Why Your Thoughts Aren’t The Enemy

so if I'm like unhappy or I feel ashamed of myself or I feel guilty we think I need to do something to change this so if I'm unhappy let me go eat something that makes me feel better let me play a video game the cognitive process the fundamental way we deal with our cognition is to regulate it this cognitive experience that happens inside my head needs to be controlled today we're going to teach yall how to go from being a thread to a five head now this may sound kind of weird because we have these

Concepts right there's like three head who's someone who kind of sucks at something and there's five head who's someone who's really brilliant at something but we have this idea that you're sort of born this way right some people are very very smart some people are not very smart and once you get placed into the three head camp or the five head Camp there's no way to move between them when I was growing up I sort of thought that things were roughly fair right so I I had this idea and I played a lot of RPGs

right where you get stat points and skill points to distribute so it's not like in one build you get 60 skill points and in another build you get 10 everyone gets roughly the same amount and you choose to specialize in something but as I looked around me in life I found that that actually isn't the case that there are some people like myself who were scrawny didn't really know how to talk to girls had Never Been Kissed before wasn't particularly good at anything I didn't really have any skills and then on top of that my

grades weren't even that good so I was like I had this High int but I I was born with the lazy trait which means I wasn't able to capitalize it and I'd look around at other people and I'd be like stunned by how good they were at everything so I had a friend in med school who was like better looking than I was you know worked really hard was a workout Warrior and was a gamer and was better than me so this guy would wake up at 6:00 a.m. every day would like work out then

go to you know go to classes would study and then like at 7 he'd have a healthy meal at 6:00 and then he'd start gaming from 7:00 to 10 then he was in bed whereas my life was a little bit more of a mess and so I look at these people and I think like how is this fair but if you think about it if you're good at one thing it allows you to be good at other things as well so if you sort of think about let's say I have a good job that Fosters

the ability to have a successful relationship because now I'm more attractive to other people if I have a good job or a good career and a good relationship then I'm more likely to be happy in life and have more resources if I'm happy in life I am able to deal with setbacks in my career more easily so it's almost like it's kind of like broken and unfair because some people struggle at everything and for some people things seem to be incredibly easy and they do well at everything there's no balance in the game of life

so here's the crazy thing it turns out that there is a difference between these two groups of people and we can actually teach you how to go from three head to four head to five head and what we're going to be drawing on is Revolutions in the field of psychotherapy when people hear that we offer coaching at HG their first question is like what on Earth even is that so here's the basic problem when you struggle with something in your life you don't see the problem from the outside you see it from the inside the

value of a coach is that they can look at your life from the outside they can understand what's going on and they can help guide you to improve things like motivation accomplish short-term goals and even increase a sense of purpose in life and over the long term we also see improvements in feelings of depression and anxiety and the best part is we've had over 100,000 coaching sessions and we incorporate that feedback to continually improve our program so if yall are interested in actually making a change in your life check out the link in the description

below so this is kind of weird but like generally speaking when we think about technological advancement we think about things like devices or engineering or things like that Medical Science heart transplants but there's actually been like research and evolution in the field of psychotherapy and if we think about what the field of psychotherapy is it is a evidence-based approach to help human beings get better at life so if I were to ask you what determines your happiness in life what determines your success there's a lot of data out there that says that the ZIP code

or the place you were born the education level of your parents your race your ethnic all of these things basically correlate with your success in life and those statistics are not wrong right so if you're born to Rich parents who love you chances are you will be happier and more successful this is exactly where Psychotherapy comes in because Psychotherapy is the evidence-based practice to take someone who has a bad hand dealt to them when they're born and help them level up to achieve things that is far beyond what you would expect for their circumstances so

if I grow up in an abusive household where I was traumatized this of course is going to lead to all kinds of problems but if I go to therapy and I sort of heal myself and I develop confidence then I can develop a good career I can have a good relationship I can be incredibly successful and I've worked with these people as a psychiatrist another really good example of that is addictions so the poorer you are and the worse your household is if you have a parent who's an addict you are more likely to become

an addict you'll start using things like marijuana or alcohol in your teen Years it'll alter your dopamine circuitry and then like it's very hard to live life and succeed but if we Institute principles of psychotherapy and we treat that addiction we help this person overcome their addiction overcome their trauma they can achieve just as much as anyone who had a very very awesome spawn point so we have to start by understanding that Psychotherapy comes in three different phases and we're going to teach you all some of these core principles of the most recent Tech in

psychotherapy so the first phase was behaviorism so this is where like there were a bunch of psychologists that basically like looked at Freud and stuff like Freud and Yung and they're like these guys are making all these claims about the subconscious but we have no way of measuring that so Freud was kind of like pre- really Scientific Revolution and then we had an explosion of like scientific methodologies in the early 1900s and then in like the 50s and 60s a group of psychologists showed up and they were like none of this stuff that you guys

are doing is measurable so what we're going to focus on is what you can measure and so they started focusing on Behavior so these were the behavioral psychologists and they were like I don't care what's going on in the subconscious the question is how can we get you to stop drinking alcohol on a daily basis that's what we're going to focus on Behavior Behavior Behavior this is the threee head approach right so if some of y'all are three heads you're all going to be like how do I I I just need to wake up every

day I just need to wake up every day I just need to wake up I need to be more disciplined I need to do this I need to this you're focusing on actions actions actions actions actions then comes the first big Tech in psychotherapy so this is graduating to a forehead okay so someone came along someone like Aaron Beck who's a psychologist who developed CBT and he's like hold on a second when you have a behavior it turns out that there are things that you cannot measure your thoughts or your emotions which influence your behavior

so if we just focus on behavior and we ignore the thoughts and emotions it will not be as successful as if we focus on the thought thoughts and emotions as well so we're adding a layer of stuff that we're working on so here's the base layer of behavior and action and now we're adding thoughts and emotions to it once we start working on the thoughts and the emotions we start to see better outcomes even at the behavioral level because we're sort of getting closer to the root of the problem and when CBT was developed we

started to get better at treating a lot of different things like social anxiety and OCD which maybe had like unclear like unclear treatment outcomes prior to that now we have very very good treatment outcomes for a lot of things once we start focusing on thoughts emotions and behavior and then comes the most recent advance in Psychotherapy and this was championed by people like Marshall lahan who developed dialectical behavioral therapy so CBT and psychodynamic maybe psychoanalytic stuff was pretty good at doing things like anxiety maybe some addictions stuff like that but then we had these people

who had personality problems so these are things like narcissism or borderline personality disorder or sociopathy these are things that are not just as simple as a thought or an emotion but this is who this person is it is the way that they perceive the world it is the way that they receive the world and Marshall inan had borderline personality disorder she went through a lot of treatment became a psychologist and my understanding of the story I've never talked to the lady is that she discovered mindfulness and then she sort of found that this was the

missing component that this enhanced everything that she had gone through in her own treatment and then she sort of developed a scientific protocol and now what's happened is this third wave of psychotherapy that essentially incorporates a a couple of core principles into treatment and once we apply these core principles it allows us to change things at the personality level so this is what allows us to go from fourhead to five head and that's exactly exactly what the research shows there are so many CEOs and entrepreneurs and people who are incredibly like famous in successful and

happy who will say like meditation is revolutionary but then a lot of people are confused myself being among them and it's like what does meditation do what is the science what is the mechanism and the really cool thing about the third wave of psychotherapy is that we've elucidated what the actual mechanisms are what's going on under the hood and that's what we're going to teach you all today the first thing is Acceptance Now acceptance really confuses people because people think that okay if I accept doesn't that mean that things don't get better so if I'm

unhappy about something and I just accept things the the way that they are doesn't that lead to resignation but the answer is if you look at the science behind it the answer is no it doesn't lead to resignation what acceptance actually gives us is a antidote to avoidance this is the mechanism so I want youall to think about all of the things in your life that you avoid why do you avoid them so if I'm a human being and and I have the opportunity to move in this direction and this creates a negative experience then

what ends up happening is I am going to move away from it I'm going to engage engage in avoidance behavior and the problem right now is with the explosion of technology these avoidance behaviors are becoming so addictive so rapidly so it is becoming easier and easier and easier to avoid I don't need to leave the house I can get grocery delivery I can work from home I never have to see other people I can try to date people online even though it's a mess so we're seeing an explosion of avoidance behavior and if we sort

of stop and think about it what is it that is the Crux of avoidance why do we avoid because we are trying to get rid of a negative consequence right this is bad we do not want bad we want good so acceptance is an incredibly powerful tool because once you accept something it allows you to actually move in this Direction so acceptance doesn't lead to avoidance or it doesn't lead to resignation it actually this is what's so weird and paradoxical it allows you to move in this direction it allows you to do things like Embrace

Life and experiences so practically the way that this works is you know if there's anything that you are trying to avoid just accept the negative consequence right so if I'm going on a date just accept that I haven't been on a date before and this is the first time I'm doing it it's going to be uncomfortable and the moment that you you accept that and you sort just sort of say like this is what's going to happen and this is something that I learned as a physician a medical student right even on my first rotation

was Pediatrics and I learned so beautifully the power of acceptance so kids are afraid of shots and if you just tell them hey it's a shot it's going to hurt for a little while you'll feel better within 5 minutes I'm going to give you a Band-Aid I'm going to give you a lollipop so when you teach this child avoidance something as simple as as getting an injection it transforms their experience of it so we need to learn how to accept accept doesn't mean don't act what we really need to focus on it doesn't mean accept

your circumstances or things like that you should absolutely change what we want to accept is the potential pain of action that's really what acceptance means now the second thing we're going to talk about is super cool and this is called diffusion so this is kind of hard to explain but defusion is taking the cognitive process as fluctuating instead of overly regulating it when we have certain thoughts or emotions we don't like those negative thoughts or emotions right so if I'm like unhappy or I feel ashamed of myself or I feel guilty we think I need

to do something to change this so if I'm unhappy let me go eat something that makes me feel better let me play a video game the cognitive process the fundamental way we deal with our cognition is to regulate it I don't like the way that you're talking talking to me so I want you to stop using those words I'm getting triggered by what you're saying so I want to avoid you even more this cognitive experience that happens inside my head needs to be controlled so once we start overly controlling our cognitive process it leads to

an overreaction to our environment the environment must be very very carefully controlled lest it tamper with my fragile internal cognitive process there is a beautiful revelation of defusion which says that actually the cognitive process by itself fluctuates if you're afraid today it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be afraid tomorrow if you're happy today it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be happy tomorrow the natural function of cognition is to fluctuate and alter you don't think one thing all day long you think one thing then another thing then nothing nothing this is absolutely

true but what are the implications the implications are brilliant and all are going to love this it means you do not have to solve problems in your mind this is the one situation where if you leave a problem alone there is a good chance that it will go away right this is crazy I want youall to think about this because like this sounds insane but it is so true if I'm upset when I go to bed one night it doesn't necessarily mean I will be upset when I wake up in the morning I feel better

tomorrow my brain when I go to sleep does all kinds of stuff with my suppressed emotions and emotional process processing and all this good stuff it means that I can feel better tomorrow oh I'm really really upset today because I got dumped that doesn't mean you're going to be upset for the rest of your life you can accept that the cognitive process naturally fluctuates and yall should love this and I love it too because this means you do not have to solve your problems acknowledging that the cognitive process naturally fluctuates is a way to procrastinate

and actually fix your problems right I don't need to overreact to things I can just acknowledge that these thoughts come and these thoughts go this is the power of diffusion and I want youall to just think about how transformative this can be for someone's life right so setbacks don't need to be overly corrected we don't need to control everything around us we can let ourselves have a bad day without trying to fix everything that amount of peace of mind that we get correlates with so much good stuff right so let's just take an example of

a relationship so if I'm in a relationship and my partner forgets my birthday I can feel sad I can feel disappointed but if I acknowledge that my cognition is a fluctuating process it also means that a couple days from now I will feel better about this now a lot of people may Wonder but Dr K hold on a second if we leave our mind alone can't that create more problems so if I tolerate this behavior from my partner who consistent L forgets my birthday doesn't that mean that my life will be worse or if I'm

really lacking confidence or I have a history of trauma and I do have these negative thoughts every day when I wake up in the morning leaving it alone doesn't fix it and you're absolutely right so there are a couple of exceptions to this the first is when we cognitively defuse it allows us to have a tranquil mind right so we're not getting thrown off base by the sadness or the disappointment then once we operate from a tranquil mind it allows us to fix are problems better so this is the whole problem with something like anxiety

so I was I've worked with so many people who get sleep anxiety it's like oh my God I need to go to sleep I need to go to sleep I need to go to sleep and the more that you need to go to sleep the harder it is to go to sleep so feeling anxious about it feeling the importance of needing to go to bed on time if I fall asleep now I'll get 6 hours that's enough but now I'm worried now it's 5 hours and now I'm stressed out that 5 hours is enough sleep

and then it becomes 4 hours and now it becomes 3 hours and now should I stay up it's so anxious the the presence of anxiety in your mind worsens outcomes and so what diffusion allows us to do we take a step back we take a breather we look at them we say okay look it's okay that they forgot this time but how do I approach this situation how can I communicate with them coming from place of calmness and understanding as opposed to sadness anger and resentment which one do you think will lead to a healthier

relationship over time so oddly enough diffusion allows us to better solve our problems because because we are not emotionally controlled we recognize that these emotions will come and go the other thing is that sometimes we have influences that will continually put thoughts or emotions in our mind so these are things like trauma or we have circumstances so if I live in a toxic household every day I will have negativity I still think that diffusion is very helpful here I'm not saying that diffusion should be used to avoid all of your problems but I think there's

a lot of data that basically shows that not all of your problems need to be done de with with the urgency and vigor that you apply to them right some stuff you can chill out about and if you have friends who are super stressed out like you know this you can tell them hey like you just really need to chill out for a little while and like it is bad and it does need to be dealt with but you don't need to stress about it so much and that's what diffusion allows us to do and

then we get to the third major competency which will allow us to become a five head which is self as context so this is super wild okay so remember that this revolution in Psychotherapy came from a couple of things so it came from things like meditative practices and I suspect this was also driven by things like psychedelics so if you remember like in the 60s there was an explosion of meditation and there was an explosion of like LSD usage and so there was a group of people who basically like were in college around the 60s

and 7s who were doing both of these things who then around the '90s or early 2000s were like in their 50 s or 60s and then were psychologists at that point so then they developed this this system of psychotherapy so what they sort of had what they figured out is they're these trippy experiences where I am not what I think I am and what they sort of discovered is that their the self is actually contextual so what they discovered is that the experience of life is filtered through our self I know that sounds kind of

weird so what they discovered is to take inner experience as a context to experience so what they discovered was that in life we have experiences which are over here but these experiences are actually filtered through a human being and that this can be acted upon independently so what they discovered is that you are a context to your experience so what does this mean so I know it sounds kind of weird but we'll try to explain and if you all have had meditative experiences it helps a lot so generally speaking when we go through life we

have experiences in life and we think of those experiences as like fixed things right so if I kind of think about like let's say a breakup so a breakup has a couple of things that go with it so first of all it has a behavioral layer right so I'm no longer physically seeing this person I'm no longer physically holding hands or kissing this person that has its own impact and then there is a cognitive emotional layer which is like sadness and maybe some amount of shame maybe some amount of relief I have these different thoughts

in my head but this is the big discovery of the third wave of psychotherapy and this is really how people become five heads is then they have the personal way that they view their thoughts and emotions and this is what this new techken Psychotherapy basically does is it helps us realize we have behaviors we have thoughts and emotions and then there is an attitude ude or mindset which is even more meta than thoughts and emotions which allows us to react to our thoughts and emotions in a specific way now a lot of people are not

aware of this so if you look at people who are truly thread when I work with these people in my office what I find is they are not able to question their experience of something they are not able to recognize that the attitude that they have towards a particular event is really what makes it problematic and so let's use this example of a breakup so the behaviors are the same I'm never going to touch this person again I'm never going to kiss this person again I'm not going to hold hands fine the thoughts and emotions

are also somewhat the same of course there's going to be sadness there may be some degree of relief there may be some degree of anxiety about the future that's for everyone happens when you break up but then there is the context that you add to the experience so when you experience these emotions how do you receive them so some some people are unaware that there is a way to receive them and so this experience becomes truth this experience becomes Destiny now I will forever be alone because they think that right they think like if I

can't make it work with this person it's too late no one will ever love me they do not question things at the level of thoughts or emotions and there are other people who are not devastated by this experience they can have a different kind of attitude towards it they can say to themselves you know I this this relationship was incredibly painful F I really wish I had done some things better there's a lot of hurt but you know what I learned a lot from this relationship this relationship just like anything else in life anytime you

have a failure it teaches you how to do it better the next time around this is five head thinking right literally and this is what separates people who are three heads who once they have one set back in life so like I was almost this or I was this for a while where I was one of these like burnt out gifted kids and then as things started to go wrong in my life I didn't realize that the way that I was perceiving myself was half the problem I had this identity it's not my behaviors and

it's not the thoughts and emotions it is the way that I judged those thoughts and emotions and the beautiful thing is that when you start to do this it changes your personality so the other really cool thing about this wave of psychotherapy techniques and especially taking self as context is it allows us to fix things like narcissism so remember narcissism is the way that you look at your beliefs right I don't know if this kind of makes sense but when a narcissist has a negative belief you are doing this to hurt me that's what they

think they take everything personally that's like literally what it is the thoughts and emotions are there but is the way that they interpret those thoughts and emotions everything is about me me me me me and if you do anything wrong you tried to hurt me because if I feel hurt there must be malice on your end it is the way that they interpret their cognitive emotional and behavioral experiences now the moment that you teach a narcissist hold on a second what are the different ways that you could view this what are the different reasons besides

malice that this person is doing this to you are they stressed out let's put ourselves in their shoes let's change the context of what we are experiencing here let's change the context of the breakup you're breaking up with me because you want to take advantage of me you hate me so much hold on a second let's change the context let's look at this from a different angle in the moment that we're able to do that this is literally what reduces narcissism in patients so self as context allows us to recognize two really important things the

first is that life is not objective furthermore in the subjectivity of life right because it's subjective there are two two different people can view something in different ways that subjectivity is actually controllable that you can change the way that you interpret what actually happens and this is exactly how you become a five head so the difference between a three-head and a fourhead is a three-head focuses entirely on Behavior a forehead is like pretty normal and what we're doing then is we recognize there's emotions and then we recognize there's cognition and we recognize there's behavior and

we recognize there's emotion and some amount of managing all three of these but then if you really want to elevate to five head if you really want to get to the level of the advantages that things like meditation or these third wave of psychotherapies teach you you need to focus on three things the first is acceptance not as a form of resignation but as a form of avoiding avoidance behaviors you just accept that it is bad accept that is something that you have to go through and embrace it right don't run away from it that

in and of itself will transform your life the second thing is diffusion and this is beautiful because diffusion means you don't have to fix everything in your mind that your mind will take care of some things on its own and people may be concerned that this allows us to propagate some negative things which can be the case but I want youall to think about generally speaking how overwhelmed and stressed you are wouldn't it be way easier if half of your problems may get better on their own it allows you to focus your resources and be

so much more productive and the last thing is to recognize that self is context that the way that you view the world the way that you view your experiences can in and of itself change and when you do these three things you will notice that you are a different person you will become one of these people who seems to be good at everything because now they're not running away from hard experiences yeah I was embarrassed to date but I stuck with it I put myself out there how do you put yourself out there you have

to accept you have to avoid the avoidance behavior second thing that these people do is they don't get overly stressed out when things necessarily get wrong they don't have to fix everything they can focus on high priority things and let go of the little stuff they're not getting you know people who are mean to them in class are not living rentree in their head and instead they're focusing on doing well in class so they do well in the class they leave the university and then they leave this person far behind right there was a period

in my life where a lot of people live rentree in my head and I was like f that this is a waste of my time why am I worrying about what someone else is doing and the more that I let go of that I recognize okay I feel a little bit intimidated today I feel a little bit embarrassed today so be it right it's not something that I what I really want to focus on is that over there why am I getting destabilized by my embarrassment and like oh I feel like I can't dance so

now I'm embarrassed yeah I don't know how to dance because I never learned how to dance some amount of embarrassment that's the end of it I'm not going to bother dancing just so I feel better in this particular situation I'm going to spend more time learning how to make a YouTube video reading about psychology playing video games that's how I want to spend my life that's what diffusion allows you to do and the last thing is to recognize this is wild that the painful stuff in life can be altered into an advantage if you change

the way that you look at it so I failed out of college which was kind of a bad thing and yet it made be the person that I am today and if you look at these five head people who are resilient whose setbacks become advantages this is precisely how they do it the last thing that I want to say is that a lot of people wonder what's the advantage of therapy and this is where you don't necessarily have to go to therapy to get all the benefits of therapy it depends on your your case from

a clinical context but I really wanted to share with youall as a psychiatrist as someone who's a former monk as someone who does this work and helps people move from being 30 years old living in their parents basement to having a job getting married you know being a published author I've done this before and these are the skills that I teach in my office these are the things that people learn that take someone who's a 30-year-old addict and allows them to have a full life 5 years later so give this a shot and I really

hope it works for you [Music]