What Enlightenment Does to Your Brain

today we're going to talk about the Neuroscience of [Music] Enlightenment so if you look at these Eastern spiritual Traditions they have this concept of Moka or Liberation Enlightenment this state of basically permanent happiness which is impervious to all of the vagaries of the world around us but if we look at the science we don't really see a whole lot of evidence of that right so we have these studies on meditation or mindfulness that will show reductions in anxiety or improvements in quality of life but no one using a mindfulness app is becoming permanently happy for

the rest of their life so it seems like we don't really have any Neuroscience evidence of Enlightenment or do we oh suspense So today we're going to understand the neuroscientific mechanisms of Enlightenment how to cultivate particular things in your life that will lead you to happiness that could be a little bit more permanent that could be a little bit more impervious to your circumstances which may sound really confusing because if we look at happiness research it actually points Us in the opposite direction there's studies that show that for example if you have lots of friends

you're more likely to be happy if you make more than $100,000 a year you're more likely to be happy these are all correlational studies that basically look at the circumstances of your life and will basically tell you okay the better your circumstances are the more likely you are to be happy so if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth and a gold spoon up your butt then good luck you did you won the lottery and you're more likely to be happy the challenge with all of these studies on happiness is that they

don't really give us actionable information right so if this secret to happiness is making a bunch of money and having a lot of friends that's not necessarily something you can control it's a huge problem because you can move in that direction But ultimately people may not like you you may get fired from your job you can't just wake up tomorrow and make 100 Grand and as I've seen in my clinical experience it's not clear that money buys happiness money does buy security which can be one of the components of unhappiness or fear or anxiety but

it's not like making infinitely more money actually increases your happiness so what does the Neuroscience of Happiness tell us what do we know about sort of principles of Neuroscience that could give us a clue how we can be happy in spite of our circumstances and thankfully there's a lot of great evidence of this we're going to start with dopamine so this is our basic pleasure chemical and the yogis say that chasing our desires or basically satisfying our dopam energic system will not lead to happiness and it turns out that they're right so here's what we

know about the dopam energic system so anytime we get a release of dopamine we get some amount of pleasure and then we also get some amount of anticipation so this is what dopamine does anytime dopamine gets released we feel good and we get anticipation and we get behavioral reinforcement so I'm kind of lumping those two together so when we talk about anticipation the other way to think about it is craving so anytime I do something dope and energic I enjoy it and I want more now this would be totally great if it were not for

one fundamental feature of life which is this thing called adaptation so all living organisms adapt right they don't just live the same way over and over again and this is why dopamine will forever be a trap so let's understand this let's say I play a video game so I get five units of pleasure and then what happens is my brain is like that was great let's get some more and so then I have five units of anticipation or craving I want to play again right I want to achieve what I achieved the first time the

problem is that when I get these five units of uh anticipation I also get one unit of adaptation so what that basically means is we velop a tolerance so this is a feature of human evolution like life Evolution really so for example like you know you can drink one cup of coffee the first cup of coffee in your whole life and you'll be like wired forever but as you develop a tolerance what literally happens with dopamine is that we remove dopamine receptors from our cells so the maximum dopamine signal that we can receive actually goes

down so let's look at what happens practically right so I do this action once and I get five units of pleasure I get five units of anticipation and I get one unit of tolerance so now the second time I engage in the activity I only get four units of pleasure because I have this one unit of adaptation so my maximum pleasure goes down the problem though is that the craving is based on this the craving actually doesn't go down the craving Remains the Same so now as I engage in the second round of the behavior

I get one more unit of Tolerance and four only four units of pleasure so this wasn't quite as fun so now what I end up with is a one unit of deficit right because I have five units of craving I want this much fun but this game wasn't that much fun so what do I do again let me let me play again so then I play another round and now I have two stacking units of Tolerance okay so I end up with three units of pleasure five units of craving a Delta of two and another

unit of Tolerance and if you look at any pleasurable activity in life this is basically what you will find right so when you the first time you play through a game oh my God it's so much fun it's so epic and I saw a thread recently where people were like if you could wipe one game out of your mind and have amnesia which game would you pick so that you could experience it for the first time so embedded in that idea is that the first time we do things is the most pleasurable right except for

losing a virginity because we don't we don't know how to have sex yet anyway so that's a conversation for a different day and so this is the core problem with dopamine which is that if we are relying on it for pleasure there are diminishing returns and so the yogis sort of figured this out and they said well hold on a second if we're chasing pleasure in life it will never lead to sustained happiness and we see this very practically right so we'll have people who will chase one dopaminergic activity after another dopaminergic activity after another

dopaminergic activity and some people will even develop almost like their life is an art of Hedonism right so they'll try to figure out I worked with patients for example who have poly substance use so what does that mean that means they're not just addicted to one substance they're addicted to a lot of substances and how does that work it's because this principle of tolerance so the first time around I'm going to do THC but since I get diminishing returns on that now I'm going to use Aderall to get five units because it's a new source

of stimulus and then I'm going to play a video game which is five units and then I'm going to basically rotate between dopam energic activities so you'll have some people who will try to develop this sort of perfect hedonistic lifestyle where I'm eting really good and I'm playing video games and I'm having sex and I'm doing drugs and it sounds awesome but overtime these people are not happy I think a great example of this if yall are familiar with Mike pner and he you know made this F famous song called I took a pill in

Aiza and then many years later he had this awesome like Instagram story or whatever he was talking about his journey and how he used to chase pleasure and like where he is now it's like super inspirational and stuff but the key thing that I found is that people will try to rotate between different pleasures and you'll notice that you do this too because after playing the same game for a little while you want to switch to a different game you want to watch something maybe watch some anime maybe do something else fun maybe go go

out drinking we rotate between dop and energic things but it never leads to sustained happiness hey all if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life check out Dr K's guide to mental health it combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a Choose Your Own Adventure format so check out the link in the bio and start your journey today the second thing that the yogis talk about is

the removal of ego so they say that as long as you have an ego you will not have sustained happiness now it turns out that Neuroscience actually supports this as well so often times we have this sense of identity right so I say oh I'm I'm All Oak and let's say I feel like I'm not happy with the way that I look and we have this idea that if I'm unhappy happy with something about myself fixing that thing will lead to more happiness right so if I get in shape I will be more happy seems

very very logical seems very very simple seems like a fact of life but if we look at the Neuroscience of it that's not true so if we look at our ego our sense of identity chances are this has to do with a part of our brain called the default mode Network so this is a it's really a circuit it's not like an anatomical part it's connections between different parts of the brain and when the default mode network is active we are thinking about ourselves and it turns out that when I am unhappy about my body

it's not the part of my body that actually causes my unhappiness it is the fact that I'm thinking about myself this is really where the unhappiness comes from so I want youall to think about your own experience right so when you reflect too much on yourself and we see this a lot in depression so for example like in studies on depression we know that these patients have a hyperactive default mode Network so what that means is that they're constantly thinking about themselves and even if one thing gets fixed the default mode network is still active

and it will find something else to think about so when I work with people who have highly active default mode networks are very depressed even if something goes right in their life they don't feel satisfied because the mind finds something else we also see this in cases of things like anorexia or body dysmorphia where isn't it isn't fixing a particular thing that leads to happiness it is the fact that this part the self-critical part of your brain the part of your brain that is thinking about you and judging you your ego as long as it

is active you will be unhappy no amount of progress no amount of facial surgeries or Buckle fat removals or Botox injections will fix body dysmorphia that's the nature of it and what do we know about the Neuroscience of these conditions it is high activity of the default mode Network it also follows and we have clinical evidence of this that disabling the default mode network is what leads to relief so when someone is depressed about their life fixing all of the problems that they perceive doesn't necessarily lead to happiness the fastest way to stop someone from

being depressed is actually a ketamine infusion so I don't recommend that you'll go abusing it if you get prescribed that's a different story but what we know is that ketamine is a dissociate of agent which means that it unplugs us from our sense of self we also know that the default mode Network can sometimes be disactivation is a very good way to dis deactivate the default mode Network so once again it seems like the yogis were on to something when they said remove your ego from the equation because once the default mode Network gets deactivated

this is when we're happy it is not in satisfying our views of our s that are not very good that actually leads to happiness it can lead to progress in some degree of contentment but that too depends on whether the default mode network is active when you are done so if I feel unhappy about my body the question is after I work out what happens to my default mode Network the more active it is the more unhappy I will remain whereas often times what happens when we move in the right direction is we actually disable

the default mode Network so that's still the key principle at play the third principle that we're going to talk about is living in the present which is really fantastic because everyone's like oh yeah man I'm trying to like live in the present so like I'm not going to pay rent and I'm not going to pay you back because that's in the future and I'm living in the present so I'm going do what I want I'mma live in the present I'mma play video games I'm G get hot it's going to be great I'm living in the

present turns out that living in the present is absolutely a fantastic idea and the reason for that is because our brain is honestly a little bit scuffed there's one basic problem with living in the future so if we look at the Neuroscience of our brain when we project into the future we can actually experience a hypothetical pain but we cannot experience a hypothetical pleasure so I'll give you all just a simple example of this okay so if you look at someone who's stuck in an anxiety Loop they're worrying about the future and then if you

literally look in their brain when someone is having an in an anxiety Loop or a panic attack the parts of their brain that experience okay so this means the feeling of it the experience not hypothetical the parts of their brain that experience negative emotion are active so when you are thinking about a future negative event you can literally feel pain you can feel shame you can feel guilt you can feel fear all of these negative emotions are possible from hypotheticals and this is what's so terrifying when I work with people who struggle with anxiety because

they don't just have one they don't experience the pain of one bad outcome they experience the pain of a hundred bad outcomes they're thinking this could happen and that hurts oh my God that hurts and then I'll be embarrassed and then this will happen and then oh my God that hurts and oh my God that hurts and oh my God that hurts and it's crazy because they're literally experiencing more pain through these hypotheticals than they would if this action actually happened and only one outcome happened even one bad outcome is one unit of pain but

they're projecting into the future and they experience a lot of pain now the scuffed thing about our brain is that this doesn't work for pleasure our brain does not hypothesize pleasure in get a spurt of dopamine right like you can't you can think you can be anxious about the future and feel like ashamed and your heart rate will go up and all this kind of crap that can happen here and now but you can't think about playing video games and get that Rush of dopamine you can't think about having sex and get the pleasure of

an orgasm our brain is just not designed to do that and that's what's so scuffed and we see this a lot in studies on things like neuroeconomics where I'll ask you okay you have a 100% chance to get $100 I can just give you $100 right now or there's a 50% chance to get $250 which one do you pick right and the majority of human beings even though we know that statistically $250 onage average I will get 125 I value the 100 guaranteed more than the potential loss of nothing so if we really look at

it in our brain the way we make calculations losses are worth more than gains they're valued at a higher rate and this is a principle of biology this is baked into our neuroscience and what is the mechanism of that the reason that our brain values losses more than gains is because of this basic principle of a hypothetical pain being experienced in the present so as you're thinking about do I want $100 in my hand or but what if I don't get anything what if I get zero that hurts so much so that tiny amount of

hurt versus the pleasure of oh crap I've got $250 that's awesome right that sort of discrepancy between the way that our brain actually works makes it so that losses feel more real and will cause suffering so what do the yogis do the yogis conclude very easily that okay so don't live in the future because it's a rigged game right so if you're living in the future you can experience the pain but you can't experience the pleasure therefore live in the present so another great example of this is casinos because casinos operate on the same principle

but in the opposite direction a casino is basically designed by the most evil Yogi on the planet because what do casinos try to incentivise you to do the reason they keep people hooked is because they keep you they prevent you from from thinking about your future losses because they know that if you start thinking about the future losses then you will have a huge problem so they'll even do things like they'll change the lighting in the casino so you have no sense of time right whether it's day or night it all looks the same they're

literally implementing things that remove the dec the the realm of time from your brain we can also look at things like anytime you lose they don't let you dwell on it so the moment you pull something on a slot machine there's anticipation anticipation anticipation didn't work and then you can just pull again when I work with people who are gambling addicts and casinos will Design this on purpose you're actually playing with six slot machines at the same time I had a patient who would walk down and back pulling levers pulling levers pulling levers pulling levers

right they're not thinking at all about the future Dimension they're actually engaged in a lot of sensory stimuli and anytime there's a loss you can pull again and you can focus on the present so they're keeping you relent LLY focused on the present and they do this with the winning as well because when you lose it's not like there's some w w no no no no the second that you lose you can pull again and you can play but what about when you win when you win there's lots of money and the money comes out

slow right it's not like they credit your account it's like the money comes shooting out and they have to spend a lot of time picking it up and there's lots of noise and lots of lights and everyone's paying attention and so they are bringing you to the present bring bringing you to the present bringing you to the present so they bring you to the present to experience pleasure and they keep you away from the future in in terms of avoiding pain and removing the dimension of time it's actually brilliant if not predatory the last thing

that the yogis kind of talk about is one-pointedness of the mind and they say as long as your mind is one-pointed you will be closer to happiness so let's take a look at this so if we look at a lot of the nature of emotional suffering ing or mental suffering if we look at Psychiatry what we tend to find is that people who suffer have a two trck mind so if we look at something like social anxiety if I go out on a date and I have social anxiety I'm not focused on the task I'm

not with this person 100% 50% of me is on the date and 50% of me is running a commentary subtitles director's cut thinking about oh does this person like this does this person not like this so what we tend to find is that anytime we have a TW track mind it will lead to suffering because what is that second track it is a commentary on the experience of life itself right so even if I'm doing something like let's say I'm taking a test and there's a question that I don't know I can try to answer

that question but the simplest way to improve or make my suffering worse to enhance increase my suffering let's say that is to think about the consequences of getting the action wrong so I don't know the answer to this question right that is some amount of pain fair enough but if I start projecting this means that I'm going to get a B on the test this means that I'm going to get a B in the class if I get one B in the class it's impossible to get a 4.0 if I don't get a 4.0 I

won't be able to go to medical school or law school or MBA or whatever these other I won't get the scholarship and then the Cascade of events happens right so if you really pay attention what you find is that suffering correlates with the fractured nature of the mind and the opposite is also true this is why we love non-boring video games so what does a non-boring video game do it keeps us 100% focused on the game at hand what are the games that we enjoy the most it's the ones what what are the ones that

are the this full of butt clenching moments and on the edge of your seat right like it's like we're right on the edge and if you look at some of these like um you you know battle arena kind of games where the world is constantly shrinking why do they do that it's to keep you constantly engaged keep you focused keep you so that a moment of distraction costs you so much right this is also why if you look at very simple game mechanics like damage to HP pools a lot of times over time what we

see in video games is the damage to HP pool is very favorable for like one-shotting things right so it's not like I have a thousand health and I do 10 damage I don't know if yall remember this game War which is a card game where it's like I flip over one card and you flip over one card and and whoever gets the higher card gets both of the cards right and the goal is to like wipe out the other person this is the most boring game on the planet because the HP pool is super high

and the DPS is super low so we're sitting there blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and what do you do when you play war you're not like Focus you're like oh my God butt clenching moment like what's going to happen next which card you're like this is so boring like give me some other game and games are designed in the exact opposite they keep you one-pointed and so the yogis actually figured out that one-pointedness of the Mind correlates with happiness this is why we love doing things that are in the Flow State

even work can be pleasurable if we can achieve flow because it's one-pointedness of the mind it's not the action it's not the outcome it is one-pointedness this is also why orgasm is so addictive because in the moment of orgasm we have a one-pointed mind this is a physiologic and neuroscientific mechanism where all thoughts of the future all thoughts of what the other person is is it good for the other person too all of those disappear from our mind and when we think about something like the sexual act right which maybe not everyone can relate to

fair enough but y'all will get there one day so if we think about the sexual act that too we can realize that the joy of this can be shattered if we ever stop for a second and think about the other person right so if we're just having sex and we're having fun but the moment that we create a TW track mind is it good for the other person is they enjoying it am I doing too much am I doing too little should I be doing this should I be doing this that commentary in our head

is where our suffering comes from so it turns out that we actually do have a lot of evidence for this concept of Enlightenment it turns out that if we literally look at our Neuroscience studies of the way that these different circuits of our brain work it actually makes sense that if you are able to consistently Implement these four things which are first of all not chasing dopamine and pleasure because there's no way that'll lead to sustained happiness secondly to disable the ego which is literally what some of the strongest treatments in Psychiatry are designed to

do is just literally unplug your ego these are things like ketamine and psychedelics third thing is to focus on the present because our brain is kind of scuffed it's kind of scuffed it's like rigged that it can experience a hypothetical pain but not experience a hypothetical pleasure and the fourth is to be one-pointed with your mind now the crazy thing is that if we Implement these four things what I seen in my own life and what I have literally helped hundred of people do is to become happy in their own lives this is not about

the circumstances of your life and this is what's so powerful about this see the problem with $100,000 a year and being 6 feet tall or if you're a woman having an hourglass shape in a thigh gap right I've worked with women who have worked so hard to get thigh gaps because the thigh gap means happiness so we go in our lives always trying to chase these external things we try to achieve these particular things we try to Chase these particular Pleasures but that means that the true control the decider of my happiness is on the

outside world if I don't get a promotion that means I'm unhappy the crazy thing is that the yogi said if you really stop and think about it you can control perfect happiness you can be permanently happy in spite of your circumstances and the crazy thing is that as we look at this neuroscientific research we know that it's not about particular outcomes it is about activation and deactivation of particular parts of your brain this is a scientific fact right so if my amydala is active when I am panicking about something this will lead to suffering this

is a scientific fact when I am not active when my amigdala is not active and I am not in anxiety Then I am Blissful we know this this is also subjective experience so the key thing is to cultivate these four things and as you live in alignment to these principles you will move closer to a permanent state of happiness B [Music]