Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Combating Tech, P*rn, & Video Game Addiction, Regaining Your Motivation and Rebuilding Your Relationships, with Dr. Alok Kanojia

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

Combating Tech, P*rn, & Video Game Addiction, How to Regain your Motivation, Rebuild Relationships, and find the right Meditation Style for your Unique Brain. This is a HUGE episode.    With millions following his insights, Dr. Alok Kanojia—Harvard-trained psychiatrist and cofounder of Healthy Gamer—dives into the shocking rise of video game, p*rn, & tech addiction, revealing how it’s KILLING our motivation and distracting us from what we truly want in life!   Dr. K breaks down what gaming and p*rn addiction look like & who is most vulnerable, the emotional regulation challenges they create, how trauma leads to dissociation and loss of identity, and how gaming impacts those with ADHD differently.   He discusses the dark side of online hate and the incel phenomenon, (and how to combat these conflicts effectively), the inverse relationship between dopamine and serotonin, and how to harness your unique way of thinking to achieve greater success. We’ll also tackle the pitfalls of subjective thinking in managing mental health, the correlation between porn addiction and unfulfilling lives, and the dangers of tech developers knowing more about our brains than we do.   What about the expectation of quick fixes in medicine? Dr. K discusses the motivational interviewing technique for treating addictions, the role of meditation in boosting motivation, and meditation techniques for those with ADHD!   Dr. K also explains: - What’s happening in the brain during severe versus mild addiction - How we are meditating wrong - Why early p*rn exposure can have detrimental effects - How childhood addictions have evolved over generations - Why ADHD is on the rise - What's the deal with dopamine fasting? - Can p*rn ever not be unhealthy? - Why psychedelics can be a positive tool—or a crutch—in treatment - Why finding acceptance online might actually be dangerous - How p*rn addiction impacts real world relationships & tips to overcome it - Rise of body dysmorphia in men - Importance of validating men’s struggles - The growing toxic masculinity movement & incel dynamics   Finally, Dr. K teaches us actionable tips on addressing addiction and mindfulness strategies for trauma & ADHD.   Level up with MBB today!!    Dr. Alok Kanojia's Book, How to Raise a Healthy Gamer: https://www.healthygamer.gg/how-to-raise-a-healthy-gamer   BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're spending four to six hours a day on a technological device, you are shutting off the parts of your brain that give you a sense of purpose. Our sense of purpose comes from our sense of identity. Our sense of identity comes from the integration of emotional experiences. We string these emotional experiences together. These experiences involve emotional activation. When we numb ourselves to this emotional activation, we don't know who we are. And if we don't know who we are, how can we have purpose?

There's a lot of research on trauma that tells us. Trauma starts with a numbing of emotion. The numbing of emotion in severe cases leads to dissociation. Once I dissociate, I don't know who I am. Once I don't know who I am, I have no direction for the future. People who are developing technology understand way more about your brain than you do. We're outgunned. What we're seeing is a whole scale increase in technology.

usage, a whole scale increase in technological addictions, and a whole scale worsening of mental health. Social anxiety, depression, generalized anxiety, suicidality, addictions, body dysmorphia, everything's getting worse. This is a human whose brain is designed to get better at stuff, form relationships. As these skills atrophy, it becomes impossible to attain this in the real world. It's my ambiolyx breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. Because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break down. Hey, I just found out something astounding.

Approximately 63% of those of you listening to or watching Myambialx Breakdown are not subscribed. We know you're listening and we know you're watching because of all of the awesome comments you leave telling us how Myambialx Breakdown is helping you lead a happier and healthier life. We love that. But the best way to support our show is to subscribe. It's also the only way to get latest updates and to know when new episodes drop. So anywhere that you listen to podcasts and on YouTube, please subscribe, hit the bell icon so that you know when a new episode drops. Thank you so much and on to the episode. Hi, I'm I'm Biallic.

And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to. You know, today's a small episode, a light, very light. We barely cover anything. Let's just do a little bit of a list here. The rise in video game and porn addiction. The rise in tech addiction, how it's pulling on our...

our attention away from finding out what we actually want to, need to, and our program to do as humans. How we process emotion and how we may be not processing our emotion and the impact on what that means for understanding what we want in life, how we pursue our goals, how we feel fulfilled, our sense of meaning and purpose and the rise in the potential risk for suicide. We're going to talk about the inverse relationship between dopamine and serotonin and how our addiction to our devices, even in a very minor way, is pulling us away from understanding what our true motivation is. We're also going to talk about meditation, how we're doing it wrong,

why we should be doing it right, and how it impacts a variety of addictive behaviors and motivation in general. We are also going to talk about online hate in cells, the rise in online negative discourse and conflict and how to combat that? And we're not even done. We're going to have a entire section dedicated to understanding ADHD. What kind of therapy works for ADHD? What kind doesn't? How does gaming impact people with ADHD different? We're also going to cover the idea that each of us has a unique way of thinking and brain structure that is unique as our fingerprints and actually finding ways to harness that can help us achieve more in life and finding ways to meditate, different ways to meditate are required for different people's brain styles.

How are we going to talk about all these things? Well, we're talking to Dr. Alok Kanojia. He is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist specializing in the intersection between technology and mental health. He's known as Dr. K to millions of people online. He's the co-founder of Healthy Gamer, which is a mental health platform. He's also the author of How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. But his integrative and psychiatric training makes him, a perfect person to talk to about all of the things we just mentioned.

He began studying alternative therapies like yoga, meditation, and Reiki. He almost became a monk. By his own admission, was turned down from medical school 120 times. He talks about how his persistence and perseverance are hallmarks of what he believes we can all achieve in order to live the life that we are allowed to and deserve to live. This is a juicy one, people. Get a glass of water because you're going to be here for a minute with us and Dr. K. Hey, welcome to the breakdown.

Break it down. Thank you so much. I wanted to start talking to you about gaming. Okay. You know, in your book, you're tackling what I think for many of us are some of the most novel aspects of parenting that many of us have experienced, meaning there are timeless issues that we have in interacting with the people that, you know, we raise. This is a new one because it didn't exist. the way that it does now. So I have a lot of interest, appreciation, also your perspective, the fact that you are very open about your history with gaming and addiction. But you speak,

you know, with real eloquence about so many aspects of which addiction is one of them. If you had to give us your opus, you know, your three-minute elevator pitch for why the work that you do, you feel addresses so many aspects of mental health, what would that be? What a great question. So I would say that the first thing to understand is that the human organism is interconnected. So, you know, I think that the reason that we address so many things is because you can't just address one thing. Everything's connected.

Second thing is that I think the basic problem that we as human beings have right now is that we have stopped understanding ourselves on a subjective level. So if you look at like science, science is all about trying to understand a problem at a population level and then creating an intervention that will fix it for you. So we have things like Ozempic, we have things like antipsychotics. We have this idea in medicine that, okay, if you have a broken bone, the responsibility of fixing it is to the doctor, which makes sense. But as we start to enter the realm of mental health, like problems are not quite as discreet.

Is it burnout? Is it depression? How much depression is normal? How much depression is abnormal? And so we've taken this approach in psychiatry of like, we're going to fix it for you. But the problem that I found as a psychiatrist is that like, I can't fix everything for my patients. I can do certain work with them in the office.

But if you look at like the research on mental health outcomes, many things that matter for your mental health are outside of what a psychiatrist can do, like solid relationships, a fulfilling career, a sense of independence, a sense of confidence. And the research supports this too. So if you look at the top risk factors in a multivariate regression model of pornography addiction, sense of purposelessness or meaninglessness in life is at the top of the list. This is not a psychiatric issue. This is a life issue. People who are reporting high levels of porn addiction are also reporting a correlative, high levels of a sense of meaninglessness. Maybe it's because they're watching so much porn. Yeah, exactly. So it's,

you know, there is a correlation versus causation problem, right? And I don't think it's, I don't think correlate, I think a lot of causation is actually circular where like we know that things are cyclic, right? So I think that's probably what's going on. And so the reason that we cover so many different angles is because I think you have to if you really want to tackle a problem. The other thing that we do where we cover a lot of angles is we will use population-based approaches, but I'm a clinician, right? So I'm not like a researcher at heart. So my job is working with an individual person and trying to figure out, okay, this is what I can do for you. What are all of the things that you can do for yourself.

The last thing to consider is that I think basically what's going on is that there is a arms race where individuals are losing, we're getting crushed. We're like people with spears fighting against stealth bombers with nuclear weapons. So the people who are developing technology understand way more about your brain than you do. What does that mean? That means that people know, for example, like if you open up your app, they understand that if I have a certain color, if I have a certain vibrancy,

if I have a certain jiggliness, if I have a certain sound, I will engage your attentional circuitry. You literally just described a first date. Yeah, that too, right? So, like, and that's, so some people understand that. So some people who are very effective on first dates

understand how to optimize color, jigglyness, you know, sound, smell. And this is the problem is like, you know, app developers will understand this, video games will understand this. They do a bunch of like A-B testing just to see what increases engagement. The problem is that we as humans don't understand how our attentional circuitry works. So now they understand how our brain works. We don't understand how our brain works. So we're outgunned. And so what we're seeing is a whole scale increase in technology usage, a whole scale increase in like technological addictions and a whole scale worsening of mental

mental health. Social anxiety, depression, generalized anxiety, suicidality, addictions, everything's getting worse, body dysmorphia. And I think that's because people are starting to take advantage of certain aspects of our brain, and we don't really know, right? We don't know why we spend three hours scrolling TikTok, even though I don't want to. I don't understand myself. So we try to look at a lot of different angles so that we can teach someone, okay, this is how you work. we really try to understand the impact of technology. And then the other thing to consider is that a lot of these technological addictions are not like one thing.

They affect, if you look at the impact of technology on the brain, it's not like alcohol where this is a molecule going to a GABA receptor and we're activating specifically GAV receptors. A video game or TikTok will lead to whole brain activations. So they're engaging so many circuits. So if we want to like understand and conquer that behavior, we have to understand all the circuit. My Ambialx breakdown is supported by Superpower.

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with the code break. Head to superpower.com. Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention my ambiotics breakdown to help support the show. Supply. You know, I don't mean to be this person, but, you know, Ayurvedic medicine, a lot of Eastern practice, Eastern philosophy, traditional Chinese medicine. This is literally the party line, is that, mind and body are connected for thousands of years, there have been recommendations made about, you know, diet, about lifestyle, about thoughts, you know. This is something that exists.

Like, we're not reinventing the wheel to talk about it. We're reinventing it in a sense in the West, in a particular in this, you know, in this culture. But I want to believe everything you say is true. And I do believe that everything you say is true. And yet, I want a quick fix. I really want to go to this doctor for this and I want to go to that doctor for that. You know, what is it about humans and in particular humans at this point, you know, in a cultural moment that makes it so hard for us to kind of accept and find ways to actually integrate this?

Well, I think you want a quick fix because a quick fix is what you've been offered. And in many dimensions, a quick fix is what you've gotten. right so like if i i mean you let like it's it sounds like you all are parents right so if i've got a kid and any time the kid asks for their food of choice if we just give it to them right away what is that child going to come to expect right so this is what's happened is we have a system of medicine that will fix your problems for you it doesn't fix everything but like you know they'll they'll we don't the reason that we have such a pharmacology has system of medicine is because we haven't invested in the science of behavioral change. So if you look at all the billions of dollars that are spent on drug development, what percentage of that

is spent on behavioral change? Whereas we know statistically the two best things that a doctor can ever do for their patients, the two best interventions that will increase the lifespan, health, and happiness of your patients the most, number one is quitting smoking. Number two is exercising. Probably number three is diet because these are whole scale interventions. But if you look at the direction of our system of medicine, that's not what we emphasize, right? We don't emphasize diet and exercise because it's hard. We emphasize Ozempic. And I have nothing against Ozempic. I prescribe medications to my patients. You know, I'm not anti-pharmacology. I think it's just like what we're starting to see is when we have a pharmacology focused medical system,

it's really great at so many things. So if we look at like generally speaking, lifespan is like increasing, right? Like antibiotics are awesome. Like human beings used to live to the age of 40. And then we developed penicillin and other antibiotics. So, so they're absolutely advantages to our system of medicine. And one of the biggest advantages, and this is when I, you know, when I prescribe something like a benzodiazepine or an SSRI, A question I'll ask my patients is, hey, do you have the time to exercise? Do you have the energy to cook healthy? Do you have time to meditate? And if the answer is, I'm a new parent with a two-year-old who doesn't sleep through the night, I have a job, I'm out of maternity leave at this point. I don't have time for that stuff. I'm like, fantastic. Here's an SSRI. Let's help you get some degree of like decent sleep. Let's help your mood a little bit. And then as you get a handle on your life, let's see if there's room for some of these more. more lifestyle interventions. Do you think there's incentive

to make those kinds of lifestyle interventions when we are sold that there is a quick fix? You don't have time to exercise or cook because you're busy and your kids not sleeping. And the solution is a pharmacological one. Then why would I want to change anything about my lifestyle? Meaning, I don't know, like,

just because my kids start sleeping a little more, I may not feel a need to exercise or eat better because you've given me a pill that's kind of bridging that gap. Beautiful question. So I've got two answers for you. The first is that in my experience as a doctor, most people want to get healthier. Right. So I've met very few people, not that's not true. I've met a lot of people. But I would say, and it depends on where you are. But I would say that more than 50% of human beings that I personally have worked with, probably close to 80%, 90% are not looking for a pill to solve their problems. The challenge is they don't understand what lifestyle looks like. They're not willing to make that investment, which is kind of

the second point. So this is where like, I think a big part of my job as a doctor is to help people's motivation. Right. So this is even in the framing of your question, they're like, what if I don't want something? Well, that's my job as a doctor. So that we even have, you know, an evidence-based technique called motivational interviewing, which is one of the most, effective techniques for addictions. And do you want to quit drinking? Do you not want to quit drinking? Well, some days I do and some days I don't.

So what is actually the medical intervention that will do? It is motivational interviewing. It is supporting this person's motivation and actually changing their wants. Right. So if someone comes in, it's not my job to craft wants for them. But if someone comes in and says, hey, I want, you know, I wanted the medication for now. And then it's my job to say, okay, here are the other options.

How do you feel about that? Well, I'm interested in that, but I feel like I don't have the energy for it. Okay, so if you could, you know, if we could make it work, would you want this? And if they say yes, then it's my job to address the motivational issue. One of the things that I always like to bring up, you know, my dad was a public school teacher. I grew up at Kaiser. You know, I grew up in a lot of waiting rooms with a lot of really, you know, difficult situations, you know, of people coming into urgent care and, you know, it was in the middle of Hollywood that, that, you know, the hospital that I went to is at. And, you know, I think that one of the things that I sort of rail against is most people are not getting the kind of care that I think you are able to provide for people.

And, you know, we talk about mental health care really being prioritized for an elite population for the most part, just in terms of, you know, a price point for any mental health support, much less a proper assessment by a compassionate psychiatrist. or even a psychotherapist or what a cognitive behavioral therapist, whatever. But I think that's also one of the challenges for us as a society is for people who are in a kind of health care system where they're given 10 minutes with a doctor and doctors are now being encouraged to sort of freely prescribe, you know, a pill for every ill. It's really hard.

It's hard for those people. It's hard for people who are, you know, not able to hardly afford, you know, the bus fare to get to the hospital or to get to their doctor's appointments. Yeah, I mean, it's a huge problem that I run into and part of the work that I do is designed to address this problem. So, you know, I have a background in public health too. I was like in an MDMPH program. And I think really the work that I do now is more public health than medical. And I think if we break that apart, there are a couple of things.

So the first is, yeah, like, I mean, you know, getting good care comes at a price. So, and if we think about how to tackle that, there are a couple of things. couple of things we need to do. So a big part of the work that we do is at Healthy Gamer. So working as a psychiatrist in an office, I realize that if we just look at the data, there's so many things that influence mental health care that are not medical or mental health, let's say. So peer support, you know, even things like exercise, diet, social stuff, having a sense of purpose, having a sense of meaning, having a direction, agency. If you look at all of these like factors, right? Burnout is a great example. So burnout is not technically a mental health, like it's not a

mental health diagnosis. It's not a pathology. It is an intersection of like human being within environment. So I think part of the problem there, so part of the solution is yeah, mental health care is expensive, but I don't think everything needs to be done through mental health care. We don't need psychiatrists and therapists doing everything. And even like, so we did, we do this cool thing on Discord where, you know, a couple hundred people show up at a time called social sandbox. And social sandbox is like we have an increasingly digital generation. People have difficulty like going and like meeting people. So how do we do that?

We create a place where you can improve, like you can level up your social skills. And we see like really good kind of anecdotal outcomes. That's not a research study we've run. We have like seven studies that we're running right now. but, you know, we see a lot of like good here. So I think a big part of like this intervention is there's much more to your mental health than treatment, right? So mental health is much more than the treatment of mental illness.

And we even see this with things like, you know, autism spectrum disorder treatment, first episode psychosis, where a big part of the treatment is teaching people's social skills, helping them reintegrate into society. So we sort of know this and we'll kind of package. it up as treatment, but I don't think it needs to be done by a mental health professional. Dr. Kay, I like a lot the analogy that we're in an arms race and that a lot of the technology that we're exposed to is literally being designed with more understanding of how our brains work than we do. Are we all becoming addicts? Probably. So I think, I mean, I think the word addict has to be

defined when you answer that question, but I think the short answer is like, my gut check is probably. So the reason I say that is like, are we all losing control over our relationship with technology and our technological behaviors? I would say the vast majority of people, the answer is yes. So I think something like the average person spends around four to six hours on their cell phone. and if I ask 100 human beings, hey, how much time do you want to spend on your phone a day? I think very few people will say six hours. It just happens.

Right? So very few people will be like, oh, yeah, like, I can't wait. I have a whole week off. I'm going to just get up in the morning, have my coffee, pull out my phone, and fucking I'm going to scroll for eight hours. Like, that's how I want to spend my Saturday. Like, I've never heard a single human being say that. You haven't met my teenager.

Fair enough. You know, and I think it's like, so I think are we all becoming more addicted? Yes, I think so. When we talk about addiction, in that sense, what we're defining it as is the inability to have agency or control or dictate how we want to spend our time. All of a sudden, our time just gets taken over and we come out of a whole being like, oh, I guess I did that, but maybe I shouldn't have. Is that accurate? Yeah. So I think there's so much subtlety in language here. So you said more addicted, right? So when you say more addicted, it implies a spectrum. And so if we're taking addiction as a spectrum where there's like zero percent addiction and 100 percent addiction, are we moving in the wrong direction? I'd say yes. Now, if we're looking at a clinical definition, it's not a spectrum, right? It's a binary thing where you are diagnosed with a substance use disorder, you're diagnosed with a video game addiction or not. And there what we're really looking for is that,

the threshold of impairment of function. So you can spend six hours a day on your cell phone, and you may not be happy with that, but I don't know that I would diagnose you with an addiction. If you're working well, if your school is going okay, if you have intact relationships, if your physical health and mental health are largely intact. I'm going to challenge that just for a second

and take it out of the clinical realm, because I totally understand that there are those people who have serious deficit and function and their lives are not going well because of a specific addiction. However, if we're all moving, on a spectrum, what are we losing? Meaning, we may not be optimizing our life. We may not be doing that next creative thing. We may not be connected to our larger sense of purpose. We may be just getting through our lives and still be on the spectrum of outside of the clinical realm of

addiction. Yeah. I mean, so what are we losing? Everything that you said. There's people that we know, like, okay, that's an addict. Like, that's someone who's, if you want to take gaming, I don't know, what does a gaming addict look like? They're sitting at their computer. you know, it's 20 hours a day. Like, what would a gaming addict look like? I can tell you what I looked like. So I was like, you know, gaming for 16 hours a day, skipping all my classes. Right.

Like, I would game to the point, I was eating one, I would order fried rice by the pound. I would get like three pounds of fried rice so that I could save on delivery charge. What kind of fried rice? Vegetable fried rice? I mixed, usually. Nice. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, it was delicious fried rice. And, you know, I would order three pounds of fried rice at a time to fuel myself. Like, it wasn't food. It was fuel. Right. I'd play, you know, 10, 12 hours before eating. I'd gorge myself, watch a couple of hours of anime go back to gaming. And then I would have to game to the point of absolute exhaustion.

Right. So that when I went to bed, I would just pass out. I wouldn't go to sleep. This is a clear addiction. We were checking off that box. Clear addiction. Give me the same. And I'm taking it.

us on a little journey here. Give me the same description of porn addiction, meaning the same encapsulation. What does a porn addict look like? Oh, beautiful question. So this is what's so interesting. So a lot of people don't realize that pornography addiction is not about lust. It's not about perversion. Probably the number one thing with pornography. And pornography addiction also isn't even necessarily associated with masturbation, which a lot of people assume. So pornography addiction, I'll give you all a clinical example, right? So not identifying. But so I'm, I'm here. I have two monitors right now. I have a beautiful podcast. If you're watching porn right now, I don't want to know. I'm not watching porn, but pornography

addicts will be watching. Got it. So frequently what happens is they have pornography kind of going on in the background. They'll watch five to 15, 30 minutes at a time. They won't even necessarily masturbate or feel lustful or aroused. So if we look at sort of the neuroscience of it, like visual stimulation of sexual material really focuses the brain. So if we kind of look at the human brain, the human brain is designed to procreate, which means that if we have the opportunity for procreation, we'll like push everything else to the side.

And so pornography is like a very powerful emotional regulation technique. It also makes us feel something. So pornography addicts oftentimes have difficulty confronting their problems. they oftentimes are internally numb, so they don't even know what's wrong. They're kind of like stuck, where they're like, they're kind of going through every day.

They feel kind of like a zombie. Not everything is falling apart, but they don't feel excited. They don't feel joy. They feel vaguely anxious, but they don't even necessarily feel depressed. They just look at their life and it feels like numb and empty.

And that's because they have this chronic suppression of their amygdala in hippocampus. So their emotional circuits are shut off, so they feel primarily numbness. And as the stress, as something stressful happens, they tend to watch more porn because it regulates their emotions. So we see this kind of like pervasive, kind of infectious pornography. You know, they'll watch pornography, they'll have it on their phone, they'll go into a stairwell and watch porn for 10 minutes. And it's almost like smoking cigarettes.

So these are two really good examples. That's clear, right? That's addiction. Talk to us about the people, as Jonathan said, who don't look exactly like that, but they look what we would maybe categorize as a milder version of that, but porn or gaming is still taking the place of,

I don't know, free time, boredom, which can lead to creativity, you know, trying new things, learning new things. This is the area I think Jonathan's talking about that many of us might be hovering in. And many people are potentially in this area, inching tor. towards a larger problem.

Oh, yeah. So when you say, like, you know, where are we all getting more addicted? Like, this is the vast majority. Y'all are talking about the majority. I was talking about the minority, right? Maybe about 9% of people are addicted to video games in an impairing function kind of way.

Highest estimates are 22%, by the way. So now let's talk about this bigger group. So this is where, like, you know, I draw a little bit more on the whole Eastern training thing, which if you all don't know, I studied to become a monk for about seven years. And so here's the way that I want you all to understand this. So I think about medicine is moving us from negative 100 to zero.

And sort of all these spiritual practices like meditation or whatever move us from zero to positive 100. So let's remember that meditation was never designed to treat anxiety. That's not what it was built for. It's a practice that was designed to pursue this weird thing called enlightenment, moksha, nirvana. And so if we look at these milder forms of addiction, this person may be able to hold a job, they may be able to have a relationship.

It's not like they're grossly overweight or have a ton of health problems or anything like that. And yet what's happening is they're around zero. So it's not like there's a pathology where they're impaired in their function. They can't do something. But they're not moving in the positive direction in life. So all of this technology, as you're kind of saying,

basically like turns their life into like kind of this humdrum, zombified kind of cycle of like, I'm getting up every day. You know, I see this a lot where people are like, is this what life is. I'm supposed to get up every day. So this is what these people will say.

I get up every day. You know, I get ready for work. I commute to work. I work nine to five. I commute back home. Since I'm supposed to take care of myself, I'd like go to the gym for an hour. I'm supposed to,

to cook, so I did meal prep, and then I have, like, I have to do laundry, right? And so then, like, 8.30 rolls around, and then I have, like, one hour before bed. Am I, like, year after year, living every day for one hour of free time? Like, what is this? So this is the experience that a lot of people have, and what's crazy, if you, like, ask these people, like, okay, let's look at your cell phone usage. They don't have one hour a day, right? So people have been working nine to five and taking care of their lives for the last 100 years, like that's been happening. These people didn't have one hour a day.

What's changed? And you look at it and you'll see four to six hours a day of cell phone use. So what's happening is it's taking away like all the positive stuff. You're right. It's taking away creativity. It's numbing us out. So this is something that a lot of people, you know, struggle with in our community is there's like, I have no purpose in life.

I don't know what I want. And if you really look at it, if you're spending four to six hours a day on a technological device, you are shutting off the parts of your brain that give you a sense of purpose. That's enormous. Like that's an enormous statement. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm pretty sure it's not like it may be a bold claim, but like it's very simple. If we look at where does purpose come from, right? There's a lot of research on trauma that tells us this. So our sense of purpose or direction comes from our sense of identity. Our sense of identity comes from the integration of emotional experiences.

So if I were to ask you, Myam or Jonathan, tell me about yourself, right? Like, what makes you you? Like, what would you say? Like, what makes Maya, Miami, or what makes Jonathan? I think we would have an easier time

answering for the other. I'm sure you would, but that's not what we want. Oh, my. How do you view yourself, right? So who are you? Like, what would you say, like, if you had to write your eulogy,

right? What would you say about yourself? I just wrote mine last night. Funny you should ask. Pull it up. Read it for us. Okay, what makes me me? Like any, like positive things, negative things, just like what makes me me? Okay. Well, what makes me me is, you know, that I'm a unique combination, as we all are, of, you know, my mother and my father. And they, you know, their parents were Eastern European. So my parents are first generation Americans. So, you know, I was raised in this sort of in between cultures and in between identities. So kind of a sense of always wanting to belong, but also feeling really different. I looked really different from other kids, you know. And, you know, I have a history as being a public person. So that's kind of strange. And yeah, I like to use both sides of my brain, you know.

I'm a creative person. I'm also very into numbers and logic and I'm very musical and I'm good with languages and have a strong desire to, you know, parent. So I'm a mother. You did great, right? So there's no right or wrong answer. But if we listen to that answer, you'll say, you'll say, like, if we pay attention, all of the statements you made are due to formative emotional experiences.

So like, for example, we talk about your upbringing. I wanted to belong, but I was different. So that statement comes from, I can guarantee you if I spend an hour talking to you, tell me about that. You would tell me about when I was in the seventh grade. Name a year. Name a year.

Right? And so these emotional experiences, we literally what our brain does is we string these emotional experiences together. You say you're a mother. You say you like to use your right brain and your left brain. So I can guarantee you at some point in your life.

You had this experience where you were way too left, brain, you got a little bit of right brain in there, and it felt so good. It felt so right. And then you were like, am I left brain or am I right brain? And then you realized, you know what, it's not either or it's both. And so these kinds of experiences involve emotional activation. And when we numb ourselves to this emotional activation, we don't know who we are. And if we don't know who we are, how can we have purpose? Purpose comes from our sense of identity. So as we disable these core, and this has all been like, we know this, like, this is like, you know, I feel 99% confident from a scientific perspective, because when you look at the

disruptions and trauma, so trauma starts with a numbing of emotion. The numbing of emotion in severe cases leads to dissociation. Once I dissociate, I don't know who I am. Once I don't know who I am, I have no direction for the future. Well, the favorite place to link that to is addiction. And I'm speaking as someone who's spoken here a lot about trauma history. The closest you can get to dissociation with a dose of what you think is fun is this kind of, like, is addiction, right? It's like they say it starts as fun, then it's fun with problems, then it's just problems, right? And, you know, the kind of clinical big book definition of Alcoholics Anonymous of addiction

is a mental obsession and this sort of physical allergy and crazy. craving, right? And what we now know, and this was written, you know, many, many decades ago, but exactly what you're talking about is that there is a physiological, a neurophysiological set of changes that are occurring as well as this sort of obsessive loop, right, which ends up taking over our lives. When we talk about people who are gaming 16 hours a day, when we're talking about people who are constantly, you know, having porn on in the background and running into stairwells as if you're having a cigarette. What's going on in the brain in that kind of addiction? And what does that tell us about what's going on in the brain at these kind of grayer levels that,

as Jonathan indicated, we're all sort of dancing in? Sure. So let's start with like understanding the basic neuroscience. And by the way, like, I think this is the kind of thing where parents really need to understand this. Because like you said, I think parenting is different now than it ever used to be. Right. So if you think about it, like most parents had to worry about addictions when their child became a teenager, right? You sit down, you have your, you have a chat with your kids. Oh, hey, like, you know, let's talk about smoking. Let's talk about drinking. Let's talk about pot. But now, like, this addictive behavior is starting literally like under one year old, right? So kids can learn how to navigate a cell phone before they're verbal.

Like, it's crazy. And so it's so interesting because, you know, we learn our parenting skills from the way that we were parented. But our parents didn't have to deal with this at the same extent. So parents really need to adapt to this world. And I think they're really on the front lines. So let's start by understanding, you know, what this technology does. So the whole point of the technology is that they don't want to engage one part of your brain. So when I was addicted to video games,

when I first started getting addicted to video games, I would play by myself. But you can't, you can only get so addicted to a game that you can beat, and then the game gets boring. So now what developers do, they'll have DLCs, they'll have expansions,

they'll have seasons, right? You can play Fortnite for like 10 years, and it'll always be fun. There's always something new. So the first thing is the game never ends. Second thing is that the games are designed to give us an artificial sense of accomplishment. So we as human beings are wired

toward something called intent to mastery. If you stop and think about this, this blew my mind once I really like connected these dots, a kid who's trying to learn how to pick up a ball doesn't give up. They try to pick something up, they fail. They fail again, they fail again, they fail again. A kid who's trying to learn how to walk, they fail again, they fail again, they fall, they fall, they fail, they fall. It's just getting, you know, messing up after messing up after messing up.

What is the drive that pushes a child to master something like grass, and walk. So we have these very powerful primitive circuits in the brain that anytime something is challenging, we actually want to pursue it. And we see this at a societal level as well where we honor people who do hard things. Right. So the Olympics is going on right now. We respect those people more than like me or you who walk down the street. Why? Because there's challenge associated with. So there's a very primitive circuit of the brain that if something is challenging and my accomplishment, I get rewarded. There's also a dopamine aspect here, but it's greater than dopamine. So what games have started to do is they've realized, okay, we're going to make things hard for you.

But you're still designed to win. You're always going to win. No game is designed for you to lose. Everything is designed to give you an artificial sense of difficulty where you will eventually win. So this activates such primitive circuits of our brain of mastery, accomplishment. And the problem is that even on an intellectual level, if I understand that getting this trophy in a video game is not the same as getting a gold medal at the Olympics, there is a part of my brain that can't tell the difference. So we see this accomplishment mastery angle. We see challenge. We see socialization, developing a sense of identity, right? There was a very famous scandal a couple of years ago where, you know, there was this, I think, Chinese streamer who was using like a lot of filters

and was pretending to be very attractive and turned out to be like a middle-aged woman. And one day, like the filter thing, the software bugged out and there was this huge scandal. And we see this on Instagram where everyone posts pictures with filters on. So we have this sense of like virtual identity, which also activates our identity circuitry.

So what we're seeing with these severe addicts is activation of all of these things. And what we see is in addition to the emotional regulation stuff. So what we see is that this is, that this is a human whose brain is designed to get better at stuff, form relationships, et cetera, et cetera. But now all of these circuits are being activated only in the virtual world. So they become completely disconnected from life. As they atrophy, like these skills atrophy, it becomes impossible to attain this in the real world. Impossible? That's how it feels to them.

Right? So they don't know how to do it. And I would argue that arguably without help, it may be impossible. So there are people that I've worked with, you know, that have been stuck in gaming for 30 years. And like, I want to say that, you know, if you could have figured it out on your own, you would have. Well, I want to connect your comment about how we start to lose access to ourselves and understanding who we are and processing our emotional experience with the impetus and the time spent on digital activities that are activating these parts of our brain. connect that to the severity of the crisis going on with young people that is increasing. The statistic is that, you know, the biggest killer of men in Europe under 20, 45 is themselves. Yeah. Not just men. So the most dangerous thing to an Asian person in the United States between the ages of 18 to 24 is themselves.

So, so Asian kids are raised to be risk averse, right? And then, but they're also raised to not have a good understanding of mental health or mental health support. So yeah, we're seeing that a lot. When we stop understanding more about ourselves, when we stop having this internal sense of who we are, we start looking for that online. And there's an increase of in-cells, there's an increase of hate online.

And can you talk about how those two are connected and actually fueling one another and that the people who are finding this online are actually being, you know, accepted in a way that is actually quite dangerous. Great, great, great question, Jonathan. So let's start with kind of basics of what's going on with everyone. And then we can talk a little bit more about incels and radicalization.

So this is like, it's honestly like a match made in hell where what's going on is there's two discrete effects going on. The first is that we are numbing ourselves. So as we lose sight of our internal signals, we lose our sense of identity. And it's not just trauma that teaches us this. So we see this, for example, in gender dysphoria being non-binary and autism spectrum disorder. So the rate of being identifying as non-binary or having some gender confusion or dysphoria for people on the autism spectrum is very high. And the reason for that is because people on the autism spectrum, parts of their brain, the way that they integrate emotional experiences is different.

And gender identity comes from the integration of emotional experiences. this is how I feel like a man, right? This is when I feel like a woman. So the first thing is we have all this numbness. Then I end up not knowing who I am. So now I'm confused. I have no internal compass. And when we as human beings have no internal compass,

what do we rely on, our senses? So at the same time, we also have all of this social media that tells us to be something. It says, okay, like if you're a dude, you should be ripped. If you're, you know,

we're seeing a rise in body dysmorphia in men at an alarming rate. Like it used to, there used to be a gender disparity. I think it's going to disappear within the next five to 10 years if it isn't already gone.

So we have all of these people online telling us who we should be, what we should look like. And there's also like really subtle things that have changed. So, you know, I recently went to Europe and I went into a co-ed sauna.

And I don't know if you guys have ever been to these things. Like we don't do them much in the United States. but it's like a lot of like naked old people, right? And they're flabby, they've got stretch marks, they're obese. You see normal human bodies and it's normal. And how I felt about my body changed instantly. And if we look at like the bodies that we see literally,

if I see 100 faces over the course of the week, how many of those faces are going to be online, how many of those faces are going to be filtered? And we're seeing a whole scale loss of confidence in ourselves because we're getting so much of this online input. I should be making more money. I should have a side hustle. I should have a grind. I should be sleeping with a bunch of women. You know, I should be getting men to pay for my meals. Whatever. I'm a boss babe. Like men, women, whatever. Someone on the internet will tell you that you should be better in some dimension.

Right. So we're getting, we have an internal void. We don't know what we want. And then we have a thousand people telling us we should want this. We have a thousand people. We have a thousand people. showing us what happiness looks like. Hey, everybody, I'm here in my tradwife kitchen where I am making, I'm growing a pig from scratch and then I'm going to raise it and then I'm going to butcher it and I'm going to turn the trotters into whatever. A collagen organic face mask to rub on my belly so that my pregnancy is healthy. Like, this is what we get. Right? And there's like dude equivalence of this. Like there's like all these like wilderness cooking channels, which I love. watching. It's like there's a dude out in the wilderness and he's going to catch something and he's

going to build a trap and he's going to catch it and he's going to butcher it and he's going to build a fire. And it's like, you know, all of these people are telling us we should be different. I think there's another level. I mean, first of all, that's, I really love how you're, you know, kind of painting this. You sound a lot like me talking to my children who roll their eyes and tell me they don't want to hear about Dr. Kay. But there's another, there's another kind of aspect to this, it's not just necessarily, you know, kind of being told what you should do. It's that there's just a constant set of input that is not your own anymore. Yeah. That's the crux of the problem, right? So when there's a void, you look for external

input. It's constant. And here's why no one gets better because it changes. So today someone tells you like work, like find work-life balance. Tomorrow someone will tell you, start a side hustle. You know, today someone will tell you, like, you should be more independent. Tomorrow, someone will tell you if society doesn't give you something, it's society's fault. You know, take more responsibility, to take less responsibility. And then we have a pile of people who are confused. They don't know. Because, I mean, our whole, and this is a generational thing, too.

So, like, our generation was sold this promise of work hard in school, go to college, get a good degree, get a good job, be happy. We were sold this. promise. That's not the experience of what people are having. Right. So like all of the answers we were told don't work. And so we're kind of left rudderless. And all of these, these addictions are left when there's emptiness, right? So lack of meaning. What does the brain look for? Looks for some porn. Looks for some TikTok. Looks for some video game. Let me at least get some dopamine because I've got no, and I know I'm kind of going off off of the rails here, but just to give you all

one last example. So there's like an inverse relationship between dopamine, and serotonin. This is a gross oversimplification. So if we look at like the sense of contentment piece, this correlates with serotonin. If we look at pleasure, excitement, this correlates with dopamine.

And generally speaking, the things that are dopaminergic are not serotonergic. So if I activate my dopaminergic circuitry a ton, my serotonin level clinically will drop. We don't know, we're not actually measuring CSF.

these people. But if I play a bunch of video games, I don't feel content about my life. And if I'm doing a lot of serotonergic activities, like meeting people, accomplishing things in real life, feeling good about myself, feeling peaceful, feeling content, those aren't necessarily dopaminergic. Like going for a walk isn't dopaminergic. It's serotonergic. Well, and also connecting with another human being in emotionally intimate, vulnerable ways is more serotonergic. Having sex with strangers is more dopaminergic. Absolutely, right? And then there's a lot of. And then there's a lot of, Once we talk about relationships, oxytocin enters the picture. Correct.

So oxytocin helps us bond, lowers our stress level, creates empathy, creates a feeling of being loved. And that's very, oxytocin doesn't get triggered by orgasm. Orgasm and dopamine go hand in hand. Oxytocin is cuddling after. I'm going to give the Dr. Kay version of that. Oxytocin is the enemy of addiction. Yeah.

So, you know, it's funny you mention that because that's like literally a lecture I'm working on, where connectedness is actually the antidote to addiction. There are a lot of studies, and if you look at things, you mentioned the big book, right? So what have alcoholics been doing for like 100 years? They've been connecting with each other. So addiction thrives when you are by yourself.

Before we get into relationships, which I think we need to get into, just tying a bow on this idea of all the messages we're getting online, can you talk about how it leads to extremism and this notion of the thwarted belonging situation? Yeah, so if you look at research on male suicide, one of the highest correlating factors with male suicide is something called thwarted belongingness.

So this is when a man tries to belong and somehow is rejected. So we see this clinically when I work with young men who are suicidal. It's like, I tried to make friends in high school. I was bullied. I tried to ask this girl out on a date. I was laughed. I was called a creep.

I was called a creep. I'm trying to, like, connect with other human beings. And they're not malicious. So then they get rejected. And this rejection of, like, the world is rejecting me will eventually lead to, like, suicidal feelings.

I think there's a pretty safe implication, or a pretty safe statement to make. Wait, wait, hold on one second. We just, sorry. And this is, you know, I'm sort of like, I'm pre-gaming here because, you know, I have a lot of opinions about the sort of in-cell conversation, not just that you have, but that we are having as a society. You know, how did we get from rejection, which is a bummer? And for many, a sort of normal with a lowercase end, normal part,

you know, of being a human and a teenager, right, especially if you're different. How do we get, in your mind, from rejection on potentially, a normal spectrum or maybe, you know, an upper end. How did we get from there to suicidal ideation? So thwarted belongingness usually happens when everyone rejects you. So what we're talking about is like, yeah, rejection is a normal part of human existence. There are a couple of big differences, though. So one is that if I get rejected continuously, that's what leads to suicidal ideation.

I try to make friends with you. I try to make friends with you. and we're talking about like years or even decades of rejection. So that's not normal rejection anymore. Like I was, you know, I asked girls out when I was in college. I got rejected. Fair enough. And then eventually I asked someone out and they said yes.

I joined a fraternity. I had friends. So most human beings have some degree of rejection and some degree of acceptance. It's the people who have a very high level of rejection. So, you know, there's a lot of research that shows that men who ask for help, are usually, like, rejected or thought less of. So it's very hard as a man to, like, ask for help people, because there's this idea that, like,

we as men should be independent, and people are like, oh, if you can't do it yourself, like, there's all kinds of reasons why men get rejected, but the data suggests that men get rejected for help all the time. So when that forwarded belongingness, and that's what, there's a difference between rejection and the clinical criteria of thwarted belongingness. Thwarted belongingness is, like,

I've tried to belong with people for years. and it's been thwarted. So I would say that thwarted belongingness is a very high level of rejection by definition. Yeah, I'm also wondering, I'm like people, there have been those dudes for all of history. Absolutely.

Right? So there's something different, and maybe you have more insight, I'm sure you do, there's something different about this culture, potentially the availability of so much input about what your life should look like,

right? Meaning the compare and despair for all of us is a lot more prominent, but there's something, I just wanted to be careful about this connection. But go ahead. Connected to that, is it reasonable to say that men are struggling more now than previously?

Maybe. So let's get to this. The first thing is like, you're right. But this is what's so crazy is like men have been killing themselves at very similar to the rates that we have now for like 100 years. We just haven't cared. So this has been going on for a long time. Like, more men die from suicide than war for like the last hundred years.

Like, it's crazy. So this is this epidemic of male suicide. You know, suicide historically has been four times as many men as women. And so, and now the question becomes what's changing. So I think there are a couple of really important things that are changing. The first is that we've been, I think, increasingly invalidating of men's experiences. or I don't know if increasingly invalid. We don't generally speaking validate men's experiences.

So if I'm a man and I say I was sexually assaulted, like I'm just not going to get treated the same. If I get accused of sexual assault, it's innocent until proven guilty. I'm sorry, guilty until proven innocent. So like there's a lot of experiences that men have. Like there's also like this invalidation of men's experiences through talking about male privilege.

And I don't think male privilege isn't real. A lot of people will come back and say like, oh, like it's not real. I think it's like, I think if you look at a society, things are complex and multifactorial. I as a man have a ton of privilege in some ways. So when I was in medical school, for example, everyone assumed when I was a medical student, I was a doctor because I'm Indian. And then I had colleagues who are doctors who get mistaken for nurses all the time. So there's absolutely a gender bias in medicine.

Well, this is the patriarchy, which hurts men and women. I mean, that's what when we talk about the patriarchy, it hurts men and women, meaning everyone's feelings, like just for the record, everyone's feelings are valid. Yeah, does our society and also, is there an evolutionary difference in how we view men who are vulnerable versus women? Yeah, that goes back tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years in terms of, you know, the evolution of how we got here. But, yeah, I just wanted to insert that.

Yeah. So I think the difference is that when a man says, hey, I'm struggling, we as a society tend to not support them in the same way. The other thing that tends to happen is we say, you shouldn't be struggling. This, I would say, 70 to 80 percent of the men I've had in therapy will have this experience where someone will tell them they should not be struggling. Like, this is silly. You shouldn't be struggling. And so the really interesting thing is there's only one corner of the internet that validates men's experiences. And I know a lot of people are like really upset with people like Andrew Tate and these toxic masculine figures on the internet. The question that I had in my mind

is like, okay, if these people are so bad, why are they growing? What is the mechanism through which this movement within masculinity is growing so quickly? Because anytime something grows, if we look at it from like an evolutionary perspective, there is something going on there. And if we really look at it, the toxic masculine folks are the only ones that validate. men's experiences. So if I'm a dude and I'm struggling and I'm saying like my life is hard, no one will talk to me, I don't get compassion. I get you're a loser, you're a creep. What I get from the toxic masculine people is, yeah, you are a loser. It's how you feel. You are a loser. Here's a way to change it. Your life does suck. And sorry, I have to insert.

And here's the reason it's because it's someone else's fault is also a huge part of the, the quote solution that you're being sold by these men. Well said. Well said. That's a huge part, right? So it allows us, there's also another really important part, which is that it really feeds our ego because it says it allows us to demonize someone else,

which allows us to absolve the responsibility within ourselves. It's dangerous. That's very, very dangerous. Yeah. It works incredibly well, right? When I say, when something is wrong in your life and it is not your fault, it is someone else's fault.

This can explain half of the political rhetoric that we see in historically too, right? I mean, Hitler did this with the Jews. He's like, oh, yeah, like Germans, your life is hard. It's like, it's their fault. Then what happens, kind of going back to Jonathan's other point, is that when these people start going down this road, we do something else very subtle,

and I think this is why things are getting worse. We tend to reject them. So when someone isn't in-cell, we don't want to associate with them at all, right? we reject them. This is literally what happens. They get banned from like more neutral online discussion spaces. And so when they get banned from like neutral places,

the only place they have left to go is like radical spaces because they get banned from everyone else. And we did some work with the United Nations counterterrorism unit on studying this because this is how people get radicalized. They get banned from neutral places and they get shunted to a corner. then there's like this incestuous, like, thought process where there's no, like, contrary experience. But if I, you know, if I'm like a lonely dude and I got rejected by women and I end up on A-chan, where there's another thousand people who got rejected by women, this is less than 1% of the population,

but it's 90% of my sensory input. So now I've created an echo chamber where everyone believes what I believe. So now I think this is true, objectively. And so that's what happens with the online radicalization process. And I think like we saw that in our community when we like, when we started talking and helping these people, we allowed them into our community. And it was like a really challenging, it was like when, you know, two oceans colliding because there were people who were like into healthy relationships and all these in cells started showing up.

Okay. So tell us what we don't understand about in cells that will help us understand the larger problem better? The biggest thing to understand about incels is that they should not be treated any differently from any other population that is struggling. Right. So if we look at like a particular ethnicity that has a high crime rate, if we look at a particular gender that has a high rate of a certain medical complication, what we tend to do is a society, thankfully, not everybody, but I think what we tend to do is we acknowledge that there is a systemic issue here, that, that that doesn't place the full responsibility on this person.

So no one is addressing the systemic issues that are creating in cells. And you're saying that the systemic issues creating in cells are actually the same systemic issues that are creating a lot of the mental health problems that we're all experiencing just to different levels. I think there's common roots, yeah. So I think we're seeing whole scale online radicalization, not just of in cells, but we see this in politics, where it's like if you go back and watch the president, presidential debate between Rami and Obama, there was like mutual respect. There was like,

I disagree with you. I think I'm better, but I don't think you're like a terrible human being. You know, like I think we can, there was just mutual respect, which is now gone because everyone's become radicalized. Well, and also the kind of information that we're talking about that, that, you know, in cells are experiencing is what we're all experiencing just to different levels. So it also, it's going to look different in different people. Some people may become porn addict. Some people may, you know, become gaming addict. Some people may, you know, experience body dysmorphia, right? Like, it's, it's kind of like, where's it going to come out? And also, I'm sure it has a tremendous amount to do with your, you know, your genetics and your predisposition and the

environment you were raised in and race, class and gender and all those things. Yeah. So that's, I mean, it's a brilliant clinical point that, see, anytime I have a stressor, so if I go for a hike, if I climb to the top of Mount Everest, some people may pull muscle, some people may have a heart attack. Some people may have an asthma attack. So with one common stressor, as that stressor enters the human organism, each of us have a weakest link somewhere within us. We are all of us in cells. Well, we have some part of our psychology that's vulnerable. So some of us end up depressed. Some of us end up burnt out. Some of us end up as incels. So I think it's a good point to make. What I hear is we're all dealing with a high level of stress, potentially increasing.

There's conflict, there's interpersonal conflict, there's political conflict, and how we're managing and dealing with that stress is going to have a high likelihood of determining what behavior we go towards. And I want to get to some of the solutions a little bit later, but I want to touch on pornography because like video games, it's in our lives in a way that it's never been before, the access, the risk to young, minds. Can you talk a little bit about what we're seeing and the risks that people should be aware of of who is most vulnerable? Like, who gets addicted? Yeah, so I think there's all kinds of surprising risk factors. So adverse childhood experiences, so like moving around a lot,

getting bullied, having parents who are divorced. Another really interesting one that we... Jesus, I'm done here. I'm done. Thanks. Nice talking to you. great life. No, like, that's a lot of people's experience for a lot of reasons that are out of their control. Absolutely. So then here's another big one, pre-pubertal exposure to pornography. So in a lot of the people in our community, they get exposed to pornography at a very young age, like seven or eight. And they're like, there's not... Can you clarify your community? You don't mean Indian doctors. No. I mean the healthy gamer community. So we're, there's about, I would say, five to seven million people that watch our content participate

on our discussion forums, join our Discord. So this is like, I would say like, you know, 70% men, 30% women. I'm sure there's a few percentage of non-binary people in there. And, and, you know, average age is actually 32 now. Like it used to be 24. But we have like teenagers watching our stuff. We also have like 60, 60 year olds now starting to watch our stuff, which is interesting, but cool, we'll take it. So we'll see a lot of early exposure to pornography. And then I think the other thing is that it's basically like an emotional regulation technique. So what you need is, first of all, some reason to need to emotionally regulate.

This is where things like divorce and those shared risk factors for addiction come in. And then you kind of have your drug of choice, right? So these people, you know, it's almost like a process of elimination where if you don't have a genetic vulnerability to alcoholism, your brain may be more dependent on pornography. Then there are a couple of other things that we tend to see. There's a lot of shame that goes with pornography. So there's like this cycle of, you know, negative emotion, addictive behavior, more negative emotion. So that kind of creates that cycle. We see that quite a bit. And then the other thing that we're tending to see is more extreme pornography.

And we're also seeing like the likelihood of getting addicted happens the more what we call supernormal stimulus you experience. So if you look at pornography, it's getting louder, virtual reality, jiggly or 4K, this, that. And so we're seeing more intensive activation. So if you look at something like, you know, fentanyl versus opium, the amount of neurological activation that you get, the more rapid than neurological activation is, and the intensity of the neurological activation increases the risk of addiction. Why does being exposed younger increase the risk later on? Is it that the younger brain just can't process what this is?

You know, it's a great question. I don't know that we know. But what I would think is that it primes our circuitry in some way. So we know that marijuana is a gateway drug as an example. So if you use marijuana, especially when you're like a teenager whose brain is developing, it alters the sensitivity of your brain to dopamine. So probably there's some kind of priming effect where watching these images, you don't have the context for it, right?

You don't feel lust, but there is some very primitive circuitry in your brain that probably like starts to activate and starts to get primed, which then increases the vulnerability during the puberal stage, this would be my hypothesis. If someone has a dependency, maybe not even an addiction or propensity to be managing their emotions by using gaming or pornography, how is it impacting connecting with other human beings and the potential for real relationships? It causes huge problems. So there are a couple of interesting things to understand.

So when we get an satisfaction from a technological source, the problem is that it's only half of a satisfaction. So when I watch pornography and let's say I masturbate, when I have that sexual experience, the orgasm, certain parts of my brain are activating. But there's no oxytocin. You can't get oxytocin from like hugging yourself, right? Someone else has to hug you. You have to like touch another human being. So then what happens is we get half of an activation without the other half. Generally speaking is a bad idea when it comes to the human brain and the human body. Right? The whole point of the human brain and body is that we're in a system of homeostasis.

So there's a balance between different factors that create health. When we remove that balance, it creates sickness, usually. So we're only getting half of an activation. That imbalance of itself can create a problem. The other really crippling thing that a lot of people don't appreciate is that when we get half of an activation, our motivational drive gets eliminated. So if I eat a twinkie, I don't get nutrition, I just get calories. But even though I'm nutritionally deficient, it'll kill my hunger. And hunger is normally the signal that leads to nutrition. So this is what we're seeing in

pornography is that I get enough sexual gratification to where it tanks my motivation. And then I can't actually the primary negative emotion that actually drives change. And if you look at why do human beings experience negative emotions? It's because they're very powerful drivers of behavioral change. They're the strongest drivers of behavioral change. If you are not connected with your anger, your sadness, your shame, shame is such a powerful motivator to fix your life. And now what we're doing is we're disconnecting from these motivators through emotional regulation.

And we are providing our brain with some degree of satisfaction. So that lust that I have that's unfulfilled will actually be a good driver for me to meet other people and try to engage in a sexual act and mate. It all gets messed up and out of whack with pornography. Do you think it can be used in a healthy way or is it a slippery slope given that it's so easy to access on a phone? It's changed from when it was in magazines to this digital content to the way that it's pretty. presented. I think it, I say this with some hesitation, but I think that the science is like pretty strong that it can be used in a quote unquote unhealthy way. What I would say, the way that I would frame that, I don't know if it's healthy, but I think that you can absolutely, there are cases of,

you know, using pornography without it being unhealthy. And this is true of just like alcohol or any other substance, right? Yeah, I was just going to say, how do you, how do you know? It's just about, I mean, so there are people, like, you know, I've had patients who are happily married. I've spoken to their spouse, and both partners will watch pornography. Their job is going okay. You know, sometimes they're just not feeling like being sexual with each other, and it's more a little bit more of like a maintenance kind of tug one out sort of thing. And it's like, I just, you know, need to get that taken care of. And so I've seen cases of it where, you know, I think the majority of men watch pornography, but I don't think the majority of men have some kind of dysfunction. If you are struggling with it, what are the approaches to intervene? Like, do you need

dopamine fast? Many people don't even know what dopamine fasting is. Can you maybe describe that and then address how to start to conquer your problem? Yeah. So, you know, dealing with an addiction, I think is like a multifactorial process. So let's first talk about dopamine fast. So the issue here is that anytime we engage with a regular activation of our brain, our brain develops tolerance. So when I first started drinking in college, one or two beers would get me drunk. I was a lightweight. As my body develops tolerance, I require more alcohol to reach the point of intoxication. The same thing can happen with our dopamine circuitry. So if I play a video game, the first hour I play it, it's so much fun. The fourth or fifth hour I play it, it is not nearly as pleasurable. So we have this dopaminergic

tolerance that builds up, and this can happen with pornography too. So the concept of a dopamine fast is we're going to actually deprive ourselves of all of these stimuli so our dopamine receptors can reset. And there is good value to those kinds of things. In the case of pornography addiction, I think the answers are like quite diverse. So we tend to be like holistic. I don't like that term, but that's naturally how we are. So I think the first thing you can do is see a mental health professionals. So if it's really interfering with something, you know, see a psychiatrist, see a therapist, recognize that there are things that could be driving the pornography addiction. So the pornography addiction can be a solution to a different underlying problem.

So working with a mental health professional is a great place to start. I think developing a alternate emotional regulation technique is very important. So as long as your brain only has one option when I'm feeling ashamed or ANC or whatever, which is porn, we have to start doing other things. This is where stuff like meditation and things like that come in. The third thing that I think is really important to do is connect. So in some way, so we offer like peer support programs and things like that, like join a community where you don't feel alone. This can even be like a pornography addicts anonymous or something like that. Just get involved with something to where you have stuff going on in your day where you're not just, you know, time to watch porn.

And then the fourth thing is, we've seen this very, like, work pretty well, is like, find purpose and direction in life. Right? So, like, basically what we kind of see, you're talking about these gray zone people, right? Not the hardcore pornography addicts, but there are a lot of people who watch more pornography in our community than they should. And basically our strategy with them is like, you got to have a reason not to, right? So when I wake up on a Saturday morning, I go to the hardware store because I'm doing

some DIY project to replace a toilet or something like that. Then I go play disc golf with my friends. we go out to lunch and then like I come home and I've got a couple hours before I go to a party, it's way easier not to watch pornography. Pornography fills, pornography addiction fills all of the empty spaces in our life. It fills the empty spaces in our relationship. It fills the empty spaces of boredom and lack of dopaminergic stimulation. It fills the emptiness of like the emotional vacuum that sometimes creates emotional vacuum.

And so that's really what I would recommend is like some amount of, you know, psychotherapy or seeing a mental health professional, some amount of like peer support, some amount of activity, some amount of emotional regulation. And I think if you can put that together, like things, we see good, good outcomes. With a lot of this, everything we've discussed in terms of we have, whether it's processing difficult emotions, whether it's trying to. manage the space between the urge and action, how can meditation help both people with addiction issues, but also those people in the gray zone and why is it important for, I would say it's important for everyone to learn, but tell us a little bit about your perspective. Yeah, so let's start with like meditation and addiction. So if you look at the brains of people who tend to get addicted to things, there are certain neuroscientific circuitry deficits. This doesn't mean their brain is busted.

it's just certain capabilities are lacking. So I'll give you all a couple of examples. So when I do my day-to-day addiction psychiatry work, you know, I'll have someone who comes in, they've been sober for six months, they'll come in, they'll say, I relapse and I'll say, what happened? And they're like, Doc, I don't know what happened.

I just woke up one day and I slipped. So you'll hear this a lot if you talk to people with addiction. There's this idea that you slipped. But really what's going on is there is a subsurface building of stressors that we kind of push away, we kind of ignore, we're not aware of. So the first thing that meditation does is makes us more aware of what is going on internally. So we can detect warning signs earlier. The second thing that meditation does is it teaches us tolerance.

So if you think about addiction, this is kind of weird, but you can't ever be sober for a year. all you can do is not drink today. Let's just take the example of an alcohol addiction. All I can do is in this moment, not have this beer. And then in the next moment, not have a beer. And in the next moment, not have a beer. I can't technically be sober for a year, right? All I can do is avoid this action in this moment.

Now, if we think about what drives me to pick up a beer, it is some kind of unhappiness with the present moment. So either I'm not having enough fun or I'm at a party and I'm socially anxious, so I need a little bit of liquid courage. I want to ask this person out, but I feel embarrassed and it's so much easier when I'm drunk. There's something, some unhappiness that you have in your life that the alcohol is a solution to. That's why we say the problem is not the alcohol or the addiction. It's being sober. It's whatever it feels like when you don't have that.

That's actually the problem. Yeah, it's such a great thing to say. Like the hardest addictions that I've had to work with are sometimes like marijuana addiction. And specifically the hardest addictions, this just kind of pops to my mind. I'm sure that, you know, math addiction is just as bad. But, you know, when I work with someone like, and this feels challenging to me and them, is that when they get high, they feel normal. When they get high, they get to live life the way that everyone else does.

My life is filled with social anxiety and my thoughts are terrible. and I don't have motivation. I overthink things. I just want to be normal. I just want to be chill. I'm not asking for a high. This is what we see with addiction. Now, the beautiful thing is that meditation helps with this.

So the first thing is that meditation allows you to tolerate discomfort, be kind of in the present moment and don't run away from the present. So if you sort of think about what addiction does, addiction allows you to run away from the present. I don't like the way that I feel let me run away from it. So meditation is specifically, the practice of being in the present, irrespective of what you feel.

So we'll have, you know, certain practices where, like, you know, you sit and then you don't move. So I learned to meditate in southern India where there was like a big meditation hall that was open and there's a ton of fucking mosquitoes. You're getting bit constantly. No moving. No moving. No moving. That sounds like torture.

It is torture. That's what they do. And then what happens is you discover something magnificent This is, the torture actually doesn't come from the mosquito bite. It comes from my reaction to the mosquito bite. It comes from my fucking A, another fucking mosquito. It's that reaction where the real torture is. And then when you meditate, you begin to learn how to tolerate and then even enjoy.

Okay, in this moment, let's see how many mosquitoes bite me today. Let's shoot for a high score. I'm going to meditate until I get 63 mosquito bites. we're going to shoot for 64. The moment that the attitude changes, suddenly every bite is a win. Like what on earth? This is crazy.

This is what meditation allows you to do. It allows you to change the way that you see the world. It allows you to tolerate the uncomfortable. And even when we sort of like think about working out, so if you really think about it, if I'm lifting weight and my muscles are crying to me, they're literally tearing. They're saying, stop, bro,

this hurts. You feel the burn, but we love it. It feels good. So the context that we add to an experience is the source of our suffering or our pleasure. You know, when someone touches my cheek late at night when I'm asleep, oh, my wife, wonderful. Or if I'm alone in a hotel room, terrifying. So meditation helps people with addictions because it allows us to tolerate those moments. The other thing to keep in mind is that addictions don't, the craving doesn't last forever. The craving will disappear on its own. All you have to do is wait it out. So meditation teaches us some of that patience and things like that.

So like it teaches us internal awareness, allows us to regulate our emotions. Oftentimes we're using a lot of physiology to do that. So certain breathing practices will literally shut off our negative emotional circuitry. And it changes the way that we experience discomfort. And when we do these things together, it helps people with addiction. A lot of people are turning to psychedelics, to ayahuasca, to, you know, psilocybin, even ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Like, people are turning to some pretty compelling and powerful treatments.

I mean, and it's Los Angeles. Everybody's like microdosing, like it's literally in the tap water. But in terms of like these larger experiences, a lot of people are kind of delving deep to get to like the root of trauma, the root of addiction. Can you speak to what it's like for an addict brain to use those kinds of treatments? Are those good treatments for addiction when they themselves have this aspect of, you know, chasing the dragon for lack of a better expression? The short answer is it depends. So we actually have studies that, you know, some of these psychedelic treatments have been shown to help with addiction. So I've had patients. You know, what?

My favorite case is there's a guy I worked with who started using substances maybe at the age of 11 or 12. Poly substance use was, I want to say, 28, 29. So it had been through all kinds of different sort of treatment. He went down to Costa Rica and tried Ibegain. And he had this, like, deeply profound, like spiritual experience where he saw the addiction as a bunch of these leeches. And then the leeches started to slough off. And then I got scared because I was like, he was like, yeah, I feel spiritually cured from my addiction. And then I was like, I got terrified.

And I was like, okay, does that mean you're coming, like you're coming back to treatment? Because he was planning on doing 30 days of treatment after he came back. And then he was like, no, I want to continue that treatment. And he said, I realize now that like there is a biological and a neurological component of my addiction that still needs to be addressed. But now the spiritual component is like taken care of. And I was like, whew. Right? So there's good, people have good experiences. Second thing to keep in mind is that not all psychedelics, you listed a bunch.

Each of these has a very discreet action. And some of these are far more abusable than others. Like ketamine is at the top of the list, where people will get addicted to ketamine because of it's dissociative properties. So I think that, like, I've used psychedelics just like any other medication. Maybe that's not fair to say, but any other tool. Like, fire is good or bad depending on how you use it. Do you mean for yourself or for other people?

No, as a clinician, I think about psychedelics as a tool. So, for example, when I was in India, most of my teachers were quite anti-psychedelic stuff, and we can go into that. But, you know, one of them, there's a path of quite rigorous meditation called agorisadana. And agor, agor means fear. So it's the lack of fear. So these sadhus are like monks or whatever, will live in cremation grounds,

and they'll consume meat, they'll do cannibalism, they'll use psychedelics, they'll do all kinds of stuff. And it's part of their spiritual practice. So one of my teachers is like, if you want to do that, it's a 10-year commitment.

We'll train you, then you go for 10 years, and then you finish. So they're not like drug addicts. They use psychedelic substances as part of a kind of prescribed spiritual path. And this is where we get to the crux

of whether it's healthy or unhealthy. I mean, cannibalism, cannibalism, not healthy. I got bumped up on that too. How does that work? It's a good question. I don't know. Okay, but let's leave that as high for now. Like people who have died already?

People who... Yes. So they live in cremation grounds. They don't murder people. Okay. So what will happen is there'll be, like this is, I mean, even weirder, but there'll be like dead bodies there and they will sometimes consume them, which is a terrible idea.

We know that preon diseases can get transmitted that way. Like, I'm not advocating for that by any means. But the whole point. to the saddana is to have no fear, the spiritual practice. So we take all of the most revolting activities that a human being can do and engage in those to kind of conquer our fear. And, you know, I was saying that it's the context that we add to the experience that makes it good or bad. Same principle. Yeah, like, do you get sentenced to that or you choose it? You choose it and it's like, it's like hard to get into kind of thing. Oh, you, you have to

qualify. Sorry, you have to qualify. A gori sadena is like, very hard to... Oh, it's like agoraphobia. That's what it sounds like. I wonder if there's a... I don't know. Probably not because I think the phobia is the fear and the agoras... Yeah.

This is the black ops of meditation. I mean... Yeah, so, I mean, there's a lot of weird esoteric stuff, right? Some of that stuff I've done, some of that stuff I haven't done, most of it, probably. But kind of going back to your question on psychedelics, I think what we know about when is it good and when is it bad, I think when it's done under the proper guidance. So if we have like, you know, a shaman who's trained in like ayahuasca journeys, like that can be healthy. When we have a therapist who uses psilocybin, so usually like, you know, the protocols involve maybe two or three doses of a psychedelic over 12 weeks of therapy. And you really process and integrate that experience.

And then there are also, you know, plenty of cases of addictions or bad things. I've seen people who've used psychedelics and ended up with PTSD, developed things like OCD or generalizing. an anxiety disorder, you know, bad trips. I think as the meditators will say, like, you know, you're playing with fire. And if you don't play with it right, you can get burned. And that's kind of how I view psychedelics. I wonder if you can give us a little bit of a primer on how we're getting meditation wrong. Because I've talked about some of the different phases of meditation.

I went from being the person who's like, I can't do it. I don't believe in it. It's ridiculous to, oh, I like listening to this nice lady. and I follow what she says and I take a nap. We had Dan Harris on and he introduced me to kind of his whole world of 10% happier meditation. And I started kind of learning from like Joseph Goldstein and, you know, people who were literally giving me skills so that I was feeling better in a different way than listening to the nice lady who put me down for a nap. And I understand that there are kind of different states of meditation. and I think many of us are hovering in kind of this first state,

but I wonder if you can describe what are we getting wrong about meditation and what are these different phases of meditation that we need to understand? Yeah, okay, so a beautiful question. So I'll try to answer somewhat succinctly. So the first thing to understand is that the word meditation translates into several different words in Sanskrit. So Sanskrit is a great language for describing states, of consciousness.

It's kind of like, you know, we have this saying that, you know, Eskimos have 100 words for snow. And it's because they know, like, there's a lot of nuance to it. So the biggest mistake I think people get about meditation is that the Sanskrit words for meditation, one of them is a verb and one of them is a state. So if I were to ask you, Ma'am, how do I go to sleep? Um, I have many funny. teach me to sleep. Oh, okay. So you get into cozy clothes and you get into...

Or no clothes. Or no clothes. And you get into bed and you close your eyes and then you just fall asleep. So I took off all my clothes. I'm team Jonathan here. I got into bed. I closed my eyes. I'm not sleeping. What am I doing wrong? I don't know. I'm confused. Do you... Do you know how to sleep? Yeah, I do. I mean, it's not her specialty. It's really not.

I don't go to sleep when I lay down and close my eyes. But for most people, yeah, I think you'd be like, I don't know, just stop thinking about things and you'll fall asleep. So the first thing to understand is that sleep is a state of consciousness. You can't go to sleep. It is literally impossible to go to sleep. You can go to the car wash. You can go to the bathroom. You can go to your bed.

You cannot go to sleep. You fall asleep. It is something that happens to you. So the first thing to understand about meditation is there's that which you do and that which happens to you. One is an action, one is a verb, one is a state of consciousness that fingers crossed. If you do the actions right, will trigger the state of consciousness. So if I put on the right music, if I take off all my clothes, if I do all of these things and I train myself, right? we know that sleep hygiene regularly induces the state of sleep.

So this is where there's a big dividing line between, let's say, meditative practices, which are actions that are done and meditative states of consciousness, which are induced by the practices. Okay? So when you say, how do I meditate, I can teach you adharana. Adhharana is a focusing technique. This is the kind of thing where I'm concentrating on my breath. This is not meditation.

This is a focusing technique. Then what happens is if I focus on my breath long enough, if I'm lucky, I will enter into a state of consciousness. And this is how I would describe this, okay? So we normally have five sensory organs that are active. And our attention, my awareness or my conscious experience is distributed through these. So everyone who's listening to this right now, your attention, you are paying attention to the words that you're hearing.

Now, one of the cool things that we know about human beings is if you want to listen to words or you want to listen to music or you want to eat something, if you close your eyes, the attention that was being utilized by your eyes, the occipital cortex of the brain shuts off. And now that attentional signal is distributed to the, let's say, listening to music. So now our auditory cortex gets more blood flow. Our occipital cortex gets less blood flow. So we enhance the experience.

Agreed? Yes. So as I remove one sense, the second sense, the third sense, the fourth sense, the fifth sense. Now all of my senses are gone and I am enhancing whatever is left. Now, for many people, what ends up getting enhanced is their mind. Right? So now I'm like, if I'm not paying attention, and we all know this, when we are lost in our mind, we're not pay attention to our eyes, we're not paying attention to what we're hearing. We're wandering down the street and our attention is fully engaged in the mind. So then comes the next step of meditation, which is getting rid of mind. And then the question becomes if you have complete attention but no object to be attending to. So I can attend to what I see. I can attend to what I hear. I can attend to what I think. I can attend to what I feel.

If I remove all of those things, and all I am is unfiltered awareness without object. And remember, each time it's getting exponentially enhanced. Once you reach that no mind state with pure awareness, this is the first stage of Dion. Or actually, Dion is then when we kind of have a melded mind. This is kind of like a flow state.

Then the first stage of pure awareness without focus is samadhi. This is what we would call temporary enlightenment. And this feels like a fucking drug. It feels amazing. When you get into this state of mind, which is very difficult to do, because a lot of people have difficulty conquering the mind. So their attention continues to focus on this thought,

this thought, this thought. I mean, I'd say most people. Most people, yes. And that's because we don't teach them to meditate, right? And so then what happens is that we induce the state of someone. And this is also where there are a lot of things that people don't really realize. But inducing the state of samadhi is a very, very specific neurochemical experience. That's my hypothesis, which involves things like eating the right kind of food, very low levels of inflammation.

We probably also need to develop a strong metabolic, alcoholic compensation apparatus. I know that's complicated. But basically what we do is normally when we have a low respiratory rate, that's not conducive with life. We know that when we have a low respiratory rate, the level of CO2 in our system increases. We know that when the brain swims around in CO2, we can have weird psychedelic experiences. Normally people who have a high level of CO2, they get brain damaged because it's transient, right? It's sudden. Like if I am asphyxiated, that's not going to be good.

But what happens in meditation is you will practice very low respiratory rates, one breath every six minutes, one breath every 15 minutes. Like a whale? Like a whale, right? And as you are capable of doing this, it allows your brain to tolerate higher levels of CO2 and starts to induce some of these weird neurochemical experiences that are similar to psychedelic experiences. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

There's also all kinds of dietary things. We do certain kinds of yoga postures. So basically what happened is for like 5,000 years, people tested this. They're like, wow, that was a super cool experience. What do I do to enhance it? Because remember, it's like falling asleep, so you can't create it.

This is why they do hours of yoga every day. This is why they do Qigong and Branaam. You have to get all of these different parts of the body in line. and when the body, when the physiology is perfectly attuned, then you can induce these states on a regular basis. So I would venture to say that most people are trying, at least in the circles that I'm running in, you know, and the apps and the like, forgive me,

like the pretty lady, you know, like with her picture on, you know, the app telling me how to meditate. They're doing body scans. They're doing, they're doing, we, we are doing body scans. cans? Yeah. But I think that that's the adharana, is that right? Dharnah. That's where a lot of people are sitting. They're sitting in trying to learn to focus and just to stop the kind of madness. But when we talk about these other states, you know, this kind of flow state and then this sort of upper level, I would venture to say that

to get the true health benefits and mental health benefits of meditation, the challenge would be to get beyond this first state and into those other states of consciousness. So this is bizarre, Maya, but I think this is the first time that I want to say you're wrong. Oh. So if we look at the science. It's the first time you want to say that I'm wrong or it's the first time that I am wrong. I'm inclined. So I would contradict your statement is what I mean.

So let's just be specific, right? because studies on the health benefits of meditation or mindfulness don't have people reaching samadhi. They have people doing body scans. So literally the science tells us that all you need for health benefits, or at least this degree of health benefits, is to body skin. Right? Like, does that kind of make sense? Because like the clinical trials don't have, you know, eight weeks of mindfulness training

when I have chronic pain. No one's attaining samadhi. You have no teachers that are enlightened gurus. You have some psychologist who is, you know, like took an eight-week course on meditation and is now teaching these people how to meditate. So they're doing the body skin. So that's actually good enough to get some health benefits. Yes, I want more. Now, yeah, so now that now we get into like the stuff that is not scientific because it is very hard to do a randomized controlled trial on enlightened human beings. Yeah. So we take normal humans and we teach them to meditate over the

course of eight to 12 weeks. And then their middling level of practice is actually good enough. And if we sort of think about it, right, this is what's super wild. So I was curious, how is it there studies that show that meditation is effective for schizophrenia, anxiety, depression? This is weird. We have an understanding that the pathophysiology of these illnesses is different. How can one thing help everything? And that is because meditation transcends the whole phenomenon of mind.

We move beyond mind entirely. And anxiety exists within the mind. Depression exists within the mind. Even to a certain degree, schizophrenia exists within the mind because we can't stop attending to these auditory hallucinations. Well, and this is also a great example

of this mind-body connection because what meditation is doing is it's supporting the body's kind of natural physiological capability to try and regulate a system that is in dysregulation. And whether that is from, you know, changing oxygen concentration,

whether it's from reducing inflammation, like whatever it's doing, it's trying to essentially elevate your tolerance for, you know, dysbiosis, I mean, for any of these things. Yeah, so I think it's a great take. I don't know how much scientific support we have of that. I think what we do know, so dysbiosis, for example, like I haven't seen, I'm sure there are now,

but studies on meditation and the gut microbiome. Well, for autoimmune conditions, this is one of the things that like. Yeah, so that, oh, But that we have a ton of data for. So thank you for mentioning jogging my memory there. So we know that meditation reduces our cortisol levels, reduces like interleukin-6, reduces TNF alpha. We also know this is what's super interesting. Meditation improves vaccine responsiveness.

So what it does, it doesn't shut down the immune system. It regulates the immune system. It essentially recreates that homeostatic balance. We're not quite sure how. But, you know, it seems to do that. So it seems to be like a positive. and there are cases of like meditation-induced psychosis or problems with meditation, but generally speaking, it's like a safe and positive practice.

What do you think the health benefits of accessing or experiencing Sumadi would be on a regular basis? I think they're huge. So a couple of things. The one thing is that sometimes when you experience samadhi, you will be healthier, but you can become a non-functional human being. I'm already non-functional. Let's try it. Non-functional in a way better way. So if you look at someone like Buddha, right? So the Buddha was a prince. He was married.

He had, you know, political responsibilities, familiar responsibilities. When he attained enlightenment, he was like, I'm done. So a lot of the things that drive us and cause us suffering or motivations, I want to be someone one day. I want to accomplish a lot. I want to retire. I want to have kids. These are all desires.

The more time you spend in samadhi, the more your desires melt away. And thus, along with your human. functionality. So the enlightened person isn't driven by desire. So the more that you experience samadhi, I think like the better life gets. I think there's good outcomes because generally speaking, it's a positive, but like, you know, you just get freer. So you have more control over yourself. You have more awareness of yourself. Things that when something bad happens to me, like sometimes it affects me, but oftentimes I'm able to like put it in context. Um, And I can feel like when I don't practice regularly and I become more attached to the world,

and things start to matter more. So in a weird way, like things become, we develop something called Vairagia or detachment, where it's not that I'm apathetic and this is what's subtle and this is like what happened, the difference between apathy and samadhi. Samadhi, you begin to realize, right? So I begin to realize, okay, like, this is my karma. This is like, you know, like it's not that I stop trying. it's that I stop letting my ego or my happiness be caught up in the outcome of my action.

I know that's kind of technical, so I'll give you all an example. So it took me three years to get into med school. And I got rejected from 120 med schools before I finally got in. I'm sorry, what? You need to repeat. You have to repeat that. I got rejected from 120 medical schools before I finally got in. I didn't even know there are 120 medical schools.

Oh, well, I applied to many. I got 120 medical school rejections. I should say that. So sometimes I apply to the same school more than once. But still, that's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. Three years. Three years of applying to med school.

That's what you get. So if you kind of think about that, like normally, when I get rejected, I feel hurt. Right? Because I have some ego caught up in like, oh, these people accepted me, this means I'm good. If they didn't accept me, that means I'm bad. This is how most human beings, if I get accepted to something, I feel good about myself. get rejected, I feel bad. But that's just ego. So 120, 120 times you were able to say they're just not that into me. Yeah, and that's what it is. Right. So I looked at my application. I realized,

okay, I've failed out of medical school. This is going to be, I mean, sorry, failed out of college. I have a 2.5 GPA. This is going to be an uphill battle. This is going to be difficult and it is going to be potentially impossible. You know, maybe one in 10,000 people with my numbers, like get into med school. So it's like, this is a statistical impossibility. But being able to dispassionately look at that and say, so be it. I'm going to do it anyway. So do I want to go to med school? Yes. Is this a goal I've set for myself? Yes. Is it one out of 10,000? Who cares? What matters is today I'm going to apply to this med school. That is the least relatable thing you've said in the whole two hours we've been talking to you.

It's so unbelievable. This is the difference between people who experience this stuff and people who don't. Like, this is what allows you to do. That was Jonathan's question. I'd hate to think what happened if you asked someone on a date. Like, how many times do they have to say no before they call the cops on you?

Right. But this is important. The reason you ask someone out obsessively is because you are attached. I want to date you. I want to date you. I want you, you, you, you, you, you, no one else you. That's obsessiveness.

That's the opposite of attachment. I'm fascinated by your persistence to continue to apply and reapply. Can you tell me a little bit, like, were you being driven by intuition that, like, I want to do this? I meant to do this. Like, what was happening that you just got all the just rejection, saw the potential statistical anomaly here, and you were like, I'm going to continue? Like, what was driving you?

Nothing was driving me. It's an absence of a driver. This is what's so confusing for people. So let me... I have to clarify that when you say it's an absence of a driver because it takes some drive to continue to fill out the forms. It's like it's a challenging process that you have to build up some momentum to do.

It's not just like I have to go check a box. No, it's not that. Tell us. No, no, no, let's understand this. Okay, I know it sounds crazy. But what is the difference between applying to the first medical school and the 119th? I mean, you're rinsing and repeating

unless you're changing it at all. Like, did you change the application? The action is exactly the same. Why is 119 harder? Because of the weight, the mental weight of the 118 rejections before. Okay, but what were you doing in the meantime? Like, what did your parents think?

So my family tried to suggest that I go to the Caribbean or get a PhD. No offense. Yeah, well, it's what those of us do who don't want to apply to medical school because we don't have the grades and we don't want to do it. Right? So people were like, this is, you know, like, what are you doing? And I said, okay, I'm going to give it one more year. If it doesn't happen this year, then so be it.

That was going to be my next question is if you put a finite end to it or if it was just going to be an indefinite continual application process. I don't know. I mean, maybe at the end of year three, I would have said one more year. But I think this is the key thing to understand is like if you really look at your life, what detachment allows you to do is focus on the action in isolation. And this is something that you have to learn in medical school or in residency. Otherwise, you will get torn apart. And doctors do get torn apart. So when I remember I was in the ED one day and a patient came in with gunshot wounds.

And it's like, okay, we have to try to save this person's life. Can we save this person's life? I have no idea. I have no control over what happens. I only have control over what I do. So one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a doctor is believe that you can save a life. You can try to save a life. But I do not.

I've been to med school, even did residency at Harvard. Like, that's a pretty good place. Nowhere did I see a single doctor that has the power over life and death. We can't do that. So when you become detached, you devote yourself to the action. You put 100% effort in the action and your ego is not tied up in the consequence. I mean, it's amazing. And you're a very busy man now. You have a private practice. You have an amazing online community. Do you make the time to meditate? What does your meditation practice look like now? It depends. So I do some kind of meditation practice on a daily basis, not much formal sitting practice. Over the last year, I realized I've been like coasting on my personal practice. So I'll do usually like sprints of quite intense and slightly more esoteric practices where I'll also do like the appropriate

physiology things, which can include things like celibacy, controlling my diet, really paying attention, like getting the physiology in the right place so that I can like do the intense meditation. So I, in the last year, I'll probably do this for about 30 days a year where I'll do like a pretty intensive meditation practice, which kind of gets me like leveling up again. Amazing. I've heard you talk about how you won't have people with trauma history do mindfulness exercises and you have a very unique approach to helping people with ADHD, practice meditation. Can you describe those? I found those fascinating. Yeah. So first thing to understand is that mindfulness is like this weird catch-all term.

And if you look at the evidence-based protocols to treat people with trauma, something like dialectical behavioral therapy, this involves mindfulness. But mindfulness is not monolithic. So specifically when you have someone with a history of trauma. If you look at things like DBT, the DBT mindfulness practices are actually what I would call grounding practices. So they are actually strong sensory stimuli which pull your attention out of your mind and into the physical world. So if you have someone who has like a history of trauma, PTSD, borderline personality disorder, or even narcissism, their experience of suffering and what causes them to spiral out of control as they get stuck in their head. We need to bring them outside of the head.

So we'll use techniques like ice diving, which is when you stick your face in a bucket full of ice water. We'll use that on the inpatient unit when people are like having a traumatic, you know, they'll having like a flashback or something. So we'll help them ground through a sense. That sounds terrible. You sound like a torturer. No, it feels great. So if you, I don't know if you guys know this, but, you know, self-injurious behavior is essentially a grounding practice. Yes. So even if you look at the science of self-endurious behavior, maximal pain with minimal damage, usually no intent to harm themselves. Literally what they do is when their mind gets so out of whack, they will create superficial cuts that you can't think about anything.

When the pain receptors right at the epidermis are firing super high, you can't think about anything. It snaps them out of their mental cycles. So that is a grounding practice. That can be technically a mindfulness practice. But the other thing is that a lot of mindfulness is about open awareness. There's a great paper by a guy named Silberswig who's chief of psychiatry at Brigham and his professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He does a great job of outlining different kinds of meditation practices from a neuroscience perspective. If we look at a lot of these mindfulness practices, it's just like observe your thoughts. But if you look at the mind of someone who has trauma, they have a lot of these defense mechanisms in place to keep thoughts down.

Because once they leak out, we don't have the ability to handle them. So when we do open awareness practices with some people who have a history of trauma, those negative thoughts can come flooding out and then like they get overwhelmed. This is why when we do trauma treatment, right, we have another, literally another human being sitting with you, helping you hold the thoughts, helping you kind of stay together psychologically. So some of that open awareness of just like observe your thoughts, sometimes that sends people into a depressive spiral, panic attack or a flashback. So we want to be super careful with like what the purpose of the meditation is.

Now with ADHD, different kind of situation. So a lot of times people think, you know, the goal of meditation is, is sure, to get the mind to sit still. But for someone who's neurotypical, getting the mind to sit still means exerting the power of your frontal lobes and your willpower to restrain impulses. Now, if you look at someone with ADHD, their impulses are way stronger and their frontal lobes' ability to control their impulses is weaker. So this works fine for neurotypical people, but if you've got ADHD, we're actually making things harder for you, not easier. Because the very act of restraining, focusing on one thing is what's hard for them. You are literally explaining why meditation in traditional ways may not work

for people with ADHD. Yes, with the strong caveat of in traditional ways, you usually had a real guru who would give you the technique that'll work for you. Right? And that's where I learned this stuff. So, like, this is what's also changed is that, you know, meditation has become like a certification. Like no one, so in the old days, like to become a Zen master took 30 years.

And then at the end of 30 years, you don't become a Zen master. It depends on your spiritual progress. So you can spend 30 years. and not be a master. Nowadays, what happens is no one, no one assesses your spiritual competence before they give you a certification to teach meditation. Because that's not how I paid $8,000 for this course.

What do you mean I don't get a certificate? Well, you didn't actually attain some of these, so you're not a qualified teacher, right? So it's crazy. Going back to ADHD. So what we want to do, remember that there are two ways to get the mind to slow down. One is to restrain it, but you all have kids.

So if you have a kid who has difficulty sitting still, what can you do to get him to sit still? I mean, I had a child who never sat still. And even when he wasn't sitting still, I mean, he had to sit still at some point. When would he sit still? When he was taking things apart with a screwdriver. Okay. So when his, the right kind of alumbana, this means like support for meditation. So the right kind of focus.

second thing that happens is I would bet you money that if your kid was playing at a playground for like an hour and a half when he was done he would sit down right maybe not your kid we had to put him in the car he resisted if it was up to him he would he literally wouldn't but yes most kids if you give them the right exercise

they'll stay up so the other way you can get the mind to sit still is actually to stress it out to push it don't try to stop it from running have it run faster harder So what I'll tell my patients with, you know, ADHD, so this was back when I was at Massachusetts General Hospital, I'd have a patient in my office with ADHD, and they're like, I want to learn how to concentrate.

I was like, great, let's go to the cafeteria. So we'd go sit in the cafeteria. There's like a couple hundred people there because of hospital gigantic. All kinds of noise. And what I tell them do is close your eyes and try to listen to as many sounds as you can, as fast as you can. Don't pay attention to the words,

but you hear a clink over there, someone's speaking over there, someone laughed over here, cell phone over here, someone talked, there was a cash register that opened, another cell phone, elevator opened, someone's walking by, and you push the mind. You push it as fast as it and hard as you can. What happens then? Because now you're in the cafeteria with this patient who is listening to all these things really fast and hard.

Then what happens? So what happens is over time, they listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, harder, faster, more. more, more, more, more, and then the mind gets tired. It naturally starts to slow down. So if I take Jonathan's kid and I say, he doesn't want to go into the car because you all are going home at an hour and a half, let him stay for four hours. Let push the mind until it is exhausted. Then it will stop.

How do we go to sleep? We push ourselves to the point of exhaustion. He would go home when it got dark. That's when he would decide to go home. Yeah. Right. So we have to push the ADHD person's mind. It wants to move fast and we say run, bro, run.

Run as fast as you want to. Does this make the ADHD go away? I'm still like, let's see, okay. Right? So the mind wants to move fast and then eventually it settles. Are people with ADHD, are their minds able to move faster than other people? Yes. I think so.

And can that obviously be a strength in some areas if earnest? Yes. So some people will get very mad at me for this. So we work with a lot of content creators. Like the incidence of ADHD is like 5 to 10% in the general population. If you look at content creators like Twitch streamers, YouTubers, it's like 30%. So something about the dynamic nature of the job, I've had patients with ADHD who have struggled in like investment banking because it's like too rigorous and like I have to sit

there and look at Excel Spruly. Exceled at commercial real estate, a real estate development. Because real estate is just such a mess. Everything is going wrong all the time. And if you have a neurotypical brain, you're going to get swept away. This is also about having the right lifestyle for your brain. Yeah, I think so. So, like, I think one of the things that we miss in the West is we think about, like,

psychology and neuroscience is, like, static. We don't really think about a cognitive fingerprint for your life. But, like, we have a cognitive fingerprint, just like we have a unique thing, like, you know, and fingerprint. And a lot of what I do in my practice is helping people understand how they're brain works, figuring out what do we want to change and what do we want to lean into. Is ADHD getting worse? Are more people getting it? Yes. Why do you think that is? Because of the digital technology, because we're so fragmented? So all manner of things.

So one thing is if you look at neurodiversity like autism spectrum, advanced maternal age, advanced paternal age, autism is one of the few things that we can blame the dad. So advanced paternal age is associated with autism spectrum and neurodiversity. So we're all having kids at a later age. That's number one. Are you a C-section discusser? Yeah. So there's all kinds of like in-utero studies and things like that. Like, you know, there's all kinds of stuff that we know happens when a child gets pushed through the vaginal canal, literally it squeezes their brain. And the squeezing of their brain

triggers certain things like the release of cortisol and stress hormones, which will lead to things like the maturation of their lungs and help them breathe. So when we're squeezing the brain, we're doing something, you know, and it's designed to be squeezed on the way out. So what extent it does, we're not sure. All right, but sorry, continue. Yeah. So going back to ADHD, so I think, you know, people are having kids older. We also know that there's probably some kinds of like dietary and neurotransmitter things going on with ADHD where we know that like low levels of inflammation or gut dysbiosis, which are much more common now. So this is where, like, you know, a lot of people, you know, are gluten-sensitive.

And they're actually, like, there's a dude in Austin near where I live who uses, like, this strain of wheat that is like hundreds of years old. The really interesting thing is people who are gluten-intolerant or gluten-sensitive can eat his bread. So there may actually be something to, I'm not like a big GMO conspiracy, conspiracy theorist, but there may be something about the way that these proteins alter that causes an increased inflammatory response. So we've got more inflammation. The other thing is technology. So our brain has a very simple principle, which is that if you don't use something, you lose it. So if I don't

practice the language, I lose it. When I have technology that doesn't require me to pay attention because it's bright and it's flashing, it's whatever, my attentional capacity actually goes down. And so I think what we're seeing is like our attention, we're losing control of our attention. We can't control, oh, like, I'm going to flip open TikTok, and then I can't stop in five minutes. So we're literally our attentional circuitry is starting to atrophy, which I think leads to more ADHD-like symptoms. Really fascinating. I have a personal example that I'm curious your thoughts on. For me, we, Miami and I both took the quiz online. I think it was like 17 questions about who, and we were trying to compare who had more ADHD between the two of us. I won.

Jonathan won for externalizing. I won for internalizing. When I'm at a cafe, for example, I have a much easier time putting my blinders on, focusing, being head down when there's external noise to tune out. Can you explain that?

Absolutely. This is also why I recommend that my patients with ADHD meditate with their eyes open. So if you look at ADHD, if there is a lack of sensory stimulation, I don't know if you guys have ever seen this clip of like the kid who's spinning around in the chair when he's like trying to do homework.

So kids with ADHD, their brains are very sensitive to sensory stimulation. And if they are understimulated, they will self-stimulate. So a lot of what teachers and parents struggle with when you have a child with ADHD is you can't get them to sit still. It's because the brain is craving stimulation. So on the inpatient unit of a psychiatry, on inpatient psychiatry, so we're experts in psychiatry, experts in ADHD. When someone is in group therapy and they've got ADHD, we let them knit. We give them some kind of sensory stimulus and somehow for a neurotypical brain, some amount of sensory stimulus is distracting. But for a child with ADHD, they need some

kind of sensory stimulus to somehow quiet down part of their brain so that they can actually focus. So they work better in coffee shops. They meditate better with their eyes, open. If they're engaged in psychotherapy, I'll let them color. I'll let them knit. I'll let them do something. We go on walks. We'll hike. Right. And so sometimes we need stimulus to calm down part of our brain. This explains so much. Mime and I are often talking. She's like, can you just not do that thing while we're having this conversation? And I'm like, it's so torturous. To listen to me, speak. No, but that's right.

So here, if both you all are somewhere on the spectrum, you need to do it in order to be able to focus, and what you were doing is distracting for her and makes it hard for her to focus. There's so much more that we want to talk to you about that we're not going to get to today, obviously. Do you want two more children? Because we would like to live with you.

So, you know, it's, I mean, I know we're joking, but like I do get adoption requests on a regular basis. Wow. I'm set with the number of children that I've got, but happy to, you know, maybe consult. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit, before we let you go,

can you tell us a little bit about how to start a conversation? What to do if you see that someone has a problem, video gaming, porn addiction, you know, for porn addiction, it's much harder because it can be kept in secret. It's very hard to know if someone is struggling with that, but you may be able to see their behavior. They're more checked out, less connected, their drive has changed, something else is going on with them.

How do you begin to open up a conversation? especially when people can be extremely defensive and try to hold on to their mechanism of comfort by any means necessary. Yeah, so it's such a great question because we're seeing these problems, but we don't know how to approach them, right? Especially if a loved one or someone

that we care about is having this. So I just wrote a book, How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. So, like, I recognize that, you know, parenting is challenging. And I think that the thing that the book has that you won't find elsewhere is like our system of,

communication. So I've worked with now with hundreds of gamers, in cells, opioid addicts, like take your pick. And the whole point is that getting someone to change in addictive behavior, they have to want to do it. You can never be sober for someone else. I've seen spouses try. Spouses trying to control people, even parents trying to control their kids. And what always happens, the challenge is that like if this person's heart is not in the right place, you not only have to deal with the addiction. You also have to deal with this person's resistance. And so it's like two against one, right? You and the person who has the problem are not on the same team. So what we've done and how to raise a healthy gamer is lay out a system of communication. So we explain all like the

neuroscience and psychology in a pretty like digestible way for parents to understand. But the book, we've actually gotten good feedback from people like spouses, like who are like, you know, I just had a kid and my husband like is not like won't stop playing video games. Like what do I do? How do I talk to this person? And in the book, what we kind of lay out is like start with like open ended questions. So start by trying to understand their perspective because oftentimes when we see a problem where like this needs to change, but they may not agree with that.

So we want to start by really understanding their perspective. That kind of gives you like a roadmap. And then you can say, okay, so. when we're talking about, you know, parents working with their kids, hey, you need to stop playing video games. But then we don't know, like, why the kid is playing video games. We don't know what their life is like. So you have a 15-year-old.

And then you talk to them and you say, hey, what's hard about the real world? What do you like about the virtual world? And then they'll say, like, oh, I get bullied. Real world. I'm going to script with you a little bit. I'll just role play. A couple of things that I've had are, you know, my friends are online. Or so that might be easier because you're like, okay, we need some real world friends.

No, we don't. No, no, no, no, that's the wrong. That's a mistake. Your friends are online. Okay. My friends are online. Everything's boring. What do you want me to do? If I'm not on video games, I'm just going to watch YouTube. And then you don't want me to watch YouTube. What am I supposed to do? Yeah. So I'd say, like, are you happy with the way that your life is right now? Well, if you get a yes. Right? So you will get a yes. Right. And so then you can ask a little bit about, like, okay, so what do you like about YouTube? What are you happy with? I'm curious, like, where do you see yourself a couple years from now. Like when you go off to college. A lot of I don't know. I don't know. I don't know, right? So, so this, we have a whole section

about what I don't know means. I don't know means I'm afraid to answer. I don't know means I'm, you know, like, and you can say, I don't know. And then you can say, like, well, what do you think about that? Like, do you think it's important to start thinking about what you want your life to be like in the future? Do you have concerns? Like, so you have friends online, like, like, what about dating? Are you, I mean, with this, go slow, right? So then we reflect a lot. So it sounds like, oh, like, you don't really know what you want.

What's that like? So, like, when we sort of like use open-ended questions and we don't say, oh, no, no, no, you've got too many virtual friends. Let's create real friends. That's the opposite. What we want to do is, okay, like, and this is what we do, literally is like psychiatrists working with people who are, like, addicted to alcohol and have been addicted for 40 years.

They don't want to change. Oh, yeah, I'm here. because my wife wants me to be here. What's that like? Sounds like you're being treated unfairly. And the alcohol doesn't cause any problems. Oh, yeah, no problems at all. I've got this liver.

Oh, I noticed that you have the liver problem. What's going on there? Well, the doctor says it's because of alcohol. Well, what do you think? So don't push. Create space. And then your child, I don't know, is like, that's the jackpot.

It's like, oh, okay, like, so let's think about that for a second. Sometimes, and you can even say this to your kid, sometimes I don't know means I'm afraid of the answer. Do you think that could be the case with you? I don't know. Okay, fine. And you just let that breathe and then like come back to it a day later?

Like how? 30 to 60 days is what we recommend of letting it breathe, one conversation a week for about an hour. One conversation a week. For an hour? What if you can't get an hour? What if you can get like four minutes? Do you then have...

Four minutes will... Now, keep in mind, we've done IRB approved research on this, okay? Four minutes will become one hour once your fucking parents stop telling you to start making friends in the real world because you have friends in the virtual world. When your parents listen, when your spouse listens, when they stop judging and they stop telling you what to do, and they feel like they can say anything to you without you weaponizing it against them, not saying you guys aren't great parents. I'm sure y'all are great parents.

And I really mean that. I'm a horrible parent. You guys are good parents. No, I'm struggling. I'm struggling, specifically in the gaming and screen time department. So, like, we're struggling. What are we been doing for the last hour and a half? Talking about all the other amazing things that you talk about.

Okay. I mean, you know, like, I'm doing my best here. Yeah, no, so this is important to understand too, right? Let's develop, I'm a terrible parent. I'm struggling. Terrible parents, I'll tell you this as a psychiatrist. Terrible parents don't struggle. Terrible parents don't think they have a problem.

Struggling means you are a good parent. The most damage that I've ever seen parents do to their kids is when they were unaware they were doing it. 100%. So if you are struggling, you are not a terrible parent. It's hard. That doesn't, this is where we're attaching our value as a human being to the outcome. It's hard. Dude, do you get, Maim, that there are billion dollar companies that are trying to, their business,

model is off of addicting your children. It works. The skin releases, the weapons, the money being spent on all the accoutrement in those games is unbelievable. It's crazy. The gaming industry is so much bigger than the music industry and the movie industry put together. Like how much money do you spend on movies a year?

Like a PS5 costs $500. That's with one controller in zero games. And endless hours of potential. attention. Yeah. So it's hard. And just because you're struggling, that just means you're like a decent parent.

Well, and I think, I appreciate that. And I think also my sort of, you know, concern is not just gaming, but screen time in general has taken the place of any other

emotional or intellectual stimulation. And, you know, I was raised by two teachers. So I was given a list of books and a list of classic movies that it was like my job to know about, read and experience. I used to keep a list of the books that I read so that I can go back and look

at, oh, what did I read when I was 16? What did I read when I was 17? And the screens and gaming has just taken the place of any other stimulation. They don't read, like nobody wants to read, you know, even having discussions, like it's a challenge, you know, just about anything other than discussions about get off your phone. Well, so the other thing that we talk about in the book, this is actually hard, is I don't think we appreciate as parents. Not many parents really realize this. Your children have a social skills atrophy compared to when you were their age. Literally, their social circuits are underdeveloped compared to what they used to be. So it literally makes talking with your kids harder. So we need some new conversational tech to compensate for what we're

seeing in terms of like social skills atrophy in our children. Any advice on how to make the real world less boring? Is it just having them spend less time digitally? Like, you know, because you get that remark like everything is just boring. Yeah. So absolutely. So there are many ways we can make the real world boring. Reducing technology usage can work, but I find that it is ineffective. So generally speaking, making the real world exciting is your kids are not going to like it if you just try to take something that they like away. It's like, the thing about, Jonathan, you know, what do you enjoy doing for fun? let me just take that away. Then you'll enjoy this other stuff. It doesn't work like that. He likes scrolling on Instagram.

Right? Scrolling on Instagram. So one of the things that we strongly recommend, and it's crazy, like how hard this is for parents to do, is ask your kids, out of the real world, what do you enjoy the most? Right. Okay, we went to the playground. What did you like about this? What did you not like about this? You tell me, like, give me information. Let's try to figure this out. I think as a parent, it's a important for you to do some stuff in the real world. I want you to help me make that as fun as possible. So like, you know, we can go to a museum. We can, I know it sounds boring, but like there's a museum of like optical illusions that's like pretty cool. Very cool. Very interactive, right? And then we, this is another thing that a lot of parents do is we don't reflect to when we've had a good time in the

real world. Hey, what was that like? Would you rather stayed home playing video games? Do you want to go home and play video games now. Let's go home and play video games. Then you tell me what would have been a better day. You game for four hours after we got back from the museum. We went to the museum in the morning. Is gaming more fun if you do something else first? This is eye-opening because the answer is yes.

I can totally relate to that. My son, who has changed his video game habit dramatically, has come to me at times and been like, this isn't that much fun right now. And it's often when he has an entire day, and he doesn't want to spend it all there, but can struggle to know what else to do. But when his schedule is packed

and he's started to play competitive tennis and he's engaged in other activities, then he kind of goes on and has some fun, and then that balance really changes the relationship with it. Yeah. And I think a lot of gamers, myself included, have discovered that playing more video games triggers this dopamineergic tolerance. This is why the hedonic treadmill never works.

We as human beings are cursed. that the more we enjoy something, the less we will enjoy it tomorrow. So the most fun from gaming actually comes with a restriction of gaming. And the moment that your children understand this, like it'll be, it'll change their lives. Before we let you go,

can you tell us what your game of choice was when you were actively gaming in addiction? Yeah, Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. Is that World of Warcraft or just, you can just different. This is pre-World of Warcraft. Before this was climbing the ladder. It's a real-time strategy game. If you all are familiar with StarCraft,

that's like the most popular one probably. It's a genre that's pretty dead because it's very hard to have micro-transactions and monetize. So game developers aren't making it anymore. Tell us where people can find all of your content. You have an amazing YouTube platform. Tell people how to get involved. Yeah.

So I think, you know, they can find us, they can get the book anywhere that books are sold, How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. You know, you can check out our YouTube channel, which is Healthy Gager, Gigi, or our website, which is www. www.healthigamer.gamer. Which has more like resources.

So we have like a guide to mental health and we have stuff for parents and things like that. But usually like check out the book if that's what you're interested in or check out our YouTube channel. Awesome. It's really been such a pleasure speaking to you. Just, I mean, endless conversation with you. We could have.

That might have been one of the most varied episodes we've ever done. There's so much in that to unpack. I think each section I was like, oh, we could spend a whole episode on ADHD. And there's still so many things we didn't even get to. We had two other, like, outlines that had a dozen things that we didn't even get to. I'd love to have him on again.

I hope he'd be open to that, maybe later on, talk more about relationships and stuff. I mean, he just kind of, like, knows a lot about everything. I'm astounded. How technology is impacting relationships. We're going to do a whole episode there. He was really, I had such a great time talking to him, and I can't wait to introduce him to my kids. I don't think they're going to like that. but I think it's going to happen.

You're going to ask them all these questions about... I can't wait to find out what my children think about their future and if life is not exciting enough and maybe we can fix it. You're going to make their gaming even more fun by taking them to do things in the real world. Make sure to subscribe to our channel, share this if you like it, and that's it from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

It's My and Beolic's Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. She's gonna bring