"Why You’re Always Bored, Unhappy & Stuck" – Reinvent Your Life With This | Dr. K (HealthyGamer)

1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

   Why is it in a world where people are more comfortable than ever before, have more material things than ever before, are so many people struggling and unhappy?

2. AKDr. Alok Kanojia0:16

   Well, so it's, it's a great question, right? So the, the first thing I would ask is what is the correlation between having material things and comfort and happiness? So I think I, I basically have kind of three answers for you, okay? The first answer is we have to understand that the human body and the human mind don't wear out with usage. They actually rust without being used. So if you look at comfort, right? So if I start taking the elevator every day instead of the stairs, what will happen to my body? It'll actually start to get deconditioned. So I think what we're seeing in society is a whole scale deconditioning of certain neuroscientific circuits. So we have all of these technological tools, all of these comforts that make things easy for us. But if you're sitting at home on your couch, you're getting food delivery, you're working on your laptop, and you never have to physically move, even though everything can be brought to you, that actually makes you worse, not better. So there's a really interesting, um, mechanism here, which is if we look at serotonin production, and increased serotonin transmission is associated with improvements in depression and anxiety. We're not quite sure if deficient serotonin production causes depression or not. There's some debate in the academic community. But generally speaking, if your serotonin levels are high or your serotonin transmission is high, you feel better. So then the question becomes, what results in serotonin production? And actually overcoming adversity, doing hard work, accomplishing something, is what causes a serotonin improvement. So I think what we're starting to see a lot of is that people-- technology is basically deconditioning us mentally. We're taking the elevator every single day. We're becoming sort of mentally kind of weak, honestly. That's one of the reasons why we're seeing everyone feels like they've got ADHD. ADHD is kinda on the rise. And so as our brains are becoming more deconditioned, we're starting to struggle more.

3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:24

   Yeah. So one, one reason is because this lack of usage is rusting our minds.

4. AKDr. Alok Kanojia2:34

   Absolutely.

5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:35

   Yeah.

6. AKDr. Alok Kanojia2:35

   Right? So not just our minds, our brains too, which are two discrete things.

7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:38

   Okay. How do you distinguish the brain and the mind?

8. AKDr. Alok Kanojia2:43

   So, so your mind is, is the subjective experience of thoughts, emotions, and things like that. Your brain is a lump of tissue, neurons, blood vessels, astrocytes, myelin, all this kind of stuff. So oftentimes people think that the brain and the mind are the same, but that's not true. So if you sort of think about it like we can measure your brain. I can do something called an fMRI study, which measures blood flow to different parts of the brain. I can do something called an EEG study, which measures electrical activity across the brain. But there is nothing that I can do to measure a thought, right? Like, every person who's listening to this podcast right now is probably having a thought, but the existence of thoughts is not measurable 'cause they, they have no, they have no material. So the brain is sort of the, the material side. Like, it's like matter, right? It's like stuff that you can touch. It can be physically injured by a traumatic brain injury, and, and the mind is the subjective experience of, like, being human.

9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:49

   Yeah.

10. AKDr. Alok Kanojia3:49

    Or part of it anyway.

11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:51

    Yeah.

12. AKDr. Alok Kanojia3:51

    And those two things are different. And they, they connect. They talk to each other. So if you think in a certain way, it will alter your neuroscience, and if you alter the neuroscience, it will change your thinking. So there's a two-way street there.

13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:05

    Yeah. No, I love that. Uh, g- now, going back to this idea that our bodies, our minds, our brains are rusting, I think we intuitively understand that through the lens of physical health, okay? Because that drum has been beat for many years, that we need to be more physically active, and, you know, the truth is, is that movement has been engineered out of our lives, so we've become more physically comfortable. But I think it's really interesting that we've also become more mentally comfortable as well. Now, as you were talking there, I was thinking these ideas of comfort are, are really, really interesting, aren't they? Because, uh, I mean, I wrote about this recently, that I was on a train to London, I would say a couple of years ago now. So I live in the northwest of England. High-speed, comfortable train to London, and the person I was traveling with got really, really frustrated because the app that basically allows you to order your drink from the cafe four carriages down wasn't working.

14. AKDr. Alok Kanojia5:16

    [laughs]

15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:16

    And I thought, "This is remarkable." 10 years ago, a service like this did not exist. You know that if you want a drink and you don't have it with you, on the train you have to get up, walk three or four carriages, choose your drink, pay the money, and walk back to your seats. Okay? No one had a problem with that back then. But now the knowledge that there is an app that can make your life easier, and then the app not working caused a friend of mine [laughs] quite an intense degree of frustration, right?

16. AKDr. Alok Kanojia5:51

    Yeah.

17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:51

    Which is fascinating, isn't it?

18. AKDr. Alok Kanojia5:53

    Absolutely, right? So I think you're touching on so many things, Rangan. So the first is, like, expectations have changed.

19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:59

    Mm.

20. AKDr. Alok Kanojia6:00

    So there's sort of like a spiritual side to this and a neuroscience side to this. So let's talk about neuroscience first. So what are the ways in which we are, we have become mentally deconditioned?So the first thing that has become mentally deconditioned is our attention. So in the past, what would happen is when I went to school, right, I would have to force my mind. My mind wants to wander. It wants to wander over here, it wants to wander over there. I would have to force it to focus on something. I'd have to force it to focus on a textbook. I have to force it to focus on something at work. So most of the hours of the day, we had to kinda harness or rein in, we'd have to put our mind on a leash and tell it where to go. So if you look at technology, do you have to force your mind to be on TikTok? Do you have to force your mind to be on YouTube? No. So the way that, what technology has done is, is it has created so many natural pulls for our attention that we no longer have to force it to do anything. In fact, what's happened is we now have a mind that has been off the leash for so long. So when I'm on TikTok and I get bored of something, all I have to do is just swipe up, right? I, and now YouTube Shorts has a swipe function. I'm sure Instagram Reels has a swipe function. So now the second I get bored, I don't have to force my mind to do anything. It gets to run over w- whatever it wants to. If it gets bored over here, we're gonna switch over to YouTube. If it gets bored with YouTube, we're gonna switch over to Instagram. So the mind does not need its attention to be directed, and this is what people experience, right? So any time you're using technology, you tell yourself, "Hey, this is a waste of time. I need to stop." But you can't control your mind. It's like your mind has become this bear that is off the leash and runs wherever it, it wants to. This is why we create doom-scrolling, right? So, like, people are just sitting there scrolling on their phone for hours and hours. The average cellphone use is somewhere between four and a half hours to up to eight hours a day. Like, this is, like, really common for people now, and that's because our attention, the ability for us to tell our mind where to go, which is what attention is, right? Pay attention. Shift your mind from this distraction over to what you need to focus on. Our, our atte- our capacity to restrain attention is, is literally becoming weakened or atrophied.

21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:28

    Yeah.

22. AKDr. Alok Kanojia8:28

    Primarily through technology use. That's one of the things. Second thing that we're really getting, this is terrible, i- is emotional regulation. We are losing the capacity to regulate our emotions, which is literally wh- what we saw in this example. So this person can't get a drink delivered because of an app. In the grand scheme of the 75 years that they're on this earth, what difference does that make? They can get their asses up and walk a couple of carriages or not, and it's, like, not that big of a deal. But what's going on in this person's brain is the emotional centers of their brain have become hyperactive, and the reason they've become hyperactive is because we've relied on technology to do our emotional regulation for us. Any time you use basically a technological device, it can be video games, it can be social media, it can be scrolling on your phone, it can be pornography. All of these technologies basically suppress our emotional circuitry. So when we have something from the outside shutting off something in our brain, our brain loses the capacity to regulate itself.

23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:42

    Mm.

24. AKDr. Alok Kanojia9:42

    Right? A really good example of this is it's not just our brain. So let's say that I'm, I, I'm used to air conditioning and climate control 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I'm in perfect weather all the time. If I go into an environment that's a little bit hot or a little bit cold, I will feel uncomfortable. And on the flip side, there are people who live in countries where, where there aren't air conditioning, there isn't heating, and their capacity to tolerate higher or lower temperatures is way better because their body can regulate their temperature i- in a subjective way more effectively. So we're all losing our capacity to emotionally regulate. We're seeing this a ton with parents. Kids are getting, throwing temper tantrums when you take away their video games. Like, you know, everyone's kinda getting more frustrated with each other.

25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:31

    Yeah.

26. AKDr. Alok Kanojia10:31

    So we're, we're losing the capacity to emotionally regulate, and when we lose the capacity to emotionally regulate, we would predict increases in depression, increases in anxiety, and we're absolutely seeing that.

27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:43

    Yeah. It's absolutely fascinating. We think about this relationship with comfort or discomfort and our physical and mental wellbeing. Couple of things came up for me there. Number one, you mentioned temperature-controlled houses, okay? Air conditioning or central heating, whatever it is, this idea that we no longer need to tolerate differences in temperature, okay? And then the first thought that came into my mind was the modern, um, what's the word? The modern kind of trend for cold plunging. Now, to be clear, I, I know there are benefits of cold plunging for some people. It can be an incredible practice. But it's interesting, isn't it, that as we've got to these more temperature-controlled lives, there is a desire with many people to experience the cold. Do you know what I mean?

28. AKDr. Alok Kanojia11:32

    100%, Rangan, and I think that's, that's not a coincidence. So-

29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee11:36

    Exactly

30. AKDr. Alok Kanojia11:36

    ... along with the rise of, of cold plunging, we're also seeing a whole scale interest globally in meditation.

Episode duration: 2:05:25