Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K)

So then what happens is we wind up in a situation where people are getting thinner and thinner and thinner, but they never feel beautiful.

The origin of feeling ugly is separate from thinness, but our brain connects these two things and relentlessly pursues one.

This is what happens with 24 year old improvers.

You live in a world where you are told

You need to be better.

The world is competitive.

You need to be an entrepreneur.

You need to be six feet tall.

You need to make six figures.

You need to do this.

You need to do that.

The world tells you that you are inadequate in a thousand different ways.

And so especially if you're a man,

Men are something called external problem solvers, which means that if we feel something bad on the inside, we correct that by fixing something on the outside.

If my wife is mad at me, I'm going to get her flowers, I'm going to get her a piece of jewelry, therefore she will not be mad at me.

I'm not going to bother learning how to deal with her anger, how to manage her anger, how to manage my own sense of guilt when my partner is angry with me.

So I'm going to correct the circumstance outside that makes me feel a certain way.

I'm not going to manage my own feelings.

I'm not going to be stoic about it.

I'm going to shape my environment so that the environment sends me no more bad signals.