HealthyGamerGG - Why You Don't Feel Good Enough

Episode Date: September 20, 2025

In this episode, Dr. K takes a hard look at why so many people get addicted to self-improvement content but never actually change. From endless motivational videos to checklists of goals, he explains how improvement can become just another way of soothing emotional pain without addressing the deeper wounds underneath. Using examples from Reddit posts, Dr. K breaks down: Why self-improvement often starts as a response to rejection or insecurity How quick hits of “inspiration” online reinforce the cycle without progress The neuroscience behind distress tolerance and why it’s the real skill you need What “putting yourself out there” actually means (and why most advice about it falls flat) Practical ways to stop chasing constant improvement and start building peace, contentment, and real change This talk challenges the endless treadmill of “leveling up” and offers a roadmap for those ready to step off and live with intention. 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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MX Business Gold Card, built for business by American Express. Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Ocinoja, 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. If you are trying to improve because you feel hurt in some way,

that is going to be a very, very dangerous. way to improve. It used to work. Okay, so this is the key thing that has changed in the technological age. But that's where we have to reinterpret the past. Okay, so why do I see this as I am a loser and I need to fundamentally fix myself as opposed to this was just one rejection? If your goal is to be better so that the future is less risky, when does that end? When do you feel accomplished? When do you feel content. When do you feel peace? Hey, y'all. Just a reminder that in addition to these awesome videos, we have a ton of tools and resources to help you grow and overcome the challenges that you face. We've got things like

Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health, personalized coaching programs, and things like free community events and other sorts of tools to help you no matter where you are on your mental health journey. So check out the link in the description below and back to the video. So let's take a look at our first post for the day. Okay, I'm stuck in the loop, this loop of self-improvement. So I relate to this so much. I feel like I'm improving improvement gooning since years without progress. I've been watching self-improvement content like Reels, YouTube videos, advice, subs for the last three to four years, but I feel like I haven't made any real progress. Every time I see a motivational video, I feel inspired, but I never take action. My save later list is just piled up with years of

videos, reels, which I probably won't be able to watch. I'm 27 now and I got into self-improvement after being rejected by a girl I liked. Since then, I've been single in trying to improve myself, but I feel like I'm collecting information instead of actually applying it. For example, I'll watch a video reel saying, don't worry about what others think. Stop comparing yourself to others. It makes sense in theory, but the moment I go out and try to interact, those same thoughts of self-judgment and comparison start kicking in. Has anyone else been in this loop? How do you actually break out of this?

Be honest, I don't need another. Just put yourself out their response. 24-year-old improver. Currently learning a new foreign language, read 50 books this year, bench press 120 KG, trying to run 4 kilometers and 20 minutes, quit smoking,

quit drinking, will likely, will quit smoking, doesn't care about anything, just wants to improve himself. Ah, I'm improving. Does nothing all day only improves. Okay. So there are two things here, okay?

The first is there's the, the person who's actually, like, addicted to self-improvement and improving all the time. And then there's the person who wants to improve, watches a bunch of improvement content, it doesn't actually improve. And so if we want to understand these two things,

like this is what's, you know, the person says, look, I don't want just another put yourself out there advice, which is great. So I think this is a really classic example of not understanding the different pieces of the puzzle. Okay. So here's what I mean. So what we're going to do, I'm going to go ahead and go back to this for a second. So let's understand a couple of things. What we're going to do is go through this line by line, or not line by line. but paragraph by paragraph and understand a couple of different mechanisms that are going on why

people get addicted to self-improvement. Okay, so the first is I'm 27 now and I got into self-improvement after getting rejected by a girl that I liked. Since then, I have been single and trying to improve myself, but I feel like I'm collecting information instead of actually implying it. So now we have to understand a little bit about neuroscience and psychology. So what is the motivation behind self-improvement. If the motivation behind self-improvement is emotion, right? So we have a temporary emotion of feeling rejected. If you feel rejected and you think to yourself, okay, now that I am rejected, I'm going to go improve. What that means is that the driver for your improvement is an emotion, which means that your brain is going to try to fix your emotional state, right? That's

what the driver is. I feel hurt. The goal is to not feel hurt. So a really simple example, right? So if I feel hungry, I'm not going to go drink water. If I feel hungry, I'm going to eat something. If I feel thirsty, I'm going to drink something. If I feel dejected, what I'm going to try to do is feel accepted. So our brain understands that when we have a signal of like, I'm deficient in some way, we correct it by fixing that signal.

Changing your life isn't easy. When I was flunking out of college, I had to travel all the way to an ashram in India to begin a seven-year journey to put my life back together. Unfortunately, that option isn't available to everyone. That's why I've taken most of what I've learned, distilled it into the most important points, not just from India, but also my years of training as a psychiatrist, into our coaching program. Coaches will help you set appropriate goals, maintain motivation, and hold you accountable. Thousands of people from all over the world have tried HG coaching and have seen sustained improvements in purpose and direction in life,

and even reductions in feelings of depression and anxiety. So if you're interested in putting your life together, but don't have seven years to wander around India, definitely check out HG coaching. Now let's look a little bit closer. I've been watching self-improvement videos for the last three to four years, but I feel like I haven't made any real progress. Every time I see a motivational video, I feel inspired, but I never take action. So stop for a second. Hold on. If our driver for self-improvement is to change our internal emotional state,

what is the brain going to do? It's not actually going to improve. It's going to try to change our internal emotional state. So the moment that you feel inspired by watching some kind of self-improvement video, then you have fixed the problem, right? So I feel dejected. Now I feel inspired. The whole goal is to change my emotional state, right?

That's what the driving force is. And so now we also see why this sort of essentially creates a loop, because that once the. inspiration goes away. So you save it for later, right? So you save it for later. But once the inspiration goes away, the next day I wake up, I still feel dejected. Now my brain asks itself, okay, when we're feeling dejected, what helps us feel better? Because watching self-help content inspires you. And your brain is like, we feel bad. Let's feel good. Simple, right? I'm hungry. Let me eat something. And then it learns, oh, you know what works really well? Watching inspirational,

motivational content. So then it goes and watches inspirational motivational content again. And as you repeat that cycle over and over and over again, this behavior gets reinforced. Oh, I'm thirsty. Let me go to the well and get water. I'm thirsty again. Let me go to the well and get water. I'm thirsty again. Let me go to the well and get water. So this is why if you are trying to improve because you feel hurt in some way. That is going to be a very, very dangerous way to improve. It used to work. Okay, so this is the key thing that has changed in the technological age.

In the past, when I got rejected by someone, and I said to myself, okay, I don't want to feel rejected anymore. I want to feel proud. The problem is that a hundred years ago, there were no shortcut dopaminergic tickets to feeling inspired. I couldn't just like sit back and watch something on the internet and feel inspired, feel better about myself, right? Inspiration was not at our fingertips. Inspiration required, and that's not even inspiration, if we wanted to correct our emotional state, we had to go and accomplish something. So I actually had to go to the gym to fix my emotional state. So now the world that we live in is one where since we have such an easy emotional inspiration at our fingertips, which corrects our original.

emotional driver for improvement fixes it, right? So if I'm improving because I feel dejected and I no longer feel dejected, I don't want to improve. And what does your brain learn is the primary way to deal with dejection? Watch an inspirational video on the internet. Done, simple. So this is, and this person is spot on. Because now what's going on is there's, I want you all to understand this really well. Okay. So this person is saying, okay, I'm frustrated. Don't just tell me to put myself out there. Fair enough. We're not going to just tell you to put yourself out there. The first thing that you need to understand is this cycle is completely independent and has nothing to do with the process of improvement. We could substitute with this with I feel unloved in the morning and I need my partner to tell me I love you, right? So if we have an emotional, if something is missing in us emotionally, we need some kind of emotional reinforcement. So then what happens, this person even says, look, this person says, I'm 27 now and I got,

for example, I'll watch a video, stop comparing yourself to others. And it makes sense in theory. But the moment that I go out and try to interact, those same thoughts of self-judgment in comparison to start kicking in. Right. So this is like, this is literally what happens. Because the moment that you go and try to interact with someone, the feelings of dejection arise again.

Because watching inspirational videos on the internet does not process feelings of being a loser. It just makes them go away temporarily. Then you go out into the world and these feelings will come up again. Right. So I don't know if this kind of makes sense. but like if you go out and interact in the world and a feeling of and there's a feeling that always comes up I feel anxious I feel concerned I feel worried I feel uncomfortable if this feeling is always coming up it lives within you and must be dealt with directly as long as that feeling is there you know it's going to keep popping up and no amount of watching inspirational videos is going to change that right so this is not even about self-improvement this is not this is about managing your emotions internally. So there are two or three different methods that you can do to fix this.

The first is that you can go back to the original insult, right? So these are like sort of techniques of like trauma processing. We go into a bunch of detail in this and Dr. Kay's guide if you all want more like info. There's like 10 hours of this stuff in there. But here's the basic idea, okay? So in that moment where you get rejected by someone, there is one experience that your brain forms conclusions based off of. So if I get rejected, that is just a rejection.

That's all it is. So one rejection. Happens all the time. But if you're not careful, your brain will learn from that rejection. It will say, oh, it tries to understand this rejection. It concludes that I am a loser. Now, even though that event is one time, the feeling of loser lives within you. And it'll keep popping up when you start to go out and you do things.

So one of the techniques that you can do is go back in time and try to ask yourself, how did I form this conclusion from this single event? Right. And your mind will give you lots of logical reasons, which is why this is hard to do on your own. But that's where we have to reinterpret the past. Okay, so why do I see this as I am a loser and I need to fundamentally fix myself as opposed to this was just one rejection? Right. Maybe they were having a bad day. Maybe they're asexual. Maybe they're in a relationship. Maybe they're not attracted to my gender. Like whatever. There are all kinds of reasons that this person could say this. But why do we make a conclusion about it? So we have to go back and reinterpret the conclusion. The second thing that we do, and this person says, just put yourself out there. So this is going to be how you just put yourself out there. Because a lot of people will say just put yourself out there. And we hate, we hate, hate, hate, hate, just being told to,

put ourselves out there. But no one ever tells us how to put yourself out there. What is the purpose of putting yourself out there? It'll just get better if you put yourself out there. Here is literally what you want to do if you have trouble putting yourself out there. When you expose yourself to a particular situation, there is an environment that will evoke feelings within you. Those feelings will feel uncomfortable. You'll have comparisons in your mind. You'll have self-judgment in your mind. So this is where we need to learn a skill called distress. tolerance. If you improve your distress tolerance, you will be able to put yourself out there. People who can put themselves out there, there's a big difference, right? Their capacity for

distress tolerance is way higher. So here's the key thing. Putting yourself out there is not about putting yourself out there. It is about staying out there. So once I expose myself to this environment, which evokes these negative emotions in me, if I'm not careful, what I will then do, what I will then do is retreat, right? So if I feel anxious, my brain is sending me signals and says, run away, like Monty Python, run away. And if we retreat, then we're doing something incredibly dangerous. We are training our brain that when I feel anxious, the right response is running away.

Now, that may be the correct response when we're living in the jungle and we're being hunted by a tiger, fair enough. But in today's world, that becomes maladaptive. So our brain is not designed for the modern world we live in. It's designed for, you know, a world that existed like 600,000 years ago. That's how it evolved. So putting yourself out there is, and this is what people get, like, really confused about. They think like, okay, if I just mindlessly put myself out there enough, then I will get better.

That's not what it is. What you need to do is put yourself in situations that make you uncomfortable. That's phase one. Second thing is learn to tolerate that discomfort. Just don't react. Don't run away. Don't force yourself to engage. Just sit in that place.

And what will literally happen is our subjective sense of distress will gradually decrease. Sometimes it intensifies first and then it goes down. Right. So a great example of this is like if I jump into some cold water, it'll feel really cold for the first few seconds. And then my body acclimatizes. my brain literally acclimatizes. So even if you are feeling anxious in a social situation, as long as you don't keep feeding your thoughts

and we'll get to that in a second, you will acclimatize and then the anxiety will go away. So now what you've managed to do is tolerate a difficult situation. Now you are in a social situation. You've done the first half of putting yourself out there. You're not even done yet. Then what you need to do is engage.

This is what putting yourself out there is. It is tolerating your job. distress without avoidance step number one and this is the cool thing is that you don't need to like you don't need to solve anything all you need to do is tank the damage and your brain will acclimatize on its own then what we want to do is the second phase of putting yourself out there now you want to engage right so now that you're in a social situation you have less discomfort try talking to people try engaging with people walk up to someone and say hi my name is whatever i'm new here do you come here often you know like what do you

you think about today's lecture, like whatever, whatever is going on. Have you played this board game before? Ask some inane question about the circumstance that y'all share. It's a way of opening a conversation. Then we engage in the behavior. And as we engage in the behavior without anxiety, this is really important. See, once we're anxious, our dopaminergic circuitry gets disabled. Okay. So if I'm like being hunted by a tiger, I can't like play D&D. at the same time. So our amygdala goes and suppresses our dopaminergic circuitry. So we have to disable our amygdala and then something cool will happen. Once we are in a situation that we're no longer distressed in, then our capacity for enjoyment increases. So as our capacity for enjoyment

increases, I enjoy being at this lecture or whatever. Now I get a little bit of dopamine, so now I feel pleasure. Then I will also induce some craving and behavioral reinforcement. So then once I go home, the end of the day, there's a part of my brain, we'll start to want to do that again. Now I have a positive association with putting myself out there. So a week later, I go out and I do it again, and the same sequence will happen. My distress will actually rise again. But I have to learn how to tolerate that distress. Distress goes down. Now the door opens for pleasure. Now I will engage with the people around me. Now I will experience some kind of pleasure. And then this gets reinforced. So when people say this, you should put yourself out there, they have subconsciously figured out

this strategy. And the main reason that it's easy for some people to figure out and some people, it's hard to figure out, is the difference between their baseline distress tolerance. So if you were wired in a way where the signals are really, really high, then it's really hard to to get used to it and instead we run away. Whereas if you are wired, if you're more extroverted, if you're more open to, if you have a higher degree of openness, depending on your temperament, you can put yourself out there more easily. And this is why people will tell you to put yourself out there and they make it sound so simple because it is simple for them. Because their experience of it is way easier than yours. That's why they can tell you and it happens automatically. They

don't even understand these phases. It happens automatically for them. So they just tell you, hey, just like do what I did, right? It's like just do a cartwheel, bro. Just do a cartwheel. It's that easy. So I can understand people's frustration with putting yourself out there as advice because it doesn't work for some of us.

And at the same time, it is still what you have to do, but we can explain to you what the steps are and then you can put yourself out there. Now, there's one really important caveat to this, which is in the phase of distress tolerance, one of the key things that you don't want to do is engage with your anxiety. So when you have anxious thoughts, there are two things that can happen. You can tolerate the thoughts or you can engage with them.

And here's what engaging looks like. If you all have experienced anxiety, you know what? Oftentimes doesn't, it's not just one thought. One thought, oh my God, like, I'm going to fail this test. And then what happens is there's another thought. If I fail the test, I'm going to fail the class. If I fail the class, I'm going to drop out of college. I'm going to fail out of college.

If I fail out of college, I won't be able to find a job. If I can't find a job, I won't be able to find a partner. If I can't find a partner, I'll be alone for the rest of my life. I'll be a loser. So you see there's this cascading chain of thoughts. So here's the problem with anxiety is with this cascading chain of thoughts. Our anxiety actually intensifies, which eat with each step. And as the anxiety intensifies, more thoughts will come.

So distress tolerance when you are engaging in anxiety means literally shifting your attention away to something else. So my favorite example of this, or my favorite, like my kind of go to is breathing. Right. So what we want to do is focus our attention on breathing. Take 60 seconds to breathe three times. So we're going to count to 10 as we breathe in and count to 10 as we breathe out. Do it with me. Breathe in and breathe out. In and out. Now, what do you all notice about my voice? what do you all notice about my affect, my emotion? What has happened to me?

What has happened to you? 60 seconds, that's all it takes. Now, here's the reason why it's important to do 10 seconds in and 10 seconds out. If I tell you to breathe in and breathe out, just deep breathe. This is what the advice that people give. Just take three deep breaths. That doesn't work. Because three deep breaths in an anxious state will still be shallow.

You'll go, you'll do three deep breaths. But those deep breaths are not, you kind of run through them so quickly that there's enough momentum in the mind for the anxiety to continue. The goal of 10 second breaths in and out is that it demands your attention. You must concentrate it. You must focus on it to succeed. It doesn't happen automatically. It isn't easy to do. So what we want to do is give ourselves a task that requires and demands cognitive attention.

The reason that we want to use breathing as opposed to other things is that when we have very slow exhalations and we have slow breaths in and slow breaths out, what will actually happen is our respiratory rate is normally 12 to 14. Once we decrease our respiratory rate to three, it will change our oxygenation level. It'll change our carbon dioxide level. And as these things change, it will activate our nervous system in a different way. So you're sort of triggering vagus nerve. activation, which is going to slow you down. So then that sort of works on the physiological level. So there is a cognitive level where if I am concentrating, I can't be anxious anymore. And we also want to use a technique, ideally, that will trigger our physiology. But if you don't like breathing or breathing makes you anxious, you can just concentrate on something

for 60 seconds. Now, if you're anxious, you're going to think, oh, my God, this is going to make me look so weird. So be it. You can go to the bathroom to do it. You can step outside to do it, or you can just breathe quietly to yourself for 60 seconds. I can almost guarantee you that if you're in a social interaction, you breathe for 60 seconds, unless you're like, you know, people can usually talk about themselves for 60 seconds without a problem. Right. So like if you feel weird about it, do it anyway and then build that distress tolerance.

Okay, so that's number one. Breaking the loop of I'm addicted to self-help content, but I never do anything, involves understanding what the origin, what the driving motivation for the self-help content is, and recognizing that social media fixes that problem without any kind of improvement. Improvement has nothing to do with this. Now, let's move on to part two.

Now let's actually talk about the improver. Currently learning a new language, reading 50 books, quit drinking, will quit smoking, doesn't care about everything, just anything wants to just improve themselves. I'm improving, does nothing all day only improves. Okay. So what's going on here?

Why are people so addicted to the 24-year-old improver? So I think self-improvement is good. I strive for self-improvement. I think it's good to improve. I'm working on a couple of things. But one of the most dangerous things that can happen is when improvement becomes the goal. Right?

So this is where if we think about the nature of improvement, improvement is a means to an end. Right? So why do I want to improve my communication? Because I want to get better in my relationship. Why do I want to learn a new language? Because I want to, you know, I want to be able to travel to that country or whatever. So like this is where we have to understand something.

Generally speaking, the reason that human beings, the way that your brain is wired to improve, is to accomplish a certain goal, right? That's how we know. I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but like, if I have trouble running a mile, my body will sense that physiological stress will increase my cardiovascular capacity, my muscles will start to grow and strengthen. So we have this very simple, anytime you go to the gym, if you lift heavy weights, why do your muscles grow?

Because your brain and your physiology recognize that if I'm trying to do a task and I'm not good at it, I need to get better at that task. So our brain and our body are trying to adapt to ideally succeed in various situations. That's why improvement exists. Okay. What happens with some people is that improvement becomes associated with some kind of psychological deficiency. So here's what I mean by that. So let's, I'll give you all an example.

So when I work with patients with body dysmorphia, this is what tends to happen. They have an abstract idea of beauty, right? What does it mean to be beautiful? There's an abstract idea that is not clearly definable. Then what happens is this idea of beauty becomes associated with certain measurable things, like thinness or musculature. So men with body dysmorphia who are bodybuilders, they want these huge muscles, right? So I feel ugly. I'm striving for beauty.

And now I don't know what beauty is. I don't know what ugliness really is. I can't define it. It's a feeling. and I am associating that with certain parameters like thinness or musculature. Let's just use thinness and talk about anorexia and body dysosomorphia, okay? So then what happens is I think to myself, I am ugly and pretty is thin. Therefore, let me increase the thinness.

Let me get more thin. Let me get more thin. Let me get more thin. But once again, the problem is that within you, you have a psychological injury that is not corrected by being thinner. So there's something that you, I'm. I feel ugly. Pretty people are thin. Let me pursue this.

But this doesn't get healed. So then what happens is we wind up in a situation where people are getting thinner and thinner and thinner, but they never feel beautiful. The origin of feeling ugly is separate from thinness. But our brain connects these two things and relentlessly pursues one. This is what happens with 24-year-old improvers. You live in a world where you are told you need to be. better. The world is competitive. You need to be an entrepreneur. You need to be six feet tall. You need to make six figures. You need to do this. You need to do that. The world tells you that you are inadequate in a thousand different ways. And so especially if you're a man, men are something called external problem solvers, which means that if we feel something bad on the inside, we correct that by fixing something on the outside. If my wife is mad at me, I'm going to get her flowers. I'm going to get her a piece of jewelry. They're therefore she will not be mad at me. I'm not going to bother learning how to deal with her anger,

how to manage her anger, how to manage my own sense of guilt when my partner is angry with me. Right. So I'm going to correct the circumstance outside that makes me feel a certain way. I'm not going to manage my own feelings. I'm not going to be stoic about it. I'm going to shape my environment so that the environment sends me no more bad signals. This is how men get. get manipulated all the time. Because the moment that someone figures out, oh, if I get angry at him, he will buy me jewelry, you're just reinforcing them getting angry with you. So then they will create emotions for you over and over and over again.

They will push your buttons so that you become a machine and you offer certain behaviors. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast, Smart Move, being financially successful. savvy, smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling.

Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Now, in the case of the 24-year-old improver, you are given a ton of anxiety and uncertainty about the world. You won't be able to date.

you won't be able to make money, you won't be able to live this beautiful fitness influencer life, and this is what you want. And instead, what you need to do is improve. So there is a certain anxiety, there is a fear of uncertainty, and you think to yourself, okay, if I get better, if I get better, if I get better, if I keep on getting better, then my chances of more money, more sex, and more everything improve. So you just start relentlessly chasing that. And the reason that it's never satisfying is because there isn't a particular goal.

If your goal is to be better so that the future is less risky, when does that end? When do you feel accomplished? When do you feel content? When do you feel peace? And then what happens is the 24-year-old improver says, ah, I know what I need to do. I need to increase my competency at being peaceful. I need to go to someone, the number of improvement chads that have. crossed my, you know, professional space because they're like, hey, Dr. K, can you teach me how to be

at peace with myself? I need to improve that. I'm always unhappy with myself. Teach me contentment. Let me level up the skill of contentment, which is always a fun journey. I love it. It's a blast. Because I'll tell them, I will teach them contentment, it's something you can learn. But, you know, it's a bit tricky. So the key thing, if you're someone who's kind of, of addicted to self-improvement is you got to really like spend some time thinking about where is the driving force for this coming from second thing that you can do is learning how to feel content and just sitting with yourself so this is a little bit harder but like it's harder to explain not so hard to do but right really stop and reflect about like just really look at yourself like where is this desire for

improvement coming from when i improve how do i feel about myself and even if you feel better at every time you go to the gym, this is also, now we get to like one advanced point. So you may notice, okay, there's an emptiness within me or there's something that is unhappy within me. And every time I go to the gym, every time I learn a language, I feel better. So then you keep doing it, right? Because you have an emotion of something missing. You improve yourself and then it feels better.

So this cycle repeats over and over and over again. And then the question that you need to ask yourself, the second level question you need to ask yourself is, why does... So what you'll notice is that the feeling of relief from, improvement is temporary. And then tomorrow, I need to go to the gym again. And I need to go to the gym. Now I need to learn language. Now I need to read 50 books. Now I need to do all this stuff. Okay. So if the feeling is temporary, hold on a second. How do I ever make this feeling go away forever? Or am I going to be on this endless treadmill of improvement? So this is also a scenario where people sort of discover that improving makes them feel better on the inside, but only for a time, which is why they become

addicted to the improvement itself. I'm all for improving. I'm not saying you shouldn't improve, but you shouldn't mindlessly improve. You should improve with intention. And then the other thing that you can learn how to do, and this is beautiful, so now we'll go to step three, is spend a day doing nothing, intentionally doing nothing. And watch as the feelings of inadequacy start to arise. And as the feelings of inadequacy start to arise, practice distress tolerance. Just watch them, breathe in and breathe out until the anxiety goes away. And then you will start the path of of being free from self-improvement. 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. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit score

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