Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Everyone's focused on changing behavior. Everyone's focused on increasing willpower to overcome this tendency. And it's like, why not just change the tendency? That sounds so simple, but that's literally what we do in psychotherapy every day. When we come in and someone has a narcissistic personality disorder, this is personality. This is who they are.
And we can psychotherapize them to be someone else. for their natural thoughts to change, for the way that they see the world to change, for their behaviors to change on its own. It doesn't require, willpower is necessary when you are trying to not be narcissistic.
Chapter 2: How can we change maladaptive behaviors?
It is not necessary when you are no longer narcissistic. So we've done it in psychotherapy. We know that if your self-esteem changes, if your sense of being changes, treatment refractory depression will change. Trauma, PTSD will change.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Alok Kanogia, also known as Dr. K. Dr. K is a psychiatrist and online mental health educator. He has a very unique background.
having trained and earned his medical degree in the United States, but also having studied as a monk for seven years. Today, we discuss powerful tools for increasing your self-understanding and mental health and for rewiring your nervous system, specifically how you can unlearn unhealthy thought patterns and behaviors and replace them with ones that truly serve you and those around you.
Much of today's discussion centers around differences between Eastern and Western concepts of things like the ego and what makes up our self concept. That portion of the conversation will no doubt have you rethinking why you do what you do in virtually everything.
And he provides a roadmap for clearly defining your best goals and for increasing things like your energy and drive, not through hacks, but by tapping into deep, intrinsic motivation.
In fact, throughout today's episode, Dr. K explains specific practices that you can use to help rewire your nervous system, resolve traumas and come to a much clearer understanding of how best to apply your efforts in work, school and relationships. We also discuss social media, dating and relationships, addiction and pornography. So there are a lot of topics covered.
And I have to say, this is a conversation unlike any other that I've had on or off the podcast. Dr. K offers a completely new perspective on how to resolve common struggles that we all face. And in doing so, he offers a lot of practical tools.
So this should be a very valuable conversation for anyone wishing to better understand themselves at the theoretical and psychological level, but also who wishes to implement specific tools to improve some or all aspects of their life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Alok Kanogia. Dr. K, welcome.
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Chapter 3: What role does self-awareness play in mental health?
And the faster you finish, the better things are. But I didn't realize how developmentally challenging it is to be like a five-year-old or a six-year-old in school with like seven-year-olds or eight-year-olds. So I think that's what originally drew me in.
If you don't mind me asking, so you were first-generation immigrant parents from India. Yep. I mean, I grew up in the South Bay in Palo Alto, so I'm familiar with... intense academic environments.
Sure, yeah.
Increasingly so in the last 10, 20 years, but even when I was there, it was intense. Did you feel that as pressure?
Absolutely. I mean, my earliest memories are of my grandmother telling me I'm going to make a great doctor one day. And when I was like 15 years old, people would ask me, like I'd go to like a party, right? With my parents and their friends. And people would ask me, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And so I was like, I'm gonna be a doctor. And everyone's like, wow, impressive.
So my 15 year old brain was like, looking at this amazing idea of what a doctor was, and both my parents are doctors. My dad was an amazing doctor. I suppose my mom is too, but my dad was one of the seminal researchers in graft versus host disease. It's how he landed his job at MD Anderson. So he came from India and was an oncologist.
And so I also remember like he used to, back then HIPAA wasn't, I think there wasn't even a HIPAA law. So he would have patients over to our house and stuff like that. He would throw a Thanksgiving party every year where like he would invite all of his patients, all cancer survivors and things like that. And so my dad was really like a mythical figure, incredibly charismatic.
And so I was like, oh yeah, I'm gonna be that. And so it became a huge part of my ego. And then it turns out that ego is not a great way to motivate. Well, it can be a great way to motivate yourself. But then I ran into trouble when I hit college because I had never learned how to study. So either I like absorbed everything and did well on the test.
So I went straight from like A's to F's and then got addicted to video games, failed out of college. But your original question was, was I into computers and why? And that probably has something to do with it.
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Chapter 4: How do we navigate the impact of social media on our identity?
And so I was talking to them a little bit about ā Because there were other students with a student who had been assaulted, and they were kind of talking to me about safety. And I remember something that the MIT chief told me that I've never forgotten. We were talking about safety, and he's like, my job is not to make people feel safe. My job is to make people safe.
And there's actually a big difference. And so something interesting has happened. We have all become more narcissistic because that's what the internet does to us. And so now if I am hurt, that is no longer my responsibility. That is because you did something wrong. Does that make sense? Like fundamentally, if I feel hurt, that is oftentimes tied to you doing something wrong.
So there's this tendency towards victimization. Where you'll see even people who are like playing the victim card, which doesn't mean that we shouldn't be believing victims. I think that's exactly what happens is we started to realize that we're not taking victims seriously.
But then all the chameleons in our society were looking at this pattern and they were realizing, okay, the fastest way for me to get ahead is to claim to be a victim. So there are all kinds of weird permutations that are happening right now with this sort of emphasis on feeling.
One more evidence-based example of this is we're seeing the prevalence of mood disorders, anxiety disorders, addictions, body dysmorphia, basically everything is getting worse. And so one weird thing that started to happen is as we've talked more about feelings, There's something called a transdiagnostic factor, which we can get into. I don't know if you're familiar with these or not.
So if you look at like all of the mental illnesses, there are certain attributes that are a risk factor for multiple mental illnesses. So a good example of transdiagnostic factors are perfectionism and rumination. So rumination ā doesn't make you depressed, doesn't necessarily make you anxious. But if you have a high index of rumination, you are more likely to have a major depressive disorder.
You're more likely to have an anxiety disorder. Does that kind of make sense? If you are perfectionistic, you are more likely to be depressed. You are more likely to be anxious. So there's one interesting transdiagnostic factor, which has gotten way worse, which is something called distress tolerance. So human beings' capacity to sit with things and tolerate things
that they do not find comfortable is starting to tank. And as that starts to tank, we're seeing just an explosion of mental illness.
Glucose is a key player in how our body functions, not just in the long term, but in every moment of our lives. That's because it is the major fuel for our cells, especially our brain cells. Glucose directly impacts our brain function, mood, and energy levels, and it may even affect our levels of tenacity and willpower. This is why I use the Continuous Glucose Monitor from Lingo.
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Chapter 5: What are the psychological impacts of betrayal in relationships?
I'm shocked. It's insane. It's absolutely insane that the the lengths that people will go to to to deceive you.
Oh, believe me, I've experienced somebody creating a world that was a complete fabrication and eventually all came tumbling down for them. But I remember being like, oh, my God. Yeah.
Right.
Chapter 6: How do maladaptive thoughts manifest after trauma?
So when you're about to marry this person. It leaves scars. So then what happens is she goes into her next relationship and she has an immense amount of distrust, is paranoid about her next partner. Next partner didn't do shit. And this guy is getting like like there's so much paranoia. Right. So if you look at life, life is a series of like bad stuff that happens to us.
Chapter 7: What is the significance of samskara in emotional healing?
And then we adapt. But the way that the human mind adapts is the same way that the human body adapts. If we get really damaged, we get a callus. We get scar tissue. Scar tissue is not functional. It's protective, but it's not functional. So most of our adaptations become maladaptations later on. Okay? So this is what a samskara is.
So it's like this emotional energy that lingers with you and shapes the way that you see the world.
Chapter 8: How does social media affect self-perception and relationships?
So it's really fascinating because we have all this trauma processing. And the yogis were talking about it for thousands of years as samskaras. And now you were talking about this thing down there that needs to be burned. So let's understand that for a second. If you look at your mind, stuff pops up, right? Have you ever wondered why certain things pop up?
Have you ever thought, why aren't you interested in the scent of a rose? It's so weird. Our mind just generates thoughts. And everyone is trying to learn discipline and willpower. I think it's terrible. Willpower is so bad because why not just shape yourself to have the right desires? Then you don't need willpower. This is what the process of yoga is really about.
This is what samskara generation is about. Did you learn a sankalpa when you did yoga nidra?
Well, they talk about it. I confess that I've maintained a very regular yoga nidra practice, but I've not explored these aspects of it.
So I'll explain to you the mechanism of a sankalpa and like literally it's fucking wild. This is reprogramming your subconscious mind so that the things that your subconscious mind puts into your conscious mind, you can control, okay? So in the case of trauma, all kinds of weird stuff gets put into our subconscious mind. Like I can't trust people. Then what happens is that floats to the surface.
In my patient's case, every time her second fiancee She doesn't know where he is. She's like, maybe he's scamming me, right? Like that's what she thinks. So I don't know if that makes sense. That's a thought in her conscious, which is being born out of something in her unconscious. We in neuroscience call this learning, right? So we're learning certain things.
So in psychotherapy, we try to get rid of that bad stuff, but let's understand how stuff goes in. Because if we can understand how the mind is programmed, and this is, it's so simple, so neuroscientific, okay? Or maybe you can tell me it's not neuroscientific, but I'm pretty sure it is. Okay, the first thing is the one pointedness of the mind allows things to sink in.
So if I'm trying to study optic nerve anatomy, okay? and I'm in a burning building with people yelling at me, I can have my eyes look at the paper, but I'm not gonna learn anything. This is the really crazy thing. is a lot of people study repetitively, right? So I read the paper again and again and again and again, but it's not like each time I read the paper, I get 10% of the knowledge.
If you really pay attention to your mind, when you are focused, when your mind is one pointed, you just need to read it once. What we're basically doing is we're rolling the dice. Am I focused this time I read the page? Am I focused this time I read the page? Am I focused this time I read the page? This is also why we have studies on things like writing.
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