HealthyGamerGG - Why "The Grind" Isn't Meant For Everyone

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

In this episode Dr. K breaks down why most people cannot “fall in love with the grind” no matter how hard they try. The real problem is exhaustion. Not the good kind of tired you feel after a full day on the lake, but the worn-out, stretched-thin kind that builds up from emotional avoidance, poor focus, and physical deconditioning. Weekends and vacations only mask the issue instead of fixing it, and modern habits like using devices before bed or relying on substances wreck the REM sleep needed for recovery. He explains that loving the grind only becomes possible after rebuilding your capacity. That means emotional conditioning, better focus, strengthening the body, and viewing your current work as a stepping stone to the life you want. The first weeks are harder and more tiring, but over a few months your baseline energy rises, your work becomes more manageable, and the grind starts to feel rewarding instead of draining. Topics include: Why most exhaustion comes from emotional suppression, not workload How poor focus and constant distraction drain more energy than the work itself The impact of physical weakness, posture issues, and poor sleep on daily fatigue Why REM sleep is essential for emotional processing and daily reset Reconditioning yourself through emotional awareness, focus training, and basic movement How to frame your current job as a stepping stone so your brain stops giving up HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3Szt HG 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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Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alokinoja, 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. Today, we're going to talk about how to fall in love with the grind.

Sometimes when people come to me, Dr. K, ha ha, genius, right? Hardward. They sort of expect me to talk about how to fall in love with the grind. do the impossible, which is fall in love with working 80 hours a week, right? How do I, Dr. K, I'm tired of working 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week. I feel so overworked. I'm exhausted, but I have friends. I know people on the internet that are like part of this hustle culture and they grind for 70 to 80 hours a week. And sometimes people will even ask me, Dr. K, how many days a week do you work? Spoiler alert, about six to seven days. How many hours a week do I work? Probably about 80 hours a week, maybe 60, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less. And so how is this possible?

How do you fall in love with the grind? So I teach them things like Vairagya or detachment. I teach them basically the answers to their questions. So as I would teach these very fancy things to my patients, I discovered something really interesting. It doesn't work. And why doesn't it work? Because people are fucking tired. And the key thing about loving the grind is that you can't be exhausted, fundamentally. See, there are two kinds of tiredness. There's one kind of tiredness that's like, let's say, like, when I had my bachelor party, we spent the day on the lake, okay? So we like went out on a boat, we like swam around, it was a speedboat, we had some fun, we did grilling, and I was exhausted at the end of the day. That is a different kind of tiredness from the kind of tiredness that is

wearing people down. And so if you want to love the grind, the first step is to know, is to not be exhausted, and that's what we're going to talk about. So this is where there are a couple of fundamental things that we do horribly wrong. And at the top of the list is the weekend. The concept of the weekend, I think, is one of the worst inventions in the history of humanity, arguably the worst one. We created this idea of the weekend where you get to recover from what we do to you during the week. The moment we created the weekend, we created, we get a gave people license to absolutely chew through us through the week. We felt this front and center with something in medicine called the post-call day.

So when you're on call, usually what happens is you show up at the hospital around 6.30 in the morning. You work a regular day, 6.30 in the morning until about 7 in the evening. This is a regular day that you work in the hospital when you're in residency, six days a week. Then you start your call at 7 p.m. And your 7 p.m. call ends at 9 a.m. the next day after sign out and things like that. So you're working like a 26, 27, 28 hour shift. And since we have worked you to the bone, we're going to give you a post-call day. So then you get to go home at 9 a.m. after having worked 28 hours.

And then you have to come back the next day at 6.30 at your regular time. So the idea of the post-call day is like, oh, if we work you any harder, you will literally crack and fall apart. That's also what we do with the weekend. We have this idea that we can work you to the bone five days a week and then you can take two days to recover. We also have that with this idea of vacations, right? Oh my God, you haven't taken a vacation in eight months. You must be exhausted. That must be untenable.

Why don't you take a vacation, recover for two weeks and then go back into the meat grinder. If you are spending more energy during the day, then you recover when you go to bed at night. If you are not waking up tomorrow morning back to 100%, this will never work and you will never love the grind. This is the true way that you pave the foundation to be able to work a large amount. We don't want to work up any kind of exhaustion debt. We need to be able to pay that exhaustion down every single day when we go to bed. We wake up the next morning. We want to be healthy, fresh, and ready to go.

If you can do that, right? So I want you all to think about the days that you woke up where you're going to be healthy, you felt full of energy and how much work you can accomplish on that day. The goal is to wake up every day in that way. Now, that may sound impossible, right? Oh, my God, Dr. Kay, my job is so hard. They demand so much of me that there's no way I can be recharged every single day. So that's where we're going to go into two or three different aspects of tiredness, okay?

The first is deconditioning. So the life that we live right now is not sustainable, because of things like weekends and stuff like that. But the main reason it's not sustainable is because we end up deconditioning ourselves. So I see this first and foremost with emotional deconditioning. So when I work with people who are exhausted and want to love the grind, I'll ask them, what is your day-to-day emotional experience like? I don't ask that question because no one wants to answer that question.

I'll ask them, you know, like, what was your day like yesterday? Tell me about how you felt, what was it like, what was challenging, right? And basically what I would find is that people are not good at handling their emotions throughout the day. This is why happy hour on Thursday and everyone at the office is like, thank God for a happy hour because if we didn't have alcohol to numb all of our negative emotions, I can't wait for a happy hour on Thursday because it's been such a tough week. We live in a society that glorifies exhaustion at work. And in medicine, top of the list. I still remember with great pride how hard we would get crushed when we were on call.

okay so this is like when you're on call like so i went to massachusetts general hospital man's greatest hospital flagship teaching hospital of the harvard medical school and we pride ourselves on getting destroyed by the work right oh my god last night dude we got crushed we got 32 patients in the ed and we had two emergencies one on the general four one on the psychiatric floor we got absolutely demolished and everyone comes in and they're like man that sounds awful dude oh my god i can't believe it. We're all very emotionally supportive, but you walk out with pride, you know, like, yeah, I survived the trenches. Like, I'm a real man now. So as we have challenging experiences with clients, with bosses, with patients, whatever, and we have these negative emotions, we tend to do things,

we pull out our phone, we drink alcohol, we go home, we start playing video games. And so we're not really managing those negative emotions. And so what we really want to do is learn how to sit with our emotions. And these are the two questions that I would encourage. I'll ask yourself in order to emotionally condition yourself. What am I feeling right now? What is this emotion trying to tell me? And what do I feel like doing? Okay.

So those are the three questions that we want you to ask yourself if you're trying to get, boost your EQ basically. But as we become emotionally deconditioned, what tends to happen is as negative emotional experiences come up throughout the day, this taxes our frontal lobes, the parts of our brain that give us discipline, that give us willpower, that help us do sustained focus and lock in and do the work, those get taxed by emotions. So as long as you are not managing your emotions properly, you will feel exhausted and your brain will be unable to lock in because it's spending all of its energy on pushing down those emotions. So this kind of emotional conditioning,

emotional processing, being tied to the work that we do in our goals is precisely the kind of work that we focus on in coaching, especially career coaching. The second way that we decondition ourselves is actually through our frontal lobes. So we have lost the capacity for sustained focus and concentration. This is something I talk about extensively in Dr. Kay's guide. There's this yogic practice called Dharnah, which is training your mind to be able to focus on one thing. When you tell it, hey, mind, we're going to do this thing right now and we're going to ignore all other distracting thoughts, it actually starts to do what you tell it to do. What we're seeing with the technology is the more notifications we have, the more that our attention gets pulled in different ways. I feel like browsing Reddit, so before I even realize it, I pick up my phone and I start scrolling on it.

So as our attention and our frontal lobes become deconditioned, our ability to focus on our work, finish our work in an efficient manner actually goes down. And then what ends up happening, what I see in my patience is that when they're not able to focus and lock in, their work stretches over the course of hours, days, even weeks. And I don't know if you guys have ever had like this axe hanging over your head at work where you're like, oh my God, I have to do this thing, I have to do this thing. I have to do this thing. And every night when you go to bed, you're like, oh my God, I've do that thing tomorrow. And every day when you wake up the next day, You're like, oh my God, I didn't do that thing.

And so I want you all to think about this. How exhausting is this one idea of a task? And as long as it is weighing on you, you will be exhausted and you will never have the capacity to love the grind. The third area of deconditioning is actually physical deconditioning. There's so much interesting stuff. I mean, I've been learning a lot just from myself and looking at literature and stuff. So I think our hips, our hamstrings, our legs, and our spines are messed up. So everyone has neck tension up here.

They have lower back pain. But the real problem is actually in the hips. We have an anterior. Most people have an anterior pelvic tilt. We're kind of hunched over. We're not breathing properly. We have an immense amount of physical deconditioning. Now, why is this important?

Because when we're deconditioned, then when we wake up the next day, we're fundamentally weak. So when I take the elevator every day, taking the stairs is harder. And when we're talking about loving the grind, When we're talking about working six to seven days a week, you cannot be deconditioned and successfully work day after day after day after day. So I want you all to think about this for a moment. The way that the human body has evolved, the most natural state for human beings, is to work seven days a week, is to work 365 days a year. That's what we're actually designed for biologically. And what evidence do I have for that?

only every other species on the planet. Does a mosquito get a day off? Does a lizard get a day off? Does an antelope get a day off? Does a crocodile get a day off? None of them get days off and none of them need days off. So once we start conditioning ourselves to be the way that we are supposed to be, then that kind of tiredness will leave us.

Okay? As we undo the process of deconditioning, as we start to condition ourselves, you will feel a transient level of increased tiredness. So every time I go to the gym, I'm going to feel more tired at the end of the day, but I will be stronger the next day. As you start emotional conditioning,

as you start frontal lobe conditioning, as you start physical conditioning, you will feel more tired transiently, but you will be more productive over the long run. And this becomes the really hard part about this process, is that for a window of time, you're going to have to expend more energy, which is already going to be hard because you already feel a little bit burnt down and exhausted. You're going to have to spend a little bit more energy to become a stronger human being for tomorrow. So I recently had a call. I'm doing a lot of work right now. And the content director here at Healthy Gamer expressed concern. And they're like,

hey, is this like, is this too much? Honestly, it's probably a little bit too much. But I was like, you know what? I'm meditating for like, you know, 20 to, 20 to 60 minutes a day. I'm going to the gym a couple days a week. I'm focused on what I ate. My diet yesterday was black rice and mung beans for dinner, black rice and acorn squash for lunch, some tofu thrown in there. So like when you're fueling your body in the right way,

you are able to maintain a high level of work. Another thing that seriously, seriously impacts our mental conditioning when we wake up in the morning is the way that we go to sleep. So this is something I'm just tossing in. It's not something I really thought about, but this is just true. I hate to say it. If y'all are using any kind of sleep aid, right?

So if you're using alcohol to fall asleep, using weed to fall asleep, if you all are using devices before you go to bed, here's the problem with all of these things. All of these things interfere, and melatonin may do this too. All of these things interfere with REM sleep. So as we go through the night, the amount of time that our brain spends in each of the four sleep stages, five sleep stages, actually changes. Rem sleep is rapid eye movement sleep. It's when our body is paralyzed. It's also when we dream. Okay. And this is when we process our emotions. So if your REM sleep is impaired by using alcohol, by all the stuff that helps

you fall asleep, usually if it helps you fall asleep and it's not like natural, like listening to an audio book or white noise or something like that, if it's any kind of substance or chemical aid that helps you fall asleep, there's a good chance it'll interfere with REM sleep. And here's the problem. When we interfere with REM sleep, it impairs our dreaming. When we impair our dreaming, we impair our emotional processing. So I did a whole video about why we dream and how to deal with dreams and things like that. But the reason that we dream animals dream is because it's the primary way I believe that we deal with emotions while we are sleeping. Now, if you do this reconditioning part, if you start sleeping well, then you're sort of like, I honestly want to say 70 to 80%

of the way there. Now, what about the loving the grind part? So there are a couple of the things that I found that really help my patience. And this is the kind of stuff, by the way, that we try to help people out in coaching with. So this is like, you know, how to put together your life so that you're better off a month from now, three months from now, six months from now. So the first is undoubtedly, the life that you have right now is going to be tiring in some ways. And you have to do extra work to dig yourself out of the life that you have into the life that you want, right? So it's not going to, like, this is the problem is you're already kind of at the verge of drowning and you're already exhausted and you're already, you're so tired when you get home,

all you have time for is to play video games and you don't feel like doing anything else. So how, is there any trick to help us do a little bit of extra work, which is going to leave us even more exhausted, right? And then we're sort of like, it's tricky because now we're even more tired when we wake up tomorrow, but this has to be gone through in a temporary way. So what we want to do is frame the work that we're doing as stepping stones to the life that we want. Now, this engages a really, really, really important cognitive principle. So if you look at rats who become depressed and inactive, there's some really fascinating studies that's really sad what they do.

They put rats basically, they dump them in a bucket of water where there's a little subsurface, right beneath the surface, there's a little like pillar that they can stand on. So they swim around and they're panicking. And once they find the pillar, they hang on to it. they're fine. So then what happens is when we're trying to measure depression and rats, what we'll do is then they'll remove the pillar and they'll drop the rat in. And then the rat will swim around and it'll look for the pillar, look for the pillar, look for the pillar, it doesn't

find the pillar and eventually it'll give up. The interesting thing is it gives up. It still has energy to keep swimming, but mentally it'll give up. And if we mess with its serotonin, concentrations, things like that, you'll start giving up way faster, et cetera. So here's the key thing to understand from this principle. If you are in a dead end life, your body, you're brain will not provide you with the energy to get out of it. Right? That's the whole point of giving up. When things are over, when you perceive, let's say you're playing a video game and you guys are down, 20K and the enemy team is winning. Once you perceive that there is no point to the task that you are doing, the brain will give up. It'll decrease your motivation. You'll just give up entirely.

So the key thing that I teach people is to view your tasks as a stepping stone. Even your dead end job is a stepping stone. There's something called the Nemic effect, which is a psychological principle that I'm also alluding to. This is about how to get people to do hard things. And the key way to get someone to do something that is hard is to frame it as a stepping stone to what they want. Right? And we use this all the time. Eat your vegetables, then you'll get dessert. Clean your room, then you get to play video games or watch Naruto, which is what my kids are, they have to shower and then they get to watch Naruto today. We're going to watch its tune in an exam. Epic. No spoilers. So if that last bit of digging yourself out of that hole is going to be using this principle of viewing everything that

you don't want to do as a stepping stone. Now, I understand that this is a little bit contradictory because here I am saying don't do anything that will exhaust you right and leave you more tired for the next day. And that's where unfortunately, I see that it usually takes about anywhere from 90 to 180 days of people adopting this attitude of reconditioning, which is going to make you a little bit more tired, working on stepping stones to your next thing. And if you all do this, something beautiful will happen. At the very beginning, you will be more exhausted, right? But it'll be a little bit like boot camp, where if you keep at it for a couple of weeks, and you can make small changes at a time, eventually you'll start to shift. And eventually you'll start to have more energy.

You'll feel more recovered because you've reconditioned and you're working on getting past that dead end job. And then you open the door to love the grind. 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.