HealthyGamerGG - Why You Can't Enjoy Anything Anymore

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

In this episode Dr. K explains why modern feeds are not trying to entertain you, they are trying to keep you bored. He breaks down boredom as a dopamine craving and withdrawal state, how short form platforms train your brain into tolerance, and why normal activities stop feeling fun. Then he shows how to reverse it by allowing boredom so your receptors upregulate, your sensitivity returns, and everyday life becomes enjoyable again. He also covers the temporary spike in stored anxiety and low mood that can surface during this reset and how to handle it safely. Topics include: What boredom is in the brain, dopamine craving and withdrawal How feeds create tolerance and downregulate dopamine receptors Why multitasking with phone plus TV feels empty The paradox: more boredom today, less boredom tomorrow Receptor upregulation and regaining pleasure from simple activities Dopaminergic flexibility, enjoying a wider range of things again Expecting rebound emotions when you unplug and why they taper When to seek clinical support if symptoms persist 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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Want to get started? Head to CarMax.com for details and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive? CarMax. This episode is brought to you. to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents

who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the dream. Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I I'm Dr. Al-Ocanogia, but you can call me Dr. Kay. 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 TikTok is not trying to entertain you.

It's trying to keep you bored. And TikTok was the big pioneer behind this, but now basically all the other platforms have jumped on board. And if we want to understand why we feel bored so much and how to feel less bored, we have to understand exactly what these apps are doing to our brain. So let's start with the basics. First question is what is boredom? Like from a scientific perspective, when you feel bored, what's going on in your brain? So my take is that boredom is a subjective feeling that correlates with your brain craving dopamine.

So let's understand this for a moment. Let's say I feel hungry. Hunger is a subjective feeling. It's the way that I feel, but it correlates with some physiology. If my blood glucose is low, if my glycogen stores are empty, if my stomach doesn't have any food in it, these are the physical signals in my body that will create the feeling of hunger. When my kidneys detect a high concentration of sodium, those signals travel to my brain and make me feel thirsty.

So what is the physiologic or neuroscientific correlate? What's going on in our brain when we subjectively feel bored? This is a craving for dopamine. Okay? So let's understand this and think about it and see if this really fits. 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 if you kind of tunnel down, okay, why aren't you motivated?

And they're like, well, there's no point. And if you get underneath, there's no point. What you ultimately find is hopelessness. So what the yogis discovered is that what we call motivation, they actually called a concentrated mind. What's the difference between someone who actually does stuff and someone who just tries to do stuff? So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today.

So when I feel bored, what do I do? This is a feeling that causes me to engage in a behavior, right? So I pull out my phone, I use a device, something like that. I want to do something to no longer feel bored. So then I give in to this behavioral drive, right? And then I pull out my phone, then my brain gets dopamine, and now I no longer feel bored. I don't feel great. I don't feel like I'm using my time well, but that subjective, intense feeling of boredom goes away.

So the other thing that we need to understand is that boredom is also, not only is it a craving, it is also correlated with dopamine withdrawal. So when I have a certain level of dopamine activity in my nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area, I feel like I'm enjoying myself, right? So dopamine gives us a sense of pleasure. It gives us a behavioral reinforcement. So whatever gives us the pleasure we want to do again.

But then once the dopamine transmission starts to drop down, what do we feel? We start to feel bad. We feel restless. We feel a lot of negative emotions sometimes. There's all kinds of negative things. things that we feel until we start using the device again. Bortem is also the subjective feeling of dopamine withdrawal. And this is kind of what we know, right? We know that all of these technological

devices are addictive, but if they are addictive, that also means they are undergoing the principles of addiction in your brain. And if you want to understand how to feel less bored in your life, we're going to walk you through some neuroscience, okay? So there's one thing that I want to say now, which is the solution to this is very simple. The more bored you are today, the less bored you will be tomorrow. The less bored you are today, the more bored you will be tomorrow. And this mirrors completely with addiction. If we look at someone who's addicted to opioids, what has to happen?

They actually have to withdraw. They have to experience the negative effects of withdrawal for some amount of time. So their body kind of basically recalibrates to normal. And this is exactly what we see with dopamine as well in all these devices. is that the more bored you are willing to be today, the less bored you will be in the future. So let's dive into a bit of the neuroscience. The first thing that we're going to talk about

is dopaminergic transmission at the synapse. So normally what happens is we have two neurons that meet. One of them will release dopamine, one of them will receive dopamine, and they have dopamine receptors, okay? So let's say we've got about five receptors, and we have a regular amount of dopamine transmission. Now, if I do a dopaminergic activity, like use TikTok, then the dopaminergic dump in the synapse increases.

I start secreting a lot more dopamine. And then my receptors are fully saturated, so they get a big dopamine signal. And then we feel really great. This feels awesome. But our body does something that really, really is unfortunate, which is that it develops tolerance. The way that it manages this is there's a part of the neuron that this is not the part of the neuron that feels pleasure. we feel pleasure subjectively. But the neuron is like, hey, wait a second, we're getting bombarded with dopamine.

We need to tone that signal down. This is the principle of tolerance. So if we think about someone who drinks alcohol, when I first started drinking two beers would get me drunk. But as I drink more and more and more, my body develops a tolerance. And so we develop a tolerance to dopamine. The mechanism of tolerance is withdrawal of receptors from our synapse. So whereas we used to have five receptors, now we only have two.

And if the number of receptors is lower, the total amount of dopamine signal that we can get actually drops. Because we don't have space for all of that dopamine that TikTok is dumping in. The goal of the synapse is to keep our dopamine at an even level. Now, this creates a big problem because unless we are bombarding our synapse with dopamine, now the dopamine signal is going to be effectively too low. So even if we have a regular amount of dopamine or something like reading a book, or my favorite is watching a TV show, and the TV show, even though it's a show that you want to watch,

you pull out your phone in the middle of the TV show. Like, what the hell is going on there, right? And it's not like you're really enjoying being on your phone or you're enjoying the TV show. It's like you're kind of half doing both and like what is going on in your brain. That's because your brain is craving that dopamine. Now, the problem is that once we downregulate our dopamine receptors,

once we develop dopamineergic tolerance, all of the other activities in life become less fun. Books, which secrete five units of dopamine, can't compete with TikTok's 20 or 30 units of dopamine. And what this creates over time is that the more that you use these devices, the more you use these platforms, the more bored you will be. Why is that? Because remember, boredom is a subjective craving for dopamine.

It's a dopamine signal that feels too low, and then we become dependent on platforms or TikTok or whatever to give us that dopamine. How do we solve this? What we basically need to do is reverse the process. We need to do is add more receptors to our neurons. And the way that we do that is by being bored. So this is what's really cool. When we're bored, that means that the dopamine signal is too low.

So when the dopamine signal is too low, what does the neuron do? It adds more receptors. The more receptors it adds, the more you will derive pleasure. Now, our sensitivity to dopamine has increased, right? It's the opposite of tolerance. Now when I sit down to read a book, I get plenty of dopamine. It's actually really fun. Even when I do things like go for a walk, suddenly this feels pleasurable. When I hang out with friends, this feels pleasurable. Sitting outside on my porch and watching the sunset starts to feel pleasurable. This is the really, really crippling thing. We've created a society where we get so much dopamine that when we develop this tolerance, the normal activities in life start to feel boring. So what we want to do. to do is reverse this dopamine tolerance. Then what'll happen is we'll start to recruit this principle called dopaminergic flexibility. So as our dopamine sensitivity increases, we start to get something

really cool, which is something called dopaminergic flexibility. And this means we become more flexible around which activities secrete dopamine. So if you look at, if you're spending a lot of time on your phone or on TikTok or whatever, the number of activities that you will find pleasurable actually decreases. Our dopaminergic circuits are not flexible. It's basically TikTok or video games or porn or marijuana or whatever. That's the only thing that works. But as our dopaminergic flexibility increases, we will find that we can enjoy all kinds of different things,

which we've already talked about. So that's one of the key principles here. So what we want to do is basically be as bored as possible for a period of time. And that boredom is literally our brain upregulating our dopaminergic receptors, and we will have more fun in the future. There's one last thing that we want to. be a little bit careful about, which is that when we are bored, there's another mechanism in our brain that is going to activate, which is that we are going to get a hyperactivation of our limbic

system and amygdala. The other effect that TikTok and these platforms have is by suppressing our emotions. And so when I add an emotional suppressor to my system, when I take that suppressor away, there's a rebound level of negative emotion. So when I'm suppressing my anxiety through drinking or TikTok or whatever, when I stop using that app, I will have a rebound anxiety. I'll feel a ton of intense anxiety. And when I work with people, this is kind of what I tell them. The more anxiety you let come up, this is all dormant anxiety that's been stored and packed away, it's not going to feel that way forever. As you experience a lot of that anxiety or a lot of that depression when you start to feel bored, right? Because we don't feel good emotionally when we're bored. We're kind of

looking for something to do. All of this stuff will basically, hopefully, fingers crossed balance out. If it doesn't, you should absolutely go see a medical professional, go see a psychiatrist, go see a therapist, because there could be an underlying disorder. But this is the last thing that I wanted to tell y'all is when you're dealing with this boredom, be prepared for an upsurge of negative emotions that should ideally taper down in about a week. So if you want to start enjoying life, if you want to be less bored, You need to start being more bored. 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.