Dr K: We Are Producing Millions Of Lonely, Addicted, Purposeless Men & Women!

this is the whole problem that everyone makes anytime we have a problem the first thing that we do is we try to jump to a solution if I'm unhappy in life I need to make more money if I'm struggling with dating I need to be sexier it's a concept that I call toxic Fuel and that will never work because if I give you a glass of water and then I piss it and then I add sugar it doesn't remove the piss because no amount of building something good will remove something bad in order to change

Behavior what you need to do is save treat Dr K is the Harvard trained psychiatrist and former monks specializing in modern mental health blending Neuroscience with real life wisdom to help millions of people unlock their true potential there's a loneliness epidemic social anxiety is increasing and falling in love seems harder but we have all the answers the problem is that everyone is doing the wrong things now first of all talking about our problems can absolutely make things worse because there's a particular way we have to talk but we're not taught how to do that the

second thing is that we are struggling to fall in love and that's actually because we're exhausting our dopamine through things like devices yeah people don't realize and then the in social anxiety is because everyone is texting so the parts of our brain that reassure Us in social situations are starting to rust so there are core things that we have to start doing so the first is that Dr K why don't people achieve their goals now this is really interesting there are two kinds of people in life there are people who like I'm going to advance

towards my goals and then there are the rest of us who are like you know I'm trying to be like these people who are productive but I'm going to do nothing and Trauma is the big difference here really yeah and this is what tends to happen so question if you could sit at a table with any four guests from the dire of CEO who would you choose here's a challenge for the entire D CEO Community if we hit 10 million subscribers by the end of 2024 you will get to pick four guests for your dream

conversation and you can make it weird or you can make it wonderful and here is the best part 3,000 of you that subscribe will be invited to join this conversation live in person and for free subscribe now and let's make this happen [Music] together Dr K if you had to summarize what you do for people professionally how would you summarize it I help them understand themselves and now expand for me what that means yeah so so here's the thing right so there are two great Traditions that have taught us about how humans work one tradition

is spirituality which we've had for a couple thousand years the other tradition is science which we've seen an explosion of especially in the fields of like neuroscience and Psychiatry over the last 20 years and so these are the two places that human beings learn about themselves so when I work with someone what I try to do is draw on both of those traditions and I especially focus on the area of spirituality that has scientific verification and teach people people like how they work so in the same way that if we think about like you know

when you buy a car you have like a manual that is in the glove compartment that tells you what everything is and how it works the problem is that in life like we don't have that manual for ourselves but we do have these two great Traditions that can teach us so much about this stuff and so what I try to do is basically translate those two Traditions to an individual the situation they face the challenges they face and the goals that they want to achieve and what experiences and work are you drawing on to arrive

at the conclusions and the support that you give people what have you done in your life what experiences have you had how many patients have you seen the first experience that I draw on is my own so I struggled a lot in high school college failed out of college was addicted to video games had no idea what I wanted to do with my life then I went to India at the age of 21 to find myself and I found myself I spent about seven years studying to become a monk um so that was very very

formative in helping me see how human beings work but then I was really like kind of skeptical a lot of a lot of that stuff so I started doing Neuroscience research for a couple years I had a couple of spiritual experiences and I was super curious like what is happening in the brain I'm starting to change as a human being but like that has to be at a neuroscientific level as well then I ended up going to medical school so I I was thinking about how can I learn the most about human beings so consider

doing like a PhD in Neuroscience But ultimately went the medical route because you know the brain exists within the body um became a a doctor um became a psychiatrist because the mind was my favorite organ um trained at Harvard Medical School where I was faculty for a few years and then you know over the last couple of years have focused a lot on addiction Psychiatry and also like performance-based stuff so once we understand okay I once had a patient for example who came in after about 2 and a half years and was like Dr K

I'm still depressed and then I assessed them right so when when someone has like a mood disorder they have like depression which causes them problems in their professional life causes them problems in their personal life and I ask them are you having problems in your professional life and they're like no are you having problems in your personal life they're like no but I still feel the same and that's when I told them I said Mike you're not depressed you're unhappy and there's a difference and then he turned to me and he's like well what do

we do about that and I was like I don't know but let's see if we can figure it out so really the work that I do is on that whole Continuum of pathology where something within you is broken but then going from negative 100 to zero is what medicine does right a doctor is not going to help you become healthy they are going to remove sickness and then from zero to positive 100 is when we really draw on things like spiritual traditions because meditation if you look at like the teachings of the Buddha the Buddha

was not using mindfulness to treat social anxiety to disorder he was using mindfulness to attain Enlightenment to attain the heights of human Perfection and so that whole Continuum is where I work it's so interesting you mentioned there the case of Mike he came to you and he had self- diagnosed his situation and I'm not surprised frankly because of the world we live in now there's a lot of people calling a lot of things depression and anxiety we kind of Ed that word quite flippantly when we go through different moods and situations how do you think

the whole Mental Health and psychology sort of Revolution we've seen over the last 10 years and the Tik Tock ification of mental health has led us astray so I think um there are some things that are good about it and some things that are problematic so I think the really good thing about it is that there is a lot more awareness of mental health so we now realize so what I used to see about 10 years ago right when I was seeing patients is like people would come in and they would not realize that this

is a problem that can be fixed so people would come into my office and they'd say I'm a loser other people are able to get out of bed they're able to have discipline they're they're productive they're happy but I'm a loser I have no willpower I'm pathetic I can't get out of bed people didn't realize that that was depression I've worked with so many people who have adult diagnosis of ADHD which uh many years ago you couldn't even be diagnosed as an adult ADHD had to be something that was kind of like a pediatric diagnosis

so now I think the the best thing is that people recognize that okay there maybe this maybe what is wrong with me is not like me I'm not fundamentally broken in some way but there is some kind of process going on in my brain in my mind that is responsible for my problems and if I fix that then I can be well now on the flip side what started to happen is no one on the internet understands the concept of differential diagnosis so everyone is like oh I have a Tik Tok that if this if

you sometimes forget your keys you have ADHD if you are happy in the morning in satday if you have a kid who throws temper tantrums they're bipolar so everyone is taking a symptom and jumping jumping to a diagnosis whereas like literally half of what we learn in med school and what we do as doctors is everyone thinks it's about treatment it's about differential diagnosis it's about understanding that if you lose your keys there are all kinds of reasons for that if you have difficulty getting out of bed maybe it's depression maybe it's trauma maybe it's

ADHD maybe it's anemia maybe it's obstructive sleep apnea and so the biggest problem is that everyone is jumping to a conclusion on the internet which then causes problems because that may not be the right conclusion we spoke last time about men yeah um and there was a lot of discussion around just this this world difference between how men are feeling in the world and how they're being understood in the world versus women we before we started recording you said your thoughts have developed even further since we last spoke on that yeah so I think um

there are a couple things to understand so the first is that if you're a man who's struggling in the world today we as men assume that if we're struggling we need to fix something on the outside right so if I am not making enough money the answer to that is to get some additional certification or become more prod productive maybe use some kind of supplement so that men are fundamentally different because we are conditioned and this could be somewhat biolog iCal but it's certainly societal to solve our problems externally but the one overwhelming thing that

I've learned about men is that you know if you're a man who wants to get better 90% of what you need to do is not outside of you it's actually inside of you but this is not where men look right we we think like okay I need to get this kind of car I need to get sexier I need to be able to bench twice as much so we always look to things outside of ourselves but in the majority of the work that I've done with men really the work that they need to do is

internal but we're not taught how to do that there's a really great example of this so if you look at the top 1% of earners versus the top 10% so the top 10% of earners on the planet have a higher IQ than the top 1% the people who actually make the most money have a lower IQ than the the cortile right underneath them and the big difference there is that people in the top 1% have a very high EQ so we grossly underestimate the capacity to control oneself and if you really want to achieve the

most in life that's what you really need to focus on and the more that I work with men I this is basically what I teach them and the outcomes that I see are amazing right we're talking like on on the worst end you know I worked with a 32-year-old guy who started using drugs when he was 13 years old polysubstance use mostly opiates and heroin uh so at the age of 32 no job um not living on the street crashing with his girlfriend and then within the span of four years this guy became a therapist

himself had a stable income got married and published his first dystopian fiction novel so we're talking about a fouryear span of like being literally a heroin addict to you know being a published author and like having a stable fulfilling relationship and job and all of that work is like internal it's about understanding the way that you work understanding the way that your brain works and learning how to control yourself is that the same for women though because I've got women friends who are same age that are really really struggling have they're not doing heroin or

drugs or anything like that but they're the objective sort of situation of their life is they're so far from all of their goals no partner feeling lonely unhealthy and seemingly out of control yeah so I've worked with plenty of women for whom that is a problem as well but I think if we look at on average right so remember that like within any population of men and women women there's going to be more variance between women than there is between men and women sure so I absolutely the case for a lot of women I think

the big difference is that a lot of the tools that we have were sort of designed with women in mind a great example of this is like Psychotherapy or talk therapy so if you look at the gold standard of how we process our emotions it's verbally now the studies actually show that if you look at like estrogen estrogen has a very very inter in effect on awareness of your internal emotional state and the ability to articulate your internal emotional state so as estrogen Rises you literally feel emotions more so this is why men women will

have problems like premenstrual dysphoric disorder PMS you know when there are these hormonal fluctuations it's not that we should treat them poorly or anything like that but they actually literally feel emotions in a more intense way because of the fluctuations in their estrogen level so I it's like like that's like scientific fact it's not like it's not good or bad right it's just something that's a fact so the higher your estrogen is the more emotional awareness you'll have so there are some biological factors and then there's also like if you look at the way that

women are conditioned they're conditioned to be good listeners to provide emotional support for the the men around them and so they they use they're a lot better at verbal fluency like that's not even related to emotions you can look at you know boys and girls who are 8 years old girls will have a higher level of verbal fluency than boys do at the age of eight so there are a lot of things in our mental health system that rely on being aware of your emotions being able to articulate your emotions using words to process your

emotions and so absolutely they can learn more about themselves I think 99% of human beings on the planet myself included can benefit from learning more about themselves but I think that women have somewhat of a leg up which is why women are set 70% of patients who seek Psychotherapy right even 70% of therapists are women so there there's like a very clear gender gap in the field of mental health so going back up the river then so the Crux of the issue is not being able to control oneself essentially I control is even a step

too far Crux of the issue is not understanding yourself right good diagnosis predes good treatment control comes later okay so first you need to understand on absolutely and how do I go about understanding on self and in the case of the gentleman you mentioned as the case study there how did he go about understanding himself as a heroin addict who had poly substance abuse to this successful person so I think the best place to start I know it's going to sound kind of simple but is to look at yourself so what a lot of us

do is anytime we have a problem the first thing that we do is we try to jump to a solution so if I'm unhappy in life I need to make more money if I'm struggling with dating I need to get a better job or be sexier or whatever so we tend to jump to Solutions so I think the first thing that you've got to do is slow a little bit down and look at yourself and when you look at yourself there are a couple of things that I think a lot of people really miss the

first is what drives a lot of their behaviors so we focus so much on fixing a behavior like using heroin for example right but we don't really ask ourselves why am I using heroin in the first place where does the drive for using heroin come from and that is the key question right so it's not about how you need to change it's about why am I the way that I am and this is where people make such a simple simple mistake I'd say the majority of people that I talk to when they look at themselves

they don't actually they're not critically thinking what they actually do is they'll make some kind of conclusion I'm lazy so like think about what that means like laziness first of all is like not a thing there is not like a laziness circuit in the brain you can't measure laziness laziness is a lazy way of looking at laziness if we look at human behavior motivation discipline things like follow-through willpower these are all discrete functions within our brain and then we just say oh we're lazy but which one of those things is lacking so as we understand

okay why are we lazy what does that really mean where is my motivation coming from what is the status of my willpower um you know as we explore these kinds of things that's when we see really what the answer answer is and the really cool thing is if you look at a lot of research on things like we use this technique called motivational interviewing where in order to change Behavior you don't need to convince anyone of anything you need to help people understand things and once a human being understands something themselves they will automatically change

Behavior right if I touch if I tell you Hey Stephen don't touch that that pan it's hot and you touch the pan and you burn yourself you won't listen to me but the moment that you touch it and you get burned suddenly your behavior will change on its own we learn through experience but if you look at the way that most people try to solve their problems it's not through experience it's through information oh I have a problem let me buy a book I have a problem let me listen to a podcast let me watch

a YouTube video and this is what we see right there are literally millions if not tens of millions or hundreds of people millions of people out there who are gaining a lot of information about change but aren't actually changing it's wild why is that there's a there's a quite a complex psychological thing because there's a certain type of person who is like a self-development junkie but they never self-develop yeah they go to all the conferences they watch all the videos they've got you know they can they know all the words but they they don't actually

put anything into action yeah so there's there's a lot of subtlety but the craziest thing is that see anytime we engage in some kind of self-help kind of thing it actually is a coping mechanism to deal with some negativity within us so let's say that I feel like I'm lazy so then my mind looks looks at me and says okay I'm lazy I need to do something about it and then it's really tricky right because you have your brain sees two options one is that I can do something hard or the others I can do

something easy and we have to understand this the brain has evolved to be lazy the brain has evolved laziness is efficiency we want to get the most yield out of the smallest investment so then what happens is our brain is like okay I could like go to the gym or I could watch a video about working out and if I watch a video about working out I will be more efficient when I go to the gym there are all kinds of scams that we run in our mind to actually activate parts of our brain that

make us feel like we're making progress without actually making progress that's how you become a self-develop junkie or self-help junkie on this point of psychotherapy not being perfectly designed for men I was watching a clip before you arrived um where a lady who's an author of a a book that's just come out said that talking about our problems makes them worse and I was wondering if that's true it can be so I think this is a big problem is that talking about our problems can absolutely make things worse so let's understand a couple of things

so the first is that there's this assumption that talking about your problems makes them better but there are actually very specific things that need to happen in order for talk talking about your problems to make things better the most important thing is something called an emotional catharsis so this is where you have like a breakthrough in therapy so there's like this moment where there's a lot of dormant stuff and Freud even described this where you have this moment of very very intense emotion that is relatively new I mean it's kind of dormant but it's not

like venting we'll get to venting in a second and so there there's a particular way we have to talk about problems that triggers emotional catharsis emotional catharsis create something like a breakthrough so this is also like an experience so this is not just talking about my problems this is experiencing my problems in a different way so it's kind of like touching the hot pan usually it's kind of painful so when we're doing like work with a trauma Survivor we don't want to just talk about the trauma we want to sort of dig into it a

little bit more and have an emotionally healing experience um the the real problem is that sometimes what'll happen is people will just talk about their problems so they'll use therapy as essentially like a venting session and venting if we look at kind of the Neuroscience of venting venting is useful for reducing our negative emotion in the moment but this is the really tricky thing if we kind of think about it you know like I I'll ask you maybe you know this maybe you don't but why do we have negative emotions Stephen it's a signal for

what it I would I would guess that it's a depends on the negative emotion but I guess it's a signal that is there to help us connect with people okay so let's I think it can be sure loneliness loneliness is a great example of a signal that's designed to connect with you what about something like anger or fear why do we have fear to warn us against impending danger absolutely right so if I'm like running through the jungle and I see a tiger and I have fear fear gives us information and what else does it

do gives us physiological energy very adrenaline absolutely for what purpose to flee absolutely so this is a big thing that people don't understand the primary motivator for change is actually negative energy a negative emotion so this is the problem with venting if you vent and get rid of all of your negative emotional energy the drive to change will disappear so if we kind of think about it what motivates you the most it's actually negative emotion and you can literally look at the like the neuroanatomy of things like the amydala so the amydala is very close

to the hippocampus which is where learning and memory happen so we actually learn the most through negative emotions so if I if I'm if I've been happily married for 15 years and there's infidelity right one case of infidelity the negative emotion from that one case of infidelity can drastically motivate me so one of the biggest problems that I see is that we try to get rid of our negative emotions and in doing so we actually hamstring our motivational capability so I've seen this a lot where people will come in and they'll go through like what

they think therapy is which is like actually same same guy Mike came in and he'd like kind of talk about his problems and I was like bro I was like Mike is this helping so I was still a trainee at the time so he'd been seeing me for about six eight months and I was like you come in here and you kind of talk about your problems but like you're you don't seem to be getting better I didn't know how to do therapy at the time and then he's like isn't that what I'm supposed to

do is come in and talk about my problems I was like yeah I think so I was a seconde Psychiatry resident but I was like is this helping he's like no and I was like okay we got to do something else then coming in and just venting is not actually Psychotherapy that's not like so talking about your problems reducing your negative emotional energy can actually keep you stuck and if you pay attention to people in your life you'll notice that there are some people who just like [ __ ] all the time right they're just

like constantly complaining they're constantly venting and they don't actually do anything to change their life it's interesting because with the Advent of social media you now get reinforced by deficiency promotion I call it there's kind of these two types of ways that you can build an audience or a personal brand one of them is idea promotion these are my my ideas this is how I think about something and the other that's emerged which is really interesting and a little bit toxic is like deficiency promotion these are all the ways that I'm broken these are all

the ways that I'm inadequate and you can build an entire audience around around that which resonate with your inadequacies and then that inadequacy that you you get held there because that's the speaking appointments you get booked to do that's what your books about your book is about all the ways you're broken and flawed all the stuff you've been through and then you it becomes your your profession and I just I watch that play out so many times I'm like I talked to my friends about it I'm like be careful of deficiency promotion because you might

you might accidentally build a revenue stream there and then you're [ __ ] yeah absolutely I I I think we what we see is that there's a lot of empathic resonance right so and I think in some ways that's a good thing so I I think when when I'm a broken human being there are a lot of broken other human beings the problem is when you're a broken human being you don't feel like you're a part of society you're like broken and everyone else is out there living their lives and being positive and so it

can feel so relieving to connect with someone else to realize oh my God I'm not alone right so I think some of these deficiency promotion and we see that a lot in like Psychotherapy groups on trauma and stuff like that where there's a lot of like trauma bonding and there's also some weird ego there with like I'm more broken than you and my trauma is worse than you a lot of toxic comparison there's a lot of stuff that can kind of go arai but I I think there's absolutely a reason why that's a way that

you can build your brand because there are a lot of people out there who feel broken and feel alone and I'd rather be broken and with someone yeah than broken and alone it's all about belonging at the end of the day yeah all of these things are about you know feeling like you belong absolutely what role does dopamine play in all of this because we we talked at the start about taking back control but much of the reason as I learned from Andrew hubman that it's hard to gain control is because many of us are

in this sort of dopamine roller coaster in our lives yeah so I I think uh dopamine plays an important role but the one thing that I really come to appreciate is that how little of a role it plays so everyone is like hung up on dopamine but dopamine first of all is a neurotransmitter right so dopamine is also like deals with things like Smooth movement so my ability to go like this is governed by dopamine you were waving your arm yeah like so so like anytime you have a smooth motion so if we look at

something like Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease is a deficiency of dopamine so there there are all kinds of things that dopamine does I'd say dopamine is like a letter in the alphabet for the brain we use it in all kinds of circuits to create all kinds of behaviors so dopamine is are absolutely important we'll talk about it but I think that there's almost like too much of an emphasis on dopamine and we oversimplify the problem when we focus too much on dopamine I'll give you a really simple example of that so one is in my clinical

experience it's almost like dopamine and serotonin have an inverse relationship so dopamine is what gives us a sense of pleasure dopamine also gives us behavioral reinforcement but dopamine gives us pleasure but will not give us contentment so I have I've had plenty of patients who chase dopamine right and we know that you know partying a lot lot using a lot of drugs having high adrenaline activities that all activate your dopamine system don't usually leave people feeling fulfilled and contented at the end of it I've had plenty of millionaire Playboys in my practice who like tried

that to find happiness and maximize the pleasure in their life and it doesn't work it's never going to work and the the problem with that is that our brain has this principle of tolerance so the more that you activate your dopam energic system the more tolerance you'll develop to it this is why people need higher doses of drugs to achieve the same goal this is why people when you first play a video game it's a lot of fun but hour five six s to eight it becomes less and less fun and then you have old

Gamers like myself who are still chasing the beauty in the high of the games that we used to play when we were kids so dopamine is almost like a scam neurotransmitter because it offers you pleasure temporarily but in an unsustainable way on the flip side we have serotonin so serotonin is is Associated more with like contentment and peace when we look at things like mood disorders often times what we're doing is improving the serotonin level boosting the serotonin Transmission in the brain so peace and contentment is very different from pleasure and these two things are

almost inversely proportional where and it's really interesting you can look at something like orgasm which is a great example of this so when you have an orgasm you get a spurt of dopamine and you feel a ton of pleasure and then after your orgasm you actually get a rise in serotonin and you feel incredibly contented the really interesting thing is that if your serotonin levels are high you won't feel horny so like what'll happen is is we know this because if we give someone serotonergic medication if we boost your serotonin transmission one of the side

effects is anorgasmia and like you can't have an orgasm and then you also like aren't as sexually you're not as thirsty okay so like this is one of the side effects this is one of the number one reason why my patient serot serotonergic medication has to do with the sexual side effects but if we kind of think about the neurotransmitters involved right when we boo serotonin and we also see this in Monks who are like super content and peace and they're not very thirsty right so if we kind of think about it peace and happiness

and contentment in life comes from serotonin dopamine is like actually kind of the opposite and monks aren't like thrill Chasers right they're they're able to develop this internal sense of contentment so dopamine is absolutely a part of the problem it's a very important part of problem but I think that it's like one piece in a in a larger hole does this explain why people sex lives typically get worse when they're comfortable and they're married absolutely it's amazing how much science can tell us about the formation of relationships and falling in love that we just don't

apply so being attracted falling in love developing a relationship these can discreetly be described neuroscientifically so being attracted actually starts in the thalamus so the thalamus is our sensory organ of the brain it's kind of the sensory Gateway so it interprets a lot of sensory stimuli so when I first meet someone I'm like oh they look really good right it looks really fantastic and I I feel physically attracted to them they smell great their laugh is beautiful so the initial stages of Attraction are all about sensory input then what happens now this is what's really

interesting falling in love is actually very dopam energic so this is one of the reasons why I think we're seeing declining birth rates this is why it's like if you talk to people nowadays like it's it's hard to fall in love everyone's dating everyone's going out on dates and stuff but like falling in love seems harder and that's actually because of dopamine so what happens is if you look at the phase of falling in love what that involves is a dopam energic connection and a great example of this is like if we're going to dinner

right and I put my hand out just Steph hold my hand and then we're all we're doing we're gazing into each other's eyes and we're just holding hands and then we feel in love and if you kind of think about people in love like it's like a dopam energic high because that's literally what's going on now what you see if you see if you go out on if you go to a restaurant you people watch which I love to do what you'll see is two people on a date both on their phones so what's starting

to happen is we are like developing this dopaminergic tolerance through things like devices we're actually exhausting our dopamine which is something that a lot of people don't understand we run out of dopamine because we're using these devices and then we have none left to fall in love and then there are later things in the relationship that are more serotonergic in nature where it's not as much about pleasure but it's about connection connection and all kinds of other stuff so what does that mean if I'm single and I'm looking to find love so if you're looking

to find love there's this is where we have to start with diagnosis before Solutions right so the first question is do you have trouble falling in love do you because a lot of people who are single are like oh like I don't feel anything right I don't feel a connection this is something that I've heard so much from our community so much from patients anymore I just don't feel a connection they seem great on paper but I just don't feel a connection there's actually Neuroscience behind to form a connection too um but what what the

first question that I ask people is okay do you feel like you just can't feel an emotional connection to people then what you actually need to do is reduce your dopamine activation through things like cell phones uh we see this also with pornography where we know that pornography correlates with like unhappiness and relationships and that's probably also like a dop and energic effect as opposed to all the other things there's a lot of stuff going on there so play fewer video games be on your phone less and especially before you go on a date you

want to like give your dopamine a chance to recharge so go on a walk for about 1 hour before you go on a date and then your literally your brain's capacity to engage in a date and fall in love and activate those feelings is going to be higher also I'd avoid as much dopaminergic activity as you can before the date before you see that person and the more that you do that the easier it will be for you to actually fall in love am I right in thinking from what you said there that dopamine is

required for us to initiate sex and want want to have sex is that what you were saying yes and no so dopamine is not actually required to initiate sex it's that's so fascinating you can like so I tried to figure this out like where where how does love work in the brain it's like every circuit is involved every neurotransmitter is involved um so dopamine is what gives us the pleasure of orgasm but initiating sex also for men and women is somewhat different so like you know women will say like oh foreplay is really important right

and dudes are like we don't need a whole lot of that and so the question is why so this is what's really interesting so to develop an erection you actually need activation of the parasympathetic nervous system which is the part of our nervous system that involves rest and digest which is why we have morning wood right so when dudes wake up in the morning we have an erection why we're not like horny in the morning well I don't think so anyway maybe who knows but like there's a physiology to it right where when we're relaxed

will develop an erection because the the development of an erection actually involves relaxing ation and then the sexual act involves transition to the sympathetic nervous system now this is the fight and flight kind of response so what we want to do is like we want to be relaxed first and then we start getting sweaty our heart rate increases blood pressure increases and this is the other thing that a lot of dudes don't understand because our our nervous system is a little bit different so when it comes to women they have the same thing going on

where they need activation of the parasympathetic nervous system before they get activation of the sympathetic nervous system and then as you activate the parasympathetic nervous system with something like a massage or making out or some something like that some playfulness relaxation people really need to feel safe then you can sort of graduate to the more explicit sympathetic nervous system sexual act this has answered so many questions that I had that I've never sort of vocalized because I didn't realize the issue but I have come to learn that I am most aroused when I'm not stressed

in any way but I don't just mean stressed as in like stressed I mean if it's Friday night and I've just come back from work and I've got home at 9:00 p.m. after a really really long day and week I am not aroused typically so what tends to happen and like we know this in my relationship and it's the same for same for my partner is on like Saturday once I've had time to relax and I've like chilled down and I've all those kind of things then I'm then I get aroused um and there is

this I think misunderstanding between men and women because we get aroused in different ways absolutely once again like we we're seeing so many problems in relation ship so many problems and dating and and you know what happens is like women will get branded as all kinds of she's an ice queen or whatever she won't put out and like there's a lot of like toxic misogyny there and then men will also get branded as like oh men only want one thing and they're they're you know so horny which can somewhat be true but I I think

this is the kind of thing where once you understand you know how does the male body work how does the female body work what of the ways because the majority of is actually very similar so like the what separates men and women is less than what we share mhm um so if you look at for example like how to create romantic attraction on a first date like that's there's a lot of good like Neuroscience data about things to do and it's not surprising at all because if you look at what's the trend in dates everyone

is doing the wrong things now dates are turning into like interviews right where it's like I don't know I don't want I need to know if I'm going to waste my time or not so we're going to sit down at a table oh do you want kids what do you want this how much do you like to travel how many trips per year it almost becomes a negotiation and if you look at the science of how human beings fall love it's completely different what is that relationship between because as you're describing that dating process I

just my head I thought God that sounds stressful and then I thought of how expectation generally creates stress so whether it's in the bedroom having an expectation that we're going to [ __ ] tonight because it's Thursday and it's date night or having an expectation when you go on a day the impact that that stress has on your dopamine and your ability to be like open and receptive yeah so it's it's it's so interesting right so like I know it sounds kind of weird but let's use your example if it's Thursday and we're going to

[ __ ] tonight so that can be stressful or like I don't know if you've been in a relationship like this it can be awesome right so like if I haven't seen you all week and you haven't seen me all week and it's like Thursday and this is the time we've set aside and like we're finally meeting and we both are like we're going to [ __ ] tonight then it's great like you know what I mean or not so much or I don't know yeah right so like this is the key thing that a

lot of people don't understand so attraction is not about whether we're going to have sex tonight or not it's that we you and I need to be on the same page so there's a really fascinating study that looked at first dates on Bridges okay so one Bridge is a stone bridge one Bridge is a rickety wooden bridge that's wobbly and what the study found is that when you have a date on a stone bridge it's Le people feel less attracted to each other than when you're on a rickety bridge now what's the difference on the

rickety bridge I'm a little bit scared and you're a little bit scared so what what really the the foundation of romantic attraction is actually empathic resonance when I feel the same things that you feel when we both feel it doesn't even have to be good it can be negative things it can be good things we just need to both be feeling the same thing that's what creates attraction this is also why people fall in love in rehab like literally at the rehabs that I've worked at like we have to like almost have a rule right

we can't technically control them but we're like hey no [ __ ] in rehab so this is going to we're going to have and because people will trauma Bond right we're sharing all of this deep emotional stuff you can be honest you can be authentic and there's someone else in the group who's also honest and authentic and you feel connected what is the nature of that connection it's shared empathic resonance so one of the biggest things that I tell people who are you know struggling to succeed in dating is like what are the emotions that

you're bringing to the table what are the emotions they're bringing to the table and if those emotions are not aligned how can you do some kind of experience that creates an emotion so this is also where like movies aren't necessarily good or bad the question is do you guys like the same kind of movies if yall like the same kind of of movies and you both laugh a lot that's a great date you don't need to talk you just need empathic resonance so whatever you can do to get empathic resonance will create a connection my

brain went in two directions then the first question that popped into my head was about the role oxytocin's playing and all of that because I've heard about this chemical called oxytocin which is there to help us Bond Etc um and I remember Simon Sy saying to me that when like cities have earthquakes it's crazy how much the city comes together and that's he pointed oxytocin as much the reason for that sort of shared struggle thinking about your rickety Bridge scenario life sometimes becomes a rickety bridge and people Bond because of that so should I be

taking my dates to theme parks for example to terrify the [ __ ] out of them or what only if you're equally terrified okay so that's why it's so important right for you to figure out like what is something that is going to give us a shared emotional experience ah okay so you've got okay we've got to both have the same emotion absolutely so if I'm not scared by it and she's terrified then that's generally speaking not good now there are other versions of that so like you can demonstrate caring right so if I'm terrified

and you take care of me then that can feel good in a different way but generally speaking like what gets us like I'm into this person is that we feel an emotional connection right that's what I'm like into this person they're like like what is the nature is the emotional connection is shared emotion so oxytocin is another phase of the relationship so oxytocin forms emotional bonds so when we feel like not this and this is what's so interesting there's different parts of the brain different neurotransmitters so oxy oxytocin is what we get from cuddling what

we get from different kinds of touch something like a massage can form oxytocin hugging holding hands all this kind of stuff triggers oxytocin and oxytocin will form an emotional bond will alleviate feelings of loneliness I think one of the reasons that men are so lonely now is because we don't feel bonded to each other so oxytocin is more about forming emotional bonds and the other way my brain went when we talking about that is a question I've asked a lot of sex therapists I've spoken to which is should we be scheduling sex this is such

a tangent from where we started but um based on what you said Thursday night date night Etc should we be scheduling sex when I ask sex experts this they they go in two different directions one group says yes one group is so passionately saying no because it kills that spontaneity they say um and that you know right so so I think this is a good example of like this is exactly what I'm talking about where we know so much more about physiology and neuros science now that the right answer to that question depends on the

science so you can schedule sex it's just make sure that you do the things are you killing some degree of spontaneity potentially um and but at the same time like so what is it about the spontaneity like let's let's tunnel down I think this is exactly what we need to do what is it that makes spontaneous sex fun Stephen oh gosh uh [ __ ] um what makes spontaneous sex fun it is exciting novel it is hold on who's excited by spontaneous sex me so and is it going to happen if your partner is not

equally excited well I think most couples would say that they much of the reason why their sex life is not great is because it's became become boring and predictable and syy so this sort of spontaneity element adds a bit of surprise and Intrigue and now hold on a second okay great so this is we're going to we're going to figure out an answer When Things become syy so if I watch like what's your favorite movie Stephen H The Pursuit of Happiness okay so if I watch Pursuit of Happiness the first time how am I going

to feel emotionally oh it was profound the first time I S it second time you watch it you know interesting fourth time fifth time so the more that we get exposed to something what changes within us our emotional the emotions change right so the first time I do something yeah emotions are activated when it becomes habitual emotions no longer become activated so this is the problem of non-spontaneous or spontaneous sex is it it has to do with that emotional empathy that emotional connection that leads to attraction so this is exactly what I'm talking about when

we look at problems in life should couples do this or should couples not do this let's understand the mechanisms at play and then if we can activate those mechanisms in the right way then it'll work so the the issue about spontaneity is is like you know if you feel like having spontaneous sex but your partner doesn't that's not going to work because y'all aren't emotionally I mean they can accommodate you and that can be fine but generally speaking what spontan adds is more of that emotional connection so when I work with um you know patients

who are exhibitionistic right so like why do they like exhibitionism what's exhibitionism having sex in public places okay so um it's a it's a kind of fetish right can get you into trouble that's sometimes how they end up in my office um but so so what what if you really look at it like what what it's about is emotional resonance so if I'm having sex in a public place that's going to activate me emotionally in some way it's going to activate my partner emotionally in the same way that's why we do it so it all

comes down to emotional resonance so the second thing is that if you're going to have scheduled sex so like spontaneous is great but if you're going to have scheduled sex that's still fine too it doesn't kill the spark you just need to figure out how to activate it right so this is where activation of the parasympathetic nervous system do something like you know give them a or even like the sex should come after some kind of emotional resonance let's go out and watch a movie together or let's do something that we both find emotionally engaging

then once you're emotionally connected the sex will be it'll be a lot easier I have a friend who has been trying for a baby uhuh I'm trying for a baby as well by the way but this is not about me this is not me like asking for a friend he lives in America and he has just had the news that he's having a baby very very happy and I saw him recently and I was asking him him about the process of you know timing the sex around your partner's cycle and they had gone for I

think three years trying to have a baby so it got increasingly more difficult all of the complicated emotions he was saying to me he was like honestly bro like sometimes we were having to have sex like three or four times a day and I was like how how do you keep an like when it becomes a job in that in that context you're doing it because you need to try and hit this egg how did you arouse yourself and he was like no I couldn't he was like I I really struggled I'd lose my erection

all the time um um and he literally said to me yeah he was he was having sex 40 50 times a month to try and he was basically being ordered to have sex with her like these are the five days you better have sex with you know that that is maybe the extreme case of total dissipation of emotional resonance as it relates to sex yeah and the other case the other end of that poll would be pursuing someone for the first time I guess a stranger for the first time and I guess the job for

people in their relationships is how do you keep that emotional resonance so I I think that that's that's exactly the kind of question and I think the first thing is that's half the answer is that a lot of people don't realize so like when people get bored sexually in a relationship right so we have two populations of people some people will get married and they'll continue to have healthy sex lives like well into their 70s like one of the craziest things that I remember encountering in med school was like you know when I meet a

70-year-old I don't think about sexual health counseling and it's one of the biggest mistakes we make as doctors like you know when you have these retirement communities and stuff no one's worried about getting pregnant you can get outbreaks of like syphilis and gonorrhea that'll tear through the community like like Co like it's crazy like we just don't but sexual desire doesn't necessarily decrease with age I know it's crazy but we you know so then the question becomes okay how do you maintain a healthy sex sexual relationship over time so at the very beginning there are

things like thalamic inputs right so what you see ex arouses you there's some amount of novelty which is also like new emotions right so then then the 10th time we watch the same movie our emotional connection is less to the movie but then this is also how couples have sex over successfully over time is that they do have emotional connections so they as you continue to bond with your partner over the new experiences that your relationship has so I think having kids is a great example where like having kids will destroy your sex drive for

some amount of time they say what two years or something on on average but even within that it's amazing because you'll find these moments where like you sort of forget right like how good sex with your partner is and then the stars align and you have sex and it's actually like incredibly fantastic it's like oh we should do that more right like that's that's like what kind of starts to happen so over time what we want to do is really lean into still that shared emotional connection oh my God I had such a like I

can't believe that our kids like finally like they the fever's gone they're relaxing we're going to sleep and then at like 2: a.m. you're going to wake up and you're you know it's going to be great right but like and so as long as you maintain that Bond it's totally fine and when we think about the mechanisms in Neuroscience that drive our Behavior once we're in a relationship and even if it's a platonic relationship um how do we keep the relationship thriving like how do we what are the mechanisms I need to be aware of

in the brain in in Neuroscience that are going to enable my relationship to be strong and thriving whether it's platonic or romantic you know because we talk about loneliness a lot and there's so many people that are struggling with loneliness and it's and you know the reasons that we often attribute to that are the way we're living our lives or we're behind screens or social media but you know you it was really Illuminating to me that you're able to point to a mechanism in um smartphones and social media that is actually inhibiting us forming relationships

and I wondered if the same mechanisms might inhibit us keeping the relationships that we have yeah so I think there are so many things that are going on there so one is like how is technology negatively impacting our relationships and the second is how do you maintain a healthy relationship over time so there's like two different things that makes sense like what gets in the way and how do you how do you keep your tire nice and full of air versus how do you uh fix it if a nail punctures it so let's start with

like what technology is doing so this is what technology is basically doing to our social connections there there is a whol scale social skills atrophy and a deconditioning of certain parts of the brain when we use technology so the first thing to understand about the brain this is beautiful thing about the human body inanimate objects the more you use them the worse they get but the moment that you have biology the human brain doesn't wear out it rusts so inactivity of the human brain is actually what causes problems okay that's number one so we can

look at studies of like dementia prevention and what we know is that encouraging neuroplasticity through things like learning how to play the piano at the age of 60 will protect us from dementia so we need to utilize our brain to make it the strongest this is also where you can look at the physical body right so when I when I think about what causes muscle atrophy and what causes muscle growth the more I use my muscles the more they grow the more you use your brain the more it grows so when we look at connections

if you actually look at human communication words are maybe I would say 25 to 50% of communication at most so you can walk into a room and without even hearing a single thing that's said you can know there's tension in the air something is wrong you can even like I remember when I was a kid I used to get bullied a lot right and I would walk into a room and I immediately knew that they were making fun of me like all the conversation would stop and everyone would look at like one person would look

at me I'd see alarm in their face they would would all see everyone else would see the alarm in their face and they'd look over and they'd see me and everyone would stop talking I know I'm being made fun of so body language tone volume this is really interesting so there are even video game companies that are starting to ban people over voice coms so how do you know if someone is toxically communicating or not what we used to do is use like words right so if you say some kind of racial slur in chat

like if you type it out the game knows to scan for that and then people will start to get around that they'll use an at sign instead of an A so now what they're doing over voice coms is measuring tone Oh so depending on the volume of what you're saying right like that's how they're actually detecting toxicity because that's where toxicity exists it's not oh hey Stephen you're a real loser I really dislike you it's like Stephen bro you're such a loser man oh my God and even if I say that right it's not negative

at all even though I'm using negative words is another quick aside so men are really specific for using the negative expression of a positive affection so this is something that's different about men so what we'll do is we'll actually say negative things to a friend of ours to express approval like when someone gets engaged or gets married it's like oh man like it's the old ball and chain we're going to lose you you're whipped but everyone's smiling everyone's congratulating you but we just express it in a negative way yeah so so much of our communication

is tone is body language is volume now what's happening is everyone is texting so then the brain does something very that's designed to do it's like hey we're not using this thing let's lose it so if you don't speak a language our brain forgets it so as you this is what a lot of people don't realize is that there's a rise in social anxiety why is there a rise in social anxiety it's because the parts of our brain that reassure Us in social situations are starting to atrophy so when we don't pay attention to body

language when we don't pay attention to tone those parts of the brain shut off and then when I go into a social situation those parts of the brain are inactive so they can't reassure me now what happens is I go to a party that I was invited to or I go to dinner with my friends that I was invited to I'm kind of sitting at the end of the table no one's really talking to me and I'm like oh like I really shouldn't be here these people just invited me out of politeness they don't really

care about me but if your brain is functioning well you're able to read all of this nonverbal communication that's reassuring so when it comes to platonic friends and why this is hard we are atrophying a lot of the social skills a lot of these brain regions that allow us to form connections allow us to feel reassured allow us to feel safe right now I kind of feel like oh my friends are inviting me but I'm bothering them by going like all these kinds of things we're seeing more and more of are you hopeful about Generations

that that have been connected from birth yeah so so I I I think that even though things are problematic right we're talking about how things are negative and social anxiety is increasing and suicid suicidality is increasing I'm very optimistic because I think we have all the answers like that's what's so cool like we have a problem but we haven't been addressing it directly even between the last time I was here and now we've learned so much more people are taking social stuff more seriously the Surgeon General of the United States released like this this um

uh bulletin on Lon like the loneliness epidemic right so even like the medical establishment is starting to see loneliness as a problem that we need to Target half of the problems that we see in the world today is because we haven't tried to fix them they kind of crept up on us things like video game addiction things like loneliness now we see okay this is a big problem so let's start devoting resources to it let's understand what's going on and we see this a lot like even on our community like where we start targeting a

problem and people do better the only reason we're losing the war is because we haven't been fighting back why haven't we been fighting back Technologies must play a pretty significant role in in this I think we were slow we we're really good at creating things without understanding what they will do to us because the impact doesn't show its face for a couple of decades sometimes absolutely and there's there's a there's an even more Insidious thing which is right now the since it's isolation like since we're seeing more isolation we don't see the impact because literally

these people are staying home so the majority of of you know young men for example like won't ever go to a therapist which is why we can't help them with their problems they won't share their problems with other people because first of all they don't know how to and secondly they don't even know what they're feeling so that they just like feel like they're a loser so what we've started to see is that these problems have been going on for about 10 20 years but they're now reaching a critical point where like we're now noticing

what's going on but this has been going on for a while are people becoming more narcissistic yes they are yeah absolutely and what impact is that having I don't even know where to start like so I I think it's affecting our relationships it's affecting our happiness it's affecting our professional ability I was thinking is social media making us more narcissistic is that then driving us to be more lonely and if so how do we first Define the word narcissism in this context yeah so I'm going to lean into um kind of a more yogic definition

so we have this this word in Sanskrit called ahamkara and aamar means ego so ahamkara is your sense of self I am dot dot dot okay okay so I am tall I'm short I'm Doctor I'm father I'm winner I'm loser the first thing to understand about ego is that it is not a real thing it is an abstraction so if you were to look at me and you say I if I say I am a doctor I know this sounds kind like kind of a weird question but is that true like what makes me a

doctor I can't biopsy myself and find Doctor you can't find doctor anywhere within me doctor is I have a piece of paper on a wall that's what makes me a doctor I have a license to practice medicine that's what makes me a doctor it's an abstraction so it's not like a truth it's like a societal shared delusion that we all agree that I'm a doctor that's why I'm a doctor okay and does that make sense yeah of course okay so this is the ego now what we also know is that from studies on narcissism that

narcissism has its roots in insecurity so if you think about someone who's like egotistical and confident like Stephen I'm sure you know both what's the difference between the two confidence feels more secure and egotistical feels more insecure absolutely where does a confident person's esteem come from inside where does a egotistical esteem com outside beautiful so this is what's what social media is doing social media and technology is externalizing our perception so if I think about it like think about a couple thousand years ago what was my mind focused on so I would go out to

hunt I'm looking for an animal I shoot a deer and then I walk three hours back so for some amount of time my mind is paying attention to the external environment maybe I'm talking with the people that I'm hunting with but what is there to say like I can't talk to them for 10 hours a day there's no substance there's no news right we're like this tribal community so if you really look at the history of humanity our perception has been internally focused at least at least 50% of the time literally what we are paying

attention to is our own thoughts our own feelings the voices the desires the drives that come within us what technology has done is wholescale externalize our perception and this is even where like you know I used to be like an efficiency junkie and so when I was in med school I was going to be like you stepen and I was going to be super efficient I was going to be super successful so I was like listening to a podcast in the morning about self-help I was going to listen to lectures on my way to the

subway I was going to read on the way on the subway I was going to listen to a lecture on my way to the classroom pay attention in the classroom then do some questions like some test questions whatever so my mind was constantly outside of me social media makes this even worse because now we're doom scrolling we're looking at what other people are doing so we are starting to exist outside of ourselves once we exist outside of ourselves all of our steem comes from the outside world cuz that's where we're spending our time so what's

happening is as we become more externalized we are becoming insecure because where does confidence really come from it doesn't come from inside this is a big mistake a lot of people uh don't realize which is if you do really well and you don't believe in yourself you don't become secure a lot of people think that becoming secure is about being successful that's not the case if you're really successful you don't end up with security you end up with imp imposter syndrome so I went to tfts for medical school and I did my residency training at

Harvard and what I saw is that the more successful you become that increases the rate of impostor syndrome there's way more impostor syndrome at Harvard than there is at the University of Texas there's way more impostor syndrome at a place like Goldman Sachs than there is at Bank of America so lots of success actually creates this idea that I don't really know if I can do this everyone else is so much better than me so we see actually lots of success leads to imposter syndrome confidence doesn't come from success it comes from surviving failure it's

also far more internal so it's not something that anyone else gives you it's like when you believe in yourself then you're confident and then the beautiful thing is that once you believe in yourself then other people can think whatever they want to about you the way that you receive criticism if you if you criticize an egotistical person they will argue with you and convince you that you're wrong and call you stupid whereas if you're confident someone says hey you're an idiot I can say Okay help me understand why like I could be an idiot help

me understand right so this is where what social media is doing is externalizing our perceptions building our ego we're so focused on the Judgment of other people I see the amount of body like subtle lowlevel body dysmorphia that I see in young women is skyrocketing and I have a buddy who's a plastic surgeon at Yale and you know he's just stunned by you you have you have now young women in their 25 26 27 who are getting plastic surgery like on a yearly basis like small amounts of Botox injections or lip fillers or like whatever

men too men too so that's also what the other great equality thing we're seeing is body dysmorphia has a meteoric rise within men this is another situation where it used to be primarily a female diagnosis that's evening out real quick so social media is making us focused on our external appearance we lose our connection to our our elves and then once we lose our connection to ourselves we lose the capacity to gain confidence and how does this then result in loneliness on a societal level so many different things so the first reason it makes us

lonely so this is I've also seen the highest level of being around people and being lonely so I see so many people who have jobs even have girlfriends boyfriends have friends and they feel so incredibly lonely so what happens when we are externally focused right so if I if I'm lonely like I need to put myself out there so what I'm going to do is transform myself and this is where a lot of it's so interesting because a lot of the guidance we give people helps in some way but actually worsens the problem so if

I'm lonely 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 i' I've become something that I can be proud of 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 you know 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 right see now you're 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 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 and that creates a fundamental loneliness even though you can be dating it's so interesting because I I'll work with influencers like we have a Creator coaching program and like it's so hard for influencers to date because who is falling are you falling in love with the influencer are you falling in love with Diary of a CEO host or are you falling in love with Steven right is it Dr K or is it Olo so this is what's really paradoxical is that we think that

forming all of these connections will help our loneliness where often times it creates the opposite effect where now what they love is a version of me not the real me and now the problem is they love this polished version what happens if I show them the ugly version they won't accept me I can never show it to them this is what I noticed in my own life I noticed that before 25 I was a total failure with women and before 25 the real defining characteristic of that chapter of my life was all the external stuff

like the Louis Vuitton bag the champagne bottles in the nightclub they're really trying really really hard to convince them and then after 25 I had much more success with women and that chapter of my life can be characterized by knowing who I was and being CAU with it all the stuff seemed to fall away like all the external stuff seemed to fall away and for some reason cuz I I talked to my friends um who are struggling with dating at the moment about this just see if it can help them in any way the chapter

of my life where I was reading those those um books the like pickup Artistry books and I was trying really hard was my most unsuccessful but the phase after where I stopped chasing so much um it the only way I can describe it is there's like a thousand little micro things in me that changed whether it's my posture the way I I don't know what it was but for me it's that season of insecurity and then the season of confidence and I'm just throwing that out there because um it kind of overlaps with what you

were saying about the influencers and when you're trying too hard you're actually struggling the most today and um and if you see this in your practice now hold on a second so let's define success so when you were doing Louis Vuitton bags and pre25 were you going on dates I was going to the club every like two times AEK a week to with like and ordering as much champagne as I could to get people to come to my table and like to impress the girls that were at my table and stuff did it work well

all the girls that I wanted never wanted me back so the like four girls that I really pursued I could name them but I probably shouldn't um I could never get them to be in a relationship with me like they wouldn't it would I would have like shortterm success and then they would never there we go so this is really important right so this goes back to what we were saying short-term success is thalamic right so that's sensory perception so you could never get into a relationship so this is like perfect right so let's understand

so champagne will get you to come to get them to come to the table oh who's this yeah bring them back to the apartment right and you can get somewhere but think about where you were emotionally and where they were emotionally you were like oh please please please right and they're that's not where they are emotionally so it's doomed to failure yeah so like I was just using that CU it's like a prime prime example of and then what happens is your conf so you're like meeting them where they're at you're a little bit confident

hopefully they're a little bit confident you form a connection and just doing a little bit of math it sounds like you've been dating your current girlfriend for a couple years now it sounds like it didn't take long from you being confident to like find someone that you've been with exactly I've been with her for almost six years yeah yeah like like snap it's like so easy once you do it right you kind of get locked down real quick right and same thing happened with me so what a couple of things so first is like this

just goes back to once again we can take your test case with the Neuroscience of how to fall in love and it maps on and like that's the beauty of science is that it's true now I even forget uh so you were talking about security and insecurity so now you you said something beautiful which is like a thousand different microcosm microcosmic things in here right like microscopic little tiny little things that you do within you I say that because when I read the book on how to pick up women it would give you these little

games these little tricks you could do and even if I did those even if I acted there was still something going on which meant these women didn't want to be with me like in a relationship I could I could pull quote unquote pull them I could get them on you know short term but I couldn't get them to to be with me yeah right so so and I I think that's because human beings are incredibly empathic so what you feel on the inside is what other people resonate with so even if we look at this

podcast why is this podcast so successful Stephen it's because you are AU IC it's because you're genuinely interested in the moment that you become genuinely interested everyone in the audience is going to become genuinely interested so this is what's really crazy that a lot of people don't understand everyone is trying to manipulate other human beings into doing what you want I want this person to fall in love with me if you want to be a leader if you want other people to be with you the most important thing is authenticity there are studies about this

that if you look at like how people in in the workplace rank leadership authenticity is at the top of the list so authenticity and the ability to navigate negative challenges these are the two most important things to like be a leader if you look at studies of psychology so when you're talking about these thousand microscopic things that you do that's exactly what I do in my work right it's helping people it's not solving the problem outside of you it's solving the problem in here and once you know how the instrument Works people will flock to

you this is what Charisma actually is charisma is like authenticity and the confidence to face hard times if you have these two things when you walk into a room people will like stop what they're doing and just like look at you it it changes the way that you conduct yourself right so we even know that there's this this discipline called psychon neuroimmunology when you believe something in your mind it affects your brain when it affects your brain it affects your whole immune system it affects your physiology and other people pick up on that so you

have to solve internally first like the more internally solved you are like like yeah it's so [ __ ] true and I say this as well from a position of um both leadership but also being a founder of companies who appoints leaders and if I think back over the last 10 years every single leader that I've appointed as CEO or something in the sea Suite who has then struggled was not being themselves absolutely and I just and it's so three cases in my brain right now of leaders who I appointed over the last 10 years

in these companies and three all three three of them failed and if I can if I could articulate exactly why they failed it was because they were trying to be what they thought a leader was and they weren't being themselves and people can see it like the thing I said about the Thousand little micro Expressions that you can't control that just show up invisibly when you are when you feel a certain way inside that's exactly what those three leaders that come to mind didn't understand was I watching them do the presentation to the team was

thinking God that person's not being themsel and they're trying to be a leader and if I know it I bet everyone else this bloody room can feel it too and then I've seen the opposite as well um where leaders have been tremendously successful and you just know that this person that I'm experiencing right now is who they are so that's the Crux of it right so I think that the challenge right now is everyone is looking to become something that they're not as opposed to really understanding who you are the good and the bad easier

said than done though isn't it but in the world we live in well that's just well that's because we don't know how to do it I mean until now we don't know how to do it properly how do how do we do it so I think there are a couple of core things that we have to start doing so the first is that you have to become less alexithymic so Alexia I don't know if I don't remember if we've talked about this before but Alexia is colorblindness to your internal emotional state so you have to

know what you are feeling basically at all times our emotions are a primary source of motivation so and our emotions will also like just because we are numb to our emotions doesn't mean that our Emotions Don't act so we see this a lot with technology where technology suppresses your internal emotional state you don't know what you're feeling but like this is crazy like just because you don't you're not aware of your anxiety doesn't mean that like it's not like the your anxiety portion of your brain shuts off and you'll if you're if you're worried about

this there are a couple of really interesting signs so one thing that's a really interesting sign of suppressed emotion is what happens when nothing else is going on so a lot of a lot of us are addicted to this external world I need to be Doom scrolling I need to be doing social media I need to be productive I need to be listening to a podcast we can't sit with ourselves so if you when you go to bed at night can you just fall asleep naturally or what happens a lot is suppressed emotions start to

come out when we sleep and this is the big problem is the more technology we use that we get into this weird situation where another good place that emotions come is during dreams so we do a lot of our emotional processing when we sleep now the big problem that we're seeing nowadays this is kind of a random aside is that normally the human being processes emotions throughout the day for about 16 hours and then whatever is left over at night gets processed while we sleep we have dreams and things like that now what's happening is

we do zero emotional processing through the day and so our brain can't really make any emotional progress because it has all this work that's been built stop we've been suppressing emotions suppressing emotions suppressing emotions and in my case when I was like addicted to video games I had to play until the state of absolute exhaustion because if I went to bed all of these thoughts will come up I saw this hilarious meme about you know we have during the day we're sitting upright so all of our anxiety is at the bottom of our feet and

when we lay down like a liquid it enters our brain so if you're someone who has like a lot of you know negative emotion when you go to bed at night that is a signal that you are suppressing too much emotion during the day okay so you're talking about me to some degree here now I wouldn't ever categorize the emotion I experienced at night as negative always sometimes it is a little bit negative but it's typically not negative it's just loud so what I end up doing is I end up watching YouTube until I fall

asleep or watching some serial killer thing until I fall asleep and it's and my partner she's the opposite you know she's a bit of Yogi like she can just if she's on the pillow for three minutes she is brilliant right she's snoring I'm so jealous of it yeah and so what you need to do is so if if you have loud emotion so what's an example if it's not negative but it's loud I love the way you said that by the way it's just it's me re like thinking about something in the company or one

of the businesses and going okay this is the solution now I finally figured out the solution and I need to write this memo and I need to blah blah blah blah blah yeah so I think that this is makes a lot of sense so whatever is built up throughout the day whenever your brain gets idle time it will process so this is also something that I think a lot of people don't realize we've stopped harnessing the power of our subconscious mind so if you look at Mo we're all like logical right we're like let's do

analysis let's do this if you really look at the source of human like Brilliance it's never logical so logic is something that we use to feed our subconscious mind and our unconscious mind data and then our unconscious mind plays around with it and then actually creates a motivational change so when I I work with people who are addicted to substances or you know I I worked with someone recently who had a relationship that wasn't going on very well right and so what what happens is we're like I don't know what to do should I break

up should I not break up you don't know what the answer is and then what happens is you're like okay let me break up with them and then you haven't really worked through it so when you break up with them now I feel alone oh maybe they'll take me back I'm going to text them anyway and then we see this ping ponging so also if you're ping ponging in life your unconscious mind is not functioning the way that it's supposed to if you think about a healthy breakup what happens is you wake up one your

day and you're like enough is enough I'm done think about that for a second where does that resolve come from why didn't you wake up with it the day before or the week before or the month before I see this a lot in addiction Psychiatry too where one day like after 14 years of alcohol addiction enough is enough and I'm done and that's what happens with most people they'll do it cold turkey like at some random time but what's going on is there's a lot of unconscious work that your brain is doing that then creates

resolve and what we're starting to do is we're not allowing our brains to do that because we're so occupied in the external world we don't experience our emotions and if we don't process our emotions during the daytime then at night which is where the mo majority of learning and memory take place that's when we have consolidation of memory but if you're if you've like you know have a bunch of piled up emotions your brain can't learn from your mistakes so what we really need to do is be more aware of our emotions during the day

and like do some amount of emotional processing during the day that'll unlock or free your brain up to do all of this other stuff at night how great question so I think um for this is where we it gets kind of technical so the first thing that I would say for men especially is that we experience a lot more emotion in our bodies than is generally Psy psychiatrically like accepted we're seeing some changes of this so one really good example of this about 10 years ago um so I'm kind of interested in evidence-based complimentary and

alternative medicine so someone that I met said hey have you ever heard of tapping and I was like what is this and it's something called the emotional Freedom technique and what they told me is that if someone has trauma you can tap on them you can become a Tapper and there's a particular way to do it then you tap on certain parts of their body and it releases the trauma so I was like what BS is this this sounds like complete BS now over the last decade there have been several studies on it there was

recently a met analysis that came out that showed that tapping is actually pretty effective for like treating trauma and I was like what the hell is this this is wild right so even if we don't understand what the mechanism is you can study whether people's trauma gets better or not but I think this is just one of the many things that we've learned about emotions existing within the body this is also a big problem that I see right now in our mental health system is the majority of therapists have no training in the physical body

but if we think about like you know anger releases adrenaline affects blood pressure affects heart rate affects gut peristalsis so a lot of our emotions are physical so the first thing that you've got to do if you're a dude and you don't understand what you're feeling is like pay attention to your physical body so do you feel tension do you feel a tightness in the chest and we men will actually use very good emotional language as long as it relates to being physical so I'll tell you Steven man this girl called me and it was

like she kicked me in the nuts now what does that mean what is that emotionally like I don't know you don't know but we both know what we're talking about we know what it's like oh my God dude I know it sucks dude it sucks when they kick you in the nuts oh my god dude it was like a punch to the gut oh my god dude like you know when when we have issues of lack of self-esteem it's like small penises right I feel like my penis is small it's like AEM masculate like all

of these negative emotions we use physicality we use the language of physicality second thing that you should do is is use your physical body so there's there's all kinds of things that you can do so I I think deep breathing is a really fantastic thing that you can do um exercise is really great I mean there are tons of people that I've worked with who were like therapy didn't work for me but after a breakup lift bro like we hear this advice and we in the medical community has have been so arrogant because we've said

oh no you should go to talk therapy like you're wrong lifting didn't work for you what you should do is go to talk therapy that's not the case when when this is working for people we should pay attention to it and the more that we learn about science the more we should tap into our body so the first thing that I would say is anytime you're feeling uncomfortable where is that physical discomfort there's actually a really fascinating study that has mapped uh s each emotion up to 100 emotions to different part like different schemas in

the body so anger is like in the chest um sadness is like in the chest and in the stomach uh you know worry is in the brain and in the stomach so like you can actually map out like each emotion to a physical sensation the cool thing that once you detect the emotion if you adjust that physical sensation you will mentally get better there's a really great example of this if you clench your right fist you will feel angry and if you clench your left fist what do you feel when you clench your left fist

let's see um it's like I don't know feel it feels a bit like a release I don't know yeah so it's really fascinating so there's actually studies on this that show that clenching your right fist activates your left hemisphere spere and will lead to anger clenching your sorry clenching your right fist clenching your left fist will actually calm you down can sometimes lead to like sadness but there even like all kinds of because everything in the body is reciprocal everything is like a circuit so you can activate it in one way like your mind affects

your body and your body affects your mind even if your your um your dominant hand is your left hand we don't know okay so I think these are usually done on right-handed people there may be some variance but the key thing still remains that um you know there's one technique that I'll do with patients in my office when they're about to have a panic attack if we're doing like some deep deep trauma stuff and they're getting physiologically activated I will tell them to run as fast as they can for 60 seconds so when you run

really really fast for 60 seconds like exercise your heart out like someone is chasing you like you're being chased by a monster so what happens is that when we have a very very high activation of our sympathetic nervous system our fight ORF flight response it automatically kicks in the parasympathetic nervous system when we're done so when someone is stuck in an anxiety state and that's like a feeding cycle so I feel anxious now my heart rate is elevated now adrenaline gets released adrenaline travels to my brain and makes me feel more anxious I have more

anxious thoughts so this becomes a cycle how do you break the cycle you actually activate the sympathetic nervous system so hard that the body has to kick in with the parasympathetic nerves which must be quite hard because when people are struggling they typically have lower motivation right yeah they're getting to the gyms harder so that's why so you can do this 60-second run like literally I used to have an office that was on Commonwealth Avenue and I would walk outside with my patients and we would run as fast as we can or do as many

push-ups as you can interesting so the really crazy thing is that when we try to control our emotions by calming ourselves down like if you tell someone who's pissed hey calm down what happens they don't get calm yeah not at all triggers them right so you need to do the opposite sometimes you need to lean into whatever emotion you're feeling activate your physiology and it'll calm your emotions down I haven't read the book but I loved the title of the book The Body holds the score and I watched a summary of that book and one

of the things it talks about in the book is the role of yoga as one of the things that really helps people with certain mental health predicaments and I was wondering if that sort of overlaps with what you're saying here I I don't do yoga but a lot of people that do almost see it as a form of therapy um and it seems that there's been lots of research on yoga as a as a way to help with our stress our mental health with depression anxiety and all of these kinds of things um what's your

thoughts on yoga I think it's great so I was you know I I was a very serious uh student of yoga for about seven years um I've recently reinvigorated my yogic practice I think uh yoga is absolutely transformative for trauma um I think it can achieve Health outcomes that we're not really fully aware of and the simple reason for that is you have to look at the studies on yoga so usually when we do a scientific study we have to we we want to be like very careful from a scientific protocol standpoint so we're going

to take two groups of people 100 200 people so group number one is 100 group number two is 100 we're going to teach a 100 people yoga and then we're going to measure what happens after 12 weeks the other 100 people are going to do something like exercise so the key thing that we have to understand about studies on yoga is we're taking novices and we're teaching them yoga there's still novices at the end of the study and we see some health benefits there are very few studies on yogis right there are a lot of

studies on yoga but a yogi is very different from yoga so when you get when you become an expert in yoga so I I do this work myself and you know I teach my patients this kind of stuff so you learn a lot about the way that your mind functions I think there are a lot of correlations with CBT but uh you know like yoga will teach us for example about our ego and so how do you know if your mind is malfunctioning or not so you know like you were saying before when we were

talking you mentioned how do I know if I'm wrong or my partner is wrong right how do you know if your mind is functioning properly one of the biggest problems in the world today is that your mind comes up with conclusions how do you know if your conclusion is right or wrong sometimes it's right sometimes it's wrong and we just assume that there's no way of knowing the difference that's not true so if your mind is operating in a pure way that's free from cognitive bias which we also know scientifically then your mind will come

up with the right conclusions so the question is how do we remove cognitive bias from the mind that's what the discipline of yoga teaches us so two things to consider if you want to know whether your mind is thinking clearly or not first of all what emotions are you feeling and if you say I'm logical right now I don't feel any emotion that is factually incorrect there is no point 24 hour hours a day 365 days of the year blood is Flowing to your the emotional circuits of your brain you are never not feeling any

emotion so the first thing we need to do is understand yoga teaches us this what is the emotional impact of our thoughts the second big thing is what is the ego saying so if your ego is active your ego will create cognitive biases I feel insecure so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do some mental gymnastics to put someone else down and Elevate myself now what you're doing is mental gymnastic you're adding a cognitive bias to help yourself feel better so yoga from a physiologic level will calm down our balance our nervous

system um you know it can do things like change our respiratory rate about 18 minutes of yogic practice is what it takes to shut down cortisol production in our brain so we know that cortisol will then affect all kinds of things so Yoga Works on the physiologic level it absolutely trains us mentally right so like yoga I think is like the most robust system of like mental training that exists in the world so how do your mind how do you control your desires how do you control your perceptions um all that kind of stuff there's

a lot of good trauma healing that can happen in yoga which has to do with a slightly different concept so I think yoga is incredibly useful and Incredibly powerful trauma healing I am I was watching something you talk when you were talking about how people who have experienced trauma almost operate in defense in their lives and earlier on we were saying that you know people have these stories they've told themselves I'm lazy I'm this I'm that but when I heard you talk um so articulately about how trauma makes us play Life in defense it made

me understand maybe a lot of people that I know in my life that aren't overtly motivated and seem to struggle with uh things like discipline what have we got to understand about the nature of trauma and the impact it has on us as it relates to our ability to show up and Achieve our goals beautiful question so this was like one of the things that when I discovered this it was transformative for me and transformative for my patients so see people who there are two kinds of people in life there are people who like have

plans and goals and work towards those goals they're like I'm going to get up today and I'm going to like Advance towards my goals I want to accomplish this in life I'm going to get better at this and then there are the rest of us who are like I don't know how these people do it like I get up today and I struggle I use a lot of willpower I try to create habits you know I'm trying to be like these people who are were productive but my default state if you let me do what

I want to do I'm going to do nothing now we we look at this and we're like how does this work are these people fundamentally different so trauma is the big difference here so let's understand when we're developing as children if we grow up in a traumatic environment what will happen is there's actually something called the loss of the future Dimension so I'll give you like an example of this right so let's say I go to my parents and I say hey I'd like to have a birthday party can I invite my friends over and

then parents say sure next day parents are drunk they get mad at me they're like no birthday party so what will happen if you look at traumatic upbringing is that children can't plan for the future any kind of future that any kind of kind of autonomy that they express uh an abusive parent will shut it down like you know this is highly controlling parents too we see this so much in like Asian and South Asian cultures where parents are like you got to do this and you got to do this no drugs no dating going

to study you're going to learn piano so we're actually doing this is like we see so many gifted kids that stall later in life because in these upbringings we remove the the ability for autonomy when a child tries to express themselves we shut it down the second thing that happens is trauma is about surviving today so I was working with a patient who you know would be able to tell within the first 60 seconds to 5 minutes when their dad got home whether they were going to get beaten today and so what people when people

grow up in traumatic environments and it doesn't have to be physical abuse it can be highly controlling it can be even like children who are parentified is kind of traumatic where you have a a a parent who's very chronically ill and is depending on the kid to take care of everything that's traumatic too because then what happens is your brain looks at your day and there's no point in planning for tomorrow all of your brain's resources are about surviving today how do I not get abused how do I make sure that my parents don't notice

me children who grow up in traumatic environments learn to be invisible and so then something very important happens in the brain where it stops planning for the future because any plan for the future can change depending on whether your parent is drunk or not and then if I was going to have a birthday party I told all my friends and I got cancelled now that hurts so much so what what happens when we get traumatized is we go into survival mode we go into protective mode and this is even mirrored like physiologically where we have

two states of the body we have our catabolic state where we're breaking things down we're trying to survive the moment and we have our anabolic State when when we are building for the future so when I encounter a tiger and I get a burst of cortisol cortisol breaks down my muscle tissue to provide me with enough energy to survive we are sacrificing the future to plan to survive the present and that happens on a physiological level it happens on a mental level so when you grow up in a traumatic environment where you are punished for

thinking about the future you can't plan for anything because your home environment is so chaotic there's no rules no organization and you're focused on Survival that becomes baked in and what happens when these people grow up is that they are bound by external stimuli if there is some kind of pressure from the external environment then I can act but I cannot derive internal sense of motivation at all because now that there's an external deadline I have to survive that deadline so they go into this survival mode instead of this like being able to look into

the future mode and it's it's really crippling because it's fundamentally like the part of their brain that plans for the future has been disabled permanently no that can be Reed it's just been disabled in this way right so like that's your default State then what we have to do is like undo that so does that mean that parents who give their children more autonomy when they're younger typically are better at attacking life and parents who stifle their kids autonomy end up playing in goal absolutely so so we can look at something called authoritative ver versus

authoritarian parenting okay so there are two kinds of parenting that people can do one is where I'm going to support my kid but I'm going to give them autonomy I'm going to give them structure and guard rails but they can operate to a certain degree independently that leads to the best outcomes versus parents who are highly controlling parents who are highly controlling their kids have worse outcomes in life so even if they're successful in some way right and I was even on this track where like when I was 9 years old like my dad told

me me and my brother he's like one of y'all is going to be a lawyer one of y'all is going to be a doctor like there was no question about it I had to become a doctor and then my brother was older he went to law school so I was like I have to I have to go to med school and so what what happened is I struggled a lot with autonomy when I was in college and failed out and all that kind of stuff and I work with so many people like in residency I

I was running this program where I did like you know Wellness for medical residents surgical residents emergency room residents and what I saw is that a lot of these people have invested a lot of this time into this dream but they're not happy so now they're kind of just like living on autopilot and they don't like know what to do about it they're unhappy but now you feel stuck you've committed to this path so how do we turn ourselves around if we are one of those people who find ourselves playing in goal in life how

do we become an attacker how do we become autonomous and a selfstarter like you described is there a a system a way a process yeah so I I think um so it's complicated but I think we know there are a couple of different steps that are involved so the first is you have to be safe so if you're in a position of life where you are constantly stressed out it shuts off your capacity for neuroplasticity so the first thing that I recommend to people is like you know if you're in a toxic relationship if you're

in an abusive home do whatever you can to create some pocket of safety in your life because the growth has to come from there so it's like super basic stuff second thing that we have to do is learn how to regulate our emotions so if we don't know first of all what we're feeling then our emotions will act in ways that are very self-sabotaging so we have to we have to decompress our negative emotion because otherwise the negative emotion will fuel things like addiction so if I don't if I don't have a healthy way of

processing my emotion my brain because it's trying to survive will start drinking alcohol because that's the only thing that works so we have to develop some degree of emotional regulation now this is the really cool thing so if you look at so Stephen let's talk about you for a second is that okay no cheing go so you're are you a survivalist or you like looking forward I'm looking forward how does that work for you how are you able to look forward like what what's your inner experience I've always looked forward I've always had to look

forward I've not really had a choice in life I don't think I think I was my parents were so absent that it created an environment where I didn't have a choice it's like if you wanted lunch money it's it's not going to appear out of anywhere if you want to eat today it's not going to appear parents aren't home so you have to go figure stuff out I had the same external pressures of trying to fit in at school or all these pressures that anyone has but I had an absence of um dictation so I

had to figure it out and run experiments so as an adult I'm still doing that that now okay that frightens me so um so my guess is that if you try to sit still you start to panic oh I really struggle with Stillness okay yeah so you have a different problem the answer I was did you find out I was a psychopath or something what have you figured out no I mean so you can't be still right so so so this is trauma like I mean I can't diagnose you with anything but I want you

this is actually a great example because your productivity is is running away from something does that make sense yeah 100% right it's crazy like you're not running towards something you're not building something I mean you're practically you're building something you're building something great and I see this so much it's a concept that I call toxic fuel right where're like but you're like oh my God unless I build something cuz you're panicked like if I if I don't do it for myself no one will do it for me that's [ __ ] sad bro is it

yes right so like like we're talking about having kids one day like do you want your kid to be able to count on you or do you want them to grow up in an environment where like they can't count on anyone they have to do if they want lunch money they have to go out and get it I would rather them be able to count on me and our parents you're getting emotional yeah why um are you getting emotional no because I'm so I'm so used to it I'm so accustomed to it for me for

me there's no when you say it's sad I'm like really it's just my life it was my life so do you know what I mean now this is a great I'm getting emotional because you're getting emotional what do you mean so just because you don't feel it doesn't mean that it isn't activating okay right so I know you don't this is normal for me it's sad and you're numb right so once again you've been exposed to this so many times but like you think like that's why like how do I know am I some psychic

where I know that okay if you try to sit still you're going to panic like no like I'm getting that from you does that make sense yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah some of it's logical but like like you know you you say I'm looking forward just the way that you said it implies for me like what is going on in your mind there's a desperation to your forward momentum yes right that's not good I know right and but here's the problem is you love it you love it because if you didn't have it where would

you be 100% I'm I completely agree with everything you're saying you're not answering the question oh you want you want me to answer the question where would I be no I want you to think about why it's hard for you to answer the question I didn't even hear the question okay um where would I be that's interesting in and of itself yeah I didn't even know it was a question so where would I be if I didn't have it I don't I I don't know and I think about this a lot I think about this

all the time because you sometimes you can like fantasize about living a completely different life and I put myself there on the on the beach or in barley or something and I'm and I just go like that I would be so irritated like irritated not as in like annoyed irritated as in as you said like not being able to sit still I would be so like I'd end up building a Hut or I'd end up like you know yes I like when I have that fantasy of like run away from my life and start from

zero on a beach somewhere I go I'll just find myself back here again because I'll do something on the Hut which will I'll build a sky grave on the hut or something this is trauma is not really the right word but it is kind of the right word so this is what I mean so you are controlled by these impulses within you I would say yes it's crazy right I always liken it to being driven and dragged and I go I think I'm dragged a little bit yeah and I love your phrase toxic fuel right

right so so you're you're all of your growth and this is what happens is this is what why men get so stuck in this cycle because that's the only way we know how to motivate ourselves right it is running away from the panic using the fear and and maybe this is a bit much but I I I think like you know I would bet money that there are there was a time in your life where you were a no one and you were like [ __ ] this never again and you were like I'm going

to I'm going to run away like I'm never going to do this again it was so incredibly painful and then that's what fuels you and if you stop I would bet money that the Panic that you feel is very is connected to that moment in your life when you're like never again who knows yes okay no yeah I mean I it's it's funny because I think I was thinking as you said it and I was I was reflecting on this day when I was younger and I walked to this park it was late at night

and this kid called Sam he he started calling me the nword and in that moment you've got I just I don't know why I I always think of this moment but you've got this real disconnection cuz I'm the only black there anyway this is like Devon in 1990 whatever um and I I thought we were so different our family was so different anyway and just that moment of feeling totally disconnected because you're you don't look like anyone else you don't sound like anyone else you you're curly hair you're different color skin and that just real

sense of disconnection and I think that kind of sort of permeated a lot of my early upbringing was this shame this insecurity this disconnection and then you compound that with your parents being aware and so when I was talk about my parents not being in the house much when I was like when I was younger I still had this disconnection and this shame but now I had this big void of freedom to do something about it which meant I could start a business I could sell some stuff and if I sell some stuff I can

buy some shoes and the shoes are going to make me fit in because everyone else has those shoes so it was this kind of spiral and as you get older I become I can be be aware of it all I want it doesn't mean it's going to help necessarily because there's a difference obviously as you know from being aware of something and then being able to take control of the thing no there isn't this is how we started the conversation no there's not a difference oh is there not I thought was a logical process hold

on hold on great so I'm not can I ask can we go a little bit 100% so you're so interesting right so you felt ashamed you felt small yeah you felt like you didn't have anyone's respect right and so you've done something beautiful when someone looks at you what do they see now the opposite yes tell me what do they what does someone see now when they look at me probably they see um confidence they probably see someone who's quite secure in themselves absolutely right so you have a very it's subtle man we're going to

get so subtle it may not make sense so there's so many layers of projecting confidence and you've tapped into an authentic confidence there's even a subtle thing because you dress very carefully right you don't dress in a way that normal people who are trying to impress people dress you want to be authentically impressive does that make sense you're not going to you're not going to take any shortcuts to being impressive you're going to be truly impressive does that make sense yeah I guess yeah but here's the subtle thing it's still it's still there the Panic

is still there you know why because you still give a [ __ ] about being impressive mhm right it's authentic impressive Rive sure enough but it's still important to be impressive and as long as that thing is there like the panic and that that's all the same thing MH it's 100% true and I I had an author on my podcast who wrote a book called status and that's when I had this like brain wobble in my head because you know I said I used to wear Louis Vuitton before I was 25 I thought that's when

I gave up giving a [ __ ] about like status and impression and then he was like no if you think about billionaires they just end up playing a different status game the logos get smaller because now Louis Vuitton would make me look like an like an idiot it would actually be it would actually lower your status they just they start playing games about boats like how big is my boat but they're still playing the same game and when he said that I thought you [ __ ] hell of course I'm still playing the same

old games in different ways yeah yeah so so I think you there's a lot of authenticity and goodness here so this is exactly how trauma Works where like we build something that is good here's the key thing to understand that yoga teaches us no amount of fixing your life will make that kid go away right so like when I work with people who are I see you smiling so like when I work with people who've been traumatized they will build amazing lives but they still carry that kid with them and the kid will come out

at times there'll be particular times where if I'm a little bit like if I like treat you in the wrong way like you'll notice that you feel like that kid again when you're Idol you feel like that kid again so that psychological those that neuronal wiring is there so you can build all this wonderful stuff and there's authenticity it's not like you're faking it this is a really common misconception are you faking no you're genuinely confident you're genuinely authentic you can't fake it and get to where you are and at the same time the wounds

that we experience leave scars yeah 100% And the real way to heal is to go back to that moment and like deal with that kid right you have to dismantle the world viw that you have which is how you heal trauma is when we get traumatized we adapt in order to come out of this situation I need to learn this particular thing so some kids that I've worked with adapt by becoming invisible I that's what I did I got bullied a lot so what do I do I learn how to be invisible some people adapt

by being successful so if I'm successful it's an antidote to my shame I don't have to be ashamed anymore if I'm successful but that old injury is still there yeah and this is why it's so complex because what you've just said is so unbelievably true but it's where the misconception happens because I don't go home and I'm not like insecure or I'm not unconfident like I'm I think like when I'm on my own I'm very very okay with Who I Am with myself I'm very very like I feel like the guy that you experience on

camera is very close to who I am when I'm in the hotel room alone at night however it doesn't mean that I still don't have those like childhood bruises and that they can't be pressed by various things and so it's this sort of this s because you know when we say these words like insecurity and shame you think you'd think that like I walk into the The Green Room over there and I'm like oh that's not it's not my life but when I where I know that there's still something there is I go how that

why are you still driving like this exactly when you are so well aware that it will not lead to any more happiness in any in any context like I'm so logically aware that becoming more will not have any impact on the things that matter yet here I am still building businesses and you know and this is the constant thing I I battle with so I go okay well there must be a force that you're consciously unaware of that's making you go go on and go on exactly yeah right so let's understand a couple things beautiful

beautiful beautiful Stephen beautiful so a couple of things to understand we think about healing as a as one Spectrum right so if I'm at negative 100 I can't also be at positive 100 those two things cancel out that's not how it works so if I give you a glass of water and then I piss in it and then I add sugar it doesn't remove the piss these are both independent things this is what tends to happen this is what we don't understand about trauma you removing the piss requires removing the piss no amount of sugar

will take it out of the drink okay so no amount of this is mistake number one no amount of building something good will remove something bad okay so healing and it's also like you know if I break a leg no amount of bench press will heal my leg like I can build as much as I want to I can fix my hair I can brush my teeth but the Le is broken the leg is broken same is true of the mind okay second thing is what happens is we have like our Consciousness is divided now

we're going to get kind of Technical and off the rails so we have all of these like dormant pieces of our Consciousness that activate in certain situations and all you have to do is pay attention to yourself in a 5minute period and you'll see this so when I walk into a bathroom that I've never used before then I start thinking about okay where's the flush where's the toilet how do I use this toilet you know so like I'll activate dormant information all the time so if someone asks me what's you know the quadratic equation that

information is there and dormant in my mind and it gets activated so one of the biggest mistakes we make about healing is we look at what is active in our mind 90% of the time and we assume that the injury is no longer there that's not the case does that make sense 100% right so the the injury just goes dormant then there are certain things that happen that can trigger that injury that's what we call triggers right so if I'm traumatized if we look at like PTSD and I'm I've been traumatized by you know a

a bomb going off literally my brain has certain circuits that scans my perceptual environment and decides what to activate so there are ways Stillness makes you feel small and [ __ ] you if you're ever going to be small again never again never again never again I would bet money that if you sit by yourself and you're not occupied right that's why you have to watch crime shows because if you don't watch crime shows you're going to be still and if you're still that's unacceptable okay so dormant things have to be healed where they belong

you don't need to worry by the way it's in your karma it's going to get healed and it's coming yeah I was laughing cuz it's so true yeah just laughing at the fact that I when I go to Bary I end up that's like where I end up writing a book and I'm like and and people would kill for that right so many people out there are like oh man I would love to be you no you guys don't want to be stepen I know you think you do this is the crazy thing we each

as human beings have our own journey and are you privileged and should you be grateful and should people aspire to be you absolutely but they don't want to be you like your own problems are enough they don't need yours too amen so now the question is how do we heal so I think the problem is like no amount of fixing things over there is going to go back to this and this is where I we can look at the science of of of healing trauma so here are the steps first thing is safety so that

we can get neuroplasticity second thing is emotional awareness and emotional regulation and this allows us for number three which is really important which is identity so if we look at our human sense of identity how do you develop an identity so if I were to ask you in three senten is Steven who are you my identity yeah tell me who who's stepen to myself or just to the world or is that the same tell me about who's Stephen I I'm an entrepreneur I am a I guess I'm a podcaster now um and I am going

to say a Manchester United fan okay so I think those are three features right so I've I've read your bio so the other thing that you tend to do in your bio is there's a narrative right you were a College Dropout yeah um you started a company yeah right you talked about this Louis Vuitton bag phase and then there's the post Louis Vuitton bag phase yeah and even before we had this podcast you were talking to me about the phases of your life yeah so identity re requires a timeline okay now the interesting thing is

if we look at the formative moments of your life they all have emotion so this is what's really important if you have an identity that is bad in any way you can never change that identity without emotions so what what happen so my like when I tell my story it's like I was a kid 9 years old I got put on these expectations dropped out of college went to become a monk went to medical school became a doctor now I started this whole helping random people on the internet thing so each of those were emotional

experiences so who we are is a narrative of our most emotional experiences and we see this in all of our like superhero movies right Batman had this tragic experience where his parents were shot by The Joker and then he became something right there all all these moments these powerful emotional moments so if your emotions are dulled by drugs by technology by pornography by watching serial killer shows you will never change who you are it is impossible the Neuroscience of your identity development requires emotional experience okay so with trauma that's the next thing that happens once

we have access to emotions then we can become someone else now the problem with trauma is that before we become someone else the beliefs we have about ourselves become our destiny so if I think to myself I'm a loser so I I when I was interviewing for residency I went to an interview somewhere on the west coast and the director of the program called me and at the end of the interview and they're like we don't understand why you're here and I was like what do you mean you don't understand why I'm here and they're

like your application is really good you could end up at any program in the country like why did you pick us and like I was like I picked y'all because I liked the way that your hospital works and I like that the city it's in and I'm super into compliment all like what what do you mean why am I here right but the way that he approached it with a lack of confidence he's like our program sucks and they had some problems at the program at the time so kind of makes sense but this becomes

a self-fulfilling prophecy if I go into a job interview and I feel a lack of confidence if I believe I'm a loser then I'm not going to get the job you used to go to clubs and buy bottles of Champagnes and thought that you were a loser didn't end up where you wanted to go so this is what a lot of people don't understand everyone's focused on productivity but the single most important thing that will determine your future is your sense of who you are and that's not like some oh spiritual get connected with this

is like [ __ ] science right if you believe you are a loser the empathic CS of other people's brains will detect that in you and they will treat you like a loser you carry who you are with you that's why you get into failed relationship number one failed relationship number two failed relationship number three until you changed and when you change your sense of identity changes then your future will change the last thing to do is on a more microscopic level look at these responses within yourself so you asked me at the very beginning

of the podcast and now we're coming full circle how do you start understanding yourself so you look at the drives within yourself right why can't I sit still and this is going to be so hard for you because if I told you this is hilarious if I told you Stephen if you want to heal your trauma you need to go to ball you need to sit on a beach and you need to do nothing you will still turn that into growth and progress because what you'll say is oh this is what Dr K told me

to heal my trauma so now I'm doing even more important work than a podcast for 10 million people on the internet now I'm doing the healing of my trauma which is the goal and you're still running away from yourself there's no way you can run away from it your mind will transform the very thing that you do into the problem and that's what trauma does I'll give you a chance to respond because I've been I'm waiting for the solution Dr K yeah so I mean I in your case I I think it's like sit just

sit and you have to be careful because if your mind turns the sitting into a goal that I have to achieve oh I need to sit and that will be my growth no no [ __ ] goal just sit waste your time what you need to learn how to do is waste your time do nothing sit be with yourself and watch out for that mind the second thing is awareness okay so as you sit you will notice all of these things come up so this is like you wanted to you asked me a question at

the beginning how do you start so what I would say is sit for 5 minutes 15 minutes sometimes we'll tell people to stare at a wall for an hour and just look at what on Earth goes on inside you you will discover that it is a zoo of thoughts feelings emotions drives panics worries distractions your internal environment is such a mess so what we need to do is just kind of calm that stuff down by like just letting it kind of run out of steam so this this is a principle of the mind that if

we in if we feed our mind it'll continue to grow but like what we need to do is just let it run out of steam so just sit and do nothing for a while people don't realize the part of our brain that exerts willpower has something to do with this part of our brain called the anterior singulate cortex the anterior singulate cortex is a piece of where willpower comes from but it is also the part of our brain that monitors conflict so will hour and monitoring a conflict are actually technically the same thing the same

part of the brain activates and if you guys if you pay attention to your own internal experience what you'll realize is anytime you're using willpower there's an internal struggle that you are paying attention to it's like I don't want to order chicken I want to order Fried Chicken so there's a monitoring of the conflict that goes on that's anytime you're exerting willpower there's this thing this way and this thing this way but you are aware of it you can't exert willpower if you're behaving automatically right that's why it's so easy to get lost in Doom

scrolling because you're not even aware of what you're doing before and then four hours have gone by and you're like what what happened you're not aware so this is the crazy thing from a neuroscientific perspective and this is what the yogis will teach as well awareness is willpower awareness is self-control and I've worked with tons of addicts they come up for air and maybe you've done this and maybe people at home have done this you go on this binge and then you come up for air and you're like what have I been doing for a

couple of days what I've been doing for a couple of hours then you gain that awareness again so the more that you are aware in the present moment the more your problems will literally melt away it's like crazy I don't quite know how it works but this is what yoga teaches you that as you were aware as you were aware as you were aware you stop rejecting things you start accepting things you focus on the present all the stuff that everyone talks about is actually rooted in awareness and we live in a society where I

say if I say you don't need habits you don't need willpower you don't need discipline all you need is awareness people will reject me that doesn't mean it isn't true and the more that you explore awareness the more you will realize like I used to think it was like 50/50 I'm now at like 90% of the problem is awareness I know it's weird no but does that because we tend to look for solutions that involve action like you know buy that thing make that list go to that meeting watch that thing it's all about action

action action as a solution to our problems so I was expecting you to tell me that the solution to everything we've discussed here is like the seven-step process of like write this thing down say this thing and you know okay so let's let's understand this okay you work really hard Stephen is it hard to work hard for me yeah no okay so now we have to understand why is it not hard for you to work hard it's why is it not hard for me to work hard because it feels good to work hard absolutely so

your problem see this is the whole problem that everyone makes so Stephen you started a company when uh first one was very young but we won't count that because I didn't register the company so the first one that was registered would have been when I was 18 okay and you've started how many companies or been involved in how many companies 10 10 20 yeah and made like millions and millions of dollars and stuff yeah right started a podcast you've got how many millions of subscribers now um across the platforms maybe 10 million okay cool right

so like this is a lot of work and everyone's like oh my God I want to be like Stephen but the whole thing is it's not hard for you it's hard for you to not do it so this is what I'm saying you don't need to focus on the action it's the internal thing that drives you like a [ __ ] slave that is responsible for your success if someone else wants a fraction of what you have 10% of what you have they don't need to duplicate your actions they need to duplicate what's going on

on the inside this is exactly my point they need your toxic fuel yeah toxic fuel is on the path to happiness right can be yeah I mean cuz you're doing pretty well do you know what though I this is maybe I don't know how this throws a spanner in the works of this but I've never felt unhappy and and I've always struggled when I I say used to say to people and because time is past now it's sometimes hard to know how you felt in the past but I say to people that when I was

18 years old and I had just dropped out a university and I was starting this first business and my parents W speaking to me I was poor and all these things I was shoplifting food I was as happy then as I am now and like when I say that to people I know it sounds like like motivational [ __ ] or something but in that moment I had Forward Motion I was excited about life I thought that I was all everything that in my objective reality was just the stepping stone to becoming and I so

I was so excited I was so happy about life and I feel the same now yeah so despite everything we've discussed um I feel happy when I'm alone I'm happy yeah and I and you know that's um yeah great so so I think that makes a lot of sense or bullshitting but I no no you're not [ __ ] I think I'm double guessing myself no you're not bullshitting so let's understand the subtlety here so the stages of unhappiness to happiness there's unhappy in all situations unhappy in some situations happy in some situations happy in

most situations and then MOA Enlightenment MTI is happiness in all situations happiness that is completely independent of your circumstances that's the stage that you're at because we can make you unhappy very very easily yeah that's true right yeah so so and it kind of makes sense this is what happens is we start to craft a life that makes us happy that's the first step totally good but then what happens is that we are still dependent on the external life for our happiness and that will never work 100% so what's this MTA you mentioned is Moka

Enlightenment Nirvana All same thing how do we get that uh how do you get there or someone else are you there no how how do I get there how does anyone get there you sit by yourself and don't do anything for how long no can't ask that question so the moment that you ask that question there's a goal there's a future Dimension there's an objective you have to exist without an objective and that'll move you in the right direction just be for no reason for no purpose recognize that all of this stuff this is going

to get kind of weird no matter what you do in the world you're still existing right so you just need you need to remove all of the stuff and just exist that's what Moka is pure existence without attachment without feeling without thought without goal just being and the crazy thing is we're all doing this all the time we're all existing all the time I hear this loud voice from all the high performing individuals that listen to my show shouting and it's also coming from my brain as well which is Dr K if I take this

advice and if I just sit how am I going to pay the bills and won't that cost me my motivation and if it cost me my motivation then it will cost me my my purpose this art business I've started this cupcake shop I'm running that's giving me so much excitement in my life when I lose my motivation if I just sit yes and no so the first thing we have to understand is yes so someone who's enlightened is not compatible with a regular life in some ways so let's understand that like that's what happened to

Buddha he was a king he was married he had a kid was loved was powerful and was like I'm done is that Buddha how we pronounce it incorrectly Buddha Buddha same thing okay yeah goam Buddha right so in a sense it is incompatible with life the second thing is that once see you have a motivation right but once you exist in the world and you are just being without anything you'll still act in fact acting will become even easier and that's hard to understand because we are so used to toxic fuel that we it's kind

of like so if you have kids one day you'll understand this I can the best I can do is an analogy so when a kid comes up to you and is crying because oh like my you know my doll has has gotten wet okay and the kid comes up to you there's no like goal that you have in your life and you're not like trying to be a good dad like you're I don't know if that makes sense like when a kid when your kid walks up to you and they're upset about something that's irrelevant

you just act in response to what is necessary in the moment you don't get upset you're not worried about their growth you're not worried about traumatizing you just respond does that kind of make sense yeah and so the other thing is like if I'm walking down the street and someone is carrying groceries and I hold the door open for them I just respond to the environment so what actually happens the closer you get to this state is you can absolutely be productive so what I found is that the closer I get to the state the

more productive I am but now what I'm doing is just responding to the environment around me I'm not driving anywhere I'm not going anywhere I'm just responding and that beautiful it's liberating there's no goal there's no falling short of there's no achievement there's just I'm going to do what needs to be done in the moment if I'm sitting in the emergency room and I'm on call and a patient walks in the door I'm going to take care of the patient if they don't walk in the door I'm going to do something else how is that

different to reacting because reacting sounds a little bit more emotional whereas you're saying respond it sounds like emotion has been removed from the situation to some degree uh so in a sense it is Rea I'm responding to the situation but often times when we react emotionally we are carrying something with us from the past into the present moment that will cause you all kinds of problems right so if I have infidelity I worked with a patient who had a problem with infidelity and their partner and then when they're dating the next person their fears of

infidelity from the past be come into the present and then they react to the situation they don't actually perfectly respond to the situation they color the situation with their baggage that's not clean responding so like when I am on call and my friend tells me the night before oh yeah we had zero patients I slept all night and then a patient walks in the door and I think to myself why am I so unlucky the majority or even arguably all of our unhappiness in life is because of what we carry with us so how do

we get to that place where we just respond so I think it's like we have to heal that inner child and all that kind of stuff we have to remove all of our past from our mind and then we have to remove all of the future from our mind we have to strive for nothing and just be what you are just be it's like kind of hard to understand but you just got to do it there's not like more methodology is not going to work that's what's so confusing about it is like you're I'm you're

keep on asking me questions I've already given you the answer you just don't like it no no no no because yeah I'm just uh sometimes it's good to hear yeah the same thing again but also also because I know I'm asking these questions in part because I know it's obviously The Logical question that anyone who just heard you say this Revelation about responding is going to go how yeah so so so what I would say is just sit down yeah and pay attention to yourself that's it that's it I mean you can do all the

stuff we've given you lots of techniques over the course of the last couple hours but like at the end of the day just sit down and explore yourself be with yourself impulses come up and then ask yourself so in a practical sense you're going to have drivers towards things and ask yourself why do I feel this way why do I need to do this why is this easy for me and why is this hard for me and the more that you explore that the more you will understand and then the more neutral you will become

and when you're fully neutral then let me put it to you this way so if you don't care about what you eat it's not like there's no suffering and whatever you get you'll be happy with right so it's like our caring that causes the problem so we need to move towards this neutrality and then actions become easy because if I don't care if I'm not attached to something then I can study or I can play a video game makes no difference to me oh do you want to watch a comedy or a horror movie makes

no difference to me then life becomes fun you can just enjoy everything and there's nothing to worry about and I think it starts with just being with yourself and understanding where your internal drivers come from because we don't get to choose the person that we become our brain makes adaptations every single day you don't get to edit what you learn does that make sense yeah yeah so our problem in life is that we have all these learnings we have this instrument this this thing that has been cobbled together after some crappy experience and another crappy

experience and some positive experience and you have this internal schema of how to live the world but it wasn't crafted with any intentionality so the first step is to be aware of like what is this road map looking like what is the blueprint and the more that you understand this stuff the easier it will become would you recommend starting your day with a little gap for this 100% awareness practice I think it's brilliant my partner does that she spends the first sort of 20 minutes of the morning she just goes and sits in a room

by herself and does nothing and I just look at her and go what a psychopath yeah right so beginning of your day or end of your day sunset uh sunrise and you can do a meditative practice meditative practices will get you here too sometimes that's actually easier because it gives your mind some kind of goal to move towards I'm going to try this okay I'm going to try this and I'm going to text you and let you know how I get on I'm going to try in the mornings when I wake up to just stay

away from all devices and just sit and I'll let you know how I get on and I'll be honest with you yeah be honest with you I will be and even if I can't do it I'll be honest with you yeah and that's okay so the one thing I would ask is that if you let me know how it goes may not go well you got to give me a chance to give you a second thing to do okay why why' you say that because I think we're asking too much of you okay you think

I'm going to fail be honest yes I think you're going to fail but I think the problem is that if I tell you you're going to fail you're going to try to succeed and we make a goal out of it so we've already failed like so so it's it's so just give me a second chance I'll figure I'll we'll trick you have we have to trick you into doing it we can't let you know that we're doing it reminds me of what you were saying about your your wife giving birth before we started recording about

lay on your left the kid likes it yeah so the mind is so tricky right so the mind will craft a goal for you out of this and if I tell you Steven you will fail I'm not trying to manipulate I'm worried that if I tell you you're going to fail you're going to do it it's so interesting what my mind did there as well and it's just and this is so icky but I'm going to be honest because it just what's the point this is called the dire of a CE so um even when

I thought about doing that like I was like okay so sit in the morning spend 20 minutes um just being and then do that try and do that Steve like a week or two weeks and then you can come back on the podcast and tell people about it I'm like that's [ __ ] you just made this about an external thing again good brilliant brilliant brilliant brilliant you know why what's brilliant about that awareness exactly yeah change is happening change cannot happen while you're blind you cannot good diagnosis predes good treatment so this is the

other thing really interesting right so one last thing I know we're running long so this is a habit for you right yeah for a habit to be this is a very simple technique to demolish any habit a habit is automatic that's what makes it a habit that's why we love habits why is everyone so obsessed with habits because if it's a habit then it happens automatically if it's a habit I don't have to work hard I want to program myself so I can be lazy so all you need to do to demolish a habit is

awareness because literally the circuits involved in your brain are completely different The Habit circuitry in your brain is the endoc canabo system awareness of the present moment is your anterior singulate cortex in your frontal loopes you cannot have a habit and exert willpower at the same time that's the whole point of a habit so as you become aware every time you catch it Stephen it will chip away at it it'll get cut away 1% 1% 1% until it disappears catch it as many times as you can is this why it's useful to keep a diary

or to write sort of it can it can be Diaries have all kinds of other mechanisms so the just a couple of quick ones so one is that Diaries slow down the pace of your thinking because when you write you write slower than you think so you me like meditate on the thoughts a little bit more the second thing is that a when we think in our head we're using some circuits of the brain but when we write we are activating our sensory inputs and our capacity to learn from our sensory inputs versus thinking is

actually way higher right yeah so it's like activating a completely different part of the brain we're slowing down our thoughts so slowing down thought and activating our sens sensory inputs is part of why a diary is useful the other thing the other third thing with a diary being useful is that when we think in our mind we end up in a different place from when we write so it's a lot easier in our mind to end up with habitual patterns of thinking in a diary it's way harder to end up with habitual thinking so you

will explore yourself more effectively using a diary when I look at the first pages of my diary I find a guy that's constantly and this is really where the Diary of AO came to be the start of the podcast was me sharing my diary the things I'd written in my diary every day um some of those early episodes that I made were about the subject of purpose which is something I've heard you speak a lot about and that's kind of where I wanted to end our conversation today is so many people and I know this

from the comments and DMs I get are struggling to find their purpose now even as I say that I go I've loaded the question because I've said find which which insinuates there some kind of search and purpose is a singular word so it indicates that there's one but you know what I'm saying what is that that people are looking for and why are they struggling to find it this is very simple you can look at any human being on the planet and you can see that they all gravitate towards something which is internal peace so

our hunger gives us a sense when we eat then we have internal peace thirst gives us a sense of wanting to drink and then we have internal peace when we want self-respect the feeling of a lack of self-respect is a lack of internal peace so this is what's kind of weird is that all of these we're chasing all of these things outside of us to create an internal state right so no matter what you do in life at some point your actions are going to cross the barrier of the external to the internal and will

make you feel a certain way why do we get married to create a particular feeling why do we give someone a kiss to create a particular feeling right so everything we experience within us now why is it so hard for people so we're all looking for inner peace that's just it period right and then the question becomes what makes it hard very simple because we're looking for it in the wrong place so we're all looking for it outside of us right so we're looking and then what happens is if we look for inner peace from

the outside so if I get Inner Peace because people tell me Al look you're so great now what happens is that peace lasts only as long as people are saying it and the real reason we're screwed is because the biological organism develops a system of tolerance so right now you've got 10 million followers and then you're going to need more and then you're going to need more and then you're going to need more we're going to need more intense pornography we're going to need more intense video games we're going to need more exciting TV shows

so the nature of the human organism is to adapt to its surroundings which is why you will never succeed if you are relying on the outside world to make you happy because you will just want more and more and more and what helps you achieve happiness comes from in here that's why it's so hard for everyone so these kids asking saying that they can't find their purpose they're in jobs they they don't like or they're you know embarking on their professional Journeys and they don't know what their purpose is what is it you say to

them when they DM you um so I I think uh one thing I would say to them is purpose is an attitude it's not a thing right so like it take any action what makes that action align with your purpose it's the attitude that you take towards it so if I give you this meditation practice to sit and do nothing you're like yeah it's part of my purpose and part of my growth you see what I mean like it's all about the way that your mind a purpose is not purpose is an attitude it's not

like a goal so I'll even do this like so when I was in in you know in residency like sometimes I would have students who were struggling right and like since I'm a nice guy people would come to me and they're like hey I'm struggling like I don't want to learn this stuff and and what we really do is we shift their purpose by shifting their attitude they're like I'm not interested in Psychiatry I'm like fair enough so here's the thing you got to understand for the rest of your life no matter what kind of

medicine you practice you're going to get people people who are mentally ill and or addicted to things who are going to be personality disordered I can guarantee you that the worst days of your life will have nothing to do with surgery they're going to have to do with having a personality disordered sociopathic narcissistic borderline personality disorder patient who is making a mess on the floor nurses are going to be paging you no one is going to want to talk to them this is vitally important for you to learn no matter what you're interested in so

it's about the attitude the other thing that I'll do with students is they're like so worried about getting honors they're like oh I got to get a good grade I got this is Harvard right so these are like really gunning medical students and I was like you guys are missing the point you're not here to get honors you're here to practice medicine so one day you're going to be on an airplane and you're going to hear the flight attendant pick up the phone they're going to be like is there a doctor on the plane and

then you don't get to say oh sorry I it's not something I'm interested in I just got a pass I can't you don't get to say that you're here to learn how to save life lives right and so that attitude when it sinks in with them changes the way that they learn I don't care what your gr is it's not about the grade it's about like we're trying to teach you medicine because you're going to need it one day a lot of people have seemingly found their purpose but then they get a little bit of

a quto lifee crisis and I've never really heard this term quto life crisis before until you started speaking about it what is a quarter life crisis and what is actually going on there so a quarter life crisis is something that we're seeing like more and more of so usually what happens is that see early on you asked earlier if if we have you know dreams right so I have a dream of something but I don't really know what it is so I'm 15 years old I pick a dream I start advancing towards it and our

our when we form our life what we try to do is we we develop a conception and then we live up to that conception so I'm going to be a doctor one day and then the reality of our the reality is very different from our dreams so then what happens is we tend to find ourselves in a place that we're like not happy with so I see this a lot from like people who are like oh I want to be like a programmer but then they're working in this environment where there's like you know there's

always like scope creep there's like burn like the Sprints are very exhausting it's burned out like I'm not happy here so the first stage of a quarter life crisis is feeling trapped now you've invested all of this time and energy into like you know medicine or being a doctor and you spent years or like being a programmer now you're trapped in this situation because you've invested so much time the second thing that happens in a quarter life crisis so people are like this is what it it sounds like so I wake up every day I

pack my lunch I drive in traffic I'm at my job where I'm underappreciated I'm not challenged I drive home I'm supposed to take care of myself so I'm going to listen to step's podcast on the way home I'm going to work out I'm going to do laundry I'm going to eat a couple of chicken breasts and then it's time for sleep and you do this for about two years and you're like is this life what else can I do so it starts with a feeling of being trapped second thing that happens is people mentally check

out so you'll feel like I don't I'm not passionate about my job now this is where people make a big mistake because if you look at the research on quarter life crisis what they will try to do is check back in they'll try to cultivate some sense of Joy or like how do I get engaged in life but this is what's really interesting is mentally checking out is an important developmental step to growth so if you don't check out of your existing job or your existing relationship there's no space in your mind for a new

one so we have to mentally check out it's actually part of the process then this is where things get really interesting if we look at the successful navigation of a quarter life crisis we all feel trapped then we check out we think this is a bad thing then what gets really interesting is that there's usually some kind of intentional moving away so in my case I literally like went to India so we know that that human beings need to create some amount of psychological or physical space I've had patients who have joined the military I've

had patients who have like driven cross country you need space like physical space and mental space away from what you're checked out from then we get to something that's really interesting so you asked this question how do you find purpose purpose is not something you find it's not like you're walking down the street and like oh or you're meditating and it's like ah I have purpose purpose is crafted right so once we're mentally we mentally check out that allows us to distance ourselves because if we don't mentally check out and we step away we're going

to feel guilt we're going to feel like you know we have to check out we have to give up on it otherwise we'll stay stuck does that kind of make sense so then what we have to do is a period of self-exploration and craftsmanship so then what we do is like discover okay who am I what do I really want we we connect with our internal selves so this is really important about a quarter life crisis the first phase of our life we are living up to external expectations and it's not really about what I

want I think I want to become a doctor but what do I really know I'm not really listening to myself I'm just being programmed by my conditioning so we start out being very externally focused then we feel trapped then we check out then we move away then we discover who we discover you don't discover it's not there you craft who you are you get in touch with yourself and then comes the last phase of the quarter life crisis which is that you craft an external world based on your internal environment so now your compass is

dictating what you do you find a relationship that resonates with you to begin with and so in my case and your case probably we probably did this in some way we failed we did something new and then we like figured out okay this is what excites me right so at some point growth excites you you so now like this endeavor is about growth it's about helping people so now you're crafting your external life based on what you've discovered about yourself internally and that's kind of the last phase the problem that people run into is that

they don't realize that this sequence is necessary and you have to do it in this order yeah I was thinking about so many of my friends as you described this process that have come to me for advice recently um these are friends who have quit their business so they've sold their company yeah and then they've taken you know two months off they've got so agitated and in two cases that I can describe a very big companies everyone listening would know that friend has gone back to the business absolutely so I mean I've had I can

think of two people as well who you know one one person you know sold a company at 29 for ton of money and then they were like tried to find themselves for a year or two and then went back to starting companies yeah right but but my friends actually went back into the same company I've seen that too like bought the company back or went back in as CEO yeah I've seen someone bought a company didn't manage it properly value declined and then you buy it back you're net positive and then you run it and

it goes well my mentor said to me when I left my first business which um is what made gave me sort of Financial Freedom he said to me when I called him it was in the middle of the pandemic and I said I've sold the company now and I'm I'm out and I'm sold my shares over the market in a private transaction and it's the pandemic like the world has stopped and you know what I'm like so I'm like well what do I do now and he said to me it's my friend Shaq Shaquille Khan

he said the hardest thing in the world for you to do and the most important thing for you to do is to do nothing and he was like you just need to sit and you need to do nothing he goes because you're going to get all these urges Steve to go back and start a similar business the same business um because you can and you know you can but he goes the reason why you are successful the first time around is now kind of expired like you did that so the thing that's going to drive

you every day and give that sense of like feel motivation and purpose is going to be something else and you're going to need to create a space for it to emerge and I say that to Founders all the time that like exit their businesses or leave their companies is you have to basically do this painful process of like sitting on your hands for like a year and being patient and waiting yeah and that's kind of what you were saying you're saying about cultivating this um this new life but from inside out not from outside in

because you get so many offers you get so many opportunities and offers in that space um but those again aren't yours you didn't cultivate them they just came to you so yeah it's such a beautiful way to put it like living your life from the inside out as opposed to the outside in and and that's that's like that's what people should do that's what you help people do and that's what you've helped me do every time we spoke and every time we speak it's it's on one hand it's so informative and so um wise and

so unique because you're combining disciplines and you're doing it in such a wonderfully smooth fluent and logical way my brain is struggles when anything gets a little bit too fluffy or like Airy fairy but as you speak you weave these worlds together in such a wonderful way and at the other end it's really confronting and I am someone that likes the confrontation because you know I gives you an opportunity to grow no because I just I what like what an absolute honor that I get to sit with someone like you who's like super smart and

gone to Har and all these things and I get to work through some of the the things that that I struggle with but also I also realize as um a podcaster that it's the most the most value that I think I can give to the audience is like me being honest about myself yeah that is the information that is in greatest demand but in least Supply in the world is people doing what we just did I you know what I mean does that make sense I I it's it's a a brilliant I mean I just

I love the way that you put thoughts together right so I I think that's correct so I I think if we look at the success of this podcast your authenticity is such a huge part of it and also what's happening is we're getting so much like derivative content we're getting like five tips for this and five tips for that and 10 techniques to do this and and what what's missing is like authenticity I've thought about this so much man it's like how do you ask obviously my job is to ask questions right and the longer

I've done this podcast what I've come to realizes the best questions are the ones that no one could give me that are like deep in my heart somewhere that I've would maybe been too scared to like to say out loud and when I get closer to those questions the conversations are so much more valuable for the audience and I can rank the conversations essentially based on how much the questions came from my soul and then the like metric that I I might measure um it based on is the amount of people that message me and

the length of the message they send because if I ask questions from my soul the messages that they send me get exponentially longer it it becomes like they send me pages when you know these are my questions if I make a conversation about the gut microbiome people might say hey I love that podcast but gut micro biome I'm meeting leafy veg now but when they come from my soul yeah it's like the world gives me that back if you know what I mean absolutely and I I I think that's that's what that's why I really

love doing this it's a privilege for me too and I think like this is a very common issue and I think we've been kind of skirting not skirting around we've touched on this issue several times but you've asked me what do we do right what is what is the answer I think the one thing I've learned for 10 years of being a medical doctor is it's not about finding the right answers it's about asking the right questions that is the methodology because an answer is outside of you it theoretically applies to all people but if

you really want to be your best self that answer needs to be tailored to you specifically to you and that answer what works for you only you know right right I don't know what's going to work for you or anyone else because I don't have information about your internal environment MH so the real key is not about finding the right answers it's about asking the right questions so that you can get the data within that applies to you 100% why do we have so much advice on the internet because none of it applies 100% to

your unique genetics your unique epigenetics your experiences your traumas your dormant unconscious so that's what you need to do is is develop a plan that is only going to work for you and that's not about an answer it's about a methodology how do you think I could be a better podcaster and I guess we have to Define what better means but how do you think that I could I don't think you can be a better podcaster and I think you should stop trying okay I think you should do exactly what you are doing and recognize

that you you are enough so just keep doing what you're doing you shouldn't try to be better this is all a part of your journey mhm I I don't think you no I don't accept the question I don't think you can be better I think the concept of better is literally hypothetical does that make sense makes perfect sense you just are so just be yeah it's funny because the the more in my life that I've just been um the better everything has got and including my romantic relationship with my partner it's just it's there's a

real correlation between just being and I don't know seemingly things just figuring themselves out it's kind of goes back to what I was saying about like the Louis Vuitton of my life and then they're like post l t around I had better results when I was just being so exactly and this podcast was based on that it was based on me just being um which was scary it was really scary at the start it was scary just talking about these things publicly at the start you know Dr K we have a closing tradition on this

podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next and the question that's been left for you is what is your rich life I guess the one that I've got I mean that you know what it doesn't matter what the adjective is the the only life I have is the one that I've got so what is my rich life what is my poor life what is my good life what is my bad life it's the one that I have and and I'll kind of leave with like one last thought so I saw something really

interesting in a study about aging so you know there's all this loneliness epidemic going on so it's really interesting because if you look at it scientifically logically as we get older our life gets objectively worse so we lose friends so literally over time the number of friends you have as you get older like they literally start dying um we lose relationships our physical body starts to break down so like our life objectively by certain measures gets worse so what's really interesting is that you'd expect old people are like more depressed because their life is objectively

worse and sometimes they are but there's one variable that correlates with being content in life versus being unhappy in life and that is how okay you are with a Bittersweet life so the more engaged with this concept of something being Bittersweet you are as you get older the more content you will be so I think my answer to that question is like embracing the bittersweetness of life like there's piss in there and there's sugar and that's just what it is thank you so much Dr K I really appreciate it you're a very special human being

and um I feel indebted to you because you you know I wish I could speak to you every day but this is why people need to go read your books and follow your YouTube channel because uh in that regard we can um and I hope to have many more conversations with you about all of these things as I continue on my journey towards I don't know where the [ __ ] I'm going but but thank you so much you're a really really special human being it's been an honor to be here and an absolute pleasure

thank you so much Stephen [Music] every single time you eat you have an opportunity to improve your health and that's why I love Zoe because Zoe helps me to make the smartest food choices for me and my body and as you guys will know by now Zoe is a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company and if you haven't tried Zoe I highly recommend you do because Zoe combines My Health Data with Zoe's worldclass science and using those two things Zoe guides me to Better Health every single time I make a

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code ce10 at checkout isn't this cool every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO at the very end of it you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO and what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home so you've got every guest we've ever had their question and on the back of it if you scan that QR code you get to watch the person who answered that question

we're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question the brand new version 2 updated conversation cards are out right now at Theon conversation cards.com they've sold out twice instantaneously so if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards I really really recommend acting quickly ah [Music] [Music]