Dr. Alok Kanuja (Dr. K)

Hey, y'all, just a reminder that in addition to these awesome videos, we have a ton of tools and resources to help you grow and overcome the challenges that you face.

We've got things like Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health, personalized coaching programs, and things like free community events and other sorts of tools to help you no matter where you are on your mental health journey.

So check out the link in the description below and back to the video.

Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast.

I'm Dr. Alok Kanuja, 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 when we're a child, we learn about the world.

We start to form expectations about the world.

And so if I'm living in an environment where my parents are intermittently available to love me, and then this magical person shows up, I have a brief interaction.

So I don't get to know them long enough to where the idealization can wear off.

I have this perfect interaction.

What does my brain learn?

My brain gravitates towards the things that fulfill my needs.

So in this moment, my brain learns, holy crap, there are perfect people who exist.

out there and this person can swoop in and this person can make everything perfect for me and they can exist.

So limerence is the feeling of being in love, but in a way that is so overwhelming, debilitating and unexpected that it usually leaves you pretty messed up.

You can kind of think about it as like crushing so hard that it, it kind of messes up your life, messes up your sense of identity.

If y'all don't know what limerence is, congratulations, you really dodged a bullet.

And for those of you that have been struggling with limerence, hopefully today's video will help y'all understand what it is, where it comes from, what the course of it is, so what to expect over time, as well as potentially how to resolve it.