The Lie of "Positive Thinking"

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**Alok Kanojia** (1:03)
Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Olu Kanodja, but you can call me Dr. K.
I'm a psychiatrist, gamer and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.
On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.
Today, we're going to talk about how to control your thoughts. So the interesting thing about this is if you look at people who are incredibly successful like Eileen Gu, she says the coolest thing about the mind is that you can control your thinking. And this is something that I actually technically hard disagree with. I think that you can't control your thinking. Even more interesting is that she's not the only one who disagrees with me. In fact, if you look at people who are incredibly successful across all kinds of industries. So here's a clip of Louis Howes. How much of our thoughts do we control? None. We don't control our thoughts? No, the mind generates thoughts. You find that most people who are incredibly successful believe that they can control their thinking. And I'm on the other side saying technically you can't. So what's the deal here? Why is there so much disagreement between people who are incredibly successful at the top of their field and me over here who's insisting that it can't be done? What we're going to tunnel into today is how these people end up shaping their mind in a way that gives them the idea that they can control their thinking. And this is work that I do like literally in my day job, right? As a psychiatrist, my job is to take people who are moderately successful and help them become incredibly successful. In my day job as a psychiatrist, my goal is to help people shape their thinking in the correct way. And the blunt, unfortunate truth is that I've learned you can't control your thinking. And I'll give you a simple example, okay? So let's say I've got a patient who's got OCD. This is by definition an illness where you can't control the thoughts that pop into your head. You have intrusive thoughts, which we call obsessions. You think about it over and over and over again, and then you have compulsive behaviors to reduce the obsessions. But it's not just OCD, right? We can think about someone who's struggling with depression. So let's say this is an actual, you know, case of someone that I've worked with, someone who built a very successful company, sold it, right? So they did the miraculous thing, the founder exit at the age of 42, and then they became incredibly depressed. So this is another situation where there are lots of negative thoughts that pop up in their head, and they don't want to think this way. They try not to think this way. They may even do things like stand in front of a mirror and say positive affirmations to themselves every day. But if you kind of pay attention, the struggle with the mind, the basic problem with the mind, is that you can't tell it what to think, right? You can't go to bed tonight and say, tomorrow when I wake up, I will be confident, and I will think positive thoughts, and I will believe in myself, and I will understand that the world is a good place. I won't have existential depression about the nature of how AI is taking everybody's jobs, and there's wealth inequality that's increasing at an astronomical rate. There's inflation. I can't buy a home anymore because of private equity. I'm not going to think that way anymore. And if you try to do that, it simply doesn't work. The cool thing is that there are a couple of things that you can do, and when I work with someone, my goal is to teach them the skills that high performers basically have internalized, what they've learned how to do, what they can control. So let's start with this example from Louis. Do we generate a thought or is a thought generated automatically?