HealthyGamerGG - You are Chained Down.

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Today Dr. K talks about Baby Elephant Syndrome and how being chained down when you're young makes you feel chained down as an adult - even if you're strong enough to break out. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we grow up, we form particular relationships with things outside of us. And what are those relationships? How do they form? How do we change them? Some of these baby elephant syndromes are very, very helpful. Like, he's talking about it like it's a bad thing that holds us back. And the interesting thing is if we look at these things, we may think that some are better than others, right? So, like, neuroticism is bad.

The tendency to worry is bad. So people with high neuroticism, for example, may be more prone to have it. anxiety disorder. Conscientiousness is good. People who have high conscientiousness can put their mind to a task and do a good job at it, like focus on it and have follow through. It's kind of like follow through. Those are better than people who have low conscientiousness. So we make all these kinds of value judgments, but the really interesting thing is that data supports that it's not really like that. So here's a question. Do you have baby elephant syndrome? So baby elephant syndrome comes from an old story about somebody who came to a circus and realized that, you know,

there's a big, powerful elephant who was chained to this tiny little rope connection to this little pole. And he asked the, you know, the circus ringmaster and says, hey, why is there, you know, why is the elephant just tied to that? Does an elephant know that he could just, like, very easily break free and just run away? And the ringmaster says, well, doesn't matter of fact, this is how we do it. You know, when we bring in a small baby elephant, we chain them up to a much thicker rope to a much thicker pole. And, you know, they'll pull and they'll try to get away. And as a result, you know, you know, know, when they can't break away, they come to realize, oh, I can't break away. So as they grow up,

they stop pulling. They stop trying because they learned that, okay, this rope is unbreakable. So even as they grow up and they change that rope to a thinner rope or sometimes maybe not even a rope at all, the elephant doesn't keep trying. And when we experience baby elephant syndrome, it's oftentimes that, you know, when we were growing up, our parents or our environment, our teachers, our friends may have told us something about ourselves that we took deep to heart. You're not good enough. You're not smart enough. You know, you're ugly. You're sure. You're whatever it is that we take on these beliefs. I know we never come to challenge those stories.

In fact, we just kind of accept it as we go on. And we go through the rest of our lives thinking that's who we are. But we never come to take a look at that. We never challenge and reflect and say, is this true? And as a matter of fact, sometimes the most powerful, smartest, most incredible people I've met in those specific fields are the people who believe they're the worst because they're the ones who've worked most at it. You know, some of the best writers I've met believe that they're genuinely terrible

writers because at some point they met a terrible teacher who said, you're a bad writer, you're never going to be a good enough writer, and they kept practicing and practicing and practicing anyway. And those are the lucky ones, because the unlucky ones, they stop trying, and they bury their talents, they bury their creativity, they bury their wisdom, and they never come back and take a look at it. So challenge your own beliefs, because otherwise, you're nothing but a baby elephant stuck in the body of a grown adult. So this is really interesting, right? So let's talk about this. So there's some things I really love about this. And some things that I think kind of concern me about the self-help TikTok generation.

So I like to kind of just share some thoughts about this. So the first is that this is a story that doesn't start with circus elephants. It actually starts in meditative traditions. Okay? So this is a story that's been told like by, you know, monks in India and China and stuff for probably India, because that's where elephants were for thousands of years. And it illustrates the point that this person is saying. which is that oftentimes when we're growing up, we form a particular belief.

And then as we grow older, we don't challenge that belief, and it starts to restrict us. And so the general sentiment, I think the story is, you know, largely shares the point that's correct. And the sentiment is to like challenge your conceptions. Okay. So both of those things I think are fantastic. There are a couple of things that I sort of have issue with. the first is calling this a syndrome. So I know this sounds kind of weird, but like when we, what a syndrome is, and we'll talk a little bit about whether using language precisely is good or bad.

So syndrome is a constellation of symptoms that people share, like people, that people share, right? So it's like a group of things that we group together. And then the cool thing about the syndrome is that once we recognize what a syndrome is, so major depressive disorder is a syndrome. ADHD is a syndrome. It's a constellation of things that go together. And when we call something a syndrome, the reason that's useful is if we can lump these things together, and it's a pattern that lots of different people can relate to, then we can study this group of people because we're putting these people together because they share a constellation of symptoms. And then we can understand how can we help this group of people. Okay?

So in the case of like ADHD, what we'll see is that there's a.D. what we'll see is that there's impulsivity. There is a lack of attention. There is difficulty like adhering to stimuli or changing your attention. There is perseveration, so hyper-focus on a particular thing, or the inability to focus. And so as we start to look at all of these features, the more features we add, the more specific we can get, the more we can group these people together. And if we group these people together and we study them together, we can figure out what

works for these kinds of people. And so when you call this a syndrome, I'm curious, what are the features of the syndrome? How do you know if you have the syndrome? Right? So, like, this is my problem with calling it a syndrome is, like, how do you know which beliefs you should challenge? Which beliefs make it baby elephant syndrome? Right? Is it a lack of, like, what are the beliefs of baby elephant syndrome?

Like, on a piece of paper, like, how do you know if you have baby elephant syndrome? So there's something of a lot of value here. This is why I think precision of language is important. Because, like, how do you know if you have this? So a lot of people will watch stuff like this, and I think this is what happens, is that we'll put labels on things that sound really good, but are relatively imprecise. And when someone watches something like this, they'll resonate with it in some way, right? And they'll say, oh, I have baby elephant syndrome.

But what are the features of baby elephant syndrome? What's the challenge your beliefs? Like, which are the beliefs that you should challenge? Because the whole point is that in baby elephant syndrome, the beliefs are so deep root. that they're not beliefs, they're facts. Right? I can't escape from the peg. This is a feature of life.

And the whole problem with baby elephant syndrome is that we are inherently blinded to our conceptions. So like what are, which are the beliefs? Like, you know, how do you diagnose someone with baby elephant syndrome? So what baby elephant, the way that I understand, the way it's taught in the East is that this is not a syndrome.

It's not a collection of symptoms. It's a feature of the mind. So the best analogy that I can kind of think of is like in mathematics, we have formulas, right? So we have y equals mx plus B. And then we have core concepts like arithmetic or addition. And a syndrome is like a formula. It's like y equals mx plus B. It's a specific representation of reality.

And then you have the core features of mathematics, like arithmetic equals division, parentheses, you know, like exponentials. And so this is a core feature of the mind. It's like the plus sign. It's not actually the equation. And this is like, maybe I'm just being like academic and being kind of judgmental here. But in my opinion, it's very important to draw the distinction between what is a formula, like ADHD equals impulsivity plus this, plus this, plus this, versus how does our mind

fundamentally work? And this was a discovery from sort of like the. yogic tradition because they were looking at the features of the mind. So what the main discovery is, is it's not a syndrome. It's not like a particular thing. It's just how our mind works. And the basic idea is that we internalize particular beliefs and we operate as if these are true.

So in cognitive behavioral therapy, this is what we call schemas. Okay. So these are things like in object relations theory. So there's a whole branch of psychoanalysis called object relations theory, which sort of is essentially an exploration of the basic. baby elephant principle, which is how do we, as we grow up, we form particular relationships with things outside of us. And what are those relationships? How do they form? How do we change them? It's not, you know, so there's like a lot of specificity here that becomes really important.

Because I think the real challenge with something like this is like, what is your peg, right? What is the thing that you're actually shackled to? And I don't get any sense that it's clear, right, from this. I don't know how to group people into baby elephant syndrome, because it's a principle of every single mind. There are a couple of other important things that we have to be careful about. So this person said that oftentimes the most successful people that they've met have issues like this, like low self-esteem. And this is where what we've got to understand is that

some of these baby elephant syndromes are very, very helpful. Like he's talking about it like it's a bad thing that holds us back. But if you look at studies of five-factor personality analysis of doctors, okay? So remember, the five-factor personality analysis or a system is like probably the best scientifically validated system of personality, okay? So it's based on a lot of research as opposed to like theory or ideas. And what they sort of found is that there are five factors. There's conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and extroversion.

So these are kind of the five dimensions. So conscientiousness is your ability to, like, like sit down and focus on a task. Neuroticism is your tendency to worry. Agreeableness is your tendency to get along or not get along with other people. Like how willing are you to adapt your beliefs to what other people want? Openness is your openness or close mindedness to new ideas and concepts. And extroversion is like how you relate to other people, whether you're kind of a loner or you're like you enjoy spending time with others. And the interesting thing is if we look at these things, we may think that some are better than others, right? So like neuroticism is bad. The tendency to worry is bad.

So people with high neuroticism, for example, may be more prone to have an anxiety disorder. Conscientiousness is good. People who have high conscientiousness can put their mind to a task and do a good job at it, like focus on it and have follow through. It's kind of like follow through. Those are better than people who have low conscientiousness. So we make all these kinds of value judgments, but the really interesting thing is that data supports that it's not really like that. Okay? So for example, if you look at medical students, what you find is that medical students and doctors have high conscientiousness and high neuroticism. That high neuroticism and the tendency to worry actually correlates with higher performance. So I was listening to a really interesting story the other day of someone who was working in Amazon and they were giving a presentation and one of

their superiors, who's a very prominent person in Amazon was there. And the presentation did not go well. And so they were really concerned about it and it kind of looked bad. And so their boss's boss was basically saying, he was like, I'm not worried about this. And the reason why is because I can clearly see that you are worried about it. And so being worried about something, like they basically knew it was going to get taken care of because someone is clearly worried about it. So worrying about things

and thinking that you're insufficient and lacking confidence in yourself can actually correlate with external success. So this is the weird thing about baby elephant syndrome is we may think that we should get rid of it. But let's understand that it's responsible for someone being a best-selling author. It's responsible for someone being an excellent artist.

Right? It's the sense of inadequacy is what drives us forward. The reason that the medical student ends up as a medical student is because when they were in college and everyone else is out partying on Friday night at 8 p.m., they were worried about not getting an A on the test. So their asses were in the library and they were studied. And so what does that mean for us? Right. So if you're someone who's got low self-esteem, if you're someone who uses the relentless whip of not being good enough to excel. And if you all have seen our interviews with like people like, you know, streamers and stuff who were very successful, I'm thinking of like Amaranth, for example. Amaranth is like one of the hardest workers that I've ever met. And it's because on some level she felt at some point, this is years ago, that she needed to do better, right? And it drives us forward relentlessly. And it drives us to succeed.

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So the challenge is that when we talk about something like this, like baby elephant syndrome, there's sort of this idea that getting rid of it is good, which generally speaking, I agree with. But there's a huge, huge problem with this, which oftentimes causes people to stumble, as they'll see something like this and they'll think like, oh my God, like, I should be more confident in myself. Like I should like stop pushing myself so hard because I am okay. And my parents taught me that I'm not okay. And then what happens when you try to get that person to accept themselves?

Do you all know? What happens when you try to help them? attain self-acceptance. They resist it. They fight it at every single step. Right? They may say, they'll watch a TikTok and they'll say like, oh, this is me. But deep down, they're against it 100%.

And why is that? It's because it's what's responsible for their success. Right? Like what? You're telling me, because here's the thing. If you relentlessly drive yourself forward, towards success, and you start accepting yourself, what does that mean about your ambitions? What does that mean about your professional success?

You're emptying your gas tank, poking a hole in it. It's what drives you forward. So baby elephant syndrome is a little bit more complicated. The first thing is that I don't know which internal beliefs. What's the stake? What's the rope? I don't know. Right?

So the general principle is 100% correct that our brain, internalizes beliefs, and we continue to operate based on them. Like gravity is a good example of this. When we're two, our brain internalizes a concept of gravity and then concludes that we can't fly. Right? And so there are all kinds of things like value, like what's important, what family means. There are all kinds of other things that will internalize too. Like what is the relationship between a husband and a wife? Does a marriage compose of a husband and a wife? And a lot of the time, the way that we behave in relationships are internalized based on what we saw our parents do. So who did the dishes? Who cooked? So these are all things that we internalize. So which ones should

you challenge? Which ones are you holding you back? I don't know. Because it's not a real syndrome, right? A syndrome is a constellation of things. This is a principle of the mind, which you should absolutely understand. But I don't think that it's a bad thing, right? It's just how we work. Should you challenge some of those beliefs? Absolutely. But how do you figure out which ones to challenge? The ones that you figure out which ones are the challenge are the ones that the situations that bring you unhappiness. So here's what I'd say about how to approach baby elephant syndrome. The first is if you're unhappy with something, if there is something about your life that you wish were different, consider this principle. Consider how much of my current situation is because

of a belief that I hold, which I take for granted. And even that, it's going to be really hard to see. This is why most of these revelations happen with someone else. So, like, we see this a lot in coaching or in therapy or things like that, where it takes an external person to point out to you, hey, wait a minute. You're having trouble with your relationships because you're giving people a cold shoulder after a perception that someone doesn't text you back right away. Maybe that's the problem, right?

It requires some degree of sophistication to see what the actual problem is. The second thing to remember is that the stake in the rope serves an important purpose. Your brain wouldn't have picked it up unless it did something for you. And if you really want to overcome it, you really have to acknowledge that it's not just a stake in a rope. It's also an anchor, right? It's like a home base. It's a nest. It's all of those things.

It does something for you. It's comfortable. It's familiar. It feels safe. And if you try to uproot it, you may be surprised because you uproot it and then you don't even walk anywhere. Right? Because like this is what you've done to survive. So I'll ask people like, you know, are you willing to accept yourself? And the vast majority of the people are like, hell no. They come in, they say, I want to learn how to accept myself better.

As we start talking through, what are the consequences of you accepting yourself? And people think, oh, like, I'm going to lose my ambition. And they're like, I don't want to, I work too much. I have no work-life balance. There's another really common. I have no work-life balance. I need work-life balance. Okay, if you have more work-life balance, you know what that means, right?

You're going to work less. Yeah, I need to work less. Okay? So like, your chances of promotion are going to be lower. Your bonus may be smaller. No, no, no, no, no. What? I can't handle that.

You're crazy. I don't want to work less. I need those things because they make choice. for a reason. There's consequences to work-life balance. You know what the consequence to building work-life balance is? You have to sacrifice your work. And people like, oh, I love sacrificing work. But when it comes down to it, like, do you? What actually motivates you? Right? Like, why do you think your work-life balance got out of whack in the first place? And this is where, like, sometimes it gets weird and psychological. It's like, yeah, my parents are Nobel Prize winning

scientists. And I decided to become an artist. And so work-life balance for me is like, I can't give it up because I have to prove to them that art is a real career because they didn't tell them. They said that like I should go into a stem field. And so there's no way like, eff it. Like there's no way I'm going to be a disappointment to them. I'm going to show them. And work-life balance means giving that up, proving your parents that you made the right decision. Like people aren't willing to do that.

So when we're held back by something, understand first of all that it's not just a chain. it's also security. It's also fuel. And you have to explore that to really give it up. Because just recognizing, oh, this is what's been holding me back, sometimes that can help, right? It can help a lot. So I'm not saying it doesn't. My point here is that baby elephant syndrome makes it sound like it's a constellation of things for there's a one-size-fits-all answer. And my whole point is that there's a lack of granularity with that concept. And that the general principle is correct. But why did the brain form that? association in the first place, what does that association do for you? What are the advantages that you have to give up by getting rid of the baby elephant syndrome? Those are the things that you really have to think about. And so if you want to change, challenge one of these beliefs,

you know, it's hard to sort of figure it out because you're blind to it. That's kind of the nature of the problem, right? But even if you find one, it's not going to be so easy to give up because there are all kinds of associations with it. There are all kinds of things that this thing gives you. It gives you security. It lets you be promoted. It gives you you. It gives you a sense of satisfaction when you're the one who gets into medical school and you're one of the 15% of applicants who actually gets in. There's no way you're going to be in that 85%. Are you kidding me? Self-acceptance and be one of these noobs that didn't get in? F that. Right? So if it is causing your problems, what do you do? The good news is that oftentimes, and generally speaking,

I've noticed this, especially for ambition, there are alternatives. There are alternatives. alternatives. That if you let go of your ambition, it doesn't mean that your work ethic has to go away. Oftentimes, the other interesting thing is that they assume that ambition equals work ethic. But if you've been trained some amount of work ethic through ambition and you let go of your ambition, the work ethic isn't going to just disappear with it. Right? That's a habit that you've borne in. So oftentimes here's what I found with these people. The first is that they overvalue the contribution of ambition to their performance. and that oftentimes their performance is, there's a certain independence to it.

That's free of your ambition. The second thing is you can still care about stuff without personal ambition. So this is where you can, really, I think the best performance comes from not ambition, but actually comes from like the flow state and a sense of service.

And so why is a sense of service correlated with the flow state? It's because the flow state is free of the ego. Ambition is tied to the ego. I want to accomplish this. And the best work actually happens when you're free of ego. When you remove yourself from the equation, you become one with the thing that you are doing. You are no longer the writer.

Like the book is coming out of you. You're like channeling this book. Like there's a story within you that needs to be told. You are a conduit for this like music that is coming from some weird dimension. And this is what my experience has been with people who are athletes, esports athletes, and creative people. Right? That when you enter the flow state, even coders,

when you enter that flow state, you disappear, your ambition disappears. And you're just like, you see it. And the code fits together and you know how to make it happen. And all of the accolades, all of the pride, all of the good job, bro, like all that leaves your mind. And then you actually reach the heights of performance. So here's the bitter pill about ambition and some of this self-flagellation and elephant syndrome.

Is that elephant syndrome will get you from zero to 90%. But if you want to go from 90 to 100, you have to let it go, which is the most terrifying thing. Because it's gotten you to 90, right? And so recognize that it's terrifying. But if you really want to go to that extra level, this is where I agree with this guy, too, because he's sort of saying you need to move past this, right? and I think he's right. He knows what he's talking about.

Some of that is, I think, the consequence of TikTok, which is like you just can't go into this nuance. But if you want to go that next step, you want to go that next level, you have to become one with the object. This is also what is called Dian in Sanskrit. So this is why I think terminology is important, because the more precise your terminology,

the more you can understand and differentiate between things. So Dian is when one becomes absorbed with the object of meditation. when you become one with the thing. That is the first step. That is actually the meditative state. When people say, I had an awesome meditation yesterday. What the hell are they talking about?

They're talking about a state of absorption of their mind with the object of meditation, where they disappear. And if you practice being in that state, you can go one step further into samadhi, which is temporary enlightenment. So someone saying, I hit Gian running all the time. Completely agree. So Marathon Runner, are the people who have been the easiest to teach meditation to,

because they're already familiar with it. Okay, but if future orientation correlated with ambition is bad, then why does it work so well for a lot of people? I never said it was bad. Remember, quite the opposite. Ambition is what gets you from zero to 90%. That's why it's so popular, because it works. It's the easiest way to become successful.

But it comes at a cost. I do think there are better ways to do it. they're just harder, and it caps out somewhere, right? Because the problem with ambition is the price you pay for success is your happiness when you're ambitious. You may say, what does that mean? The price you pay for success is happiness. Like, what, that's ridiculous. You talk to people who are ambitious. When they achieve, are they content? No. Are they happy? No. I made $100,000 this year. Next year, it's going to be $200. I got promoted. Am I content? No. I'm going to celebrate a little bit, and it's back to the grind, back to the hustle.

There's always more. There's always more. That's the problem with ambition. So contentment and ambition are opposites, right? Like, we think of them as like, if I'm content, that means I'm not ambitious. That's the mistake that they make. So you can still be content and work hard. That's the thing that people don't understand.

Is there are alternatives to ambition? I think service is the number one thing to think of. Right? you can work really hard not for yourself for other people. And that's incredibly fulfilling, makes you happy, and causes your work ethic to be awesome. You can't get much for five bucks these days, unless you go to Wendy's for a $5 biggie bag.

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