TRANSCRIPT: We Are Producing Millions Of Lonely, Addicted, Purposeless Men & Women: Dr. K

What have you done in your life? What experiences have you had? How many patients have you seen?

Dr. Kanojia’s Personal Journey and Professional Experience

DR ALOK KANOJIA: The first experience that I draw on is my own. So I struggled a lot in high school, college, failed out of college, was addicted to video games, had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Then I went to India at the age of 21 to find myself. And I found myself. I spent about seven years studying to become a monk. That was very, very formative in helping me see how human beings work.

But then I was really like kind of skeptical a lot of a lot of that stuff. So I started doing neuroscience research for a couple of years. I had a couple of spiritual experiences and I was super curious, like what is happening in the brain? I’m starting to change as a human being, but like that has to be at a neuroscientific level as well.

Then I ended up going to medical school. So I was thinking about how can I learn the most about human beings? So consider doing like a PhD in neuroscience, but ultimately went the medical route because the brain exists within the body. Became a doctor, became a psychiatrist because the mind was my favorite organ. Trained at Harvard Medical School where I was faculty for a few years. And then over the last couple of years, I’ve focused a lot on addiction psychiatry and also like performance based stuff.

So once we understand, okay, I once had a patient, for example, who came in after about two and a half years and was like, “Dr. K, I’m still depressed.” And then I assessed them, right? So when someone has like a mood disorder, they have like depression, which causes them problems in their professional life, causes them problems in their personal life. And I asked them, are you having problems in your professional life? And they’re like, no. Are you having problems in your personal life? They’re like, no, but I still feel the same. And that’s when I told him, I said, “Mike, you’re not depressed. You’re unhappy and there’s a difference.”

And then he turned to me and he’s like, “Well, what do we do about that?” And I was like, I don’t know, but let’s see if we can figure it out. So really the work that I do is on that whole continuum of pathology where something within you is broken. But then going from negative 100 to zero is what medicine does, right? A doctor is not going to help you become healthy. They’re going to remove sickness. And then from zero to positive 100 is when we really draw on things like spiritual traditions.

Because meditation, if you look at like the teachings of the Buddha, the Buddha was not using mindfulness to treat social anxiety disorder. He was using mindfulness to attain enlightenment, to attain the heights of human perfection. And so that whole continuum is where I work.

The Impact of Mental Health Awareness and Social Media

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s so interesting. You mentioned there the case of Mike. He came to you and he had self-diagnosed his situation. And I’m not surprised, frankly, because of the world we live in now, there’s a lot of people calling a lot of things, depression and anxiety. We kind of use that word quite flippantly when we go through different moods and situations. How do you think the whole mental health and psychology sort of revolution you’ve seen over the last 10 years and the TikTokification of mental health has led us astray?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So I think there are some things that are good about it and some things that are problematic. So I think the really good thing about it is that there is a lot more awareness of mental health. So we now realize, so what I used to see about 10 years ago, right, when I was seeing patients is like people would come in and they would not realize that this is a problem that can be fixed. So people would come into my office and they’d say, “I’m a loser. Other people are able to get out of bed. They’re able to have discipline. They’re productive. They’re happy. But I’m a loser. I have no willpower. I’m pathetic. I can’t get out of bed.”

People didn’t realize that that was depression. I’ve worked with so many people who have adult diagnosis of ADHD, which many years ago you couldn’t even be diagnosed as an adult. ADHD had to be something that was kind of like a pediatric diagnosis. So now I think the best thing is that people recognize that, okay, maybe what is wrong with me is not like me. I’m not fundamentally broken in some way, but there is some kind of process going on in my brain, in my mind that is responsible for my problems. And if I fix that, then I can be well.

Now on the flip side, what started to happen is no one on the internet understands the concept of differential diagnosis. So everyone is like, oh, I have a TikTok that if this, if you sometimes forget your keys, you have ADHD. If you are happy in the morning and sad, if you have a kid who throws temper tantrums, they’re bipolar. So everyone is taking a symptom and jumping to a diagnosis, whereas like literally half of what we learn in med school and what we do as doctors, everyone thinks it’s about treatment. It’s about differential diagnosis.

It’s about understanding that if you lose your keys, there are all kinds of reasons for that. If you have difficulty getting out of bed, maybe it’s depression, maybe it’s trauma, maybe it’s ADHD, maybe it’s anemia, maybe it’s obstructive sleep apnea. And so the biggest problem is that everyone is jumping to a conclusion on the internet, which then causes problems because that may not be the right conclusion.

Understanding Men’s Mental Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: We spoke last time about men. Yeah. And there was a lot of discussion around just this, this wild difference between how men are feeling in the world and how they’re being understood in the world versus women. We was, before we started recording, you said your thoughts have developed even further since we last spoke on that.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. So I think there are a couple of things to understand. The first is that if you’re a man who’s struggling in the world today, we as men assume that if we’re struggling, we need to fix something on the outside, right? So if I am not making enough money, the answer to that is to get some additional certification or become more productive, maybe use some kind of supplement so that men are fundamentally different because we are conditioned, and this could be somewhat biological, but it’s certainly societal, to solve our problems externally.

But the one overwhelming thing that I’ve learned about men is that, you know, if you’re a man who wants to get better, 90% of what you need to do is not outside of you. It’s actually inside of you. But this is not where men look, right? We think like, okay, I need to get this kind of car, or I need to get sexier, or I need to be able to bench twice as much. So we always look to things outside of ourselves, but in the majority of the work that I’ve done with men, really the work that they need to do is internal, but we’re not taught how to do that.

There’s a really great example of this. So if you look at the top 1% of earners versus the top 10%, so the top 10% of earners on the planet have a higher IQ than the top 1%. The people who actually make the most money have a lower IQ than the quartile right underneath them. And the big difference there is that people in the top 1% have a very high EQ. So we grossly underestimate the capacity to control oneself. And if you really want to achieve the most in life, that’s what you really need to focus on.

And the more that I work with men, this is basically what I teach them, and the outcomes that I see are amazing, right? We’re talking like on the worst end, you know, I worked with a 32-year-old guy who started using drugs when he was 13 years old, polysubstance use, mostly opiates and heroin. So at the age of 32, no job, not living on the street, crashing with his girlfriend. And then within a span of four years, this guy became a therapist himself, had a stable income, got married, and published his first dystopian fiction novel.

So we’re talking about a four-year span of like being literally a heroin addict to, you know, being a published author and like having a stable, fulfilling relationship and job. And all of that work is like internal. It’s about understanding the way that you work, understanding the way that your brain works, and learning how to control yourself.

Comparing Men’s and Women’s Mental Health Challenges

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that the same for women though? Because I’ve got women friends who are same age that are really, really struggling, they’re not doing heroin or drugs or anything like that, but the objective sort of situation of their life is they’re so far from all of their goals, no partner, feeling lonely, unhealthy, and seemingly out of control.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. So I’ve worked with plenty of women for whom that is a problem as well. But I think if we look at on average, right, so remember that like within any population of men and women, there’s going to be more variance between women than there is between men and women. Sure. So absolutely the case for a lot of women. I think the big difference is that a lot of the tools that we have were sort of designed with women in mind.

A great example of this is like psychotherapy or talk therapy. So if you look at the gold standard of how we process our emotions, it’s verbally. Now studies actually show that if you look at like estrogen, estrogen has a very, very interesting effect on awareness of your internal emotional state and the ability to articulate your internal emotional state. So as estrogen rises, you literally feel emotions more.

So this is why men, women will have problems like premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMS, you know, when there are these hormonal fluctuations, it’s not that we should treat them poorly or anything like that, but they actually literally feel emotions in a more intense way because of the fluctuations in their estrogen level. So it’s like, like that’s like scientific fact. It’s not like it’s not good or bad, right? It’s just something that’s a fact.

So the higher your estrogen is, the more emotional awareness you’ll have. So there are some biological factors. And then there’s also like, if you look at the way that women are conditioned, they’re conditioned to be good listeners, to provide emotional support for the men around them. And so they use, they’re a lot better at verbal fluency, like that’s not even related to emotions.

You can look at, you know, boys and girls who are eight years old, girls will have a higher level of verbal fluency than boys do at the age of eight. So there are a lot of things in our mental health system that rely on being aware of your emotions, being able to articulate your emotions, using words to process your emotions. And so absolutely, they can learn more about themselves. I think 99% of human beings on the planet, myself included, can benefit from learning more about themselves.

Gender Differences in Mental Health Treatment

DR ALOK KANOJIA: But I think that women have somewhat of a leg up, which is why women are 70% of patients who seek psychotherapy, right, even 70% of therapists are women. So there’s like a very clear gender gap in the field of mental health.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So going back up the river then, so the crux of the issue is not being able to control oneself essentially. Control is even a step too far. The crux of the issue is not understanding yourself, right? Good diagnosis precedes good treatment. Control comes later.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Okay. So first, you need to understand one’s self.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Absolutely. And how do I go about understanding oneself? In the case of the gentleman you mentioned, there’s a case study there. How does he go about understanding himself as a heroin addict who had polysubstance abuse to the successful person?

The Process of Self-Understanding

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So I think the best place to start, and it’s going to sound kind of simple, but is to look at yourself. So what a lot of us do is anytime we have a problem, the first thing that we do is we try to jump to a solution. So if I’m unhappy in life, I need to make more money. If I’m struggling with dating, I need to get a better job or be sexier or whatever. So we tend to jump to solutions. So I think the first thing that you’ve got to do is slow a little bit down and look at yourself. And when you look at yourself, there are a couple of things that I think a lot of people really miss.

The first is what drives a lot of their behaviors. So we focus so much on fixing a behavior, like using heroin, for example, right? But we don’t really ask ourselves, why am I using heroin in the first place? Where does the drive for using heroin come from? And that is the key question, right? So it’s not about how you need to change. It’s about why am I the way that I am?

And this is where people make such a simple, simple mistake. I’d say the majority of people that I talk to, when they look at themselves, they don’t actually, they’re not critically thinking. What they actually do is they’ll make some kind of conclusion. I’m lazy. So like, think about what that means. Like laziness, first of all, is like not a thing. There is not like a laziness circuit in the brain. You can’t measure laziness. Laziness is a lazy way of looking at laziness.

If we look at human behavior, motivation, discipline, things like follow through, willpower, these are all discrete functions within our brain. And then we just say, oh, we’re lazy. But which one of those things is lacking? So as we understand, okay, why are we lazy? What does that really mean? Where’s my motivation coming from? What is the status of my willpower? As we explore these kinds of things, that’s when we see really what the answer is.

And the really cool thing is if you look at a lot of research on things like, we use this technique called motivational interviewing, where in order to change behavior, you don’t need to convince anyone of anything. You need to help people understand things. And once a human being understands something themselves, they will automatically change behavior. Right?

If I tell you, “Hey, Steven, don’t touch that pan, it’s hot.” And you touch the pan and you burn yourself. You won’t listen to me. But the moment that you touch it and you get burned, suddenly your behavior will change on its own. We learn through experience. But if you look at the way that most people try to solve their problems, it’s not through experience. It’s through information. Oh, I have a problem. Let me buy a book. I have a problem. Let me listen to a podcast. Let me watch a YouTube video.

And this is what we see, right? There are literally millions, if not tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people out there who are gaining a lot of information about change, but aren’t actually changing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s wild. Why is that? There’s a quite complex psychological thing because there’s a certain type of person who is like a self-development junkie, but they never self-develop. Yeah. They go to all the conferences. They watch all the videos. They’ve got, you know, they can, they know all the words, but they don’t actually put anything into action.

The Pitfalls of Self-Help

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. So there’s, there’s a lot of subtlety. But the craziest thing is that anytime we engage in some kind of self help kind of thing, it actually is a coping mechanism to deal with some negativity within us. So let’s say that I feel like I’m lazy. So then my mind looks, looks at me and says, okay, I’m lazy. I need to do something about it. And then it’s really tricky, right?

Because you have, your brain sees two options. One is that I can do something hard or the other is I can do something easy. And we have to understand this. The brain has evolved to be lazy. The brain has evolved. Laziness is efficiency. We want to get the most yield out of the smallest investment. So then what happens is our brain is like, okay, I could like go to the gym or I could watch a video about working out.

And if I watch a video about working out, I will be more efficient when I go to the gym. There are all kinds of scams that we run in our mind to actually activate parts of our brain that make us feel like we’re making progress without actually making progress. That’s how you become a self-development junkie or self-help junkie.

STEVEN BARTLETT: On this point of psychotherapy, not being perfectly designed for men, I was watching a clip before you arrived, um, where a lady who’s an author of a book that’s just come out and said that talking about our problems makes them worse. And I was wondering if that’s true.

The Complexities of Talking About Problems

DR ALOK KANOJIA: It can be. So I think this is a big problem is that talking about our problems can absolutely make things worse. So let’s understand a couple of things. So the first is that there’s this assumption that talking about your problems makes them better, but there are actually very specific things that need to happen in order for talking about your problems to make things better. The most important thing is something called an emotional catharsis. So this is where you have like a breakthrough in therapy. So there’s like this moment where there’s a lot of dormant stuff.

And Freud even described this, where you have this moment of very, very intense emotion that is relatively new, or I mean, it’s kind of dormant, but it’s not like venting. We’ll get to venting in a second. And so there’s a particular way we have to talk about problems that triggers emotional catharsis. Emotional catharsis creates something like a breakthrough. So this is also like an experience. So this is not just talking about my problems. This is experiencing my problems in a different way. So it’s kind of like touching the hot pan. Usually it’s kind of painful.

So when we’re doing like work with a trauma survivor, we don’t want to just talk about the trauma. We want to sort of dig into it a little bit more and have an emotionally healing experience. The real problem is that sometimes what will happen is people will just talk about their problems. So they’ll use therapy as essentially like a venting session. If we look at kind of the neuroscience of venting, venting is useful for reducing our negative emotion in the moment. But this is the really tricky thing. If we kind of think about it, you know, like I’ll ask you, maybe you know this, maybe you don’t. But why do we have negative emotions, Steven?

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a signal.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: For what?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I would guess that it depends on the negative emotion, but I guess it’s a signal that is there to help us connect with people.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Oh, okay. Loneliness.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Loneliness. Loneliness is a great example of a signal that’s designed to connect with you.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: What about something like anger or fear? Why do we have fear?

STEVEN BARTLETT: To warn us against impending danger?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Absolutely. Right. So if I’m like running through the jungle and I see a tiger and I have fear, fear gives us information. And what else does it do?

STEVEN BARTLETT: It gives us a physiological energy.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Very good. Adrenaline. Absolutely. For what purpose?

STEVEN BARTLETT: To flee.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Absolutely. So this is a big thing that people don’t understand. The primary motivator for change is actually negative energy, a negative emotion. So this is the problem with venting. If you vent and get rid of all of your negative emotional energy, the drive to change will disappear. So if we kind of think about it, what motivates you the most? It’s actually negative emotion.

And you can literally look at the neuroanatomy of things like the amygdala. So the amygdala is very close to the hippocampus, which is where learning and memory happen. So we actually learn the most through negative emotions. So if I’ve been happily married for 15 years and there’s infidelity, right, one case of infidelity, the negative emotion from that one case of infidelity can drastically motivate me.

So one of the biggest problems that I see is that we try to get rid of our negative emotions. And in doing so, we actually hamstring our motivational capability. So I’ve seen this a lot where people will come in and they’ll go through like what they think therapy is, which is like actually saying the same guy, Mike, came in and he’d like kind of talk about his problems. And I was like, “Bro, I was like, Mike, is this helping?”

So I was still a trainee at the time. So he’d been seeing me for about six, eight months. And I was like, you come in here and you kind of talk about your problems, but like you’re you don’t seem to be getting better. I didn’t know how to do therapy at the time. And then he’s like, “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do is come in and talk about my problems?” I was like, “Yeah, I think so.” I was a second year psychiatry resident, but I was like, “Is this helping?” He’s like, “No.”

And I was like, “OK, we got to do something else.” Coming in and just venting is not actually psychotherapy. That’s not like so talking about your problems, reducing your negative emotional energy can actually keep you stuck. And if you pay attention to people in your life, you’ll notice that there are some people who just like bitch all the time, right? They’re just constantly complaining, they’re constantly venting, and they don’t actually do anything to change their life.

The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s interesting because with the advent of social media, you now get reinforced by deficiency promotion, I call it. There’s kind of these two types of ways that you can build an audience or a personal brand. One of them is idea promotion. These are my my ideas. This is how I think about something. And the other that’s emerged, which is really interesting and a little bit toxic, is like deficiency promotion. These are all the ways that I’m broken. These are all the ways that I’m inadequate.

And you can build an entire audience around that, which resonate with your inadequacies. And then that inadequacy that you get held there, because that’s the speaking appointments you get booked to do. That’s what your book’s about. Your book is about all the ways you’re broken and flawed, all the stuff you’ve been through. And then it becomes your profession. And I just I watched that play out so many times. I’m like, I talked to my friends about it. I’m like, be careful of deficiency promotion, because you might, you might accidentally build a revenue stream there and then you’re fucked.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, absolutely. I think what we see is that there’s a lot of empathic resonance. Right. So and I think in some ways that’s a good thing. So I think when when I’m a broken human being, there are a lot of broken other human beings. The problem is when you’re a broken human being, you don’t feel like you’re a part of society. You’re like broken and everyone else is out there living their lives and being positive.

The Role of Empathy and Connection in Mental Health

DR ALOK KANOJIA: And so it can feel so relieving to connect with someone else, to realize, “Oh, my God, I’m not alone.” Right. So I think some of these deficiency promotion and we see that a lot in like psychotherapy groups on trauma and stuff like that, where there’s a lot of like trauma bonding. And there’s also some weird ego there with like, “I’m more broken than you and my trauma is worse than you.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: A lot of toxic comparison.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: There’s a lot of stuff that can kind of go awry. But I think there’s absolutely a reason why that’s a way that you can build your brand, because there are a lot of people out there who feel broken and feel alone. And I’d rather be broken and with someone.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Than broken and alone. It’s all about belonging at the end of the day.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. All of these things are about, you know, feeling like you belong.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Absolutely. What role does dopamine play in all of this? Because we talked at the start about taking back control. But much of the reason, as I learned from Andrew Huberman, that it’s hard to gain control is because many of us are in this sort of dopamine rollercoaster in our lives.

The Role of Dopamine in Mental Health

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, so I think dopamine plays an important role. But the one thing that I really come to appreciate is that how little of a role it plays. So everyone is like hung up on dopamine. But dopamine, first of all, is a neurotransmitter. Right. So dopamine is also like deals with things like smooth movement. So my ability to go like this is governed by dopamine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You were waving your arm.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. Just like so. So like anytime you have a smooth motion. So if we look at something like Parkinson’s disease, Parkinson’s disease is a deficiency of dopamine. So there are all kinds of things that dopamine does. I’d say dopamine is like a letter in the alphabet for the brain. We use it in all kinds of circuits to create all kinds of behaviors.

So dopamine is absolutely important. We’ll talk about it. But I think that there is almost like too much of an emphasis on dopamine and we oversimplify the problem when we focus too much on dopamine. I’ll give you a really simple example of that.

So one is in my clinical experience, it’s almost like dopamine and serotonin have an inverse relationship. So dopamine is what gives us a sense of pleasure. Dopamine also gives us behavioral reinforcement. But dopamine gives us pleasure, but will not give us contentment.

So I have I’ve had plenty of patients who chase dopamine. Right. And we know that, you know, partying a lot, using a lot of drugs, having high adrenaline activities that all activate your dopamine system don’t usually leave people feeling fulfilled and contented at the end of it. I’ve had plenty of millionaire playboys in my practice who like tried that to find happiness and maximize the pleasure in their life. And it doesn’t work. It’s never going to work.

And the problem with that is that our brain has this principle of tolerance. So the more that you activate your dopaminergic system, the more tolerance you’ll develop to it. This is why people need higher doses of drugs to achieve the same goal. This is why people when you first play a video game, it’s a lot of fun. But our five, six, seven, eight, it becomes less and less fun. And then you have old gamers like myself who are still chasing the beauty and the high of the games that we used to play when we were kids.

So dopamine is almost like a scam neurotransmitter because it offers you pleasure temporarily, but in an unsustainable way. On the flip side, we have serotonin. So serotonin is is associated more with like contentment and peace. When we look at things like mood disorders, oftentimes what we’re doing is improving the serotonin level, boosting the serotonin transmission in the brain.

So peace and contentment is very different from pleasure. And these two things are almost inversely proportional where and it’s really interesting. You can look at something like orgasm, which is a great example of this.

When you have an orgasm, you get a spurt of dopamine and you feel a ton of pleasure, and then after your orgasm, you actually get a rise in serotonin and you feel incredibly contented. The really interesting thing is that if your serotonin levels are high, you won’t feel horny. So like what will happen is is we know this because if we give someone serotonergic medication, if we boost your serotonin transmission, one of the side effects is anorgasmia and like you can’t have an orgasm. And then you also like aren’t as sexually you’re not as thirsty.

OK, so this one of the side effects is one of the number one reason why my patients stop serotonin, serotonergic medication has to do with the sexual side effects. But if we kind of think about the neurotransmitters involved, right, when we boost serotonin and we also see this in monks who are like super content and peace and they’re not very thirsty. Right. So if we kind of think about it, peace and happiness and contentment in life comes from serotonin.

Dopamine is actually kind of the opposite. And monks aren’t like thrill chasers. Right. They’re able to develop this internal sense of contentment. So dopamine is absolutely a part of the problem. It’s a very important part of the problem. But I think that it’s like one piece in a larger whole.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Does this explain why people’s sex lives typically get worse when they’re comfortable and they’re married?

The Neuroscience of Love and Relationships

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Absolutely. It’s amazing how much science can tell us about the formation of relationships and falling in love that we just don’t apply. So being attracted, falling in love, developing a relationship, these can discreetly be described neuroscientifically. So being attracted actually starts in the thalamus.

So the thalamus is our sensory organ of the brain. It’s kind of a sensory gateway. So it interprets a lot of sensory stimuli. So when I first meet someone, I’m like, oh, they look really good. Right. Looks really fantastic. And I feel physically attracted to them. They smell great. Their laugh is beautiful. So the initial stages of attraction are all about sensory input.

Then what happens now is what’s really interesting. Falling in love is actually very dopaminergic. So this is one of the reasons why I think we’re seeing declining birth rates. This is why it’s like if you talk to people nowadays, like it’s hard to fall in love. Everyone’s dating. Everyone’s going out on dates and stuff. But like falling in love seems harder. And that’s actually because of dopamine.

So what happens is if you look at the phase of falling in love, what that involves is a dopaminergic connection. And a great example of this is like if we’re going to dinner. Right. And I put my hand out, just even hold my hand. And then all we’re doing, we’re gazing into each other’s eyes and we’re just holding hands. And then we feel in love.

And if you kind of think about people in love, like it’s like a dopaminergic high because that’s literally what’s going on. Now, what you see, if you see if you go out on, if you go to a restaurant, you people watch, which I love to do, what you’ll see is two people on a date, both on their phones. So what’s starting to happen is we’re like developing this dopaminergic tolerance through things like devices. We’re actually exhausting our dopamine, which is something that a lot of people don’t understand.

We run out of dopamine because we’re using these devices and then we have none left to fall in love. And then there are later things in the relationship that are more serotonergic in nature where it’s not as much about pleasure, but it’s about connection and all kinds of other stuff.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what does that mean if I’m single and I’m looking to find love?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So if you’re looking to find love, there’s this is where we have to start with diagnosis before solutions. Right. So the first question is, do you have trouble falling in love? Do you? Because a lot of people who are single are like, “Oh, like I don’t feel anything.” Right. I don’t feel a connection. This is something that I’ve heard so much from our community, so much from patients anymore. I just don’t feel a connection. They seem great on paper, but I just don’t feel a connection. There’s actually neuroscience behind how to form a connection too.

But the first question that I ask people is, OK, do you feel like you just can’t feel an emotional connection to people? Then what you actually need to do is reduce your dopamine activation through things like cell phones. We see this also with pornography, where we know that pornography correlates with unhappiness in relationships. And that’s probably also like a dopaminergic effect as opposed to all the other things. There’s a lot of stuff going on there.

So play fewer video games, be on your phone less. And especially before you go on a date, you want to like give your dopamine a chance to recharge. So go on a walk for about one hour before you go on a date. And then you’re literally your brain’s capacity to engage in a date and fall in love and activate those feelings is going to be higher. Also, I’d avoid as much dopaminergic activity as you can before the date, before you see that person. And the more that you do that, the easier it will be for you to actually fall in love.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Am I right in thinking from what you said there that dopamine is required for us to initiate sex and want to have sex? Is that what you’re saying?

The Neuroscience of Sexual Arousal

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yes and no. So dopamine is not actually required to initiate sex. It’s so fascinating. You can like I tried to figure this out, like where where how does love work in the brain? It’s like every circuit is involved. Every neurotransmitter is involved. So dopamine is what gives us the pleasure of orgasm. But initiating sex also for men and women is somewhat different.

So like, you know, women will say like, oh, foreplay is really important. Right. And dudes are like, we don’t need a whole lot of that. And so the question is why. So this is what’s really interesting. So to develop an erection, you actually need activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part of our nervous system that involves rest and digest, which is why we have morning wood. Right. So when dudes wake up in the morning, we have an erection. Why? We’re not like horny in the morning. Well, I don’t think so. Anyway, maybe who knows.

But like if there’s a physiology to it, right, where when we’re relaxed, we’ll develop an erection because the the development of an erection actually involves relaxation. And then the sexual act involves transition to the sympathetic nervous system. Now, this is the fight and flight kind of response. So what we want to do is like we want to be relaxed first and then we start getting sweaty. Our heart rate increases, blood pressure increases.

And this is the other thing that a lot of dudes don’t understand, because our nervous system is a little bit different. So when it comes to women, they have the same thing going on where they need activation of the parasympathetic nervous system before they get activation of the sympathetic nervous system. And then as you activate the parasympathetic nervous system with something like a massage or making out or something like that, some playfulness, relaxation, people really need to feel safe. Then you can sort of graduate to the more explicit sympathetic nervous system sexual act.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This answered so many questions that I had that I’ve never sort of vocalised because I didn’t realise the issue, but I have come to learn that I am most aroused when I’m not stressed in any way. But I don’t just mean stressed as in like, oh, stressed. I mean, if it’s Friday night and I’ve just come back from work and I’ve got home at 9pm after a really, really long day and week, I am not aroused typically. So what tends to happen and like we know this in my relationship and it’s the same for my partner is on like Saturday once I’ve had time to relax and I’ve like chilled down and all those kind of things, then I get aroused.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: And there is this, I think, misunderstanding between men and women because we get aroused in different ways.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Absolutely.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Once again, like we’re seeing so many problems in relationships, so many problems in dating. And what happens is like women will get branded as all kinds of the she’s an ice queen or whatever she won’t put out.

And like there’s a lot of like toxic misogyny there. And then men will also get branded as like, oh, men only want one thing. And they’re so horny, which can somewhat be true. But I think this is the kind of thing where once you understand, you know, how does the male body work? How does the female body work? What are the ways? Because the majority of is actually very similar. So like what separates men and women is less than what we share.

The Science of Attraction on First Dates

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So if you look at, for example, like how to create romantic attraction on a first date, like that’s there’s a lot of good like neuroscience data about things to do. And it’s not surprising at all, because if you look at what’s the trend in dates, everyone is doing the wrong things. Dates are turning into like interviews, right? Where it’s like, I don’t know, I don’t want I need to know if I’m going to waste my time or not.

So we’re going to sit down at a table. “Oh, do you want kids? What do you want this? How much do you like to travel? How many trips per year?” It almost becomes a negotiation. And if you look at the science of how human beings fall in love, it’s completely different.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is that relationship between because as you’re describing that dating process, I just my head, I thought, God, that sounds stressful. And then I thought of how expectation generally creates stress. So whether it’s in the bedroom, having an expectation that we’re going to fuck tonight because it’s Thursday and it’s date night or having an expectation when you go on a date, the impact that that stress has on your dopamine and your ability to be like open and receptive.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, so it’s so interesting. Right. So like I know it sounds kind of weird, but let’s use your example of it’s Thursday and we’re going to fuck tonight. So that can be stressful or like I don’t know if you’ve been in a relationship like this. It can be awesome. Right. So like if I haven’t seen you all week and you haven’t seen me all week and it’s like Thursday and this is the time we’ve set aside and like we’re finally meeting and we both are like, we’re going to fuck tonight, then it’s great. Like, you know what I mean? Or not so much. Or I don’t know. Right.

So like this is the key thing that a lot of people don’t understand. So attraction is not about whether we’re going to have sex tonight or not. It’s that you and I need to be on the same page.

The Role of Shared Experiences in Attraction

DR ALOK KANOJIA: There’s a really fascinating study that looked at first dates on bridges. OK, so one bridge is a stone bridge. One bridge is a rickety wooden bridge that’s wobbly. And what the study found is that when you have a date on a stone bridge. It’s people feel less attracted to each other than when you’re on a rickety bridge. Now, what’s the difference on the rickety bridge? I’m a little bit scared and you’re a little bit scared.

So what what really the foundation of romantic attraction is actually empathic resonance. When I feel the same things that you feel, when we both feel it doesn’t have to be good. It can be negative things. It can be good things. We just need to both be feeling the same thing. That’s what creates attraction.

This is also why people fall in love and rehab, like literally at the rehabs that I worked at. Like we have to like almost have a rule, right? We can’t technically control them, but we’re like, “Hey, no fucking in rehab.” So this is going to we’re going to have and because people will trauma bond, right? We’re sharing all of this deep emotional stuff. You can be honest. You can be authentic. And there’s someone else in the group who’s also honest and authentic. And you feel connected. What is the nature of that connection? It’s shared empathic resonance.

So one of the biggest things that I tell people who are struggling to succeed in dating is like, what are the emotions that you’re bringing to the table? What are the emotions they’re bringing to the table? And if those emotions are not aligned, how can you do some kind of experience that creates an emotion? So this is also where like movies aren’t necessarily good or bad. The question is, do you guys like the same kind of movies? If you all like the same kind of movies and you both laugh a lot, that’s a great thing. You don’t need to talk. You just need empathic resonance. So whatever you can do to get empathic resonance will create a connection.

STEVEN BARTLETT: My brain went in two directions. And the first question that popped into my head was about the role oxytocin is playing in all of that, because I’ve heard about this chemical called oxytocin, which is there to help us bond, et cetera. I remember Simon Sinek saying to me that when like cities have earthquakes, it’s crazy how much the city comes together. And that’s he pointed out oxytocin as much of the reason for that sort of shared struggle. Thinking about your rickety bridge scenario, life sometimes becomes a rickety bridge and people bond because of that. So should I be taking my dates to theme parks, for example, to terrify the shit out of them or what?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Only if you’re equally terrified. OK, so that’s why it’s so important, right, for you to figure out, like, what is something that is going to give us a shared emotional experience?

STEVEN BARTLETT: OK, so you’ve got OK, we’ve got to both have the same emotion.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Absolutely. So if I’m not scared by it and she’s terrified, then that’s generally speaking, not good. Now, there are other versions of that. So like you can demonstrate caring. Right. So if I’m terrified and you take care of me, then that can feel good in a different way. But generally speaking, like what gets us like I’m into this person is that we feel an emotional connection, right? That’s what I’m like into this person. They’re like like what is the nature of the emotional connection to shared emotion?

The Role of Oxytocin in Relationships

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So oxytocin is another phase of the relationship. So oxytocin forms emotional bonds. So when we feel like not this and this is what’s so interesting, there’s different parts of the brain, different neurotransmitters. So oxytocin is what we get from cuddling, what we get from different kinds of touch, something like a massage can form oxytocin, hugging, holding hands, all this kind of stuff triggers oxytocin and oxytocin will form an emotional bond, will alleviate feelings of loneliness. I think one of the reasons that men are so lonely now is because we don’t feel bonded to each other. So oxytocin is more about forming emotional bonds.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the other way my brain went when we’re talking about that is a question I’ve asked a lot of sex therapists I’ve spoken to, which is should we be scheduling sex? This is such a tangent from when we started. But based on what you said, Thursday night, date night, et cetera, should we be scheduling sex? When I ask sex experts this, they go in two different directions. One group says yes. One group is so passionately saying no, because it kills that spontaneity, they say. And that, you know.

The Debate on Scheduling Sex

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Right, so I think this is a good example of like this is exactly what I’m talking about, where we know so much more about physiology and neuroscience now that the right answer to that question depends on the science. So you can schedule sex. It’s just make sure that you do the things. Are you killing some degree of spontaneity? Potentially. And but at the same time, like, so what is it about the spontaneity? Like, let’s let’s tunnel down. I think this is exactly what we need to do. What is it that makes spontaneous sex fun? What is it that makes spontaneous sex fun, Steven?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, gosh, like what makes spontaneous sex fun, it is. Exciting novel, it is.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Hold on, who’s excited by spontaneous sex?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Me.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So is it going to happen if your partner is not equally excited?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I think most couples would say that they much of the reason why their sex life is not great is because it’s became become boring and predictable and samey. So this sort of spontaneity element adds a bit of surprise and intrigue.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: And now hold on a second. OK, great. So this is we’re going to we’re going to figure out an answer when things become samey. So if I watch like what’s your favorite movie, Steven?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Hmm. The Pursuit of Happiness.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: OK, so if I watch Pursuit of Happiness for the first time, how am I going to feel emotionally?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, it was profound the first time I saw it.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Second time you watch it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You know, it’s interesting.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Fourth time, fifth time. So the more that we get exposed to something, what changes within us?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Our emotional, the emotions change, right?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So the first time I do something, emotions are activated when it becomes habitual, emotions no longer become activated. So this is the problem of non-spontaneous or spontaneous sex is it has to do with that emotional empathy, that emotional connection that leads to attraction.

So this is exactly what I’m talking about. When we look at problems in life, should couples do this or should couples not do this? Let’s understand the mechanisms at play. And then if we can activate those mechanisms in the right way, then it’ll work.

So the issue about spontaneity is is like, you know, if you feel like having spontaneous sex, but your partner doesn’t, that’s not going to work because you all aren’t emotionally. I mean, they can accommodate you and that can be fine. But generally speaking, what spontaneity adds is more of that emotional connection. So when I work with patients who are exhibitionistic, right, so like why do they like exhibitionism?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s exhibitionism?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Having sex in public places.

STEVEN BARTLETT: OK, so it’s a kind of fetish, right?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Can get you into trouble. That’s sometimes how they end up in my office. But so what if you really look at it like what what it’s about is emotional resonance. So if I’m having sex in a public place, that’s going to activate me emotionally in some way. It’s going to activate my partner emotionally in the same way. That’s why we do it. So it all comes down to emotional resonance.

So the second thing is that if you’re going to have scheduled sex, so like spontaneous is great. But if you’re going to have scheduled sex, that’s still fine, too. It doesn’t kill the spark. You just need to figure out how to activate it. Right. So this is where activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. Do something like, you know, give a massage or even like the sex should come after some kind of emotional resonance. Let’s go out and watch a movie together or let’s do something that we both find emotionally engaging. Then once you’re emotionally connected, the sex will be it’ll be a lot easier.

The Challenges of Trying for a Baby

STEVEN BARTLETT: I have a friend who has been trying for a baby. I’m trying for a baby as well, by the way, but this is not about me. It’s not me like asking for a friend. He lives in America and he has just had the news that he’s having a baby. Very, very happy. And I saw him recently and I was asking him about the process of, you know, timing the sex around your partner’s cycle. And they’ve gone for, I think, three years trying to have a baby. So it got increasingly more difficult.

All of the complicated emotions he was saying to me, he was like, “Honestly, bro, like sometimes you’re having to have sex like three or four times a day.” And I was like, how do you keep an erect? Like when it becomes the job in that in that context, you’re doing it because you need to try and hit this egg. How did you arouse yourself? And he was like, “No, I couldn’t.” He was like, “I really struggled. I’d lose my erection all the time.” And he literally said to me, “Yeah, he was he was having sex 40, 50 times a month and he was basically being ordered to have sex with her. Like these are the five days you better have sex.”

You know, that that is maybe the extreme case of total dissipation of emotional resonance as it relates to sex. Yeah. And the other case, the other end of that poll would be pursuing someone for the first time, I guess, a stranger for the first time. And I guess the job for people in their relationships is how do you keep that emotional resonance?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So I think that that’s that’s exactly the kind of question. And I think the first thing is that’s half the answer, is that a lot of people don’t realize. So like when people get bored sexually in a relationship. Right.

Maintaining a Healthy Sex Life in Long-Term Relationships

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So we have two populations of people. Some people will get married and they’ll continue to have healthy sex lives like well into their 70s. Like one of the craziest things I remember encountering in med school was like, you know, when I meet a 70 year old, I don’t think about sexual health counseling. And it’s one of the biggest mistakes we make as doctors.

Like, you know, when you have these retirement communities and stuff, no one’s worried about getting pregnant. You can get outbreaks of like syphilis and gonorrhea that’ll tear through the community like like covid. Like it’s crazy. Like we just don’t. But the sexual desire doesn’t necessarily decrease with age. I know it’s great, but we you know, so then the question becomes, OK, how do you maintain a healthy, sexy, sexual relationship over time?

So at the very beginning, there are things like ophthalmic inputs. Right. So what you see arouses you. There is some amount of novelty, which is also like new emotions. Right. So then the 10th time we watch the same movie, our emotional connection is less to the movie. But then this is also how couples have sex over successfully over time is that they do have emotional connections. So as you continue to bond with your partner over the new experiences that your relationship has.

So I think having kids is a great example where like having kids will destroy your sex drive for some amount of time. They say what, two years or something on average. But even within that, it’s amazing because you’ll find these moments where like you sort of forget, right, like how good sex with your partner is. And then the stars align and you have sex and it’s actually like incredibly fantastic. It’s like, “Oh, we should do that more.” Right.

Like that’s that’s like what kind of starts to happen. So over time, what we want to do is really lean into still that shared emotional connection. Oh, my God, I had such a like I can’t believe that our kids like finally like they’re the fever’s gone. They’re relaxing. We’re going to sleep. And then at like 2 a.m., you’re going to wake up and you’re you know, it’s going to be great. Right. But like and so as long as you maintain that bond, it’s totally fine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And when we think about the mechanisms in neuroscience that drive our behavior, once we’re in a relationship and even if it’s a platonic relationship, how do we. Keep the relationship thriving, like how do we what are the mechanisms I need to be aware of in the brain and in neuroscience that are going to enable my relationship to be strong and thriving, whether it’s platonic or romantic, you know, because we talk about loneliness a lot and there’s so many people that are struggling with loneliness and it’s and you know, the reasons that we often attribute to that are the way we’re living our lives or we’re behind screens or social media.

But, you know, it was really illuminating to me that you were able to point to a mechanism in smartphones and social media that is actually inhibiting us forming relationships. And I wondered if the same mechanisms might inhibit us keeping the relationships that we have.

The Impact of Technology on Relationships

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, so I think there are so many things that are going on there. So one is like how is technology negatively impacting our relationships? And the second is how do you maintain a healthy relationship over time? There’s like two different things that make sense, like what gets in the way and how do you how do you keep your tire nice and full of air versus how do you fix it if a nail punctures it?

So let’s start with like what technology is doing. So this is what technology is basically doing to our social connections. There is a whole scale social skills atrophy and a deconditioning of certain parts of the brain when we use technology. The first thing to understand about the brain is a beautiful thing about the human body. Inanimate objects, the more you use them, the worse they get. But the moment that you have biology, the human brain doesn’t wear out, it rusts.

So inactivity of the human brain is actually what causes problems. OK, that’s number one. So we can look at studies of like dementia prevention. And what we know is that encouraging neuroplasticity through things like learning how to play the piano at the age of 60 will protect us from dementia. So we need to utilize our brain to make it the strongest. There’s also where you can look at the physical body. Right. So when I when I think about what causes muscle atrophy and what causes muscle growth, the more I use my muscles, the more they grow, the more you use your brain, the more it grows.

So when we look at connections, if you actually look at human communication, words or maybe I would say 25 to 50 percent of communication at most. So you can walk into a room and without even hearing a single thing that said, you can know there’s tension in the air. Something is wrong. You can even like I remember when I was a kid, I used to get bullied a lot. Right. And I would walk into a room and I immediately knew that they were making fun of me. Like all the conversation would stop and everyone would look like one person would look at me. I’d see alarm in their face. They would also everyone else would see the alarm in their face and they’d look over and they’d see me and everyone would stop talking. I know I’m being made fun of.

So body language, tone, volume. This is really interesting. So there are even video game companies that are starting to ban people over voice comps. So how do you know if someone is toxically communicating or not? What we used to do is use like words. Right. So if you say some kind of racial slur in chat, like if you type it out, the game knows to scan for that. And then people will start to get around that. They’ll use an at sign instead of an A. So now what they’re doing over voice comms is measuring tone.

So depending on the volume of what you’re saying, right, like that’s how they’re actually detecting toxicity, because that’s where toxicity exists. It’s not, “Oh, hey, Steven, you’re a real loser. I really dislike you.” It’s like, “Steven, bro, you’re such a loser, man. Oh, my God.” And even if I say that, right, it’s not negative at all, even though I’m using negative words is another quick aside.

So men are really specific for using the negative expression of a positive affection. So it’s something that’s different about men. So what we’ll do is we’ll actually say negative things to a friend of ours to express approval. Like when someone gets engaged or gets married, it’s like, “Oh, man, like it’s the old ball and chain. We’re going to lose you. You’re whipped.” But everyone’s smiling. Everyone’s congratulating you. But we just express it in a negative way.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So so much of our communication is tone, is body language, is volume. Now what’s happening is everyone is texting. So then the brain does something very that it’s designed to do. It’s like, hey, we’re not using this thing. Let’s lose it. So if you don’t speak a language, our brain forgets it. So as you this is what a lot of people don’t realize is that there’s a rise in social anxiety. Why is there a rise in social anxiety?

It’s because the parts of our brain that reassure us in social situations are starting to atrophy. So when we don’t pay attention to body language, when we don’t pay attention to tone, those parts of the brain shut off. And then when I go into a social situation, those parts of the brain are inactive, so they can’t reassure me. Now what happens is I go to a party that I was invited to or I go to dinner with my friends that I was invited to. I’m kind of sitting at the end of the table. No one’s really talking to me. And I’m like, oh, like I really shouldn’t be here. These people just invited me out of politeness. They don’t really care about me. But if your brain is functioning well, you’re able to read all of this nonverbal communication that’s reassuring.

So when it comes to platonic friends and why this is hard, we are actually seeing a lot of the social skills, a lot of these brain regions that allow us to form connections, allow us to feel reassured, allow us to feel safe. Right now, I kind of feel like, oh, my friends are inviting me, but I’m bothering them by going like all these kinds of things we’re seeing more and more of.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you hopeful about generations that have been connected from birth?

Hope for Future Generations

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. So so I think that even though things are problematic, right, we’re talking about how things are negative and social anxiety is increasing and suicidal suicidality is increasing. I’m very optimistic because I think we have all the answers. Like, that’s what’s so cool. Like, we have a problem, but we haven’t been addressing it directly, even between the last time I was here. And now we’ve learned so much more. People are taking social stuff more seriously.

The surgeon general of the United States released like this this bulletin on like the loneliness epidemic. Right. So even like the medical establishment is starting to see loneliness is a problem that we need to target. Half of the problems that we see in the world today is because we haven’t tried to fix them. They kind of crept up on us. Things like video game addiction, things like loneliness. Now we see, OK, this is a big problem. So let’s start devoting resources to it. Let’s understand what’s going on. And we see this a lot, like even in our community, like where we start targeting a problem and people do better. The only reason we’re losing the war is because we haven’t been fighting back.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why haven’t we been fighting back?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Technologies must play a pretty significant role in this. I think we were slow. We’re really good at creating things without understanding what they will do to us. Because the impact doesn’t show its face for a couple of decades.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Absolutely.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: And there’s there’s an even more insidious thing, which is right now the since it’s isolation, like since we’re seeing more isolation, we don’t see the impact because literally these people are staying home. So the majority of, you know, young men, for example, like won’t ever go to a therapist, which is why we can’t help them with their problems. They won’t share their problems with other people because, first of all, they don’t know how to. And secondly, they don’t even know what they’re feeling so that they just like feel like they’re a loser. So what we’ve started to see is that these problems have been going on for about 10, 20 years, but they’re now reaching a critical point where like we’re now noticing what’s going on. But this has been going on for a while.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are people becoming more narcissistic?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yes, they are.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, absolutely. And what impact is that having?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: I don’t even know where to start. Like, so I think it’s affecting our relationships. It’s affecting our happiness. It’s affecting our professional ability.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was thinking, is social media making us more narcissistic than driving us to be more lonely? And if so, how do we first define the word narcissism in this context?

Understanding Narcissism and Ego

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, so I’m going to lean into kind of a more yogic definition. So we have this this word in Sanskrit called ahamkara and ahamkara means ego. So ahamkara is your sense of self. I am dot, dot, dot. OK, so I am tall. I’m short. I’m doctor. I’m father. I am winner. I’m loser. The first thing to understand about ego is that it is not a real thing. It is an abstraction.

So if you were to look at me and you say, if I if I say I am a doctor, I know this sounds kind of like kind of a weird question, but is that true? Like what makes me a doctor? I can’t biopsy myself and find doctor.

The Nature of Ego and Identity

DR ALOK KANOJIA: You can’t find doctor anywhere within me. Doctor is I have a piece of paper on a wall. That’s what makes me a doctor. I have a license to practice medicine. That’s what makes me a doctor. It’s an abstraction. So it’s not like a truth. It’s like a societal shared delusion that we all agree that I’m a doctor. That’s why I’m a doctor. OK, and does that make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: OK, so this is the ego. Now, what we also know is that from studies on narcissism, that narcissism has its roots in insecurity. So if you think about someone who’s like egotistical and confident like Steven, I’m sure you know both. What’s the difference between the two?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Confidence feels more secure and egotisticalness feels more insecure.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Absolutely. Where does a confident person’s esteem come from?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Inside.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Where does a egotistical esteem come from?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Beautiful.

The Impact of Social Media on Self-Perception

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So this is what social media is doing. Social media and technology is externalizing our perception. So if I think about it, like think about a couple thousand years ago, what was my mind focused on? So I would go out to hunt. I’m looking for an animal. I shoot a deer and then I walk three hours back. So for some amount of time, my mind is paying attention to the external environment. Maybe I’m talking with the people that I’m hunting with. But what is there to say? Like I can’t talk to them for 10 hours a day. There’s no substance. There’s no news. Right. We’re like this tribal community.

So if you really look at the history of humanity, our perception has been internally focused at least 50 percent of the time. Literally what we are paying attention to is our own thoughts, our own feelings, the voices, the desires, the drives that come within us.

What technology has done is whole scale externalize our perception. And this is even where, like, you know, I used to be like an efficiency junkie. And so when I was in med school, I was going to be like you, Steven, and I was going to be super efficient. I was going to be super successful. So I was like listening to a podcast in the morning about self-help. I was going to listen to lectures on my way to the subway. I was going to read on the way on the subway. I was going to listen to a lecture on my way to the classroom, pay attention in the classroom, then do some questions like some test questions, whatever.

So my mind was constantly outside of me. Social media makes this even worse because now we’re doom scrolling. We’re looking at what other people are doing. So we are starting to exist outside of ourselves. Once we exist outside of ourselves, all of our steam comes from the outside world, because that’s where we’re spending our time. So what’s happening is as we become more externalized, we are becoming insecure because where does confidence really come from? It doesn’t come from inside.

The Paradox of Success and Confidence

DR ALOK KANOJIA: There’s a big mistake a lot of people don’t realize, which is. If you do really well. And you don’t believe in yourself, you don’t become secure. A lot of people think that becoming secure is about being successful, that’s not the case. If you’re really successful, you don’t end up with security. You end up with imposter syndrome.

So I went to Tufts for medical school and I did my residency training at Harvard. And what I saw is that the more successful you become, that increases the rate of imposter syndrome. There’s way more imposter syndrome at Harvard than there is at the University of Texas. There’s way more imposter syndrome at a place like Goldman Sachs than there is at Bank of America. So lots of success actually creates this idea that I don’t really know if I can do this. Everyone else is so much better than me. So we see actually lots of success leads to imposter syndrome.

Confidence doesn’t come from success. It comes from surviving failure. It’s also far more internal, so it’s not something that anyone else gives you. It’s like when you believe in yourself, then you’re confident. And then the beautiful thing is that once you believe in yourself, then other people can think whatever they want to about you. The way that you receive criticism, if you if you criticize an egotistical person, they will argue with you and convince you that you’re wrong and call you stupid. Whereas if you’re confident someone says, “Hey, you’re an idiot,” I can say, “OK, help me understand why. Like I could be an idiot. Help me understand.” Right.

So this is where what social media is doing is externalizing our perceptions, building our ego. We’re so focused on the judgment of other people. I see the amount of body like subtle, low level body dysmorphia that I see in young women is skyrocketing. And I have a buddy who’s a plastic surgeon at Yale, and he’s just stunned by you. You have now young women in their twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven who are getting plastic surgery like on a yearly basis, like small amounts of Botox injections or lip fillers or like whatever.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Men, too.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Men, too. So that’s also the other great equality thing we’re seeing is body dysmorphia has a meteoric rise within men. This is another situation where it used to be primarily a female diagnosis that’s evening out real quick. So social media is making us focus on our external appearance. We lose our connection to ourselves. And then once we lose our connection to ourselves, we lose the capacity to gain confidence.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how does this then result in loneliness on a societal level?

The Connection Between Social Media and Loneliness

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So many different things. So the first reason it makes us lonely. So this is I’ve also seen the highest level of. Being around people and being lonely. So I see so many people who have jobs, even have girlfriends, boyfriends, have friends, and they feel so incredibly lonely.

So what happens when we. Are externally focused, right, so if I if I’m lonely, like I need to put myself out there, so what I’m going to do is transform myself, and this is where a lot of it’s so interesting because a lot of the guidance we give people helps in some way, but actually worsens the problem. So if I’m lonely, I’m going to focus on my social skills, I’m going to get a good haircut, I’m going to learn how to dress, I’m going to start working out, I’m going to become professionally successful. And now I’ve I’ve become something that I can be proud of.

And now that I’ve become something that I can be proud of, I’m going to go interact with other people and look at they’re going to love me because now I’m sexy and I’m successful and I’m I know how to talk to people and I’m going to talk to them in this way and I’m going to do eye contact and I’m going to do all of the things. So you take an accent to connect with you, make you like me, right? See, now you’re now you’re laughing. So now I feel OK because now I know Steven’s laughing. He likes me. I’m likable.

So what we actually do is we create a false version of ourselves for people to love. And that’s what really screws us, because they don’t fall in love with us. They don’t like us. They don’t like the broken, pathetic kid that I used to be. They like this glossy, polished version. And that creates a fundamental loneliness, even though you can be dating.

It’s so interesting because I’ll work with influencers like we have a creator coaching program and like it’s so hard for influencers today because who is falling? Are you falling in love with the influencer or are you falling in love with Diary of a CEO host or are you falling in love with Stephen? Right. Is it Dr. K or is it Alok?

So this is what’s really paradoxical is that we think that forming all of these connections will help our loneliness, where oftentimes it creates the opposite effect, where now what they love is a version of me, not the real me. And now the problem is they love this polished version. What happens if I show them the ugly version? They won’t accept me. I can never show it to them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is what I noticed in my own life. I noticed that before 25, I was a total failure with women. And before 25, the real defining characteristic of that chapter of my life was. All the external stuff like the Louis Vuitton bag, the champagne bottles in the nightclub, they’re really trying really, really hard to convince them. And then after 25, I had much more success with women. And that chapter of my life can be characterized by knowing who I was and being cool with it.

All the stuff seemed to fall away, like all the external stuff seemed to fall away. And for some reason, I talked to my friends who are struggling with dating at the moment about this, just to see if it can help them in any way. The chapter of my life where I was reading those books, the like pick up artistry books, and I was trying really hard, was my most unsuccessful. But the phase after where I stopped chasing so much, the only way I can describe it is there’s like a thousand little micro things in me that changed, whether it’s my posture, the way that I I don’t know what it was, but for me, it’s that season of insecurity and then the season of confidence. And I’m just throwing that out there because it kind of overlaps with what you were saying about the influences. And when you’re trying too hard, you’re actually struggling the most today. And and if you see this in your practice.

Understanding Relationship Success

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Now, hold on a second. So let’s define success. So when you were doing Louis Vuitton bags and pre-25, where are you going on dates?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was going to the club every like two times a week with like and ordering as much champagne as I could to get people to come to my table and like to impress the girls that were at my table and stuff.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Did it work?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, all the girls that I wanted never wanted me back. So they’re like four girls that I really pursued. I could name them, but I probably shouldn’t. I could never get them to be in a relationship with me like they wouldn’t. I would have like short term success and then they would never.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: There we go. So this is really important, right? So this goes back to what we were saying. Short term success is thalamic, right? So that’s sensory perception. So you could never get into a relationship. So this is like perfect, right? So let’s understand. So champagne will get you to come to get them to come to the table. Oh, who’s this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Bring back the apartment. Right. And you can get somewhere. But think about where you were emotionally and where they were emotionally. You were like, oh, please, please, please. Right. And there that’s not where they are emotionally. So it’s doomed to failure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. So like I was just using that because it’s like a prime, prime example.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: And then what happens is you’re confident. So you’re like meeting them where they’re at. You’re a little bit confident. Hopefully they’re a little bit confident. You form a connection and just doing a little bit of math. It sounds like you’ve been dating your current girlfriend for a couple of years now. It sounds like it didn’t take long from you being confident to, like, find someone that you’ve been with.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Exactly right. I’ve been with her for almost six years.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. Yeah. Like like it’s like so easy once you do it right. You kind of get locked down real quick. Right. And same thing happened with me. So what a couple of things. So first is like this just goes back to once again, we can take your test case with the neuroscience of how to fall in love and it maps on. And like that’s the beauty of science is that it’s true.

Now, I even forget. So you were talking about security and insecurity. So now you said something beautiful, which is like a thousand different microcosm, microcosmic things in here, right, like microscopic little tiny little things that you do within you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I say that because when I read the book on how to pick up women, it would give you these little games, these little tricks you could do. And even if I did those, even if I acted, there was still something going on, which meant these women didn’t want to be with me, like in a relationship. I could I could pull quote unquote pull them. I could get them on, you know, short term, but I couldn’t get them to be with me.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, right.

The Power of Authenticity in Relationships and Leadership

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So and I think that’s because human beings are incredibly empathic. So what you feel on the inside is what other people resonate with. So even if we look at this podcast, why is this podcast so successful, Steven? It’s because you are authentic. It’s because you’re genuinely interested in the moment that you become genuinely interested. Everyone in the audience is going to become genuinely interested.

So this is what’s really crazy that a lot of people don’t understand. Everyone is trying to manipulate other human beings into doing what you want. I want this person to fall in love with me. If you want to be a leader, if you want other people to be with you, the most important thing is authenticity. There are studies about this, that if you look at like how people in the workplace rank leadership, authenticity is at the top of the list. So authenticity and the ability to navigate negative challenges. These are the two most important things to like be a leader. If you look at studies of psychology.

So when you’re talking about these thousand microscopic things that you do, that’s exactly what I do in my work, right? It’s helping people. It’s not solving the problem outside of you. It’s solving the problem in here. And once you know how the instrument works, people will flock to you. This is what charisma actually is.

Charisma is like authenticity and the confidence to face hard times. If you have these two things, when you walk into a room, people will like stop what they’re doing and just like look at you. It changes the way that you conduct yourself. Right.

So we even know that there’s this this discipline called psycho neuroimmunology. When you believe something in your mind, it affects your brain. When it affects your brain, it affects your whole immune system. It affects your physiology. And other people pick up on that. So you have to solve internally first, like the more internally solved you are, like, like, yeah, it’s so fucking true.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I say this as well from a position of both leadership, but also being a founder of companies who appoints leaders. And if I think back over the last 10 years, every single leader that I’ve appointed a CEO or something in the C-suite who has then struggled was not being themselves.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Absolutely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I just and it’s so three cases in my brain right now of leaders who I appointed over the last 10 years, these companies and three, all three of them failed. And if I can — if I could articulate exactly why they failed, it was because they were trying to be what they thought a leader was and they weren’t being themselves. And people can see it.

Like the thing I said about the thousand little micro expressions that you can’t control that just show up invisibly when you are when you feel a certain way inside. That’s exactly what those three leaders that come to mind didn’t understand was I watching them do the presentation to the team was thinking, God, that person’s not being themselves and they’re trying to be a leader. And if I know I bet everyone else in this bloody room can feel it, too. And then I’ve seen the opposite as well, where leaders have been tremendously successful. And you just know that this person that I’m experiencing right now is who they are.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So that’s the crux of it. Right. So I think that the challenge right now is everyone is looking to become something that they’re not, as opposed to really understanding who you are, the good and the bad.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Easier said than done, though, isn’t it in the world we live in?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Well, that’s well, that’s because we don’t know how to do it. I mean, until now, we don’t know how to do it properly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do we do it?

Understanding and Processing Emotions

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So I think there are a couple of core things that we have to start doing. So the first is that you have to become less alexithymic. So alexithymia, I don’t know, I don’t remember if we’ve talked about this before, but alexithymia is colorblindness to your internal emotional state. So you have to know what you are feeling basically at all times.

Our emotions are our primary source of motivation. So and our emotions will also like just because we are numb to our emotions doesn’t mean that our emotions don’t act. So we see this a lot with technology where technology suppresses your internal emotional state. You don’t know what you’re feeling, but like this is crazy, like just because you don’t, you’re not aware of your anxiety, doesn’t mean that like, it’s not like your anxiety portion of your brain shuts off.

And you’ll, if you’re worried about this, there are a couple of really interesting signs. So one thing that’s a really interesting sign of suppressed emotion is what happens when nothing else is going on. So a lot of us are addicted to this external world. I need to be doom scrolling. I need to be doing social media. I need to be productive. I need to be listening to a podcast. We can’t sit with ourselves. So if you, when you go to bed at night, can you just fall asleep naturally? Or what happens a lot is suppressed emotions start to come out when we sleep.

And this is the big problem is the more technology we use that we get into this weird situation where another good place that emotions come out is during dreams. So we do a lot of our emotional processing when we sleep. Now, the big problem that we’re seeing nowadays, this is kind of a random aside, is that normally the human being processes emotions throughout the day for about 16 hours. And then whatever’s left over at night gets processed while we sleep. We have dreams and things like that.

Now what’s happening is we do zero emotional processing through the day. And so our brain can’t really make any emotional progress because it has all this work that’s been built up. We’ve been suppressing emotions, suppressing emotions, suppressing emotions.

And in my case, when I was like addicted to video games, I had to play until the state of absolute exhaustion because if I went to bed, all of these thoughts will come up. I saw this hilarious meme about, we have during the day, we’re sitting upright. So all of our anxiety is at the bottom of our feet. And when we lay down like a liquid, it enters our brain.

So if you’re someone who has like a lot of negative emotion when you go to bed at night, that is a signal that you were suppressing too much emotion during the day.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so you’re talking about me to some degree here. Now I wouldn’t ever categorize the emotion I experience at night as negative always. Sometimes it is a little bit negative, but it’s typically not negative, it’s just loud. So what I end up doing is I end up watching YouTube until I fall asleep or watching some serial killer thing until I fall asleep. And my partner, she’s the opposite. You know, she’s a bit of a yogi. She can just, if she’s on the pillow for three minutes, she is.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Brilliant, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: She’s snoring. I’m so jealous of it.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, and so what you need to do is, so if you have loud emotions, so what’s an example if it’s not negative, but it’s loud? I love the way you said that, by the way.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s just, it’s me like thinking about something in the company or one of the businesses and going, okay, this is the solution. Now I finally figured out the solution and I need to write this memo and I need to blah, blah, blah.

The Power of the Subconscious Mind

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, so I think that this is, it makes a lot of sense. So whatever is built up throughout the day, whenever your brain gets idle time, it will process. So this is also something that I think a lot of people don’t realize. We’ve stopped harnessing the power of our subconscious mind. So if you look at, we’re all like logical, right? We’re like, let’s do analysis, let’s do this. If you really look at the source of human brilliance, it’s never logical.

So logic is something that we use to feed our subconscious mind or our unconscious mind data. And then our unconscious mind plays around with it and then actually creates a motivational change. So when I work with people who are addicted to substances or I worked with someone recently who had a relationship that wasn’t going on very well, right? And so what happens is we’re like, I don’t know what to do. Should I break up? Should I not break up? You don’t know what the answer is. And then what happens is you’re like, okay, let me break up with them. And then you haven’t really worked through it. So when you break up with them, now I feel alone. Oh, maybe they’ll take me back. I’m gonna text them anyway. And then we see this ping ponging.

So also if you’re ping ponging in life, your unconscious mind is not functioning the way that it’s supposed to. If you think about a healthy breakup, what happens is you wake up one day and you’re like, enough is enough. I’m done. Think about that for a second. Where does that resolve come from? Why didn’t you wake up with it the day before or the week before or the month before?

I see this a lot in addiction psychiatry too where one day like after 14 years of alcohol addiction, enough is enough and I’m done. And that’s what happens with most people. They’ll do it cold turkey, like at some random time. But what’s going on is there’s a lot of unconscious work that your brain is doing that then creates resolve. And what we’re starting to do is we’re not allowing our brains to do that because we’re so occupied in the external world. We don’t experience our emotions. And if we don’t process our emotions during the daytime, then at night, which is where the majority of learning and memory take place, that’s when we have consolidation of memory.

But if you have a bunch of piled up emotions, your brain can’t learn from your mistakes. So what we really need to do is be more aware of our emotions during the day and do some amount of emotional processing during the day. That’ll unlock or free your brain up to do all of this other stuff at night.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How?

Techniques for Emotional Processing

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Great question. So I think this is where it gets kind of technical. So the first thing that I would say for men especially is that we experience a lot more emotion in our bodies than is generally psychiatrically accepted. We’re seeing some changes of this.

So one really good example of this, about 10 years ago, so I’m kind of interested in evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine. So someone that I met said, “Hey, have you ever heard of tapping?” And I was like, what is this? And it’s something called the emotional freedom technique. And what they told me is that if someone has trauma, you can tap on them, you can become a tapper, and there’s this particular way to do it. And you tap on certain parts of their body, and it releases the trauma. So I was like, what BS is this? This sounds like complete BS.

Now, over the last decade, there have been several studies on it. There was recently a meta-analysis that came out that showed that tapping is actually pretty effective for treating trauma. And I was like, what the hell is this? This is wild.

So even if we don’t understand what the mechanism is, you can study whether people’s trauma gets better or not. But I think this is just one of the many things that we’ve learned about emotions existing within the body. This is also a big problem that I see right now in our mental health system, is the majority of therapists have no training in the physical body. But if we think about anger releases adrenaline, affects blood pressure, affects heart rate, affects the gut, peristalsis.

So a lot of our emotions are physical. So the first thing that you’ve gotta do if you’re a dude and you don’t understand what you’re feeling is pay attention to your physical body. So do you feel tension? Do you feel a tightness in the chest?

And men will actually use very good emotional language as long as it relates to being physical. So I’ll tell you, Steven, man, this girl called me and it was like she kicked me in the nuts. Now, what does that mean? What is that emotionally?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Like, I don’t know, you don’t know, but we both know what we’re talking about.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: We know what it’s like, oh my God, dude, I know it sucks, dude. It sucks when they kick you in the nuts. Oh my God, dude, it was like a punch to the gut. Oh my God, dude. Like, you know, when we have issues of lack of self-esteem, it’s like small penises, right? I feel like my penis is small. It’s like emasculate. Like all of these negative emotions, we use physicality. We use the language of physicality.

Second thing that you should do is use your physical body. So there’s all kinds of things that you can do. So I think deep breathing is a really fantastic thing that you can do. Exercise is really great. I mean, there are tons of people that I’ve worked with who are like therapy didn’t work for me, but after a breakup, lift, bro. Like we hear this advice and we in the medical community have been so arrogant because we’ve said, oh no, you should go to talk therapy. Like, you’re wrong. Lifting didn’t work for you. What you should do is go to talk therapy. That’s not the case.

When this is working for people, we should pay attention to it. And the more that we learn about science, the more we should tap into our body. So the first thing that I would say is anytime you’re feeling uncomfortable, where is that physical discomfort? There’s actually a really fascinating study that has mapped each emotion, up to 100 emotions to different schemas in the body.

So anger is like in the chest. Sadness is like in the chest and in the stomach. Worry is in the brain and in the stomach. So you can actually map out each emotion to a physical sensation. The cool thing is that once you detect the emotion, if you adjust that physical sensation, you will mentally get better. There’s a really great example of this. If you clench your right fist, you will feel angry. And if you clench your left fist, what do you feel when you clench your left fist?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Let’s see. It’s like, I don’t know, it feels a bit like a release. I don’t know.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, so it’s really fascinating.

The Connection Between Physical Actions and Emotions

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So there’s actually studies on this that show that clenching your right fist activates your left hemisphere and will lead to anger. Clenching your, oh sorry, clenching your right fist. Clenching your left fist will actually calm you down. It can sometimes lead to like sadness. But there are even like all kinds of, because everything in the body is reciprocal. Everything is like a circuit. So you can activate it in one way, like your mind affects your body and your body affects your mind.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Even if your dominant hand is your left hand?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: We don’t know. Okay. So I think these are usually done on right-handed people, so there may be some variance. But the key thing still remains that there’s one technique that I’ll do with patients in my office when they’re about to have a panic attack, if we’re doing like some deep trauma stuff and they’re getting physiologically activated, I will tell them to run as fast as they can for 60 seconds.

So when you run really, really fast for 60 seconds, like exercise your heart out, like someone is chasing you, like you’re being chased by a monster. So what happens is that when we have a very, very high activation of our sympathetic nervous system, our fight or flight response, it automatically kicks in the parasympathetic nervous system when we’re done. So when someone is stuck in an anxiety state, and that’s like a feeding cycle, so I feel anxious, now my heart rate is elevated, now adrenaline gets released. Adrenaline travels to my brain and makes me feel more anxious. I have more anxious thoughts. So this becomes a cycle. How do you break the cycle? You actually activate the sympathetic nervous system so hard that the body has to kick in with the parasympathetic nervous system.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which must be quite hard because when people are struggling, they typically have lower motivation, right?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. The game’s harder. So that’s why, so you can do the 60 second run, like literally I used to have an office that was on Commonwealth Avenue, and I would walk outside with my patients and we would run as fast as we can, or do as many pushups as you can.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So the really crazy thing is that when we try to control our emotions by calming ourselves down, like if you tell someone who’s pissed, hey, calm down, what happens?

STEVEN BARTLETT: They don’t get calm, yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Not at all.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It triggers them.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Right, so you need to do the opposite. Sometimes you need to lean into whatever emotion you’re feeling, activate your physiology, and it’ll calm your emotions down.

The Role of Yoga in Mental Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: I haven’t read the book, but I loved the title of the book, “The Body Keeps the Score.” And I watched a summary of that book. And one of the things it talks about in the book is the role of yoga as one of the things that really helps people with certain mental health predicaments. And I was wondering if that sort of overlaps with what you’re saying here. I don’t do yoga, but a lot of people that do almost see it as a form of therapy. And it seems that there’s been lots of research on yoga as a way to help with our stress, our mental health, with depression, anxiety, and all of these kinds of things. What’s your thoughts on yoga?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: I think it’s great. So I was a very serious student of yoga for about seven years. I’ve recently reinvigorated my yogic practice. I think yoga is absolutely transformative for trauma. I think it can achieve health outcomes that we’re not really fully aware of. And the simple reason for that is you have to look at the studies on yoga.

So usually when we do a scientific study, we wanna be very careful from a scientific protocol standpoint. So we’re gonna take two groups of people, 200 people. So group number one is 100, group number two is 100. We’re gonna teach 100 people yoga, and then we’re gonna measure what happens after 12 weeks. The other 100 people are gonna do something like exercise. So the key thing that we have to understand about studies on yoga is we’re taking novices and we’re teaching them yoga. There’s still novices at the end of the study, and we see some health benefits. There are very few studies on yogis, right?

There are a lot of studies on yoga, but a yogi is very different from yoga. So when you become an expert in yoga, so I do this work myself, and I teach my patients this kind of stuff. So you learn a lot about the way that your mind functions. I think there are a lot of correlations with CBT, but yoga will teach us, for example, about our ego.

And so how do you know if your mind is malfunctioning or not? So like you were saying before when we were talking, you mentioned how do I know if I’m wrong or my partner’s wrong, right? How do you know if your mind is functioning properly? One of the biggest problems in the world today is that your mind comes up with conclusions. How do you know if your conclusion is right or wrong? Sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong. And we just assume that there’s no way of knowing the difference. That’s not true.

So if your mind is operating in a pure way that’s free from cognitive bias, which we also know scientifically, then your mind will come up with the right conclusions. So the question is, how do we remove cognitive bias from the mind? That’s what the discipline of yoga teaches us. So two things to consider if you wanna know whether your mind is thinking clearly or not.

First of all, what emotions are you feeling? And if you say, I’m logical right now, I don’t feel any emotion, that is factually incorrect. There is no point, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, blood is flowing to the emotional circuits of your brain. You are never not feeling any emotion.

So the first thing we need to do is understand, yoga teaches us this, what is the emotional impact of our thoughts? The second big thing is what is the ego saying? So if your ego is active, your ego will create cognitive biases. I feel insecure. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna do some mental gymnastics to put someone else down and elevate myself. Now what you’re doing is mental gymnastics. You’re adding a cognitive bias to help yourself feel better.

So yoga from a physiologic level will calm down or balance our nervous system. It can do things like change our respiratory rate. About 18 minutes of yoga practice is what it takes to shut down cortisol production in our brain. So we know that cortisol will then affect all kinds of things. So yoga works on the physiologic level. It absolutely trains us mentally. So yoga I think is the most robust system of mental training that exists in the world. So how do you control your desires? How do you control your perceptions? All that kind of stuff. There’s a lot of good trauma healing that can happen in yoga, which has to do with a slightly different concept. So I think yoga is incredibly useful and incredibly powerful.

The Impact of Trauma on Goal Achievement

STEVEN BARTLETT: So let’s talk about trauma healing. I was watching something when you were talking about how people who have experienced trauma almost operate in defense in their lives. And earlier on we were saying that people have these stories they’ve told themselves. I’m lazy, I’m this, I’m that. But when I heard you talk so articulately about how trauma makes us play life in defense, it made me understand maybe a lot of people that I know in my life that aren’t overtly motivated by things like discipline. What have we got to understand about the nature of trauma and the impact it has on us as it relates to our ability to show up and achieve our goals?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Beautiful question. So this was like one of the things that when I discovered this, it was transformative for me and transformative for my patients. So see people who, there are two kinds of people in life. There are people who like have plans and goals and work towards those goals. They’re like, I’m gonna get up today and I’m gonna like advance towards my goals. I wanna accomplish this in life. I’m gonna get better at this.

And then there are the rest of us who are like, I don’t know how these people do it. Like I get up today and I struggle. I use a lot of willpower. I try to create habits. I’m trying to be like these people who are productive. But my default state, if you let me do what I wanna do, I’m gonna do nothing. Now we look at this and we’re like, how does this work? Are these people fundamentally different?

So trauma is the big difference here. So let’s understand when we’re developing as children, if we grow up in a traumatic environment, what will happen is there’s actually something called the loss of the future dimension. So I’ll give you like an example of this, right? So let’s say I go to my parents and I say, “Hey, I’d like to have a birthday party. Can I invite my friends over?” And then parents say, sure. Next day, parents are drunk. They get mad at me. They’re like, no birthday party.

So what will happen if you look at traumatic upbringing is that children can’t plan for the future. Any kind of future that any kind of autonomy that they express, an abusive parent will shut it down. Like, you know, and this is highly controlling parents too. We see this so much in like Asian and South Asian cultures where parents are like, you gotta do this and you gotta do this, no drugs, no dating, you’re gonna study, you’re gonna learn piano.

So what we’re actually doing, this is like, we see so many gifted kids that stall later in life because in these upbringings, we remove the ability for autonomy. When a child tries to express themselves, we shut it down. The second thing that happens is trauma is about surviving today.

So I was working with a patient who, you know, would be able to tell within the first 60 seconds to five minutes when their dad got home, whether they were gonna get beaten today. And so what people, when people grow up in traumatic environments and it doesn’t have to be physical abuse, it can be highly controlling. It can be even like children who are parentified is kind of traumatic where you have a parent who’s very chronically ill and is depending on the kid to take care of everything. That’s traumatic too.

Because then what happens is your brain looks at your day and there’s no point in planning for tomorrow. All of your brain’s resources are about surviving today. How do I not get abused? How do I make sure that my parents don’t notice me? Children who grow up in traumatic environments learn to be invisible. And so then something very important happens in the brain where it stops planning for the future because any plan for the future can change depending on whether your parent is drunk or not. And then if I was gonna have a birthday party, I told all my friends and I got canceled, now that hurts so much.

So what happens when we get traumatized is we go into survival mode. We go into protective mode. And this is even mirrored like physiologically where we have two states of the body. We have our catabolic state where we’re breaking things down. We’re trying to survive the moment. And we have our anabolic state when we are building for the future. So when I encounter a tiger and I get a burst of cortisol, cortisol breaks down my muscle tissue to provide me with enough energy to survive. We are sacrificing the future to plan to survive the present. And that happens on a physiologic level, it happens on a mental level.

So when you grow up in a traumatic environment where you are punished for thinking about the future, you can’t plan for anything because your home environment is so chaotic. There’s no rules, no organization. And you’re focused on survival, that becomes baked in. And what happens when these people grow up is that they are bound by external stimuli. If there is some kind of pressure from the external environment, then I can act. But I cannot derive internal sense of motivation at all. Because now that there’s an external deadline, I have to survive that deadline. So they go into this survival mode instead of this like being able to look into the future mode.

And it’s really crippling because it’s fundamentally like the part of their brain that plans for the future has been disabled.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Permanently.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: No, that can be rewired. It’s just been disabled in this way, right? So like, that’s your default state. Then what we have to do is like undo that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So does that mean that parents who give their children more autonomy when they’re younger typically are better at attacking life and parents who stifle their kids’ autonomy end up playing in goal?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Absolutely. So we can look at something called authoritative versus authoritarian parenting, okay? So there are two kinds of parenting that people can do. One is where I’m gonna support my kid, but I’m gonna give them autonomy. I’m gonna give them structure and guardrails, but they can operate to a certain degree independently. That leads to the best outcomes versus parents who are highly controlling. Parents who are highly controlling, their kids have worse outcomes in life.

So even if they’re successful in some way, right? And I was even on this track where like, when I was nine years old, like my dad told me, me and my brother, he’s like, “One of y’all is gonna be a lawyer, one of y’all is gonna be a doctor.”

The Impact of Controlling Parenting

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Like there was no question about it. I had to become a doctor. And then my brother was older, he went to law school. So I was like, I have to go to med school. And so what happened is I struggled a lot with autonomy when I was in college and failed out and all that kind of stuff.

And I’ll work with so many people, like in residency, I was running this program where I did like, wellness for medical residents, surgical residents, emergency room residents. And what I saw is that a lot of these people have invested a lot of this time into this dream, but they’re not happy. So now they’re kind of just like living on autopilot and they don’t like know what to do about it. They’re unhappy, but now you feel stuck. You’ve committed to this path.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how do we turn ourselves around if we are one of those people who find ourselves playing a goal in life? How do we become an attacker? How do we become autonomous and a self-starter like you described? Is there a system, a way, a process?

Steps to Overcome Trauma and Develop Autonomy

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, so I think, so it’s complicated, but I think we know there are a couple of different steps that are involved. So the first is you have to be safe. So if you’re in a position of life where you are constantly stressed out, it shuts off your capacity for neuroplasticity. So the first thing that I recommend to people is like, if you’re in a toxic relationship, if you’re in an abusive home, do whatever you can to create some pocket of safety in your life because the growth has to come from there. So it’s like super basic stuff.

Second thing that we have to do is learn how to regulate our emotions. So if we don’t know, first of all, what we’re feeling, then our emotions will act in ways that are very self-sabotaging. So we have to decompress our negative emotion because otherwise the negative emotion will fuel things like addiction. So if I don’t have a healthy way of processing my emotion, my brain, because it’s trying to survive, will start drinking alcohol because that’s the only thing that works. So we have to develop some degree of emotional regulation.

Now, this is a really cool thing. So if you look at, so Steven, let’s talk about you for a second, is that okay?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, I’m joking.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So are you a survivalist or are you like looking forward?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m looking forward.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: How does that work for you? How are you able to look forward? Like what’s your inner experience?

Steven’s Experience of Looking Forward

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve always looked forward. I’ve always had to look forward. I’ve not really had a choice in life, I don’t think. I think I was, my parents were so absent that it created an environment where I didn’t have a choice. It’s like, if you want a bunch of money, it’s not gonna appear out of anywhere. If you want to eat today, it’s not gonna appear. Parents aren’t home, so you have to go figure stuff out. I had the same external pressures of trying to fit in at school or all these pressures that anyone has, but I had an absence of dictation. So I had to figure it out and run experiments. As an adult, I’m still doing that now.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Okay, that frightens me. So my guess is that if you try to sit still, you start to panic.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, I really struggle with stillness.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Okay, so you have a different problem.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you find out I was a psychopath or something? What have you figured out?

The Concept of Toxic Fuel

DR ALOK KANOJIA: No, I mean, so you can’t be still, right? So this is trauma. Like, I mean, I can’t diagnose you with anything, but I want you, this is actually a great example because your productivity is running away from something. Does that make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, 100%.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Right, it’s crazy. Like, you’re not running towards something. You’re not building something. I mean, practically, you’re building something. You’re building something great. And I see this so much. It’s a concept that I call toxic fuel, right? Where like, but you’re like, oh my God, unless I build something, because you’re panicked. Like, if I don’t do it for myself, no one will do it for me. That’s fucking sad, bro.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yes, right? It’s also like, we’re talking about having kids one day. Like, do you want your kid to be able to count on you? Or do you want them to grow up in an environment where like, they can’t count on anyone? They have to do, if they want lunch money, they have to go out and get it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I would rather them be able to count on me and our parents.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: You’re getting emotional.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Why?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you getting emotional?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: No, because I’m so used to it. I’m so accustomed to it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. When you say it’s sad, I’m like, really? It’s just my life. It was my life. Do you know what I mean?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Now, this is a great, I’m getting emotional because you’re getting emotional.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you mean?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So just because you don’t feel it, doesn’t mean that it isn’t activating. Okay. Right, so I know you don’t, this is normal for me. It’s sad and you’re numb, right? So once again, you’ve been exposed to this so many times. But like, you think, like, that’s why, like, how do I know, am I some psychic where I know that, okay, if you try to sit still, you’re gonna panic? Like, no, like, I’m getting that from you. Does that make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Some of it’s logical. But like, you know, you say, I’m looking forward. It’s just the way that you said it implies for me, like, what is going on in your mind? There’s a desperation to your forward momentum.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Right, that’s not good, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I know!

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Right? But here’s the problem is you love it. You love it. Because if you didn’t have it, where would you be?

STEVEN BARTLETT: 100%. I completely agree with everything you’re saying.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: You’re not answering the question.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, you want me to answer the question? Where would I be?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: No, I want you to think about why it’s hard for you to answer the question.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I didn’t even hear the question.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Okay. Where would I be?

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s interesting in and of itself. Yeah, I didn’t even know it was a question. So where would I be if I didn’t have it? I don’t know. And I think about this a lot. I think about this all the time. Because sometimes you can like fantasize about living a completely different life. And I put myself there on the beach or in Bali or something. And I just go like, I would be so irritated. Like irritated, not as in like annoyed. Irritated as in, as you said, like not being able to sit still. I would be so like, I’d end up building a hut. Or I’d end up like, you know?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yes, when I have that fantasy of like, run away from my life and start from zero on a beach somewhere, I go, I’ll just find myself back here again. Because I’ll do something on the hut which will, I’ll build a skyscraper on the hut or something.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: This is, trauma is not really the right word, but it is kind of the right word. So this is what I mean. So you are controlled by these impulses within you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I would say, yes.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: It’s crazy, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I always liken it to being driven and dragged. And I think I’m dragged a little bit.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. And I love your phrase, toxic fuel. Right, right? So you’re all of your growth. And this is what happens is, this is why men get so stuck in the cycle. Because that’s the only way we know how to motivate ourselves, right? It is running away from the panic, using the fear.

And maybe this is a bit much, but I think like, you know, I would bet money that there was a time in your life where you were a no one, and you were like, fuck this, never again. And you were like, I’m gonna run away, like, I’m never gonna do this again. It was so incredibly painful. And then that’s what fuels you. And if you stop, I would bet money that the panic that you feel is very, is connected to that moment in your life when you’re like, never again.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Who knows?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. No, yeah, I mean, it’s funny because I think, I was thinking as you said it, and I was reflecting on this day when I was younger and I walked to this park, it was late at night. And this kid called Sam, he started calling me the N word. And in that moment, you’ve got, I just, I don’t know why I always think of this moment, but you’ve got this real disconnection because I’m the only black kid there anyway. And this was like Devon in 1990, whatever. And I thought we were so different. Our family was so different anyway. And just that moment of feeling totally disconnected because you don’t look like anyone else. You don’t sound like anyone else. You’re curly hair, you’re different color skin. And that just real sense of disconnection.

And I think that kind of sort of permeated a lot of my early upbringing was this shame, this insecurity, this disconnection. And then you compound that with your parents being away. And so when I talk about my parents not being in the house much when I was younger, I still had this disconnection and the shame, but now I have this big void of freedom to do something about it, which meant I could start a business. I could sell some stuff. And if I sell some stuff, I can buy some shoes and the shoes are gonna make me fit in because everyone else has those shoes.

So it was this kind of spiral. And as you get older, I can be aware of it while I want. It doesn’t mean it’s gonna help necessarily because there’s a difference obviously, as you know, from being aware of something and then being able to take control of the thing.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: No, there isn’t. This is how we started the conversation. No, there’s not a difference.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, is there not? I thought it was a logical process.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Hold on, hold on. Great. So I’m not, can I ask, can we go a little bit further?

STEVEN BARTLETT: 100%, go for it.

Exploring Steven’s Motivations

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Okay, so you’re so interesting, right? So you felt ashamed. You felt small.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: You felt like you didn’t have anyone’s respect, right? And so you’ve done something beautiful. When someone looks at you, what do they see now?

STEVEN BARTLETT: The opposite.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yes, tell me. What does someone see now when they look at me?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Probably they see confidence. They probably see someone who’s quite secure in themselves.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Absolutely, right? So you have a very, it’s subtle, man. We’re gonna get so subtle, it may not make sense. So there’s so many layers of projecting confidence and you’ve tapped into an authentic confidence. There’s even a subtle thing because you dress very carefully, right? You don’t dress in a way that normal people who are trying to impress people dress. You wanna be authentically impressive. Does that make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: You’re not gonna take any shortcuts to being impressive. You’re gonna be truly impressive. Does that make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I guess, yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: But here’s the subtle thing. It’s still there. The panic is still there. You know why? Because you still give a shit about being impressive. Right, it’s authentic impressive, sure enough, but it’s still important to be impressive. And as long as that thing is there, the panic and that, that’s all the same thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s 100% true. And I had an author on my podcast who wrote a book called “Status.” And that’s when I had this brain wobble in my head because I said I used to wear Louis Vuitton before I was 25. I thought that’s when I gave up giving a fuck about like status and impression. And then he was like, no, if you think about billionaires, they just end up playing a different status game. The logos get smaller because now Louis Vuitton would make me look like an idiot. It would actually lower your status. They just, they start playing games about boats.

The Persistence of Trauma

STEVEN BARTLETT: But they’re still playing the same game. And when he said that, I thought, gee, I’m fucking hell, of course I’m still playing the same old games in different ways.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So I think there’s a lot of authenticity and goodness here. So this is exactly how trauma works. We’re like, we build something that is good. Here’s the key thing to understand that yoga teaches us. No amount of fixing your life will make that kid go away. Right, so like when I work with people who are, I see you smiling.

So like when I work with people who have been traumatized, they will build amazing lives, but they still carry that kid with them. And the kid will come out at times. There’ll be particular times where if I’m a little bit, like if I like treat you in the wrong way, like you’ll notice that you feel like that kid again. When you’re idle, you feel like that kid again.

So that psychological, that neuronal wiring is there. So you can build all this wonderful stuff and there’s authenticity. It’s not like you’re faking it. This is a really common misconception that are you faking? No, you’re genuinely confident. You’re genuinely authentic. You can’t fake it and get to where you are. And at the same time, the wounds that we experience leave scars.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, a hundred percent.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: And the real way to heal is to go back to that moment and like deal with that kid, right? You have to dismantle the worldview that you have, which is how you heal trauma. Is when we get traumatized, we adapt. In order to come out of this situation, I need to learn this particular thing. So some kids that I’ve worked with adapt by becoming invisible. That’s what I did. I got bullied a lot. So what do I do? I learn how to be invisible. Some people adapt by being successful. So if I’m successful, it’s an antidote to my shame. I don’t have to be ashamed anymore if I’m successful. But that old injury is still there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, and this is why it’s so complex because what you’ve just said is so unbelievably true, but it’s where the misconception happens because I don’t go home and I’m not like insecure or I’m not unconfident. Like I’m, I think like when I’m on my own, I’m very, very okay with who I am with myself. I’m very, very, like I feel like the guy that you experienced on camera is very close to who I am when I’m in the hotel room alone at night.

However, it doesn’t mean that I still don’t have those like childhood bruises and that they can’t be pressed by various things. And so it’s this sort of, this one is, because when we say these words like insecurity and shame, you’d think that like I walk into the green room over there and I’m like, oh, that’s not my life. But when I, where I know that there’s still something there is I go, how the, why are you still driving like this? When you are so well aware that it will not lead to any more happiness in any context. Like I’m so logically aware that becoming more will not have any impact on the things that matter. Yet here I am still building businesses and, you know, and this is the constant thing I battle with. So I go, okay, well, there must be a force that you’re consciously unaware of. That’s making you go, go on, go on.

The Nature of Healing

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, right. So let’s understand a couple of things. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, Steven, beautiful. So a couple of things to understand. We think about healing as a, as one spectrum, right? So if I’m at negative 100, I can’t also be a positive 100. Those two things cancel out. That’s not how it works. So if I give you a glass of water and then I piss in it and then I add sugar, it doesn’t remove the piss. These are both independent things. This is what tends to happen.

This is what we don’t understand about trauma. Removing the piss requires removing the piss. No amount of sugar will take it out of the drink, okay? So no amount of, this is mistake number one. No amount of building something good will remove something bad, okay? So healing, and it’s also like, you know, if I break a leg, no amount of bench press will heal my leg. Like I can build as much as I want to. I can fix my hair. I can brush my teeth. If the leg is broken, the leg is broken. Same is true of the mind, okay?

Second thing is what happens is we have, like our consciousness is divided. Now we’re gonna get kind of technical and off the rails. So we have all of these like dormant pieces of our consciousness that activate in certain situations. And all you have to do is pay attention to yourself in a five minute period and you’ll see this. So when I walk into a bathroom that I’ve never used before, then I start thinking about, okay, where’s the flush? Where’s the toilet? How do I use this toilet? You know, so like I’ll activate dormant information all the time. So someone asks me what’s, you know, the quadratic equation. That information is there and dormant in my mind and it gets activated.

So one of the biggest mistakes we make about healing is we look at what is active in our mind 90% of the time and we assume that the injury is no longer there. That’s not the case. Does that make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT: 100%.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Right, so the injury just goes dormant. Then there are certain things that happen that can trigger that injury. That’s what we call triggers, right? So if I’m traumatized, if we look at like PTSD and I’ve been traumatized by, you know, a bomb going off, literally my brain has certain circuits that scans my perceptual environment and decides what to activate. So there are ways stillness makes you feel small and fuck you if you’re ever gonna be small again. Never again, never again, never again.

I would bet money that if you sit by yourself and you’re not occupied, right, that’s why you have to watch crime shows because if you don’t watch crime shows, you’re gonna be still. And if you’re still, that’s unacceptable, okay? So dormant things have to be healed where they belong. You don’t need to worry, by the way. It’s in your karma. It’s gonna get healed and it’s coming.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I was laughing because it’s so true. Yeah. I was laughing at the fact that when I go to Bali, I end up, that’s like where I end up writing a book. And I’m like.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Right. And people would kill for that, right? So many people out there are like, oh man, I would love to be you. No, you guys don’t wanna be Steven. I know you think you do. This is the crazy thing that we each as human beings have our own journey. And are you privileged and should you be grateful and should people aspire to be you? Absolutely, but they don’t wanna be you. Like your own problems are enough. They don’t need yours too.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, amen.

The Steps to Healing Trauma

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So now the question is how do we heal? So I think the problem is like no amount of fixing things over there is gonna go back to this. And this is where we can look at the science of healing trauma. So here are the steps.

First thing is safety so that we can get neuroplasticity. Second thing is emotional awareness and emotional regulation. And this allows us for number three, which is really important, which is identity. So if we look at our human sense of identity, how do you develop an identity?

So if I were to ask you in three sentences, Steven, who are you?

STEVEN BARTLETT: My identity?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, tell me, who’s Steven?

STEVEN BARTLETT: To myself or just to the world or is that the same thing?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Tell me about Steven.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m an entrepreneur. I am a, I guess I’m a podcaster now. And I am gonna say a Manchester United fan.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Okay, so I think those are three features, right? So I’ve read your bio. So the other thing that you tend to do in your bio is there’s a narrative, right? You were a college dropout. You started a company, right? You talked about this Louis Vuitton bag phase. And then there’s the post Louis Vuitton bag phase. And even before we had this podcast, you were talking to me about the phases of your life.

So identity requires a timeline. Now, the interesting thing is if we look at the formative moments of your life, they all have emotion. So this is what’s really important. If you have an identity that is bad in any way, you can never change that identity without emotions.

So what happens, so my, like when I tell my story, it’s like I was a kid, nine years old, I got put on these expectations, dropped out of college, went to become a monk, went to medical school, became a doctor. Now I started this whole helping random people on the internet thing. So each of those were emotional experiences. So who we are is a narrative of our most emotional experiences.

And we see this in all of our like superhero movies, right? Batman had this tragic experience where his parents were shot by the Joker and then he became something, right? There are all these moments, these powerful emotional moments. So if your emotions are dulled by drugs, by technology, by pornography, by watching serial killer shows, you will never change who you are. It is impossible. The neuroscience of your identity and development requires emotional experience, okay?

So with trauma, that’s the next thing that happens. Once we have access to emotions, then we can become someone else. Now, the problem with trauma is that before we become someone else, the beliefs we have about ourselves become our destiny. So if I think to myself, I’m a loser.

So when I was interviewing for residency, I went to an interview somewhere on the West Coast. And the director of the program called me at the end of the interview, and they’re like, we don’t understand why you’re here. I was like, what do you mean you don’t understand why I’m here? And they’re like, your application is really good. You could end up at any program in the country. Like, why did you pick us? And like, I was like, I picked y’all because I liked the way that your hospital works, and I like that the city it’s in, and I’m super into complimentology. They’re like, what do you mean, why am I here, right? But the way that he approached it with a lack of confidence, he’s like, our program sucks. And they had some problems with the program at the time, so it kind of makes sense.

But this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I go into a job interview, and I feel a lack of confidence, if I believe I’m a loser, then I’m not gonna get the job. You used to go to clubs and buy bottles of champagnes and thought that you were a loser, didn’t end up where you wanted to go. So this is what a lot of people don’t understand.

Everyone’s focused on productivity. But the single most important thing that will determine your future is your sense of who you are. And that’s not like some, oh, a spiritual, get connected with you. This is like fucking science, right? If you believe you are a loser, the empathic circuits of other people’s brains will detect that in you, and they will treat you like a loser. You carry who you are with you. That’s why you get into failed relationship number one, failed relationship number two, failed relationship number three, until you changed. And when you change, your sense of identity changes, then your future will change.

The last thing to do is on a more microscopic level, look at these responses within yourself. So you asked me at the very beginning of the podcast, and now we’re coming full circle, how do you start understanding yourself? So you look at the drives within yourself, right? Why can’t I sit still?

And this is gonna be so hard for you, because if I told you, this is hilarious, if I told you, Steven, if you wanna heal your trauma, you need to go to Bali, you need to sit on a beach, and you need to do nothing. You will still turn that into growth and progress. Because what you’ll say is, oh, this is what Dr. K told me to heal my trauma, so now I’m doing even more important work than a podcast for 10 million people on the internet. Now I’m doing the healing of my trauma, which is the goal, and you’re still running away from yourself. There’s no way you can run away from it. Your mind will transform the very thing that you do into the problem. And that’s what trauma does.

I’ll give you a chance to respond, because I’ve been-

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m waiting for the solution, Dr. K.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, so, I mean, in your case, I think it’s like, sit. Just sit. And you have to be careful, because if your mind turns the sitting into a goal that I have to achieve, oh, I need to sit, and that’s gonna be my growth. No, no fucking goal. Just sit. Waste your time. What you need to learn how to do is waste your time. Do nothing. Sit. Be with yourself.

The Importance of Awareness

DR ALOK KANOJIA: And watch out for that mind. The second thing is awareness, okay? So as you sit, you will notice all of these things come up. So this is like, you asked me a question at the beginning, how do you start? So what I would say is sit for five minutes, 15 minutes. Sometimes we’ll tell people to stare at a wall for an hour. And just look at what on earth goes on inside you. You will discover that it is a zoo of thoughts, feelings, emotions, drives, panics, worries, distractions. Your internal environment is such a mess. So what we need to do is just kind of calm that stuff down by just letting it kind of run out of steam.

So this is a principle of the mind that if we feed our mind, it’ll continue to grow. But what we need to do is just let it run out of steam. So just sit and do nothing for a while. People don’t realize. The part of our brain that exerts willpower has something to do with this part of our brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. The anterior cingulate cortex is a piece of where willpower comes from, but it is also the part of our brain that monitors conflict.

So willpower and monitoring a conflict are actually technically the same thing. The same part of the brain activates. And if you guys, if you pay attention to your own internal experience, what you’ll realize is anytime you’re using willpower, there’s an internal struggle that you are paying attention to. It’s like, I don’t wanna order chicken. I wanna order fried chicken. So there’s a monitoring of the conflict that goes on. That’s anytime you’re exerting willpower, there’s this thing this way and this thing this way, but you are aware of it. You can’t exert willpower if you’re behaving automatically, right?

That’s why it’s so easy to get lost in doomscrolling because you’re not even aware of what you’re doing before and then four hours have gone by and you’re like, what? What happened? You’re not aware. So this is the crazy thing from a neuroscientific perspective, and this is what the yogis will teach as well. Awareness is willpower. Awareness is self-control.

And I’ve worked with tons of addicts. They come up for air and maybe you’ve done this and maybe people at home have done this. You go on this binge and then you come up for air and you’re like, what have I been doing for a couple of days? What have I been doing for a couple of hours? Then you gain that awareness again. So the more that you are aware in the present moment, the more your problems will literally melt away. It’s like crazy. I don’t quite know how it works, but this is what yoga teaches you. That as you are aware, as you are aware, as you are aware, you stop rejecting things, you start accepting things, you focus on the present. All the stuff that everyone talks about is actually rooted in awareness.

And we live in a society where I say, if I say you don’t need habits, you don’t need willpower, you don’t need discipline, all you need is awareness, people will reject me. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And the more that you explore awareness, the more you will realize, I used to think it was like 50-50, I’m now at like 90% of the problem is awareness. And that’s weird.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, but does that, because we tend to look for solutions that involve action. Like, buy that thing, make that list, go to that meeting, watch that thing. It’s all about action, action, action as a solution to our problems. So I was expecting you to tell me that the solution to everything we’ve discussed here is like the seven step process of like, write the thing down, say this thing and, you know.

The Internal Drive Behind Success

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Okay, so let’s understand this, okay? You work really hard, Steven. Is it hard to work hard?

STEVEN BARTLETT: To me?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Okay. So now we have to understand, why is it not hard for you to work hard?

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s, why is it not hard for me to work hard? Because it feels good to work hard?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Absolutely. This is a whole problem that everyone makes. So Steven, you started a company when?

STEVEN BARTLETT: First one, I was very young, but we won’t count that because I didn’t register the company. So the first one that was registered would have been when I was 18.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Okay. And you started how many companies or been involved in how many companies?

STEVEN BARTLETT: 10, yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: And made like millions and millions of dollars and stuff.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, right?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Started a podcast. You’ve got how many millions of subscribers now?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Across the platforms, maybe 10 million.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Okay, cool, right? So like, this is a lot of work. And everyone’s like, oh my God, I want to be like Steven. But the whole thing is, it’s not hard for you. It’s hard for you to not do it.

So this is what I’m saying. You don’t need to focus on the action. It’s the internal thing that drives you like a fucking slave that is responsible for your success. If someone else wants a fraction of what you have, 10% of what you have, they don’t need to duplicate your actions. They need to duplicate what’s going on on the inside. This is exactly my point.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They need your toxic fuel.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Toxic fuel is on the path to happiness, right?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Can be. Yeah, I mean.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because you’re doing pretty well.

The Complexity of Happiness

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you know what though? This is maybe, I don’t know how this throws a spanner in the works of this, but I’ve never felt unhappy. And I’ve always struggled. When I used to say to people, and because time has passed now, it’s sometimes hard to know how you felt in the past. But I say to people that when I was 18 years old and I had just dropped out of university and I was starting this business and my parents were speaking to me, I was poor and all these things, I was shoplifting food. I was as happy then as I am now. And when I say that to people, I know it sounds like motivational bullshit or something, but in that moment, I had forward motioned, I was excited about life. I thought that I was, everything in my objective reality was just the stepping stone to becoming. And so I was so excited. I was so happy about that. And I feel the same now. Yeah. So despite everything we’ve discussed. I feel happy when I’m alone. I’m happy.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. And I and you know, that’s, um, yeah, great. So so I think that makes a lot of sense. Or I’m bullshitting. But I know you’re I think I’m double guessing myself.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, you’re not.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So let’s understand the subtlety here. Yeah. So the stages of unhappiness to happiness, there’s unhappy in all situations, unhappy in some situations, happy in some situations, happy in most situations. And then Moksha, enlightenment, Mukti is happiness in all situations, happiness that is completely independent of your circumstances. That’s the stage that you’re at. Because we can make you unhappy very, very easily.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, that’s true. Right?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. So so it kind of makes sense. This is what happens is we start to craft a life that makes us happy. That’s the first step. Totally good. But then what happens is that we are still dependent on the external life for our happiness. And that will never work 100%.

[Advertisement break]

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what’s this Mukta you mentioned?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Mukta is Moksha, Enlightenment, Nirvana, all same thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do we get there? How do you get there or someone else? Are you there?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do I get there? How does anyone get there?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: You sit by yourself and don’t do anything.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How long?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: No, can’t ask that question. So the moment that you ask that question, there’s a goal. There’s a future dimension. There’s an objective. You have to exist without an objective, and that’ll move you in the right direction. Just be for no reason, for no purpose. Recognize that all of this stuff, this is going to get kind of weird. No matter what you do in the world, you’re still existing, right? So you just need to remove all of the stuff and just exist. That’s what Moksha is. Pure existence, without attachment, without feeling, without thought, without goal, just being. And the crazy thing is we’re all doing this all the time. We’re all existing all the time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I hear this loud voice from all the high performing individuals that listen to my show shouting. And it’s also coming from my brain as well, which is, Dr. K, if I take this advice, and if I just sit, how am I going to pay the bills? And won’t that cost me my motivation? And if it costs me my motivation, then it will cost me my purpose, this art business I’ve started, this cupcake shop I’m running, that’s given me so much excitement in my life. Won’t I lose my motivation if I just sit?

The Paradox of Motivation and Enlightenment

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yes and no. So the first thing we have to understand is yes. So someone who’s enlightened is not compatible with a regular life in some ways. So let’s understand that that’s what happened to Buddha. He was a king. He was married. He had a kid, was loved, was powerful, and was like, I’m done.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that Buddha? How we pronounce it incorrectly?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, same thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. Gotam Buddha. Right? So in a sense, it isn’t incompatible with life. The second thing is that once, see, you have a motivation, right? But once you exist in the world, and you are just being without anything, you’ll still act. In fact, acting will become even easier. And that’s hard to understand because we are so used to toxic fuel that we, it’s kind of like, so if you have kids one day, you’ll understand it.

The best I can do is an analogy. So when a kid comes up to you and is crying because, oh, like my, you know, my doll has gotten wet. Okay. And the kid comes up to you. There’s no like goal that you have in your life. And you’re not like trying to be a good dad. I don’t know if that makes sense. Like when a kid, when your kid walks up to you, and they’re upset about something that’s irrelevant, you just act in response to what is necessary in the moment. You don’t get upset. You’re not worried about their growth. You’re not worried about traumatizing. You just respond.

Does that kind of make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: And so the other thing is like, if I’m walking down the street, and someone is carrying groceries, and I hold the door open for them, I just respond to the environment. So what actually happens the closer you get to the state is you can absolutely be productive. So what I found is that the closer I get to the state, the more productive I am. But now what I’m doing is just responding to the environment around me. I’m not driving anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just responding. And that’s beautiful. It’s liberating. There’s no goal. There’s no falling short of. There’s no achievement. There’s just, I’m going to do what needs to be done in the moment. If I’m sitting in the emergency room, and I’m on call, and a patient walks in the door, I’m going to take care of the patient. If they don’t walk in the door, I’m going to do something else.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How is that different to reacting? Because reacting sounds a little bit more emotional. Whereas you’re saying respond, it sounds like emotion has been removed from the situation to some degree.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So in a sense, it is. I’m responding to the situation. But oftentimes, when we react emotionally, we are carrying something with us from the past into the present moment. That will cause you all kinds of problems. Right? So if I have infidelity, I worked with a patient who had a problem with infidelity in their partner. And then when they’re dating the next person, their fears of infidelity from the past become into the present. And then they react to the situation. They don’t actually perfectly respond to the situation. They color the situation with their baggage. That’s not clean responding.

So like when I am on call, and my friend tells me the night before, oh, yeah, we had zero patients. I slept all night. And then a patient walks in the door. And I think to myself, why am I so unlucky? The majority or even arguably all of our unhappiness in life is because of what we carry with us.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how do we get to that place where we just respond?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So I think it’s like we have to heal that inner child and all that kind of stuff. We have to remove all of our past from our mind. And then we have to remove all of the future from our mind.

The Simplicity of Being

DR ALOK KANOJIA: We have to strive for nothing and just be what you are. Just be. It’s like kind of hard to understand. But you just got to do it. There’s not like more methodology is not going to work. That’s what’s so confusing about it is like, you keep on asking me questions. I’ve already given you the answer. You just don’t like it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, no, no, because yeah, just sometimes it’s good to hear. Yeah, the same thing again. But also big also because I know I’m asking these questions in part because I know it’s obviously the logical question that anyone who just heard you say yes, this revelation about responding is going to go out.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So what I would say is just sit down. Yeah. And pay attention to yourself. That’s it. That’s it. I mean, you can do all the stuff. We’ve given you lots of techniques over the course the last couple hours. But like at the end of the day, just sit down and explore yourself. Be with yourself.

Impulses come up and then ask yourself. So on a practical sense, you’re going to have drivers towards things and ask yourself, why do I feel this way? Why do I need to do this? Why is this easy for me? And why is this hard for me? And the more that you explore that, the more you will understand. And then the more neutral you will become.

And when you’re fully neutral, then let me put it to you this way. So if you don’t care about what you eat. It’s not like there’s no suffering and whatever you get, you’ll be happy with. Right. So it’s like our caring that causes the problem. So we need to move towards this neutrality and then actions become easy. Because if I don’t care, if I’m not attached to something, then I can study or I can play a video game. Makes no difference to me. Oh, do you want to watch a comedy or a horror movie? Makes no difference to me. Then life becomes fun. You can just enjoy everything and there’s nothing to worry about.

And I think it starts with just being with yourself and understanding where your internal drivers come from, because we don’t get to choose the person that we become. Our brain makes adaptations every single day. You don’t get to edit what you learn. Does that make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So our problem in life is that we have all these learnings. We have this instrument, this thing that has been cobbled together after some crappy experience and another crappy experience and some positive experience. And you have this internal schema of how to live the world, but it wasn’t crafted with any intentionality. So the first step is to be aware of like, what is this roadmap looking like? What is the blueprint? And the more that you understand this stuff, the easier it will become.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Would you recommend starting your day with a little gap for this?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: 100%. Awareness practice. I think it’s brilliant. My partner does that. She spends the first sort of 20 minutes of the morning. She just goes and sits in a room by herself and does nothing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I just look at her and go, what it’s like at that? Yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Right. So beginning of your day or end of your day, sunset, sunrise, and you can do a meditative practice. Meditative practices will get you here too. Sometimes that’s actually easier because it gives your mind some kind of goal to move towards.

Steven’s Commitment to Practice

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to try this. Okay. I’m going to try this and I’m going to text and let you know how I get on. I’m going to try in the mornings when I wake up to just stay away from all devices and just sit. And I’ll let you know how I get on. And I’ll be honest with you.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, be honest. Yeah, I will be. And even if I can’t do it, obviously. Yeah. And that’s okay. So the one thing I would ask is that if you let me know how it goes, may not go well. You got to give me a chance to give you a second thing to do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. Why? Why’d you say that?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Because I think we’re asking too much of you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. You think I’m going to fail? Be honest.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yes, I think you’re going to fail. But I think the problem is that if I tell you you’re going to fail, you’re going to try to succeed and we make a goal out of it. So we’ve already failed. Like, so it’s just give me a second chance. I’ll figure out we’ll trick you if we have to trick you into doing it. We can’t let you know that we’re doing it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Reminds me what you were saying about your wife giving birth before we started recording about lay on your left. The kid likes it.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah. So the mind is so tricky, right? So the mind will craft a goal for you out of this. And if I tell you, Steven, you will fail. I’m not trying to manipulate. I’m worried that if I tell you, you’re going to fail, you’re going to do it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s so interesting what my mind did there as well. And it’s just and this is so icky, but I’m going to be honest, because it’s just what’s the point is called the diversity. So even when I thought about doing that, like, I was like, okay, so sit in the morning, spend 20 minutes just being and then do that. Try and do that, Steve, like a week or two weeks. And then you can come back on the podcast and tell people about it. I’m like, that’s you just made this about an external thing again.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Good. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. You know why? What’s brilliant about that?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Awareness.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Exactly. Yeah. Change is happening. Change cannot happen while you’re blind. You cannot good diagnosis precedes good treatment.

Breaking Habits Through Awareness

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So this is the other thing really interesting, right? So one last thing I know we’re running long. So this is a habit for you, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: For a habit to be this is a very simple technique to demolish any habit. A habit is automatic. That’s what makes it a habit. That’s why we love habits. Why is everyone so obsessed with habits? Because if it’s a habit, then it happens automatically. If it’s a habit, I don’t have to work hard. I want to program myself so I can be lazy.

So all you need to do to demolish a habit is awareness. Because literally, the circuits involved in your brain are completely different. The habit circuitry in your brain is the endocannabinoid system. Awareness of the present moment is your anterior cingulate cortex and your frontal lobes. You cannot have a habit and exert willpower at the same time. That’s the whole point of a habit.

So as you become aware, every time you catch it, Steven, it will chip away at it. Chip away at it. It’ll get cut away 1%, 1%, 1% until it disappears. Catch it as many times as you can.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is this in part why it’s useful to keep a diary or to write?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: It can be. Diaries have all kinds of other mechanisms. So just a couple of quick ones. So one is that diaries slow down the pace of your thinking. Because when you write, you write slower than you think. So you meditate on the thoughts a little bit more. The second thing is that when we think in our head, we’re using some circuits of the brain. But when we write, we are activating our sensory inputs. And our capacity to learn from our sensory inputs versus thinking is actually way higher. Right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So it’s like activating a completely different part of the brain. We’re slowing down our thoughts. So slowing down thought and activating our sensory inputs is part of why a diary is useful. The other thing, the other third thing with a diary being useful is that when we think in our mind, we end up in a different place from when we write. So it’s a lot easier in our mind to end up with habitual patterns of thinking. In a diary, it’s way harder to end up with habitual thinking. So you will explore yourself more effectively using a diary.

Finding Purpose

STEVEN BARTLETT: When I look at the first pages of my diary, I find a guy that’s constantly… And this is really where the Diary of a CEO came to be. The start of the podcast was me sharing my diary, the things I’d written in my diary every day. Some of those early episodes that I made were about the subject of purpose, which is something I’ve heard you speak a lot about. And that’s kind of where I wanted to end our conversation today is so many people, and I know this from the comments and DMs I get, are struggling to find their purpose. Now, even as I say that, I go, I’ve loaded the question because I’ve said find, which insinuates there’s some kind of search. And purpose is a singular word, so it indicates that there’s one. But you know what I’m saying. What is that that people are looking for? And why are they struggling to find it?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: This is very simple. You can look at any human being on the planet, and you can see that they all gravitate towards something, which is internal peace. So our hunger gives us a sense when we eat, then we have internal peace. Thirst gives us a sense of wanting to drink, and then we have internal peace. When we want self-respect, the feeling of a lack of self-respect is a lack of internal peace.

So this is what’s kind of weird is that we’re chasing all of these things outside of us to create an internal state. So no matter what you do in life, at some point your actions are going to cross the barrier of the external to the internal and will make you feel a certain way. Why do we get married? To create a particular feeling. Why do we give someone a kiss? To create a particular feeling. So everything we experience within us.

Now why is it so hard for people? So we’re all looking for inner peace. That’s just it. Period. And then the question becomes, what makes it hard? Very simple. Because we’re looking for it in the wrong place. So we’re all looking for it outside of us. So we’re looking, and then what happens is if we look for inner peace from the outside. So if I get inner peace because people tell me, Alok, you’re so great. Now what happens is that peace lasts only as long as people are saying it.

And the real reason we’re screwed is because the biological organism develops a system of tolerance. So right now you’ve got 10 million followers, and then you’re going to need more, and then you’re going to need more, and then you’re going to need more. We’re going to need more intense pornography. We’re going to need more intense video games. We’re going to need more exciting TV shows.

So the nature of the human organism is to adapt to its surroundings, which is why you will never succeed if you are relying on the outside world to make you happy. Because you will just want more, and more, and more. And what helps you achieve happiness comes from in here. That’s why it’s so hard for everyone.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So these kids asking, saying that they can’t find their purpose. They’re in jobs they don’t like, or they’re embarking on their professional journeys, and they don’t know what their purpose is. What is it you say to them when they DM you?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So I think one thing I would say to them is purpose is an attitude. It’s not a thing. Right? So like, take any action. What makes that action align with your purpose? It’s the attitude that you take towards it. So if I give you this meditation practice to sit and do nothing, you’re like, yeah, it’s part of my purpose and part of my growth. You see what I mean? Like, it’s all about the way that your mind… Purpose is an attitude. It’s not like a goal. So I’ll even do this.

Changing Perspectives on Purpose

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So when I was in residency, sometimes I would have students who were struggling, right? And since I’m a nice guy, people would come to me and they’re like, hey, I’m struggling. I don’t want to learn this stuff. And what we really do is we shift their purpose by shifting their attitude.

They’re like, “I’m not interested in psychiatry.” I’m like, fair enough. So here’s the thing you got to understand. For the rest of your life, no matter what kind of medicine you practice, you’re going to get people who are mentally ill and or addicted to things who are going to be personality disorder. I can guarantee you that the worst days of your life will have nothing to do with surgery. They’re going to have to do with having a personality disorder, sociopathic, narcissistic, borderline personality disorder patient who is making a mess on the floor. Nurses are going to be paging you. No one is going to want to talk to them. This is vitally important for you to learn, no matter what you’re interested in. So it’s about the attitude.

The other thing that I’ll do with med students is they’re like so worried about getting honors. They’re like, “Oh, I got to get a good grade.” This is a Harvard, right? So these are like really gunning medical students. And I was like, you guys are missing the point. You’re not here to get honors. You’re here to practice medicine.

So one day you’re going to be on an airplane and you’re going to hear the flight attendant pick up the phone. They’re going to be like, “Is there a doctor on the plane?” And then you don’t get to say, “Oh, sorry, it’s not something I’m interested in. I just got a pass.” You don’t get to say that. You’re here to learn how to save lives, right? And so that attitude, when it sinks in with them, changes the way that they learn. I don’t care what your grade is. It’s not about the grade. It’s about like we’re trying to teach you medicine because you’re going to need it one day.

Understanding Quarter-Life Crisis

STEVEN BARTLETT: A lot of people have seemingly found their purpose, but then they get a little bit of a quarter-life crisis. I’ve never really had this term quarter-life crisis before until you started speaking about it. What is a quarter-life crisis and what is actually going on there?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: So a quarter-life crisis is something that we’re seeing like more and more of. So usually what happens is that, see, early on, you asked earlier if we have dreams, right? So I have a dream of something, but I don’t really know what it is. So I’m 15 years old. I pick a dream. I start advancing towards it. And when we form our life, what we try to do is we develop a conception, and then we live up to that conception. So I’m going to be a doctor one day. And then the reality is very different from our dreams. So then what happens is we tend to find ourselves in a place that we’re like not happy with.

So I see this a lot from like people who are like, “Oh, I want to be like a programmer.” But then they’re working in this environment where there’s always scope creep. The sprints are very exhausting. It’s burnout. I’m not happy here. So the first stage of a quarter-life crisis is feeling trapped. Now you’ve invested all of this time and energy into medicine or being a doctor and you spent years being a programmer. Now you’re trapped in this situation because you’ve invested so much time.

The second thing that happens in a quarter-life crisis, so people are like, this is what it sounds like. So I wake up every day. I pack my lunch. I drive in traffic. I’m at my job where I’m underappreciated. I’m not challenged. I drive home. I’m supposed to take care of myself. So I’m going to listen to Steven’s podcast on the way home. I’m going to work out. I’m going to do laundry. I’m going to eat a couple of chicken breasts. And then it’s time for sleep. And you do this for about two years and you’re like, is this life? What else can I do? So it starts with a feeling of being trapped.

Second thing that happens is people mentally check out. So you’ll feel like I don’t, I’m not passionate about my job. Now this is where people make a big mistake because if you look at the research on quarter-life crisis, what they will try to do is check back in. They’ll try to cultivate some sense of joy or like how do I get engaged in life? But this is what’s really interesting is mentally checking out is an important developmental step to growth. So if you don’t check out of your existing job or your existing relationship, there’s no space in your mind for a new one. So we have to mentally check out. It’s actually part of the process.

Then this is where things get really interesting. If we look at the successful navigation of a quarter-life crisis, we all feel trapped. Then we check out. We think this is a bad thing. Then what gets really interesting is that there’s usually some kind of intentional moving away. So in my case, I literally like went to India. So we know that human beings need to create some amount of psychological or physical space. I’ve had patients who have joined the military. I’ve had patients who have like driven cross-country. You need space, like physical space and mental space away from what you’re checked out from.

Crafting Purpose

Then we get to something that’s really interesting. So you ask this question, how do you find purpose? Purpose is not something you find. It’s not like you’re walking down the street and like, “Oh,” or you’re meditating. It’s like, “Oh, I have purpose.” Purpose is crafted, right?

So once we mentally check out, that allows us to distance ourselves, because if we don’t mentally check out and we step away, we’re going to feel guilt. We’re going to feel like, you know, we have to check out. We have to give up on it. Otherwise, we’ll stay stuck. Does that kind of make sense? So then what we have to do is a period of self-exploration and craftsmanship. So then what we do is like discover, okay, who am I? What do I really want? We connect with our internal selves.

So this is really important about a quarter-life crisis. The first phase of our life, we are living up to external expectations. And it’s not really about what I want. I think I want to become a doctor, but what do I really know? I’m not really listening to myself. I’m just being programmed by my conditioning. So we start out being very externally focused. Then we feel trapped. Then we check out. Then we move away. Then we discover who we discover. You don’t discover. It’s not there. You craft who you are. You get in touch with yourself.

And then comes the last phase of the quarter-life crisis, which is that you craft an external world based on your internal environment. So now your compass is dictating what you do. You find a relationship that resonates with you to begin with. And so in my case and your case, probably, we probably did this in some way. We failed. We did something new. And then we like figured out, okay, this is what excites me, right? So at some point, growth excites you. So now like this endeavor is about growth. It’s about helping people. So now you’re crafting your external life based on what you’ve discovered about yourself internally. And that’s kind of the last phase.

The problem that people run into is that they don’t realize that this sequence is necessary and you have to do it in this order.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I was thinking about so many of my friends as you described this process that have come to me for advice recently. These are friends who have quit their business. So they’ve sold their company. Yeah. And then they’ve taken, you know, two months off. They’ve got so agitated. And in two cases that I can describe, a very big companies, everyone listening would know that friend has gone back to the business.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Absolutely. So I mean, I’ve had, I can think of two people as well, who, you know, one person, you know, sold a company at 29 for a ton of money. And then they were like, tried to find themselves for a year or two, and then went back to starting companies.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. But my friends actually went back into the thing.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: I’ve seen that too. They like bought the company back or went back in a CEO.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I’ve seen someone bought a company, didn’t manage it properly, value declined, and then you buy it back, you’re net positive, and then you run it and it goes well.

My mentor said to me when I left my first business, which is what made, gave me sort of financial freedom. He said to me, when I called him, it was in the middle of the pandemic. And I said, I’ve sold the company now and I’m out and I’m sold my shares over the market in a private transaction. And it’s the pandemic, like the world has stopped. And you know what I’m like, so I’m like, what do I do now? And he said to me, my friend Shaq, Shaquille Khan, he said, the hardest thing in the world for you to do, and the most important thing for you to do is to do nothing. And he was like, you just need to sit and you need to do nothing. He goes, because you’re going to get all these urges, Steve, to go back and start a similar business, the same business, because you can, and you know you can.

But he goes, the reason why you were successful the first time around is now kind of expired, like you did that. So the thing that’s going to drive you every day and give you that sense of like motivation and purpose is going to be something else. And you’re going to need to create a space for it to emerge. And I say that to founders all the time that like exit their businesses or leave their companies is you have to basically do this painful process of like sitting on your hands for like a year and being patient and waiting.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s kind of what you were saying, this thing about cultivating this new life, but from inside out, not from outside in, because you get so many offers, you get so many opportunities and offers in that space. But those again, aren’t yours, you didn’t cultivate them, they just came to you. So.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Yeah, it’s such a beautiful way to put it, like living your life from the inside out, as opposed to the outside in. And that’s what people should do. That’s what you help people do. And that’s what you’ve helped me do every time we spoke, and every time we speak, it’s on one hand, it’s so informative, and so wise, and so unique, because you’re combining disciplines, and you’re doing it in such a wonderfully smooth, fluent, and logical way.

My brain struggles when anything gets a little bit too fluffy, or like airy fairy. But as you speak, you weave these worlds together in such a wonderful way. And at the other end, it’s really confronting. And I am someone that likes the confrontation, because, you know, I…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Gives you an opportunity to grow.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: No, because I just, what an absolute honor that I get to sit with someone like you, who’s like super smart, and has gone to Harvard and done all these things. And I get to work through some of the things that I struggle with. But also, I also realized as a podcaster, that it’s the most, the most value that I think I can give to the audience. It’s like me being honest about myself. That is the information that is in greatest demand, but in least supply in the world, is people doing what we just did. You know what I mean? Does that make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s brilliant. I mean, I just, I love the way that you put thoughts together, right? So I think that’s correct. So I think if we look at the success of this podcast, your authenticity is such a huge part of it. And also, what’s happening is we’re getting so much like derivative content, we’re getting like five tips for this, and five tips for that, and 10 techniques to do this. And what’s missing is like authenticity.

I’ve thought about this so much, man. It’s like, how do you ask? Obviously, my job is to ask questions, right? And the longer I’ve done this podcast, what I’ve come to realize is the best questions are the ones that no one could give me that are like deep in my heart somewhere that I’ve maybe been too scared to like to say out loud. And when I get closer to those questions, the conversations are so much more valuable for the audience. And I can rank the conversations essentially, based on how much the questions came from my soul.

And then the like metric that I might measure it based on is the amount of people that message me and the length of the message they send. Because if I ask questions from my soul, the messages that they send me get exponentially longer. It becomes like they send me pages. When, you know, these are my questions. If I make a conversation about the gut microbiome, people might say, hey, I love that podcast, but gut microbiome, I’m eating leafy veg now. But when they come from my soul, it’s like the world gives me that back if you know what I mean.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Absolutely. And I think that’s why I really love doing this.

The Importance of Asking the Right Questions

DR ALOK KANOJIA: It’s a privilege for me too. And I think like this is a very common issue. And I think we’ve been kind of skirting, not skirting around, we’ve touched on this issue several times. But you asked me, what do we do? Right? What is it? What is the answer? I think the one thing I’ve learned for 10 years of being a medical doctor is it’s not about finding the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions. That is the methodology because an answer is outside of you. It theoretically applies to all people. But if you really want to be your best self, that answer needs to be tailored to you, specifically to you.

And that answer, what works for you, only you know. Right? I don’t know what’s going to work for you or anyone else because I don’t have information about your internal environment. So the real key is not about finding the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions so that you can get the data within that applies to you 100%. Why do we have so much advice on the internet? Because none of it applies 100% to your unique genetics, your unique epigenetics, your experiences, your traumas, your dormant unconscious. So that’s what you need to do is develop a plan that is only going to work for you. And that’s not about an answer. It’s about a methodology.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you think I could be a better podcaster? And I guess we have to define what better means, but how do you think that I could…

DR ALOK KANOJIA: I don’t think you can be a better podcaster. I think you should stop trying. I think you should do exactly what you are doing and recognize that you are enough. So just keep doing what you’re doing. You shouldn’t try to be better. This is all a part of your journey. I don’t think you… No, I don’t accept the question. I don’t think you can be better. I think the concept of better is literally hypothetical. Does that make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Makes perfect sense.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: You just are. So just be.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. It’s funny because the more in my life that I’ve just been, the better everything has got, and including my romantic relationship with my partner. There’s a real correlation between just being and, I don’t know, seemingly things just figuring themselves out. It kind of goes back to what I was saying about the Louis Vuitton era of my life and then the post-Louis Vuitton era. I had better results when I was just being.

DR ALOK KANOJIA: Exactly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And this podcast was based on that. It was based on me just being, which was scary. It was really scary at the start. It was scary just talking about these things publicly at the start.

Closing Question

STEVEN BARTLETT: Dr. K, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next. And the question that’s been left for you is, what is your rich life?

DR ALOK KANOJIA: I guess the one that I’ve got. It doesn’t matter what the adjective is. The only life I have is the one that I’ve got. So what is my rich life? What is my poor life? What is my good life? What is my bad life? It’s the one that I have. And I’ll kind of leave with one last thought.

So I saw something really interesting in a study about aging. So there’s all this loneliness epidemic going on. It’s really interesting because if you look at it scientifically, logically, as we get older, our life gets objectively worse. So we lose friends. So literally over time, the number of friends you have as you get older, they literally start dying. We lose relationships. Our physical body starts to break down. So our life objectively by certain measures gets worse.

So it’s really interesting is that you’d expect old people are more depressed because their life is objectively worse. And sometimes they are. But there’s one variable that correlates with being content in life versus being unhappy in life. And that is how OK you are with a bittersweet life.

So the more engaged with this concept of something being bittersweet you are as you get older, the more content you will be. So I think my answer to that question is like embracing the bittersweetness of life, like there’s piss in there and there’s sugar. And that’s just what it is.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much, Dr. K. I really appreciate it. You’re a very special human being. And I feel indebted to you because you, you know, I wish I could speak to you every day. But this is why people need to go read your books and follow your YouTube channel, because in that regard, we can. And I hope to have many more conversations with you about all of these things.

Related Posts

• Joe Rogan Experience: #2429 with Tom Segura (Transcript)
• This Past Weekend: #630 with Stephen Wilson Jr. (Transcript)
• Shawn Ryan Show: SRS #264 with Hunter Biden (Transcript)
• Tucker Carlson Show: Matt Gaetz on ADL, Israel Policy, and Identity Politics (Transcript)
• TRIGGERnometry: Christina P on Woke Culture, Feminism, and More (Transcript)