HealthyGamerGG - Your Imagination Won't Fix Your Life

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Dr. K breaks down how getting stuck in regret, fantasy, and “what could have been” thinking can quietly block real change. When the mind keeps rewriting the past or imagining alternate versions of life, it feels productive, but it actually drains the emotional fuel needed to move forward in the present. This episode explores why fantasy can feel comforting but ultimately keeps people stuck, especially in depression. Dr. K explains how negative emotions are closely tied to learning and motivation, and why avoiding them through imagination, rumination, or distraction prevents real progress. The focus is not on fixing the past or visualizing a perfect future, but on tolerating the present long enough to take the next real step. Topics covered include: Why regret-based fantasy feels helpful but blocks action How imagination converts negative emotion into false relief The connection between negative emotion, learning, and motivation Why rewriting the past creates a false present you cannot act from How to shift from “what should have been” to “what do I do now” HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3Szt HG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the dream. Hey, chat. Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-O-Konoja, 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. Hey, y'all. In today's video, we're breaking down how you can accidentally prevent yourself from improving in life because you're too busy solving problems in a fantasy world instead of the real world. This is something that a lot of people have been asking about for Mental Illness Awareness Week, and I originally made this video as part of Dr. K's Guide to Depression. It's something that I noticed a lot of my patients would do.

They'd be too busy solving the problems in their head in order to actually solve the problems in the real world. The Guide to Depression is a piece of Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health, and if you all want to learn more, check out the link in the description below. Let's talk a little bit about something that I call the fantasy trap. For some people who describe themselves as depressed, what they really do is like have a bunch of regret. The quality of their depression is about regret over past actions.

So they kind of look it back in their life and they kind of will say things like, oh, I screwed it all up. You know, if I hadn't done this, then everything would have been fine. And they feel really hopeless now. But the nature of their hopelessness was that something happened in the past. And what happened in the past was so definitive, was so final that they're kind of screwed for the rest of their life. And so what their mind does is really focuses on that regret, focuses on that mistake in the past.

And they have this case of what I call the should or what it could is. And so they kind of, their mind, if you talk to them, they'll say things like, oh, if I had done this, if I could have done this, if I would have done that, then everything would be different today. And oftentimes these people also live in kind of like a world of fantasy. So in their mind, they kind of are constantly thinking about how things would be different today. And they kind of imagine, like, oh, if I hadn't made those mistakes, imagine how awesome my life would be now. And so their mind kind of lives in this fantasy. And instead of sort of doing anything about it, they kind of are stuck in this, what I call a fantasy trap. So the first thing that we have to do is understand, okay, like, what is the nature of fantasy?

How does fantasy work in our mind? And this is where I'm going to share a little bit about my own experience. So I remember, you know, when I used to fantasize a lot as a kid. So I was young and generally speaking scrawny. So I would get bullied a lot in school. And so I remember like it's, I kind of remember it like it was yesterday. You know, when I get bullied like these kids would be bigger than me. Sometimes they were like one or even two years older.

And so I'd get bullied by this big kid and I would feel like really, really sad and ashamed of myself, right? Like you feel so bad when you get bullied. Everyone's laughing at you. And the bully and everyone else kind of gets bored of like beating up on you and they kind of walk away. And I'd be sitting there like, like holding back my tears, feeling really bad about myself, and then my mind would start to think. It's start to think about how I'm going to learn martial arts, right? It's going to be like

super karate kid up in here. And I'm going to learn how to like defend myself. And then one day the bully is going to show up and I'm going to teach him a lesson, right? That's what's going to happen. And then I'm going to kick his ass and then everyone's going to start cheering. And then I'm going to, and then what's, it's kind of bizarre, but there, there I am on the playing, on the playground. And I feel the sense of triumph, which is really bizarre because I just got bullied, but my mind now, suddenly I feel so good about myself. I feel righteous and there's justice and he's going to get what he deserves and I'm going to be the one to give it to him. So I feel so good about myself. If you stop and think about it, like, what the heck just happened

there? There I was feeling ashamed about myself. There I was feeling so negative about myself. And my mind played this little trick on me. My mind started to fantasize and then what happened to the negative emotion. It suddenly became a sense of triumph. So the first thing to understand is that fantasy is our mind's way of taking a negative emotion and transforming it into something positive. Taking that negative emotion and then when we run through that little script in our mind, we kind of feel relieved in the present. And why is that even a problem, right? So if we really think about it, you know, fantasy is like pretty cool. It's like a way of coping with negative emotions. you can kind of imagine how things would have been different, and then you feel good about yourself.

And even those people who come into my office filled with regret, when they fantasize, they imagine, right? So there they are thinking, oh, my God, my life is terrible, I screwed it all up, tons and tons of negative emotion. And so when they fantasize, they think, oh, imagine how things could have been, I would have had tons of friends, I would have been super successful. I would have been, you know, I would have found that next tech company or I would have developed the first crypto coin, if only, oh, man, that would be. be so awesome and they feel good about themselves. So then what's the problem with that, right? Why is that a bad thing? Because our mind clearly transforms negative emotion into positive emotion when we fantasize.

The reason that's a problem is because most of our energy, most of our learning, and a lot of our motivation actually comes from negative emotion. If you look at what spurs human beings forward, it's usually negative emotion. And even if we look at our brain, what we find is the parts of our brain, we find, the parts of our brain that experience negative emotion are actually very, very close to and quite connected with the learning centers of the brain. And you'll understand this very easily if you have like, you know, 10 good experiences at one restaurant, but then the 11th time you get sick when you eat there, you're not going to want to eat at that restaurant again. Because our mind learns so

much and so much of our behavior is actually dictated by our negative emotion. And our amygdala, which experiences so much of our negative emotion, is literally right up against our hippocampus in our brain. So the connections are very, very strong between the negative emotional parts of our brain and the learning parts of our brain. And so now we can see why people who are in the fantasy trap are kind of stuck, right? Because instead of using that negativity to spur them forward, instead of using that negativity to actually change their behavior and make a change in their life, when they engage in the fantasy trap, they sort of pull the plug on that negative emotion. It kind of drains away, and then they end up doing nothing to fix their life. And this is

also what we see in other kinds of distracting things. So, for example, video games and substances, when we feel bad about ourselves and we play these video games where we use substances, it shuts down our emotional centers of the brain, and then we actually don't make any changes in our life. So this is the first thing to understand about the fantasy trap, is that it replaces negative emotion with positive emotion. And when we replace that negative emotion with positive emotion, we actually deprive ourselves of a lot of fuel

to actually make positive changes in our life. So let's just kind of take a quick look at this and kind of diagram it out. Okay? So here I am feeling sad about myself in the process. present. Oh, no. Look at how much I screwed up in life. I made so many mistakes and I am destined to be loser. So then what happens is we're thinking about all of this regret. Okay? And so then what does the fantasy trap do? There we are feeling bad about ourselves and it rewrites history, right? So then we come up with this other history in our mind where if I had done this differently, if I had done that differently, then life would be different and I wouldn't be the person that I am.

today. And so the first thing that that does is we notice the emotional change, right? Here's the negative emotion and here's the positive emotion. So even by doing this, what we've done is deprive ourselves of some of that motivation that comes from negative energy. There's another energetic component to this as well, which is that simply the mind can't do everything. So our mind has a limited amount of energy, and we can only fix or focus or expend our energy thinking about one thing at a time. So if we think about this scenario, what have we actually spent our mental energy doing? We've spent our mental energy to rewrite history. And this is a really, what I'm about to say next is really confusing because it's so damn simple, but rewriting history is never

going to make your life better. You literally cannot rewrite history. The present is the present. Your life is your life. So when you spend 10 or 15 minutes dumping the energy in your mind, because think what you're doing here, right? You're doing so much problem solving. You're thinking, okay, if I had done this, then this would be different. If I had done this, then this would be different. Your mind is literally spending your problem solving energy to change the past into a hypothetical present. And then the question becomes, where do you go from here? You can't go anywhere from here, because that's not real. It's a fantasy.

When your mind rewrites history, it creates a false present. And you spent all of your energy in doing this. And so this is the second reason that you stay stuck. Because you expend all of your energy to create a false present, and you can't actually move anywhere from a false present. So now the question becomes, what do we do about the fantasy trap? How do we change things? The first thing to understand is that you have to talk,

tolerate negative emotion. So what I want y'all to do is to notice that when you're feeling bad about yourself, watch your mind go back to the past and watch your mind rewrite history. And I want you to try to stop doing that and just sit with that negativity in the moment. It can be really overwhelming at first. But just sit with those negative thoughts. Okay, I made mistakes. My life isn't very good right now.

And then what we're going to do is ask yourselves, what am I going to do? now. So instead of asking yourself, because this is where your mind goes, what should I have done differently? Because you can ask that question as many times as you want to. It's going to feel really good. You can problem solve the past until the end of time, and it will never change today. So instead of asking yourself or focusing on what you should have done, ask yourself, what am I going to do now? So what we really want you to do is instead of looking to the past, because this is the problem in depression, remember, is that our mind is focused on the past

when things were okay and then rewriting to the present and creating a false future, what we want to do is redirect that energy to looking forward, right? And asking yourself, what can I do now? Because this is where your cognitive energy needs to go. You need to be focused on the present.

And everyone says, focus on the present, man, live in the present, bro. And it's so awesome. be so mindful and we're like living in the present. Like I try to live life in the present, which is why I don't pay my bills and I don't take out the trash because I'm living life in the present. What people don't realize is that living in the present sucks. It's brutal. Because when you live in the present, you have to sit there and acknowledge all the crap that you've done and where you are. And that moving forward from this point is not easy.

The reason it's so damn hard to live in the present is because living in the present is terrible. But we've still got to do it. It's our only way forward. I know it sounds really bizarre. This is another one of those super profound statements that sounds so obvious. It's dumb. You can't live anywhere except for the present. Like literally, the only thing that I can do is move my hand around now.

I can't move what I did a minute ago, and I can't move what I'm going to do a minute from now. The only time action can be taken is from the present. And the problem with the fantasy trap is that it lets us get out of the present. It absolves us of dealing with the present. And if it absolves us of dealing with the present, we can't actually move forward. You can also create fantasies in the future, right? You can say, oh, if I did this today,

then imagine what the future would be like. But the problem is that any action has to be taken in the present. So if we want to overcome the fantasy trap, we don't want to switch from the past to the future. Remember, the question that we ask ourselves is, what do I do today? Okay, fine, I'm in this place, and this place sucks. What am I going to do about it now? You don't ask yourself where you're going to wind up.

Don't worry about the outcome. Ask yourself, what is the first step that I need to take? What is the next step that I need to take? What is the step that I need to take right now? 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.

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