Modern WisdomWhy You Keep Repeating the Same Patterns - Dr K HealthyGamer (4K)
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,065 words- 0:00 – 7:28
What is Technology Doing To Our Brains?
- CWChris Williamson
You spend a lot of time thinking about our interaction with screens.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
How would you describe what technology is doing to our brains?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Uh, I think the short answer is, not good. So I, I think technology has a lot of benefits. So it has a lot of benefits for our lives, but specifically, what is... what is it doing to our brains I think is, generally speaking, not very good. Um, so just as one example, if you look at basically social media, video games, pornography, most of the technology that we use that is not directly work-related is going to have suppressive effects on our, like, negative emotional circuitry. So any time you're feeling bad, if you browse social media or you play a video game, like, it's gonna shut off your negative emotions, which can feel good in the short term, but in the long term, it's really not good.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. So it is a... anesthetic-
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... that people use to salve bad emo-... I've, uh, I've seen a number of girl friends who, if there is a... i- if they're feeling a little bit uncomfortable, will get on their phone and, like, self-soothe by scrolling.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah. I mean, I think everyone does that.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So, so I, I think... Uh, if you, if you really pay attention, what I've noticed is, you know, watch yourself in a transition. So any time there's a transition, any time you're getting into the elevator, you're waiting in line somewhere, you're even getting up from, like, your, your work desk to walk somewhere else, people will just automatically pull out their phones.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So we're, we're so... We've, we've become so hooked to these things, and I think, um, app designers, phone designers have also tried to capitalize on that impulsivity. So if you think about it, like, even things like face ID, like, that shrinks the time between an impulse up here and engagement in your phone.
- CWChris Williamson
What does chronic, long-term hiding from feeling feelings result in?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
I think it prom-... Uh, pro-... Uh, I'd say the biggest problem that it creates is, like, being stagnant in life. So if we understand, like, let's think about this, right? So e- everyone thinks we have good emotions and bad emotions. So we have these emotions that are good, like excitement, joy, curiosity, love, and then we have bad emotions, like anger, sadness, shame, fear, and we don't want the bad emotions. We want the good emotions. But if you stop and think about it for a second, every human being on the planet has evolved to experience bad emotions. It's a feature. It's not a bug. And then the question is, why? And if we look at our negative emotional circuitry, it is very close, like, like, anatomically, our limbic system is very close to our hippocampus, which is where learning and memory take place. So they're, like, sitting right next to each other, a lot of strong connections. So negative emotions are powerful sources of information and motivation. So if you kind of think about anxiety, we all wanna conquer anxiety, but if we stop and really think about it, anxiety helps us realize, like, what to avoid, um, you know. It, it drives us in a particular direction. If we look at emotions like shame, shame actually is, is supposed to be a powerful motivator to drive corrective action. So if I feel ashamed for failing a test, I wanna study really hard so I never feel that shame again. And so paradoxically, what happens when we shut off our negative emotions is we lose the motivation to actually fix our problems. And this is why I think we see a generation of people who are, like, stuck.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Jonathan Haidt was on the show recently talking about his new book, The Anxious Generation.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
How much of the modern uptick in anxiety, depression, persistent feelings of listlessness and hopelessness, how much of that do you think actually should be laid at the feet of social media?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
I think a fair amount. Like, I don't know how to give it a percentage. Maybe somewhere between 30% and 50%. But I, I think that what, what I really see with technology is that it propagates problems. So technology, in some ways... So there are actually... Uh, it creates some problems, but it also propagates problems. So in, in my kinda clinical work, what I see a lot of is that, you know, if s-... If you're depressed about something in life, social media or video games will propagate that problem way worse. So what, what I see a lot of is, like, you know, let's say I'm a 15-year-old kid. I'm overweight. I'm going through puberty. My voice is cracking. I don't feel great about myself. I don't have a whole lot of friends. And when I was growing up, like, I had no choice but to overcome that in some way because I had no escape, so I had to learn how to make friends even though it was painful. Now what we're seeing is a generation of people who can use technology to run away from their problems. So I, I would say that what, what I really see is, is whatever direction you're moving in in life, technology will amplify that. So if you're moving in the wrong direction, it'll make it worse, but if you look at people like yourself and maybe me, we use technology to amplify the work that we're doing.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. I think it still... I mean, it... Even with all of the m- m- millions of plays and all the rest of the stuff, uh, uh, technology is pretty close to, like, a net zero for me overall.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
I, I have a very negative relationship, I think, with my phone and with social media, um, a lot of shame around being so, uh, fragile and fickle that I can't control the compulsion to take it out, to check it. You know, you see, from a front row seat, all of the minutes and hours that you fritter away, all of the times that you open up another tab, and then you try and then bring in additional technology to try and constrain this. I've been using Opal for iPhone. I'm using Cold Turkey for Mac, which sort of limit websites-
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... within particular schedules throughout the day, and, uh, yeah, it just... I don't feel proud of my, of my phone and technology and social media use even though it's something that I... has, has created a life that I very much enjoy. I think a lot of people feel like that.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah. So I, I have kind of a weird answer to that, which is like, uh, so...What came first, the shame or the problem with technology?
- CWChris Williamson
Probably the shame.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah. Right? So I think this is what we tend to see is that, so if- if you have... And this is kind of the Sunscript concept of something called a samskara, which is like a ball of undigested negative emotion. And- and even in psychoanalysis, we kind of have this theory that's, like, Freud and Jung kind of came up with, right? That we have stuff living in our subconscious. And then what happens is, that feeling of shame will find some manifestation in your life, and unless you heal that feeling of shame... So why is it that you feel shame in relation to technology instead of anger, instead of paranoia that, "Oh my God, because of, I'm so addicted to technology, everything's gonna fall apart. It'll all get messed up," or you're pissed at yourself, or you're pissed at iPhone makers or whatever. So the manifestation, your manifestation of how you relate to technology comes in part from you. And so I- I think when I work with people, usually what I find is the antidote to that is, get to the root of that shame and where that shame is kind of lingering from, coming from. Um, and- and, you know, I- I can even see in your life that you've become so amazing, and I would bet money that your search for being an amazing human being, physically fit, successful, proud, emotionally connected with yourself, has been to run away from a version of Chris that was ashamed of himself.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, absolutely correct. Yeah.
- 7:28 – 14:56
How to Deal With Shame
- CWChris Williamson
And the emotional connection thing, uh, I'm glad that you're here. Uh, this is something I'm pretty obsessed by at the moment, trying to feel feelings and- and work out how emotions work. Um, before we go into that, uh, let's say there is someone listening that's like, "I- I think I feel shame. I think, I- I, that, uh, that does arise in me. Perhaps that's something that's there." Dr. K just spoke about, you get to the root of it and kind of look at it and stuff. What does that mean? Like, how- how do people deal with shame through self-inquiry? Or how do people deal with shame at all?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So I mean, I have a couple of different answers. So one is, like, based on this yogic tradition, so I spent years studying to become a monk, and I think that's incredibly invaluable, and then also from, like, a psychiatric perspective of being a psychiatrist and doing psychotherapy. I think both directions kind of meet, by the way. Um, so I- I'd say we have to start by understanding that... Okay, so what, let's think about emotions, right? So if I am walking down the street, and let's say I reach out to pet a dog, and if I pet a dog and the dog, like, nips at me, I feel fear. And then if I'm a kid, I may start crying, and then mommy or daddy picks me up, and then five minutes later, I feel totally fine because mommy or daddy has distracted me, gi- gives me ice cream, whatever. But then if you sort of look at it, the next time I see a dog, I will have a physiologic response. I will be, feel afraid of the dog even if the dog is across the street. So in a very, very simple sense, if we look at the way that we learn and the way that the trauma works, so we have a negative experience, and oftentimes we do not process that experience. It simply goes dormant. And so the next time that I- I see the dog, the fear comes rushing back because it's living in my mind.
- CWChris Williamson
What does processing an experience mean?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah. So let's say that you were walking down the street. As a grown adult, do you like dogs?
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And if you get... If you try to pet a dog and it nips at you, in the first second or less than a second, you will have the identical physiologic response as a five-year-old. Your sympathetic nervous system will activate. You'll panic. You know, your- your, you'll get a burst of adrenaline. And then what would you say to yourself after the dog tries to bite you?
- CWChris Williamson
That dog's a dick. Uh, wha- what caused that to happen? Was there something that I did? Is it because of the...
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
There you go, right? So what happens in a five-year-old's mind? Not that. "Did I do something to cause this? What's going on with the dog? Maybe I should be a little bit more careful." So what you do, you, what you literally do is you take that emotion and then you look at it from different perspectives. This is also what we do in psychotherapy. When someone has a, let's say they have a bunch of shame, we'll ask the question, "Okay, where does that shame come from? How do you feel about that? What are the different ways that you can look at it?" And if you sort of look at it, the other thing that happens with shame is we start to develop identities of ourselves. So there's the emotion of shame, and then we start to form conclusions about ourself, like, "I feel ashamed in this moment," and then that becomes, "I am a terrible human being. I'm a loser." Right? Now this becomes a statement of fact that has a life that is independent of the shameful experience. So when we talk about processing shame, there is some amount of emotional work, but then there's also work on the ego level, or the ahamkara is what it's called in Sunscript, where our emotional experiences result in conclusions that we form about ourselves, and so those conclusions need to be reexamined. And the most damning thing is that when we are emotional, we form very powerful conclusions, but since we, we're emotional, they're more likely to be wrong.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And if anyone has gone through a breakup, you know exactly what I'm talking about, because you go through all these conclusions in your head. "This person is terrible. Women are terrible. I'm terrible. I'll never find love again."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
You form all these conclusions from an emotional state, but those conclusions don't go away when literally the emotional circuitry of our brain reaches homeostasis or equilibrium. Those learnings stay with us.
- CWChris Williamson
So we have the ball of unprocessed emotion from the eastern side. What are you looking at from a Western equivalent? What's the- the viewpoint there?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah, so I would say, and the Western equivalent, so how do we process shame? Or how do we handle shame? Let's say, le- let's- let's divide it into a couple of things. One is that there are certain techniques that you can do to literally reduce the activity of your negative emotional circuitry, so you can do things like breathing exercises. We know that each emotion is correlated with a certain pattern of breathing. So we can even do a quick demonstration where I'm just gonna breathe at you, and you tell me if you can tell what kind of emotion I'm feeling, right? So...
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) ...anger?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Absolutely. Right? Now, so it's gonna seem similar, but (breathing deeply) .
- CWChris Williamson
Arousal?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah, absolutely, right?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Both of them are deep breaths.
- CWChris Williamson
I like the second one.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Right?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And, and, and I, I can't help it, I have to add a little bit of facial expression to it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And, and so, uh, you can just listen to someone's breathing. And then there's also (breathing rapidly) . What do you think that is?
- CWChris Williamson
Nervousness! Fear!
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Absolutely. Like, and think about that. You're not trained as a psychiatrist-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
... this stuff is baked so deeply into your mind. Our empathic circuitry is wired this heavily, where you and anyone else who's watching or listening to that can tell. So our emotional energy, the, uh, when we have our amygdala and our limbic system that's active, there are certain physiologic changes. And we can engage in certain techniques to essentially reduce those. And this is why breathing is, is really helpful, because if you change the nature of your breath, everything in the body has a homeostatic, so, uh, there, there's a feedback loop. So you can start breathing a particular way, and as you breathe a particular way, it will alter your emotions. If you feel a certain emotion, it will alter your breathing. So we can work on that level. Then the second thing that I kinda mentioned is that we have, uh, once we have emotions, then we have kind of, like, these conclusions that we draw. We have impacts on our identity, which is our, like, ahamkara, or our ego, and then once we have those kinds of conclusions about the world and about ourself, those then form the basis of our logic, which then influence our behaviors.
- 14:56 – 18:40
The Terrifying Survival Feature of Trauma
- CWChris Williamson
I'm fascinated by the assumptions that we have about the world, and the fact that... I, I spoke to Dr. Paul Conti-
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... a trauma guy, and he gave me this really great story where he said, um, "I was in a, a car crash when I was, like, 20, 20 years old, and I was fine, but I could have not been fine."
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
He said that when you encounter something that's a highly traumatic event, your memory after that can color your memories before that based on that experience. And I never thought about this, that I could tell myself, um, because of, let's say I had travel anxiety, which I didn't, "I have travel anxiety. Is it because of the car crash? Well, no, I've never liked driving. I've always been scared of driving. Even before that thing happened, I've known." And it's just part of the baked-in assumptions and physics of your system.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
100%.
- CWChris Williamson
And that's now just how you see the world.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
100%.
- CWChris Williamson
And that's terrifying.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Because to me, you have been robbed of your ability to fact-check what is true and what is false by your own mind.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And that's intended. That's, that's, uh, that's not a bug, that's a feature.
- CWChris Williamson
How so?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
That's a survival feature. So I'll give you just a simple example. So let's say I go eat at a restaurant five times, right? And it's my favorite restaurant. The sixth time I go, I get food poisoning. So if we look at, like, what happens, if you get food poisoning once, your brain does not think, calculate, "Okay, 15% of the time, we get food poisoning, so we should be able to eat there." All it takes is one negative experience to bias all of our recollections of the past. And that's a survival mechanism, right? So let's think about, like, when we were evolving, let's say I go to a watering hole to get water, but the sixth time I go, a crocodile jumps out at me. It is of a lot of benefit for my survival if I go back and question the last five, "Did I get lucky? Was that actually safe? Who knows?" So one, one of the things that we know, and there's, there's a fascinating field of science which is emerging now called neuroeconomics. And neuroeconomics is fascinating because it looks at all of these cognitive biases that we have, especially around negative experiences. And one of the things that we learned is that the human brain doesn't wanna perceive reality. It wants to perceive, it wants to adjust reality for the benefit of survival. And I'll give you just a really interesting and terrifying example of that. So our brain, when we look at, let's say, I'm, I'm gonna ask a girl out on a date. Okay? So our brain, when I think about asking the girl out on the date, the dopaminergic centers of my brain, the nucleus accumbens, the place that I feel pleasure, so if I ask her out and she says yes, I feel an exhilaration of pleasure. The dopaminergic circuits of my brain, in a hypothetical yes, do not activate. But the, the, uh, negative emotional circuitry in my brain can activate and actually make me suffer based on a hypothetical. So if you've ever been in this situation and you think about how things go wrong, that's not a hypothetical. You can feel the pain of a future loss today.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
But you cannot feel the, the pleasure of winning an award or getting a trophy today. Like, literally, hypotheticals can activate your negative emotional circuitry in the present, but they do not activate your dopaminergic circuitry.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And this is one of the reasons why we're so biased towards the negative.
- CWChris Williamson
So it's a fundamental neuroscientific asymmetry-
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
100%.
- CWChris Williamson
... of (...)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And we didn't know this even 10 years ago, because now we know so much about human behavior, we know so much about neuroscience that we can actually, like, look at some of these behaviors that people have where people are very risk-averse, right? And we know what the neuroscience of it is.
- CWChris Williamson
That
- 18:40 – 27:27
Why Anxiety is So Prevalent Today
- CWChris Williamson
is crazy. I have this idea, uh, anxiety cost, which is the longer that you take to do a thing, the more times you think about having not yet done the thing. So you wake up on the morning, you've got to meditate, and you have the thought, "I still need to meditate today five times." Had you just meditated first thing in the morning, you would have not needed to have those. And it's a way to, uh, I guess, justify front-loading stuff that needs to be done, and also it brings a cash value to inaction. A lot of the time we believe that inaction is a, it's an impartial strategy, it's not really doing anything either good nor bad, but there is a cash value in attention. But it seems like there's an even more important cash value of ruminating about this particular thing can cause you to embed a, uh, circuit and a story and an identity about the sort of person that you are, because if it's a negative, uh, experience that you're going through, you, in very many ways, are living it over and over and over again.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
100%. And that's why... Think about it for a second. If you don't meditate in the first thing in the morning, do you remind yourself once or do you remind yourself five times?
- CWChris Williamson
Five times.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And the reason is because... So if we think about it, okay, sitting down to meditate requires some willpower, right? And then if I start to feel anxious, that negative anxiety circuitry activates. Now what I literally have to do is the willpower that I would have used to sit down to meditate is now focused on reining in that anxiety. So my willpower drops, I can't force myself to meditate, which is why you feel anxious again, and a third time, and a fourth time. And the more anxious you feel, the harder it becomes to meditate, which is why I think it's beautiful that in your example, you didn't say, "I feel anxious twice." You said, "I feel anxious five times." And then what ends up happening is we get so frustrated with ourselves that eventually, if we're lucky, we'll sit down to meditate.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
But absolutely, there's a huge cost to even experiencing anxiety.
- CWChris Williamson
Why is anxiety, depression and attention or lack of focus, why does it seem like those three, maybe some others, but largely those three are the emotions du jour of the modern world? What is it that's activating those particular pathways? Anxiety, depression, attention deficit?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Uh, so I've got kind of two answers. One is like an Eastern answer and one is a Western answer. So let's understand a couple of things. So I personally think from the, if you take an Eastern perspective, this is all rooted in a lack of attention. So if we look at, let's say, depression or anxiety. So a big experience of depression is shame or regret. So people are not usually depressed about the future, they're usually depressed about the past. And even if you think you're depressed about the future, the reason you're depressed about the future is because of the conclusions about yourself that you draw from past behavior, right? So I'm, I-I'm hopeless about the future because I'm a loser. Well, where did that, that conclusion of "I'm a loser" come from? It came from past experiences. So if we look at it from an Eastern perspective, the mind has three places it can be. It can be in the present, it can be in the past, or it can be in the future. And one of the things that we kind of know is that if my mind is stuck in the past, that's where we have depression, where there's regret and there's shame about past actions. Anxiety, it has to be future-focused. You can't be anxious about something in the past. So when our mind goes to the future, we are prone to anxiety. When our mind goes to the past, we're prone to depression. So what that means is that the fundamental problem, if you think about runaway anxiety, what does that mean? We give people, you know, medications like benzodiazepines or serotonergic medications. And what do these medications do? Benzodiazepines activate the GABA receptor in the brain. They increase chloride flow across our, our channels and they hyperpolarize our neurons. They essentially dull us out. So one of the treatments for anxiety is to literally, like, turn the brain down to 50% function. That is our treatment, okay? Serotonergic medications work in some similar ways. So what that means is we, we're trying to literally, like, dull out the brain. And why is that? That's because the brain has gotten out of control. We cannot control our anxiety. We're stuck in a thought loop, there's a panic attack, whatever. So if we really look at it, what's the root of the problem? If you can stop thinking about it, then the anxiety goes away. Enter addiction. This is where technology comes in because, hey, what is the best way to stop thinking about something? Let me watch some pornography, because when I'm watching pornography, when I'm playing a video game, I'm no longer worrying about tomorrow. So now what's happened is we, we bring our attention to the present. Because when I'm playing a video game, I'm not thinking about the future, that's the whole joy of it, right? "I'm playing against this guy, I'm going to own him in the game," right? So it brings our attention to the present, which is why it's so addictive. Now this creates a problem though, because once I use a video game as a crutch to bring myself to the present, then my frontal lobes weaken, I cannot control my mind anymore, so the second I stop playing a video game, my mind will return to anxiety or depression.
- CWChris Williamson
Because it's been so buttressed and reliant on the technology to step in.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Absolutely, right? So it's like we're taking the elevator instead of the stairs every single day in our mind-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
... and so we become deconditioned.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So this is where if you look at... E- even if you look at, like, you know, uh, evidence-based mindfulness techniques and things like that for depression and anxiety, it's all about attentional control.If you can control the attention of your mind, the anxiety and the depression will melt away. And this is what I've seen in my clinical practice as well. So I would say, "And why is depression and anxiety getting worse?" I think it, uh, I really believe the root of it is attentional. And if you look at the biggest impact of all technologies, they're all attentional. They're all trying to keep us glued in. And then once we're glued in, there can be other downstream effects, like when everyone's using filters, then we can have low self-esteem, and that can make us feel depressed and things like that. So th- there's absolutely those effects as well. But I think attentional problems are actually at the root of it.
- CWChris Williamson
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- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Because they- they give you dying and failure. So here's the beautiful thing, okay? (laughs) Chris, think about this. So the whole problem, if- if video games did not offer dying and failure, people would be way better off. So here's what happens in a video game. You die, you fail. What happens next?
- CWChris Williamson
Reborn.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Absolutely. And then what do you do? You try again. Now, think about this, right? So the beautiful thing about a video game is it gives you this illusion of failure and the reason it's an illusion of failure because there's no consequence. The game is designed for you to eventually win. It's designed to give you the illusion of failure, not real failure. Now, in the real world, if you, if I fail a class and I get an A next time around, my GPA, my transcript is screwed forever. There's no redos in life, right? Like, that's the whole problem. So now what we have is we have this virtual world where failure comes at no cost, and we have the real world where failure comes at an astronomic cost, and then your brain sees failure in both places, and it's, by the way, the denial of reward that results in, like, more dopamine being released.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So this is where, like, if you play competitive games online, like, losing one game is what makes winning the next game so much more satisfying.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
But it's all artificial, and so it's that denial of reward, that artificial sense of failure, and it- it's really, it's not even artificial failure. It's safety with failure. There's always safety in a video game, but in the real world, there's no safety. There's permanent consequences. If you ask a girl out and she says no, I don't know why I keep on going to that example. You ask a girl out and she says no, everyone in school is gonna hear about it the next day. That doesn't happen. So video games are a safe place to fail.
- 27:27 – 33:40
How to Deal Better With Emotions
- CWChris Williamson
How can people better learn to feel and integrate their emotions? It seems to me that everyone wants to be more rational. Everyone would like to have, uh, uh, the perfect utilitarian rationalist view of the world, but that emotion's kind of a- a second string, um, both indicator, uh, assistant, uh, signal of what we should do. How can people better learn to use, feel, integrate their emotions?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
This is a great question. I think it depends on who the people are, so I think the answer is somewhat different for men and women. So we know, for example, that, like, estrogen makes us more aware of our internal emotional state. So this is part of the reason why women will have a fluctuating emotional experience. I don't think this is good or bad, it's just what happens. Um, so I think for men, the answer is a little bit different because we are conditioned to experience emotions in a certain way. So for men, I think the best way to reconnect with your emotions is through your body and interestingly enough, through your rational mind. So there's a fascinating study, and- and I can send you all the reference, where a group of, um, researchers basically looked at, they- they had people map out physical sensations when they are feeling an emotion. So if you think about butterflies in the stomach, a lump in my throat, you know, a l- it feels like I got kicked in the balls-
- CWChris Williamson
Heartache.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
... heartache, right? So we actually have a somatic map when anytime we have an emotion, remember, an emotion is not mental, it is, nothing is just mental. Everything is physiological too. So one of the best things that you can do, and this is, like, literally a sequence that I go through, is oftentimes we as men don't know that we're feeling emotions. Like, even when we're feeling, uh, we don't feel them, but they're active. That's the way I would put it. So what I'd have people do is, uh, ask them to pay attention to your body. What do you feel in your body? Where do you feel tightness? Where do you feel discomfort? Wh- do you feel jittery? Do you feel, like, wiggling around or... Uh, so zone into that and it's beautiful how good men are at this. So th- the second question that- that you, uh, write it down, really pay attention to what you're feeling, and then ask yourself a hypothetical. If another person were feeling these things, what emotion do you think they could be feeling? If someone's feeling butterflies in the stomach and- and pain in their chest and tightness in their throat, what emotions do you think those could be? And this is where our rational mind kicks in. Maybe that's sadness, maybe that's anxiety, maybe that's worry, maybe that's love.... and then something beautiful happens. Do you think you could be feeling those things? And then people will say, "Oh my god, yeah, I'm feeling all of those things." And this is what makes it so hard is that if we don't know... if we haven't been trained in our emotions, what makes it hard to isolate emotions is that frequently we feel many of them at the same time and many of them in ways that feel conflicted, right? So when I feel... when I get dumped, what do I feel? I feel love, I feel grief, I feel sadness, I feel hopeless, I feel relieved, right? There's all... at least it's over now. But we're not aware because it's so complex. So I-I'd say start with your body, really ask yourself some of these questions, and then you'll be amazed at how far you can get.
- CWChris Williamson
What's that alexith- alexithymia? Alexithymia?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah. So alexithymia is a, is a, I guess, clinical term that means, um, cl- colorblindness to your internal emotional state. So this is exactly what I'm talking about is w- if you ask a dude, like, "What do you feel?" Like anytime you ask a dude, like, "What do you feel?" they're gonna say pissed, right?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So if I'm getting bullied, "How do you feel?" "Oh, man, like, screw that guy." If you ask someone out and they say no, "Oh, screw her," you know, like w- the only, uh, uh, emotion that we're really aware of, that we're aware that we're feeling... And if you ask guys, "Well, how's life going?" "Oh, it's frustrating."
- CWChris Williamson
Agitation.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Agitation, frustration. So a- as men, we're kind of conditioned to feel one emotion, which is anger, and there's all kinds of other emotions underneath anger. So what we call an inability to detect your internal emotional state is something called alexithymia. Now there's even research on something called normative male alexithymia. So normative meaning it is normal. Why is it normative male alexithymia? Because this is actually the... most men are alexithymic. This is w- what we've discovered. And it's because of the way that we're raised, maybe because of testosterone, who knows? I mean, who knows how much of it is nature/nurture, but most men are not really aware of what they're feeling and so then they'll say, "I don't feel a whole lot emotions." Like I'll talk to people who will say, like, "I'm a robot," or they strive to have ice in their veins.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Right? So we even, like, glorify-
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
... these, the lack of emotional experience. The problem is that being numb to something does not mean that it doesn't exist, right? So if I give you lidocaine and I give you anesthesia and you can't feel anything and I literally cut into your belly, your belly is open. Just because you don't feel it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And this is also where we see technology because now what we're seeing is an evening out between men and women for alexithymia primarily due to technology, is my belief. So technology, all forms of technology, will suppress our negative emotional circuitry so we're all becoming more alexithymic. As we become alexithymic, now we're in huge problems because just because you're not aware of the emotion doesn't mean that the emotion doesn't act. And this is why people are so confused about why their life is a certain way. "Why can't I get- get up in the morning? Why can't I just apply for a promotion? Why can't I set limits with this person?" And what's literally going on is you have a huge inferno of emotions that are restricting your behaviors that you're numb to and so you don't realize what's going on, but what people feel is just paralyzed and stuck, and they don't realize why they can't be like these other people that are disciplined and hardworking. Like, "Why am I not like this? Why can't I just get out of bed and do what I need to do?" Well, there's something else that is motivating you to not do that and that's usually an emotion that you're blind to.
- CWChris Williamson
It's so interesting.
- 33:40 – 37:38
Opening Up About Your Feelings
- CWChris Williamson
I- it's like a, a vicious cocktail where, uh, people, first off, don't want to feel emotions because it feels bad for a lot of the time. Secondly, we now have the tools to be able to hide ourselves away from them. And then thirdly, there is this glorification of the rational robot. Uh, so almost a, uh, looking upon emotions as being a second-class signal, uh, v- vulnerability, weakness, um, like a lack of sophistication as well as a thinker. "Oh, I'm, I'm, I'm too... I'm, I'm significantly too sophisticated to act on something-
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... as idiotic and basic as emotions."
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, I- I- I tweeted this a while ago, I got a ton of stick for it but I don't care, uh, basically saying that, um, not opening up about your vulnerabilities doesn't make you any less vulnerable, it just makes you less truthful. That if you're feeling a thing, not opening up about it, to me, there's no additional strength, like, bestowed to that person and in many ways the person that he's able to open up to the right person, like not just necessarily to Twitter. Um, well, is the person that is able to talk about the thing which is difficult to them weaker or stronger than the person who isn't able to talk about it?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So I- I- I think it's good to talk about negative emotions and- and-
- CWChris Williamson
Me too.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
... we have to understand even the mechanism of it. So here's something to understand. So anything that is left in the mind will compound. So if you take a patient who has been traumatized, right? So let's say we have a... I've had patients who've been abused in their upbringing and what happens is... oftentimes what happens in abusive r- relationships, in abusive households is there's secrecy. So what does secrecy do? What secrecy does is it compounds whatever is on the inside. So in trauma what, what we see is a- an- an incredible healing ability. If we ventilate what is in there, we kind of let it out, and then literally the energy in the mind decreases. Anytime you say something, it gets taken out of your mind and, like, gets vented to the ether. Now the really interesting thing is this is true positive things as well. So I don't know if you know people who talk big, right? So they have all this excitement about all this stuff that they're gonna do, they have this great idea for a startup, they have a great idea for a book. "I'ma do this, I'ma do this, I'ma do this, I'ma do that." They're full of hot air.And what's happening is they have all of this energy and they're venting it out, and then they never accomplish anything. So even if you look at this, this deep spiritual tradition of mantra, tantra, mantra, tantra. So a mantra is meant to be kept secret. And what a mantra really is, here's my kind of understanding of it, is it's the same principle as a trauma kept secret, except it's a positive thing. So when you have something that is positive-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
... that is within you, that you keep within you and you do not vent to the world, it can be incredibly motivating.
- CWChris Williamson
Ryan Holiday says, "Talking about the thing and doing the thing vie for the same resources. Allocate yours appropriately."
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
100%. And Freud said that too. So Freud made a really interesting discovery, that language is a substitute for action. And what we know from psychotherapy is if you have someone in your office who has homicidal ideation, they want to kill another human being, literally what happens is if they're able to share their feeling about wanting to kill another human being, that actually reduces their homicidality. Something about speaking about it substitutes for action in your brain. So the two become interchangeable.
- CWChris Williamson
But this is discriminated in a particular direction, which is talking about the positive thing may decrease the likelihood of you doing the positive thing, which is probably negative, but not talking about the negative thing doesn't release the pressure internally, which causes it to build up, which is the opposite of what you want.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Absolutely. So whatever you want to cultivate within you, keep within yourself.
- CWChris Williamson
What a lovely summarization.
- 37:38 – 45:28
Can You Have Too Much Self-Awareness?
- CWChris Williamson
How should people deal with having lots of self-awareness or being a deep thinker? I heard, uh, a guy ask Peterson this question, "The depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. Is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so very deeply?" And I thought it was a really great question. What's your opinion on that, and how can people with high self-awareness deal with it?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So it's funny because (laughs) , um, you know, there, there's, uh, some- someone once told me that, you know, I think my problem is that I have too much self-awareness. And so here's the main thing to understand, if you have a bunch of self-awareness, this is neither a good thing or a bad thing. The question is, who's in control? So the problem with people who have, quote-unquote, "too much self-awareness" is that they are not in control of where their awareness goes. So if I become hyperaware, so we even see this in cases of people who have, uh, psychosomatic illnesses. So if you look at people who have things like irritable bowel syndrome, infl- uh, less so inflammatory bowel disease, fibromyalgia, what we know is they have something called visceral hypersensitivity. So any tiny signal in their body, like you and I are sitting down right now, our body is sending us lots of signals about us being uncomfortable, but we are able to suppress those. But some people are hypervigilant and hypersensitive to their internal signals. And this is the basic problem with awareness is that if you have too much awareness, it's not that it's good or it's bad, it's that it's out of control. So if we kind of think about, let's say a raging river, is a raging river good or bad? Well, that depends. Where are you-
- CWChris Williamson
Where is it raging?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Exactly. Is it part of a, a dam where we're harnessing hydroelectric energy? Then it is amazing, which has been my experience is that when I can take these people and teach them how to harness their awareness and focus their awareness, because most people who have too much awareness, it's like light that is diffracted and spread everywhere. Instead, what you need to do is focus light just like a laser beam, at which point instead of being diffuse and wasted all over the place because your mind is hyperaware of this and now I'm thinking about this, and now I'm aware of this, and now I'm aware of this, you need to be able to focus your mind like a laser beam and then it can cut through things and it is an amazing tool. So it's about who's in control, not that it's good or bad.
- CWChris Williamson
What are the strategies that are most efficacious for controlling?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Uh, so I like a couple of pr- uh, specific practices. Um, so the two like very simple introductory ones that I tend to teach people, one is something called Trataka, so-
- CWChris Williamson
I love your Indian accent. Every, every word that you say in India, I want to do the whole podcast in India.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Okay, sure.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
We can do podcasts in India. It's no problem.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Okay, so first one is Trataka, okay?
- CWChris Williamson
I can't focus. Go back, go-
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
You can't focus? I will teach you practice, right? Interesting. You're talking about (imitates Indian accent) not good. Okay, don't worry. Don't worry. I will help. I will help.
- CWChris Williamson
Ooh, okay.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Okay? You can't focus? No problem. Laugh. What is problem? See, laughing is not, is not lack of focus. Let yourself laugh better. Come on, let it out, let it out, let it out.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Right? What is the problem? Enjoy. Focus fully on the laughter. See, this is what I mean.
- CWChris Williamson
Doing this in front of a jungle background is gonna get someone canceled. (laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
(laughs) Uh, uh, no, it's okay. Don't fear the cancellations.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Breathe and you'll be okay. Okay? Your choice. I can go either way.
- CWChris Williamson
Let's stick with this one for now.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
I did enjoy that though.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So, so one, one practice is something that I call Trataka, which is... or not I, that's what it's called. It's fixed-point gazing. So what I tend to find is that, uh, so fixed-point gazing is usually when you look at something like a candle flame or like a yantra, which is like a spiritual symbol, and you gaze at it for maybe 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, you work your way up slowly, and it's best to learn this from a teacher without blinking. So over time, what literally happens is you're, you tell yourself, "Okay, I'm gonna look at this without blinking." And then over time your body will send you signals that are like, "Hey, we want to blink. This is uncomfortable. Let's move, let's move, let's move." And so what you're literally doing is you're training your attention to not do this thing. I also like Trataka because there's a certain badassness to it, right? Like, you feel awesome.
- CWChris Williamson
Fuck you, buddy.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah. Like, like, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna control this." And you feel strong and powerful-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
... when you do this, this kind of Trataka practice.
- 45:28 – 50:57
The Antidote to a Distracted Mind
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
- CWChris Williamson
Is this when you got your inspiration for the make people stare at a wall for 30 minutes exercise?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
(laughs) No, actually. So that, that's a different, that's a different practice. But the, the make people stare at a wall, which has been a revolutionary practice-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
... in our, in our community. It is...
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
The joy of that practice is... See, we're so distracted from ourselves. And so many people come to me and they're like, "I don't know what I want to do." Right? So someone who doesn't know, they're like, "Should I major in this or should I major in this? Should I break up? Should I not break up? Should I change jobs? Should I stay jobs? Should I pursue my passion? How do I find my dharma or my duty?" You know, no one knows what to do in life. And so as we become clueless about what to do, we turn to the outside world, and then we look at influencers. And then influencers say, "You should do this, and you should do this, and you should do this." And then before we had influencers, we had the original influencer, which are w- which is our parents. And our parents say, " (Indian) , you're going to be good doctor," right? Those are the original influencers. And they give us this set of conditions that we have to fulfill. And so the, the main thing that's happened is if you literally look at our attention, our attention is always outside of us now, because I want to be efficient, right? So what am I gonna do? I took a shower this morning, I put on... This is a great podcast called Modern Wisdom. It's by Chris Williamson.
- CWChris Williamson
I love it.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And, like, I'm gonna put on this episode because then when I'm in the shower and I'm taking a shit... Can I use language?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Okay. When I'm taking a shit, when I'm shaving, like, I'm gonna be learning during those moments.
- CWChris Williamson
Yup.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And then this was something that I did during med school where I was, like, constantly, like, input, input, input.
- CWChris Williamson
Overclock.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah. And so we don't spend time with ourselves. And when we don't spend time with ourselves, we lose sight of our internal compass, and no wonder we have no idea what to do, because we're listening to all these different people. And then this person says this one day, this person says this the next day. And then, like... So I keep changing my mind.
- CWChris Williamson
It's like programmed schizophrenia.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Sort of, yeah. And so the, the staring at a wall practice is sit at a wall, and we're just gonna look at a wall for an hour. And then at the beginning you'll be bored, but then you have all of this crap that has piled up inside you, all these Samaskaras that are dormant, all these negative experiences of hurt, that the second you felt hurt, you flipped open your phone to distract yourself from the pain, and then that pain sunk into you and lived in your subconscious. So what we're gonna do is just stare at a wall and just let whatever is there come up.
- CWChris Williamson
What are some of the strangest trip reports that you've heard from your community about this?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
I mean, it's, it's wild. So, like, even, um, someone in our, uh... Like, one of our employees that did the practice and he was kind of describing what happened, and... Like, people will have all... Like, people will start crying, they'll, like, feel all these things that they've never felt before. Usually the first 5 to 15 minutes are, like, complete boredom. People with ADHD will struggle to pay attention, their mind will bounce all over the place, and then some of them will actually, like, end up having a very, like, calm and rested mind after it bounces around for all over the place. But I think some people, the lucky, I'd say maybe 10 to 25%, will really, like, learn something or get some kind of emotional catharsis. I think a longer, a larger number of people start to realize they do not need to fear being with themselves.And that's really powerful. You don't need something else to, uh, to entertain you. You can take a flight to Europe. That is eight hours. You don't need a book, you don't need a phone, you don't need anything. You can sit and, oh my God, it's like so terrifying, right? And then, uh, uh, and so it, it's amazing what you can learn if you sit with yourself. The challenge for a lot of people is that there is so much negativity in there that it can feel overwhelming.
- CWChris Williamson
Sitting with yourself is an unbelievably uncomfortable experience.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah. And there's a beautiful, um, sort of apocryphal story, like a mythology story in, in the Hindu tradition about this churning of the ocean. And at the bottom of the ocean, there was like some kind of nectar or ambrosia or some sort of divine substance. But the whole point is that when they started churning the ocean to try to get to it, poison came up first. And so there's a really cool kind of perspective from the, this like this yogic tradition that anytime you wanna find gold within you, or anytime you wanna find n- nectar or amrut, um, you're gonna find poison first. So the pathway to finding inner peace involves going through poison.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 50:57 – 55:28
Learning About Your Own Thoughts
- CWChris Williamson
I had a, uh, an insight when I started doing self-inquiry about five or six years ago that, um, for every... It's kind of like being in a garden and looking for stuff underneath stones. And, you know, every so often underneath a stone, you find something that's really beautiful that you're proud about yourself or it's a g- it's a, a realization that you feel whole. Uh, but that's one out of 20. And the remaining 19 have something terrifying and disgusting and, and, and awful hiding underneath. And I think that's around about the right proportion as well.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah. So, so let me ask you this. Has that changed over your five or seven year?
- CWChris Williamson
I would say so. Uh, but in some ways the level of attention and the sort of, uh, complexity, not complexity, but like the level of dexterity and, and, uh, finesse with which I'm looking at stuff has now increased. It's always getting more, it's always getting more, it's always getting more.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So as you are getting better at looking within yourself, what, what has changed about what you're finding?
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, originally I think I was just trying to sort of lay down a path. It was really struggling... I remember the first time when I first started reading, you know, all of my 20s I sent, I sent and received like 10 million WhatsApp messages over a decade as a club promoter, right? Mostly on my phone. This wasn't WhatsApp Web, so it... Kind of impressive, kind of terrifying. Um, and then I, I remember when I first... Before I even started meditating, I just wanted to read and I'd look at a book and as I was sat down, my body would like twitch and move, uh, presumably 'cause it was trying to down regulate to this much lower level of stimulus. There was no bings, bongs-
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... no banners coming down, no nothing. It was a piece of paper. Um, so the first 500 sessions of meditation that I did were I think just like learning to be able to have a slightly still mind and a slightly still body. Then the next 500 were probably a little bit more about, uh, noticing thoughts when they arise. And the next stage where I'm trying to get to now is, "Where are these coming from?" Like, "What is the motivation for this story that I tell myself?" This is why my current obsession with emotions and feelings is coming from, also doing therapy, um, to try and see, okay, not just can you sit with it, not just can you notice it, but why is that there? Why is this a pattern that you are seeing-
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... more increasingly? So it's kind of hard for me to say, um, like, am I becoming, uh, i- is the proportion of things changing because I'm like, each time I move to a different... It's like a computer game-
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... I move to a different garden.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah. So, so I, and I think that's, that's wonderful. Uh, and I, I think, you know, being obsessed about emotions is, I'm sure not the first obsession you've had.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) True.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Right?
- CWChris Williamson
Very true.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So, so one day you're gonna have to ask yourself, where does the obsession of things come from?
- CWChris Williamson
Right. The meta meta question. Yeah.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah, ex- absolutely. Right? So that, that's when, and when you get to that level, by the way, all of your obsessions will fall apart. So that-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
... that's, that's the good thing. So I, I think, uh, so for a lot of people, and this is I think what we see in therapy, right? Is that the negativity comes first and then the positivity comes afterward. And so for a lot of people who, and this is what's so hard about internal work, is that, see, the reason that there's so much crap underneath the rocks is because our garden has been untended for such a long time. And so the negativity piles up. And I realized this actually very interestingly, I was, I was working with someone who was, uh, an immigrant and was from an aboriginal kind of tribe. And I realized that in their life, in the normal human's life, we had so much time for emotional processing. We're gonna go out as hunter-gatherers, we're gonna hunt, right? What is there to talk about? You can talk a little bit, but then for hours you're with yourself. And that's how our brains evolved. Our brains evolved with a minimum of external stimulation, which means the default mode of where our attention goes, like so much of it, eight hours of the day was internal. We used to do all these rote tasks like churning butter.... and, like, churning butter, like, you know, you're, what is, what do you think about when you churn butter? Like, you just, uh, so your, our, our brain defaults to so much time for emotional processing, and now what started to happen is we lose that time, this negativity piles up. Then as you start to look within yourself, there's a bunch of negativity, which is why we need therapists, because most people can't handle that on their own, right? We're not trained to do that. And so over time though, I think you're going to find a lot of positivity, and you'll find that that negativity, unless you continue to feed it-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
... it will start to dissolve.
- CWChris Williamson
Let's say there's
- 55:28 – 1:02:41
How to Do Well in Therapy
- CWChris Williamson
someone who is thinking about starting therapy and wants to do therapy well, do therapy right, be a good therapeutic patient, not, uh, please the therapist, but get the most out of it. How do people do well in therapy?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
What a beautiful question, and I, I think this is a question that everyone should learn, uh, or the answer to. So I, I have a couple of thoughts. The first is that remember that therapy is a partnership, and so we are so conditioned to do well, right? So, like, if you think about a child from a very young age, there's A's, B's, C's, D's, and F's. There's, i- in the United States, we have varsity and junior varsity, and we have, you know, the A team and the B team. So we start segregating everybody up. We start measuring people up, and we assign a s- like, you, you, you do right or you do wrong. So therapy isn't about that. It's a partnership between you and your therapist. So the first thing that I would say, um, concrete pieces of advice, one is that if you don't like working with your therapist, work with someone else. So there's a certain amount of, like, idea that, okay, I must not be doing this right, or I need to try harder. What we know from something called common factors research, which is, like, we did a bunch of research on therapy, because there are all these different types, right? There's psychoanalysis and psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral therapy. And so people sat down and were like, "Which one's the best?" And what we discovered is that all of it's about the same. There's some exceptions to that, but basically it's all roughly the same. And the question is like, how could that be, because psychoanalysis and talking about dreams is so different from mapping out your thoughts, your behaviors, and your emotions? And so what we discovered is that what really matters is fit, so you need to find the right person to be your therapist. So I, what I recommend to, like, friends of mine who want to get therapy is I say, "Be prepared to make three appointments," um, and I even tell them at the get-go to make three appointments with three different people, like, two weeks apart. And then you can cancel if you really like one, but do the legwork. Don't try one and then, like, you know, then start the process of finding the second one. So I say, "Make three appointments upfront, two weeks apart, so you have plenty of time to cancel if you want." If you really, uh, try them all out, and then pick the one that you like the best.
- CWChris Williamson
What does that mean?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
You will feel a difference. So there are some people where you're going to kind of, like, walk out of the office, and you're like, "Eh, I don't really know if I, like, enjoyed that or, like, if that was good or that, or that was bad or whatever." But I, I think a lot of people, um, y- you know, I've had so many therapy patients walk into my office, and, like, when the hour is up, they don't want to leave, right? And especially for intakes, sometimes I would schedule my intakes at the end of the day, and, like, we'd have, like, a t- solid two hours of like, "Let's get into this." And then other people kind of come in. They kind of ask some questions. I do sort- some- somewhat of an assessment, and it feels like we're kind of done at the hour mark. So I, I think, I think people will feel the difference, so just grab it-
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, so choose well.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah, just, just, and listen to yourself, right? Like, "So which one do you like the best?" Second thing is that if something is not working for you in therapy, make that the therapist's responsibility. So this is where a lot of people will just switch therapists, but if you kind of say to some, like, if you're like, "I'm not getting a whole lot out of this," or, "I feel like I'm stuck," share all of the problems that you see in therapy with your therapist. This is where everyone is so sad, but patients are so worried about disappointing therapists, right? And so the best thing that you can do for your therapy and for your therapist is to say, "Hey, this is working for me," or, "This is not working for me." And sometimes we'll even get to something really beautiful, which is that, "Okay, like, you think this therapy is not working for you. Let's examine the cognitive bias. You've been doing this for six months. Here's where you started. Here's where you are now. Would you call this progress? Why aren't you able to see the progress in your life?" Holy shit-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
... because the moment that you realize-
- CWChris Williamson
That tells you something about the patient as well.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Absolutely, right? So oftentimes, solving the problems in therapy that you have with your therapist will be kind of, like, the best way to accelerate the therapy.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Half of the breakthroughs that I've had with patients, uh, that's not, 20%, let's say 30%, come from a period of difficulty in therapy, and it-
- CWChris Williamson
Because it's a breeding ground for their patterns outside of therapy.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Absolutely, right? So this is where the, the concepts of transference and countertransference kind of come in.
- CWChris Williamson
I learned about this in my book last week.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
(laughs) Um, and, and so, uh, I would say talk to your therapist if things aren't going well, and then I would say the third thing is... Yeah, I think actually that's number one and number two. I think that's, that's the book.
- CWChris Williamson
Two very good tips.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. I found, uh, opening the door a little bit, one of the patterns that I have is people pleasing. Uh, specifically, uh, not upsetting women. I have a big thing about not upsetting women. I see them as something that is, uh, psychologically fragile and must be protected, like a professional white knight, basically.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, and what that led to was I was, uh, unprepared to say if things, 'cause it's a female therapist, uh, unprepared to say if there were things during therapy that made me a little bit upset or that made me angry or that made me frustrated. And you're totally right, that I had to, and I still am, having to overcome the pattern that exists outside of therapy inside of therapy, not about anything in my life, but about the therapeutic relationship itself.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Uh, it's, uh, yeah, so that's what's so cool about a therapeutic relationship. So I, I think the main thing to understand about therapy is it's the one place where you don't have to worry about the consequences of what you say-So it's the, it's really a wonderful practice ground for certain things. I mean, there are certain things you, you shouldn't do, and that's the therapist's responsibility to like let you know. So if you say things that are abusive or not respectful or unethical, then the therapist should let you know. But, you, you know, I've had patients, uh, you know, yell at me and, and call me a f-er and like all this kind of stuff. And like right towards the... and at the end of that, like we'll kind of say like, "Okay, like how does that... Are we done?"
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Right? So like oftentimes that'll come out and it'll be kind of unexpected and it's like, "All right, cool. So like you think I'm a f-er? What are we going to do about that?"
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
"Does that mean you're never coming back or are we going to work through that and, and figure it out?" And so I- I think that i- i- it's a... it can be incredibly beneficial and there's just no environment like it. Because even when we look at emotional support... So I was looking at research today about, you know, part of the challenge... So men have a, a four times increase in risk of suicidality after a breakup.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And, and so one of the reasons for that is that oftentimes men will rely on their partners for like emotional support. And the challenge there is that there's always a dual relationship with your partner because you want to like lean on them for emotional support but you also want them to respect you, you want them to love you, you want to feel proud of yourself. The cool thing about a therapy relationship, it's, it's the one place where you don't have to care about what the other person thinks. And that can feel so liberating and you can examine things that you can't examine anywhere else.
- CWChris Williamson
Petty things. Repetitive-
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Petty things.
- 1:02:41 – 1:15:42
Why Therapy Sucks for Men
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
- CWChris Williamson
Why does therapy so often suck for men?
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So a couple of reasons for this. The first is that I think we have a misunderstanding. Somewhere along the way we got the impression that talking about our emotions is the best way to handle them. So I think we have a bias about our understanding of emotions. We think, first of all, they're primarily mental. Secondly, we think that talking about them is the way to go. And therapy is the best evidence-based approach that we've got basically historically of dealing with your emotions, but I think there are a couple of biases. The first is that the majority of therapists are women and the majority of patients are also women historically. Which means that if you're looking at a population and you say, "Talking about emotions really works for my patients," if you're just a therapist, we don't really segregate between our male patients and our emotional... uh, and our female patients. We sort of like look at this and we say like, "This is what works." Now there are lots of trials that actually show the opposite of that, so we'll have trials on cognitive behavioral therapy that look at 50% men, 50% women, both of them have good effect sizes, but there too I think there's a selection bias. Because even if you're looking at success in therapy, you're not counting all the people who left.
- CWChris Williamson
That didn't go to therapy in the first place.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Because talking about emotions did not work for them.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
There's even a really interesting, um, paper... uh, uh, so there's a lot of exploration into this and, and one paper actually points out that there are two kinds of therapy that you can give. One is what we call emotionally supportive therapy where you talk about your emotions, and the second is something called instrumental support which is like problem solving. And what we tend to find is that men prefer problem solving, but if you look at therapy training we are actively disincentivized to problem solve with our pa- patients. We're not there to solve your problems. So when I was like, um, a, a, a second year psychiatry resident and, and I had this 16-week therapy course where I'm learning the basics of therapy and, you know, one of the teachers came in and was like, "If a patient walks in and says, 'Can you help me find a girlfriend?' what's the right answer?" And then the right answer is that, "Help me understand why you think you can't find one, help me understand why you want one, let's talk about it." The answer is not yes. Right? So, so as therapists we're not very good as a, as a whole profession at like helping people solve problems. And I think especially if you look at men there's, there's a lot of disturbing data on diseases of despair. So between I think like 2009 and 2018, um, suicide-related diagnoses in people under the age of 18 went up by 287%. So what's happening right now especially if you look at male mental health is we're starting to realize that, uh, there's a, there's another study for example that... there are a couple studies that show that somewhere between 37 and 66.7% of men who commit suicide, somewhere between 37 and 66%, have no history of mental illness. So what we're starting to realize is there's a very troubling signal that we're seeing that people who kill themselves may not be mentally ill. They may actually have a life that they've just mentally checked out on. They've looked at their situation, they've tried to fix it, and they just have nowhere to go. And we're seeing this especially as we see things like, uh, changes in our economic situation, changes in employment or underemployment. There's a lot of economic forces that are affecting men. And so now the problem is that especially when I work with my male patients what I see is sometimes when they come in, they'll say, "Okay, I feel suicidal. I have low self-esteem. Okay, I diagnose you with depression. Tell me about your life." "I'm 30 years old. I have no job. I've never been in a relationship." And so like what would this person look forward to, right? And so a big part of helping them is not just talking about your problems. A big part is helping them build a life and that's not something we're trained in as therapists.
- CWChris Williamson
Does this require an entire new type of therapy? It, it almost... To me, based on what I know about the definitions of therapy, almost sounds like it gets into some kind of coaching in a way.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Yes, yes. So, so I, I think that that's why coaching has emerged as a field, right? So I think that what started happening at some point is therapists stopped focusing on material outcomes for their patients.So if you look at how we judge the quality of a therapist, it's the reductions in their depression scores, anxiety scores, which I think is completely reasonable, right? That, like, makes sense because that's what our job is. But we certainly don't measure things like promotion or what percentage of people get married and things like that, which is if you really look at, like, what makes people's lives worth living, it's those kinds of achievements. And even if we look at... So the really fascinating thing is if we look at the evidence-based methods of therapy for diagnoses that are predominantly men, we see more action. So a great example of this is something called motivational interviewing. So if you look at addictions, the majority of people who have addictions are men. And if we look at what is the best evidence-based techn- maybe not best, but one very effective evidence-based technique, it's something called motivational interviewing, which is all about getting people to do shit. It's not about talking about your feelings. It's not, we're not gonna examine your dreams or things like that. It's like you have this goal, how can I interview you in a way that increases your motivation and moves to action? So we actually see that, where there are some diagnoses that are predominantly men, where the, the technology that we use, the therapeutic technology that we use is action-oriented, is instrumental.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
And we talk about emotions and stuff, but the emotions is not the end, it's a means. How can we understand how these negative emotions are impacting your actions and preventing you from achieving what you want? So we absolutely see that signal in therapy.
- CWChris Williamson
I was talking to Adam Lane-Smith, uh, ex-psychotherapist, now turned sort of coach, attachment expert guy, and he was talking about the way that the male brain actually... There's a sex difference in how it sort of m- moves in this linear motion between seeing something and then moving toward action, whereas the female brain works in a slightly different way. I know that, uh, MRIs are able to detect male brains and female brains at 10 years old with a 90% accuracy, which is almost exactly the same as you can detect faces, the, the, the sex of faces.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
So a machine is basically as good as a human when it comes to looking at either just the brain or just the face. And, um, yeah, I, I think I'm, I'm pretty interested by this. I, I, it's my shiny new toy and I'm trying not to sort of apply it to everything. Um, but certainly when I compare my time, you know, maybe between 1,000 and 1,500 sessions of meditation, maybe 500 to 1,000 sessions of breath work, uh, maybe 1,500 days of journaling, something like that-ish, maybe 2,000 days of journaling, uh, six months of therapy has provided me with insights that I would have never got, I didn't get, um, at all. Uh, it identified patterns in me that I just did not have the perspective to be able to see. It showed the origins of where particular behaviors and thought loops and assumptions and neuroses about the world, where they came from, and it began to give me a timeline that helps me to understand who I am and why I behave the way that I do, not just noticing the behavior comes up, which it also helped me to do. It's like, "Hey, you keep on saying this sort of thing. This is a term that keeps on being used." And, uh, the best thing, the best thing that, uh, she said is, "Pay attention to fleeting thoughts." That's the coolest thing that I've learned. And, uh, almost I wonder whether, uh, people that are very practiced meditators, you know, what you're doing, the equanimity that you're looking for, you notice the thought arise inside of you, see, hear, feel, note it, and it sort of goes away. But by doing that, you never actually investigate, okay, where did that come from? Like, why did that particular thought... That's the fifth time I've had that thought this morning, and that's a, a, a rumination I have about myself or whatever, and it seems to me like, um, uh, therapy, therapy-type practices help to hold onto that.
- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
A- absolutely. So, so, so many things. I, I love everything that you said, Chris. So let's go through a couple things. One is that going back to why... So therapy is awesome, and you've had a good experience. I- I'm a therapist. I love doing it. I work with a lot of men and women. Let's understand a couple things. The first is that, see, when you look at meditation or journaling, you're the only one in the room. So if you- just think about the people in your life, right? So how easy is it for you to know what mistake someone in your life is making? It's so much easier to see mistakes in someone else. And so the real value of working with another person, like a therapist, is that they can see your problems way clearer than you are, and they have a pile of training to really tease apart, with the information that you give them, really what's going on. So it is, it is not... I'm not surprised at all that you have had an overwhelmingly positive experience in a short amount of time with therapy. I also think that other people's mileage may vary, because generally speaking, the harder working you are at introspection, the more mileage you'll get out of therapy. So I think the big irony is that a lot of men who are very independent and focus on journaling and meditation and want to improve their own lives, they will get so much benefit out of therapy because they've done so much internal work and the, the two really combine. And that's part of the reason why I will combine a meditative practice with, uh, therapy, because it enhances the effect size of therapy when I help people train their minds. Second thing is that I'm with you 100% that there are some things, so a- action orientation and instrumentally improving our lives, like, that's the reason we built a coaching program. So ha- having worked as a therapist, and I had an awesome mentor who told me about this place called the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital in Harvard Medical School, and he's like, "You should really go check that out because I think this is the kind of work that you do." And I was like... My mind was blown away, and then I realized that what people need right now is not just talking about their feelings. I think a lot of people need therapy, but that a lot of people don't know how to accomplish their goals. And we were talking a little bit about creators, right? So, like, we created a creator coaching program, which has had now 500 coaches go through it. And what we discovered is that, like, teaching them some of these skills and helping them understand why is it that you...You know, y- you can't afford to take a break from content creation, but you're so burnt out that your content is crap. And so like, they get stuck in these cycles in helping people understand how to actually achieve their goals, which is sort of what, what... If you look at some of these organizations like the International Coaching Federation and stuff like that, it's all about, like, helping people achieve and accomplish what they want. This is why you have coaches that are employed by, like, Google and, and YouTube and stuff like that. Everyone has seen that there's a lot of value to that. The other thing that I kinda want to say, just one more point about gender, is that-
- CWChris Williamson
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- KKDr K (Alok Kanojia)
So remember we said earlier that estrogen makes you more aware of your internal emotional state, and so talking about emotions is easier, um, for women, p- potentially because of estrogen. And there are even studies that show that the reason that men are reluctant to go to couples counseling is because they feel outgunned. So anytime a man-
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