Dr. K unpacks the intense, destabilizing experience of limerance—the obsessive, all consuming “crush” that can hijack your thoughts, emotions, and even your sense of self. He explains how limerance isn’t just infatuation, but a powerful mental state fueled by unmet needs, anxious attachment, fantasy coping, and even traits that overlap with OCD and ADHD. Drawing on Dorothy Tennov’s classic work and his own clinical insights, Dr. K explores how limerance forms, why it can last for years, and how it alters your motivational hierarchy pushing careers, relationships, and identity into the background. He also walks through the neuroscience, attachment roots, and even the spiritual lens that frames limerance as a karmic echo. Most importantly, he offers practical strategies to ground yourself, recognize mental distortions, and re-calibrate your nervous system. Topics include: What limerance really is and how it differs from normal attraction The “limer beast” that hijacks thought patterns and emotions How childhood attachment injuries create fertile ground for limerance Links to OCD, ADHD, and maladaptive daydreaming\ Why limerance thrives on uncertainty and fantasy, not reality The role of the sympathetic nervous system in fueling obsession Practical steps: reality-based thinking, therapy, nervous system regulation, and acceptance This episode blends psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy to help you understand why limerance happens—and how to take back control from it. HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3Szt HG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
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. So this has been a hard video for me to make. So I'm a psychiatrist by training and I trained at Harvard Medical School.
And one of the key things that they taught us there is that, you know, you shouldn't like open your mouth unless you have data to back it up. And this is one of the biggest challenges with limerence because, first of all, it's not like a diagnosable condition. Most people don't even know what it is, but the experience of it is definitely on the rise. That's why we're kind of making this video.
And there isn't a whole lot of data about it, right? So people won't do studies on limerence. There aren't RCTs. So it's really hard to sort of synthesize information and be able to confidently say, this is what limerence is, this is what causes it. So I've been working on this video for about two years and I finally feel confident enough to share something with you.
So what we're going to start with, I think this is the best place to start, is in 1975 there was a woman named Dorothy Tenov who wrote a book about limerence. And I think the opening lines of the book are so phenomenal, it's like poetry, y'all, that I think the best way to describe what limerence is is by just reading this off to y'all. So you think, I want you.
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