Why Gifted People Burn Out The Fastest

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Alok Kanojia** (0:48)
Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Olo Konoja, 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.
So, if you have a high IQ, your cognitive ability is better. If your cognitive ability is better, you are able to perform more calculations. If you can perform more calculations, you can develop a stronger predictive model of the future. And as your ability to make robust models for the future increases, your anxiety increases directly in proportion to that.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:38)
There are a lot of people who, when you were kids, were classified as gifted and all this. You know what? You're autistic.

**Alok Kanojia** (1:45)
I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but...

**SPEAKER_2** (1:46)
You know, it's true, right?

**SPEAKER_4** (1:48)
So, I took the test because I've always thought, why do I act this way and da-da-da? But then you flip it and it was also your superpower. That's where you could stand on stage and make up these worlds and do these things.

**Alok Kanojia** (2:01)
Giftedness versus special, which are you? So, I have an interesting question for y'all that I asked myself some time ago. Why is it that everyone isn't a genius? Why is the average IQ of human beings not 200? Why do y'all think that is? Right, so sure, it's relative. But why is the average IQ like 100 instead of 200? High IQ is also a liability. I gave a kidney transplant, now I've only got one kidney left. Why don't I have three kidneys? Why don't I have two hearts? Why don't I have three eyes? Why do I have two eyes? Why not just one eye? Why not one ocular organ? I have one nose, why two eyes? One mouth, two ears, why?
So it is a metric, y'all are right. So you could average it, IQ is a scaled score. So fair enough. Why is there computational power where it is instead of being way higher? And people say evolution, that's correct. But evolution selected for this level of IQ. Not a little bit more, not a little bit less. This is the average, right? And maybe there's a neuronal gap, like maybe there's a certain, there's like a, there's a hardware issue, right? We've only got so much RAM in the brain. There's only so much computation we can do. But for those of y'all who are saying, there's a cost that is exactly right. So we see this with gifted kids. Gifted kids don't necessarily perform better. We see, also see this with autistic savants, where we know that in the autistic brain, some of these people are capable of incredible things. But that capability comes at a terrible cost. So I don't know if you guys know this, but this is now old news. So now, I can't believe it's 20 years ago. In 2007 and 2008, there was something called the subprime mortgage crisis, where basically what happened, like the economy crashed, okay? And basically the reason it crashed is because people were doing something really interesting. They were giving out loans to people who could not afford them. Then what they were doing is packaging all of those loans and selling them to somebody else. I am going to loan you 100 bucks, chance that you'll default is 10%, and I'm going to do that a hundred times. And so some of these loans are going to go bad, I'm going to lose a lot of money, but then I'm going to package them all up and I'm going to sell them to somebody else. And then with the money that I get from that sale, I'm going to go out and do it to another hundred people, because now I've got all this money, right, in my bank. So I can be like, okay, now I'm going to give it to you. So people were doing this, and there were some shenanigans going on, basically was creating a huge risk of default, and there was a guy who was a radiologist who got into finance who is on the spectrum. I don't know if in the movie he's central, I don't know, but there were books written about this. And he's basically the one who figured it out. So the rest of the world was like, oh my God, this is the way to make money, this is the way to make money, this is the way to make money. This guy was like, hold on a second, there's something shady going on, and he basically figured it out. So he's on the spectrum. And we'll see this time and again, I'm not sure exactly who this person was, but in the clip, someone who's incredibly gifted happens to be autistic. There's severe autism as well, where there's no positive trade-off, people who are nonverbal, people who engage in self-injurious behavior. There's some versions of being on the spectrum that don't confer any advantage in my mind, like I haven't seen. I've seen cases like this. Many of the patients that I've worked with will have some advantages, but on balance, it doesn't make their life easier. You know, what you get when you trade the autism for the savant is not worth it, because it causes so many problems in relationships and things like that. But the main thing to understand is that intelligence comes at a cost. So, for example, if we look at this paper over here, this is really fascinating. So, high intelligence, a risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities, implicates high IQ as being a potential risk factor for affective disorders, ADHD, ASD, and for increased incidence of disease related to immune dysregulation. So, it's really fascinating, but I want to explain to you all how this works. So, if you have a high IQ, your cognitive ability is better. If your cognitive ability is better, you are able to perform more calculations. If you can perform more calculations, you can develop a stronger predictive model of the future. And as your ability to make robust models for the future increases, your anxiety increases directly in proportion to that. So people with high IQ have higher anxiety because when they go into a situation, they are able to see all of the things that could go wrong. And if we think about what is anxiety, anxiety is looking into the future and being able to predict problems. I'm worried that I could fail the test. I'm worried that I could get stuck in traffic on the way home. Anxiety is literally the ability to predict problems. There's a problem though with anxiety and giftedness, which is that normally the way that the number of problems that we want to predict needs to be in proportion with our ability to do something about it. Why do we get anxious? So we can predict a problem and do something. Oh my goodness, I could fail my test. Oh, to avoid that, let me study. So prediction of problem, implementation of solution, one to one and at 100 IQ, the problems that most human beings predict are solvable. But IQ has a big problem, which is that if I'm capable, if I only have two hands and I only have 24 hours in a day, but I can predict 100 problems, I can't solve all of those problems. Like literally, there is, I want y'all to understand this. There is a gap between my ability to detect problems and for me to be able to implement solutions because I am bounded by time, space, and reality. But my mind can make predictive models. This is why people who are gifted struggle with anxiety. Hey y'all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health. There are actually two sources for anxiety. One is cognitive, and one is physiologic. For the majority of people, reassurance becomes something that you become dependent on. You're not really dealing with the root of the anxiety, and it sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the more socially anxious you become, the more awkward you appear, and then it kind of becomes this vicious cycle. So check out the link in the bio, and start your journey today.