The Emotional Cost Of Being A Deep Thinker - Dr K HealthyGamer

how should people deal with having lots of self-awareness or being a deep thinker I heard uh a guy asked Peterson this question the depth of my Consciousness causes me to suffer is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so very deeply I thought it was a really great question what's your opinion on that and how can people with high self-awareness deal with it so it's funny because um you know there there's uh some someone once told me that you know I think my problem is that I have too much self-awareness and so here the main thing to understand if you have a bunch of self-awareness this is neither a good thing or a bad thing the question is who's in control so the problem with people who have quote unquote too much self-awareness is that they are not in control of where their awareness goes so if I become hyper aware so we even see this in cases of people who have uh psychosomatic illnesses so if you look at people who have things like irritable bowel syndrome infl uh less so inflammatory bowel disease fibromyalgia what we know is they have something called visceral hypers sensitivity so any tiny signal in their body like you and I are sitting down right now our body is sending us lots of signals about us being uncomfortable but we are able to suppress those but some people are hyper Vigilant and Hyper sensitive to their internal signals and this is the basic problem with awareness is that if you have too much awareness it's not that it's good or it's bad it's that it's out of control so if we kind of think about let's say a raging river is a raging River good or bad well that depends why is it raging exactly is it part of a a dam where we're harnessing hydroelectric energy then it is amazing which has been my experience is that when I can take these people and teach them how to harness their awareness and focus their awareness because most people who have too much awareness it's like light that is defract and spread everywhere instead what you need to do is focus light just like a laser beam at which point instead of being diffuse and wasted all over the place because your mind is hyper aware of this and now I'm thinking about this and now I'm aware of this and now I'm aware of this you need to be able to focus your mind like a laser beam and then it can cut through things and it is an amazing tool so it's about who's in control not that it's good or bad what are the strategies that are most efficacious for controlling uh so I like a couple of specific practices um so the two like very simple introductory ones that I tend to teach people one is something calleda so love your Indian accent every every word that you say in Indian I want to do the whole podcast in Indian okay sure we can do podcast inan no problem okay so first one is trataka okay I can't focus go back go you can't focus I will teach you practice right interesting you're talking about not being okay don't worry don't worry I will help I will help okay okay you can't focus no problem laugh what is problem see laughing is not is not lack of focus let yourself laugh better come on let it out let it out let it out right what is the problem enjoy Focus fully on the laughter see this is what I mean doing this in front of a jungle background is going to get someone canell no it's okay don't fear the cancellation just breathe and you'll be okay okay your choice I can go either way let's stick with this one for now I did enjoy that though so so one one practice is something that I call thoa which is not I that's what it's called it's fixed Point gazing so what I tend to find is that uh so fix Point gazing is usually when you look at something like a candle flame or like a yantra which is like a spiritual symbol and you gaze at it for maybe 30 seconds 60 seconds 90 seconds you work your way up slowly and it's best to learn this from a teacher without blinking so over time what literally happens is you're you tell yourself okay I'm going to look at this without blinking and then over time your body will send you signals they're like hey we want to Blink this is uncomfortable let's move let's move let's move and so what you're literally doing is you're training your attention to not do this thing I also like thoa because there's a certain badassness to it right like you feel awesome yeah like like I'm going to I'm going to control this and you feel strong and powerful when you do this this kind of thoa practice so we'll we'll do kind of fix Point gazing at a candle it also there's also some cool stuff that happens in the practice which keeps people engaged like our photo receptors tend to get exhausted with pigments and then you have kind of psychedelic experiences and stuff which kind fun kind of get Tunnel Vision on the outside right so so that's how you know you're doing it right so there's a lot of good things in the practice you got to be careful with it you don't want to damage your eyes or anything so don't don't do it excessively so that's one practice and the second practice that I really like is something called gum which is perfect Stillness so it's just to sit in a space that is and just be perfectly still and over time what will happen is that will become increasingly uncomfortable is your body cries out to you we want to we want to relax we want to move we want to do this we want to do that and then and then usually what what what becomes beautiful about that is that as your body cries out with more and more pain what starts to happen is what a lot of people will discover is that breathing becomes amazing because as your body becomes uncomfortable the only Solace that you have is the breath while you're focused on the breath while you're breathing in and out then you feel amazing like but the second that you stop concentrating on your breathing the body becomes a flame of discomfort and so these two practices it's interesting how how much ecstasy can be derived from the breath and then the other really brilliant thing about this practice is you begin to realize that it's really weird and and maybe we should have done it but you begin to realize that like there's so much joy just in breath and then hopefully people who do this practice long enough will start to realize something really insane which is that a lot of your happiness in life is not dependent on the things that you think normally bring you happiness even the breath can be so pleasurable so intoxicating so relaxing and you do this all day long and you just have no awareness of it and then hopefully what tends to happen and this is my experience with most people is they start to realize that okay a lot of My Life The Joy is actually created on the inside it's about how I live it's about how I receive things and and then they start working on the inside which is when the magic starts to happen how long should people look to do the stare at the candle sit still for for a introductory session yeah so I I would say for something like draa you know it's it's best to learn from a teacher and many like yoga and meditation schools will teach this stuff but you know for tho I would say like go to the point of discomfort but not to the point of pain um there are some medical contraindications so you need to like talk to your doctor about it if you've got things like glaucoma or other like pressure related problems in the eyes but generally speaking I'd say you can start with 30 to 60 seconds and gradually work your way up to like 2 minutes 3 minutes 4 minutes um and then that's usually enough and then there's another the cool thing is with thoa there's a there's a different practice that you can do called Ana which is kind of the next phase so um and this is where you you kind of said you get the tunnel vision so the cool thing that happens in in the in the eyes is once you exhaust your photo receptors and your pigments in your eyes if you close your eyes you will see the after image in negative so then what you can do is without risking any problems in your eyes you can close your eyes and you'll actually see a blue candle flame if you're gazing get a candle and it's the opposite and that's just how our eyes work and then you can continue to do the throa like in your mind like looking in your mind at at the negative image of the candle flame and then you can do that practice for like 15 20 minutes is this where you got your inspiration for the make people stare at a wall for 30 minutes exercise no actually so that's a different that's a different practice but the the make people stare at a wall which has been a revolutionary practice in our in our community it is the joy of that practice is see we're so distracted from ourselves and so many people come to me and they're like I don't know what I want to do right so someone doesn't know they're like should I major in this or should I major in this should I break up should I not break up should I change jobs should I stay jobs should I pursue my passion how do I find my Dharma or my duty you know no one know knows what to do in life and so as we become clueless about what to do we turn to the outside world and then we look at influencers and then influencers say you should do this and you should do this and you should do this and then before we had influencers we had the original influencer which which is our parents and our parents say I look become doctor you're going to be good doctor right those are the original influencers and they give us the set of conditions that we have to fulfill and so the the main thing that's happened is if you literally look at our Attention our our attention is always outside of us now because I want to be efficient right so what am I going to do I took a shower this morning I put on this is great podcast called modern wisdom it's by Chris Williamson and like I'm going to put on this episode because then when I'm in the shower and I'm taking a can I use language yeah okay when I'm taking a when I'm shaving like I'm going to be learning during those moments and then this was something that I did during med school where I was like constantly like input input input over CL yeah and so we don't spend time with ourselves and when we don't spend time with ourselves we lose sight of our internal compass and no wonder we have no idea what to do because we're listening to all these different people and then this person says this one day this person says this the next day and then like so I keep changing my mind programmed schizophrenia sort of yeah and so the the staring at a wall practice is sit at a wall and we're just going to look at a wall for an hour and then at the beginning you'll be bored but then you have all of this crap that is piled up inside you all these some scars that are dormant all these negative experiences of hurt that the second you felt hurt you flipped open your phone to distract yourself for the pain and then that pain sunk into you and lived in your subconscious so what we're going to do is just stare at a wall and just let whatever is there come up what are some of the strangest trip reports that you've heard from your community I mean it's it's wild so like even um someone in our uh like one of our employees did did the practice and he was kind of describing what happened and like people will have all like people start crying they'll like feel all these things that they've never felt before usually the first 5 to 15 minutes or like complete boredom people with ADHD will struggle to pay attention their mind will bounce all over the place and then some of them will actually like end up having a very like calm and rested mind after it bounces around for all over the place but I think some people the lucky I'd say maybe 10 to 25% will really like learn something or get some kind of emotional catharsis I think a longer a larger number of people start to realize they do not need to fear being with themselves and that's really powerful you don't need something else to to entertain you you can take a flight to Europe that is8 hours you don't need a book you don't need a phone you don't need anything you can sit and oh my God it's like so terrifying right and then and so it's amazing what you can learn if you sit with yourself the challenge for a lot of people is that there is so much negative ity in there that it can feel overwhelming sitting with yourself is an unbelievably uncomfortable experience yeah and there's a beautiful um sort of apocryphal story like a mythology story in in the Hindu tradition about this churning of the ocean and at the bottom of the ocean there was like some kind of nectar or Ambrosia or some sort of divine substance but the whole point is that when they started turning the ocean to try to get to it poison came up first and so there's a really cool kind of perspective from the this like this yogic tradition that anytime you want to find gold within you or anytime you want to find nectar or amut um you're going to find poison first so the pathway to finding inner peace involves going through poison I had a uh an Insight when I started doing self inquiry five or six years ago that um for every it's kind of like in a garden and looking for stuff underneath stones and you know every so often underneath the stone you find something that's really beautiful that you're proud about yourself for it's it's a a realization that you feel whole uh but that's one out of 20 and the remaining 19 have something terrifying and disgusting and and and awful hiding underneath I think that's around about the right proportion as well yeah so so let me ask you this has that changed over your five or seven year I would say so uh but in some ways the level of attention and the sort of uh complex not complexity but like the level of dexterity and and uh finesse with which I'm looking at stuff has now increased it's always getting more it's always getting more it's always getting more so as you are getting better at looking within yourself what has changed about what you're finding uh originally I think I was just trying to sort of lay down a path it was really strugging I remember the first time when I first started reading you know all of my 20s I sent I sent and received like 10 million WhatsApp messages over a decade as a club promoter right mostly on my phone this wasn't WhatsApp web so kind of impressive kind of terrifying um and then I I remember when I first before I even started meditating I just wanted to read and I'd look at a book and as I was sat down my body would like twitch and move uh presumably because it was trying to downregulate to this much lower level of stimul there was no Bings bongs no banners coming down no nothing it was a piece of paper um so the first 500 sessions of meditation that I did were I think just like learning to be able to have a slightly still mind and a slightly still body then the next 500 were probably a little bit more about uh noticing thoughts when they arise and the next stage where I'm trying to get to now is where are these coming from like what is the motivation for this story that I tell myself this is why my current obsession with emotions and feelings is coming from also doing therapy um to try and see okay not just can you sit with it not just can you notice it but why is that there why is this a pattern that you are seeing more increasingly so it's kind of hard for me to say um like am I becoming is the proportion of things changing because I'm like each time I move to a different it's like a computer game or I move to a different Garden yeah so so I and I think that's that's wonderful and I I think you know being obsessed about emotions is I'm sure not the first Obsession you've had no true right so so one day you're going to have to ask yourself where does the obsession of things come from right the maatic question yeah absolutely right so that that's when and when you get to that level by the way all of your obsessions will fall apart that's that's the good thing so I I think so for a lot of people and this is I think what we see in therapy right is that the negativity comes first and then the positivity comes afterward and so for a lot of people who and this is what's so hard about internal work is that see the reason that there's so much crap underneath the Rocks is because our garden has been untended for such a long time and so the negativity piles up and I realized this actually very interestingly I was I was working with someone who was uh an immigrant and was from an Aboriginal kind of tribe and I realized that in their life in the normal human's life we had so much time for emotional processing we're going to go out as hunter gatherers we're going to hunt right what is there to talk about you can talk a little bit but then for hours you're with yourself and that's how our brains evolved our brains evolved with a minimum of external stimulation which means the default mode of where our attention goes like so much of it eight hours of the day was internal we used to do all these rot tasks like churning butter and like churning butter like you know you're what is what do you think about when you churn butter like you just so you're are our brain defaults to so much time for emotional processing and now what started to happen is we lose that time this negativity piles up then as you start to look within yourself there's a bunch of negativity which is why we need therapists because most people can't handle that on their own right we're not trained to do that and so over time though I think you're going to find a lot of positivity and you'll find that that negativity unless you continue to feed it it will start to dissolve we'll get back to talking to Dr K in one minute but first I need to tell you about momentus trust really is everything when it comes to supplements and that is why I rely on momentus they have the most rigorous third-party 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Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 465,514

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, chris williamson, Chris Williamson modern wisdom, modern wisdom podcast, chriswillx, Chris Williamson Modern Wisdom Podcast, dr k, dr k healthy gamer gg, dr k healthy gamer, dr k chris williamson, dr k healthy gamer chris williamson, dr k modern wisodm, dr k mental health, dr k mental health advice, dr k health, dr k healthy gamer interview, dr k sneako, dr k healthy gamer adhd, dr k healthy gamer meditation, dr k on deep thinkers, dr k deep thinker

Id: 7ivEDhelEBg

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024