HealthyGamerGG - Why Your Favorite Stuff Isn't Hitting Anymore

Episode Date: March 15, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K explores the modern epidemic of emotional numbness—that feeling where your favorite hobbies, games, and interests just don't "hit" the way they used to. He breaks down why we are feeling more apathetic than ever and provides a biological and psychological map for how to start "feeling" again. What to expect in this episode: The Absence of Signal: Why numbness is actually harder to treat than pain, as your brain stops sending the vital signals you need to know what to fix,. The Dopamine Lemon: How technology and high-potency substances "squeeze" your brain's reward system until there is no pleasure left to give. The Freeze Response: A look at why chronic stress causes the brain to "play dead," leading to a state of burnout where you simply hit the "fast-forward" button on your life,,. Emotional Colorblindness: An introduction to Alexithymia, where your brain feels physical sensations like "butterflies" or "aches" but can no longer label them as emotions,. The "Apparently Normal" Personality: How the brain uses dissociation to wall off painful memories, leaving you feeling like a hollow, logical version of yourself,,. The Cost of Feeling: A deep dive into the psychological defense of suppression—why we stay numb because we are afraid that letting the "fire" out will overwhelm us,. Retraining Your Brain: Dr. K explains the Theory of Constructed Emotion and how you can intentionally build new emotional responses like compassion and resilience,,.HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. 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/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-O. Knoja, 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. All righty, chat. Let's get started. Welcome to another Healthy Gamer Gigi stream. My name is Dr.

Olo Ocinoja. Just a reminder that although I'm a psychiatrist, nothing we discuss on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice. Everything is for educational or entertainment purposes only. If you'll have a medical concern or question, please go see a licensed professional. Chat, I have been recovering from the flu, the one, the only the influenza. Hope y'all are doing well. Give me a second. Let me pull up chat.

But let's get to the lecture. Okay. So today I want to talk to you guys about numbness. Now, this is something that people have been feeling more and more and more of. People are feeling more numb. Maybe this has something to do with technology. We've got wars all over the place. We're getting inundated with things like dopamine and,

and this and that, right? The potency of things like marijuana is increasing. The potency of things like pornography is increasing. And people are feeling like more and more and more numb. I think numbness is one of the most... How can I say this? It is something that used to not be as huge of a problem as it is today, in my opinion. So I think that if you go back 20, 30, 40 years,

if you go back in the history of psychiatry, a lot of it was about fixing pathologic states that were like present in some way. I feel depressed. I feel anxious. I'm psychotic. Right? And we as in the field of psychiatry are better at dealing with this stuff.

Okay? So a good example of this is we have really good medications to deal with positive symptoms in schizophrenia. we are very bad at dealing with negative symptoms in schizophrenia. Positive symptoms in schizophrenia are things like hallucinations, delusions. So we can give people antipsychotic agents, dopaminergic blockading agents, and we can sort of help them stop hallucinating.

But a big part of schizophrenia is a motivation. A big part of schizophrenia is flattened affect. So just not feeling a whole lot on the inside. We're not so good at that. And the other like insidious problem with numbness is that if you're, it's not clear what you're supposed to fix in numbness. Right. So I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but like numbness is the absence of something. And if we look at the way that the human body works, forget about schizophrenia and complex psychological things. our body sends us signals when something is wrong.

So if I feel hungry, like I have this pit in my stomach, my body is sending me a signal, hey, something is wrong. If I have food poisoning, I'll feel nausea. I feel like vomiting. Oh my God. If I'm having a heart attack, I'll have left-sided chest pain that may radiate to the neck. So when we have a problem, pain is a really good example. our body, our brain, lets us know.

So then there's a group of people who has a big problem, which is that the signal that they have, their experience of things, is actually an absence of signals. So I don't feel anything. And then that creates a very, very special problem. Because if you don't feel anything, how do you know what you're supposed to correct?

Right? If I don't feel hungry. and they're examples of this. So, for example, it's really, really nasty. But if you look at diabetic neuropathy, so in diabetes, when we have high levels of sugar in our blood, that does over time, over many years, that damages are vascular,

damages our nerves. And specifically what happens with diabetic neuropathy is the longer the nerve is, the more prone it is to damage. So right close to the cell body, our nerves will stay relatively intact, but the longest nerves in the body, specifically the nerves that travel from my spinal cord all the way down to our toes, that end portion of the nerve is what dies.

And then people with diabetic neuropathy have a big problem because they no longer feel pain in their toes. As they no longer feel pain in their toes, you know, fair warning here. Diabetic neuropathy. in feet. So this is actually not so bad. Yeah, here's a good example of diabetic neuropathy in the feet. So you guys see this? This is what happens in diabetic neuropathy. So we have difficulty feeling. And when we have difficulty feeling, then we can't fix our problems. And so today what we're going to

talk about is sort of a differential diagnosis. This is not medical treatment. This is not actually a diagnosable condition of numbness. So if you feel numb, why? What are the different reasons that you could be feeling numb? And in order to do that, what we have to do is look at the systems of feeling. Because if you want to understand why you feel numb, the first place to start is to look at where feeling comes from. And if we understand where feeling comes from and what kinds of feelings are you, you

are developed by what systems, then we may even be able to diagnose our numbness. Because not all numbness is the same. So sometimes when people say they feel numb, what they really are is burnt out. Sometimes when people say they feel numb, what they really lack is an internal passion. Sometimes when they feel numb,

what they really feel is what their experiences is dissociation. right so the subjective experience of i don't feel anything i feel numb can be evaluated and once we understand what the source of that numbness is then we can understand how to feel again more importantly than just how to feel again we can understand why we're numb in the first place why is the system active in this way and what makes it hard to feel to begin with okay so here's what's going to be tricky about this. We can think about numbness across a person. And what do I mean by across?

So we can look at numbness from the perspective of neurotransmitters. We can look at the perspective of numbness across circuits. Okay? We can look at numbness as, let's say, emergent, neuropsychiatric, phenomenon. Now, what does that mean? What the hell does that mean? So, I'm going to show you guys a quick paper. Right? So emotional blunting associated with SSRI induced sexual dysfunction. Do SSRIs inhibit emotional responses? So this paper looks at serotonin. And we know that one of the side effects of SSRIs is that people feel emotionally numb. Some people argue that actually that's the only benefit of SSRI.

This is that they numb us, right? So their fundamental thing, they don't improve our mood. What they do is numb our negative mood. So if we look at SSRI-induced emotional numbness, this is at the level of neurotransmitter, 5HT is serotonin. Then if we look at numbness across another level, we can look at something like our limbic system. So let's just say our amygdala.

And if we feel numb, that something is suppressing our amygdala. So either we have a substance or we're using social media or things like that. But then there are higher order levels of numbness. So if we talk about something like dissociation, this is a good example. Alexithymia. So in Lexothymia is emotional colorblindness. So it's not that we're numb, it's that we're colorblind. So we see a color, right?

I know this sounds kind of weird, but like, if you're colorblind, can you see color? Like, sort of, right? You can't technically see color, but you can see shades of gray. So, like, does that kind of make sense? It's not the same as being completely blind. It's that there's a certain level of perception that we lack. So my point, and then what we have is emergent neuropsychiatric phenomenon. And then we've got psychology.

Okay. So this is the mind. So things like defense mechanisms, like suppression. So when I sit with people and they come into my office and they say, I feel dead inside, I feel numb, I think about all of these dimensions. And the problem here is that if you're asking, okay, Dr. Kay, which one is it? The answer is all, right? So an individual person may have this. And another individual person may have this.

where the majority of their numbness comes from a psychological defense mechanism, but they are also a little bit elixothymic. And they happen to be on an SSRI. Right? So this is person number one. This is person number two. And their patterns of numbness could be different. The good news is if we can understand what kind of numbness you have,

then we may discover a way to start feeling again. Okay, so let's dive in. Does this make sense? So which one is it? Who knows? Okay. Okay. So let's start with neurotransmitters.

We're going to start with 5HT, serotonin. So like we looked at earlier, there's a, you know, there's a paper that shows. I personally think this is, like, correct, basically. I think that SSRIs are really good at inducing numbness in a subset of people. I don't quite agree 100% with some of the people like Mark Horowitz is a good example. We've had him on stream before. Love the work that he's done overall. I think he's made some really strong contributions to questioning this idea that

depression is a serotonin deficiency. And I like his paper in molecular psychiatry. Okay. So patients reported significantly less ability to cry, irritation, care about others' feelings, sadness, erotic dreaming, creativity, surprise, anger, expression of their feelings, worry over things or situations, sexual pleasure, and interest in sex, right? So this implies there is numbness. So let's understand a little bit about how serotonin works.

So serotonin tends to be associated with mood. when we see dysfunctions in the serotonin system will have problems like anxiety and depression. So let's examine this for a moment. Okay?

So there are polymorphisms of serotonin receptors. So what does that mean? So we have genes, right? I'm going to try to draw a DNA This is supposed to be a counter-helix, the double helix. And then some people will have a green over here.

Some people will have a red over here. This is what we call polymorphisms. So there are some people who their serotonin transporters are short. They've got shodys. Okay? And when they have short serotonin transporters, their risk for things like depression and anxiety. go up. So we know that the serotonin system is associated with mood, depression, and anxiety.

Now, here's the really interesting thing. The serotonin system, because everything is connected in the brain, is connected with our dopaminergic system and our norepinephrine system. So sometimes when we increase serotonin transmission, we will see a paradoxical decrease in these two systems. So the dopaminergic system, especially in the VTA or nucleus accumbens, is associated with pleasure and reward. And the norepineephyran system is associated with arousal. Okay. So if you look at, for example, a medication called buproprione, this also affects the norepinephrine system. So when people have SSRI induced sexual dysfunction, induced numbness, we will also affect the norepinephinectin.

numbness, we will oftentimes add buproprione because this kind of boosts this up. Okay? So the SSRI increases our 5HT, which in turn decreases our norepinephrine transmission, which in turn decreases the sense of arousal. And we don't just mean sexual arousal. People feel sluggish. It's a wakefulness too. and then what we'll do is we'll add a little bit of buproprione which bumps this up

and then hopefully bumps this up and it can deal with the side effects of an SSRI. Okay? So one system of numbness is potentially the serotonergic system. Now there's another really interesting kind of example of this, which is that when people are depressed, they become anhydonic. Okay? So we're not quite sure how this works,

but there's some degree of anhedonia, inability to experience pleasure, and this is probably mediated by dopamine in some way. Right? So if our dopaminergic system is messed up, then we become anhedonic. Another good example of this is this is why sometimes people who are depressed

become vulnerable to addictions. So let's think about this, okay? So if my serotonin levels are low, which it's not clear that they are in depression to begin with, right, then I can have an increased dopamine sensitivity. I feel crappy. So I'm going to eat a bucket of ice cream. It's going to give me some sense of pleasure,

some sense of joy, right? It's going to give me something. And then this is where if we look at happiness and pleasure, There is something called hedonic pleasure, and there is something called eudamonic pleasure. Actually, not really eudamonic pleasure, euda monia. So this is euda man, eutamonia. This is sort of a sense of contentment, peace, arguably mediated by serotonin, and hedonic is mediated actually by cannabis.

I mean, not cannabis, sorry, that's the wrong term. It's not mediated by cannabis. It's mediated by THC. in dopamine. Actually, not THC. This is wrong. Flu is catching up with me, chat. Endocannabinoid.

That's the right term. It's not cannabis. Okay? So, if you're numb, could have something to do with 5HT. Okay? Now you may say, but Dr. Kay, if it has something to with 5HT,

what do I do about that? We'll get to that. Second thing, let's talk about D. dopamine because we're already here. So when we're talking about numbness, there is a numbness that is an absence of negative feeling, and there is a numbness that is a lack. So I want to try to keep track of this, okay? So you all keep track of this with me. Lack of pleasure. Okay. So I want you all to, I want to keep track of the kinds of numbness.

So when you have a problem with your dopaminergic system, oftentimes these people don't feel excited by anything. They don't feel drawn to anything. They start to feel apathetic, like they don't care. Now, I want to be clear about what this kind of is and what this isn't. So this is like, I get up in the morning and everything just kind of feels blazze. They may actually have access to some degree of curiosity. They can have some degree of pride. They can even have some degree of sadness. But what's missing is sort of like the spark that gets you going.

I kind of like the word spark. These people have no spark in their life. And there's a really interesting... Let's see if you can find. Yeah. So this is from a great paper. Love it, love it, love it. I've done a very, very...

I think I did a pretty big video about this a couple of years ago. Paper is pure gold. I love... I think it's Nature Reviews, right? Yeah. Dude, nature reviews. Neuroscience is just a fucking stellar publication.

So this paper really explores, you know, effort-based decision-making to obtain rewards. So we're going to talk about this for a second, okay? Okay. So our dopaminergic system gives us pleasure, gives us motivation, gives us craving. This kind of numbness is an absence of, like, wanting things in the outside world.

We have this thing in here. It's not that I'm incapable of feeling in here. It's that if we look at like us, right, we like want stuff from the outside. And it motivates us. So even if you look at that motivation, we think about motivation is a good thing, but if you look at it subjectively,

that motivation can be the desire to get rid of something bad. I'm tired of feeling this way. I want people to look at me with respect. I want to walk into a room and have everybody be impressed, right? I want to hit it hard. I want to party till the sun comes up, like zest of life. And when our dopaminergic system gets impacted, right? So what are the ways that we impact it?

Top of the list right now is technology. So we have this whole scale bombardment of our dopaminergic system. And then the problem with our dopamine-ergic system, remember y'all, is that our dopaminergic system is like a lemon that gets squeezed. Okay? So our dopamine system is full of dopamine. And when it gets squeezed, the dopamine kind of comes out. And then there's not a whole lot left.

So when we chronically use technology, we exhaust our dopamine system. And once the dopamine is gone, this is what gives us pleasure. It's what gives us drive, motivation. Okay? And then there are a couple of other things that go into this.

There are things that can increase the squeeze in your dopaminergic system. So, and I want you all to pay attention to this. There's a component that is anhydonic. This means I can't feel pleasure. And then there's a component that is apathetic, which means I don't feel like doing anything. I'm not motivated. Okay. And here's the really interesting thing. So if we look at the hedonic impact, this is the pleasure of engaging with something, right? That's an hedonia,

hedonia, hedonia and hedonia. But apathy is triggered by other things. So this is what a lot of people don't realize. See, if you feel apathetic, you may think, okay, I can't experience pleasure. That's why I'm apathetic, because these things get tied together, right? If I don't experience pleasure, then I don't feel like doing anything. But apathy, the desire to do something isn't necessarily tied to hedonism. I know they're separate and I'll explain. Because sometimes you don't feel like doing anything, but when you go and you actually do it, you're like, hey, you know what, this is actually pretty fun. I should do this more. That signals to us that our system of motivation generation is impaired, but our system of hedonism, our system to experience pleasure is

actually intact. So if you've ever had the experience of, I don't feel like doing anything, but when I do it, it actually turns out to be pretty fun. That shows us that it's a motivational problem, not a hedonic problem. And the cool thing about nature of views is that they actually give us some guidance here about what we can do about this. Whoops. So one key thing is option generation. Okay.

So if you give human beings options, they are more likely to act. Right? So a really good example of this is, you know, when you're, when you have a young kid, pediatricians will do, you know, some counseling for new parents. And they'll say, like, okay. If you're having your trouble getting your kid out of the house, ask them which one they want to do first. Do you want to put on your jacket first or do you want to put on your shoes first? Human beings are more likely to engage in behaviors if we give them options.

So dating apps figured this out. Grocery stores figured this out. If we give people options, they're more likely to do stuff. Now, what do we see in today's world? A whole scale perception of a lack of options. You may say, hold on a second, doctor here. Didn't you just say dating apps and Amazon and grocery stores give us tons of options? Yeah, but you don't feel like you have options in life, right?

You have to go to work every day. Oh, my God. I have to deal with this person at work. Oh, my God. I have to deal with customers at work. Oh, my God. And it's so simple. This is why it's so easy to shop online, but so hard to go to work.

Because you don't have a perception of options. So literally, part of the world is, work that I do with people, this is a huge part of what coaching has also figured out as a field, is we want to give people options. Right? So in motivational interviewing, we'll sort of, when someone is developing a plan for sobriety, we don't tell them, hey, you got to go to meetings and you got to do this and you got to do this, and people don't listen.

Instead, we ask them, where do you want to start? What going to meetings work better? Do you want to do psychotherapy with me? Do you want to try medication? Let's give people options. because people like options. So if you are finding yourself in a situation where you don't feel like doing anything,

ask yourself what your options really are. Second thing that we want to do is a cost-benefit analysis. Reward effort, time, and risk. We want to evaluate our options. And here's the really tricky thing from a psychological perspective. y'all may think that you do this but you don't y'all may think you do this but you don't what are your options at work

there's nothing i can do what are your options oh my god i guess i could do this and i could do this but the chances of that working out may be low here's the biggest problem i could put in all of this effort but there's not any guarantee that i'll get something in return so this is where you have to be a little bit more critical about your option generation. This is why sometimes it works to help with a person. There are a lot of people that I know that think that they are very, very good at option generation and option evaluation. But if you really pay attention, what goes on is their mind like doesn't critically think

about it. It's actually an emotional response. Okay? So option generation, option evaluation. This is what your dopaminergic circuit is doing all the time on its own. Okay. And then the other big thing that we're going to talk about is the hedonic impact and consumatory phase of behavior. So oftentimes people make a huge, huge, huge mistake when they are doing something that they don't like, which is that they try to skip the experience. So savering is a huge part of, increasing your hedonic activation, which will then reinforce the behavior. And oftentimes, if people are numb, what happens when they don't feel like doing something is,

even when they do it, they try to skip the experience. You numb yourself out to it. Oh, I don't want to do the dishes. Let me put on a podcast so that I don't have to suffer through doing the dishes. I don't want to be on this flight. Let me skip past the suffering. So you guys see how there's a subtle numbness there. There's a suppression of what you experience because we're trying to avoid those negative feelings.

But when we suppress all of that stuff, what we are doing is we are not helping ourselves with this system. So think about the kinds of things that you run away from in your life, the experiences that you run away from. And oftentimes what we discover is people who are avoidant of the negative things in their life, the people who mentally check out when their boss says, hey, can I talk to you for a minute? You're mentally checked out before you even go in. And then we wonder why we're numb. So here's another really important point.

The brain does what it is trained to do. So if you're mentally checking out through a lot of your day, your brain will be mentally checked out. Which is why when I work with someone, right? This is why we like ask you so much about your feelings, bro. Let's get, how do you feel about that? How does that make you feel? We're encouraging the awakening of these circuits. Dopaminergic system is incredibly fascinating.

I have done whole lectures about it, but let's move on. Now we're going to talk about the norepinephrine arousal. cortisol system. It's not really a system. It's just, you'll have to remember, I'm a clinician first, which means my goal is to help people, a human being with a problem.

So I tend to muddy the waters when it comes to some of these systems. This is also the stress system. Okay? So here's kind of how this works. Here's me. and then depending on the environment, I have these circuits

that cause me to activate in response to stress. Right? So if I'm being chased by a tiger, my body's going to be like, all right, let's activate, let's turn on. So if there is a tiger

that wants to eat me and it approaches me, then my stress system will activate. Now, the stress system does all kinds of interesting things. It will make me think in black and white. It'll do some amount of emotional suppression. It'll do some amount of emotional activation.

So I feel fear, but I don't feel the existential dread of non-existence when the tiger comes up to me. Okay? So it does these kinds of things. It activates my physiology. So increases heart rate, respiration. rate, blood pressure, blood glucose. Oh, that's not BG, blood glucose. It activates all these things.

But then we have a problem, because the stress that we experience on a day-to-day basis is not acute. It's chronic. So something problematic happened, which is that the stress that we experienced, So we are, if you think about like a deer, what is its experience of stress? It's like, if there's an alligator around, I'm stressed, if there's a lion around, I'm stressed.

Otherwise, I'm kind of chilling. And the system turns on and it turns off. The problem is when we think about things like paying a mortgage, this is a toad, not a house. Right? We think about paying a mortgage. if we think about the existential threat of AI, taking my job, the immigrants were taking my jobs, now the AI is taking my job.

These will chronically activate the system. And when the system gets chronically activated, we get burnt out. So we have this dual system of emotional suppression and emotional activation. And then what happens is since half of our emotions are being suppressed, our positive emotions are being suppressed,

and then we have chronic activation of our negative, certain negative emotional systems. Then what happens is we have an adaptation to this. So when we have chronic positive suppression, what do you think our adaptation is? Substances. Tech. Right?

Because these systems are really, really, really suppressed. So when people are in a chronic state of stress, stress is a risk factor for addiction. The adaptation is addiction. And then chronic negative activation. So this is what feels like frayed. These people feel frayed to me. Ragged at the edges. Lack of empathy is huge.

They just can't feel. They don't have the bandwidth to feel what. other people feel. I can barely, I hate feeling what I feel. So this experience, when I sit with these people, there's a lot of emotions at the edge. They're also antsy. They're like, there's a lot right under the surface that they're trying to push away. And then this gets really complicated because they're adaptations. And these adaptations, by the way, we'll get to like some of this stuff and this stuff. Okay. But there's also a couple of other things here. So I think I'm going to show you all a paper on polyvagal theory.

But I think, I personally think that polyvagal theory has basically been debunked. People talk about it a lot. But I think some of the core scientific concepts behind it have been debunked. So I'm not saying polyvagal theory is true. I think what's really interesting about polyvagal theory is that it does a very good, some of the interventions that are based on polyvagal theory, I think are quite effective. So I think this person, in my personal opinion, okay,

I think their scientific mechanism is off, but I think what they discovered is very important. Okay? So there are a couple of things that, so let's talk about the basics of this before we look at the paper. So when we are stressed out, our body does one of three things.

It runs away, fight, fight. fight, let's engage with our challenge or freeze. Let's conserve energy. Let's play for survival. Let's play dead. Right? So we know that, you know, possums play dead.

There are some studies that suggest that catatonia, which is an extreme state of stress, is sort of a freeze response. But basically, these are the three things. And when we don't fight and we can't. can't run away, we sort of end up in this freeze bucket very easily. I have to go to work every day. I can't argue against my boss. I can't afford to quit, right?

So this isn't an option. This isn't an option. So I'm going to just take it. And so this requires, in order to do this, we have to have environmental assessment. And then if we perceive it as safe, we're going to inhibit these limbic structures that control, fight, flight, or freeze. So basically what happens is this system gets run really ragged. So either we are assessing threats constantly in the environment,

and then we're sort of winding up freezing. And then once this system activates, it is suppressing these parts of ourselves. It's suppressing some of our motivational circuitry. It's suppressing, you know, a lot of people will wonder, I have all these things that I want to do. Why don't I ever do them? If you're in survival mode, the part of your brain that is planning about building something towards the future is shut off. Right? And a lot of people, I mean, I feel like I'm sort of laboring a point, but I want to like make this super clear.

See, if you're in a situation where you are struggling to survive, if that's what it feels like, it's damn near impossible to like build something, even though you have all of the hours in the day. This is where like are we think to ourselves like I have all this time. Why don't I use it productively? And we get frustrated with ourselves because we're like, oh my God, I'm just spending all my time like, you know, wasting my time. I'm essentially hitting the fast forward button on my life. I'm not doing anything productive. And I want you to really think about that. Why?

Right? Like that's really weird. You would think that, okay. the way this should work is that I should be using this time productively. Like, I have all this time. I can see that I have all of this time, but like I just end up wasting it. Why?

And that's because if you're in a state of high stress, that is literally altering blood flow to different parts of your brain. So sometimes when I'm dealing with like dead bedroom, in my practice, we'll ask some really basic questions. Like, what's your, what's sleeping like? Oftentimes when you have like new kids in the house, right? When a newborn or something like that, sexual intimacy goes down, emotional intimacy goes down.

And it's just because their body is not designed for this. Their body is sending them signals like you don't feel frisky and like one good, good night's sleep and suddenly the sexual intimacy is back on, baby. So a lot of times what happens is I see this so much where it's like, I can't fix my problems. I can't avoid my problems. I may be able to avoid them psychologically by mentally checking out and stuff like that, but I really can't run away from this problem. Do you all understand that like we talk that you shouldn't run away from your problems? This is dumb.

Running away from your problems is great. Running away from our problems is why antelope run fast. Most organisms, most mammals on the planet, most vertebrates live a life of avoidance. That's like how we survive. Avoidance is baked in. It's why, as human beings, like, you know, running away is something that we're really good at. Hiding is something that we're really good at. Building shelter.

The umbrella is running away from the rain. The roof is running away from the rain. So if you can't fix your problems and you can't run away from your problems, then your brain is like, and you feel stressed. Then your brain is like, wait it out, bro. Wait it out, girl. Freeze. Passage of time is our strategy.

And like, look at a turtle. Waiting it out is like literally what they've evolved to do. And we've evolved to do it as well. Possums have evolved to do it as well. So instead of forcing yourself to try to change, right? This is what's, I'm going to, okay, I need to show you guys this. I was just so happy about this. 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. out the link in the description below and back to the video. See, everyone is like so concerned about, I just want to do something. Like, I just want to get my ass out of bed. That's not what I think works.

Okay. So did an analysis on all of our coaching profiles, web positioning, exit surveys. Basically, our coaches help gain clarity through relational processing into a client's internal life. Through that, the client develops agency and then actions happens because the client recognizes the cause of their behavior. This is different from many coaching models which are endgame focused through tangible goals being attained. Okay. Based on goals and sign-up flow clients come into coaching due to identity deficit,

directionless, no internal compass values, and cognitive dissonance between knowing and doing. I've just been looking at this shit, so it's kind of top of mind for me. But I think that's literally what we see here, is everyone is just caught up with, I'm paralyzed. How do I act? not the right move. It's not forcing yourself to act. And that's why it doesn't work. Because you can't just force yourself to act.

Like, by all means, build habits. But if your system is designed in a way that it is telling you to be still, that needs to change. Okay? So this is your stress system. If it's hyperactive, it's going to be numbing you out and or you will be afraid you will be fried from hyperactive emotions. So you feel anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious,

then you enter this phase of burnout. Okay? So those are our three neuroscience perspective, neurotransmitter perspectives. Next, let's talk about alexothymia. So, Alexothymia is the inability to recognize your own internal emotional state. Now, here's what a lot of people don't realize

is that your internal emotional state is so much more than an emotion. So we're going to talk about interoceptive awareness. Okay? So what does this mean? So if you feel numb on the inside, one of the reasons could be that you're elixothymic, you're emotionally colorblind.

But what does that mean? How does one become emotionally colorblind? We're going to do just a, we've done a whole lecture on this, but let's just do a quick kind of 30,000-foot view. I want you all to think about how do you know what an emotion feels like? So if you all ever ask this question, how do you know what anger feels like? Where did you learn what anger feels like?

Like think about it for a second. It's actually not... Okay, so someone's saying your behavior while feeling it. But hold on a second. How do you know that it's anger? Right? So sure, you have a behavior. It hurts, but, like, how do you know that it's sadness versus anger?

Right? Just an inner knowing. An inner knowing of what? Conditioning, what kind of conditioning? These are all good answers. By reference, what are you referring? Okay, so here's the really cool thing. You know, there are some people that are histrionic.

And like someone who's histrionic is someone who displays a lot of their internal heart. I'm hurt them. It's not my fault. Oh, my God. Right? You're like, hey, can you please return my measuring cups? And they're like, oh, my. They display.

They feel a lot. They display a lot. And so if we look at people who are very, very anxious and are hypochondriacs, they have something called visceral hypersensitivity, which means that the signals in here all get ramped up. That's why they're hypochondriacs, because they're like, oh, my God, I have a little bit of gas in my stomach and my intestines. That means that I may have cancer.

Oh, my God. I can feel it so much and it's such a sharp pain and it's not going away. Literally the signal from the inside of their body, the volume is termed way up, so they attach a lot of importance to it. So here's a key thing to understand. First thing to understand, if you're a lexathymic and are emotionally colored by. We have to understand what emotion is. We think about emotion is a feeling.

Well, what do we mean by that word? So emotion is not mental, exclusively. It is physical and mental. It is physiologic. Anger, butterflies in the stomach. An ache in my heart. I need your body. And I don't know if you all have ever been in a situation where you need some.

somebody's body. But when you need somebody's body, it's an ache. It's a body-wide ache. And it's not, actually, it's not body-wide. That's not correct. If you guys pay attention to needing somebody's body, what it is, is it's on one surface of your body. You guys know what I mean? It's on the ventral surface or it's on the dorsal surface. It's never both. Or maybe it can be. Sometimes it can be. Right? But sometimes it's like you, you need, I need you like here, like here. Like I need you like this. Like right here. Belonging is an ache on the ventral surface of your body. Or it can be an ache on the back of your body where I need to be the little spoon. I want to be my turn to be a little spoon. I want you back here and I want arms around. and hold, squeeze it. Right? So we think about these emotions,

but it's not just butterflies in the stomach. It's like pro-preoception in its weight. Like, I remember, you know, the thing that I miss about having babies is the density. You guys ever wonder, like, it's kind of hard to understand, but if you, like, look at, like, you know how, like,

there comes a point where some adults become obsessed, with holding babies. And they become like fucking nuts. They're like, oh my God, like let me hold the baby. Let me hold it. Let me hold it. Can I hold it? Can I hold it?

Please. Oh, my God. Come to me. Come to me, little one. Come, let me hold you. And then you're like, no, like the, you know, my baby has never met you before. My baby's not really comfortable with that. Like, will you please stop trying to steal my baby?

And it's because there's a certain sensation. There's a certain density to a baby. which unless you've held a baby a lot, you don't know what I'm talking about, right? There's just a lot of, they're like packed in there. There's just dense. And so we have all of these physical sensations that we call, that having awareness of is something called an interoceptive awareness. Okay?

Interoceptive awareness skills for emotional regulation. So literally the way that we know what we feel, feel is through a combination of stuff. It is through the reflections of the people around us. Oh my God, is we too baby hurting? You must be so angry. Look at you. You're such a big boy.

Look at you did such a big poo-poo. Wow. Amazing. Look at you pulled up your diaper all by yourself. Let's go. Right? So there are exaggerated facial expressions, which is a big part of emotion,

there are internal signals that you have to be aware of. And then what happens, I want you all to think about this, okay? So as your brain is developing, you're getting external signals from other people, you're getting a certain character of your thoughts. I'm not angry, I'm right.

Right? And it's so interesting because recognizing emotion is not so easy. I'm not angry, I'm right. You're the one who's angry. And then there are interoceptive signals. My heart is beating. I have a feeling in my stomach.

And literally, unless we integrate all of those things, we will not know what we feel. And so there's a really interesting relationship. I hate this. But when someone has illness anxiety disorder, one of the things, one of the evidence-based treatments is regular, scheduled, primary care or general practitioner visits. So someone comes in, remember, they have the visceral hypersensitivity, so they're feeling all kinds of stuff that like you and I don't feel, this is a big thing to understand.

And then we have them meet with a psychologist, we'll have the meet with a primary care person regularly. We're not going to run tests. We're not going to do another MRI. Certainly ain't going to biopsy your belly again. Already done two is enough. And so we convince these people, we treat these people like they're crazy. we tell them it's all in your head.

But that's not why these things work. It's not all in your head. There is visceral hypersensitivity. But here's the cool thing. When we help them emotionally, it translates physically. Right? There's a very tight relationship between emotional processing and various physical illnesses. Stress.

Taketsubo cardiomyopathy after a breakup. men are the day after a breakup, there is a spike in risk of heart attack. So the way that we feel and the function of our body are one and the same. So alexothymia happens and then what happens when I sit with someone who has alexothymia is they don't know what they feel, but they have all these physical sensations. I feel an ache in my back. Everybody's got back pain, right? And we think it's because we're sitting at computers all day.

that has a lot to do with it. But is there any correlation between the decline in our mental health and back pain? There's certainly a correlation. Is there a causation? It's not something that's been well explored outside of things like yoga, where they've said spinal health is really, really good for enlightenment. Is necessary. Interesting, right?

And everyone's got back pain. We have a mental health crisis, but those things aren't related. Or they're related through a confounding variable, which is everyone's on a connection. computer, and the computer is poisoning our mind and it's damaging our back. But is there a direct effect? I imagine so. So the reason we're numb is because we don't know what an emotional, what an emotion looks like. Actually, what it is without this interoceptive awareness and integration of external signals and all this kind of stuff, unless we put all of these things

together, that's what an emotion is. It's a set of thoughts. It's a physiologic reaction. It is a reflection from your surroundings. That's literally what an emotion is. And if we have the appropriate upbringing, a healthy upbringing, we put our brain stitches all of these things together. But if something was missing, if you are not held as a child, if you are not emotionally mirrored as a child, if people did not take you seriously, then what happens is an emotion, and we feel numb because you say, I don't feel emotions.

but you feel all the pieces of emotion. You just don't know that when put together, they're an emotion. Alexatymia. Another cause for numbness. So what does this look like? Oftentimes hypercognitive. Right? So if you ask someone how they feel, they'll tell you how they think.

And this is one of the other things that I fucking hate. We do this to a lot of people who are lexathymic, especially men. where we like make them feel stupid. And we force them to use emotional language. And we don't acknowledge that this person doesn't have access to that. It's like asking a blind person, what do you see over and over and over again and asking someone, how do you feel?

If they can't answer the question, they don't have the capacity to it. Stop asking the question. So the reason it feels hypercognitive is because the cognition is not tied to the body. body sensations, right? And they'll say, I feel numb. But is that, do you have stuff going on in your body?

You have weird sensations in your body? Do you feel tightness in your throat, tightness in your chest? Does your mind have a lot of cognitions? Are there things that you run away from? And this is where, like, things that you run away from may not be what you thought they were. Like, they may not be, like, you're running away from things like, people appreciating you. Really common. I don't mean just shit that's scary and shit that's bad.

I mean, like, weird stuff. Another part of Alexaaimi that's really common is preference for big signals. So it's like, what do I mean by big signals? I mean anime. The crying is intense. The triumph is intense. There's fucking speed lines when we're angry.

We need these hyper, signals to evoke feelings from in here because we don't know how to fill in that gap. You know, like subtle, subtle, like Nordic, noir shows don't do it for us. We need, like, lots of colors and lots and lots and noises and lots and lots and lots and lots. Novelty-seeking behavior, absolutely. Right? Dopaminergic behavior, absolutely. Man, this is taking longer than I expected. another source of numbness,

Alexothymia. But here's the key thing. If you're Alexhymic, we'll talk about this as the source of numbness. It's not the source of numbness, a source of numbness. Alexithymia feels different than a dopaminergic circuit

that is like completely washed and has no motivational drive. Right? So I would say the feeling of someone who's alexothymic is that they have a lot of different things that they don't piece together. So there's a lot going on cognitively in your body, but we don't put the word emotion to it. We can have strong reactions to stuff, but we don't put the word emotion to it. Weird kinds of avoidance.

Next thing we're going to talk about, dissociation. Trauma-related, structural dissociation of the personality. Allert Nien Hoyse Ono van der Haart And Kathy Steele Utrecht Deutsche Leutschland Not Germany

Netherlands Um Okay Let me find the quote here Dude I fucking Europe is great dude The Dutch Deep thinkers

Man Okay Um Primary Structural Structural Okay. Myers described this as the primary structural dissociation in terms of dividedness between the apparently normal personality and the emotional personality. Studying acutely traumatized World War I combat veterans, Myers observed that the emotional personality recurrently suffers vivid emotional sensory motor experiences charged with painful affects.

That means painful emotions. At least subjectively, closely match the original trauma. The emotional personality is struck in the traumatic experience that persistently fails to become a narrative memory of the trauma. The apparently normal personality, on the other hand, is associated with avoidance of the traumatic memories, detachment, numbing, and partial or complete amnesia. Okay? I don't know if that made sense to you all, but let's explain it. So here's what the dissociative numbness looks like, right? So are you alexothymic?

are you dissociating? So with dissociation. So normally what happens is I have emotional experiences. And those emotional experiences get woven into a narrative and they become a part of me. Right?

So hi, I'm Dr. Kay. I am a position 5 Dota 2 player. And this has caused me all kinds of suffering in life. Right? So this is what happens. We have all these experiences

become a part of us. but in in dissociation so if you want a really detailed explanation of this, check out our trauma guide I think it's top notch. So what happens is in trauma

is this thing happens to us and it doesn't become part of the rest of us. So basically like in, you know, what Myers described is that we have this strong emotional thing that just stays walled off. So there's this process called hemispheric lateralization, which is we have right brain,

which is where we feel our emotions. We have left brain, which is our logic. It's a general simplification, but somewhat true. And then we have this thing called the corpus callosum, which is the bridge between the two parts, our two hemispheres. And literally what we know when people dissociate is there is decreased transmission

across the corpus callosum. So you're feeling a bunch of emotions in this hemisphere, and you're logically cool in this hemisphere. And this one is taking over. So you're just numb. And you can see things happening to you. Fascinating.

But then the problem is with that failure of integration, we're walling it off. So then I have this emotional version of myself, and then I have the apparently normal version of myself. When the emotional version of myself activates, first of all, it never becomes a memory. Right? So if we think about trauma, we're like,

oh yeah, this thing happened to me in the past. The whole problem with trauma is that it doesn't become the past. It stays in the present. And this is what's so confusing about as people were like, but, you know, this person abused you years ago. Why are you still hung up on it?

Well, it's because in their mind, the abuse didn't happen in the years ago. It's happening today. It could happen tomorrow. It's not actually in the memory. There's a problem with memory consolidation. So this kind of person when they dissociate, this creates a numbness that is temporary. That's the big thing.

The numbness becomes on, off. That's the key feature here. So either you get hyperactive or you are the apparently normal personality. But in the apparently normal personality, there is still a set of emotions that is walled off. So literally, like, what this looks like is, you know, here's your mind. And then I've got this section over here that's on fire. And oftentimes what happens is I'm totally fine out here or I'm on fire in here. And then I move between the two.

Frequently. So you kind of lose it and there's a ton of emotion. And then there's complete normalcy. It's like really, really, really bizarre. And when people feel numb, the reason they feel numb is because there's a bunch of, like, know, emotion that's walled off like an abscess. So do you get bursts of emotion? Does the emotion turn on and off?

Do you find yourself, how can I say this? Avoidant of triggers. And I know this word gets tossed around a lot, but I really think it's a fucking bastardization that everyone's getting triggered all the time because there are some people who like literally get triggered, like with bursts of emotion in how. have a history of trauma, and it's such a useful word, avoidance of triggers that then create

bursts of emotion in a really uncontrollable way. Right? So we'll sometimes call these flashbacks where the person is there again, not just upset with you and here now, they're like back there again. And we call it an apparently normal personality because a normal personality requires integration across this, right? where we need a little bit of fire all over the place. This is what's a normal human brain is like.

We get a little upset at a lot of things. But what we see in pictures of traumatic dissociation is a bizarre level of lack of upset, and then in the wrong circumstances, way too much upset. Okay? Now let's talk about the psychological. So psychological numbness is sort of like a different,

thing. Okay? I mean, does it involve the brain? Sure. Is it a lexathemia? Why not? Is there a dissociation? Sure. Does it have a problem with interoceptive awareness? Why not? But I think there are a couple of important questions to ask if you feel dumb from a psychological perspective. The first is, what's the cost of feeling? And this is the most important, I mean, In my experience, this is the most important question to answer. It is not the most important question to ask. Now, since I'm feeling the Friday, let me ask y'all a question. Let's see how good y'all are. If it's the most important question to answer, but it is not the most important question to ask,

how does that work? Why wouldn't it be the most important question to ask? Good. Yeah, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good. Right? So, so good. You guys are basically on the right, I guess I should, I, I guess I do expect a lot from all, which is why I ask that question. I'm trying to trick you. Be careful. Yes. Okay. So people can't answer it if you don't ask. That's very good, right? So I think several of several of you all got it. People were also saying, you know, it's about what surfaces in you figuring it out in a roundabout way. Excellent.

So this is what's really hard about a lot of the information that we need doesn't necessarily come up if we ask it. Okay. So the main question to ask yourself, if you feel numb, you know, is what is the price of feeling? What is the consequence of feeling? If I let myself feel, what will happen? And so then what happens is we oftentimes discover that, so this is what I want you all to understand. If you are a certain way, you may think you're broken, you're not broken, this is a solution, it's not a problem.

The human brain adapts the best way it knows how. The body adapts. That's what we do. So if you are becoming numb, there's a reason that you're numb. It's because there is a problem with feeling. So oftentimes it's because the feeling is. overwhelming. Oftentimes it's because the feeling hurts. And this is kind of a, let's see if I can. But yeah, from a psychological perspective, we really have to understand that suppression,

for example, is a psychological defense mechanism. So we're trying to push something down. Repression, so suppression is when you do it consciously. Repression is when you do it automatically. And so we have to protect ourselves from our feelings because our feelings cause us to lose control, our feelings hurt, those are number one and number two. And a lot of people will say, like, what's the point of talking about my feelings? It doesn't help my situation at all. And this is the sad thing is that I think sometimes those people are correct, right? I think we have to be careful about assuming that talking about your feelings will be sufficient to improve your life. I think talking about our feelings is a way of

understanding ourselves. It's a way of toning down when we talk about things, it becomes weaker. So literally, this is so interesting. When you put words to your emotions, a necessary part of that process is your linguistic cortex, the part that selects language, requires tamping down of your emotional circuitry. So when you feel really, really, really upset and you're like, ah! When When I ask you, what are you experiencing? The linguistic cortex shuts down the amygdala some, shuts down the limbic system some, and it's like, hey, what's really going on in there? What are we feeling?

And then they do some communication, but that communication can't work if your limbic system is hyperactive. And then something really cool happens is when we put words to things, we gain power over them. I have an idea. What is it? It's great. What is it? It's great. But what is your idea?

It's great. That doesn't mean anything. When we put words to things, we gain power over them. So some of the numbness that we feel is simply suppression. It's repression. It's all kinds of other psychological defense mechanisms. But we are numb because we can't afford not to be. And then if you really want to undo that numbness, which I think is necessary,

then it becomes really hard. because you have to grapple with that feeling of being overwhelmed. You have to grapple with the futility of it. Right? So oftentimes what am I numb to? I'm numb to my hopelessness. Why am I numb to my hopelessness? Because if I let my hopelessness out and it'll overwhelm me,

we don't think about it that way. What we really think about is if I let the hopelessness out, then I know that I'll be hopeless because the hopelessness is right and I'm not right. That's really how I feel. It's taking all of my energy to keep those emotions at bay. And then we run into, this is kind of tying back to neuroscience where we run into this basic problem, where when I'm turning down the volume on my emotional circuitry, I can't be selective about that. I mean, sometimes people can with suppression and repression.

That's how we become selective, but it doesn't really work that way. The other reason we feel numb, this is a bit complex, but we'll talk about it anyway. Here, I want to show you guys this passage. Just one example. This figure gets its energy from hatred aggression and negative affect that the traumatized child feels in its moments of abuse but can rarely express toward its abusers. Fairbairns suggests that the child uses a maximum of its aggression to suppress a maximum of its libidinal need. The result is an attack by an internal saboteur on the libidinal ego. An unexpressible anger suppresses need.

Aggression is bottled up directed back into the system against the childlike vulnerable. So what does this mean? So I want you all to focus on, suggest that the child uses a maximum of its aggression to suppress a maximum of its libidinal need. One of the reasons that we become numb is because we want things. And I want something so bad

and it hurts so much and it's such a powerful want. In order to keep that ache from overwhelming me, I need another psychological force to suppress it. And aggression is really great at doing that. So what happens is I take the parts of myself that want. I want to be loved. Instead, what do I do? I turn it into self-loathing.

Stop being such a pussy. I want to be respected. Stop being so ego-oriented. and focused on the opinion of others, I want to be appreciated, respected. Stop being so narcissistic. Stop being someone who craves the attention and approval of others. Like, why are you being weak?

Right? It's so interesting. But sometimes the character of numbness is actually exhaustion from internal conflict. Very common when we come to this psychological. I mean, you can do a whole lecture on psychological defense mechanisms and how they'll sort of isolate a particular kind of emotion. But I think this is a really common pattern where needing, wanting, hurts so much that I cultivate

another kind of emotion to keep that one in check. I cultivate some degree of self-loathing. I cultivate some amount of devaluing of myself to try to take that part of me that I want, the part of me that's childlike, the part of me that's innocent, the part of me that is ignorant, the part of me that is naive, the part of me that is weak, the part of me that is joyous, the part of me that is delightful, the part of me that walks through a field and just picks up a thing of a little flower and then smells it. And that part doesn't help me. I need to push it down. I need to suppress it. Best energy to do that is self-loathing.

And somewhere at the end of that, right, is where you're suppressing, so there's the part of you that feels, and then you're trying to keep it in check. So you're kind of pushing it down. And so you end up exhausted, which is another kind of numbness. It is the numbness of psychologically internal conflict that is never ending. right so like if i'm pushing against myself all the time i will be exhausted and i will go nowhere i will not feel one thing or the other so there's a certain kind of what i would call exhausted numbness which also can map onto you know this the burnout numbness where we're kind of like freezing all

the time and we're like we're kind of black and white and there's emotional suppression and emotional activation. So it can be that, but this feels a little bit different. This is a little bit more on the psychological side. Right. So this is what's so interesting. Remember, we talked about how things kind of slice through. So what's happening in the amygdala of the person who is psychologically attacking

their childlike vulnerability? Maybe it's hypoactive. Who knows? We don't know. Right? But it feels a little bit different. and so the character of your numbness, the type of numbness that you have,

actually gives you insight into what the problem is. And then depending on what kind of numbness you have, is it something as simple as reducing technology usage? Is it letting some of those emotions out and really facing, okay, when did I start hating having childlike joy again? When did I, am I someone who's just so burnt out? And this is why stress management is so important because if you're someone who's burnt out due to stress management

and literally what we're talking about is hyper cholesterol activation. Sorry, not cholesterol, cortisol activation. Mindfulness may help way more than something like, you know, if you've got the elixothymic part, alexothymic is not understanding the kind of feelings that you have. Well, mindfulness helps there too, but this is the different mechanisms of meditation.

oriented practices. Right? Do we want to increase awareness of our bodily sensation? And basically, we want to move in the opposite direction of the blue stuff that I wrote. Questions. So the solution is no more stress. That is one solution, right? No more stress.

Remember that a big part of the stress, I don't know if you all remember this, but... So literally, the solution can be no more stress. Now, when you ask that, and I say, yes, that is the solution. Now, here's my question for you. What do you all think, do you think, what do you, how viable do you think no stress is? Right. So let's understand something. Stress will come.

You can't avoid it. See, this is what's so interesting. I mean, they're asking a black and white question. Solution is no stress? Like, sort of. This is the key thing. When we look at our environment, we make a certain interpretation that triggers a stress response. And literally what you will find is that not everybody is burnt out, right?

People will have both be working in the same job. One person will have burnout and one person won't have burnout. The question is how? See, if the environment is what produces the burnout, then it should be equal amongst everybody. And we certainly know that the environment has a contribution to the burnout, for sure, because we have some environments in which burnout is higher and some environments in which burnout is lower. But it's not the same for all people. So the question is, what's the difference?

And this is where I strongly, strongly encourage you all to watch out for a certain kind of thinking, which is that when your mind jumps to an answer so, what? You're saying this? But there's so much inherent skepticism where I think there's a lot of opportunity for what I would call uncommon sense. So just be stress-free, right? Well, like, hold on a second. How much can you move the needle on being stress-free? Instead of thinking, no more stress, how much can you adjust your stress? And I'll give you all kind of a a simple kind of example of this, because this is literally what we do. Right?

When someone has an environmental assessment and they trigger a freeze response, the stress happens in here. It happens right here. So this is modifiable. This is what's really wild. Now, why does it feel like it is impossible to modify? Because we've never been taught, right? we're not taught how to modify stress as it from our environment.

And if anything, we're actually taught the opposite. We're taught that we as human beings, the way that I feel in here is determined by my environment. So if my environment is a certain way, I will feel a certain way. And this is like literally why, like, and when I say we're taught, I mean, we're conditioned every single day, literally, literally, 365, unless you work really hard to get away from it. But if you think about anyone who's selling anything, right, especially objects, if you wear this pair of boots, you will feel good. I think food is maybe different, but when I think about the ownership of material things, there's a tacit idea, like, why do we do stuff to feel a certain way?

so if you wear this shirt or if you wear this dress or if you wear these boots you will feel a certain way if you have this kind of watch you will feel a certain way if you have this kind of lamp if you have this kind of decoration and we're so conditioned if you play this video game you will feel a certain way if you watch this movie you will feel a certain way this is literally what we're conditioned for So the idea that you can modify your stress level internally feels impossible because we're conditioned every single day to do the exact opposite. Solve the way that you feel in here by changing your environment. And this is what's really weird.

Our body is our environment too when we really get down into it. So change the way that you feel by taking this pill. Change the way that you feel by having this drink. change the way that you feel by smoking a duby. So we go on trying to modify ourselves, but we modify ourselves from the outside. And literally the process of freeing people up from this is by modifying things in here.

Right? So when we literally have a patient who has PTSD, they have an environmental assessment which has an internal calculation, which results in a certain behavioral response. We need to make that modification on the inside. I think that's what... Different graphic.

Right? And that's what... I mean, like, so that's why I thought was so interesting when I saw our coaching person's analysis, and he was like, actually, we just don't focus on behavioral change. We focus on helping people understand what goes on inside of them, and then the behavior changes on its own. We modify this.

That's what this channel is about, is modifying this, not modifying this, and not even necessarily modifying this. It's modifying this. This is the one thing that you can intervene on. Here's what's really crazy. You guys think that's insane.

You'll show you guys something even weirder. You guys want some science on this? You guys want to see some fucking wild papers. You guys ever heard of this? The theory of constructed emotion. Okay. Theory of constructed emotion. This is wild, guys. Theory of constructed emotion.

See, we go through life thinking that our feelings are not ours to control, and this is what's so unfortunate. We have this, like, weird therapy-speak kind of epidemic going on, where people are like, you're entitled to your feelings, right? your feelings are true. We sort of take feelings as something that we are given. And it's sort of like the feeling is not changeable. It's not modifiable.

You shouldn't even try to change it. You should just accept it. Like if you feel angry, you're entitled to feel angry. What we sort of say is that if you have an emotion, you should accept what it is, accept your emotion. Don't try to change it. Don't try to control it. Don't try to suppress it. and then down the road, sure, your feelings are valid.

Your conclusions based on those feelings may not be valid. The behaviors that the feeling is driving you to do may not be appropriate, but the feeling itself is not something that you have any control over. So just accept it. Your feelings are true. Theory of constructed emotions suggest that 50% of the emotion that we experience up to 50% is actually creatable, modifiable. we create our emotional experience.

And the reason that we are so emotionally fucked up is because no one taught us that. And if anything, we're moving in the opposite direction where we're saying, if you feel angry, like accept you're allowed to feel angry. And that's sort of like where we sort of gave up on, we sort of accepted feelings as truths, at least on that dimension.

Not the consequences of the feeling. We're not saying if you feel angry, you should attack people. That is wrong, but the feeling itself is totally fine. That's not what the Buddha said. And this is what's so interesting is like, you know, in psychiatry, we get trained that there's no such thing as a good feeling or a bad feeling.

They're just all feelings. And there's a good argument for that, right? So we've evolved to have anger and anxiety for reasons. They all serve an evolutionary purpose. But like, hold on a second. Don't we strive for more positive feelings? we have words, positive feeling and negative feeling. That just happens to not be true.

So here's the insane thing. You can actually control what you feel. And by control, I don't mean suppress. You can control what your emotional, what emotion is generated in response to a particular situation. And that sounds insane, except it's not.

and we do this every single day. Because when someone comes in with a generalized anxiety disorder and experiences anxiety when they're ordering a hot dog and when they go to work and when they're checking out at the grocery store, we will literally alter the creation of emotion within them over the course of treatment. That is literally what we will do, what we will train them in. And it's so interesting, right, because we,

Look at some people and we envy them because they're like, oh my God, this person responds to this situation with so much resilience, whereas I feel hopeless in the same situation. There is something special about them, but hold on a second. The only way that that's true is if we start with the assumption that the emotion that I create is not modifiable by me. And as we have sort of moved towards this emotional acceptance, we have actually actually given up, like we've sort of thrown in the towel on a very, very, very difficult battle, very important battle, which is that you can actually generate a certain kind of emotion.

You can alter your emotional experience. Another really good example of this is imposter syndrome. I'll tell you guys exactly how to do this, like literally. This has been studied. When you look at people with imposter syndrome and they do a good job, they generally, they generate a certain kind of emotion, which is fear. So literally what happens in their head is when they do a good job, they attribute their successes to circumstances, and they attribute the successes of other people. When somebody else does a good job, it is through their hard work,

talent, or effort. When I do a good job, it is because of my circumstances or luck. The situation is the same. I got an A, you got an A. When I look at you, my mind generates a certain kind of answer. When my mind looks at me, it generates a different kind of answer. Those two things also generate a different kind of emotion. So when I look at somebody else succeed, I feel admiration. I feel happy for them. When I look at myself succeed, I feel panic. And this is torture. It's adaptive. Because when I do a good job and I feel panic, what do you think I do next time? I don't relax. That panic drives me to keep doing well, keep doing well. keep doing well, which is why we see so much imposter syndrome at places like, so I went to

medical school at Tufts, I did residency at Harvard, way more imposter syndrome at Harvard than there is at Tufts. Tops is like a bunch of people who are like basically kind of chilling. We like work pretty hard, we do a pretty good job. We're not the smartest of kids in the class. We're sort of okay with that, right? We got some gumption. But you can literally create your emotional experience. You can create which emotions come up in the first place. And I think Buddhism is, I think, the best system for this. Hinduism in that way is kind of like, eh, so concerned about that. They're like, transcend the mind entirely.

Just like leave it all behind. Whereas the Buddhists, they're like cultivate compassion, cultivate equanimity. You know, cultivate all these positive emotions. If you feel jealous towards someone, recognize that you cannot feel jealous without appreciation. This is super cool. Let me see if I can find this for you all. Oh, no. Anyway, appreciation has to exist for jealousy. And you can lean into appreciation instead of jealousy. So when people say like, oh, just don't feel stress, solution is no more stress, like actually yes. And we have a lot of evidence for that. We know that there's certain foods that

you can eat, which will modify your stress levels. We know that there are things that you can do like take walks every day that will modify your stress levels. We know that you can meditate every day, which is we'll modify your stress levels. So this is where like, guys, I kid you not. Think about how dangerous it is the moment that we give up on what emotional experience we get in life. The moment that we move from, hey, I don't, I can't actually feel happy. All I can do is manage the feeling of sadness that comes up,

which I'm entitled to and which is authentic and which is real, maybe not the conclusions from it, but that emotion. Even that, like, we've given up, what we're basically doing is like we're playing defense for the rest of life. And I want y'all to really try it. Right? So the challenge with the theory of constructed emotional, guys, I'm trying to figure it out.

Okay? So the problem with this is that there isn't a DIY to it. This is like some pretty dense neuroscience, you know, but there is not a whole lot about how you DIY this, which is why I like Buddhism. So I think Buddhism is really good at what's the DIY path to this?

Because they do it. They don't know this neuroscience stuff, but they figured it out. But I want you guys to think for, a moment. Really, try this. Try to modify your internal emotional experience to something. And this is, this is like honestly the simplest thing on the planet. And I'll give you guys a good exercise. If you're playing an online video game and you feel pissed at a teammate, can you cultivate compassion towards this person? Can you be kind to them? Can you cultivate,

not just act kind? Can you in your heart recognize, hey, this person, could be having a hard day. So I had this recently, not recently, a couple of years ago, but, you know, I was talking to, I was working with a group of pros, pro-esports, e-sports pros. And we were talking about, you know, they were expressing their frustration at, like, when they, you know, grind pubs, like, there are people in the pubs who just really suck, and they're fucking toxic on top of that. And then I was like, have y'all ever considered what it's like to be in, like to be one of the pubs who plays with pros?

You grind just as much as a pro dust. You've devoted so many same amount of years, right? So if you're like a top ranked Challenger League, whatever, Immortal Diamond Back, whatever, I don't know, take your rank of choice. Right? To be like a good pub who's like a tier three. compared to a pro. You make the same sacrifices. And what do you get in return?

Nothing. Nothing. And imagine what that's like. Like, y'all get paid salaries. You guys sometimes even win tournaments. Like, your sacrifice is worth something, right? But imagine, imagine if you were just shittier, you were like 300 spots lower.

And you're putting in the same effort. Really bad. So you can change the way that you emotionally react to things. You can generate a different set of emotions. And at the beginning, this requires a little bit of work. Because usually it starts with cognition. Literally think about the situation in a different way. Cultivate compassion for this person.

What is it like to be this person? Let me really try to understand. And another really good example of this is like, take a look at, think about someone who's like you're bully. and oftentimes bullies, the weird thing, right, is that bullies are oftentimes popular. And so you think to yourself, like, why is someone this way when they have everything? When they have friends, they're captain of the football team. Like, what must it be like to have so many of the things that I don't have?

The things that would make me content, the things that would make me feel so much happier. and if I had all of those things, what would have to be going on inside me to be an ass to other people? Changes your perspective. And then what happens? This is the cool part. This is why it requires training, conditioning,

neuroplasticity. The first time that we think a different way, it's really hard. And then as we think a different way again and again and again and again, then it starts to become automatic. This is what we do in psychotherapy for generalized and anxiety.

disorder. We alter the baseline emotional response that people have as they navigate through the world, and you can do it too. Time for one question. Would taking mushrooms or LSD fix you? Probably not. But there is some evidence that they can be helpful. Here's the key thing to remember about psychedelics, y'all. So first of all, we don't really know much about safety. I actually do know some stuff about safety, but that's why you shouldn't just do the stuff at home. But the studies that show good outcomes with this stuff have good support. So I think about psychedelics is inducing a state of neuroplasticity, but what gets written down is, I've seen people have bad trips and develop PTSD and panic disorder from a bad trip. So you're playing with fire. Do not recommend it.

When you're talking about me changing at the fundamental level and not the environment, are you talking about changing the ego sense of self? I'm actually talking about even a deeper layer than that. So your ego or your sense of self is your identity. What we're talking about is changing the automatic response that is generated by you in a particular situation. Ego responds to that. How does ego death affect that?

It's going to be a riot. Hold on. Okay. So I don't know if I like this. You guys know this or not, but I mean, for every paper that I talk about, for every topic that I share, there's like maybe five to six that I don't. Theory of Constructed Emotion is a good example. I just read a ton of stuff every week. So this paper is fascinating. Near-death experiences and personal values.

Near-death experiences reportedly foster value transformations and decrease suicidal ideation. 89 survivors of near-death experiences judged values related to material and social success as less important than did 175 control subjects. So here's what's really interesting. I observed something very strange as a psychiatrist. If you look at the data on risk factors for suicide, one of the risk factors, no surprise, is a history of prior suicide attempts. Another risk factor is completed suicide in the family. Now, there's a

problem with these risk factors, which is that what we do with risk factors is we look at a large population. Let's say we look at 10,000 people, and we look at, let's say, the 10,000 people who attempted suicide. And then we discover that, okay, out of the 10,000 people that attempted suicide, 3,000 of them attempted it before. So we say that's a risk factor. It makes sense, right? but 7,000 people didn't attempt it before. So oftentimes, even though something is a risk factor, it's not a risk factor for everybody. And something really strange happened. I once had a patient, and they had a history of multiple suicide attempts, and I was doing

a safety assessment one day, and I said, you know, do I need to be worried about you attempting suicide? And my patient said, no. And I said, why is that? And he said, well, the last time I attempted suicide, I realized that I'm trying to kill myself and there is something within me that wants to live more than I want to die. So even though I want to end my life, my heart wants to keep living, my liver is detoxifying things, my respiratory, my lungs are like breathing no matter how much I want to stop.

So something in me wants to live more than I want to die. And that's why I won't try to kill myself. I was like, that's a really fucking profound answer, man. So here's the other thing. One of the most protective factors, and I'm not suggesting that you go do this, and if you're having thoughts about hurting yourself, you should absolutely see a mental health professional and call 911 and go to the emergency room. I really believe that stuff, okay?

I believe that as someone who's worked in the emergency room and helped people when they're thinking about suicide, immediately tried suicide. I really don't think it's a good option. But the weird thing is that we look at a study like this. And one of the other really interesting things is that a passion for life can sometimes come from almost dying. And this is something that I know sounds crazy, but it's actually not when you think about it, right? When someone almost dies and they survive, they have a zest for life. And it's really interesting because if you look at this paper, what they sort of show is that when someone almost dies, they

divest and detach from social and material success. And it kind of makes sense. Like sometimes when someone almost dies, their subjective experience will be as like, it made me realize what's important in life. And that a lot of their lust for life improves because they no longer care about money as much. They no longer care about being well-liked as much.

The really interesting thing is that if you look at this paper, there's actually, let me show you guys. It's fascinating. Hold on. Yeah, so it did not find that the study group valued self-actualization, altruism, or spirituality more highly than did the control group. I think this is a really cool finding. Because it's not like almost dying brings you closer to God or makes you meditate more. or anything like, it actually doesn't do that. It doesn't make you like a better human being.

All it does is causes you to divest from material and social success as things that are important to you. And it decreases your desire to die. Fascinating. Someone asked a question that made me think about that paper. There's a lot of weird stuff out there, man. A lot of cool research. Yeah, so people are asking about microdosing.

I don't think there's really good evidence for microdosing. I think the reason people microdose is because they get addicted to it. But I saw a meta-analysis a few years ago that show that microdosing doesn't really help. Hi, Dr. K, almost nobody grasps non-attachment. What are your thoughts on it? I mean, I think a lot of people think that non-attachment is apathy, because that's what their experience of it is. Yeah.

But, I mean, we teach a lot about Vyragya detachment. Okay, guys, I think I'm done for the day. Good to see y'all. I know it's been a little while. We're really looking forward to streaming more this year. So I think we're doing a couple of cool things here at HG. So, yeah, I think we're going to be, you know, stay tuned for some of the stuff that we've got coming up. But I hope today was helpful, and I know that someone posted this.

Yeah, if you guys haven't. So I will say this. This was a blast. And I think if you guys have not, like I know like a lot of times on podcasts, I kind of say the same stuff over and over and over again. But if you guys have not seen this episode, I think it's a lot of fun. I don't know exactly how much you'll learn,

but I think it's fun. It was a lot of fun to go on. I really like, you know, it's interesting. I appreciate people like Raj and Andrew Huberman and like there's just some amazing podcast hosts out there. Really knowledgeable, really have done their homework, you know, professors at Stanford, et cetera. But sometimes it's like there's some podcasts that, and those are all, those are both really amazing podcasts. Actually, it's been sick. Like I've been on a handful of podcasts recently.

They're all fucking great and they're all very different. But, you know, some of them. are just fun. They're more fun than educational. So check those out and we'll see you guys I think week after next. 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. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988. Can't suicide crisis hubline.

It's good to know, just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada.