HealthyGamerGG - Why You Feel EVERYTHING (And Others Don't)

Episode Date: September 5, 2026

Talk to a HG Coach 1-on-1: https://bit.ly/46bIkdoDr. K's NEW Guide to Love, Sex, & Relationships is here! Order now: https://bit.ly/4dO3x0VDr. 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/3ZOopgQIn this episode, Dr. K provides a profound look at what it actually means to go through life with a higher sensory capacity than the average person. He breaks down why sensitive people are neurologically more vulnerable to trauma, why standard self-help advice fails them, and how to build a specialized psychological buffer to protect yourself from external negativity. What to expect in this episode: The 1-to-20 Experience Scale: Why sensitive people (including those with social anxiety, BPD, and visceral hypersensitivity) are wired differently. While the average person's physical and emotional pain scale goes from 1 to 10, a sensitive person's scale goes up to 20—meaning they literally experience twice the intensity of everyday life. The Problem-Solving Hyperactivation: Why highly sensitive people get easily "entangled" in toxic relationships. When faced with sadness or anger in others, a sensitive brain doesn't just feel more empathy—its problem-solving and planning circuits hyperactivate, forcing them to obsessively try and "fix" the situation. The Missing Buffers: How the average brain is protected by default cognitive distortions like illusory superiority (the belief that bad things only happen to other people) and the narcissistic bias (instantly shifting blame to others during a conflict). Sensitive people lack these default filters, leaving them exposed to raw, unfiltered negative inputs. Why "Normie" Solutions Fall Short: Why standard advice like "fake it till you make it" or "just put yourself out there" fails sensitive people. Because their experience of disapproval can reach a level 15, standard confidence-boosting techniques designed to bump someone from a 3 to an 8 are simply not strong enough to protect them. The Trauma Skyrocket: Why a highly sensitive person is statistically much more likely to develop PTSD from a negative event. Because they absorb significantly more malice, fear, and pain from a single bad experience, they collect a far greater density of negative data than a neurotypical person in the exact same scenario. The Screaming Metaphor (Physiology of Roller Coasters): A fascinating, personal breakdown of why Dr. K hated roller coasters for years, and the cool physiological science of how screaming tightens the diaphragm, increases intrathoracic pressure, and physically keeps your internal organs in place during a drop. Leaning Into the Body: Why healing physical sensitivities (like chronic pain or IBS) requires moving toward the body rather than away from it. Dr. K explains how body-oriented practices like Yoga and Tai Chi rewire the flexibility of the somatosensory cortex by demanding its attention, introducing positive inputs to balance out the negative ones. Building Your Level 15 Buffer: A step-by-step psychological protocol to cultivate highly robust self-esteem. Dr. K explains why you must challenge yourself in isolation—tackling difficult physical or mental projects that absolutely no one else will ever witness—to build a rich, internal database of self-worth that is entirely immune to the opinions, praise, or criticism of other people Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025.

Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Ocinoja, 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. All right, chat. Today, we're going to talk about going through life with a greater sensory capacity than the average person. So if we look at different people, it turns out that their experiences of life are fundamentally different. And this kind of makes sense, right? We sort of say in some weird way that like, yeah, everyone has their experience of life, everyone is entitled to their perspective. And this took me a while to understand as a psychiatrist. So I worked with patients who had things like borderline personality disorder, social anxiety disorder, hypocondriasis or illness anxiety disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, visceral hypersensis.

Misophonia, right? So I worked with a lot of these different patients, and it took me a while to actually figure out that their experience of life, the way that they move life, is fundamentally different from the average person. And sure, everyone has some variability in their experience. But when we say statements like that, I don't think we really acknowledge that, like, sure, two people have experiences of going through medical school. But if your brain is wired a certain way, if your neurons are wired a certain way, if you're no susceptors, which are your pain receptors, are wired a certain way, your experience of life is fundamentally different. So I'll give you all a simple example. So I did a lot of work on chronic pain and people

who have opioid addiction. And we think that people with opioid addiction, like, because they are addicted to opioids, they messes with their pain receptors and then they're like, they complain more about pain. Well, it turns out that modern research shows that it's actually the exact opposite. So if I get injured and I go to the emergency, room. Someone will ask me, what's your pain on a scale of 1 to 10? And I'll say, okay, my pain is a 10 out of 10. And then they can ask another person, someone who has a predisposition for an opioid addiction, what is your pain on a scale of 1 to 10? They'll say, I have a pain 10 out of 10. Now, here's the mistake that we make as a society and as a medical system. We assume that these two numbers are the same. What I now understand as a psychiatrist is that on my pain scale, I go from 1 to 10. But if someone has a no susceptor sensitivity, if they have a genetic predisposition for opioid addiction, their pain scale actually goes up to 20. They're capable of experiencing twice the pain of a normal person, the average person. And this isn't just with issues of pain.

If we look at people with borderline personality disorder or social anxiety, their experience of social situations or breakups or arguments with friends or loved ones is like fundamentally different. It's like they experience the world with more, with kind of this distortion of color. Okay. So here's one study that is looking at brain scans of people who are sensitive. And what we see here is that their brains activate in different ways. So there's a lot of common advice, right? So like, oh, if you're like feeling lonely, just like put yourself out there.

And this is the real challenge with being a sensitive person, which is that the common solutions to problems that we all face, land differently. So I'll share a simple example of this. So when I grew up, I didn't really go to a whole lot of theme parks. Okay. I didn't go to amusement parks, things like that. So I didn't like roller coasters. I didn't enjoy roller coasters. Well, after I went to India and, you know, trained to become a monk, and then I was in medical school and my wife wanted to go to Universal Studios. So I was like, okay, fine. Like now I'm like, I'm a big boy. I have all this yogic training and I just, I haven't liked roller coasters in the past, but I just need to like try it, right? And I just need to get used to it. And if I get used to it, I will enjoy it. So we went to Universal Studios, and for three

days, I went on lots of roller coasters. And what I found was that, like, each and every roller coaster was absolute torture. I just did not like the way that I felt. And no matter how much I went on it, I remember kind of going in and, like, doing my, like, yogic training, right? So I was, like, controlling my breathing and, like, trying to enjoy it and all this kind of stuff. And no matter what I did, I never enjoyed it. At the end of day three, it was just as torturous as the beginning of day one. And that's when I sort of realized like, oh, my physiology is just wired in a way where when I am hurtling downward at a particular speed, it detects these changes, right? My vestibular apparatus and things like that are active. I also found something kind of random and

interesting, which is why screaming helps so much in roller coasters. So it turns out that when you're plummeting, okay, your body understands that you're falling primarily through your So we have this thing called the vestibular apparatus. This is where our sense of motion and space comes from. But when you're on a roller coaster, you get another signal that you're falling, which is your internal organs. So your stomach and your intestines are not supposed to be here. So what I sort of noticed is that when I'm plummeting on a roller coaster or moving really

fast or whatever, like, oh, my visceral internal organs are in places where they don't belong. And then I started screaming on roller coaster. Coasters because that's what you're supposed to do. And then I realized something really cool about screaming, which is physiologically, when you scream, you increase intratheracic pressure, right? So you like tighten and you scream. And when you tighten to scream, your diaphragm tightens and actually keeps your intestines in place, which helped me a lot when I was on roller coasters. But back to the main point, which is that my physiology is just not wired to enjoy this stuff. And this is what I found

if we look at things like visceral hypersensitivity with IBS. So this is where some people, their capacity to detect signals from inside their GI system is actually higher, right? So they detect small air bubbles. They detect cramps more easily. So they're just receiving more data. And here's the really fascinating thing. Whether we're talking about social anxiety, borderline personality disorder, or visceral hypersensitivity, not only is your brain more sensitive to these things, there's something else that keeps things balanced for the average person.

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So I'll give you guys an example. Okay. We all get signals from our internal gun, right? So like, I feel a little cramp. And if I have hypersensitivity, you know, it's not that I'm, so I feel the cramp more. But the other thing that's really interesting is that there is a protective mechanism that some people lack. So one example of this is a bias called illusory superiority. So if you ask most human beings, hey, are you healthier than average?

Yeah. Do you eat fast food every day? Absolutely. Do you drink alcohol? Sure. Do you vape? Yeah. Are you aware that these things cause problems? Yeah, I'm aware that they cause problems, but they're not going to happen to me. Yeah, like, vaping is bad for other people, but I'm going to be fine. Look, my grandmother, she smoked two packs a day and had a whiskey and fried fish every day. She lives until she was 92. So we have this thing called illusory superiority, which like we think bad things aren't going to happen to us, unless maybe you're sensitive, which we'll get to in a second. Right. So if we look at what keeps people in check, it isn't just that our pain dial goes from one to 20 and something. instead of one to 10, it's that we have certain cognitive biases in place that buffer the signals that we receive. So when someone has illusory superiority, they detect things in their stomach. But some part of their brain is like, hey, bra, it's going to be fine.

Ain't no thing. That pain in your stomach, it's not appendicitis. There's nothing wrong with you. Like, you're going to be fine. It'll get better. And on the flip side, if we look at things like social anxiety or borderline personality disorder, when someone gets mad at you, right, you may react really. badly and and this is what's really fascinating. So here's one study that was looking at the social impact of positive and negative emotion. And what they actually found is that the brain regions of

someone who's sensitive activate in a different way. And here's what's really interesting about that. Not only is your sense of empathy increased, your sense of like planning and problem solving also activates. So this is something that I think we don't realize is like when you're a sensitive person, it's not just that you feel more. It's the part of your brain. that tries to solve problems also hyperactivates when someone is angry or sad or upset around you. This is why we get so entangled with people who make us feel so bad because the part of our brain that says, oh, we have to fix this is also hyperactive. That's why we get tangled into it.

Now, let's look at the cognitive bias that most people have. If someone says, hey, bro, you did a bad job. If you have a high sensory perception, you're going to detect that. You're going to feel all that. You're going to absorb that negative energy, and you're going to try to solve it. But the average person has a narcissistic bias. Oh, hey, I screwed up. I didn't screw up.

You screwed up. It's not a me problem. It's a you problem. And we know that the narcissistic bias is a distortion, right? It is a removal from reality. So here's what, like, when I've worked with a lot of these patients, what I sort of realized is it's not just about the neuroscience. It's not that your pain scale is higher or your empathy is higher or your visceral

hypersensit. is higher. It's also the absence of cognitive biases that normally buffer us. And the problem with this is that we experience a lot of these situations that everyone goes through in life, but we feel more and some of the protective buffers that are actually cognitive biases are less present in our minds. So we have to come up with our own solutions because a neurotypical solution or an average solution of just put yourself out there, fake it till you make it, right? You need to get acclimatized to it. Doesn't work.

And so one of the reasons that we've sort of developed our own systems here at HG, like coaching program is a good example, is we have a lot of problems that are shared with everybody else in the world. But what we found here at HG is that when we draw from our community, which is where a lot of our coaches come from, they understand that like normie solutions may not work for you, right? because they are also not normies. Well, now we've got some normies in there.

But there's some evidence-based approaches that we have to help you find the solution that works for you. Because your sensitivity, there may be visceral hypersensitivity, there may be like, you know, social sensitivity. We're not sure. But there's going to be a relatively unique pattern and you need a customized solution. There are one or two principles, however, that I'm going to share with you all today about how I approach this as a psychiatrist. So when I have a patient who is more sensitive, what's the? a general idea here. And what I found is that we need to focus on that buffer. Okay. So remember, for the average person, their pain scale is whatever, but then they have these compensatory biases,

right? The narcissistic bias, illusory superiority. And we don't have those. So that's what we need to build. And when I work with my patients, what the evidence shows, and we'll go through a couple of clinical examples of this, what the evidence shows is that we need additional data. So if I'm sensitive, I'm receiving more data from the outside world. I'm even receiving more data from the inside of my body. And so in order to balance that, either I develop narcissism, which works great, or what I need to do is create a more stable buffer, a more stable grounding, so that the data that I receive from my body or the outside world doesn't, like, cause me to, like, move away or, like, float off in some direction or get swept away in a particular direction.

So we're going to give you guys a simple example of how to build up this buffer. Okay. And we're going to use the example of chronic pain. So back in 2008, my first job at Harvard Medical School was being a research assistant in a somatosensory cortex lab. The somatosensory cortex is the part of our brain that maps onto our body. So when I like touch myself here versus here and you ask me, hey, where are you getting poked? There's a part of my brain that knows that, okay, the face has this much stuff and my arm has this much stuff. It's basically a map of your body. And normally what happens is that map will be fluid based on what we feel. So if I go and get a massage, normally the map is like, let's say, 100% I'm aware of all of my body.

And then if I go and get a massage and someone is working on a knot, like 90% of my somatosensory cortex shifts to the knot. Other examples of the fluidity of the somatosensory cortex are like sexual activity. So when you have sexual activity, when you have sexual activity, your body is not giving an equal amount of attention to every portion of your body, right? So what happens in chronic pain is it loses the ability to be flexible. That's actually the source of the problem. Okay?

So what happens is like if I have chronic pain, let's say I've got chronic lower back pain, there is 40% of my RAM in my brain is just always focused on my back. So even if I get a massage, 40% is locked into my back and it hurts all the time. So what we sort of discovered is that the mechanism through which Tai Chi and yoga improve chronic pain is when you do Tai Chi and yoga, you're like doing all these postures and stuff, right? And when you're doing those postures, it demands the attention away from your back to whatever you're doing in your somatosensory cortex. So it literally rewires the flexibility of your somatosensory cortex in yoga, right?

We're trying to pull the attention away from one part of the body to another part of the body. That's why we do all the bendy poses. It's not to improve flexibility. The key principle here, though, is that we want some additional information. So in the case of physical issues, what will end up. doing is a lot of body-oriented work, right? So, and this is helpful for things like fibromyalgia, yoga, things like that. The key thing here is that if you're sensitive, what you need is more input, not less. We need to add good input instead of bad input. The second area that we're

going to explore is social sensitivity, borderline personality disorder, and things like that, okay? So if you are sensitive to the judgments of others, if someone says, hey, you really let me down, you really disappointed me. So you're like, like super sensitive to what your boss says, what your friends say, how do you buffer against that, right? Because you don't have the narcissistic defense. And this is where what I, what I do with the people that I work with is I try to develop a sense of self-confidence, right? And that's kind of like, duh, like, oh, if you feel bad about yourself, if someone says something, like you need to develop self-confidence. But I want you all to understand, this is a very precise thing that we're doing. This is

an additional input about your worth. That is the solution, right? It's not to run away or try to convince people that you're a good person. That doesn't work. What you need is additional information that substitutes for the cognitive bias of illusory superiority or narcissism. You're getting these bad inputs, which by the way, you're able to detect a lot more, right? So you're able to detect disapproval from other people at 15 instead of 10. And how do you buffer against that? You need to develop inputs from yourself that you are a good person. We need to work on confidence Not from a sense of like just in general self-esteem, but that you need to have 15 levels of self-confidence to deal with the 15 levels of disapproval. And this is what also makes things not work for us, right?

Which is that when people say, hey, you need to develop confidence, they're talking about moving from like three to eight. They're not talking about moving from three to 15. So how do you develop this self-confidence? So in the case of physical things, we need additional input. So whether we're talking about chronic pain, whether we're talking about visceral hypersensitivity, ibs. This is why numerous clinical trials show that things like tai chi or yoga are effective at improving these conditions. And the reason they work is because we're not running away from the body. We're leaning into the body. We need additional inputs. Now, what about from a social perspective?

Let's say that I have, I'm a highly sensitive person. I'm highly empathic. Maybe I have borderline personality disorder. Maybe I have social anxiety disorder. Maybe I've got PTSD. Quick aside about PTSD and sensitivity. People think that after you become traumatized, now you are hypersensitive to something, right? Because there's hypervigilance that happens after trauma. What's actually really interesting is that if you are a highly sensitive person, your risk for trauma sky rockets. And why is that? If you have a negative experience, let's say that someone mugs me in an alley. If I am a normal person, the amount of suffering I experience, the malice that I read into their face, the amount a pain that I experience when they slug me in the stomach is like, let's say the malice I detect

is five. And then I also have the narcissistic bias, right? Because I'm like, who is this guy? How dare they try to mug me? Don't they know who I am? Right? So I detect five levels of malice and I have five levels of narcissism. And then the punch that they go in my gut hurts, but I'm like, bitch, I'm going to get you. You better run. Like, you better know, do you know who I am? Right. So this kind of balances out. So sure, it's like somewhat dramatic. Here's the really scary thing. If you are a sensitive person, the malice you detect in their face is like a 10. When you detect that level of malice, the fear that you experience is a 10. When they punch you in the gut, it hurts as a 10.

And so that is more likely to traumatize you. Because when there is a negative situation, you are literally collecting more negative experience from a given situation. So a huge part of this work that I've done is in people who have been traumatized. And what do we do with people who are traumatized? We don't avoid, which is what the natural inclination is, right? So this is a scary thing. Let me move away from it. What we actually have to do is increase balancing sensory input.

So we've talked a little bit about doing yoga and Tai Chi, which mediate that. But what about on the mental perspective? What about from an empathic perspective? What about from a social perspective? So let's say I'm in a social situation where someone is upset with me and I experience some degree of disapproval. And since I'm sensitive, my disavisive, my disavisive. disapproval isn't between one and 10, disapproval goes up to 15. So I experience 15 units of disapproval. The right solution there is for me to have 15 units of confidence. And this is the other

reason why the normie solutions don't work for sensitive people, because they will say, okay, if you lack confidence, do something that'll bump you from a three to an eight. A plus five works for them. Plus five isn't enough for us, right? We need something, if we need to go from five to 15 because the negative inputs that we're getting are so much higher. So in the case of social anxiety or disapproval or whatever, you need a self-esteem that is quite robust. So how do we develop that internal sense of self-esteem? So if we look at self-esteem versus esteem from other people, which by the way, people who are highly sensitive are more likely to have their esteem be dependent on the opinions of others because we don't have that illusory superiority or narcissistic

bias. So how do we develop that additional information, right? We need those inputs. We need that data from ourselves and it needs to be at a level of 15. So how do we do that? The core method that I tend to use with my patients that I did myself was challenge yourself in isolation where no one can see. So you have to do something that's difficult that you can be proud of that no one else will witness. In my case, it's things like climbing that was big for me. Right. So I'd go to a place. I'd see it, I saw a 12-foot Boulder and I was like, I'm a climb to the top of that. And you try and you fail and you try and you fail and you try and you fail and eventually you succeed. And then I did that for several years, challenging myself over and over and over again. Even today, this week, despite all the work that

I have to do, I challenged myself to write a thousand words of a project that I'm passionate about. It's fiction. And I went ahead and did it and no one fucking knows. So even now I'm making a mistake because now I'm sharing it with you. And the moment that I share it with you, you become proud of me. Maybe. I don't know. Or you judge me. You're like, look at this arrogant guy, arrogant guy telling me that he's like solving all these problems. He's doing all this shit. Like, look at him showing off. Right. So already my mind starts to think about the response of your thing. So whatever challenges you have, whatever victories you have, whatever failures you have, you need to keep them internal. And as you have that rich internal source of data, it will help you buffer against the disapproval and judgment of others. Now, if you guys want more information, We have a three-hour deep dive into developing resilience and improving that buffer. So be sure to check it out. 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. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.

Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siyah and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today, I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll.

So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.