Why You Keep Telling Yourself I'll Do It Tomorrow

If I have 13 things then I will feel more overwhelmed because 13 is more than 10. But the science shows us that feeling overwhelmed is not about the total number of tasks that you you do. It is about the number of tasks that you choose compared to the number of tasks that you have to deal with. So the ratio of things that you want to work on versus things that you have to work on is literally what leads to feeling overwhelmed. The more that we take on, the less overwhelmed we feel. And we see this

principle once again in sleep because as you are feeling stressed out if you work on anything our brain is keeping track of this and sort of says okay we've done some stuff today so now we can go to sleep. >> What would you diagnose Voldemort with? >> Antisocial personality disorder. >> What would you diagnose Cedric degree with? >> Normal. Normal healthy development secure attachment. You know does pretty well. Cedric's dad may have some degree of like trophy golden child narcissism extended through his son. >> What about her? >> Normal. >> Not OCD. >> No. >>

What about Fred and George? >> Also normal varants. Maybe if anything I mean I don't think they have this but oppositional defiant disorder is probably a streak that they have but I don't think that it really qualifies. They just break rules and it's within normal variation. >> Okay. What about Bellatrix? Um, let me think. So, I don't know if there's a discreet diagnosis for this, but like basically she exhibits behavior consistent with people who are deep into cults. So, she's certainly somewhat sociopathic, so some degree of antisocial personality disorder, but she has like obsessional worship,

cultlike perspectives towards Voldemort. It's not clear that she actually has a history of trauma or substance use. I think people would be tempted to diagnose with with her with something like BPD, but I think that's kind of like an unfair characterization. So, I think she's just obsessional. If anything, the best way. So, she's interesting because I think she has a lot of like features of illness, but doesn't fit diagnostic criteria for anything except for ASPD, antisocial personality disorder. So, she has like low level of distress tolerance, high impulsivity, is very prone to negative a effect,

right? So, it's not like she's depressed or bipolar or borderline. She clearly doesn't have any empathy for other people. But I think her key thing is like she's got this weird obsessional cult streak, which I don't know what the diagnosis of that is. What causes narcissists to become narcissists? Were they born that way or exposed to trauma that caused them to become that way? What a great question. So, where does a narcissist come from? Basically, the way that a narcissist forms, you can call it trauma, but I would say it's a very specific thing. A

narcissist forms from conditional love. See, when we unconditionally love someone, we teach that person that there is something within you that is good, that is independent of how you act, how you look, how you behave. When you are not unconditionally loved and when you are conditionally loved really really really hard or not so much the love but when the conditions are huge. When your whole life is about conditional responses then what happens is someone becomes very attuned to things outside of them. They become focused on the outside focused on the outside. Focused on the outside

and that leads to narcissism. But the other thing is if you grow up with a narcissistic parent they're narcissistic right? So the way they feel about themselves depends on how you behave. And then in turn, I don't know if this kind of makes sense. I'm going to try to draw this. They'll do something that then makes you do something, behave in a certain way, which then then makes them feel proud. And if they feel proud, that means that they are a good parent. So this behavior that you do determines whether they feel proud or they

feel good. And if they feel good, then they love you. So what happens then? You learn that love depends on this behavior. If you do this behavior, then you get love. If you don't do that behavior, you get punishment. You're growing up in a conditional love situation, which is really common when your parent is a narcissist. And so that will make you narcissistic. You can't make up anything. Once time is gone, it's gone. You can't truly undo anything you've done to another person. You can try to compensate, but you can't really reverse it. Any words

that leave my mouth have left my mouth, and they have the impact. Two things you can't take back in life. [music] The time that has passed and the words that come out of your mouth. Can't. And now something cool happens. Once you believe that you can't really make up for your past mistakes, then you start to live in a much more vital and important way. So some people will listen to this and they'll say, "Does that mean I'm doomed by my past mistakes?" No. You have to be very subtle and careful about this because if

you have a negative cast to your mind, you'll say that you can't ever fix your mistakes. Therefore, stop trying. No, it's the opposite. Since you can never make up or undo your mistakes, that's why it's important that you start to live every single day in the best way that you can because you never get a chance to go back and undo that. The way that all of us are sitting right now is wrong. The way that we're sitting like is not how we're supposed to sit. >> How we're supposed to sit. >> So, if you

guys want to sit up straight, there's one really easy principle. All right. >> Your knees should be lower than your hips. >> Oh, what the hell? >> I don't think the couch lets me do that. I'm too busy. Exactly. So, the reason that you hate sitting up straight is because no furniture is designed for you to sit up straight. >> So, I'll teach y'all something cool. Okay. >> So, I'm going to sit like this. So, this is easy for me to sit up straight. You guys may not be able to do that. >> No problem.

>> If you sit on the cushion >> Oh, on the cushion, >> but put your put Yeah, like that. >> I got it. >> So, half and half is right. And notice what happens to your back. >> Does it feel weird anymore? >> It doesn't feel weird or it does. >> It doesn't feel weird anymore. So, isn't that weird that sitting up straight no longer feels weird? There's a really simple test that you can also do where if you sit at the edge of your chair and you put your feet out in front of you

and you cross your legs, your back will naturally be straight. >> So, edge of the chair, feet >> Yeah. So, scoot back just a little bit and you notice the difference now. >> Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I can feel it in like my lower back. >> A lot of people misunderstand this because they think that fixing an insecurity is the way to overcome it. But fixing an insecurity is not overcoming it. That is actually feeding into it. So the weirdest thing about overcoming insecurities is that fixing insecurities is not overcoming them. In fact, it just reinforces

it. It just makes it go dormant. So this is the difference between fearlessness and courage. Very different things. To be courageous is to overcome your fear. To have the fear and to overcome it. To be fearless is to remove the fear. And then if it returns, you won't have courage. Right? So I can do something like get drunk to overcome my fear. get some good old social courage. I mean, liquid courage and social lubricant before I go ask someone out on a date. That doesn't drunk doesn't overcome my insecurity. It just makes it temporarily disappear.

If you want to go to bed on time, it's not even about bedtime. It's about daytime. You have to understand, okay, what is the part of my brain that allows me to sleep or keeps me from sleeping? Because you want to sleep, but something in your brain is not letting you sleep. And there are a couple of important inputs that we need to understand. Number one, any kind of work that we need to do, if your brain is not satisfied with what you've done today, it will keep you awake. So this first 4 hours of

the day, you need to be as productive as possible. Next thing, any amount of pent up emotions or stress will activate your mind and has been artificially suppressed. So you want to spend 1 hour just with unstructured mental activity. Next thing is there are certain dietary things that we can do. Be careful about super highfat diets and have a decent amount of healthy carbohydrate before you go to bed. It's fine. I'm not talking about dessert. I'm talking about dinner. Complex carbohydrates will also leak glucose into your system. And glucose will actually suppress arexin and help

you fall asleep. So you want to have maybe a really solid meal 2 hours before bed and then no devices, folks. Hate to say it, but that's how it is. And this is how people who don't have trouble sleeping sleep. So the number one thing that correlates with male suicide is not depression. This is super scary. There's one study I saw recently that suggests that 50% of men who kill themselves have no history or evidence of mental illness. I believe the statistic in in my clinical practice because I know what depression looks like. I know

what bipolar disorder looks like. And half the men that I've worked with at least are not actually mentally ill. See, mental illness means a pathology of the mind, which means that the mind is malfunctioning. Most of the suicidal men that I work with, their mind isn't malfunctioning. They genuinely have a life that is no longer worth living. They're looking at things and objectively realizing that there's no way out of this situation. So, they turn to suicide. So, I know it's kind of like a very controversial statement, but I think that's what my clinical practice has

shown. And there's some research to even back that up. So if we sort of look at what's going on with men, we're sort of they have nowhere to turn to. And the number one thing that correlates with it is not mental illness, but is a sense of thwarted belongingness. But basically what happens is what causes people to kill themselves is they try to connect with others and they get rejected. So I see so many people who have jobs, even have girlfriends, boyfriends, have friends, and they feel so incredibly lonely. And if I'm lonely, like I

need to put myself out there. So what I'm going to do is transform myself. I'm going to focus on my social skills. I'm going to get a good haircut. I'm going to learn how to dress. I'm going to start working out. I'm going to become professionally successful. And now that I've become something that I can be proud of, I'm going to go interact with other people. And look at they're going to love me because now I'm sexy and I'm successful and I'm I know how to talk to people and I'm going to talk to them

in this way and I'm going to do eye contact and I'm going to do all of the things. >> Why are you doing the accent? >> To connect with you, to make you like me. [laughter] Right now you're laughing. So now I feel okay because now I know, oh, Steven's laughing. He likes me. I'm likable. So, what we actually do is we create a false version of ourselves for people [music] to love. And that's what really screws us because they don't fall in love with us. They don't like us. They don't like the broken, pathetic

kid that I used to be. They like this glossy, polished version. Right now, like so many people are taking [music] advantage of these like traditional work environments. And as more people take advantage of it, we have a generation of people who are just checking out. They're like, "This doesn't work for me. Like, this is not worth it." You know, if you look at things like, you know, wages, like for example, teacher wages. So teacher wages have not kept up with inflation at all. And then on top of that, we have this like growing technological crisis

where kids are becoming more disregulated than they've ever been. We also have all kinds of like fear of lawsuits. So teachers cannot discipline kids. And so we're we're seeing an absolute collapse. I don't know if like people are seeing it like economically, but I'm seeing it on the level of like teachers who are burnt out and like students who are really struggling, like parents come to me, no one knows what to do, and like the school systems in the United States are getting absolutely screwed. So, I think what we're seeing is a whole scale failure

of our traditional institutions. Today, when you fail, the reason you're demoralized and you give up is not because you failed today. It's because you add the energy of all of your previous failures onto this failure. This is why it's overwhelming to deal with. It's not just this failure. You're not looking at it in isolation. They do it once and then they fail again and they fail a third time. And then what happens? Now I've failed three times in a row. You stack them all together without processing each one. And then the fourth failure, you're not

dealing with one failure. You're trying to manage four failures. This is how you get these kind of patterns of people who are like, I've tried everything and nothing works. failure after failure after failure stacks up changes the way that your mind thinks and then you start engaging something called the noibo effect which is the opposite of placebo. So placebo is >> explain that term. >> So placebo is if we think something is going to work it works and noibo is if we think something isn't going to work it doesn't work very simple you decide for

yourself how are you going to live the next day of your life the next week of your life. You know, one of my favorite things to do is to hang out in chat before we go live or like when we go live, but we're in like the starting soon space. It's very fascinating. Um, yeah, it's great. Oh yeah, people are crashing out because of finals. Oh yeah. What's up? What's up? stalking. Absolutely. You guys get to stalk me. What? I don't get to stalk you. Okay. Welcome to another Healthy Gamer GG stream. My name is

Dr. Al Kenoja. Just a reminder that everything we discussed on stream today is intended to be taken for educational and entertainment purposes only. Um, if y'all have any concerns or question, please go see a licensed professional. While I am a medical doctor and psychiatrist, nothing we discuss on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice. I'm not therapizing y'all. I'm not treating y'all. We're just talking about stuff. So, um, yeah, we're going to be talking about procrastination today. And I got to be honest with y'all. I saw this and you know, someone was

saying, "Hey, Dr. K, can you talk about this?" And my first thought is, I'm tired of talking about procrastination. I've been talking about procrastination on this channel for years. And so today, what I'm going to do is I'm going to teach y'all how to stop procrastinating because I'm I'm tired. I I never want to talk about procrastination again. So, this may sound kind of confusing because if I could teach you how to stop procrastinating, why haven't I done it already? Um, we have a great video on the channel about the three types of procrastination. There

are lots of people who are neuroscientists and psychologists and people like myself who will make procrastination a complicated topic. And I didn't quite realize how bad this was until um I started learning more about AI. And I realized that what you know what AI basically does is the way it generates responses is based on what you find acceptable. That's why everyone thinks that AI is so great. It learns very much what you want to hear. U we did a a video recently about AI induced psychosis and how AI is very sicopantic. And I realized also

in the self-help space of YouTube and podcasters and whatever people like myself are very good at crafting answers that people want to hear. So when you have a problem like procrastination, we develop all of these complicated mechanisms which are true. It's not like we're lying to you. So I had talked in the past about how procrastination has an emotional side, right? So we're the reason we procrastinate is because there's certain emotions we're trying to avoid. Procrastination also has there's an operational type of procrastination. This is all evidence-based stuff, right? Lots of studies about how the

reason we don't get started is because our mind cannot figure out what all the steps are. And if someone breaks down the task for us, I recently went through this when I was helping my daughter pack and she doesn't know how to pack. So, I have to break it down for her and then she can do the individual things. And all of these are reasons that we get started. But today, when I looked at this and I was like, "Okay, I'm going to just tell y'all how to resolve procrastination once and for all." And the

reason that we don't say this stuff is because it's hard, right? Not that it's complicated. In fact, it's really simple, but it's hard. And the answer is not willpower. First thing to understand, if you want to never procrastinate again, I'm not really sure if that'll work. Your mileage may vary, etc. Various disclaimers. But the first thing to understand is when people try to procrastinate or when people are struggling with procrastination, it's I want to do this work but I also want to do this. So there's some internal conflict. So if we want to deal with

procrastination once and for all, the first thing we need to understand is that your mind is not a part of you. That your mind is outside of you. This is step number one. The reason we really struggle with this is because we don't really understand how this thing functions. So I want you all to think about this. If you were conflicted, there must be at least two things, right? Number one, so we view the mind as monolithic. We view the mind as us. Um, there's this great uh I mean I don't know if it's great

actually, but I I I do this analysis in in our meditation guide where I try to explain to people that the more that you think your mind is you, the more mentally ill you get. So simple example, most severe mental illness, hallucinations and delusions, right? So when we look at psychotic disorders, psychotic disorders are some of the worst on the planet in terms of prognosis. People get worse. People have die 10, 20 years earlier than they normally would. Really bad. And what happens in psychotic disorders? In psychotic disorders, the mind produces a thought and we

are not able to recognize that that thought could be false. The thought becomes reality. Right? So you know when people say your thoughts are not facts like absolutely right. If I think I'm a millionaire, every time I imagine being a millionaire or I imagine that clever comeback for when that dude made fun of me and oh yeah, if I had said this, I would totally own them. Ah, they'd learned their lesson. That's not reality. Our thoughts are not reality. When we believe our thoughts are reality, we become mentally ill. That's what we call psychosis. That

was that's what we call delusions. A little bit healthier than that is something like panic attacks where your mind is really telling you, "Oh my god, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to die. But then there's a part of you that's like, "Wait a second. I'm not really going to die, but it really feels like I'm going to die. I'm really going to die. I'm really going to die. I know I'm not going to die, but really I'm going to die." Right? So, there's

a little bit of doubt in the mind. Then we get to things like an anxiety disorder, which is arguably less severe. And that's when, okay, I'm worried about this. I know it's kind of not true, but I'm really worried and it's hard. How do I deal? How do I get rid of this anxiety? See, the person who's delusional doesn't try to get rid of the delusion because they think it's true. The person with anxiety at least knows, hey, this is anxiety. This is not real. So, there's separation between you and your mind. And then we

get to the normal human being. And the normal human being has some thoughts, you know, that they think are correct and some thoughts that they don't think are correct. Oh, this is my imagination. This is in my head. It's not really that big of a deal. We are able to reflect on our thought process. Then we get onto the healthier side, right? So when I do psychiatry and coaching, I start off with people who are anxious, panic attacks, delusional, and then we eventually move them over to coaching where now we're using some of these techniques

to not just fix the pathology, but to improve their life. Things like cognitive flexibility. What is cognitive flexibility? Cognitive flexibility is when your mind believes one thing comes to a particular answer and you are able to shift your mind. So the first thing you need to understand if you want to be done with procrastination is that your mind is outside of you. And the problem is that most of the time when we go through our life we listen to our mind. We fuse with our mind, right? The mind says, "I want to do this." The

mind also says, "I should do this." And we see a conflict within the mind, which is exactly what the mind wants to do. So, I don't know if you guys can feel this. So, now we're going to talk. The reason that this is hard and it's hard to answer the question in this way is because I'm going to talk about subjective experience which cannot be transmitted. Y'all ever know that feeling of false procrastination. It's not the procrastination that's false. It's like there's a falsity to it. So, it's not really the best word, but you know

how you've already made up your mind. You're just pretending to be conflicted. There's a part of you in the back of your mind, your mind has already decided we're not going to do this today. [laughter] And then for the sake of form, right, for the sake of decency, for the sake of saving face, your mind is like, "Oh my god, we should do it today. No, I don't want to do it today. Oh my god, let me just" and then you start arguing with yourself. You start pleading with yourself, right? It's the stages of grief.

You start bargaining. Okay? Like, let me take a break for one hour and then I'll do the work. Your mind goes through all of these things, all of these cycles. And why does it do that? to satisfy you, right? To throw in the towel the moment you start trying to work. That's like kind of pathetic. But instead, what we're going to do is we're going to pretend to struggle. We're going to pretend to fight. Because if we can pretend to struggle and we can pretend to fight, then we can get better at it. We can

get better at struggling. Oh yeah, the reason that I procrastinate is because I'm not good enough. I don't have enough willpower. I don't know if I have enough discipline. The mind is going to be like, "Oh, bro, like you just need more discipline." Like, "Yeah, it's okay to like lose today. like we're going to level up your discipline. We're going to level up your willpower. We're going to build good habits. We're going to do all these things tomorrow. And then once you do all of these things tomorrow, you're going to beat me. And you'll never

procrastinate. You're going to be so great. You're going to be full of willpower, full of habits, full of discipline, and then procrastination will be solved. Trust me, bro. I got you. Let's order Atomic Habits on Amazon today. Let's do it. I I got you, fam. So the mind works outside of you. It actually manipulates you constantly because the mind has certain things that it wants. The mind is primitive. It's an organ just like your tongue, just like your stomach. Your stomach doesn't know what is good for you. Your tongue doesn't know what is good for

you. It just knows what it wants. So our biggest mistake, the reason everyone struggles with procrastination is because no one knows what the mind actually is. The mind is an organ that exists outside of you. And the moment that you understand that it exists outside of you, then you can change the way that you manage it. Then we can start training the mind. The reason that you procrastinate is because your mind is untrained. The reason that it's untrained is because you don't realize it can be trained. Training happens when I'm training a dog. I'm over

here. The dog is over here. And once the dog becomes trained, then it obeys me. What's the difference between the average person sitting at home and a yogi in the Himalayas? The difference is one has a trained mind, the other does not have a trained mind. And the simplest way that we fail to train our mind is not even understanding that it is outside of us. Second thing to understand is that the mind is not really an organ per se. It is a set of activity. Mind is not really a a noun. It's really an

action that is outside of you. Mind is minding. It's not really it's not an object. Right? So if you look at the nature of the mind, what you will notice is that it fluctuates. That's the nature of the mind. You have a thought, it disappears. Right? When you have an object like an organ, your kidney doesn't like disappear and reappear. Your liver doesn't disappear and reappear. Mind is actually activity. It's not a thing. Thought comes, thought goes. Another thought comes, another thought goes. Another thought comes, another thought goes. Emotion comes, emotion goes. Emotion goes away,

emotion comes back. So if we look at our mind, really what it is is it's kind of like a pool of water. And what we experience as mind is the ripples in the water. Right? The mind doesn't have like substance. It's activity actually. So it is a series of activities that we then localize to a particular thing. So now once we understand these two things, there are a couple of important things that we can understand about dealing with procrastination. Okay. So the first need to draw this out. So if you want to deal with procrastination

or really anything else for that matter, the most important thing to understand is the way that you deal with your mind. Okay? And by deal with I mean literally respond to. So this is what I hear me out. mind has a thought I should work right this is a thought that exists in your head now when this thought happens what you'll notice is that you respond to the thought maybe you'll say something like I can start tomorrow or I don't want do and then the mind will respond back but I really need to and then

you'll say okay after one hour so the first thing to understand this is something that we all got to understand the mind can't exist without input So, one of the simplest ways that we get input is through our sensory organs, right? So, if my mind sees an advertisement, it will want that thing. But I want y'all to notice how the mind communicates. There's back and forth between two things. And then you may start to wonder, well, hold on a second. If I'm not my mind and my mind is outside of me, who's the other voice?

Right? Because isn't my mind telling me I don't want to? Is this my mind or is this my mind? Like I'm a bit confused. Good. That's how you learn. See, once you start getting confused, this is what a lot of people don't understand. This is what neuroplasticity feels like. So everyone talks about oh enhance neuroplasticity enhance I will take this supplement it will make my brain plastic and then I will be able to learn better. What is the subjective feeling of neuroplasticity? It is confusion. And this is why there are a lot of brilliant people.

Ancient Japan, Korea, China, Zen masters. And Zen masters realized that as long as the mind thinks it knows what's going on, there's going to be no neuroplasticity. Your brain won't change, right? And I don't know if you guys have ever talked to someone who has made up their mind. And once they've made up their mind, they don't change their mind. the ability to think differently, the ability for cognitive flexibility, all of that goes out the window. They're not capable of doing that. And the one thing that you can be sure of is the more that

they've made up their mind, the less confused they are. We want you to be confused because when you are confused, you will look at things and you will try to understand them. You cannot try to understand what you already understand. The problem is your mind has tricked you. Because you don't understand, it understands. And because it understands so well, you keep procrastinating because it knows. Oh my god, I have a great idea. This person, I want y'all to think about this for a second. How messed up this is. Someone instead of doing some work made

this someone maybe this person this is this person's work maybe they make money off of Twitter who knows someone instead of doing the work that they need to do decided to tweet about this and 320,000 people instead of doing the work that they need to do liked this. We're so busy liking posts, gifts about procrastination that we're not even working. You guys, this is the ultimate SCOP. Everyone's like, "Conspiracy theory this and SCOP that." This is the ultimate The ultimate SCOP is your mind and what it does to you, right? Like tell me I'm wrong

because here you are with all these hopes, all these dreams, all these aspirations, not doing watching some guy on the internet instead of doing your actual work. And what has your mind told you? It has told you, "Oh my god, if I watch this guy, it'll fix my procrastination." And in so doing, you actually avoid doing the work that you're doing. You see how it twists and how it turns? There's no way to win within the mind, which is how it's designed. The mind is like a carne game where you show up, you pay five

bucks, they're like, "Yeah, it's really easy to win. Pay me $5. Here's three rings. If you get the ring over a single bottle, you get a million dollars." And so like, "All right, you see how it works? No way to win if you are operating inside it. If there is not distance between you and your mind. So the first thing that I want you all to understand is that the mind will have thought number one and then it'll have thought number two and then it'll have thought number three and then it'll have thought number four.

But this is the beautiful thing. As long as you are like existing within this pipeline, right? You're arguing should I do this? Should I not do this? Should I do this? Should I not do this? I want to do this. I don't want to do this. But this is where I was saying if you really pay attention subtly out here, the mind is already decided. It already knows where you're going to end up, right? It it knows we're not going to But when you start procrastinating, you're done. You're done. You're done doing your work. It's

already happened. It's already decided. The mind just has to do something that keeps you asleep. So once we understand that our mind is outside of us, once we understand that the mind has its own goals, right? This is where people talk about things like dopamine and stuff like that. We have addictions. I think addictions I learned half of this stuff in the mountains in India sometimes mostly out of Bangalore actually not in the mountains small part in the mountains. And I learned a lot of this stuff doing addiction psychiatry because I I don't know if

you guys know this. You know, when you have an addict, the addict only pretends to resist the addiction. They're not actually resisting. They're just pretending to resist. And so, how do you conquer this? How do you conquer an addiction? Right? Because that's my job. People come to my office and they're like, "Dr. K, I'm addicted. Can you help me?" And I'm like, "Sure, bro. So what do we teach them to do? We teach them to disbelieve their mind. We teach them to run away from whatever the mind says. And that's why something that really confuses

people who are not like alcoholics. Hi, my name is Alo. I had my last drink in 1977 and I'm an alcoholic. They're like, how can you be an alcoholic if you had your last drink 48 years ago? How is that even possible? you're not an alcoholic. Now, the reason that people do this in AA is they must train themselves to disbelieve their mind. What we think is actually a hallucination, a delusion is actually healthy. To disbelieve your mind is the healthiest thing that you can do. So, whatever your mind tells you, it'll give you all

kinds of good reasons. And what we're going to do is the thing. That's what we're going to do. We're going to do the thing. We're gonna do it. We're going to do it. Now, now notice what happens when you say that to your mind. It's not going to listen. Why? Because it's been untrained for so many years. Imagine you have a feral animal and then you have a feral cat and you put a leash on it. What is the the cat going to do? It's going to resist. It's not going to work. And then it

jibbates you. How does it jate you? What are y'all What are y'all thinking? Dr. K, this doesn't work. It's not working. Oh my god. This aspect of disbelieving the mind and giving it commands is not effective. We better stop. Ineffective. Bro told me to do this. Doesn't work. Let me watch another video about procrastination. Well done. You just got played. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist. The greatest trick your mind pulls is convincing you that the things that are working don't work. So what does this practically look

like? Two very simple steps. We're start with step number two. The first is do the actions that your mind tell you are insufficient. You need to be stupid, not smart. Because anytime you're smart, the mind will win. Oh, you don't need to do it today. You can do it tomorrow. We'll figure it out. I see this all the time with addictions. Oh, yeah. Like, I know that this addiction causes a problem, but if we get better at handling it, then it's going to be fine, right? We need to be smarter. We need to be smarter

than the the addiction. We need to be more disciplined. We need to plan a little bit better. We need to protect ourselves from the bottom end. And then we can do the top end without a problem. We need to be smarter. We need to be better. We need to biohack. We need to neurohack. We need to neuroplasticity. We need to listen to all this podcast stuff. We'll figure it out eventually. Like if we get enough knowledge and we get enough information. If we do all of the things except for doing the thing, it'll work eventually,

right? Take this supplement. Watch this video. Figure out how to optimize. figure out how to do this without paying a cost. This is too this this hurts too much. This is too difficult. It's too many hours of work and I don't even know if it's going to work. Let me use AI. Let me figure out how to use AI. Let me figure out how to do AI programming. Let me try to do prompt engineering. Let me try to do all of this stuff except for doing the thing. And this is smart. This is stupid. This

is dumb. It's so dumb. It's such a waste. What's the point of working really hard right now if it's not going to work? How about I figure out how to be more efficient and then I'll do the work. So two steps. Number one, do things that are foolish. Not like actually foolish and things that are damaging to you, but look for a particular thought which is this is not enough. It's inefficient. Right? It's it's it's subtle. It's going to be something about quantification. We can do it later. It's going to have it. It's going to

have the dimension of amount time. It's there's going to be a number involved. Always some kind of number. It won't be explicitly a number, but it'll have some amount of quantity to it. Inefficiency, not enough. Those are like number one and number two. And this is what training your mind is like, right? it is going to rebel against it as much as it can. Now, you may say, "But Dr. K, I tried this before." There's a really great great question. So, is it that you shouldn't interact with your mind? Basically, yes. Do not engage with

it. Command it. Now, this becomes difficult because we think we're commanding it. And that's the subtlety. This is why this is like this is why people don't explain it this way because this is hard to do. It's hard to do because it requires a level of perception and awareness. You have to be able to detect things and when people are not able to detect it, they think it's impossible. Right? So, like I had a friend who was teaching one of my daughters to fish when she was three. So, we went out on a boat and

my friend was trying to teach her and she's like, "No, no." Like, it's like I put you put the bob in, I put the bob in, you catch a fish, I don't catch a fish. There's nothing I can do. There's a certain finesse. There's a certain perception. And right now, I have to do the c I'm modeling catching your mind. And y'all are caught. You feel caught. And so what's really interesting is half the people will have stopped paying attention and on purpose. There are some people who will have clicked off to something else because

the mind is like, "Oh this guy's going to figure it out. Can't have that. Let's get bored." That's the other thing. Mind uses this beautiful trick called boredom. biggest scam, dude. It's like you want to do something, mind's like, "Ah, I'm bored." And then you're like, "Oh shit." Well, if I'm bored, I better stop doing it because I can't handle boredom. Oh my god. Boredom. Death. Ah, death. Ah, boredom. Oh my god. If it's bor I can't do that, Dr. K. It's boring. So, oh yeah, that's right. It's not. No, bro. Not so. No, man.

It's dopamine, man. My dopamine systems are all messed up. So therefore, I can't do it. You don't understand, man. It's not just boredom. It's dopamine, bro. My dopamine. I heard it on a neuroscience podcast, bro. Dopamine. I can't control it. Oh wow. You can't control it because of dopamine. Oh my bad. Better watch another episode of the podcast. Better order this person's supplement. only $9.99 per day and it'll fix your problems. Oh, great man. Yeah, awesome. So, notice the activity of the mind. Right? So, step number one, look out for not enough. Here's the key

thing to understand. When your mind tells you not enough, when your mind quantifies you that's exactly what you should be doing to engage in futile action, foolish action, what the mind tells you is futile. Something beautiful will happen. It's not what the mind wants to do. And if you do it anyway, eventually the mind will stop resisting. It'll realize that you're the one who's in charge. And then you tell your mind to jump. And like a dog that is trained, it will jump. When you tell your mind to heal, it will heal. It will come.

It will sit. The more effortful and futile the action is, the more your mind will obey you. Now, here's what's really cool. Recently, Gen Z his Gen Z and and Gen Alpha have been sort of discovering sensory deprivation all on their own. They call it raw dogging IRL. Raw dogging without an iPad, without headphones, just raw dogging. I'm gonna sit there and I'm not going to do anything. So, here's the cool thing. What is the most useless action you can take that requires the most effort and yields you absolutely nothing? What do y'all think? What

is an action that is really hard to do but gets you nothing? You guys know what do we call this thing? Yeah. Effortful stuff is kind of like picking stuff up and putting it down over and over and over again. Very good. Very good. Not doing stuffs. Not scrolling. Scrolling is not effortful. It is effortless. meditation. Very good. See, with all of these mindfulness apps and all this mindfulness everywhere, people call it raw dogging IRL. And what they're doing is just not stimulating themselves for like 15 minutes. I'm raw dogging IRL for 1 hour. This

is what meditation is. Meditation is simple. And see, this is where like this is why mindfulness is such a scam because at some point mindfulness became about stuff, right? It's like, oh, if you do mindfulness, it'll lower your stress levels. If you do mindfulness, it'll do this. It'll do this. It'll do this. And yeah, it'll actually do all of those things. But here's what people forget. You know who like basically popularized mindfulness in the modern day? this guy named Goautam Buddha and like we sort of forgot or not forgot we actually intentionally so this is

what's really fascinating to me everyone's like oh yeah like I do mindfulness as the from the tradition of Buddhism I'm not like a Buddhist but I'm like I'm a secular Buddhist I do the practices what was the Buddha actually teaching he was not teaching stress reduction he was not teaching conquering your anxiety. He was not teaching improving your gut health. That was not the point. You know what's really insane? No one actually teaches the teachings of the Buddha anymore. Have you all noticed that? You have a bunch of ripachets which are great. Nothing against them.

You have all these monks, all these modern teachers, which are fantastic teachers, teachers like myself who have our own version of things. I'm not a fantastic teacher, teacher, as evidenced by this lecture. But we don't actually teach what the Buddha taught. You know why? Because what the Buddha taught would never exist in chat pt would never exist in AI because what the Buddha taught people would rebel against what the Buddha taught everyone's like oh my god I want to conquer anxiety Buddha was like bro that's a terrible idea what you need to be conquering is

joy what you need to be conquering is curiosity what you need to be conquering is love don't get rid of the bad stuff get rid of it all. Don't be happy. Try really hard. Get rid of happiness. Get rid of joy. Get rid of curiosity. Get rid of it all. He says, "Even happiness will bring you suffering." Because the moment that you have happiness, you will crave more happiness. In that craving is suffering. No way to win. Get rid of all the positivity. Right? Imagine if I showed up on Oprah and I was like, "Hi,

my name is Dr. Okay. And today I'm going to teach you how to get rid of your joy, your curiosity, your passion for life, your love. I'm going to teach you how to get rid of all that's what actually what the Buddha taught. And what the Buddha wasn't trying to solve stress. He was trying to help people become enlightened. Attain moa. That's what he was actually teaching. Most people don't even know what that is. The concept of it. It's like I've never seen a meditation app that's like yeah 15 minutes a day visualizations about nature

and enlightenment at the end. So we've lost some really fundamental stuff and the most important thing here. So step number one is watch out for the quantification of mind. Step number two is really simple. Watch the mind. Don't let it get you don't need to. People are saying should I not interact with it? Absolutely don't interact with it. Just watch it. watch it spin and squirm and do absolutely nothing. And when it is ready to, you're going to do two things. You're e either going to do the thing that you need to be doing or

you're going to do nothing. See, procrastination is delaying what you need to do in favor of something else. And people think it's I'm doing nothing. You're not doing nothing. You're actually doing a lot of something. You're spending a lot of time playing video games, spending a lot of time scrolling. Those are things. Those are actions that you're taking. You're not just sitting on your ass doing absolutely nothing. Sit on your ass or do the thing. It's that simple. Not easy. Simple. Awareness. Number one. Watch out for the quantification of the mind. Number two. Now, there's

one last thing that we have to address. If you guys are paying attention to this and you're listening to this, you're going to get confused. because the system that I'm describing is not complete. So, some people have been asking, I imagine I I didn't actually see this, but I think you guys should be asking this, but then hold on a second. Who is it that does the wanting, right? So, I should be studying, but my mind wants to play video games. So, which of these things comes from where? Because if I should be doing this,

is that my mind? Isn't that part of my mind? Isn't that all for my benefit anyway? Is that social conditioning? Is that living up to expectations? Where does this stuff come from? So, this is why it's like hard to explain. But it all comes from the mind. And all of it is bad. Even the stuff that you you should be doing that you're procrastinating against is a scam of the mind. But then how do I know which part to listen to? Should I listen to this or should I not listen to this? And here's the

cool thing. The mind wants both. But the thing that judges what the mind wants knows what's good and knows what's bad. The judging capacity, the mind wants both things. But there is something else that is judging the mind that is outside of the mind. That is really what you are. You are the capacity for awareness and judgment, not the activity of the mind itself. And then something strange may happen. But hold on a second. If all of the wants and the shoulds are in the mind, what does the thing outside of you want? The part

that observes as y'all are listening to me, you have may have noticed the activity of your mind. And if you notice the activity of your mind, the part that does the noticing, what does it want? I'm actually asking y'all, what does the part that observes the mind, what does it want? And you may say, but that part wants the mind to be under my control. No, it doesn't. The mind wants your mind to be under control, right? Because let's understand this. If the mind is under control, then the mind gets what it wants. I want

all these things. I want love. I want marriage. I want kids. I don't want kids. I want to be a double income, no kids household. I want to have a $100,000. I want to have a million dollars. And if I could just study for my test instead of spending time on the internet, I would have all of these things that I No, no. The mind is what wants it. The mind is what wants to study. It also wants this. And this is why we can never, this will never work if we listen to the mind.

Because if we're going to listen to the mind, then we are going to listen to the mind. And on one day the mind wants to study and on the other day the mind doesn't want to study. And we have gotten into the habit of listening to the mind. We've been not been training the mind. The mind tells us what it wants. That's what we do. So it never works. So what about that part outside of you? What does that want? And the answer is very good. That part wants nothing. the capacity, the capability of want

does not exist in that other thing. And now a lot of people think that this is a problem because if I don't want things, how am I ever going to motivate myself? Here's the cool thing. When you are free from all of your wants, your life will be exactly what you want it to be. See, when you don't want anything, how can I say this? I'm going to use an analogy. I have two cups here. If someone tells me, "Hey, you need to use this cup, not this cup." That's not a problem for me because

I don't actually want either one. I can do whatever I'm supposed to do. It becomes easy. Sure, I can use that cup. Ain't no thing. Sure. It's funny. People recently have been worried about me, which I appreciate and I wanted to say thank you for. I want to show you all this. Um, so someone So, someone was like, "Anyone else feel like Dr. K is absurdly overworked?" And it's nice. Like, this is really nice and compassionate, right? Cuz I'm overworked apparently. And I like I I I I appreciate it. Everyone's like, "Oh my god, Dr.

K is overworked." Overworked isn't a problem if you don't want anything. Does that kind of make sense? It's like when you look at it, you say, "Oh, this guy's overworked." Like, I'm not overworked. Doesn't feel like overworked because I don't want anything. It makes no difference to me. I mean, it's not that I don't want anything. It's that wanting to work and wanting to play video games is not the same. But it's like the gap between those two things is pretty small. And so I want you all to think about what really restricts you. What

restricts you? It's not motivation. It's restriction. That's what really a want is. We call it a motivation. But if we are motivated in this direction, we are restricted from everything else. Ego. Dr. K, be careful. Oh my goodness. Look at this enlightened human being who says he doesn't want anything. Oh my god. Ego. Dr. K. Y'all caught me secretly. I do want something. And I guess I am tortured. Influencer cries about how his life is so hard because he works so hard. Oh my god. This Justin influencer complains about his life. Come on, guys. I'm

not saying I'm special. The whole point of this is that it's not special. It's simple. We just don't understand it. Like, the reason I do this is because I'm pretty sure I'm not special. The reason I can say this stuff is because this is what my we're no different. This is how procrastination works. And here's the cool thing, right? So once you stop overworked implies that work has a certain tax and we talk about this like I talk about this where the main thing that I try to do is live in such a way where

when I wake up in the morning I'm as refreshed as I started the previous day. I just don't want to get into debt. Does that kind of make sense? Like the real problem that people have, the reason that people get overworked is because they work and they're not recovered the next day. And this is what's really weird if you really think about it. Are you overworked by Tuesday or are you overworked by Wednesday? Are you overworked by Thursday? The only way you can be overworked is if you're building up some kind of debt and then

you need the weekend to recover. So the right way is to work in such a way where you recover the next day. It's about recovery, not about the quantity of work. And actually, it's the relationship between the two. So, if you're overworked and you can't recover, then you're going to be overworked. So, it's not like I'm And one of the key things about that is how much you want, right? So, the more neutral you are, the more neutral you are, the easier your life will be. You will discover that motivation is a terrible way to

work. Worst thing you can do because fundamentally you are not in control. Everyone wants to cultivate motivation because once you start being motivated then you can be a lazy Think I know it sounds crazy. It's not. Maybe it is. Who the knows? Maybe I'm an idiot. But why does everybody want to be motivated? So that they don't have to do it. It's not hard to do. I want to wake up with that passion and that drive and that I can just surrender the controls of this organism and it's going to just do whatever it feels

like doing. I just wanted to do the right thing, right? I want to cultivate the right desires. I want to be sexy. I want to be ripped. I want to be millionaire. I want to do this. I want to do this. I want to cultivate all of these motivations so that I can sit back and be a lazy in the back and it doesn't have to be hard for me. I want to program myself so that I can be on autopilot. Try wanting nothing. Try operating from the place outside of mind and let me know

how it goes. Yeah. See, it's about mental effort. Very good. We don't want to exert effort. And when I stop exerting effort, what happens to the body? What happens to the mind? Right? When I when I develop an anti-gravity floating device so that I no longer have to carry my weight, what will happen to my body as I use more and more AI to solve problems for me? What happens to my critical thinking? Gets worse. And something really cool happens. The more effort we engage in, the easier things get. If you want to have an

effortless life, you should exert a lot of effort. This is not a paradox. Sounds like a paradox. It's just not. It's reality, right? The more I work out my muscles, the stronger it the easier it gets to use my muscles. This is what's really cool about being human. We level up. Why don't humans like effort? It's a great question. One second. Why don't humans like effort? So, this is a little bit even stranger than what we talked about. So I have an answer for this, but the answer is not defensible. So if you look at

some of these like weirdo spiritual people, they talk about something called spiritual evolution. And our current society hates this kind of stuff, right? It's all about neuroscience. It's all about randomized control trials. It's not about meditation and enlightenment in moka. It's about reducing our stress level, balancing our alosatic load, increasing neuroplasticity, boosting dopamine production, boosting serotonin production. We don't like this idea of spiritual evolution because we don't know what it is. It's not a real thing. We can't measure it. We can't detect it. Right? So, if we can't detect it, that means it doesn't exist.

This is how science functions, right? So, what's kind of weird about this is that thoughts kind of fall into this category as well because you can't detect a you can't scientifically detect a thought. It's impossible. Can't measure a thought. Can't see a thought. As far as we know, and I want you to think about this for a second. Have you ever seen e you've seen evidence maybe of thoughts sort of you can extrapolate thoughts? We can look at blood flow in the brain. We can look at electrical activity in the brain. But that's like I

don't know if this makes sense. An EEG is not thoughts. An EEG is electricity traveling through meat. An fMRI is blood traveling in and out of meat. That's what it is. We have no evidence of the existence of thoughts. So if we look at why people like effortlessness, it's because of physical evolution. So if we look at physical evolution, there were two organisms. One that was efficient, one that did things in an effortful way and one things that did it did things in an effortless way. And the more calories it could conserve, right? The less

effort it had to expend, the more the greater the likelihood of survival. So we've been for the majority of life on Earth, we have been capped by the efficiency of caloric intake. So plants were like, "Hey, I have a cool efficient way to get energy. I'mma use this thing called the sun." And then there were little things like amiebas. And then plants came along and plants were like, I'mma find an easier way to get energy. I'm gonna let them make all the energy and I'm just gonna eat the plant. Done. Easy. Cool. Then we had

an herbivore. And then one animal was like, I have a cool idea. Why don't I eat the thing that digests all the chlorophyll and turns it directly into tissue? The amount of energy that's required to take plant matter and turn it into muscle tissue. Why don't I just eat the muscle? That's the best way, right? So it's like it's a complete like this is the cool thing. Eating an animal is a complete protein. It's not an incomplete protein. It's a complete protein. Super cool. So if we look at evolution, it's all about reducing effort. We

want to get the most yield with the smallest input. That's the way that our bodies have been programmed, right? That's why we do things like hold on to calories. Y'all ever thought about why we hold on to calories? Why we get fat? Why our body is is like, "Hey, we have a Twinkie. Let's hang on. Let's hang on to as much of it as we can. We love this stuff. This is going to be great. We're going to have so much cholesterol. We have nowhere else to put it. We're going to slap it in our

arteries." So, that's why we like things that are effortless. We all gravitate towards things that are effortless, right? Animals If you give the animal an opportunity to be lazy, it will be lazy. So this is where that is pretty defensible. This is where we depart the defensibility. So human beings and maybe this is the arrogance of being human. Maybe this is not scientifically correct. I happen to think this holds a certain amount of weight and you have to decide this for yourself. Human beings are a little bit different. Maybe dolphins have this too. We have

the capacity for metacognition. And our capacity for metacognition is robust. So human beings are a little bit different in that we have and you can argue that this is a delusion which is a fair argument. We have the capacity to go against our instincts. And this is where the spiritual evolution begins. So you can make an argument that everything that I'm going to say is actually selected for by evolution is just kind of a meta level selection where our brain part of our sele uh part of the natural selection process which I think is c

definitely true metacognition is somehow se actually I don't know if metacognition is selected for by natural selection anyway I'm I'm not too sure about that but somewhere along the way we had the the capacity for metacognition we had certain amount of consciousness. Now, some people will say that consciousness is not a real thing, is created by the brain, etc. We can get into that if you all want to get into it, but but the original question is why do we like effortlessness? And that's because that's what we've been physically evolved to do. So, if we

look at that, so that that's sort of what physical evolution has led us to do. Then there's this concept of spiritual evolution. And spiritual evolution is what's kind of weird is like it's running against physical evolution. It's running against things being effortless. It's leaning into stuff like effort. It is recognizing that spiritual evolution is at the level of the individual. Evolution is at the level of well also the natural selection is at the level of the individual. But we think about evolution over you know generations. Spiritual evolution happens within you. And the interesting thing about

spiritual evolution is it's in the opposite direction. It's where effort becomes the most important thing. Now, I'm not saying that this stuff is right or wrong that you have to decide for yourself. I'm simply passing along my understanding of this stuff. I happen to put some faith, I guess you could say. Not faith isn't the right word. Basically the main thing that shifted for me is once I realized that our subjective experience exists on the subjective realm and that the subjective realm and the material realm don't ever have to touch and then you have to

decide for yourself if the material realm can never touch the subjective realm does the subjective realm exist or not and I think from a material standpoint it doesn't exist but it exists in my subjectivity and then I did something really interesting I started to develop technology in that realm. And I don't say that out of out of arrogance. I started to utilize technology is a better way to put it. I learned certain meditative techniques. And what are these meditative techniques? They're ways of exploring your consciousness. And that's not like a oh my god exploring your

consciousness. And that means literally if you stop and you close your eyes, you will notice that you have a subjective experience, but we don't have a telescope or a microscope for our subjective experience. Which is why these things about procrastination are so hard to teach. easy to easy once you get it once you understand that your mind is outside of you we're just not given the tools so I went to India and someone gave me a telescope someone gave me a microscope and in the same way in the material world I can use a telescope

or a microscope to get a better understanding of the world around me you can use certain meditative techniques to explore the dimension of subjective experience now is what you find they're real. It can't be transmitted. I have no evidence of scientific detection of it. Is it real? It is real subjectively. That's all I feel confident in saying. Here's the other thing. It's cool. Exploring consciousness is cool for me. It's kind of like very exciting because if you look at the world, right? So, we had these explorers like Mellin who were like, there's stuff out there

and we don't know what's out there. So, I'm going to get on a boat and I'm going to go see what's out there. And we developed this telescope and it's like, oh, I can see the sun and I can see the moon. I can see these stars, but what is beyond that? Someone's like, I know. We're going to make the Hubble space telescope see really far away. We're going to develop certain tools that give us the ability to understand what is around us in a way that our basic perception cannot. Now, if you take someone

who has no idea what a microscope, this is one of my favorite stories that I learned was getting my masters in public health. So it was a a professor of mine was building wells in subsaharan Africa and these people would use they would build wells in the traditional way using certain kinds of clay and and mud and things like that. And so what would happen is they would have periodic outbreaks of things like various uh GI related uh illnesses sometimes things like hepatitis and chalera and things like that. I forget exactly what. And so he's

like, "Hey, the reason you guys are getting sick is because your latrine is over here. Your well is over here. And when you use your latrine over there, the well is made of clay, the clay is porous, the groundwater travels this way, carries the illness, right? So when one person in your tribe gets sick, they'll have diarrhea over there, it'll travel this way, it'll go through the well, and the bacteria are still in there. And then you guys drink from the well and you get sick. This is like what y'all need to do. Dig deeper

and use cement. And they're like, "But cement is so much more work than the clay." He's like, "What do you mean like we're getting sick? The water tastes fine over here. There's like it's not diarrhea, it's water. How are these these two things connected?" He's like, "Bro, what y'all don't understand are these tiny little microorganisms that you can't see that are in the water. You got to trust me, bro. They're there. And those are the things that are making you sick." And they're like, "I don't know, man. Like, you're saying these are the tiny little

things that I can't I don't see them." And you're like, "Yeah, you can't see them. You need a very special device." And they're like, "Show me the device." Like, "I don't have the device." He's like, "You trust me, bro. They're really in there." And they're like, "No, man. Like the reason that we get sick is not because there's some secret little micro whatever this invisible thing in the water that's making us sick. It's because of the bad humors and because of the the the deities and the ancestors. Like that's what making us sick. That's why

like when when the one person when the dity gets mad at this person, there's a curse on the village and then we do the the ritual. The ritual takes five or six days and then we we're totally fine. I don't I don't see these microorganisms. Literally, this was his problem. And so then he ended up convincing them not because he brought a microscope in, right? Because even if you bring a microscope Yeah. You see there's little things in there. There's little squiggly things. That's why you're getting sick. The way he convinces them is he's like,

"Hey, when you guys make clay wells, you have to remake them because clay is not sturdy. If you sure it takes five times as much work to make a cement well, but once you make a cement well, it's forever." And they were like, "Okay, fine. we'll use cement and we'll dig deeper. That's how we ended up doing it, which is an interesting case in public health. So the problem though is that you can show someone a microscope, you can show someone little bacteria eventually like if they go through an education, we have in the physical

world, the whole point of the physical world is that we can be like reliable, right? So if I look in a microscope and you look in a microscope, if I look in a telescope and you look in a telescope, we're going to see the same thing. The problem is in the subjective world there's no way to transmit it. So spiritual evolution is a personal quest to explore delusion and there's no one that can ever convince you that it's worth it. There's no way to transmit it. I've been in love. Have you been in love? There's

no way that we can transmit it. But two people who've been in love can talk about it. And when they talk about it, everyone who hasn't been in love has no idea what they're talking about. And sure, you can understand love from the perspective of oxytocin and serotonin and dopamine. We can understand the mechanisms of love, but the subjective experience of it is different. So what we have, the reason we're we love effortlessness is because we physically evolved in that way. And the really interesting thing is that there's a lot of us who feel like

that's not good. And that's really weird, right? Like I want y'all to think about that. Where is that coming from? It's coming from sort of a subjective place, which you can clearly make the argument that even that subject subjective place is essentially a delusion that evolution has given us, which is fair enough. I think it's a good argument to make. And so traveling in the subjective realm is where effort becomes really important. That's where the more effort you put in, the better you're going to do. And then we have this practice called meditation, which is

a ton of effort for no clear gain. And that is the way in which we spiritually evolve. Because when we do these kinds of things, when you're meditating, what you're basically doing is developing your own telescope, developing your own. Actually, you're not developing a telescope or microscope, but you're getting good at using one. You're becoming proficient in using one. And the telescope and microscope, I think, are the particular meditative practices in this analogy. So, if you do agnakra practices, third eye practices, that's the equivalent of a telescope, right? Microscope is I don't know what. Those

are perceptual. So y'all have to decide. Okay. [laughter] Do you ever feel social anxiety has killed your personality? At my core, I'm witty and goofy, and it's my favorite thing about myself. My social anxiety has gotten so severe I feel like I've lost all my personality. At work, I can hardly think of anything to say and will often be quiet for hours while all my colleagues chat with each other. When I do talk, my voice gets shaky and no one listens to me. I can never think of a single joke during the conversation when I

was once so witty. And I feel like my colleagues think I'm the most monotone, boring person on earth, and it makes me so sad. Only my mom and sister know my fun funny and funny side. Can anyone relate? So in the early days of my psychiatric training, we used something called the five axis system to diagnose people. Axis one was disorders that happened to you. Axis 2 is personality disorders. The way you are is messed up. So I want y'all to understand the difference between these two things. So depending on how I was raised, I

can develop a personality. Right? So this is the way I am. is not something that happens to me. So if I have a narcissistic personality disorder, I have an insecurity that is baked in. Isn't that something that happens to me? So I have an insecurity. I think I'm pathetic. I think I'm a loser. And so I have this narcissistic defense where if anyone points out that I'm a loser, I'm going to tell them you're wrong. And I'm going to get them to stop. I want to win awards. I want everyone to show me how great

I am because I don't feel good on the inside. And early on in my psychiatric training, they explained to me that this is different from depression. Depression is when you have a normal personality structure. And when someone has major depressive disorder, there is a change. So this is the normal way that they are, but then they change. And then they have a sense of negative self attitude. That's the technical term for it. They feel like they're pathetic. They're losers. They just have a negative attitude towards the self. It can take all kinds of different shapes

and sizes. The key thing is they think negatively about themsel. And the whole point of major depressive disorder is that it fluctuates. Here's your real personality. And the depression is layered on top. And when it's active, you become a different person. You don't become a different person. Your mind alters its functioning. You're still the same person. And as we've learned more and more about psychiatry, we've started to realize that these distinctions are somewhat artificial, there's avoidant personality disorder, there's social anxiety disorder. The overlap between them is pretty big. And so in the most recent version

of diagnostics, we've gotten rid of this axial system. We've said it's all basically one bucket. So, here's the question that I have for you. You exist and there's a funny and witty version of you and then you go to work and there's a quiet, monotone and terrified version of you. Why do you assume that the witty version of you is the real you and the socially anxious version of you is not the real you? Why isn't it that the socially anxious version is the real you and the overly relaxed version of you is the fake

you? Where do we get this idea that there is a real us and a notreal us? This is the real me. Oh, but I just stopped being the real me over here. So, this is the really nutty thing. So there's a lot of science that sort of supports this, right? This idea that this is the real me and this is not the real me. And if we look at things like trauma responses, if we look at things like you know serotonin imbalances or whatever, so we can look at like social anxiety and what happens in

social anxiety and I I want to be technical here. Okay? So I enter a particular environment. There are certain stimuli from that environment. I go to work, there are co-workers, I see co-workers. When there is a particular stimulus, it triggers a reaction. So that reaction is I start to think about what I'm saying. I overanalyze what I'm saying. It triggers certain changes in my brain. Not changes in my brain, activations in my brain where I start to see ambiguous stimuli. So, I walk past someone and they don't say hi. So, this is an ambiguous stimulus.

Maybe they dislike me. Maybe they like me. Maybe they're occupied. Maybe they're thinking about what they need to get from the grocery store on the way home. Maybe they have a a song stuck in their head that they're trying to get stuck out get out of their head. But we take an ambiguous stimuli and our brain interprets it interprets it in a negative way. And then we have certain behavioral manifestations, not just what's on the inside, but then that manifests with monotone. I'm not going to talk. And we say this is not the real me.

This is the activation of our sympathetic nervous system. Fight, flight, freeze. This is the survival mechanism of our brain and our body. When you're being chased by a tiger, are you the real you? Are you witty? Are you funny? When you are fighting for your life, when you get mugged and someone's attacking you with a knife, are you the real you? Or is that a fake you? Now, pathology illness is in psychiatry is when we say, "Okay, we don't like this part of us." That's fair enough. If you don't like it, it's interfering with your

goals. That's totally fine. Like, I understand that that needs to be fixed. It needs to be changed. But that doesn't mean it isn't you. Social anxiety is your personality. This is one of the hardest things to understand because we don't like to think this way, but this is actually it's a revolutionary way. If you're trying to conquer your social anxiety, and this is where we look at some of these things like radical acceptance, literally evidence-based stuff, start by recognizing that your personality is social anxiety. This is you. This is the first most important step that

you can take. And what I mean by this is the reason I laid it out that way is because this is like a technical thing about personality. This is what personality is. So let's define what personality is. We're not saying we're not going to change it. We're not saying you can't change it because you can change your personality, which is absurd. I don't know. This is what I mean. It's like there's the real me and then there's the false me. And I want to be the real me and I don't want to be the false

me. How about instead we say this is the real you and we can shape it in this way. This concept of the real me is the one of the most damaging concepts because it implies I want y'all to think about this. It implies that the perfect product is there. I just need to get to it. I need to get rid of all this stuff. But there's the perfect me. The perfect me exists. I'm so witty. I'm so funny. That's the perfect me. I want to get rid of this and I just want to be that

guy. That's the real me. This is the false me. And if you look at studies on radical acceptance and dialectical behavioral therapy, you begin to realize that the moment that you start to believe there is a fantastical person, the perfect version of yourself, you open yourself up to all kinds of problems like addictions. Oh my god, dude. I'm not addicted to marijuana. I just get to be me when I get high. I get to live life the way that everybody else gets to live life. I get to be my authentic self when I'm high as

a kite. It's the real me that comes out, not the part that's socially anxious. That's not the real me. I get disinhibited. The true, the deeper real me gets to come out. and all this noise on the top isn't the right me. I love that idea, man. That sounds so beautiful. Turns out it's wrong. Let's understand what personality is. I'm not saying we're not going to change. I'm not saying you can't be witty and funny. What I'm saying is there's a different way to get there. Remove the delusion that there's a real you and that

there's a false you. Instead, accept that all of this is you and all of this can be worked on. be clear there, okay? Just because I'm arguing against the model does not mean that I don't dis that I don't agree with the goal agree with the goal. We just have to understand how it actually works in order to help you get there. Personality is three things. The way you perceive the world around you, the way you internally react, and the way that you interact with the world. That's literally what personality is. perceptions, reactions, interactions. So

if I take two people with different personalities, the whole point of personality is in the exact same situation. These two people will behave in different ways. I take two human beings who both get a B on a test. The reality of their situation is the same. They both have a B. The way they perceive that B is different. The way that they react to that B is different. The way that they change their behavior is different. One person says, "I got a B. Thank God." Another says, "I got a B. Oh shit." The reality is

the same. the way we perceive the world around us. The way that that perception evokes reactions, relief, and then the behavior. I'm going to study exactly as much as I did for this test. Oh my god, I didn't study nearly enough. The reality is the same. The human being, the personality determines the way that we react to our circumstances. So, let's start with the understanding of the whole reason. And this is like literally what we do in treatment, right? We take people with social anxiety and we help them rewire. So when you are at home

and you your mom or sister walks by you and doesn't say hi to you, how do you perceive that information? When you're at work and someone walks by you and doesn't say hi to you, how do you perceive that information? What is your internal reaction when your mom or your sister expresses dissatisfaction with your work product? Hey, this pie is a little bit burnt. How do you react? Oh, my bad. I'll do better next time. Let me try to focus on that. Because your reaction is based on this idea that they love you and you

know that they love you. But when you receive feedback, constructive feedback about your work product at work, what is your reaction? Oh my god, this person thinks I'm terrible. So here's the key thing to understand and there are personality disorders and social anxiety. I think there's some good evidence to suggest that these two things are are separate, right? That there is a social anxiety disorder. There's an avoidant personality disorder. Those two things are not the same. They have different diagnostic criteria. What I'm talking about is not the diagnosis and treatment of a psychiatric illness. What

I'm talking about is this perception that there's the real you and there's the flawed you and you trying to be the real you all the time. What you need to realize is they're all you. What you need to realize is that even in your social situation, your brain has been programmed and activates a different script. It's not that one is you and one is not you. It is the scripts that your brain is activating. They're all you. Social anxiety is your personality. Is that a problem? Absolutely. But here's the key thing. Everyone thinks personality is

static. And this is important to understand. If we think we have a perfect version and we go hunting for it all the time, that is different from understanding that we are wired a particular way and we need to change our wiring. Right? One is something that requires wiring and effort. The other is something that requires hunting. How do I bring this finished product out of me? And this is what I've seen as both a coach and a clinician. the wiring way seems to work better. Now, there's avenues to use the hunting way, which we can

talk about if you guys want, but generally speaking, I think accept that social anxiety is the way you are. This is part of your personality. Your personality, the way that you respond to situations, is by perceiving ambiguous stimuli is negative, is by reacting in a particular way, is by behaving in a particular way, being obsequious. >> Oh, no. Lily, I'm great. You're so awesome. You did such a good job. Can I do anything else? Can I get you this? Is this okay? Is this okay? Do you love me yet? Do you like me yet? Do

you accept me yet? Can I be kinder and kinder and you can accept me more and more? And when we engage in these interactions, it does not help us. It actually reinforces things because they say, "Yeah, you are great, but I did all of these 10 things. You asked for ranch dressing. Here's thousand island dressing and French dressing. And I know you like your salads this way, so I did this for you and I did this for you and I did this for you. will you love me and accept me now? And they'll say, "Yeah,

this is great. Thank you so much. You're doing a great job." And we think this helps us. It doesn't help us because what did we have to do in order to get that? Now, the actual answer is absolutely nothing. But when we overperform, in order to get someone to like us and we get that positive feedback, what are we reinforcing? overperformance is the only way that I can get acceptance. When you have to overperform to get acceptance, you will continue to be socially anxious because look, they don't accept me. They accept this pretend version of

me. This this isn't the real me. This is me doing a lot of extra stuff and the real me would have gotten rejected. So, I have to do all this extra stuff, right? when you're engaging in behaviors that make you feel that when you're inducing someone's love, you will never get confidence. So, how do you feel relaxed? What's different about your mom and your sister is that you don't have to induce their love to receive it. And that's where the confidence comes from. So if you're someone who's struggling with social anxiety killing your personality, step

number one, understand it's not killing your personality. That there are parts of you that are activating which are activating certain scripts. There's a relaxation script and there's a stress script. They're both part of you. They're both critical for your survival. You can try to activate the relaxation script, but often times there is a reason why we don't do that automatically. So, first question you've got to ask yourself is what makes it hard for me to activate relaxation.exe. Second thing you can do is literally adjust each of those steps. This is so interesting. Very few people

train themselves to question their perception. We always talk about training our willpower, training discipline, training emotional regulation. We never talk about training perception. Most of medical school is not about treatment. It is about training your perception. What do you hear when you oscultate? What do you feel when you percuss? When your patient comes in and says, "Oh my god, you're the best psychiatrist on the planet. You're so amazing. I've had 16 psychiatrists before you, but you came along and you're Dr. K. And you're amazing. Oh my god, you're the best on the planet. You can

save me when no one else can. You're so great, Dr. K. And if I'm not careful and I haven't trained my perception, I'll be like, "Oh yeah, tell me I'm great. Oh my god, tell me about all. Oh my god, I'm going to be empathic and compassionate. Tell me about all these other psychiatrists that are so bad. Tell me about how they screwed you over. Oh my god, I'm going to be compassionate. I'm going to reflect. That's so unfair for you. You're so unfair. You're tragic. Oh my god, such trauma. And everyone in the medical

system has screwed you and I'm going to be different. You want me to be your hero? I'll be your hero. Instead, we train our perception. Oh this is idealization. This is splitting. This person could have borderline personality disorder. Today I'm getting the positive side. Soon I will be number 17 on the list. Train your perception. Recognize that your mind perceives certain things. Specifically with social anxiety, the money is on ambiguous stimuli. When someone doesn't speak with you, when they don't say hi, what's the differential diagnosis? What are the reasons they could not say hi? Have

you ever considered that they're socially anxious, too? And when they walk in the room, they see you observing them like a hawk, and they're like, "Oh my god, this person is pissed off. They're not smiling at me. I better try to be small cuz I don't want to piss them off more so they don't say anything to you." Two socially anxious people walk into a room and they walk out out each feeling like they're a piece of when they're terrified that the other person doesn't like them and all they want to do is tell the

other person how much they like them but they're afraid to. Number two, what is your internal reaction? Just because you react away doesn't mean that it is real. Take a deep breath. Go for a walk. really think through things. Number three, behave in a way that moves that that makes you live the life that you want to live. Don't behave in a way to try to make them feel a certain way. So, when someone comes in and you're afraid that they don't like you, what is the life that you want to live? Do you want

to say hi to people who walk into the room? Yes or no? Is that the kind of life that you want to live? Do you want to behave with them in the way that you behave with your mom or your sister? Then behave that way with them. But they may not like it. Absolutely. So then if you get data, right, we want a differential diagnosis for the ambiguous data that they interpret. But here's the cool thing. When people usually don't like you, I know we're sort of living in a world where people are everyone's ghosting

and they don't actually tell you that they don't like you. But here's a key key tip. If you're afraid that people don't give you feedback when you do something wrong, the number one reason for that is that they don't think you can accept feedback. Why didn't you tell me this is coming out of nowhere? I feel like I'm being blindsided. Yeah. The reason you're blindsided is because when I do tell you, you react like this and then you disincentivize me from telling you. People will give you feedback. And the funniest of the version of this

is like when people are really anxious, they'll ask for feedback. Hey bro, can I have feedback? Am I doing okay? Am I doing okay? Yeah, you're doing fine. You know why they tell you you're doing fine and then you end up getting a B or you don't get honors in the rotation? Because every time they tell you you're not doing fine, the anxiety takes over and then they have to deal with that for a while. So, they can't afford to give you negative feedback even though you're asking for it. The way you receive feedback determines

whether people will give you feedback. And so, the cool thing about social anxiety is if you're really bothering someone, they will let you know. If you're socially anxious, what happens is we make ourselves small and then we project their dislike of us to make ourselves smaller and then we try to disappear and then we end up where our real self doesn't show up. This is real self too. But that other self can show up. You need to behave in that way. What is the what is the way that pay attention to the way that you

perceive your mother, the way that you perceive your sister, pay attention to the way that you react when they do or say certain things towards you. How are those two things different? Take a piece of paper, line down the middle. When mom or sister does this, when people at work do this, right? And there's some modifications that you have to make. Some things are not appropriate. I feel like my real self when I'm with my wife. And when she says, "Hey, Alo, your hair looks great today." And I'm like, "Take me now. Let's go to

the bedroom. I'll show you other kinds of hair." you know, that's [laughter] not something you want to do at work, right? So, like a little bit of a difference there, but like I think there's [laughter] there's a long way there's a big gap between those two things, right? You don't have to like duplicate your at home self at work, but you also like there's something in the middle there that's pretty healthy. And then when HR calls you in for sexual harassment, you will receive that feedback with grace and a plum. All right. I hate who

I'm becoming. How do I rebuild self-discipline and self-respect? I'm 23 years old. I've never had a girlfriend. I still live with my parents. I'm currently studying at university. I normally work out six days a week. play trumpet in a band, have a small group of friends that I really care about. So, so far, normal. And yet, I don't feel like I'm living like a a real adult right now. I have a huge exam coming up in spring, and a paper that makes a big part of my final grade. I should be studying. Instead, I'm on

my phone, average of eight hours a day, YouTube, porn. On a good day, I get maybe an hour of actual work done. There's no structure to my days, no real work times. I just sit at my desk and let the day pass. When I try putting my phone away, I still end up wandering around the house, playing darts, making coffee for myself. And every so often, it hits me. People my age are working in relationships, living normal lives. Meanwhile, I feel stuck in the mindset of an 18-year-old on summer break. It leaves me feeling useless,

inferior, and honestly a bit depressed. I hate that I can't seem to break the cycle. I want to change, not only for myself, but also because there's this girl I really like. There it is, chat. And I don't want to waste this opportunity. Oh my god, but I know I'm not in a place for a relationship right now. How can I expect someone to love me when I don't even love myself? If you've been in this situation, how did you break out of it? How do I start living a normal life structured again and build

self-respect? Okay, so first thing we've got to understand, man, there are two things that I want to say that are the first thing that I want to say. So I don't know which one to do. So let's start with the second one and then we'll do the first one. First thing to understand is we have this idea of discipline and self-respect. And if we look at discipline, it's a noun. And self-respect is also a noun. I have selfrespect. I have discipline. I am disciplined. Right? It's a thing that you have. And what I've noticed is

that a lot of people who want discipline, want to have the thing, there's one thing that we don't understand. Discipline is not a noun. Self-respect is not a noun. These are both verbs. They're verbs. They're activities. And I want you all to think about this for a second. See, when we look at someone who's developing discipline, what they're actually doing is an action, right? So, discipline is even when I put my phone away, I'm wandering the house and playing darts and drinking coffee instead of doing my work. There is a process of disciplining which we

understand when it comes to things like animals, right? I'm disciplining my child. I discipline you. I discipline child. I discipline dog. It is a verb. What is discipline? Discipline is having an impulse and taking an action. It is you have impulse number one and impulse number two. Impulse that you should do. Thing you should do, thing that you want to do. What is the verb of discipline? Discipline is the action of moving from what you want to do to what you should do. Do you all get that? It's like an action. It is like literally

a movement. Discipline is a cognitive movement from one place to another place. It is disciplining. And when we say someone has the trait of discipline, right? Because we talk about discipline like a trait, like a personality trait, like it's something that you have. And this is the really scary thing. And this is why no one gets a discipline because everyone thinks it's something that you get. So, like, how do I get discipline? How do I have the discipline? And then I'm like, oh yeah, I'm so now that I'm disciplined, I can just be a lazy

And since I have discipline, since I have the tiara of discipline plus 10, I can be a lazy And then I can just do like the discipline will take over. And then I'll be disciplined and then I don't have to do anything. If I'm disciplined, then I can be lazy because the discipline will take over. It'll do everything automatically for me. Oh my god, I'm going to be so disciplined. It's going to be great. That's why we want discipline. But disciplining is the action that we take when we move from impulse to what we should

be doing. This is how we develop discipline. But don't for moment think that you will have ever developed discipline. That's the big scam. We think we will have it. We think it's binary. We think once we cross the finish line, it's done. It's like a number in your bank account. That's not what discipline is. So I I want you all to remember that the mind is not an object that has things. It is an activity. A thought is a fluctuation within the mind. An emotion is a fluctuation within the mind. The whole problem with motivation

is that it fluctuates. The mind is a state not an object. Right? So when I there's the billiard table and then the billiard table can be in a particular configuration. Mind is a configuration not an object. It's an arrangement. Certain thoughts, certain emotions. Disciplining is what we need to do. It is not what we need to get. And how do you do discipline? Well, that we sort of know, right? When you are sitting there and your mind is telling you, "Oh my god, I have a paper that makes up a big part of my grade.

I need to be doing it." And then the mind has an impulse. What is the verb? What is it that you do in response to the impulse? You give into it. You get up and you walk around. You move around. It is the way that you respond to your thoughts. That is the disciplining or the not disciplining. So on a given day, are you going to do the discipline or not? What does doing the discipline mean? That means sitting there and noticing that my mind wants to do this and my mind wants to do this.

Then I'm going to do the discipline. I'm disciplining. I'm going to take that thought and I'm going to say no and I'm going to do this. Now you will say, "But Dr. K, that is hard." Yes, it is. Just like any other verb, playing the violin is hard until you learn how to do it. The first time you play a violin, not going to be easy. And here's the problem. When we scroll for eight hours a day, what what are we actually doing? We are decaying our disciplining capability. We are becoming rusty. So this is

something that's really scary about the development of discipline. How easy it is to lose. So no, most of the time when we talk about skills acquisition, skills acquisition persists for a long period of time. Right? So, if I learn how to play the violin, even 10 years later, if I really learn it, it'll stick around for a while. Here's the scary thing. I want y'all to think about the time scale that disciplining happens. So, within one day, if I'm not disciplining myself, how many rounds of discipline am I giving up? Like a thousand, 2,000. I

want to do this, I give into this. I have this thought, I ignore it. I'm going to keep watching one more episode. I feel like eating Cheetos. I feel like eating popcorn. Let me order pizza. We can decay our discipline so quickly by not disciplining ourselves. You can work out for 6 months, you're doing great, you fall off the wagon once, and then you stop disciplining yourself. And why does that happen? Why is it? Have you guys noticed everyone's like, "Oh my god, I have trouble getting started." What we don't talk about enough is how

many human beings on the planet are good at doing something not just for a couple weeks but for a couple of months and then they lose it. I was working out for 6 months. It wasn't just like a weekend. I was being pretty consistent. I was going to therapy for a couple months there. I really was practicing and learning the violin. Then what happened? That's the right question. What happened? What was the verb? What happened is that for those 6 months you were disciplining yourself. The way the verb the cognitive action that you took in

response to an impulse changed and then you stopped taking those cognitive actions. And once you stop taking those cognitive actions, once you stop disciplining yourself, it's like, "Oh my god, I was gardening for six months and my garden was beautiful and then I stopped gardening and then what happened? The garden is now overrun with weeds." Why don't we say it like this? Why don't we explain it like this? Because this sounds effing exhausting. But what y'all need to understand about life, there's this idea, you know, I sometimes hate these ideas like fire. Like I'm not

against the concept, but there's something about it. So fire is financial independence and retire early. So most human beings on the planet want to be done. I want to be done. I want to be done. I want to be finished. I want to retire. I want everything to be done. And then I want freedom ahead of me. As long as you are locked into this idea of being done, it will be very hard to progress. Now, there's a lot of people who love this idea and it gives them the motivation and discipline to move towards

a financial goal. And I think like it's cool. Like, by all means, go for it. But I want you all to be careful about this idea of I want to be done with the garden. I want you to understand that you as a biological organism are in homeostasis or in equilibrium. That every day you need to eat. Every second, every few seconds you need to breathe. Every day you need to take a piss. There's no being done with food. There's no being done with breathing. You are a living, breathing biological organism that requires investment to

stay still. You are fighting against the force of entropy. This is what it means to be alive. A rock does not fight against the force of entropy the way that something with a cell membrane and a cell wall and mitochondria do. To be alive is to act constantly. This is your lot in life. You can stop acting when you're dead. You can stop acting if you are inanimate. Understand this is life. Now, we can get upset about it. We can whail about it. The good news is it's not nearly as bad as we think because

the human organism is adaptable. Life is adaptable. So it feels bad at the beginning. Oh my god, I hate brushing my teeth at night. Until you do it for a while, then it becomes a habit, then it's not a problem. Disciplining is something that you can get used to. But make no mistake that disciplining happens as an action in the mind. It's not something that you get. This also helps us with self-respect. Here's the other thing. People think self-respect is something that I have. Here's a cool thing. Self-respect is not something that you have. It

is something that you do. Literally. So, if I take the minds of two of my patients, one of whom has self-respect, one of whom does not have self-respect. What is the difference between these two people? Can I biopsy them? Can I x-ray them? What is the nature of self-respect? Self-respect is the way that you respond to yourself. It is an action, right? I respect others. Notice the word respect. It is a verb. I respect you. I respect the environment. I respect our planet. I respect this space. It is a verb. Here is what self-respect is.

It is the way that you respond to yourself. When you work really hard and your boss passes you over for promotion and says, "Yeah, I'm going to give it to this person instead." And you don't respect yourself. You will accept that. Your mind will say, "Okay, looks like you didn't deserve it. Fine." The way that you respond to yourself, the way that you stand up for yourself, I want you all to understand. Standing up for yourself starts in here. Sure, you stand up for yourself when you speak certain words, but be precise. Okay, this is

really important. Those words start with a thought. And this is the sequence. There is thought, there is response to thought, and then there is action. Self-respect is not about the initial thought. It is about the way that you respond to your thought. Your first thought when somebody else gets the promotion is, "Oh my god, this guy is doesn't work as hard as I do." And then this is where the self-respect comes in because the self-respect will say, "Yeah, you're right. You should say something." And if you don't have self-respect, you will take that initial thought

and then you will bury it. Not bury it. That's not right. You will work it down. I don't know how else to put this because this is some weird cognitive stuff, right? You'll have some thought of I deserve more and then this other thought will come up. It is an action. The way that you respond to your thought. No, you don't. If you deserved more, you would get more, You need to work harder. If you want more, you need to work harder. Stop being a loser. Stop being a whiny about it. Have some self-respect and

work harder. It's not self-respect. The opposite. Self- abuse. Have some self-respect. Wrong. The way that you are talking to yourself is not self-respect. It is not respecting you. So, this is the the thing that is like everyone's like, "Okay, I have self-respect or I don't have." No, it's the way that you respond to yourself. If you want to be someone who has self-respect, change the way that you respect yourself. What do do you treat yourself in a respectful way? Chances are you don't. Respect doesn't mean allowing of indulgence. See, we indulge those people that we

want to win over, not the people that we respect. We treat ourselves like we're pathetic. We treat ourselves. We indulge ourselves. We spoil ourselves. That's actually the right word. I was fumbling around for it. That's really what it is, right? So, like we we wonder like why do I wake up every day and I don't do my work? It's because you don't treat yourself with respect. You spoil yourself. Oh, you want to do this? Oh, does widow baby want another cupcake? Have another cupcake. Have two. I love you so much. So, I'm going to give

you whatever you want. You're you're daddy's widow baby. And if your daddy's witter baby, you you want to play dots. You don't want to do your work, don't do your work. Play dots and then spend time. Oh, now do your baby's feeling bad. How about you watch a little bit of porn and have a little bit of a tug? Go give your go tug it out, buddy. You can do better than that, buddy. You can do just I don't want you to hurt. I don't want you to suffer. be happy all the time. Play dots

and then jerk off and then have some coffee and then take a walk. Then watch a YouTube video about how to develop selfrespect. Is that what you need? Do you need another YouTube video about selfrespect? Yeah, you do that, baby. Oh my god, you're hurting so much. Oh my god, wife is so hard. Oh no. Watch more YouTube videos about self-respect cuz wife is so hard. So hard for you, my little princess. My little prince. Oh my god. That's not respect. It's indulgence. What's wrong with that? Nothing's wrong with that. If you're okay with where

it leads you, okay? Like, if you're happy with where it leads you, fine. And I'm not saying don't ever spoil yourself, right? Remember, selfrespecting and disciplining are verbs. Spoiling is also a verb. I'm not saying don't ever spoil. I'm saying be careful about the quantity of action that you take. And if you change the way that you relate to yourself, if you change the way that you act towards yourself, you will end up with what other people call discipline or self-respect. Last thing, this is the second thing. Remember I said I want to start with

two things. Here's the second thing. 50% of people under the age of 30 are living with their parents. Being an adult is happening later. Being an adult looks different. What real adulting is today is trying to figure out how to do and be what an adult was 50 years ago. That's honestly the problem of the modern day. What used to happen is you used to be born into this world and then it was like a water slide. Like you just start at the top, get popped out of the uterus, slide your way into adulthood. Doesn't

work anymore. Slide's busted. Pop out. Get stuck somewhere. No more water. Slide is busted. Real adulting is figuring out how to be what you think an adult should be. That's what adulting is now. And I know that sounds weird, but like think about it for a second, right? So what's the difference between a child and adult? A child doesn't try to be anything. You are adulting when you're trying to figure out how to be an adult. But being an adult is different now. Being an adult is now trying. It's trying to achieve something that has

become way harder to achieve. And the problem is that we look around and we see all of these other people who seem to be getting their stuff together, which is fine, but you're not them. So instead of trying to be them, focus on being you. You're 23. You're behind. Like I finished I finished school at 32. Right? I'm doing okay. Now, your mileage may vary. Some people will be like, "I still haven't finished school. I'm 40." Okay. Well, that's your life, right? It's still This is where once again, we get back to this idea of

like the what is the way you're going to treat yourself. Treat yourself. And it's okay. Everyone's behind now. Being behind is normal, which is like the new normal. Like being it's that's what's so terrifying about like I see y'all struggling. Like I'm lucky. I was I was born when the water slide still worked. So I make it down to the bottom and I look up. I'm like, "Oh water slide's broken." Right. But like I was of the generation thankfully and I'm like I'm right on the cusp cuz some millennials got screwed. I got lucky. I

was like the last like the me millennials are right on the cusp of the generation that like sort of got screwed but things were like functional enough and now I look up and it's hard for everybody and that's okay. I mean it's not okay but like you're not different and don't worry about I mean you should worry about it but like trying to figure out how to be an adult is really what adulting is today. So I know it's hard. I see how hard it is. I'm trying to help. Thankfully other people are trying to

help. The good news is that everybody has this problem. So this is the problem of the day. Um, okay. We're going to talk about one more thing. Any other ADHD women feel too deep for this shallow world? I'm internal ADHD type. Intense, observant, emotionally deep. Not the cha chaotic stereotype, but the overthinking, hyperaware version. Lately, I've realized the hardest part isn't ADHD itself. It's living in a world where so many people feel shallow, inconsistent, or emotionally unavailable. I crave depth and real connection, but most people seem to function only on the surface. Sometimes I feel

completely out of place. Does anyone else experience this? Do you feel like your ADHD makes you deeper than the world around you? Does anyone else feel too deep all the time? like you're cosplaying as a normal person in conversations. Okay. I'm 28, diagnosed with ADHD, inattentive type, keep realizing the hardest part isn't forgetting keys or starting 10 tasks at once. It's this constant feeling that my brain is running a deeper program than the room I'm in. And I have to pretend it's not. Okay. Okay. And I like um was a Oh, yeah. So, I like

this. Do you guys like XKCD? Look at all these people, glassy eyed automatons, going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and think I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep. Okay. So, one of the things that I think is really cool about everyone having ADHD now is that we're discovering all of these weird nuanced manifestations of ADHD. And feeling a certain amount of depth and disconnection is actually like one of these features. And I and I know that like there's a lot of stuff on social media about how, you know,

ADHD means this and if you have this basically normal human experience, it means you have ADHD. And the reason that I show the XKCD is because, you know, this is a comic that's like, oh my god, I'm deep and the rest of the sheep are shallow and since I have ADHD, like that must be that it is like narcissistic ADHD explains everything in my life. So the challenge thing as a clinician is like when someone comes to me and they're like, "Okay, I feel too deep for the people around me. Is that a feature of

my ADHD?" Or, "I think that's my ADHD." And then it's like literally my job like I need to figure this out. Is this narcissism and just thinking you're deeper than the rest of the world? Or is it ADHD? And this is really important because if I jump to the conclusion that oh my god this person is just like ADHD now causes this now causes this then I'm doing a huge disservice to them because they are deeper. They're having trouble forming connections and if it is a feature of their ADHD I need to help them navigate

that. Okay. So here's what I got. First thing, does ADHD make you deeper? And I think it's interesting because the people who, you know, complain about this more or concerned about it more are frequently women. So, what's going on there? It's not like men can't do it, but let's let's look at the science of ADHD and see if this is something. So let's look at a few neurodedevelopmental features of ADHD. One is we're seeing this as ADHD in women. So what are a couple of features about this? Number one, ADHD in women is hormonally dependent.

If you guys want, I'll show you all a paper about this later. One of the reasons that ADHD is underdiagnosed in women, in girls, couple of reasons. The first is that the number one reason why ADHD is diagnosed is hyperactivity. When someone is disruptive, they get diagnosed with ADHD. Women are more likely to have the inattentive type, not the hyperactive type, which means that they just don't pay attention. Second thing is that there are a lot of female stereotypes that we will attribute to people with ADHD and then we don't call it ADHD. She's spacey.

She's an airhead. She's a blonde. Oh my god, she's a blonde. She just spaces out all the time. She's not like a deep thinker and she's not like a STEM major. She's just like kind of like artsy and like looks out the window and like that's just how she is. She's an airhead. Oh my god. Turns out could have ADHD. So second reason, maybe that's three, I forget. Then what happens is we notice that there's a spike in diagnosis once people hit puberty. And so estrogen and progesterone will affect ADHD symptoms. And I say effect

because that's what they do. It's not like they necessarily make them worse. So one really interesting thing is I started realizing that when I have female patients with ADHD, I often times need to adjust the level of medication depending on where they are in their menstrual cycle. There's a ton of evidence behind this. Okay, you guys, let me ask actually. Do you all want to see the papers? Now I show papers at the end. What do you all want? Papers. Now, papers later now. Okay, give me a second. I find paper. [snorts] Um, I find

paper. Give me a second. Okay, let's look. Let's look together, chat. Uh, childhood. This is not what we want. Oh, this is a good one. Um, but this is not what we want. This is the one that talks about divorce rates and ADHD. Um, yeah. So, [snorts] five core themes. Unidentified childhood to adult diagnosis. Really common. I'm looking at uh I'm looking for one thing in particular. Oh yeah, brain metabolism found that the brains of people with ADHD lower. That's not what we're looking for. We don't care about brain metabolism, bro. Here we go. Express

differently. Right. So found that women with ADHD had higher rates of major depression, anxiety disorders, conduct disorder. Oh, interesting. More evidence of school failure, and cognitive impairment. Um, this is not what I'm looking for. This Yeah. Okay. So, college women with ADHD were were shown to have higher rates of inattention. Um, so they're more hyperactive. I'm looking for something about diagnosis that spikes in puberty. Okay, so more difficulties with inattention, right? This goes back to why we missed the diagnosis in girls. Here we go. Females often receive a diagnosis of ADHD significantly later than do

males. Um, and this is the paper Nancy Nusbau and there are hormonal factors which play an important role in the understanding of ADHD in females. So if we dig into this paper more, we will find let me see if we can get to neurosych. Nope, this is brain. Oh, here we go. This is it. Hormonal inferences uh gain an important factor. Here we go. influence on estrogen's co women's cognitive functioning is been an area of considerable debate in the last several years. Um yeah, hormonal and physical maturation differences during puberty may offer a better understanding

of the differences in ADHD prevalence rates in males and females. Okay. uh Frink, Rosie, Grace, and Quinn found a significant increase in the dopamine receptors in the stridum in response to estrogen stimulation, which increases during puberty in girls. Boys show an overproduction of dopamine receptors before and during puberty, which may contribute to hyperactivity symptoms. There's a 55% reduction in receptor density in adulthood by boys uh in boys by adulthood whereas dopamine girls demonstrate a later increase in dopamine receptors related to an increase in ex estrogen during puberty. This is the money this is the paper

I was looking for. Sorry y'all sometimes like I remember the statistics but I don't remember which paper it comes from. Okay, so this is fascinating. Incredibly fascinating. So, boys start out super high dopamine sensitivity. Ah, we love this stuff. And then as our frontal loes develop, we start to tone down a little bit, right? Like we're crazy kids and then we're like kind of moody teenagers and then we become mature men. No, man. Men don't play games. Men do manly things. But girls have an increase in dopamine sensitivity when they go through puberty and dopamine

is hugely implicated in ADHD. Okay. So this is governed by the D2 receptor sensitivity. Okay. But what about the sense of depth and the inability to connect because people are shallow. So there are two other mechanisms which are important here. One is that empathy is often impaired in ADHD. And now let's understand why. So what is empathy? Empathy is being able to feel what someone else feels. Okay. So if we look at how empathy works, one of the most important things for empathy is sensory input. This make sense? If I can't see or hear or

smell or feel anything from another human being, it's hard to have empathy. Empathy is critical for the sense of connection. So these people with AD ADHD are claiming they're like I don't feel connected to other people. I'm deeper and they're shallow. So there's a disconnect. Part of that disconnection is literally sensory information. So what I tend to find and if you guys have friends with ADHD, what you'll notice is like they're kind of operating on their in their own world. Their internal environment is very engaging. They get distracted easily. They start thinking about things. Now

my attention is over there. So it's hard to form empathic connections with people from as simple as reason is like we don't see what the other person we don't pick up their facial signals. We're not like really paying attention. Our our brain is not filtering out the correct information. It is overwhelming us with other information. It's it's focused on this. So there's absolutely like an inattention sensory element that impairs people's empathy. Once we have impaired empathy, it's hard to form connection. So I think this tracks with ADHD. Second, the third thing and this relates to

estrogen is emotional reactivity. So what does this mean? So, we know that there are subtypes of ADHD which involve difficulty with emotional reactivity. Let me see if I can find a paper about this. This is gonna be harder because I don't remember which uh um okay so I guess this is good enough right so if we look at this approximately 25% of patients in each population had comorbid ADHD and anxiety um right so the coorbidity between ADHD and anxiety deserves careful scrutiny its own right. Um, yeah, we're not going to get into this. Oh, synaptic

gating. This is a cool paper. So, this is basically talking about, you know, so ADHD is a neurodedevelopmental disorder, which means that it like alters the way that our brain is formed. It shapes our brain. And synaptic gating is this way of activation of neurons. And when we have problems with our synaptic gating, it results in anxiety because we're overactivating certain neurons. We're underactivating other neurons, right? The anti-anxiety neurons are underactive. The pro-anxiety neurons are overactive. So we see a lot of ADHD and anxiety. So here's the key thing to understand. When you are deep,

what does it mean when someone is deep? It means that their the volume of their emotional experience is greater. Right? So being a deep person is not the same as being a deep thinker. Often times the two can be connected because deep thinkers oftentimes have like this like existential depth. The reason I think deeply is because I feel deeply and I try to think deeply. I use thinking deeply to try to help me understand and navigate feeling deeply. And so are people with ADHD deeper? I think there's a strong argument to be made for yes.

And let's understand the components. Number one, in ADHD, our emotional circuitry activates more quickly. It activates more intensely and it lasts longer. Right? We just saw the coorbidity of ADHD and anxiety was 25%. That's crazy. We saw some stuff about synaptic gating and how the way that our neurons are wired will predispose us to more feeling. Core moorbidity rates for depression are also higher. Now, let's talk about the women component. A couple of things. Women have more internalizing symptoms. What does that mean? That means I spend time inside and then my access to the depth.

It's not just the quantity of emotion, right? There's how deep under the mountain, how far down under the mountain can we go? And then there is how much time do I spend above the ground and how much do I time do I spend below the ground. So as we have internalizing symptoms that are prone to things like depression and we have a greater emotional reactivity, we're spending time underground. We're spending time with that depth. Whereas people who are neurotypical may be spending time above ground even if they have an equal amount of depth. But chances

are they don't feel emotions as quickly and as intensely. Now, I think the total amount of emotion that a neurotypical person and a person with ADHD can feel is probably about the same. I haven't seen any data that suggests, except for one thing. We'll get to women in a second, that it's not like I I hurt less if I have ADHD uh if I if I'm neurotypical. I can hurt just as much as someone with ADHD. The difference is the frequency of my hurt is less. The average intensity of my hurt is less. The duration

of my hurt is less. But the capacity for my hurt I believe is the same. So I do think it's like an understandable experience for there to be a lack of connection. So even if someone else is capable of that depth, my ability to read that that depth is impaired. But it's also very reasonable to consider that maybe the average neurotypical person doesn't spend as much time underground as I do and that the average trip underground I go way deeper than they go. It's actually a completely like understandable stance. Last thing comes down to estrogen

itself. So why are we seeing this complaint in women more so than men? Doesn't mean that men don't do it. It just seems like women are complaining about it more, experiencing it more. So estrogen literally gives us emotional depth. The higher our estrogen levels are, the more capacity for emotion we have. It sensitizes our emotional circuitry. And this like happens in dads. So when I became a dad, like I started crying in Disney movies and I was like, what the hell is going on? I was so confused. I was like sitting there with my two

and a halfyear-old and we're like, "Let's watch The Lion King." And it's like, "Oh my god." And I was like, "What is happening?" I felt this tightness in my throat. I felt like a I was like, "What is wrong with me?" I just had access to this emotional depth that I didn't have. And it's because I my estrogen increased. Oh my god. I became womanized. became feminized. Dr. Kim feminized. No, it's not that. My testosterone levels are quite healthy. My testosterone levels are quite high. But you also get access to estrogen. And this is important.

The reason that you need this is because when you spend time with babies, babies can't talk. And so, you need to have estrogen to be able to have a greater capacity and sensitivity for feeling. I need the outside world my I need to turn up the volume way up because this little human doesn't know how to communicate in my stem mind my like hey if you feel something let's analyze look at this Dr. K Dr. Okay. Does this Oh, you are feeling depth. Let's look at the neuroscience of depth and let's explain. Let's understand mechanistically.

What is the neuroscience of depth and feeling? What is this? Let's break it apart. Let's look at this synaptic gating. Let's go. Synaptic gating theory. This is how I understand the world. I'm a man. Look at this. Look at these synaptic gates. Beautiful. But unfortunately, when my daughter is two, synaptic gating theory doesn't really do the job. So, you need access to estrogen. And for me, it was like amazing because now I like art. It's cool. I feel so much more. It's great. So, I think this is where like women really do feel like, you

know, I I think it makes sense that you have more estrogen. Probably the amount of depth that you feel, I would bet money, I would guess, varies with your menstrual cycle that you feel disconnected from other people. Maybe because you have difficulty with empathy, you have difficulty connecting with them, right? But that doesn't mean that they're shallow. But it kind of does because they may not feel the frequency and intensity of emotion. doesn't mean that they're shallow as people. It just means they spend less time at deeper waters. Doesn't mean that they don't exist. So,

in terms of how to do this, how to deal with this. What do you do if you feel this depth? I'd say number one, be patient, right? You will get there faster than other people get there, which is so hard for people with ADHD. Just be neurotypical. Number two is I would say really pay attention to the other person. Really try to read what they're sending. And the last thing that we got to say is that I think more people are shallow across the globe. And what does that mean when more people are shallow? So

I think the other reason people are observing this is because everyone is more shallow. This is like I know this is supposed to be a joke but there is some truth to this right and the reason for that is if we look at the influence of technology technology brings us outside of ourselves. Even when you're reading a book your imagination has to be active in order to enjoy the book. Most of the time the way that human beings are supposed to be is we're somewhat internal. We live internally. So even when I read a book

like I'm in here, the book is just triggering this creation internally. But now what's happening is our attention is moving to the outside. And as we move to the outside, we're spreading out along the surface. So we have no longer have access to the mind shaft and we don't go deep. Even when we trigger emotions, they're so transient. We don't hang out down there. Oh my god, look at these. This little cat lost a leg. Oh my god, it's so cute. Oh my god, it's so sad. [laughter] Did you see? Oh my god, this cat

is surfing. That's hilarious. So, we're activating this stuff up, but we're not living down there. So, I do think that it's very possible that especially if you're a woman, maybe a dude, and if you're a dude in the audience, feel free to chime in, that you do feel things more deeply, that you are a little bit deeper, that you spend more time down there. But I don't think it's as brutal as like, oh my god, I'm alone and I have no one to connect to. I think you can do that. You can form those connections.

need to be a little bit more socially attuned, which is hard, you know, and I think people can get there. You just got to give them a little bit of time. All right, y'all. Before we wrap for the day, um we have a a quick announcement. Um so, every year during the holidays, we offer a discount on Dr. 's guide. So, if you guys want more info on ADHD, anxiety, meditation, if you guys like some of the weird stuff on meditation that we were talking about earlier, like this really fundamental stuff, definitely check out the

guide. There's a discount code for guide gift 25, um, which y'all can use at checkout for 25% off and it's through January 5th. Um, so if y'all want to support the channel, if y'all want more information, we're committed to trying to provide value when y'all give us money. So, we want to help y'all out and we want y'all to help us out financially, right? So, we're very interested in making a trade. Um, it's a big part of what we do here. We haven't done things like Sabbathons and, you know, like asking y'all to sub and

all that kind of stuff. Like, comment, and subscribe. I should be saying it more. No, but we really try to build things that are helpful for you. Offer a little bit more depth. Offer uh plans of action. That's a big part of it. Offer things like um meditations and things like that. That's a big part of the guide. So, if you guys are like, I want to learn how to process emotions, you can absolutely watch the YouTube video and we have a set of meditation practices that will theoretically help with emotional wellness and health. Um,

so that discount is available until January 5th and it's guide gift 25 at checkout. Okay, so happy holidays everybody. Um, we've got a couple of cool lectures coming out on the YouTube side and we will see y'all later.