You Need To Start Ignoring Yourself

Summary

In this video by HealthyGamerGG, the creator discusses an oft-overlooked skill: how to ignore oneself. Drawing from his experience as an addiction psychiatrist, the creator emphasizes the importance of learning to resist impulses and emotions to lead a more fulfilling life. He highlights principles from ancient yogic and stoic philosophies to demonstrate how non-reactionary behavior can lead to happiness and control over one's life. The video also explores practical techniques like meditation and impulse control exercises to cultivate this important skill.

Highlights

• Ignoring oneself can help conquer addiction by avoiding negative impulses. 🚫
• Making the right choice once doesn’t make future choices easier - breaking this cycle is crucial. 🔄
• Yogic and stoic teachings emphasize ignoring impulses as a path to happiness. 🧘‍♀️
• Arjun's story illustrates how resisting emotions aids in maintaining happiness. 🏹
• Stoicism involves not letting emotions dictate actions, focusing instead on mindfulness. 🧘‍♂️

Key Takeaways

• Ignoring your impulses can lead to more happiness and less suffering in life. 🧘‍♂️
• It's important to distinguish between resisting bad impulses and choosing the right actions. 🥗
• Both Stoic and yogic philosophies highlight the importance of controlling one’s desires. 📜
• Learning to resist impulses involves training your brain and practicing mindfulness. 🧠
• In today’s society, where technology often triggers desires, learning to ignore impulses is crucial. 📱

Overview

In this engaging video, HealthyGamerGG introduces a unique and often overlooked concept - the art of ignoring oneself. He explains how ignoring one's impulses and desires can drastically change one's life for the better. Dr. K draws on his experience as an addiction psychiatrist, explaining how mastering impulse control can help break the cycle of addiction. He also introduces ideas from ancient philosophies, illustrating how they can be applicable in modern life.

Through the story of Arjun and Krishna, the creator explores how resisting negative emotions can lead to less suffering and more happiness. By focusing on mindfulness and self-control, individuals can manage their emotions and reduce life's challenges. Techniques such as meditation and fixed-point gazing are suggested as methods for enhancing impulse control.

Moreover, in a world dominated by technology which often heightens impulsive desires, training oneself to resist these technological temptations becomes imperative. By adopting practices from yoga and stoicism, individuals can gain better control over their impulses and thereby their lives, fostering a happier and more controlled existence.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction: Importance of Ignoring Yourself The chapter titled 'Introduction: Importance of Ignoring Yourself' explores a unique skill that many overlook: the ability to ignore oneself. Drawing from experiences as an addiction psychiatrist, the narrative focuses on how crucial it is to ignore certain impulses and desires to overcome addiction. It implies that the more proficient individuals become at disregarding these internal urges, the more successful they tend to be in their recovery. This skill's relevance extends to common struggles such as waking up and other everyday challenges.
• 00:30 - 01:00: The Challenge of Making the Right Choice The chapter discusses the difficulty of consistently making the right choice. It highlights the fact that even if a person makes the right choice one day, it doesn't necessarily make it easier to do so the next day. Many people can manage to make good decisions for a short period but often end up reverting to poor choices, finding themselves back at square one. The chapter intends to teach the reader how to break this recurring cycle of decision-making.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Yogic and Stoic Wisdom: The Story of Arjun and Krishna This chapter explores the shared wisdom of yogic and stoic philosophies, emphasizing the concept of self-ignorance as a path to happiness and easier living. It begins with the famous story of Arjun and Krishna from Ancient India. Arjun, facing a civil war against his cousins, is filled with despair before entering battle.
• 01:30 - 02:00: The Illusion of Despair The protagonist grapples with internal conflict about fighting in a battle against his own family, friends, and teachers. He questions the value of fighting for the kingdom and considers retreating instead. Arjun is counseled by Christian, who acknowledges his struggle and explains the situation further.
• 02:00 - 02:30: The Nature of Happiness and Suffering The chapter explores the concepts of happiness and suffering, emphasizing the impact of one's actions on both. It draws on Krishna's teachings to Arjuna as an illustrative guide. One key lesson is that emotions, like despair, should be understood in terms of homeostasis rather than being blindly obeyed or ignored. Krishna encourages Arjuna to reflect on his current emotional state to gain insights into its true nature and to question whether it should dictate his actions.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Anxiety and the Cycle of Avoidance The chapter discusses the impulse of anxiety and how avoiding it doesn't resolve the issue. Instead, it suggests that if one does nothing about the impulse, it will naturally subside as emotions return to a state of homeostasis. Additionally, there's a mention of Dr. K's guide, a resource built to help people understand and manage their needs based on the author's extensive experience as a monk and psychiatrist.
• 03:00 - 03:30: The Perfect Wedding Fallacy The chapter titled 'The Perfect Wedding Fallacy' discusses the concept of managing one's emotions to take control of life. It highlights that suffering often stems from reacting to emotions rather than managing them. The narrative suggests that fleeing from challenging situations, like running away from abusive relatives, can lead to increased suffering. The underlying message is about the importance of facing battles rather than escaping, as avoidance may not stop the ongoing issues and could exacerbate suffering. The chapter underscores the significance of not merely following negative emotions but understanding and controlling them for a more fulfilling life.
• 03:30 - 04:00: The Science of Resisting Impulses The chapter explores how giving in to impulses and allowing them to control our actions leads to more significant life issues. A personal example is provided: someone who feels socially anxious might avoid social situations, resulting in loneliness. This loneliness could lead to a negative self-perception, further discouraging social interactions. The chapter emphasizes understanding and resisting these initial negative impulses to prevent long-term consequences.
• 04:00 - 04:30: Understanding Addictions and Impulse Control In this chapter, the concept of addictions and impulse control are explored through the lens of self-awareness and emotional regulation. The narrative examines how succumbing to impulsive thoughts can lead to negative outcomes such as social anxiety or difficulty in forming relationships, illustrated using the scenario of attending a party. The chapter emphasizes the importance of not allowing emotions to dictate one's actions, as doing so can result in personal distress. By referencing mythical and real-world scenarios, the chapter highlights the necessity of mastering one's emotional responses to avoid the cycle of suffering, with examples that extend to cultural stereotypes such as 'Bridezillas,' suggesting a broader societal relevance of the discourse.
• 04:30 - 05:00: The Consequences of Following Impulses This chapter discusses the concept of 'groomzillas' and the obsession with having a perfect wedding. The speaker observes that those who focus intensely on perfection for their weddings often end up divorcing within a few years. Through discussions with patients going through divorces, it's revealed that the importance of a perfect wedding may contribute to marital dissatisfaction.
• 05:00 - 05:30: The Timeline of Desires The chapter titled 'The Timeline of Desires' explores the concept of managing emotions and desires. It begins with an example of a couple who wish for a perfect wedding but face imperfections, leading to resentment and eventually the deterioration of their marriage. This narrative sets the stage for a lesson drawn from a dialogue between Krishna and Arjun, highlighting the importance of resisting impulsive emotions. Krishna advises Arjun to learn how to resist emotional impulses, as resisting these impulses lays the foundation for making the right choices. The chapter emphasizes that understanding emotions and mastering the resistance to immediate desires are crucial from both a philosophical and scientific perspective when it comes to decision-making and taking appropriate actions.
• 05:30 - 06:00: Learning from Impulse Control The chapter titled 'Learning from Impulse Control' delves into the concept of cognitive tasks associated with decision-making, especially in the context of choosing between a healthy and an unhealthy option. It underscores that making such a decision involves two distinct mental processes: resisting the impulse (such as craving a burger) and then enforcing a choice towards something less desired (like opting for a salad). This dual-task challenge is the crux of impulse control issues and highlights why people often struggle with making healthier decisions.
• 06:00 - 06:30: Techniques to Develop Impulse Control: Meditation and Trataka The chapter discusses techniques for developing impulse control, emphasizing the importance of focusing on one task at a time. It uses the metaphor of renovating a house—breaking down a wall before building a new one—to illustrate that removing negative habits is the first step towards achieving positive outcomes. The chapter critiques society's goal-focused mentality, which often overlooks the importance of avoiding wrong actions in favor of only pursuing correct ones.
• 06:30 - 07:00: Practical Exercises: Ignoring Impulses at Restaurants The chapter emphasizes the often overlooked goal of resisting impulses, particularly in the context of dining out, as a significant step towards achieving personal objectives. It points out that not giving in to impulses, though it may seem like 'doing nothing,' is a crucial form of progress. The narrative discusses insights from neuroscience, specifically how individuals with addictions struggle with certain neurological deficiencies, one being the challenge to resist impulses. This concept is applicable beyond addiction, suggesting the universal value in strengthening impulse control.
• 07:00 - 07:30: Importance of Resisting Technological and Food Impulses This chapter underscores the significance of resisting both technological and food-related impulses, particularly for those grappling with addiction. It introduces the primary strategy of 'doing nothing' and learning to disregard immediate desires and impulses. The chapter details techniques such as 'following the timeline of your desires,' akin to methods used in addiction psychiatry and recovery programs like AAA (Alcoholics Anonymous). The approach of 'playing the tape through to the end' is highlighted, whereby individuals are encouraged to visualize the outcome or consequences of succumbing to their impulses before acting upon them.

You Need To Start Ignoring Yourself Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 today we're going to learn a really interesting skill that not many people really think about which is how to ignore yourself [Music] I've worked with a ton of people as an addiction psychiatrist and I've noticed that helping my patients conquer addiction really involves teaching them how to ignore some of their impulses and desires and the better they get at ignoring themselves the better off they tend to do and you may have struggled with this as well where like you wake up
• 00:30 - 01:00 on a particular day and there's something that there's like the right choice and there's the wrong choice and even if you make the right choice the real problem with that is that there's no credit tomorrow making the right choice today doesn't actually make the right choice easier tomorrow in fact oftentimes what I find with people that I work with is that they can make the right choice for a day or two days or three days but eventually you sort of return to making the wrong choice and you're kind of back to square one and today we're going to teach you how to crack that cycle and this is something
• 01:00 - 01:30 that the yogis and the stoics discovered they sort of discovered this ability to ignore yourself and if you kind of focus on that a lot of happiness will come and life will become easier so we're going to start with a really famous story that sort of illustrates this principle and there's this guy in Ancient India named Arjun and he has this charioteer named Krishna and Arjun is on the cusp of a civil war it's the dawn of battle and on two sides of the Civil War are actually sets of cousins and so Arjun is about to go into battle and he starts to Despair
• 01:30 - 02:00 and he's like you know I actually don't think that fighting for the kingdom is worth it like the kingdom is immaterial and like is it really like that important these are these are my cousins these are my family they're even some of my friends on the other side my teachers are on the other side I don't want to kill them and so he struggles and he despairs and what he really wants to do is Retreat from the field of battle instead of engaging and like fighting against his teachers who he loves and respects so what Christian explains to Arjun is that listen I understand that
• 02:00 - 02:30 you don't want to fight and I understand that you're not despairing but there are a couple of key things you need to understand about the nature of happiness and suffering and how engaging in action affects those two things and one of the most important important principles that Krishna teaches our Journeys it says okay Arjun look at yourself right now you feel despair right what is the nature of Despair and should you listen to it and essentially what Krishna teaches Arjuna is this concept of homeostasis that anytime we have some kind of emotion or impulse if we
• 02:30 - 03:00 actually do nothing about the impulse that impulse will disappear and even our emotions will return to a baseline state of homeostasis hey just a quick note a lot of people will ask us what do I do next and that's why we built Dr K's guide It's a comprehensive resource that distills over 20 years of my experience both as a monk and as a psychiatrist and it's designed in a way that's tailored to fit your needs so if you're interested in better understanding your
• 03:00 - 03:30 mind and taking control of your life check out the link below the suffering that you have in life is because you follow your emotions instead of not reacting to them so if you listen to the despair and you flee from the field of battle over time this will actually lead to more suffering because the whole reason that you're fighting in the first place is because your cousins are like abusive and and even if you run away they're going to keep chasing you he doesn't actually go into all that detail but he sort of points out to him that is following our negative emotions
• 03:30 - 04:00 and letting them control us that actually leads us to the most problems in life and think about this in your situation right so like I'm socially anxious I feel awkward when I go to a party so I'm gonna stay home and even if I give in to that social anxiety and avoid that awkwardness what happens over time I become lonely and as I become lonely I start to think to myself oh my God I'm so pathetic I'm so lonely I have no friends then if you listen to that you'll sort of even when you go to a
• 04:00 - 04:30 party you're going to have all those thoughts in your head and you're kind of giving in to those thoughts and even if you force yourself to go to the party it's going to be really really hard and you're going to feel pathetic and it's going to be hard for you to make friends and the whole cycle will repeat itself so what Arjun basically learns from Krishna is that any kind of emotions that you have if you let them control you will lead to suffering so there's another really illustrative example of this which is people who are like Bridezillas and this is a little bit offensive towards women because I'm sure there are groomzillas too but these are the stories that you don't you don't
• 04:30 - 05:00 hear about groomzilla's on the internet but I've worked with a lot of people who really wanted the perfect wedding and the main thing that I noticed is like how long does the happiness from the perfect wedding last oftentimes the people who strive really hard for the perfect wedding are the ones who are actually getting divorced between one and three years and even when I'm working with patients who are going through a divorce very rapidly after getting married I'll ask them questions about like hey like how important was having a perfect wedding to you and oftentimes what I discover is that they
• 05:00 - 05:30 really wanted a perfect wedding but things weren't perfect and then they Harbor some resentment which actually forms the seed of the destruction of their marriage so what Krishna basically teaches Arjun is that listen bro any kind of emotions that you have you have to really learn how to resist them and resisting the impulse is actually going to be the foundation of taking the right action now this is really important to understand from a scientific perspective as well when we think about making the right choice or doing the right thing we
• 05:30 - 06:00 don't understand that these are actually two discrete cognitive tasks at play so let's say I want to eat a burger but instead I want to force myself to eat a salad there's healthy option and there is unhealthy option so choosing the salad is actually two cognitive tasks one is resisting the impulse of the burger and the second is forcing yourself to eat the the salad so there's kind of resisting the desire and then there is choosing the thing that you don't want to do the real problem that people fall into the reason that this
• 06:00 - 06:30 can feel repetitive and like you're not making progress over time is because we don't actually focus on the two tasks separately so if you sort of think about you know like let's say I want to renovate my house building like a new wall requires me breaking down the wall first so like getting rid of the bad thing is the first step to doing the right thing the problem is in our society today we are also goal focused and outcome focused that we just think about doing the right thing we don't think about avoiding the wrong thing and sort of think about moving towards your
• 06:30 - 07:00 goals no one thinks about hey I didn't screw up today as a an important step towards my goals right that's not actually progress that's just doing nothing nothing and doing nothing isn't progress so we don't even try to do it and this is the huge mistake that we make if you look at Neuroscience research on people with addictions what you find is that they have six discrete neuroscientific deficiencies and one of those key deficiencies is the ability to resist impulses every single person I've
• 07:00 - 07:30 worked with who has conquered addiction starts with the very fundamental step of doing nothing and learning how to ignore their desires and ignore their impulses so this involves a couple of techniques the first is following the timeline of your desires so this is also something an addiction Psychiatry or like especially like AAA and peer support recovery called playing the tape through to the end so when we have an Impulse we don't really pay attention to what the
• 07:30 - 08:00 cost of this impulse is or what giving into it really costs us over time so I'll give you all a simple example I am browsing this thing called the internet and I am on Reddit and someone on Reddit said something stupid and what do I do oh man time to put this noob in their place I argue with them back and forth for like 45 minutes I write 2 000 words of text I reply they reply and then something's dangerous starts to happen my my replies start getting downvoted and their replies start getting upvoted and so things start going downhill right I'm trying to put this this noob in
• 08:00 - 08:30 their place on the internet but like now I'm feeling a little bit more frustrated I've spent about an hour arguing with them and I'm like ah and then I load up a video game or I open up YouTube or I start scrolling stuff on Tick Tock or whatever and then I spend the next hour or two like decompressing from getting owned on the internet and at the end of that what have I learned absolutely nothing right the next day rolls around and you don't ever stop to think like okay hold on a second I had a desire to reply to someone on the internet and when I gave into that desire what was
• 08:30 - 09:00 the consequence of that action what did it actually cost me to not ignore myself when I listen to myself and I wanted to put this noob in their place I spent an hour writing 2 000 words instead of you know that is like 1 40th of a non-fiction book that is like 1 40th of a novel you spent that amount of time writing 2.5 of a book arguing to someone on the internet and after you got owned on the internet then you gave in to another impulse which is now I feel bad
• 09:00 - 09:30 so what am I going to do to feel better I'm gonna start opening up a video game and I'm gonna start playing it so this is what Krishna teaches Arjun pay attention to the timeline of your desire as you give into your impulse what actually happens over time study it scientifically when you do this it engages other parts of your brain and the key thing that it engages is your hippocampus and your learning circuitry so it requires some amount of conscious attention and reflection to actually
• 09:30 - 10:00 learn the price of giving in to your impulses the next thing that we're going to focus on is how to resist our impulses and this is the key discovery about that both the stoics and the yogis made that if you want life to be easy the most important thing to conquer is actually your own desires that the more non-reactionary you can be the more control you will have over your life and so if you kind of think about stoicism what is stoicism stoicism is not letting your impulses your emotions your desires actually determine what you do so how
• 10:00 - 10:30 can we build up this skill because this is absolutely like a function in the brain called impulse control that we can train through certain practices so the first is meditation and I'll even do this with like my four-year-old kid so what we'll sort of do is I'll have them meditate and then I'll take a feather and I'll tickle them under the nose or under the chin or somewhere else and I tell them okay we're gonna play a game where you're not supposed to move at all and daddy's gonna try to tickle you and then they get to try to do it to me too which is lots of fun but it works really
• 10:30 - 11:00 well because what we're actually doing what's happening in their brain is they have an Impulse to move but what are they doing in that moment they are exerting control over that impulse they're resisting the impulse and the really cool thing is as I've done this practice with my kids over time their ability to resist the pull of screens has actually skyrocketed they can actually self-regulate themselves as they practice these kinds of skills so for y'all you can't really do this the the feather tickling yourself because someone else has to do it for you but
• 11:00 - 11:30 there are other techniques that you can do so one of my favorites is something called trataka so thratica is fixed Point gazing and that's what we're going to do is look at a candle and we're going to sort of stare at the flame without blinking so we'll teach y'all more how to do that there's we've got videos on that on YouTube and you can also check out Dr K's guide for like the details of how to do that technique but you can basically do any kind of mindfulness technique provided that you really focus on resisting whatever impulses you have so if you're doing a different technique like a breath technique then if you've got an itch or
• 11:30 - 12:00 a scratch or you want to shift just do your best not to do that and literally what you'll be doing is strengthening your brain and its capacity to resist impulses the other thing that you can do which is sort of like more of an organ meditation technique is anytime you go to a restaurant don't order the thing that you want to order so I'm not saying you have to order your least favorite dish right but what we really want to practice is is not forcing yourself to do something that you dislike because remember that's the second part of the equation what we really want to do is resist the impulse to eat what you want
• 12:00 - 12:30 so this is where it's actually way easier but what I'd say is pick number two on your list or pick number three on your list just don't pick your most favorite thing to order at the restaurant resist that impulse so I know it sounds kind of weird but one of the most important skills that people don't practice is how to ignore yourself this is the foundation of what the stoics and yogis discovered that if you want to have control and happiness in your life ignoring yourself is actually the first step and this is becoming increasingly
• 12:30 - 13:00 important in today's society because of things like technology because what is technology actually doing as we get more and more cookies added to our browsers and stuff like that people know what you want and they're going to trigger different Desires in you right this is why we have notifications on your phone to trigger desires and Trigger impulses and technology is becoming harder and harder to resist and it's not just in technology there's also been some really fascinating research recently that additives and food will neuroscientifically induce Cravings so
• 13:00 - 13:30 what even the food that we ate eat is actually inducing impulses within us and trying to get us to eat things so if you want control over your life and you want to like reduce your you know your unhealthy eating habits maybe tackle things like obesity stop using technology and stop giving into your emotions take the road that the stoics and yogis took and actually learn how to ignore your impulses foreign