HealthyGamerGG - Therapist Explains Why You Don't Feel Anything Anymore... (Alexithymia 101)

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

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Attachment is how we learn what we feel on the inside. So a child early on doesn't know what they're feeling, right? So if I'm an 18-month-old and I'm walking around and I stumble and fall, do I feel hurt? Should I panic or should I laugh? And if the adults in the room are terrified, oh my God, little Timmy fell down. Then the child starts crying. He's like, oh crap. Today what we're going to talk about is Alexothymia.

So Alexothymia is the inability to experience your internal emotional state. And what I kind of view this as is almost like an emotional colorblindness. So a lot of times what we don't really realize, but a lot of our problems actually come from an inability to experience our internal emotional state. We're not really aware of what we're feeling on the inside. And there's actually a lot of science that shows that being unaware of what you're feeling can lead to all kinds of problems. So Alexothymia has been associated with problems with motivation and finding direction and purpose in life.

So if you're someone who kind of like is going through life, but you're not really sure, you know, what's the point? Like you don't know why you're on this earth. You don't really like, like you look around at other people and you see like, oh, these people are so motivated. Like they get up every day and they're striving for something. But I get up every day and it's just kind of like a haze, right? I don't know really why I'm here. I'm just sort of existing instead of living. And that's actually been tied to alexathymia. We also find that Alexa thymia is a common culprit in a lot of psychological problems. So leads to problems, or not leads to, but exacerbates problems like addiction. So people who are lexathymic are more prone to addiction will even dive into a lot of my clinical experience with working with people with addiction, which I don't know if you all

have struggled with this yourself or maybe you have a friend who will say, yeah, I was doing great. I was like sober for six months and then I don't know what happened. I just relapsed one day and it was out of the blue. But what you will really discover when you work with those people is it really wasn't out of the blue. And what was actually going on is that there were slight emotional stressors that were building up over time, building up over time, building up over time. And there's really good neuroscience to support this. And then when those stressors got overwhelming, the person ended up

relapsing. And remember that these people are colorblind to this, which is why they don't really, they're not aware of it. They think everything is fine, even though problems are building in the background. And lexothymia is also a culprit for problems in relationships. So what we tend to find is that when we don't understand what we're feeling, it creates all kinds of stresses in relationships. We start to send mixed signals because someone asks us, hey, is it okay if I, you know, go to this party without you? And you're like, yeah, it's fine, like whatever. And then you kind of feel resentful, but you don't know how to vocalize that resentment. You feel ashamed for feeling that resentment. And so as a result, it kind of sabotages your relationship because you said it was okay,

but now you're punishing this person for something that you gave them permission. for. So lexathymia has been associated with all these kinds of things. And what I'd love to do is dive into really what alexothymia is today, as well as a little bit about how it manifests in different dimensions in our lives. Okay, so something else cool to show y'all. So a couple month, maybe a month ago, we looked at a very popular psychology today article where there was a psychologist who was talking about how men are struggling and dating and what they need to do is become more emotionally available. I think the article is really useful in a lot of ways. made a lot of good points. But I think the challenge is you can say like, okay, like people need to be

more emotionally available. My question is how? How do you learn to be emotionally available? Can you go sign up for emotional availability class? Everyone is saying the world needs to be a particular place. Or Gen Z needs to stop being so entitled. Or this quiet quitting is a problem. Or men need to be emotionally available. And so as the emphasis on emotional awareness increases, we've got events like Right in the Fields. Right in the Fields is all about helping you understand your emotions, raising awareness of emotions, hopefully helping you regulate your emotions so that you can kind of boost your EQ a little bit. So I'd love to share with y'all what we've discovered so far. So here is our Right in the Fields emotion tracking. I just wanted to share this with you all today. So the most common emotion that

we feel in our community is actually happiness, which is something that you sometimes wouldn't get. You look sometimes at our community and it's like, oh, man, like, people are, like, struggling so much. But actually, this is what's cool. It's like a lot of people are happy. A lot of people are building their lives and starting to be happy. It's, like, awesome that happiness is actually the number one winner. Now, there may be some kind of selection bias here. And this is something I encourage y'all to think about.

For people who are participating in the event, I think there's a greater likelihood that those people will be happy. Now, we have to be careful here because are they, if I'm happy, does that mean I'm more likely to participate in stuff? maybe, but I think there's another subtle association here, which is it's people who participate in stuff like this that actually improve their emotions. The likelihood to participate in activities that help you understand your emotional awareness, the kind of people who will sign up for this are the kinds of people who have done other stuff because they're more likely to sign up. And as you do more stuff, you will become more happy. So out of the first 4,000 people, how many of them did touch grass? There's probably a really high overlap. In fact, it's probably

the people who did touch grass and really improved from it that are signing up for this too because they're like, wow, that was so awesome. And so the key thing here is that I don't think that happiness necessarily makes you sign up, but the more likely you are to sign up for something and engage with something, the more likely you are to actually wind up being more happy. So other stuff. So what is right in the fields? So it's a challenge to help you identify the emotions you struggle with and build emotional awareness over six weeks. So we're going to start by identifying simple emotions, identifying complex emotions, identifying obscure emotions, recognizing intensity, participate in emotional regulation and do emotional reflection.

And we're going to focus on six emotions over six weeks. Shame, fear, boredom, anger, sadness, and happiness. Hold on a second. Are you saying that boredom is an emotion? And of course, in order to encourage participation, we're going to bribe y'all because that's what we have to do. There are rewards, discord events that we're going to be talking about. and so check it out.

So let's take a look. So let's talk about elixothymia. Okay. So Alexa thymia is the inability to detect internal emotional state. Alexothymia has been associated with motivational problems. We've already said. Purpose has been associated with addictions and other mental health problems. Right?

And these are not just diagnosed addictions, but also like digital addictions like YouTube and TikTok and stuff like that. And then lastly, relationship problems. Now, here's why talking about Alexaaemia is important. A lot of people who struggle with these three things will go looking for answers for these three things, right? Does that make sense? We're looking for answers. So they'll say, how do I find purpose in life? And what people will do is give them answers about purpose. So we'll say like, oh, like go read inspiring things or like go out and volunteer and go do this and go do this and go do this and go to this. And they don't realize that the problem, that what's really in the way is actually emotional colorblindness. Because when you ask someone,

like if I Google like, how do I find purpose in life? You're not going to see Alexa thymia or emotional colorblindness come up. How do I overcome addictions? You're not going to see Alexa thymia come up. I have problems in my relationship. I encourage you all go look at like, you know, any kind of relationship advice situation. Like, go look at like a subreddit or a forum or whatever. No one is going to say, hey, the problem with this relationship is that you're emotionally colorblind, right? What they're going to do is they're going to say, oh, like this person doesn't respect your

boundaries, break up with them. And as it turns out, there's actually good scientific evidence that all of these things are influenced by alexothymia. So let's take a look at what are the components of alexothymia. Okay. So number one is difficulty identifying feelings. Okay. And now we're going to see, so number two is difficulty describing feelings to others, right? You all see maybe how this can relate to relationship problems if I can't describe what I'm feeling.

Number three is, you all ready for this? This is going to be a CO, okay? Stimulus bound, externally oriented. thinking style. Now, you may say, what does this mean, Dr. K? This means that in order for you to be motivated to do something, there must be a stimulus from the outside that causes your motivation. An externally oriented thinking style means that you need external deadlines, pressure. These are both stimuli, right? Do you all get that? In order to act. Now, that's kind of interesting because this seems like a huge problem, right?

I can't bring myself to do something until there's some kind of consequence or deadline. I'm like externally motivated. And it turns out that being externally motivated is correlated and is one of the features of being internally colorblind, which sort of makes sense, right? Because if I'm blind to my internal drivers,

I'm going to need to rely on external deadlines and pressures and things like that in order to act. The last thing that's kind of interesting is a constricted imagination. And you may say, well, wait a second. What does imagination have to do with internal colorblindness? So there are studies that show that literally people who have Alexothymia will have more logical and like less emotive dreams. So they'll have dreams that are like really kind of run in the mill kind of like emotionally bland kind of stuff. And what I've seen when I work with people who are lexathymic is I'll ask them one really important question. I'll ask them, where do you want to be in five years?

And when I ask this, you know, where do you want to be in five years question? People who are lexathymic are like, I have no idea. I can't even imagine it. They can very much vocalize, I don't like that I'm living at home. I don't like that I'm alone. I don't like. And they'll use these words like, like. or don't like, right? They won't say, I'm ashamed of living at home. I feel pathetic about myself.

They'll say, yeah, I don't want this. This needs to change. Needs to change. And then the problem that we get into is that remember, they're stimulus bound. So even though it needs to change, if your parents aren't kicking you out of their basement, then you're never going to leave. And so they have difficulty imagining the future. And by the way, difficulty imagining the future leads to a lack of purpose. Because if we think about those people that we want to be like, right, who have purpose. is in or driven for something, can devote 20 years of their life to create a dream. But if you can't even imagine what the future would be like, how are you supposed to have visions to go towards? How are you supposed to find goals? And what we end up doing when we're

alexothymic is since we don't, we're not in touch with ourselves, what we end up doing is just looking at external sources for inspiration. So we end up with this kind of bland materialism, where we look around and we're like, I don't really want this, but I guess it would be nice. I should move out of the house. I should get in shape. I should start eating healthy. I should start making more money. Because we like, look at all of these things, but we don't have this internal driver.

We're stimulus bound. And so we just kind of like look outside of ourselves and we're like, okay, I guess I should do that because that looks good. Okay. So these are the four features of alexothymia. And as we'll see, we're going to break down how these already, how these lead to these three common problems. So let's talk a little bit about the origins of alexothymia. So how does someone become elixothymic? So the first thing to understand is that there's, alexothymia is more often found in men than in women. So there's

even something called, I forget the exact, yeah, normative male elixothymia. So let's talk about normative male elixothymia for a second. So what do we mean? by normative male alexothymia. What we mean is that researchers have sort of found that a certain amount of elixothymia is normal in men. And why is this? So if you look at how men are sort of culturally raised, we're really raised to express one emotion. So frustration or anger. That's really the only thing that you're allowed to feel as a man growing up. This is sort of changing now, thankfully, but I just saw a social media clip about, you know, how men shouldn't cry from a conservative commentator. But so this is kind of normal where we're sort of taught like, you know, if you think about

like, you know, a 13 year old kid who's playing sports and they feel afraid to go to the big match. And when they feel fear, what are they taught? Or is that an acceptable emotion? No, fear is something that needs to be conquered. Fear is for the weak. And heaven forbid, you feel ashamed, right? Because like crying and feeling shame, like those aren't acceptable emotions. Those are also emotions of weakness. What are the emotions that a strong man feels? A strong man, feels anger, righteousness, right? And what I really find is that for a lot of men that I've worked with, and we'll get to women in a second, because things are changing very rapidly, is that anger sort of forms an umbrella emotion. So I'll give you all kind of a simple example, okay? So let's say I get

rejected by someone that I'm interested in. Let's assume a heteronormative relationship between a man and a woman. So when I feel rejected by someone, there are all kinds of things that normally come with rejection, right? So there could be fear that I'll be alone forever. shame at myself for being rejected, feelings of low self-worth. But is that what I say? Do I go to my friends and say, hey, I ask this person out. They turn me down. And now I'm afraid that I don't have the basic qualities necessary for being in a relationship. I'm afraid of being alone for the rest of my life. You know, like, I'm just really scared about what this means for my future. That's not how we talk, right instead what you tend to see is what what's a lot of considered toxic uh masculinity which is like

oh yeah like she dumped me like screw her and then my friends will also say yeah like you deserve better right and that what they'll kind of do is they'll like they'll they'll kind of ramp me up and this isn't just true of men it absolutely happens with women as well where people will say yeah you dodged a bullet oh yeah that person doesn't deserve you and they'll take all those fears and shames and loneliness and what they'll do is they'll like replace them with anger. Screw that person. They'll get mad at this person for hurting you. And so it's very easy for anger to become the umbrella emotion.

That's the thing that we're kind of normalized to feel. A couple of other considerations here is that in my opinion, this is changing rapidly. And I've seen more women who are elixothymic in the last, you know, if we look at like when I started med school in 2010, I'd say the nature of alexothymia and the discrepancy between men and women is shrinking. So there's good evidence that a lot of women are alexothymic as well. So for example, if we look at anorexia nervosa, so this is a diagnosis that predominantly affects women. 63% of people with anorexia nervosa will be alexothymic. Okay. 50% of people with major depressive disorder will be alexothymic. About probably less than 10%

of the population is severely elixothymic, which is pretty big. And then, like, like probably, you know, up to 30 to 50% of the population is moderately or mildly alexothymic. I'm not entirely sure about that number. And so what we're seeing is that this is probably changing rapidly. Why is it changing rapidly? So the first is that there's some good news, which is that men are getting more in touch with their emotions. That's something that, you know, we try to do here and other people are trying to do as well. I think women especially are starting to recognize that men have difficulty with emotions. So thank you for y'all support. The other thing that's happening with Alexothymia is increasing technology use. And this isn't gender specific.

And what we see with increasing technology use is that using any kind of social media or video game suppresses our emotional circuitry, like the limbic system. So this is like the amygdala, to certain degree, the hippocampus, a couple of other areas. And so what happens is if we spend eight hours a day using technology, those are eight hours of the day where our emotional circuitry is being suppressed. And as our emotional circuitry enters this chronic state of suppression, and more importantly, as it gets suppressed during periods of critical development, so if I'm a teenager and I feel really bad about myself, normally like, so a lot of teenagers feel bad about themselves, and to a certain degree, we can't escape those feelings. So we are by definition forced to deal with them,

right? So I'm moping around the house. My parents notice something is wrong. They try to talk to me about it. I reject them. I go hang out with my friends. This is kind of when I was going up when I was a teenager like back in the 90s. Right. And there was a certain amount of like emotions I couldn't escape from. I started falling into a video game addiction because that's when I started to escape from my emotions. And now what we're seeing is a generation of kids who have a very, very, very easy escape from their emotions. And as we have escapes from our emotions, we don't develop them. We don't develop our internal understanding of them. So as technology use is increasing, we're seeing that normative male lexathymia is starting to actually get balanced out. And I think a lot of women, I'd say

women now are more elixothymic compared to men. I'm not saying they're more than men, but the gap seems to be shrinking with technologies. Okay. So the internet is essentially dulling our emotions. So as our emotions get dulled, what kind of problems does this create? So the first is let's talk about purpose and motivation. Hey, chat. Subscribing to our YouTube channel allows us to help more people with their mental health. Thanks to your support so far, we've already reached thousands of people from across the globe. So help us out and hit subscribe. Wait, they have to hit subscribe and click a bell now. Let me ask you all a question. How do you find purpose in life? So like, how do you find it? Do you go outside walking down the street and then you find it? Do you Google your way to an answer? Do you

randomly go and volunteer until you discover purpose in your life? That's not, that doesn't really work. Right? So I don't know how to say this, but purpose comes from inspiration. And what do we, what do we mean by purpose comes from inspiration? It's kind of like if you find my purpose, my purpose doesn't come from outside of me. It comes from within me. And what I've seen more and more in our society is that we've got, when people have difficulty finding purpose, what I tend to see is that their internal voice has been squashed. So I'll see this a lot with controlling parents, for example. So parents who will say like, I don't care what you want. You need to do what I tell you to do. We see a lot of gifted kids who struggle with finding purpose. And I think one of the middle connecting pieces is actually Alexothymia. Because these are kids whose potential was realized, right? Or notice by their parents. And their parents were like, oh, you're too smart to do ABC. Forget what your internal voices. I don't want you to spend time in art class. I want you to go, you know, be an entrepreneur tech genius at the age of 19. And so a lot of times what we're seeing.

seeing is that people have difficulty finding purpose because those internal voices were squashed by controlling parents. We also tend to find that people who have difficulty finding purpose were also neglected or dealt with some kind of abuse or had early childhood experiences or poor attachment formation. So remember that attachment is how we form human relationships. And the attachment theory also teaches us or attachment is how we learn what we feel. on the inside. So a child early on doesn't know what they're feeling, right? So if I'm an 18 month old and I'm walking around and I stumble and fall, do I feel hurt? Should I panic or should I laugh? And if you look at an 18 year old who stumbles and falls, the first thing that they're going to do is

look to the adults in the room. And if the adults in the room are terrified, oh my God, little Timmy fell down. Then the child starts crying. He's like, oh, crap, I should be worried right now. everyone else is worried. And so then a child learns to, they learn to recognize their feelings by looking at the faces of others. Similarly, if that same child turns to everyone else and everyone else starts laughing, then the child will start laughing too and they'll be like, oh, this is funny. And so what ends up happening is if we grow up in neglectful households. So we're not talking necessarily about abuse, but even if you have a single parent household who works two jobs and they're not around to reflect your emotions back to you, what we discover is that these kids grow up

to be Alexa Tha Tha. And as they grow to be alexothymic, they struggle because they don't know how to look into themselves. And as they don't know how to look into themselves, they can't find purpose. And what they end up doing is looking outside of themselves for some kind of compass or goal to move towards. I have no idea what I want in my life. If you ask me, so now we can kind of go back to some of our data, right? So if we kind of go back to this, if you ask me what I want, I have constricted imagination. I have no idea what I want.

What I want is to have purpose. What I want is to no longer live this life. I want this life to change. That's what they want. This is also where you see people who are externally motivated. And why are they externally motivated? Because they're colorblind to themselves. Because remember, what is the relationship between emotion and motivation?

If we want to understand this, go watch a movie. Any movie. It doesn't matter what the movie is. When there's a protagonist, hero or heroin, what? motivates them to overcome, to triumph against adversity. Dig really deep and beat that final boss. Is it logic? When the hero is losing or heroin is losing,

and that critical period comes, do they go to the library and do the next four hours of the movie show them doing exhaustive research in logical mathematical proofs to discover the solution? And then they hand a treatise about how the villain is being a bad person to them. That is logically perfect.

And then the, then they show that, the villain is flipping through the pages and then realizes logically I am defeated and then the movie ends. No, you never see people furiously reading things on Wikipedia and listening to podcasts in order to triumph over adversity and find motivation to keep going, right? What do you see? Emotions. And if you think about the periods of your life where you've been the most motivated, chances are emotions have something to do with it. All those moments of life where you're like, never again, I'm never going to be in this situation again. Or you feel inspired. to create, right? Is that like logically you're like, oh, I guess I should do this? No, you feel

inspiration. And how are you supposed to feel inspiration if you're emotionally colorblind? There's a lot of good evidence to support this as well. So we know that the amygdala, which is our fear center, is really good at putting the brakes on our frontal lobes. It can just shut them straight off. So our frontal lobes are responsible for our executive function, which is planning and executing tasks. So we can wake up this morning and say, okay. I've got this to-do list, and I've got 14 things to do. And our amygdala is like, yeah, we're afraid to leave in the house. We're not going to do that today.

And you're like, all right, well, I guess I'm not going to do anything today. But you don't realize it because now the problem with Alexaaimi is you're blind to this component. So what are these people actually experience? They experience a motivation. I'm just not motivated to do anything. They don't see the emotions holding them back. Because what keeps us from acting negative emotions? Fear of shame.

fear of rejection, fear. So purpose and motivation are absolutely tied to alexothymia. Next up, let's talk about addictions. So there's evidence that shows people who relapse are emotionally unaware. So if you look at when people use, the more that someone is able to identify what they are feeling in the moment, the less likely they are to use a substance. So for example, this is why AA uses call your sponsor if you're struggling. Right? Let's think about that. Why should you call your sponsor if you're struggling? When you call your sponsor, first of all, let's understand what struggling means. What is the experience of struggling? Feeling negative emotions. Why don't we say call your sponsor if you're feeling negative emotions? Why do we use the word struggling? Because we're elixothymic and we don't even know what these are. So all we experience is the struggle. Do you'll see that? Our experience of it is just that life is hard because we don't even know that struggling. Struggling, struggling is,

is not a real thing. It's an umbrella term. What is struggling? Like, what does it mean to struggle? Things are hard. Well, what does that mean? It's hard for me to do something. Well, okay, what makes it hard? Well, I'm terrified of asking my boss for a raise because I don't want to be perceived as greedy. Okay. Now we see that there's potential for shame. Now we see that there's fear. Now we see that there's anxiety. But what we do when we're alexathymic is we just say, I'm struggling. Bro, I'm struggling. And I've seen this clinically a lot where I'll like work with people. And I'll them. I'll be like, hey, so like, you know, you're sober for six months. What happened? They'll say, I don't know what happened. I just relapsed. I was good one day and then suddenly I wasn't good.

It just happened. And the more than I tunnel down with those people, I don't know if you all have friends who have struggled with addiction or you yourself have struggled with addiction. And I don't not to say this, but like, if RNG is responsible for whether you stay sober or not, like that's not a winning strategy, right? Because when someone says, it just happened. That's RNG. There's nothing you can do? Like, if it just happened, what can you do to overcome it? You can't do anything. Oh, I guess just in the future, just make sure it doesn't happen again. Well, how? So the more that I work with those people, what we actually tunnel down into is it didn't just happen. There was a slow burn of negative emotion that reached a certain tipping point was overwhelming and you didn't know how to cope.

Because here's the common element of all addictions. What is the one thing that unifies all addictions? Emotional coping. The one thing, right? So whether I'm shooting up heroin or I'm addicted to shopping, What they do is manipulate my emotions. So any substance will kind of mellow you out or maybe activate you, right? Start make help you feel good. Sometimes that's euphoria. But other kinds of behavioral addictions like technology addictions, they dull our emotional circuitry.

And so as we dull our emotional circuitry, this is really important to understand. It doesn't make the emotions go away. We just lose sight of it. And as we lose sight of it, it starts to act in other dimensions of our life. It always seeps out. That emotional energy is there in the brain. It just affects different parts. of our brain in different ways. Just because I'm unaware of the activity of amygdala

does not mean that the amygdala does not interfere with my frontal lobes. Doesn't mean that I don't feel fear and it keeps me trapped at home. Right. So the effects on the brain are absolutely there. We just aren't aware of them. So what we see with alexothymia is that people who are addicted, there's actually excellent research on this by Dr. Volkow. Volkow, I don't know how to pronounce it, but she's awesome neuroscientist who talks about the neurobiology of addiction. And she actually has isolated that there are like particular emotional circuits in the brain that as we raise awareness of our emotions or we look at people who are how are the brains of people who are addicted different from the brains of people who aren't and there's one of the major benefits sorry one of the major

differences is that people who are vulnerable to addiction have a lower level of emotional awareness and literally their brains are wired in a different way so what we tend to find is that people who are not aware of their emotions can't manage them so this is where like here's the tricky thing So if I'm not aware that my negative emotions are building up, how am I supposed to healthily cope with them? Because the goal of overcoming an addiction is you have to develop healthy coping mechanisms. Fantastic. Let's develop healthy coping mechanisms. Let's meditate. But if I'm not even aware that I'm feeling anxious, like I'm not even going to bother to meditate. Does that make sense?

So in order to develop healthy coping mechanisms, we have to know when we need to cope in a healthy manner. And if we're lexatymic, we don't even realize it. So let's move on. Now we get into some real problems. Okay. So here's what we tend to find in people who are lexathymic and what their relationships look like. Oftentimes, they are cold and distant when it comes to communication. So in their relationships, they like feel distant. So this is what we would call emotional unavailability. I'm looking for someone who's emotionally available. That's someone who is not cold and

distant. Let's think about what the opposite is, right? So warm and present. This equals emotional availability. And I want you all to think a little bit about, okay, if you're cold and distant in a relationship, think about your parents, right? Were your parents warm and present, or were they cold and distant? A second feature, if you look at the science of alexothymia and look at, if you take people who are lexathymic and look at what other communication patterns do you see, the other thing, y'all are going to love this. Social non-assertive communication. So sometimes this is social anxiety, or we call this social anxiety. I'm not saying that they have a social anxiety disorder.

What I'm saying is that people who are socially non-assertive with communication have difficulty walking up to someone and initiating a conversation. They have difficulty advocating for themselves, right? They're non-assertive in their communication style, so they're passive. So this is the person who will go to a party and will stand there in the corner and wait for someone to talk to them. And we call that social anxiety. But this is actually associated with.

Alexothymia. Okay? Next thing, this is the beta mindset. Right? So I'm going to draw a pretty broad correlation here. I'm not saying that this is real, but what I'm saying is if you listen to people who talk about being betas or get called betas, they're non-assertive communicators, right? So they're people who will like have lots of feelings, but then like won't go and ask someone out. So I think, I know it sounds kind of weird, but I think a lot of like people like this, you don't have to go and take the red pill and become an ultra chat or things like that, what you actually just need to do is be aware of what your internal emotional state is. And as you become more aware of your internal emotional state, you can start to be more assertive in communication. And this is where if you look at some of

like this community, right, they're all about assertive communication. I think sometimes their assertiveness crosses the, you know, the bridge into toxicity and being harmful. But I think that like this is the kind of interesting thing about that community is I think they've stumbled on a lot of good stuff, but I think their underlying mechanisms are not scientifically based. Because what you actually discover is that as you become less elixothymic, we're not saying that you need to be a better person. You just need to be aware of what you're feeling on the inside. And as you become aware of what you're feeling on the inside, you can start to communicate more assertively. So this is also, there's some really interesting data here to understand about relationships, which is that if you look

at men, men will oftentimes be reluctant to engage in couples counseling. There's research on this. And if you ask men, why don't you want to go to couples therapy or why are men resistant to couples therapy? What it actually comes down to is that men feel like they are at a disadvantage in terms of participating in couples therapy. And why is that? It's because they don't know how to describe, they can't describe their feelings to other people. And so what happens is they go into couples therapy and then they have a partner who's very emotionally descriptive. And then they feel like their partner does such a better job at explaining. themselves, that the therapist takes their side. And then when the therapist asks, okay, what's your experience of this? The dude is like, I don't know, right? So men actually feel like they're at a

disadvantage when it comes to therapy. Now, I'm not saying that men are at a disadvantage. That's a really, really important thing to consider. So when I work with men, for example, in couples therapy, what I oftentimes find is that if I have an elixothymic patient, man or a woman, right, because a lot women can be a lexothymic too. It's my job as the couples therapist to translate this into I'm afraid. I'm ashamed. So I don't think that men are actually at a disadvantage in couples therapy for the record. They just feel that way, which leads to their reluctance to engage. And then let's try to think through. So if you can't communicate your emotions, if you don't know what you feel and you can't communicate emotions, what is that, what happens in a relationship

when you can't communicate your emotions. Well, this is where things get hard because what happens is we get into arguments. And we get into arguments that are very confusing because the stated reasons that we have don't actually match what we feel. So I'll give you all an example. So I was once working with a young man

who got into a conflict with their significant other. And he was concerned because she had a couple of conferences and business trips lined up where there were male colleagues that she would go with, right? So it was like a group of people from their job. So it wasn't just like one woman and one man. But this guy was really, really concerned. And he was like, yeah, like, you know, men just want one thing. And his partner would say like, oh, you know, these are just

my, like they're friends of mine from work. I'm not romantically interested in them at all. They're not romantically interested in me at all. We're just friends. So there's nothing for you to worry about. And then the man responds with, well, like, that's just not true. All men just want one thing. You know, they're just biting their time. Like, I don't want you to go. Like, you know, like, I don't think it's good. You don't understand them. And so there's this kind of paranoia that started to come out. And sometimes would really result in controlling behavior. Right. So there's paranoia and controlling behavior because they're like, you don't understand men. Right. I understand men. You're in danger. I don't want you hanging out with them. I don't want you hanging out with them.

When really what's underneath is fear. Right. So the man isn't able to articulate. I feel insecure. I'm afraid that I love you so much and I think you're such an amazing person and I have self-esteem problems. I don't think I deserve you. I think you deserve someone way better than me. And so what I'm afraid of is that at some point, if you spend time with other men who are better than I am because I have self-esteem issues, eventually you will realize that you can do better than me.

And since I love you and since I care about this relationship, I don't ever want that to happen. I don't ever want to lose you. Do you deserve better? Yes, but do I want to hang on to you? Absolutely. And so now what happens is unless the man is able to vocalize that, because by the way, what kind of shameful crap is that? Like, who says like you, you know, like who says that kind of thing? How is that chat at all? Like, that's the most beta stuff you could say, by the way, right? Which is why we suppress those kinds of thoughts growing up and then we don't know how to articulate them. And now we see how this leads to conflict in a relationship.

Because now the discussion is, are all men trying to get into your pants? No, they're not. and you guys are arguing up here, and then there's no resolution, because y'all are each trying to convince each other where the real problem is I feel insecure. I'm afraid that you're going to leave me. And then the worst part of this situation

is because that's the root problem that leads to the paranoia and the controlling behavior, eventually what ends up happening to this person's previous girlfriends? They end up leaving because he's so controlling, right? And you take that to the internet, and people like, oh my God, that guy is so controlling,

dump him and move on. And then, like, now what's happened? Now the person has been further traumatized. Oh, my God, my self-esteem is so much. I really didn't deserve that. People have been leaving me over and over and over again. Now I really like any decent person deserves better than me. And so then the whole cycle repeats.

And what does it come down to? Alexa, I mean. It comes down to inability to understand what you're feeling, inability to admit to yourself that you're insecure. And sure as hell ain't going to communicate that to this person that I'm afraid of leaving. And so I sabotage myself. I shoot myself in the foot, and we result in a situation where you can't communicate with your partner and you end up driving them away. Because the actual problem in the relationship cannot be

discussed or addressed. And instead, you all end up having nine rounds on whether all men are trying to get into your pants or not. So a lot of what we see is controlling behavior actually comes from inability to understand and articulate your own feelings. Now, in this example, we sort of use the situation of a man-dating woman. I've absolutely seen it the other way as well, right? Where a lot of controlling behavior actually comes out of insecurity. And so it's not necessarily men to women just just in that direction. So what we end up seeing is that elixothymia causes all kinds of problems. And when you go look at relationship advice stuff, they're not going to say, oh, yeah, the problem here is that you're, you know, you're emotionally colorblind. What people will say is

communicate, communicate, communicate. But communicate what? People say communication is the foundation of a healthy relationship. But what to communicate? What should I say in communication? What you should say is be aware of your feelings and communicate your feelings, your drives, your desires to your partner. And so I think that alexathymia is a really, really common and growing problem. We know that less than 10% of the population, up to 10% of the population, has severe elixothymia. But we also see that there are high correlations of elixothymia with all kinds of other problems. 63% of people with anorexia nervosa have alexothymia. We also know that to a certain degree, there is normative, alexathymia. So there's a certain amount of the way that all men are raised, which leads to a

certain degree of alexothymia, which is sort of really allowing us to feel only one emotion. And as we feel predominantly anger, we lose sight and don't know how to detect these other emotions. As we lose sight of those emotions, which, by the way, technology is increasing, is making alexothymia worse across the board, because the universal effect of technology is to numb our emotional circuitry and especially our negative emotional circuitry. So as we have a generation of people who are becoming more internally numb, it creates all kinds of problems, that we see front and center. The first is purpose and motivation. I'm so burnt out at work. Well, why are you burnt out at work? Well, I took this job. Well, why did you take the job?

It's because I had a quiet voice deep inside me that told me that I really want to do this, and that voice was first squashed by my parents, and then I internalized that dialogue and took all of my hopes and dreams and throttled them. And then I ended up, picking a job for prestige, and now I call it quiet quitting. It starts with alexathymia. So we struggle to find purpose. We also know from lots of research that people who are lexathymic have difficulty with their imagination, especially around the future. We also see a lot of problems that we see with motivation, which is that a lot of people will say, oh, I'm externally motivated. I can't do anything unless there's a deadline. And this is literally associated with

alexothymia. It's one of the key four features of elixothymia is to be externally, to be externally oriented thinking and stimulus bound, which means that you don't act unless there's an external thing that is pushing you to act. And let's think about that for a second. Well, why is that? Well, duh, it's because you spent the first 20 years of your life turning down the volume on the internal stuff, which results in alexothymia. I don't know what I'm feeling on the inside. And so what are the only things that I'm left to motivate myself with are things from the outside. We also see other consequences of this, such as a vulnerability towards addiction or worsening of addicting behaviors.

There are high correlations between elixothymie and all kinds of mental diagnoses. So very high correlation with autism spectrum disorders. 63% of anorexia, which we talked about, about 45% of binge eating disorders. A lot of addictive behaviors, up to maybe 50% of people with major depressive disorder, will be alexothymic as well. And so what we're starting to see is that when people get addicted, what is the purpose of an addiction? The purpose of an addiction is emotional coping.

That's the one uniform thing between all addictions. They help us manage our emotions. And if I am colorblind to what I am feeling, I cannot develop a healthy coping mechanism. Because I don't even know that my trash can is 50% full. The only time I notice it is when it's overflowing. Because that's when it starts to create problems in my life. And that's when I end up relapsing. The third big dimension that Alexaaaa causes problems is within relationships.

Because remember, the second core feature of Alexaaidae is difficulty describing your emotional state to others. And when I can't articulate how I feel in a relationship, I'm sort of at a disadvantage in terms of communication. And then I don't know how to tell my partner how I feel, or even friends, right? Where like your friends didn't invite you to a party. And then like just imagine this for a second, like they didn't invite you to a party and you feel hurt and left out. Do you actually go to them and say, hey, it was really hurtful to me that y'all left me out? I feel neglected and I feel undervalued compared to other friends in our friend group. Does anyone talk like that? Maybe increasingly.

But generally speaking, what people will say is there'll be some kind of like weird passive aggressive exchange, right? I'll be mad at you and be like, hey, by the way, I'm around in the future, you don't know how to say that to people. Or when you do say it, because the other person is a lexathymic and you say, hey, I feel undervalued compared to other people. That makes your friend feel ashamed, but they don't realize that they feel ashamed. And so what they end up doing is getting mad at you, right? Because they're alexothymic too, and all they know how to feel is anger. So that shame turns into anger. And they're like, all right, bro, whatever, you're a loser, I'm out.

And that's what the first person is afraid of, that they're going to have a negative reaction. So now I can't even articulate my feelings. Because you've got two elixothymic people, which explains so many online relationships, where we can't communicate our needs to other people, right? When you say, hey, I feel neglected and undervalued as part of the group. And if your friend is not alexothymic, they'll recognize, oh, I feel bad. I'm sorry about that. It's really hard for me to hear that, especially because I've tried to invite you three or four times.

and I feel like I actually value you more than other people in the relationship. Here's my perspective. That the last three times I've invited you, you've declined or you haven't shown up. And the reason that I didn't invite you isn't because I value you less. It's because I feel rejected when I invite you to things and you don't show up. I start to wonder, is there something wrong with me that this person doesn't want to hang out with me? And then you all like have a conversation about it. But if we're alexothymic on either side, let alone both, it's going to sabotage our relationship.

So we tend to see that Alexa Thymia causes problems in all. three of these dimensions. And the real challenge is that unless we're aware that Alexothymia is even a thing, we go on Google searching answers for each of these problems. How do I get my friends to invite me to things? That's a very common problem. No one is out there saying become more emotionally aware, right? When there's actually strong data that suggests that Alexothymies is associated with all this. So hopefully this quick foray into like kind of alexothymia 101 is illustrative helps you all understand a little bit about what's going on. The good news is that alexothymia is not set in stone.

There's some evidence that it kind of gets classified as a personality trait, but I've seen overwhelming clinical success in terms of like teaching people about their emotions. So even when it comes to addiction, I developed a meditation program for people who had addictions at McLean Hospital where the goal, the focus of the meditation program was internal emotional awareness. Because I saw the sort of neuroscientific deficit and we picked all of the meditations that will help people become emotional. aware. And what did we see? As we started teaching people emotional awareness meditations, they started relapsing less. But for a brief period of time, they started feeling worse. They started acknowledging their negative emotions earlier, but then they could reach out for help.

So made them feel a little bit emotionally worse in the short term, reduced relapses over the long term, and overall improved their mental health one year out. So the good news is that there is stuff that you can do about this. You just have to really understand that emotional awareness is a really, really key component because it's like literally chunks of our brain are all devoted to our emotions. And if we don't really understand what those are, how to regulate them, it's going to cause all kinds of problems in our life. If you found this video helpful, check out Dr. Kay's guide. We've spent hundreds of hours writing and filming to help people understand their mind so that they can build the lives that they want. So check out the link in the description below.