Dr. K Q&A: Video Game Addiction Neuroscience, Science vs. Spirituality, Dr. K Enlightened? & more

will I get a legit evaluation or will they just think I'm depressed you cut out gaming and then you just replace it with other crap people think that is a particular thing that makes them bored no your mind isn't a pro boredom State ok this is a great question I see you keep flaming therapy is there a situation which therapy is the right move what alternatives do you recommend ways to give back to the community so you know you're welcome to get involved with us so we're we're you know as we're training coaches and stuff what's happening in the brain with you all of a sudden stop enjoying games and actually prefer doing more productive things is it still about dopamine levels do you find spirituality conflicts with scientific research not at all so let me be clear about a couple of things what I say I'm on lightened know what at what age it hasn't happened yet I have a question if I try to get professional help for video game addiction will I get a legit evaluation or will they just think I'm depressed I really think I'm an emotional I have an emotional dependency on games and I use them to evade bad feelings to the point that I can't get that get things I need to get done okay so will you get a legit evaluation or will they just think I'm depressed so you will get a legit evaluation and they will probably think that you are depressed so the first thing doctor says is that very few mental health professionals understand video game addiction or how video games affect psychology or neuroscience and that's not their fault right like when we were training like in my training I got over the course of four years in about twelve to fifteen thousand hours of training I got a grand total of zero hours of training on video game addiction and that is at all places at the Harvard Medical School and so the first thing you guys need to understand is if you're gonna seek a mental health evaluation it's not their fault that they don't understand video games it's not that no one has been trained to ask are you addicted to video games so that's the work that I'm trying to do with the American Psychiatric Association so I'm putting together a continuing medical education like a class for psychiatrists to educate them about video game addiction to try to get them I teach at various places to try to raise awareness so that people do like start asking about it but I think if you want to get proper help I think it is your responsibility to share this with them if you share this sentence with them you walk in and you say hey you talk to them they're gonna ask you so what are you what's bringing you in they're gonna I'll ask that question they're like what's bringing you in today they're gonna ask this open-ended question about why you're coming to see them and if you say I really think I have an emotional dependency on video games and I use them to evade bad feelings to the point that I can't get things I need to get done that's all you need that's the perfect answer they should be able to handle that because remember that what psychiatrists and psychologists and therapists are good at is like not necessarily understanding the nuances of a particular addiction like if you go see me for example so I'm an addiction psychiatrist and I work with people who have like cocaine addictions but like I don't know the ins and outs of like using cocaine and what it does I'm not an expert I've never even tried cocaine so I don't I don't know really and know anything about it but I can absolutely help them with their emotional dependency on it and how they use it to evade bad feelings to the point that I can't get things done because that's not specific to video games right that's just normal like that that's what we deal with like a therapist should be able to help you explore your emotional dependency on video games should be able to help you explore what it is that you're using your video games to like emotionally avoid because we do that for all kinds of stuff like we watch TV we engage in unhealthy relationships we use substances of abuse all of that stuff happens all the time and psychiatrists should be able to handle that so I don't think you're gonna get like a super knowledgeable person about video game addiction and what it does to you but I think that's something that you have to kind of educate them about and that you guys can kind of like work on together and I think you can get help I think you just can't if they say like I think you're depressed and and then I think you should push back on that you can say like yeah but I really think like video games are my problem in that it may look like depression but and so I think it's very important if you're if you're with a therapist that you say what is on your mind because that's what really helps them if you just say what's on your mind even if you disagree with them that should be fine and if they don't listen to you then you should find a different therapist unfortunately some of them no one's you know no perfect so um thoughts on coronavirus II I think coronaviruses Batman I don't know like what is going on in China where like they're having all these like really bad viruses break out not quite sure like there's some kind of public health issue there what are their breeding bad viruses I don't know if it's because of the way that they like keep their chickens or what because there's so little information about what's going on but it's like that like it's not it's not a coincidence that you know like SARS the corona virus and like other public health catastrophes or like coming like when you have public health catastrophe after public health catastrophe come out of a particular country like that's a problem right so they they have something within their system of reporting or the way that they treat things or the way that they house because these are all zoo and otic infections right that's important to remember as well so these are all like like I think most of them were coming from poultry so I think they've probably got something going on in terms of like the way that they're handling zoonotic stuff so let's use Anakim paracin so mad cow was a big deal you know like a decade or more ago and we haven't really heard much about mad cow mad cow by the way is absolutely terrifying if you all don't really know what it is it's a terrifying concept in medicine and mad cow isn't like as big of a deal now like we don't hear about continual mad cow outbreaks I'm sure they're conspiracy theorists out there who say that oh they're outbreaks happening all the time but the truth is that like people have made I think the UK and the US have implemented like very strong although if you really look at it kind of terrifying levels of oversight like it isn't how little oversight there is but they've implemented sufficient oversight to prevent further outbreaks of Mad Cow which is really really great so my question is I don't know what China's public health policies are I don't know if it's just they're unlucky but like I think it's it's interesting and you know you have to wonder why there are multiple zoonotic bird related infections that are like killing people in China is it is it so bad because they just don't have the infrastructure to support the health like I don't know I don't know what's going on but I think from a systems perspective like that's problematic that's what I think I was wondering if you could advise on recovering from dopamine exhaustion I'm finding that once I cut out gaming I tend to randomly browse the internet and watch shows when I would rather be developing productive up hobbies and habits okay so fantastic you and everyone else myself included right so like it's not just about cutting out gaming so this is a big important point so we'll talk about dopamine exhaustion in a second the first thing to understand like the whole reason that we did healthy gamer like why is it called healthy gamer is because I don't think gaming is actually the problem right so people who take an abstinence approach to gaming abstinence only approach to gaming like for some people it's very successful but like what I think is way way more common than someone cutting out gaming and then transforming their lives is this you cut out gaming and then you just replace it with other crap so you got to get to the root of why you're gaming in the first place right you have to build a healthy life for yourself what are the the emotions that you're avoiding through gaming because you can stop the gaming but your brain is gonna find other way to avoid the emotions and it'll like you'll Sprouse read it and watch TV shows to avoid your emotions you will find a way to procrastinate if you really want to procrastinate your mind is really good at procrastination mind is really good at avoidance so cutting out gaming is a good and significant step but I don't I think it's like a band-aid it's like looking at the symptom of the problem instead of the root the root is like what is it in your life why aren't you moving forward in life what are you trying to avoid and what are you like afraid of about forward momentum so we had an interview a couple weeks ago with crucify was kind of talking about having an invisible wall like when he tries to make progress he runs to an invisible wall and we were I was surprised to discover that his invisible wall it's a great interview by the way isn't actually a wall it's actually himself holding himself back so when he starts to make progress like on if he gets a job like he quits it after seven days but on day three he starts to like not want to go and like that's where the money is and so a bizarre thing that happens is like the better he does in life the more his depression happens and I'd be wondering how common that pattern is so the question is you know what is it that the gaming is actually protecting you from and if you can deal with those feelings of shame or fear or social anxiety or whatever like then you don't need shows on the Internet right because this is a game of whack-a-mole I see this also in people who have borderline personality disorder eating disorders and substance use there's a group of people that I you know work with that all have all three of those things so they have an eating disorder they have something called BPD so they do self-harm at behaviors and they have problems with substances like alcohol so this is like the the sort of this textbook example of this like the question that you're gonna see if you take a medical board exam is like a 17 year old girl who cuts uses alcohol and hasn't like is like underway and what we find when we treat these people is if you can control one of them the others get worse and if you can control two of them the last thing gets worse so if you stop them from self harming and cut out the alcohol they're eating gets worse if you force them to eat or you engage in like like anorexia treatment and you stop them from drinking then they're cutting gets worse I mean if you do anorexia treatment and stop them from cutting than their drinking gets worse so like it's a game of whack-a-mole and it can be really frustrating and engender a lot of difficult dynamics between you and the patient but the issue here is that like all three of those are coping mechanisms to deal with negative emotion cutting is actually a coping mechanism it's almost like a meditative practice when you really talk to people about it it's not they're not trying to actually hurt themselves it's just the pain focuses their mind and like relieves them of emotional tension if you talk to people who engage in self-harm behaviors that's actually how they describe it and so the cool thing is that they get better when you start teaching them things like meditation so when you teach the meditation they have something else that they can go to for that emotional relief so you can play whack-a-mole with Netflix Reddit and gaming all you want to and gaming I do think is like more insidious because it engages our brain in a more profound way then let's say reddit or Netflix does like you have no sense of like online identity or accomplishment when you're well maybe when you browse reddit and you get uploaded we'll see there you go that's why read it's addictive so like Netflix is the least addict addictive it sounds like reddit is a little bit more addictive in gaming is even more addictive so the issue is what's at the root now the second thing is this person is talking about dopamine exhaustion there's got to be like YouTube videos on our channel about this I hope if not then I'll make one but this is just a general concept that's important to understand in terms of playing a lot of video games when I work with people who play excessive video games they talk about like being bored and if you really ask them like what's what they hate the most and what they're trying to avoid more than anything is not any kind of emotion or anything like that is boredom they hate boredom and when they stop trying to play games they feel bored and so I feel like the biggest enemy like the biggest challenge is just straight border like that's the challenge that's them it's not some complicated psychological your dad did this or you're afraid of death or you know it's not anything like that it's just boredom so let's think about what boredom is and we're gonna jump to the interview in about five five minutes okay so when you play video games your your mezzo limbic the mesolimbic circuit of your brain releases something called dopamine and the bezel limbic circuit of your brain is is that's one of the dopamine circuits that governs pleasure and reward so there are other dope there other dopamine circuits for example that regulate movement and things like that so people who have Parkinson's disease they also have like they have a dopamine shortage in their brain so there are lots of dopamine does a lot of stuff in your brain it's not just pleasure and reward but the Meisel limbic circuit is devoted to pleasure and reward so when you play a video game you dump a lot of dopamine and on a regular basis in your mieze olympic circuit with spikes of higher reward so if we take a drug like cocaine cocaine causes a large amount of dopamine to be dumped into your reward system like very quickly whereas gaming is like slow steady dopamine with spurts and that's why you can play a game for like 12 hours and then they're like moments in the game what do you feel super excited and it's very kind of activating and engaging so how does the body respond to constant stimuli it does it responds by something called tolerance and so what what tolerance is is like if you drink caffeine every day like at first it kind of wires you and can keep you up all night but if you drink enough of it your your brain actually down regulates caffeine receptors and what that means is it numbs itself to the signal of caffeine so when you needed to drink one cup of coffee and that would have kept you wired through the night if you drink coffee every day like one cup of coffee isn't gonna keep you wired because your brain has kind of numbed itself to the effects of caffeine and so if we look at gaming people who game a lot their brain also adapts same principle so it numbs itself to dopamine and that's what I call dopamine exhaustion you just like run out of dopamine and the dopamine doesn't have really much effect and your your body it's really a tolerance principle but and then you kind of so things like become less fun so then if you stop gaming so gaming remember is like a steady stream of dopamine with spikes but then if you try to do something like read a book reading a book just releases less dopamine then playing a videogame does and so when people start to like to try to do other things they find them boring and the reason they find them boring is because your brain is built up such a tolerance to dopamine it's numbing that signal of enjoyment that's literally why everything is boring because your brain numbs the sensation of reward and pleasure because you've dumped so much dopamine into your Me's Olympic circuit but that's how your brain is gonna adapt so what you need to do is just understand that for two weeks if you cut out gaming you're gonna be bored you're gonna be really bored and that overtime that boredom is gonna go away in and of itself and this is the problem that a lot of gamers make is they conclude that the activity is what's boring right you remove yourself from the equation you're like oh I don't like to read a book books are boring I don't like to garden gardening is boring I don't like to go fishing fishing is boring I don't like to work out working out is boring I don't like to go to job my job job is boring I don't like to go to my classes class is boring so you associate boredom with the activity without acknowledging that your neuro chemistry is actually what's causing it boring when you find your job class fishing working out gardening and reading all boring that's not everything in the world being boring that's you right so you have dopamine exhaustion so what you need to do is stop exposing your brain to dopamine for a long time so take a period of like two weeks do something like a gaming cleanse and just understand that for two weeks I'm not gonna be sad I'm not gonna be shamed I may have low energy level but the main challenge that you have to you have to survive two weeks of boredom and if you survive two weeks a Bourdon boredom something magical happens all of those things that you used to be boring then start becoming fun then the even more magical thing happens what gamers want more than anything else is to enjoy the things that they should do gamers look at themselves and they say oh like I like playing video games and I find school boring I wish I was like those people who found school fun because if I found school fun they'd enjoy it then I could study and then I could get a job and then I could take control of my life I wish I was like those people well here's the thing you can be like those people you can literally do it all you have to do is alter your neuro chemistry through a two-week like gaming cleanse thirty days is better and as your brain rewires and like recalibrates and as your tolerance level goes down then you're gonna enjoy things better and then you will become the very thing that you want it to be and once you become that thing and you enjoy school like that means you're gonna do better in your classes that means you're gonna graduate like you're gonna enjoy working out more your motivation that intrinsic motivation that most gamers are missing will start to come back and as it comes back like that's how you become a healthy gamer like that's my whole point is that like as you build things in your life that you also find enjoyable you're living a healthy and fulfilling life and then you like also get to play video games the crazy thing is is that even the best part the games even become more fun like the gaming becomes more fun minute to minute hour to hour when the rest of your life is in order it gets better okay I just watched the video with reckful and hearing the four states of consciousness got me thinking and apologies for what will probably turn out to be a wall of text apology accepted is game okay so if you guys want to y'all can go back and look at the video with reckful I also talked about this with Devin Nash on one of our earlier streams about the different like for states of like consciousness and mind it's a pretty interesting way to understand how your mind works as gamers do you know that feeling when you're completely immersed in the game and enter into sort of a trance where your mind stops thinking you and you become one with the carrot yes I do that's called a flow state for example when playing a shooter you no longer feel even you no longer even feel moving your mouse or pressing buttons or your keyboard no thoughts or anything you just automatically react react to whatever's on screen get in your groove and just play yeah absolutely so the first thing let's just pause here so that's a flow state right so a flow state is a period of time where your mind is like ultra focused and you lose some sense of self and you kind of like become one with the activity so in a flow state your performance improves you feel better and like you're not plagued with stuff like anxieties I find that I perform exponentially better in that mindset both in in a game environment and when attempting to be productive yes so this is correct okay so let's pause this for a second this is exactly what I'm saying so your productivity has nothing to do with like whether it's a game or school or your cooking or whatever the quality and state of your mind determines your productivity it goes back to what we were saying last time about boredom people think that is a particular thing that makes them bored no your mind is in a pro boredom state and if you can get into a flow state it doesn't matter what you can do you can be playing to music you can be singing music you can be hanging out with your kids you can be gardening you can be playing a video game it all gets better everything gets better and that's because you change right like this is about remember guys like in when you're playing the game of life like you have a character and your character influences things it's not just the environment so like it's like when your character goes into like you know flow mode you are gonna perform better it's like a buff to all of your stats and all of your skills 20% improvement to all of your stats and all of your skills when you're a flow state is that actually it's way more than 20% it's probably 100% is that State of Mind similar to the place I'm trying to enter when meditating yes and no so the goal of this the meditative mind is to have consciousness with no mental activity the goal of a flow state is to have either consciousness with one pointed in focus mental activity or focused mental activity without consciousness that may actually be a flow State I'm gonna have to think about that and explore that myself so the question is like do you lose track of time and awareness of self when you're in a flow state because a flow State may be one pointedness of mind not a variable mind with actually no consciousness I'm not sure or whether consciousness is there or not or not and what what I will tell you is so I I teach people how to get into flow States and these include physicians surgeons investment bankers professional gamers NFL athletes and I teach them and train them how to get into a flow state and like I teach all of these different people because the activity doesn't matter it's the state of mind that matters right so when I work with like an eSports team I teach them how to enter flow States so that like when they start to tilt and their anxiety like raises through the roof and it affects their performance I teach them how to recalibrate their brains so that they don't they get out of that state so it's very similar to end the way I teach that is by teaching meditation and then we kind of do additional things as well but meditation is a great way to facilitate flow States not exactly the same but it's like moving you in the general ballpark I've been chasing that state of mind since I break out of thought loops and just simply do very good does anyone else enter such a mindset when doing work absolutely very productive people do does anyone else even experience what I'm describing or am I just crazy no you're not crazy the reason that you feel like you're crazy is because this is a hard state of mind to duplicate right so you have these flashes of insight where you're in this state of mind and you're like whoa that was amazing like I played a better game I'm able to study and then you try to chase it right and you even said you chase it the problem is that the act of chasing reduces the chance that you'll enter a front flow state so the more that you chase the flow state the harder the flow State is to attain and then you think you're crazy because it happens once and it's like brilliant and wonderful and then like you try to find it again and you can't find it again so then you start to question yourself you're like kind of gaslighting yourself like did that really happen is that really possible does this happen to other people this is kind of weird because 90% of the time or even 95% of time or 99% at a time you're in the thought loop state where your mind is super active because most of the time as we live our day our mind is active that's what it does it's active it's thinking about stuff that's how we do it and then rarely you enter a flow state kind of naturally but that absolutely works for other people and I'd say that the more successful people that I meet tend to enter flow States better and if you think about like where I was when I was failing out of college and where I am now like one of the biggest things that's changed is my ability to enter a flow State so I consistently enter flow States and that's what makes me successful right it's my state of mind but this is what I keep telling people like my personality hasn't changed I'm so lazy I still procrastinate I still like watch the Leipzig major instead of doing my work but the difference is that I enter flow States on a pretty regular basis and since I enter flow States I tend to be productive enough and I do well in life it's not crazy so I'd say absolutely try to cultivate flow States then your question is gonna be how which is a fair question so we'll let me just think about how to teach you guys how to that's like a long thing though I can't just explain that in five minutes beyond meditating but I don't think that's sufficient so let me think I'm just gonna have to add that like I have to so we're developing a curriculum of like start to finish stuff about meditation and Tyrel and Ayurveda so I'm gonna have to add a segment on flow States then how to cultivate them so I'm just gonna have to make a mental note to do that okay by the way so you guys know sometimes I do what I just did and I pause on stream and I like stop doing whatever I'm doing and sometimes when I'm talking to people it's kind of awkward but I'm gonna say I'm gonna just think for a minute that is literally me trying to go into like a little mini flow state like it's like me taking a step back in reducing my thought loops and if I'm really really desperate then I'll really try to go into a flow state because if I'm desperate and I don't know what to think like I literally what that means is my brain is picking up on something that I cannot logically process and it's too much so I have to pause and I have to like get into the flow state and then something like some answer comes out and that's part of what makes me effective like if you guys watch my interviews we'll see if it happens today so keep an eye out so actually this is what we should do today so I want you guys to be more active viewers today okay I want you guys to look watch me and try to see when I enter a flow state and when I don't and try to see when is my thinking logical and when is it not logical and just because it's not logical doesn't mean it's wrong but I think you guys will be able to see some of the stuff that I do is logical in a product of the analytical mind but some of it is not the analytical mind and I'm trying to do like this crap like I don't know how else to describe it but like I it's something like meditation something like a flow state something like intuition as opposed to analysis and try to see if you can tell the difference okay and then we'll talk about it a little bit after the interview okay this is a great question I see you keep flaming therapy is there a situation which therapy is the right move what alternatives do you recommend so I I think therapy is fantastic so I was sharing with you guys my personal beefs with therapy right but that's like I think it's important when you engage in a practice to understand its weaknesses it doesn't mean that the practice is bad right you can also say that like college sucks for all kinds of reasons it doesn't mean that college is bad but college sucks because people are click is sure like you know people their fraternities or like you can say whatever you want to about things being negative so I want to thank you for answering this question because I think therapy is actually really good and like I said I recommended therapy to him so I think that you know I was being critical of a therapist was just really unfair because I didn't understand you know the therapist may have been making their judgment based on all the information that Jake was sharing with them so the therapist may be correct too so it does sound like the dad is emotionally unavailable to be fair right because we can sort of infer that it's not like rocket science so it's kind of a dick thing for me to say I think therapy is actually very good I mean I'm a therapist in my day job so I think it's very effective I think a lot of people could benefit from it I think most people could benefit from it but I think like with anything that you do in life you should understand what the shortcomings and downsides are because that allows you to protect against them so the funny thing is that I think that something like what we do on stream is a very good adjunct to therapy so I think if you want to correct your life you should meditate watch stuff like this stream work out you know watch like professional streams and stuff to like learn how to make a resume and go to therapy I think it's actually oftentimes the right call and very rarely is that the wrong call what's your opinion on Kundalini Yoga so I think Kundalini Yoga is an incredibly powerful spiritual practice that should be done under the guidance of a guru so Kundalini Yoga can like literally make people go crazy so I was talking a little bit I don't know if I mentioned this but there are you know there case reports of meditation induced psychosis meditation is also practiced that comes with risks and Kundalini Yoga is actually one of the more riskier kinds of yoga now if you go to like a yoga studio and they'd have a kundalini yoga class that's not real Kundalini Yoga that's all of that is hot day yoga and it's all awesome awesome is yoga postures so 99% or 95% of what they teach it in yoga classes yoga studio is like in the West is not true inauthentic Kundalini Yoga so true and authentic Kundalini Yoga involves a couple of things leak shock which means initiation the second thing so it involves ASSA and it also involves prana I am so certain breathing practices it also involves very specific modernist mood the resin Bundys pattern are specific meditation or focusing techniques mudras or particular hand signs or locks and Bundys or locks so you lock certain parts of your body to shift the flow of your branagh so true Kundalini Yoga involves like all of that stuff and if you do that under without the guidance of a guru like I really don't think that that's safe but I think it's really powerful I so a big part of my personal practice very early on and what I felt was somewhat transformative was Kundalini Yoga okay hey dr. K just recently found your channel I'm starting my internship this year and will soon be wrapping up my clinical psych PhD as I move into my career I think at some point it would be awesome to do something on the side that benefits the community I grew up in a lot of mmo's and fighting games any suggestions for ways to give back to the community have you ever thought about collaborating with other mental health providers and professionals with this stuff yeah so first of all I think it's great that you're pursuing a psych PhD and that you want to give back to your your gamer bros and girls and everything in between so I think ways to get back to the community so you know you're welcome to get involved with us so we're we're you know as we're training coaches and stuff I'm we're exploring a lot of other kind of options and I think if you're especially a trained psychologist that would be cool so you could try to help us because we're trying to help people and they're more people than I can help and the second thing is have I thought about collaborating with other mental health providers and professionals absolutely so I you know I have a couple of professional connections that are you know all over the place so like there are other therapists and psychiatrists that I talked to about what the work that I'm doing some of them find me because their YouTube algorithm sent me send me their way and then I'm also trying to educate psychiatrists and soon-to-be psychologists about video game addiction and stuff like that so I do some national stuff I teach a lot through residency programs and through HMS I I'm doing stuff with the American Psychiatric Association so I have like this whole academic side like part of the reason that I only stream like six or seven hours a week is because you know I do all this other kind of academic stuff clinical stuff things like that I mean if you're interested in getting involved with that you know we have a prospective collaboration with MIT going on so we'll see how that goes to actually like study neuroscience and things like that so you know if you're interested in getting involved in any of that stuff reach out I think we're gonna try to add a link at the bottom for people who are interested in volunteering or getting involved so yeah yeah if you guys want me to quit in instream full-time you got it I got to get those sweet sweet subs and I've transman dr. K has bills to pay do you think we shouldn't listen to music 24/7 because our minds are overstimulated um no I think the bigger problem well I guess yeah maybe maybe the answer is yes so I'd be really curious why you listen to music 24/7 like what do you get like if you're listening to something 24/7 aren't you basically drowning it out like do you really listen to it I mean I find music to be incredibly impactful for my mental state like I really like it to get me in the right kind of mood to work or facilitate a flow State or get pumped up but I find that like them you know you you have to be intentional I mean if I intentionally listen to music it pumps me up if it's playing on in the background as less of an effect so I listen to certain music before I stream and I think it puts me in like a good mindset and do I think your mind is gonna be too stimulated yeah so I think that you should give your mind a break for mental activity so remember that your mind is sort of like a cow and likes to chew over things so it's like it wants to like chew cud and things like that so it wants like chew over things so I think if you I found that in my life like I noticed one day that you know I would listen to an audio like I listen to audio lectures and stuff in the morning when I was in med school and then on the train I would listen to an audio lecture when I was walking to the train when I sat down on the train I would study I would listen to an audio book or something like that when I get off the train and walk into class then I'm in class and like basically like the whole day my mind was occupied by you know audio lectures or audio books which I listened to a lot of and there was this phase in my life where I felt like I didn't want to waste a moment I always wanted to be learning something so a lot of audiobooks in between studying and then I realized like actually I'm just my mind is just I need to give my mind time to just be itself because I think something you guys have to remember is that sure you can learn a lot from other people and reading things and stuff like that but do not underestimate what your mind can discover so if you give your mind enough like space it will process things and help you understand things and make discoveries of its own it'll give you creative ideas like just think about this for a second you know like I don't know if you guys are Game of Thrones fans and I'm talking about the show talking about books but you know if you think about that like how did george RR martin like his mind came up with that right if he was constantly listening to stuff and constantly occupying his time he would not be able to create new ideas new ideas and creativity requires space for them to happen and if you feel stuck in life if you feel uninspired part of that may be because you're not giving your mind the space to actually like figure out what it wants to do so I think you should be careful about me listening to music 24/7 and really try to understand what is it doing for you and what is it doing for your mind what's happening in the brain with you all of a sudden stop enjoying games and actually prefer doing more productive things is it still about dopamine levels the short answer is I don't know and no one does okay the long answer is I don't think so so I think that over time if you feel stuck in life or if you engage your mind in other ways that's gonna like create intrinsic motivations or pulls away from video games the other thing that happens over time is that your frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex mature so frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex are responsible for impulse control and being able to delay gratification so when you're like a five-year-old your capacity to enjoy investing a lot of work and getting out of it versus an immediate reward is like really skewed like five-year-olds don't get much accomplishment out of growing a tomato plant over the course of months and like getting value out of like getting that tomato it mean like when spring comes around right they don't have that capacity because their prefrontal cortex so they'll eat the tomato they'll enjoy the tomato but the idea of like invested work and like reaping those rewards is not something that their brain enjoys as much as like impulsive activities as we grow older so our IQ can top out relatively quickly but our brain involves so much more than like analytical capability so our frontal lobes develop until about the age of 30 and some people even say like 30 to 35 I suspect in gamers they actually continue to develop because they're like sort of delayed in their development until like 32 to 35 and so a lot of that change in enjoyment is because as your frontal lobes develop your capacity to enjoy activities that involve delayed gratification and your sense of accomplishment from a hard day's work is actually actually changes so that's just one circuit in addition or one neuro scientific principle that in addition to dopamine can explain your response but I think there's all kinds of other stuff that goes on like other kinds of psychological things and stuff like that but the short answer is it's complicated and no one really knows but I do think it's way more than dopamine and the simplest thing is you know as you grow older your capacity to delay gratification and enjoy high investment activities increases dr. K I've noticed quite a few references so we'll do like two more questions then we're gonna wrap up okay dr. K I've noticed quite a few references to spirituality in the videos of yours that I've seen so far do you find spirituality conflicts with scientific research not at all so let me be clear about a couple of things so the reason that I talk about spirituality is because you guys asked for it right so the early phases of our if you guys like go through our healthy game or like the original YouTube list like the twelve videos for the first workshop that I did and we've got about 25 other videos that are just collecting dust I talked very little about spirituality it's all psychology and neuroscience well referenced the interesting thing as I've started interacting with my community and as I've started streaming what I see so let's just take our inner what I see is like Adam like what's missing is not the science it's like this the stuff that we call spirituality so if we think about our last interview with Jake we can talk so we did a lot of like psychology stuff at the beginning we talked about emotions we talked about alexithymia we helped him find his emotions and that's like that helps him but it's not like the full story for him right the full story for him I didn't feel like the interview was complete until we talked about Dharma so I think what's missing and what people ask for is like I mean the most questions that I've are about Dharma and so that's what's missing you guys lack purpose it's not just depression and anxiety and that's also why this isn't therapy because therapy is about treating depression and anxiety it's about diagnosing and treating a particular condition this is this goes beyond that right like we started with some psychology and then like we absolutely moved on to spirituality with the end so I'm talking more about spirituality because that's what I'm sensing people need and science I mean I think they're both great I don't think they conflict at all so I think that over time science and spirituality are gonna get closer and closer and closer together so the more that we understand let me just think if I could find a good example of this so this is gonna be kind of a stretch but how to explain this because they're just some assumptions that we take for granted which we think are logical and scientific but are not actually logical and scientific so let's talk for a second about okay so this may not make much sense and I have to probably formulate this argument better but I'm gonna just try so karma is a spiritual concept right like people think about God Amara karma is a spiritual concept it's not a scientific concept but if you really look at this the definition of Karma all karma means is cause and effect garma just says that there are causes and their effects and that if you see in effect now there is a cause in the past that explains why things are the way that they are that is really all the theory of karma says that's the essence of the theory of karma and so we look at that and we say okay the theory of karma is kind of like not scientific right you can look at something like physics and then as people discovered like law like so Yogi's have been saying that all effects are preceded by causes for thousands of years before we understood like Newtonian physics that was not accepted within the scientific community Newton was the one who discovered like the laws you know his laws of physics which is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction that became science and we now all accept that is true but after Isaac Newton but before that garma was saying that all along like karma and Isaac Newton are saying like basically the same thing and now we just assume that that scientific so in our minds a concept that used to be under the umbrella of spirituality has now been moved to scientific because of scientific exploration right like that's what's happened now we regard that concept is not spiritual anymore but its scientific even though it's been talked about by spiritual people for thousands of years so here's the next example of that is genetics so people said okay fine in the realm of physics we can say that every action has an equal and opposite reaction but when someone is born a particular way is that random and the answer is no that the genetics and now we sort of all accept genetics we all understand genetics but you have to like think of like put yourself in the shoes of someone like in the 1800's and like how radical of a concept genetics is that your physical form is not determined by like is determined by like something that is like not under your control at all and has nothing to do with this life like your choices or anything like that that genetics is essentially like the process of some cause that creates a particular effect and that's kind of like a no-brainer right like that's like a no-brainer like Dalek genetics means that my hair is black because both my parents have black hair but that was actually like a relatively revolutionary concept like over a hundred years ago and gadhimai has sort of implies that and you can you can make an argument that karma doesn't imply that and that's a fair argument go down that road but I I think that actually what's happening is that the more we investigate science the closer the more we're finding scientific validity for certain spiritual concepts so I'll give you guys sort of the last example which we don't fully understand yet so I talked a lot about Dharma Dharma is duty or responsibility and it's my belief that Dharma is the thing that allows you to face difficult things in life and choose the right thing despite it being hard so in addiction psychiatry research what we've realized is that for people to quit in addiction so people people took a bunch of people who were addicted to substances and then tried to understand how is it that one person is able to quit and another person is unable to quit so we did qualitative and quantitative research on people who are addicted to substances and we tried to look for the sweet secret sauce like where's the magic like what is it that allows one person to overcome alcoholism and another person to not overcome alcoholism and the answer is something called a competing interest or that's not the answer it's one of the variables right there are a lot of variables we don't know and so competing interest is like a good reason that makes it worth your while to quit the substance and that is Dharma like those are that's the same thing so like science it talks about a competing interest Yogi's talk about Tata MA and it like the end of the day a competing interest in the tournament it's like a good reason a duty or a responsibility if you actually look at what are examples of competing interests and I've talked about this before but I'll give you guys an example so I was like working with someone around smoking cessation and I tried to inform them of all the dangers of smoking cessation like lung cancer heart disease stroke etc and as much as I hate them week after week after week after week after week they didn't quit smoking and then one day I decided to be a dick and I said do you ever want to see your daughter graduate from college do you ever want to see her get married and do you ever want to meet your grandkids that got him to change because that's his Dharma that's a competing interest same thing so I don't think that spirituality and scientific research conflict at all in fact I think the more that we advance in scientific research the closer we will validate certain spiritual concepts the reason I say certain spiritual concepts this is very important because I don't think all spiritual concepts are correct I think as we investigate some we will not find any evidence of them and as we investigate others we will see what's true and what is it because that's what's cool about science science tells us what's true the thing that we have to be careful about though is that we have to understand that science is still progressing in our capacity for science is still in its infancy in some areas especially when it comes to psychology and neuroscience like we understand like Newtonian mechanics pretty well we're getting a better sense of things like quantum mechanics we have a pretty good understanding cardiac physiology we have a pretty good understanding of endocrinology we have less of an understanding of the immune system less of an understanding of the brain and even less understanding of psychology right so what that means is that we have to remember that just because science is not discovered or validated a particular spiritual concept is that concept related to something that is in the neuroscience or psychology round because if so we're gonna suck at investigating that so you have to have you have to remember that some spiritual concepts are gonna be wrong and that you shouldn't accept spirituality just for its own sake that spirituality should in and can be tested by science but also that science has limitations that science is not going to be appropriately equipped to test for things like reincarnation we just don't have the scientific capability of that yet so is it logical to believe in it is it scientific to believe in it absolutely not but it is my hope that one day we will progress science to the point of somehow being able to test reincarnation because if it is real that means that science should be able to test it at some point that's like that's how the world works right and I know it sounds absolutely crazy today but I think you guys just have to remember that like a thousand years ago we didn't understand how electricity worked we sure as hell didn't understand the brain we didn't understand like something like we couldn't send someone to the moon a thousand years ago we couldn't send someone of the room two hundred years ago those would have been completely ludicrous we didn't even know what the moon was a thousand years ago so it's like so there are things that sound absolutely ridiculous and I understand that it sounds absolutely ridiculous to be able to test reincarnation like what the f are you talking about how do you even go about doing that short answer is I don't know I don't have any idea but we should be careful not to have scientific arrogance that our capacity to test and understand the world right now is like anywhere close to complete because there is nothing that I can there I've seen no evidence although our capacity to understand is growing at an asset a exponential rate I have no idea where the asymptote is if that makes sense to people like I don't know like we could continue growing at this rate of scientific understanding for 2,000 years and be like ten thousand times as smart as we are today and still like not understand half of what goes on in the universe so I don't think that those conflict at all and what I actually really like is like what gives me a lot of personal like comfort and confidence is when there are scientific points that validate spiritual concepts and in my personal life and also like in my treatment what I try to do is find the areas where spirituality and science overlap and it's those things that I recommend the strong them the most like we're in the best example of that is every stream I don't talk about iron mother I don't talk about reincarnation I sort of talk about Dharma because that's what you guys want but what is the one thing that I recommend on every single stream you guys know absolutely and why is that it's because there is overwhelming spiritual support for it and overwhelming scientific support for it and let's remember so meditation is the last example that'll leave you guys with let's remember that meditation was thought is like hokey silly stuff that yoga hippies did back in the 60s it had no scientific validation and so people assumed it was false because it had not been studied and now like meditation is like they're just gigantic Institute's that are studying the effects of meditation so let's remember let's be humble and not practice scientific arrogance and remember that just because something has not been scientifically investigated does not mean it is false so reincarnation is where meditation was a hundred years ago just because we don't know how to study it and haven't tried does not mean it is false which is one of the biggest mistakes that I see a lot of people who are like prosigns and anti religion make right it's like we just don't we haven't studied it appropriately so am I asking you to believe in it no but it doesn't it's just like we haven't studied it yet like I don't even know how to study like I don't even know how that works but anyway great question okay last question would you say you're enlightened if yes at what age did it happened and can you get more enlightened what I say I'm enlightened know what at what age it hasn't happened yet and then can you get a more lined sort of so there are many stages of consciousness that apparently like you can purify so there's like a level one enlightenment level to enlightenment level three enlightenment if you read but then Julie's yoga system is he talks about some of this stuff I'm not quite sure about all that stuff because I haven't I haven't experienced it and I haven't seen scientific evidence of it so I don't really like I don't talk about it much so I've studied it and I can talk about it but the things that I tend to rely on are things that are based on my personal experience or clinical experience and that which has scientific validation so there you know there's Samadhi which is a stage of temporary enlightenment and then there are like other stages of enlightenment supposedly after that and then there's the complete enlightenment which is at the end and I just don't talk about it because I don't really understand it and I'm not enlightened so I think one thing one good example of this is that I do think for example different stages of enlightenment or different faculties that they describe to ascribe to enlightened people do map on pretty cool with like different parts of the brain so I think as we understand as people meditate it's not just because enlightenment is sort of like a global level up right it's not like leveling up one skill it's just like it's like like Super Saiyan form it's like a different form of human being where everything is boosted and that's what we actually see so that's how spirituality and yoga describes enlightenment or Dao or Buddhism and we actually see that in science that as you meditate you get your attention gets better your concentration gets better your memory gets better your capacity for empathy gets better your narcissism goes down your capacity to delay gratification gets better your capacity to for impulse control gets better so if we look really look at it scientifically meditation is like a buff to everything which is aligned with what people actually have people describe enlightenment is like a global improvement I mean there are very few things in medicine that actually have global improvements right so I mean I think that meditation and and spirituality and science are like not exclusive at all in fact I think that's it's the areas that they overlap which gives you guidance on both so if there's a scientific concept you know if there's a bet if there's a spiritual concept which has no validation in science then like it's less valuable than the ones that do have ala Dacian science [Music] okay okay guys thank you guys very much we're gonna go ahead and wrap up and I just want to thank everyone so I saw we had some gifted subs from

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

Views: 55,037

Rating: 4.969697 out of 5

Keywords: mental health, meditation, drk, dr kanojia, healthygamergg, healthy gamer gg, video game addiction, neuroscience, video game psychology, overstimulation, science, spirituality, enlightened, spirituality vs science, religion vs science

Id: sb4j96fIL0M

Length: 55min 1sec (3301 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/theycallmeflacko]

He says "a few weeks ago we had an interview with Crusive?

I couldnt make out what he says or find a video with any of my guesses