Why You Feel EVERYTHING (And Others Don't)

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**Alok Kanojia** (0:30)
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**Alok Kanojia** (1:03)
Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Ollo Kanoja, 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.
All right, chat, today, we're going to talk about going through life with a greater sensory capacity than the average person. So if we look at different people, it turns out that their experiences of life are fundamentally different. And this kind of makes sense, right? We sort of say in some weird way that like, yeah, everyone has their experience of life. Everyone is entitled to their perspective. And this took me a while to understand as a psychiatrist. So I worked with patients who had things like borderline personality disorder, social anxiety disorder, hypochondriasis or illness anxiety disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, visceral hypersensitivity, mesophonia, right? So I worked with a lot of these different patients, and it took me a while to actually figure out that their experience of life, the way that they move life, is fundamentally different from the average person. And sure, everyone has some variability in their experience. But when we say statements like that, I don't think we really acknowledge that, like, sure, two people have experiences of going through medical school, but if your brain is wired a certain way, if your neurons are wired a certain way, if your nociceptors, which are your pain receptors, are wired a certain way, your experience of life is fundamentally different. So I'll give you all a simple example. So I did a lot of work on chronic pain and people who have opioid addiction. And we think that people with opioid addiction, like because they are addicted to opioids, it messes with their pain receptors and then they're like, they complain more about pain. Well, it turns out that modern research shows that it's actually the exact opposite. So if I get injured and I go to the emergency room, someone will ask me, what's your pain on a scale of one to 10? And I'll say, okay, my pain is a 10 out of 10 And then they can ask another person, someone who has a predisposition for an opioid addiction, what is your pain on a scale of one to 10? They'll say, I have a pain 10 out of 10 Now here's the mistake that we make as a society and as a medical system. We assume that these two numbers are the same. What I now understand as a psychiatrist is that on my pain scale, I go from one to 10 But if someone has a nociceptor sensitivity, if they have a genetic predisposition for an opioid addiction, their pain scale actually goes up to 20 They're capable of experiencing twice the pain of a normal person, the average person. And this isn't just with issues of pain. If we look at people with borderline personality disorder or social anxiety, their experience of social situations or breakups or arguments with friends or loved ones is fundamentally different. It's like they experience the world with more, with this distortion of color. So here's one study that is looking at brain scans of people who are sensitive. And what we see here is that their brains activate in different ways. So there's a lot of common advice. So like, oh, if you're feeling lonely, just put yourself out there. And this is the real challenge with being a sensitive person, which is that the common solutions to problems that we all face land differently. So I'll share a simple example of this. So when I grew up, I didn't really go to a whole lot of theme parks. I didn't go to amusement parks, things like that. So I didn't like roller coasters. I didn't enjoy roller coasters. Well, after I went to India and trained to become a monk, and then I was in medical school, and my wife wanted to go to Universal Studios.