Dr. K on Fixing Your Anxiety, Redpill Men Are Good, & Beating Cheap Dopamine

People who have anxiety have a very low heart rate their ability this has nothing to do with what you're worried about This is the way that you're physiologically wired so what you need to do is there's like a red pill 2.0 That's kind of like happening right now, which I think is actually quite healthy So really if I think there's a lot of good stuff in there if there was not good stuff in there It would not be growing right? That's why you're angry all the time. Oh, no, that's true. He's reading you It's all those women being happy But look at all these podcasts, bro. It's right. So at some point we started demonizing homosexuality and when we started doing that men stopped touching each other We can't just do this right. We got to do like a yeah, it's got to be borderline aggressive It's got to be like borderline aggressive or borderline homosexual. We can't touch someone unless it's a joke I want to girlfriend I want to girlfriend I want to girlfriend just a bro like there's no way you can get this person to fall in love with you Go be the best person that you can and accept that sometimes they're gonna say no So we could all kiss each other on the cheek, and we could ask each other. What is your experience of this? This has been a great podcast guys See this is where he blames his autism. That's why I don't believe it's autistic. He's just black and homophobic I don't even know how to respond What's up everybody on the podcast today? We are honored to have healthy gamer Gigi also known as Dr. K If you're not Indian and if you are Indian, Dr. Alok, Anodja. He's a Harvard trained psychiatrist Maybe a monk judging by the way he's sitting I believe him and the single best source to address mental health in today's Doom scrolling society He's here to fix Alex's autism my anger and marks paralysing fear of conflict guys give it up for Dr. Alok So autism paralyzing fear of conflict and just general anger and anger and Yeah, but if I got a grudge it ain't I'm not letting go of it like Andrew who's normally in this seat He's like as I've gotten more successful, especially if I get more successful than the person I didn't like I let go of it. I don't I still am like nah fuck that guy Yeah, okay. Yeah Okay, so here's fix him you yeah, they have a real problem with this even though I'm right 95% of the time these guys can't handle that But point is yours I listen to your dire to CEO. I thought it was awesome I think you're awesome. I've listened to a couple of your videos But I feel like and I was just saying this to you. I feel like you're in a different place Then you were a year ago when you recorded there is a you said I've connected more to my spirituality I'm looking at you're sitting in half Lotus. Okay, you got the withdrawal shot I don't think you had that on you I'm just not you were like now you're in the black tea. What's going on? So probably what so I went through a midlife crisis a couple of years ago. Oh started a midlife crisis We'll see whether I'm done or not Okay, and you know This is something that I think first thing that a lot of people don't understand is that it's like developmentally appropriate So there are periods of time in our lives where we have to go through crises I think we're seeing a lot of quarter life crises now You know the classic perception of a midlife for crisis is like dude is in his forties check You know starts buys a sports car like dies his hair Maybe is going through a divorce or something like that So I think we tend to like first of all pathologize it a lot We say that this is a bad thing, but I think that many people you know There are periods in your life where like you are operating based on a certain strategy And then you reach a certain point and you're like that strategy is not working Yeah, they're stealing on it. Yeah, or it's just like you feel like you're taking all the right steps and you sort of end up in the wrong place Oh, right, we just oftentimes how we like live our lives, right? So we're both around yeah, and so when I was growing up It's like I look you're going to be knocked down. Yeah, and so you did it I did not yeah, so I mean I did it super late. So I started med school at 28 Yeah, and so I remember like you know going going home for Christmas one day and and I was like 24 or 25 at the time and You know one of my friends from high school. I was like, hey, what are you up to and and she's like, you know I'm in my first year of ophthalmology residency and she's like what are you up to and I'm like I'm applying to medical school for the third time Yeah, you know, oh you to play three times. Oh, yeah, I got rejected from a hundred and 20 medical schools. Yeah And that's what happens right here. I mean we joke about it Yeah, but that's really what happens especially like manner, you know taught to be a particular thing And then you do all of those things then you end up in a place where you're kind of like what am I doing here? Like what's the point? Yeah, so was somewhat unhappy which is kind of ironic because we you know, I was successful. Yeah But then is like stuff started happening. It sort of felt like it was growing out of control in a good way Mm-hmm. So I started streaming back in 2019 and sort of like blew up during the pandemic and then a couple years later You know, we started this company and we have like this research division and we have this coaching program and you know I'm going on these podcasts and stuff and I was like I don't know if this is actually what I want to do Oh, right so what happens is like opportunities start coming towards you Yeah, and I think a big lesson that I've learned is like walking away from good things is how you achieve peace and freedom in life Wow, yeah, right? So you're like you someone sends you like a good opportunity and you're like oh, I should really take advantage of this Yeah, but is that really what you want to do? Yeah, yeah, yeah So went through sort of a midlife crisis had a lot of problems in my marriage at the time too I was just unhappy and I think my wife is awesome. I think she dealt with it really well um, and then started to really engage in spiritual practice So was coasting for a long time. So I spent about seven years studying to become a monk Mm-hmm, and then basically like went to med school and all that good stuff and then was like in residency. What is studying to become a monk? So when I was failing out of college. Yeah, so now I'm 19 years old. Just finished my sophomore year have like a 2.0 GPA You know, my parents had tried kind of everything they tried like tough love They tried like you know being loving and supportive, but I was just playing video games for 16 to 20 hours a day joined a fraternity I mean, it was great like yeah, I actually don't regret it at all I think if you want to you know if you want to screw up that your 20s is the time to do that is true Mm-hmm, and I also think it's really weird because like especially like a lot of Indian people, you know They'll be like oh like I got it like get all my stuff done, and I'm like super like type A, right? Yeah, and so what they're in the earlier I start working the earlier I can retire Yeah, yeah, you're trading your 20s for more free you're giving up the freedom in your 20s for more freedom and you're in 60s Yeah, yeah, that doesn't sound like a good thing. No, it's not I think we define we are taught by our parents And they didn't mean to but we're kind of taught success is one metric. It is financial and academic and what and that's it Yeah, there's not like a 360 degree view of what success is for us like success is being a great father Like if you're a billionaire and not a great father I think most Indians will still be like look that guy But most Indian parents or at least we would look at that as that successful, but now I'm learning that's failure If my wife hates me, and I have kids who don't resent me, it all matter what I do in my career. I'm a failed Yeah, so I think that that's a virtue of the world they grew up in and the virtue of the world that we grow up in Right, so my parents, you know emigrated from India and like my dad, you know grew up living in like a eight by ten room With like nine people, so they would sleep like outside the house in the stairwell Like so they'd put out like sleeping not sleeping bags, but you know godless. Yeah, no, that was bad They put out like basically like their beds. They would sleep like in the stairwell like every you know Area where you kind of climb up and then you know you kind of turn around So it'd be like one or two people sleeping there right and so they grew up in a in a situation where like success was Survival yeah like financial success financial stability and security security absolutely So, you know my grandmother would tell me that like we'd run out of money on the 25th of every month And like out of money and so you have to figure out how to like stretch for like five or six more days So I think that they grew up with a set of value system a value system that was sort of determined by the system around them Mm-hmm. I think the reason we all I don't know that y'all But you know, I'm making assumptions about gosh, but I can't imagine your path to Being a comedian was like you looked at my favorably. Yeah, right no and so we have to learn a different system And I think that's why people are struggling so much because like the rules that applied 20 or 30 years ago about how to become successful at the top of the list is go to college get a good job right now That doesn't work anymore. Yeah, like you you show up with a ton of debt. Jobs are being replaced by AI You know like 50% of people under the age of 30 are living at home buying a house is like not really a possibility for Most people of like the Gen Z millennial generation So like all the old rules don't work, and so we have to discover a new set of rules Mm-hmm, and and that's what I really tried to start helping people with on the internet Yeah, as we got far away from that No, not at all. Oh yeah, so just before we get too far So you said you were doing bad in school and then that's when you like left Yeah, so so my dad I still remember the conversation we'd been talking for like like three hours and it was like One in the morning and he was like I look you need to go to India Yeah, and and I was like that's your solution to everything. Yeah, well So I think it was a good one So so I was like why and he's like you just need to go and that was the one time in my life that I just like listen to him Mm-hmm, and so about 10 days later. I think eight days later I was you know getting on a plane and then went to a part of India that I've never been to before don't speak the language there You know I got picked up like so I remember like walking out of the airport and like I didn't understand like who was picking me up. So I still remember like there was no one with a sign or anything like I just walked out of the airport and I was just like they're awaiting with my suitcases and there was a you know a bunch of people milling about I don't know if y'all have ever been Indian and eventually everyone left yeah and there was like one guy there yeah and he walked up to me and we like kind of shook hands he didn't tell me his name and he started walking and I started following him and it's like he's there to pick up someone he doesn't know who he's there to pick up I'm there to be picked up so I just got in a car with the stranger and we started driving. Yeah sorry did this mind on me important why do you go to Bangalore? To me it's the most western city so maybe that's why I would know so I was going to an ashram outside. Oh so I flew into Bangalore okay got it and this was like reverse home alone like instead of them leaving you. Absolutely so they just sent me right and I was like desperate I mean I had tried so hard to like get control of my life like I didn't understand you know I remember like every morning I would set my alarm clock and like my alarm would go off at like 7 a.m. because I don't know if you guys have ever done this but I started signing up for 8 a.m. classes because I thought like okay like if I sign up for an 8 a.m. class then I have to wake up right yeah and then if I if I get up early then like then I can take control of my day. I tried that one semester didn't work. Yeah right it's so interesting so I like would try to set up all these structures around me to like get me to do the things that I couldn't make myself do and that just failed catastrophically I you know the alarm clock would go off I'd turn it off I'd go back to sleep what I discovered interestingly enough is the best way to sleep through my alarm clock and avoid all the guilt and shame was to go to sleep at like five then I was so dead tired yeah yeah so dead tired that it feels impossible to get out and I just be like okay I'll get out of bed tomorrow then since I have this morning class load I wake up around one or two o'clock I have oh if I get my ass out of bed I can go to like one class at 230 but I missed the whole day you know like might as well just start fresh tomorrow yeah yeah and then the cycle would continue yeah yeah yeah um sorry I went to an oshram yeah okay and I still remember the first you I said okay that I'm telling stories not it yeah everything whatever you want to do okay so you know I still remember like I got to the oshram around like 3 a.m. there was no no power so like their power had gone out so they like took me to a room and like there was a bed and and and then I go to sleep that the moon was out and then I wake up a little bit later because there's this bell ringing like someone's ringing a bell I look outside the moon is still up I'm like it's I don't know what time it is yeah um I didn't have a cell phone back then okay this is 2003 oh it's a long time ago okay so and then I I walk outside and I see that they're people milling about I hear like toilet slushing things like that so I'm like okay I guess I have to get ready and then you know I start walking with the just following the herd of people in the moonlight and then I hear this yeah like what was that and then I hear yeah and then I'm like that sounds like vomiting and then I hear a lot of it like people like like 6 7 8 10 12 people and then I'm following these people and I see there's like a ditch yeah with a row of people vomiting like leaders of stuff into the ditch oh fuck and there's a group of people walking behind them like kind of patting them on the shoulder and being like oh it's like okay like and what's going going to like do I did I come to the plague did they drink the water yeah so it turns out it's a yogic practice called vomit where you drink a bunch of isotonic water so like basically like saline water with electrolytes and then you vomit it out and it like cleans out your whole system and so it was just this weird like bizarre like kind of esoteric yogic practice and what I found in India was basically a system to understand why I could not control myself like I wanted to get up but I wouldn't get up and so how does that work like if you want something why don't you do it you know it's like such a simple thing yeah but we don't teach this stuff right so fell in love with it because I felt in control for the first time in my life um you know found someone who was something like a guru who just really helped me immensely and then I decided three months later that I was going to become a monk so I went to one of my teachers and I said I'm ready to become a monk going to take my vows and so the my teacher said you know becoming a monk is about giving up a life and you don't have a life to give up you're like nothing thank god so he said to me that's the most Indian parents should ever you're a loser yeah so he said uh you know I'll teach you so you can come back every summer and every December and you'll continue learning like you can progress and do like more advanced spiritual practices and it's like that but you're also going to go get a doctoral degree and then if you decide at the age of 30 that you want to take your vows if you still want to do it nine years later you can still continue learning then we'll take you okay so I was like okay so then I went back to the US and I was like okay I'm going to go get a doctoral degree met my wife um she's Indian right so he's so I knew I like he knew I like he's a brown love guy I love brown love I also love brown love yeah you don't even know he loved it yeah um it's guy acts like a monk dude okay what I'm really doing brown love I don't know if I look like a monk which is interesting because actually well one of the things that we discuss like literally week ago my wife was like you know we should really start an only fence and and she's CEO of healthy gamer so she's my boss yeah yeah so she wasn't going to be in it's unbelievable yeah um we need to talk about the conversation by the way but that's a later conversation we can talk about that yeah sure yeah so um yeah she was saying like you know you should like start helping people on only fence and uh anyway so going back to the monk story so then I I went back and I met her and then um you know promptly fell head over heels yeah we were dating for a couple of years um and then at some point I was like okay I have to get a doctoral degree and she was like I want to be married she was watching a grayson out of me at the time and she was like I want to be married to a neurosurgeon so I was like why the hell not it's so it's so funny because people think that you know the the early when I like was I majored in pre-med obviously yeah but like I was like oh I'm going to be doctor yeah yeah I'm going to be best doctor I'm going to go to hardware and I'm going to be the best and then years later it's like we're gonna do this so that we can get laid until we're 30 years old and then we're gonna give it all up and so I was also like telling garage like you know there's no like long-term potential here because like I really want to become a monk and that's my path in life she's like yeah whatever she was like okay fine what I felt like she did not bother her at all um and so ended up going to med school and then really didn't care about like grays and stuff because I wasn't like you know oriented towards that stuff at that point um and then it was actually kind of embarrassing because my mentor called me after like the day of graduation he's like where are you and I was like oh you know I'm not coming to the dinner or whatever and he's like you're like I'm presenting an award for you like why aren't you here and I was like oh shit because I didn't even know like I never looked at my grades like so I ended up winning a couple of awards I do not look at your grades uh yeah so like that that's a big part of like spiritual practice is not being oriented towards the outcome of your actions okay so you focus on the action itself yeah and so everyone around me I still remember like the first year of med school I like kind of came in I was a little bit older so much like 22 to 24-year-old kids I was 28 at the time and then they're so paranoid about like grades grades grades they're all bunch of these like you know brown kids and Asian kids and white kids and black kids and Hispanic kids and they're not a bunch in in order but so it's it's funny you say that so I still remember my the day I walked into intern orientation at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School um like a third of the room was brown a third of the room was Asian yeah like East Asian and a third of the room was everything else and I was like this is insane yeah absolutely man all over the world I mean there's it's a big problem right now and then they also litter all over the place what what like like brown people yeah it's a real thing it's it's a real problem yeah I'm in my uncle's house I had like a rapper some junk food obviously because I'm fat and I was like hey we're shy throw this away I don't see a trash can he's like I just throw it outside I did see a video of a hotel I think in Mumbai where a girl brought her trash down and the guy goes well thank you so much then toss over the fence what's their culture not good judge yeah it's like when you have one point four billion people like yeah maintaining civil order is like super hard little tricky yeah yeah um anyway so I don't remember where I was you're a med school you're gonna award you miss it yeah so so that's what you just know that you pass that's all you know yeah I mean I knew I had passed like you know you sit down you take a test you know yeah whether you know the answers or not yeah I didn't know about this didn't know about this and really I mean when I was in med school my orientation was like okay I'm gonna be a doctor one day you know I'm gonna just try to learn as much as I can, because I'm not gonna. to like practice, I don't know if I'm going to practice for long, but and then was 30 years old when I was still in med school and had gotten married at that point, I think, yeah. So decided to get married, decided not to become a monk. So, but really was just about, and this is what I even tell like the medical students and stuff that, you know, I'll mentor. I think a lot of people think like medical school is all about getting grades because this is the way we've been conditioned, right? So like you've got to get A's in high school, you got to make the decision to become a doctor at the age of 15. Yeah. And then you got to be like, do good in high school so you can get into a good college, be at the top of your class in college so that you can, you know, so your grades, grades, grades, grades, grades, parents, parents, parents, parents, parents. So all these kids are like oriented towards getting good grades, but like I still remember I was doing interviews for residency. So I was like on a flight and then there's like, you know, you hear this intercom and it's like, is there a doctor on the plane? And I was like, like, I'm a fourth year medical student, I'm not a doctor. Yeah. And then like, I'm like, okay, hopefully somebody else will answer. Yeah. And then like a few minutes later, they're like, is there a doctor on a plane? And I was like, oh, yeah. You know, so then I like ring the call dial and I go to the back, thankfully, there was another doctor on the plane. So I was like, you know, I'm a fourth year medical student happy to help. And there's like a dude like laid out. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, is he having a hard attack or a panic attack? And so I felt lucky. But that's what I sort of realized at that moment, and this is what I tell everyone who goes to medical school is one day, you could be somewhere like a wedding. Yeah. So 50% of the weddings I go to will have at least one medical emergency, you know, that are Indian because there's like hundreds of people there. And you don't get to say, I didn't study hard enough. I don't know what's wrong with you. Right. At the end of the day, like the practice of medicine is like a human being walks into your office. And if you make a mistake, like this person could die. So you should learn as much as you can about the human body. Don't just focus on the thing that you want to do like everyone sort of focuses on their specialty. But I strongly recommend that if you're going to be a psychiatrist, you should focus on everything else in medical school, because you have your whole life to learn psychiatry. But this is the last time you're going to get a chance, like, I haven't delivered a baby in like, you know, what, 10, 10 years. And so every baby that I delivered, like, hopefully, those are the last babies that I'm going to deliver. And I won't have to deliver a baby. But if you're on a cruise ship or something and some woman goes into labor, you don't get to say, yeah, I'm a medical doctor, but I'm a psychiatrist. And I just know how to talk about feelings. Like I don't know how to do that. Right. So went through medical school. And then how do we, why am I talking about my life story? I was wondering if you ever went like, did the whole shape head bow a silence? No, so the other big decision I realized is that like after years of spiritual practice, I realized that I wanted to become a monk out of ego. So like I failed at life. Right. So I remember like being 26 and hearing from my friend who was like finishing med school, and I'm like applying for the third year and then so like, you know, what happened in my ego was like, oh, these people are better than me. How do I become better than them? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to become a monk. I'm going to be a non-materialistic. Give it up. I'm better than you. You are successful, but I'm a monk. I see you are chasing all of these monies. I'm better. Yeah, I'm developing. It's fantastic. It's my life is that good at a whole different career. Yeah, I'd be selling out the garden right now. Unbelievable. How's your accent? Dude, it's not that good because my mom moved here when she was 14, so she hasn't, she hasn't accent, but it's not like the traditional accent. And my dad's is kind of off too. It's not like, it's so hot I didn't have that like Indian accent in my house, so I didn't learn that. Yeah, so it's funny is my kids will do the accent. Really? But I don't know where they're learning it because you're not. You don't speak that way. My mom doesn't have it anymore. It's so weird, like it's like genetic or something. Yeah, maybe. I'd be a doctor if I had the accent. I'm missing this genetic component. This is because you're pursuing this whole time. That's what it was. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I decided to, I decided that spiritual practice is like not about wearing robes and shaving your head. It's how you live on the inside. It's all like internal, like that's what it is. It's not about what you physically do. It's about your attitude and what happens in your mind and what happens internally. So it's like, oh, I don't need to do that. It seems like there's a transformative point. I don't know if there's a specific moment or it kind of happens over time, but I'm curious, were you able to sort of self-diagnose the things you were going through in that period while you're in college, dealing with this sort of lethargy and maybe depression? Again, I don't want to diagnose you. Yeah, yeah. And what exactly is underlying there and what are the tools you use to get yourself out of that rut? So I can absolutely look back retrospectively and understand exactly what was going on. So I don't know if there was like a moment, but what I've qualified for clinical depression, absolutely. If I saw a psychiatrist, like I met all the criteria, wasn't getting out of bed, all this kind of stuff. I mean, I was addicted to video games. And so I think I probably could have been diagnosed that way. But I think in terms of the understanding, I think it happened really in phases, right? So the first thing that happened was I sort of learned from a perspective of ego and stuff like that. I was like, okay, I'm like doing all this stuff out of ego. So I'm going to just devote myself to like action. So that's also where like, you know, if you look at getting rejected from med school for basically three years in a row, a lot of people would like give up, right? But the reason you give up is because each rejection is not an individual event, it becomes a pile that you're carrying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So if you look at what really weighs people down in life, it's that they accumulate stuff that they don't know how to put down. So in my case, every rejection, I'm like, oh, this is like me holding on to stuff. That's called a sum scar. So I'm going to like, let that go. I'm going to change the way that I view this. That I have a bunch of I have this storm scar. What does that mean? Sun's God is teaching, right? It's the same word, but it has a couple of different meanings. The way that I understand this is, so you know, when we say like, oh, like I've been traumatized, like you carry emotional baggage. Right. So if you sort of look at the way that human beings work, we have emotional experiences and we internalize them in some way. We carry them around. So a great example is I had a patient once who was engaged to be married when she found out her husband was like living a lie. So husband claimed to have a job would leave the house every day, fiance, would leave the house every day, would go to his parents place, brown die. Okay. Would go to his parents place. Yeah. We just hang out there during work hours and then would drive back and his parents were putting money in his bank account. So all of them were maintaining this lie that he's got like a career so that he can get married. And so she ends up like discovering this one day because someone sees him somewhere and then he's, you know, he like goes to McDonald's or something and he gets spotted. I think literally at a fast food drive through on in a different part of town. And she thinks that he's got an office over there. So she starts asking about it and he's like, oh, yeah, like I had something, but she can tell that he's kind of BSing. So then she starts digging, digging, digging, and then basically like discovers like he's not employed and his parents are in on it and they're like depositing money in his account. That's great. That's crazy. And so she's so terrified of this. Then she gets into another relationship. And then this is how she ended up in my office because she's now scared because her husband like won't let her look at her phone. Right. So she's like, she's like, I want to look at his phone and I want to make sure he's not having an affair. So the second person is not has given her no indication that he's unfaithful. But what happens is when she sees certain things. So when she sees him on his phone like texting people or whatever like late at night, her brain has these prior experiences which then interpret this completely normal thing with the context of her experience. Does that make sense? Yeah. So even though there's nothing wrong, I had this experience in the past. I'm carrying this experience forward and injecting it in the present. And if I don't know what you all's like, relationships are like, but we see this all the time in relationships. We're like, they're not judging you. Yeah. They're they're judging all of their past and they see their past in you. Yeah. Right. Which is why we'll talk about relationship baggage. We know is a society that people like carry stuff forward. Right. So what is the mechanism through which we carry that stuff forward? That's what in Sanskrit is called Somskar. This is in psychiatry and we'll call it trauma. Okay. Or now you've been traumatized. So you like, see the world in a different way. Let's just understand what a Somskar is. Yeah. Actually, let's take a step back and understand what the mind is. So what I like about the theory of mind from yoga in the karmic religions is that it's kind of a DIY theory. So if we look at like, if you study psychology, it's really hard to understand like Freud's theories in terms of like what's going on in your head. So Freud was like, there's an anal stage, a phallic stage, an oral stage. Yeah. And like, I don't know what that looks like in my own life. Right. I mean, maybe if we're talking about only fans, but, but you know, like a lot of these psychological concepts, if you sort of look at the way that psychiatry developed is like, you're sitting in that chair and you're talking to me, you're making observations about my mind and you're the psychiatrist. And then you develop these theories. But fundamentally you have no idea what I'm thinking or what my what we don't know what my internal experiences. So Western psychology in Psychiatry is about observation from the outside. That's how our whole system of medicine works. Yeah, right? So how do we know if you have an interesting that you tell me everything? Well, we account for the fact that I'm not telling you, right? So that's how we learn how to detect things But if we look at like even how do we know if you have COVID or not will like you know do a swab will take a chest X So Western medicine is like you're over there. I'm going to look from the outside So if you look at the application of psychological theories, it's really hard to do yourself Right, you it's very hard to like therapist yourself. Right Whereas in the yogic system, they had one bit of information which Western science doesn't have access to which is they could observe the mind So I know what's going on in my mind. None of y'all know what's going on in my mind, but I know what's going on in my mind So the yogic system I think is way better if you want to do self work, which is all what yoga is about like yoga is not about Helping another human being. It's about my journey to enlightenment. Right. I'm only working on myself So in their system of mind, which I think is super cool. I've taught this to like eight-year-olds and it's amazing how accessible it is to people So the first is that you've got four parts of the mind of five. So Chitra, Chitra is what I would call like the sky It like if you look at the sky. There's like clouds in it. There's the sun. There's the moon, but there's like a backdrop So the Chitra is sort of the backdrop on which other things exist people will also call the Chitra the unconscious, but I don't think that's really fair The second part of the mind is something called Woody. This is intellect So we all have a capability of reasoning and analysis Third part of the mind is the monos so this is the emotional mind also the judgmental mind Also the part of us that gives us like or not like Okay, so just to give you a simple example if you give me almond butter versus peanut butter Do you like almond butter or peanut butter peanut butter peanut peanut peanut peanut? Okay, so all three all like peanut butter more than almond butter. Yeah, which part of you does the liking? The Muna the monos right so there is this thing within us That gives us preferences. We don't choose them. It's not our intellect. It's not analysis and if you pay attention to that thing That's the same thing that gives you emotions because the emotions just come up You don't choose to feel a certain way right it arrived It is a preference or a reaction that arises within you then you can analyze it you can think about it But if I touch you over here, that's gonna make an emotional reaction right now. You're suppressing it, right? But like as I'm touching you like what's going on within you fucking get off me, right? So that's the monos reaction, and then your Boothie is like is Catholic is afraid of how much you like you So so right so when when you feel uncomfortable you you lock down and when you feel uncomfortably make a joke Yeah, right? So then we have this initial reaction and then we respond to it in a particular way. Mm-hmm. That's what he's like. Nope Third part of the mind and this is that I think the main thing that Western psychology sort of doesn't get right is The third part is the aham god the aham god is what we call ego, but it is the feeling of eye So this is not whether you like peanut butter Do you'll see how like liking peanut butter is like qualitatively different from an emotion which is qualitatively different from like my ability to do logic So aham god is if I if you make the statement I am dot dot dot Anything that comes after the dot dot dot is your ego That's the aham god. So if I say I'm a man That's my ego now that seems really weird because we'll say well like you are a man because I've got So let me ask y'all Are you all men? Yes, how do you know? You can say x y chromosomes Okay, yeah, you could say you know Okay, so the way we operate in society so let's say that like you have an accident and something happened that you no longer have a penis Are you still a man? I don't know It's your self-scope of masculinity certainly absolutely right? So if you sort of think about your experience of life Like when I take a sip of this water If all of my existence was just what if let's say I was conscious for just one moment of life which is this moment? Would I be a man? Hmm I don't know you don't know right? So that it's just sipping water. Yeah That's all it is So if we really look at Our lives like whether I'm taking a dump or eating a taco or sipping water Right like 99% of our lives Me being a man is like not a real thing you wouldn't be able to detect being a man You know when when I'm when I pull the covers over my head like I'm not a man or a woman I'm just a dude with covers over my head So this is where a lot of like our identity or a hum god is like this is our it causes us a lot of problems Maybe the reason that you get angry. We'll talk about that can't wait Conflict avoidant Also this notion of like the I am blank like this is titan's like machismo. We're describing like sure You know masculinity for example. Yeah, like I guess we can understand physiologically People may be you know male or female based on like chromosome will make up In terms of how that actually manifests in society. That's ego. Yeah. So so you if I say I'm a doctor Okay, so question number one Am I me? Yes Okay, am I a doctor? Yes. Yes Was I me before I was a doctor? Yes. Yes. Okay. So is being a doctor a part of me? Yes or no? Yes It so which part of you it's a part of me but So if we sort of you do that exercise with every attribute of ourself. I'm successful I'm rich. Well, discover is that like all those things are temporary Right, like I could lose my license like I could retire and then am I still a doctor? All of the things that we think we are are actually illusions Okay, so like let's say I'm a doctor If I got trapped on a desert island for the rest of my life would I be a doctor? Right. I would say yes, but it's why his license would expire Right, and then there's no longer a practice of No one's interesting. Maybe this is how I look at the world But your achievements are something that live on they cannot where do they live on very good in your Yeah, I guess in your ego or like what? Absolutely, right? So it lives on within me in my psychology Yeah, what I used to say is as I climb in the career like early early early on I'd be like oh they they can't ever take that away from me even if I don't make it if I stop After my first good review and I don't become I can't sustain as a comic I did these things you can't take away from me right and being a doctor is something they can't take from you They can't do that. Yeah, but so so you notice how that structure Requires a me, right? So remember we're talking about parts of the mind So that's not an emotion. It's not even logic that cannot exist unless there's a me That's the third structure of the mind or fourth if you can cleach it that then we get to some scar So some scar is basically I kind of think about it like emotional baggage that lives within you So it's sort of like when we feel powerful emotions generally speaking what happens is Some of those emotions go dormant they don't disappear Right, so if I get like bitten by a dog The next time I see a dog I'm gonna feel fear. Mm-hmm. Where is that fear coming from? I'm not in any danger So what happened is when I got bitten by the dog in the first place Let's say my mom or dad comes up to me and let's am a kid and they're like oh you're crying crying are you crying? Let's get you an ice cream they get me the ice cream and suddenly I'm happy mm-hmm so even then the emotion Seemingly is disappeared it can absolutely come back mm-hmm. So that's how some scar works so usually what happens is we go through life We're accumulating This emotional energy which then comes up Right, we call triggered yeah, yeah, right? So if I say this particular thing just don't comment about my beard Like don't ever talk about my beard mm-hmm. You know like that. Oh just like you can say anything but just don't do this Like how does that work? I'm not saying whether it's like fair or unfair or kind or unkind just how does that work mentally So generally speaking what we find is that if you have a some scar that here's the first way to detect it When you have a disproportionate emotional response to a situation. Mm-hmm Let me do that Yes, you have yeah, right? That's why you're angry all the time because that dormant energy comes up over and over and over again mm-hmm Because the source of it is in your some conscious and you calm yourself down you calm yourself down You make jokes about it you make jokes about it, right? That's when you respond to it in the right way But it'll bubble up. Oh, no, that's true. He's reading you That's what I'm talking about. That's when you know My might be pissing me off and I'll be making jokes a lot or I'll just kind of look at her and laugh because it's like Yeah, I don't want to get angry See that's beautiful, you know the root of that you never lost my temper with any of these guys. I have a temper But this this thing that he it's a fucking whatever I hate you dude. All right go ahead. So so here's the really interesting thing So if you guys Eat triggered something triggered. Yeah, I feel I find this a bit unfair, but go ahead Go ahead you find it. I find it a bit unfair. I'm misjudging you. I feel they're misjudging me You're not if you read that then I believe it. Okay, so which part of you gets judged? the intellect, the monos, or the ego. - There you go. - 100%, 100%. And when the ego arises, anger will come with it. So these two things will happen. So another key thing to understand. So let's, let me finish this, okay? So first thing is if you have a disproportionate emotional response, that's how you know there's a some scar. Because that's not coming from now. It's coming from the past. Second thing to understand is when your some scar activates, your ego will activate to protect you. So when I was in college, and I joined a fraternity, I was hanging with my homies. And what we would do is we would have a fraternity? - No. - Damn. - Interesting. - So yeah, I had a brown fraternity. Dude, they're, I mean, no offense. People would join brown fraternity. They're like so toxic. At least they weren't your tea back when I was there. - Yeah, yeah. - There was like two of them and they'd always get in the pizza. - Oh, dude, I know, probably the two brown fraternities. There was beta-kype beta, and there was, fucking no, my cousin. - DSP Delta. - That's it, right? Okay. - But like they would always go to a 6th grade, they'd go to clubs, and then they'd always fight with each other. - Yeah, yeah. - It was like, it was just so funny. - So once you have that negative, so I like a girl, right? And I'd be like, oh, like my friends would be like, who do you like? And I'd be like, oh, yeah, she's hot. Then you like ask her out and she says, no. - Right, that's not good. - Then what happens? - Oh, your ego's hot. - Oh, she's not worth it. She sucks. - She sucks. - She sucks. - Yeah, she's ugly like, I was doing her a favor. - Right, so how do I feel emotionally? I feel rejected. And then my ego comes in and it does one of two things. Either puts them down or it pumps me up. That's how the ego works, okay? So the sequence of event is, I'm going through life. I have a disproportionate emotional response. I feel a ton of emotion. Happens a ton for men, by the way, women too. But I see this a lot in the man that I work with. Then what happens is you'll have some kind of thought and you can pay attention, you can track this in your mind. I will start thinking negatively about somebody else or I will think positively about me. And then here's the really interesting thing. So if you argue with someone who says, I didn't like her anyway, no amount of argument does it gonna work, right? If you didn't like her anyway, why did you ask her out? Oh, it's just I felt like it at the moment. So this is where a lot of people get so frustrated because they'll try to use, when someone else is behaving emotionally, ego-tistically, and you try to point it out to them, their mind is like a steel wall. Like there's no amount of logic that seems to work. The defense mechanism is so strong. Absolutely. Can I ask you about a third option? Do you want to continue with this? I guess, what if you agree? Like is it possible that a woman could reject you and you go, you know what, she's right, I am the worst. I do suck. So is the ego getting attacked in that case? So this is where there's two, yes. So this is where there's two kinds of ego. So this is what's really interesting. So in the West, we're very familiar with narcissism, right? And narcissism is like, I have a big ego. So I'm the best. I'm better than everybody else. Everybody should get in line to spend time with me. There's another kind of ego that gets a bit technical called thumbsick ego, which is just as powerful of an ego, but it is negative in direction. I'm a loser, I'm pathetic, I'm an in-sell. And if you try to talk to a narcissist about how they're not the best shit on the planet, they will never understand. And if you talk to an in-sell, which I've done a lot, about how they're not pathetic, you're not a loser. You're, you know, like you've had some bad experiences, but believe in yourself, man, that low self-esteem is also ego because the really strong thing is, I, I, I, I, I, I, hmm. And when I work with patients who are depressed, it's really interesting what they say. I'm a loser, my family is better off without me. My kids would be so much better if I was not alive anymore. Everyone at my job hates me, but it's still me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Which is what's really interesting because if we look at meditation and psychedelics in their usage and treatment refractory depression, the mechanism through which they work is they shut off a part of our brain called the default mode network. This is the part of our brain that gives us self-awareness and allows us to think about ourselves and self-reflect. So when someone is hyper, super depressed, they're constantly thinking about themselves. I'm a loser, I'm pathetic, when someone is narcissistic, they're constantly thinking about themselves. When we shut off that part of the brain, that's what correlates with healing and depression, healing from some degrees of trauma, and meditation shuts off that part of the brain too. So then we start stop thinking about myself, right? That's sort of like, I'm not trying to get an A in class. I'm not looking at my grades. That's, I don't care about achievement, right? It's just, I'm going to try to learn medicine as best as I can. So once the default mode network shuts off, and this is why people with psychedelics like they feel connected to everything, I realized I wasn't what I thought I was. This whole life has, there's this bigger purpose, this grander thing, I used to exist like this. And now I realize that I'm so much more than that. So it's really fascinating how all these things, there's a lot of, and the reason I sort of talk about these yoga concepts is because I think there's a ton of scientific evidence for them now. - I do towards you a little bit. You were talking about how the ego will pump you up. - Yeah, so here's the sequence of events. First of all, you have an experience where there's more emotion than you can metabolize and we'll get to that in a second. That emotion goes dormant. The second thing that happens is you are going about your life and you encounter something that pisses you off, makes you way more sad. Really good example is you're walking down the street, you see two people, this happens a lot in my community. I see two people holding hands and it just makes me so angry. It's like what do they do to you? They do nothing, right? That powerful jealousy, I want that. I hate them for having that. I want it. I hate myself for feeling this way. There's all kinds of just emotion that comes up. Then the ego rises. So how does the ego protect us? Let's see if we can do this, okay? I mean, it's okay if y'all don't get it. It's a hard question because I'm just introducing these concepts, but for people listening at home, how does the ego protect someone? What does it say to you when you see two people holding hands and you feel incredibly jealous and incredibly angry? They're probably not even happy. They're probably just doing this because they don't love each other and they're pretending or that's one way of the ego. Yeah, you don't need that. That's another way of the ego, right? We see that all the time, right, dudes who are like, yeah, I don't need anybody else. I'm a pillar, I'm a mountain, I'm stoic, right? I don't need anybody. That guy's probably gay holding hands with a woman. You know what I mean? What's he doing? What a bitch. That's one way of doing it, right? So I think the more common way is I'm a loser. That's never possible for me, right? Because that's protective. It's for 100%. Right? Because if it's impossible for me to get a girlfriend, if I'm so ugly, so pathetic, what does that allow me to do? No. Not go after it. Not absolutely. And when I don't go after it. You can't get rejected. Absolutely, which means I protect myself from what? Rejection. Rejection, hate, negative emotion, right? So giving up on life is actually a protective mechanism because then you don't have to try. And so when you see people that are self-sabotaging, is this going in line with this sort of thinking here? It could be. That's one form of self-sabotage, but there's all kinds of other reasons why people will quote unquote self-sabotage. But I think that a lot of people, see a lot of people who are stuck in life have a certain identity, which excuses them from action, so you'll look at these people and you'll see like, oh, like this person isn't trying. They've given up because giving up protects you from pain. It's also why people stay in abusive relationships, right? Because if I just give up and I just take it, all I have to focus on is survival. And these people who have these identities that protect them from trying, these are the people we see there's so much there just existing. Every day I'm on my phone, I'm playing video games, I'm using drugs, I'm doing pornography why? To advance the clock until I die. So what's happening when you actually want to do something, but you're procrastinating and you're not doing it? But you actually want to do that thing, like say, do something productive and it's like you just find a bunch of bullshit to do instead of the thing you actually want to do. So that, the short answer is it depends, okay? So it depends on, so this is where I think one of the key things that I learn and I try to teach is that good diagnosis perceives good treatment. So right now if you look at the world, including influencers, like myself, we're out there on YouTube, given people all kinds of answers, you should do this, get your testosterone tested, learn about stoicism, take these supplements, do all these things, and so everyone's focused on solutions. But the problem, I mean, you learn this the hard way in medicine real quick, where like I try treatment number one, it doesn't work, I try treatment number two, it doesn't work, I try treatment number three doesn't work. What's the problem? My diagnosis is wrong. So there are a ton of people out there, why is the self-help industry so big? Because everyone is selling answers, and the reason people keep buying it is because it's not working. Because the diagnosis, because the diagnosis is incorrect. And maybe it works for the influencer, but the influencer is different than the person listening. Absolutely, so that's another key point, right? So people will sell what worked for them, but their diagnosis could be different. And this is where the word, for words like procrastination and motivation, these things do not exist. Hmm, motivation is a umbrella term that describes a ton of neuroscience deficits. your procrastination can come from many places. - So, as deficits is interesting. - Yeah, so motivation is like, is that a deficit of willpower? Is it a deficit of emotional activity? Just to give you a couple examples of incentive. - So, if I see, if I say that I'm not motivated, why is this? - Oh, I thought you were saying motivation. Being motivated is deficits. - Oh, being motivation can be a deficit too, which we can talk about, which is really interesting. But, so if I say I'm not motivated, one place that this could come from is my emotional circuitry. So, if we sort of look at what our primary source of motivation is, as humans, is emotion. - Okay. - Right? So, if I like, if I like show up at y'all's house in the middle of the night, like you're in your bathroom, and like I step inside and I'm like, "Hey, I've got, you said I couldn't come by any time." (laughing) Like, your reaction to that, like you're gonna be motivated to do something. - Yeah. - So, here's the reason. - Bucky, probably. (laughing) - Oh, what? (laughing) - I mean, why are you talking like that? (laughing) - I guess I walked into that one. (laughing) I think it was like, what did I explain? - No, you're outside my pocket, keep going. - Yeah. - So, so if you sort of think about it, like most of like, you know, if I like slap someone across the face, I feel anger. - Mm-hmm. - And then I wanna slap back. So if we look at like anger, anger, suppresses our risk assessment circuitry, which is on purpose, 'cause I gotta be angry in order to look as if I think about what's gonna happen, like, you know, I need to act fast. So here's the problem is, right now in our society, we are messing up our emotional circuitry so much, especially through technology use. So everyone thinks about dopamine, but the key thing is if you spend your time, if you spend time on, let's say you scroll on your phone, do you all know what your average cellphone use is by the way? - Oh, it's probably high, six hours a day. - Yeah, six hours is about average. - What is your emotional experience on your phone? - Yeah. - I mean, neutral to negative. - Neutral to negative is exactly what I would say. - No one. - Sometimes some laughs. Like, sometimes some positive. - So it's variable, I guess. - Overall, I would say it is variable reward, right? - No, no, no, so, so, so, when you scroll on your phone, let's be precise here, okay? - Okay. - I'm not talking about overall. What is your emotional experience for like five minutes or 10 minutes? - Uh, joy, I guess. - Some joy? And then what? - It's a sadness, probably, emptiness. - I think it's probably perfectly neutral. It's probably a slot machine, right? Like it's, - So you guys are thinking, you guys are thinking, it's probably, no, I want you to pay attention to your experience. Don't think about, forget about slot machine and random reinforcement schedule. If you look at the internet, what we see, is there's variable emotional engagement. That's what all the algorithms do. So you see some terrible shit happening. People are dying over here. There's inflation, you know, this prime president is saying this, this prime minister is doing this. Then you see cat videos, then I see my boy, a cat show up on some short because he was at the comedy cellar or whatever, right? And then I'm laughing over there and I scroll and they give me something else. So what happens is there's a ping pong. If you really pay attention, they will ping pong you. And if they don't ping pong you, what you will do is switch to a different app that does a better job of ping pong. - Wow. - Right? So I'll see, I'm following some, some, you know, person on Instagram who's showing me a lot of flesh. And then some people make me feel really good. Some people actually make me feel really bad. Right, so there's a ping pong new emotions. Then what happens is it exhausts our emotional circuitry. So when I'm sitting in therapy with a patient, really powerful session or a podcast, I'm drained afterward. I'm emotionally activated. We're expressing so much emotion. And so then once my emotional battery is empty, there's no motivation left. What is it that gets us doing things in life? I'm excited. I'm curious or I'm angry. I'm never gonna let that guy. This my girlfriend dumped me. And now she's dating a different dude. I'm gonna get sexier. I'm gonna get a hair transplant. I'm a showher, right? So so much of motivation comes from emotion. And then there's the dopaminergic circuitry, which is a completely different system. This is when we talk about reward and stuff like that. So when we talk about something like procrastination, oftentimes procrastination is correlated with things like perfectionism. So are you perfectionistic? Do you need it to be perfect before you get started? Right, so I have to figure everything out and then I want to do it. Now why are we perfect? - That's how I used to be, right? - Because insecurity of I don't want to get rejected, I don't want to fail and face that failure. So I procrastinate. - Absolutely, right? So if you can't afford to fail, then it needs to be perfect. So perfectionism is an antidote to anxiety. Because anxiety is like this could go wrong. This could go wrong. This could go wrong. How do I fix this problem? I make it perfect. And there's no room for anything to go wrong. And so if I become perfectionistic, now everything has to be perfect before I get started. That means I'm procrastinating because getting things perfect is hard, right? So I know so many people who will like, they wanna do something, but they wanna do it perfectly. - Yeah. - There are other reasons that we can procrastinate. So I think oftentimes procrastination is about emotional avoidance. So my favorite example of this is something that I struggled with a lot in the receiving end of, or I used to be when I was faculty in teaching is like sometimes you have to email a professor, hey, can I get an extension? But what if they say no? - Right. - So there's this part of your brain that is like, this is a bad outcome. If I never send the email, I can never get rejected. So there's a certain amount of emotional avoidance in procrastination. So if you're trying to overcome procrastination, couple of things that you can do is do you have anxiety? But is there an emotional consequence that you're avoiding? - Yeah. - Why are you avoiding that emotional consequence because of a sub-scar? Because you know that if you're in that situation, there's gonna be a ton of emotional stuff that you can't handle. - And so once you've identified the sub-scar, how do you immediately rate that? - So it involves a couple of steps. The first is notice it, right? So notice that, okay, this is a disproportion emotional reaction. Second thing is observe what your ego does. And this is the other part that I was getting to. Then the ego hijacks the intellect. The ego goes to the intellect and says, hey bro, we're feeling terrible about ourselves. I need you to help me feel better. So give me a very, very selective logic that justifies why this bitch doesn't deserve us. And then the intellect is like, yes sir. - Yeah. - She does this, she does this, she does this, she does this. - And the smarter you are, the more reasons you can come up with. - Absolutely. So this is like higher IQ is associated with depression. Higher IQ is associated with procrastination, right? So higher IQ has become really maladaptive in our current world because our EQ does not balance, right? So we don't know enough as people become hyper-intellectualized, they lean into their IQ, they lean into their IQ. There's a really great study that showed that how well you understand your diagnosis correlates with the degree of suicidality that you have. So if you're smart and you can look at your life and you can project out, I never dated a girl in high school, I never dated a girl in college because it was COVID. Now I'm 23 years old, I've had no experience the likelihood. And then I read all this stuff on the internet and I see how bad things are, I'm gonna be alone for the rest of my life. That is a hard calculation to argue against if you're super smart because you're right. - Statistically. - What I mean is that if you have high IQ, the likelihood that you make a correct calculation is higher than if you have moderate IQ or lower IQ. - There's still cognitive bias as a point. - It's easy to feel hopeless, I think if you're really, if you're large smarter because you just look at the state of the world and you're like, what is all this for? - Yeah, so IQ also correlates with existential depression. So I did a whole lecture about that. That was fantastic, it's on YouTube. But and so there's all these problems that we think of IQ is just like a good thing. And generally speaking, it is a good thing, but you need an EQ to balance it. And the reason that people with high IQ tend to be emotionally stunted is because early on when you're like a kid, you learn what you're good at and then you use that thing, right? So if I'm right handed, I don't go around using my left hand for things. My brain defaults to the most efficient thing possible. So when we start using our intellect, we start using our intellect, we start using our intellect and then our emotional circuits become underdeveloped. - Okay, that's really interesting. - Now in this case, why is the, I'm sorry, what is the term again for this baggage? The sum scar, why is it different than the moonas? Is that what it is? So moonas is where we experience the like or dislike. It's where we experience the emotion, but the moonas just creates emotion right now. So I'll give you a simple example. So the first time I touched your leg, there was no baggage, right? But now if I do this, what's happening? - I thought it was gonna grab my thigh again. - Right, but I'm not grabbing your thigh. - Right. - When you're feeling emotion, now where did that come from? Some of it comes from this experience. Some of it comes from the last experience which you haven't metabolized. So it is a storehouse of emotion. That's what a sum scar is. And then it activates. - Yeah. - But now, is it not the inverse of like, my mom would make me a specific soup and I would have it and it reminded me of this time of it's been a thing. - You're gonna have positive sum scar too. - So that would be allocate under some scar. - Absolutely, right? So when you have a disproportionate reaction, emotional reaction, That's what a sum scar is, they're not all negative. - Good or bad, yeah. - Yeah. - But this is interesting, it's through therapy, I've learned. And I know, I guess you're proponent of therapy, but maybe one thing I learned, my wife and I, if we got in like a really explosive argument, usually be me, 'cause she'll like get annoyed and say stuff, and she's just getting annoyed and venting. I would take it as, I'm not good enough, 'cause that's what my sum scar was, I'm not good enough. So I had to learn when I would explode, and I've gotten much better at this. Take a little pause, I'll literally just write a thing out to myself, hey, I'm good enough, and she knows that, this is not about that. She's just frustrated that X, Y, Z. If I take 10 minutes, I can come back and be like, okay, I think I see what you were feeling. I was feeling this, but I understand you were feeling that. Cool. - Great, so now let's ask y'all a tough question. Why, you said that when she gets mad at you, you feel like you're not good enough? Why does he feel that way? What in his history would create emotional experiences of him being insufficient? - I could think of a few things. - Yeah, like what? - I mean, can we share, like-- - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I mean, like, Akash just talked about his relationship with his father. - Great, yeah. I grew up in a house where there was abuse, and I felt like I could've stopped it or done something, and I didn't, and I carried that a little bit. I also think there's a little survivor's remorse that I'm here, and I see they're doing better now, but like my mom's family in India, I remember going there 2008, and they were studying with the fucking torch, and I'm like, I'm here with electricity and a house and whatever, and I can't become a doctor, I can't X, Y, Z, and these guys studying by torch cannot. And I carry a lot of guilt of like, why did I get that? - So now, now the question for you, when I sit like this, how do you feel? - Not good enough. - Not Indian enough. - There we go. You guys see it? So he shows it as respect. He's like, oh, you're a real Indian. And I'm bad as fuck. I'm like, every Indian parents dream and every Indian kid's nightmare. I wear this, I sit like this. I became a doctor at Harvard Medical School. Oh my God. Right? - Indian kids would always get straight A's. I would not. - Right? So all of that every time, every single time, you get an 88, or an 86. - 78. - 78. - 78. - You can go. - And you feel bad. - Yeah. - And so these some scars accumulate over time. And now they're so big that when you see things and these things, the reason that you use anger, this is really important to understand. So men do something very special with anger. We turn all of our negative emotions into anger, which is why men are so angry. So now, let me ask you all, what is the evolutionary function of sadness? What does sadness make us do? - We cry, we. - Good, excellent. - It connects with grief, maybe, to process. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. - Psychological talk. - Okay. - No psychological talk. - I can't think of an evolutionary advantage to grief. - I can think of an advantage. - No, no, no, no, no, no. - That sadness. - That sadness. - I can't think of one for anger. - I go do things. - What does sadness do? When I am sad. - So first of all, sadness has high visibility, high auditory stuff, right? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - You can see someone is sad. You can hear someone is sad. So sadness is the most outward facing emotion, if you really look at it. Now, when you see someone crying on a park bench, what do you do? - I mean, you want to go and pat him on the back and be like, "Here, you're in New York long enough, you're like, "Shut the fuck up." - Okay. - At the very least, you aren't a what happened. - Right, instinctually. - So if we look at the evolutionary purpose of sadness, I feel sad because I can't handle something I'm hurting. Fundamentally, we feel sad when we can't handle the world around us. So what do we do? We signal for help. S-O-S. (laughing) And then people, what do we feel like as human beings because we're communal animals? I want to find out, "Hey, what's going on? "Oh my God, are you doing okay?" It is a signal for help when you feel like you can't handle the world around you. That's literally what sadness does, right? Why does a kid cry? Because they're like, "Hey, I need help." Now, this is a really tricky thing. When a man needs help, what does society do? - What does society do? - So when I signal, when I'm a dude, - And you cry. - And I crying, what's gonna happen? - Rob dirtin' it. - Rob dirtin' it. - Yeah, right. - Oh, up. - Mm-hmm. - Well, if you make fun of you. - Right, what are you crying about? - Man, or privilege? - I'll give you something to cry about. - Yeah. - Right? So we don't respond to men. So there's one really troubling thing in our society right now, which is that we expect men to solve their own problems. We don't help men, right? So male rates of matriculation, so their ability to go to college is like, I think 60 plus percent of people in college are women, but there's no male and these scholarships are very few. Right, we're not trying to fix that problem. - Yeah. - Male suicide has been four times the rate of female suicide for the last 60 plus years. That's not a problem that there's any real systemic movement around, right? So we expect men to help themselves. So what men learn is that when I cry, it doesn't work. - Mm-hmm. - So sadness is a signal for help. And so what we do is we turn it into anger, because when I feel-- - It's the only masculine way, masculine acceptable way to it. - And it's not even about masculine acceptability. I think it even goes deeper than that. What is the purpose of anger? What is anger? - Like rectifying injustice. - Very, okay, so rectifying, right? So sadness makes me do what? - Right. - Good, and that makes me do what? To fix my problems. - And get help. - Nothing. - Nothing in America. - Nothing, right? So sadness is like, I'm not doing the problem. You guys fix that. - So did it. - But what does anger make me do? - I fix it. - Rectify. Now I'm gonna do it. Now I'm gonna show them. Anger is a motivating emotion, right? So anytime we feel angry, you feel like doing something, right? And oftentimes when people get really, really angry, we tell them, don't do anything. But what do you wanna do when you get pissed? - Hey. - Or anything, everything. - Whatever, yeah. - Right, so this is where what we've learned as men is like, okay, the sadness signal doesn't work. So instead what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna transmute that into anger. And once it gets transmitted into anger, now I have the motivation to fix this problem because I ain't no one gonna fix it for me. - Mmm. - Guy. - Let me just jump in not to throw you off, but like I grew up feeling that I can't show emotion, that it's weakness and for probably up until my mid-20s would never cry. And I kind of felt like emotionally set times. And so now I'm way more secure in myself. I'm in a better place. I actually force myself to cry. Like I'll purposely watch a sad movie because I just need to feel something, make sure that's still in there. And then I feel way better after I get those tears out. Why am I doing that? What the hell's wrong with me? - What makes you think there's something wrong with you? - Well, diagnose me. Why am I doing wrong with them? - There's something. There's something. - It texted me. He said, "What was. " - I don't remember. I said, "What do you think is wrong with you?" I'm confused about why you view that as something that's wrong. - Initially I would do it because I was worried that I was emotionless. - Okay. - And then I was like, "Oh, okay, I feel something when I watch you sad movies." And then it actually felt good when I felt something. So I'm like, "Oh, let me pick a time in place where I can get it out." And now it's like I have some nice balance in my life. Like I'm happy, I'm happy. - Do you feel like you have a lot of sadness in your heart, way deep down? - Like if I look at the state of the world and stuff like that, yeah, that'll make me sad, but I'm okay. - Okay, but do you feel like you carry sadness not the state of the world? But do you have. If the world was a good place, would you still be sad on the inside? - I don't think so. - Okay. So I think, I mean, we don't know, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind. The first is that people on the autism spectrum love anime. And one of the reasons I really think they love anime, I've worked with a ton of people who are on the spectrum, is that so if we look at autism, autism affects the emotional circuits of our brain in a very profound way. So it affects social circuits in our brain and it affects emotional circuits in our brain. Generally speaking, the intellectual circuits are completely intact and not affected at all. So oftentimes people with autism spectrum, this is also why people on the autism spectrum are more likely to be transgender or non-binary identity. Because people who are non-binary, our sense of gender identity comes from our emotional, like our emotional experience, right? So like, how do you know you're a man? Well, I feel like a man, hold on a second, which part of your brain does the feeling like a man? That's fundamentally usually an emotional and social circuitry. So both of those things, there's a very high correlation between autism spectrum and being transgender. And this is why I think that there's like a good biological basis for being transgender because we know that there's social alterations and emotional alterations. And if those two things contribute to gender identity, then we would expect if we tamper with those circuits, gender identity will be affected. Now the reason that people watch anime is because anime tends to have a hyper active, a hyper elevated signal of emotion. And what my patients who are on the spectrum, they just love because it helps them feel. So I think what you're doing isn't unhealthy. There's nothing wrong with you. You are doing what a hungry person does when they eat. You are discovering that there's some environmental stimuli that are almost like self-medicating, that are bringing out these emotions that you don't know how to bring out in other ways, but they absolutely need to get out. And especially when we talk about things like sadness, I mean, there's so many physiologic things We'll see you next time. sadness that are helpful. The rate of our breathing, when we become sad and we start crying, and then we're, right, when we do that kind of thing, that alters our parasympathetic nervous system activity, ends up reducing our stress level and things like that. So there's all kinds of benefits to getting your emotions outside of you. And I think what you've discovered, like many people who are on the spectrum, is that I need a particular kind of emotional trigger to help me get that stuff out. The other really important thing there is I think we make a huge mistake in the field of psychiatry, which is that somewhere along the way we got into this idea that talk therapy is the gold standard. Talk therapy is the gold standard for women. 70% of psychiatric patients historically have been women, 70% of therapists in psychiatrists historically have been women. So what do men need to do to be better off, less angry, whatever, if it's not possible? Watch anime. Really? I think talking about it is correct, but I think the way we should talk about it is different. We should use more physical language, right? When I get dumped by my girlfriend, it feels like she kicked me in the nuts man, right? So we force men into using these very certain kind of emotional words, which we just don't have access to. There are a couple of great studies about why men don't like to go to couples therapy and it's because they feel out-gunned. Like. Not me, Doug. I be dunking on my bitch. Okay. So hold on. What? No. Hold on. Let's. What just happened? She's feminine. You know? No. You made a joke, right? So what just happened? Happened like this. Did we see it? Mm-hmm. Men feel out-gunned. Mm-hmm. What? Does he feel out-gunned in therapy? I'm going to say yes. Good. Because just like when he said that you're a real Indian, he also said that he dunked on his girl in therapy. Right. So is he putting himself up and putting somebody else down? Yeah. Right? I don't. That doesn't happen to me. Can I be honest with you? I feel out-gunned in every other part of my relationship except when we went to couples therapy. Awesome. That's probably what it is. Yeah. Because in couples therapy, if you're a comic, you tend to be good with words. So she would actually have the complaint of like he can verbalize everything really well and really coherently and I'm kind of like emotional and I can't find the words as well as him. But I think in the rest of our relationship, she'd be doing that shit perfectly. Yeah. So I think it's a great example. I saw. I'm wrong. And I think it perfectly illustrates the point, right? So I think 99% of people will have Akasha's experience. If they're not 99% of people that's wrong, I think it's probably closer to 70%. But 70% of dudes aren't good with their words. They're not good at expressing themselves. They're not good at being emotive, right? So Akasha is an all-y-all or incredibly emotive. But when he laughs, he doesn't. Yeah. Right? If we go back and we watch an all-y-all rolling round, I'm kind of like, "This is funny." Yeah. But I was kind of like, "Okay." Right? So he is very emotive, very in touch with, which I think is part of what comedy does, right? So you have a lot of hurt and you have to like learn how to grapple with that hurt. I think comedy is incredibly therapeutic, right? So you take that hurt and you turn it into jokes and you help people laugh and you feel connected with people. So I think you're not lucky, but your professional training, I imagine, helps you with that quite a bit, which is great. Yeah. I think the majority of men will feel outgunned for a couple of reasons. One is that women or girls tend to have a higher verbal fluency than boys do. So this is like, you can detect us at the age of like six. Their ability to like put things into words is better. They be happy. They be happy. They talk a lot. They do talk a lot. Right? So we don't. Yeah. Right? Unless we're podcast bros. Yeah. It's the one space we're allowed to talk, right? Yeah. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. So those women being happy. Look at all these podcast bros, right? Like, we don't talk, but like, except what we get together. Is that because this is a one space where it's like acceptable for us to talk a lot? Absolutely, bro. Wow. Why do you think it's not, why is the podcast like, it's all podcast bros? Yeah. Because we don't have this anymore anywhere else. Ah. Right? This is acceptable for guys to just get together and just get with their boyfriend and talk. Exactly. So what are we doing? Think about this, right? Have you all select topics? What? What's, I guess, trending that we're interested in? Absolutely. So how do men address the issues that they deal with? We like listen to podcasts where they address the zeitgeist that all the men are going through. So we're talking about motivation, relationship, pornography, this is all the shit that people are dealing with. Yeah. So they tune in. They hear us talking about it. And this is the beautiful thing. When y'all laugh, they laugh too. They feel connected. They're not alone anymore. Y'all are doing God's work here. I say that very seriously. Right? So there's a lot of emotional connection. Last thing about women that makes them better verbal things is estrogen, the amount of estrogen in your system correlates with your awareness of your emotions. So a lot of times, you know, we joke about PMS and like when you're dating a woman and she's on her period, you know, there's like this weird like emotional fluctuation. That's literally because estrogen correlates with like our ability to detect emotions. So it amplifies emotions. Yeah. And this isn't just women. Yeah. So I think the other thing that you can do is increase your estrogen level. Then you won't need to watch stuff. And I'm gonna grow tits. You don't even do it that much. So there's a, that has other advantages but this is really fascinating. So you know, I used to never cry when I would watch a movie and then I had kids. And what happens? It was so weird. Like, I had kids and like my, I have a two year old and we watched like the Lion King. And like I started bawling and I was seeing before. And it's a movie that I've seen before. And I was like crying and I was like, what the hell is going on? And now like I cry all the time. And what I realized is like, Oh, like in order to understand my six month infant, they don't know how to use words. I need to increase like my empathic detection capability. You started crying more. And I might be saying this is a joke. You started crying so much more when he had his son. Yeah. Absolutely. So this is a universal experience for men. Well, if we're lucky. Yeah. Right. So our estrogen level actually increases when we have a kid at home. That is funny. And it helps us become. Oh, now you don't want to grab it. To be honest, to be honest, no, no, no, no, no, not annoyed. I was like, are you guys don't understand who I am, man? What I'm going to do, what we should do is we should signal, bro. Okay. I'm going to talk to my wife, baby, I don't want to see it, I'll tell her, oh, you know her. I know. Okay. We'll send you an. We'll pull up a picture. We'll send you an urban dictionary link later. Is that it? >> So trick act. >> I treat you and I. >> And two guys and then they. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> This is how men connect. >> Yes. So another really interesting thing is I think we got way worse when we so one of the biggest things the wrong with our culture right now. Is that it? No, it's a common sutric act. Okay. is when we started demonizing homosexuality. So what happened when I was growing up-- - That's them. - Yes, yes, yes, yes. - When I was growing up touching another dude, I remember when I went to India, I was 21 years old and I had a friend there and he was like two of his friends showed up and it was just the weirdest thing. And I remember thinking 'cause I grew up in like South Texas and so things were gay. So this dude, my friend was there and he had his arm around two of his male friends and they were both rubbing his belly. - That. - And they were talking about how he's gonna get married and how he's gonna eat real well, okay? And I was like, "What is this stuff?" So at some point, we started demonizing homosexuality and when we started doing that, men stopped touching each other. And now, even as we're talking about this, what's the kind of touch that we do? We can't just do this, right? We gotta do like a- - Yeah, it's gotta be borderline aggressive. It's gotta be like, ah. No, it's not a borderline aggressive or a borderline homosexual, right? So these are the kinds of touches. Like, I mean, you went for the tit bro. (laughing) - To be funny, right? - Yeah, so we've started doing this thing. - It's gonna be actually affectionate. - We can't touch someone unless it's a joke. - Yeah. - And even the male hug is always packed, that you don't hold. There's no like hold. - Yeah. - I think male hug is heterosexual. I'm not trying to fuck you. - I don't, I don't. - Right, so something weird happened, where like men stopped touching each other. And like people who are gonna hear me say that are like, whoo, right, like really? And now men are so like starved for touch women are too in today's world. But like there's so many dudes like, I mean, I have held men in my arms as they cry in my office. And it happens a lot, and it feels great. To be a dude and to cry and to just be like held. - Yeah. - And if men can start doing that for each other, I think our relationships with women will vastly improve. - Really? She's not just your life partner, your sexual partner, she also It also has to become your therapist, right? So now like when we share emotions, we only have one person. We basically will cry in front of like two people. Our wives are moms, right? Those definitely are our dads. Yeah. So we'll kind of do this thing. And so what happens is a lot of times women will feel like there's too much of an emotional burden when they they date a man like because the man puts all of their emotions on the woman. So many of my female patients experience this because the man doesn't have an emotional outlet outside of his wife. And so as you start to have, as you start to deal with your own shit outside of that, then you're like a normal human being with her drastically improves the quality of the relationship. Yeah. Take some of the burden off. Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. I'll come coddle you a little bit. I would absolutely love that. No, that's not my love language. I love it. I love it. My favorite thing. You hugged me. No! Oh, I want you to pay attention to what happened. You made a joke. He was authentic and then you said what you rejected him and hugs everybody he meets and I'm I'm gay for wanting to hug because you really want it. Don't want it so much. Yeah. So I think this is like an excellent, excellent example of I just want to kiss him on the cheek for years. He won't let me. Jesus Christ. What? I kiss Mark on the cheek when he had a baby. I kiss Andrew on the cheek. All the time. What makes you uncomfortable about kiss? His lips. They're nice. They are. I got a good set of lips, dude. You do are good. Let's do it. If he adds a white guy, like one of the ease, I, yeah, whatever. That's like nothing. Did you like him? Mosque. Would you kiss Alex right now on there? Mosque. He got a got a bottom. No. Jesus. He never has lips. I have like some duck lips. I don't have lips. Yeah. I'm catching straight. No, yeah. All right. Let's get back to therapy. We don't know. We have to kiss anybody on the lips. Yeah, let's see. But so the other thing is, if you're on the spectrum too, this is another important thing. People with on the spectrum and ADHD, their brain processes a touch in a different way. So it's really interesting. It's fascinating. Some people with ADHD have a lot of difficulty with sex because they have something called tactile defensiveness. So the way that literally your brain processes, when you feel a physical touch, if you have ADHD or you're on the spectrum, this can be perceived as ticklish or aggressive. So like a lot of like the four play that will engage in to sort of like, you know, loosen people up, will actually like trigger weird things if you've got ADHD or autism spectrum. Another really good example of this tactile sensitivity is textures for people on the spectrum or ADHD. And so I have a daughter who probably has ADHD and you guys know what dollars? Yeah. Okay, you do. Okay. So dollars like an Indian lentil soup, but we put a bunch of stuff in it. We'll put like curry leaves and mustard seeds and all kinds of stuff. And so one day, a couple years ago, you know, my wife was getting mad at my daughter because she made doll and she wasn't eating doll. And then I asked her a question, I said, you know, what is it that you don't like about the doll? And she doesn't know how to answer that question. I was like, is it taste bad or it feels bad in your mouth? And she's like, I'm not sure. And I said, let me do something. So I took the doll and I strained it. And then I gave her the doll. And I was like, how is that? And she's like, that's fine. That really interesting thing is she ate the doll. And then she can take the individual pieces that I had strained out and she ate those individually. But she just needs it separated. So there's another diagnosis called arvid, which is avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, which also has this sensory difference to it. So I mean, I know we're all joking about, you know, why don't you want to get kids? But you know, it'd be really interesting like we could do a very interesting experiment. And I'm not joking here, but I am joking too, because that's how we test boundaries with dudes, right? I'm going to make a joke. And like if you guys treat it as a joke, then cool. But then like, if y'all are like, okay, let's really do this. So we could all kiss each other on the cheek and we could ask each other, what is your experience of this? Right? This has been a great podcast, guys, but see, this is where he blames his autism. That's why I don't believe he's autistic. He's just black and homophobic. I don't even know how to respond to that. It's like, if I say what's in my mind, y'all can say it. My ass is going to get sick. Yeah. What is it? What is it? No, let us say it. He did it wrong though. Yeah. It's his culture. It's his upbringing. It's his culture, yeah. Right? So, yeah. Yeah. But the problem is, even if that's your culture, the fundamental, I'm going to keep going. Yeah. Please, please, please. It doesn't bother me. It really does. But I think there's something important because I think a lot of people struggle with this. Your body's need for oxytocin, your body's need for connection, does not change. Right? So, if you grow up in a culture where you're not allowed to touch dudes and it feels really uncomfortable for you, it feels uncomfortable at the beginning, my guess, unless you have this neurodevelopmental thing going on where there's tactile defensiveness and things like that. So, we have to be careful. Right? Good diagnosis proceeds. Good treatment. This is brain is processing things differently from the way that our brains are processing. Yeah. I think it's more so growing up, it was like taboo guys don't touch each other. Yeah. And then being around more white guys, they do the white boy fun and I've gotten better with it over the years. Yes. But does it feel physically uncomfortable for you or does it feel like, like, is it just the physical sensation? Does it feel like, you know, here's the way I would describe it. So, people want to understand, okay, is this like emotional for me or is it physical for me? If it's physical for you, if it's a sensory processing deficit, or we call it the deficit alteration, you'll ever had like scrambled eggs with a piece of shell. Yeah. You know how like, it fucking ruins it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what it's like to be artistic and navigate through the world. That's a good ass way to put it. Right. So, like, feel for real? Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes it was like a little thing could happen and that just throws me off. And it's like, it's like ruins your whole, like, it doesn't matter if it was just one little bite. And there's four bites left that are totally fine. One little thing is like, ah, just ruins it. Bro, if you talk too much, you're like, she can tell you thousands of things. Right. So, this is where I think we should really have a ton of compassion for people for people as far as I can. I apologize for not believing you. It is their life is going through a neurotypical world with fucking egg shells in their scrambled eggs all over the place. The clothes we wear, the way that we touch, the sounds that we make, right? It's like, they're just fucking, their life is just a little bit shittier, but way worse. Their experience of it is just so difficult. So in relevance to, like, the anger conversation we're having, what can you do to basically disengage that anger, disengage that is the only way that someone feels emotional? I'm going to go back to some scar thing. Then we're going to talk about your anger because I think that's the best way to do it. Is that okay? And let me know if you don't feel comfortable with that. So some scar, here's the basic sequence, disproportionate emotion, activation of the ego, hijacking of the intellect. So what we want to do is a couple of things. One is exactly what Akash does in therapy. So he takes a step back, removes ego from the equation, just notices what he's feeling, doesn't engage in an intellectual discussion. That's the biggest mistake that a lot of people make. All these people who are red-pilled and black-pilled, they're just operating on the intellectual level. They're not getting to the ego or the emotions underneath, okay? That's a great way of putting in. And so you could play that game as long as you want to, but it doesn't solve problems. It's a way of coping and not necessarily in a bad way, but like we said, right? So if I give up on life, that allows me to protect myself. So they sort of adopt this negative worldview. And then that protects them because it's not my fault. If I'm fundamentally broken, it's not my fault that I am not successful. It's not my fault that I'm single, if I'm fundamentally ugly, right? So then what we want to do is there are two important things to do. One is if you just observe the process, that is enough. I'm sorry, just to go back to the red pill thing. So their process or their copies, it's not my fault, it's women's fault, they XYZ, is that what they do? I think there are a lot more heterogeneous than we give them credit for. They're not all one way. They used to be that way. But now I think there's like a red pill 2.0 that's kind of like happening right now, which I think is actually quite healthy. So if you go to red pill like subreddits and stuff, there's a lot of encouragement. Get your ass to the gym, do something with your life, become professionally successful, and go to therapy. Like there are huge proponents of therapy now. Oh, wow. Okay. So there's an evolution of red pill that's not what it used to be. Yeah. Potentially, a good thing. Yeah, I think there's a lot of good stuff in there. If there was not good stuff in there, it would not be growing, right? So anytime we see human beings changing in a particular way, that is because they are adapting to their environment. So in a world where the systems do not support men, what choice do men have, we're going to support each other. And I think the problem is that there's all kinds of negative emotion that gets turned into anger, which we already talked about, right? So like sadness doesn't work, crying about it doesn't work. So I'm going to get angry. And then when you get angry, it's very easy to blame someone else. There's also a hum God at play. So these people will like pump themselves up and put someone else in. down. Who do they pump up? Men. Who do they put down? Women. There we go. Right. So this is why I love this model. Like y'all are a bunch of comedians. I think smart for sure. Right. But once you understand this model, you can understand so much human interaction around you. Right. This is the ego at play. So anytime you see someone being egotistical, the question to ask yourself is, what are they protecting themselves from? Yeah. And the moment that you sue that thing, the ego will disappear. You can disarm you go by giving people kind of what they need. Now fixing the some scar involves understanding the process, doing kind of what I gosh said where if you just sit down and just write your emotions, so you can use an emotional regulation technique. So if you even do like deep breathing or something like that, some like meditative stuff, I teach a lot of that stuff and meditation stuff, I have these guides and things. But if you do that kind of stuff, that'll help because then what is activating the ego is the emotion. So the moment that the emotion goes away, the ego will go away. And then when the ego goes away, there's fucked up logic will go away, then you'll be okay. The second thing that we want to do, this is a really cool thing. That dormant emotion can be brought to the surface and experienced fully and metabolized. So when you have like a breakthrough in therapy, right, this is where something comes up, there's a ton of emotion that comes to the surface and it's felt and accepted, not suppressed, not distracted from. That's what we usually do, right? We bury it. But instead what we want is like, so what's going on in therapy is like they're talking about some time in their life where they really felt hurt and then they're bawling, I'm holding them, you know, we're all crying, I'm crying, they're crying. And then how do you feel? I feel so much better. And then they walk out and like a chunk of it is gone. So the way that to do that is I would recommend that people, when you feel this disproportionate emotion, ask yourself, when was the first time I felt this? And what you'll discover is that people who feel this disproportionate emotion, there's a time that happened a long time ago where they felt that way. And it was a really powerful moment for them. And so when you go back to that thing and you sort of experience that again, that gets a bit technical and there's a whole some scar digestion process that we go through in our trauma guide. But that's the essence of it, is that you go back and you re-experience those things, you bring out that emotion. And that's literally what we do in therapy is we take all these dormant emotions. And once you bring out the dormant emotions and you metabolize them, people feel healthier out. That's as riff. I spoke with a therapist and I was talking to him about early childhood experiences that I had. And he basically said, I don't want to talk about any of those. I want to give you tools to deal with the emotions you're feeling today. Sure. And I felt frustrated by this because I was like, my suspicion is that the reason I feel these things is because of these initial experiences I had in my childhood through, you know, family or whatever else. And I'm just now manifesting them in my adult life. And if I just dealt with it in this first instance, I can probably deal with it better. I'm curious if you've heard of these different therapy tactics. Absolutely. So, you know, I think talking about your past, I'm going to oversimplify. But that's what we call kind of the psychodynamic model where we like, it's sort of dormant stuff. But then more recently, what we've had is something called a cognitive behavioral model, which is like, we're just going to alter your behavior and we're going to deal with the present. And if we really look at like what's causing problems in your life, it's not that hurt that happened before. It is the way that the hurt that happened before shows up today and affects your life. So even if I like, even if Akasha's, you know, his dad was mean to him or abuse over whatever, that's manifesting in the present in a particular way. And we can deal with that manifestation in the present and his problems will be solved. It is the manifestation of that hurt that really screws up your life now. But so this is kind of like saying, I guess what I could say is like, you know, if I have a well that is ejecting feces, I can clean up the feces every time it comes out. Or I can go down and empty out the well. Right. But both of them will end up with a clean surface. So in the cognitive behavioral model, I think, so some people just like that model more, that's just where their mind actually goes. And I don't know if y'all caught that, but we sort of included both the sumscarred digestion. Right. So you can regulate the emotion directly in the moment with breathing practices. And then the hum car will deactivate, the woodly will deactivate. We're not actually solving the sumscar. We're intervening at the level of the monos. Or you go back. And what I tend to find works really well is both. Right. That's what I would think. Yeah. So I mean, when I work with people, I do both. And I think also from like a yogic standpoint, yogic standpoint, they don't give a shit about what happened to you in the past. They just focus on the present. They're like, just understand what is happening. And the beautiful thing is that works like incredibly well. Even if you just understand this process and you observe it, that will take the emotional bite out of it. So I don't know if y'all get this, but when your sumscar activates, you activate like a program. They'll kind of get that, like, you lose control. I do. I do. Right. There's like, oh, like now they're thinking, like, you think, like they're judging me and like, I feel this way. And now I mean, I'm going to do this. Like, people start operating in a really repetitive way. And if you're in a relationship and like, you trigger your partner, you're like, oh, shit, they're doing this shit again. And you can predict it. It's like, first they're going to do this. Then they're going to do this. And until they calm down, like, there's nothing that we can do. Right. So you can stop the, the, that pattern, a big part of that pattern is a lack of awareness that it's happening. So if you go to your partner and you say, hey, you're doing this shit again, they're like, no, I'm not. You're doing this. They have no insight into it. So insight, anytime you have awareness of what goes on within you, you automatically control it. You guys want to test that? Yeah. Observe your breathing, but don't change it. Go. Be possible. I can't. You tried for like three seconds. Try for a little bit longer. Can you observe your breathing without changing it? I think so, but I don't know how I was breathing before I started observing it. So I don't know. Are you controlling it if you're observing it right now? Yes. Can you stop controlling it and observe it? You can stop breathing. Yeah. I don't know. Stopping breathing is controlling it. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. I can't. This is incredibly hard for me when I focus on my breathing. Like if I'm trying to meditate, I've noticed I'm like, I feel like I'm breathing. Now I'm in control of how I'm breathing and that's weird. I'm not just observing the breathing. Yep. Right. So this is really cool. You guys have heard of this thing called enlightenment. The person who can observe their breath without controlling it will become enlightened. Oh. Okay. So that makes me feel better because it's actually incredibly hard to do is what I'm saying. Because I used to be like, what the foot what's why am I so in my head that I can't even just watch myself breathe. I have to now I'm changing it every time. Yep. So this is the beautiful thing. You cannot observe without changing, right? So even in physics, which I'm hesitant to draw correlations from, there's like this idea of the observer effect where we can't measure something without altering it in some way. So the beautiful thing is that even in your own life, if you have patterns, the moment you start observing him, they'll start to dissipate. They'll start to like sublimate and become weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker. So this is something that in the West, we really don't understand. Awareness is enough. You don't actually need to do anything. You just need to observe, observe and observe properly. That's the technique that's pretty hard. But as you observe what happens as you become like think about any problem that you've had in your life, once you really understood what was going on, it becomes way easier to handle. So even just acknowledging, oh, I'm in this recursive anger program. Just watch it. Take a step back and watch, okay, I'm feeling anger. There's the ego thought, right? And we've done it a little bit today. Like y'all, I'll ask y'all to, you know, what is our gosh feeling right now? Where does this come from? And y'all are like hypothesizing, hypothesizing. So if you do that process for yourself, and this is important because this isn't like analyzing. A lot of people, this is a big mistake that a lot of people make. People analyze their problems, but observation and analysis is different. Biggest mistake that people make, they say, oh, I'm aware of my problem. No, you're not. You're analyzing. You're not watching them in real time. You are thinking about them retrospectively. You are analyzing them. Just watch it. And not as a detour is completely, but I find that this is a benefit of psychedelics. And that I've spoken to people that have done like ketamine therapy, or even prescribed ketamine therapy, like there's psychologists that do ketamine therapy. And basically because it's a disassociative, it will strip the behavior in the emotion or the thing that was done to you in the emotion, you're able to see the thing as a third party. And you can kind of see things objectively, and as a result of that, be able to draw new conclusions. I think he wanted our attention. Oh, no, you can stand that topic. Yeah. So psychedelics, I think, are really great because they give us a scientific insight into things that meditation have been doing for thousands of years. So the hard thing about understanding how meditation affects your brain is that the majority of studies on meditation in order to be, you know, like, I mean, to be nonbiased, we take a bunch of random people, we teach them a meditation technique, and then we measure the results. So one of the exclusion criteria for most of the studies on meditation, involve not knowing how to meditate. So what we're basically doing is we're training up a bunch of amateurs. So the hard thing is that you have some of these people who've been meditating for a very long time, and successfully too, there's a big difference between just doing it a lot and doing it successfully. And those people we don't know how to study. So I saw this great like TikTok of this like Yogi in the Himalayas, who's just like running around like basically, he's got a loincloth on, but there's a lot of stuff that people do. So there's one study that was done by the Benson Henry Institute, I think many years ago that showed that you can, through yogic practices, you can alter your body temperature by nine degrees Celsius. Well, right? So there's all kinds of weird stuff like there are people in the Himalayas that. One eight plus degrees Fahrenheit, right? Nine fifths plus 32. But I think the alteration is you'd have to do both conversions, right? So yeah, about 20 degrees, so there's a lot of weird stuff in yoga, but we don't know scientifically like how to study that. So the biggest. The top of the list is like altered states of consciousness. So the cool thing about psychedelics is that people will really like them, and why? Because they give people dissociative experiences. So let's think about this. In our Vedic model of the mind, which is what I taught y'all, a lot of our problems come from, which part of those, which of those five things, jitta, samskar, ahamkar, woodti, and manas? Which one do you think causes us the most problems in life? Samshkar. That's what one would think for ahamkar. It's a ahamkar. So our samskar, for a particular problem, it's samskar. But when your ahamkar is out of control, every dimension of your life will be a mess. That's your ego again. Ego. Right? Ketamine comes in dissociative agent. What does it do? It disconnects you from your sense of self, deactivates the default mode network, exactly what happens in a practice like shunya meditation. Shunya means void, null, or nothingness. Right? So when I'm going through my mid-life crisis, what do I do? What am I doing now? Like, you know, we started this company and like, I'm actually making way less money than I would have if I just continued being a psychiatrist to like start up companies from MIT and Harvard and all this kind of stuff was doing work at Harvard Business School and like, you know, I started working with gamers and that like felt good for a while. But like, now what the fuck am I doing? Like, I spent all my days and meetings and I'm not, you know, so what am I doing? So then do shunya meditation. Go back to being nothing. I'm nothing. I'm nothing. I'm nothing. And really, this is beautiful because if you, I don't know if you guys can do this right now. But if you pay attention, what you'll find, I'm trying to debate, okay, let me try this first this way. What do you feel at the core of your being? I'm talking about feel. Don't give me an intellectual answer, be, be, be, say more like a void kind of where deep in the pit of my stomach, okay, do you all feel nothing? I'll, I sometimes, I have issues with mind body connection. Okay. Good. I'm not sure. Okay. I have a hard time answering that. A lot of people will experience like you can feel the outside, but right here, it's kind of empty. You don't feel anything. There's an absence of sensation somewhere in here. So a really powerful shunya meditation is like the simple way to do it is if you want to, if you're, if you feel like you have ego and by ego, I mean the Rajsik ego or the Tham Sik ego, which means the ego where I'm really great or empathetic, there's a really beautiful practice that you can do is just focus on this and whatever you think about yourself, send it there. Just send whatever you feel about yourself, just send it to feel that emptiness within you if you can. And if you feel that emptiness, this is why you shouldn't do breath meditation. You should do this because you have a lot within you that you're trying to get rid of. How do I stop being angry? How do I get rid of my self esteem, right? And you figured out how to adapt to the stuff on the surface. You've done what his therapist tried to teach him, which is how can I functionally, how can I exist and adapt? How can I be happily married? How can I be professionally successful? How can I survive with this stuff? But the stuff is still there. You've adapted, but you haven't fixed it. And breath meditation doesn't work for you. So you need to do shunya. You need to send all that negative stuff. Just send it in there and you'll be amazed at how much things change. No, I'll absolutely try that. I think you've said this incredibly from wrong, but I was something to the effect that true confidence is not thinking, oh, I'm so great or thinking like that inverse of, oh, I'm so terrible. The universe is conspiring against me. It is a lack of thought about yourself. It is a lack of connection to your performance that you just sort of are existing. Is that a fair assessment? Sort of. Yeah. So here's what I would say. When you are egoless, you will be incredibly confident. Right? Look at like, okay, who is confident in the world? Who is the most confident person that you can think of? It's a class of people, actually. Most class of most confident people on the planet. Is it the top 1% or something? Nope. Way more common than that. Narcissists? Nope. So Narcissists have a sense of inferiority. It's not old people. Oh, kids. Absolutely. And what does a kid think about themselves? If I take a 1-year-old, they have no concept of ego. They have no harm god. And look at their confidence. Here. It's amazing. It's almost as if when they develop an ego, oh, you're a good boy. You are a bad boy. It doesn't matter whether you're good or bad. It's going to create problems for both of you. I get people in my office who are failed at life, 29 years old, living in mom's basement, watching pornography all day, playing video games, and I get 44-year-olds, CEOs of billion dollar companies. I don't know what to do next. I built this thing. I feel stuck. I want a quit. I can't afford to quit. Other people aren't going to be able to do it as good as I can. Now my wife expects me to be able to take her on private planes or my husband expects me to be able to take him on private planes. The moment you add ego to the equation, "Ah, what happens if we give you a drug that dissociates you?" Disables the ego. Now depression improves. Treatment refractory depression improves. The kind of depression that doesn't respond to cognitive behavioral therapy. The kind of depression that is so deep that the regular techniques don't work. What we have to do is unplug it at its root. Disable the ego. Meditation can do it too. It's way harder. Why, in this case, would I ever meditate if I could do psychedelic drugs and achieve the same end goal? Great question. For two reasons. First is you're not going to achieve the same end goal. You're going to move in the same direction. Second reason is because ketamine is a drug of abuse. I remember when I was training to be a psychiatrist. We got a lecture because the nice thing about being a mass general and Harvard and all that good stuff is we get a lot of experts there. This person came to talk to us about psychedelic therapy and ketamine treatment for depression. She's an expert in that right, was doing it. This is back in 2015. Back before it was cool. She talks to me. She's like, "Yes. Some of my patients require ketamine infusions every single day in order to keep their depression at bay." I was like, "Hold on a second." That sounds like an addiction. The problem with ketamine is that we can become dependent on it. That's what we see. So many people abuse ketamine because we love that state, but it requires a drug to get there. There are other problems with ketamine because you're artificially doing something. I can give you, if you exercise, you can increase your heart rate. I can also inject you with adrenaline to increase your heart rate. Both of them involve the same physiological end point, which is increase in heart rate. But the mechanisms through which they achieve are very different. And I imagine the benefits of your cardiovascular health is. Night and day. In the same way when you meditate, you're not just going to disable the default mode network. You're going to improve your frontal lobes, which allow you to focus your attention and stay on task. They're going to make you better at stopping distractability. They're going to improve your emotional regulation. So what I tend to find with people who engage in psychedelics is that the amount of transcendental experiences they have is very limited compared to a very experienced meditator. So a psychedelic is like getting on a helicopter and boarding a train and going from like zero to 6,000 feet. It just goes from this place to this place. You don't get to control what happens in a psychedelic. When you meditate, you learn how to fly. So you can go beyond 6,000 feet, 10,000 feet, 12,000 feet, 20,000 feet. And you can understand things and experience things that people with psychedelics, I don't think you've ever done. I've never heard of a psychedelic experience that takes that height. Yeah. I've also heard people say in relation to this, be concerned about unearned wisdom. Yeah. So there's those kinds of truisms, which I wonder if it's a sort of alluding to this. same sort of sensation, that you're getting access to experiences without really learning and building the use. So that's a problem. I think the other problem is that when you get a psychedelic experience, it's completely decontextualized, right? So when you meditate for a long period of time, kind of like you said, you kind of pick up things along the way. So as you pick up things along the way, it's kind of like if I take you from zero to 6,000 feet and you run around, you're going to have a lot of trouble. You'll get altitude sickness. And if I want to climb, it's really interesting many years ago, I climbed Kilimanjaro and I did it in about five or six days. And as I was looking at it, one of the things that's really interesting is the longer you take, the more successful you are. So the highest failure rates are the shortest trips. So when you take 11 days to climb to the same height, your body has more time to build red blood cells. You have more time to adapt, right? So when you meditate for a very long period of time, your capability is a stay in that state. Explore in that state actually utilize, utilize the state is very different work you have or steroids. What are some tools for being able to meditate? When I was younger, I used to be in karate for many years and I actually remember times where it's like, I felt like true meditative state where it was just like nothingness. It wouldn't be often, but I can recall the times it would happen. Now I've been my adult age, I've tried a couple of times and it's like, I can't meditate for shit and I give up because it's just so frustrating. Like what's something for me per se? Okay. So I made a whole guide of meditation precisely because of this. So I think one of the biggest problems in the world right now is that we have all this muck mindfulness, right? So you have all these apps that basically give you basically one kind of meditation. Most of them are descended from the Zen tradition, like the Buddhist Zen tradition. And so there's a lot of different types of meditation in the same, I'd kind of say like, you know, if we have American cuisine, you can have a lot of derivatives of American cuisine that like sushi is like completely different, do a size like completely different. So I think the reason that a lot of people struggle to meditate is because they're not meditating in the right way. The reason they're not meditating in the right way is because teachers of meditation. So it used to be that if you wanted to be a teacher of meditation, you had to achieve. So the average time it takes to become a Zen master is 30 years. Shit. And at the end of 30 years, you don't even become a master. Your master says either you are a master or you aren't. So right now, like the idea of investing 30 years and then not getting a degree. So right now, the way that people teach meditation is they get certifications. And getting a certification in meditation does not mean, like, how do you guys think? What do you think it takes to get a certification in meditation? We have a thought of respecting online course. Yeah. Right. You just have to show up. You don't even have to do that. So no one is saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to, like, you can teach meditation because you've had transcendental experiences. You've been to 20,000 feet. Now you understand now you're prepared to teach. So this is why this is a big problem because everyone is teaching meditation very few people are qualified. Now in terms of you, I think this is where, like, we get to a lot of details, right? So if you were to ask, like, I would need to know more about what you struggle with. So a couple of things that I can already piece together. So one is that, especially if you're on the spectrum, once again, the way that you manage sensory input is different. So oftentimes when I have patients on the spectrum, we will do very body-oriented meditations. So what I would tell you to do is if you want to achieve a no-mind state, stand on one leg. And you know, I don't know if you guys know this leg meditation posture where you're standing on one leg and this leg is tucked in over here, I can show you all later. But it's locked. It's reposed. I don't know what the actual name is. I don't know what the, so you know, just stand on one leg for as long as you can and then switch to the other leg. And what you'll find if you do this practice is that at the beginning, you know, you're going to be thinking about all kinds of stuff. You're trying to focus your mind, trying to focus your mind and your mind wanders. You don't need to try to focus your mind, try to distract yourself, try to think about a million different things. As you stay in that pose, what do you all think will happen? You know, legs are going to get so tired and you're going to start thinking about focusing on what? Just how exhausted your leg is from holding it. Very good, right? So you're going to think about that and then you will enter a no-mind state. This is the piece that a lot of people miss. When you focus on one thing for an extended period of time, what does your mind do with it? I don't know, I don't know. When you put on your shirt first thing in the morning, you feel it? Mm-hmm. What happens? Do you continue to feel it all day? You're wearing it all day? Yeah. You lose awareness. You lose awareness. When I enter a crowded restaurant and I hear everyone talking, what does my brain do with that? Right. It turns into. Any constant stimulus will then disappear. So the whole point of meditation is I am trying to do one thing because emptying my mind is impossible. If I create an empty mind, there will be a vacuum. All kinds of thoughts will flood in. So what I try to do is I focus it on one thing and I focus it on this thing so that everything else disappears. I'm taking it all out. I can get down to one thought. That's it. And as I acclimatize to that thought, then that thought will disappear. And then what you will be left with is emptiness. And those times when you did martial arts, you were fully focused on the art and at the end of full focus becomes empty mind. So whatever it is that brings your mind to one point very, very easily is what you should do to meditate. So I asked you all a question, what do you feel in here? You didn't feel anything. You felt something. That's what you should do. Forget about breath meditation. Not good for you. Yeah. For trauma, I did a breath work session where they like find the points and all that. And that was actually very, I found that talk therapy was really helpful. And then now I find that more helpful for like processing stuff like that. Yeah. So you know, that's you earlier, I mentioned that, you know, we thought talk therapy was the gold standard. Yeah. So I think men especially need to do a lot more stuff in their body because my wife did it. And she was like, I don't feel like this is something. I remember in 2012, I was in medical, I was in medical school. I'd done research at Harvard for a couple of years. I got an email from a cousin of mine in India. And he's like, hey, there's this thing called the emotional freedom technique. Like what do you think about it? And I was like, it sounds like it's BS. And then he's like, shouldn't we? So we got into this debate about it. I looked at some research. It didn't seem very convincing. Many years later, now we have a ton of studies on EFT, which is similar to kind of like tapping is what they call it. So there's like trauma is like stored in the body in some ways. And there are now studies that actually seem like pretty solid. That there's ways of bringing stuff out through the body. We see this also in like, you know, masculine communities of when you get dumped, what do we tell people to do? Hit the gym. Right. So physical. And if we think about emotions, we think about emotions as mental. They're not mental. They're physical too. Heart rate. You know, how do you know there's a beautiful paper? I'll see if I can send you all in, you guys can link. But that maps on, I use it all the time with the men that I work with, maps every emotion to your body. So they did a beautiful paper where they like measured like what where people feel things. And what's really cool about is there's like a hundred emotions there. And even little things like feeling rejected, feeling disappointed, feeling angry, feeling frustrated, feeling like someone denied you something. These are all things that we call anger. But there's subtle variations and where where that emotion shows up in our body. Yeah. And so the really cool thing you said, you struggle with mind body stuff. But this is what's really neat is, is the research that I did many years ago on mind body stuff is that when you move the body, you activate the brain in different ways. So if I'm feeling like, like I have a, you know, a pit in my stomach, is I move my body literally that sensation will change. And once I fix, if I fix the emotion mentally, it'll change my physiology, but if I no longer feel sad, then my physiology will calm down. If I change my body, the emotion will fix itself too. It's like a two way street. Everything in the body is a two way street. I've heard this by like power posing and things like that is like kind of the way people have corporatized and westernized it. We're like, you're feeling nervous, put your hands above your head, being a large state, you're feeling sad, try to smile and it'll actually send oxytocents to your brain and make you happier. Is that related to what you're saying? Yeah. So I think it's corporatization, but there's a really cool study about someone was trying to, if someone was studying how we detect emotions and faces. So what they did is they took all their lab students and they had them make facial expressions. And what they specifically were measuring is how quickly can someone detect a change in your facial expression? So if I go like this, and then I go like this, if you guys slow that down and make like microsecond cuts, there's a transition from happiness to like anger, right? So when can people detect that? So they stumbled upon a really interesting finding, which is that they were training their lab people, right? So I'm doing experiments with people, so my like my lab assistant is like making smiling faces and angry faces. What they discovered is that when they trained the lab assistants, those lab assistants started feeling that way. So the person who had to make the angry face was pissed at everybody and the person who was smiling a lot was happy with everybody. So there's abs, everything in the brain is like reciprocal and homeostatic, right? And if you kind of force yourself to smile, that's hard because the forcing yourself to smile, if you just do it, like, I go like this. - It feels crazy. - Yeah, it feels crazy, right? But if I go like this, right? You could tell the difference, right? And you didn't get to see it, but yeah, yeah. - No, I was thinking about the breath work thing. I remember the first time I did my male friend that told me about it. He's like, it's crazy, what do you like? And I was like, I was kind of skeptical. I remember going in, she started poking around, do you feel anything here? And then I felt this crazy pain. And then she would say, like, thrash around whatever and I did. And then I just sort of crying. And then I remember she was like, okay, turn on your stomach. As I turn on my stomach, I look at a mirror. I'm pouring sweat. My eyes are puffy from crying. And I'm like, all right, well, I'm done. And then she goes, okay, this is the heart of the spine. You can store a lot of trauma in here along my spine. Or the heart of the back. And I was like, what the fuck is she talking about? We're done. She starts going along the back. I felt even more crazy, even more tears. And that was, since then, it hasn't been as extreme of a thing, but it's interesting that you say, men feel that more because my wife didn't. She was like, I don't know, I don't feel that. Right, so you feel it less because now it's out. Yeah, right? So that's emptying the well. Right, so what I love about hearing stories about this is if we come up with a model, we should be able to make predictions. So if there really is a well of emotion down below, if we get rid of it, it should be gone. And that's, I hear stories like this, that makes me think we're kind of on the right track. Yeah, and it was, I've stopped doing talk therapy. I thought it was very helpful, but this seems like it's a more helpful thing now. Yeah, so I think it, they help with different things. Yeah, what, can we change gears just to anxiety? Sure, that's something that I personally deal with. I think a lot of people probably deal with. Okay, so I want to also just be cognizant of time. I'm not saying we should rush, but do you want to talk about anger? Do we want to talk about anxiety? I want to talk about, yeah, comasutra. Comasutra? I think what we feel is that most people struggle with a lot of anger and anxiety. Okay, let's talk about anger. I think we are the conduits, hopefully, for anybody who's feeling these things, and I think these are both things. I'm on lexapro, low dose. I've actually found to be pretty helpful with even that super peak anger. I don't get there the way I used to. I don't think I've gotten there early since, but like there was an anger level that I would hit that the lexapro has helped with. I don't know if you find those things helpful or not helpful. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, anxiety, I think it's. I prescribe medications. Yeah, okay. Oh, your psychiatrist, that's right. Yeah, okay. But yeah, both. Yeah, so let's talk about anxiety, wouldn't we? So I'm curious if you have helpful tools for, I guess, assessing anxiety and trying to deal with them in different cases. So for me personally, before I have a big show or a big meeting or some type of life event that I'm concerned about, I'll feel intense anxiety. And then there's also sort of a secondary ambience anxiety that I'll feel generally without even really knowing it. So I don't know if there's one of those that's easier to sort of discuss first. What's the problem with what you described? That I will, before a show, I'll feel this anxiety that then will manifest in different ways. So if I'm feeling really anxious, then I might do nothing and I'll try to just sleep because that is a way that I cope with the anxiety. Or I'll just feel generally uncomfortable. And even on stage, if you're, I've noticed if I'm nervous, I'm less free and my performance tends to suffer. The times where I'm like almost weirded out that I don't seem to care before I get on stage, I actually kind of do better. Sometimes I'll be so not nervous that it makes me a little nervous. But then I get up there and I'm so free that I can ride any kind of quiet tension without worrying about what it's, and then usually the set is just rough on a show. And I get there right when I'm supposed to get on stage and I have no time to think about it. And then I go on and I have a great set. Or if I'm thinking about it all day and ruminating and thinking and thinking, and then there's actually a stiffness that sort of goes along with that. Okay, so you would like to be relaxed because you wanna do better or because it feels better? I think both. And I think that I think there creates a cycle that the better I do, the better I feel. Okay. The better I feel that I do. So let's understand, there's so many ways to tackle this, but so we're gonna go through all of them. (laughing) So the first thing to understand is baseline anxiety. So there's this measure of physiology called heart rate variability. Now, HRV is the variability in your heart rate. How much it can go up and how much it can go down? So I'm gonna ask you all a question. If I take a 29, it's hard question, trick question. If I take a 29 year old gamer who's sitting in their basement and I take an Olympic athlete, which one do you think has a greater heart rate variability? - The Olympic athlete. - Absolutely. Okay. - Why? - We know. - Yeah, why? Why is, why is it- - I assume it's a heart health thing that I'm as capable of. - So what are nervous systems? - Yeah, so if you look at an Olympic athlete, their baseline heart rate is bradycardic, it's 40. So the capacity for their heart, their variability in their heart rate, they can go from 40 to 140. So their HRV is 100, okay? People who have anxiety have a very low heart rate variability. They're always living high in their body's capacity to respond to stress is lower. So as your heart rate variability increases, your capacity to handle stress increases. So high HRV good, low HRV bad. - Right. - People who have baseline high anxiety have a low heart rate variability. So what we wanna do is increase. This has nothing to do with what you're worried about, nothing to do with being on stage. This is the way that you're physiologically wired. Now, I really got into the stuff, not when I was working with anxiety, but when I was working with trauma. So I was working with a group of first responders for a period of a few months, and I kinda noticed they're just like always on edge. There's hypervigilance, they overreact to things. They have very little like, you know, they go from zero to 100. That's not technically true. So a lot of people think, oh, I go from zero to 100. The person I'm dating, oh gosh, he gets so angry. He goes from zero to 100. He doesn't go from zero to 100. He lives at 80. So getting to 110 is only like a plus 30, whereas the rest of us are at zero, and like, you know, we can handle 30 points. So what you need to do is alter your baseline physiology. So there's a trauma guide where I kind of lay all this stuff out. There's a series of practices that you can do to essentially increase your HRV. Now, the way that we do it has something called physiologic stretch, that's what I kinda call it. So one thing that I'll do with my patients is I'll tell them to run for 60 seconds as hard as they can. Just stretch your physiology, push it really hard, and then relax. So anything that you do that increases the top end will increase the bottom end. So you wanna stress your physiology. This is also why people with anxiety find that exercise is so helpful for them. That if they exercise regularly, the baseline anxiety level goes down. - I find this to be the case, right? So, but this is the important thing. Good diagnosis proceeds, good treatment. So your anxiety is not one mechanism, it's multiple. So your baseline anxiety, it's beautiful the way you describe it. You said there's actually two things. So let's deal with each of those things, okay? So with this baseline anxiety, I think it's great to start with physiology and to use physiology and to understand that half the reason that we have an anxiety crisis in the world today is because the majority of people who treat anxiety have zero training in the body. - Oh, okay. - Right? - Okay. - Psychologists don't learn medicine. They learn psychology. It's not a knock on their profession. - But they're not going to prescribe. - Forget about, they're not going to take an enemy. They're not going to take physiology, right? And that's why our treatments are fundamentally not as effective as they could be. We have someone like Akash who's been to therapy and what does he say? He said, "The moment I started focusing on my body, I got better in a completely different way." - But the colleges don't learn nervous system. - They'll learn nervous system, but they won't learn physiology, right? They'll learn neuroscience. They won't learn about the four chambers of the heart, you know, your lateral circumflex artery, what it feeds and things like that, right? That's just not part of their training. - That running exercise, how often do you have to do it and for how long before you start to see the benefits of? - So the running exercise starts, you see the benefits right away. So if you're feeling anxious and you run for 60 seconds, just run, just as hard as you can, do push ups jumping as it doesn't matter. That will activate. So what'll happen the moment that Jay, if you ran for your life for 60 seconds, what would happen in your physiology afterward? It would calm down. 'Cause now it's us, you're not thinking about anything. You can't be anxious, right? You're running for your life. You have one pointed mind. And then, you know, you'll start, so it can happen immediately. But then the more you stretch your physiology, the more gradual the change will be. Generally speaking, if you do this stuff for about eight weeks, I think that's when we really start to see a lot of change. - And how many, like daily three to a day, I mean, so running really hard is something that, you sure you can do once a day. If you're looking for daily practice, I would say a mind-body practice like yoga or Tai Chi is better. So do 20 minutes of yoga a day, do 20 minutes of Tai Chi a day, you can take your pick. If you like to move, do Tai Chi, if you like to be still, do yoga. - Oh, okay. - Okay. So that's baseline anxiety. Second thing we can do for baseline anxiety is some scaric work. That's the well of anxiety. It's always there. You have this kind of existential dread about, you know, why are you anxious, right? Because like, oh, I can't handle things or something as long as there's something that you're very sensitive to. So if you do that kind of inter-emotional work, that'll help too. Now, anxiety in the moment, this is where we're gonna do a couple of cool things. The first thing is just to change our relationship with anxiety. You see anxiety is a problem. It's not a problem. It's your friend. It's there for a reason. Everyone's like, oh, there's an, everyone has anxiety. Like, yeah, we're supposed to. - Right, it helps you in some ways. - Right. So, changing the way that, and here's the beautiful thing, you said that it kind of becomes a vicious cycle, right? So, if you set up, if you start off right, it's a vicious cycle in the right direction, virtuous cycle, where now I'm relaxed, now I'm vibing, now I'm having a good time, now they're having a good time, that relaxes, let's just like, you know, I'm relaxed, they're having a good time, now I'm vibing, now we're vibing, now everything's great. Anxiety is the opposite, I'm nervous, I go up there, I screw up my joke, they're not laughing as much, now I get more nervous, it's a vicious cycle. - Yes. - So, you learn to fear the anxiety, you learn to panic, you have anxiety about the anxiety, that's the real problem, that's what creates the cycle. So, change your relationship with anxiety, I'm anxious, right? This is my body telling me that this is important to me, this is important to me, it's okay for me to be anxious, I'm gonna go out there, I'm gonna do the best that I can, I could screw up, I may not, out of my hands, I'm very foreign to people with anxiety. - Yeah, giving up control would be. - Absolutely, concerning. - Concerning, and so practice giving up control. So, I came to this podcast today, is this important for me? - I don't know. - Yeah, right? Like, think about it, why do guests come on your podcast? - It's a good platform, we can talk about what they want to talk about. - Absolutely, right, you all are fun to talk with, you guys have a good reach, all this kind of stuff, it's a great podcast, what if I screw up? - No, really, you guys are saying, "Hmm, is if you learned something, would you?" - Yeah. - Particularly. - What if I screw up? - Hey, well, I like you, you might get negative comments, you might, yeah. - So, what do I gonna do about that? - Nothing. - You can prepare, you can think about every problem. - Yeah, so I'll solve that problem when I get to it, but like, being worried about it now doesn't help me at all. Right, so I show up, and this is sort of the attitude that can get you in trouble, because you don't show up to your med school graduation, get it your award, but like, you know, you can just do the best that you can. The rest of it is out of your hands. - You need to have confidence that you can fix it when you get there. - Yeah, so that's another, it's a great point. So, if you look at people who have anxiety, they misestimate, they underestimate their capacity for damage control. Have you had bad sets before, Mark? You're not fucked. Why not? See, your brain doesn't connect those two dots. So, literally, if people have anxiety, focus, rethink how good you are at damage control. And if you want a complete lack of anxiety, be really good at damage control. This is a big mistake that people make. When I feel anxious, I want everything to be perfect. That's not the winning strategy. The right strategy is be able to handle the shit when it gets bad. If you can handle the shit when it gets bad, it can go good, or it can go bad, doesn't matter. And if it doesn't need to go good, then I can relax. - Yeah, that's the thing. - Right, I do think men or maybe, I remember a friend of mine saying, "Well, women are better at making decisions." And I said, "Yeah, but what costs?" Like, they're constantly thinking about what could go wrong. And I think men generally are just like, "I'm going to make the decision, it might not be right. Who cares?" - Yeah. - I think that's the thing we're a little better at. - So, I think we can cultivate a sense of detachment. That's kind of what I call it. And I think it's like, it changes your relationship with anxiety, right? The anxiety isn't a longer something that you need to be anxious about. That's what you need to change. Then the rest of it is just a physiologic response in the moment. I find I'm anxious today. Maybe I'll screw up, right? Tomorrow's another day. And this is really something that I think it's so hard for people to learn. I think I learned this as a doctor because you sort of like, that's how you learn that, right? So like, being a doctor is like, maybe it's similar to being a comedian, I don't know. But you just faced with a lot of situations that there's like no way to win. Like, you know, kids with cancer and patients who kill themselves and you did everything that you could. You learn really, really quickly. One of the biggest lessons I learn in residency, really, is that we think that doctors save lives. Like I can't save anybody's life. I don't know if you guys get this, but as a doctor, I do not have the power over life and death. What absurdity is this, right? So as a comedian, what do you have power over? Mark? - I mean, the jokes I say, the way I present myself on stage. - No, the first thing you have, the second thing you don't. The way you present yourself, no, you don't, you don't have control over that. - And just the way I'm perceived, I don't have control over, but like though my affect. You don't have control over that? - What? - 'Cause what if you're anxious? Can you just control that? - No. - Okay, let that go. See, here's the problem with anxiety. We don't understand what we really have control over. And if you think you have control over the way that you present, well, what are we talking about, bro? We're saying that when you go on stage, you have anxiety and you don't want anxiety. It changes the way that you act, it changes the way that you talk, changes how locked up you are, you have control over that shit? No. If you did, then you will be asking this question. So oftentimes if we look at people who are anxious about things, they believe they have control over something that they don't have control over. - What if those physical things affect your performance and adds more anxiety? Like how can you, like I, for example, I have extreme stage fright and we have a live show coming up in Saudi Arabia. And I'm, right now I'm worried about the show. And it's like I'll get fidgety. I start sweating and all that type of shit. And when I'm on stage, it gets 10 times worse. What can I do to prevent that from happening, knowing that it's going to happen? Like, I want you to listen to what you said. How can I prevent that from happening when I know it's going to happen? - Every time I've been in front of the computer, how can I rewind time because time keeps moving forward? Yeah, how can I prevent something that I know is going to happen? How is that? - Yeah, it's a paradox. - You can't. - Are there ways or like actions I can take to prevent it from happening? - No. - So just forever, I'm always just going to sweat and get the shakes every time I go in front of people. - Isn't that what your experience has been? - Yeah, it sucks. - Okay. So. - Fix me. - Yeah, this is not comforting. - Yeah. - Hold on a second, right? I can't. Now what are you gonna do? They can never be fixed. - Keep doing it or avoiding it. - Right, so that's the decision you have to make. So this is the interesting thing. You are afraid of your anxiety. The problem here isn't that you're anxious. It's that you're afraid of anxiety. And here you are trying to prevent something that is inevitable. Like bro, how can you prevent something that is inevitable? You can't. Like I'm using your framing. I'm not trying to do some, you know, psychiatry magic on you. You're like, you see this is inevitable and you ask me to prevent it. You're setting up an unwinnable situation. And when you set up an unwinnable situation and you fail and you fail and you fail, how do you, what do you think that does to you? - It confirms it and strengthens it. - Yeah. - And you become more powerless and more powerless and more powerless. You are setting yourself up for constant failure and then what you have at the end result is this. It happens every single time because of the way that you're doing it. - So the problem with this sense was knowing that it's going to happen. Have you just said, how do I keep this from happening with that change? - No. - No, it's the exact opposite, now you get it my dude. - So it's like, hey, all right, I'm going to go on stage but I'm going to sweat and I'm going to shake. It is what it is. - Absolutely, right? So like, look, you're a comedian. You're going to Saudi Arabia. Do you want to go to Saudi Arabia? - Yeah, a little afraid, but yeah. - There we go. Yes is the wrong answer. Yes and no. - Yes and, yeah. I want to have gone. I want it to be behind me. I want to be done with it. That's the way you really feel about it. But there's a part of me that hates this. But I'm going to do it anyway because this is who I want to be in this world. And it ain't going to be easy. It ain't going to be pretty. And there is no way to prevent the shit. The moment you start living life like that, your anxiety will disappear. It won't disappear physiologically but you'll be able to handle it. Let's put it that way, right? You can't control. This is the problem with anxiety. The reason that the human brain thinks we can solve our anxieties because of our perception of control. What is, are you anxious about getting hit by a nuclear bomb today? - No. - Why not? Maybe you didn't think about it. - Yeah. - Right? So people will actually big get anxious about things that they can't control. But I think a big part of anxiety is like our perception of control because if we can control something, then we can do everything right. And if we do everything right and we can control things, then it'll be perfect. And then I won't have to suffer. But the moment that you're like, look, I wanna girlfriend, I wanna girlfriend, I wanna girlfriend, just a bro. Like there's no way you can get this person to fall in love with you. Go be the best person that you can and accept that sometimes they're gonna say no. As you start living your life that way and there's a lot of psychological mechanisms that I'm kind of throwing around here or injecting into this thing, your relationship with anxiety will change, right? And then you say, okay, my life is not about preventing anxiety. My life is, I wanna go to Saudi Arabia. I wanna try to make people laugh. There's a part of this that's gonna suck. But I'm choosing to do it any way. - Except. - Don't try to fix your anxiety. Train yourself to act in spite of it. Then you will be free. Because as long as you are trying to get rid of anxiety if anxiety shows up, then you're fucked. No control over your life. This is something by the way that happens to men a lot. So as men, we are trained to fix ourselves by changing our environment. If I feel like I'm ugly and unattractive to women, what do I do? - Work out. - Absolutely. I change, right? So I had a patient once, 18 years old, I was working in jail. I asked him, bro, how do you get, how do you get in jail of age of 18? Like what happened? He said, "When I was 12 years old, my dad left, I have three sisters that are older." They came to me and they said, you gotta be the man in the house now. Man in the house provides. - Well, right? So we need this, we need this, we need this, we need this, it's time for you to step up. Now that makes him feel, how do you all think that makes him feel? - It's a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure, right? So it's interesting the language that we use. We don't use emotional words. Did you all see that? Pressure. This is the emotional experience of men. Not anger, not sadness, not frustration, pressure. This is the number one emotional experience of men, pressure. So then he starts selling drugs because that's the only thing you can do at the age of 12. And then the way that they treat him creates emotions with him. He feels guilty, ashamed of himself, if he doesn't bring enough money. And then something really interesting happens. Whether he feels ashamed or not depends on his environment. If they're proud of him, he feels proud. And if they're disappointed in him, he feels ashamed. So if you look at what happens, what men do, we will shape our whole environment to make us feel a certain way, right? So if someone's disappointed in me, Akash, you have to go to medical school. You need to do yoga. I need to shape my environment to make me feel a certain way because I can't handle the feelings in here. Does that kind of make sense? This is the way that men get emotionally manipulated all the time. Because if someone in your environment can evoke a feeling in you, they can control your behavior. Right? So if I can make you feel guilty, you're gonna do what I want, 'cause then I can tell you, oh, I love you, and then you're gonna feel better. I control you, right, by evoking your emotions, because we don't know, once we have guilt on the inside, the only way, if I feel ugly, I'm gonna go to the gym. I'm gonna change the world outside of me instead of dealing with the emotion on the inside. This is how we develop body dysmorphia. Really interesting study, the drive for muscularity, which is how swole dudes wanna be correlates with divorce rate, unhappiness and marriage, unhappiness and life. If I'm relying on something else to create an emotion in me, then the moment my environment changes, I change in response to it. When your dad, making your dad happy, avoiding his wrath, became the way that you felt safe, right? That's the only way we shape our environment to make us feel a certain way. So in this way, learn how to manage your emotions, learn how to accept your emotions, learn how to experience your emotions. You're anxious, I'm sorry, bro, that sucks. You've got the short end of the stick, you've got the short end of the genetic, shallow end of the gene pool. You're wired for anxiety, poor guy, you're a little bit autistic. Your life is gonna suck more than other peoples. I hate to break it to you, but you know this, I know this, everyone with, on the spectrum knows this. I'm sorry, really, but you are amazing. That stuff doesn't have to dictate the life that you live. Stuff is gonna be shittier for you than it would for anyone else. Is that fair? No, but you get to go to Saudi Arabia, you get to do your comedy, it's gonna suck for you, but when you're done, you're gonna love it. And that's what got you here. You haven't conquered your anxiety and look at where you are. You don't need to conquer your anxiety. It doesn't have shit on you, my friend. - Right, how do you balance acceptance with ambition in this regard? Like I recognize that many successful people probably have a, you know, a dearth of self esteem and they might have some insecurity that flares up, that then compels them to do these great things. But then you also might have someone that's, you know, playing video games all day and is overweight and maybe they just are accepting of their position. And we've recognized that both are kind of bad. - So I don't think that the person who plays video games, so generally speaking, I think ambition, okay, so I think ambition gets you to a certain point. So I think ambition is adaptive and then becomes maladaptive. So for example, you know, I can have ambition and that can drive me to succeed and can even give me some degree of happiness. But like, so ambition is really good at getting me out of inaction and action, but it won't give me happiness. And we don't actually need it to start acting. So I think the problem with ambition is when we become outcome oriented. So if I'm super ambitious and I work towards something and I get it, that's great. But if I'm super ambitious and I don't get it, what do you think will happen? - I mean, I get frustrated and disappointed. - What do you think it'll do to your motivation? - If you don't get it for long enough, it'll discourage you. - Absolutely, right? So ambition will like get you part of the way there. But it's like, I would call it like toxic fuel. Like it'll get you there, but not in a good way. So I think what works way better is actually acceptance. And when we say like the 29 year old at home is accepting a circumstance, no, he's not. He's ignoring a circumstances. He's running away from a circumstances. So ambition is about where you wanna go. Acceptance is about where you are. Ambition is about the last step you're looking to take. It's about achieving your goals. Acceptance is about the next step that you're gonna take. Okay, I have anxiety. It's there all the time. What am I gonna do about it? See, he thinks in terms of ambition. How do I end this problem? That's not what you wanna do. What do I do about it now? What's the first step that I take? You know, this gets like so confusing because when I work with people with trauma, acceptance is really hard. Accept that this happened to you and take responsibility for it. And what are you gonna do about it, right? So when I'm working with someone in an abusive relationship, one of the reasons that they're in the relationship is because their partner has taught them that they're powerless. But what you have to accept is that you're not powerless. But that's really scary. It's hard to do because if you accept you're not powerless, and you have the power to change, what does that come with? You have to do something. Not just I have to do something. If I have the power to fix my situation, who is to blame for my situation? Oh, myself. Right, then this is what's so weird. There's a bunch of pathological self-blame, but this is what's so tricky when someone's in an abusive relationship, you have to show them that they do have power. They do have agency. But then that comes with responsibility. And people don't like that. So acceptance, I think, is way harder than people think it is. It's not just, so a lot of people think that acceptance means giving up. That's not acceptance. It's the opposite. It's like, okay, I'm done. It's giving up. That's what it is. Acceptance is saying, okay, this is the reality now, and what am I gonna do about it? That's the really important thing. I have to accept that my child does not love me. So that was go hand in hand, acceptance and ambition. No, I think they actually don't go hand in hand. I think so, acceptance oftentimes gets confused for apathy, like inaction, right? So if I'm like, if I have a patient who comes in and has cancer, we need to start by accepting that you've got cancer, but that doesn't mean we're getting up. Right, it's acceptance plus responsibility. So yeah, that's what I'm saying, you accept where you are, and then this is where I want to go. No. So that's the subtle thing. So where I want to go is the end. I think the most healthy way to do it is this is my next step. It's not even about the goal. It's like, this is the direction I'm gonna go. Okay, my child never wants to speak with me again. What do I do about that? Let me, I want to repair my relationship with the child. It's okay to think about that goal, but I think the most adaptive way to do it is to focus on the next action. You can have some vision and you should think about where that action leads, but don't attach yourself to that outcome. Let me start therapy. But if therapy doesn't work, so be it. And why didn't therapy work? Because I fucked it up too bad with my kid. And you accept that. You accept from the get-go that I have damaged this relationship so much that it may not be repairable, but I'm gonna do everything within my power to make it right. The moment you have that attitude, like when you all hear me say that, what is it a vogue within you? There's, there's ability, there's capability, there's not guaranteed success. In fact, quite the opposite. When you accept that you have very little control, a lot of people think that means apathy. I think it means freedom. It's a bit daunting, though. Very daunting. The prospect that all of my problems in life are, maybe not all, but many of them are fundamentally my own. Yes. And that they're my responsibilities who then take the first step. Yes. It is daunting. It is also the best way to do it. It's very the alternative, which is, I have no control on everything is happening to. It seems initially that there's a feeling of hopelessness with that. It is. Even though I understand in the end, it's not hopeless, but the alternative is more hopeless, so. No, no, so let's understand why it's hopeless. Why is it hopeless? 'Cause there's nothing I can do. This is what it is. Yes. Right? So there's hopelessness because you can't control the action or the outcome, sorry. But there's another layer of hopelessness because you don't have faith in yourself. Right? So what's daunting about it? You're saying it's daunting because it's like so much work. That's only daunting like when I have an eight-year-old art. So when my eight-year-old daughter tries to take a 50-pound suitcase up the stairs, it's daunting. But that's because she doesn't have the capability. So as you start living like this, you start to realize, okay, what is my true capability? When you face a daunting task that you feel is impossible and you even get 25% of the way there, holy shit, what it will do for your confidence. Right? Did I get what I wanted? No. But I got way further than I thought I would in a moment that you realize, holy crap. My understanding of my capabilities is wrong. My understanding of my capabilities comes from which part of the mind? Ahamkar. There we go. So here I am at work. Oh my God, I'm not going to get promoted. I take this dissociative agent and now I'm not worried about it anymore. I'm going to just do my best. Right? So easy. Once we let go of that ego, what am I capable of nothing? I showed up today. How is this podcast going to be? I have no idea. I'm just going to show up and do my best. Is it going to be good? Is it going to be bad? I had no idea what y'all are really like to sit with. First sentence out of y'all's mouth. Let's fix his anger, fix your anxiety and fix his autism. Holy shit. In two hours? That's daunting. That sounds daunting. What am I going to do about it? Let's get started. Yeah. How do you think we did? Fantastic. Yeah. Interesting. Did I know that this was going to work? Did I know? Did I prepare? No. Ironies, I did prepare but for a lot of things we didn't talk about. Dr. Nogia, this was awesome. We would love to have you back. You are great. Do you want to plug anything? Obviously, there's a book. How to raise a healthy gamer. We got to talk more about gaming and just fixing the youth. I feel like you fixed me, but it's fixed the youth too. No, part two Andrew will be here. He has a lot of fixing. Thank you for to it. Thank you so much, man. Thanks a lot, man. All right. Thank you so much. Check them out. Healthy gamer GG, guys. Thank y'all. See y'all next week.