Transcription
So, if I'm unhappy, feel ashamed of myself, or feel guilty, we think I need to do something to change this. If I'm unhappy, let me go eat something that makes me feel better; let me play a video game. The cognitive process, the fundamental way we deal with our cognition, is to regulate it. This cognitive experience that happens inside my head needs to be controlled. Today, we're going to teach y'all how to go from being a three-head to a five-head.
Now, this may sound kind of weird because we have these concepts, right? There's like three-head, who's someone who kind of sucks at something, and there's five-head, who's someone who's really brilliant at something. But we have this idea that you're sort of born this way, right? Some people are very, very smart; some people are not very smart. Once you get placed into the three-head camp or the five-head camp, there's no way to move between them.
When I was growing up, I sort of thought that things were roughly fair. I had this idea, and I played a lot of RPGs, right, where you get stat points and skill points to distribute. It's not like in one build you get 60 skill points and in another build you get 10. Everyone gets roughly the same amount, and you choose to specialize in something. But as I looked around me in life, I found that that actually isn't the case. There are some people, like myself, who were scrawny, didn't really know how to talk to girls, had never been kissed before, and weren't particularly good at anything. I didn't really have any skills, and on top of that, my grades weren't even that good. I had this high intelligence, but I was born with the lazy trait, which means I wasn't able to capitalize on it. I'd look around at other people and be stunned by how good they were at everything.
I had a friend in med school who was better looking than I was, you know, worked really hard, was a workout warrior, and was a gamer. This guy would wake up at 6:00 a.m. every day, work out, go to classes, study, and then at 7:00, he'd have a healthy meal. From 7:00 to 10:00, he was gaming, and then he was in bed. Whereas my life was a little bit more of a mess. I looked at these people and thought, "How is this fair?" But if you think about it, if you're good at one thing, it allows you to be good at other things as well.
So, if you sort of think about it, let's say I have a good job that fosters the ability to have a successful relationship because now I'm more attractive to other people. If I have a good job or a good career and a good relationship, then I'm more likely to be happy in life and have more resources. If I'm happy in life, I am able to deal with setbacks in my career more easily. So, it's almost like it's kind of broken and unfair because some people struggle at everything, and for some people, things seem to be incredibly easy, and they do well at everything. There's no balance in the game of life.
So, here's the crazy thing: it turns out that there is a difference between these two groups of people, and we can actually teach you how to go from three-head to four-head to five-head. What we're going to be drawing on is revolutions in the field of psychotherapy. When people hear that we offer coaching at HG, their first question is, "What on Earth even is that?"
So, here's the basic problem: when you struggle with something in your life, you don't see the problem from the outside; you see it from the inside. The value of a coach is that they can look at your life from the outside, understand what's going on, and help guide you to improve things like motivation, accomplish short-term goals, and even increase a sense of purpose in life. Over the long term, we also see improvements in feelings of depression and anxiety. The best part is we've had over 100,000 coaching sessions, and we incorporate that feedback to continually improve our program. So, if y'all are interested in actually making a change in your life, check out the link in the description below.
This is kind of weird, but generally speaking, when we think about technological advancement, we think about things like devices or engineering or things like that—medical science, heart transplants. But there's actually been research and evolution in the field of psychotherapy. If we think about what the field of psychotherapy is, it is an evidence-based approach to help human beings get better at life.
So, if I were to ask you what determines your happiness in life, what determines your success, there's a lot of data out there that says that the ZIP code or the place you were born, the education level of your parents, your race, your ethnicity—all of these things basically correlate with your success in life. And those statistics are not wrong, right? If you're born to rich parents who love you, chances are you will be happier and more successful.
This is exactly where psychotherapy comes in because psychotherapy is the evidence-based practice to take someone who has a bad hand dealt to them when they're born and help them level up to achieve things that are far beyond what you would expect for their circumstances. So, if I grow up in an abusive household where I was traumatized, this, of course, is going to lead to all kinds of problems. But if I go to therapy and heal myself and develop confidence, then I can develop a good career, have a good relationship, and be incredibly successful. I've worked with these people as a psychiatrist.
Another really good example of that is addictions. The poorer you are and the worse your household is, if you have a parent who's an addict, you are more likely to become an addict. You'll start using things like marijuana or alcohol in your teen years; it'll alter your dopamine circuitry, and then it's very hard to live life and succeed. But if we institute principles of psychotherapy and treat that addiction, we help this person overcome their addiction and trauma. They can achieve just as much as anyone who had a very, very awesome spawn point.
So, we have to start by understanding that psychotherapy comes in three different phases, and we're going to teach you all some of these core principles of the most recent tech in psychotherapy. The first phase was behaviorism. This is where a bunch of psychologists looked at Freud and stuff like Freud and Jung, and they were like, "These guys are making all these claims about the subconscious, but we have no way of measuring that." Freud was kind of like pre-really scientific revolution. Then we had an explosion of scientific methodologies in the early 1900s, and then in the '50s and '60s, a group of psychologists showed up and said, "None of this stuff that you guys are doing is measurable."
So, what we're going to focus on is what you can measure. They started focusing on behavior. These were the behavioral psychologists, and they were like, "I don't care what's going on in the subconscious. The question is, how can we get you to stop drinking alcohol on a daily basis?" That's what we're going to focus on: behavior, behavior, behavior. This is the three-head approach.
If some of y'all are three-heads, you're all going to be like, "I just need to wake up every day. I just need to wake up. I need to be more disciplined. I need to do this." You're focusing on actions, actions, actions, actions, actions. Then comes the first big tech in psychotherapy, so this is graduating to a four-head. Someone came along, someone like Aaron Beck, who developed CBT, and he said, "Hold on a second. When you have a behavior, it turns out that there are things that you cannot measure—your thoughts or your emotions—which influence your behavior."
So, if we just focus on behavior and ignore the thoughts and emotions, it will not be as successful as if we focus on the thoughts and emotions as well. So, we're adding a layer of stuff that we're working on. Here's the base layer of behavior and action, and now we're adding thoughts and emotions to it. Once we start working on the thoughts and the emotions, we start to see better outcomes even at the behavioral level because we're sort of getting closer to the root of the problem.
When CBT was developed, we started to get better at treating a lot of different things like social anxiety and OCD, which maybe had unclear treatment outcomes prior to that. Now we have very, very good treatment outcomes for a lot of things once we start focusing on thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Then comes the most recent advance in psychotherapy, championed by people like Marsha Linehan, who developed dialectical behavioral therapy.
So, CBT and psychodynamic, maybe psychoanalytic stuff, was pretty good at doing things like anxiety and maybe some addiction stuff like that. But then we had these people who had personality problems. These are things like narcissism or borderline personality disorder or sociopathy. These are things that are not just as simple as a thought or an emotion, but this is who this person is. It is the way that they perceive the world; it is the way that they receive the world.
Marsha Linehan had borderline personality disorder, went through a lot of treatment, became a psychologist, and my understanding of the story—I've never talked to the lady—is that she discovered mindfulness. She found that this was the missing component that enhanced everything she had gone through in her own treatment. Then she developed a scientific protocol, and now what's happened is this third wave of psychotherapy that essentially incorporates a couple of core principles into treatment.
Once we apply these core principles, it allows us to change things at the personality level. This is what allows us to go from four-head to five-head, and that's exactly what the research shows. There are so many CEOs, entrepreneurs, and people who are incredibly famous, successful, and happy who will say that meditation is revolutionary. But then a lot of people are confused—myself being among them—and it's like, "What does meditation do? What is the science? What is the mechanism?"
The really cool thing about the third wave of psychotherapy is that we've elucidated what the actual mechanisms are, what's going on under the hood, and that's what we're going to teach you all today. The first thing is acceptance. Now, acceptance really confuses people because people think that if I accept, doesn't that mean that things don't get better? So, if I'm unhappy about something and I just accept things the way that they are, doesn't that lead to resignation?
But the answer is, if you look at the science behind it, the answer is no; it doesn't lead to resignation. What acceptance actually gives us is an antidote to avoidance. This is the mechanism. I want you all to think about all of the things in your life that you avoid. Why do you avoid them? If I'm a human being and I have the opportunity to move in this direction and this creates a negative experience, then what ends up happening is I am going to move away from it. I'm going to engage in avoidance behavior.
The problem right now is that with the explosion of technology, these avoidance behaviors are becoming so addictive so rapidly. It is becoming easier and easier to avoid. I don't need to leave the house; I can get grocery delivery. I can work from home; I never have to see other people. I can try to date people online, even though it's a mess. So, we're seeing an explosion of avoidance behavior. If we stop and think about it, what is the crux of avoidance? Why do we avoid? Because we are trying to get rid of a negative consequence.
This is bad; we do not want bad; we want good. So, acceptance is an incredibly powerful tool because once you accept something, it allows you to actually move in this direction. Acceptance doesn't lead to avoidance or resignation; it actually—this is what's so weird and paradoxical—allows you to move in this direction. It allows you to do things like embrace life and experiences.
So, practically, the way that this works is, if there's anything that you are trying to avoid, just accept the negative consequence. If I'm going on a date, just accept that I haven't been on a date before and this is the first time I'm doing it. It's going to be uncomfortable. The moment that you accept that and you sort of say, "This is what's going to happen," and this is something that I learned as a physician, a medical student.
Even on my first rotation, which was pediatrics, I learned beautifully the power of acceptance. Kids are afraid of shots, and if you just tell them, "Hey, it's a shot; it's going to hurt for a little while; you'll feel better within 5 minutes; I'm going to give you a Band-Aid; I'm going to give you a lollipop," when you teach this child avoidance—something as simple as getting an injection—it transforms their experience of it.
So, we need to learn how to accept. Acceptance doesn't mean don't act. What we really need to focus on is that it doesn't mean accept your circumstances or things like that. You should absolutely change. What we want to accept is the potential pain of action; that's really what acceptance means.
Now, the second thing we're going to talk about is super cool, and this is called diffusion. This is kind of hard to explain, but defusion is taking the cognitive process as fluctuating instead of overly regulating it. When we have certain thoughts or emotions, we don't like those negative thoughts or emotions, right? So, if I'm unhappy or I feel ashamed of myself or I feel guilty, we think I need to do something to change this.
If I'm unhappy, let me go eat something that makes me feel better; let me play a video game. The cognitive process, the fundamental way we deal with our cognition, is to regulate it. I don't like the way that you're talking to me, so I want you to stop using those words. I'm getting triggered by what you're saying, so I want to avoid you even more. This cognitive experience that happens inside my head needs to be controlled.
Once we start overly controlling our cognitive process, it leads to an overreaction to our environment. The environment must be very, very carefully controlled lest it tamper with my fragile internal cognitive process. There is a beautiful revelation of defusion, which says that actually the cognitive process by itself fluctuates. If you're afraid today, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be afraid tomorrow. If you're happy today, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be happy tomorrow.
The natural function of cognition is to fluctuate and alter. You don't think one thing all day long; you think one thing, then another thing, then nothing. This is absolutely true, but what are the implications? The implications are brilliant, and all are going to love this: it means you do not have to solve problems in your mind. This is the one situation where if you leave a problem alone, there is a good chance that it will go away.
Right? This is crazy! I want you all to think about this because this sounds insane, but it is so true. If I'm upset when I go to bed one night, it doesn't necessarily mean I will be upset when I wake up in the morning. I can feel better tomorrow. My brain, when I go to sleep, does all kinds of stuff with my suppressed emotions and emotional processing and all this good stuff. It means that I can feel better tomorrow.
Oh, I'm really, really upset today because I got dumped. That doesn't mean you're going to be upset for the rest of your life. You can accept that the cognitive process naturally fluctuates, and y'all should love this, and I love it too because this means you do not have to solve your problems. Acknowledging that the cognitive process naturally fluctuates is a way to procrastinate and actually fix your problems.
Right? I don't need to overreact to things; I can just acknowledge that these thoughts come and these thoughts go. This is the power of diffusion, and I want you all to just think about how transformative this can be for someone's life. Setbacks don't need to be overly corrected. We don't need to control everything around us; we can let ourselves have a bad day without trying to fix everything. That amount of peace of mind that we get correlates with so much good stuff.
Right? So, let's just take an example of a relationship. If I'm in a relationship and my partner forgets my birthday, I can feel sad; I can feel disappointed. But if I acknowledge that my partner forgot, I can also recognize that a couple of days from now, I will feel better about this. Now, a lot of people may wonder, "But Dr. K, hold on a second. If we leave our mind alone, can't that create more problems?"
So, if I tolerate this behavior from my partner, who consistently forgets my birthday, doesn't that mean that my life will be worse? Or if I'm really lacking confidence or I have a history of trauma and I do have these negative thoughts every day when I wake up in the morning, leaving it alone doesn't fix it. And you're absolutely right.
So, there are a couple of exceptions to this. The first is when we cognitively defuse; it allows us to have a tranquil mind. We're not getting thrown off base by the sadness or the disappointment. Then, once we operate from a tranquil mind, it allows us to fix our problems better. This is the whole problem with something like anxiety.
I've worked with so many people who get sleep anxiety. It's like, "Oh my God, I need to go to sleep! I need to go to sleep! I need to go to sleep!" The more that you need to go to sleep, the harder it is to go to sleep. So, feeling anxious about it, feeling the importance of needing to go to bed on time—if I fall asleep now, I'll get six hours; that's enough. But now I'm worried; now it's five hours, and now I'm stressed out that five hours is enough sleep.
Then it becomes four hours, and now it becomes three hours. Now, should I stay up? It's so anxious. The presence of anxiety in your mind worsens outcomes. So, what diffusion allows us to do is take a step back, take a breather, look at it, and say, "Okay, look, it's okay that they forgot this time, but how do I approach this situation? How can I communicate with them coming from a place of calmness and understanding as opposed to sadness, anger, and resentment?"
Which one do you think will lead to a healthier relationship over time? So, oddly enough, diffusion allows us to better solve our problems because we are not emotionally controlled. We recognize that these emotions will come and go. The other thing is that sometimes we have influences that will continually put thoughts or emotions in our mind. These are things like trauma or we have circumstances.
So, if I live in a toxic household, every day I will have negativity. I still think that diffusion is very helpful here. I'm not saying that diffusion should be used to avoid all of your problems, but I think there's a lot of data that basically shows that not all of your problems need to be dealt with with the urgency and vigor that you apply to them. Right? Some stuff you can chill out about.
If you have friends who are super stressed out, like you know this, you can tell them, "Hey, you just really need to chill out for a little while." It is bad, and it does need to be dealt with, but you don't need to stress about it so much, and that's what diffusion allows us to do.
Then we get to the third major competency, which will allow us to become a five-head, which is self as context. This is super wild. Okay, so remember that this revolution in psychotherapy came from a couple of things. It came from things like meditative practices, and I suspect this was also driven by things like psychedelics.
If you remember, in the '60s, there was an explosion of meditation and an explosion of LSD usage. There was a group of people who were basically in college around the '60s and '70s who were doing both of these things, who then around the '90s or early 2000s were in their 50s or 60s and then were psychologists at that point.
So, what they sort of figured out is that these trippy experiences where I am not what I think I am, and what they discovered is that the self is actually contextual. So, what they discovered is that the experience of life is filtered through our self. I know that sounds kind of weird.
So, what they discovered is to take inner experience as a context to experience. What they discovered was that in life, we have experiences, which are over here, but these experiences are actually filtered through a human being, and that this can be acted upon independently. So, what they discovered is that you are a context to your experience.
So, what does this mean? I know it sounds kind of weird, but we'll try to explain, and if you all have had meditative experiences, it helps a lot. Generally speaking, when we go through life, we have experiences in life, and we think of those experiences as fixed things.
Right? So, if I think about, let's say, a breakup, a breakup has a couple of things that go with it. First of all, it has a behavioral layer. I'm no longer physically seeing this person; I'm no longer physically holding hands or kissing this person. That has its own impact.
Then there is a cognitive-emotional layer, which is like sadness and maybe some amount of shame, maybe some amount of relief. I have these different thoughts in my head. But this is the big discovery of the third wave of psychotherapy, and this is really how people become five-heads.
Then they have the personal way that they view their thoughts and emotions. This is what this new tech in psychotherapy basically does: it helps us realize we have behaviors, we have thoughts and emotions, and then there is an attitude or mindset, which is even more meta than thoughts and emotions, which allows us to react to our thoughts and emotions in a specific way.
Now, a lot of people are not aware of this. If you look at people who are truly three-heads, when I work with these people in my office, what I find is they are not able to question their experience of something. They are not able to recognize that the attitude that they have towards a particular event is really what makes it problematic.
So, let's use this example of a breakup. The behaviors are the same: I'm never going to touch this person again; I'm never going to kiss this person again; I'm not going to hold hands—fine. The thoughts and emotions are also somewhat the same. Of course, there's going to be sadness; there may be some degree of relief; there may be some degree of anxiety about the future. That's what happens for everyone when you break up.
But then there is the context that you add to the experience. So, when you experience these emotions, how do you receive them? Some people are unaware that there is a way to receive them, and so this experience becomes truth. This experience becomes destiny.
Now, I will forever be alone because they think that, right? They think, "If I can't make it work with this person, it's too late; no one will ever love me." They do not question things at the level of thoughts or emotions. There are other people who are not devastated by this experience. They can have a different kind of attitude towards it.
They can say to themselves, "You know, this relationship was incredibly painful. I really wish I had done some things better. There's a lot of hurt, but you know what? I learned a lot from this relationship. This relationship, just like anything else in life, anytime you have a failure, it teaches you how to do it better the next time around." This is five-head thinking, right? Literally.
This is what separates people who are three-heads, who once they have one setback in life—like I was almost this or I was this for a while, where I was one of these burnt-out gifted kids. As things started to go wrong in my life, I didn't realize that the way I was perceiving myself was half the problem. I had this identity. It's not my behaviors, and it's not the thoughts and emotions; it is the way that I judged those thoughts and emotions.
The beautiful thing is that when you start to do this, it changes your personality. The other really cool thing about this wave of psychotherapy techniques, especially taking self as context, is that it allows us to fix things like narcissism. Remember, narcissism is the way that you look at your beliefs.
I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but when a narcissist has a negative belief, they think, "You are doing this to hurt me." That's what they think. They take everything personally; that's literally what it is. The thoughts and emotions are there, but it's the way that they interpret those thoughts and emotions. Everything is about me, me, me, me, me.
If you do anything wrong, you tried to hurt me because if I feel hurt, there must be malice on your end. It is the way that they interpret their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral experiences. Now, the moment that you teach a narcissist, "Hold on a second. What are the different ways that you could view this? What are the different reasons besides malice that this person is doing this to you? Are they stressed out? Let's put ourselves in their shoes. Let's change the context of what we are experiencing here."
Let's change the context of the breakup. "You're breaking up with me because you want to take advantage of me; you hate me so much." Hold on a second; let's change the context. Let's look at this from a different angle. The moment that we're able to do that, this is literally what reduces narcissism in patients.
So, self as context allows us to recognize two really important things. The first is that life is not objective. Furthermore, in the subjectivity of life, right? Because it's subjective, two different people can view something in different ways. That subjectivity is actually controllable; you can change the way that you interpret what actually happens.
This is exactly how you become a five-head. The difference between a three-head and a four-head is a three-head focuses entirely on behavior. A four-head is pretty normal, and what we're doing then is we recognize there's emotions, and then we recognize there's cognition, and we recognize there's behavior, and we recognize there's emotion, and some amount of managing all three of these.
But then, if you really want to elevate to five-head, if you really want to get to the level of the advantages that things like meditation or these third waves of psychotherapies teach you, you need to focus on three things. The first is acceptance—not as a form of resignation, but as a form of avoiding avoidance behaviors. You just accept that it is bad; accept that it is something that you have to go through and embrace it.
Right? Don't run away from it; that in and of itself will transform your life. The second thing is diffusion, and this is beautiful because diffusion means you don't have to fix everything in your mind, that your mind will take care of some things on its own. People may be concerned that this allows us to propagate some negative things, which can be the case, but I want you all to think about, generally speaking, how overwhelmed and stressed you are. Wouldn't it be way easier if half of your problems may get better on their own?
It allows you to focus your resources and be so much more productive. The last thing is to recognize that self is context, that the way that you view the world, the way that you view your experiences can, in and of itself, change. When you do these three things, you will notice that you are a different person. You will become one of these people who seems to be good at everything because now they're not running away from hard experiences.
Yeah, I was embarrassed to date, but I stuck with it; I put myself out there. How do you put yourself out there? You have to accept; you have to avoid the avoidance behavior. The second thing that these people do is they don't get overly stressed out when things necessarily go wrong. They don't have to fix everything; they can focus on high-priority things and let go of the little stuff.
They're not letting people who are mean to them in class live rent-free in their head, and instead, they're focusing on doing well in class. So, they do well in the class, they leave the university, and then they leave this person far behind. There was a period in my life where a lot of people lived rent-free in my head, and I was like, "F that; this is a waste of my time. Why am I worrying about what someone else is doing?"
The more that I let go of that, I recognized, "Okay, I feel a little bit intimidated today; I feel a little bit embarrassed today." So be it, right? It's not something that I really want to focus on. What I really want to focus on is that over there. Why am I getting destabilized by my embarrassment? "Oh, I feel like I can't dance, so now I'm embarrassed."
Yeah, I don't know how to dance because I never learned how to dance. Some amount of embarrassment—that's the end of it. I'm not going to bother dancing just so I feel better in this particular situation. I'm going to spend more time learning how to make a YouTube video, reading about psychology, playing video games. That's how I want to spend my life.
That's what diffusion allows you to do. The last thing is to recognize—this is wild—that the painful stuff in life can be altered into an advantage if you change the way that you look at it. So, I failed out of college, which was kind of a bad thing, and yet it made me the person that I am today. If you look at these five-head people who are resilient, whose setbacks become advantages, this is precisely how they do it.
The last thing that I want to say is that a lot of people wonder what's the advantage of therapy. This is where you don't necessarily have to go to therapy to get all the benefits of therapy. It depends on your case from a clinical context, but I really wanted to share with you all, as a psychiatrist, as someone who's a former monk, as someone who does this work and helps people move from being 30 years old, living in their parents' basement, to having a job, getting married, you know, being a published author.
I've done this before, and these are the skills that I teach in my office. These are the things that people learn that take someone who's a 30-year-old addict and allows them to have a full life five years later. So, give this a shot, and I really hope it works for you. [Music]