HealthyGamerGG - Why Time Is Your Enemy

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

Have you ever found yourself saddened and depressed at the thought that you aren't where you had planned to be? Perhaps you are anxious about your progress in life and its correlation with the passage of time? In today's episode, Dr K discusses time's effect on the mind, and what we can do to combat it. Check out more mental health resources here! https://bit.ly/3xsk6fE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Man, I screwed up so much in high school. I didn't date anyone. I didn't learn how to talk to people I was sexually attracted to. So now I'm alone in college. I missed these milestones. And since I missed these milestones, now my future is hopeless. So literally, if you talk to them about where their mind goes, their mind does not stay here and now. It either goes into the past or goes into the future.

And in both cases, it projects negatively. Today, we're talking about why time is the enemy, unless you know how to handle it. There have been some really revolutionary papers in the fields of psychology and neuroscience that now give us a really interesting insight into why some people get depressed and anxious and other people do not. And it turns out that it has to do with how these two different groups of people relate to the concept of time. So if we want to understand why this is the case, we got to go way back and understand why are human beings different from animals in the first place. What is the big cognitive or evolutionary change that allowed human beings to, to dominate the planet and explore the stars. It turns out that it probably has to do with our conception of time.

At some point, human beings started evolving their brains to think about the future, not just in abstract ways, but in concrete ways. And there are some animals who have awareness of the future. For example, squirrels will bury seeds or nuts in the ground for wintertime so that they can find food when there's no food around. But there's a big difference between sort of this instinctual behavior where I'm going to just bury this stuff, and I'm not really thinking about it,

versus understanding this dimension of time. The difference is that squirrels bury nuts in the ground, and human beings develop agriculture, right? So this concept of thinking about the future, planning for the future, is what allows human beings to rise to the top of the world in terms of the dominant species. The problem is that it comes with a price,

and that is things like suicidality. So if we look at human beings, the other thing that's really unique about us is we're basically the only species on the planet that is capable of suicide or engages in suicide. So you can even take animals that are engrossed in grief, right? So you can look at animal models where a parent has lost a child. And then there's interesting experiments that you can do.

You can drop them in water. And if you drop a depressed mouse in water, it'll swim around and try to survive. So when push comes to shove, generally speaking, the animal kingdom is not capable of suicide. Whereas human beings are. The question is why. And I think it really comes down to this dimension of time. When people hear about our coaching program, their first response is usually, why would I work with another human being when I can watch YouTube videos all on my own?

Working with a coach is about amplifying your time and effort. We're great at wanting things and even making some progress, but we usually struggle with follow through or have some kind of setback. And that's exactly why working with a coach can help you accomplish particular things in a fixed amount of time. They'll help you set appropriate goals, keep you accountable towards that progress, and ultimately even work through the setbacks that you will inevitably face. So check out the link in the description below to see if coaching is right for you.

So if we look at something like depression, let's try to understand where does someone's mind go in depression. So when I work with patients who are depressed, oftentimes they are hopeless, right? They're thinking about the future and the projections that their mind makes are so negative. have no hope. Nothing is going to work out. I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. Is it just 30 years of working 9 to 5, commuting for two hours, doing laundry, eating food, getting rejected on dating apps until I retire at the age of 65 and in debt and all this kind of stuff? There is a societal level of hopelessness that is so deep. And you can't have

hopelessness without the dimension of time. How does this understanding of time lead to things like depression and suicidality? So this is really simple. I want you to think about the last day of your vacation, right? So think about the last day of vacation. What's that day like? You're sitting there, you're on vacation, you're maybe enjoying yourself at the beach, you're going for a hike. What is in your mind when you are on vacation for the last day, right?

Oh, suddenly we're thinking about, oh, man, now I have to go back to the grind. Now I have to get back. I have to travel. I have to do this. I have to do this. I have to take care of this. Oh, my God, I have to do this. Or you can even think about the weekend, right?

So what is Sunday on the weekend? Like Sunday is the worst day of the week because now you know the week is coming. So the human mind has a very, very unique ability to take the present joy, right? So like this day of vacation, which is supposed to be fun and rob you of that by thinking about the future. This is the fundamental, right? So this is what's crazy. Some people don't know how to control that faculty. And when they don't know how to control that faculty, it leads to depression.

Let's understand. So when I talk to patients who are depressed, right? So I've seen a couple of hundreds, hundreds or thousands of patients at this point. I find that there are two places, two places that their mind goes. The first is that they're oftentimes hopeless. So when they look out into the future, they do not see a reason to be hopeful. They're worried about, you know, always being this way for the rest of their life. They're worried about loneliness.

No one wants to spend time with me. I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life, right? Now that I've gotten dumped, I'm hopeless about my future prospects. And it's not people with, it's not just people with like, mood disorders. I'm seeing a sort of societal level of hopelessness in the future. 50% of people under the age of 30 are still living at home. There's a dating crisis, made in crisis all over the world right now. The future looks bleak. There's climate change. So we have no reason to hope. And so I feel depressed today. The second reason that people get depressed is not about the

future, but it's about the past. So when I work with people, it's oftentimes regrets. Right. So I peaked in high school. Man, I screwed up so much in high school. I didn't. date anyone. I didn't learn how to talk to people I was sexually attracted to, so now I'm alone in college. I missed these milestones. And since I missed these milestones, now my future is hopeless. So literally, if you talk to them about where their mind goes, their mind does not stay here and now. It either goes into the past or goes into the future. And in both cases, it projects negatively. Right? This goes back to the same concept of vacation, where you can be potentially or theoretically enjoying today, but because of the unregulated structure of your mind,

it shoots to the future or the past. And this is why technology addiction is blowing through the roof right now. So if we look at doom scrolling, social media, or video games, why do we get so addicted to these things? Right? So when I am feeling bad, when I'm feeling hopeless about the future, when I've gotten rejected by a bunch of people on dating apps, my mind is suffering, right? It's thinking about, oh my God, I've just got rejected by 10 people. I will never find anyone. And that's a logical thought, right? So your mind has just experienced 10 rejection. So it's not that crazy to think that way. And yet, what do we start doing? We start doomsrolling. And why do we dooms scroll? Where does our mind go when we actually doom scroll? Or we play video games.

Our mind returns to the present. Because in this moment, I'm looking at this hilarious, oh, look at this cat is voting. Or look at these dogs. Look at these people saving a beached whale. or they're releasing a bear back into the wild, whatever it is, whatever kind of crap. Well, look at this person is baking a cake, right? So when we start to scroll on the internet, the beautiful thing about it and the really scary thing about it is that we lose the dimensions of time and we kind of return to the present, right? That's what it does for us.

It allows us to forget about the future and forget about the past. And this is very addictive for the human mind. The human mind loves being in the present. This is actually the source of my future. most of our peace in life. If we think about why people love video games, it's because I get into the zone. I get to be fully present here and now. I get to enter a flow state when I play a video game. This is also why we really love certain activities like surfing or rock climbing or even watching a sunset or taking a bath or jumping into a pool of water. There are all kinds of activities that we

will engage in that will bring us to the here and now. And we love those activities. And the beautiful thing is that even within video games, we can see how the dimension of time ruins a video game for you. So when your mid-player or whatever, one player on your team starts feeding, you start raging. You get really, really upset. And why are you raging? Are you raging because they died twice? No. You are raging because they've thrown the game.

Your mind inserts the dimension of time into a video game, and then the game no longer becomes fun. And this is a concept that people do. used to understand. So if you look at older cultures, we used to worship time, right? So the Greeks had Kronos, who was the god of time. The Hindus still worship Mahakal, which is the god of time. And when I look at some of these like teachings from Mahakal, I think what I think it's what it really boils down to is human beings used to have and cultivate a healthy relationship with time. We used to be really good at training our minds to be in the present and not worry so much about the or the future. And something fundamental changed where we started thinking about time as a dimension

of physics instead of a dimension of the mind, instead of a dimension of subjective experience. And as we sort of lost that cultivation, as we lost that skill of being in the present, what we've seen is an explosion of mental illness as well as an antidote of technology addiction. So how do we solve this problem of depression? So it turns out that we need to change our understanding and our relationship with time. So a lot of people get stuck in this rut of thinking to themselves, okay, I'm hopeless about the future, therefore there's no point in doing anything, which sounds logical, right? Is logical in a way. The challenge is that we assume that hope precedes action, that the reason I start to act is because I'm hopeful. So what I'm going to do is

start to cultivate hope. I need some reason to be hopeful. And if I'm hopeful, then I will act. So modern research on depression actually shows us that this is not the correct move, that hope doesn't lead to action. Action leads to hope. Action actually comes first. And so one of the biggest things that we need to do is start acting without hope. So the research on this comes from something called the behavioral activation system, as well as behavioral activation therapy, which is a evidence-based treatment for depression. So what researchers basically figured out is we have these two systems in our body. we have the behavioral activation system and the behavioral inhibition system.

This may sound kind of weird, but I'll explain very quickly. So we have some forces in our body that get us to do things. Like, I'm hungry, so let me get up and go do something. I'm bored. Let me go for a walk. Let me go paint. But we also have this other system called the behavioral inhibition system. So these are circuits in our brain as well as our physiology that keep us from acting.

Now, you may wonder, well, why on earth would we have this behavioral inhibition system? So that we don't waste time. so that we don't waste energy, we don't waste resources. If we were acting willy-nilly all the time, we would be exhausted all the time. And what we know from the science of mood disorders like major depressive disorder is that the behavioral inhibition system becomes hyperactive. So all of the signals that keep you in place are actually hyperactive. So you don't feel like doing anything.

Physiologically, you have low energy. You don't feel like thinking about anything. Your mind is not an exciting place. You don't even experience pleasure from everyday activities. that you normally enjoy. So this is an overactivation of the behavioral inhibition system. So what we sort of figured out is that if you want to treat someone with depression, what you really need to do is use something called behavioral activation,

where you get them to actually just do stuff. And this is what's really tricky about it is a lot of times we think that targeting depression is about targeting the hopelessness, which is actually like a good style of treatment. But there's this other dimension that we're discovering, which is that what you really want to do is get depressed people to do something, anything, literally get out of house. I even worked with one company that was developing a smartphone app that would predict when someone was becoming depressed. So one of the biggest problems with depression is that, you know,

it starts and then it gets really, really, really, really bad. And then once it reaches a critical level, people will come to the emergency room, they'll get suicidal, they'll become suicidal, they'll get hospitalized because they have very severe depression. So one company sort of was trying to figure out, okay, how can we stop things before they get really, really bad, right? So if you've been depressed for six months, it's really hard to turn that around. How can we intervene at one week or two weeks? And what they sort of discovered was something very, very simple. They can just look at your location data on your phone to determine when you are in the process of getting depressed. Are you moving around within your own house? Are you leaving the house? So every day you still go to work,

because a lot of times depressed people, you know, will still go to work. But are you are you stopping by different places on the way home? They can literally just look at the activity level of your movement and be able to predict to some degree how depressed you are. And it turns out that the behavioral activation therapy focuses on just getting you out of the house, just getting you to do things. And as you act more, we activate this behavioral activation system. And then we end up feeling better about ourselves, that the action leads to hope. So this is a major thing that a lot of people who are depressed really struggle with.

This is a major thing that a lot of people who are anxious really struggle with, right? And what is the nature of that struggle? Let's go back to the mind and understanding time. So when you struggle to act, right, any time you struggle to act, what is in your head? I'll do it later. I don't feel like doing it. There's no point. It won't be enough.

Or what is it that keeps you from acting? Your mind is dwelling in the past. Oh, I screwed this up. I screwed this up. I screwed this up. You are literally not living in the here and now. Your mind is living in one of two places that do not exist. And the human brain is very unique because.

It has the capacity to do this. We can rob you of your present joy. We can rob you of your present energy and your will to act because of thinking about the future and thinking about the past. So this is where we have to change our relationship with time. So I want you all to think about, first of all, just where in time are the thoughts in your head? So this is a great journaling exercise that you can do, but just pay attention to yourself. Where are my thoughts? Are they thinking about what I should do right now?

Are they thinking about action in the present? Or are they thinking about the future? Are they thinking about the past? That's step one. Step two that we want to do is think about when I'm thinking about the future and when I'm thinking about the past. What is the correlation between literally occupying those spaces in my head and my mood? So the more time I spend thinking about the future and the more time I spend thinking

about the fast, what happens to my mood? And the third thing that we need to do once we notice these two things is strive absolutely for action, any actions. Let's take this very simple example. Taking out the trash, right? So this is what happens when I work with patients and I try to use behavioral activation with them. Take out the trash. Okay. So they say, okay, Dr. K, fine. So they take out the trash. And what actually happens in their brain? When they take out the trash, they think to themselves, oh my God, I have so much trash to take out, right? So even as you make progress, your mind feels so hopeless because there's such a large thing to climb. So in that moment, you do the right thing and your mind punishes you for it. Or when you take out the

trash, you look at the trash, right? You guys know what I'm talking about. You walk by that task you're procrastinating every single day and what happens in your mind. You regret. Oh my God. I can't believe that I haven't taken out the trash. I should have done it a long time ago. You're filled with regret. And those two negative experiences, hopelessness and regret will activate the behavioral inhibition system. Those thoughts will literally lead to an inhibition of your behavioral drive. And it's rooted in the thought. That's actually where it starts.

It's not your hormones. It's not your energy level. Maybe those things too. It's not your insulin level. It starts with these thoughts. So instead, what we want to do is just take out the trash. That's it. Now, when I say just take out the trash doesn't work that easily, right?

Because when you take out the trash, notice these thoughts. Prepare for these thoughts. prepare for noticing that progress actually comes with this weird paradoxical reaction of hopelessness or regret. And then no wonder you're stuck in time. And the last thing to consider is when you've got a bunch of trash to take out, how did you get a bunch of trash in the first place?