The Unseen Problem of Women's Cognitive Load w/ Dr. Gowri Aragam

**Gowri Aragam** (0:00)
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**Alok Kanojia** (0:26)
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**Alok Kanojia** (1:04)
Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Kanojia, 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.
Alrighty, chat, let's get started. Are we streaming? Are we live? Is this live, testing? One, two, three, one, two, three. Okay, so welcome to another Healthy Gamer GG stream. My name is Doctor Alok Kanojia. Just a reminder that everything we discussed on stream today is intended to be taken as, for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing we discussed on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice. So if you all have a medical concern or question, please go see a licensed professional.
Couple of quick announcements. So first thing is we're going to be speaking with the awesome Dr. Gowri Aragam today. She's the host of the Sense of Self podcast, and she's also an amazing psychiatrist.
I'm lucky enough to be able to call her a friend. So we're going to be talking to her about issues around women's cognitive load, which I imagine she's an expert in. Now let's actually hop in with Dr. A. Give me a second. We want to do... Oh, I'm going to have to fix an overlay. Give me a second chat. Let's do this. Yep, as expected. But I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it.
Oh boy. Here we go. Hello.

**Gowri Aragam** (2:46)
Can you hear me?

**Alok Kanojia** (2:47)
Yes, we can hear you, great.

**Gowri Aragam** (2:49)
Amazing. Thanks to see you.

**Alok Kanojia** (2:51)
Nice to see you too. So can you start by just telling us a little bit about who you are and what you're up to nowadays, where people can find you too?

**Gowri Aragam** (3:01)
Sure. First and foremost, I'm your friend. I'm a psychiatrist based in San Francisco. I'm an adult psychiatrist now focusing primarily in women's mental health. Although I do work at the interface of medicine and psychiatry, and so I do a lot of consultation as well to primary care and to the OBGYN service.
I'm a podcast host. I created this podcast, Sense of Self, to focus on how women can reclaim and rewrite the stories that we tell and are told about who we are. I found that that was hugely central to my work clinically and non-clinically, and so that's a little about me. I have a past life ongoing currently in mental health tech as well, and so I've applied a lot of this to my product development work in the past. But literally now you can find me at UCSF working clinically and on any of your major podcast platforms.

**Alok Kanojia** (3:54)
So I'm a bit confused by… So I love your podcast, by the way. It's so you.
And the other thing is I'm confused by what that means. So when you said the podcast is about the stories that we get told and the stories that we tell ourselves, can you tell me what does that mean?

**Gowri Aragam** (4:15)
Oh my god, this is so perfect. I feel like every woman I've told this to is like, yes.

**Alok Kanojia** (4:20)
Exactly, I figured as much.

**Gowri Aragam** (4:21)
So this is perfect, thank you. This is not rehearsed beforehand. So yeah, I mean, I guess that general idea is that we all have narratives that we tell ourselves. It's just a part of the human condition. Those narratives are populated about who we are. And those narratives can be populated by something as simple as you're the eldest son. And so your mom tells you that you're the most special.