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this is the whole problem that everyone makes anytime we have a problem the first thing that we do is we try to jump
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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
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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
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piss it and then I add sugar it doesn't remove the piss because no amount of building something good will remove
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something bad in order to change Behavior what you need to do is save treat Dr K is the Harvard trained
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psychiatrist and former monks specializing in modern mental health blending Neuroscience with real life wisdom to help millions of people unlock
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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
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problem is that everyone is doing the wrong things now first of all talking about our problems can absolutely make
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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
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in love and that's actually because we're exhausting our dopamine through things like devices yeah people don't
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realize and then the in social anxiety is because everyone is texting so the parts of our brain that reassure Us in
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social situations are starting to rust so there are core things that we have to start doing so the first is that Dr K
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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
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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
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the big difference here really yeah and this is what tends to happen so
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question if you could sit at a table with any four guests from the dire of CEO who would you choose here's a
00:01:38
challenge for the entire D CEO Community if we hit 10 million subscribers by the
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end of 2024 you will get to pick four guests for your dream conversation and
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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
00:01:56
invited to join this conversation live in person and for free subscribe now and
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let's make this happen [Music] together Dr K if you had to
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summarize what you do for people professionally how would you summarize
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it I help them understand themselves and now expand for me what that
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means yeah so so here's the thing right so there are two great Traditions that
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have taught us about how humans work one tradition is spirituality which we've had for a
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couple thousand years the other tradition is science which we've seen an explosion of especially in the fields of
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like neuroscience and Psychiatry over the last 20 years and so these are the two places that human beings learn about
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themselves so when I work with someone what I try to do is draw on both of those traditions and I especially focus
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on the area of spirituality that has scientific verification and teach people people
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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
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manual that is in the glove compartment that tells you what everything is and how it works the problem is that in life
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like we don't have that manual for ourselves but we do have these two great Traditions that can teach us so much
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about this stuff and so what I try to do is basically translate those two Traditions to an individual the
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situation they face the challenges they face and the goals that they want to achieve and what experiences and work
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are you drawing on to arrive at the conclusions and the support that you give people what have you done in your
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life what experiences have you had how many patients have you seen the first experience that I draw on is my own so I
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struggled a lot in high school college failed out of college was addicted to video games had no idea what I wanted to
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do with my life then I went to India at the age of 21 to find myself and I found
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myself I spent about seven years studying to become a monk um so that was very very formative in helping me see
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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
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Neuroscience research for a couple years I had a couple of spiritual experiences and I was super curious like what is
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happening in the brain I'm starting to change as a human being but like that has to be at a neuroscientific level as
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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
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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
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doctor um became a psychiatrist because the mind was my favorite organ um trained at Harvard Medical School where
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I was faculty for a few years and then you know over the last couple of years have focused a lot on addiction
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Psychiatry and also like performance-based stuff so once we understand
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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
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depressed and then I assessed them right so when when someone has like a mood disorder they have like depression which
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causes them problems in their professional life causes them problems in their personal life and I ask them are you having problems in your
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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
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said Mike you're not depressed you're unhappy and there's a difference and
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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
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do is on that whole Continuum of pathology where something within you is broken but then going from negative 100
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to zero is what medicine does right a doctor is not going to help you become healthy they are going to remove
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sickness and then from zero to positive 100 is when we really draw on things like spiritual traditions because
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meditation if you look at like the teachings of the Buddha the Buddha was not using mindfulness to treat social
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anxiety to disorder he was using mindfulness to attain Enlightenment to attain the heights of human Perfection
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and so that whole Continuum is where I work it's so interesting you mentioned there the case of Mike he came to you
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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
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of people calling a lot of things depression and anxiety we kind of Ed that word quite flippantly when we go
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through different moods and situations how do you think the whole Mental Health and psychology sort of Revolution we've
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seen over the last 10 years and the Tik Tock ification of mental health has led
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us astray so I think um there are some things that are good about it and some
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things that are problematic so I think the really good thing about it is that there is a lot more awareness of mental
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health so we now realize so what I used to see about 10 years ago right when I
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was seeing patients is like people would come in and they would not realize that this is a problem that can be fixed so
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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
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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
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get out of bed people didn't realize that that was depression I've worked with so many people who have adult
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diagnosis of ADHD which uh many years ago you couldn't even be diagnosed as an
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adult ADHD had to be something that was kind of like a pediatric diagnosis so now I think the the best
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thing is that people recognize that okay there maybe this maybe what is wrong with me is not like me I'm not
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fundamentally broken in some way but there is some kind of process going on in my brain in my mind that is
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responsible for my problems and if I fix that then I can be well now on the flip
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side what started to happen is no one on the internet understands the concept of differential diagnosis so everyone is
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like oh I have a Tik Tok that if this if you sometimes forget your keys you have
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ADHD if you are happy in the morning in satday if you have a kid who throws temper tantrums they're bipolar so
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everyone is taking a symptom and jumping jumping to a diagnosis whereas like literally half of what we learn in med
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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
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your keys there are all kinds of reasons for that if you have difficulty getting out of bed maybe it's depression maybe
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it's trauma maybe it's ADHD maybe it's anemia maybe it's obstructive sleep
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apnea and so the biggest problem is that everyone is jumping to a conclusion on the internet which then causes problems
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because that may not be the right conclusion we spoke last time about men yeah um and there was a lot of
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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
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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
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to understand so the first is that if you're a man who's struggling in the world
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today we as men assume that if we're struggling we need to fix something on
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the outside right so if I am not making enough money the answer to that is to
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get some additional certification or become more prod productive maybe use some kind of supplement so that men are
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fundamentally different because we are conditioned and this could be somewhat biolog iCal but it's certainly societal
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to solve our problems externally but the one overwhelming thing that I've learned about men is that you know if you're a
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man who wants to get better 90% of what you need to do is not outside of you
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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
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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
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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
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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
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the top 10% of earners on the planet have a higher IQ than the top 1% the
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people who actually make the most money have a lower IQ than the the cortile
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right underneath them and the big difference there is that people in the top 1% have a very high EQ so we grossly
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underestimate the capacity to control oneself and if you really want to achieve the most in life that's what you
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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
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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
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started using drugs when he was 13 years old polysubstance use mostly opiates and
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heroin uh so at the age of 32 no job um not living on the street crashing with
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his girlfriend and then within the span of four years this guy became a therapist himself had a stable income got married and
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published his first dystopian fiction novel so we're talking about a fouryear span of like being literally a heroin
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addict to you know being a published author and like having a stable fulfilling relationship and job and all
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of that work is like internal it's about understanding the way that you work understanding the way that your brain
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works and learning how to control yourself is that the same for women though
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because I've got women friends who are same age that are really really struggling have they're not doing heroin
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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
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unhealthy and seemingly out of control yeah so I've worked with plenty of women
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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
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of men and women women there's going to be more variance between women than
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there is between men and women sure so I absolutely the case for a lot of women I
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think the big difference is that a lot of the tools that we have were sort of
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designed with women in mind a great example of this is like Psychotherapy or talk therapy so if you look at the gold
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standard of how we process our emotions it's verbally now the studies actually show that if you look at like estrogen
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estrogen has a very very inter in effect on awareness of your internal emotional
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state and the ability to articulate your internal emotional state so as estrogen Rises you literally feel emotions more
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so this is why men women will have problems like premenstrual dysphoric disorder PMS you know when there are
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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
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intense way because of the fluctuations in their estrogen level so I
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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
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so the higher your estrogen is the more emotional awareness you'll have so there are some biological factors and then
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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
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men around them and so they they use they're a lot better at verbal fluency like that's not even related to emotions
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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
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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
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emotions being able to articulate your emotions using words to process your
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emotions and so absolutely they can learn more about themselves I think 99% of human beings on the planet myself
00:13:51
included can benefit from learning more about themselves but I think that women have somewhat of a leg up which is why
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women are set 70% of patients who seek Psychotherapy right even 70% of therapists are women so there there's
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like a very clear gender gap in the field of mental health so going back up
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the river then so the Crux of the issue is not being able to control oneself essentially I control is even a step too
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far Crux of the issue is not understanding yourself right good diagnosis predes good treatment control
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comes later okay so first you need to understand on absolutely and how do I go about understanding on self and in the
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case of the gentleman you mentioned as the case study there how did he go about understanding himself as a heroin addict
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who had poly substance abuse to this successful person so I think the best
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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
00:14:50
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
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need to make more money if I'm struggling with dating I need to get a better job or be sexier or whatever so
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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
00:15:10
there are a couple of things that I think a lot of people really miss the first is what drives a lot of their
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behaviors so we focus so much on fixing a behavior like using heroin for example
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right but we don't really ask ourselves why am I using heroin in the first place where does the drive for using heroin
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come from and that is the key question right so it's not about how you need to
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change it's about why am I the way that I am and this is where people make such
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a simple simple mistake I'd say the majority of people that I talk to when
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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
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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
00:16:00
laziness laziness is a lazy way of looking at laziness if we look at human
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behavior motivation discipline things like follow-through willpower these are all discrete functions within our brain
00:16:12
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
00:16:19
what does that really mean where is my motivation coming from what is the status of my willpower um you know as we
00:16:25
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
00:16:32
things like we use this technique called motivational interviewing where in order to change Behavior you don't need to
00:16:39
convince anyone of anything you need to help people understand things and once a human being understands something
00:16:45
themselves they will automatically change Behavior right if I touch if I tell you Hey Stephen don't touch that
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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
00:16:57
and you get burned suddenly your behavior will change on its own we learn through experience but if you look at
00:17:04
the way that most people try to solve their problems it's not through experience it's through information oh I
00:17:10
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
00:17:17
what we see right there are literally millions if not tens of millions or hundreds of people millions of people
00:17:22
out there who are gaining a lot of information about change but aren't
00:17:28
actually changing it's wild why is that there's a there's a quite a complex psychological thing
00:17:33
because there's a certain type of person who is like a self-development junkie but they never self-develop yeah they go
00:17:40
to all the conferences they watch all the videos they've got you know they can they know all the words but they they
00:17:45
don't actually put anything into action yeah so there's there's a lot of subtlety but the craziest thing is that
00:17:51
see anytime we engage in some kind of self-help kind of thing it actually is a
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coping mechanism to deal with some negativity within us so let's say that I
00:18:03
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
00:18:09
it's really tricky right because you have your brain sees two options one is that I can do something hard or the
00:18:16
others I can do something easy and we have to understand this the brain has evolved to be lazy the brain has evolved
00:18:23
laziness is efficiency we want to get the most yield out of the smallest investment so then what happens is our
00:18:30
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
00:18:36
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
00:18:44
actually activate parts of our brain that make us feel like we're making progress without actually making
00:18:50
progress that's how you become a self-develop junkie or self-help junkie on this point of psychotherapy not being
00:18:57
perfectly designed for men I was watching a clip before you arrived um where a lady who's an author of a a book
00:19:04
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
00:19:11
so I think this is a big problem is that talking about our problems can absolutely make things worse so let's
00:19:17
understand a couple of things so the first is that there's this assumption that talking about your problems makes
00:19:23
them better but there are actually very specific things that need to happen in order for talk talking about your
00:19:29
problems to make things better the most important thing is something called an emotional catharsis so this is where you
00:19:36
have like a breakthrough in therapy so there's like this moment where there's a lot of dormant stuff and Freud even
00:19:41
described this where you have this moment of very very intense emotion that is relatively new I mean it's kind of
00:19:49
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
00:19:54
about problems that triggers emotional catharsis emotional catharsis create something like a breakthrough so this is
00:20:01
also like an experience so this is not just talking about my problems this is
00:20:06
experiencing my problems in a different way so it's kind of like touching the hot pan usually it's kind of painful so
00:20:12
when we're doing like work with a trauma Survivor we don't want to just talk about the trauma we want
00:20:18
to sort of dig into it a little bit more and have an emotionally healing
00:20:24
experience um the the real problem is that sometimes what'll happen is people will just talk about their problems so
00:20:31
they'll use therapy as essentially like a venting session and venting if we look at kind of the Neuroscience of venting
00:20:37
venting is useful for reducing our negative emotion in the moment but this
00:20:43
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
00:20:49
but why do we have negative emotions Stephen it's a signal for what it I
00:20:55
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
00:21:02
connect with people okay so let's I think it can be sure loneliness loneliness is a great
00:21:08
example of a signal that's designed to connect with you what about something like anger or fear why do we have fear
00:21:14
to warn us against impending danger absolutely right so if I'm like running through the jungle and I see a
00:21:21
tiger and I have fear fear gives us information and what else does it do
00:21:26
gives us physiological energy very adrenaline absolutely for what purpose
00:21:32
to flee absolutely so this is a big thing that people don't understand the
00:21:38
primary motivator for change is actually negative energy a negative emotion so
00:21:43
this is the problem with venting if you vent and get rid of all of your negative emotional energy the drive to change
00:21:50
will disappear so if we kind of think about it what motivates you the most
00:21:55
it's actually negative emotion and you can literally look at the like the neuroanatomy of things like the amydala
00:22:00
so the amydala is very close to the hippocampus which is where learning and memory happen so we actually learn the
00:22:07
most through negative emotions so if I if I'm if I've been happily married for
00:22:12
15 years and there's infidelity right one case of infidelity the negative
00:22:18
emotion from that one case of infidelity can drastically motivate me so one of
00:22:24
the biggest problems that I see is that we try to get rid of our negative emotions and in doing so we actually
00:22:30
hamstring our motivational capability so I've seen this a lot where
00:22:36
people will come in and they'll go through like what they think therapy is which is like actually same same guy
00:22:43
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
00:22:49
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
00:22:56
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
00:23:02
and talk about my problems I was like yeah I think so I was a seconde Psychiatry resident but I was like is
00:23:07
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
00:23:14
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
00:23:21
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
00:23:27
they're constantly venting and they don't actually do anything to change their life it's interesting because with
00:23:32
the Advent of social media you now get reinforced by deficiency promotion I
00:23:38
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
00:23:45
how I think about something and the other that's emerged which is really interesting and a little bit toxic is
00:23:50
like deficiency promotion these are all the ways that I'm broken these are all the ways that I'm inadequate and you can
00:23:56
build an entire audience around around that which resonate with your inadequacies and then that inadequacy
00:24:01
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
00:24:07
you're broken and flawed all the stuff you've been through and then you it becomes your your profession and I just
00:24:13
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
00:24:19
build a revenue stream there and then you're [ __ ] yeah absolutely I I I think we what we see is that there's a
00:24:24
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
00:24:31
human being there are a lot of broken other human beings the problem is when you're a broken human being you don't
00:24:36
feel like you're a part of society you're like broken and everyone else is out there living their lives and being
00:24:42
positive and so it can feel so relieving to connect with someone else to realize
00:24:48
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
00:24:54
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
00:25:01
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
00:25:07
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
00:25:14
I'd rather be broken and with someone yeah than broken and alone it's all about belonging at the end of the day
00:25:20
yeah all of these things are about you know feeling like you belong absolutely what role does dopamine play in all of
00:25:27
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
00:25:34
because many of us are in this sort of dopamine roller coaster in our lives yeah so I I think uh dopamine plays an
00:25:40
important role but the one thing that I really come to appreciate is that how little of a role it plays so everyone is
00:25:48
like hung up on dopamine but dopamine first of all is a neurotransmitter right so dopamine is also like deals with
00:25:54
things like Smooth movement so my ability to go like this is governed by dopamine you were waving your arm yeah
00:26:00
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
00:26:08
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
00:26:13
use it in all kinds of circuits to create all kinds of behaviors so
00:26:19
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
00:26:26
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
00:26:33
experience it's almost like dopamine and serotonin have an inverse relationship
00:26:39
so dopamine is what gives us a sense of pleasure dopamine also gives us behavioral
00:26:46
reinforcement but dopamine gives us pleasure but will not give us contentment so I have I've had plenty of
00:26:52
patients who chase dopamine right and we know that you know partying a lot lot
00:26:58
using a lot of drugs having high adrenaline activities that all activate your dopamine system don't usually leave
00:27:05
people feeling fulfilled and contented at the end of it I've had plenty of millionaire Playboys in my practice who
00:27:12
like tried that to find happiness and maximize the pleasure in their life and it doesn't work it's never going to work
00:27:18
and the the problem with that is that our brain has this principle of tolerance so the more that you activate
00:27:23
your dopam energic system the more tolerance you'll develop to it this is why people need higher doses of drugs to
00:27:30
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
00:27:36
it becomes less and less fun and then you have old Gamers like myself who are still chasing the beauty in the high of
00:27:43
the games that we used to play when we were kids so dopamine is almost like a scam neurotransmitter because it offers
00:27:49
you pleasure temporarily but in an unsustainable way on the flip side we
00:27:55
have serotonin so serotonin is is Associated more with like contentment and peace when we look at things like
00:28:02
mood disorders often times what we're doing is improving the serotonin level boosting the serotonin Transmission in
00:28:09
the brain so peace and contentment is very different from pleasure and these two things are almost inversely
00:28:14
proportional where and it's really interesting you can look at something like orgasm which is a great example of this
00:28:21
so when you have an orgasm you get a spurt of dopamine and you feel a ton of
00:28:26
pleasure and then after your orgasm you actually get a rise in serotonin and you feel incredibly contented the really
00:28:33
interesting thing is that if your serotonin levels are high you won't feel horny so like what'll happen is is we
00:28:39
know this because if we give someone serotonergic medication if we boost your serotonin transmission one of the side
00:28:45
effects is anorgasmia and like you can't have an orgasm and then you also like
00:28:51
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
00:28:56
reason why my patient serot serotonergic medication has to do with the sexual side effects but if we kind of think
00:29:03
about the neurotransmitters involved right when we boo serotonin and we also see this in Monks who are like super
00:29:08
content and peace and they're not very thirsty right so if we kind of think about it peace and happiness and
00:29:14
contentment in life comes from serotonin dopamine is like actually kind of the opposite and monks aren't like thrill
00:29:20
Chasers right they're they're able to develop this internal sense of contentment so dopamine is absolutely a
00:29:26
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
00:29:33
sex lives typically get worse when they're comfortable and they're married
00:29:38
absolutely it's amazing how much science can tell us about the formation of relationships and falling in love that
00:29:44
we just don't apply so being attracted falling in love developing a
00:29:50
relationship these can discreetly be described neuroscientifically so being attracted actually starts in the
00:29:55
thalamus so the thalamus is our sensory organ of the brain it's kind of the sensory Gateway so it interprets a lot
00:30:02
of sensory stimuli so when I first meet someone I'm like oh they look really good right it looks really fantastic and
00:30:07
I I feel physically attracted to them they smell great their laugh is beautiful so the initial stages of
00:30:13
Attraction are all about sensory input then what happens now this is what's really interesting falling in
00:30:19
love is actually very dopam energic so this is one of the reasons why I think we're seeing declining birth rates this
00:30:25
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
00:30:30
out on dates and stuff but like falling in love seems harder and that's actually because of dopamine so what happens is
00:30:36
if you look at the phase of falling in love what that involves is a dopam energic connection and a great example
00:30:42
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
00:30:48
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
00:30:54
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
00:31:00
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
00:31:07
we are like developing this dopaminergic tolerance through things like devices we're actually exhausting our dopamine
00:31:14
which is something that a lot of people don't understand we run out of dopamine because we're using these devices and
00:31:19
then we have none left to fall in love and then there are later things in the relationship that are more serotonergic
00:31:24
in nature where it's not as much about pleasure but it's about connection connection and all kinds of other stuff
00:31:29
so what does that mean if I'm single and I'm looking to find love so if you're
00:31:34
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
00:31:41
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
00:31:47
connection this is something that I've heard so much from our community so much from patients anymore I just don't feel
00:31:53
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
00:32:00
the first question that I ask people is okay do you feel like you just can't feel an emotional connection to people
00:32:05
then what you actually need to do is reduce your dopamine activation through
00:32:10
things like cell phones uh we see this also with pornography where we know that pornography correlates with like
00:32:15
unhappiness and relationships and that's probably also like a dop and energic effect as opposed to all the other
00:32:20
things there's a lot of stuff going on there so play fewer video games be on your phone less and especially before
00:32:26
you go on a date you want to like give your dopamine a chance to recharge so go
00:32:32
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
00:32:39
fall in love and activate those feelings is going to be higher also I'd avoid as much dopaminergic activity as you can
00:32:46
before the date before you see that person and the more that you do that the easier it will be for you to actually
00:32:51
fall in love am I right in thinking from what you said there that dopamine is required for us to initiate sex and want
00:32:58
want to have sex is that what you were saying yes and no so dopamine is not actually required to initiate sex it's
00:33:05
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
00:33:11
every neurotransmitter is involved um so dopamine is what gives us the pleasure of orgasm but initiating sex also for
00:33:19
men and women is somewhat different so like you know women will say like oh foreplay is really important right and
00:33:24
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
00:33:30
develop an erection you actually need activation of the parasympathetic nervous system which is the part of our
00:33:37
nervous system that involves rest and digest which is why we have morning wood right so when dudes wake up in the
00:33:43
morning we have an erection why we're not like horny in the morning well I don't think so anyway maybe who knows
00:33:48
but like there's a physiology to it right where when we're relaxed will develop an erection because the the
00:33:55
development of an erection actually involves relaxing ation and then the sexual act involves transition to the
00:34:02
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
00:34:08
relaxed first and then we start getting sweaty our heart rate increases blood pressure increases and this is the other
00:34:15
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
00:34:21
thing going on where they need activation of the parasympathetic nervous system before they get activation of the sympathetic nervous
00:34:27
system and then as you activate the parasympathetic nervous system with something like a massage or making out or some something like that some
00:34:33
playfulness relaxation people really need to feel safe then you can sort of graduate to the more explicit
00:34:41
sympathetic nervous system sexual act this has answered so many questions that I had that I've never sort of vocalized
00:34:47
because I didn't realize the issue but I have come to learn that I am most
00:34:52
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
00:34:59
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
00:35:06
aroused typically so what tends to happen and like we know this in my relationship and it's the same for same
00:35:11
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
00:35:17
things then I'm then I get aroused um and there is this I think misunderstanding between men and women
00:35:23
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
00:35:30
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
00:35:36
like there's a lot of like toxic misogyny there and then men will also get branded as like oh men only want one
00:35:41
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
00:35:49
the male body work how does the female body work what of the ways because the majority of is actually very similar so
00:35:54
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
00:36:00
romantic attraction on a first date like that's there's a lot of good like Neuroscience data about things to do and
00:36:07
it's not surprising at all because if you look at what's the trend in dates everyone is doing the wrong things now
00:36:12
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
00:36:18
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
00:36:25
if you look at the science of how human beings fall love it's completely different what is that relationship
00:36:31
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
00:36:37
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
00:36:44
having an expectation when you go on a day the impact that that stress has on your dopamine and your ability to be
00:36:49
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
00:36:55
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
00:37:01
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
00:37:07
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
00:37:13
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
00:37:20
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
00:37:26
at first dates on Bridges okay so one Bridge is a stone bridge one Bridge is a
00:37:34
rickety wooden bridge that's wobbly and what the study found is that when you have a date on a stone
00:37:39
bridge it's Le people feel less attracted to each other than when you're on a rickety bridge now what's the
00:37:45
difference on the rickety bridge I'm a little bit scared and you're a little bit scared so what what really the the
00:37:51
foundation of romantic attraction is actually empathic resonance when I feel the same things that you feel when we
00:37:57
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
00:38:03
feeling the same thing that's what creates attraction this is also why people fall in love in rehab like
00:38:09
literally at the rehabs that I've worked at like we have to like almost have a rule right we can't technically control
00:38:14
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
00:38:21
right we're sharing all of this deep emotional stuff you can be honest you can be authentic and there's someone
00:38:26
else in the group who's also honest and authentic and you feel connected what is the nature of that connection it's
00:38:31
shared empathic resonance so one of the biggest things that I tell people who are you know struggling to succeed in
00:38:38
dating is like what are the emotions that you're bringing to the table what are the emotions they're bringing to the
00:38:43
table and if those emotions are not aligned how can you do some kind of experience that creates an emotion so
00:38:51
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
00:38:58
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
00:39:03
can do to get empathic resonance will create a connection my brain went in two directions then the first question that
00:39:08
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
00:39:15
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
00:39:22
comes together and that's he pointed oxytocin as much the reason for that sort of shared struggle thinking about
00:39:28
your rickety Bridge scenario life sometimes becomes a rickety bridge and people Bond because of that so should I
00:39:33
be taking my dates to theme parks for example to terrify the [ __ ] out of them or what only if you're equally terrified
00:39:40
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
00:39:47
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
00:39:53
then that's generally speaking not good now there are other versions of that so like you can demonstrate caring right so
00:39:58
if I'm terrified and you take care of me then that can feel good in a different way but generally speaking like what
00:40:05
gets us like I'm into this person is that we feel an emotional connection right that's what I'm like into this
00:40:11
person they're like like what is the nature is the emotional connection is shared emotion so oxytocin is another
00:40:17
phase of the relationship so oxytocin forms emotional bonds so when we feel like not this and this is what's so
00:40:23
interesting there's different parts of the brain different neurotransmitters so oxy oxytocin is
00:40:28
what we get from cuddling what we get from different kinds of touch something like a massage can form oxytocin hugging
00:40:35
holding hands all this kind of stuff triggers oxytocin and oxytocin will form an emotional bond will alleviate
00:40:41
feelings of loneliness I think one of the reasons that men are so lonely now
00:40:46
is because we don't feel bonded to each other so oxytocin is more about forming emotional
00:40:52
bonds and the other way my brain went when we talking about that is a question
00:40:57
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
00:41:04
what you said Thursday night date night Etc should we be scheduling sex when I ask sex experts this they they go in two
00:41:09
different directions one group says yes one group is so passionately saying no because it kills that spontaneity they
00:41:16
say um and that you know right so so I think this is a good
00:41:21
example of like this is exactly what I'm talking about where we know so much more about physiology and neuros science now
00:41:27
that the right answer to that question depends on the science so you can schedule sex it's just make sure that
00:41:33
you do the things are you killing some degree of spontaneity potentially um and
00:41:40
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
00:41:46
spontaneous sex fun Stephen oh gosh uh [ __ ] um what makes
00:41:53
spontaneous sex fun it is exciting novel it is hold on who's
00:42:00
excited by spontaneous sex me so and is it going to happen if your partner is
00:42:06
not equally excited well I think most couples would say that they much of the reason why their sex life is not great
00:42:13
is because it's became become boring and predictable and syy so this sort of
00:42:19
spontaneity element adds a bit of surprise and Intrigue and now hold on a second okay great so this is we're going
00:42:25
to we're going to figure out an answer When Things become syy so if I watch like what's your favorite movie Stephen
00:42:31
H The Pursuit of Happiness okay so if I watch Pursuit of Happiness the first time how am I going to feel emotionally
00:42:38
oh it was profound the first time I S it second time you watch it you know interesting fourth time fifth time so
00:42:45
the more that we get exposed to something what changes within us our
00:42:51
emotional the emotions change right so the first time I do something yeah emotions are activated when it becomes
00:42:57
habitual emotions no longer become activated so this is the problem of non-spontaneous or spontaneous sex is it
00:43:04
it has to do with that emotional empathy that emotional connection that leads to attraction so this is exactly what I'm
00:43:10
talking about when we look at problems in life should couples do this or should couples not do this let's understand the
00:43:16
mechanisms at play and then if we can activate those mechanisms in the right way then it'll work so the the issue
00:43:22
about spontaneity is is like you know if you feel like having spontaneous sex but your partner doesn't that's not going to
00:43:29
work because y'all aren't emotionally I mean they can accommodate you and that can be fine but generally speaking what
00:43:34
spontan adds is more of that emotional connection so when I work with um you
00:43:40
know patients who are exhibitionistic right so like why do they like exhibitionism what's
00:43:45
exhibitionism having sex in public places okay so um it's a it's a kind of fetish right can get you into trouble
00:43:52
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
00:43:58
about is emotional resonance so if I'm having sex in a public place that's going to activate me emotionally in some
00:44:04
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
00:44:09
emotional resonance so the second thing is that if you're going to have scheduled sex so like spontaneous is
00:44:15
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
00:44:20
figure out how to activate it right so this is where activation of the parasympathetic nervous system do
00:44:25
something like you know give them a or even like the sex should come after some kind of emotional resonance let's
00:44:31
go out and watch a movie together or let's do something that we both find emotionally engaging then once you're
00:44:37
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
00:44:44
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
00:44:50
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
00:44:56
about the process of you know timing the sex around your partner's cycle and they had gone for I
00:45:02
think three years trying to have a baby so it got increasingly more difficult all of the complicated emotions he was
00:45:08
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
00:45:13
was like how how do you keep an like when it becomes a job in that in that
00:45:18
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
00:45:24
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
00:45:31
yeah he was he was having sex 40 50 times a month to try and he was
00:45:37
basically being ordered to have sex with her like these are the five days you better have sex with you know that that
00:45:42
is maybe the extreme case of total dissipation of emotional resonance as it
00:45:47
relates to sex yeah and the other case the other end of that poll would be pursuing someone for the first time I
00:45:54
guess a stranger for the first time and I guess the job for people in their relationships is how do you keep that
00:45:59
emotional resonance so I I think that that's that's exactly the kind of question and
00:46:05
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
00:46:11
sexually in a relationship right so we have two populations of people some people will get married and they'll
00:46:16
continue to have healthy sex lives like well into their 70s like one of the craziest things that I remember
00:46:23
encountering in med school was like you know when I meet a 70-year-old I don't think about sexual health counseling and
00:46:29
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
00:46:35
you can get outbreaks of like syphilis and gonorrhea that'll tear through the community like like Co like it's crazy
00:46:40
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
00:46:47
the question becomes okay how do you maintain a healthy sex sexual relationship over time so at the very
00:46:52
beginning there are things like thalamic inputs right so what you see ex arouses you there's some amount of
00:46:59
novelty which is also like new emotions right so then then the 10th time we watch the same movie our emotional
00:47:06
connection is less to the movie but then this is also how couples have sex over
00:47:11
successfully over time is that they do have emotional connections so they as you continue to bond with your partner
00:47:18
over the new experiences that your relationship has so I think having kids
00:47:23
is a great example where like having kids will destroy your sex drive for some amount of time they say what two
00:47:29
years or something on on average but even within that it's amazing because you'll find these moments where like you
00:47:36
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
00:47:42
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
00:47:49
is really lean into still that shared emotional connection oh my God I had
00:47:54
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
00:48:00
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
00:48:07
and so as long as you maintain that Bond it's totally fine and when we think about the mechanisms in Neuroscience
00:48:13
that drive our Behavior once we're in a relationship and even if it's a platonic relationship um how do
00:48:21
we keep the relationship thriving like how do we what are the mechanisms I need to be aware of in the brain in in
00:48:27
Neuroscience that are going to enable my relationship to be strong and thriving
00:48:32
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
00:48:38
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
00:48:45
really Illuminating to me that you're able to point to a mechanism in um smartphones and social media that is
00:48:51
actually inhibiting us forming relationships and I wondered if the same mechanisms might inhibit us keeping the
00:48:56
relationships that we have yeah so I think there are so many things that are going on there so one is like how is
00:49:02
technology negatively impacting our relationships and the second is how do you maintain a healthy relationship over
00:49:07
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
00:49:15
versus how do you uh fix it if a nail punctures it so let's start with like
00:49:20
what technology is doing so this is what technology is basically doing to our social connections there there is a whol
00:49:27
scale social skills atrophy and a deconditioning of certain parts of the
00:49:32
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
00:49:40
you use them the worse they get but the moment that you have biology the human
00:49:47
brain doesn't wear out it rusts so inactivity of the human brain is
00:49:52
actually what causes problems okay that's number one so we can look at studies of like dementia
00:49:59
prevention and what we know is that encouraging neuroplasticity through things like learning how to play the
00:50:04
piano at the age of 60 will protect us from dementia so we need to utilize our
00:50:10
brain to make it the strongest this is also where you can look at the physical body right so when
00:50:15
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
00:50:22
more it grows so when we look at connections if you actually look at human
00:50:28
communication words are maybe I would say 25 to 50% of communication at most
00:50:34
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
00:50:41
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
00:50:48
they were making fun of me like all the conversation would stop and everyone would look at like one person would look
00:50:54
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
00:50:59
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
00:51:06
is really interesting so there are even video game companies that are starting to ban people over voice coms so how do
00:51:16
you know if someone is toxically communicating or not what we used to do is use like words right so if you say
00:51:22
some kind of racial slur in chat like if you type it out the game knows to scan
00:51:27
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
00:51:32
doing over voice coms is measuring tone Oh so depending on the volume of what you're saying right like that's how
00:51:39
they're actually detecting toxicity because that's where toxicity exists it's not oh hey Stephen you're a real
00:51:44
loser I really dislike you it's like Stephen bro you're such a loser man oh
00:51:49
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
00:51:55
aside so men are really specific for using the negative expression of a positive affection so this is something
00:52:02
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
00:52:08
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
00:52:15
smiling everyone's congratulating you but we just express it in a negative way
00:52:20
yeah so so much of our communication is tone is body language is volume now
00:52:25
what's happening is everyone is texting so then the brain does something very that's designed to do it's like hey
00:52:30
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
00:52:39
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
00:52:44
because the parts of our brain that reassure Us in social situations are
00:52:50
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
00:52:56
brain shut off and then when I go into a social situation those parts of the brain are inactive so they can't
00:53:02
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
00:53:08
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
00:53:13
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
00:53:21
all of this nonverbal communication that's reassuring so when it comes to
00:53:27
platonic friends and why this is hard we are atrophying a lot of the social skills a lot of these brain regions that
00:53:34
allow us to form connections allow us to feel reassured allow us to feel safe
00:53:39
right now I kind of feel like oh my friends are inviting me but I'm bothering them by going like all these
00:53:44
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
00:53:52
think that even though things are problematic right we're talking about how things are negative and social
00:53:57
anxiety is increasing and suicid suicidality is increasing I'm very optimistic because I think we have all
00:54:03
the answers like that's what's so cool like we have a problem but we haven't been addressing it directly even between
00:54:10
the last time I was here and now we've learned so much more people are taking social stuff more seriously the Surgeon
00:54:16
General of the United States released like this this um uh bulletin on Lon like the loneliness epidemic right so
00:54:23
even like the medical establishment is starting to see loneliness as a problem that we need to Target half of the
00:54:28
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
00:54:34
video game addiction things like loneliness now we see okay this is a big problem so let's start devoting
00:54:39
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
00:54:45
targeting a problem and people do better the only reason we're losing the war is because we haven't been fighting
00:54:51
back why haven't we been fighting back Technologies must play a pretty significant role in in this I think we
00:54:57
were slow we we're really good at creating things without understanding what they will do to us because the
00:55:04
impact doesn't show its face for a couple of decades sometimes absolutely and there's there's a there's an even
00:55:09
more Insidious thing which is right now the since it's isolation like since we're seeing more isolation we don't see
00:55:16
the impact because literally these people are staying home so the majority of of you know young men for example
00:55:22
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
00:55:28
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
00:55:33
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
00:55:38
for about 10 20 years but they're now reaching a critical point where like
00:55:44
we're now noticing what's going on but this has been going on for a while are people becoming more narcissistic yes
00:55:51
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
00:55:56
affecting our relationships it's affecting our happiness it's affecting our professional ability I was thinking
00:56:03
is social media making us more narcissistic is that then driving us to be more lonely and if so how do we first
00:56:08
Define the word narcissism in this context yeah so I'm going to lean into
00:56:13
um kind of a more yogic definition so we have this this word in Sanskrit called ahamkara and aamar means ego so ahamkara
00:56:22
is your sense of self I am dot dot dot okay okay so I am tall I'm short I'm
00:56:28
Doctor I'm father I'm winner I'm loser the first thing to understand about ego
00:56:34
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
00:56:42
know this sounds kind like kind of a weird question but is that true like what makes me a doctor I can't biopsy
00:56:48
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
00:56:55
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
00:57:00
not like a truth it's like a societal shared delusion that we all agree that
00:57:06
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
00:57:14
we also know is that from studies on narcissism that narcissism has its roots in insecurity so if you think about
00:57:21
someone who's like egotistical and confident like Stephen I'm sure you know both what's the difference between the
00:57:28
two confidence feels more secure and egotistical feels more insecure
00:57:35
absolutely where does a confident person's esteem come from inside where
00:57:40
does a egotistical esteem com outside beautiful so this is what's what social
00:57:46
media is doing social media and technology is externalizing our
00:57:52
perception so if I think about it like think about a couple thousand years ago what was my mind focused on so I would
00:57:59
go out to hunt I'm looking for an animal I shoot a deer and then I walk three
00:58:04
hours back so for some amount of time my mind is paying attention to the external environment maybe I'm talking with the
00:58:11
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
00:58:18
tribal community so if you really look at the history of humanity our perception has been internally focused
00:58:25
at least at least 50% of the time literally what we are paying attention to is our own thoughts our own feelings
00:58:33
the voices the desires the drives that come within us what technology has done
00:58:39
is wholescale externalize our perception and this is even where like you know I used to be like an efficiency
00:58:45
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
00:58:51
going to be super successful so I was like listening to a podcast in the morning about self-help
00:58:56
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
00:59:02
listen to a lecture on my way to the classroom pay attention in the classroom then do some questions like some test
00:59:08
questions whatever so my mind was constantly outside of me social media makes this even worse because now we're
00:59:14
doom scrolling we're looking at what other people are doing so we are starting to exist outside of
00:59:20
ourselves once we exist outside of ourselves all of our steem comes from the outside world cuz that's where we're
00:59:26
spending our time so what's happening is as we become more externalized we are
00:59:31
becoming insecure because where does confidence really come from it doesn't come from inside this is a big mistake a
00:59:38
lot of people uh don't realize which is if you do really well and you don't
00:59:44
believe in yourself you don't become secure a lot of people think that becoming secure is about being
00:59:49
successful that's not the case if you're really successful you don't end up with security you end up
00:59:55
with imp imposter syndrome so I went to tfts for medical school and I did my residency training at Harvard and what I
01:00:02
saw is that the more successful you become that increases the rate of impostor syndrome there's way more
01:00:08
impostor syndrome at Harvard than there is at the University of Texas there's way more impostor syndrome at a place
01:00:15
like Goldman Sachs than there is at Bank of America so lots of success actually
01:00:20
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
01:00:26
actually lots of success leads to imposter syndrome confidence doesn't come from success it comes from
01:00:32
surviving failure it's also far more internal so it's not something that anyone else
01:00:38
gives you it's like when you believe in yourself then you're confident and then the beautiful thing is that once you
01:00:44
believe in yourself then other people can think whatever they want to about you the way that you receive criticism
01:00:50
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
01:00:57
someone says hey you're an idiot I can say Okay help me understand why like I could be an idiot help me understand
01:01:03
right so this is where what social media is doing is externalizing our perceptions building our ego we're so
01:01:10
focused on the Judgment of other people I see the amount of body like subtle
01:01:15
lowlevel body dysmorphia that I see in young women is skyrocketing and I have a buddy who's a
01:01:22
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
01:01:29
who are getting plastic surgery like on a yearly basis like small amounts of Botox injections or lip fillers or like
01:01:34
whatever men too men too so that's also what the other great equality thing we're seeing is body dysmorphia has a
01:01:41
meteoric rise within men this is another situation where it used to be primarily a female diagnosis that's evening out
01:01:48
real quick so social media is making us focused on our external appearance we
01:01:54
lose our connection to our our elves and then once we lose our connection to ourselves we lose the capacity to gain
01:02:01
confidence and how does this then result in loneliness on a societal level so many different things so the first
01:02:08
reason it makes us lonely so this is I've also seen the highest level
01:02:14
of being around people and being lonely so I see so many people who have jobs
01:02:20
even have girlfriends boyfriends have friends and they feel so incredibly lonely
01:02:26
so what happens when we are externally focused right so if I
01:02:32
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
01:02:37
of it's so interesting because a lot of the guidance we give people helps in
01:02:42
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
01:02:48
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
01:02:55
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
01:03:01
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
01:03:07
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
01:03:12
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
01:03:19
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
01:03:26
create a false version of ourselves for people to love and that's what really
01:03:31
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
01:03:36
I used to be they like this glossy polished version and that creates a fundamental
01:03:43
loneliness even though you can be dating it's so interesting because I I'll work with influencers like we have a Creator
01:03:48
coaching program and like it's so hard for influencers to date because who is falling are you falling in love with the
01:03:55
influencer are you falling in love with Diary of a CEO host or are you falling in love with
01:04:02
Steven right is it Dr K or is it Olo so this is what's really paradoxical is
01:04:07
that we think that forming all of these connections will help our loneliness where often times it creates the
01:04:13
opposite effect where now what they love is a version of me not the real me and now the problem is they love this
01:04:20
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
01:04:26
what I noticed in my own life I noticed that before 25 I was a total failure with women and before 25 the real
01:04:32
defining characteristic of that chapter of my life was all the external stuff like the
01:04:37
Louis Vuitton bag the champagne bottles in the nightclub they're really trying really really hard to convince them and
01:04:44
then after 25 I had much more success with women and that chapter of my life
01:04:50
can be characterized by knowing who I was and being CAU with it all the stuff seemed to fall away like all the
01:04:55
external stuff seemed to fall away and for some reason cuz I I talked to my friends um who are struggling with
01:05:02
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
01:05:09
Artistry books and I was trying really hard was my most unsuccessful but the phase after where I
01:05:14
stopped chasing so much um it the only way I can describe it is there's like a
01:05:20
thousand little micro things in me that changed whether it's my posture the way
01:05:25
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
01:05:31
throwing that out there because um it kind of overlaps with what you were saying about the influencers and when
01:05:38
you're trying too hard you're actually struggling the most today and um and if you see this in your practice now hold
01:05:45
on a second so let's define success so when you were doing Louis Vuitton bags and pre25 were you going on
01:05:52
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
01:05:58
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
01:06:03
girls that I wanted never wanted me back so the like four girls that I really pursued I could
01:06:09
name them but I probably shouldn't um I could never get them to be in a relationship with me like they wouldn't
01:06:14
it would I would have like shortterm success and then they would never there we go so this is really important right
01:06:20
so this goes back to what we were saying short-term success is thalamic right so that's sensory perception
01:06:26
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
01:06:32
to the table oh who's this yeah bring them back to the apartment right and you can get somewhere but think about where
01:06:39
you were emotionally and where they were emotionally you were like oh please please please right and they're that's
01:06:46
not where they are emotionally so it's doomed to failure yeah so like I was
01:06:51
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
01:06:56
where they're at you're a little bit confident hopefully they're a little bit confident you form a connection and just
01:07:02
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
01:07:08
being confident to like find someone that you've been with exactly I've been with her for almost six years yeah yeah
01:07:14
like like snap it's like so easy once you do it right you kind of get locked
01:07:19
down real quick right and same thing happened with me so what a couple of
01:07:24
things so first is like this just goes back to once again we can take your test case with the Neuroscience of how to
01:07:32
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
01:07:39
were talking about security and insecurity so now you you said something beautiful which is like a thousand
01:07:44
different microcosm microcosmic things in here right like microscopic little tiny little things that you do within
01:07:50
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
01:07:56
tricks you could do and even if I did those even if I acted there was still something going on which meant these
01:08:02
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
01:08:07
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
01:08:12
beings are incredibly empathic so what you feel on the inside is what other
01:08:18
people resonate with so even if we look at this podcast why is this podcast so
01:08:23
successful Stephen it's because you are AU IC it's because you're genuinely interested in the moment that you become
01:08:29
genuinely interested everyone in the audience is going to become genuinely interested so this is what's really
01:08:35
crazy that a lot of people don't understand everyone is trying to manipulate other human beings into doing
01:08:40
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
01:08:46
with you the most important thing is authenticity there are studies about this that if you look at like how people
01:08:52
in in the workplace rank leadership authenticity is at the top of the list so authenticity and the ability to
01:08:59
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
01:09:06
these thousand microscopic things that you do that's exactly what I do in my work right it's helping people it's not
01:09:13
solving the problem outside of you it's solving the problem in here and once you know how the instrument Works people
01:09:20
will flock to you this is what Charisma actually is charisma is like authenticity and the confidence to face
01:09:27
hard times if you have these two things when you walk into a room people will like stop what they're doing and just
01:09:33
like look at you it it changes the way that you conduct yourself right so we even know that there's this this
01:09:38
discipline called psychon neuroimmunology when you believe something in your mind it affects your
01:09:44
brain when it affects your brain it affects your whole immune system it affects your physiology and other people
01:09:50
pick up on that so you have to solve internally
01:09:55
first like the more internally solved you are like like yeah it's so [ __ ] true and I say this as well from a
01:10:02
position of um both leadership but also being a founder of companies who appoints leaders and if I think back
01:10:07
over the last 10 years every single leader that I've appointed as CEO or something in the sea Suite who has then
01:10:13
struggled was not being themselves absolutely and I just and it's so three
01:10:18
cases in my brain right now of leaders who I appointed over the last 10 years in these companies and three all three
01:10:25
three of them failed and if I can if I could articulate exactly why they failed it was because they were trying to be
01:10:31
what they thought a leader was and they weren't being themselves and people can see it like the thing I said about the
01:10:37
Thousand little micro Expressions that you can't control that just show up invisibly when you are when you feel a
01:10:43
certain way inside that's exactly what those three leaders that come to mind didn't understand was I watching them do
01:10:49
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
01:10:55
else this bloody room can feel it too and then I've seen the opposite as well um where leaders have been tremendously
01:11:00
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
01:11:08
right so I think that the challenge right now is everyone is looking to become something that they're not as
01:11:13
opposed to really understanding who you are the good and the bad easier said than done though isn't it but in the
01:11:19
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
01:11:27
I think there are a couple of core things that we have to start doing so the first is that you have to become
01:11:33
less alexithymic so Alexia I don't know if I don't remember if we've talked about this before but Alexia is
01:11:40
colorblindness to your internal emotional state so you have to know what you are feeling basically at all times
01:11:47
our emotions are a primary source of motivation so and our emotions will also
01:11:53
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
01:11:59
technology where technology suppresses your internal emotional state you don't
01:12:05
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
01:12:11
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
01:12:17
interesting signs so one thing that's a really interesting sign of suppressed emotion is what happens when nothing
01:12:24
else is going on so a lot of a lot of us are addicted to this external world I need to be Doom
01:12:30
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
01:12:36
with ourselves so if you when you go to bed at night can you just fall asleep
01:12:41
naturally or what happens a lot is suppressed emotions start to come out
01:12:47
when we sleep and this is the big problem is the more technology we use that we get into this weird situation
01:12:53
where another good place that emotions come is during dreams so we do a lot of our emotional processing when we
01:12:59
sleep now the big problem that we're seeing nowadays this is kind of a random aside is that normally the human being
01:13:06
processes emotions throughout the day for about 16 hours and then whatever is left over at night gets processed while
01:13:13
we sleep we have dreams and things like that now what's happening is we do zero emotional processing through the day and
01:13:19
so our brain can't really make any emotional progress because it has all this work that's been built stop we've
01:13:25
been suppressing emotions suppressing emotions suppressing emotions and in my case when I was like addicted to video
01:13:30
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
01:13:39
saw this hilarious meme about you know we have during the day we're sitting upright so all of our anxiety is at the
01:13:44
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
01:13:51
know negative emotion when you go to bed at night that is a signal that you are suppressing too much emotion during the
01:13:56
day okay so you're talking about me to some degree here now I wouldn't ever categorize the emotion I experienced at
01:14:02
night as negative always sometimes it is a little bit negative but it's typically not negative it's just loud so what I
01:14:09
end up doing is I end up watching YouTube until I fall asleep or watching some serial killer thing until I fall
01:14:16
asleep and it's and my partner she's the opposite you know she's a bit of Yogi like she can
01:14:22
just if she's on the pillow for three minutes she is brilliant right she's snoring I'm so
01:14:28
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
01:14:33
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
01:14:38
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
01:14:44
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
01:14:51
whenever your brain gets idle time it will process so this is also something that I think a lot of people don't
01:14:57
realize we've stopped harnessing the power of our subconscious mind so if you
01:15:02
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
01:15:08
human like Brilliance it's never logical so logic is something that we use to
01:15:14
feed our subconscious mind and our unconscious mind data and then our unconscious mind plays around with it
01:15:21
and then actually creates a motivational change so when I I work with people who are addicted to substances or you know I
01:15:28
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
01:15:35
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
01:15:41
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
01:15:46
to text them anyway and then we see this ping ponging so also if you're ping ponging in life your unconscious mind is
01:15:53
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
01:15:58
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
01:16:05
you wake up with it the day before or the week before or the month before I see this a lot in addiction Psychiatry
01:16:10
too where one day like after 14 years of alcohol addiction enough is enough and
01:16:15
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
01:16:22
work that your brain is doing that then creates resolve and what we're
01:16:28
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
01:16:34
experience our emotions and if we don't process our emotions during the daytime
01:16:39
then at night which is where the mo majority of learning and memory take place that's when we have consolidation
01:16:45
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
01:16:51
your mistakes so what we really need to do is be more aware of our emotions during the
01:16:56
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
01:17:03
other stuff at night how great question so I think um for
01:17:08
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
01:17:15
bodies than is generally Psy psychiatrically like accepted we're seeing some changes of this so one
01:17:21
really good example of this about 10 years ago um so I'm kind of interested in evidence-based complimentary and
01:17:27
alternative medicine so someone that I met said hey have you ever heard of tapping and I was like what is this and
01:17:32
it's something called the emotional Freedom technique and what they told me is that if someone has trauma you can
01:17:38
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
01:17:45
what BS is this this sounds like complete BS now over the last decade there have been several studies on it
01:17:50
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
01:17:56
hell is this this is wild right so even if we don't understand what the mechanism is you can study whether
01:18:01
people's trauma gets better or not but I think this is just one of the many things that we've learned about emotions
01:18:07
existing within the body this is also a big problem that I see right now in our mental health system is the majority of
01:18:13
therapists have no training in the physical body but if we think about like you know anger releases adrenaline
01:18:19
affects blood pressure affects heart rate affects gut peristalsis so a lot of our emotions are physical so the first
01:18:25
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
01:18:32
tension do you feel a tightness in the chest and we men will actually use very
01:18:38
good emotional language as long as it relates to being physical so I'll tell
01:18:43
you Steven man this girl called me and it was like she kicked me in the nuts now what does
01:18:49
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
01:18:55
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
01:19:01
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
01:19:07
like AEM masculate like all of these negative emotions we use physicality we use the language of
01:19:13
physicality second thing that you should do is is use your physical body so there's there's all kinds of things that
01:19:19
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
01:19:25
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
01:19:31
like we hear this advice and we in the medical community has have been so arrogant because we've said oh no you
01:19:37
should go to talk therapy like you're wrong lifting didn't work for you what you should do is go to talk therapy
01:19:42
that's not the case when when this is working for people we should pay attention to it and the more that we
01:19:48
learn about science the more we should tap into our body so the first thing that I would say is anytime you're
01:19:53
feeling uncomfortable where is that physical discomfort there's actually a really fascinating study that has
01:20:00
mapped uh s each emotion up to 100 emotions to different part like
01:20:06
different schemas in the body so anger is like in the chest um sadness is like
01:20:12
in the chest and in the stomach uh you know worry is in the brain and in the
01:20:18
stomach so like you can actually map out like each emotion to a physical sensation the cool thing that once you
01:20:25
detect the emotion if you adjust that physical sensation you will mentally get
01:20:30
better there's a really great example of this if you clench your right fist you will feel angry and if you clench your
01:20:37
left fist what do you feel when you clench your left fist let's see
01:20:44
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
01:20:50
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
01:20:58
your right fist clenching your left fist will actually calm you down can sometimes lead to like sadness but there
01:21:04
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
01:21:10
affects your body and your body affects your mind even if your your um your dominant hand is your left hand we don't
01:21:17
know okay so I think these are usually done on right-handed people there may be some variance but the key thing still
01:21:23
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
01:21:29
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
01:21:36
seconds so when you run really really fast for 60 seconds like exercise your heart out like someone is chasing you
01:21:43
like you're being chased by a monster so what happens is that when we have a very
01:21:48
very high activation of our sympathetic nervous system our fight ORF flight response it automatically kicks in the
01:21:55
parasympathetic nervous system when we're done so when someone is stuck in an anxiety state and that's like a
01:22:02
feeding cycle so I feel anxious now my heart rate is elevated now adrenaline
01:22:07
gets released adrenaline travels to my brain and makes me feel more anxious I
01:22:12
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
01:22:19
the body has to kick in with the parasympathetic nerves which must be quite hard because when people are struggling they typically
01:22:25
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
01:22:31
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
01:22:39
many push-ups as you can interesting so the really crazy thing is that when we try to control our emotions by calming
01:22:45
ourselves down like if you tell someone who's pissed hey calm down what happens they don't get calm yeah not at all
01:22:50
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
01:22:57
your emotions down I haven't read the book but I loved the title of the book The Body holds the
01:23:03
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
01:23:09
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
01:23:14
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
01:23:22
been lots of research on yoga as a as a way to help with our stress our mental health with
01:23:29
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
01:23:36
know I I was a very serious uh student of yoga for about seven years um I've
01:23:42
recently reinvigorated my yogic practice I think uh yoga is absolutely
01:23:48
transformative for trauma um I think it can achieve Health outcomes that we're not really fully
01:23:55
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
01:24:02
study we have to we we want to be like very careful from a scientific protocol standpoint so we're going to take two
01:24:08
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
01:24:14
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
01:24:21
have to understand about studies on yoga is we're taking novices and we're teaching them yoga there's still novices
01:24:28
at the end of the study and we see some health benefits there are very few studies on yogis right there are a lot
01:24:34
of studies on yoga but a yogi is very different from yoga so when you get when
01:24:40
you become an expert in yoga so I I do this work myself and you know I teach my
01:24:46
patients this kind of stuff so you learn a lot about the way that your mind functions I think there are a lot of
01:24:52
correlations with CBT but uh you know like yoga will teach us for example about our ego and so how do you know if
01:25:00
your mind is malfunctioning or not so you know like you were saying before when we were talking you mentioned how
01:25:06
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
01:25:12
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
01:25:18
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
01:25:26
free from cognitive bias which we also know scientifically then your mind will come up with the right conclusions so
01:25:32
the question is how do we remove cognitive bias from the mind that's what the discipline of yoga teaches us so two
01:25:39
things to consider if you want to know whether your mind is thinking clearly or not first of all what emotions are you
01:25:46
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
01:25:54
hour hours a day 365 days of the year blood is Flowing to your the emotional circuits of your brain you are never not
01:26:00
feeling any emotion so the first thing we need to do is understand yoga teaches us this what is the emotional impact of
01:26:07
our thoughts the second big thing is what is the ego saying so if your ego is
01:26:12
active your ego will create cognitive biases I feel insecure so what I'm going
01:26:17
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
01:26:23
mental gymnastic you're adding a cognitive bias to help yourself feel better so yoga from a physiologic level
01:26:31
will calm down our balance our nervous system um you know it can do things like change our respiratory rate about 18
01:26:37
minutes of yogic practice is what it takes to shut down cortisol production in our brain so we know that cortisol
01:26:43
will then affect all kinds of things so Yoga Works on the physiologic level it absolutely trains us mentally right so
01:26:51
like yoga I think is like the most robust system of like mental training
01:26:56
that exists in the world so how do your mind how do you control your desires how do you control your perceptions um all
01:27:02
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
01:27:09
incredibly useful and Incredibly powerful trauma healing I am I was watching something you talk when you
01:27:15
were talking about how people who have experienced trauma almost operate in
01:27:20
defense in their lives and earlier on we were saying that you know people have these stories they've told themselves
01:27:26
I'm lazy I'm this I'm that but when I heard you talk um so articulately about
01:27:31
how trauma makes us play Life in defense it made me understand maybe a lot of people that I know in my life that
01:27:37
aren't overtly motivated and seem to struggle with uh things like discipline
01:27:43
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
01:27:49
question so this was like one of the things that when I discovered this it was transformative for me and transformative for my
01:27:56
patients so see people who there are two kinds of people in life there are people
01:28:02
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
01:28:08
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
01:28:14
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
01:28:20
I try to create habits you know I'm trying to be like these people who are were productive but my default state if
01:28:26
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
01:28:31
are these people fundamentally different so trauma is the big difference here so let's understand when we're developing
01:28:37
as children if we grow up in a traumatic environment what will happen is there's actually something called the loss of
01:28:43
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
01:28:50
like to have a birthday party can I invite my friends over and then parents say sure next day parents are drunk they get
01:28:58
mad at me they're like no birthday party so what will happen if you look at traumatic upbringing is that children
01:29:05
can't plan for the future any kind of future that any kind of kind of autonomy that they
01:29:10
express uh an abusive parent will shut it down like you know this is highly controlling parents too we see this so
01:29:17
much in like Asian and South Asian cultures where parents are like you got to do this and you got to do this no
01:29:22
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
01:29:29
kids that stall later in life because in these upbringings we remove the the
01:29:35
ability for autonomy when a child tries to express themselves we shut it down
01:29:40
the second thing that happens is trauma is about surviving today so I was working with a patient who you know
01:29:46
would be able to tell within the first 60 seconds to 5 minutes when their dad got home whether they were going to get
01:29:52
beaten today and so what people when people grow up in traumatic environments and it doesn't have to be physical abuse
01:29:58
it can be highly controlling it can be even like children who are parentified is kind of traumatic where you have a a
01:30:05
a parent who's very chronically ill and is depending on the kid to take care of everything that's traumatic too because
01:30:11
then what happens is your brain looks at your day and there's no point in planning for tomorrow all of your
01:30:17
brain's resources are about surviving today how do I not get abused how do I
01:30:22
make sure that my parents don't notice me children who grow up in traumatic environments learn to be invisible and
01:30:28
so then something very important happens in the brain where it stops planning for the future because any plan for the
01:30:34
future can change depending on whether your parent is drunk or not and then if I was going to have a birthday party I
01:30:40
told all my friends and I got cancelled now that hurts so much so what what
01:30:46
happens when we get traumatized is we go into survival mode we go into protective mode and this is even mirrored like
01:30:52
physiologically where we have two states of the body we have our catabolic state where we're breaking things down we're
01:30:58
trying to survive the moment and we have our anabolic State when when we are building for the
01:31:04
future so when I encounter a tiger and I get a burst of cortisol cortisol breaks
01:31:10
down my muscle tissue to provide me with enough energy to survive we are sacrificing the future to plan to
01:31:17
survive the present and that happens on a physiological level it happens on a mental level so when you grow up in a
01:31:23
traumatic environment where you are punished for thinking about the future you can't plan for anything because your
01:31:30
home environment is so chaotic there's no rules no organization and you're focused on Survival that becomes baked
01:31:38
in and what happens when these people grow up is that they are bound by external stimuli if there is some kind
01:31:44
of pressure from the external environment then I can act but I cannot derive internal sense of motivation at
01:31:51
all because now that there's an external deadline I have to survive that deadline so they go into this survival mode
01:31:57
instead of this like being able to look into the future mode and it's it's really crippling because it's
01:32:02
fundamentally like the part of their brain that plans for the future has been disabled permanently no that can be Reed
01:32:10
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
01:32:18
that so does that mean that parents who give their children more autonomy when they're younger typically are better at
01:32:25
attacking life and parents who stifle their kids autonomy end up playing in goal absolutely so so we can look at
01:32:32
something called authoritative ver versus authoritarian parenting okay so there are two kinds of parenting that
01:32:38
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
01:32:44
structure and guard rails but they can operate to a certain degree independently that leads to the best
01:32:50
outcomes versus parents who are highly controlling parents who are highly controlling their kids have worse
01:32:56
outcomes in life so even if they're successful in some way right and I was even on this track
01:33:03
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
01:33:08
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
01:33:14
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
01:33:20
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
01:33:26
running this program where I did like you know Wellness for medical residents surgical residents emergency room
01:33:32
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
01:33:39
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
01:33:45
committed to this path so how do we turn ourselves around if we are one of those people who find ourselves playing in
01:33:50
goal in life how do we become an attacker how do we become autonomous and a selfstarter like you described is
01:33:56
there a a system a way a process yeah so I I think um so it's complicated but I
01:34:01
think we know there are a couple of different steps that are involved so the first is you have to be safe so if
01:34:08
you're in a position of life where you are constantly stressed out it shuts off
01:34:13
your capacity for neuroplasticity so the first thing that I recommend to people is like you know if you're in a toxic
01:34:19
relationship if you're in an abusive home do whatever you can to create some pocket of safety in your life because
01:34:25
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
01:34:30
regulate our emotions so if we don't know first of all what we're feeling then our emotions will act in
01:34:37
ways that are very self-sabotaging so we have to we have to decompress our negative emotion because otherwise the
01:34:44
negative emotion will fuel things like addiction so if I don't if I don't have a healthy way of processing my emotion
01:34:51
my brain because it's trying to survive will start drinking alcohol because
01:34:56
that's the only thing that works so we have to develop some degree of emotional regulation now this is the really cool
01:35:02
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
01:35:09
survivalist or you like looking forward I'm looking forward how does that work for you how
01:35:18
are you able to look forward like what what's your inner experience I've always looked forward I've always had to look
01:35:23
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
01:35:29
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
01:35:35
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
01:35:41
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
01:35:50
figure it out and run experiments so as an adult I'm still doing that that now okay that frightens
01:35:56
me so um so my guess is that if you try to sit still you start to
01:36:02
panic oh I really struggle with Stillness okay yeah so you have a
01:36:07
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
01:36:14
so this is trauma like I mean I can't diagnose you with anything but I want you this is actually a great example
01:36:20
because your productivity is is running away from something does that make sense yeah 100%
01:36:27
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
01:36:33
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
01:36:38
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
01:36:45
that's [ __ ] sad bro is it yes right so like like we're talking about having
01:36:51
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
01:36:57
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
01:37:02
rather them be able to count on me and our parents you're getting emotional yeah
01:37:09
why um are you getting emotional no because I'm so I'm so used
01:37:15
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
01:37:21
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
01:37:27
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
01:37:34
normal for me it's sad and you're numb right so once again you've been exposed
01:37:39
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
01:37:45
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
01:37:51
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
01:37:57
implies for me like what is going on in your mind there's a desperation to your forward momentum yes right that's not
01:38:05
good I know right and but here's the problem is you love it you love it because if you
01:38:14
didn't have it where would you be 100% I'm I completely agree with
01:38:19
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
01:38:26
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
01:38:32
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
01:38:38
this a lot I think about this all the time because you sometimes you can like fantasize about living a completely
01:38:44
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
01:38:50
that I would be so irritated like irritated not as in like annoyed irritated as in as you said like not
01:38:57
being able to sit still I would be so like I'd end up building a Hut or I'd
01:39:03
end up like you know yes I like when I have that fantasy
01:39:08
of like run away from my life and start from zero on a beach somewhere I go I'll
01:39:13
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
01:39:19
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
01:39:25
are controlled by these impulses within you I would say yes it's crazy right I
01:39:34
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
01:39:39
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
01:39:45
so stuck in this cycle because that's the only way we know how to motivate ourselves right it is running away from
01:39:52
the panic using the fear and and maybe this is a bit much but I I I think like
01:39:58
you know I would bet money that there are there was a time in your life where
01:40:03
you were a no one and you were like [ __ ] this never again and you were like I'm
01:40:10
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
01:40:17
fuels you and if you stop I would bet money that the Panic that you feel is
01:40:23
very is connected to that moment in your life when you're like never
01:40:29
again who knows yes okay no yeah I mean I it's it's funny because I think I was
01:40:35
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
01:40:45
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
01:40:50
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
01:40:59
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
01:41:05
look like anyone else you don't sound like anyone else you you're curly hair you're different color skin and that
01:41:11
just real sense of disconnection and I think that kind of sort of permeated a
01:41:17
lot of my early upbringing was this shame this insecurity this disconnection and then you compound that with your
01:41:22
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
01:41:29
disconnection and this shame but now I had this big void of freedom to do something about it which meant I could
01:41:34
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
01:41:41
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
01:41:47
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
01:41:53
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
01:42:00
great so I'm not can I ask can we go a little bit 100% so you're so interesting
01:42:06
right so you felt ashamed you felt small yeah you felt like you didn't have
01:42:12
anyone's respect right and so you've done something beautiful when someone looks at you what
01:42:20
do they see now
01:42:25
the opposite yes tell me what do they what does someone see now when they look at me probably they
01:42:31
see um confidence they probably see someone who's quite secure in themselves
01:42:37
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
01:42:44
layers of projecting confidence and you've tapped into an authentic confidence there's even a subtle thing
01:42:51
because you dress very carefully right you don't dress in a way that normal people who are trying to impress people
01:42:58
dress you want to be authentically impressive does that make sense you're not going to you're not going to take
01:43:04
any shortcuts to being impressive you're going to be truly impressive does that make sense yeah I guess yeah but here's
01:43:12
the subtle thing it's still it's still there the Panic is still there you know why because you still give a [ __ ] about
01:43:18
being impressive mhm right it's authentic impressive Rive
01:43:23
sure enough but it's still important to be impressive and as long as that thing is
01:43:30
there like the panic and that that's all the same thing MH it's 100% true and I I
01:43:35
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
01:43:41
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 [ __ ]
01:43:46
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
01:43:53
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
01:43:59
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
01:44:04
still playing the same old games in different ways yeah yeah so so I think you there's a lot of authenticity and
01:44:10
goodness here so this is exactly how trauma Works where like we build something that is good here's the key
01:44:15
thing to understand that yoga teaches us no amount of fixing your life will
01:44:21
make that kid go away right so like when I work with people who are I see you smiling so like
01:44:28
when I work with people who've been traumatized they will build amazing lives but they still carry that kid with
01:44:36
them and the kid will come out at times there'll be particular times where if
01:44:41
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
01:44:46
you're Idol you feel like that kid again so that psychological those that neuronal wiring is there
01:44:53
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
01:45:00
you're genuinely confident you're genuinely authentic you can't fake it and get to where you are and at the same
01:45:05
time the wounds that we experience leave scars yeah 100% And the real way to heal
01:45:12
is to go back to that moment and like deal with that kid right you have to
01:45:17
dismantle the world viw that you have which is how you heal trauma is when we get traumatized we adapt in order to
01:45:25
come out of this situation I need to learn this particular thing so some kids that I've worked with adapt by becoming
01:45:32
invisible I that's what I did I got bullied a lot so what do I do I learn how to be
01:45:37
invisible some people adapt by being successful so if I'm successful it's an
01:45:42
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
01:45:50
this is why it's so complex because what you've just said is so unbelievably true but it's where the misconception happens
01:45:56
because I don't go home and I'm not like insecure or I'm not unconfident like I'm
01:46:01
I think like when I'm on my own I'm very very okay with Who I Am with myself I'm
01:46:06
very very like I feel like the guy that you experience on camera is very close
01:46:12
to who I am when I'm in the hotel room alone at night however it doesn't mean
01:46:18
that I still don't have those like childhood bruises and that they can't be pressed by various things and so it's
01:46:24
this sort of this s because you know when we say these words like insecurity and shame you think you'd think that
01:46:31
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
01:46:39
there's still something there is I go how that why are you still driving like
01:46:46
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
01:46:51
so logically aware that becoming more will not have any impact on the things that matter yet
01:46:59
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
01:47:05
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
01:47:13
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
01:47:21
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
01:47:28
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
01:47:34
independent things this is what tends to happen this is what we don't understand about trauma you removing the piss
01:47:40
requires removing the piss no amount of sugar will take it out of the drink okay so no amount of this is mistake number
01:47:47
one no amount of building something good will remove something bad
01:47:53
okay so healing and it's also like you know if I break a leg no amount of bench
01:47:58
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
01:48:04
the leg is broken same is true of the mind okay second thing is what happens
01:48:11
is we have like our Consciousness is divided now we're going to get kind of Technical and off the rails so we have
01:48:16
all of these like dormant pieces of our Consciousness that activate in certain situations and all you have to do is pay
01:48:23
attention to yourself in a 5minute period and you'll see this so when I walk into a bathroom that I've never
01:48:29
used before then I start thinking about okay where's the flush where's the toilet how
01:48:34
do I use this toilet you know so like I'll activate dormant information all the time so if someone asks me what's
01:48:41
you know the quadratic equation that information is there and dormant in my mind and it gets activated so one of the
01:48:47
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
01:48:54
injury is no longer there that's not the case does that make sense 100% right so the the injury just goes dormant then
01:49:00
there are certain things that happen that can trigger that injury that's what we call triggers right so if I'm
01:49:06
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
01:49:14
certain circuits that scans my perceptual environment and decides what to activate so there are ways Stillness
01:49:23
makes you feel small and [ __ ] you if you're ever going to be small again never again never again never again I
01:49:30
would bet money that if you sit by yourself and you're not occupied right that's why you have to watch crime shows
01:49:36
because if you don't watch crime shows you're going to be still and if you're still that's
01:49:42
unacceptable okay so dormant things have to be healed where they belong you don't
01:49:47
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
01:49:54
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
01:50:00
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
01:50:08
each as human beings have our own journey and are you privileged and should you be grateful and should people
01:50:13
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
01:50:22
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
01:50:27
this is where I we can look at the science of of of healing trauma so here
01:50:33
are the steps first thing is safety so that we can get neuroplasticity second thing is emotional awareness and
01:50:39
emotional regulation and this allows us for number three which is really important which is identity so if we
01:50:46
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
01:50:53
are you my identity yeah tell me who who's stepen to myself or just to the world or
01:50:59
is that the same tell me about who's Stephen I I'm an entrepreneur I am
01:51:05
a I guess I'm a podcaster now um and I
01:51:11
am going to say a Manchester United fan okay so I think those are three features
01:51:16
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
01:51:22
were a College Dropout yeah um you started a company yeah right you talked
01:51:27
about this Louis Vuitton bag phase and then there's the post Louis Vuitton bag phase yeah and even before we had this
01:51:34
podcast you were talking to me about the phases of your life yeah so identity re requires a timeline okay now the
01:51:41
interesting thing is if we look at the formative moments of your life they all have
01:51:46
emotion so this is what's really important if you have an identity
01:51:52
that is bad in any way you can never change that identity without emotions so what what happen so my like
01:52:00
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
01:52:07
to become a monk went to medical school became a doctor now I started this whole helping random people on the internet
01:52:13
thing so each of those were emotional experiences so who we are is a narrative
01:52:19
of our most emotional experiences and we see this in all of our like superhero
01:52:24
movies right Batman had this tragic experience where his parents were shot by The Joker and then he became
01:52:30
something right there all all these moments these powerful emotional moments so if your emotions are dulled by drugs
01:52:36
by technology by pornography by watching serial killer shows you will never change who you are it is impossible the
01:52:43
Neuroscience of your identity development requires emotional experience okay so with trauma that's
01:52:50
the next thing that happens once we have access to emotions then we can become someone
01:52:56
else now the problem with trauma is that before we become someone else the beliefs we have about
01:53:02
ourselves become our destiny so if I think to myself I'm a loser so I I when
01:53:08
I was interviewing for residency I went to an interview somewhere on the west coast and the
01:53:14
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
01:53:20
don't understand why I'm here and they're like your application is really good you could end up at any program in
01:53:26
the country like why did you pick us and like I was like I picked y'all because I
01:53:32
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
01:53:38
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
01:53:44
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
01:53:52
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
01:53:58
and buy bottles of Champagnes and thought that you were a loser didn't end up where you wanted to go so this is
01:54:04
what a lot of people don't understand everyone's focused on productivity but the single most important thing that
01:54:10
will determine your future is your sense of who you are and that's not like some oh spiritual get connected with this is
01:54:17
like [ __ ] science right if you believe you are a loser the empathic CS
01:54:22
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
01:54:30
that's why you get into failed relationship number one failed relationship number two failed relationship number three until you
01:54:37
changed and when you change your sense of identity changes then your future will change the last thing to do is on a
01:54:46
more microscopic level look at these responses within yourself so you asked
01:54:51
me at the very beginning of the podcast and now we're coming full circle how do you start understanding yourself so you
01:54:57
look at the drives within yourself right why can't I sit still and this is going
01:55:02
to be so hard for you because if I told you this is hilarious if I told you
01:55:08
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
01:55:15
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
01:55:21
important work than a podcast for 10 million people on the internet now I'm doing the healing of my trauma which is
01:55:27
the goal and you're still running away from yourself there's no way you can run away from it your mind will transform
01:55:34
the very thing that you do into the problem and that's what trauma
01:55:41
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
01:55:48
case I I think it's like sit just sit and you have to be careful because if
01:55:53
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 [ __ ]
01:56:00
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
01:56:09
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
01:56:16
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
01:56:23
minutes 15 minutes sometimes we'll tell people to stare at a wall for an hour and just look at what on Earth goes
01:56:30
on inside you you will discover that it is a zoo of thoughts feelings emotions
01:56:39
drives panics worries distractions your internal environment is such a mess so
01:56:46
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
01:56:52
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
01:56:58
it run out of steam so just sit and do nothing for a while people don't realize the part of our brain that
01:57:06
exerts willpower has something to do with this part of our brain called the anterior singulate cortex the anterior
01:57:12
singulate cortex is a piece of where willpower comes from but it is also the part of our brain that monitors
01:57:20
conflict so will hour and monitoring a conflict are actually technically the
01:57:26
same thing the same part of the brain activates and if you guys if you pay attention to your own internal
01:57:32
experience what you'll realize is anytime you're using willpower there's
01:57:38
an internal struggle that you are paying attention to it's like I don't want to order chicken I want to order Fried
01:57:45
Chicken so there's a monitoring of the conflict that goes on that's anytime you're exerting willpower there's this
01:57:50
thing this way and this thing this way but you are aware of it you can't exert willpower if you're behaving
01:57:56
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
01:58:02
have gone by and you're like what what happened you're not aware so this is the crazy thing from a neuroscientific
01:58:08
perspective and this is what the yogis will teach as well awareness is willpower awareness is self-control and
01:58:16
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
01:58:22
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
01:58:28
hours then you gain that awareness again so the more that you are aware in the
01:58:34
present moment the more your problems will literally melt away it's like crazy
01:58:40
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
01:58:46
aware you stop rejecting things you start accepting things you focus on the present all the stuff that everyone
01:58:51
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
01:58:57
don't need willpower you don't need discipline all you need is awareness people will reject me that doesn't mean
01:59:03
it isn't true and the more that you explore awareness the more you will
01:59:09
realize like I used to think it was like 50/50 I'm now at like 90% of the problem is
01:59:14
awareness I know it's weird no but does that because we tend to look for solutions that involve
01:59:22
action like you know buy that thing make that list go to that meeting watch that
01:59:28
thing it's all about action action action as a solution to our problems so I was expecting you to tell me that the
01:59:33
solution to everything we've discussed here is like the seven-step process of like write this thing down say this
01:59:40
thing and you know okay so let's let's understand this okay you work really
01:59:45
hard Stephen is it hard to work
01:59:50
hard for me yeah no okay so now we have to understand why is it not hard for you
01:59:57
to work hard it's why is it not hard for me to
02:00:03
work hard because it feels good to work hard absolutely so your problem see this
02:00:09
is the whole problem that everyone makes so Stephen you started a company when uh first one was very young but we
02:00:17
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
02:00:24
many companies or been involved in how many companies 10 10 20 yeah and made like millions and millions of dollars
02:00:30
and stuff yeah right started a podcast you've got how many millions of subscribers now um across the platforms
02:00:37
maybe 10 million okay cool right so like this is a lot of work and everyone's
02:00:42
like oh my God I want to be like Stephen but the whole thing is it's not hard for
02:00:47
you it's hard for you to not do it so this is what I'm saying you don't
02:00:54
need to focus on the action it's the internal thing that drives you like a [ __ ]
02:01:00
slave that is responsible for your success if someone else wants a fraction
02:01:06
of what you have 10% of what you have they don't need to duplicate your actions they need to duplicate what's
02:01:11
going on on the inside this is exactly my point they need your toxic
02:01:17
fuel yeah toxic fuel is on the path to happiness
02:01:24
right can be yeah I mean cuz you're doing pretty well do you
02:01:30
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
02:01:36
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
02:01:42
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
02:01:48
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
02:01:57
people I know it sounds like like motivational [ __ ] or something but in that moment I had Forward Motion I
02:02:03
was excited about life I thought that I was all everything that in my objective reality was just the stepping stone to
02:02:09
becoming and I so I was so excited I was so happy about life and I feel the same
02:02:14
now yeah so despite everything we've discussed
02:02:20
um I feel happy when I'm alone I'm happy yeah and I and you know that's um yeah
02:02:27
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
02:02:33
myself no you're not bullshitting so let's understand the subtlety here so the stages of unhappiness to happiness
02:02:39
there's unhappy in all situations unhappy in some situations happy in some situations happy in most situations and
02:02:46
then MOA Enlightenment MTI is happiness in all situations happiness that is
02:02:52
completely independent of your circumstances that's the stage that you're at because we can make you
02:02:57
unhappy very very easily yeah that's true right yeah so so and it kind of makes sense this is what happens is we
02:03:04
start to craft a life that makes us happy that's the first step totally good
02:03:11
but then what happens is that we are still dependent on the external life for our happiness and that will never work
02:03:19
100% so what's this MTA you mentioned is Moka Enlightenment Nirvana All same
02:03:24
thing how do we get that uh how do you get there or someone else are you there no how how do I get
02:03:33
there how does anyone get there you sit by yourself and don't do
02:03:40
anything for how long no can't ask that
02:03:47
question so the moment that you ask that question there's a goal there's a future Dimension there's an objective you have
02:03:54
to exist without an objective and that'll move you in the right
02:03:59
direction just be for no reason for no purpose recognize that all of this stuff
02:04:06
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
02:04:13
you need to remove all of the stuff and just exist that's what Moka is pure
02:04:22
existence without attachment without feeling without thought without goal just being and the crazy thing is we're
02:04:29
all doing this all the time we're all existing all the time I hear this loud voice from all the
02:04:37
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
02:04:43
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
02:04:49
cost me my motivation then it will cost me my my purpose this art business I've started this cupcake shop I'm running
02:04:55
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
02:05:01
we have to understand is yes so someone who's enlightened is not compatible with a regular life in some ways so let's
02:05:09
understand that like that's what happened to Buddha he was a king he was married he had a kid was loved was
02:05:14
powerful and was like I'm done is that Buddha how we pronounce it incorrectly Buddha Buddha same thing okay yeah goam
02:05:21
Buddha right so in a sense it is incompatible with life the second thing is that once
02:05:28
see you have a motivation right but once you exist in the world and you are just
02:05:34
being without anything you'll still act in fact acting will become even easier
02:05:40
and that's hard to understand because we are so used to toxic fuel that we it's
02:05:45
kind of like so if you have kids one day you'll understand this I can the best I can do
02:05:50
is an analogy so when a kid comes up to you and is crying because oh like my you
02:05:59
know my doll has has gotten wet okay and the kid comes up to you there's no like
02:06:04
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
02:06:10
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
02:06:16
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
02:06:23
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
02:06:30
environment so what actually happens the closer you get to this state is you can absolutely be productive so what I found
02:06:37
is that the closer I get to the state the more productive I am but now what
02:06:42
I'm doing is just responding to the environment around me I'm not driving anywhere I'm not going anywhere I'm just
02:06:50
responding and that beautiful it's liberating there's no goal there's no
02:06:55
falling short of there's no achievement there's just I'm going to do what needs
02:07:00
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
02:07:06
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
02:07:12
saying respond it sounds like emotion has been removed from the situation to some degree uh so in a sense it is Rea
02:07:18
I'm responding to the situation but often times when we react emotionally we are carrying something with us from the
02:07:24
past into the present moment that will cause you all kinds of problems right so if I have infidelity I worked with a
02:07:31
patient who had a problem with infidelity and their partner and then when they're dating the next person
02:07:36
their fears of infidelity from the past be come into the present and then they
02:07:42
react to the situation they don't actually perfectly respond to the situation they color the situation with
02:07:48
their baggage that's not clean responding so like when I am on call and
02:07:56
my friend tells me the night before oh yeah we had zero patients I slept all night and then a patient walks in the
02:08:01
door and I think to myself why am I so unlucky the majority or even arguably
02:08:06
all of our unhappiness in life is because of what we carry with us so how do we get to that place where
02:08:13
we just respond so I think it's like we have to heal that inner child and all that kind
02:08:18
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
02:08:25
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
02:08:31
to do it there's not like more methodology is not going to work that's what's so confusing about it
02:08:38
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
02:08:44
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
02:08:51
asking these questions in part because I know it's obviously The Logical question that anyone who just heard you say this
02:08:56
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
02:09:02
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
02:09:09
end of the day just sit down and explore yourself be with yourself impulses come
02:09:15
up and then ask yourself so in a practical sense you're going to have drivers towards things and ask yourself
02:09:21
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
02:09:27
you explore that the more you will understand and then the more neutral you will become and when you're fully
02:09:33
neutral then let me put it to you this way so if you don't care about what you
02:09:39
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
02:09:46
causes the problem so we need to move towards this neutrality and then actions become easy
02:09:51
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
02:09:58
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
02:10:04
think it starts with just being with yourself and understanding where your internal drivers come from because we
02:10:10
don't get to choose the person that we become our brain makes adaptations every
02:10:16
single day you don't get to edit what you learn does that make sense yeah yeah
02:10:21
so our problem in life is that we have all these learnings we have this instrument this this thing that has been
02:10:27
cobbled together after some crappy experience and another crappy experience and some positive experience and you
02:10:33
have this internal schema of how to live the world but it wasn't crafted with any intentionality so the first step is to
02:10:39
be aware of like what is this road map looking like what is the blueprint and
02:10:45
the more that you understand this stuff the easier it will become would you recommend starting your
02:10:51
day with a little gap for this 100% awareness practice I think it's
02:10:56
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
02:11:02
just look at her and go what a psychopath yeah right so beginning of your day or end of your day
02:11:08
sunset uh sunrise and you can do a meditative practice meditative practices will get
02:11:14
you here too sometimes that's actually easier because it gives your mind some kind of goal to move towards I'm going
02:11:21
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
02:11:27
away from all devices and just sit and I'll let you know how I get on
02:11:33
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
02:11:39
ask is that if you let me know how it goes may not go
02:11:44
well you got to give me a chance to give you a second thing to do okay why why'
02:11:50
you say that because I think we're asking too much of you okay you think I'm going to fail be
02:11:56
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
02:12:02
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
02:12:08
trick you have we have to trick you into doing it we can't let you know that we're doing
02:12:15
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
02:12:22
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
02:12:28
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
02:12:34
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
02:12:42
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
02:12:50
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
02:12:56
like that's [ __ ] you just made this about an external thing again good brilliant brilliant brilliant brilliant
02:13:01
you know why what's brilliant about that awareness exactly yeah change is
02:13:07
happening change cannot happen while you're blind you cannot good diagnosis predes good treatment so this is the
02:13:13
other thing really interesting right so one last thing I know we're running long so this is a habit for you right yeah
02:13:23
for a habit to be this is a very simple technique to demolish any habit a habit is automatic that's what
02:13:31
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
02:13:36
happens automatically if it's a habit I don't have to work hard I want to program myself so I can be
02:13:44
lazy so all you need to do to demolish a habit is awareness because literally the
02:13:49
circuits involved in your brain are completely different The Habit circuitry in your brain is the endoc canabo system
02:13:55
awareness of the present moment is your anterior singulate cortex in your frontal loopes you cannot have a habit
02:14:02
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
02:14:10
Stephen it will chip away at it it'll get cut away 1% 1% 1% until it
02:14:17
disappears catch it as many times as you can is this why it's useful to keep a
02:14:23
diary or to write sort of it can it can be Diaries have all kinds of other
02:14:28
mechanisms so the just a couple of quick ones so one is that Diaries slow down the pace of your thinking because when
02:14:35
you write you write slower than you think so you me like meditate on the thoughts a little bit more the second
02:14:40
thing is that a when we think in our head we're using some circuits of the brain but when we write we are
02:14:46
activating our sensory inputs and our capacity to learn from
02:14:52
our sensory inputs versus thinking is actually way higher right yeah so it's like
02:14:59
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
02:15:06
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
02:15:12
our mind we end up in a different place from when we
02:15:17
write so it's a lot easier in our mind to end up with habitual patterns of
02:15:22
thinking in a diary it's way harder to end up with habitual thinking so you will explore yourself more effectively
02:15:29
using a diary when I look at the first pages of my diary I find a guy that's
02:15:34
constantly and this is really where the Diary of AO came to be the start of the podcast was me sharing my diary the
02:15:40
things I'd written in my diary every day um some of those early episodes that I made were about the subject of purpose
02:15:46
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
02:15:52
comments and DMs I get are struggling to find their purpose now even as I say that I go I've loaded the question
02:15:58
because I've said find which which insinuates there some kind of search and purpose is a singular word so it
02:16:04
indicates that there's one but you know what I'm saying what is that that people are looking for and why are they
02:16:10
struggling to find it this is very simple you can look at any human being on the planet and you can see that they
02:16:17
all gravitate towards something which is internal peace so our hunger gives us a sense when we
02:16:24
eat then we have internal peace thirst gives us a sense of wanting to drink and then we have internal peace when we want
02:16:31
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
02:16:38
all of these we're chasing all of these things outside of us to create an internal state right so no matter what
02:16:45
you do in life at some point your actions are going to cross the barrier of the external to the internal and will
02:16:52
make you feel a certain way why do we get married to create a particular feeling why do we give someone a kiss to
02:16:58
create a particular feeling right so everything we experience within us now why is it so hard for people so we're
02:17:05
all looking for inner peace that's just it period right and then the question becomes what makes it hard very simple
02:17:12
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
02:17:19
happens is if we look for inner peace from the outside so if I get Inner Peace
02:17:24
because people tell me Al look you're so great now what happens is that peace lasts only as long as people are saying
02:17:31
it and the real reason we're screwed is because the biological organism develops a system of tolerance so right now
02:17:38
you've got 10 million followers and then you're going to need more and then you're going to need more and then
02:17:44
you're going to need more we're going to need more intense pornography we're going to need more intense video games
02:17:51
we're going to need more exciting TV shows so the nature of the human organism is to adapt to its surroundings
02:17:58
which is why you will never succeed if you are relying on the outside world to make you happy because you will just
02:18:04
want more and more and more and what helps you achieve happiness comes from
02:18:10
in here that's why it's so hard for everyone so these kids asking saying that they can't find their purpose
02:18:16
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
02:18:23
you say to them when they DM you um so I I think uh one thing I would
02:18:29
say to them is purpose is an attitude it's not a thing right so like it take any action
02:18:36
what makes that action align with your purpose it's the attitude that you take towards
02:18:41
it so if I give you this meditation practice to sit and do nothing you're
02:18:46
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
02:18:51
mind a purpose is not purpose is an attitude it's not like a
02:18:57
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
02:19:02
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
02:19:08
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
02:19:14
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
02:19:20
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
02:19:26
worst days of your life will have nothing to do with surgery they're going to have to do with having a personality
02:19:32
disordered sociopathic narcissistic borderline personality disorder patient
02:19:38
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
02:19:43
vitally important for you to learn no matter what you're interested in so it's about the attitude the other thing that
02:19:50
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
02:19:55
really gunning medical students and I was like you guys are missing the point you're not here to get honors you're
02:20:00
here to practice medicine so one day you're going to be on an airplane and you're going to hear the flight
02:20:06
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
02:20:12
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
02:20:19
learn how to save life lives right and so that attitude when it
02:20:24
sinks in with them changes the way that they learn I don't care what your gr is
02:20:29
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
02:20:35
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
02:20:41
crisis before until you started speaking about it what is a quarter life crisis and what is actually going on there so a
02:20:48
quarter life crisis is something that we're seeing like more and more of so usually what happens is that see early
02:20:55
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
02:21:01
it is so I'm 15 years old I pick a dream I start advancing towards it and our our
02:21:08
when we form our life what we try to do is we we develop a conception and then
02:21:14
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
02:21:20
different from our dreams so then what happens is we tend to find ourselves in a place that we're like not happy with
02:21:26
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
02:21:32
know there's always like scope creep there's like burn like the Sprints are very exhausting it's burned out like I'm
02:21:38
not happy here so the first stage of a quarter life crisis is feeling trapped
02:21:43
now you've invested all of this time and energy into like you know medicine or
02:21:49
being a doctor and you spent years or like being a programmer now you're trapped in this situation because you've
02:21:55
invested so much time the second thing that happens in a quarter life crisis so people are like this is what it it
02:22:01
sounds like so I wake up every day I pack my lunch I drive in traffic I'm at
02:22:08
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
02:22:14
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
02:22:19
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
02:22:25
else can I do so it starts with a feeling of being trapped second thing that happens is people mentally check
02:22:31
out so you'll feel like I don't I'm not passionate about my job now this is where people make a big
02:22:37
mistake because if you look at the research on quarter life crisis what they will try to do is check back in
02:22:44
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
02:22:50
mentally checking out is an important developmental step to growth so if you
02:22:57
don't check out of your existing job or your existing relationship there's no
02:23:03
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
02:23:09
things get really interesting if we look at the successful navigation of a quarter life crisis we all feel trapped
02:23:15
then we check out we think this is a bad thing then what gets really interesting is that there's usually some kind of
02:23:21
intentional moving away so in my case I literally like went to India so we know
02:23:27
that that human beings need to create some amount of psychological or physical space I've had patients who have joined
02:23:33
the military I've had patients who have like driven cross country you need space like physical space and mental space
02:23:39
away from what you're checked out from then we get to something that's really interesting so you asked this question
02:23:45
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
02:23:50
you're meditating and it's like ah I have purpose purpose is crafted right so
02:23:55
once we're mentally we mentally check out that allows us to distance ourselves because if we don't mentally check out
02:24:02
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
02:24:09
that kind of make sense so then what we have to do is a period of self-exploration and craftsmanship so
02:24:16
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
02:24:22
is really important about a quarter life crisis the first phase of our life we are living up to external expectations
02:24:29
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
02:24:34
listening to myself I'm just being programmed by my conditioning so we start out being very externally focused
02:24:40
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
02:24:46
there you craft who you are you get in touch with yourself and then comes the last phase of the
02:24:52
quarter life crisis which is that you craft an external world based on your internal environment
02:25:00
so now your compass is dictating what you do you find a relationship that
02:25:05
resonates with you to begin with and so in my case and your case probably we probably did this in some way we failed
02:25:13
we did something new and then we like figured out okay this is what excites me right so at some point growth excites
02:25:20
you you so now like this endeavor is about growth it's about helping people so now you're crafting your external
02:25:27
life based on what you've discovered about yourself internally and that's kind of the last
02:25:33
phase the problem that people run into is that they don't realize that this sequence is necessary and you have to do
02:25:40
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
02:25:47
friends who have quit their business so they've sold their company yeah and then
02:25:53
they've taken you know two months off they've got so agitated and in two cases
02:25:58
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
02:26:05
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
02:26:12
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
02:26:18
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
02:26:25
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
02:26:31
well my mentor said to me when I left my first business which um is what made gave me sort of Financial Freedom he
02:26:37
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
02:26:43
market in a private transaction and it's the pandemic like the world has stopped
02:26:48
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
02:26:55
you to do and the most important thing for you to do is to do nothing and he
02:27:00
was like you just need to sit and you need to do nothing he goes because you're going to get all these urges
02:27:06
Steve to go back and start a similar business the same business um because you can and you know you can but he goes
02:27:13
the reason why you are successful the first time around is now kind of expired like you did that so the thing that's
02:27:19
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
02:27:24
space for it to emerge and I say that to Founders all the time that like exit their businesses or leave their
02:27:29
companies is you have to basically do this painful process of like sitting on your hands for like a year and being
02:27:35
patient and waiting yeah and that's kind of what you were saying you're saying about cultivating this um this new life
02:27:41
but from inside out not from outside in because you get so many offers you get
02:27:46
so many opportunities and offers in that space um but those again aren't yours you didn't cultivate them they just came
02:27:52
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
02:27:58
and and that's that's like that's what people should do that's what you help people do and
02:28:05
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
02:28:14
because you're combining disciplines and you're doing it in such a wonderfully smooth fluent and
02:28:21
logical way my brain is struggles when anything gets a little bit too fluffy or like Airy fairy but as you speak you
02:28:28
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
02:28:35
I gives you an opportunity to grow no because I just I what like what an absolute honor that I get to sit with
02:28:42
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
02:28:48
also I also realize as um a podcaster that it's the most the most value that I
02:28:55
think I can give to the audience is like me being honest about myself yeah that
02:29:00
is the information that is in greatest demand but in least Supply in the world
02:29:06
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
02:29:13
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
02:29:20
success of this podcast your authenticity is such a huge part of it and also what's happening is we're
02:29:26
getting so much like derivative content we're getting like five tips for this and five tips for that and 10 techniques
02:29:31
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
02:29:38
ask obviously my job is to ask questions right and the longer I've done this podcast what I've come to realizes the
02:29:44
best questions are the ones that no one could give me that are like deep in my heart somewhere that I've would maybe
02:29:50
been too scared to like to say out loud and when I get closer to those questions the conversations are so much more
02:29:56
valuable for the audience and I can rank the conversations essentially based on
02:30:01
how much the questions came from my soul and then the like metric that I I might
02:30:07
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
02:30:13
questions from my soul the messages that they send me get exponentially longer it it becomes like they send me
02:30:21
pages when you know these are my questions if I make a conversation about the gut microbiome people might say hey
02:30:26
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
02:30:32
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
02:30:38
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
02:30:44
of skirting not skirting around we've touched on this issue several times but you've asked me what do we do right what
02:30:49
is what is the answer I think the one thing I've learned for 10 years of being a medical doctor
02:30:55
is it's not about finding the right answers it's about asking the right questions that is the methodology
02:31:02
because an answer is outside of you it theoretically applies to all people but if you really want to be your best self
02:31:11
that answer needs to be tailored to you specifically to you and that answer what
02:31:16
works for you only you know right right I don't know what's going to work for
02:31:21
you or anyone else because I don't have information about your internal environment MH so the real key is not
02:31:28
about finding the right answers it's about asking the right questions so that you can get the data within that applies
02:31:35
to you 100% why do we have so much advice on the internet because none of
02:31:41
it applies 100% to your unique genetics your unique epigenetics your experiences
02:31:46
your traumas your dormant unconscious so that's what you need to do is is
02:31:53
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
02:31:59
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
02:32:06
podcaster and I think you should stop trying okay I think you should do exactly what you are doing and recognize
02:32:13
that you you are enough so just keep
02:32:18
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
02:32:26
I don't accept the question I don't think you can be better I think the concept of better is literally
02:32:31
hypothetical does that make sense makes perfect sense you just are so just be
02:32:37
yeah it's funny because the the more in my life that I've just been um the better everything has got
02:32:45
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
02:32:53
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
02:32:59
better results when I was just being so exactly and this podcast was based on that it was based on me just being um
02:33:05
which was scary it was really scary at the start it was scary just talking about these things publicly at the start you
02:33:12
know Dr K we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next and the question
02:33:18
that's been left for you is what is your rich
02:33:26
life I guess the one that I've got I mean that you know what it doesn't
02:33:32
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
02:33:37
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
02:33:43
last thought so I saw something really interesting in a study about aging so you know there's all this loneliness
02:33:48
epidemic going on so it's really interesting because if you look at it scientifically
02:33:54
logically as we get older our life gets objectively worse so we lose friends so literally
02:34:02
over time the number of friends you have as you get older like they literally start dying um we lose relationships our
02:34:08
physical body starts to break down so like our life objectively by certain measures gets worse so what's really
02:34:15
interesting is that you'd expect old people are like more depressed because their life is objectively worse
02:34:20
and sometimes they are but there's one variable that correlates with being content in life versus being unhappy in
02:34:27
life and that is how okay you are with a Bittersweet life so the more engaged
02:34:34
with this concept of something being Bittersweet you are as you get older the more content you will be so I think my
02:34:42
answer to that question is like embracing the bittersweetness of life like there's piss in there and there's
02:34:47
sugar and that's just what it is thank you so much Dr K I really appreciate it you're
02:34:54
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
02:35:00
this is why people need to go read your books and follow your YouTube channel because uh in that regard we can um and
02:35:06
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
02:35:13
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
02:35:21
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02:36:42
cards that you can play at home so you've got every guest we've ever had
02:36:47
their question and on the back of it if you scan that QR code you get to watch
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