't know what Shrut means, but welcome. What is Shrewd? Is this, are my getting memed right now without my realization? Nice, dude. Welcome, guys. Shrut farms. This is your fix.

I'm your host, Stasi Shroeder. Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the Affleasing. official podcast. What's the most unhinged thing of season three? Stephen, because he's so evil. I do think he is misunderstood. You see everyone face consequences. It's intoxicating. The writers just know how to trick you. There's always a twist in this show. Tell Me Lies, the official podcast, January 6th, and stream the new season of Tell Me Lies, January 13 on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus. Is there a balance to optimization and living a sedentary life? I don't think so. I get shooted.

What is this? Should I Google this, or is that, is this a mistake? Okay, so for Prime Raiders, you guys want free therapy, this is not medical advice? But is, for the people who are coming from Prime, is there something that, is there something in particular that y'all would like to understand or need help with? Google it, that's safe. This seems like a scam, but I'm going to do it anyway. Ah, change route. Oh my God.

Okay. Okay. We're going to give y'all something special. Okay. Change route. A Unix Linux command that changes the apparent route directory for a process, creating an isolated environment, a jail where programs can only access files. Okay.

Okay. Okay. We're going to do something fun. This is going to be nuts. Okay? So I'm going to need y'all's help. And those of you who have done memberships, Okay? Silence. Minimal participation in chat. Okay. I'm going to ask a weird question. So, I don't, I'm not a programmer, okay? So I'm a kid who grew up with DOS, not MS DOS, then I grew up with MS DOS. Then I grew up with MS DOS. I installed games from floppy disks.

And then the hard disk, floppy disk. Okay? So I know something of the old magic, but not the new innovations. So in a file system, there is a root directory upon which all things are built. Okay? So, I don't know if this question makes any sense. What is the root directory of a human being? What is the root directory of a person?

Okay, good. So these are, these are, these are quite, we're going to, we're going to break these down, okay? Okay, love it. So people are saying the brain. Okay, so brain, spine, mind, root, survive. Okay. Okay, so let's talk about survival as the root director.

I'll fucking love this. Man, I forgot why I love streaming. Okay. Let's deal with each of these in turn. This is going to be pseudo-philosophical bullshit by Dr. K 101, but there's a chance there's brilliance in here. Who knows? Okay, so let's understand this. Survival, number one.

So you can make the argument that the root of human, the root directory of being a human, is survival. Okay? Now, there's a really strong argument here because we know from evolution that organisms the per, what natural selection actually selects for, is viable offspring. Right? So it's not survival. Let's be very clear.

Survival is not what evolution selects for. If survival is what evolution selected for, organisms would last forever. So what we select for is offspring that are capable of having offspring. That's really what we select for. So you can easily make the argument that the root directory of being a human is survival. But I would challenge that argument. I would say that is the root directory of life, not humans.

Because humans are capable, and this also can be disputed, humans are capable of going against their nature. that's what makes us human. Now, you can make an argument that that is not the case, right? But my favorite example of this is, I don't know if you guys have ever seen these like, you know, these like TikToks or whatever

of like, my dog is a vegan and my dog loves vegan meat. And then they take their vegan dog and they go on some morning show or whatever and they give them like a pile of regular meat and a pile of like fake meat. And then the vegan dog miraculously eats the real meat. Oh my God.

It's such a betrayal. Right? So human beings, we have. all of these natural impulses, to eat things like Twinkies, but we go against our natural impulses. And the most profound example of this is suicide, right? You have human beings who will eliminate themselves. Another example of this is celibacy. You have got this whole crop of human beings.

I'm not talking about insults. I'm talking about monks who are like, you know what? I ain't going to have any viable offspring. and yet these things continue to persist in society. Now, you can make another evolutionary argument that on the whole, these things can be selected for based on evolution that's absolutely there. So you can make that argument, but that's not the answer that I want. I don't think it's the fun answer.

So let's dispense with survival. Okay? Maybe for life, but not for human. human root is happiness. I don't know about that. Sort of, maybe. We'll get there. Second thing, the root of the root directory of human is brain.

I do not think so. Now the question is, how can I make an argument that it is not brain? Okay, so the brain is just a mass of neurons. Okay? So there's a bunch of neurons in our gut, too. but we don't say that the root of humanity is our gut. So you could say like, okay, it's our brain, but why is it our brain? Like, our brain does a lot of stuff.

So, like, our brain is like, you know, manages. So a fourth of our brain, I mean, maybe not by mass, but by lobel delineation. We've got this thing called the occipital lobe, which is in the back of our head. It's a whole lobe. We've got four lobes, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, frontal lobe, and occipital lobe. Four lobes in the brain. One of the lobes is occipital. The occipital load, the occiput, the back of our brain, is basically all visual processing.

Right. So is a fourth of the root directory of humanity visual processing? I don't think so. Right? Is like 25% of our life visual processing. Maybe today, because this is what we do. This is what we do. But that's not really what it means to be human, right?

Being human is not defined by how you look at things. Or maybe it is. Who knows? That's maybe a profound philosophical statement in and of itself. But I don't think it's the brain because the brain is just like, it's like a mass of tissue, right? It does all kinds of stuff. It's important. But I don't think it is like more important than the gut.

And so what I love about meditation is that I think meditation, and this is my bias. Okay, I'm not saying this is like correct. I'm not a philosopher. I have no idea if there is philosophical weight to the arguments that I've made. But you guys came in here and you started spamming Shrut. So I looked at the definition of Shrut and I was like, oh, this is awesome. Because what is the root directory of humanity? And I love exploring this stuff.

Right? So like when I sit with a patient and when I think about my own development, I was like, okay, what's at the bottom? Like, where can I go? Like, so any patient comes into my office. They have depression, they have anxiety, and I think about how do I help them? Right, that's what we're trying to do is, like,

help them on a fundamental level. So you can help them at a more terminal level. Like, okay, if you have depression, you think this way, then think this way. If you have anxiety, instead of thinking this way, think this way. If you have narcissism, instead of thinking this way, and think this way. If you have depression due to a chronic medical condition, if you have depression due to a sluggish nervous system, if you, there's a great study that came out, I think in 2002 that showed that a long-term exercise is superior to SSRI medication when it comes to the treatment of depression. So it's like, okay, like this person needs this kind of fix. This person needs this kind of fix. This person needs this kind of fix. This person needs this kind of fix. Then you do something really cool, which is you look at all three of those fixes. And you ask yourself, is there something deeper that explains how these three fixes happen?

Is there something deeper in the file structure instead of deleting depression.exe and deleting anxiety.exe and deleting narcissism.exe, can I go to a further back root directory and hit the delete button? And the answer is scientifically yes. So then we stumbled upon something really cool called transdiagnostic factors. Okay? I'm going to show you all some research. Okay, so I know I'm having fun with our new guests, and I think Prime is great. So this is what I'm doing. I'm going to shift back to what I was supposed to do in a bit. Okay. Transdiagnostic approaches to mental health. Let me see if I can. No, I want you to, how do I?

I want to move... Okay, whatever. This bothers me. Not whatever. Here is what we're going to do. Transdiagnostic approaches to mental health problems, current status, and future directions. Okay?

Despite longstanding and widespread... Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So in their place, there is a gathering support for a transdiagnostic approach that cuts across traditional diagnostic boundaries or more radically sets them aside altogether to provide novel insight,

into how we understand mental health difficulties. Okay? So what this basically means is we then review several recent transdiagnostic approaches to classification, biosopal processes, and clinical interventions, highlighting novel developments. So number one evidence that there is a root directory for mental illness, there's a bunch of comorbidity. A lot of people will say, I have depression, anxiety.

I have depression in ADHD. Second reason why there may be a root directory is because depression doesn't capture everything that happens to a person. Okay. And then, so here's, so here's an example of what transdiagnostic factors actually look like. Okay. So there's signs and symptoms of depression or anxiety. And then we segregate these, right? So this is like eating pathology, here's phobias, here's anxiety, here's,

bipolar disorder, here's personality disorders, different kinds of personality disorders. And if you go back to the root directories, there are the capacity to internalize. There is antagonistic externalizing. So I'll explain what these two things are. And then we'll, I'll explain what transdiagnostic. Are you all with me? Is this fun? Are you guys enjoying this?

I'm going to check chat in like 10 seconds. And if you guys don't like this, then I'm going to move on. Okay. All right. So what does this mean? Internalizing is a transdiagnostic factor. So if you take people who have depression and if you guys want to understand where mental illness comes from, fucking trute is going to lead us to the origin of mental illness and how to defeat all mental illness.

Okay. We're doing it right now. Solving. Solving right now. Your mileage may vary. Not medical advice. Okay. Internalizing.

Okay. What does this mean? So if you take every human who has depression, every human who has anxiety, what you discover is that they spend time inside their head more so than the average person who does not have depression, does not have anxiety. You guys know how people say ignorance is bliss? And you know how there's like stupid people out there? And the reason they're so happy is because they lack the intellectual capacity to have existential dread. Right? And there's data to support this. Okay. There's a lot of data that shows that the higher your IQ is, the more likely you are to be depressed. Insight trial is a great example that shows that rapid insight, understanding the severity of your situation, correlates with suicidality.

Okay? So there's people out there who are like dumb and happy. And part of the reason for that is, because they do not internalize. They're like, they're kind of like bots. They're like, hello. Like I'm envisioning like oblivion NPCs where you like walk up to them and it's like they have no internal environment, right?

They're like oblivion NPCs. They just say the same thing over and over again and like they're like oblivion NPCs. Okay? And that's because they don't internalize. If you over internalize, you are prone to depression, you are prone to anxiety.

Now, let's take a look at another one. Does that make sense? So there is a root directory for depression and anxiety, which is the tendency to go in. This is another, oh, I love this. Antagonistic externalizing. That's the next one we're going to talk about. Let me just see if chat is, you guys.

Okay, this is good. Okay. Yeah, I had mental health issues once, and then I took an arrow to the knee. Arrow to the knee is the truth. You guys jump to the thing. Jump to the answer. So antagonistic externalizing.

What does that mean? If you look at people who are narcissistic, histrionic, paranoid, and borderline, what is the root directory of these personality disorders? You have an antagonistic relationship with the people around you. The feelings that you have get externalized with people around you. in an antagonistic way. When I feel stupid, it's because you're calling me stupid.

Histrionic. What is histrionic personality disorder? Cairns. People who yell and, you know, like you've seen these Cairns who are like rolling around on the floor of a grocery store because someone wouldn't let them

skip ahead in line and they're being assaulted. They're histrionic. They show a lot of distress. You're doing. it to me. Narcissists. I feel insecure.

That's your fault. Borderlines, I feel the way that you perceive me. You're angry at me. That means I'm a loser. They can't separate. You being disappointed with me is not my value as a human being. These two things are not separate for someone with borderline personality disorder. The key thing, though, is what is the root directory of this?

It is an antagonistic externalization. So when I feel things, I'm going to, and I'm going to move it outside of me onto you, and then I'm going to get angry with you. Okay? And then there's other ones, right? So other transdiagnostic factors. Here's another one. Y'all will love this.

The detachment, right? This is not Vyragya, the yogic detachment, but schidoid-evoidant and histrionic. So what does this mean? This means that basically these people, IDGAF. Oh, what? G-G-G-G-G-G-G. Right?

Schizoid people like, eh. They're detached. They move away from the people around them. Other examples of transdiagnostic factors. Perfectionism. Rumination. Right? So what is rumination?

Rumination is thinking about something repetitively, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Some people think about things once. If there's no answer, they let it go. Some people think about things over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, even if it yields nothing. So these are transdiagnostic factors for mental illness. And this is how far psychiatry has come.

But there is hypothetically, right, so now we depart science. Okay, so huge disclaimer, leaving science behind. If you look at the search for peace in the history of humanity, there are some people who have offered us all kinds of guidance. It's not scientific, but that doesn't mean that it isn't true. So you can look at people like the Stoics, and you can look at people like the yogis. And there's one really interesting, fucking frustrating thing. Okay, let me see.

Okay, I'm back. So, here's my problem as a psychiatrist. Is that I can't help all of my patients. So I've had three patients that I can think of in the history of my career. I've seen over a thousand patients. There are three patients that I really have not been able to help. TBH. I would say that my treatment has been basically a failure.

And so when I have a patient who I fail treatment with, I try to, I don't like take that lying down. Okay? So I do things like read, read. I read a lot. I try to figure out how can I help this person, right? So that's how I stumble with transdiagnostic factors. And then I also look at one other place, which is like, okay, there are these people like Stoics or people like yogis. So I read books like this.

Ravi Zacharias, the Lotus in the Cross, Jesus talks with Buddha. Hey, what did Jesus have to share with Buddha? Here's a book on Vedanta. Okay? If you guys, this dude, if you know who he is, he needs no introduction. If you don't know who he is, I'm not going to introduce him to you. And then there are books like this. This one is an absolute banger.

Okay? And like, there's good stuff in here. Right? So this actually talks about the root. directory. So chita and vriti, right? And then I read this book. I don't even know what this one is. Maya Hindu Hermannos. These are just the ones that I've been reading right now. Brahma, Mudra, and meditation. This is actually a great book because this is by, I don't know if you guys can see this, but yeah, you're not going to be able to read that. This is, there's a

research institute and a health care center and like a scientific research institute, and there's Vedic yoga, the path of the rishi. So I read this stuff. Because what I'm looking for is the root directory for transdiagnostic factors. And I think the best answer is over here. And the reason that I think the best answer is over here is because I never find what I'm looking for in these books. And why do I not find what I'm looking for? What I'm looking for is I have a patient who's got treatment refractory depression.

So I'm thinking like, oh man, these yogis are so smart. Stoics are so great. Like let me read this and let me see if they have answers that can help me help me help. this person. And none of them have fucking answers. It's annoying as none of them have answers. None of them talk about how to overcome depression. None of them talk about how to overcome anxiety.

None of them talk about that stuff. You know why they don't talk about that stuff? Because the yogi tries to and enter pseudoscience like now we're on the pseudoscience rocket ship. Okay? They transcend mind.

The yogi is not interested in solving a particular vriti. Vrithi means fluctuation in the mind. They say, if you really look at the mind, the mind is not an object. The mind is activity. Right?

So the mind is this thought right now and this thought later, in this emotion right now, and this emotion later. So really, if you think about it, even what we call the subconscious is activity. Right?

So they're like, wait a second. This is not matter. This is a waveform. And so how do you fix all waveforms? How do you, if you return to stillness, if you get back to baseline, and there is no fluctuation, then you will be at peace. Now, people say, does that mean death? I don't think so. So let me explain.

Right? So here's some really interesting, and this is where this is something, this is, I'm not making a philosophical argument. If you guys want to understand what the root directory of humanity is, I'm going to give you a hypothesis that you must investigate. Because this is something that can be experienced. I can teach it to you, but until you feel it, it doesn't have any value. I can talk to you for 10 years about love. But until you felt it, eh. So question number one, when you are unlawful,

Unhappiness, almost always, or let's just say always, is rooted in a desire that is unfulfilled. Right? I want this and I don't get it. Therefore, I am unhappy. But you will say, but what about depression? I'm pathetic. I'm a loser. Think about it.

I'm pathetic. I'm a loser. What is the desire there? I don't want to be pathetic. I don't want to be a loser. I want to be respected. I want to be loved. I have anxiety.

Oh my God. I'm going to fail. I'm going to fail. I'm going to fail. I'm going to crash my car. This person is going to break up with me. I'm not worth loving. What do I want? I want to pass.

I want money to pay my bills. I want to drive home safely. It is in the dissatisfaction of our desires that we find all mental illness. Arguably. This is an argument, not a psychiatric truth. Okay, we've left science behind. This is for you to explore. Now, there's another piece there.

which is, if the dissatisfaction of my desires is why I am unhappy, there's a really cool experiment that you can do. You can look at what happiness is. So if I'm thirsty, this is unhappiness. And then if I drink something, thirst goes away. Thirst, cessates, ceases. I don't know if cessate is a word. Ceases. And once my desire ceases, I presume that to be happiness, right? If I'm hungry, eat something, and then you will be happy. So our whole life is about, for most people, the cessation of our desires, the completion of our desires.

I want. Give it to me, then I will be happy. I want it. I want it. Now, the yogis and the Stoics, and this is why I like this answer. So I like this answer because it was. independently discovered by two people, two groups of people. They said, if you really, they have slightly different answers, slightly different perspectives, but the yogi said actually what happiness is,

is a cessation of the fluctuations of the mind, is stillness. And then as they started chasing that, because the yogis are the biggest junkies on the planet, they're happiness junkies, they're bliss junkies. As they started chasing it, what they discovered is there is a way to get past mind entirely. And that actually, if we think about the cessation of desire, the cessation of desire means cessation of the activity of the mind. And if you think about your most content moments when you were at full peace, laying on the beach, not a thought in your head, not a worry in your head, not a desire in

your head just soaking it in. Orgasm, number two. Some people long for sleep, even long for death. If I went to sleep today and I never woke up, we call that passive suicidality. They don't want to die, but they're okay with the cessation of all of their mental activity because their mental activity is painful. So contentment is the cessation of mental activity. And then we get to the root, the trute. And the whole problem is that there's the root directory, but then we changed the root directory. And when we changed the root directory and we stepped into mind, then we restricted, I love this. This is so good, dude. Hold on. Where's shrewd? When we changed the root directory, we created an isolated environment, a jail where programs can only access files within

that new directory. This is like literally. Like, this is insane, man. If you look at, like, some of these old, like, texts on spirituality and meditation, they say the misidentification of the divine self, the baramatman with the individual ego, I think I'm the ego. I moved out of root into truth. And once I did that, they literally call that the Moksha or Enlightenment is called liberation. It's breaking free of the jail. of the trute. Like, it maps on one to one,

because there's a root directory that you can go back into. So step number one of going back to the root directory is like individual mental patterns, which are highly specific, moving back to transdiagnostic patterns, antagonistic externalizing,

perfectionism, cognitive inflexibility, rumination, more primitive forms, where if we fix, this is really cool, I'm not going to pull up the paper right now, but yeah, yes, I am. Fine.

Fine. Fine. I'll pull it up. Yes. No. Yeah. So I think. Okay, whatever.

I can't find it right now. So, here's the thing. When we treat a transdiagnostic factor, so when we treat rumination instead of anxiety or depression, the therapeutic value of that trait, treatment is equal to treating depression or anxiety directly. So I can treat, I can delete the file up at the high level file structure, or I can deal with the transdiagnostic factor, and then it gets fixed. Okay? So treating the root directory actually works. And then there are these guys who said, look, we can even go beyond that. We can get back to the fundamental root directory. And as you get to

the root directory, all of your problems will be solved. You will attain enlightenment, moksha, or bliss. So now the question is going to become, how do you find the root directory? And now we get to yogic technique. So, we talked about this yesterday. We did advanced meditation practice. But there are a lot of lectures that you have to do before you get there. But here's the most fundamental thing. I'm going to leave y'all with an exercise or an exploration, which is what makes you you. And the way that this goes is you are not your body.

Very simple evidence of this is that you call it your body. Right? So it is a possession of yours. You are not your mind. You call it your mind. That's argument number one. Second thing is that your body changes. but you are always you.

You never become me. I never become you. You never become someone else. You are always you. But you will say, but Dr. K, I have changed over time. Some of you has changed. So your body can change, but you're still you. Your personality can change.

Now we get to another answer from chatters, right? Personality. Your personality can change, but you're still you. Right? So there is a component of you that does not change when your personality changes. maybe that's a better way to put it. And we literally can change personality

because that's what evidence-based treatment for personality disorders is. It's like, you're a narcissist. This is your personality. We can measure it. We can quantify it. We're going to therapy as you no longer a narcissist. So your personality can change, your body can change.

But there is an element of you that is always you. Never anybody else. And never seems to change. What is that element? you are the person who experiences everything in your life. You never experience anybody else's, and nobody else experiences yours. Body can change, mind can change, mind changes every day.

That's the whole problem, is that the mind changes every day. I want to eat healthy today, I want to eat unhealthy also today. Five minutes later, five seconds later. But the one thing that never changed, If you really look at your life, the one thing that never changes is you are the one who is living it. And you can watch your mind. You can watch your body.

You can observe these things. And if you are observing them, you are over here and your body and your mind are over here. You are looking at them. The observer and the observed are not the same thing, right? Even if I am looking at my eyes, I can never see my eyes. I can look at a reflection of my eyes. And so what the yogis suggest and what I would encourage you to do is sit with, because you're not going to be able to see it, sit with that which sees everything in your life.

Sit with the experiencer itself, not the experience of life. Take a step back. And what I want you all to do is look at the quality of looking. meditation will be observe your breath screw that you can observe your breath if you want to but what is it that is

observing the breath and you will say that is my mind but that thing can also observe your mind so what is that and literally in yesterday's lecture I taught meditation for an hour

because we have other stuff to do today otherwise I do it right now you guys can just watch it there's a vaude. And advanced meditation practice is zooming out, receding into the experiencer. And my belief, the best answer I've got is that there is a root directory when it comes to humanity, when it comes to you, which is your capacity to experience, which we all have, but there is no scientific proof of, right?

It's a critical philosophical problem around consciousness, that you can experience something, but we have no evidence of your experience. We can see electrical changes in the brain, we can see blood flow changes in the brain, but that is not the experience of red. Right? This is a big philosophical problem.

And so many people, the biological reductionist, will say that doesn't exist. Well, that's really interesting, because the nature of what exists is rooted in human observation. How does science discover things? We observe something, right? And then we explore it, and then we discover it. All of science starts with human observation.

There's one kind of universal delusion, which is that we experience stuff. And here's the tricky thing. It's not clear to me that science will ever be able to explore that. because science is about things that you can measure. We have yet to discover an instrument that can measure experience directly. Like, I don't know if this makes sense. I may not be a real person.

I could be like an AI generated whatever, right? Like even in my own head, you could be hallucinating right now. You could be living in the matrix. You could be in a coma having a fever dream. Like, I may not be a real. The only thing that you know is real is you because you experience. experience it. So go there if you want to find truth. What to do if everything is an illusion. So classic Hinduism and even Buddhism will say that everything is an illusion. And so you should

enjoy it. That's what you should do. Right. So it's kind of like, and I know that sounds kind of weird, but actually it's not because we do that every day. We pay money to do it every day. We pay money to enjoy illusions. We call them video games. So good, so good, so good. New spring arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big with up to 60% off ragging bone, Mark Jacobs, free people, and more. How did I not know Rack has Adidas? Because there's always something new.

Join the Norty Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Okay. Enjoy it from which experience. That's the cool thing. So once you get to the technical aspect,

you can enjoy all experiences. Right? We enjoy painful experiences all the time. My favorite inspirational workout quote is from Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he says the greatest feeling that you can get at the gym, the most satisfying feeling

you can get at the gym, is what we call the pump. Let's say you train your biceps, this blood rushing to your muscles. You get this really tight feeling in your muscles. It's like, yeah, someone is going to be blowing air into your muscles, and they're going to explode.

And that feeling is what we call the pump. It is satisfying to me as is. And if you guys know the quote, you know the quote. Right? But if you look at the pump, like most of working out is like technically painful. You're struggling,

you're sweating, your muscles feel like they're going to explode. The greatest feeling you can get to the gym. Yeah, chat, we're going to fucking, for all y'all that are saying this stuff, We're not going to show it. Band, chat. Right?

And it's the most satisfying feeling. But it's not pleasant. Right? And so there's a lot of pain in life that feels good if you feel it in the right way. This is something that I absolutely love. I forget what this, let me see if I can find this.

Okay, we're going to get to the... Oh my God, it's 130 already. Okay. There's a really cool theory called the theory of constructed emotion. Fascinating. It comes from like a blend of neuroscience and like affective neuroscience, social theory, like social psychology and things like that. That basically like, see, when we have experiences, we're like, I don't like work. interviews make me anxious.

I don't know if this makes sense. But we think that when we have an experience, the experience serves me the emotion. If I have an interview, I become anxious. And we'll believe that for good reason, because I've been on 10 interviews and I've been anxious in every single one of them. But this theory of constructed emotion

actually suggests otherwise. And there's good neuroscience data to back this up. that we actually construct our emotional experience, right? And like, we know we do that because that's when I have a patient who has PTSD, what is the treatment of PTSD literally doing? It is altering the constructed emotional experience of an environment. I have PTSD because I got bit by a dog. Well, let's do it.

Now when I see a dog, I get served up this emotional experience, which is terror. Through the process of emotional processing, through the process of exposure therapy, EMDR, take your pick. What we are doing is altering the constructed emotional experience. And I want you all to really think about how crazy this is. we go through life thinking that this thing makes me feel this way. For some people, a dog makes me feel great. For some people, a dog makes me feel terrified. For some people, a dog used to feel great, and now it feels terrifying.

For some people, a dog used to feel terrifying, and now it feels great. This is scientific fact. So then the question becomes, feeling great or feeling terrified. where does that happen? Where does it come from? It doesn't come from the dog. If it came from the dog, your experience of it would always be the same.

There would be no psychotherapy for PTSD. It would not exist. The other crazy question that got me thinking about this really messed with my mind, really blew my mind. Why do people who survive genocidal experiences, why do 100% of them not have PTSD?

In fact, the minority of people, genocidal survivors have PTSD. Like, what? This is so bad. And yet the minority of people are crippled from it. So this is what I want y'all to understand. Your emotional experience is literally constructed by you. Some people hate working out. Some people love working out.

Some people learn to love working out. And I want you to think for a moment, if this is true, what does that mean about your life? And this is where things get terrifying and difficult. Because it means if your life is shit, that is constructed by you. I'm not saying that the circumstances of your life aren't shit. worked with homeless people, worked with people in jails, worked with survivors of genocidal incidents, worked with people with dead-end jobs, abusive bosses, abusive relationships. Not saying that your circumstances don't suck, but here's the insane thing.

Here's the bridge that I try to cross with every one of my patients who is a trauma survivor. your experience of this life is constructed by you. And the moment we cross that bridge, then they get to decide what their life is. That's what trauma healing really is. It is reconstructing your experience of life. It is not letting the trauma dictate your experience of life. And when they learn this,

when you construct your image, emotional experience, and this is basically what the stoics stumbled into. The big difference between the stoics and the yogis is the stoics didn't give techniques. That's not what their emphasis was on. I'm sure there are techniques in there, but generally speaking, they say you should to do this. Yoga is all about the how. They don't talk so much about what you should do. They just say how to do it.

Because they say, if you do the technique, then it'll happen. And I may misunderstand stoicism there. I'm not an expert in stoicism. I've read easily over 100 books on yoga, studied at all kinds of ashram, so that could be a knowledge deficit on my part. Apologies, and I'm misjudging stoicism. But once you understand that you are constructing your emotional experience, what it means is that you will not select certain things based on the emotional experience

that they evoke. Right now, the problem with your life is that when you do a particular thing, it creates a particular interaction and your capacity to modulate, stimulus in response is not there. I mean, I'm sure it's there in some degree. Right? So then we think, okay, in order for me to be happy, I need this job.

In order for me to be happy, I need to date this person. I need to find this kind of person in order to be happy in a relationship. This is the biggest lie that has been sold to us by every single dating service on the planet. We can find you the perfect person. And in that is the subtle axiom that finding the right person is how you find the right relationship. It depends on the person, not the way that you interact with the person, not the way that you respond to the person, not the way that you tolerate the person.

one of the weirdest observations I've made as a psychiatrist is that every, almost every, really healthy relationship that I have seen starts with a red flag, including my own, and a couple of them. And you can argue that mine is successful, not successful, whatever. Right? So I had one requirement for the person that I was going to date. as it happens, my wife had the same requirement, which is that, so you may think,

oh, that would be a match made in heaven. Not really, because our one requirement was that we weren't going to date Indian people. Don't want an Indian girlfriend. She doesn't want an Indian boyfriend. Turns out that that worked out, even though it's the exact opposite of our requirement. It's kind of weird.

Right? And then you get to the science of what really builds relationships, which is shared emotional experiences. And I was like, man, I really don't want to date Indian girls. And she's like, that's great. I don't want to date Indian guys. I was like, awesome. Want to hang out sometime?

Sure. This is what is powerful and transformative. Is that you don't have to take what life serves to you. You don't have to accept that experience in that way. You can modify it. And jury's still out on this from a scientific perspective. How much of it is constructed? Right.

How much can you modify it? Can you modify it 100%? Can you modify it 50%? We don't really know. I have my answer. I imagine you guys can figure it out. But my answer is irrelevant to you. So what should you do about it?

Very simple. Really, really simple. Take one thing that you dislike. Do it and see if you can modify your experience of dislike. That's it. Can you change it even 1%. Is there anything that you can do to make it more comfortable, to make it more enjoyable? Can you stick lipstick on a pig?

We've got other things to get to. Okay, I believe I have sufficiently welcomed Prime Chatters at this point, because we've been doing this for an hour. How do I modify it? Figure it out. Okay, we've got other stuff. Oh my God. Oh, I'm still upset that I could not find that thing about. Okay, we did optimizer.

Oh, making something your personality. I think that was number two, right? Okay, let's do this. All right, I hope this is not too loud. Okay, let's talk about making a hobby your whole personality. Cool people try a hobby. They choose one. Unbelievable.

They Google it once. They buy the basic starter kit like a normal person, book a weekly session, stick to it and slowly improve over time. Imagine doing something without it turning into a post. personality, a lifestyle and a three-year business plan by lunchtime. PhD people try a hobby and it's a full personality shift that can last anywhere between four minutes and seven business days because we don't collect hobbies, we're collecting possible lives. Every time we pick something up or try something new, what we're actually

doing is running a deep psychological experiment that's called, could this finally be the life that fits me? Last week I tried yoga for the first time and the instructor said, I can't believe that this is your first class. The next thing you know, I'm searching if I could realistically move me and my dog to Barley for £1.85 and become a wellness instructor because her comment made me feel something. Okay. So let's talk about this for a second. There are times where we run into stuff.

And we think, oh, my God, could this be me? And there are a lot of good reasons for that, right? Because I think, like, most human beings feel out of place. And we look around and there's this idea of, like, finding your tribe. Like I remember when I was in medical school, so when I went to medical school, I was going to become an oncologist. My dad was an oncologist. He was an amazing oncologist. Was one of the seminal researchers in something called Graff versus Host Disease, was at MD Anderson, which is one of the best cancer institutions in the world, came from India. It was just an amazing doctor.

And so I saw my amazing doctor, dad. I saw how his patients treated him with so much respect. I saw how much money he made. And like, M.D. Anderson is gigantic. And I was like, I'm going to do that. I'm going to be a real doctor. I'm a cancer doctor. I'm a cure lives.

I mean, cure cancer. I'm going to save lives. Like, in, like, lives that, like, I'm not going to be some, like, allergist. You know, like helping people sneeze less. I'm going to cure lives. I mean, cure cancer. Save lives. Then I went to medical school.

And I had a real, real, real, real problem. See, on my psychiatry rotation, there was something called Shindle Time. And Shindle Time was named after a particular psychiatrist who worked there. And what was scary, actually this was on the internal medicine rotation. So the psychiatrist would come and he would like sit with a group of medical students in a room. And the problem was that like he wasn't teaching us anything. We'd just be in a room with him for one hour a week.

And we didn't understand what we were doing there. And we're like, oh my God, this guy's going to, like, psychoanalyze us. And so, like, everyone goes into the room. He doesn't make an introduction. He comes into the room, and he's just quiet. And so we're like, oh, shit, it's happening. He's fucking psychiatrists analyzing us. He's sitting in silence.

We all know he's sitting in silence. He knows he's sitting in silence. He hasn't told us what we're doing here. We don't know what we're doing here. We've heard legends and myths of this kind of thing from the senior students. we'll even ask them, what are they actually doing? And they're like, ah, we don't really know. Some people will be like, it's a waste of time.

Like, it's like, whatever. So during Shindled time, he makes some effort at conversation. You know, but people are quiet because, like, we ain't going to let you psychoanalyze us, bra. Then he's got an apple. And this starts eating his apple. He's just sitting there and he's eating his apple. We're like, this is some experiment, bra.

This is some experiment. This is the moment I decided to become a psychiatrist. I didn't realize it yet. And then he eats this apple, and he eats down to the core of the apple. And then he does something insane. He eats the core of the apple. He just, there's a little bit of an apple left. He takes it, and he eats half of it.

He's like, just bites, and then he chews the seeds, and he swallows the seeds. And the whole room is like, what, dude? You cannot do that. What are you doing? And then he's like, what? And then he eats the remainder of the apple. Then he's got the stem, and everyone's like, bra, bra, bra, bro, what are you doing? and he's like, what?

And then he eats the stem and everyone's like, oh my God! And they're like, don't you know that apple seeds have cyanide, bro? We're in medical school, man. Cyanide kills you. And he's like, really? They've got cyanide?

And then he just like pops the tension in the room and then everyone is talking. We can't help them ourselves and we've become outplayed by this guy who we knew he was going to get us to talk. We fucking knew he was going to get us to talk. We weren't going to talk.

he's going to be silent, I'm going to be silent too. And this guy just eats an apple. Gigi, game over. And so I was like, amazed. I was like, what was that? What was that? Right. So then I went on my psychiatry rotation, and I thought that was like, I sort of liked it more than I realized.

And then, you know, I went to go meet the guy and then like, so I found my tribe. And so here's the scary thing. is like, in life, we have this idea that people find their tribe, and that's what we're looking for. And this lady is talking about ADHD, and I think one of the problems with ADHD is everyone's like, people with ADHD do this. This does happen to people with ADHD.

Now, let's understand why. It doesn't happen exclusively with them, but let's talk about this idea of, this hobby is my life. So I fell in love with psychiatry, and we're all looking for that thing to fall in love with. Now, here's the first thing to understand if you want to find the thing that you want to fall in love with. The first thing is if you are looking to find the thing that you are falling in love with, the chances are you won't fall in love with it.

I hate to say this. This is anecdotal evidence as a psychiatrist. I decided to be celibate, met my wife, decided to be a real doctor, save lives and cure cancer, fell in love with psychiatry. See, when we are looking for something, we're so hungry for it. Give it. Is it this? Is it this? And we get just an inkling of something. Right? We're like, oh my God, is this the thing that I want to do? You just get a touch of it. And you're like, oh, oh, finally I found it. Oh, my God. And then what happens? It turns out to not be your thing. You abandon that hobby. You're not a chess person. So then what happens? The looking gets more frantic. Oh my God. That's not my thing.

and that's not my thing and that's not my thing. Please let this be my thing. And so the moment that something nice happens, you're like, oh, I get a little bit excited. This is me. Finally, I found the thing. You guys see how the hunger becomes a cognitive bias.

It becomes rose-tinted glasses. The more desperate we are to find something, we get so excited. And that's where the ADHD comes in because people with ADHD are more vulnerable to that. They're more vulnerable to the emotional fluctuations. There are other reasons to. But let's start with this idea of, you know,

if I'm hungry for something, if I'm looking for something and I get some sign of it, because here's the thing, remember, I haven't found my tribe, I haven't found my personality. So I don't know what it is to have a personality. So like, if I don't know what love is, and then it's kind of like that, you know,

the butterfly meme of like, is this love? Like, we don't know. yet, right? Because we haven't found ourselves. So we don't know what finding ourselves looks like. Therefore, we will look at something and we'll think, oh, this is finding myself, but it's not. It's just what we think finding ourselves looks like. In my experience, finding yourself is usually done kicking and screaming. You're dragged to it out of spite, right? It's an uphill battle, not something, well, not always. That's what's so weird, is it's kind of an uphill battle, but it feels so natural.

So that's the first thing. Second thing, why are we so hungry for this hobby to be our life? Let's understand what your life is, what your perception of your life is. Now we're going to talk about ADHD because I think it's a beautiful example. I'm going to be this kind of person. What does that mean? Neuroscientifically, developmentally, cognitively, developmentally, psychologically.

Who we are is a string of emotional, experiences integrated into a narrative. So if I talk about my life, I have this story about Shindel time, right? That was a seminal moment for me. And what makes it a seminal moment? The emotion of that moment. I was blown away. So your life is not having chicken salad sandwich every day for 30 years.

It is the emotional experiences. We string them together into a narrative. and that is who we are. Now, if you have ADHD, this becomes a real problem because chances are your emotional experiences were negative in nature. You were getting in trouble at school. You were getting yelled at by your parents.

You were not getting invited to birthday parties. So then what happens is you develop an identity. And this is why there's a great study of comorbidity between ADHD and depression. major depressive disorder. Where if you look at the causal relationship between these two things, 3% of people who are diagnosed with major depressive disorder will grow up to have ADHD. Or of the people who have both, 3% had the depression first, then developed ADHD.

70% of people who had ADHD will develop depression. of a comorbid population. Right? So when you grow up with ADHD, now every time I have a patient who's being evaluated for ADHD, one of the first things that I do in the initial intake

is rule out depression. They have depression until proven otherwise. That is now my default assumption as a clinician. So the identity that you develop is not a good one. Right? there's one common exception to this, which is the class clown. So oftentimes we'll develop an identity of being a funny person.

I remember when I was in the third grade, I had trouble making friends and stuff. So what I would do is put a pair of underwear on my head and I'd run around and I'd talk in funny accents. And then the kids would like me. So you develop this identity. Oh, I'm the class clown. And then as you grow up as an adult, that kind of thing doesn't really work when you're like 43. so you have to do something else. So now we're looking for a new identity.

And then we see a hobby. And we see people who do, oh, I want to be that kind of person. Because if I find that kind of person, if this is my thing, then first of all, if this is my thing, then it'll solve my motivational problems. It'll solve my follow-through problems because I have all these problems that follow-through and motivation and I leave things behind. But if I find my thing, there's a thing out there that'll fix all of those motivation. problems for me. Oh my God, I hope it's this one. The problem is that ADHD brain is vulnerable

to this whole cycle. It's vulnerable to the emotional impact of not having found your thing. You have this identity of being a little bit depressed, not having found your people. But man, sometimes when neurodivergent kids get together, they get along really, really well. And they also get really frustrated with each other, but they fit. I have one kid who's probably neurodivergent has one friend who's definitely neurodivergent and they're like they get along really well but they also have a lot of conflict it's really weird they keep want to see the they always want to see each other but even then like every time they have a play date there'll be like an hour where they're just in separate rooms doing things on their own but they like it right so we're

sensitive to excitement right when we get excited we're like oh my god this is the thing this is the thing this is the thing. We've looked for the thing for so long, so we're hungry for the thing, and we find it, we hope it's the thing. And then there's the allure that if this is the thing, then it'll solve my ADHD problems. I won't be that kid who I used to be, who didn't follow through with things, who abandoned projects. This thing will be different. And so we want to adopt it whole scale. We want to make it our personality. It becomes our identity. It does not become a hobby, it becomes an identity. Now, what do you do about this? I think the first thing is to recognize. So always, always, always, if you ever want to break free of a pattern, the first thing is

to recognize the pattern. Now, a lot of people will say, I know the pattern. I don't think so. So overwhelmingly, in my experience as a psychiatrist, people have an understanding of the pattern, but they usually miss critical elements. And there's some very interesting sort of like theory of medicine around this. So if you look at sort of like the scientific study of like how people heal, people solve their problems. Very few human beings do not solve their problems. The reason that problems don't get solved is because they don't understand how to solve them.

Their understanding of the problem is incorrect. So most human beings, if they have a problem, in life, it's not a lack of treatment, it's an improper diagnosis. Their understanding of the problem is incorrect, which is why our job is psychiatrists is to help them understand. I'll give you all a really simple example of this. Most people think that addictions are problems. Patient comes into my office says, oh my God, I got to stop drinking alcohol. I got to stop. I got to stop smoking weed. Weed is ruining my life in this way and this way and this way and this way and this way and this way. I got to stop, I got to stop, I got to stop, I got to stop.

They see it as a problem. So what is my job? What does weed do for you? Let's not talk about the problems. Let's talk about the problems it fixes. Let's talk about weed as a solution. Not as a bad thing is a good thing. Because the reason we get addicted to weed is not because of the problems that it causes.

We get addicted to weed because of the problems it solves. Right? But we don't see it that. way. Except sometimes we do. Right? There's the pothead advocate. Weed is great, man. I function fine. I do great. It enhances my life. There's no downsides. It's natural. It's better than alcohol. Alcohol causes more deaths than weed. You can't overdose on weed. You know, there's the pothead. I don't know, what's the, what's the word I'm looking for? The pothead can to argue. argument, you know, the party line, the party propaganda.

And those people are sometimes in denial. There's something that we call pre-contemplative about the negative effects of weed. And I'm not saying that it isn't great in many ways. Like I said, it solves problems. Right? So if you want to break out of this pattern, first thing is to understand the pattern, observe the pattern. Notice that I'm getting excited. If you've got ADHD, the most important skill that I teach people, I say most important

all the time. I don't know that's actually the most important. The most underrated skill that I try to teach all of my patients with ADHD, everyone wants to control their negative emotions. They want to manage their negative emotions. Learn to manage your positive emotions. Managing your excitement is the most underrated skill in ADHD. And why is that important? Because we already talked about where does that anxiety come from? I mean, sorry, excitement come from, right? I want to be this. I want to be this. I want to be this. it's going to create a cognitive bias. When you, the brightest flame burns out the fastest. This is the problem in ADHD.

Don't make it your personality. Keep it as a hobby, right? Because the problem is we go from nothing to everything. There's no in between. And then we run out of steam. You burn up our excitement. And here's the neuroscience behind this, okay? if we look at our

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including over 25,000 cars under $25,000. Want to get started? Head to CarMax.com for details and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive? CarMax. the part of our brain that ultimately dictates our behavior, right? So we have our motivational center of the brain. This part of the brain gets inputs from other parts of the brain.

It gets inputs from some parts of our frontal lobe, which are doing planning, like long-term planning. They're like, this part of our brain is like, we should do this because five years from now it'll help us in this way. Then we have another part of our brain, the nucleus accumbens, right? That's going to go there and it's going to be like dopamine, bro. Like, let's do this because it's fun. Then we have another part of our brain, the amygdala, the limbic system.

This is the emotional part of our brain. This is the part of our brain that tells us to do something. Oh, like roller coasters are fun. Dopamine or nucleus of commons is like, let's do it. But the amygdala is like, they're all so scary, so let's not do it. Frontal lobe is like, let's not go to the theme part today because we have a test on one day. All of these parts have inputs into this motivational center that makes this calculation. And then it makes a decision.

Now, the tricky thing about controlling your motivation, controlling your behavior, is that each of these voices, frontal lobes, nucleus accumbens, and libic system, planning, long-term planning, enjoyment, emotion. Each of these has a different weight. Like, one of them gets 10 votes, one of them gets 10 votes, the other one gets 20 votes. what determines the weight of these factions, the strength of these factions is how much you listen to them,

just like in the real world. Right? If you're the dictator and you've got three advisors and there's one advisor that you listen to over and over and over again, that advisor is going to get stronger. So the reason people have difficulty with follow through with ADHD

is because when they get excited, it heavily influences my behavior. Therefore, my behavior depends on my excitement. And if it depends on my excitement, when the excitement wanes, the behavior disappears. This is why we start things and stop things. Simple. It's actually not about dopamine. Everyone thinks it's about dopamine.

Nucleus accumbens is just one part of the brain. Dopamine is one neurotransmitter. Ventral tegmental area is just one. part of the brain. There's lots other parts of the brain. And because we live in a world where there's short form content, we tend to reduce and simplify things. And that's why people with ADHD struggle so much because the truth is your brain is not all one way. The truth is that your brain is a complex organ, quite possibly the most complex organ on the planet. And there are many things that influence your behavior. So be careful. Modulate your excitement.

learn to rein it in. It'll last longer and you will become less dependent on it. Then a hobby remains a hobby. And then we get to the second problem, which is if my hobby is a hobby, holy crap, Dr. K, then it's not my identity. Then what is my identity? Excellent question. That is a question that you should answer through working through the question,

not find a brewing kit, and then suddenly the answer is, like, found, right? Answer the question, do the work. Like, show your work, like in mathematics. Who do you think you are right now? Where did you get that idea of who you are? Who would you like to be? What can you do to become that person?

Right? And this is where I would encourage you all to scale back a little bit. Don't focus so much on the end goal. Who do you want to be today? Do you want to be someone who reads this book or plays, you take your pick of game? Right. So who you are, I mean, there's this narrative sense of identity that we talked about integrative, integral emotional experiences, which is there.

But then a big part of that, this is what I think what people don't understand is that, emotional experiences are not always big experiences. Sometimes they're very small ones. Like, I remember a big one for me is when I first moved to Boston, I didn't have a car, I didn't have much money, so I stayed at a place that was not the best location. And I had access to public transport only. And so I had to walk.

I had to change buses two times to get to a grocery store because I wasn't on a good public transport kind of line. So I used to walk for 45 minutes. because taking the bus was basically the same amount of time or even longer. The bus would run every 30 minutes. This bus runs every 30 minutes. Then the other bus, sometimes I miss and then I have to wait there for 30 minutes. So I just walk for 45 minutes every time I went to the grocery store.

One way trip is 45 minutes. I'd have to lug groceries back. Those are the kinds of little things that made me the person that I am. It's little things, right? So when you look at the person that you are today, what are you upset with? Oh, I'm a loser. I waste my time. I don't do anything with my free time.

I just doom scroll. I'm a black pillar. I'm an in-cell. I'm a, ma-ma, ma-ma. That can be changed. You don't have to dooms scroll right this moment, but it's hard. Yes. What does hard mean?

Hard means that that circuit in your brain is underdeveloped. That means that it's an advisor that you have not listened to. And there's something really cool. Once you start doing it, see, somewhere along the way, I don't know when this happened. Hard became a bad thing. You guys noticed this? That somewhere along the way,

when things became hard, we tried to find solutions to make it easier instead of doing the hard thing. In the moment that we did that, like it's efficient, right, the moment we did that, we ran into a very, very scary biological wall, which is that the human body strengthens through hardship and weakens through ease.

The elevator doesn't give us gigantic quads. the stairs do. And we tried to make, when things became hard for us, we accommodated that difficulty instead of rising up to it. Fundamentally, this is what I think is like wrong in the world. When things became hard, we said, okay, let's make it easier for you. And if you look at like product development, right, people talk about capitalism like it's an evil thing.

I think it's humans who are to blame. But products make things easier for you. Oh, we'll get it to you. You don't even have to think, oh, my God, we've got two-hour delivery now. Like, this is insane. I went to India recently. They don't even have two-hour delivery. They have 15-minute delivery.

I was on New Year's Day is 1.30 in the morning, and I was at a New Year's party. And someone shows me these two big delivery apps, Zamado and Blinket. And he's like, yeah, you can get whatever you want within 15 minutes. And I was like, I was just looking at it. And it's like, I can order a blender at 1.30 in the morning on New Year's Day. And it'll be at this guy's flat in 15 minutes. Insane. Like, oh, bra.

Planning, you don't need to do that. Just be impulsive. We can manage your impulses. We can accommodate your impulsiveness. Oh, you feel like, you forgot to get a blender and you want to make a smoothie. we'll take care of it for you. We've started to make life so easy for ourselves, right? There's so many cars everywhere, and we're, like, becoming obese.

We're not hauling groceries for 45 minutes anymore. We're getting them delivered to our doorstep. And then we have to compensate as human beings. Since I'm not moving, now I have to go to the gym and uselessly just lift weight like this. Just over and over and over again. What are you doing? I'm accommodating for the fact that I sit in this. chair all day. Like, this is what our life has become. It's so weird. You guys notice this?

It's so weird. When things became hard for us, we said, that's okay. Don't do it. We'll make it easy for you. And what do we all want? We all want things to be easy. Anyway, we departed from how to make things your personality. Did you guys feel like that was enough of an answer or do you all have follow-up questions? I'm enjoying streaming today. How do I deal with entitlement? I mean, your own entitlement or somebody else's entitlement. Okay. Let's move on. Oh, okay.

We got to do this one. This is fascinating. Why have a personality at all? Yeah, that's a great, great question. Okay. You can go pee. You can just come back and, and rewind, bro, or girl. Okay.

I went down a rabbit hole with this one. So I stopped sharing my thoughts and feelings with my girl. The relationship improved, and now I'm alone again. So this is like a really common thing that I've been hearing recently from men, that they can't really share their thoughts and feelings in their romantic relationship. There's all kinds of crap on social media about how, you know, like a dude, like sharing his feelings gives people the ick. There's lots of people who say, like, no, sharing your feelings is actually okay. There's a lot of dudes who are like, yeah, like, I'll never do it again.

and I got punished for it. So, like, what's the deal with this? Okay? So I see these posts, and I was trying to figure out, like, okay, like, what is the deal? Because half the internet is saying, you should share your feelings.

Like, oh, it's like you should talk about your feelings, man. Like, feel your feelings, bro. And the other half of the internet is like, don't ever do that. Makes you a pussy. Makes you beta. And, like, because they, because they're alpha males,

that means they're wrong, right? Like, they have to be wrong if they're alpha males. They can't be on to anything. Right? People who say, let me find this real quick. I can't find it. There's a paper I saw recently about long-term exercise being superior.

Oh, wait, hold on. Let me see if I can find it. Anyway, I was facetiously saying because they're alpha males, they can't be right. One second. No, no, no, no. No, can't find it. No, jeegied. Okay.

They can't be right, right? No way. But one of the things that I've learned as a psychiatrist is when, you know, when a human being comes into my office and says, this is my experience of life. I know it's insane in the day and age of social media, but I believe them. I start with belief, right? Because if someone says, hey, this is my experience of life and you're like, no, is it? You're wrong. I don't, I think that kind of thinking is what got us here. You know,

like, this is not a great place. And there's all this idea of like, okay, like sharing your feelings does improve relationships, right? So I tried to get into the research with it. And we're going to get into this. And I think it's incredibly fascinating because what I discovered, some people say it's okay to share your feelings. Some people say it's not okay to share your feelings. Here's what I figured out. When it is okay to share your feelings and when it isn't okay to share your feelings, that both can actually be true, but there is a way to do it, and more importantly, there is a way not to do it.

Right? And this is what usually happens in the world. It's not like this group is right and this group is wrong. Right? So a very common argument that we hear in the U.S. is like, we don't want freeloaders taking advantage of the social safety net. And people are like, we need a social safety net to help people get out of poverty so that they don't have to be dependent on the social safety net. And the truth of the matter is that they're both camps.

There are people who take advantage of social services and there are people who utilize social services to get out of poverty. I'm not saying one is more right than the other. I'm just using it as an example of like it's not black and white. Very few things in the world are black and white. So let's get into the data. Okay? First thing. Self-disclosure in intimate relationships, associations with individual relationship and characteristics over time.

Overall, men and women indicated a similar high level of self-disclosure. So here's the first thing. If you actually look at data, not what is on your social media feed, self-disclosure in relationships is roughly the same between men and women. As hypothesized, positive associations were found between self-disclosure and the individual characteristics of self-esteem, relationship, and responsiveness. Self-disclosure was also positively associated with relationship quality, satisfaction, love, and commitment. Although the more that women perceive their...

Okay. We'll get to that next sentence in a minute. So let's start with this. Okay. So generally speaking, first thing is this is an association. So this says that self-disclosure is associated with self-esteem, is associated with relationship satisfaction. Now, here's the key thing.

A lot of people will interpret this as causative. Therefore, it is okay to share your feelings in a relationship. That's not what this study shows. the study shows that it could be both ways. If you have self-esteem in a relationship, if you have a high-quality relationship, then you can share your feelings. It could be that way too.

The two tend to cluster together. So this brings us to a really important basic principle of science, which I am going to use this amazing drawing capability, which y'all are going to. get to see. We're going to talk about bell curves. When people say men are this way, women are this way. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to find blue. So if you look at sharing your emotions, this is men, and let's say this is women. Okay, so in most cases, even if there's a gender difference, which this paper does not say that there's a gender difference, we have to remember that there are some men

who share a lot of their emotions, and some women who share a lot of their emotions, but there are also plenty of women who don't share many of their emotions. There may be more men who don't share emotions or feel punished by sharing their emotions. Where'd my mouse go? Wait, what?

Right? So remember that we're dealing with overlapping bell curves here. So even though men may do something more than women or women may do something more than men, remember that the variance, this is basically a statistical fact, the variance within a population almost always outweighs the variance between populations. So if you look at a man who gets, there are some men that self-disclose a ton and some men that self-disclose very little.

That difference, that delta, is going to be greater than the delta that you see between men and women. The other way to look at this, okay, is if we look at self-disclosure, the gap between this guy, the gap between this guy and this guy is this big. The gap between this woman and this woman is this big. But the gap between men and women is this big. Do you all understand that? So the very insurmount. within a population is almost always greater, which is why a lot of this gender stuff on the internet is just wrong. Like it's just statistically, it's wrong.

Okay? Now, I'm going to, if you're a black and white thinker, I'm going to piss you off no matter which side of the equation you're on. Second thing, here's what's really interesting. The more that women perceived their partner disclosed at time one, the less likely the couple was to break up by time too. This is a really interesting finding. So the higher a woman, if a woman believes that her partner is sharing their feelings,

that is associated with a less likelihood of breaking up. So this would be data that suggests the opposite of what this person's experience is. Okay? So let's look at another paper. Self-disclosure and intimacy and interpersonal relationships, role of perceived partner responsiveness. Research shows that self-disclosure and perceived partner's self-disclosure are essential in developing intimacy in a relationship.

Likewise, perceived partner responsiveness, PPR, when interpreted as understanding, validating, caring, significantly impacts the intimacy of a relationship. So generally speaking, if you were to ask a mental health professional, like a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and personally, I think the average psychologist is probably better trained at this

than the average psychiatrist. Okay? Is it good to share your feelings in a relationship? The average psychologist will say yes. We will say that if you want a healthy relationship, you should share your feelings. That is what we will say.

and that's generally what the data shows. But it gets a little bit more complicated. So this is what's really cool. In relationships, there are two general goals that people will have. They'll have one or the other, usually. Some people have a goal to get closer. So I want us to be here and here. I want to be more intimate with you.

I want to know you better. I want to know every part of you. I want to know your body inside and out. I know everything. All of your fears, all of your dreams. Tell it all to me. Let me know who you are. And let me share what I am with you.

And let us intertwine our souls and our bodies. And we will be one together. And we are one soul split between two bodies. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That's what I want from you. right? That's the point of a relationship. Turns out no. Turns out there is another thing that people will shoot for. Yes. Okay. Results consistently indicated that for prevention-focused individuals being emotionally suppressive was associated with greater marital satisfaction. But only for those who perceive their spouses as also emotionally suppressive. So I'm going to explain this in just a second.

Here's the key thing. In prevention-focused individuals, being emotionally suppressive, was associated with greater marital satisfaction. What? Turns out, bro may have been right. So let's understand. So there is another thing, which is that in relationships,

sometimes people drift apart. And in some relationships, the goal for people is not to get closer, the goal for people is to not drift apart, right? And if you guys have been in relationships, you know that sometimes you just don't want things to get worse. Things are okay the way they are. I don't need a whole lot of intimacy.

I'm just trying not to screw it up. Things are fine. I like the status quo. I don't want to move. I don't want to have kids. I don't want to explore the world. Like, things are fine. Can we just, like, live our life the way it is right now?

Do you really need to move to New York to follow your dreams? Can we just, like, have life as it is right now? I just don't want to screw it up. I'm happy with the way things are. I don't need to get closer. I just don't want things to get worse. So this is where if we look at research, there is promotion-focused individuals, okay? And there are prevention-focused individuals.

Wait, wait. okay these are two different goals so when we're dealing with promotion focused individuals they're moving in this direction other people are trying to not fall apart so it turns out that emotional suppression is helpful in these situations improves marital satisfaction so it's not one or the other right so should you disclose in a relationship this gives us our first answer Well, it depends. Are you trying to not rock the boat? Or are you trying to get closer?

More importantly, remember that there's an element of partner responsiveness here or partner perception, but only for those who perceive their spouses is also emotionally suppressive. So here's another thing, another really important thing. Does your partner express their emotions? Right? So you want to match their energy if you want to maintain harmony. I'm not saying it's healthier or unhealthy. We're just trying to figure out when is it okay

to share your emotions with your partner? And when will it hurt things? Then we get to the next paper. Scary. For people with less social anxiety, relationship closeness was enhanced over time when negative emotions were openly expressed. So if you are not socially anxious,

sharing feelings enhances closeness, whereas relationship deterioration was found for those more likely to withhold emotions, okay? So this makes, we're going to draw this out, here is a person without social anxiety. When I share, things get better. When I don't share, things get worse. Make sense? Now, since I showed that paper, and it's a paper about social anxiety, what do you all think is coming next? The reverse pattern was found for people with greater social anxiety such that the relationship closeness was enhanced over time for those more likely to withhold negative emotions. If I am socially anxious and I don't share. relationship improves. If I do share,

relationship goes down. Now this is getting to be a little bit tricky, little bit scary. Oh, my God. Because what I have seen time and time and time again as a mental health professional is that if my patients are mentally ill and they dump that on their partner,

that we will lead to things like caregiver burnout, it can be burdensome. I hate to say this. but this is kind of true, right? So, like, if we look at something like major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, or heaven forbid, bipolar disorder, that's where I think I've seen the most damage.

It's not about blaming a partner. It's to understand that if there is a diagnosis of bipolar disorder within a relationship, that becomes a challenge for the relationship. I'm not trying to make a judgment on whether this is, fair or good or whatever, I'm simply pointing out that once mental illness enters the picture, this is a paper looking at social anxiety, sharing can actually deteriorate the quality of the

relationship. So second thing where you have to be careful is if there is mental illness in the picture. Now, this sounds brutal, right? Because you're like, damn, Dr. Kay, are you basically telling me I'm fucked if I've got depression? I can't share my feelings like that? Like, I'm depressed. Like, it's bad enough that I've got depression, but I can't share my feelings. That's not what I'm saying.

Don't be black and white. Right? We're going to get to what to do about this. But, like, let's be honest. If you ask 100 people with depression, how does sharing your feelings impact your relationship? Not all of them are going to say, it makes it wonderful. What is y'all's experience? receiving the negative emotional energy of your romantic partner?

What is your experience of offloading your negative emotional energy onto your partner? Like this is the reality we are living with, right? It's not my job to tell you, oh, hey, in a perfect, beautiful world, you can share all of your negativity with your partner and they will love you. No, guys, like, I hate to say it, like, it is a disadvantage. Mental illness is a disadvantage. That's why we try to treat it. We try to fix it because it fucks people's lives up, right?

But it doesn't mean that things are hopeless. Like, please, God, do not interpret that from what I am saying. Let's be clear. When we're going up against the boss of a level, we should understand that the boss is a boss and not a regular mob. This is an uphill battle that we have to fight. We're going to help you fight it. But let's be clear. Let's not pretend that the problem doesn't exist.

That doesn't help us. Now, we get to an even scarier part. So I'm going to ask you all a question. This is going to be the hardest part. If you all thought that was bad. When you see a tweet like this or you have an experience like this, I shared my feelings with my girl. And the relationship got better.

And now I feel alone again. This is why it's so damaging to try to try. to understand relationships from social media, because I'm going to ask you all a question, and hopefully that will show you all why this is a terrible place to learn about relationship dynamics. I think it's a wonderful place to understand people's experiences, but it's a terrible place to get answers. And here's why. Simple question.

When this person says the relationship improved, what are they measuring? And I'm not trying to shit on this person in particular. I love that this person is sharing this. I think it's really good that we're talking about it. We wouldn't be talking about it unless they shared their experience. But here's where half the answer is. When they say the relationship improved, how are they measuring it? Like, what is the indicator?

What is your pre-test post-test for improvement in the relationship? What is the time scale that we're talking about? Are we talking about a week? Are we talking about a month? How are you measuring? How are you measuring? Improvement. Is it your perception of improvement?

Is it a certain behavior? Is it a perception of your partner? Are they even asking their partner? Did they ask their partner, when I was sharing my feelings, how do you feel about that? Now that I've stopped sharing my feelings, how do you feel about that?

How are they measuring? And this is why, like, I hate to say this, The internet is not science. And this is the reason. Like, this is the reason. You can have an experience, but this is not science. And here's the scary thing. Because I found a paper that really highlights this.

Gender, emotion, work, and relationship quality. A daily diary study. Like, fuck, yeah. This is a study that looks at relationship quality in the emotional work that people put in. Okay? First, three patterns emerged. First, emotion work predicted relationship quality

in this diverse set of couples. Second, gender differences were minimal for fixed effects. Now, third, this is what we're going to focus on. Gender differences were more robust for volatility. For partner effects, having a partner with who reported higher average emotional work predicted lower love, lower volatility and love satisfaction closeness for women versus greater volatility and love in commitment for men.

I'm going to explain what this paper says. We're going to go down here for a second. Women and men who reported higher average emotion work across a week experienced lower overall daily volatility in love, commitment, satisfaction, and closeness. Let's talk about what the hell that means for a second. So what is emotional work? Emotional work is kind of a grab bag.

I don't know, I don't remember exactly what the methods of the study are and how they defined it. I'm sure they use some kind of scale. But basically, it's like how much work do you do for your partners? How much emotional work do you do for the sake of your partner? Now, the first thing that they found is that, generally speaking, The second thing is we're measuring volatility. Okay? So what is volatility?

Now, this finding is not that doing emotional work makes the relationship better. So this is what's really cool. It's a daily diary study. So it was seven days. Five, six, seven. Okay. So then they asked them, how committed are you in this relationship? How committed are you in this relationship?

Every single day. How much love do you feel? So volatility is like, this is low, volatility. This is high volatility. So here's the really cool thing. Doing emotional work doesn't necessarily improve the relationship. It reduces the volatility. We go from this to this.

When we do emotional work for our partner, the amount of love and commitment that we experience stays stable over time. Okay? Now, this is where things get really, really, really, okay for women having a partner who reported higher average emotional work predicted women's experience of lower volatility and love satisfaction and closeness what does this mean this means that oh whoops when a man i think that's the male symbol right does emotional work the woman feels stable in the relationship that's what this means when a woman does emotional work

ready for it? I think you know what's coming. For men, having a partner who reported higher average emotion work predicted men's experiences of greater volatility in love and commitment. So this is really insane, y'all. Whoops, I keep on screwing up what I want to do. When a woman does emotional work to support her partner, the man's experience of volatility in the relationship increases. So I like this study because it's methodologically very interesting.

So what this study did is boyfriend and girlfriend are doing daily diaries where both of them are measuring some degree of emotional work. So man does emotional work,

woman does emotional work. Then they're also measuring sense of love and commitment on both sides. So we're seeing both perspectives in one state. And what we discover is that when the woman does more emotional work, there is a greater sense of fluctuation in the man's sense of love and commitment.

Now, there's a lot of stuff I'm not thrilled about this study when you get to the discussion. They have a lot of interpretations based on various aspects of feminist psychology, the patriarchy, not that that is wrong, but that I feel that it is incomplete. And there's other reasons for that. But anyway, they're like the patriarchy. I think it's a convenient answer. I think it's probably more complicated than that. But here's the really scary thing.

So if we look at this study, what this shows is that the man's subjective experience of love and commitment correlates with the level of emotional work that a woman is doing. I'm not trying to bash men here. Okay, there's lots of, it's not men's fault. But what I'm scared of, and what terrifies me is this sentence right here. The relationship improved.

In what way? How are you measuring it? And here's the really scary thing. Is your quality of perception, what I'm really scared by by this particular study, is that the quality of perception, or sorry, the perception of your relationship is disconnected for,

men in this study, there were 74 couples, I think, is disconnected from the emotional work that women do. So the more she is doing, the more volatile you feel. So that's not what I would expect, right? What I would expect is something that is more akin to what we see in women, which is like the more effort that a partner is putting in, the more stable the relationship feels. So I think this is a situation where at the end of the day, like, why am I getting into this? I'm getting into this because I believe that we should understand. I do not want people reading this tweet and thinking to themselves,

if you're a dude out there, I cannot share my problems with my girlfriend. But on the flip side, I also want people to understand if they read this tweet and they're like, oh my God, all men are so emotionally babies and it's all men's fault. We also need to understand

that there are very real situations where sharing your emotions is not a good idea that if men are having this experience, there's a reason for it. And it's not just because we're all babies in the patriarchy. There's like real science at play here. Those are elements of it, to be sure. And the most important thing is

we're seeing a dating and mating crisis where people are struggling to figure out what to do. Because on the one hand, some fucking psychologist is telling me, share your emotions. And on the other hand, when you share your emotions, people get dumped. So, like, what am I supposed to do?

And the answer is, be careful about how you share your emotions. First of all, is there mental illness at play? If there is mental illness at play, recognize that your partner's responsibility is not to be your therapist. So you can share some of your emotion, but they should not be your primary emotional outlet. That's number one. They should do the emotional work of,

of a partner, not the emotional work of a therapist. Number one. Number two, what is my partner's level of emotional discussion? Right? So if my partner is sharing emotions, they are more likely to receive my shared emotion. Issue number three, are we trying, is this relationship about maintaining harmony or getting closer? Does my partner demonstrate to me that they want to get closer?

If they want to get closer, then it's okay to share. But if they're kind of in a, I don't know if you guys have had these relationships, but like these equilibrium relationships. Have you guys seen these relationships? Maybe you're in one where like, we're just kind of in equilibrium. The relationship isn't really going anywhere. It's like we are coexisting. maybe there's love, but it's not necessarily moving in a direction.

It's like maybe we'll get married one day, maybe we'll have kids one day. And it doesn't mean that an equilibrium relationship always remains an equilibrium, right? So I can talk about my relationship for a moment. I got married seven years after I started dating this girl. And for those seven years, we were sort of in an equilibrium relationship. And the reason we were in an equilibrium relationship is because we were settling, our lives. So our relationship stayed the same while our

lives were changing. And once our lives settled, then the relationship moved forward. Or we had to decide whether we wanted it to move forward or not. Right? So once like stuff got settled, so that's normal. It's not equilibrium relationships

are not bad. But it's important to think about like, what's the goal here? Are we trying to get closer? Are we like pretty content with where we are? And the third thing to keep in mind is that if you have a perception, your partner may have a different perception. I'm not saying one is right and one is wrong. It's not what this is. Right? This is like, if you have this perception, how are you measuring it? What is your partner's experience of when

you were sharing emotions and when you weren't sharing emotions? That is a critical piece of information, right? Because what I don't want is this. This is what I'm trying to prevent, like this is why I started streaming, to prevent this. Now, there's one last element to this, which is very pseudoscientific and also maybe the most functional. There's one last thing which my psychiatrist's brain jumps onto when I see this problem. How do you know whether you can share your emotions with your partner if you're a man. How do you know? So in psychiatry, we have science.

But then, we just redid the office, so I'm, I can't, I don't have my bookshelf intact. So I was going to pull up memories, dreams, and reflections by Carl Jung. So in psychiatry, we've got science. And then we also have like these psychoanalytic thinkers, right? people like Freud and people like Jung, who came up with a lot of ideas. Now, the problem is when they came up with these ideas, they weren't like scientifically, rigorously tested, but it doesn't mean that they're not true. And when I read things like this, when I sit with a patient, I don't just use science.

I also use psychoanalytic theory, psychodynamic theory, right? Things like the repetition compulsion, things like projection and projective identification, these kinds of like things that, I mean, those are more scientifically valid, but so the thing that I'm going to talk about right now is going to like maybe upset a lot of people, but it's a, it's an option. It's one way that I think is helpful. We're going to talk about archetypes. So Jung talked about two archetypes, anima and animus, which are sort of the male and the female archetype.

Okay, so what does this mean? So this means that we have each of us within our, psychology has things that are considered traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine. This has nothing to do with gender identity or anything like that. This is like there are certain qualities, like let's say nurturing versus encouraging and challenging. If we sort of think about these qualities as a society, we will say this one is feminine, right? So the nurturing capability is feminine. And like the challenging and like pushing capability of like,

and like pushing people to do things is like more masculine, right? So your dad pushes you and your mom nurtures you. Now, this is not necessarily bound to gender. So in my marriage, for example, in some ways I am more nurturing and my wife is more like challenging for my kids. So I grew up. I was raised by my grandmother, and my grandmother lost a child to a congenital heart defect.

And I think that was a very traumatic experience for her. So she basically, I grew up in like basically a paranoid household. Not like psychotic paranoia or like schizophrenic paranoia. But since she had lost a child to a congenital heart defect, she was paranoid that like, she was terrified, she was traumatized that I would get hurt. So anytime like I was trying to do anything, she was like, stop, you're going to matthewfer.

which means you're going to crack your skull open. So if I was like climbing on vurniture, she was like, Matu footijhese. Crack your skull open. And so I internalized that behavior. And now when my kids run around and jump on things, like that programming is within me. So I'm very, like, restrictive, reflexively.

My wife is the opposite. She was raised by her dad in the early years more so than her mom. Her mom was in residency and was working in the hospital and stuff. So her dad spent a lot of time with it. It was super cool. And dad would be like, you know, you can jump on things and I'll flip you around and stuff like that. So she's like more adventurous when it comes to physical play. I'm more careful.

So do you all see how like in that way I am feminine and my wife is masculine if we look at those archetypes? Now, there are certain, that's in some dimensions. And other dimensions, I'm more traditionally masculine. Like, you know, if my daughter is like, I'm unhappy. I'm like, we will, we're going to teach you the meaning of unhappiness. it's like we're going to teach you how to manage unhappiness. My wife is like, oh my God, like, let's be nice to her. And I'm like, no, she needs to learn how to detach from her unhappiness.

I will spiritually punish her until she's like ready. Actually, like that's not cool. But I will challenge her spiritually. My wife is more nurturing. Right? So if we're trying to figure out what kind of woman wants to hear about your feelings? there's one element of pseudoscience, which I think is really helpful.

And that is whether the woman is hyperfeminine or more integrated. Right? So Jung, actually, it wasn't Jung. Maybe it was Emma Jung. I think wrote the essays on anima and animus. I think animus the female archetype.

Animus is the male archetype. Let me just make sure I have that right. It's been a while since I read the stuff. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. So we have each of these forces, right? We have a masculine force and feminine force. And what I tend to find, so what, it's fascinating. So if you look at the original essays, I don't have them right now, but, you know, Emma Jung talks about what unintegrated animus looks like in a woman. So remember, animus is the male archetype. So women with an unintegrated masculinity become hyperfeminine. And so because they become hyper-feminine, they look for hyper-masculine men. And a woman who has not integrated her masculinity becomes so polarized into the femininity

that there's no room for femininity within a man. So if you cry, the woman is like, I need you to be hyper-masculine. Don't even show a shred of what we can traditionally conceptualize is feminine. Don't cry. Because I'm thinking about like, okay, like if we want some back of the napkin shit, okay? So I'm not here as you're a psychiatrist. I'm here as a dude who's trying to help you out, some crazy guy who's in his 40s who you meet at a bar, who's trying to give you advice on the off chance that it helps you.

And so I think what we see on social media is hyperfeminine women, especially in places like Instagram and we see hyper-masculine men. And what we tend to see is the hyper-masculinity is like, like we tend to see it. We see the hyper-feminity. And it is associated with a psychological hyper-feminity too. Right. I'm not going to work. I'm going to be my best self. I'm going to get taken care of. I'm hot. I've got a boob job. I get Botox starting at the age of 21. I'm going to get this work done. I'm going to get a BBL. I'm going to do this. I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like champagne and mimosas and like bubbly drinks and this and like it's just a hyperfemininity, bleach blonde, everyone kind of fucking looks the same. If you all

notice that, they're like all these hyperfeminine influencers and hypermasculine influences like dudes who are totally ripped and like, I'm going to do this and I'm going to inject testosterone and I'm going to drink bovine growth hormone and I'm going to be hypermasculine. Right? So what we tend to find and it's these people, have you guys noticed this, it's the hyperfeminine men who are saying that the best men are hyper-masculine, and it's the hyper-masculine who are saying that the best women are hyper-feminine. If a woman has a fucking job, that's a threat to my masculinity. Women need to be, no, like, no.

The best woman is women without a job. Right? And it's like, on the flip side, it's like the best man is a man who takes care of me while it's my job to get my nails done, my hair done, and whatever. So they're hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine. And what I think is fascinating is, I wish I could pull these up, maybe if we do like a YouTube edit, I'll pull these up and show you guys these quotes from Emma Jung, where she like describes this stuff, actually. Hold on a second. If you guys, can, can I, y'all be patient?

Can I show you these quotes? It'll take me some time to find them. But I will find them. Can we be patient? Just just give me, go pee. I know I'm just like reading stream, but give me a second. I found one. Okay. Here we go. All right. So some of this, like, I'm going to have to read and I'll piece together, but... Okay.

So such a total transfer of the animus image as that described above creates together with an apparent satisfaction and completeness, a kind of compulsive tie to the man in question and a dependence on him that often increases to the point of becoming unbearable. Let me explain what that means. Okay, because I know that doesn't make any fucking sense, so I got to explain it. Okay. So, when a woman is not... not integrated with her inner masculinity.

Okay? So, like, she becomes hyperfeminine. She projects her masculinity onto the dude she's dating. Okay? And then what happens is an apparent satisfaction and a compulsive tie to the man and a dependence on him that often increases to the point of becoming unbearable. So what does that mean? So that's like, I'm not masculine.

all. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm 100% feminine. So I'm going to take the elements of me that are masculine, the drive, these are traditional masculine elements. If you read this stuff, it would do fucking, Emma Jung would get canceled today because of some of the stuff she says about relationship dynamics. So you have to keep that in context. Right. So the drive to be entrepreneurial, to get shit done, these were traditionally viewed as masculine. So she like, let's go of all of that stuff. She projects it onto the masculine man. And then she loves it because he, He is complete male, complete masculine, and then over time, though, that becomes unbearable. Because no one is 100% masculine.

Okay? That's what that's saying. Okay. However, projection not only means the transference of an image to another person, but also the activities that go with it. So that a man to whom the animus image has been transferred is expected to take over all the functions that have remained undeveloped in the woman. You have to pay my mortgage. You've got to pay my bills. You've got to do this.

You've got to do that. You've got to take care of me. I'm never going to taking out the trash. All of the functions that are masculine, you have to do now. Whether the thinking function or the power to act or responsibility towards the outside world, you have to pay the bills. I'm not going to pay the bills. In turn, the woman upon whom a man has projected, his anima must feel for him or make relationships for him. And this symbiotic relationship, in my opinion, is the real cause of compulsive

that exists in these cases. Then the incongruity between the image and the image bearer often becomes all too obvious. Does this make sense to y'all? Okay? So like if you look at these people on the internet who are like, a man should be this way and a woman should be this way, how do you know that this is a woman that is safe to feel your feelings with? If she is hyper feminine, there is a good chance, not research-based, based on Emma Ewing and Dr. K's off the back of the neck, an anecdotal experience. The more hyper-feminine she is, the more traditionally feminine she is, the less likely she is to be

able to handle your emotions. And this is what really, really, really sucks. because oftentimes the women that men want are the hyper-feminine ones. Right? The men that women want are the hyper-masculine ones.

This is where we see all these rage bait things on social media about, okay, do you want to date a guy who's six-foot-two, how much money does he make? Okay, what percentage of the population is that? It's like one out of 100,000. Good luck. We have all of these unrealistic expectations

of hyper-masculine men and hyper-feminine women, if you're trying to figure out what is safe, there's a good chance that the closer someone is to what you see as an icon of their gender on social media, the less safe you will be sharing your emotions with them. Because that's not what men do. Right? Now, this is a very, very unfair judgment for a lot of influencers out there,

I'll be the first to say that. This is my back of the napkin kind of thing, and my hope is that those two things are not correlated. There's no data behind that. So if you are someone who is a hyper-masculine or hyper-feminine influencer and you are okay with anima and animus being all over the place, then good for you.

That is exactly the way society should be. You are a role model for our generation, right? props to you. But if you're someone who's trying to figure out, is this safe? Pay attention to this dimension. I don't think it's true. It's functionally, potentially useful.

Right? And I'm sharing this with you all, once again, like there's the science which gives us an answer. But then, like, sometimes when I'm trying to help my patience, some of this weird Jungian stuff helps them understand how to proceed. Right? So it's like, is this safe to share my feelings? Well, that depends on the person I'm talking to. How open they are they to a feminine man? And if the answer is they're not, then don't share them. Unless you're okay challenging the relationship and for the purpose of growth and whatever. Do you all get it? Like, sorry, but like we're trying to figure out how to navigate this crazy world, right? You guys have any?

questions? I'm working on a lecture on chronic pain. I'll be honest with y'all, it is something I've been avoiding. So I'll share one quick thing about chronic pain. So you all know, so back when I was, part of the reason I think I got accepted to Harvard for residency is that I was focused on complementary and alternative medicine. And complementary alternative medicine, there's some good trials on things like chronic pain. Literally, I was working, starting in 2007, I started as a research assistant in a lab at Harvard that was trying to understand the mechanism of chronic pain, neuroscience of chronic pain.

So that was like my background. So since it was my background, I started working with patients with chronic pain. And it's really challenging. I got to be honest, I don't think this is true, but I personally, where I was in my training, I was not, I was learning how to be a psychiatrist, and I was very ineffective.

In my opinion, substantially helping those people in the way that I wanted. And so it really shook my confidence with relation to that diagnosis. And in the subsequent years, when I treated more and more and more people, I got way better at it. And so I feel good about it. But it's so interesting, when I think about making a video about how to deal with chronic pain, my instinctive emotional reaction is like hopeless. So I have to work through that, just my experience of being like a PGY 2 and a PGY 3 and having a ton of chronic pain patients in my clinic and they just wouldn't get better and I didn't know what to do. And like, it's really hard. It's really hard. So I've been working on it for a while. I realized recently that I've been avoiding it.

But I'm going to do it because things can be done. Like the date is actually promising. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the dream. Is relationship business? It depends on the relationship. I mean, I worked with some people who power couples, and, you know, for them, their relationship is business.

Doesn't mean it can't be a genuine relationship. Okay. How much is acceptable emotional work to a partner? That's a great question. So, what amount of emotional burden can you place on a partner? Beautiful question. I'm also working on a lecture on caregiver burnout. So I think the first thing about how much can you emotionally burden your partner

is not the quantity in a moment, it's the duration. So remember when we're thinking about load, right? So in medicine, we have this concept called allostatic load, which is like stress is not binary, like stress is quantifiable. Your cortisol levels can be low, medium, high, super high. There are measures of stress. So what I sort of think about is this concept, of emotional load.

And emotional load is duration, frequency, and intensity. These are the three variables. So how long are you emotionally burdening them? When there is emotional burden, what is the intensity of the emotional burden? And how often do you emotionally burden? And oftentimes people get confused between frequency and duration. Are you crying once a week for you? year, or are you crying every day for a year? Right? So frequency and duration, how long is the overall

emotional episode? How often does the emotional episode show up in your partner's life, and how intense is the emotional episode? And so I think if you're trying to figure out, you know, how much can I burden my partner? I mean, that depends on the person. depends on the situation, but I think a good way to start looking at it is how often does my partner deal with my emotions, how long have they been dealing with my emotions, and how intense are my emotions when they are dealing with them. And so generally speaking, I think that a sustainable therapeutic style relationship, right, is my partner a primary source of dealing with my emotions for an extended period of time on a very regular basis at a high intensity,

my sense is that it's too much. Now, the scary thing is that there are some partners for whom they will say it isn't too much. That's when we get into codependency. So what is codependency? Co-dependency is when I have something psychologically unhealthy that matches or or fits with your psychologically unhealthy. Good examples of what that codependency could look like is my sense of value as a person is as a helper, as a fixer.

So the more distressed you get, the more good about myself I feel. See, I'm doing something. I'm a good boyfriend because you're crying and suicidal with me every day. this is how I know I'm committed. This is what makes me a great boyfriend. I'm the best boyfriend on the planet because I'm dealing with suicidal girlfriend

every single day. Make sense? So just because y'all are in a pattern that is harmonious doesn't mean it's healthy. So generally speaking, I think what we're sort of looking for is fluctuation.

Right? We don't want to be like depressed for 10 years and crying to our our partner once a week for a decade. What we want to see is things that are moving in the right direction. So is the duration, the frequency, and in the intensity over the course of a month, three months, six months, or a year moving in the right direction? Doesn't have to be all three. It can be one, but is something moving in the right direction. The second thing to understand,

and the reason that we're focused on direction is that in life, shit happens. So it is normal and expected for circumstances that are generally speaking temporary to make your partner's mood significantly worse or make your mood significantly worse and for your partner to support you through that hardship. The challenge arises when the circumstances are not changing and when the emotional dependence is not changing, right? Things should be moving in life. the goal is to like move in a generally upward trajectory.

And so if you're saying, if you say like, okay, well, my circumstances have been shit for years, and it's like, okay, what are you doing about that? And if the answer is, I can't do anything about that, if you're in a sort of a holding pattern for now, that's actually okay. Right? But the question is, when can you do something about it and how can you start doing something about it? Like when and how?

Right, because sometimes you really can't do anything. But what's really scary is some people believe they can't do something when they could be doing something. And what's really scary, what I really get, like, concerned about when I see these in my patience is a life situation that is negative, that creates a lot of negative emotion, right? So my job sucks, my job sucks, my job sucks, I hate my job, I hate my job. I've been in this dead end job for years. And the reason I am able to emotionally handle that job is because my partner is

carrying that emotional burden for me. So I get toxicity from the job, and then I offload it to my partner. Get toxicity, offload it. Get toxicity, offload it. So what's really scary is sometimes in these situations, we attain an equilibrium that is unhealthy. And since my partner is bearing my emotional load, my drive to fix my situation doesn't actually exist. And this is really important to understand. Complaining every day is not a drive to fix your situation. In fact, it's the opposite. When we complain, we vent our emotional frustration. Complaining is an alternative to fixing. And this is why if you're, if you pay attention, you'll see. see some people complain a lot.

Why? Why do they complain all the time? Because that is their method of emotional coping. So when I feel unhappy in a situation, I can change the situation so I'm no longer unhappy or I can complain. Because then I'm venting that negativity. Right? So there are people who complain about things and then there are people who fix things.

And that's not precisely true. The truth of the matter is that complaining is a. useful emotional coping tool, right? But when we become overly reliant on an emotional coping tool, that's what becomes an addiction. When I become reliant on, to have a couple of drinks to unwind and de-stress and bitch about my job is like not so bad.

When it becomes what we become reliant on, when we start doing that every single day or every single week, instead of actually fixing our situation, that's when it becomes an addiction. So what amount of emotional dependence is okay? Depends. Generally speaking, I think about what is okay emotional dependence

is temporary emotional dependence. That's the TLDR. Great question. Okay, y'all. I got to give my voice a break. Oh, animan animus is coming in some big way. Not anytime soon. Like, not like in the next month, but like, it's coming.

Puerre really messed us up for a couple months there. But, okay. Thanks a lot, y'all. It was great, great catching up with you guys. If any, any prime viewers are still here, thanks for coming. And, yeah, here's to a better 2026. Take care, everybody. 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. It's tax season, and at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers. But here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now, here's another big number.

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