1114: Dr. Alok Kanojia | Breaking the Cycle of Digital Dependence

1114: Dr. Alok Kanojia | Breaking the Cycle of Digital Dependence

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[00:00:20] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:00] Dr. Alok Kanojia: A lot of people think that by avoiding things, okay, I'm feeling anxious. Let me do something to make myself less anxious. When you feel that negative fear and anxiety and you engage in an avoidance strategy, you're actually strengthening the anxiety's control over you.

[00:00:20] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show, I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional extreme athlete, Emmy nominated comedian, hacker pirate, or special operator.

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They'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/starts, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today, backed by popular demand, Dr. Alo Kenia is here for round two. We dive into trauma in our response to trauma, something called OnlyFans addiction, which honestly, I did not know was a real thing, and it's crazier than you think.

Also, porn addiction, A DHD therapy and psychedelics and more. Dr. K was a huge hit last time. I really enjoyed my conversation with him. So here we go, round two with Dr. Alo Kenia.

I gotta get my energy going man. It's one of those mornings where I'm just like under caffeinated slash I have a thousand unread emails. 'cause I just got back from a trip and I'm like vibrating with, it's not actual anxiety because it's not like there's anything actually going on it. It's anxiety that feels real, but is ridiculous because half of that email is like, I'd like to pitch this financial planner for your show.

And it's like, delete. But it still feels real.

[00:02:04] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah, it's, it's a great point. We restrict our definition of anxiety quite a bit. Yeah. So we think that I'm not allowed to feel anxious unless I'm afraid of something. Yes. But what I'm hearing is that certain parts of your brain, like especially your frontal lobes, recognize that there is a lot of work that needs to be done and is starting to think through.

It's sort of like mentally loading responsibility. Yes. Which is not exactly anxiety, but I think a lot of the circuits are the same, or the experience of it is the same. It

[00:02:36] Jordan Harbinger: is. Everybody in the developed world has this feeling, they call it the Sunday scaries. Have you heard of this? Mm-hmm . Yeah. For people who don't know what this is, Sunday night comes around and you're like, oh, I got work on Monday.

Oh, the Turner account. The boss is gonna, oh, we have that meeting. I've gotta like make sure my PowerPoint slides are good. I gotta do that at 8:00 AM And so you're freeloading all the stuff that you have to do, and it's causing you anxiety because it's not time to do it yet. If you're doing it, you probably feel better.

Yep. But it's basically worry. But it's like the other side of the worry coin.

[00:03:04] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. So I think there's two kinds of worry. There's worry that you're afraid that things will go bad, and then there is the anticipation of future effort. So you kind of know that you'll be okay, but your mind already knows that tomorrow is gonna be heavy lip for me.

It's gonna be challenging for me. There's gonna be some amount of suffering that goes into it. We are anticipating our future subjective experience of difficulty as we solve our problems. And a lot of people think that I won't be anxious unless I'm worried about the outcome. No, you can absolutely be anxious about how much it's gonna suck for you to have to deal with that.

[00:03:39] Jordan Harbinger: Because I used to feel this way about working out, oh man, I got my workout tomorrow. It's leg day. It's gonna be really hard. Now I look forward to it, but it took three years. But with email or other work, I don't know. I'm 44, I still don't go, oh, I have so much opportunity to do email tomorrow. It's gonna be great.

Because the outcome is there's just more email later, whereas the outcome of fitness is a feel and look good, which is kind of nice. .

[00:04:01] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. That's interesting. So do you have a sense of what changed for you over the course of those three years? Why don't you dread it anymore?

[00:04:07] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So at first I thought, oh, a trainer's going to yell at you and demean you until you puke.

So that went away after the first week because my trainer's actually really good. And that's not actually what good trainers do. They don't just yell at you and tell you you're a piece of crap and demean you and make you vomit in your living room. That was the first change, and that kept me going for at least the first year or two, and then I think later, just the positive association that I had with having a good workout, reaching the edge of my ability, but never having a heart attack as a result or something like that.

And then looking in the mirror and going, I lost 40 pounds of fat and I gained 20 pounds of lean mass, or whatever it is. That was pretty awesome. And that itself becomes addicting probably because there's a visible and even measurable result. But with email, the visible result is zero inbox for 13 seconds if you're lucky, and then everything floods back in, and then the result is, I don't know, I guess some stuff got done.

It's hard to quantify. Certainly in there, some of those were important, but most of them weren't, and then it just starts over again. So yeah, maybe that's the difference.

[00:05:10] Dr. Alok Kanojia: I think a lot of it is the way that we experience progress, and a lot of times our society focuses on outcomes, right? So the value of studying for a test is getting an a.

But that creates a very serious problem because if you work hard and you get a B, now your brain is making a calculation that says all of this effort wasn't worth it, and it actually decreases your motivation. So if you fall short of your target, you'll actually decrease your motivation. So what you need to do in that moment is study harder, but instead neurologically what'll happen is your brain will be like, this wasn't worth it.

We put in all of this effort and we did not achieve what we wanted. Instead, what we really need to do is calibrate towards feeling good about what we do, not what our outcomes are. And so with the working out, it's interesting 'cause you mentioned these other advantages, like you notice all these changes to your weight and stuff, but I would bet money that somewhere in there you started focusing on.

Being glad you worked out that day?

[00:06:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, definitely. When I go through 150 emails or more, I feel accomplished similar to having worked out that day, but somehow I don't look forward to the emails, but I do look forward to the working out . So what's going on there?

[00:06:25] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah, so I think probably part of it is that there is that noticeable difference.

The challenge is that with the emails, you can feel accomplished after one 50, but there's no sense of like progress tomorrow because the emails are just back. So it's way harder to get progress. So oftentimes what we'll try to do is help people link the emails to something that is noticeable. If I go through these 150 emails, what has come out of that?

And that's the value, the

[00:06:52] Jordan Harbinger: realization that I need a virtual assistant . That's what's come outta that.

[00:06:55] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah, sure. And that's valuable too, because as we look at ourselves and we realize, okay, I just never get enjoyment of this. Is it Sisyphus in

[00:07:03] Jordan Harbinger: the Boulder? Is that the guy that's holding up the boulder?

Yeah. It keeps sliding down and that guy's already jacked because he's a Greek god. But let's say that he wasn't, if he was like, man, my shoulders are starting to look really good after we're pushing this boulder. Maybe he wouldn't be so miserable. But that's what email is, right? It's the boulder and you're never building anything as a result so far.

Or at least that's not how I'm looking at.

[00:07:21] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. So I mean, I, I think it's that latter part that makes a difference. I was talking to someone a week ago who's an entrepreneur, and we were asking them a little bit about how they find clients. Mm-hmm . He was saying that he'll spend 40 to 50 hours a week for like three or four weeks of the year sending cold emails, just cold emails.

And so it feels awful, yeah. To do that. But he actually doesn't mind because. That is worth like hundreds of thousands of dollars of business. Right? Which is why we get so much email, by the way, because someone on the other end

[00:07:53] Jordan Harbinger: is spamming us. Jordan, have you thought about making YouTube shorts? Yes.

Actually 50 times today because that's how many times I've gotten this email. Yes, it's true. And I see what you're saying. So he's a pretty good direct link where he goes, look, I send 5,000 cold emails over these hundreds of hours, and 13 of them result in six figure clients through the year. It's really hard for most of us, myself included, for example, fan mail is a big part of the mail that I get, which is look hashtag blessed.

Right? It's good to have people telling you how awesome your show is or something like that in your email. When I was a lawyer, I didn't get a ton of that, as you might imagine. But also it's hard to go, wow, I just answered a hundred really nice people. That did something for my business. 'cause it really kind of didn't, it did something for my ego only, but like yeah, the marginal difference between doing 10 of those and a hundred of those is really tiny.

Right. Absolutely. Like I get one nice letter. It's really nice. I get a hundred, I have a hundred emails.

[00:08:50] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yes. The purpose of answering fan emails for you, the incremental difference is pretty small. But for the 11th person who gets a response, it's huge.

[00:08:59] Jordan Harbinger: They're excited and it's nice to talk to these people.

Like I enjoy it at some level, and so when I get the email back I'm like, oh, this nice person with this funny story wrote me back. So I enjoy that. But yeah, it's still running on the treadmill. It's still an extra, you know, step on the treadmill, whatever. Now I just feel like I'm complaining about something most people would kill to have.

No,

[00:09:16] Dr. Alok Kanojia: I think a lot of people resonate with the idea of an endless amount of crap coming into your email.

[00:09:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I suppose most of my emails are nice, except for the YouTube shorts pitches. I'm never going to make YouTube shorts, and if I do, it's not gonna be with you person who's sending that email. So just don't bother.

They're never gonna listen because I'm on a list. You touched on this a little bit earlier, I'm exaggerating here. This email's not traumatic, but trauma is so fascinating and I've heard you discuss the idea. That if we have a traumatic experience, like a car crash, for example, our mind will play a trick on us and convince us that driving is scary and dangerous.

I had a friend like that. She got in a car accident and then we went driving in Morocco in the Atlas Mountains and she was just frozen having a nervous breakdown in the backseat because there's no guardrails and like it's Morocco. So they're going a hundred miles an hour down a blind curve. I get it.

She was losing her mind, but even at home, she said, I've been driving for 30 years and now I can't drive anymore. So it's kind of like your mind is correct. That driving is scary, but also you do it so often. Why is it scary again? Or food poisoning? Maybe that's a better example. You eat out maybe hundreds of times a year.

Maybe your favorite is sushi. You eat sushi a dozen times a month maybe, but you get food poisoning once you're never eating sushi again. Maybe it takes you years to recover. We don't really think. Huh. Less than 1% of the time I eat this, I get food poisoning. So trauma hijacks this logical response and puts it into overdrive.

[00:10:41] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yes. The idea that the trauma is incorrect is actually incorrect when you have a negative experience. Our brain is wired for survival. So the first thing you have to understand is that the brain does not weight positive and negative experiences one-to-one. Okay. Our brain is designed to weigh negative experiences way more heavily than positive experiences.

So if you and I get into a fist fight, let's say you break a bone, and I don't, that's a win in my column. But then if I get into another fist fight and I break a bone, that's not like even Steven. That's like if breaking a bone in the way that we evolved is like a lethal injury. So food poisoning is lethal.

Not anymore, but in the way that we evolved food poisoning was lethal. Potentially we're biased against losing things. So we have this thing called loss aversion, right? Which is, if you ask someone, Hey, if I give you a 50% chance to win $250 or a 100% chance to walk away with $100, which one will you pay?

Yeah.

[00:11:41] Jordan Harbinger: I'm taking a hundred bucks.

[00:11:42] Dr. Alok Kanojia: We are taking a hundred bucks. Right? So our brain is wired that way. You're talking about the Sunday scaries or whatever. Yeah. So our brain has a unique ability to feel future pain in the present. Tell

[00:11:54] Jordan Harbinger: me about it. That's the story of my life. .

[00:11:56] Dr. Alok Kanojia: I think

[00:11:56] Jordan Harbinger: a lot

[00:11:56] Dr. Alok Kanojia: of people listening can relate, right?

So my favorite example is the last day of a vacation.

[00:12:01] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:12:01] Dr. Alok Kanojia: My

[00:12:02] Jordan Harbinger: favorite

[00:12:02] Dr. Alok Kanojia: hobby

[00:12:02] Jordan Harbinger: is ruining

[00:12:02] Dr. Alok Kanojia: that last day of the vacation. Technically you're on vacation, you get a whole day to enjoy yourself, but I'm not doing that. But that's not what you're doing. No. You're thinking about going back. And the interesting thing is that we know that hypotheticals are capable of activating our amygdala, which is our fear center.

So a hypothetical will make us feel fear in the present. It's not a hypothetical fear. It's like we feel the pain in the moment. Yeah. And that's the way that our brain works. But we cannot feel a hypothetical pleasure in the moment. We can have some degree of anticipation. Yeah, you can be paranoid about a car crash, but you can't imagine going to the movies and then get a rush of dopamine.

It doesn't work like that. You actually have to go to the movies.

[00:12:47] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's some bullshit, isn't it? ?

[00:12:49] Dr. Alok Kanojia: It's wild, right? Yeah. So there's a fundamental imbalance in the brain. So our nucleus accumbens, our positive emotions cannot be activated by hypotheticals. Whereas our negative emotions can be we get robbed.

This is what's really important about trauma, is when we have a negative experience, our brain, for survival reasons, warns us against that experience. So now if I've had one car accident, we literally know that it creates something called the hyper vigilance. So you become hyper aware when you go into the car because most of the time when we're in the car, we're not paying attention to the car, right?

Even when we're driving, like a lot of that stuff is done on autopilot. You're not consciously thinking about everything all the time. And so what happens with people with trauma is that their brain hyperactivates because it's had this negative thing, it's hypersensitive to potential problems and we feel really, really, really bad.

Now, our treatment for that is usually something called exposure and response prevention. That can be pretty useful, where we expose ourself to the thing and then . We prevent the response, our body will start to acclimatize to it. The tricky thing that a lot of people trip up with is that even when you go driving, you may not be doing response prevention.

You're actually panicking and you're not really able to calm down. So it's almost like it's re-traumatizing, which is why it, it persists for so long. Every time you drive, you're not able to calm yourself down and have a more neutral experience. All it does is ramp you up and then you feel paranoid. You start to use avoidance strategies, which is not actually response prevention.

That's the biggest mistake people make.

[00:14:20] Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. This reminds me a long time ago, one of my friends, she was very, unfortunately, she was assaulted while on a date, and she wouldn't date after that, obviously. But then she realized, okay, I'm miserable doing this because of this feature, as opposed to a bug of the human mind where the trauma is sort of every time I'm alone with somebody on a date or whatever, this could happen again.

So I started to go to the same restaurants and sit where she could see me, but the guy couldn't. And we did that several times. And the strategy was if she came up and said, oh my gosh, are you Jordan, I haven't seen you for so long. We grew up together. I would be like, oh my gosh, hi. And give her a big hug.

And then we would just like leave lucky to have a friend like you, Jordan. You know, I just had no life. Um, but also I didn't want to keep seeing her suffer. That's the truth. But that never actually needed to happen. Basically. She just went out at a bunch of nice dates with nice guys and had nice dinners.

Didn't feel scared because if the guy did anything, she was literally looking right at me. And he was gonna get choked. probably if he tried to do anything. Plus we're in a public place. So it was just a easier sort of thing. And then she was like, Hey, I don't really need you to show up anymore. And I remember being like, we were really happy about that.

'cause it was like, Hey, I can actually go to this Italian restaurant and not have a panic attack that I'm gonna get attacked. And you know, I. Happily married. That was her sort of self-designed stimulus response, right? She kind of had to desensitize herself to this thing most of us consider normal. That to her was an existential threat.

[00:15:46] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Absolutely. I think that's what a lot of people discover. So the people who end up healing from it discover ways to expose themselves to the dangerous situation and then acclimatize to it so that it no longer triggers that response. 'cause remember that anything that we do that doesn't reward us and that reward can be negative, right?

So every time I play with a dog and I don't get bit, that will slowly extinguish the response. The biggest problem that a lot of people run into is that when they experience the response, they'll use an avoidance strategy. They think that they're, oh, I'm exposing myself, and so shouldn't that fix things?

No, it's actually the opposite because now what you're doing is when you feel that negative fear and anxiety and you engage in an avoidance strategy, you are actually strengthening the anxiety's control over you, right? So when the anxiety acts, you act in a different way. So that actually strengthens the anxiety.

A lot of people think that by avoiding things, they don't really think about it that way. They're like, okay, I'm feeling anxious. Let me do something to make myself less anxious. And that will be an avoidance strategy, which will just re-trigger the anxiety when you're in that situation again. And then you'll become dependent on the avoidance strategy, which is why a lot of people who go to parties and feel socially anxious end up on their phones the whole time.

I feel anxious. Let me pull out my phone. This makes me feel a little bit better. And then you're like, why am I even here? And no one's ever talking to you because you're on your phone the whole time. And like it becomes like, I. A vicious cycle. That's interesting.

[00:17:14] Jordan Harbinger: There's a video for people who wanna make changes similar to this.

You say a better question than am I ready to change? Is do I wish I were somebody who wanted to change? Can you bring the difference into the foreground here? I've never heard this before and also it seems weird to ask, do I wish I were somebody who wanted to change? 'cause isn't the answer kind of always Yes.

[00:17:33] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. So , okay, so great question, but we gotta like go back a couple of layers to understand this. Okay. So the first is that if you look at change, most human beings are conflicted about change. So I wanna go to the gym and workout, but I also wanna binge watch my favorite show. And so it's really interesting because what we really try to do is conquer ourselves, but you can't conquer yourself who's doing the conquering and who's being conquered.

So if I conquer my desire, I get really good at overcoming my desires. That's also strengthening my ability to overcome my desire to go to the gym. So it's kind of weird, right? It's weird. It sort of doesn't work. Conquering yourself basically doesn't work. Sometimes it works and sometimes people are pretty lucky with it and things like that.

But a lot of people really struggle and they do want to change, but they also don't wanna change. And then a lot of times what happens is it's not that we actually want to change, it's that we know we should change. Now, this is really important to understand because should in the brain does not lead to motivation.

So generally speaking, if we look at the concept of should, where does it come from in the brain, it comes from our social emotional circuitry. So if we look at should, when I do things that I should do, what I avoid is a feeling of shame. What I avoid is a feeling of guilt. What I gain is a feeling of pride, potentially, right?

When I do what I should do. The driver for shoulds is our relationship to like other human beings, which is why if there's something you should do in life and no one is watching, you'll never do it because literally should comes from. Where does should come from? Should is a societal expectation, which even if you believe you should do things, where did you learn that you should do things from other people?

So should is fundamentally a social construct and involves the social circuits of the brain. Which is why like when someone's watching us, oh, where do you want to eat Now I'm gonna order a salad when I go out with my friends, but like when I'm going by myself, it's gonna be fried chicken and french fries.

I feel seen . Yes. So should is never gonna work. I feel attacked actually, unfortunately. Right? If only we could be seen all the time. Exactly. Man, I'm glad I'm not alone. So want comes from the nucleus accumbens want or desire comes from craving and behavioral reinforcement and the seeking of pleasure. So these two things are fighting and if you are fighting in shoulds versus wants, the only way the shoulds will win is if someone is watching, which is why as people become more isolated.

Their lives have gotten worse because so few people are watching now that we get away with it used to not get away with it because someone was paying attention.

[00:20:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. My trainer knows a lot about exercise and that's the main reason I'm working out with him. But the other reason is it's really easy to lolly gag when you're working out by yourself.

You be half as it and then you leave when you're bored. Yeah, absolutely. That's

[00:20:33] Dr. Alok Kanojia: the first thing to understand. Wants and shoulds are like fundamentally different. They can compete, but we need social environment to make 'em really work. So then the second question is like, okay, if you don't really want to do it, you should do it, but you don't want to do it.

That doesn't activate our behavior in the right way because there's a should moving in one direction. There's a want moving in the other direction. So if we wanna motivate behavior, right? Motivation comes from the nucleus accumbens, we have to have a motivation to do something. But oftentimes it's really interesting.

So if you move one level back, do you wish you were someone else? Now that's something you're motivated towards. This is something that we've learned in psychiatry is that if you can't solve this problem, oftentimes moving one level back is where the money is. So now if I ask you, okay, so you don't really wanna work out fair enough?

Do you wish you were someone who wanted to work out? And that's absolutely yes. I wish I was like these other people that enjoyed working out. I wish I was a different person. Now that opens the door to all kinds of things. It opens the door to self-judgment, which is like good in a way, right? 'cause now we're exploring this stuff and that's the stuff that gets in the way of you actually engaging like all these negative emotions.

And the other cool thing is that then we can ask the question, okay, if you wanna be a different person, how do we go about that? How do you actually change? And then something cool happens once you run down that sequence of exploration, you figure out, okay, this is how I become a different person. Then you become a different person and then working out becomes easy.

I

[00:22:04] Jordan Harbinger: love this. It's scary to admit that you wanna be a different person. I think because it feels shameful. Yeah. But just about everyone does. Yeah. So why lie about it? There's a shame element maybe involved or like you can be a different person, which is actually empowering if you think about it. It's just that, wow, that's gonna take a lot of work to become a different person.

But for people who are hell bent on self-actualization and personal growth, you're already becoming a different person. People say every seven years, every five years, every 10 years, whatever it is. You're already essentially, in many ways, a fundamentally different person than I was, let's say, before I started to value my health, not just workout, but value my health.

I was in denial before that. I look at photos and I'm like, oh my gosh, how did that happen? Luckily, about 11 or 12 years ago now, I went to one of those executive health screens. Have you ever done one of these? No, but I'm somewhat familiar with them. You get like a DEXA scan, which is a bone density and fat scan, and they take your VO two max and they weigh you.

And I was like 40% body fat. I was 33 years old, pre-diabetic. My lean mass is like 127 pounds, but I weighed like 1 92 or 1 93. I mean, it was ugly. And I was like, but I'm not that fat. And the doctor was like, you are going to get diabetes, you're gonna get this. This is gonna happen. You're probably gonna die earlier, or you can do all of this totally different stuff that you have never done.

These markers will all change and you're young, you can and should do this. I was on blood pressure medication, dude 33 is on blood pressure medication. And they're like, you're never gonna be able to stop taking these. And the guy who did the screening is like a really well respected doctor. And he goes, look, I'm not your primary care physician.

You should definitely not need those. There's no reason for you to need those. That's horrible. Get yourself in shape. And so it took me a few more years of farting around, I'm gonna work out on my own, I'm gonna eat a little bit less. And then when I finally started to actually value my health, I look back at that other person and I'm like, what is wrong with you?

Like, who is that idiot who's just like, I'm going to eat whatever I want. Do whatever I want. What are you thinking? And now I value other things in my life in a totally different way that you can sort of change fundamentally who you are. And I, the reason I'm bringing all this up is because I think there's a lot of resistance to, you can't just become a different person that's wishful thinking or you play the hand that you're dealt.

And I just don't necessarily always believe that you're stuck where you are.

[00:24:24] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. It's a beautiful story, by the way. So I think you're right that a lot of people don't think you can change. And I think it's very possible to change. And I also think it's way easier than a lot of people think it's, but the hardest work is to not be yourself.

So we think we are this particular thing, like we think that I'm like a piece of crap and I'm like fat and I'm overweight and all this kind of stuff. That's who we think we are, but that's not really who we are. It's our current existence. Fine. But I think that oftentimes my experience is that changing happens way faster than people expect it to.

And the reason that people think it's really hard to change is because no one has taught us how we learn like algebra, but we don't learn the science of changing who you are. And once you understand that, then like things actually become pretty easy. So I'll give you like just a simple example. You said that sometimes people say, okay, do you wanna work out yes or no?

Do you wish you were a person who wanted to work out? That question is like 10% of the change, huh? I know it sounds crazy, but like literally in that moment you are learning to look at yourself in a different way. You are changing the questions that you ask yourself. And the reason that people don't change is because they ask the same question.

I should work out, I should work out. And they bludgeon themselves with that and it never works. So like it's crazy like how asking the right question can elicit such a large change, can changing your relationship with yourself. And asking yourself, who am I? Instead of forcing yourself into trying to be something like that.

Change in and of itself is gigantic. Like, who am I? What do I really want? And like, you don't really answer that question honestly. You don't say to yourself, I actually don't want work. I don't want a career. I'm living my life. Ping ponging not towards what I want. I'm ping ponging between two negative things.

I feel ashamed for not having a career. So you are like, that's why I should have a career, but I really don't enjoy this job. I don't want a career. And so it's very hard to change if you're lying to yourself. That's 50% of it. So I, I think the flip side of it is also, it becomes way easier to change than a lot of people realize once you stop lying to yourself.

[00:26:49] Jordan Harbinger: That's fascinating. I love that. And I'm gonna ruin it by switching gears into OnlyFans addiction because this is such a juicy, oh, I shouldn't say funny. It can be tragic, but it's also, it's such an odd. 2024 ish phenomenon. I got a letter on feedback Friday, which is our advice segment of the show where a woman who does OnlyFans, she was our listener.

She finds out that this person who's sending her and paying her to do some pretty like kinky, gross stuff, and I'm not kink shaming, she said, this is like really denigrating and gross stuff that this guy was having her do. But she's like, well, he's paying me a lot of money. She finds out it's her friend's husband who's a devout Jehovah's Witness, and it just ruined their marriage and everything, and he was clearly addicted to it, right?

It wasn't good for him. This wasn't something he wanted to be doing. It just ruined his marriage. But what was more weird for her was his arousal seemed almost like it was the social element of the relationship despite all the weird stuff he was having her do. It was actually the fact that he had like an intimate connection with her in this way.

And I know a lot of people are doing this, they're being intimately connected or they're chatting with who they think is this person on OnlyFans and it's this bizarrely 2024 kind of phenomenon. Oh

[00:28:05] Dr. Alok Kanojia: yeah. This is really important to understand. So first thing is, we'll get to OnlyFans in a second, but I think pornography is, I really suspect it's the worst addiction on the planet right now.

And I know that sounds like a, a really extreme take 'cause we have people dying of opiates and things like that. So if you look at the statistics, okay, back in about 2005 to 2010, the rate of pornography addiction was like somewhere around three to 11%. Can you guess what estimates of pornography addiction are

[00:28:29] Jordan Harbinger: now?

What, three to 11 sounds insanely high. You mean 11% of the population in 2010 was addicted to porn? It's higher than that now, I assume. That's crazy. Yeah. So it's crazy.

[00:28:41] Dr. Alok Kanojia: 49 to 75%. Wow. Wow. Okay. Like it's insane. How do they measure that? Great question. These are surveys. One of the citations I'm talking about surveyed 13,000 people, random people, and just ask them, do you feel like you're addicted to pornography?

Holy smokes. And 49 to 75%. Some studies suggest it's around 66%. Let's assume that all those studies are wrong. Okay? Let's assume that they grossly overestimate it. Let's assume that they're like double it. Even then we're talking about 30% or something like that. It's insane. That's crazy. Crazy high. The numbers are literally unbelievable and I wonder if I'm just like misinterpreting the research or things like that, but it's crazy.

That is

[00:29:22] Jordan Harbinger: very alarming. In fact, there was so much talk of porn addiction that I was basically like, I'm just never gonna watch porn again. And I had absolutely no problem with that. It was, it was actually really easy. Most of it is dumb. I don't know if you've ever seen it, doctor Kja. It's actually mostly garbage and silly and ridiculous.

I found it as a 44-year-old man, pretty easy to just be like, I'm never going to use this again. The fact that there are maybe 70% or whatever that number was of people who say that they probably can't stop or that they would have trouble stopping. It's beyond alarming. You can't overstate it. Yeah, it's wild.

[00:29:57] Dr. Alok Kanojia: And I was trying to figure out like why, what's changed? And then I tried to understand, okay, what is the neuroscience of pornography? It did a deep dive. There's a beautiful paper that I found that talks about. Sexuality in the brain. So where does sex exist in the brain? And so it turns out that we don't have a circuit for sex in the brain.

Sex affects every aspect of the brain. So it involves so many different regions, involves a ton of different neurotransmitters. And if you kind of think about it like what is the purpose of human evolution? It is to procreate, right? So our whole brain, our whole physiology is going to be wired towards this goal.

And so now what you have is pornography, which hijacks all of these circuits. And what we're seeing about the addictiveness of pornography is that the more that pornography approximates real sexual behavior, the more parts of your brain that it's going to activate.

[00:30:51] Jordan Harbinger: I see where you're going with this.

The social element of being able to say. Good morning to your favorite, whatever OnlyFans person that is the circuit of like, Hey, I'm connected to this person. We're talking about our day. She's asking how I am. That doesn't happen in my real life because I sit around coding all day or playing games, and then it's like dot, dot, dot.

Almost an afterthought. After 11:00 PM you're watching some videos of her, I don't know, getting real by her boyfriend or whatever the hell you're paying for, but like it hits all these different switches as if they're a real person that's really in your life that really cares about you. And that's more than just watching a video.

[00:31:25] Dr. Alok Kanojia: So I think that's the biggest change, is that pornography used to be passive consumption. There's no interaction. And if you think about how does your brain know you're in a relationship? I know it sounds so weird, but a lot of times it's just people respond to you. People say, good morning, people interact with you.

So now what OnlyFans has created is the capacity to form a relationship. And it's such an interesting relationship. People think it's a very unhealthy relationship. In some ways it is, but in some ways it's the best relationship because in this relationship, as long as you pay money, this person does what you want.

And if you look at what do people want in relationships, it doesn't sound healthy. But what do you want in a relationship? You want someone who does what you want them to do.

[00:32:09] Jordan Harbinger: Geez, does not sound healthy. Doctor, as long as you pay money, this person does what you want, all you gotta do is pay for it. Oh my gosh.

That's a dirty secret though, right? Yikes. Maybe I should start an OnlyFans. I already have a pair of social relationship growing with many of my show fans. No videos though. Yes, that might be a deal breaker for a few of these folks.

[00:32:27] Dr. Alok Kanojia: It could be a deal maker for a lot of them too. Jordan .

[00:32:31] Jordan Harbinger: I will never show you anything below the belt.

How's that? All right, here's my money. It's scary. So I'm gonna make it

[00:32:38] Dr. Alok Kanojia: a little bit scarier. So Jordan says, I'm never gonna show you anything below the belt. Fair enough. So imagine if I'm one of your fans. How intoxicating it is for me to get you to change that , the feeling of power over another human being.

Yeah, sure. It's like false in a sense, but it kind of isn't.

[00:33:00] Jordan Harbinger: Right. I'm never gonna show you anything below the belt unless you gimme like 10 grand, in which case, yeah, there might be a dick pic coming your way. Just saying

[00:33:06] Dr. Alok Kanojia: if you don't even add the, unless I've worked with these people, right. When you like get behind closed doors and you like talk to 'em about how they really feel about it, there's an immense sense of power and influence and connection.

[00:33:19] Jordan Harbinger: The person who's addicted to OnlyFans, right, you're talking about, yeah. I see. Oh yeah, and the flip side too. That's a different podcast. now help me support my OnlyFans addiction by purchasing one of the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored by Better Help.

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[00:34:26] Jen Harbinger: Discover your Relationship Green Flags. With better help. Visit Better help.com/jordan to get 10% off your first month. That's better. Help HE com slash Jordan.

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In six minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course, so come on and join us. You'll be in smart company Where you belong, the course is free over@sixminutenetworking.com. Alright, back to Dr. K. This is so damn fascinating. But what do people do if they find themselves in this trap?

Because when it's an addiction, right? You don't just say, Hey, you know what you should do? Stop chatting with the person who's actually just an Indonesian chatbot agent, not the girl of the video. You have to stop being intimate with this person because. It's a trick, it's an illusion, right? We tend to think, so

[00:36:03] Dr. Alok Kanojia: this is where like when I feel a connection with a chatbot in Indonesia, I don't want to believe it's a chatbot.

I wanna believe it's a real person. When you see a name in a text message, like you could be an AI generated image, this could all be false, but that's not what we believe. It's not what we wanna believe our senses are telling us. This is a real conversation. If you think about it, like we have a vested interest in believing this is real, even if we know there's a possibility it isn't, and then we're getting enough, literally sensory input to make it feel real.

So let's just start by tossing that out or like acknowledging that now in terms of how to stop, it doesn't work to just stop. So for some people, cold Turkey can be effective, especially if someone finds out about it and then they're like regulating you. I've been a doctor for 10 years now, and a psychiatrist for six.

What I have learned is that the first thing to overcome an addiction is you have to want to overcome it. So the willingness, like how do I stop? This is where we go back to the first question, right? Do you really want to stop? Tell me why. Help me understand. Why is it important for you to stop? And then we have to ask another question, which is, what would you give up by stopping?

And this is the question that a lot of people don't ask, and this is the really important question because what's driving the behavior is that question, what do you gain? Addictions are not problems. They're solutions. This is why we keep doing them.

[00:37:30] Jordan Harbinger: Won't you go into some sort of withdrawal from this as well?

Like you'll feel super lonely, right? Yeah,

[00:37:34] Dr. Alok Kanojia: sort of. Right? That's what tends to happen is people don't realize. So they're like five discreet circuits in the brain that when I'm working with someone with pornography or OnlyFans addiction, you have to target all these. So the problem with porn and OnlyFans is that it has such a global effect on the brain that you can't just stop.

Because even if you address, let's say, the dopaminergic aspect, you're not gonna address the loneliness aspect. People will resist the dopamine and they'll succeed, but then their loneliness will start to kick in. And then overcoming pornography in OnlyFans addiction is like fighting a war on five fronts at the same time.

You may win a battle here, you may win a battle there, but inevitably you're gonna lose, not inevitably. I mean, there's hope out there. So usually what my strategy is, is to really focus on five different things and to address those five things simultaneously, you have to start with the thalamus, which is your sensory input.

So recognize that your desire is controlled by your sensory input. So log out of all of the websites, disconnect your bank accounts. Make it harder for you to access the stuff, uninstall all the apps. That's not gonna be enough.

[00:38:37] Jordan Harbinger: This is like the James Clear Atomic Habits method, right? Like make it such a pain in the ass to get back into it, that you have enough time and runway to stop yourself.

[00:38:45] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Absolutely. Right. So there's an impulsiveness component too. So that's the second part of the brain are frontal lobes, which are, are impulse control, are willpower. So those need to be trained up. So this is where practices like meditation or other kinds of like planning activities, using calendars, things like that, filling up your day so that we're not vulnerable to impulses.

I was gonna say, you put your masturbation time on your calendar. Oh, that's awkward. Yes you did. Yes you do. So in, in the most severe cases, we'll give people one hour in the morning, like usually around noon and like one hour in the evening. Wow. An hour bravo for somebody who needs an hour each time. I think a lot of people don't understand that pornography addiction is not about masturbation.

So a lot of times pornography addiction involves second screen porn use. So people will just have porn on their second screen while they're doing like pivot tables on Excel for like hours at a time. No. Yeah. Oh my god. A lot of people don't understand this. That had not occurred to us, dude. So that's where we get the third part of the brain is our limbic system and our amygdala.

So if you think about it, especially if you're a dude, and this is probably one of the reasons why men are more vulnerable to pornography addiction. So you can be having a panic attack, but if you have the chance to procreate, you know there's this joke that men only want one thing. The drive for sex is very powerful.

It's suppressing everything else in our brain. So when you walk pornography, it literally shuts off your negative emotional circuitry. We reduce the blood flow to our amygdala in our broader limbic system. So people will use it as a very strong emotional regulation technique. It's very potent at that. So that's thalamus, frontal lobe and limbic system.

And then the fourth system that we have to target is the oxytocin system. Oxytocin is our emotional bonding hormone. So I dunno if this kinda makes sense, but in the way that we evolved, you couldn't have sex without some kind of relationship. We lived in tribes of 300 people, so you had to develop some kind of social activity in order to.

Have sex. And if you look at teenagers, this is why like friendships become so important for teenagers because we have all these parts of our brain that are driving us to connect with other human beings as an avenue to sex. So there's a part of our brain that believes that any kind of sexual release checks the box of forming a connection.

It doesn't really, which is why we never feel connected, but our brain is tricked. It's wired to think that these two things are connected. So as long as you're feeling lonely, you'll return to pornography. Oh, and then there's the dopaminergic system. So I think generally speaking, when we're disconnecting from OnlyFans, what we tend to find is that you have to build a lot of positives in your life and then kind

[00:41:28] Jordan Harbinger: of disconnect.

I'm hung up on this porn addiction. The second screen thing is just trippy, man. Is there a connection between events happening in people's life on any particular day and when they bust open the porn? Like is it stress related? Oh, a hundred percent.

[00:41:43] Dr. Alok Kanojia: So there are a couple things like a lot of people don't understand about porn addiction.

One of the biggest risk factors for porn addiction is pre-pubertal. Exposure to pornography. So everyone thinks that porn addiction is about like sex and getting laid and being horny. Most of the time it actually isn't. I've worked with several people who have healthy marital relationships. They'll have healthy sexual relationships and they'll be addicted to porn.

And something changes in your brain when you get exposed to it. It's kind of like getting marijuana at the age of nine, by the way. And nine is the average first age of pornography exposure that is gross and horrifying. People get exposed to it and something changes in your brain. You don't feel horny.

You have no concept of loss, but limbic structures feel sooth. You get some amount of like dopamine release and you kind of get hooked to it even though it doesn't do anything for you from a horniness perspective. And then you hit puberty and then things get worse.

[00:42:31] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my

[00:42:32] Dr. Alok Kanojia: God. So first thing is that like people get exposed super early and then what happens?

You mention what are the events that trigger it? So this is also another part that we work on a lot, is to really pay attention to your triggers. When do you watch it? It's almost like an IV for dopamine.

[00:42:47] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:42:48] Dr. Alok Kanojia: And an IV for emotional regulation. And so what we'll do is talk about anticipation of certain difficult parts of the day.

Like you have a performance review coming up, this is going on. What are the urges you gonna feel? How are you gonna protect yourself from it? And we want to basically plan a contingency or an exit strategy and then what we end up doing, if you're gonna walk porn at one o'clock, you know we're gonna hold off until then and we have to really plan for it in order to even succeed.

There.

[00:43:16] Jordan Harbinger: You have these guys plan like your porn time, where you're gonna scratch that itch. That way it's not just the whole day on a low simmer. Absolutely. Wow. Yep. I really have sympathy for people who are stuck in this. I can't imagine what it takes to get to the level where you buy a second monitor just to have some gross stuff playing while you're using Google spreadsheets or whatever.

It's so weird, and I don't mean to denigrate people by saying it's weird. It's alien to me. And I think a lot of people don't understand what sort of situation these people find themselves in. And again, I actually have deep sympathy for them 'cause there's no way that that's fun. Interesting. Entertaining.

The shame attached to it must be crazy. Those people must be desperate by the time they're reaching out to you to fix it.

[00:43:59] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yes. That's what's confusing is they themselves actually think the way that you do. It's really confusing to them because we basically have a shared conception about what porn is and why we use it and what it does for us.

They themselves are the most perplexed by how hard it is to kick. And they're like, I don't even understand what this is doing for me, but it's doing something for me.

[00:44:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, they're thinking, I'm literally handling a PowerPoint presentation for my boss. Why am I playing this on the other monitor that I bought for the purpose of having this so that I can see it 24 7 while I'm wearing?

If you're struggling with this, reach out for help. There's help out there. Do not let this dictate the rest of your life.

[00:44:36] Dr. Alok Kanojia: You hinted at a couple of other things that are really important. One is that it is very shaming because people don't understand. You judge yourself partially, so once you activate the shame circuitry, the best way for you to deal with that is to watch pornography.

So that creates this cycle of shame and worsening addiction. The second thing that it also does is it's very isolating and lonely because people don't understand and you get judged for it. And you said, this person who is doing the OnlyFans addiction, how's their marriage working? Does anyone stop and ask?

Hey, this person needs help. That's almost never what we say. We're like, this is gross, this is disgusting. I mean, the dude is a Jehovah's Witness apparently. So presumably is, tries really hard to be a moral and good person and do we give them any credit for that? Of course not.

[00:45:19] Jordan Harbinger: No. It ruined the marriage because apparently any sort of porn consumption is basically cheating.

So even if he wasn't paying for it but was just looking at the stuff, it would be bad enough. But the fact that he was paying and it was like really kinky and it was their wife's friend, that just was too much.

[00:45:34] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah, and, and so that sort of isolates us and then our oxytocin system wants us to bond and reconnect and porn gives us some shadow of that.

It satisfies that part of us for a few moments.

[00:45:47] Jordan Harbinger: Oh man. So shifting gears a little bit here, why do you think mental illness is on the rise? Are we just better at diagnosing it? I'm always wondering about that. When I see stats like autism is up 5000%. It's like, okay, well now we can see it. Instead of just thinking that this person is weird or has, you know, a learning disability.

[00:46:03] Dr. Alok Kanojia: So. That is a piece of it. The rise in mental health diagnosis does definitely include catching things that we used to miss, but I think it's also on the rise because there are many influences in our life that make us more mentally ill. So just to give you like a really simple example about autism spectrum.

The likelihood of autism is tied to the age of the parents, and it's one of the very few diagnoses that is tied to paternal age as well. One of the other reasons why autism is increasing is because the older you are when you have kids, the higher your risk is of developing autism. I think those statistics are still correct.

Last time I checked, that's one of the risk factors is paternal age. So that's one reason why autism is increasing. But I think what we're also seeing is a whole scale effect of technology on the brain, which is worsening mental illness. So we're seeing things like pornography is getting more addictive.

You said that I watched porn, I just didn't get into it. That's because you're lucky enough that the algorithm did not find what worked for you. If you keep scrolling, the algorithms are now really, really good at figuring out what kind of porn will work for you. So we're seeing more pornography exposure.

We're seeing social media usage, video game usage. There's a lot of fundamental changes in our brain that are happening because of technology and the society that we live in. So the other basic thing that's happening is like we no longer have to fight for survival. And since we don't have to fight for survival, our mind gets occupied on other things and those things are actually harder to fulfill.

Purpose. Now, one of the two biggest variables, risk factors for pornography addiction is a sense of meaninglessness in life.

[00:47:46] Jordan Harbinger: I was just gonna ask if it's a profound and widespread lack of purpose. 'cause it seems like what you're saying is we've maybe air quotes solved the lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and so now we're turning inwards at the top of the pyramid, which is, I think, self-actualization.

And it's like you find yourself lacking pornography. It's funny you mentioned the algorithm didn't find what works for me. If there was porn where somebody was like, your podcast is so interesting, then maybe I'd be hooked on the thing. But instead it's just, well, yeah, it is what it is. This is a family show.

It's family-ish show. But yeah, man, people are, they're overworked, they're lonely, they're suffering from mental health issues at seemingly the maximum rate we've ever seen. Is there some common thing that people do that sabotages their wellbeing?

[00:48:29] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah, so I think there are a couple. I, I think if we look at all of the technologies, there are a couple of things that they tend to do, all of them.

The first is that they. Give us a messed up sense of self. So if you look at one of the foundations of health, and this is why we are asking the question, do you wanna be someone who wanted to work out, right? So we have to connect to ourselves if we're not connected to ourselves, I dunno if this kind of makes sense, but we're operating off of a false version of ourselves, right?

So if I build a life based on who I think I am and what should make me happy, I'm not gonna end up happy. So we're also seeing the highest level of quarter life crises we've ever seen. LinkedIn did this study we're up to 50% of people have a quarter life crisis, which used to not really happen much. The biggest thing is that all of these technologies distort our relationship with ourself.

So we have these weird things where when I post something on Twitter, let's say, and it gets like this many likes, the social circuitry in my brain feels somewhat validated, but then it also feels invalidated when the next post doesn't get as many likes, or my friend gets more likes. There's weird things going on where like our brain is designed to have communities of 300 people.

That's what we've evolved in. Now that we have like thousands and thousands of people, it really distorts our sense of self and the way that it does. This is platform specific. So we're seeing a rise in eating disorders and body dysmorphia and both men and women. As a simple example, when I use a filter, some apps will auto apply filters.

You don't even have to apply it. It does it automatically.

[00:50:05] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, and like we noticed that you're kind of ugly. So we've taken the liberty of removing every blemish from your skin and making you look younger.

[00:50:13] Dr. Alok Kanojia: So it's not even that you're kind of ugly. You can be beautiful and they'll do it too. We're gonna just do it to everyone.

And now the human brain is faced with a really weird conundrum. I like this person on the screen. I don't like this person in the mirror.

[00:50:26] Jordan Harbinger: That's not something that the app tells you. Your message that you're getting is, the app thinks I should look different. Wow. It's right. I would say that.

[00:50:34] Dr. Alok Kanojia: The app makes me a different person.

I see that's even worse, right? It's so fundamental. But when you wake up every day and you look at the mirror and you have this artificial version of yourself that is better than what you actually see, what impact does that have on your psychology? It is not good. No, that's terrible. It's awful. So this is where we see body dysmorphia.

We see eating disorders, we see rises in depression. We also see rises in social anxiety, and everyone is looking at the blemishes on my skin because I myself am not used to seeing them right now. I'm gonna take pictures and send them to my friends because I'm using Snapchat or whatever, or for dating profiles, but I'm walking into the date.

Knowing that the person that I am is not as beautiful as the person that they're attracted to. Ugh, brutal.

[00:51:18] Jordan Harbinger: You're going in with that handicap, right? Absolutely. Alright. I'm already down one because I'm not the person in the pictures and they're not the person in the pictures. But I'm not thinking about that.

I'm not thinking we're starting on even keel 'cause we're both down. One. I'm just thinking about how crappy I look compared to this fake AI version of myself on the internet.

[00:51:36] Dr. Alok Kanojia: And that's just one slice of identity. Then there's all of the other, okay, what kind of stuff pops up on my feed? The kind of stuff that pops up on my feed is the stuff that I am interested in, produced by people who are better than me.

If I'm interested in entrepreneurship, I'm gonna go on the Jordan Harbinger podcast and I'm gonna listen to some amazing entrepreneur who has done way more than I've ever done. And those are our exposures. And I'm not saying that your podcast is bad, I think it's great. No, no, no. Right. But like we have to understand that these are tools that can help us in a lot of ways and hurt us in a lot of

[00:52:11] Jordan Harbinger: ways.

I'll be honest, feedback Friday where people write in with these really serious problems. One of the main things people like about it when we did a survey and what we see on our subreddit is people go, wow, other people have really serious problems. My life isn't so bad and I'm rooting for them to be better.

Because we're all humans. We're all helping it. Like Jordan and Gabriel are helping them, and I want them to be in a better situation. It's actually quite healthy. And also I think interviewing people who have made a giant mess of their lives. You know, like Sammy the bull or mafia hitman, that doesn't hurt either, right?

Because you realize that not everybody's Richard Branson or Alo Kenia.

[00:52:45] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. So that's actually brilliant, right? So I think that's where like we found the same thing, is that people really resonate in a positive way and that these tools can be used for good or evil, right? Or they can used to help or hurt.

And humanizing successful people is one of the best things you can do on social media. To recognize that even though this person is very successful, they struggle. Right? Because there's this fundamental idea that these people who are successful are fundamentally different from me. And reducing that gap can be very healthy for people.

It's a strong work man.

[00:53:17] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. It wasn't super conscious at the time. It just sort of evolved that way. That's what happens when you answer hundreds of fan mails and you actually listen to your audience instead of ignoring them. You find that they guide your work in a really positive way most of the time.

I've heard you say something along the lines of undiagnosed A DHD is causing depression for thousands of adults. Is that accurate? I don't wanna misquote you. Yeah,

[00:53:38] Dr. Alok Kanojia: so sure. There's a really fascinating study that looked at comorbid populations of A DHD and depression. So these are people who have both diagnoses, and then they went back and they asked which diagnosis came first.

So 3% of people who were diagnosed with a mood disorder, like major depressive disorder. When they were diagnosed, let's say as a teenager with a mood disorder, 3% of them when they're 25 will grow up to have a DHD. Wow. 70% of people who get diagnosed with A DHD will grow up to have depression, but this is out of a comorbid population.

So it's not that 70% of people with A DHD are depressed, but this is, this is a study that looks at what comes first. And for the vast majority of people, A DHD comes first. Once you work with A DHD people, or if you have a DHD, you know exactly what I'm talking about because our current society is not designed to support people with A DHD.

So what these people grow up with is all kinds of challenges that we don't really think of as consequences of A DHD, the first of which is by the second grade, a large percentage of kids with A DHD get invited to zero birthday parties. Really? That's terrible. It's awful. So when you're a first grader, what happens?

You don't wait for your turn in line, you cut go. Oh man, the dopamine rush of going down the slide was so fun. You can't think about anything else. You're running back in. You push another kid outta the way and then you go, you don't wait your turn. You don't play with other kids in a nice way. You're not attuned to them in a good way, right?

So there's like a lot of social isolation that comes with a DHD

[00:55:18] Jordan Harbinger: that makes me so sad.

[00:55:19] Dr. Alok Kanojia: That's just one example. The second thing is that kids are really good at judging iq. Like it's amazing. So we're really good at recognizing like stupid people and smart people. . Okay, so this is paradoxically really damaging for an A DHD kid.

'cause an A DHD kid knows that they're not stupid. Like I know that I'm just about as smart as all of my friends, but I cannot achieve what they achieve. So there's an achievement gap. So even though I'm just as smart and I learn things just as quickly, my grades are way worse. So. If you know your IQ is the same, your performance is way worse.

How does a child make sense of that? The child says, okay, I'm busted in some way. There's something wrong with me, and they have evidence of this, right? Because other kids are able to make friends, but I just know that everyone went to a birthday party and I wasn't invited. So they grow up with this idea that there's something wrong with me, and they're right.

It's that people don't understand that this is a neurodiverse individual. So that core of, uh, something is wrong with me. Coupled with the lack of academic performance, coupled with the lack of social performance. When all that stuff piles on, they wind up depressed later in life.

[00:56:34] Jordan Harbinger: That is a really great explanation.

And also man, as a parent of two small children and as a guy who had undiagnosed A DHD until college, that really hits, I didn't not get invited to birthday parties, but I also think my A DHD is nowhere near as severe as a lot of other people's and, and when I meet other A DHD people to look at their coping strategies and stuff like that, it's like, oh my gosh, you are on another level.

I've got a friend who's a very successful fitness entrepreneur. She has an assistant, and one of that person's jobs is to text her things she has to do, and I'm like, don't you just use the calendar? She's like, yes. I need someone to text me. And she showed me screenshots of her assistant texting her. It's, you have a call in one hour, you have a call in half an hour, you have a call in 15 minutes.

That call is in five minutes. That call is in two minutes. Your call is now. Are you on that call? Are you sure you're on that call? If you don't answer me, I'm gonna assume you're not on that call. And that is for every appointment in her calendar. She does that for everything because she will forget.

[00:57:29] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah.

So let me ask you, Jordan, when you were 33 and you had like 40% body fat or whatever, what was your mental state like?

[00:57:35] Jordan Harbinger: Uh, I remember I was doing pretty well in business and I was doing pretty well. I just met my wife and stuff like that, so I wasn't super depressed or anything like that, but I certainly wasn't feeling as good as I feel now at 44.

[00:57:48] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah, I think there's a couple of other like interesting connections there. One is that people with a HD do way better in entrepreneurship

[00:57:56] Jordan Harbinger: really? 'cause we can multitask like crazy 'cause we don't have a choice. Yeah.

[00:58:00] Dr. Alok Kanojia: What's the reason? There's a lot of different reasons for that. So one is that. People with A DHD are very good reactively.

The problem is that you need a stimulus from the outside to act, right. This example that you get this text message an hour, text message, 30 minutes, text message five minutes away, getting three text messages over the course for an hour for a neurotypical person will drive them insane . Yeah. But for someone with a DHD, they're stimulus bound, so they're like externally motivated.

So when you're playing dodgeball and there's like five people throwing balls at you, if you've got a DHD, you're gonna handle that really well. So oftentimes entrepreneurship is less structured. There's a lot of inbound stimulus, which actually activates your ability to focus. That pressure is what it takes for you to activate your optimal ability.

[00:58:50] Jordan Harbinger: This explains so much about how my days look as well, this makes complete sense. I'm proudly sort of unemployable in any other person's business, I suppose. But for what I do now, being able to function and do a conversation while producing a show, while running the business and switching from, you need to rehearse this thing, now you need to review this document.

Now you have a phone call, now you have a show, which is essentially a performance. And then my hobbies are like voice acting and video games and boxing. And it's like I can do all of those things in one day and it's not weird to shift between those activities.

[00:59:20] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. So I think that's a very dynamic mindset.

So I think the challenge with A DHD is I've worked with plenty of people clinically for whom it's crippling and it's just very impairing. But I think there's a spectrum of severity. And for many of us, and I'm the same way for many of us, like finding the right environment where we actually thrive in chaos when other people don't, can actually be a competitive advantage.

There's even a really fascinating study that shows that hypomania in bipolar disorder or 4% of the population is hypomanic and don't even qualify for bipolar disorder. 1% of people have bipolar disorder, but 4% of people are hypomanic and are not mentally ill. So they have features of hypomania. It's really weird, but these people's income is lower than average if they have a job and is way higher than average if they're entrepreneurs.

So there are all kinds of weird intersections about understanding who you are, understanding how you're wired, right? And this kind of goes back to, do you wish you were someone else? It starts with accepting who you are and then really thinking about, okay, what are the parts that I really do wanna change?

And also, how can I craft my environment to be optimal for the person that

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It is that important that you support those who support the show. Alright, now for the rest of my conversation with Dr. K. What are some of the easiest things that we can incorporate in our lives that give us a high return on maybe happiness, energy, et cetera, relative to the effort that it takes?

[01:02:50] Dr. Alok Kanojia: So I would say one of the most important things that has basically helped 99% of people I've worked with is paying attention to how you've been conditioned versus who you are.

So one of the biggest sources of frustration is that we strive for things that were implanted within us. They're not really what we want. And so then when we try to go for them, our motivation is lacking, our productivity is lacking, our focus is lacking. And then what happens is we try to biohack brain hack, life, hack ourselves, optimize our nutrition, and start taking supplements to fulfill that goal and increase our motivation.

Whereas I oftentimes find that like the best way to gain motivation is to really understand truly who you are and what was implanted within you. And if you can separate those two things and start to craft a life based on who you really are and what you want. And that can even mean changing certain aspects of yourself.

But even when we talk about changing the self, are we changing the self to make myself happy? Are we changing the self to make society happy? My parents happy, my spouse happy. So really starting with that I think is like the most important thing that leads to lifelong changes. And the best example that I can give you is I had a patient come into my office who was anxious about getting fired.

'cause they were like, it's so stressful. And I know I'm smart. Sometimes they do a good job, but sometimes like people take credit for my work and like I'm terrified that I'm gonna get fired, right? So they're like, help me fix the anxiety. And so we did this kind of work and like 18 months later they quit.

I really got worried about this. And I even talked to some of my mentors and like supervisors because 30% of my patients will make a career change within about 18 months of like coming into my office. And I started to wonder, am I biasing them? Am I somehow influencing them, pushing them in some way? Am I like encouraging them to do this?

Am I screwing them up? Basically? Am I like adding my own values?

[01:04:48] Jordan Harbinger: Maybe they're more in touch with themselves than they realize they're in the wrong career. That's what I think really happens. And

[01:04:53] Dr. Alok Kanojia: there's a lot of data to support that, right? Because when you choose a career at the age of 18, if you go to university, like you don't really know what you want, you have no idea.

And then you start building up this life out of what other people tell you you should be. No wonder you're not motivated towards it because

[01:05:10] Jordan Harbinger: you don't really want it. This is like 90% of lawyers. You go to undergrad and you do well and then you're like, crap, I don't know what to do for work. And then you go to law school and you're just like, well, there's gonna be a lot of money in this.

And you become an investment banker or a lawyer, and then you turn 27 a few years later and your brain is fully developed and you're like, what the actual hell am I doing? In this office doing this job. This is insanity. And you've moved.

[01:05:32] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. And I see that with tons of high performing people. I've seen it in medical students too.

So like, you know, when I'm mentoring people who are applying to med school or applying to residency, they'll have all these like, oh, I wanna help people. You don't need to train for eight years to help people. You can go work in a soup kitchen today. Yeah.

[01:05:46] Jordan Harbinger: I wanna help people and make a bunch of money and have my parents finally love me because they always wanted me to be a doctor

[01:05:52] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Absolutely. So we ask those hard questions like, what do you really want? Right. And it's fine if you just want money in prestige, like let's just be honest with ourselves. We're not gonna put that in the personal statement. If I was reading a personal statement where someone said. I want to go to medical school because I like science and I want money and I want job security.

I would be totally fine with that. At least this person's

[01:06:12] Jordan Harbinger: being honest. Right, man. I'm so curious what you think of psychedelics and the use of psychedelics and treating mental illness or even just for self-actualization and personal growth. I know those are two very different use cases.

[01:06:24] Dr. Alok Kanojia: I think it's a great question.

So let's understand a little bit about what psychedelics do and what they don't do. So, as a psychiatrist, I've worked with basically equal numbers of people who have been transformed for the positive by psychedelics and people who have been destroyed by psychedelics. Wow. Okay. So let's understand that psychedelics can result in PTSD.

Strangely enough, I see a lot of weird like OCD or generalized anxiety or like sustained mood problems after psychedelics, which I, I think there's not a whole lot of literature about. It's just clinically, someone will come in with an anxiety to start. I'll be like, when did this start? And they're like, it started when I tripped really bad on LSD and now I'm anxious all the time.

So that confuses some people, right? Because we also have all these studies. It's still early stages, but we have a lot of data that shows that psilocybin, MDMA assisted psychotherapy can be very helpful for trauma. We have studies that show it can be helpful, and so then people make a huge mistake. They say, here's all this research that shows that psychedelics can be healing.

Therefore, if I am sick or if I'm mentally ill, or I'm suicidal, let me take psychedelics and I will be healed. Huge mistake. So we have to understand the mechanism of psychedelics and we have to understand the circumstances that make them transformative in a positive way. If you wanna simplify it, psychedelics induce neuroplasticity.

So your brain is normally in read only mode, but we are allowed to edit it. So that's really the biggest thing that they do. From a scientific perspective, that's how I'm simplifying it. So then what happens is when you enter into edit mode, what is the circumstance that you're in? So if you're alone in suicidal, the circumstance that you're in is not good.

So it can be traumatizing. Whereas if we look at the historical evidence as well as modern studies of the healing of psychedelics, what we find is that there's a shepherding in both cases. So in these spiritual traditions, you have a shaman who, when you're in that neuroplastic state, rewires you in the right direction, right?

The studies on psychedelic assisted psychotherapy find the same thing too. So over the course of 14 weeks of psychotherapy will have three doses of psychedelics. And when you're doing psychedelics, some of these protocols are very specific. For eight hours, you will have a male therapist and a female therapist who will sit with you and shepherd you through that experience.

But it doesn't end there because you had this neuroplasticity, you have this experience. Then what they do in the next couple of weeks is they integrate that experience into your life. What does this mean about you as a person? What does this mean about your trauma? What does this mean about your relationships?

What does this mean about boundary setting? So it puts your brain into edit mode. And then if you shape it the right way, then it can be quite healing.

[01:09:09] Jordan Harbinger: I worry when I hear about people using these, either without any supervision or their shaman who's running their ayahuasca ceremony in the middle of nowhere, six hours away from the nearest hospital was a stockbroker a month ago, that kind of stuff.

And I'm not even exaggerating. I've got a buddy who had a really bad ayahuasca experience and he was like, yeah, we went into the woods and we did it with eight dudes in one room in a cabin, laid out on yoga mats on the floor. And I jumped out the window into the woods and they couldn't find me because the shaman was high too.

And then I finally hit a highway and turned around and came back, and I'm like, in the winter you went outside, . You ran until you found a highway through the woods and somehow you found your way back to the cabin. And of course everybody was like, dude, where did you go? We couldn't find you. He could've died doing that.

And they were, again, hours away from the nearest hospital if somebody has a seizure or whatever. Just absolutely insane.

[01:09:57] Dr. Alok Kanojia: There is definitely potential to them. I think we should really study them more robustly for mental health. And I think that becomes really important for a couple of reasons, because we're starting to realize now like more about how mental illness forms, and I really love the yogic traditions for this.

So there's also some really interesting studies where you can ask someone what their psychedelic experience is like, and you can predict whether they will have a clinical improvement or not based on the subjective content of their experience. So what happens when you trip is predictive for whether you get healed or not.

Now, the problem is we can't control what a healthy trip is versus an unhealthy trip. But basically what we found is that if you have an ego death experience, the likelihood of a clinical improvement is super high. So if you're just like out and you're flying around in space or whatever, like that doesn't necessarily correlate with any kind of clinical improvement.

But when we break down our sense of self, right, and this is what we're talking about, like when we're talking about technology, what is technology doing? It's polluting our sense of self. It's giving us this false sense of identity. So when we use psychedelics and we have these ego death experiences, which are very hard to handle by the way they can traumatize us too, it breaks down our sense of our patterns about who we are, the way that we connect to other people.

One of the reasons that I love meditation is because meditation can basically induce psychedelic states. The difference is that in the meditative path, it's not clear that they induce them in the same way. So there's probably some variability there. But we know that ego death is a part of meditative experience too.

And then the other thing is that in meditation, we train ourselves way more before we enter the psychedelic experience, right? So it's like dropping someone in like Class five rapids and be like, swim bro. Or training yourself up to level one, level two, level three, level four rapids before you go down Class five rapids,

[01:11:47] Jordan Harbinger: right?

'cause in meditation there's no real shortcut, but just downing a bunch of a substance, it just drops you right outta the airplane. So

[01:11:54] Dr. Alok Kanojia: there are like some meditation techniques, like holotropic breath work, which I'm not a huge fan of actually, 'cause I think it can be dangerous. There's some techniques that I've done.

Two examples. One is one where your respiratory rate is 240 per minute. The normal respiratory rate is like 12 to 14. It's very, very difficult to do. But when you have a super high respiratory rate, it like does weird things. So definitely don't recommend that you just do that without the guidance of a guru.

[01:12:21] Jordan Harbinger: I did some breath work a couple of weeks ago with people where you're just like, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling. And it was apparently 75 minutes long. For me, it seemed like it was about 15 minutes long. At the end I was like, this is kind of some bs. What is this? And then I just started like massive emotional release.

It was very interesting. I couldn't stand up. People who listen to the show are gonna be like Jordan, because I am not the WOOWOO guy. I'm the guy who's like, whatever, this is dumb. And I was like disoriented and physically unable to stand. It was wild experience.

[01:12:49] Dr. Alok Kanojia: I think the main thing to remember is that psychedelics don't create anything in our brain.

They activate things in a very unusual way, so they go and bind to existing receptors. And activate those. Sometimes hyper activate them in ways that are very hard to do normally. But if we also look at what happens in the brain during meditation is very similar. The flip side of it is like one breath per hour.

So there are some practices that can get you there, which sounded crazy, but now we know about free diving and stuff and we know that human beings can do that. But the technique that will result in brain death for one person, one breath an hour will be lethal. For most human beings, 20 minutes underwater will be lethal for most human beings.

But if you train your physiology in the right way, you can do it safely. So it's really interesting. But in the brain, what starts to happen is we start to build compensatory mechanisms so we don't get damaged by it. And also the changes to carbon dioxide and oxygen levels will induce alterations in how the brain activates and result in like a psychedelic experience.

Once again, something that you definitely have to do under the guidance of a guru, otherwise you'll end up with brain damage or die. Oof.

[01:13:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that disclaimer. I think there's a lot of people who think they can just learn this from YouTube, and it's a little. A little scary. I'm curious what you think of the backlash against talk therapy these days.

I'm a huge proponent of therapy. I recommended it all the time on the show, but good therapists are very hard to find and there seems to be this impossibly rare balance of a therapist who will get you to open up and talk about your feelings and your issues, but also actually help you accomplish your goals and not just keep you on the couch for, I don't know, two decades complaining about your mom or whatever.

[01:14:25] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. So I, I think the backlash against therapy is somewhat justified. So let's understand a couple of things. So the first is that I think there are a lot of things that we can do to heal mentally and support our mental health that are not talk therapy. So somewhere along the way we started focusing on talk therapy is the only option.

And I think, especially when I work with men, one of the biggest like assumptions that we have is that talk therapy is the way, but there's a huge bias in therapy. Therapy is primarily about talking, but we also know that 70% of therapists are women. And historically in the field of psychiatry, 70% of patients are women.

So when we're looking at what works, there's a huge bias towards people who benefit from verbal usage. And we know that women are actually better at verbalizing their emotions. And some of that is even due to like things like estrogen. So estrogen literally increases your sensitivity to your internal emotional state.

So this is why, you know, they get judged harshly for things like PMs and stuff like that. It's just literally estrogen increases our biological awareness of what we're feeling. And people who become fathers will have some of these changes too. So I started becoming so much more emotionally sensitive after I had kids.

Totally, man. Like I start like crying during Disney movies now and it used to be like .

[01:15:41] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. I'm not the only one. I'm glad to

[01:15:42] Dr. Alok Kanojia: hear you admit this. Yeah, it's weird. Like as if you're a dude, it's so confusing. You're like, it is.

[01:15:46] Jordan Harbinger: Why am I tearing up? This is weird. It's funny 'cause society does this to us, right?

It's super embarrassing. You're watching The Lion King and you're like, oh man, I hope that guy doesn't die. I'm gonna lose my mind. And then it happens and you're just like, I have to go to the bathroom 'cause I'm gonna cry right now.

[01:16:00] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Mufasa dying is the most heartbreaking. Like it affects me every time.

Like it's wild.

[01:16:04] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

[01:16:05] Dr. Alok Kanojia: There's literally a biological component to our ability to express our emotions. And so somewhere along the way we started with therapy and I think therapy is great. I love being a therapist. I think it's really good. And also. Especially with a lot of the men that I work with, there are other kinds of work we'll do, more body focused, emotion focused, physical focused, because emotions absolutely don't just exist in the mind and in our words.

They exist in our physiology. We even have some really interesting meta-analyses that show that things like the emotional freedom technique, which I thought was pure BS and some meta-analysis has been shown effective for trauma. So this is like where they tap on certain parts of your body and they release stored emotions.

But in clinical trials, like even a, we have no idea how biologically it works in clinical trials. People improve. I don't think it's all about talk therapy. I think talk therapy is great. I think there are a lot of other methodologies that work for people that are not talk therapy. So there are even studies that show that, you know, exercise.

There's a recent big study that came out that showed that exercise is just as effective as talk therapy for improving some aspects of mental health. So I think a big part of it is that talk therapy doesn't work for everyone. And then an even bigger part. Is that we have a very poor system for improvement as therapists.

So if you kind of look at it like how do you know that the food you're making is good? How do you improve? You can taste it. You can see how many customers are coming in to eat your pizza. If you look at something like Amazon, we have product reviews. We have metrics that show us that we're performing.

Psychotherapy has very, very few metrics to show a therapist that they're doing bad. And the crazy thing is as our field, like we actually discourage this stuff. The number of times I've been in supervision and like my business mind is confused by some of the stuff that I hear from my fellow therapist.

If a patient comes in for one appointment and never shows up again. Then you're a therapist and you go ask your therapist, Hey, I had this patient who didn't show up again. We're gonna construct all these like psychoanalytic, oh, they weren't ready for therapy. You didn't do anything wrong. It's like some kind of weird, like emotionally supportive kind of group.

No one is ever saying, and it's even like sometimes an ethical violation to track that patient down and say, Hey, what did I do wrong? So we have no basic system of like customer feedback in the field of therapy. And so what that results in is a lot of therapists who like don't realize when they're making a mistake, I think what we have is a field of people.

Some of 'em are not very good and some of 'em are very good and we don't have a good system for the people to be able to tell the difference,

[01:18:43] Jordan Harbinger: right? You basically have to look and this person's $300 an hour and this person's $50 an hour. Okay, which one can I afford? They're probably different, but that's nothing.

That's marketing. That's the area where they live. I mean, I've gone through a bunch of therapists. Some were great in past years and some are great now. But I will tell you it's often I'm hitting that switch therapist button a few times when I select therapists.

[01:19:05] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yes. And I think there's another like really challenging part, which is that sometimes I think that people who judge therapists as bad are doing a bad job as patients.

And this is something we never talk about. We never say that the patient is doing something wrong, whereas like absolutely the patient can do wrong things. So I'll give you just one quick case. So someone was saying I didn't make any progress in therapy for two years and then I switched therapists. And this therapist gives me no agency.

They don't talk about what I wanna talk about. They're very insistent that I just do this thing, but like I feel like they don't care about what I want. And then you'll post this on the internet, right, which is where the backlash is. And you'll get a bunch of other people. Who will say like, yeah, screw that therapist, find a different therapist.

Whereas as a therapist, I'm looking at this and I'm saying, hold on a second. You had two years of unproductive therapy and you probably did what you wanted instead of what you needed to do. And now the second therapist is like, Hey, what you wanted to do didn't help you. Let's do something else. And so there's a lot of nuance there where like, you know, it's really challenging, but sometimes as a therapist, the way to help someone is to like face the difficult stuff.

And some people do not like that.

[01:20:15] Jordan Harbinger: No. A good therapist guides you there and holds your feet to the fire, but in a way that keeps you coming back, I suppose.

[01:20:21] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Hold on a second. Whose responsibility is it for you to keep coming back? I see. See, now what you're doing is really subtle. You're making this very interesting tightrope that you want the therapist to walk right.

They need to like push you but push you the right amount because otherwise you're gonna leave.

[01:20:36] Jordan Harbinger: It's like a trainer, right? If you barf, you might not come back, but maybe you're just really out of shape and when you work out in any reasonable way, you barf and you just gotta push through that. I see what you're saying.

[01:20:46] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. So I think it's super challenging. I know it sounds wild, but a big part of this, I mean, I've had plenty of patients who don't take responsibility and don't do their part and we don't say that often enough. This makes sense.

[01:20:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I basically, I look forward slash dread therapy and training sessions and I guess that's the balance you need to have.

But I'm also used to pushing through discomfort and finding results on the other end. And if you've never done that before, therapy and working out and anything you do in life is gonna be hard, man. I think. So what can someone do to get the most out of therapy? I don't think we're probably asking that enough.

[01:21:22] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. So I think one of the biggest things, and I think people don't do this enough, so one of the biggest things is talk about how the experience of therapy is going for you. If you feel like you're not making progress, tell someone, tell your therapist, Hey, I've been coming here for six weeks. I feel like I'm not making progress, or I've been coming here for six months.

I feel like I'm not making progress. This a really subtle thing where patients wanna make their therapists proud, and oftentimes making them proud means pretending we're getting better. And I think that doesn't help anyone and saying, Hey, I'm not making progress, or, this is what's working for me. This is what isn't working for me.

And then I think this is where there's like almost a really important test for a therapist, which is how much responsibility does the therapist take for that? And sometimes if they say, well, if you're not making any progress, that's your problem. This is where I think we get to your point about hold my feet to the fire, but also encourage me and teach me in the right way.

So I think that there's a lot of shared responsibility and it's kinda like if something isn't working, you gotta talk about it. That's the most important thing to do.

[01:22:23] Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. Yeah. I guess you're absolutely right. That's something I, I'm gonna have to remember as well. I selfishly wanted to ask, as a parent of two young kids, what does the research say slash what do you think about screen time?

Because my kids, they watch iPad, but they learn so much stuff from it. They're learning different words, they're learning about how things work. It's, I'm always blown away by what they seem to learn from that. But whenever I look at screen time research, I don't find a whole lot of clinical research. I just find parents shaming other parents on Instagram or whatever.

[01:22:51] Dr. Alok Kanojia: Yeah. So the first thing to understand is that screen time is not homogenous, right? So like playing a video game, the kind of video game you play, whether you watch YouTube, whether you watch short form or long form, all that is like very different. I literally wrote a book about her. So how to raise a Healthy Gamer is all about guiding parents and helping them understand this problem.

I think the biggest thing is that screen time is not monolithic. And the second thing is that to remember that all of the addictions around screens, we get addicted because they are doing something for our brain. So the problem with screen time addiction is when you become dependent on the screen to fulfill that need.

So when pornography becomes the main way that I satisfy myself sexually, that's a problem. When social media becomes, when I stop living my life in the real world and I start existing on social media exclusively, that becomes a problem. So I'd say the biggest thing about a healthy approach to screen time for kids is if I had to summarize it super fast, it is build a fulfilling life for them.

As kids. So they should be doing some kind of sports. They should be socializing, they should be expressing themselves creatively, studying, and then the screen can be added on top of that. But it should never be a substitute for parenting . And there are other challenges here where like oftentimes we use it, I sometimes use a screen as a substitute for parenting because I don't have the bandwidth , it's really hard to be a parent right now.

So a lot of times parents will ask How much is too much? Well, it depends on what else is going on. So I've worked with some kids who will, you know, use screens for 20 hours a week and it's totally fine because they're doing everything they're supposed to be doing. So I think it's more about building positive stuff and then screens can be after that.

But generally speaking, I don't advocate for any regular use. So my kids will be screen free, generally speaking, four days outta the week. And I actually rather like a binge approach to screen usage where we'll like plan something, right? So like this Saturday, what are we gonna do as a family? We're gonna go play pot.

And then next weekend it's like we're gonna have a Smash Brothers party or a Mario Card family party. You know, we're gonna play for like three hours until bedtime and we can stay up extra late. So I think that there's a way to like model usage and it's kind of like the porn addiction where we don't want second screen usage.

The most damaging screen usage is the screen usage that permeates our day, but keeping it localized to a particular area and time for a particular goal, I think is totally fine. This

[01:25:19] Jordan Harbinger: makes so much sense. I always worry that kids who get a ton of screen time are being raised maybe, but maybe by disengaged parents.

Maybe that disengagement is actually the thing causing the adverse outcomes that people say is caused by the screen. So it's not the iPad, it's the fact that dad works until 9:00 PM every night and doesn't always come home. And mom works during the day and she gets home late and then she's gotta deal with running a whole household and gets no help.

Or there's a substance issue, like maybe it's not cocoa melon that's causing the damage here.

[01:25:45] Dr. Alok Kanojia: So it's a great point. 40% of kids, I think, grow up in single parent households. The numbers are not in your favor. And it's a really good point that . Is it the screens themselves or is it also, and the answer is it's both.

It's the screen because the screen does have a particularly damaging effect, but it's also the circumstances and risk factors of the household that contribute to that mental health decline. I.

[01:26:09] Jordan Harbinger: Thanks once again for doing the show. Man. You got a ton of wisdom to share. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Yeah, likewise, Jordan. Thank you for being here. Ever find yourself trapped in a cycle of always wanting more, never feeling content. You are about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show, where scarcity brain, author Michael Easter, unravels the mysteries of our primal drives and how they can be both our downfall and our salvation.

[01:26:31] JHS Clip: I'm a investigative journalist, but I firmly believe that to understand a story, to understand all the mechanics of it, to get the information that you need to really tell a story, you have to go in person. Sometimes I get to go to the nice shiny, comfortable labs where they bring me coffee and it's, you know, at Harvard or whatever.

But some days you find yourself in Iraq in a prison looking at cells of drug dealers and terrorists. But ultimately, I think that going there makes you get a better story, makes a story more interesting, and gets you better information to really understand it. Everyone knows that everything is fine in moderation, so then the question is.

Why do we all suck so bad at it? People keep eating when they're full. We often find ourselves shopping when we already own a ton of stuff. We scroll through social media or keep binging news when we know it's not necessarily improving our mental health. When you think about how humans evolved, everything we needed to survive in the past, it was all scarce and it was all hard to find, right?

So everything from food to possessions to information, even influence and status, the number of people we could influence, all hard to find, all scarce. And we lived like that for basically two and a half million years. And it wasn't until very recently in the grand scheme of time that we started to get abundance of all these things that were sort of built to crave.

So in the past, it always made sense to eat more food than you needed. If you had the opportunity to hoard items, to try and get as much information as you can, just keep seeking information, all that would give you a survival advantage. And then our environment's flipped and now we have an abundance of all this stuff and still compelled to just consume and consume all the stuff.

[01:28:03] Jordan Harbinger: For more about our insatiable desires and how to harness them for good Tune into episode 9 0 2, another great one in the Can with Dr. Alo Kenia. I definitely really enjoyed talking with that guy. I'm all for the science, and I think we should fund the heck outta the research of psychedelics, but I do think the hype is surpassing the science by a very dangerous mile or two.

Again, on the hall, I'm a big fan, but I'm not an advocate or activist for it outside of the actual medical scientific realm, if that distinction makes sense. I'm a little worried we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit and people might get hurt, but I'm also wanting much more real scientific research into it.

Again, I think I mentioned this earlier on the show, I've done some of this, but only under the supervision of a physician. And I may be doing some stronger stuff next year or this year, I don't know. Also, under the supervision of a doctor, I gotta admit I'm a little afraid of what I might find if I'm a hundred percent honest here.

You know, you never know what's in the little dark closet of your mind. One thing that Dr. K brought up outside of our conversation was that negative emotions are actually drivers for positive change in many instances. My own experience required a lot of that, just making myself better by brute force.

'cause I was either really lonely or not doing well in a certain way. Most therapists, they don't specialize in changing external behavior. Although, shout out to my therapist back in la she was not hesitant at all to do that, and she frequently gave me great advice. One thing she told me when I was living with some really rotten people, she said, Hey, as your therapist, but also your friend, move out of the damn apartment.

Your roommates are assholes. And she was right. And I moved out and I felt much better after a few weeks. And then I went to her for a few more months and she said, okay, you're, you're fired as a client. You graduated buddy. And she's just a lovely person. Uh, more therapists need to do that. Dr. K's point here is that therapists should be giving advice in many ways.

They're afraid not to. Uh, he has a whole sort of rant on that. And they also focus too much on processing negative emotions, which in Dr. K's opinion is not always a good thing because sometimes those negative emotions are what you need to feel in order to get off your ass and change your life. So if you focus on these emotions all the time and you simply seek to metabolize the feelings, you can lose the drive to actually fix.

The crap that makes you feel that way in the first place. All things Dr. K will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who make the show possible. Also, our newsletter wee bit wiser.

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