Brainrot Explained: Why You Can't Stop Watching

our dopamine circuitry is like a big lemon that's full of juice we can do a very pleasurable activity and that's like squeezing the lemon really hard right or we can do a very boring activity so it's like a slight squeeze when I wake up in the morning and my dopamine circuitry is full of dopamine even a slight squeeze will give us a fair amount of juice right when the lemon is full I can squeeze a little bit I get a decent amount of juice the problem is that if I squeeze it really hard when I

first wake up in the morning all of the juice runs out so there's this weird stuff on the internet that kind of rots our brain this stuff like skidy toilet I don't even know what that is like I don't know if it's like a song or a dance move or a picture or a philosophy or religion I don't even know what skibbidy toilet is and the problem is that the internet is getting filled with this kind of stuff and we spend our times engaging with this stuff that like isn't a narrative it's not a story

it's not a game we just spend our time on the internet doing this weird crap but the weirder thing is is not just that we do it it's that we can't stop so today we're going to teach y'all a little bit about what the hell is going on and also hopefully give y'all a foundation to spend less time rotting your brain so the first thing is that the stuff that we're going to be talking about today is going to be like really fundamental stuff we're going to be going to biological Basics and I know that

that that may sound a little bit weird but I think it's becoming increasingly important for you to understand how your brain actually works like what is it for like why do we have these organs called brains once we understand that we'll understand what is going on with all of this weird content on the internet which by the way is like a weird thing to call it right it's not a story it's not a game it's not a movie it's content it's some weird lifeless amorphous pile of whatever that is not like anywhere near an art

form so we have to understand what's going on in our brain how this content is affecting our brain and hopefully that will lay the foundation for us to understand how to actually get over it so we're going to start with like really basic stuff okay which is like why do human beings have brains so we have brains to help us survive and the circuitry in our brain is designed to move us towards staying alive right and a lot of the stuff that we have in our brains is kind of designed for that reason so a

simple example is orgasm so why do human beings or animals for that matter how why are they capable of orgasm why did we evolve this kind of particular circuit so that we can experience this maximal pleasure it's because for the survival of the human race we require sexual relations and so without this fundamental thing the human race would die out therefore from an evolutionary standpoint we develop this thing that gives us immense pleasure arguably the most immense pleasure that you can get from life is orgasm so we're going to say like okay this thing is

really important for us therefore we are going to maximize the pleasure circuitry around it to induce the right kind of behavior and it's not just orgasm so this is also why for example we develop social relationships when you get when you uh hug someone or when you receive a hug you get this Spurt of oxytocin oxytocin improves your anxiety improves your mood helps you form bonds relaxes you a little bit lowers your stress level and why is that it's because when human beings hug each other it forms a bond with them and this sort of

helps them increase their survival chances okay so this is the thing the brain is all designed to help us survive even the negative things that we experience like hunger and thirst why are they negative it's because the brain is sending us a signal hey this thing is against our survival this thing unless we fix this problem we will die like drinking water water therefore I'm going to make this experience of dehydration unpleasant so our brain wants to reward particular experiences that improve survival and punish us for particular experiences that decrease survival simple enough right now

here's the problem a bunch of people out there have figured out how to in isolated ways activate some of these circuits in our brain without actually providing us with the full benefit of what that circuit is for now I recognized that that sentence was kind of long so I'll give you a simple analogy right so there's a difference between calories and nutrition right so one of them is sure it's like energy and fuel it's a partial way to stay alive right we can eat calories just plain calories we can eat like a candy bar or

a Twinkie but that's very different from broccoli now our taste buds and our GI system and even our brain has started to send rewarding signals to us when we eat calorically dense food because it sort of correlates with survival so someone came along is like hey I have a great idea let's make a candy bar and with a candy bar what we're going to get is a maximum activation of this particular Circuit of the brain but we're not going to include any nutrition in it right so what happens if you eat candy bars all day

you'll get a bunch of calories and you'll get arguably a bunch of pleasure but you won't get the full complete experience of nutrition if you eat a bunch of candy bars you'll develop obesity you'll develop insulin resistance you'll develop vascular complications you'll literally develop things like numbness in your fingertips and Toes which results in like wound healing problems and all of these kinds of problems so this is the key thing that we also need to understand about these circuits and when we inappropriately activate them anytime you inappropriately or artificially activate a circuit it causes problems

in the human body and today what we're going to do is go over a couple of examples of those and really sort of highlight why brain rot is so devastating and so addictive hey y'all if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we discussed to your life to actually create change check out Dr K's guide to mental health the guide synthesize my years of training as a monk along with years of clinical experience as a psychiatrist to cover common topics like meditation ADHD and Trauma the guides include over 100 additional videos that can

be navigated based on your needs or interests or in a more open Choose Your Own Adventure format the guides are now available in the YouTube store below and if they're a little bit outside of your price point you can check out a piece of them with our free resource packs which are also linked below so definitely check them out so another good example of like when we artificially activate things is actually medication so I can give you a medicine for lowering your blood pressure and that's on balance a good thing but as I'm sure youall

know what comes with medicine side effects and this is exactly what we see with all of these brain rot kind of things right when I eat just candy bars when I take medication when I watch pornography it activates my body or brain in a isolated way instead of a complete way we're getting calories instead of nutrition and therefore that causes problems so what are the big problems that are caused by brain rot the biggest problem with calories instead of nutrition is that it destroys our hunger so remember hunger is used to help us survive so

when I fill up on candy bars I no longer feel hungry this is the driving force for like health and survival and arguably happiness and what's going on on the Internet is we have a bunch of people who are experimenting with stuff right and and this is the problem with the Internet is that like the most brain rotting stuff is what Rises to the top because we have this darwinian experience of okay there's like a bazillion Tik toks out there or YouTube shorts or whatever right Instagram reals or we're being platform agnostic okay we have

a thousand of these things and which one do you see you see the one that rots your brain the most because this content is the stuff that activates certain parts of your brain so the there's certain content that will be funny but will also like activate your empathic circuitry and will also help make you feel like pity for someone else and it engages you in lots of ways we also know that there's stuff like rage bait right and when we watch rage bait what we see is increases in heart rate we see increases in blood

pressure but when we see increases in heart rate and blood pressure without things like physical exercise that actually damages our body and we'll show you a couple papers about that later so this is the basic problem with the brain rotting stuff right so first of all there's this darwinian evolutionary kind of selection for the most brain rotting stuff and the most brain rotting stuff actually activates a number of different circuits but only partially and once we start to activate these circuits in a partial way the biggest problem is that once we activate the circuit the

drive to actually do something healthy disappears when I eat a candy bar I no longer want to eat broccoli so let's run through a couple of simple examples of why this stuff is so unhealthy for us so everyone knows that dopamine is kind of like this pleasure chemical we have this part of the brain called the nucleus accumbent which anytime we do something pleasurable it releases a spurt of dopamine now we have a a really good video about we've got a couple of good videos about dopamine y'all can definitely check those out but I'm going

to kind of give youall a quick rundown of one of the really important points here so when we wake up in the morning our dopamine circuitry is like a fresh lemon okay so big lemon that's full of juice now there are two kinds of activities that we can do we can do a very pleasurable activity like playing a video game and that's like squeezing the lemon really hard right so the more pleasurable the activity is the hard hard The Squeeze or we can do a very boring activity like sorting our mail or going through our

mail or doing some kind of paperwork now this is not a very pleasurable activity so it's like a slight squeeze now here's the issue when my lemon when I wake up in the morning and my dopamine circuitry is full of dopamine even a slight squeeze will give us a fair amount of juice right when the lemon is full I can squeeze a little bit I get a decent amount of juice the problem is that if I squeeze it really hard when I first wake up in the morning all of the juice runs out and then

if I try to do a slight squeeze nothing actually gets the juice out I need to squeeze very very very hard so this is what we tend to find if you look at so I've worked with a lot of people who are you know addicted to video games and this is what we tend to find if you play a video game in the first couple hours of the morning the reward that you get from doing work that is important to you actually declines drastically we essentially empty our dopamine through a video game and then there's

no dopamine left to give us a sense of reward for studying or going through the mail or organizing our bookshelf or whatever the flip side is that if you wake up first thing in the morning and you start to do work you're squeezing out you get some degree of positive reinforcement behavioral reinforcement and pleasure and then even after you're done doing some amount of work then you can squeeze the lemon right so we've squeezed out half of the Juice by doing not very fun things and then we can squeeze really hard by playing a video

game at the end of the day and we still have fun so this is the problem with brain rock is all of these activities that we do squeeze all of the dopamine out and then they reduce our ability to experience pleasure from other things when you watch shorts for about 3 hours nothing else feels engaging right it's not fun to read a book it's not fun to hang out with other people there's no amount of pleasure that we experience from work and I see this all the time where people people are like oh am I

just supposed to like work for 8 hours a day and then commute and then work out and do laundry and like this is what my life is for the next 30 Years and I empathize with that we want life to be more than that but often times what I'm stunned by is when I work with people in my office who are talking about how terrible life is I'll ask them one really simple thing hey can I see your phone for a second and I'll flip it open and I'll look at their average screen time usage

right I'll tell them hey can we just like check out what your screen time usage is per day and I'm shocked because it's usually about 4 and 1/2 hours at the minimum up to about 6 hours a day which is sort of the national average in the United States and so it's not just that our life is like empty it's that we are engaging with things we are sort of eating so much so many calories without getting nutrition that it messes up the way that our brain circuitry works so let's take another example relationships and

socialization so once again the internet offers us an opportunity to scratch certain parts of our brain but not really do the whole thing and anytime you get a partial activation of the brain this results in problems down the line so there's simple things like I can socialize on the internet right so I'm going to talk to my friends and I'm someone who socializes on the internet I have friends that I've been gaming with for years that I've never met in real life I consider them my real friends I played Starcraft I started playing Starcraft with

someone when I was 15 years old or maybe even 14 that the first time I met them was at at my wedding so I'm not one of these people who's like oh my God internet relationships are fake they are real they can be very positive in many ways and they are incomplete and they are a little bit closer to calories than nutrition because there are some things that you can't do over an internet relationship you can never receive a hug you can never have physical contact and these kinds of things when we talk about the

circuitry of Human Relationships these things are very beneficial for us right we already talked about oxytocin anytime I hug someone I get a spur of oxytocin reduces my stress improves my mood reduces my anxiety reduces my inflammation like my whole body inflammation goes down with something like oxytocin so what we see with all of these like internet relationships is number one and then especially on the brain rot side we see things like parasocial relationships and this is part of the reason why some of these platforms like twitch and only fans become so popular because what's

starting to happen is people are figuring out how to scratch more of that itch and the more of the itch that they scratch the more addicted you will become so let's use a simple example like only fans so it used to be that pornography would just activate your sensory receptors and sort of activate some of your dopaminergic circuitry like that's it right so we're getting this we're seeing these naked people doing things that are sexual we feel somewhat aroused and then maybe there's some amount of masturbation or orgasm associated with it which is some amount

of dopamine and that's kind of how it was but the issue was that with pornography you couldn't have a relationship with this person right you are a consumer they are filming something right it's a film that you're watching or whatever and then someone invented only fans and with only fans now you can have interaction you can say to them good morning and they can say back to you good morning you can even create some degree of a transactional relationship or some degree of reciprocity you send the money they make a special video just for you

and so if we look at what is this actually doing it is starting to activate additional parts of our brain the problem is when we start to do this activation it's it's not actually like we're moving from uh Twinkies or candy bars to broccoli we're actually just eating Twinkies for more parts of our brain now there is this fake level of social interaction because when you're getting a DM from an only fans Creator chances are it's some 45 balding dude who's like been hired by the only fans Creator to make you feel special it is

highly unlikely that it's the only fans Creator themselves and even if you do this kind of stuff right so even if you're directly interacting with them I don't know that you know I've never heard I've never heard of a case of someone spending a ton of money on an only fans Creator and then actually forming a real relationship with them but this is the way that people feel right they think okay like this is like this person really does get me this person has a relationship this person cares about me a lot and why do

we feel that way we feel that way because these parasocial platforms engage more circuits of our brain and once again the real problem with this stuff is that it decreases our drive to engage in real relationships and I've even seen or heard and worked with people who have horror stories of ruining their real life relationship because of a relationship with an only fans Creator so this is the core problem with why we're rotting our brains people are figuring out how to AR artificially activate these various circuits and the more circuits that they activate the more

we get pulled into it right because remember all of these circuits evolved to drive us towards survival so when our brain gets this stuff it's like hey this is good this is great we like this candy bars are awesome we're getting a bunch of calories and this increases our survival the problem is that it costs us so much the first thing that it costs us is it reduces our motiv it tanks our motivation to actually build the real thing and I've worked with so many people who have so much Social Anxiety that they'll turn to

online relationships because they feel safer over there and there can be good things associated with that we're not against online relationships but the problem is that you can get engender a dependence on that online interaction and specifically with social anxiety the more online time you spend the more some circuits of your brain start to atrophy right so we'll see things like um things uh circuits related to body language tone some of these like interpersonal communication skills start to weaken when all you're ever doing is dming people or sitting in voice chats right there's no there's

no like how much there's no like understanding of like eye contact for example and so what I see is a lot of these people then try to go socialize and since they don't have practice with eye contact they don't know how to do eye contact properly and since they don't know how to do eye contact properly one of two things happens either they get called a creep because their eye contact is really intense and they don't look away often enough or they feel people feel like they're mentally checked out because there there's not enough eye

contact and they're always like kind of looking over here or looking over here and they never make eye contact with you so these eye contact circuits require some degree of practice and if they're out of practice we end up feeling incredibly awkward then what happens I try to go socialize and since I've been on this diet of candy bars this whole time when I socialize people call me a creep or they call me awkward or I feel awkward and then I it's very hard for me to socialize again so this is literally what's happening as

we're activating our circuits we are sort of losing the capacity to engage normally we're losing the capacity to engage in like romantic relationships right cuz we're eating this internet diet of like this weird toxic whatever like uh pink pill red pill whatever kind of stuff right we have all these ideas about relationships but we're not spending a whole lot of of time in relationships we have all this dopam energic crap that we're consuming that messes with our behavioral reinforcement in motivational circuitry so we don't feel like doing anything we have all of these problems with

simple things like socialization and anxiety and all that kind of stuff but that's not the end of it so I was looking at a bunch of research right trying to figure out okay what is the cost of spending time on the Internet or playing video games and we'll just show you all a couple of papers like this stuff is wild okay right so enhancement of allergic skin wheel response in patients with atop atopic eczema dermatitis syndrome by playing video games or by a frequently ringing mobile phone so this is a study that looks at like

literally the like how video games and a ringing mobile phone will make your allergic skin responses worse so if you have an atopic disease like asthma eczema these things will get worse when you actually play video games so physiologic responses to playing a video game this is another um paper that kind of looks both of these papers look at cardiovascular things so when we play video games we'll do things like we'll see increases in heart rate systolic and diastolic blood pressure ventilation so these are normally things that are associated with exercise so when we exercise

we see all of these increases the problem is that like when our physiology gets stressed in this way and we're not exercising it actually causes damage so we see this like this gets really wild so it turns out that there's this is a paper that looks at four cases of people people who have thromboembolic events so sometimes human beings have these things called blood clots and sometimes the blood clot is in a place like your brain and then you get something called a stroke and when you have a stroke there is a part of your

brain there's a part of a blood vessel in your brain gets blocked off by a clot and when a a clot blocks off a blood vessel all of the tissue Downstream from the clot that gets fed by that blood vessel actually doesn't get blood anymore and then that tissue dies so this is normally a problem that we see in older people right so strokes and blood clots are things that we see in people who are like 60 plus 70 plus like not even 50y olds like the majority of people who have blood clots are like

you know in retirement age now what's super scary is as we play these dop and energic games and we're sitting on our ass all day we have young people who are developing blood clots and things like strokes and this is insane right this is not what the body is is made for and by the way there's also a correlation between um you know the the inappropriate activation of the cardiovascular system and the development of blood clots like all that stuff is related like everything in the human body is related we also see uh problems with

things like insulin resistance like literally playing video games I'll show you all the paper real quick right so associations of sedentary Behavior in screen time with biomarkers of inflammation and insulin resistance so Leisure screen time was detrimentally associated with il6 this is an interlukin that activates our immune system and leads to things like autoimmune disease leptin this is something that has to do with our feeling of hunger and satiety insulin um H we won't go over that and there's all these other things but basically like these are all like these are all indicators of our

energy metabolism our feeling of feeling full feeling hungry inflammation and insulin resistance and insulin resistance leads to things like diabetes forget about forming bonds forget about dopamine there are very real health effects from engaging with this brain rotting content and so the question is like what do we do about this right how do we stop how do we break this cycle and this is the real problem is like this is the reason it's so important is because as we consume this weird content right this weird like AI generator like bot Farm rage bait inducing crap

the problem is that it destroys our motivation to actually like build our lives because what happens is they offer us such a cheap and easy way to get mentally satisfied the problem is they literally like not literally I guess no I I think I can say literally right because it induces inflammation it induces thrombolic events it induces insulin resistance all of these things are messing us up and then detract from our ability to actually improve our lives and that's the real problem so what do we do about this so the short answer is I don't

know right so this stuff is so new that I don't have a very simple like okay just do this this this and this but here's what I would kind of say here's when I work with people this is kind of what I focus on the first thing is that understand that there is a difference between calories and nutrition and take a look at your life and start to ask yourself what am I really getting from this what direction is this stuff moving me in now I know that everyone sort of says like oh yeah like

obviously I should play less video games obviously I should spend less time on my screen but I just don't do that and then the question becomes why because when I work with people that it's not like there's a generic answer this is where like the reason I love doing individual work is because people have individual Solutions and so I I really start with sort of thinking a little bit about you know what do you get from doing this and don't say I don't get anything it's a waste that's incorrect you know I wrote a book

about like parenting kids with video game addiction and one of the key things that I sort of found when it comes to addiction is you have to understand what is driving the addiction why are we engaging this Behavior what am I really getting out of this and then the real way to get off of this brain rot is to really think about okay what am I getting out of this and how can I get this outside of the brain rot content consuming only fans video game kind of world right how can I get this outside

of that and here's what I tend to find when I work with people is that when you start to work on getting it outside from whatever the brain rot content is it actually reduces your dependence on the brain rot a simple way to put it is if I eat a bowl of broccoli my desire for a candy bar will actually decrease right so this is what's really cool is we can use the same principle of candy bar make if I eat a Cy bar I don't want to eat broccoli the same is the opposite is

also true if I start to eat broccoli I don't feel like having a candy bar if I'm dehydrated and I drink water my desire for soda will naturally go down okay so this is where what we tend to work on here at healthy gamer is building a life that is worth living so take one or two things start very very small take one or two things and and really think about okay what am I getting from this kind of thing is it social interaction is it a sense of joy is it a sense of accomplishment

what is it and try to do those things as early in the day as possible it can be something as simple as food right so even if I'm like spending three hours on the internet and then I'm starving and then I order a pizza or like microwave something it can be something as simple as eating something so steam some broccoli and eat it try to create whatever you can that sort of gets you to satisfy some nutritional need in yourself that's the first thing second thing we really want to focus on is inflammation and the

third thing we want to focus on is sleep so anytime I'm working with someone what I tend to find is that there's a very efficient path of like reducing their inflam inflammatory burden so I know so the second thing that we're going to focus on is inflammation now this sounds kind of weird right because what does inflammation have to do with this so all of these activities not all but the majority of these activities will increase our inflammatory burden now the problem is that inflammation causes all kinds of Downstream effects that make it really hard

for us to stop the brain rot activities so INF has been associated with depression inflammation is common in things like anxiety inflammation also makes it hard for us to sleep so I see this cycle when I work with people where like they have they have a high inflammatory burden it's hard for them to sleep so when they wake up in the morning their frontal loes in their willpower is actually exhausted a crappy night of sleep means that you have very little willpower the next day which then makes it very hard to resist all of this

brain rotting activity so what I tend to and then it becomes like an impossible cycle right so if I can't sleep then I have no willpower if I have no willpower I can't resist the activity if I can't resist the activity I can't sleep right because then I stay awake all night I stay awake way too late spending time on the Internet or whatever so how do you break the cycle it's really interesting but often times you have to kind of work tangentially so try to reduce your inflammatory burden as much as possible so that

means a couple servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day um you know there are some supplements and things like that have been that have been shown to use inflammatory burdens strongly recommend that you'll talk to your doctors about things like that but even things like fish oil and omega-3 and stuff like that has been shown to reduce inflammation can be healthy for your heart so do whatever you can to reduce your inflammation another thing that's really good at reducing inflammation is actually exercise and you can even do something like go for a walk for

like 30 minutes the cool thing about going for a walk is it sort of activates your cardiovascular system creates an energy expenditure causes you to do things like sweat and then the cool thing about exercise is as you exercise you will start to Crave healthier foods so your desire for drinking water will actually increase the more that you exercise so anti-inflammatory diet and exercise I'd say spend one hour a day that's it right so we're going to do some activity at the beginning that we find nutritious and then we're going to exercise for 30 minutes

and cook yourself some kind of healthy meal and I know it sounds like but how does that tackle the brain rot this is the key thing that I want youall to understand you need to leverage your physiology right you need to get your physiology working for you instead of working against you and when we have a brain rot lifestyle when we have a sedentary lifestyle our cravings for water actually decrease our desire for soda can increase because we have insulin resistance so the you know we need more sugar to overcome that insulin resistance so a

lot of things can start to turn around the last thing that I would strongly strongly recommend if you're stuck in this brain rot lifestyle is a decent night's sleep so I recommend things like Yoga Nidra about 1 hour before you go to bed you can take things like melatonin and stuff that's definitely something to talk to your doctor about but this is the kind of thing where getting a good night's sleep is about how you spend your day we have a whole video about that that hopefully will help you all out quite a bit and

this is sort of how we break free from the cycle so it's kind of scary but the stuff that we that rots our brain is actually incredibly addictive and the reason that it's incredibly addictive is because people have figured out how to hyperactivate certain circuits of our brain that in the past helped us to survive which means that since these circuits were survival oriented anytime we activate them we have a very strong behavioral reinforcement to engage with it again the biggest problem with activating these circuits isn't even the direct damage that they do it's actually

that it destroys our motivation to satisfy those circuits in the way that they're supposed to be satisfied in a way that is way healthier and so that reduces our motivation to actually put our lives together so I hope that this video has been helpful for you all I know it's incredibly challenging and please let us know you know for what we said today what works what doesn't work what are the additional challenges that youall run into and let us know because this is not the last video that we're going to make on brain rot hey

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don't like the vibe of it it's painless to cancel so I hope youall definitely check it out and I hope to see yall next month B