How To Control Your Emotions & Become Mentally Strong - Dr K HealthyGamer - #768

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. K. He's a psychiatrist, Harvard Medical School instructor, co-founder of Healthy GamerGG, Twitch streamer, and a YouTuber. Humans face a predicament that has never been seen before, a massive overload of stimulation. The effect of constant exposure to social media, video games and porn is not good, but thankfully Dr. K has developed a ton of powerful ways to finally take back control of your attention. Expect to learn what social media is doing to our brains, how much we can attribute the mental health crisis to screens, why anxiety and depression are so prevalent, how to let emotions into your life more, why therapy so often sucks for men, why high-profile YouTubers are quitting, how to separate your self-worth from your accomplishments, and much more. I love Dr. K. He has got this awesome blend of Western and Eastern practices. He's funny with the way that he communicates things. It's strategic and simple. It's empathetic and caring. I love him. I think he's one of the best mental health and mindset advocates on the internet at the moment. And I'm really, really glad for this to be the first one, the first episode from that huge video wall production thing that I've been harping on about for a little while now. And it's beautiful. But given that you're listening to this just on audio, you won't feel any difference. It's just gonna be nice, normal conversation with some buttery quality audio sounds coming through your ears. And if you do want to check out what it looked like, you can head over to YouTube. Also don't forget that we have three more of these huge episodes to release with Dr. Peter Atiyah, Tim Ferriss and Mr. Ballin. The only way that you can ensure you won't miss those when they go live is by pressing subscribe and it's free and it supports the show and it makes me happy. So navigate to Spotify and press the follow button in the middle of the screen or the plus in the top right hand corner on Apple Podcasts. I thank you very much. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. K.
You spend a lot of time thinking about our interaction with screens. How would you describe what technology is doing to our brains?

**Dr K** (2:27)
I think the short answer is not good. So I think technology has a lot of benefits. So it has a lot of benefits for our lives, but specifically what is it doing to our brains, I think is generally speaking, not very good. So just as one example, if you look at basically social media, video games, pornography, most of the technology that we use, that is not directly work related, is going to have suppressive effects on our like negative emotional circuitry. So anytime you're feeling bad, if you browse social media, or you play a video game, like it's going to shut off your negative emotions, which can feel good in the short term, but in the long term, it's really not good.

**Chris Williamson** (3:07)
Right. So it is an aesthetic people use to salve bad mood. I have seen a number of girl friends who, if they're feeling a little bit uncomfortable, would get on their phone and like self soothe by scrolling.

**Dr K** (3:24)
Yeah. I mean, I think everyone does that. So I think if you really pay attention, what I've noticed is, you know, watch yourself in a transition. So anytime there's a transition, anytime you're getting into the elevator, you're waiting in line somewhere, you're even getting up from like your work desk to walk somewhere else, people will just automatically pull out their phones. So we've become so hooked to these things. And I think app designers, phone designers have also tried to capitalize on that impulsivity. So if you think about it, like even things like face ID, like that shrinks the time between an impulse up here and engagement in your phone.

**Chris Williamson** (4:06)
What does chronic, long-term hiding from feeling feelings result in?

**Dr K** (4:17)
I think the biggest problem that it creates is like being stagnant in life. So if we understand, like, let's think about this, right? So everyone thinks we have good emotions and bad emotions. So we have these emotions that are good, like excitement, joy, curiosity, love.
And then we have bad emotions like anger, sadness, shame, fear. And we don't want the bad emotions. We want the good emotions. But if you stop and think about it for a second, every human being on the planet has evolved to experience bad emotions. It's a feature. It's not a bug. And then the question is why? And if we look at our negative emotional circuitry, it is very close, like, like anatomically, our limbic system is very close to our hippocampus, which is where learning and memory take place. So they're, like, sitting right next to each other, a lot of strong connections. So negative emotions are powerful sources of information and motivation. So if you kind of think about anxiety, we all want to conquer anxiety. But if we stop and really think about it, anxiety helps us realize, like, what to avoid. You know, it drives us in a particular direction. If we look at emotions like shame, shame actually is supposed to be a powerful motivator to drive corrective action. So if I feel ashamed for failing a test, I want to study really hard so I never feel that shame again. And so paradoxically, what happens when we shut off our negative emotions is we lose the motivation to actually fix our problems. And this is why I think we see a generation of people who are, like, stuck.