HealthyGamerGG - This Is Why You're Not Disciplined

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

🎙️ In this episode Dr. K discusses why people struggle to become disciplined. He explains that many people enjoy their current lifestyle and don't want to change. However, our brain constantly calculates the cost and benefit of our actions, which can make it hard to become disciplined. Tune in to learn more about the science behind why you might not be ready for discipline.💡 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're going to talk a little bit about wanting to become disciplined, but not being ready to. I enjoy video games, YouTube, staying up late, and scrolling, but I wish I was more responsible and self-disciplined. Whenever I think about changing myself, I start to think in a very serious mindset, and I start to feel like I might lose all the fun and goofiness that I feel right now. I know I have to change someday, but I never feel ready. And so this is a really common problem that a lot of people face. It's absolutely something that I struggled with myself. And if we really stop and think about it, why should we change? Right?

If you're living a life today where you're enjoying yourself, you're having lots of fun, you're like waking up every day playing video games. I remember in my case, I was failing out of college, but boy, did I love every single second of it. I'm waking up every day I'm playing video games. I used to order fried rice two pounds at a time to save on delivery costs. And then I could fuel myself for a 24-hour gaming binge. And I was just having such a.

blast. And so sometimes we kind of look at life and we start to think to ourselves, okay, I should be doing more, right? Like at some point I need to get disciplined. I need to start working. I need to start exercising. I should be doing all this stuff. But I'm just not ready to, right? I actually kind of enjoy my life. And that can be so frustrating. But if we really sort of think about it, what's going on? Why is it so hard to become disciplined in the first place? So let's play that tape through to the end. So in your mind, what's going on? Okay, I should exercise, I should put my life together. I should get a job. I should for promotion, I should go to graduate school. Why? What's the point of all that stuff? So let's kind of think about it, right? Okay, so if I get a job, then, okay, I'm going to make more

money. If I make more money, I'm going to work really hard, I'm going to grind, I'm going to spend all these years, I'm going to work 60 hours a week, I'm going to make more and more money, I'm going to get more and more promoted for what reason? So I can retire early. And then once you retire early, what are you going to do? I'm going to have fun. Well, what do you enjoy? What do you enjoy doing? What's fun for you? It's playing video games and watching YouTube and scrolling and just like relaxing and chilling and not doing anything. And this is a really common problem. We all struggle with sort of having things that we want, but feeling like we should be more disciplined. So this is the really wild thing, right? Is we like kind of know we should get disciplined.

We know we should be studying harder, maybe applying for more jobs, gunning for promotion, whatever. But the truth of the matter is that oftentimes we're just not ready for it, right? We actually really enjoy our life right now. So let's say that, okay, you did get disciplined, right? Let's say you did it. Hey, I'm going to like wake up every day. I'm going to work out. I'm going to go to work early. I'm I'm going to be like grinding for like, you know, I'm grinding at school. I'm going to get straight A's. I'm going to get promoted. I'm going to go graduate school, whatever.

You do that for a while. You get paid more money, right? You get paid more money. You grind. You get promoted again and again and again. And what's the point of working so hard so that you can retire early? And let's say you make so much bank that you can retire early. And then what are you going to do with your time?

Well, then I'm going to have fun. Like, okay, so what do you enjoy doing? Well, I enjoy playing video games. I enjoy watching YouTube. I enjoy like sitting around and scrolling on my phone. And so then your brain is kind of thinking, well, hold on a second. Like if the goal of grinding really hard is so that you can retire early and have a good time, but what you enjoy doing is like actually sitting at home and playing video games, like, why on earth would you go through all that trouble when you can actually do that right now?

Because our brain has this like circuit that constantly calculates the cost and benefit of our actions. So this is the circuit that sort of tells us, okay, hey, we need to go to the bathroom now because we're going to be in the car for three hours. And going to the bathroom now, even though I don't feel like it, it's going to cost. me more down the road to go to the bathroom later than it would to go to the bathroom now. So this is a really basic circuit that is integrated with all kinds of physiologic signals like hunger and thirst and needing to use the restroom. But it also does things like abstract tasks, right? So it thinks about, okay, what's the cost of studying versus the benefit of playing video games today? And anytime you're looking at that cost benefit analysis, that part of your

brain is like, why would I want to grind when I enjoy the rest of my life, when I can just my life today. I can just have dopamine today. I can enjoy myself and it's going to be great. And so this is the really tricky thing is that your brain is actually kind of saying and if you really kind of think about it, right, you say you're not ready to change yet, which is a really, really good self-aware kind of statement. And why? Because what's the point? Because at the end of the day, we're going to end up just doing this anyway. And so how do human beings actually get disciplined? Right? Because when you've got the joy of doom scrolling, watching YouTube and playing video games versus all of its hard work, like what's it for? And what we sort of discover,

is that there's one really important thing that actually causes human beings to be disciplined. And that's something called a competing interest. And we know this because we've done lots of research on people with addictions. And I'd love to tell you all just a simple example of this, okay? And so I had this patient who had a skiing injury and then started on opiate medication and they had a genetic vulnerability to it. So they got addicted to it. Super high functioning person, really, really capable. And so I kind of told them, I was like, hey, you know, if you need to withdraw off of, if you need to get off of opi, it's like, we probably need to, like, hospitalize you and, like, give you pain medications and things like that. But they were in a

situation where they couldn't afford to do that if people found out that they were getting substance use treatment. Their job would have all kinds of problems and stuff. So they're like, you know what, I'm going to do it cold turkey. I'm going to do it home. And the nice thing about opioid withdrawal is that it's not as life-threatening or medically dangerous as something like withdrawing from alcohol, which can actually be lethal. So they just decided that they wanted to quit cold turkey. And it was one of the most painful experiences of life. And so if you kind of think about it, how is a human being able to do that? So if you think about the discipline that's required to withdraw off of opiates, cold turkey, or quit smoking, or all these

other kinds of things, right? Because if you think about all that stuff, all these addictive substances, what do they do? They increase our enjoyment, right? They give us dopamine and they give us all the stuff. So how is it that human beings are able to pay that price? And that's the problem with not being ready for discipline is we're not ready to pay the price for discipline. We're not ready to pay the price to get promoted, to go to graduate school, to get in shape, right? We're just not ready yet. And so how do you become ready? You develop something called a competing interest. And so what we learn from getting off of substances is people have to have a good reason to do it. So they have to have something called a competing interest, which is that I have to want something more than the pain of

getting off of this substance. And so in your life, if you're not ready for discipline, what you really need to figure out is what is worth the pain to you, right? And this is where we fall into another trap. This is why this problem is so common right now, because right now, where do our wants come from? Our wants and our desires come from the outside. And if you're someone who's struggling to get discipline because you're not ready or you do it like kind of half-heartedly and then you give up, where is your desire for discipline coming from? Is it coming from in here or is it coming from societal expectations? I should do this. I should do this. My parents are doing this. My friends are doing this.

And this is the problem is that all that crap from the outside and our world is becoming more and more focused on fulfilling like external desires. Right now it's like we have advertisements. We have personalized advertisements. All these websites are tracking you. Right. So they're telling you all the time what you want. So this game company is like, hey, you really want this game. And now if you kind of think about it, we have these like big launches for video games where like we've got three trailers and there's so much hype and we have conventions and they're like hey you want this game hey you want this game and now all these like streamers get early access codes to games right so for like a year before the game comes

out the world is telling you hey you want the stuff hey you want this stuff and your parents are telling you you should do this your friends are telling you should do this you should do this you look at everyone else around you and everyone's telling what you should do what you should want but none of that stuff is a competing interest because it all comes from the outside. And so we as a society have forgotten how to find what we care about. So if you're not ready to get disciplined, it's never going to work as long as you're developing the discipline for someone else. And some of you all may have even grown up in situations where your parents were very controlling, right? And they tried to instill discipline. But if someone is forcing you to study or

forcing you to work or forcing you to do anything, that's not actually disciplined. It's actually the exact opposite, because these are external forces that are controlling your behavior. The point of discipline is that it's an internal force that overcomes your barriers. And so this can be really confusing for a lot of people because even if they've been pressured and they've been successful, they can sometimes have no discipline at all. And any time they're left to kind of self-start, they struggle with it. So what do we do about this? The first thing is, like I said, acknowledge for a moment that a lot of what you want, right?

Not the games and stuff, because that's actually what you want. That's how you want to spend your time, which is why you move towards it, right? And that's also why you're willing to sacrifice things like external respect or money because you're actually fulfilling your own desires there. So how can we start to cultivate healthier desires that sort of qualifies this competing interest that allow us to pay the price to develop discipline? So the first question that I have for you is what do you want? And if your answer to that question is, I don't know, then that's a diagnostic sign that your

mind has been so clouded by external desires. You've been so influenced by advertising and personalized cookies that you don't even know what you want. The world is telling you what you want. Okay. So then the next question that we've got to ask you is, do you want to change? And if you really pay attention to yourself, what you may find there is actually you're going to say, no, I don't want to change yet. I don't want to change now. And then you may sort of say, well, okay, if I don't want to change, then I'm screwed, right? No, no, no, don't worry about it. We're going to help you out. So then there's one more. question you can ask yourself. Do you want to want to change? Do you wish you did want to change? And then

you may find a slightly different answer, right? Chances are we're moving closer to yes. And if the answer that question is yes, I wish I was different. I wish I wanted to change. So now we found something actually really, really important. Even though you don't want to change, you wish that you wanted to change. And now we found something the world is not telling you that, right? The world is not telling you, hey, you like need to change. Maybe they are. But they're not sort of going one level above. Do you wish you were a different person in that you wanted to change? And if the answer to that question is yes, now we've got something really important. So usually when we think about the person that we want to be, there's a laundry list of stuff. I want to exercise. I want to eat healthy. I want to put more

money in my savings account. I want to go to graduate school. I want to grind more. I want to write a book. There's a laundry list of crap, okay, that we come up with. And what you want to do is write that stuff down on a piece of paper, and then go through it and then ask yourself, okay, is this something that I actually want, or is this something that was instilled within me? Is this a want that was transplanted from advertising or parental expectations or societal expectations? Or does this really come from me? And what you'll find is that 90% of stuff on your list doesn't actually come from you. What you're going to end up with is hopefully one thing. Just start with one thing that you actually want. And if you can find that one thing that you actually want, stop and just like,

sit with that for a second. And then what I really want you to focus on is try to do whatever you can to start that thing in the smallest way possible. Think for a moment about the person that you want to be, not the person that society wants you to be. How do you want to be different? And I'm not saying giving up video games or YouTube or any of that stuff. I'm saying like, okay, so if you want to be a little bit physically healthier, then go for a walk every day. Start with the smallest thing. Do five pushups. Do two push-ups, do one push-up. Whatever that smallest thing is, do something, pick something that you can do and that you can actually be like sort of satisfied with yourself at the end, right? Because now you're actually moving towards something that you genuinely want. Now, if you try to do this, you're going to

run into a pitfall. And maybe you're running into it already. And that pitfall is, but it's not enough. So this is where your mind is going to be super sneaky and it's going to tell you like, this doesn't make a difference. Because what difference does two push-ups make? Right? We have all this laundry list of things to do. And so we have to be really careful here. And this is like so kind of twisty and sneaky that it's easy to lose you all. So really try to pay attention to this. Okay. When your mind tells you that, the first thing is what is your mind telling you to do? Your mind is telling you is trying to convince you that you should want all of this stuff because all of those habits or all of those desires have been implanted within you. Right. So it's trying to trick you into telling you that this

isn't enough. The other thing that's really interesting though is that when it tells you those things, what is it actually trying to convince you to do? It's trying to tell you, oh, you can't just do 1%. You need to go 100% or nothing. Because your mind knows you're not going to go 100%. So what your mind is actually doing in that moment is trying to convince you to do nothing and just continue doing exactly what you're doing

because it's doing the cost benefit analysis and it's kind of saying, hey, actually, we can get a ton of benefit by just watching YouTube and playing video games every day. So don't bother with that other crap. It never works. We've tried it before, right? And so we know it's not work.

it. So you've got to be super careful about that pitfall. Just notice what it's kind of trying to to keep you stuck. And the reason that it's kind of trying to keep you stuck, because the mind does this really interesting trick, is that it convinces you that you don't want to change. That's what it's trying to do, right? Saying it's not worth it. And if it's not worth it, then we don't want to do it. And if we don't want to do it, we can continue doing what we're doing. So this is what's so tricky is that that sort of lack of readiness actually comes from the mind. There's one pitfall that we have to worry about, though. If you pick one thing and you start to do a tiny little amount that is aligned with what you want, your mind is actually going to try to pull a really interesting trick on you.

The second you start to move forward with something that you want, your mind is going to remind you of all the stuff that you should be doing because it's going to get all tangled up and it's going to say you should be doing this, you should be doing this, you should be doing this. So doing two pushups a day or walking 15 minutes a day isn't going to be enough. So it's interesting because the second you start to develop forward momentum, the mind will actually trick you by sort of telling you, hey, it's not enough. And what your mind is going to tell you is that it has to be all or nothing. And we can kind of see that in the post. And if you pay attention to yourself, usually when you try to make a change, you try to overhaul your life. So why does the mind do this? Why does the mind tell you that

it's all or nothing? Because the mind knows, hey, if I make it all or nothing, this dumbass is going to choose nothing. And if this person chooses nothing, remember, it's got that cost-benefit analysis running. If we don't bother with all this crap, what do we end up doing instead? We end up playing video games. We end up watching YouTube. We end up scrolling. We end up having a great time getting a ton of dopamine.

And by the way, because we've already done the calculation, right? So if we start to do all of this catastrophic, amazing change, we're going to end up in this place anyway. So I'm going to, I'm looking out for you. That's what your mind is saying. I'm going to save you all the trouble. And we're going to jump right to the end of the movie right now. We're going to just retire right here, right?

If you're a degenerate who's playing tons of video games and you don't want to change, what are you actually doing? You're retiring at the age of 22. And who wouldn't want to retire at the age of 22? Everyone wants to retire at the age of 22. And your mind is like, hey, you don't need to actually make any money. Because this stuff is cheap. There's free to play games.

We're actually set. I'm going to help you retire right now. All you need to do to retire right now is don't worry about all that crap that you should do. So I'm going to convince you that you don't need to do any of it. So you've got to watch out for that pitfall because it's waiting for you. and it's what's kept you stuck this entire time. So just to kind of summarize, it's really normal for us to enjoy the life that we have right now. Because our society is designed that way, right?

Games are getting like more interesting. When I was growing up when I was like seven years old, eight years old, you couldn't game 24 hours a day because you had limited access to games. You had to go and buy a cartridge and put it in your Nintendo Entertainment System. You could play that game for 20, 30 hours, and then you're done. And then there aren't more games to play. nowadays we have an endless amount of entertainment. And then what we sort of tell ourselves is, okay, like, I should do all of this stuff, right? But then there's a part of your brain that's

actually playing that tape through the end, even if you haven't. And it's saying, okay, why should we do that stuff so we can get more money? Why do we want more money so we can retire early? Why do we want to retire early so we can do what we want? What do we want to do? We want to play video games. Why on earth would I waste 30 years when I can actually jump straight to that right now? And this is why we're not ready to change. The other thing to consider is that if we really do want to develop discipline. That comes at a cost, right? Exercising, eating healthy, working hard, those come at very high costs. So how is it that human beings develop the capacity to pay those costs, develop the willingness to pay those costs? That comes from a competing interest.

And this is why things are so hard right now because it's so hard to know what you want. Why is it hard to know what you want? Because the world is brainwashing you to want other things, right? But when a video game company is trying to sell you stuff, they're thinking about their own interests. They don't care about whether you stay at home and, you know, become degenerate. So our society has made it so that we've forgotten or lost the capacity to even know what we want. And so start with that list of shoulds and parents can kind of do that kind of stuff too, right? Where they tell you you should look a certain way, you should have this kind of job in society, Instagram and like all these other social media things, magazines, movies, they're telling you

should look a certain way or dress a certain way. So they're shoving what you want at you. But it's not really what you want. It's what they want you to want. And so how do you get around that? There's a really important question you can ask yourself, is even if you don't want to change today, so be honest with yourself, do I want to change?

No, am I ready to change? No. Do I want to become disciplined? No. So be it. Do you wish you were someone that wanted to change? And if the answer to that question is yes, then come up with a list of all the crap that you should do and try to find a single thing that you actually care about

and move one step towards it. But be careful because your mind will create a pitfall because it'll tell you it's not enough. We have to do everything. So be super careful about that pitfall of your mind. Really focus on what you want and try to implement the tiniest change possible.