HealthyGamerGG - Why Effort Alone Doesn't Lead to Change

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K explores the complex patterns of addiction and the "scam" of hard work. He explains why your life might feel "gray" after getting sober and provides a psychological and spiritual roadmap for reclaiming your joy by understanding how your mind colors reality. What to expect in this episode: The Attention Marketplace: How multi-billion dollar tech companies compete for your attention, creating "addiction machines" that weaken your frontal lobe and ruin your quality of life. The Effort Paradox: Why "working harder" is often a scam; Dr. K uses the "board game box" metaphor to show that shifting your orientation is more effective than just pushing harder. The Post-Sobriety Void: An analysis of why life feels flat and boring after quitting addictions like gaming or drugs, and why sobriety alone is not enough to find happiness. Mourning the "Way of Life": A Freudian look at decathexis—the process of withdrawing your emotional energy from an addiction through "life by a thousand cuts". The Concept of Klisha: How your mind "colors" simple facts with negative projections (like "I’m a failure" or "this takes too long") and how these phantoms prevent you from solving real problems. Rewiring Through Reality: A practical introduction to the Tea Ceremony meditation, designed to train your brain to stay with reality rather than your mind's internal conditioning.HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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To see how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Canojo, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. All righty, chat. Let's get started. Welcome to another Healthy Gamer Gigi stream. My name is Dr. Alokinoja. Just a reminder that nothing we discuss

on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice. Everything is for educational and entertainment purposes. Only if you'll have a medical concern or question, please go see a licensed professional. Yeah. So how you all doing, chat? Are you guys enjoying yourselves, having a good time? Happy Thursday, everybody. Love to be streaming. We've got some fun stuff today talking about effort.

Going to be reacting to some stuff posted on the subreddit. So it's going to be good, man. I love this community, dude. Like, this community is so good. But before we do that, I don't know if you guys saw that, saw this. Did you all see this thing about meta and YouTube in this social media addiction trial? Did you guys like see this? So parents and campaign groups seeking tighter restrictions in social media have welcomed a Los Angeles jury handing down an unprecedented win for a young woman who sued meta and YouTube over her childhood addiction to social media.

media, okay? So I don't know if you all saw this. What do you all think about this? Do you guys think this stuff is, do you think that YouTube and meta should be held liable for social media addiction? Um, huge. Yeah. So, um, you know, it's interesting. Meta said teen mental health is a profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. This, I think is true. Uh, Google said this, case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site. Now, I think this verdict is interesting for a couple of reasons. This is a case of someone winning because of the addictive nature of meta and YouTube.

And I think this is huge. So there are a couple of other lawsuits. I don't know if you all have seen this, but there was this TikTok challenge that is like a blackout challenge, which I don't know exactly what that means, but I think people like basically asphyxiate themselves. And then they died. And so somebody sued TikTok. And then there's this other verdict about child safety. So basically like was liable for the way in which its platforms endangered children expose them to sexually explicit material in contact with sexual predators. And then Instagram and YouTube owners built addiction machines trial here.

So this is a, this is about fundamental addiction. So let's talk about this for a second. So what do you all think? What do you all think YouTube and meta should be held liable for? Out of all the social media, YouTube is the good ones. I was addicted to TV should I sue Disney. So I think these are all good questions, right? So I think it's complex.

It's so hard to protect kids without infringing rights. So I want to talk about this, like, let's talk about the complexity. So meta says this is more complex, and I agree. So I think there's a couple of different things to understand about the negative health outcomes from major tech platforms. So there are cases of endangerment. Okay, so this is like popularizing challenges that are dangerous. This is stuff like exposing to child predators. Okay. Now, this stuff, I think, is like, in a sense, relatively simple. So if there is stuff, there's content on the platform that encourages people to get hurt, like, that is bad. If children are getting exposed to child predators, that is bad. One really interesting thing is, like, the risk for pornography addiction increases astronomically with the age of first,

exposure with a particularly big spike pre-puberty. So if you get exposed to pornography before you even hit puberty, your risk of addiction is way higher. So I think like this stuff I think is like sort of no-brainer that like, you know, if a platform is propagating things that are harmful to people or exposing children to predators, like that's bad. What I think is far more insidious is the fundamental idea of addiction. Right?

So that's where the harm is like not overt. The harm is like brain rot. The harm is an inability to engage with life. The harm is something that we call failure to launch. So this is kind of funny because, you know, I'm known as an expert on many things. And I teach about meditation and all this kind of stuff. But I saw this problem coming back in 2015. I started working on how to raise a healthy gamer,

which is like based on the premise that you have tech platforms that are spending billions of dollars competing with each other for your attention. And let's understand why this happens. Okay. So the fundamental revenue model for all of these platforms is advertising, right? Because people don't want to pay for content. Like content, we have this idea that content is free. And so everyone's like, if YouTube wants to show me ads, screw them, I'm going to use an ad blocker.

I deserve access to this content. So no one's willing to pay for content, which means that the money has to come from somewhere, and it comes from advertisers. So if the money is coming from advertisers, then you have a fundamental incentive structure on the platform, which is get people to watch more. The more they use my platform, the more money I will make. And then you have a problem because now what's happening is you've got all these big tech companies that are competing with each other for your attention.

There's a bunch of research. There's actually this field now of like, I guess, business psychology called the attention marketplace, which is this fundamental idea that your attention is worth money. arguably it's the most valuable thing that people can get from you. So the way that other people monetize you as a human is through your attention. And now we've got all these, you know, multi-billion dollar companies that are competing with each other for your attention. So what they do is they try to increase engagement.

Spend more time on the platform. Pick one more video. And this is something that we've struggled with a lot. So there's been a lot of criticism on our subreddit about the click baitiness of our titles and thumbnails. I think the criticism is fair. The challenge that we face is like, do we make titles and thumbnails that people will click on? Yes or no. Do we want people to click our videos?

And the platform is optimized for this. And so this is where, like, fundamentally, I think the basic problem is, here is that parents especially are outgunned, right? Because you've got these companies that are hiring like psychologists, neuroscientists, behavioral economists, developers, and their goal, like their compensation, whether you get paid $300,000 or $400,000 is can you increase watch time by 0.05%? Can you pull a user away from TikTok onto Instagram? So these are the kind of mandates that people have. And so the good news is like, you know, the reason I wrote how to raise a healthy gamer is because

basically the reason parents I think are fundamentally losing is because we don't know how to fight back. And there's a lot of good information about how to build healthy technology habits. And once we start fighting back, we see really good outcomes. So you can like overcome that addiction. But I think there's a fundamental reckoning, which has to happen. I think this stuff about safety is actually a blip. because I think platforms over time,

because platforms are not incentivized to, how can I say this, when a platform prevents a predator from engaging with a child, that does not cost them a whole lot of revenue, is my belief. The real problem is going to be, how do we reconcile the fundamental idea that the more time you spend on the platform, the more money the platform makes.

And the more time you spend on the platform, the more your life gets ruined. This is the fundamental issue, which I think needs to be addressed. And until this is addressed, like all the other stuff, I think over time TikTok will hopefully get better at like not having dangerous challenges. I know YouTube actually does, in my opinion, a really good job about a lot of this stuff. So I don't know if you guys, like most people don't even realize this, but, you know, sometimes people will search for, like, methods for self-harm and suicidality on YouTube. And YouTube has actually been really on the ball about preventing this kind of stuff. So they do a lot of stuff on the back end. I think it's, like, actually quite good where they're very, very safety conscious.

I think they're the first platform, and I'm not saying this because I'm streaming on YouTube, but I genuinely, you know, think that they're doing good stuff. A good example is if you look at our YouTube channel, they separate out health based on whether you're a licensed medical professional or not. I don't know if other platforms even do that, but they started doing it a while ago. So I think they're quite conscious about safety information. I think the challenge still remains, though, that there's this fundamental idea that the more you use YouTube, the more money YouTube makes. And then there's the second problem, which is getting you to use YouTube a lot or getting you to use YouTube a lot or getting using to use Twitch or TikTok or whatever major content platform, in order to get you to do that, the techniques that they use, the way that they pull your attention in, the way they keep you

engaged, weakens your frontal lobes, and causes problems in the rest of your life. So until this fundamental thing gets addressed, I don't think we're going to see like fundamental, we're not going to see a change in this basic mental health crisis that we're experiencing relating to tech usage. So I think that this decision about just basically addicting without something like death or suicide or something like that, that I think is a really, really, really important decision in the right direction. Because if social media companies or content platforms are,

responsible for the general addictive harm, the cost to your life for making the platform addictive, then I think we'll see change in the right direction. I think it's really fascinating, though. Hey, y'all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health. And so we start by understanding what literally is meditation. How does experience shape us as human beings? How do we strengthen the mind itself as an organ. And so by understanding our mind, we understand a very, very simple tool, a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we want to build the life that we want to. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. I'm back because I failed

again. Dr. Kay, please give me some closure if you can. Earlier times, I can't handle things. Maybe I should try harder. I can do this. Other, I can do this. Other must have worked hard too, even if I can't do anything or handle anything. I must keep doing. I would eventually learn how to deal with stuff. I should try harder. Everything will be fine, right? So you kind of force yourself to work hard. After a long time, I kept fooling myself. I thought things would work out. I knew something was missing within me. I couldn't even do the simplest stuff. I took so much stress on simple stuff. I couldn't even begin to live. I'm a waste who can't do anything properly. I just want to be a parasite. I'm wrong. I failed at everything. Money. Time myself. Nothing but a walking corpse. Bleak.

So I think one of the biggest scams that we propagate in the world today is that hard work will fix your problems. Right. So we live in a culture where like, I don't know if this kind of makes sense, you have one lever that theoretically you can pull to improve your situation, which is that you can expend more effort. Right. If you get a B in a class, if you just study more hours, you will get an A. if you don't make enough money, you can work overtime to get more money. Right? We have this like basic idea that if you work hard, things will get better.

And it's like sort of true, right? Like in the examples that I provided, if you do study more, that is correlated with getting better grades. If you do work more hours, it is correlated with making more money. So it's kind of this like simple cure-all for your problems. And if you look around at people who are successful, there are people who are lazy and people who are not lazy. They're the hard workers and the not hard workers. And we have so much stuff about how to become a hard worker. Right.

So if you're someone who's fundamentally lazy, here's how to build good habits. Here's how to strengthen your frontal lobe. Take this supplement and it'll improve your frontal lobe function. You should meditate every day. You should do this. You should do this. Here's how to cultivate internal motivation. Right?

So we have like, I've taught about that stuff easily, like literally hundreds of times on this channel. All of the elements of how to work hard. But I think there's like a basic, basic, basic problem here, which is that the people who are very successful in life, and I've worked with like degenerate gamers living in their parents' basement. I've worked with like literal billionaires. The difference is not in the amount of time they spent productive. The difference is actually in their effort. The degenerate gamer, I think actually is far more effortful than the successful entrepreneur.

And I know that sounds weird, but like, I'll give you all an example. example, okay? So, you know, I'm a psychiatrist, so I work with people who have depression. And when people have depression, basic things require a lot of effort. Getting out of bed requires a lot of effort. Cleaning your room requires a lot of effort. And then also, when we've got, when we've got ADHD, I was talking to a colleague of mine who's a professor. And my colleague was telling me that, you he's got two students in his class with ADHD. And he was like really surprised by this because he's like, you know, they're able to carry on conversations.

They participate well in class, all this kind of stuff. So he's like confused by the diagnosis. And he's not like trying to suggest that they don't have it. He was genuinely trying to learn about this. So he's like, can you explain this to me? Because it seems to my perception of what ADHD is is different, right? So I thought like people would struggle, but they seem to be well engaged. And so I explained to him that.

one of the key things about ADHD is not that you can't do something, but that the effort required is way higher. So when a neurotypical person participates in a conversation in class, the cost to them is pretty low. Like I can participate in conversations for eight hours a day without a problem, right? Maybe I feel tired at the end of it, but I can do it. The problem with ADHD is that the effort is way higher. So we live in a society where we tell people work hard, right?

So especially in America, lift yourself up by your bootstraps. This is the land of opportunity. The harder you work, the more successful you will be. There's a lot of research that shows that this is probably not true. And this is something that I realized as a psychiatrist, like, you know, everyone talks about, I was in residency. And residency is like hard. It's a lot of work.

You work 80 hours a week, basically every week on average in psychiatry. in surgery or neurosurgery, it's like 100, 110. There are these other, there are these other, you know, professions like investment banking or big law or things like that where you just work crazy amounts of hours. And so, like, I had this kind of perception that, you know, I'm successful because I work hard. Like, I'm working 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week. And then I realize, like, I have some patients who actually work way harder than I do. I have patients who have three part-time jobs because,

a single employer like Walmart won't give them full-time hours because then they have to pay for benefits. So they work like 24 hours at three companies because no one's willing to pay them benefits. That's the most that they can get. So, and so this concept of hard work, I think, like this idea that if you have this idea in your mind, that hard work will fix my problems. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't be productive and you shouldn't be effortful, right? This is what's really hard about this is like if hard work doesn't fix your problems, like, what are you advocating for? You know, I work six to seven days a week. We'll get to that in a second because when I talk about that, a lot of people get upset.

Or not upset, but they're like, is Dr. K becoming a hustle culture, bro? Not really. And we'll get to that in a second. But the key thing here is that effort is usually not what we want to do, actually. I think this is sort of the scam that this idea of, I just need to work harder. I just need to work harder. I just need to work harder. And when I work with patients who have things like addictions, right, there's this idea that

I need more self-control, more willpower, more effort, more effort, more effort, more effort. I don't think that's the right way to live. I think actually, so this is something that is so silly. I had a My daughter and I were playing a board game This was like two years ago And I don't know if you guys have ever had this issue Where like you know you have like a box

For a board game and then you put the lid on top And she didn't understand this Because if the lid is slightly tilted You can push really really really really really hard And the box will never go down Whereas if you reorient the box just a little bit It goes down effortlessly And this is what I think

life is like. Right? So when I work with people, when we have like coaches and stuff working with people, the goal there is not to get them to just work harder. I think that's actually a mistake because when you just work harder, this is how you end up. Right? You end up in this situation where you have all of this hard work that you've expended, all of this energy, and then you're absolutely burnt out.

And then we get into this like pendulum of I just want to be a parasite. I just want to take it easy. I'm tired of working hard. I want to do nothing, right? So I've done everything and more for a long time. And now I want to do nothing and even less. I want to be a degenerate. I just wish I had money.

I wish I won the lottery. I wish I had participated in that Starcraft tournament 20 years ago where third place was 300 Bitcoin and first place was $250. I wish I had done that. I wish I could just be a parasite. because we're tired. Our relationship with effort is all messed up. And so I think the first thing to understand is that like, you know, if my problem is not solved by a certain amount of work, we have this idea that like, okay, more work, right? So how do I build more motivation? How do I

build more discipline? How do I do this stuff? And I've worked with people like that. So I'd say I've worked with a lot of people who are, let's say, between the ages of 27 and 45. And this group of people is classically successful. So they have early life crises and they have midlife crises. They've got stuff like imposter syndrome. They force themselves to work really hard. They end up getting promoted

and then they're doing stuff that they don't really want to do and it never really gets better. And they kind of find themselves sort of like trapped where they've worked really hard and now they find themselves high up on a mountain that they don't like.

So this is where I think a fundamental thing that is missing for a lot of these people is actually understanding. That if you are working really hard and things are not working for you, what you need is better understanding, right? You need to shift that box just a little bit. You need to understand what is the source of resistance. And instead of powering through, shift a little bit. In a shift of your efforts will drastically change the yield on the energy that you

put in. And this is something that it's like, it's so silly, but, you know, I sometimes think we can learn a lot from gaming. And I think, like, any sort of ranked multiplayer game, this is a really good example of, where if you understand one or two additional mechanics, that's worth, like, a rank or a medal. As you're understanding, it's not mechanical skill, it's not effort, right? It's not necessarily being locked in. It's like, okay, if I learn how to creep pull from Dota 2, or if I get a little bit better at last hitting, or if I learn how to do this, if I learn, you know, so I remember seeing this post from a Dota 2 player that if you're a carry and you're on the other side of the river and two people are missing, you should leave the enemy's side of the map. It's like really

simple stuff. And the climb from low rank to high rank is not playing more games, right? This is why we have people who played 10,000 hours of League of Legends, Valorant, Dota, 2, take your pick, and they're still like hard stuck at bronze or whatever. So this idea that working hard will improve your life, I think is like fundamentally incomplete at best and wrong at worst. Like, it's wrong. Now, should you invest your energy productively? Absolutely.

But we'll get to that in a second. So what you need is more understanding. And what I want you all to notice about this post is what are they learning from the friction? Right? This is a person that eventually I'll learn how to deal with stuff. I should try harder. Everything will be fine. Their body, their brain, their life is sending them signals that this is not working.

And they are ignoring those signals. So this is something that, like, you know, this is a problem. this is a classic problem in our community. When I developed the coaching program, this was the problem that was designed to sort of target. And the way that it works, I'll just share this with y'all, and we'll sort of walk y'all through this a little bit, is understanding first.

So really simple. If a patient has, if I have the wrong diagnosis for a patient, this medication doesn't work, this medication doesn't work, this medication doesn't work, I can keep on increasing the doses on medications, I can try additional medications. they have this treatment refractory problem. I can increase the intensity of treatment that I provide,

but it's not going to work if I'm misdiagnosing the problem. Simple, right? You can play a thousand games of Dota 2 or whatever, Fortnite, whatever, but if you don't learn from your mistakes, if you don't understand why the effort is not translating into improvement, it's never going to work. So here's what's kind of interesting. We were looking at some quality improvement data

And a lot of coaching out there is about action and accountability, and our coaches are trained in that too. But the interesting thing is I think our coaches work slower. It takes them longer. So we see optimal changes in 12 to 16 weeks, not four to eight weeks. But we see larger changes because it's focused on understanding your problem. So let's talk about what your problem is. So here's the first thing that you've got to do. this is kind of weird, but if you think about this idea of hard work, okay, think about where you

learned hard work will improve your life. Basically, you learned it from the outside, right? Because if you look at your own experience like this, hard work is not working. if you're someone who has worked really hard, and this can include things like someone who's got ADHD or someone who's got depression, where a ton of effort gives you a tiny little yield. So we've been taught all of this stuff on the outside.

Everyone tells you just keep working hard, keep working hard, keep working hard, eventually you'll figure it out. That's what you learned from the outside. And that works for some people. But if it doesn't work for you, what you need to do is do a better job of understanding yourself, understand what the diagnosis is. So what I find when I work with these people is they ignore their internal signals. Just ignore them.

So when something doesn't feel good, I need to power through. And they kind of get stuck. Like part of the reason that they sort of ignore their signals is if they listen to themselves, they end up just numbing, oh, what do I feel like? does my body feel like? What does my brain feel like? My body and brain feel like doing nothing. So I'm going to do nothing. Well, that's not working. So then I have to ignore what my body and brain do. You'll kind of get that, right? So if I've, I learn to ignore my body or brain because listening to my body or brain doesn't work. And then I have to push myself. But then that doesn't work either. So this is what I recommend you all do. This is a bit hard.

pay attention to what leads to contentment. And we have to define contentment precisely here. Contentment is the opposite of regret. Okay, so the first thing is contentment is after the fact. The action is completed. And if you are at peace, great. If you are not at peace, what is the nature of, what is the way in which peace gets destroyed after you're done?

it's basically what we call regret. Oh, I should have done things differently. It's not enough. I should have done things more. So pay attention to what leads to peace and what leads to regret. And here's the interesting thing. Even if you want to be a parasite,

if you want to waste your time, you know, if you're like, oh, I'm exhausted. All I want to do is play video games all day. I don't want to work anymore. I'm tired of working. That will lead to numbness. It will not lead to peace. You will wake up the next day

you will have regret. Okay? So then we get to another problem, which is that if you work, if you are moving in the right direction, there's still a chance that you will have regret, even when you shouldn't have regret. Okay, let me draw this out. And let's understand why this is. So here's the options. Okay, I feel like doing nothing. And now I have regret. Okay? So that doesn't work. Do something. And I have regret. And what is the nature of this regret? Now here's the fundamental problem.

So look for peace, but these people have difficulty finding peace because it's not enough. Should have done it sooner. Okay. So this is what you need to look for. So look for when you move in the right direction. What are the ways in? in which your mind turns a W into an L. This is what happens.

The other thing is that there's one really, really, really key clue, right? So it's kind of hard, but there's one really key clue. So this is going to be oftentimes related to the Aham Gata or ego. So I'll give you all a good example. So earlier I talked about coaching. And so I would venture that there's a lot of people in the audience. who resonate with this idea, right? So they resonate with this idea.

And then when I say, okay, like, you know, you can work with somebody else. And the reason, you know, I'm a psychiatrist. So I saw firsthand the value of the impact that a professional can have on somebody's growth. Like, that's what I do in my day job. It's a model that works really well, super evidence-based. But there's a problem, which is that I, I don't want to work with somebody else. Right?

So the problem with blind spots is that you're blind to them. That's why it helps to work with somebody else. But you don't want to work with somebody else. You want to be able to do it on your own, right? And so what I find with these people, it's really subtle, is that there are many things that they are unwilling to do because they have this idea that there's like lazy people and then there's the hardworking people.

And I want to be this. I don't want to be this. So oftentimes these people will reject help. So this is beautiful. There's a great paper. Let me see if I can pull it up. Called the hateful patient. Ah!

I'm going to have to Google it. Yes. So this is great. Taking care of the hateful patient. So Jim Groves, absolute brilliant man. works at MGH, had the privilege of studying with this guy briefly. So he talks about manipulative help rejectors. So these are people who will ask for help.

They actually seem the opposite of entitled. They appear to feel that no regimen will help. Appearing almost smugly satisfied, they return again and again to the officer clinic to report that once again, the regimen did not work. Their pessimism and tenacious naysaying appear to increase in direct proportion to the physician's efforts and enthusiasm. So sometimes, I'm not saying that everybody who, you know, falls into this category is in the hateful patient.

But oftentimes these people are very what we call help seeking, help rejecting. They ask for help, and when someone says, okay, here's what you should do, they don't want to do that. Because they have a model of, I want to do it in this way. I want to do it without help. I want to be the kind of person who pulls myself up with my bootstraps. Now, some of y'all may fall into that category. Some of y'all may not. That's the challenge of trying to talk about this, right?

Because this, this is my whole point, is that this pattern has a lot of different reasons internally. So the patterns that we can look for, this is why it's useful to work with people, right? So I'm sharing some of the patterns that I see frequently. So one pattern is that when you engage in effort and you make progress, something in your mind tells you that it's not good enough. So instead of feeling, even though you're moving in the right direction, instead of feeling peaceful about it, instead of feeling proud or positive about it, your mind adds something else.

Look for your mind adding insufficiency. It's not enough. It's too late. and behind. I should have started this a long time ago. You're moving in the right direction and your mind is punishing you for it. Not going to work. Second thing to look for, if you are theoretically moving in the right direction, is that impacting your ego in some way? Is moving in that direction make you feel like you're someone that you don't want to be? I want to do it that way. I want to do it by myself. I don't want to show people how pathetic I am. I don't want to have to say, oh, I went and

saw a therapist and they helped me with my stuff. I want to be able to do it myself. I want to be the thing that the rest of the world taught me about, which is like the hard worker who conquers adversity. Look for ego. That'll be your second clue. And the most important thing, so this is where, you know, sometimes in India, they, like when I went to India and, you know, you hear these stories about people going to places like

monasteries and stuff and their, you know, transformed by. it, which is great. Let's transform people. All for it. What is it that accounts for the transformation? One of the most important things that I learned in India is getting data from here instead of out there. What is it that works for you? Right. And that's where there are certain things like, speaking of like effort and working hard, so I'll just explain this very simply. So there's a lot of people who say that you should work really, really, really hard and expend a bunch of effort, right? Hustle culture people, you'll find these people on LinkedIn and they're like, I work seven days a week, bro. You've got to go hard and like going hard is the way to go.

Like, oh my God, let's go hard. That's not what I'm talking about. So I want y'all to ask yourselves a question. Do yogis in the Himalayas take weekends off? The answer is no. Every day is the same. Right? and this is where you can say rightly so,

that's easy to do because they're in the fucking Himalayas and they don't have their boss emailing them at Friday at 5.38 p.m. telling them that they need something done by Monday. They're not existing in the world. And exactly, that's why they don't exist here because this world is a mess. But here's the key thing that I learned in residency and now when I work a lot, here's the key thing to understand. Being able to engage in sustained effort is a bit of,

not going into the negative, right? So this is the problem with people who work really hard and get burnt out, is they work harder than they have the capacity to work. That's the key problem, right? Is the moment that you dip into reserves to get something done, you are signing up for a debt of exhaustion. And this is where people will say, but Dr. Kay, I don't have a choice.

my boss demands this of me. I have to do it. In my circumstance, I have no choice. I have no choice. I have no choice. And that may be true now, right? And this is the hard thing about this, is crafting your life to where that is not true a year from now.

Being very intentional about, okay, if I have to do this now, so be it. But how can I make things better six months from now? And this is where there are people who do this. There are people who will, you know, job hop every two years because that's what optimizes, you know, income and things like that. But it's not so much about necessarily optimizing income. It's about improving the basic state of your life. Right. So building that sustainability is the goal. I'm not saying that it's easy to do right the second, but that's what you should strive for and put your effort in a direction that reduces the burden of your effort, reduces the demands of your environment over time.

That's hard to do, right? So that's why oftentimes the details of your situation, I mean, generally speaking, I think there isn't generic advice that works for this. So this is where you really have to understand what your situation is and try to improve things by one to two percent. Move the needle a little bit at a time. And there's all kinds of stuff from going to bed on time and fixing your sleep, which we, by the way, have a great lecture tomorrow on. You know, so it's hard to do, but I think it's doable. And like, this is the hardest thing as a psychiatrist is, see, I have so many patients who don't have power in their life. And I can't, like, they

genuinely don't have power. But just because you have power today doesn't mean that you don't have power today doesn't mean that you won't have power tomorrow. And the hardest thing to do, I see this most often in people who are in abusive relationships, is helping them reclaim the power. I understand that you don't have a choice in this moment. How can you get a choice tomorrow? And that oftentimes is highly individual. What are the individual aspects of your environment? everything from parents who, when you come home from work, they take half your paycheck. Like, that's really hard to deal with. Right?

So it's not easy by any means. But there's a lot of wasted effort. And as long as you're wasting your effort, as long as your effort is not yielding gains, really hard to get ahead or fix your life or even catch up. What questions do you all have? taxes. Like, what practical stuff can we do about it? Yeah. So I don't know if this makes sense, but I offered practical stuff. So what I'm curious about is what feels impractical about what I said. Nice. You're the one who posted it. Thank you for posting it. Okay. Okay. So, so, so, okay,

I thank you for asking these questions, right? So how do I know if I found a balanced lifestyle? How do I know, how do you handle a relationship where you're both always in survival mode? How do you handle all these things? So this is my basic point. This is a practical point. So when y'all are talking about, you're saying, okay, what do I do? My whole point is that doing is the wrong thing. This is the most practical we can get, and it's such a mind fuck.

Because doing is the problem. If you're doing anything, that's a problem. you're asking what is the solution my point is that good diagnosis precedes good treatment how do you know if you are balanced or burned it's out you look within right those internal signals are there and the primary internal signal to look for is regret or contentment what feels right within so don't pay attention to what people say dr k says okay Here's how to work seven days a week. Fucking ignore that.

Someone else says, here's you should work four hours a week, right? Tim Ferriss. Ignore that too. As long as you are letting your actions be dictated by things outside of you, it's never going to work. They need to start being dictated by in here. So pay attention to yourself and move towards what feels good,

what feels peaceful, what feels like a lack of regret. right and this is the hard thing about this problem like the hard thing about this problem is this is not a problem it is a symptom of a way of approaching work and effort right so so if someone says okay dr k k how do i close this box right so closing the box is a different like is that's one kind of effort that i'm putting in too hard and then like you just need to shift the orientation of the box and then it'll close you know that's just like one kind of effort for one kind of problem. The specific solution depends on the problem, the thing that you are exerting effort in. How do I get, so here's one that I unfortunately hear way too much. I recently had a

child and my boyfriend or husband comes home every day, says they're tired for work from work, and they play video games for four hours. How do I get my husband to stop doing that? I've tried this, I've tried this, I've tried this, I've tried this, I've tried this, I've tried this. There's a lot of effort with no gain. Right? So that has a different solution. But if we're talking about the fundamental of wasted effort, this is a problem of failure of diagnosis, not failure of treatment.

So the right solution is to get better information. And this is something that feels so foreign because in a world like YouTube and Twitch and whatever, we're all here giving you solutions. We've been trained by. Self-help gurus and things like AI to give us solutions, give us solutions. This is really fascinating. There's a... I'm going to show you all a interesting paper.

There's a really interesting paper that's looking at AI usage for mental health stuff. So this paper is really fascinating. What they did is they presented chat chip-t, which I don't think chat chep-t. This isn't like anti-chat chach-ch-pt. This is just what they studied. They presented ChatGPT with three scenarios. Okay. 22-year-old college student, insomnia for two weeks.

Goal is improving sleep quality. 58-year-old management assistant with a history of lupus, insomnia for two weeks. Goal improving sleep quality. 23-year-old woman, breastfeeding delivery by C-section after traumatic labor, insomnia for two weeks. These three people come to an AI and ask. for help. Provides a quick response. Here's the really interesting thing. It basically provided the same response to all three people. And this is a huge problem, because this person probably has a first episode bipolar depressive thing post-pregnancy. So here's the key thing. We have all been trained.

You guys have been trained. What's the solution? What's the solution? What's the solution? And AI will give you solutions. That's not what makes AI dangerous or ineffective. What makes AI dangerous is that it does not ask questions. The reason y'all are stuck, the number one reason, what is the problem here? What is the problem here? The problem here is not, the problem here is a misunderstanding of what the problem is. So this is where you have to look within. How do you do that? You literally sit and you pay attention to yourself when you act and you look for these particular thoughts, right? When you do something that is correct, what are the thoughts that you have in response to that, that are discouraging doing something in the right direction?

Look for the sense of ego. Do you want to be someone who solves your problem? Or do you want to be someone who solves your problem in a particular way? As long as these two things are there, not going to work. Could it be all kinds of other stuff? absolutely, right? And that is the value of exploration. And self-exploration is hard because you're blind to your blind spots. But this usually gets people started. Great question. Can Agna Chakra meditation help? Absolutely. Okay. Let's move on. Okay. I quit porn, gaming,

and every dopamine hit and now nothing makes me happy anymore. Has anyone else felt that void? Okay, so this has a lot of upvotes. Does anyone else hate the feeling of sobriety? I freaking hate it. I've done and continue to do so, the work, the therapy, read all the books, try meditation, exercise, walking all things, working on my PTSD, but I just feel blah at best, usually much worse than blah. They say it takes about three to six months to feel sober. I just want to be able to be myself and feel good. I want to know if I can feel joy naturally again.

I really don't know how to explain this without sounding dramatic, but I feel like I can't enjoy anything anymore unless I'm on drugs. When I'm high, the stuff that I used to enjoy feels amplified. When I'm not, the stuff that I used to love just doesn't bring me any joy anymore. Music pretty much just sounds like white noise, video games I used to love so much just feel flat. Hanging out with people feels forced and pointless. The stuff I used to genuinely love just feels gray and insufferable. It's like the color has been drained out of everything. life without substances is the most flat, boring, and depressing experience.

When I was high, the only time I was the only time when I felt connected, interested, and motivated. So this is really interesting. So one of the most bizarre lessons I've learned working in addiction psychiatry is sobriety does not fix addiction. So, you know, when I was like training, I had a patients who would be fucking shoot up heroin and I was in Boston, so there was a lot of K2 usage, which is like synthetic marijuana. It's like fentanyl was big, is still big, right? So a lot of opioid addiction, a lot of K2 addiction, a lot of adderol addiction, marijuana addiction, alcohol addiction, right? And so like we have this idea that, okay, so if you're using substances and it's messing up your life, the way to fix that is to stop using substances.

Like, make sense. Like sobriety is great. But then I had like a problem. with my patients, which was, or my patients had a problem, which is that even after they, after they do all the behavioral stuff to fix their, to attain sobriety, sometimes they're left like this, which is like, yes, I'm sober. And being sober is like better than using, because when I was using, my life was a mess. I was homeless, like, you know, running out of money on probation at work. Like I, you know, had nowhere to live. Like, I was bumming money off of people. And like, you know, my parents, like, I was like bad to move back in with my parents.

And like, so life when you're like a bad addict, my life was empty. I wasn't progressing in life. I have all these goals. I'm not moving towards them. I'm kind of stuck in this fucking mess. And so it's like, okay, bro, get sober. But then people get this other problem. Which is after they're sober, life doesn't feel fun.

And so like in some ways it's better to be. sober, but it's also like there's something missing when you're sober. The joy, the zest, everything feels great. It's just not as fun. And so there's almost this like post-sobriety depression that my patients, some of my patients would go through. And this is where, you know, I love neurobiology perspectives on addiction and stuff like that, but this is where I think there's some cool stuff from the field of psychological. And this is not just a problem with people who become sober. This is also a problem of, so I don't know if you guys had this kind of growing up.

So I grew up in a small town in Texas. And there were people who like peaked in high school. Like this guy was like, you know, homecoming king, quarterback for the high school football team, kind of peaked in high school, sort of went to college. college, got a scholarship, wasn't good enough, sort of washed out. And then he's like trying to reclaim that former glory. Another good example of this is someone who gets caught up with the one who got away. Had a relationship, everything was fine. The relationship ends. This person moves on with their life and my patient is stuck. They can't move on. So this is like a problem where I don't know if this kind of makes sense.

some human beings have something in their life that they really love. And then when that thing ends, they feel empty. And so we're going to talk about fundamentally moving on. So if you're someone who has difficulty moving on, right? And by sobriety, and this is like kind of what I mean about addiction is, and you all kind of know what I'm talking about if you've been addicted to something, which is that like the high of that thing is so fucking good and you go chasing it.

Even after you're sober, you're like, how do I find that zest? And people will tell me, and I have patients who do all the right stuff, right? I'm fucking, I'm telling them. Meditate. Because meditate brings joy and inner peace. Meditate more.

You'll find bliss. Blist out, baby. Let's get blist. Right? And people used to do like LSD or psilocybin or things. like that and they're like, hey, I've heard that meditation can have these spiritual experiences too. So let me try that. Let me go to Dr. K. And Dr. K is going to teach me this esoteric meditation. And then I'm going to have these spiritual experiences. And then it'll be like I'm back to LSD or

psilocybin without having LSD or psilocybin. The core thing is you want to go back to that thing, that feeling. And then the problem is you look for other things. Right? You're like, how do I find joy without drugs? like what game is going to give me scratch that itch and nothing does no person lives up to the one who got away no glory that you can find today will live up to the glory that you had in the past no amount of enjoyment sober will live up and let's be honest y'all will live up to fucking using drugs right some Some studies show that crystal meth. You guys want to know why people get addicted to crystal meth.

It increases dopamine transmission by 1,000 to 10,000 times normal dopamine transmission in your pleasure circuits in the brain. And then we're looking for something like that. A gambling. Oh, what a great example. the hit that you get from winning $30,000, you're playing a fucking game of blackjack and you've got 15 on the board, okay? And you're like, hit me.

And you're kind of in for a lot or you're playing poker, like take your pick, right? You're all in, you've got two outs, like a 4% chance and you hit. hit it and then you win the pot and you're like 30,000. You made a bad decision. You made a bad decision. You're fucking stuck.

You're in a bad spot. And then you go all in and then you six seconds later, you make the decision in six seconds because you're fucked and you know you're fucked. You're like, oh my God, how did I get into this situation? Okay, fine. Hit me. One more. I'm all in.

Six seconds later. Boom. Card goes down. Card comes up and you won. The hit that you get from that. And oh my God, we're talking about, we talked earlier about addiction to social media, YouTube and meta. Gambling is a new epidemic. The hit that you get is amazing.

And then you're like, okay, but I'm losing all my money. I'm addicted. I'm a degenerate gambler. Let me go see Dr. Kay. And Dr. Kay is like, okay, let's meditate. Let's help you become sober. Let's uninstall everything. Let's help you, help you, help you.

And then we help you. And then you're like, ah, everything's great. So, this is a weird, fundamental, psychological thing. But if you are someone who's fundamentally stuck and looking for life to have zest, we're going to go back to our boy, the one, the only, the Sigmund. Okay? This is from his original paper of mourning and melancholia. And I want to read y'all something, okay?

So I'll explain this because it's Freudian language, which is hard to understand. Reality testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. Okay? The demand arouses understandable opposition. It is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even indeed when a substitute is already beckoning them. I guess I got to explain it now, because we can't move on. We can't move on without explaining it. So here's what's going on.

We'll go back to Freud. Here's you. This is like some fundamental psychology, okay? So like strap in, fucking revolutionary. So this is how, like, once I understood this concept and I helped people who were addicted, that's how they move on and they find real joy. It's findable. You can find something that is real joy.

But it requires an additional step beyond some. sobriety. Sobriety is not enough. Now we need psychology. We need Zygmund. So here is the object. Let's say winning it being gamba. Right? Gotcha game. T.H.C. Meth. So let's talk about libidinal energy. So what does that mean? Does that mean sex? Freud in the anal phase, the phallic phase, the alec phase. So here's like, okay, this is like some fucking fundamental psychological stuff, okay? But I really want to try to explain it. And I'm going to try.

So here's you. And here's some object outside of you. And then what happens is this object brings you joy. So then what happens is, you invest in this object. You have this fundamental energy. So the libidinal energy is the energy of like enjoyment and emotional investment. So if you guys think about something that you're like addicted to, you're emotionally invested. You have a relationship with that thing. Right. So it's like the game or the gambling or the weed is how I feel alive. It's how I feel. It's how I feel. It's how I

joy. It's how I feel like I'm invested in this thing. This thing is the source. It's where I put my joyful energy in my emotional engagement. Right? And I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but when you're like really into drugs, there's all kinds of other shit that you're just not invested in. There's your job, there's your family, sometimes there's even your lover. right? And you're just not, it doesn't, it's not where your mind is, it's not where your energy is, it's not where your investment is, you're just like, you're a fucking addict. So this is what you're thinking about all the time. Now here's the really messed up thing. When this thing goes away, and this paper is about mourning and melancholia, right? So he's talking about mourning.

So this can even be a person. So this can be, you know, my glory days as a football, Star, this can be the one who got away. It doesn't really matter. Like, do you all see how, I'm going to just check chat real quick because I need to understand this. Do you all see how, like, all this stuff is kind of the same? It is the fundamental energy of investment into a thing, the thing that we get attached to, the thing that brings us joy and pleasure. Do you all see how this is like all kind of one thing? Does this make sense? Okay. So all of this stuff is one thing. Now, here's the problem. When this thing goes away, when this person dies, when the football career ends, the one who got away, gets remarried, we stop using meth.

Even though this thing is gone, our emotional energy is still stuck in this pipeline. And here's how you know this, because you think about it. Because you look for something else, right? So this thing, I don't know if this kind of makes sense. Okay, this is like Dr. Kay trying to explain the fundamentals of Sigmund Freud in 15 minutes. Okay. So this thing has like a shape. Right?

So this thing has drugs, let's say, lover. And then once these things are gone, we look for other things. Like, okay, meditation. Can I get meditation to fit in here? We look for fundamentally, we always look for a replacement of that thing. That's the key thing. We want to replace that thing. We don't want something else.

We only want that thing. I'm looking for my former glory. I don't want a new glory. I want the former glory. I don't want to listen. I don't want to enjoy music in this way. In this white noise way. I want to enjoy music in that way.

Like the feeling of drugs when they hit, baby. You know what I'm talking about? When it hits. When it hits. And you know you are. in for a good time. Fuck yeah. Chasing the dragon.

Oh my God. It's been so long since I've used. I've been sober. Oh my God. I've been sober for six months. And I relapsed. Oh, thank God. Let's go.

Oh, my God. All my receptors are back to baseline. I have no tolerance anymore. Oh, my God. I relapse. It feels so fucking good. Even when I was sober, right? I was still attached to this.

I was looking for the replacement, baby. I was looking for the replacement and nothing. I tried to get this thing to fit in there and it didn't fucking fit. And I tried to get this thing to fit and it does fit inside, but it's only this small. I want this whole space, man. Come on. I want that love again. Right.

So even though we're sober, even though we're single, even though we're healthy, our fundamental investment is still here. Make sense? So let's talk, no, baby. I don't want to, y'all tell me to relax. No. We're talking about Sigmund Freud. I'm getting geared up.

Okay? All right. So the demand arouses an understandable opposition. It is a matter of general observation that people will never willingly abandon a libidinal position. Okay? What does that mean? That means that once the...

This shit is over here. I'm not going to give this up. I don't want to give this up. Because if I abandon this position, then all this stuff is just in here and this doesn't feel good. There's no libidinal attachment to anything. Like there's just, it's just empty, right? So I want to find a replacement. I don't want to just have nothing because I have no attachment over here, no attachment over here, no attachment over here.

No attachment over here. So it's just like if I just give up drugs, then I've got nothing. Okay? The opposition can be so intense that turning away from reality takes place and clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis. Now, what the hell does that mean? That means that even though we know this is gone, right? Oh, like the one that got away, he's married now. This is gone and never coming back.

We are still hoping. We are still looking for. for a substitute. Even though it's gone, even though it's gone, even though we're sober now, we're still hunting for something in here. We don't want to give it up. You guys know what I mean? Like if you're sober, you still don't want to give it up.

And this is why people say, hi, my name is Alok. I'm an alcoholic. My last drink was 32 years ago, and I'm still an alcoholic. What does that mean? Is it a neurobiological genetic predisposition to get addicted to alcohol? sure, but it is also this. It is also this. Okay? Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless, its orders cannot be obeyed all at once. They are carried out bit by bit at great expense of time and cathetic energy. And in the meantime, the existence of the lost object

is psychically prolonged. Okay, we'll explain what this means. This is the key sentence. Each one of, Each single one of the memories and expectations in which libido is bound to the object is brought up in hypercithected, and then detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it. Okay. What the hell does that mean? Okay. So, what does that mean? So here's the key thing.

Okay, this is huge. Oh, my God. I hope this is making sense. So, let's just pick marijuana. When I form a libidinal attachment to, marijuana. Okay, so like, I'm fucking invested. Like, yeah, let's go. Love getting highbrough. We think that when we're sober, this is gone, but it's not gone. I'll tell you, this thing is actually a thousand things. It's the sound of music. It is the joy of video games. And it's also

different kinds of joy. It's a moba. It's an FPS. It's a story-based game. It's a cutscene, right? And it's different kinds of music. It's appreciating reggae, appreciating Snoop Dog, appreciating maybe classical, right? And it's also feeling normal instead of socially anxious. It's being able to lay down and enjoy falling

asleep. You guys like get me? What we get invested in is not a substance. It's not a joint, it's not a gummy, it's not a pill. What we get invested in is all of these experiences. And there are so many of them, right? So my energy's here and my energy's here and my energy's here and my energy's here and my energy's here and my energy's here and my energy's here and it's over here and over here and so we think we've conquered the thing it's a way of life oh beautifully put it is it is a way of living and if it is a way of life it is a person it is your way of life now this is where things get a little bit complicated. I'm going to include it for the sake of a completeness, but I'm not going to explain it unless you guys want more explanation. But then what happens is not only I like this,

it's a way of life, because all of this stuff, when we lose it, gets internalized. This is what Freud says, into the ego. So one way to kind of think about this. So we can think about this in more standard mourning, because that is a better example, right? So when I, so here's the example that Freud gave with mourning. So when there's a person that we lose, right, so this person dies. And let's say we love this person and we're angry with this person. What happens is like we kind of polarize them. We have all the love for the lost person over here, right? Because we don't speak ill at the dead, right? Because when people die, they become saints. And so all of this anger towards this person has nowhere to go, and it becomes internalized.

So all of this emotional energy, which includes love and anger, right, we're going to just use red and green, even though I don't know which one's which. And so there's no, we can't, they can't receive it anymore, so it actually comes into us. So when we lose marijuana, or we lose fentanyl or we lose gambling, like we lose some, like we lose a part of ourselves. Like, we get tied to that loss. Like, that person is gone. That person who was riding high and on top of the world, that person is gone.

So here's the tricky thing. Okay? What we need to do is something called de-cathesis. So this energy needs to be withdrawn and pulled back into us. And when we do this, this is really hard to do. our life we're not we have nowhere for the libidinal energy to go we have nowhere for the emotional investment to go so this life is gray you may think like oh when our my libidinal energy is within me does that mean that i feel fulfilled no it's actually not this is it just has nowhere to go right

and this is normally what Freud says is so when we kind of go back to this passage for a second they are carried out bit by bit at great expense of time and cathetic energy, and in the meantime, the existence of the object, lost object, is physically prolonged. So what does this mean? This means that this process, remember this over here, how... So each of these happens one step at a time. So, okay, I'm going to give up MOBAS. And then I get a little bit of cathetic energy back.

And then I'm going to give up FPS. And then I get a little bit back. And then I'm going to give up story-based games. Then I get a little bit back. And then I'm going to give up, oh, my God, feeling normal. A little bit back. Right?

So what Freud tells us is that, and if you guys have experienced mourning, you kind of know what I'm talking about, right? Because you don't, like, the person is dead, but you mourn them in slices. Mourning is a thousand different cuts. You mourn them in slices. Christmas rolls around.

Like, you know, so like when I was, you know, I'm more, I'm still mourning my dad. Because my dad, you know, he passed away the year I got into medical school and he was so happy that I was, I finally got into medical school. And he's like, you know, all oak you would be a great doctor one day. And then sometimes when I like get accolades for the work that I do, I really miss my dad. So these things, right. And if you've been addicted to something, you kind of know because like it's like death by a thousand cuts. It's like this thing has changed now.

This thing has changed. So I'll give you all an example. So, you know, I have a patient who is addicted to alcohol. And alcohol, it's not just giving up alcohol. It's giving up barbecues. It's giving up happy hours. It's giving up boozy vacations at all inclusive resorts. It's giving up cruise ships.

It's giving up a nice glass of wine when you're touring through Napa Valley. It's like think about all of the experience. It's giving up getting drunk and getting frisky. It's giving up when your friends travel to France and bring you a bottle from the Bordeaux region of France, and they bring you a beautiful gift. It's giving up going to Vegas with your boys. It's giving up having a beer at a football game.

It's giving up such a large part of life. And we don't want to give those things up, right? So when Freud says, so hopefully now this is making sense. So when he says, the demand arouses understandable opposition, we don't want to pull back. It is a matter of general observation that people will never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even indeed when a substitute is beckoning them. So Freud says, even if you've got an alternative, you don't want to give it up. You don't want to give up barbecues and football games and feeling frisky and going to Vegas with your boys.

You don't want to give all that up. Like, that's what life is. And this is the problem when we don't give it up because then it has nowhere else to go. Right. So it's hard to give up. And it has to be given up a thousand different ways. And the most important thing is giving it up means entering this state. the state of gray, truly giving it up.

And that's what needs to be done. Right? So when I work with people like this, it's like helping them understand that actually, so here's the cool thing, actually. So here's actually the most important part. Once that libidinal energy is back within you, once it's truly been withdrawn, there's absolutely a gray zone. but now you can form a new connection.

Now a thread can go over here and now a thread can go over here and now a thread can go over here and now a thread can go over here. And then life can start to have joy. But this object is different. And this object is different. There is never going to be this object again.

But you can have other objects. And here's the key thing. The joy, this is the hard part where hopefully it makes sense now. the joy from drugs doesn't technically come from the drug. It comes from your libidinal investment in the thing. This is where the joy comes from, not the drug itself.

And I'll give you all an example, right, because I'm a gaming addict. You guys know like when you grieve, when a video game ends, right? And then you're looking for that next game. You're looking for that emotional, attachment, getting lost in this world that has good mechanics and leveling up and progression, like you get swept away. You were in that thing now. And as long as you are making comparisons

to that last game, as long as you're making comparisons to that ex-boyfriend, as long as like, sure, I got an award for making the most money at work in my used car. I'm a used car salesman, and I got an award, for getting the highest sales in February of 2020. Whoopty fucking do. Doesn't touch going all in when you have a 4% chance of victory, when you've got two outs left and hitting it big.

Standing up to the world and saying, oh man, I'm so fucked and then getting pulled out of that into a victory, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. I sold some cars. whoopty fucking do. But here's the key thing. Here's why I'm sharing this with y'all.

It's only whoopty fucking do because your libidinal energy is still in that thing. On some fundamental level, you are still chasing that thing. You've not withdrawn from it. You really haven't given it up. It's absent,

but you have not given it up. This is that window in between sobriety and happiness. And so this is the most painful thing, because Freud says it, and it's true, right? We really have to give it up. That doesn't mean, I don't mean behaviorally, which is an important part of like addiction recovery. Like it helps to be sober to give it up. But even, I've seen cases of de-cathesis, even when someone is actively using, you can even argue that, so I don't know if this makes sense.

This is what's like actually really fucking cool. I never thought about this like this before, but this is, I don't know if this makes sense. Okay. So let's say the drug is over here. You have all this libidinal energy towards it. Here's the cool thing. If you give it up, even when the substance is present, now you're not invested in it.

And this probably happens. Like I've worked with so many patients who will say, you know, one day I woke up in enough was enough. They psychologically separate first. They say, I'm done. Psychologically, this is over. It's physical. I'm severing my libidinal attachment.

I'm done. I'm fucking done. I want it. It hurts. I'm in withdrawal. I've had patients who have had both cancer and been an opiate withdrawal, and they've told me opiate withdrawal is way worse than cancer. I'd rather have cancer and chemotherapy over opiate withdrawal any day of the week.

But you sever that attachment first, and then the behavior will disappear. It's so tricky. But here's the key thing. if you are someone who feels like life is gray, life is empty, and nothing brings you joy, sure, there is a dopaminergic neurochemical component that'll balance out within weeks to months, fine. But for some people, that doesn't even do it. That pole is still there.

The siren song is still there. You're still invested in it in your being. You haven't really given it up. And that's what absolutely has to be done on this. level. You have to give it up and give it up forever. And then your mind will ask you the question, if I give it up forever, does that mean my life will be empty in gray? And the answer is yes, and you have to do it anyway. You have to accept, I filled a moment. You have to accept this as a state of life. You have to accept this as a state of life. Then the libidin

energy will grow within you, you'll feel really bad, and then it'll find another thing to invest in. And the simplest way to put this is you can't fall in love with somebody else until you've truly given up on your ex. Right? So simple. You have to make space for other things in your life. And as long as the craving for that first thing is there, as long as that libidinal attachment is there, ain't never going to work.

Questions. Okay, first of all, I've got a question. Does that make sense? So this is like one of these things that... It's like a hard concept. It's not simple. It's Freudian. It's dense.

But it's so powerful. Right? It's not like, oh, here are the six things to balance your dopamine. Oh, I love the question. Okay. What if my ex is my soul? soulmate. If ever I have heard a question that represents a libidinal attachment, it is that one. What is a soulmate? What is the concept of a soulmate? The concept of a soulmate is someone who has all of your libidinal attachment.

It is a libidinal attachment that makes the soulmate. Beautiful. You guys see that it's so good, man. Oh my God. I love fucking being with you all so much. You do. The demand arouses an understandable opposition. It is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even indeed when a substitute is already beckoning them. Here you are at work with another soulmate ready to go who's into you. But oh, what is the concept of the soulmate? The soulmate is what your mind consciously tells you when you have a libidinal attachment to someone else.

Does that make sense? Beautiful question. Now, it's a good question because, you know, over on the membership side, we talked about karma and soulmates at some point. And I believe in that shit. But I think this is the hard, fun, this is the hard, fun, and problematic part about what we do here is if you ask me, Dr. Kay, is there karma and soulmates? I would say, I think so. And you say, Dr. Kay, is there like libidinal attachment and is the soulmate basically the conscious manifestation of this psychological process, which has nothing to do with death or reincarnation? None of that shit exists.

I'd say, yeah, I think so. Right. So the beautiful thing and the challenging thing about being human and being in the world is we have imperfect knowledge. And we have to figure out for ourselves, like, what works and what doesn't work. And sometimes we have contradictory kind of symbols or signals. and like that's just part of it. My take is that there are layers of reality, right? There's like the layer of consciousness and all that kind of stuff.

And then there's a psychological layer, which Freud talks about. There's a neurobiological layer. So I think it exists at every level. So the libidinal attachment towards a soulmate is part of your karma that you're completing and then it gets ruptured and you have to let that soulmate go. You have to cultivate detachment even towards your soulmate. So like it kind of works in a weird way all at the end, which I'll be the first. I mean, if you guys say no, it doesn't, Dr. Kay, I'll be open.

I'm not like convinced that it works. It just seems to be working. You know what I mean? Like there's some way to make it, make it fit. But I'll be the first to say like, that's us trying to make it fit. I ain't saying it's true. Yeah. So what steps I can take to give up on something?

Great question. So a couple of different things. The first is recognized that giving us. up on something is not multiple steps towards one thing. It is a thousand one step things. Right? So your attachment towards a thing is all of the things that it was in your life. How do we mourn? We go through Christmas. We go through birthday. We go through, oh, watching the next season of the show that we were watching together. It's death by a thousand cuts, except we have to go through it. Actually, it's life by a thousand cuts. That's what it is. That's how

how you start living again. That sounds, I can't tell if that's social media, tweet, Instagram worthy. Oh, life by a thousand cuts. Oh, my God, Dr. Kay, you're so brilliant. Life by a thousand cuts. But that's what DeCathsus really is. It's life through a thousand cuts, a thousand tiny severings. And this is the brutal part of it is what you have to do is say, this is gone. stop looking for a substitute. And then you will feel empty. And so be it.

This is what life is. Life is empty. Now, life is over. Love is lost. Now, here's the key thing. When life becomes empty, people will take one extra step that will mess them up, which is life is empty forever. Right? And that's what keeps us attached.

Okay? Let me show you what I mean. So, libidinal attachment. to object. When we withdraw it, life is empty. And so we don't want it to be empty. Right?

We don't want this state. And in the avoidance of this state, we keep it there. That's precisely the absence of mourning. We don't want to be here. And the problem is there's a gap between being here and being here. and there's an uncertainty about being here and being here.

This may never happen. And so when Freud says, the order cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit at great expense of time and cathetic energy. Okay? So this is kind of what he's saying. It's like we don't, so what you have to do is give that up. And then the problem is that once, so here's the thing.

thing. Okay. Here's the thing. Once we're, ah, I won't you draw, bro. Okay. Once you're here, here's the key thing. This feels like forever. And since this feels like forever and is intolerable, we end up going back this way. And if you all have gone through a breakup where like you lost your soulmate, you hopefully and you bounced up, you know, bounced back on the other side. What you discovered is that there was a period of time where you thought you would never love again. But then a couple years go by, you meet someone new and, oh, wow, I can love again. I found my soulmate once in my life and I'm the luckiest person on the planet because I found my soulmate twice.

And that's the problem, right? is when we're in this state of, when we're in this state, I don't even know how to explain this. I'm high. The stuff that I used to enjoy feels amplified. The stuff that I used to genuinely love just feels gray and unsufferable. You have to be in that state. And then the libidinal energy, this is the cool thing.

The libidinal energy won't stay that way forever. It has a natural tendency to go and form attachments with things. but you have to get through that period. That's how you mourn. You give it up, and you don't just stop doing the behavior. That's the whole point of this lecture, is that stopping to do the behavior will leave you gray and sober.

You have to accept that gray and sober is a way for life, and you have to accept it wholeheartedly. And then the libidinal attachment will start to go somewhere else, because it truly needs to be withdrawn into yourself. And there's a period of, like, mourning there. Okay. Um, soul here. I'm like this bros.

Okay. Let's move on. Okay. I like that question. So I'm going to, I'm going to try to get around to it. But there's stuff, there's stuff we got to do first. Okay. Another let's go subreddit.

Meet the impatient man. Hates therapy takes too long. Scared of failure needs to prove his worth. Failure feels worse, the more experienced he is. Ooh, that one hurts, right? I should be able to do this by now. I'm better. I'm higher level.

I should not be wiping on this particular thing. Develops high standards a day after starting a new hobby. Consta procrastinator. Chronic goal post-pushing wants answers not work. I should be good by now. But excessive pressure on himself to succeed feels like he's on borrowed time every second of his life. Never feels good enough. The impatient man.

Okay. So this is a little bit tricky, okay? And here's the reason it's tricky. So when someone makes a post like this, I don't know if this makes sense, but these are all problems that can be solved, right? I'm scared of failure. How do you conquer the fear of failure? Develops high standards after starting a new hobby. How do you keep yourself from moving the goalposts?

Okay. Oh, chronic goalpost pushing. There we go. Never feels good enough. What is the origin of self-esteem? Okay, failure feels worse, the more experienced here. So like, these are all things needs to prove his worth. These are all things that we can give answers to. So we can say, okay, how do you stop moving the goalposts? Okay, this has, or how do you stop setting high standards as soon as you start something? And this is where I could say, okay, there's this interesting psychological, concept where when you feel like you're behind, your mind needs to catch up. So there's something I lived through where I was getting Fs in classes. And when you're done with that semester and you go into the next semester, you don't say, okay, I got all Fs. I should shoot for all Ds. You say, I need all A's. Right? So one of the reasons that we set impossible standards for ourself is as long as we feel like we have to make up for lost ground because learning the thing is hard enough anyway like even if you're not compensating for anything else.

As long as you are internally compensating for your failures, you will set impossible standards for yourself because you need to make up for lost time. That's just one example, right? Another example. Failure, the more experienced you get, failure hurts more. Hurts, right?

So what's the answer there? this has to do with your ego, your perception of I am someone who should be able to do this. I am someone who should be competent and I made a mistake. And so this is not who I want to be. So this is like an issue of ego and identity. And the moment that you let go of that identity and you recognize even experience people can make mistakes, you can be productive towards it. You can ask yourself, okay, how did I make this mistake in this situation even though I've done this before? You can problem solve and fix the issue instead of feeling butt hurt because you're a failure and you should know better. That has to do with the humgar ego.

There's a thousand different answers to this, right? Because each of these are problems. But this person brilliantly was like, this all feels like one thing. And they call it impatience. Like, I'm impatient. Okay? So, you know, we have this. idea that, you know, like, these people who go to India or like go to South Korea or China

or whatever, and they study to become a monk, right, they go through like this training. And then they come back transformed. There's like something fundamental, it's something special that they learn over there that then like solves these problems, right? Like all these problems. And it's like, they get solved, like fundamentally. Like it gets fundamentally fixed. And what is it that they learn?

So we're going to teach you one of these concepts today. I did a two-hour lecture on this concept over on the membership side. Part of the reason that we're not going into that level of detail here today is because some of the stuff that we do on the membership side has like steps to it. So that's, you know, that lecture is like maybe part two of like a series. So you have to understand certain things. But we're going to teach the basic concept. So if you want to solve all these problems,

there is a way to do it. It's fundamental, but it's simple, but it's hard. So this is like the cool thing about like yoga, right? So you have these people like the Buddha who's like, hey, here's this thing that you can do to never suffer again. Just got to do this thing, and you'll never suffer again. And it sounds unbelievable. But I'm going to teach you all about a concept called Glistah. And once you understand

Klitshda, once you understand the nature of mind, you will see how all of these problems are related. And they have one basic thing going on, which is like a basic thing that messes up our life. So Klitshhta means coloring. So here's what is going on. So what we're going to do, I'm going to show you all this.

Okay, we're going to kind of bounce back and forth a little bit. it here. Hates therapy takes too long. We're going to take each of these things. Takes too long. Okay. Are you guys, you guys tell me in chat, oh, y'all tell me in chat which one you guys want me to address, okay? Never feels good enough. I should be good by now. Needs to prove his worth. Okay. Want's answer is not work. Okay, goalposts. Okay, good enough. Okay.

So, we're going to take these things, and we're going to analyze the construction of them. So this is a lecture about thought process. This is not some like clickbait kind of thing. This is going to be kind of hard to wrap your head around, but it's incredibly powerful. Like this is the fundamental shit that they teach when you go stay at an ashram in India. you go to a good one. I mean, a lot of them just teach, like, yoga and meditation. But this is the real stuff.

Okay, so this is stuff that Bataanjali's Yoga Sutras talks about in, like, Sutra 1.10. So I want you all to look at the construction of this sentence. Therapy takes too long. So this is the reality. I go to therapy. And then I say it takes, takes too long. Okay. So never feels good enough. I did something good. It's not enough. Okay, so let's use an example. Like, I ate a salad today. And it's not enough. I should be good by now. This is, um, I should be good. So I did this. Should

be good. Right? I've been going to therapy for eight weeks, let's say, I should be good. Prove his worth. So let's say I did this work. I'm looking for price. Once answers not work. So here's a problem that I have. This will become clear in a second. Okay, you guys gave me a lot of example, so I'm doing this a lot. There's a problem that I have. This work may improve it, but I want to figure it out so that I can avoid the work. Right? This is the sentiment of, I don't know if this kind of makes sense. Like, I'm kind of randomly making this stuff up. It'll become clear in a second. But do you all kind of get how the person who wants answers is like, I don't want to do this work. If I figure this out,

then I won't have to do the work. This is sort of the reality, and this is what they want. So in each of these things, in each of these examples, moving the goalposts, last one, this is actually the easiest one. I did this thing. I need, should have done second thing. So the first thing that I want to point out, and this is probably going to be a little bit confusing, is like, I'm not going into the detail of the examples, right?

The whole point of yoga is that actually you don't need to. You don't need to solve any of these problems. What you need to solve is the pattern or process of thinking itself. And this is where Glittha comes in. So I'm going to explain Glistula, okay? So I want you all to, I sort of construct it this way. We can reconstruct it in a better way in a second. So in life, this is one of the first.

Fundamentals. In life, stuff happens. But when stuff happens, our mind does something really interesting. It adds stuff to the stuff that happened. So let's use moving the goalposts. I said to myself, I should get one A this semester. I got an A. Then my mind adds something else. you should have gotten two. The reality is I got what I wanted. I achieved what I wanted. But then the mind comes in and adds something. So each and every one of these things has the mind adding something, right?

I did this work for eight weeks, but I should be good. This is what the mind adds. It's not the reality of it. Hates therapy. It takes too long. I go to therapy. That's what I should be doing. The reality is I am in therapy.

My mind adds it takes too long. It's not that it doesn't work. It takes too long. Where does it get that idea of what's too long and what's too short? The key thing, don't even worry about that. My point is that this is what is added by the mind. Never feels good enough. I did something good.

And then the mind says not enough. Do you guys see this fundamental construction in all of these statements? Oh boy. The fundamental construction in all of these statements is reality plus thing that mind adds. I accomplished my goal. Mind says not enough. It's like that simple, right? And we can go back to this.

I should be good by now. I should be good. puts excessive pressure. There is a normal pressure. Okay, it's hard to succeed. Let me put forth some effort. And the mind is like, let me add some more. Develops high standards after starting a new hobby.

The reality of it is anytime you start to learn something, it takes some time to learn. Duh, simple. But the mind is like, no, you have to be faster. Okay? So this is what Glistachita is. In life, there is a bunch of, bunch of simple facts. We live in a world of simple facts. But the more disturbed our mind is,

the more we add things to it. So even though this is plain, our mind can add a lot to it. It can add a lot to it. Or it can add very little. It can add a medium amount. It can add a little bit. It can add a decent amount. It can add a lot. So I'll give you all an example. I got dumped by my girlfriend. This is a fact. right it has certain consequences the reality of my situation is that i have to find or let's use this one the lips the reality of the situation is i have to find i have to find a new place to live that's a reality i don't have anyone to kiss on valentine's day that is a reality right there's certain realities i'm going to have to start cooking my own meal okay i'm going to have to figure out

how to pay my bills because we were splitting rent and now i have to figure out finances. This is the reality of the situation. The problem is that after a breakup, I don't live in reality. I live with Glistah. This means I'll never be in love again. This means that now my life is an absolute financial mess. Everything worked out with them, but now I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm like, I'm never going to be able to find a place to live. Or I'm going to have terrible roommates, you know, like I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life, that is what your mind adds to the equation. And if you look at all of these problems, all of these problems will be solved.

I mean, this is a little bit of a hyperbole, but like I really kind of believe this. If you look at all of these problems, they are what your mind adds to it. Right? So imagine chronic goalpost pushing. What if you just hit your goalpost and then it stayed there? Then that problem is solved, right? develops high standards day after starting a new hobby. What if you just started a new hobby

and you understood the reality of the situation, which is that hobbies take time to learn? Problem solved. Hate therapy takes too long. What if you realized, okay, if you look at the science of therapy, it has a variable duration of effect. Some people that happens faster, some people happen slower.

This is the reality of the situation. But it takes too long. How do you define too long? how does this person define too long? They define it by now. Whatever amount of time is too long, right? They don't do an evidence-based approach of thinking about, okay, there's a variability.

Therapy effect sizes are somewhere between 12 and 32 weeks. It also depends. If we look at common factors research, we see that emotional connection to my therapist and feeling heard and understood and validated, having a framework and a meaningful narrative framework that makes sense of all of my problems, having a therapeutic frame

that accounts for everything that happens in my life, these are the things that are necessary for therapy. Also, depending on my past experience and the therapist's competence, sometimes roadblocks in therapy are encountered, and the resolution of those roadblocks is growth. Taking too long is part of the process because things are not simple.

That's not the way they think. Their mind adds glistah. I broke up. These problems are real, but it doesn't mean I'll be alone forever. Is it going to be hard to find a place to live? Sure. But doesn't mean it's impossible. It doesn't mean that my roommates will necessarily be bad.

Do I have to figure out my finances? Is that a difficult situation? Absolutely. So this is really interesting. One of my mentors is a guy named Bob Waldinger. And I don't know if you guys have heard of Bob. He gave a great TED Talk. He's the PI for the longest running study, I think, in the planet,

on the planet, which is the study of human development. He's a professor at Harvard Medical School. And Bob was looking at what leads to health and happiness later in life. They're looking at a bazillion things. Bob is a great guy, also Zen priest. Fascinating. Cool dude. That's why he was my mentor.

So one of the things that Bob found in the study of adult human development is that people who are healthy and happy later in life have a good way of dealing with problems. We call this resilience sometimes, but fundamentally they have a way of dealing with adversity. It's like a fundamental approach. And if you look at someone like the impatient man, that's what they're missing.

They don't have a good way to deal with this stuff. So problems that are real, and challenging, become catastrophic. This is the consequence of Glistha. And it's like, I'm playing a game of Dota 2 in my mid-fed first blood. That is a challenging situation. But if I let Glistha run wild,

then my mind will start adding all kinds of stuff to it. This means that we're going to lose. Now their mid is fed. They're going to rotate to my lane. Oh, my God. How can I be with this noob? we start to tilt. And literally what is tilt?

Tilt is what your mind adds to the reality of the situation. That is what tilt is. And this person fundamentally tilted, tilted at life. Therapy takes too long. Oh, my God. Right? You're adding negativity onto whatever. This is glistah.

And this is one of those fundamental things. where like, if you stop adding things to the reality of your life, your life will get better in a thousand different ways. All of these problems will start to get better. This is what you learn in India or what I learned. China, South Korea, even Hawaii, your ashram down the street, if it's a good one. Glistah, coloring.

So I encourage y'all to examine your life. Look at the reality of the situation. And look at everything that your mind is afraid of. Let's look at something like social anxiety. Social anxiety is all glistah. It is not the reality of the situation. It is all of your projections about the situation. It is, and here's the problem with glistah,

when our glistah is really bad, we think it's the reality. This person didn't laugh at my joke. that means they don't like me. And that becomes truth. But hold on a second. So this is how you find glitha. This person did not laugh at my joke. That means XYZ.

That means is the glistula. The reality is this person did not laugh at my joke. But if we really examine it, there is a differential diagnosis for that. Maybe they weren't paying attention. Maybe they were on their phone. Maybe they were distracted. Maybe they have social anxiety.

Maybe they have ADHD and stopped paying attention. Maybe their dog is in the hospital, so they're not paying attention. Could be a thousand things. But the moment that Glittha becomes reality, that's when we suffer. That's when we get stuck. And it causes all kinds of problems because now we literally start solving those problems. And now we get really messed up. And the reason is because we're solving.

things that aren't real. If I'm socially anxious and I'm trying to get people to like me, but they already like me, do you guys understand? That's an impossible problem to solve. And I will spend all of my energy solving impossible problems. And so now we have another issue here, which is that the impatient man, not only do they set all these negative things in their head, but now I'm trying to, I need to prove my worth. Oh, my God.

Speaking of stuff that we can do lectures about, when you need to prove your worth to someone else, you are looking for some kind of response from them. You're looking for some kind of validation, and you will hunt it all day long, even though they already like you. But you're looking for this symbol that will make you feel good on the inside.

And why is that so hard to accomplish? Because your glistah is adding stuff to the equation. So when we're dealing with setbacks, right? There's the reality of the situation. And this is where sort of the adult development study kind of comes in. So you have to have a way of dealing with your problems. So when you're faced with a problem, what is your path to fix the reality of it? Don't fix, don't fight the phantoms in your head.

Not a yogi. The psychiatrist will say, let's fight the phantoms in your head. Let's deal with each of these things. Let's go through imposter syndrome, burnout, chronic goalposts moving, the need. Why is your self-esteem so low? And I'm not saying that that isn't useful, right? Like, I fucking do that shit in my day job. That's why we have a bunch of lectures about each of those problems.

Those are worthwhile problems to solve. But if you look at Patanjali's Yoga Suthras, he doesn't talk about how to solve this problem, in this problem, in this problem. He looks at the nature of how these problems develop in the first place. Sigmund Freud talks about the content of mind. He also talks about process. Carl Jung talks about the content of mind, the content of dreams, the meaning of what your mind produces.

But Thangeli says, let's just bypass all of that to begin with. We don't really care. We're just going to see reality as it is. If we change, if we just remove mind's influence on reality to begin with, all of whatever the fuck your mind has wrong with it becomes irrelevant. because it's not acting on the reality of the situation. So then the question becomes, how do we remove glistah? So this is where there's like kind of two elements to it.

The first is to simply go through this construction of what is the reality of the situation and what is the meaning to me is what we do in psychotherapy. What does it mean to you? When a patient has borderline personality disorder and someone doesn't text them back, What does that mean to them? The reality is this person did not text you.

And the meaning is this person hates me. And so literally we can see, if we look at pathology, the more severe your glithta is, the more pathology you have, literally. Right? So if someone has BPD, this text means all of this stuff. And if you don't have this text, if you don't have BPD, then this text means this amount of stuff,

which you can still cause you. some suffering, still causes some suffering, but it's not as drastic. It doesn't induce self-injurious behavior. So the depth of your klishta is what we call a personality disorder, right? The association, social anxiety, heavy klishtha, being a little bit anxious in a social setting, less glistah. Fascinating. And the reason I teach this stuff specifically is because there is a lot of scientific support for this fundamental idea. And we even know there's some evidence-based treatments, like things like cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, where they talk about something called thought

diffusion is an evidence-based principle of treatment, which is separating the sense of reality from your thoughts. When thoughts become facts, that's when you become ill. So there's good scientific support for this idea as well. The difference is that the people who developed acceptance and commitment therapy were students of the meditative tradition. And Patanjali was the master. So he goes to the core of it.

But it's hard to do. So separate the reality from what you attach to it. And simply acknowledging that this is produced by my mind, and this is the reality of it. Going through that process, what we see from studies on thought diffusion and acceptance and commitment therapy and some forms of CBT,

is simply going through that process fixes half of it. Super cool. So what is the reality? What is my mind attach? And then acknowledge that that is an attachment of my mind. It's not that it can't be true.

It's that it could be true, but it is not necessarily true. And as we start solving the phantoms in our mind, we stop solving the actual realistic problem and direct your problem-solving efforts towards that reality. That's first phase of working with Glishda. Second phase of working with Glishda is simple meditation to absorb yourself in the reality of an experience.

literally practice putting your brain in a state of mind where you are just with the reality of the experience. A beautiful meditation for this is drinking tea. The tea ceremony is the best meditation for that. I don't know if it's the best, but I love it. Because when you do the tea drinking ceremony, it's beautiful. It's like, how do you do the tea? drinking ceremony. You make some tea and you drink it. Okay? But if you sort of think about it, like the whole point of the tea ceremony is like you're thinking about this and you're thinking

about this and then you like take a sip of the tea. And then you really feel the tea. You feel the taste of it. You feel the warmth to go down your, your esophagus. You take another sip. You're ready for the, you get distracted. You think about this. You're like, okay, should I take another sip? Is this enough tea? Should I make more tea? But you just sit and you do a thing. And you are just there in the reality of it. And then you'll notice that your glisthas will pop up. Oh my God, the tea drinking ceremony is too long. Dr. Kay said that the tea drinking ceremony will help with the glittha.

Is this helping with the gliththa? Am I doing it right? The reality is you are drinking tea. The moment that you add, am I doing it right? That is glistah. So you literally practice being with reality. Practice. And I like the tea drinking ceremony because,

there are so many layers of reality that can be revealed when you do the tea drinking ceremony. You can do chan, or you, or whatever, you know, tradition you want. And what do I mean by layers of reality? First, there's just the taste of the tea. Then there is, you know, I don't know if you guys know this, but the tea drinking ceremony has like, you have, you know, you add multiple rounds of water to the tea. So you put some amount of tea in there. There's the first steep, which is, let's say, 15 seconds, 30 seconds.

Then you do a second steep, a third steep, a fourth steep. So the T subtly changes. And like, why do Zen monks do this? Why do Buddhist monks do this? Because they absorb themselves in the different layers of reality. Can I detect the subtle fluctuations in the flavor of tea? And the cool thing, this is what's so cool. When your brain does this, it rewires.

And the cool thing, this is both the beautiful and terrible thing about the brain, is we carry our wiring with us, right? So if I grew up in an abusive environment, I could have complex PTSD because even though now I am safe and now people love me and now people appreciate who I am, the wiring of the past carries forward with the present. This is the beautiful thing about meditation. When you rewire, it carries forward into a new reality. And Badangeli talks about Glashda because if you want to attain enlightenment, liberation,

moksha, nirvana, Kaivalia, then you must eliminate Glistah from your mind. And then theoretically, once you eliminate all Glisha, then we get to other steps. Then you are well on the path to permanent peace and happiness. That's the claim. Right? We don't really know. It hasn't been scientifically proven. All we do know is that there happened to be a handful of people who seem to understand this stuff.

And when they understand this stuff, they're different. And people come to them for guidance and people feel like they improve their life a huge amount. That's what we know historically. Questions about Glistachda. Ah, beautiful. I prefer coffee, sorry. Great. That's why you should do the tea ceremony.

Love it, love it, love it, right? So think about this for a second. I prefer coffee. This is not about your preference. What's the problem with doing tea? You will enjoy it less? So what? Where is the idea of I prefer coffee?

We're not talking about preference. Preference has nothing to do with it. I really do appreciate that comment because this is how reflexive glitch-the is. Very good. Someone's like, that's a glitch-tha. You see how fast it is? Oh, I prefer coffee. That no one talked about, we talked about being with reality, not enjoyment.

Right? So this is where like, and the Zen people fucking understood this. This is beautiful. Zen people understood this. That's why they were like, aha. We have an even greater practice. Can you all guess what the even greater practice? The even better practice.

There's one more advanced tea drinking practice. Anyone, anyone, anyone, anyone. Come on, guys. Not the pool. No, no, no. Come on, y'all can do it, Enema. No tea. Yeah, so drinking from an empty cup, right?

Drinking from an empty cup. Have a tea ceremony without tea. And I don't quite know, right? Like, I don't, it's not my tradition, right? So I don't know how that maps on. Because it's like, then what is the glistah? I'm not sure. Are we just adding glistah?

I don't really know how that maps on, but I'm pretty sure it's the next step. Budget ceremony, I can afford that. Don't like hot water, though. Okay? This tea tastes empty. And then the Zen master says, or tea taste empty, right?

Okay. But this is great. I love how everyone's like, I don't like hot water and I don't like this. Like, that's, you see how much, how quickly your mind adds things to it. But those are subtle glitch this, right? They're not really deeply colored. There's not a whole lot of like stuff caught up in it. There's not a whole lot of suffering.

This is like, even a preference is the mind says, I like this. Okay. Other questions. Where does glitch that come from? Yeah. It comes from conditioning. So Glishtha comes from not observing reality. You can think about it kind of like a somsacar, but yes, it is conditioning.

It is an impression that is left. So somscar means impression. So what that means is like, you know, if I have a pillow and I sit on the pillow and I get up, there will be an impression left in the pillow. So Glisha is when we have a mind that is not perceived. reality in the right way, and there is emotional energy left over, that emotional energy gets left over and changes the way that we perceive things in the future. So a good example, I think actually the best explanation for how Glitza is formed actually

comes from Western psychology. I think they do a better job of this. And it's schema formation. So schemas are higher order memory structures. What does that mean? It's not a discrete memory. It's a memory that has implications attached to it. It's a memory structure that has ideas about you, ideas about the world,

and ideas about other people baked in. Right? So when my boss calls me in for a meeting at Friday at 5 o'clock, that means they're going to fire me. And how would I have developed that glistha? Because I had some experience in the past that created that schema. So a schema is like a pile of different sensory inputs, meanings, perceptions about the self, the world, and other people kind of put together.

And I think that's closer to a glitza. And a glittha is also related to samskar. So when a somsar activates, it colors the activity of the mind. So related that way. Okay. We are at time for today, y'all. So thank you guys so much for coming. If you guys want more info,

so there are a handful of lectures that are really similar. So I'd say the lecture on Glistha, the lecture on Vashina, there's a couple of these other deeper concepts. But I'll be the first to say that this stuff is like fundamental. which does not make it easy. Right? So if you look at something like F equals MA

or E equals MC squared, these are fundamental equations which appears simple, but really have a lot of depth to them. So if you guys want more of that stuff, we do that stuff over on the membership side. But I think that this, I love it. I love these memes and stuff that you'll post

because I think this is a, I've been looking for a way to teach you guys this concept. And I think this is the best way. So thank you all very much for coming today, and we will see you all. I'm doing a deep dive into rest and sleep tomorrow. It's going to be a little bit more science-based, a little bit less spirituality-based, also over on the membership side. And then we've got a video on the main channel as well about sleep,

if you guys are interested in that. So usually we'll do like part one on the main channel, and then for people. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe.

Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.