HealthyGamerGG - The Real Reason You Can’t Make Progress

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

Sometimes we try to make progress in life, but we can often discount the progress we have made, or find reasons to not start at all. In this video, Dr K. discusses some of the issues that could be holding you back, and how best to tackle them. Check out more mental health resources here! https://bit.ly/3xsk6fE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When they try to progress, a part of their mind tells them don't bother unless we're going to go the whole distance. There's no point in starting to date unless we know it's the one. And if you kind of think about this, what does this allow your mind to do? It allows you to procrastinate. It allows you to not do that hard thing. It allows you to not deal with uncertainty. I don't know if this is going to work out or not. But I definitely know that if I binge watch a particular show, I will have fun today.

And this is the calculation that your mind makes. Today we're going to talk about how to choose progress over procrastination. And what a wonderful clickbait kind of like, oh, like today we're going to teach you how to progress instead of procrastinate. But legitimately, that's what we're going to talk about. Because if we sort of look at our lives, we sort of see that, okay, in a lot of ways, I should progress, right? I should work on this particular Google AdWords certification.

I need to polish up my resume. I need to, you know, go through this course of emotional awareness so that I can be more emotionally available in my relationships. There's all kinds of stuff that we should do. And we want to do these things, right? We value. These things are important to us. This actually, this progress is important to me. What I want more than anything in life is to make more money, have a successful relationship, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is that we don't do those things, right? Instead, we just end up procrastinating, which seems really confusing, right? Why do we do, I don't care about binge watching Netflix for like 15 hours or playing video games. What I really care about is

dealing with this crippling loneliness. But that's not actually how we function. We don't, our actions are not aligned with our perceived goals. And here's the main thing to understand. See, the body, the brain, and the mind will do what they think is best. So if I have a choice between eating a salad or eating a cookie, in that moment, there are all kinds of calculations that something within me is making, either my stomach, my brain, or even my mind, that make me choose the bad thing. And the craziest thing about progress and procrastination is that based on the calculations that you are making, progress is not a good thing.

Progress is the enemy and should be avoided. And procrastination is the thing that we should be doing. That's why we do it, right? So all human organisms operate based on this biological principle of, doing on some level what the organism thinks is best. So in the case of video games, we know that our dopamine circuitry is all messed up, but that's where that signal is coming from. And I've worked with a couple of hundred people probably at this point who come to me

with this problem. Hey, Dr. Kay, I'm stuck. I may be, like I've worked with an entrepreneur, for example, who can grind all day when it comes to their business. But for the life of them, they cannot, like, engage in relationships. Oh, the only thing that's missing in my life is relationships, but I just can't do it. I have to do this work, I have to do this, I have to do this. And then at the other end of the spectrum, I've worked with people who are like video game

addicts who need to put together their life and are filled with shame. But for some reason, they can't progress. And what I've found working with these people is that about 95% of them make a particular kind of miscalculation in their mind. So remember that what happens in your brain and your mind and whatever is that you're making some kind of calculation, right? there's some kind of subconscious calculation that drives your behavior. And even though we think progress is a good thing, there is another part of us that is calculating

progress as a bad thing. When there should be a plus sign, there's like a negative instead of a positive. And the crazy thing is when I work with these people and we discover these particular miscalculations, it opens the floodgates for them to progress forward. Because these people will come in and they'll say like, oh, I struggle with motivation. It's not an issue of motivation. It's that there's a bottleneck. Something, even though you can try to cultivate all the motivation and go to workshops and go to an ashram and go find yourself and join some group, right, or like some entrepreneur startup, WhatsApp group.

You can do all of these things to cultivate your motivation. But as long as your mind is making this miscalculation, it won't work. So you may wonder, okay, what are these miscalculations? And I'll share them with you. Okay. So we're going to go through about six of them. And what I find is that in 95% of people that I work with, they are doing this particular thought process, which turns the positive of progress into a negative. When people hear about our coaching program, their first response is usually, why would I work with another human being when I can watch YouTube videos all on my own?

Working with a coach is about amplifying your time and effort. We're great at wanting things and even making some progress, but we usually struggle with follow through or have some kind of setback. And that's exactly why working with a coach can help you accomplish particular things in a fixed amount of time. They'll help you set appropriate goals, keep you accountable towards that progress, and ultimately even work through the setbacks that you will inevitably face. So check out the link in the description below to see if coaching is right for you. So the first one is it's not enough. So anytime someone thinks about making progress, your mind, if you pay attention, your mind will do something,

where you're like, hey, I should do this particular. particular thing. And your mind will tell you it's not enough. Therefore, don't do it. Because what is the point of expending effort if it isn't enough? So I'll give you all a simple example. Okay. So I was working with someone who was an entrepreneur. And the example that I mentioned earlier, they were interested in building a relationship. They're like, okay, I'm someone who wants to put together my life, right? So like, I'm going to put together my life. I'm going to start this company. I'm going to grind. I'm going to learn marketing. I'm going to do all this kind of stuff. And then they come to me and they're like, you know, the one thing I'm missing in my life is I'm lonely and I don't, you know, I haven't

been able to find a partner. And then we kind of tunnel down into, okay, like, what about dating and things like that? And that's when I sort of realize when they're talking to me, they're like, yeah, well, like, I don't see the point in dating. And I was like, what, what do you mean you don't see the point in dating? Well, like, I don't have time for a relationship in my life right now. I'm working 80 hours a week and I don't have time for another person. So why don't you go on dates? Well, anytime I think about going on a date, I don't have the space for a relationship. So there's no point. And now this is really, really subtle, but it's like really important to understand.

Because now what we're doing is if you want a relationship that presumably starts with dating. But the second that you think about dating, your mind says, okay, this only brings us 1% of the way. And we need to go 99% of the way, right? We need to create space in our lives for this person. And there's no point in getting started because just starting dating isn't going to be enough. But it's not just examples like this. And I've seen that same example with people who are like, developers at fang companies and things like that. It's also people who are like in their basement

at the age of 24, younger versions of myself, who need to put together their lives. And we sit down and we say, okay, well, like, what do you need to put together? Like, I need to put together everything. Okay, so let's get started. And what does their mind do? Their mind performs a very, very interesting bit of mental gymnastics. Oh, there's no point in finding a relationship because I don't have a job. progressing in this path is not worth it because there is so much left to go. And I want y'all to just think about this for a second. If I have to go from one to, or zero to 100, and I go forward 10 points, right? So if I go 10% of the way there and my mind tells me this is not enough, what does that

do to my motivation? Right now I've literally moved forward 10%. But my mind tells me this is not enough. Scratch it. because now we have to go from zero to 100. Unless we can go from zero to 100, there's no point in getting started. So this is the first miscalculation that the majority of people will make. Okay.

Now, another quick caveat here is that what I found is that people will sort of make one of these miscalculations very consistently, maybe two, maybe three. So not everyone makes all of these. That's why we're sharing all six with you. Okay? The second one is similar, but subtly different. And the reason we're sort of illustrating this is because we want to sort of give you a clue as to what to look for in your mind. So the second one is there's no point in starting unless I can go the whole distance. So this may sound a lot like the first one.

And they're somewhat related. But honestly, like literally when people talk about it, they say different things. Right. So in one situation, people are saying like, okay, I'm doing this, but it's not enough. And I need to be doing more. I need to be doing more. I need to be doing more. In the other version of this, what this is is there's no point in getting started unless I can

go the whole distance. So I was working with someone who was trying to get back into school. So they had been in school twice in university. They had dropped out twice because they had picked kind of the wrong major or whatever happened. They got into video games. They got into pot, whatever. We don't really know exactly what happened.

And so I talked to them and I asked them, okay, what's your goal, right? And their goal is like, I need to finish college. Like, I need to get some kind of degree so that I can, you know, find the right. job and then I can start then I can get financially independent then I can focus on relationships so like the first thing that I need to do is like finish school fair enough right but then when I talk to this person like okay what's you know what's getting in the way why don't you apply or you know what's getting in the way and they kind of say well there's like there's no point in starting unless I can go the whole distance I've already tried starting twice right and I didn't go the whole distance

so I don't want to do that again like I don't want to go through like like the start of school again and then just drop out later. So what I need to know before I get started is that the whole thing will be complete. I need to know that the whole distance will be complete. And unless I go the whole distance, there's no point in getting started. And if you kind of think about it, right, like this person is not wrong. This is logical. Like if you guys have this thought, you're going to say to yourself, yes, Dr. K, that's

exactly what I do. Like, what's the point of failing a third time, right? I need to know that I can go the distance. But I want you all to just stop and think about that for a second. and think about it critically. Do you ever know that you are going to go the whole distance before you get started? Right? That's like impossible. Like I don't know if y'all can predict the future. I can't predict the future. And it's not just the situation like college. I've also seen this in relationships where people are like, I don't want to invest in this relationship unless I know they're the one. And I want you all to think about how self-defeating this is.

Right. So you want a relationship. You can't predict the future. You don't know if this is the one or not. Right. And for the record, I don't think that there is. is A, the one, I think that relationship is built based on you and them working together over time. You build up to being in a relationship with being the one. It's not something that you find. You don't find the one just on the street. So this is the second miscalculation that people make, which is that when they try to progress, a part of their mind tells them, don't bother unless we're going to go the whole distance.

And this is the really subtle and sneaky thing about the mind, because when the mind tells you this, It gives you good reasons to procrastinate. There's no point in starting to date unless we know it's the one. And if you kind of think about this, what does this allow your mind to do? It allows you to procrastinate. It allows you to not do that hard thing. It allows you to not deal with uncertainty. I don't know if this is going to work out or not.

But I definitely know that if I binge watch a particular show, I will have fun today. And this is the calculation that your mind makes. And you see, it's not stupid. It's actually incredibly smart. And all it does is drive you towards procrastination. The third one is my favorite. If I do it now, it'll be inefficient. If I do it later, it will be more efficient.

There's no point in starting now because in the future, it will go easier for me. So if you sort of think about this, right? Oh, there's no point in dating right now because it'll be so much easier. I'll be so much more attractive to a potential partner if I have my own place and I'm all sexy and I have a sexy body and then I'm making a ton of money. Oh, like, if I do this later, it will be easier. So your mind is really sneaky, right? It's like, oh, like, it's going to be so much effort if you do it right now. But if you do it later, if you put it off, the effort will be reduced.

You won't have to work as hard. Things will be so much easier. And of course, do you want an easy life or do you want a hard life? Of course you want an easy life. Do you want an easy life? Do you want 10 hours of your work to give you $1,000? Or do you want 10 hours of your work to give you $100? Obviously, we want 10 hours of your work to give you $100?

we want 10 hours of our work to give us $1,000. We want to maximize efficiency. And maximizing efficiency is done by waiting, right? So interesting how the mind does this. So literally when I work with these people, this is what happens. When I ask them, why don't you date? Well, they're like, well, right now if I date, it'll be inefficient. It'll be hard.

If I do it later, it will be easy. And this is the real tragedy of it, right? Because the moment that our mind tells us this, we have a justification to not act. Our mind actually tells us, oh, procrastination is better. Better to not do it today. It'll be easier for you. It'll be a net positive for you to not act today. Beautiful how this works.

The next one is a little bit more psychological. Psychiatrine, no? Psychotherapist. Progress actually makes us feel guilty. We assume that progress is a good thing, right? We say, okay, like if I progress, I'll feel good about myself. I'll give myself a pat on the back. Like, yeah, like a comp or something, yeah.

But with some of the people that I work with, When they actually progress, they don't experience a positive rush of motivation. What they actually feel is guilt. Now, you may be like, what on earth, Dr. Kay, what does this mean? So I'll give you all examples of this, okay? Oh, I should have done it earlier. I feel so stupid for finally doing it, right? Oh, my God, I'm such an idiot.

I should have started this a long time ago. And I want you all to think about literally what this is, right? Let's tunnel down into it because I feel this way. I feel this way on a weekly basis. Oh, I should have done it earlier. I should have gotten started earlier. So let's understand this. So when our mind, when you make some kind of progress and you feel stupid, you feel guilty,

you blame yourself for not doing it earlier, let's understand what's going on. So here I am, I move over here. As I make progress, I experience a negative emotion of guilt. And what do you think that does, right? What is the function of guilt? Guilt prevents us from engaging in the behavior again. We feel guilty when we do bad things. right? And so I want y'all to think about how crazy this is that when you make progress,

you feel guilty. Like what the hell? No wonder you don't continue to progress. Because if progress is associated with guilt in your mind, the evolutionary function of guilt is to reduce a behavior. Oh, I did something wrong. I got mad and I yelled at you. I feel guilty. I'm never going to yell at you again. That's what guilt is for. And now we attach this crap to progress. What do you expect is going to happen? Now, oftentimes when we think about progress, we don't even notice that we do this. We don't really pay attention to it. But when I work with people, you'd be amazed at how many people, I'd say 30 to 40 to even 50% of people, feel guilty when they make progress.

And if you feel guilty when you make progress, how do you expect yourself? There's no positive motivation. That's why our brain views progress is a bad thing. It's like, hey, this is bad. That's our experience of it. Now we move on to the next thing. Also very subtle, very devastating and very justified in the moment. mind. We devalue our progress. So let's say that you have a pile of mail that needs to be gone through

and you go through the pile. And then someone asks you, hey, what did you do today? And you're like, yeah, I sort of through the mail. And then you look at this and you're like, this is pathetic. Like this noob. Oh my goodness. Like people are out there starting companies and developing apps and even climbing to the top of the leaderboards on a particular game. And here is my dumb ass. What did I do today? I went through the mail. People are out there exercising and my dumb ass. All I can do is go for a walk. All I can do is this pathetic little thing.

And once again, I want you all to think about what is this calculation resulting in? What's on the right side of the equal sign? You have literally made progress. And what do you do? You beat yourself up for it. You devalue the progress. There's another way that this looks, which is that sometimes people will even congratulate you. And they're like, hey, like, great job, you know, six months sober.

Like, good job, bro. good job girl like solid good for you and then what does your mind do your mind says oh this is easy like other people do this very easily like i don't understand why you are congratulating me for something that i did that is pathetic i don't deserve congratulations for this if i win a Nobel prize sure congratulate me if i'm sober for 15 years sure congratulate me if i actually land a job sure congratulate me but hey i applied for a job congratulations No, this is pathetic. This is the way that you view things.

You take your progress and you devalue it in your mind. So once again, what does that do? What does this actually teach your brain about progress? What are you learning about progress? That progress is pathetic. You should not be rewarded for this. This is pathetic. You should have done this a long time ago.

And once again, I want you all to think about if I make some amount of progress. What is my mind telling me? Is it reinforcing? Is it say, good job, pat on the black. Believe in yourself. You can go the whole this. No, you're blaming yourself. You're devaluing yourself. And then how do you expect to progress? So now we have two options. I can progress and feel pathetic, which creates negative emotions, or I can waste a day. I can play a video

game. I can doomscroll. And that will quiet those negative emotions. So this also reveals a really interesting pattern that we see with people. Oh, I can't follow through. Let's understand why you can't follow it. Because you did it one day. I started cleaning. I cleaned the closet, but I didn't clean the On Monday I cleaned, you feel that this is pathetic. You devalue it. Now you're full of negative emotion. So what happens on Monday you clean the closet? What happens on Tuesday morning?

You're beating yourself up. Oh my God, I spent a whole day and all I did was clean the closet. I didn't even get to the kitchen. I didn't get to the garage. You devalue yourself. You feel bad. Now you have negative emotions activating. And so what do you do?

Do you continue cleaning? Do you work on that momentum? No, it does the opposite. Now you have to manage those negative emotions. And what do you use? this bad boy, right? You may have even done something productive yesterday and what are you doing now, you're watching YouTube because you're looking for that inspiration to keep going. So we devalue things and then we have to deal with the negative emotion of progress. And then we spend the next

couple of days dealing with the negative emotion. We wake up on Friday frustrated with ourselves. Oh my God, I got such a good start to the week. And then I've wasted it all. I'm so pathetic. Shocking. Progress is not a good thing. It is a painful thing. Now the last thing that we do, comparison, right? So thankfully, the good news about this one is that we know that comparison is not good, right? There's a lot of stuff that says that comparison is the thief of joy. I see people sharing this on the Instagram and the Twitter and like, oh, there's like some, you know, picture of a cat and motivational, inspirational, oh, don't compare.

And Dr. K. talks about the ego and evils of comparison. But remember, what we're focused on is literally when you wake up on a particular day, why do you procrastinate instead of progress? Because once again, when you do something, what does comparison look like? Oh, this other person, it would have been easier for them. I worked for eight hours and I only did three job applications. And this person worked for eight hours and they did 15. And this is something that I struggled a lot with in med school, right?

Like in my first year of med school, I was like, oh my God, like I'm working so hard and I only got through this much. And I have all of my friends in med school and my colleagues, like these people in our pre-assigned study groups because that's what you do when you start out. They're doing so much more than me. And so anytime I would actually like study for something, would I feel good and positively motivate myself to keep going? No, it's like when I actually spent four hours studying instead of giving myself a carrot, I gave myself a stick. And it's like, what the hell?

You are making progress in life and then you are punishing yourself because some other human being who is not living your life can do it better than you. And if we're really, really careful, we're really subtle. This is what I love about working with other people. You don't just compare yourself to one person, do you? No, you compare yourself to this person in terms of relationships. You compare yourself to your older brother or sister in terms of their financial success. You compare yourself to your younger brother and sister because they got, they fell in love and they found a beautiful relationship and they got married. Your best friend, you compare yourself in terms of their face and your face or their hair and your hair.

Your other friend that you have or this neighbor that you have, you compare your body to their body and this is how it goes. So any dimension of progress that you make, what does your mind tell you? Your mind tells you someone else does it better. And does this positively reinforce the progress? Absolutely not. So this is the crux of it. These are the six things. It isn't enough.

I don't want to get started until I'm sure I can finish. There's no point in doing it until I can go the whole distance. If I do it tomorrow, it'll be easier. Let's focus on efficiency. If I do it today, it'll be inefficient. Progress makes me feel guilty. I should have done it. I should have started a long time ago.

oh yeah like I did this but like anyone could do this this is not an achievement my work is a source of me feeling pathetic instead of something to be celebrated and the last thing we compare to others yeah this person did better than me this person did better than me and all six of these things result in one thing anytime you move forward your mind makes this mental gymnastics calculation turns a positive into a negative and then suddenly the whole equation is moving in the opposite direction now the question is what to do about these things. And we're going to start with the most basic thing to do. So when I work with these couple hundred people who have one of these six things, the start of the answer is the same, is to notice the activity. You don't even need to fix it.

Because if you really pay attention what's going on here is these are subconscious or unconscious conclusions that settle into your mind automatically. And once your mind has this conclusion, in its calculating apparatus, that is what will dictate what you do today versus tomorrow. Do you progress or do you procrastinate? As long as we let these conclusions remain the way that they are, it will be a struggle to progress. So the first thing that we want to do is just catch them in the act. And I want to say this is responsible for 50% of it. Now, according to some theories, so if you look at the yogic theory, they say catching it in the act is 100%.

percent enough to change. You don't need to even do anything. Even psychotherapy will say like, okay, you're going to get a lot of mileage out of just observing and sitting with these feelings. You know, Freud said that language serves as a substitute for action. So when you kind of, like, you know, if you're in therapy and you like really want to kill someone, right? So sometimes we do with something called homicidal ideation. Venting those feelings out basically reduces the feelings. So you don't actually have to kill someone to feel satisfied. Thank God. Please don't hurt anyone else. If you have homicidal ideation, go see a psychiatrist because they can help you eliminate those feelings without harming another human being. So we know that observation of the thing

is therapeutically useful. So the first thing that we need to do is catch yourself in the act. At the end of the day, did I want this task to be done? It is done. Why can I not experience a win? Why am I beating myself up for accomplishing my goals? Like, what the F? And when I work with people, this works incredibly well. It starts out by them realizing, holy crap, I did not realize I was talking to myself in this way. I did not realize how much I really beat myself up over these things. Because remember, the more automatically they happen, the more they happen behind the scenes, right? Like the more it's shaping your thought process. And the moment that it stops being autopilot and you have awareness of it, it doesn't calculate in the same way. Right. So if you think

about a lot of your behaviors, they're due to subconscious calculations. Most of what we do is not under our conscious control. I don't know if that kind of makes sense. But if we kind of think about like when you get up in the morning and you pull out your phone, you're not sitting there making like a 15 line calculation about, okay, should I do the phone? Should I not do the phone? If I do the phone now, should I do it for seven minutes? Should I do it for eight minutes? Should I set an alarm? Should I set a timer? Should I make coffee first? That's not what you do. You just pick up your phone. Most of your life is unconscious. And that's the way that the brain is designed.

Like even if you sort of think about digestion is unconscious, hunger is relatively unconscious until it tells you, hey, we're hungry. So much of our life runs on autopilot because that's the way the brain is designed. But it only runs this way and controls your life is why you feel out of control because all of these autopilot calculations are happening in the subconscious. Bring awareness to it. And that's honestly 50%. So just notice yourself and catch yourself, am I doing one of these six things?

and you will be stunned at how much you do them throughout the day. The next thing to do is when you catch yourself, ask yourself, is there some way that I can deviate this? It's not to induce some false sense of pride. You can even start with the question, what makes it hard for me to feel positively when I make progress? Right. That's the second question.

This is the way that you start to metabolize it. Crumble it apart. The third thing that you can try to do is to intentionally try to reframe a little bit, right? So this is where we don't want to like counter necessarily. We don't want to be harsh with that other voice when you say, oh, like other people could accomplish this way faster than I could. We're not going to try to argue with it, interestingly enough. We're not going to say that's not true because it is true.

Other people may be better at it than you. Instead, what we want to do is take the attitude of so what, right? At the end of the day, if someone else is better at it than you are, what can you do about that? At the end of the day, what is important to us? So what? The question is, do you want to continue to do this? Are you happy at the end of the day?

if I could create an alternate universe where you did not do whatever it is that you're thinking about, at the end of this day, today, are you glad that the thing is done? Are you glad that the thing is not done? Focus on the fact that it has been checked. All of the caveats that you want to have, sure, it's inefficient. Sure, someone else could have done it better. Sure, you should have done it earlier. All of that stuff is true. We're not saying that that stuff is true. That's, by the way, why it's so powerful because your mind doesn't convince you with lies. It convinces you with truths. So it's not about arguing against it. It's about so what? Can I be happy with something? What pride can I take? That's kind of the fourth step. And if you go through these four steps, what pride can I take? I'm not saying that you should call all your friends and organize a celebration. People will celebrate. Oh, like we're getting married. Let's have a celebration. You're like, I made a Tinder profile. Let's celebrate. I'm going to invite 150 people. We're going to have a ballroom. We're going to have a band. Yeah. I'm not saying do that. That's absurd. But wouldn't that be fun?

Wouldn't it be fun if we could celebrate the small things as a society? So instead, what you should do is get whatever celebration you can. Right? So acknowledge whatever positivity you can. It doesn't have to be huge. It doesn't have to be equal. It doesn't have to be as good as what someone else does. Just acknowledge what you can that is positive.

And when you go through these four steps, your brain will start to change. So we know, for example, that willpower correlates with your, awareness of the internal environment. Because anytime you exert willpower, you are fighting with yourself. You cannot exert willpower and be on autopilot. So we know that these kinds of techniques strengthen your frontal lobes. You catch it in the act. We also know from research on imposter syndrome that when we start incorporating small positives

and a more balanced perspective on our life, that this leads to good outcomes. See, we know that one of the pathological signs of some mental illnesses, things like depression, things like borderline personality disorder, are black and white thinking. I'm a loser for going through my mail. It's pathetic that I made a Tinder profile today. And my friends have been married. This is black and white thinking. We just know that when the mind stops thinking in black and white, this moves towards health. So if you are even measuring whether someone fits the diagnostic criteria, whether someone qualifies for the diagnosis.

of borderline personality disorder, one of the diagnostic features is black and white thinking. So if they stop thinking in black and white, they're literally by definition less borderline. So these are the components that we want to add, right? So pay attention. Notice the thing in the act. You know, how did I come to think this way? Where is this coming from?

Next thing, so what, right? So what that someone else can do it? How does that affect my life? That cultivate some degree of detachment. And then the last thing is find whatever positivity you can. And I've worked with, like I said, hundreds of people who have this problem. And generally speaking, this is the formula that works for them. It doesn't happen overnight.

It happens slowly, right? Because neuroplasticity and rewiring your neurons takes a lot of effort over time. Last thing that I'll leave you with is if I say, oh, it's not going to fix it overnight, does that mean you're not going to get started today?