The Resilient Mind - Why the Best Decisions of Your Life Will Look Like the Worst Ones First - Dr. K (Healthy Gamer)

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Dr. Alok Kanojia, known as Dr. K, is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and co-founder of Healthy Gamer, a mental health platform built for the digital generation. Having battled video game addiction himself, he went on to train in both Western psychiatry and ancient Vedic philosophy giving him a rare and powerful lens on the modern mind. Through his wildly popular YouTube channel and coaching programs, he has helped hundreds of thousands of people understand the hidden emotions driving their behavior and holding them back. He is one of the most distinctive voices in mental health today — making complex psychology impossible to ignore.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_JournalExplore tools from past guests of the podcast. Some links below are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you:💓 HeartMath: https://www.heartmath.com/resilient 🧠 Muse: https://choosemuse.com/resilientmind 🌿 Brain Ritual: https://www.brainritual.com/THERESILIENTMINDThis episode is brought to in partnership with Motiversity & Chris Williamson.🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What I'm interested in is switching fuel sources. So I've had this analogy in my mind for ages. I wonder if you think that this is cool. So you remember the old style rockets that used to take shit into space before we had Falcon 9 stuff? And there would be the launch rocket, big guy in the middle. And then once you got off the launch pad, you got to a certain altitude. And then they would switch to the booster rockets that were the ones on the sides.

And then once it got to an even higher altitude, then those would fall away. Typically, there's epic shots of the two things falling off to the side. And then there's another. What I've been kind of fascinated by is different fuel sources at different altitudes of your journey. And thinking about toxic fuel in the beginning, get you off the launch pad, resentment, bitterness, anxiety, chip on your shoulder, depression, need for validation, social recognition, get the goal, get Jack, do the thing. It's like, okay. But why I'm particularly fascinated in is that timeline of trajectory of sports. of switching from toxic fuel to like EV.

So it's beautiful. Yeah. So there are so much to say. So let's start with science and then we'll move a little bit to spirituality. So if we look at a human being who is despairing, sad, et cetera, oftentimes they need ego and they need anger to move forward. So depression, I mean, anger can get you out of depression. Because they're so ossified, they're so sort of stuck. Well, so usually what happens is if we look at depression, anger is turned against the self.

And so if you're beating yourself up, that's not going to motivate you. Well, actually, it can motivate you to do a lot, right? So if I look at myself in the mirror and I think to myself, oh, this guy is pathetic, then I can go to the gym. I can do all kinds of things to start to feel better. Or you can get angry at other people. But generally speaking, we know that activating anger or redirecting anger, or redirecting anger, can lift you out of depression. So oftentimes with my patients, like I said, if they come in depressed, I'll look for the anger.

Where is the anger wanting to go? And you can sort of activate that anger. And it is toxic fuel. It kind of gets you from point A to point B, let's say. Then what happens is I like the way that you're thinking about the booster rockets because I think we sometimes think about motivation as if it's one thing. But motivation actually has its own developmental trajectory. So if you look at, I think something like there was a study on LinkedIn that showed that 70% of people under the age of 30 feel like they're going through a quarter life crisis. Okay.

So if you just talk to like people in their 20s, they're not going to know what to do. They're sort of like in some career, but they're not sure. There's this existential threat of AI. So we used to see a lot more midlife crises and we're starting to see a lot more quarter life crises. I think I had two in my 20s. very well. What happened to you? I had one when I left university. Okay.

You know, I was in full-time education for 18 years. I did five years at uni, two degrees plus a placement year. So I was there for a long time until I was 23. And then you just sort of get spat out into the world and you're off these rails. I knew where I needed to be. At what time I had a trajectory. And then I have to define my life for myself. That was a small one.

And then I had a much bigger one at sort of 28, 29, where I realized. that I probably wasn't being the person I was supposed to be. I was running this big events company, nightlife stuff. Everybody in this city of a million people knew who I was. I'd stood on the front door. I was, you know, like, I'd completed it. I'd achieved success in a lot of the ways that society tells a young man that he should do. Like, local fame, status, some financial freedom, goals, all of the things.

Like, you're the guy. You're the guy that runs the parties. and I found myself increasingly leaving the front door of a thousand person party to sit in my car across the street and watch School of Life videos from a Landibotan explaining emotions jammed into my car steering wheel with the window open in case someone needed something from me. We had a team of people that was running it and I was like, I think there's something up here.

If I'm leaving the party to go on, if I'm leaving that thing to come and do this thing, maybe there's something in this thing. And that was kind of the initial, genesis of me doing the self-discovery podcast-y thing. Do you remember how you felt? Displaced. Okay.

Uncertain. Hopeful. Okay. Like, a bit exhilarated, actually, to be honest. What did you do next? A really complex morning routine for five years. Like a really long... Were you still an events planner?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was still doing that, but I was starting to work this in more and more. And then COVID happened and shut down all nightclubs, which was great for me. So I started journaling, meditating, doing breathwork every day, yin yoga on a morning, morning walks, reading, trying to read the first few times I sat down to read. Like, my body was doing this because I was just so used to the level of hyper arousal, I guess, from a phone that was bings and bongs and messages. And like, this page doesn't even fucking move.

like I've got to turn it myself. Yeah, so what's really interesting is your story maps on to the research, like close to one to one. So this is what's really fascinating. So if we look at our motivational structure, when we're kids, we actually don't have any internal sense of self. So if you really look at it, kids are so free, why are they so free? Because they're not worried about judgment. They don't even have really self-awareness of like who I am. They're just impulses.

And then what happens is the society around the, them is conditioning them, socializing them. This is right, this is wrong. Sit in your chair, study for your test, put your plate away, you know, make sure you hang your towel up after you shower. So you're sort of, you get all of these influences from the outside telling you what to do. And then if you look at a child's brain, it's very responsive to feedback. So if everyone says good job, you feel really, really great. And if everyone says bad job, we see this trauma, that shapes you as well. So our motivational structure when we're children and teenagers basically is to make the people around us happy. That's why teenagers are so vulnerable to peer pressure because we become acutely aware that people are judging us.

It's really being a teenager is so terrifying because if you kind of think about it, you didn't realize that like when you're a five, you don't realize that people are going to judge you and will have these lasting judgments. What I do today is going to determine how they treat me a month from now. So the second that we hit puberty, our brain starts to change, those kinds of circuits and our brain start to develop, we become hyper-aware of this. So the first phase of our life is exactly what you said. Like, I want to make it. I want to be, I want to get the girls. I want to make money.

I want to be famous. We tend to be very externally oriented. Then one of two things happens. Either you kind of trundle along and sometimes things are okay for people. but the quarter life crisis is characterized by starting off by feeling like you don't belong in this life that you have created and tried to create. You wake up one day and you're like, I wanted to be a doctor my whole life. Now I'm in med school and I'm thinking about getting an MBA. So something doesn't feel right to you internally.

The really fascinating thing is that the second stage of resolving this is physical or mental separation from your old environment. So it's so funny because when I work with people, like I went all the way to India to leave this environment. I traveled halfway across the world. I came to the U.S. You came to the U.S. You also sat in your car when this other thing was going on. So it doesn't have to be like a great amount of distance. Oftentimes what people will experience is mentally checking out.

And this is where they make a huge mistake because this moment you mentally check out, you think to yourself, oh my God, how do I check back in? How do I check back in? How do I become productive? How do I become passionate again? I used to want to grind and be the best, but now I'm 26 years old and I just don't have that energy anymore. Mentally checking out is a necessary step

to finding yourself. You know what's fascinating about that? Yeah. I learned about leverage from Naval Ravikant that there are certain things that have, if you apply a little bit of effort to them, they give you an outsized return. Leverage.

I got toward the end of my 20s. About the time that I started, did the show, which was when I was 30. And I learned about leverage from Naval, and I was so wistful. I was very disappointed in myself that I had deployed like an unbelievable amount of dedication and effort to this industry. And it had become, you know, one of the biggest events companies in the north of the UK, maybe in the entire UK, voodoo events. And that I'd done it in an industry that had basically no leverage. The leverage was one to one. You can't make the market any bigger. There's a million people in the city, maybe 50,000 people in the age bracket.

On any one night, there's 10,000 that are out. It's a very small pie, and there's no way that you can lever that any higher. I can't pick my event up and move it to Carlisle. In Carlisle, there's a Chris Williamson doing exactly what I did. Fuck you, I know all of the people here. There was no leverage at all. I remember thinking, I've spent that fuel. I've blown my load prematurely in an industry that was wrong.

and then that exact same force of nature, like make a dent in the world energy, came straight back around once the podcast became like a routine part of my life. And I just did the same thing again after a lull in between. Yeah, so I'm conflicted because I want to speak to that and I want to finish what I was saying. So I'm going to speak to that first, if that's okay. How do you understand that? There's an interesting intersection between passion. and opportunity.

Say more. That I still had lots of opportunity in the world of nightlife, but I'd spent my passion for that, and I wasn't that keen on doing it anymore. Then I had passion for a thing, which was like learning self-development, emotions, understand yourself in the world around you, but I didn't have an opportunity.

Like, I could deploy it into this thing, but it was like the project wasn't big enough, it didn't have enough momentum and I didn't understand, I didn't have enough mastery to really be able to get it going. And then after a little bit more time in the podcast,

I was able to put the passion that I wanted and I had the opportunity to be able to sort of force that forward. How do you understand that on like a metaphysical level? Alignment. Or is that being true to myself. Understanding that playing a role, a persona,

even if it gives you objective metrics of success subjectively leaves you feeling very hollow. Okay. So let's, I think this is a beautiful example. So one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make is they have this internal calling. And I use that term carefully because it tends to have certain associations that are kind of woo-woo. And I want those. So you have a calling.

And then you had this conversation with Naval. and he talks to you about leverage, and you look at your situation and you say, damn it, if only I had blown my load in an industry where there was leverage,

if only I had blown my load in a thing where that I could do something and continue to grow upward. If that was a possibility, worst mistake of your life. Getting what you wanted in that moment,

terrible. You get what I'm saying? So if you had the option, If in Carlisle, there wasn't another Chris Williamson. And then you could have gone to Carlisle. And then you could have had a million people there. And then you could have expanded somewhere else and you could have expanded somewhere else. You would not be here.

So one of the biggest challenges that I have when I sit with people is to try to help them understand that when you have a drive in here, your mind, based on your socialization and your conditioning, will want to express this thing in here in a certain. way outside of you. I want to do more. I want to enhance my leverage. I want to reach more people. That is like an intrinsic sort of desire that you automatically apply to your current industry. Huge mistake. 30 to 40 percent of my patients make a career change within 18 months of stepping into my office. So I was really concerned that I'm like biasing them in some way. I don't really think so. So I liberating them in some way. Not liberating. So I was concerned about the opposite that my I think what I am doing is liberating them.

Yes, yes, yes. But what I was worried about, because you got to be careful, right? So, like, maybe I'm like indoctrinating them. Right? So, oh, your job is bad. Go find another job. Right. So you got to be careful. So I sought a lot of supervision.

And I think what I'm doing is liberating. It's a strong word. But, right, so helping them understand that this fuel that you have, this passion that you have doesn't have to manifest in this industry based on your past history. Perfect. that this thing in here is actually supposed to, and I use that in a woo-woo invoking way, you know, I recognize that, is like, because I hear stories like this and is supposed, like you were supposed to do something else. That career was supposed to fail. That was part of your developmental trajectory. And when everyone is focused on the end goal, when everyone is sort of focused on external status or whatever, right, when you're thinking about the next promotion, the next promotion and the next promotion, you've sort of of boarded this train from the place that you were, which is going in a completely direction from where you really want to go.

So, and this is what's really hard for people. I think some of the best decisions that you can make in life are terrible decisions. So my life, my story of success is a series of bad decision after bad decision after bad decision. I spent seven years studying to become a monk. And then I was like, you know what? I like my wife. I'm not a huge fan of celibacy.

I mean, she wasn't my wife at that point, right? But I was like, I trained for seven years and I was going to throw it all away for, like, a girl. You know, that's a bad idea. Like, you're throwing it all away. And then I went to med school and I did all this alternative medicine stuff. And at the 11th hour in med school, I was like, instead of doing holistic oncology and curing people of cancer, I'm going to become a psychiatrist. And I'm going to become a psychiatrist. Absolutely. Right?

And I got a lot of pushback from my cancer. family. Like, they were like, you know, like, my mom was like, I mean, bless her, she's wonderful. She's a pediatrician. But she was like, if you spend a lot of time with crazy, people, you're going to become crazy. Fair assessment. Yeah. Inaccurate, but sure. And then even when I was like in academic, so, you know, being at Harvard and was developing all these meditation programs for all these different mental illnesses and things like that. And then like walking away from being faculty there. It's like people grind so hard to like go to Harvard and I'm faculty and and had. awesome career career trajectory, quit to start streaming to a couple hundred people on Twitch. Fucked it again. Absolutely. Right?

And so I think this is where we get locked into this idea that, okay, I need to do this kind of thing. But really, like, I know it sounds cheesy, but following that passion in a reasonable way, right, recognizing that, okay, there's like some internal part of me. You mentioned, like, alignment between opportunities and passion. And if you stay locked into your current career, there's not going to be space. I have so much to say about that, but I know that you want to round out the quarter life. Yeah. So that's where, I mean, even if we look at your story and my story, there's distance. There's physical distance or mental checking out.

And I think the biggest mistake that people make is like they force themselves to check back in. Or they look for productivity or leverage or whatever. How can I make this thing into what I want instead of fall? following what I want to a completely different place. So once you gain that distance, then you need some time to like basically germinate. Like you've got to go into this cocoon mode for a little while. I think some of the tools that you use are big parts of that. There are certain things, you know, certain accelerants that you can use.

I'll talk about some of that stuff. And I made it this guide to meditation where I wanted to teach people these things. So how do you find purpose? Why can people get that? Healthy Gamer.G., Dr. Kay's Guide to Meditation. But I basically sort of thought about, okay, like, what are the different tools that you need?

For this introspection, because this introspective stuff that you talked about, you know, doing yoga, breathwork, that actually will alter your brain in certain ways, help you understand things. So then you end up,

once you know who you are, once you discover who you are, then what happens is you start to craft a life around you, that is in alignment with what you are in here. So I make a life, but I don't know who I am. I wake up in that life, it doesn't feel like it fits. I step out of that life, discover who I am, and then recraft.

And that's what we see with you. That's what we see with me. That's what I see with the hundreds of people that I've worked with. And that you have to go through this process. It's developmentally appropriate to feel burnt out. It's developmentally appropriate to struggle with productivity. Dude, I'm so excited.

I'm like, this is right in the middle of everything I've been thinking about for the obsessed about for probably the last three years. So, like 10 things I need to say. First one, probably the coolest quote that came out over the last few years was the magic you are looking for is in the work you're avoiding.

And my one this year is the answers that you're looking for are in the silence you're avoiding. And I think that that seems to be true with this. When it comes to the physical distance, that comports perfectly with what I did, So I had this ridiculously elaborate morning routine that lasted like two and a half hours. What was it? It was isolation of monk mode.

It was me extracting myself from what was going on. I called it the manopause, which is this get toward the end of your 20s. You'd love it. It's so fucking sick. Like, there it is, right? And it feels like funny. Anyway, I love the manopause. getting like a crab that sort of grows up against its shell.

David Data talks about this in the way the superior man. He says the passions that used to light you up no longer feel exciting. And there's this sort of weird amount of shame that goes on around that. There's sort of a scarcity mindset. Well, I've got it. For me, I knew that I probably should have left nightlife three years before I did, finally. And it was really only catalyzed by the fact that COVID came along. COVID was the best thing that could have happened to me.

because it shut all of the nightclubs. It gave me a stable sleep and wake pattern for the first time in my entire adult life. And it taught me, oh, this is what life would be like if you weren't doing that thing. And I preferred it. I was like, fuck.

Like, okay, this is definitely something that I need to pay more attention to. But without the monk mode, monk mornings, I guess we could call it, um, without those, I would have really, I would have really struggled, I think.

And this leads onto like my favorite idea from the last couple of years, which is the lonely chapter. So the lonely chapter being a time where you are sufficiently developed that you don't resonate with your old set of friends, but not yet sufficiently developed that you have found your new set of friends, and you're in this weird liminal space in the middle. You're sort of floating out in space as of yet haven't found the people that are around you. And to stick to the kind of altitude metaphor for today,

if you can imagine that you're a rocket ship, and there's other rocket ships around you, and they're all moving at different velocities, and you can say that as maybe a pace of personal growth. This isn't a comment on who's better or who's worse, that someone who grows more is inherently better than other people. There are people who don't focus on personal growth at all that are wonderful humans that are way more satisfied than I am with life.

But if you have a high velocity of personal growth, i.e., if you are changing and developing very quickly, most people are not going to be like you. And the problem is that maybe somebody that's ahead of you, and you're like, oh, brilliant, my friend, oh, fuck. Like, I've kept going and we're just not asking the same sorts of questions.

I can't resonate with them in the same way anymore. And you have this choice. Do I want to suppress this personal growth trajectory in order to fit back in with this group to continue going to the same places? For me, going out partying. That was something I needed to let go of. So I did six months sober three times

and then a thousand days sober. Not that alcohol was really a big problem. for me, but it was a commitment that I made that muted partying and stopped me from doing that because that was an area where I just felt out of alignment. It was like a chord that was played and one note was out and I was that note. Everybody else was in resonance and I was like, oh, this isn't feel right. So this, and you're like, fuck, okay, I just kind of need to float on my own for a little while and that is again this distance. And I think the reason that lonely chapter thing resonated so much with a lot of people that listen to the show is that

I get the sense that podcasts like modern wisdom is kind of a safe harbor for people who feel like they're in the lonely chapter that they do not have anyone around them that's interpersonal growth their friends still want to get a bag in with the boys on a weekend and they're like I got this meditation streak I'm six days in I really don't want to fuck it on Sunday like that would be really cool for me to keep going and I want to I'm learning about all of this new stuff and like I've got these dreams like I might become an artist like I'm I might change. I might go and study film and no one around them resonates in that way. So yeah, it's a safe harbor for people going through the lonely chapter in that way. Absolutely. And I think

that there's, once again, so much. I think the first thing I would say is that it can be painful, but I think we sometimes have to leave our friends behind. We have to leave our life behind. And in a sense, sometimes the more you do it, right, the better off you will be. And it's so interesting. I used to, when I was a degenerate gamer and failing out of college and stuff like that, I had a group of friends that I used to play a particular video game with. And then I sort of got my shit together. And then we reconnected after 20 years. And, you know, they're doing well in life.

But I think it was just interesting that I had to leave them behind. And I think so many people are afraid to do that, right? There's a lot of safety because we don't want to walk through that lonely chapter. We don't want to go through that dark night of the soul, right? where we are alone. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.