The Liz Moody Podcast - Porn Is Just A Symptom—The REAL Relationship & Dating Crisis (And Where We Go From Here)

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

I sit down with Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K), Harvard-trained psychiatrist and founder of Healthy Gamer, to explore why there’s an increase in porn addiction and why dating and relationships feel harder than ever before. We dive into exactly what’s creating these widespread mental health struggles, especially in men, and what we can and should be doing to protect ourselves, our partners, and the world at large. This episode blends neuroscience, psychology, and timeless wisdom to help you understand your inner wiring. We discuss tools to amp up our distress tolerance, curb addictions, limit our use of technology, increase social connections, and own our agency to help create a better world.  Plus, we discuss a ton of juicy information and opinions around porn usage. We get into: The rise of erectile dysfunction in men Porn’s impact on your sex life If porn is bad and exactly how and when to use it Porn’s surprising use for things other than masturbation Addictions and how to stop them Dopamine engineering Distress tolerance Declining birth rates Why there’s less dateable men (and what to do about it) And so much more For more from Dr. K, find him on YouTube @HealthyGamerGG, online at https://www.healthygamer.gg/, or check out Dr. K’s Guide to Mental Health. Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome. Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: Osmia SkinCare: head to OsmiaSkincare.com and use code LIZMOODY2025 for 20% off your first order. LMNT: go to DrinkLMNT.com/LizMoody to get a free LMNT sample pack with any order. Masterclass: visit MasterClass.com/lizmoody for 15% off annual membership. Evlo: head to EvloFitness.com and use code LIZMOODY for 6 weeks for free. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 365. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What role do porn and technology play in the current mating and dating crisis? Oh my God. So big. What we're starting to see is a huge impact of pornography on the dating world. So one of the really scary statistics is it used to be that the rate of erectile dysfunction in men under the age of 30 was about 5%. It's close to like 20 to 25% according to some studies out of Europe now. Guys are having a hard time getting hard. And my friends are attributing it. to porn because they're seeing this very different vision of what sex is in porn, and then that doesn't line up with what sex is like in life, but it is a thing that my girlfriends are talking about quite a bit.

They're absolutely seeing it. That makes sense. That's what the statistics show. I think the reason is a little bit different. The reason that I wanted to do this episode wasn't just to help people who may be dealing with porn addiction in their life. I feel like there's this greater cultural thing happening. Now I'm wondering, is it possible to even engage with porn in a way that's not.

not addictive. My name is Alok Kanoja. I'm a Harvard trained psychiatrist. I run a YouTube channel called Healthy Gamer, where we talk to about 10 to 15 million people every month about the modern mental health challenges of the world we live in. The reason that I wanted to do this episode wasn't just to help people who may be dealing with porn addiction in their life, but it was because I feel like there's this greater cultural thing happening. So in two facets. One, I think there's some pretty serious things happening with men and with male and female relationships, which we can get back to in a second. But also, my views on porn have changed a lot recently. I used to think, like, oh, it's pretty innocuous. People can use it. They cannot use it. It's a different path for people

to explore pleasure. And I feel like porn has been overtaken by the same algorithms that we have on social media with infinite scrolling and variable rewards and autoplay. And on top of that, I think what we're seeing is getting more and more extreme on porn because you need more and more hits to get that dopamine surge. And so now I'm wondering, is it possible to even engage with porn in a way that's not addictive? Like for anybody listening who's like, well, that's not me. I'm not addicted. I use porn intermittently. I'm like, everything is designed now to get us addicted to porn. Well said. So I think you're also picking up on a couple of great things. So first thing I want to say is that porn is not monolithic. Right. So when we talk about pornography, if you're talking about

the algorithmic websites and things like only fans and stuff like that, is that stuff becoming increasingly addictive? Absolutely. They're taking something that the substance of which is naturally addictive because it gives us pleasure and removes pain. Those are the two requirements for something to be addictive, by the way. It has to give us pleasure. It has to take away pain.

So sex does that. And then they're layering on algorithmic kind of stuff. which involves things like online drift. So this is a principle that you kind of alluded to that generally speaking, we need more extreme versions of things to stay entertained. So the first time that I browse on social media,

I see one cat, and I just see a still picture of a cat, and I'm like, oh my God, that cat is so cute. The algorithm knows that I'm going to switch from TikTok to Reels or YouTube shorts unless it shows me cats now playing with each other. And then cats are now fighting.

And now this cat is falling off. So we actually need more stimulation, a greater amount of stimulation. In pornography, we see this, there's research on this. It's called supranormal stimulus. So if we look at what a human being is naturally aroused by,

what they do is they take all of those aspects and they make them bigger. So everything is bigger, everything is shinier, everything is jigglier, everything's in 4K, everything's in high-deaf. They use all these really creative camera angles to alter like the perception of how things look and stuff like that. And that's because our brain like literally latches onto certain features and that's what triggers our brain to be attracted to something. And what's really fascinating is the way people figure this out. They, people observed, like a group of basic biologists, I think, observed something really weird, which is that a group of beetles were starting to try to mate with beer bottles.

And they were like, what the hell is going on? They'd see like these green beer bottles that would be like swarmed by certain kinds of beetles. And then they're like, what is happening here? And it turns out that, you know, what the beetle looks for in a mate, the way their eyes work, a particular color of green looks like a female beetle to these males. So they would go and basically like try to copulate with the bottle. And as we sort of dug into this research, we discovered, oh, this happens in humans too,

that there are certain features that will trigger our brain. And now the way that the algorithm works, they don't really understand this neuroscience, but what they do is a bunch of like A-B testing. So I'm going to show you this thumbnail. I'm going to show you this thumbnail. Which one gets people to click more? So once I start to use this algorithmic technology, we're serving up things that are more and more

addictive. Another huge component that we haven't really touched on, there are two other really big ones. Most people who are addicted to pornography use it as an emotional regulation technique. So if you sort of think about, especially the male brain, and this is where there are differences between men and women, both genders can use pornography as a way to manage emotions and feel better about themselves. But if you look at what pornography does, it basically shuts off the negative emotional circuitry of your brain, especially if you're a man. So if I watch, like, if I'm having a bad day, if I'm feeling anxious, and I watch pornography, those are like millions of years of evolutionary circuits that are like, okay, as a man, you know, in order to pass along my genes, all I need to do

is be around for about three to eight minutes. And by the way, the average sexual act is about three to eight minutes, right? So I want to suppress everything that's wrong in my life. Focus on this for three to eight minutes. That's enough to achieve climax. That's enough to do the job of what sex is supposed to do from an evolutionary perspective. But in doing so, when we're shutting it down all these things in our brain, like all these negative emotions, now men become dependent on that. Because the other problem with men is that we generally speaking are not taught emotional regulation skills. So many of the people, this really surprises people that a lot of people think that pornography addiction involves masturbation. but there are many people who will watch pornography on a second screen while they're working from home.

After you have a tough meeting, they'll go into the bathroom at their work and put in AirPods and watch pornography in a stall. They'll watch pornography at all kinds of non-sexual in non-sexual ways that don't involve masturbation, don't involve climax. And that's basically like they're becoming, they're self-medicating their negative emotions using pornography. Without ejaculating. Without ejaculating. it? So once I start to use this algorithmic technology, we're serving up things that are more and more addictive. Given that, is there a way to engage with porn that is not going to press on those addiction buttons in your brain? I mean, yes and no. So like you could do something I mentioned earlier,

you know, not all pornography is monolithic. So you could watch like feminist pornography, right? You could watch pornography that is outside of these algorithmic platforms. And theoretically, that would engage less of that. So our approach here at Healthy Gamer is restraint instead of restriction. So a lot of people will be like anti-video games, you know, anti-social media use, things like that. When it comes to like the way that I raise my kids, I think that they're inheriting a world that is going to be full with with invasive technology. So they need to learn how to manage themselves. So I think I've had several patients who will, you know, used to have used pornography in an unhealthy way that are able to use it in a healthy way. But you asked a really cool question, which is, can you use it without touching

those buttons? I don't think so. So those buttons are going to get touched. The question is whether you have enough meaning and purpose in your life, whether you have alternate emotional regulation skills. So it's more like buffering up appropriate defenses so that that amount of addictive exposure is not going to like completely mess up your life. That kind of makes sense. Will we need more and more of those as these things, you know, there's tons of engineers literally working on how can we make these more addictive, more addictive? When you get AI involved, that's going to get even more exponentially addictive. Are we going to need just more meaning, more purpose, or is there a point where you can't balance it anymore? Liz, I'm super impressed

with your way of understanding things. So the way that you look at problems, the way that you predict where things are going, like, honestly, I'm super impressed because absolutely you're spot on. So I think that things are going to get harder. Now, I think that this is where practically, I think you can hit a certain level where you are basically insulated from most of these things. And even though technology will get worse, I think if you don't have like fertile soil for an addiction, I think you're basically going to be okay. But I think that it is getting harder and harder.

So generally speaking, we are seeing more skills that are necessary. we're seeing the burden, especially on people like women and in relationships. Like, you know, if a woman was dealing with a partner who had a pornography addiction 30 years ago, the size of that problem, I think, is way smaller than it is today. The addictive nature of pornography is way worse now. And you're spot on that we're going to see, like, you know,

problems with AI and things like that. People already have, like, AI boyfriends and girlfriends. We're starting to see, like, the, and it's not even AI stuff. I think OnlyFans is a really good example. because OnlyFans activates the social parts of our brain. It activates the emotional parts of our brain. When I watch pornography on a website,

I'm not interacting with that person at all. But some of the people that I've worked with, they'll tell me like, oh, if I quit OnlyFans, like this person won't be able to pay rent. I impact this person's life in a very meaningful way. I'm important to her. She messages me. She tells me, like, we talk, we really connect.

There's something really special here. And like, this is a real connection. And you can form real connections over the internet. So I think what's even scarier than AI is that people are basically experimenting. They're innovating. And for every 10 innovations, one of them makes things way more addictive. So things are absolutely getting harder. I think, though, and this may have to do it a little bit with my spiritual training.

But I think, like, there's basically a way that you can, can essentially like conquer desire. Like there are certain things that you can do that will make you highly, highly resistant to those addictive influences, the ability to control your perceptions, understanding how perception creates desire. Like stopping that process, I think like internally is quite effective. And I think basically people are okay if they learn these techniques well enough. And that would apply generally to desire? Like would that stop your desire for social media or unhealthy food. So these techniques were originally designed by like, you know, yogis to attain enlightenment.

So this is to conquer all desire. Like this is a fundamentally like understanding where desire comes from, how it shapes your thought process, and being able to control that process. Okay. I got to know what the techniques are. What can we do? A couple of big ones. So one is to understand the relationship between perception and desire. So we understand this in advertising.

really well. Like advertisers understand that if they bombard your perception, they will create desire. So our desire within us is evoked by what we see. A lot of people will think like, okay, so then what I should do is I should restrict what I see. This is why I think many years ago, you know, I don't remember if it was like the Puritans or who, but they developed tablecloths because they had this idea that like even a table leg will evoke lust. So if something evokes lust, let's cover it up. And that's still pretty prevalent in some parts of the world today, right? Where it's like, I remember once we had a priest of a particular sect of Hinduism, like, come to our house. And he was like, yeah, I'm not going to be in the same room as a woman.

Because like, if I see a woman, that'll evoke lust. Many years later, I was like, that's ridiculous. The whole point of being a Swami or a yogi is that you should be able to see things and not be controlled by them. So the first thing is to understand the relationship between perception and desire. And then once you do that, you can start to look at how perception creates desire. So as you go through your day, think about where your desires come from. If you consume a certain kind of thing, notice the kind of thoughts it creates in your mind. The next kind of general technique is notice what happens to your desire when you give into it. Giving into desire never works. If I want a cookie and I eat a cookie, that satisfies my desire, but then I want another one. And if I

eat another one, that satisfies my desire, then my desire kind of goes away until tomorrow when I want another cookie. And if I give into my desire today, if I give into my desire tomorrow, my desire will only grow the next day. So we see this all the time. I work with some people who are incredibly successful and they fall into this problem of, I made $10 million, what's next? Now I need 15. Now I need another promotion. So once you really look at the nature of desire, you'll see that really anything that you feed will grow. So if I give into my desires, my desires will grow over time. And they won't lead to happiness. Then the last kind of major thing that you have to stumble into is, okay, if I don't give into my desire, then I feel uncomfortable, then I don't like it. But watch what happens with

desire. I teach this technique to people who are addicted called urge surfing, which is when they have a craving for something, what happens if you don't give into that craving? So when you feel hungry, it goes away for a little bit, right? And then it gets recreated, technically. Hunger is maybe a bad example. Because the second time you feel hungry, it's because the same signals that created hunger recreating it. But anytime we have a desire, if you watch it long enough, it will disappear. If we look at urge surfing, basically with desires, if we weight them out, they will disappear. And once we wait it out, then it will start to shrink. So, you know, I work with people who have been addicted to alcohol.

And at the beginning, it's really hard. But over time, if they stop drinking alcohol, they'll tell me years later, I don't even feel like drinking it anymore. I don't even think about it anymore. So whatever we reinforce in the brain will grow and whatever we deny will actually shrink. So as you go through some of these processes of really understanding the nature of desire, how there's really no way to win if you really look at it. And then you have to practice some of these things like urge surfing, which is literally just watch an urge, it'll grow, it'll be like a wave that comes in, it'll peak,

and then it'll decline and it'll disappear. Is there something wrong with me if my urges don't disappear? Like I'm incredibly food motivated and my husband will make fun of me because sometimes I'll just get this vision of like, I want a Rice Krispy treat. And until I have a race, I'll think about it for like a day or two without it going away. What's going on there? Yeah. So you are training your brain in a very, very bad way. There's nothing wrong with you. Everybody is like this. So one of the strangest things that I'll tell people who are trying to quit pornography is resisting your pornography craving is the worst thing that you can do.

And this is something that, I know it sounds weird because then how do you get rid of it? So this is something that I learned when I was treating opioid withdrawal. So let's understand the nature of desire and the nature of craving and what's going on in your body, what's going on in your brain, then it'll make perfect sense. So if I'm addicted to opiates and I start to experience a little bit of withdrawal, what is happening here? There are cells in my brain that are starting to malfunction because I'm going through opioid withdrawal. So the pain fibers, the no susceptors in my, in my body, in my brain that experience pain, these things are downregulated by opioids, right? So like once the opioids disappear, I start to feel like whole body pain. This is what happens when you have opioid withdrawal.

So now there are cells that are sending signals to me and they're saying, hey, this is hurting, this is bad, this is dangerous. I start to sweat, I start to get diarrhea, I start to have all these kinds of malfunctions in my body. So my body is sending signals to my brain. Hey, dumbass, we need this stuff. And then I say, in my frontal lobes using my willpower, I say, no, I'm going to quit opioids. Then what happens is my body starts to suffer more. Pain fibers are activating even more. I have more diarrhea. I have more sweating. I start to feel nauseous. So my body is sending me desperate signals, desperate signals. And then finally, I crack and I use opioids. Now, what has my body learned from this? What do you think? That not having opioids is very painful?

Absolutely. And it's learned an even more dangerous thing. When it sends me mild signals of discomfort, does it get what it wants? No, it needs to send you major signals of discomfort. So when people resist opioids, if they end up, if they resist and end up giving in, you are training your body to be like, oh, hold on a second. This person doesn't, he doesn't listen when I speak at a regular volume. I need to start yelling. We see this with parents with ADHD, where they learn why do kids with ADHD get yelled at so much? Because parents learn that this kid's attention is focused on the Legos, focused on the Minecraft. If I see, speak at a regular volume, they're not going to be able to hear me. So I have to elevate the volume.

I need to send a bigger signal. So I would bet money that when you have, when you want to rice, crispy treat, you do your best to resist it and then eventually you give in. Yeah. And then your brain is like, oh, man, this chick, okay, like, she's slow to react. We got to intensify the signals. But if, if we keep at it, right? If we're persistent, and as long as we crave it for three days, she's going to crack. So you're training your brain, training your body to be persistent, to be more obsessive with food because it's learned, oh, if we forget about food, we don't get what we want. But if we're obsessional about it, if we keep on reminding her, then she's going to listen. So Dr. Kay, what do I, what do I do?

Ah, beautiful question. So two things I would recommend. I had a beautiful teacher who once taught me something about desire. And he said, if you're struggling with a particular desire, don't restrict yourself at all. Engage in it wherever you want and just do it with full awareness. So his particular problem is he was addicted to potato chips. And he'd like struggle for a while and he'd crack. This was in India where they like make him fresh on the street. So his teacher told him, just carry a bag of potato chip wherever you go. Whenever you feel like eating it, go ahead and have it. But watch yourself. Watch yourself with full awareness. And then you'll sort of, notice a couple of these things.

Like, okay, like, if I have the Twinkie now or if I have the Rice Krispy Treat now, what does this do to my desire? What happens the next day? Start to really give your brain additional forms of data. And then the other thing that I strongly recommend is when you resist,

I think most people, I don't know if this is going to make sense, they resist without awareness. You try to distract yourself. You try to make it go away. Don't try to make it go away. Watch it. Notice, okay, now I want the Rice,

Krispy treat. When I don't eat it, what happens? I want it more. I want it more. Then comes the important question. Is that okay? Is it okay to not give it the rice crispy treat? Now that an hour is gone by, don't fight with it. Just watch it. Just see. Experiment. Don't fight. And then an hour will go by. And if you're lucky, fingers crossed, you may take a couple of reps and you may need a little bit of practice. But at some point, you'll be like, okay, I resisted that for an hour. How is that affected my day? I didn't get a Rice Krispty treat today. Is my day worse? Am I enjoying my dinner just as much?

What is the impact of not fulfilling my desire? And then it may come back tomorrow. So I do this. I used to be addicted to playing video games. I still play video games. And the way that I do it was with awareness. So if I like, I don't play games if I don't feel like it, but there are some days where I'm like, you know what,

I really am exhausted. I really don't want to work today. And I give in. I give in with awareness. And I'm like, okay, Alok, you've been working for 13 days in a row. You get to take a day off. Go ahead and reschedule some of your meetings and then just like play some games and have some good time. So I think the biggest thing that people are missing is watching themselves as they struggle with desire.

We want to win and make it go away forever. How do I fix this? Right? That's what you're asking. How do I not have to struggle in this way anymore? The moment that you have that thought is the moment you're fucked. And the moment you say to yourself, and this is what I see with my patients who are addicted, take your choice of addiction.

The moment you say every day is going to be a struggle, there's no getting rid of this addiction. Hi, my name is all. My last drink was 32 years ago. I am an alcoholic. The moment that you accept that this struggle is going to be for the rest of your life, which makes you want to quake, which means like, oh my God, I want to be free of this. It is the being free of this that gets you to eat the Rice Krispy Treat in the first. place. You want this desire to be gone. I'm tired of fighting. I want to be free. No, don't be free.

Struggle. Struggle, struggle. Struggle, struggle. And every day you struggle, you're doing a push-up. Every day you struggle, you're going to get more swole. Every day you struggle, it's going to get easier. And then you will conquer it. Because now taking the stairs isn't a problem, right? Because I've gotten used to it. Your frontal lobes will be strong. They won't be exhausted by such simple things. Okay, I have a comment and two questions. Awesome. Let's do it. The comment is what I love about saying, I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to enjoy it and doing it with awareness and intention is it takes that shame layer out of it. On the days where you're like, I'm just going to play video games, you're getting so much more out of that than the days where we're playing video games,

but we're yelling at ourselves in our heads as we're playing video games. And I love that component of it. My first question is, does this method work even with things that are getting more and more engineered to be addictive? So with the potato chip example, food companies more and more are engineering food so that we never reach a satiety point. We need to eat more and more and more of them. We talked about it with porn. How does that play up against this as a technique? So here's why that is so important to understand. So when you eat a Rice Krispy treat, what effect does it have on your brain?

that also gives you dopamine and reduces your negative emotional circuitry activation. So all of these substances or add add addictions that we engage in, the moment that we add shame to the equation, we are intensifying the addiction. So brilliant insight. Once again, Liz, super impressed. Honestly, I'm saying that. I'm not just trying to glaze on you. Your ability to connect that is really important because that awareness, when you remove the

shame from the equation, you're removing fuel from the fire of addiction. So it absolutely is like spot on. Now, everything else is getting super addictive. Sure, like these kinds of yogic techniques work with potato chips, but do they work with 4K AI generated personalized pornography? I think yes. So this is where, you know, we'll see. But so far what I've actually found is that, I mean,

the reason we've grown is because in a world where everything is getting harder, certain bits of ancient wisdom about fundamentals, about how the mind works. Where does desire come from? What is the nature of willpower? So I don't like willpower at all. I try to minimize the usage of willpower. Once you understand the system of desire,

then you can start to make alterations, and it should work. So in my experience, I've had people who are very, very severely addicted. And not just things like pornography, I think another thing that we haven't talked about at all yet, and we don't need to, is marijuana. So marijuana addiction is getting way more difficult

because the potency of marijuana is increasing. The stuff is getting more addicting. But I do believe, and this is where we can talk about this a little bit more, but I really think that like once you truly understand a problem, once your level of awareness increases so much, it will conquer any problem. And I understand if a lot of people are skeptical of that, like I would be too, except I've had the experiences that I've had and I've worked with,

you know, thousands of people at this point and like the methods work. What do you think is wrong with trying to have willpower? I think it's effortful. Life should be easy. I'm like a lazy dude. Like, I want life to be easy. And I think this is a crazy thing. It's like, I mean, willpower is literally, it's exhausting.

Like literally, it's fatiguing. So if you understand the system, right? So I would say it's like willpower is like trying to push a car instead of using the gas pedal. Okay. It's like brute forcing your problems. And like my God, it's so exhausting. Yeah. You know, just understand where desire comes from, you know, sublimated.

And then like you're just chilling. And then my second question was, are there other techniques that we can do outside of the moment that we're trying to contend with the thing that we have desire for? Like, if we meditate, does that strengthen that muscle? Does physical activity? Like, are there other things we can do that would be helpful? Yeah. You can absolutely meditate. Meditation will absolutely help. I love meditation. Meditation will strengthen your frontal lobes. It'll give you more willpower. It will allow you to restrain your thoughts and all that good stuff. The kind of meditation you do, by the way, affects your brain in different ways. But I'm going to ask you, Liz, so you have an amazing health and wellness podcast. A lot of people listen to you. How many people, have you had that come on and talk about meditation? A lot. When they talk about meditation over and over and again, what percentage of your listeners meditate regularly because they've heard about the health benefits on it? I think a lot of people try. Very good. See, now we're getting somewhere. So I can come here and I could say, oh, Liz, everyone should meditate. You know, I learned this in India's secret technique. It's going to help everybody. But they don't meditate. So let's start with like why that is

before we sort of recommend meditation. This is kind of what I'm saying. So, so, you know, if you understand what the problem is, I could tell you, oh, this, like, this will help you, but unless you're willing to do it, unless you're able to do it, there's no point in offering that advice. Why don't we meditate? So you're asking, like, I'm going to sort of answer a couple of things by, okay, just bear with me, okay? I'm a bit nutty. So I'm going to teach a principle that I think is really important because you originally asked what's something else we can do. So I would say, don't worry about doing, first of all, worry about understanding. So if you think about things in your life. What's the difference between something being hard and something being easy?

If you know how to do it, it's easy. If you don't know how to do it, it's hard. And the biggest mistake that we make is when things are hard, we think we need more willpower. Oh my God, no. Just understand how to do it. Understand how it works. Once you understand how your kids work and what they need to go to bed. You know, I learned this thing really simply that if they miss their bedtime, it's so hard to put them to bed. And then I cannot. these dots and I was like, oh, so once their frontal lobes are completely exhausted, once their willpower is exhausted, they cannot restrain their impulses. They cannot force themselves to be still enough to fall asleep. So then they're wiggling, then they're getting up, now I need water, now I need

to go to the bathroom. The moment that I realize they have a window to fall asleep and they need enough frontal lobe energy, they need enough willpower left to be able to force themselves to lay down and be able to relax and then sleep is easy. So now I know that if we miss the sleep window, it's going to be a mess. But once we understand how the sleep window works, now I'm not pulling my hair out because why is it easy one day and why is it hard another day? We've been trying to get them to sleep for six months. They still won't sleep. That's because I don't understand what's going on. You with me? So let's understand something super basic. Let's talk about why we don't meditate, which will help us with whatever addictions we have. So we're going to learn about something called

of iraigya detachment. So our biggest problem is that, is not that we want things. It's that we're attached to the things that we want. It's that if we don't get what we want, we suffer. In the grand scheme of things, if you got a rice crispy treat six months ago or you didn't get a rice crispy treat, there's some amount of discomfort. But what really messes up in life is our attachments. We're like, should have gotten a rice crispy treat. Does that kind of make sense? I think it's kind of weird, but this is so hard to understand until you kind of get it. You can want things.

There's nothing wrong with wanting things. Being upset when you don't get them, that's where the suffering comes from. So in Buddhism, they call this the principle of two arrows, which is there's nothing you can do. Like life will send one arrow at you sometimes shit happens. Like you lose your job. But if you really look at your suffering, that's not from losing your job. There may be pain, there may be inconvenience, there may be pressure or stress.

But the real suffering comes from, oh, like, I shouldn't have lost my job. That other person deserved it more than I did. This is not fair. It is the attachments that we get to the things that we want. That's really where the problem arises. So if I were to ask you, Liz, if you don't get a Rice Krispy treat, what is it like? for you. I'm so attached to the things that I want. As you are talking, I'm running through a list of examples of things that I've attached to that I want. Say more. I just like my husband and I have

been struggling to figure out our housing situation. I have so many shoulds around like we should have a house that should feel this way, stuff with my career, stuff with my friendships. I just have this vision of a life that I feel that I should have access to. And I have so much negative self-talk about not having access to it. That's where your suffering comes from. Like, you see that it's not even, so here's the crazy thing. When you have really strong attachments, you'll be unhappy even when you get what you want. I have experienced that as well.

Right, which is like, hold on a second, bro. Like, what the fuck, man? You're telling me to chase this stuff. And even when I get promoted, the first thought, so I used to do a lot of work in finance, had a lot of patients who were like private equity investment bankers and things like that. Bonus time rolls around. I don't know if you're familiar with finance, but half of their compensation will be bonus.

So I get paid $250,000, which is plenty of money. And then I get paid $250 more as bonus. And people are like, yeah, let's go $500K. And then I find out that my coworker got $310. And it's like, wait, what? Now you're unhappy? So it is our attachment to things. Pain and pleasure is not attachment.

suffering and contentment, that's what we're talking about. So going back to this original question of why don't we meditate? Well, why should, like, why would you meditate? Well, because I want, I theoretically want these benefits of meditation 12 weeks from now when I meditate regularly. It's like, I don't actually want to meditate. I want to be someone who wants to meditate. That's what you're a tactic.

You wish you were a different person. Instead of being the person that you are, you try to set up all these things to meditate when you don't even realize you actually want to meditate. You don't want to spend 30 minutes sitting on your ass, letting your mind wander tortured in your head. You want to watch TV. And when you delude yourself about what you want, and I say this as a clinical psychiatrist, that's when you screw up your life. when you marry someone and you really don't want to because y'all have been in a relationship for seven years and everybody says it's such a great match when you delude yourself from who you are that's when you're going to have problems and if you're struggling to meditate take a big step

back and ask yourself why the fuck are you doing this in the first place like what are you looking for oh i want this and i want this and i want this like why do you want so much because if you want all of those things and you don't enjoy meditating, what your brain is going to do is listen to this podcast, listen to that podcast, get this supplement. Look for something else. Look for the easy way that gets you what you want. If meditation is a way for you to gratify desires in the future, once I meditate, then I'll be rich and then I'll go to the gym and then I'll do this and then I'll wake up on time, then I'll have less time on my phone. Think about what you're doing, you're trying to gratify your desires. And this is the reason it doesn't work because your brain is like, oh, we're in the business of gratifying desires. Is that what we're doing? Well, fuck, we don't have to meditate. We can just pull out our cell phone. We can gratify our desires right now. I'm genuinely confused how master class gets literally the absolute top people in every single field to teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly,

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So is the secret to meditation to find a meaning in it in the moment? Yes and no. I would say that you're kind of getting there. I would say that this is the first step to meditation. This process is actually the introduction to meditation. So take a step back and look at yourself and being like, what the hell is going on there? Then what you should do is be still. Don't try to meditate.

Just look within yourself. Just close your eyes and just see what comes up. Now, when you say to find some meaning to meditate, that'll absolutely from a neuroscience behavioral standpoint, the more purpose and drive that you have towards meditation, the more your behavior will change. But I would say that like the first step to it is instead of forcing yourself to meditate, look closely at why you don't want to. That is real meditation. Can you connect that to the porn conversation that we're having? Sure. So having worked with a bunch of people who watch a lot of pornography and come to me to learn meditation, you know,

I'll tell them to look within. Right? So, like, we'll, so I combine meditation a lot with psychotherapy and we'll sort of ask them, like, you know, like they'll say, I want to quit pornography. And I'll be like, why? It's ruining my life. What's it ruining? Well, I don't have this, this and this.

And it's like, well, it's not a good life, but I don't know that pornography is actually ruining it. I think if you take any given day of your life, chances are your life is like somewhat shitty. And pornography actually improves it. Right? So take a step back and really like look like if you're unsatisfied and what I really try to dig for is like when we meditate, there's a beautiful kind of mythological story where thousands of years ago there were the angels and the devils, the devas and the Asuras, and they were trying to find Ambrosia at the bottom of the ocean. And so what they did is they started

churning up the ocean. But the first thing that, came up was poison. So first, when we start mixing things around, the first thing that floats to the surface is poison, and then the ambrosia is underneath. So even in psychotherapy, like, I love this principle because it's like, before you get to the good stuff, you have to work through the bad stuff. The light at the end of the tunnel is at the end of a tunnel. There's a lot of period of darkness before you get to the light. So oftentimes when I'm working with pornography addicts and we're trying to meditate, they're trying to meditate to fix their problems. Instead, what I'll try to help them do is look at, understand, and accept the problematic state.

They're trying to run away from pornography. I want to fix everything, fix everything, fix everything. They're moving towards a state that is better. The reason that never works is because if you are trying to improve your life and that process is painful, you will never do it. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah, it does. And it really makes sense the idea that you think porn is ruining your life, but it's actually one of the best things in your life and how on earth would you quit it if it is one of the best things in your life, which makes me think that one of the best ways to deal with porn usage, overusage, is to look at the rest of your life and start there. And I, I want to kind of double down on this point because a lot of people don't realize that,

see, if you want your life to get better, but the path to that improvement is a lot of crap, you have to start by accepting the crap. You have to start by saying this is going to be hard. This is not going to be easy. Right? And you're spot on that, like, you know, with pornography, we take a serious look at our lives and I'll be like, bro, like, how do you feel about this? And then I want them to say, you know, we'll get there and they'll be like, I hate this.

And I'll be like, what do you ate about it? I hate that I have no reason to get up in the morning. And then I'll be like, okay, then forget about pornography. Let's start there. This is maybe not within the purview of this conversation. Beautiful. Do you think that we've gotten worse at dealing with discomfort? And is there a way to get better at dealing with that discomfort that's going to be on the

path to creating the life that we want? Absolutely. So, yeah. Like Liz, I mean, your instincts are spot on. So when I was starting Healthy Gamer, I sort of saw that there are a lot of people who are like struggling. And what I saw was that this isn't like depression. This isn't anxiety. There's like something fundamentally wrong with this person's life.

He'll come to me and be like, whoa, like, you know, what's wrong with you? I have depression anxiety. Everyone says like depression anxiety. Like everyone is just like mentally unwell. They have a little bit of addiction, a little bit of social media addiction, a little bit of pornography addiction, a little bit of pornography addiction, a little bit of like existential dread about the nature of the world. a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of addiction to Rice, Krispy Streets. And I'm like, what the hell is this? So I did a lot of research.

And I stumbled upon something called a transdiagnostic factor. These are things that predispose us to multiple mental illnesses, but are not mental illnesses. So one example of a transdiagnostic factor is perfectionism. Is perfectionism a mental illness? No. But if you are perfectionistic, will you be anxious? absolutely, because unless everything is perfect, something could go wrong. And if something could go wrong, that's the anxiety. Is that makes sense? If I'm perfectionistic, I'll also be depressed,

increases my risk of depression, because I loathe myself. Nothing I ever do is good enough for me. I have to be perfect. I have to be perfect. I have low self-esteem. I can't accept myself unless I'm less than perfect. So what we try to build at Healthy Gamer is these underlying roots that predispose us towards these diagnoses. And one of those transdiagnoses, factors is something really simple, distress tolerance. So when you as a human being do not feel good, what is your capacity to handle that? What we are seeing a whole scale decay of in our society is distress tolerance. We can't even take a dump without using our cell phone. There's a great study that showed that if you change your phone to gray scale, it reduces your usage by 20 to 30%.

When I tell my patients, hey, bro, change your or girl, change your phone to gray scale, what do you think happens, Liz? I feel like they probably don't want to do it. Yeah, so thankfully they do it, but then what do you think happens? You're right, they don't. Do they change it back to color? Absolutely. How long do you think it takes to change it back? Like 24 hours.

I don't know. Less? Oh, my God. You're so optimistic. Yeah. I've done it. I've done the gray scale and I've gone, I've been like, yeah, I go right back. Right. So this is what's going on. Like when things are not good for you, we need to change it. So here's what's happening. It's super scary. We are relying on our environment to dictate our internal state. So if I am hot, I turn on the air conditioner. If it's sunny outside, I put on a cap. If I don't like what you sent me over DM, I'm a fucking walk you.

I'm going to find somebody else. If I'm bored for, oh, my God, 100 seconds while I'm taking a dump in the morning, I can't handle that. Oh, my God. You see kids nowadays, everyone has a freaking iPad at the grocery store on planes. It's like, how did we even parent without iPads before? Yeah. we are training ourselves towards distress intolerance.

Like, I can live arguably a fully functional and hollow life sitting at home. I don't want to commute. I'm going to work from home. I'm going to get food delivery. I'm going to get a Roomba to do the cleaning for me. I'm going to get AI to map my day. We're, like, deconditioning ourselves. in the biggest amount of deconditioning I see,

and you'll kind of see this with kids nowadays. So I have a lot of people, you know, friends and stuff who are still in academia still. And it's amazing like how intolerant students are of any kind of difficulty. There's really is a generational problem where we're seeing like skyrocketing anxiety and depression and things like that.

But like kids, like I'm not trying to be like an okay boomer sort of guy here, but really like the capacity of people who are 10, 20 years younger than me. And I think this is a, it seems like it's getting a little bit better. This may be related a lot to COVID, but their capacity to tolerate distress is like shrinking. So now we've even gotten to the point of if words that you say hurt me, you need to stop talking. Now, this is important to understand. I'm not a fan of hate speech

or anything like that, but like I had a great conversation once with the head of security at MIT when I was working in the emergency room. They had brought a student of theirs. And, and, I was talking to him about, like, you know, students feeling safe. And he's like, my job isn't to make them feel safe. My job is to make them safe. There's a big difference. And as our tolerance for distress goes down, we may actually be okay. Things may be okay.

And if things are not okay, if there's an actual danger, things like that, then that's something we have to be cognizant of. But what I'm noticing more and more is we expect the rest of the world to accommodate our distress. Like this performance review is stressing me, out, I'm sorry I can't do performance reviews anymore. Yeah. Something that I hear from my audience all the time is like the world is getting scarier and scarier.

And do you think that's true or do you think that our ability to tolerate how scary the world is has decreased? I think both of those things are true and there's a third component. So I think in some ways the world is literally getting scarier. So I think we can look at the world in an object. way and see that there are certain indicators that the things are getting worse. So suicide rates are increasing. They never really went down, but they're increasing slowly. The rates of addiction are increasing. The rates of mental illness are increasing. I think there's a lot of uncertainty in the

world. Things like wealth gaps are increasing. There's a lot of uncertainty. Like, you know, there's dating and mating crisis. 50% of people under the age of 30 live with their parents now. we have all these like economic indicators, certain health indicators are getting worse. So like I think that things in many ways are getting scarier, like from an objective standpoint. I think it's also true that our capacity to handle a scary world is declining. So now what happens is as I rely on my environment to make me feel good, if the environment changes, I feel bad. This is why people feel out of control. Because I've conditioned myself to the way that I feel depends on the outside world.

And we see this so clearly with social media. If I make a post and it gets a lot of likes, I feel good about myself. If I make a post and it doesn't get a lot of likes, I feel bad about myself. Now the way that I feel about myself is not determined by me. I've lost control of my life. Literally. Not like some metaphor. It's like literally I don't, I'm not in control.

my self-esteem depends on how other people respond to this thing. This is why we use filters. This is why there's cosmetic surgery happening so much for especially women under the age of 30. So, you know, one of my bodies was recently telling me, someone asked him a question. He's a cosmetic surgeon. Someone asked a woman under the age of 30, said, how many years younger will this make me look? Like, I'm 29 right now. If I get the surgery, you know, will I look 24, 25? He said, no, you'll look like 29 who's had work done. That's what you. you'll look like. You won't look 24 or 25. Yeah. The last thing is that I think that the world was always a scary place, but our visibility into how scary it is is skyrocketing. So there's literally

a really interesting, I was about to say scary, neuroscientific mechanism where the more problems we see that we can do nothing about, the more we lose motivation. So if my brain is looking at this scenario and it's like, okay, I got to get some water from the well, I got to plant some crops and my wife is pissed at me. These are three problems that I can act on. So I can address 100% of my problems. Not saying they're easy, but then my brain is like, okay, I can handle this. The reason people feel so out of control, there's beautiful neuroscience research that basically backs this up to a T

is every time you see a problem that you can do nothing about, your brain looks at this and says, oh, we can't do anything. Yeah. We can't do anything. We can't do anything. Now, 40% of what you see, you can do nothing about. What does that do to your sense of self-efficacy? As your sense of self-efficacy goes down, this is the really damaging thing. As you believe you can no longer be effective, which makes sense because you're looking at famine and war and inflation, then that idea of who you are, you carry with you to every part of your life. Now your boss says, hey, you didn't do a great job on this work. That sense of lack of self-efficacy means, oh, shit, there's nothing I can do.

My boss dislikes me. And so what you'll see, you mentioned that a lot of people in your audience are between the ages of 40 and 60, and I will bet you money that they see this in the generation below them. They see that there's a whole generation of people who can improve their lives, but seem completely unmotivated or completely hopeless. So the biggest mistake that you can ever make, and I see this all the time with patients of mine who are in abusive relationships, the moment that the abuser convinces their partner that their efforts are futile, that's when you win. You win when the other person gives up.

So what's the antidote to that? Is it, I hear from all these people, they're like, I don't want to bury my head in the sand. I want to know what's going on in the world. But is the idea that every time we're having these exposures to what's going on in the world, we're decreasing our sense of agency and self-efficacy. So how do we, how should we approach that? Great question. So you say, I want to know what's going on in the world.

Why? I think that people feel a certain sense of responsibility, especially if they're in a place of privilege in their life. Okay. So what is your responsibility? One, I think there's this idea of responsibility just via amplifying stories and information that people feel might be suppressed and they feel like that information needs to be out there.

and so they feel like they need to intake that information to amplify it. Maybe also to say this is what's going on. So they're trying to in their brain grapple with like, where is my agency and what can I do? And they don't want to be a bad citizen and have things they don't agree with happen. Okay. Beautiful answers. So I think there's a couple of things going on here.

The first is that we've got to be super careful about when our brain, gets addicted to something the way that we subjectively rationalize it. So I have this vague, abstract sense of responsibility. But that's not the reason that I scroll through things. The reason that I scroll through things is because platforms have figured out that the more that they can ping pong my emotions, the more engaged I'll be. And this sense of responsibility is wonderful because you see, oh my God, there's tragedy over here, tragedy over there.

someone's got to do something. I'm a good person. I got to do something. Let me share it. So I saw a really fascinating study about fundraising. There is an inverse correlation between someone sharing a story and donating to a cause. So in the mind, this is so scary. In the mind, when I shared something, that means I've done my part.

That's exactly what you said, right? I've done my part. Now I've shared. What have you shared? I've made somebody else's life a little bit more pessimistic by sharing all these horrors. What's the actual action that's being taken? So this is where I say take a step back, very practically reduce your social media exposure, localize it to a particular time in the day.

You don't want to be getting bombarded with this stuff for five minutes, 15 times a day. So it's a really fascinating study that they did on pain control. Someone's pain correlates with the number of times they get asked, how bad their pain is. If a nurse comes in every three hours asks you, how's your pain? Your pain's fine. If a nurse comes in every 15 minutes, how's your pain? How's your pain? How's your pain? How's your pain? Pain gets worse. Interesting. Then look at yourself, right? Why are you looking at all this stuff? Oh my God. These people are so terrible what's happening. This is happening. It's so terrible. It's so terrible. Oh, my God. That cat is so cute. Oh, did you see what that cat is doing? Oh,

my God, things are so terrible. That's what our experience of social media is. It ping flongs our emotions. I also wonder if we have this self-image of ourselves as even on an unconscious level, lacking that agency and efficacy, and we're almost unconsciously reinforcing it, if that makes sense? Yeah. So I think that that's also true. Like we sort of have this, we see so much, right? And we're not really doing anything. Then we feel guilty.

And so we spend time on social media. So there's absolutely some weird unconscious. stuff going on. There's so much like virtue signaling now too, right? And we sort of call it virtue signaling because it's not real virtue. It's virtue signaling. So I think if you have people who feel a sense of responsibility towards the world, I'd say pick your corner, your tiny little thing and actually do something. What if they don't feel like there's anything they can do? I mean, a lot of people, for instance, feel very freaked out by the political situation or the environmental situation and they don't feel like they have any agency in in those bigger things.

Great, great point. So I think two things. One is that a lot of people confuse agency with outcome. Agency is what you do. Outcome is what happens. So I know this is going to sound kind of weird, Liz, but what agency do I have? I mean, you have agency and continuing to have this conversation with me. You could walk away from it. You have agency and what you do next with your life, what you say next, what you eat next, who you talk to next, where you donate your money. Is that any different from any other human being on the planet? I think you probably have more agency than people with less privilege. In what way? You mean in terms of financial resources? Financial resources, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, freedom of time.

So I think some of that stuff is absolutely true. So I've, come to appreciate as I work, as I've worked with more and more women, many of the things that will work for me simply won't work for them. They just can't get away with it. Right. So if I'm like, oh yeah, your boss is like being mean to you, like go tell them that they're being mean to you. And it's like, that doesn't work. So there's absolutely an element to that. But I think we've got to be super careful about this like specter of privilege. So I think fundamentally, I think that in terms of, I would say, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe this is a masculine perspective, that, most of us have roughly the same agency. So the agency that I exercise that got me to where I am today

is I had a $60 web camera and I had an internet connection and I had a PC. And I turned it on and I started streaming and I opened my mouth. And that is accessible to many people. The impact that I have is a little bit different. But I think this is where we get to a couple of other important things about agency. See, when you say, I can't do anything about the broader political climate. You may not be able to. Neither can I. But our agency is not in what we accomplish. It's in what we do, what our actions are. So two years ago, I went to the White House and I tried to advocate for $2.5 billion in increased funding for training of addiction professionals because I saw pornography addiction on the rise. I said, we need like way more money to like help professionals

deal with these problems. And I was there, along with a lot of people who do not have nearly as much privilege. I was the only doctor there out of like 130 people. Most people were just like ordinary citizens, not to say that, like there weren't medically trained at all, handful of social workers. And these are just people whose lives addiction had touched. And when we went into a senator's office, we sit down, we each share our stories. We can all do a lot. And here's the really beautiful thing. our sense of agency in life is not based on what we accomplish. It's on the effort we exert. So when you try something, when you give it your all, that's what makes you feel empowered, not succeeding.

So if you try and fail, you will still have a greater sense of self-efficacy than somebody who did not try at all. 100%. So this is something that people don't understand. There's a bunch of neuroscience to back this up. agency is not about success. It is about self-direction. I said I was going to do this. I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to give it my all. And you may have like noticed people like this who can never have played a game of tennis in their life and you're like, hey, do you want to play tennis? And they're like, sure, they can suck at it and they feel great. And we envy these people.

Because if you ask me, do you want to play tennis? I'm going to be like, oh my God, I suck at tennis. I don't want to look bad. The other really crazy thing, this is what I've been lucky if you want to talk. I don't know about privilege, but luck I definitely have a ton of. The thing that I've gotten really lucky about is I learned something, which I had heard before but never really understood, which is that no snowflake believes it's responsible for the avalanche. So people will look at me, you know, I mean, like I get approached. I want to say 80% of the time I leave the house, someone will walk up to me,

and they'll be like, hey, Dr. Kay, you've helped me so much. Like, cool, whatever. You know, like, I'm glad. But like, I'm just one human. And there's a lot of people listening to me right now that may think, oh, like, Dr. Kay can do this because it's Dr. Kay. Like, y'all don't, I mean, you guys are seeing this version of me. Like, but I guarantee you that when I take a dump, like, I wipe my ass the same way you do. You know, I get frustrated with my kids.

I'm, I studied for seven years in India to become a yogi. And I'm a Harvard-trained psychiatrist. And I still get pissed at my kids. I'm an ordinary human being. Don't elevate me because the most. moment that you put somebody else on a pedestal, you lower yourself. We're all human. We're all capable of a lot. And what I have seen time and time again, whether it's someone who's got a CEO of a billion dollar company or a degenerate gamer who's 27 living at home, jerking off all day,

the moment that you try with every fiber of your being to accomplish something, you will be amazed at what you're capable of. You will feel so much better from it. You don't have to say, fix all the world's problems. You go to a soup kitchen and you serve meals to someone. Forget about soup kitchen. I mean, that's such a common thing. But I want you to think about the moments in your life, Liz, and if people are listening there, how impactful a small gesture can be.

I had a patient once who was going to commit suicide. Before she committed suicide, she wanted to get her favorite candy bar one last time. So she went to a grocery store, bought the candy bar, was going to eat it, was going to go home and kill themselves. The person at the counter says, hey, how are you doing today? Oh, yeah, I love this candy bar. It's really great. Have you tried this drink?

Just a very small interaction. And somehow that was enough. The person who's at the grocery store, I'm sure, has no idea the impact that they had on their life. That's all this person needed. So we sort of think about, oh, my God, the world has big, big, big, big, big problems. And yeah, it does. I'm not saying it doesn't. but don't undersell yourself on the impact that you can have on a single human being.

You don't have to save the world. Just like try to make one person's and just think about, you know, the times in your life where a human being like if it's a waiter or a waitress who notices, they're like, oh, hey, like it looks like you're not enjoying your food. Can I get you something else? It makes such a big difference. Yeah. And if we get caught in this vicious cycle where we stop engaging with the world because it's hard,

because it's scary, then we miss those opportunities to actually create change. Absolutely. And then we get stuck in one of these cycles where we're like, we're not doing anything about it, and then we feel guilty, and then we're like sharing this tweet and stuff like that. And then we're also like watching the porn and trying to push the dopamine buttons and other ways, and we're back in the vicious cycle we talked about earlier. Absolutely. Beautiful way to tie things together.

How can we build our tolerance for discomfort? What are some pragmatic action steps we can take? What a great question. This is the least favorite question from our community. They hate it when I talk about distress tolerance. So the simplest way is to tolerate distress. So oftentimes people don't want to tolerate the distress that they really don't like. So like for you, for example, I wouldn't say, don't start with a Rice Krispy Treat.

You know, so I think sometimes we try too hard to fix our problems instead of fix the skill that we, need to level up. So I see this a lot when people are dealing with like narcissistic parents and they're like, I need to learn how to deal with narcissists. But you don't have to start with your parents because that's so much like charged with emotions and love and lack of love and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, I really like things like hot yoga or cold showers or stuff like that. Like for me, a big part of it is like just jumping into the water. So I like speaking of privilege, sometimes I'll go to places that have access to a cold plunge. So I think there are like little things that you can do where you can really push yourself. One of my favorite things to do to build up

distress tolerance or Vyagia or detachment is for a period of about a few years, I never ordered what I wanted on the menu. Your face is shocked. Like everyone's like, oh my God, that sounds terrible. Like, it's, I didn't say I ordered the worst thing on the menu. It's like, if I want this thing, I'm just going to pick something else. That was my rule. It just is so. counter to how long we all stare at the menu, trying to be like, oh, what's the exact most satisfying thing I can get? Let me ask you this. How do you think it affected my enjoyment of the meal when I stopped ordering what I wanted on the menu? I imagine it increased it based on Olympic gold medal syndrome, which is like when we say this thing is going to make us happy, often we end up

less happy as a result because that thing doesn't bring us the happiness that we thought it would. So my experience is that it made no difference. So I just want you to think, think about, you know, like, if your favorite thing on the menu, they're like, oh, we're out, and you get something else. It's not like your meal is ruined. Like, most restaurants have pretty good second options. And that's when I sort of late, and then it was like awesome because I was like, oh, crap, life is not going to be ruined if I don't get what I want. The moment I understood that, then you can tolerate a lot of distress. This is bad, but for how long? Right? This flight sucks. Yes, it does suck. But for how long? Something weird happened. So as I started, you know, really focusing on

being uncomfortable in flights. I love laying down. I'm like two or three nights ago I was laying down with my daughter. And I was like, you know, sometimes I just like to imagine what it's like to be on a flight before I get into bed. And we take bed for granted. But holy, like, you know, can you like, you know, like, it's like laying down in your bed every single day is such a privilege. Being on a bus, like back when I was like broke and dating my girlfriend who is now my wife and she was in New York and I was in Boston, I'd take this $15 like bus from child. of town so uncomfortable. One time there was a crate of chickens in like the seat. Like, you know, this is, and like that just really makes you appreciate things. So I think in little ways,

I would start to put yourself in uncomfortable situations. And if you want a great start, number one is don't order the things on the menu. If people want to get hardcore, I'm going to give you a second one that they're going to hate way more. Okay. Second one is don't take your phone into the bathroom ever again. I know it's more sanitary. but I think a lot of people are going to balk at that. Yeah, they're going to hate it. Third one, they're going to hate even more. You ready for it?

Yeah. Next time you're at a restaurant and the waiter, waitress asks you, how was your meal? You give them an honest answer. That's the one that people hate the most. If you didn't like it or it was a little bit undersalted or this thing was a little bit overcooked or this thing was a little bit undercooked, you share that. Man, it mortifies people. They hate the idea of doing that.

I'm processing. That's like my worst nightmare. Yes. So tolerate it. The people, the waiter or waitresses don't mind. They want to know, right? You don't have to be an, I'm not saying being it Karen. I'm saying like, hey, like, oh, yeah, the chicken was great. The fries seemed kind of cold and oily. But I still want to pay for them. Please don't tell the chef. Don't say that. Don't say that. That's the distress. Do you see what you're doing there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The distress is making you open your mouth. You have to make sure that they're okay. No, they asked you a question. You answered it. So be it, tolerate. that distress. Okay. Does tolerating distress in one area impact our ability to tolerate distress in other areas? And specifically, is there some sort of neurological mechanism that we are literally strengthening in some way? Yes. Man, I love these questions. So the answer is yes and no. So distress tolerance is a transdiagnostic factor that we can roughly level up. The thing, though, is in the pornography addiction community, they're big fans of cold showers.

So they'll take cold showers. It builds up willpower. So here's the key thing about distress tolerance. Once you habituate to one thing, it no longer builds distress tolerance. So the whole point is that once I get used to taking a cold shower, it no longer builds distress tolerance. So generally speaking, what you want to do is just whatever it is that makes you uncomfortable, lean into that a little bit.

And generally speaking, the more diverse we are, the more our distress tolerance will increase. One of the key factors for like individuation and developing good self-esteem is stretching your capacity. And so if we look at things like dementia prevention, like learning a new instrument will prevent dementia, learning chess will prevent dementia, but you have to keep learning new things. It's the novelty of it that really strengthens things the most. One of the other reasons that I wanted to do this episode is because I'm feeling more and more like porn is both a cause but also a symptom of the world that we're living in. And I've heard you say before that we're in the middle of a mass extinction event. Who is going extinct and how is that happening?

What's going on? Yeah. This is like, you know, kind of scary, but like literally what we're seeing is so what is natural selection, right? So natural selection is in a particular environment, there are certain adaptations that will lead to successful offspring and certain adaptations that won't. So I think that we're going through, we literally are going through a natural selection event, a mass extinction event, which is COVID. So prior to COVID, we lived in a world where I fall into this camp.

Post-COVID, I would have never had kids, I think. I would have been screwed. So I lived in a world where I was socially anxious growing up, didn't know how to talk to girls, went to college. The world that I grew up in was in person enough that it forced me into uncomfortable situations where I learned how to socialize. So avoidant was not an option for me in terms of socialization. It probably took me about three or four years of forced contact with other human beings through things like university classes and and stuff like that, where I sort of like learned how to socialize, learned how to talk to girls, et cetera. So I think what we're starting to see now is that there are some human beings who are very risk-averse, some human beings who are neurotic,

who now have options to never, so basically what happened in my case is I was forced into distress tolerance. I was forced in the situations that I was uncomfortable in that sort of forced me to kind of grow up. Now something really scary has happened where people are not being forced into anything. And if you look at people who talk about dating, what you'll find is that there's like a big discrepancy.

Some people will be like dating is actually not that bad. You just have to put yourself out there, just sign up for apps or go to beat up groups. Like this is, I had trouble. I did this. Now I'm fine. And other people are like, it's impossible. I read this study on the Galapagos Islands

and Darwin's original paper on the Finches. And I kind of asked myself, like, if Darwin's finches were on Twitter and one of them has this kind of beak where they can, like, crack a nut, and the other one has a beak where they can get into like some little gap and eat, eat an insect, if Darwin's finches were on Twitter, what would their dialogue look like? One of them would be like, yeah, eating's not a problem. There are seeds all over the place, like, not a big deal. And they always like, I can't find food.

It's impossible to find food. Like, all the bugs are dead. That's what I realized. It's like that's what we're seeing, is that there's two groups of people, some people who are not capable of adapting, their natural adaptations, the way that they're wired, their personality system is designed to thrive in the current environment. And there's a lot of people like myself who the social structure of society gave me a thousand opportunities to like catch up to people who are more social.

But those opportunities are gone now and these people are like absolutely struggling. So we see this, like, you know, a lot of times we'll call them incels. But there are a lot of people who are struggling to date, struggling to like, and literally, I realize there's like a crop of people. The age of, you know, first sexual activity is decreasing, I mean, increasing. So, you know, people are having sex later and things like that. People are forming relationships later. Rates of marriage are going down, you know, birth rates are like down to like 0.67 in some parts

of the world. So if we literally look at what's happening, if the births of, birth rate is 0.67. That means for every, I think, one person, 0.67, we're having 1, you know, 0.67 children, which means one out of three people is, like, not procreating. And so those people will literally, their genes will leave the gene pool. And the other kind of weird thing about this is like, I know this is going to sound insane, but I kind of sometimes wonder, I think a lot about, about the subjective nature of what we experience and what's going on in our brain. So a really good example of this is boredom, when our nucleus accumbens craves dopamine, the subjective feeling of that is

boredom. When our glucose levels are low, the subjective feeling of that is hunger. Do our genes know when we're dying out? And what does that feel like? So is there some part of our brain that detects and keeps track of the fact that are the chance for us to like pass along our genes, the chance for us to have kids, can we actually feel that in some way? And what I really am starting to wonder, I don't know, I don't really have any data to back this up, but sometimes when I just sit with these people, I get this existential desperation. These are people who feel like when I sit with them, what it feels like is this is a human being who is dying out. Like that's what it feels like. That's the language that I would use. This person, their life is shrivel.

They're shriveling into nothingness. They're 35 years old. They've never had a girlfriend. They've got some relatively dead end job. They're not doing anything. They have no joy in life. They're just withering away. They're waiting.

They're basically using dopamine, drugs, porn, and video games to advance the clock until they die. That's what their life has become. If a man listening does not want to be part of this mass extinction event, what is in his power. I think so much. So I think this is where there's a big difference between Darwin's Finches and human beings, which is that like our fate is not nearly as determined by the circumstances of our birth and even our situation now. Human beings are very rare. We have the capacity of self-awareness. And the moment that we have the capacity of self-awareness, we can change. So I think this

is where like it's so tricky because what a lot of people will do is they'll be like, okay, if I have trouble finding a girlfriend, what do I need to do to find a girlfriend? And people say, go to the gym. They'll say like, you know, fix your style, do this, do this. And a lot of people, this is what's really scary is they'll check all the boxes. They'll quote and quote, do everything right. And they still don't find what they're looking for. So this is why literally we have like a whole YouTube channel. But I think a big part of this is that a lot of people don't realize the ways in which they sabotage themselves. So oftentimes there's a great principle in psychiatry,

which Freud kind of talked about called the repetition compulsion. And there are certain subconscious things that we do that wind us up in situations over and over and over again. Just to give you a quick example of that. So if someone has a fear of abandonment, like someone with like borderline personality disorder, I'm afraid you're going to abandon me. So what am I going to do?

It's the thought of you abandoning, oh, Liz, we're so close. I love you so much. I don't ever want you to leave. It'll hurt so much when you leave. So what I'm going to do is push you away. I'm going to push you, right? Because I want to make sure you're not going to abandon me. And I push you away and you're like, no, I don't want to abandon you.

I'm committed to this relationship. And then I push you away and you're like, I'm committed to this relationship. I'm not, you're going to abandon me. You're going to break up with me. You're going to break up. No, I'm never going to break up with you. And I keep on doing this over and over again until I drive you insane. And then you're like, I can't handle this shit anymore.

How many times do you need to hear from me that I'm not going to abandon you? I'm done with this, and then you leave. So we end up creating the same circumstances. For men, what I see in dating, this is what's so scary about the red pill stuff. Everyone thinks that like this red pill stuff is an antidote to your loneliness. I think it reinforces your loneliness. So here's what I see. When people go down the red pill rabbit hole, I think there's a lot of good stuff there.

People there will now tell you to go therapy. but oftentimes what they do is they'll say, okay, women are transactional. Women want a high alpha male. They just want money. They just want this. So now as a human being in my mind, I have this script. Women are just looking for my money. When I go on a date and I have a transactional view of a relationship and I sit across

from someone who does not have a transactional view of the relationship, things don't work out. They don't like me. I don't like them. This person is looking for genuine connection. Deep down, that's what I want, but I have all this transactional view. When I come to a date, thinking in a transactional way, if I buy or enough stuff, I'm going to get laid. That's the way that they approach it. And so then what happens is everyone who's looking for a long-term committed relationship doesn't select for that.

And what I end up with is people who are harmonizing with me. I end up with the women who are transactional. And when they view things transactionally, and I view things transactional, there's harmony, and then something really scary happens. Now I get data. I get evidence that my view is correct.

So if you talk to people who are like red pillars, right, they'll be like, oh, yeah, like everyone says this is true. It's only true because of the way that you're approaching it. It's a selection bias problem. You're biasing the way that you're approaching the study. So I think really like spending some time, introspecting, getting a little bit out of that red pill rabbit hole, really like trying to understand the experiences of women.

I think a huge thing that someone can do is have a friend who is a woman. That's huge. To be able to understand that women are not women, they're people. Y'all aren't bots that you have some like script in your head that dictates what you do. Every one of us, men, women, all human beings on the planet are, own unique blend of like psychological conflicts and like desire polls and things like that. And the more that they start to see people as humans, and there's one other last interesting thing that if you look at people who like panic about this natural selection stuff, they tend to be

scientifically they're abstract thinkers. So they think in terms of generalizations and decontextualize. They don't think in terms of individuals. And the more that you can change your abstract thinking like, oh, this is happening, there's a mating crisis because you can't fix a mating crisis. But a mating crisis is not, how do I make this relationship work? That's the question they should be asking. What would you say to the women out there who rightfully are like, where are all the men? Where are all the datable men? So a couple of things. One is, I know this is going to sound kind of harsh, but let me ask you this, Liz, if a man, if a man is, man walks up to you and says, where are all of the good women? What would you say to them?

I would say I've got 17 friends for you. Okay. You're much more charitable than I am. So I would say that when men walk up to me and, I mean, the people don't walk up to me, but like, you know, if I'm engaging with someone, you know, if they say, like, where are all the good men? I'd say, like, look in the mirror first because maybe you're doing something that is not attracting good men. And I know it's kind of harsh. Like, I'm not trying to be a dick here. but like, you know, this is where, like, if I look at the, I'm a big fan of, like, personal responsibility, and this, by the way, is very masculine. This is the way that we're raised.

But I would say, like, you know, if you're having trouble finding good men, first, like, look at yourself and really think about whether a good man would be attracted to you. And this is not an issue of being like, and then a lot of women will default to things like appearance and stuff like that. But what I tend to find is, is, you know, if you talk to dudes about, like, what kind of women they like. There's a lot of like things like neuroticism or drama orientation, things like that that like will really steer a lot of men away. So I know it's kind of a dick answer and I'm sure your audience doesn't like it. But like, you know, there are good men out there. And the first

place to start is by looking at yourself. But you also said that there's less good men out there because of the societal belange that's taking a lot of players out of the game. Absolutely. So I'm not done. So that's the first place. So that's where I start. So anytime I have a problem in my life, I look to myself first. But what a lot of people are going to hear from that, which makes sense because I should have been better at answering it, you see what I just said there? I took responsibility for my answer.

Is that that's not the whole equation. So I think that the other problem is, like you said, there are a lot of people who would have become good men who are now kind of lost. They've gone down the red pill rabbit hole. The total population of available good men is shrinking, absolutely. The last thing is that I think a lot of them get taken. The number one rule of habits is to make the things that you want easier and the things that you don't want harder. Yet so many of us want to eat healthier, but so few of us actually take the steps to make eating healthier easier.

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at one skin.c.com slash Liz. Again, that's 15% off at oneskin.com with code Liz. So I think people who have like secure attachment are more likely to, you know, bond earlier in life. The other thing that I do, I know this sounds insane, But the other thing that I do is I, you got to take this with a real grain of salt, but like, I'd give bad men a chance. I got to be precise about what I mean about bad.

But I'm noticing that both men and women tend to make selections of who they want to date based on things that have nothing to do with the correlation of a successful relationship. So patients come to me for all kinds of things, not always relationship problems. I noticed that most of my patients who were happily in relationships had a pretty big red flag early on in life. So my wife and I started dating, I was broke. It took me five and a half years to graduate from college. I had a 2.5 GPA.

When I was 26 years old, what was I doing with my life? I had applied to 80 medical schools and got rejected from 80. That's who I was. Not particularly handsome. No money. No prospects. 2.5 GPA. No job.

Very little work. experience, I was a complete failure. Like if my daughter wanted to date 26-year-old me, I'd be like, this is a terrible idea. And so what I tend to find is that most good relationships start with red flags. And this is the reason, I think. So when you have a red flag early in the relationship, when you have a problem early in the relationship, it shows you how this person responds to problems. So, like, it blew my mind how my wife was never like, this is a good, this is terrible. You got to get your shit. Not once.

I was fucking living at her place. She had a job. She started working at the age of 16. She's worked ever since. She was supporting me. I was, like, studying and playing video games and just being a little bitch, honestly. And I have no idea why she tolerated that. But then one day I woke up and I was like,

holy shit, she deserves better. She has done so much for me. I got to get my shit together. This is insane. And like, I woke up and I was like, I got to get my shit together. And then from 2.5 GPA, ended up getting to med school, grinded at the fuck out, wound up at Harvard, won two awards from failing out of college to winning two awards for academic achievement in medical school. And I thank my wife for it. Like, she believed in me when no one else did.

And it's not that like that was, that I had that potential. I grew up, I woke up and I was like, she deserves better. I, and it's not the person I was. It's like, I want to be this for her. How do we end up with that versus another child that we're doing all the mental load? We're doing the emotional labor for. We're bringing home the bacon. Like, how do we end up with that situation?

It's terrible. It's so scary because you're spot on that like, I know people who are listening to that. I'd be like, I tried being supportive of this person. They never got the fuck up. So my guess is that, you know, I showed some signs. of self-efficacy. Yeah, self-efficacy, like taking responsibility, like moving forward in some way.

And I think this is, it's a great point because I think there are something, so sometimes when we support people, what we really do is enable their bad behavior. And I think you've got to be really, like, critical of that. And really think about, okay, does this person need my support? Do they, or am I enabling bad behavior?

So the analogy that I kind of use here is, you know, if a patient of mine has a mental illness and their partner wants to divorce them, it's interesting how I'll be on like, like kind of either side of that. So if the partner wants to divorce them, what I'm kind of brutal, I'll tell my patients, I'm like, look, bipolar disorder is not your fault. But taking your medication, showing up to therapy, meditating every day, taking melatonin when you travel internationally, that is your fault. So is this person taking responsibility? And I think, you know, that, There's so many things about so many women that I've worked with that really will be like dating men children.

It's like, and this gets so bad when they have kids. So like you have your first child, you don't have your first child. Suddenly you have two kids. You know, I don't mean to blame women. But I think that you should look at yourself in the mirror and really, and things are getting harder because there are fewer good men out there. And be really careful about your selection criteria. because what makes a successful relationship is not anything that you can detect on an app.

When you start filtering based on height, when you start filtering based on income, you know, that's like you're just shrinking your pool a lot. Which is already smaller than it has historically been. Absolutely. And I think when we look at the science of how human beings form relationships, it's like organic, right?

You have to give yourself enough opportunities to be with someone. where you start to form like an organic, like oxytocin-based, vasopressin-based bond. And oftentimes what I see a lot of both on men and women is like we don't even give people a chance. And there are plenty of women that I've met who give way too many chances, right? And that's where you really have to self-reflect.

Am I giving too many chances or am I giving not enough? And I've seen this time and time and time again. You can do everything right in life and still get fun. Does that mean you should do nothing? No. This is where I'll leave you with one last thought, which is a last principle from yoga, which is what I try to do, which is karma far. Garmah means action, farr means fruit.

As a human being, you are entitled to your actions, not the fruits of your actions. So what you should focus on is not finding the right guy, but doing the right thing. So am I socializing? Am I working on myself physically? am I working on my self-esteem? Am I working with a therapist to figure out what my patterns are?

Am I giving people a chance? Am I judging people too prematurely? You should do everything within your power to try to make yourself the best possible person. And then the rest is up to random chance, entropy, or God. I want to end us with zooming out on the porn question a little bit because this episode was born from me really feeling

like I switched in my opinion of porn. always been like, I think that there's empowered ways to do it. I love people being able to get in touch with their sexuality, especially women in ways that they might not otherwise. But I think because of this algorithmic component, all the stuff that we've talked about, I've started to think, is there, is porn super net negative for society? So I'm curious at this point, do you think that porn is more net positive, net negative, or net neutral for society? I mean, I think it's got to be net negative. But I think that if it wasn't porn, it would be something else. You kind of said that, you know, porn is a cause and it's a symptom of a problem and it's a cause of a problem. So I think

what we're really seeing is that in any given environment, certain kinds of pathologies will float to the surface. So if I scratch my arms a lot and I develop, you know, breaks in the skin, I'm going to get a skin infection. If I eat the wrong food or like my gut microbiome is messed up, I can get a GI infection. So we have some systemic things going on in the world today where I think basically like porn is like an infectious agent. It's like a cancer that has suddenly showed up and is now like ballooning out of control. So I think that porn causes an immense amount of harm in today's society. I think a lot of this stuff about the benefits of porn are really overblown. Even for women? No. So there are benefits to porn. So if you look at studies specifically on women, you find that women who watch pornography as part of their relationship experience greater sexual satisfaction in sad relationship. So pornography can oftentimes be used. Here's like one of the great benefits of porn. It's a great conversation starter. So if a lot of people are like nervous about sharing what they want to do with their partner. And so pornography kind of gives people and,

excuse to be like, hey, would you ever be interested in trying that? You know, I think the likelihood that porn is damaging for women is way lower than men. But if you ask me, like, on balance, like, I think that, yeah, I would say it's a net negative. If you were going to give a porn prescription for somebody who just wanted to, like, have the optimal situation. If they didn't have a problem, they were like, what is the best way to approach this? Would you say no porn? Would you say only porn in relationships? Would you say only porn in relationships, but it has to be a VHS and separate from this algorithmic world. What would you say? I would say that you should watch pornography to do what pornography is supposed to do and nothing else. So the problem with pornography is when we start using it as a substitute for other things.

So when we start using it for emotional regulation, when we start using it to fill up the empty times in our day. So if you want to use it as part of like a healthy sexual relationship, go for it. If you want to use it for some amount of physical arousal because you need some sexual release, I think that's fine too. But there's a big difference between like sexual release and management of emotions. There's a big difference between using it as a substitute for a relationship and using it as a part of a relationship. So the same is true for things like alcohol or marijuana, right? So alcohol should be used in the way that I think it's quote unquote design.

So if you're getting married and you want to celebrate, if you're going to a bachelor party and you want to get hammered, like, I think that's more appropriate. The moment we start using alcohol to manage our emotions because I have, oh, today was a hard day at work. Let me go to the bar and have a couple to like calm down. So I think generally speaking, when we start to use pornography to make the negative things in our life better to move from negative 100 to zero, that's when it really becomes damaging. And you're spot on that, Generally speaking, the risk of using algorithmic pornography probably makes it more dangerous. I think that that stuff is outweighed by this fundamental emotional addictive stuff. Would you recommend people stay off of only fans because of that potential for a parisocial relationship? Or do you think that I've also debated this because I'm like, the women are directly getting the money, which I really, really like in how, yeah, parasitic porn can be. I do not recommend people get off on a platform as of yet anyway. So I think it's like the real answer is not as simple as getting off or on of a platform.

I think it's to really understand that OnlyFans has a greater amount of vulnerability, right? Because it's activating parisocial circuits. It's activating emotional circuits. You know, you can look at this from like sort of a porn is a predatory industry and power imbalances. And OnlyFans empowers female creators. I did an awesome interview with Sasha Gray. I don't know if you know who she is a couple years ago. And it was one of my favorite interviews of all time.

And I've worked with many people who are sex workers, only fans, creators, things like that. So I don't think it's like neither good nor bad. I think everything in the world is what it is. And once you understand what it is, like, is it okay to punish your kids or not punish your kids? Like, that depends. Like a punishment is a punishment.

It's going to have a particular effect. I don't think you can separate a platform form from a person in terms of the health of it. Does that kind of make sense? That does make sense. Do you think that there's ethical porn or do you think that it's always born from somebody having less options, highlighting lack of privilege, etc, etc? I mean, I don't know to be like ethics is not so medical ethics I understand. But I think there are a lot of people who like talk about porn as an industry and is an ethical industry and stuff like that. And I'd say like, I'm a psychiatrist. So, you know, the lens that I really look at is a human.

What would you say to a woman who felt that the men she was interacting with, whether it was by dating or in a relationship, we're interacting with porn in a way that was impacting her sex life? Like, can we say to our partners or two guys we're dating, hey, I wish you wouldn't watch as much porn? Yes. So this is the question that I was hoping to get on this podcast. This is the question that I wanted to answer the most and talk about the most, actually.

Right. There we are. I think absolutely. I think it's vital. So I think that what a lot of, the mistake that a lot of women make, not just women, just people, when we relate to technology, is that we try to take something away when it's harmful. But I think when you try to take something away, in this, I've seen this so many times where, you know, a girlfriend or wife says, hey, like this pornography, I don't like it. Any, a whole spectrum of this feels like a betrayal. Why do you need people besides me? I feel like my self-esteem is lower. I can't compete with that. Two, like, really practical things. Some of those are a little bit more, like, arguably inside the mind of said woman. But, hey, you're watching porn. You can't get it up.

You have erectile dysfunction, like, all kinds. Like, you know, you spend your time watching porn. I need your help changing diapers. So I see this, the whole spectrum of, like, very tangible physical things that pornography is causing problems to, like, softer, more internal, emotional things. Porn is okay. Only fans is not okay.

You know, there's all kinds of variants of this. So first thing that I'd say, I'm trying to help y'all. So like, you know, it's so interesting, like, what can we do for women? I think, honestly, a lot of men needs to step up. There's a really fascinating study that showed that delinquent behavior in juvenile elephants correlates with the presence of male elephants in the pack. So when you have a teenage male elephant, they start being little bitches until older males will, like, put them in line.

And not their parent, older males. Not their parent. You just need, like, dudes need to keep dudes in line. Like, I've been in the situation socially where, like, you know, someone will talk about porn and I'll be like, bro. You got to cut the fuck back, man. Like, this is crazy, bro. And that's all it takes. You know, we don't need a whole lot of words sometimes.

So first thing is, I'm in y'all's corner. I'm trying to do what I can, okay? because this problem is too big. You're right. It's systemic. Everything is falling apart. So, like, we got to step up and, like, do something about it. Now, in terms of what they should do, I think having a conversation about it is huge. But I think there's so much there because conversation is the tool of a woman. And there's research on this. So if you look at why men don't like to go to couples therapy, it's because they feel like they're not effectively able to use therapy. There are even biological elements of this, where if you look at therapy, 70% of therapists are women, 70% of patients are women. Why is that? Girls have a higher verbal fluency than in boys. Estrogen makes us more aware of our internal emotional state. So our ability to even understand what we're feeling depends on our estrogen level. This is something I understood when I had kids. When you have a kid, if you're a man, your estrogen level skyrockets. It was wild. I started like crying in Disney movies. I can't watch Disney movies anymore because I

start crying. Welcome. Welcome to the party. I know. It's like a really bewildering experience. It makes life feel more in color, but it's like so uncomfortable. But it's so excruciating. Yeah, that's, that's life for women. Yeah, right. So, and I think that this is where like what a lot of women will default to is having a deep conversation. Just recognize that your male partner may not be able to like play tennis in that way. So should you talk to them? Absolutely. But don't assume for a moment that their capacity to understand what they're feeling or communicate what they're feeling or interpret what you're saying or most importantly, interpret the feelings that go with your words is there. So you need to be way more concrete about it. When you watch

porn, it affects me in these ways. I would like you to watch porn, stop watching porn or reduce your porn because of this. And then ask them also like what, how do you feel about it? Why do you watch porn. What's it like? What would it be like to scale back a little bit? Are you capable of scaling back? Can we try this thing? So be super solutions focused. Offer like solutions. That's oftentimes what men will respond to. So can we try taking a break from porn for one week? And then like let's start to have more like intentional sexual activity. We're going to set some time on our calendar. We're going to meet at this time. Like let's see how that goes. What's this like for you? So I think that kind of angle where you should absolutely talk about them, to talk about it,

absolutely advocate for yourself. Do not let this thing go undressed for the reasons that you've been saying over and over and over again, Liz, things are getting worse, not better. And so you should absolutely advocate for yourself. Expect a lot of resistance,

and it's an uphill battle, and then send them our way. To the YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. Like, send them our way. Like, we have great streams of people who are addicted to pornography.

Like, we'll talk about this kind of stuff. And dudes, no. Oftentimes the reason that men deny problems is because they feel powerless to be able to fix them. And so I would rather pretend it doesn't exist than know it exists and feel powerless. Because fingers crossed, if it doesn't exist, then maybe I'm okay. We've talked about so many things today. And we've talked about porn and how it's connected to this direction that society is going and how that's relating to our relationships and how we're interacting with each other. Do you have a final message for how you wish people were thinking about relationship dynamics,

how you wish people were thinking about porn, any misconception to like to bust? Like, what do you want to leave us thinking about these topics? Yeah, great thought. So here's what I would leave y'all with. Right now, the majority of the problems that people are experienced, I'm going to talk about the world. I'm talking about people. is because we are being shaped without our awareness or consent. We are being molded by the internet, by social media.

So the biggest thing that you can do is to be aware of what is going on inside you. You're changing. The way that people are responding to this podcast, there may be all kinds of things that I said today that will piss people off. I don't absolve myself of that. But think about when you listen to my words, there's all kinds of things that you're filling in the gaps, right? So you may have thoughts like, oh, I can't do that. Or that'll never work. Or this guy doesn't get it at all. And so I think what we

really have to be careful about, and you may be right, I'm not saying I do get it. But the moment that you start like defaulting to these kinds of thoughts, this is what I've noticed, the more reflexive thinking that you have, that's all been shaped by social media. If someone has an instinctive reaction, oh, yeah, these people are bad, right? The political climate is really contentious right now. I'm not saying one is right or one is wrong, but what I can guarantee you is that the more liberals and conservatives reflexively think the other side is an idiot, that's what makes things worse. So be super thoughtful about the way that you're being shaped. take a look at what's going on inside you and as best as you can cultivate yourself in the direction

that you want to go. I mean, the world can fall apart around you. That doesn't mean that you need to stop growing in the direction that you need to grow. And you'd be amazed at how possible that is. Can you take a second and just tell us in your own words about your amazing YouTube channel and anything else that you want to spotlight? Yeah, sure. So, you know, the main thing that we do at Healthy Gamer, I have a YouTube channel. I do some live stream. streams, we talk about modern mental health issues. We used to be about 95% male. Now we're down to 70% male. So there have been a ton of women that have flooded our community recently. And we actually focus a lot on female focused mental health issues that I notice a lot of people don't talk about,

like a really good example is ADHD and women. So I think there's a lot of new problems that women are facing. And what I really want to be able to do is understand those problems. And help people with them. So check out our YouTube channel and also like let us know if there's something that based on what you've heard today, if there's something that you want me to talk about or cover, like please let us know. My sister sends me one of your videos every single day. She's a psychologist. She uses them in her practice. So thank you from her. Thank you from me and thank you from everybody listening. This was a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much, Liz. I had an absolute blast. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Liz Moody podcast.

If you enjoyed the episode, go ahead and follow on Apple or Spotify or subscribe on YouTube and hit that notification bell so you never miss a new episode. And if there's somebody in your life you think would benefit from this episode, send them a quick link. It is the best way to support the podcast and it is so, so appreciated. And if you're watching this, drop me a comment. I would love to hear your thoughts and what resonated most with you. Thanks again for being here. I feel so lucky that I get to grow and learn and share with you. and I will see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast.

Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional.