Understanding Gaming Addiction and Children

Your Child’s Brain Is No Match for Modern Gaming | Dr. Alok Kanojia

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

In this engaging and insightful presentation by Dr. Alok Kanojia, the complex relationship between children and modern gaming is explored. As a psychiatrist, Dr. Kanojia brings a wealth of knowledge to help parents understand why their children are drawn to video games and how this affects their brains. Emphasizing understanding over control, he shares practical strategies for fostering a healthy relationship with technology and the importance of empathy in parenting. The talk is not just about curbing gaming addiction but guiding children to balance their digital and real-world experiences, ultimately ensuring that both parents and children are on the same team.

Highlights

Video games hook kids with a false sense of achievement, much like real-world success 🏆.
Games provide emotional safety and an escape from real-life pressures to children 🚀.
Child-parent understanding leads to better regulation of gaming habits 🌟.
Set boundaries collaboratively, involve kids in the decision-making process 🛡️.
Educate children on managing boredom as a craving for dopamine rather than instant entertainment 🎯.

Key Takeaways

Understanding is key: Know why your child loves video games to address their gaming habits effectively 🎮.
Safe space: Video games provide a sense of control, accomplishment, and emotional safety for kids 🙌.
Team up: Approach tech struggles as a shared challenge with your child, not a battle against them 🤝.
Set realistic boundaries together: Allow your child to be part of the gaming regulation process 🕹️.
Boredom is a craving: Teach your child to manage dopamine cravings by engaging with boredom thoughtfully 🧠.

Overview

Dr. Alok Kanojia delves into the intricacies of children’s addiction to video games, drawing from his professional experience as a psychiatrist. He emphasizes that modern games are designed to mimic real-life achievements and explains how they manage to captivate young minds by exploiting basic human psychological needs such as autonomy, accomplishment, and safety.

Through this talk, Dr. Kanojia encourages parents to shift from fighting against gaming to understanding and working with their children to balance virtual enjoyment with real-world responsibilities. He stresses the importance of empathy, urging parents to really listen to their children’s experiences with games to form a united front against potential tech addiction.

The talk is peppered with humor and relatable anecdotes, bridging the knowledge gap between traditional parenting methods and modern challenges. Dr. Kanojia’s insight extends beyond gaming, providing parents with tools to tackle broader issues like boredom and motivation, aiming to transform potential conflict into an opportunity for growth.

Chapters

00:00 - 03:00: Introduction and Personal Background The chapter titled 'Introduction and Personal Background' begins with Dr. K being welcomed. Dr. K expresses gratitude for the introduction and shares a delightful experience of spending time with middle schoolers that morning. Dr. K describes the time spent with the students as a 'blast' and notes that it was thoroughly enjoyable, though humorously acknowledges not knowing what the middle schoolers shared about the encounter. The chapter sets a light-hearted and engaging tone as Dr. K transitions to the main presentation, inviting interaction despite the formal lecture setting.
03:00 - 10:00: Challenges of Parenting and Technology Addiction In this chapter, the focus is on understanding the challenges parents face due to technology addiction in their children. The speaker, a psychiatrist, emphasizes the importance of addressing parents' specific questions and concerns regarding developing a healthy relationship with technology. The speaker offers guidance and tips for managing children's video gaming habits, while underscoring the value of interactive discussion over purely expert-driven dialogue.
10:00 - 18:00: Understanding Video Game Attraction The chapter begins with an introduction where the speaker expresses appreciation to various individuals and groups for their support, such as Joe, the PTA, and their agent Bird. The setting seems to be a casual meeting or event where the speaker encourages audience interaction and aims for a relaxed atmosphere as it's an evening without their children. The speaker proceeds to share a personal anecdote or background story, hinting at a more informal narrative that differs from their official biography. The chapter sets a tone of gratitude and personal connection as a foundation for discussing the topic of video game attraction.
18:00 - 30:00: Building a Healthy Relationship with Technology This chapter explores the personal story of someone who developed an addiction to video games. It impacts their academic performance, leading to significant struggles in high school and eventually failing out of college with a GPA below 2.0. The narrative delves into the emotional and behavioral aspects, such as skipping exams to play video games. The individual's parents, who are first-generation immigrants from India and both doctors, also play a role in supporting and attempting various interventions to help their child manage the addiction.
30:00 - 50:00: Setting Boundaries and Behavioral Techniques This chapter discusses the challenges parents face in setting boundaries and using behavioral techniques in the digital age. It highlights the struggle against powerful companies creating addictive technologies aimed at capturing children's attention. Despite trying various approaches, from tough love to supportive methods, parents often feel overpowered by the sophisticated strategies employed by these companies to keep kids engaged with devices.
50:00 - 70:00: Approaching Emotional and Psychological Issues The chapter discusses the goal of helping parents understand their children's emotional and psychological relationship with technology. It emphasizes the importance of developing healthy habits and not being perceived as the 'bad guy' in the process. A key takeaway from addiction psychiatry is highlighted: one cannot become sober for someone else, observed through family dynamics in addiction scenarios.
70:00 - 90:00: Risks of Online Gaming and Social Media The chapter titled 'Risks of Online Gaming and Social Media' addresses the challenges and emotional struggles faced by family members trying to intervene and help loved ones regulate potentially harmful behaviors. It draws parallels to real-life scenarios where spouses or parents make concerted efforts to curb alcohol or drug use, such as heroin or marijuana, emphasizing the difficulty of such endeavors. The key message conveyed is that successful intervention requires the individual to desire a change, highlighting the importance of teamwork and aligned efforts between parents and children to effectively tackle these issues.
90:00 - 110:00: Handling Boredom and Mindfulness The chapter discusses the challenges parents face when handling their children's use of technological devices. It highlights a cycle of increasing conflict and resentment, where the child's excessive use of devices leads to deception and behavioral changes, causing stress and a lack of enjoyment in parenting. This underscores the need for strategies in dealing with digital distractions impacting family dynamics.

Your Child’s Brain Is No Match for Modern Gaming | Dr. Alok Kanojia Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 further ado I'd like to welcome Dr k so John thank you so much okay so um it was an absolute privilege and who here has middle schoolers so I I got to spend a half hour with them this morning it was a blast i don't know what you all heard about it i certainly had a great time um so thank you very much for the introduction i think just a couple of like simple things so I I know that this is a presentation and we are all in a lecture hall um but if you guys have
00:30 - 01:00 questions in the middle like I'm here for you like I'm here to just talk to you all about what I understand about video gaming hopefully give you all some tips and some guidance on how to help your children develop a healthy relationship with technology but uh one of the things I've learned as a psychiatrist is that like you know the questions that you all have matter way more than like what the expert has come to bestow upon you so fair enough right so if you all have a concern or question or you're like "Actually can we stop
01:00 - 01:30 here i have a question my kid does that." Just raise your hand i'm really here for you um and huge shout out to to to Joe and and the PTA for making this happen bird my awesome agent who I'm meeting for the first time uh the book is a book because of Bird um so thank you all very much and let's just have a good time because it's Wednesday evening and our kids aren't here and maybe we can just like hang out for a little bit sound good okay so just a little bit about myself i I think that you know that you'll got the bio but here's kind of the the real version so I grew up um
01:30 - 02:00 I was addicted to video games struggled a fair amount in high school but like it wasn't that bad and then when I went to college I basically failed out uh I had less than a 2.0 GPA after my first year um just skipped my Spanish final because I didn't feel like going and I was playing Diablo II and my parents tried like everything so my parents are like good loving parents um first generation immigrants from India both doctors and
02:00 - 02:30 so you know that they they tried everything they tried tough love they tried being really supportive they tried like you know whatever they knew how to do and I think one of the things that we're seeing which is really scary for parents is that we're just kind of outgunned right so we have all these devices that are being developed by like billion dollar companies multi-billion dollar companies that are employing psychologists and psychiatrists and neuroscientists behavioral economists to figure out how to optimize your children's eyes on the device and so my
02:30 - 03:00 goal here today is to try to level that playing field and help y'all understand what is going on in your child's brain and in your child's mind so that you can help them develop a healthy relationship with technology and more importantly you stop being the bad guy okay so one of the key things that I learned when I was practicing more traditional addiction psychiatry is you can never be sober for someone else i've seen wives and
03:00 - 03:30 husbands try really hard to get their spouses to stop drinking i've seen heart I've seen heartbreaking stories of parents doing everything within their power to stop their kid from using heroin or marijuana or alcohol and you just the person themselves has to want to regulate their behavior are y'all with me and so the core problem that I saw was that if you and your kids are not on the same team then it's going to be really hard to make it work even if
03:30 - 04:00 you kind of win a battle you're going to lose the war because they're trying to undermine you all the time what I see from parents over and over and over again is like the harder that they get into the technological device whether it's gaming or gambling or cell phones you all sort of tighten your grip and then they start undermining you they start deceiving you they start resenting you and then it's like not fun to be a parent right your kid starts to change they start to get really angry and like they used to be such a sweet little kid and then the device showed up and then they start to become this other person
04:00 - 04:30 so the thrust of you know my approach both as a psychiatrist um as someone who helps about 15 million people on the internet every single month and these are gamers by the way people who decide that they want to quit is to equip y'all with some tools to basically get on the same team with your kids so the first thing that we have to understand is what does what do video games and technology do in the brain of your children okay so are you all okay if I ask you all questions okay so why
04:30 - 05:00 do kids like games okay so perfect answers and what do they mean right so I'm a psychiatrist so like no answer is simple so what is fun like I'm not saying why are they fun i'm asking y'all what is fun if I'm an alien from another planet and I come here and you say "Yeah we play video games because they're fun." And I'm like "What does that mean
05:00 - 05:30 okay dopamine okay dopamine so here's a crazy thing that we're going to do okay so like I've done neuroscience research i'm a psychiatrist we're going to stay away from neuroscience for a little bit cuz like dopamine is a neurotransmitter fair enough but like we mentioned control escaping right so so I don't know if this kind of makes sense why do they escape into that reality right so think about this for a
05:30 - 06:00 second there are a thousand different realities that kids could escape into they could read books they could use their imagination why do they escape into video games easier than what okay so that is the right answer for the wrong reason okay so here's the crazy thing you guys are spot on it is re easier than real life so if you look at
06:00 - 06:30 what video game developers have done they have figured out what our brain is attracted to so I'll give you all a simple example so in in the introduction you know they mentioned because part of my bio right which says that I trained at Harvard Medical School and I taught there and when people say that that sounds impressive right why is that impressive what what's the reputation it's hard so here's the key thing when
06:30 - 07:00 something is hard and we do it we get a surge of dopamine so when your kids play video games whose kids play Fortnite okay do you all know in Fortnite how many people are in one arena 100 100 how many of them win in a game one so what video games are doing what developers have figured out what is our brain attracted to and they create false versions of this for the same reason that everyone is impressed by Harvard
07:00 - 07:30 your that same circuit in the brain when your kid wins at Fortnite here you all are telling them "Oh you got to study hard you got to work hard so you can go to college you can get a good job you can live the life of your dreams right?" And you tell them that there's a lot of effort and there's a payoff at the end there's a lot of effort and there's a payoff at the end of Fortnite too the big difference is that Fortnite activates the brain in the same way but it is way easier to do y'all with me so this is what I want y'all to understand about video gaming the reason your kid
07:30 - 08:00 is into the video game is because all of the things that you want them to do that we are all wired to do that we have come to value as a society the video game lets them do that just easier okay so in addition to accomplishment right because video games are hard i don't know if you all know this but like video games are hard why are they hard they Does this make sense the game designers could make them easy you could hit one button you defeat the final boss why don't they do that it'd
08:00 - 08:30 be boring so they've figured out how to titrate the difficulty of the video game to be perfectly suited to your kid now how can it be perfectly suited to your kid who who here has kids that don't play Fortnite okay so now we have 10,000 video games and out of those not 10,000 100,000 200,000 and out of all of those video games your child will end up self- selecting to the difficulty level that they find dopamineergic y'all with me so
08:30 - 09:00 first thing is we tell them oh you need to work hard to accomplish things video games give a sense of accomplishment second thing someone mentioned control spot on now this is why I love talking to parents because y'all know your kids that's what we're going to lean into so video games give a sense of control who here has kids that play Minecraft what do they do in Minecraft build right they get to build what
09:00 - 09:30 their own world is Is there a final boss no so here you have a kid right who is unlucky enough to be my kid and they have a parent who says go to sleep on time wake up on time do your homework go to music class meditate do yoga you know don't watch YouTube so you have these kids who have an emerging sense of autonomy and when I'm sitting here and I tell y'all wake up on time you know do this do that do that we wouldn't have it
09:30 - 10:00 we wouldn't have it for a second we human beings especially in America we love autonomy right and so your kids are also biologically driven towards autonomy but guess where they get more autonomy at home or in Minecraft so they're into Minecraft okay so there's a sense of control there's a sense of accomplishment the very values that we are instilling in our children video games give them an easy version of does that make sense third thing that
10:00 - 10:30 we're going to talk about is safety so video games are incredibly safe especially for kids of y'all you know that we're talking about y'all's kids middle schoolers high schoolers so I got bullied a ton when I was in elementary school middle school and high school so school can sometimes be an unsafe place i think Joe and and them seem to be doing a great job some of the happiest kids I've ever seen great participation but like one of the things one of my experiences with like when I get bullied I can't run away like my bullies are there every single day when I go to
10:30 - 11:00 school like they're there all the time every PE they're looking for me right there's nothing I can do about that but on the internet you get to be whoever you want if you don't like someone you never have to talk to them again you can block them very easily on the internet no one judges you for the way you look no one judges you for your weight no one judges you for the clothes that you wear no one judges you for the acne scars on your face so the internet is a place where children get to develop an identity that they get to be whoever they want okay this is also where escape
11:00 - 11:30 comes in because if I don't like who I am in the real world I can become something on the internet and I like that person way more so safety is the third thing agency accomplishment safety games do provide a sense of emotional regulation which we'll get to so I think there are a lot of questions about that but I think these are kind of the three big things this is why people play video games okay so any ideas on how we get them to stop
11:30 - 12:00 that's why I'm here okay great fair enough okay so here's what our approach is we want to help them get those things in the real world right so your kids are not able to get that in the real world world for some reason and even though us as parents like we kind of know what's good for them but we're not thinking about it in that way so there's a a great study out of University of Toronto that basically found that there are like
12:00 - 12:30 personality types that get attracted to certain video games we sort of saw that today with some kids playing Fortnite some kids playing uh Minecraft some kids playing Roblox whatever so one of the key things that we want to do is try to understand what is it that the child is getting for from this video game and understand why is the child not able to get that from real life and then your job is your you guys know your job better than I do what I think is effective and we've done studies on this is for you to try to help your child get
12:30 - 13:00 that in the real world okay so the three things that we three things that we want to really focus on are um really understanding these three aspects of gaming and trying to figure out which of these is appealing to your child then what we need to do is sort of start to understand by talking to our kids which is what we want to get to next trying to understand from their perspective why they're playing the video game so a big part of what our approach is and and y'all can find this in the book is like
13:00 - 13:30 we want to talk to our kids and instead of telling them what to do we want to understand why they're doing what they're doing and what we'll discover from kids who play Minecraft is that they don't have enough autonomy or control in the world so generally speaking what we want to do is start by engaging our kids in conversation start by understanding why they play video games and they may not be able to give you great answers at the beginning which is okay there's kind of like a long-term plan that is like sort of laid out week by week in the book but then this also
13:30 - 14:00 does a second thing that's really important is when y'all sit down and try to understand your kids what do they do any idea they push back okay so what is the conversation that causes them to push back really common experience right so so I want you all to think about each and every one of you I'm sure has talked to your kids about gaming so why what is the what do you all say to
14:00 - 14:30 them that causes them to push back there we go okay so beautiful love it right because you're understanding so now this is an antagonistic relationship if you are really trying to understand they won't push back does that make sense if you have an agenda they'll push back and they are your children so before they learned how to talk before they learned how to walk you understood what they needed and
14:30 - 15:00 before they learned how to talk and before they learned how to walk they understood what you intended right they understand from the get-go when you come in and you're afraid when you think "Oh this kid is ruining their life how do I get this kid to stop?" They sense that energy and they clamp right down so what we recommend sounds absolutely insane okay but there are research studies that back this up for the first month tell your kid "Hey you know what i realize I
15:00 - 15:30 don't really understand why you play video games i get worried about it i think it's bad i see all these problems but I don't understand your perspective." So what I want to do is spend one month talking to you about video games nothing you tell me is going to impact anything I do related to video games i'm not going to punish you or take them away so you have to disarm that defensiveness really approach them from understanding and the cool thing happens like you know if I use profanity with my kids they're going to use profanity with me right if I give them a
15:30 - 16:00 hug every time they I see them they're going to give me a hug every time they see me if you try to approach because what's going on what's really going on you're not trying to understand your kid you're trying to tell your kid what to do so you're like you're demonstrating to them you listen to me and what do they do you listen to me they're approaching you with the same energy that you are approaching them now y'all may be wondering this sounds like really simple right but this is what's changed just to be fair is 50 years
16:00 - 16:30 ago there were not highly addictive devices being given to 2-year-olds right we weren't giving like two-year-olds heroin now we are so the challenge that y'all face as parents has become way way harder the other thing is we learn how to parent from where our parents guess what our parents didn't grow up with heroin in the household right so we are not actually equipped as parents to deal with this
16:30 - 17:00 stuff so we are learning we don't have a like thousands of years of of human history like they have we haven't had to deal with this so this is new for us so we have to learn a new way of doing things okay that's my hypothesis my thesis whatever so approach them first from a perspective of understanding try to understand why do they play video games try to understand what's going on in their life and what I see in just about every single video game addict that I've worked with myself included is that there is a correlation between why
17:00 - 17:30 they play video games and what is not going well in life as a parent said earlier they play the first answer was escape escape from what if they no longer need to escape the drive to play video games goes away so everyone is asking questions how do I get my kids to stop honestly I don't know but that's not what I'm going to teach y'all i'm going to teach y'all how to make them stop want to play does that make y'all make sense we're focusing on
17:30 - 18:00 the behavior that's the wrong way to do it in my opinion okay because you can't be sober for someone else this is the other thing about this approach why did I start a company called Healthy Gamer i was addicted to video games now I teach my kids how to play video games they still play behind my back so everything I'm saying take with a grain of salt okay happened just a couple days ago so we don't want to change so we're going to talk about behavioral techniques but the key thing is we want to try to get on the same team with them we want to understand what is wrong with their life
18:00 - 18:30 and then what we want to do is give them avenues to fix it so if you're playing video games so there was a great question about my kid plays video games as a way to relax from anxiety and so a lot of parents are concerned okay like it's is it a healthy coping mechanism is it a healthy way to decompress or is it like a problem which is fair enough like I think you can play video games if you have anxiety like fair enough but the real question we need to be asking is what are you anxious about because if they're playing video games because they're anxious if they are no longer
18:30 - 19:00 anxious they will no longer want to play video games and I say this as someone who you know gamers average age used to be 24 now it's 32 so people will come to like our YouTube channel and stuff like that and and they're we're helping them build lives so this is the other thing i'm not I know I wrote a book Pretend Bird close your ears so I'm not an expert in parenting technically okay like you guys y'all know more about parenting than I do but what I'm an expert in is your
19:00 - 19:30 kids the people that I set out when I was instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School I started streaming on Twitch do you all know what Twitch is the reason I started streaming is because there was a generation of predominantly young men who no one was helping they were on Twitch they were wasting all of their lives in front of a computer 25 years old still living with mom and dad don't have a job don't have a girlfriend this was back in 2015 by the way okay that I really saw these problems and I set out to help the the
19:30 - 20:00 ver the people that your kids would become that's where my expertise comes from and now the question is from working with thousands of people who were addicted to video games what can we teach their parents to prevent that from ever happening so understand why they get attracted to the video game understand what is going on in their life that they need to escape from and they won't open up in that way if they think you're going to take away their video game
20:00 - 20:30 the whole idea is to be on the same team so now let's get on to a couple of practical things if y'all want to ask more questions about that we can but I I think you know really sitting down and talking to your kids like even if they're young um is really important just what do you like about the video game help me understand the video game can I play the video game with you sort of like really joining them and and it's not about like the the key thing is to disarm that defensiveness because if you approach them with openness you're modeling that behavior and they'll kind of meet you halfway you'll be amazed at what their how their behavior changes
20:30 - 21:00 when they know that you are not the enemy so now let's talk about how to be an effective enemy and set boundaries okay so the other thing that we want to do is we want to notify our kids so there was a question in here about like how do I how do I if things get really bad and they're playing too much how do I know when to go like cold turkey and like take the video game away from them right so this is often times the problem that parents face are like they're not listening they're not listening they're not listening i got to take it away so
21:00 - 21:30 the story that I hear over and over and over again is "Hey dinner is at 7:30 come down at 7:30." This is at 5:00 you tell them "Hey it's 6:00 wrap up your game dinner is at 7:30." 6:30 rolls around hey you've got an hour left come down at 6:30 i mean 7:30 7:15 rolls around hey you got to come down in 15 minutes 7:30 rolls around hey it's time to come down 7:45 rolls around hey it's time to come down sounding familiar 8:00 rolls around they're still not down you
21:30 - 22:00 go up there you blow up at them you're like "Oh my god." You unplug the the power and you're like "Ah." So in this moment this is going to be a hard question okay unless you all are psychologists what are you teaching your kid to do huh push the boundary not listen push the boundary not listen what is the What is the Where are the Where is the boundary that you're setting not never right because you do show up what
22:00 - 22:30 are you training them to do you've told them to stop 15 times to play until you take it away so you know this is why it's so stressful to be a parent because they find the point that is right 99% to explosion and that's what you're training them to get to so what is your experience as a parent like when you're at 0% explosion nothing 50% nothing they get really good at detecting when you are gonna pardon my language lose your right that's
22:30 - 23:00 what they look for that's what you're training them for that is literally the behavior that re you're reinforcing if you get pissed then they will listen and what does this create this creates constant you're pissed at them they're on the defensive completely not we're going to we got to do it a different way okay we agreed okay all right so instead what we want to do is let them know hey so here are some responsibilities i So we've like listened to them for a month okay so here's what I understand i understand that you have like these
23:00 - 23:30 goals and stuff like let's problem solve around how to get some of those things going well there's more details about that in the book but then what we want to do is tell them like okay now changes are coming and I would like you to be part of this dictatorship as an adviser right so So it's not a democracy okay no democracies in my house it's it's a dictatorship between me and my wife we are co-dictictators but but you want to let the kids know like hey I understand this is important to you so you tell me what kind of gaming you want
23:30 - 24:00 to do what's important to you about gaming so I'll give you all a really simple example so a lot of parents will ask me how many hours a day is okay so who here has like played video games really loves playing video games okay awesome there's one in the audience so when you play video games do you like playing for one hour a day what do you like one hour one hour okay wrong person to ask I guess so so like I don't know if you all have played video games but like I mean I used to do
24:00 - 24:30 these things called land parties does anyone know what a land party is it's when you before the days of the internet I would lug my my PC and monitor and keyboard to a friend's house we would hook everything up over a local area network and we would play from dusk till dawn we would refuel on Taco Bell and we would play again okay so the the nature of video games is that I maybe this is like uh we can use some other example but if you think about like you know really diving into something like you don't want to read necessarily for 1
24:30 - 25:00 hour a day sometimes if you've got a really good book you want to like binge it binge watch shows on Netflix we want to binge so one of the key things is when we have these conversations many students will say I mean many kids will say like I don't want to play 1 hour a day like so I'll ask my kids so the total is 7 hours right so if we kind of say okay if it was 1 hour a day 2 hours on weekends maybe it's about 10 hours would you rather play like let's say that I order you pizza at 7:00 p.m on a Friday and you get to play till midnight would you rather have that or like 1 hour a day so this also changes the way
25:00 - 25:30 that you are fighting with them instead of daily fights it's like suddenly instead of cutting things off at 1 hour which is a battle like mom or dad shows up with a pizza and Mountain Dew and just go ham you become the good guy y'all are on the same team so you could you want to talk to them about what game which kind of gaming they like right we want to support those kinds of things but then they have to do their part so this is where what we strongly recommend is you let them you explain to them right so
25:30 - 26:00 this is where now that you've understood now it's their turn to understand so don't worry I got your back parents it's not just all about you know understanding them so then you kind of let them know like look my job as a parent is to make sure that you do these things if you do those things then you can game it's totally fine so that's kind of the approach that we take is it's not a certain amount of gaming that they're entitled to that they've negotiated with you it is hey you can game as long as you do these things and that's really the approach because then what happens is I don't know if y'all
26:00 - 26:30 have like had this experience but generally speaking you know if you let kids know that punishments are coming down the road they're they respond way better to them y'all had that experience right so what we really want to let them know is like hey like so a really great example which is devastating and kid hated me for this but so you know it was like okay if I get an A then I get to play as much as I want to if I get a B I get this much if I get a C it's no gaming so the thing interesting thing about this was a a kid in high school is like you know a C is like something that
26:30 - 27:00 you get over a semester so when that punishment institutes it's for a whole semester this is something that they agreed to and then they're not really happy with but that's what we have to enforce okay so what we really want to focus on is what are the things that they need to be doing and this is where it depends on how old your kids are i think people here have younger kids i work with a lot of parents who have like young adult children so this is where we also kind of say like the 25% rule which is probably not as valid for younger
27:00 - 27:30 kids but what I tell parents is look at where you are look at where you want to go cut that in half and cut that in half again so if they're playing 20 hours a week and you want to go down to you know 5 hours a week because that's healthy don't start there start at 15 hours a week the key thing is that we want to show our kids that we are going to you know that we can work together we want to set targets that we can achieve going from 20 to 5 is going to create a lot
27:30 - 28:00 more resistance in your kid it's also going to be way harder for you to enforce you all get that so it's way it's really hard if your kid is paying 20 hours a week because you got like tax season is coming up right and these are the realities we face as parents we can't be watching our kids like hawks all the time so instead what we really want to do is try to raise a healthy gamer which is someone who learns how to regulate their own relationship with technology we want them to be doing 50% plus of the work that's the goal we
28:00 - 28:30 can't be chasing them down all the time we have parenting to do right okay so we want to start small and the key thing is that this is another thing that I tell parents find the smallest hill that you can that you're willing to die on so don't shoot for something big shoot for something small like I told you dinner at 7:30 or you can't play for a week like make the punishment so drastic so there's all this weird behavioral stuff where we're training them in the wrong way we're going to now put our sociopathic psychiatrist hat on
28:30 - 29:00 and we're going to teach you some of these things so that you can use this information for good okay so if you set a very small boundary that is easy for them to follow then it becomes like easier for them to just listen to you than like deal with it does that kind of make sense so there's an erosion of their power which we're going to really institute right so set a really small boundary but really just enforce that and then over time we can start to pick other things but we want to be moving them in a right direction in a way that
29:00 - 29:30 we can be really consistent with one of the biggest problems that I see parents make is that they set boundaries when they're pissed off so when I'm pissed off and I say no gaming for a week in that moment that I'm really angry and my amydala is hyperactive it suppresses the part of my frontal loes that know that tax season is coming up so I'm not thinking oh I've got tax stuff to do so this is why we strongly recommend yall sit down with them you know listen to them for once uh
29:30 - 30:00 you talk to them for once a uh once a week for about a month then tell them okay like these are the goals like what do you feel like doing there's also some details in there we strongly suggest that you give them the first option to suggest something so I need you to have at least a 3.5 average you tell me how you're going to get it and we're going to try this plan and if it works great if it doesn't work then we do it my way so we want to set conditions we absolutely want to stay firm with our boundaries but the biggest par mistake
30:00 - 30:30 that parents make is that we set boundaries without really thinking things through and then we can't follow through with them there's unstable enforcement which means that they don't have to listen does that make sense so we want to set boundaries use the 25% rule sound good so I'm going to give youall now I'm going to finish that story and then we'll open it up to questions okay um so CEO type talking with his son asks his kid you know what's the problem kid lacks confidence
30:30 - 31:00 so kid says okay what I want to do is martial arts class so parent says okay fine we're going to do martial arts class 3 days a week so this is what I thought was the really beautiful conversation so on Monday the kid has martial arts on Tuesday Thursday and Saturday so on Monday dad comes home and says hey tomorrow you have martial arts when I tell you you have martial arts and You tell me you don't want to go should I listen to you or should I force
31:00 - 31:30 you kid thinks about it for a second and he's like "Force me." Right so they've like they've built this relationship they've understood each other and then time comes around he's like "Look you martial arts in 30 minutes time to go." He's like "You told me to force you so I'm going to force you." So that's not even the punch line of the story after class is over kid says "Thank you thanks for forcing me." Like I know it sounds literally unbelievable this is like literally
31:30 - 32:00 apparent this is what we see time and time and time again right cuz at the end of the day if you have a 17-year-old son they want to do martial arts for a year that's a goal that they have so you can get behind it and that's the thesis of our program is first of all stop fighting each other because as long as y'all are fighting they're going to undermine you every step of the way may I mean maybe your kids are better than mine but second thing is really understand you know what what's going on with them what are their goals what do they want
32:00 - 32:30 to achieve and start working around that help them understand okay you're playing these games is not actually serving your goals forget about mine for a second and then you can share like these are the things that I have to do i you need to get a 3.5 GPA and then outside of that I can be flexible and once you start working with them things start to move in the right direction like it's amazing you'll be amazed at how much your kids are willing to transform like the fighting just stops it doesn't stop that's not true it gets way easier like way way easier
32:30 - 33:00 okay questions i have one what you just said right now it seems to me that it's more for younger kids does it work for like a 16y old sometimes I feel like I missed the boat to be honest so I think what I what I do works way better for older kids younger kids is harder so once you have a 16-year-old your 16-year-old has a crush on someone is not too happy about the way that their body is starting to look has aspirations right there's all kinds of
33:00 - 33:30 stuff going on like kids who are 16 know that maybe college is coming up maybe they pretend not to care about it but why do they pretend not to care about it what do y'all think they're scared they're afraid that they're not going to be able to do it and then if you push them do it i know you can do it do you all know what happens when your kid doesn't believe they do something and you say "I know you can do it." What does that do for them so here's a crazy question so I
33:30 - 34:00 have patients when I work in an emergency room i have patients who come in who are suicidal and when they come in and they're suicidal do you all know what I say help me understand why you're suicidal they give me this list i'm going through a divorce my kids hate me i'm an alcoholic i have no reason to live i say you know what i can totally understand why someone in your situation would be suicidal makes a lot of sense if I was going through a divorce my kids hated me i think I'd want to kill myself too and I'd like to work with you i'd
34:00 - 34:30 like to see if maybe we can't fix some of those things what do you think so we want to meet people where they're at we want to be emotionally validating because when you say "I believe in you right oh my Aloc he's the most beautiful boy in the world that's what my mom says when my mom tells me "Oh you're so great you look lovely." And I'm going on a date with the girl that I'm in love with like that's not what I need to hear right so you need to like especially when you have a 16-year-old right you
34:30 - 35:00 need to meet them where they're at why don't you want to go to college like what is it like are you like you know help me understand like what's going on there so I actually find that the older kids are right because what I really am an expert in is not kids but your children especially as they get older fantastic question though so I think this is where y'all have to decide you know what's right for your kids so what I see is a world that my kids are growing up in where the addictive nature
35:00 - 35:30 of technology is getting worse not easier so my approach is like teach them how to swim don't keep them out of the water that's why we're help i mean there are lots of people who are like anti-gaming and stop gaming and stuff like that right so as as parents too when something is harmful we want to take it away from them and like there are a lot of reasons to do that right if we're talking about like heroin right we don't want to teach them how to be healthy heroin users but I think technology and gaming is different because there are
35:30 - 36:00 lots of questions about you know it's a normal part of thing 98% of people under the age of 30 play video games it is their form of social interaction so it's a really easy way to ostracize your child if you don't let them play video games so I think it's absolutely about teaching healthy technology habits to prepare them for the world where right now we have Meta and we have Amazon and we have Google or like whatever right and companies are only going to get more sophisticated over time if you guys like
36:00 - 36:30 just look at your own phones and look at how long you spend on them just like look at the daily usage right and do you all want to be using them that much it's only going to get harder so I personally believe that you should teach them how to be healthy gamers yeah so when I was 9 years old my dad took me and my brother aside and said "One of y'all when you grow up one of y'all is going to be a doctor and one of y'all is going to be a lawyer." That's what he said and when I was
36:30 - 37:00 interviewing for medical school people would ask me,"Wh are you here interviewing for medical school?" And I I told him this story and I said "My brother was older he picked law school so here I am." And then I never had to ask answer the question uh you know why I was there i was there because of parental expectation so I you know as someone who has children who have a lot of potential I completely resonate with that i am terrified of the day that my kids do
37:00 - 37:30 everything that I tell them to do and they waste a gigantic amount of their time the short answer is I don't know but I do think there's a lot here to examine the first is understanding your own feelings like how do you feel when your kid isn't living up to their potential right because that's where your driver is coming from it's coming from your own like why do your kids have to live up to their potential right that's the question I would ask you like
37:30 - 38:00 if they're doing everything that they're supposed to be doing what is this potential that you speak of and this is from the kids perspective okay not to sucker punch you here but if they're doing everything that you're asking how can they ever make you happy i hear you and I ask myself this question what's the problem what is the problem so you got to you got to come see me in my office and we'll talk about it i'm serious right so like a a lot of what we
38:00 - 38:30 have as parents like what we want on our kids comes from us not from them and I'm with you because like I was I was stunned that oh I'm like so supportive of kids and stuff like that second my kid you know my kid got a B and I was like this is unacceptable i like activated parent programming right away like my parent programming and because I know she can get an A she got a 92 the other day on her science homework and I was like "We're going to go over the homework." She's like "Why i got a 92." And I looked at her and I said "I know
38:30 - 39:00 you got a 92 not because you understand science but because you know how to find the right answer i want to teach you science so I'm with you it's hard." Yeah with that and you'll laugh this question but great are there games that you think are good and I only 11y old why I allowed him to get a Nintendo Switch is because as a child I did I love Mario Brothers and I love Tetris and I had a good relationship
39:00 - 39:30 with them like I remember playing with my sisters and having fun too much and I don't know how my parents did that but are there games that you think are good games yes so first let's clarify why how your parents did that the reason they did that is because Tetris was made by one person not a mega corporation investing billions of dollars to try to add microtransactions and loot boxes to
39:30 - 40:00 Tetris okay can right so they had an easier problem so interesting thing about Tetris tetris has been shown in studies to prevent the development of PTSD post-traumatic event okay that's one thing second thing is in 2015 the US Department of Defense did a study on soldiers that played video games versus didn't play video games turns out soldiers who play video games have a 15 to 20% higher something called fluid IQ which is problem solving IQ when faced with new situations so there are
40:00 - 40:30 absolutely situations in which video games can be good that's why we're healthy gamer not no gamer right that's why our approach is first of all build an alliance second of all make sure they're doing all the things that they're supposed to be doing third of all make sure that their fundamental psychological needs are being met in real life not the video game and then for whatever is left over go for it right i still play video games
40:30 - 41:00 but I do so after I edit this chapter for bird right so that's what the goal is where you stand on terms of controlling screen time and things like that using the technology to stop yeah so I think those are all great but as adjuncts to what you're doing right so so I I think that the conversations are the most important and then we also have to understand that the kid's brain is
41:00 - 41:30 working against the kid and you so we don't want to set our kids up to fail by giving them easy access but what I see too many parents doing is using Wi-Fi restrictions as the method of intervention so these under underlying fundamental relationship things are like the most important and then we should absolutely use fire to fight fire
41:30 - 42:00 huge okay so this is really fascinating i told this story to your kids by the way um I think they liked it so y'all know that advertising gambling to children is illegal right has anyone here heard of Kick who here has kids that watch streamers or content creators or YouTubers okay so there is a company called Stake which is an online casino
42:00 - 42:30 which realized Brilliant this is what we're up against okay so they realize that advertising to kids is illegal but you know what's not illegal paying a streamer like myself to gamble online while kids watch so every foot football game that you watch is not technically an advertisement for football and yet when we watch a lot of football we want to play football theoretically anyway right
42:30 - 43:00 so So this is where online gambling I think is so in 2015 when I just finished my intern year I went to my mentors at Harvard Medical School and I was like "What do y'all think about online gaming?" I was really concerned about it people weren't so worried about it back then i think 10 years from now we're going to realize that there is a huge gambling problem sports betting is really bad you have these companies like Kick which have figured out like how to and what they'll do this is what's really weird um so I have it on good authority that you know they'll pay a
43:00 - 43:30 streamer a $120 million contract and Yeah oh yeah i don't think we understand the scale of money that we're talking about here $120 million okay and what they what they let the the streamer do is they give them like $50,000 every two weeks to gamble so when they gamble when they lose $50,000 no big deal so what kind of
43:30 - 44:00 viewership experience do you all think that creates cuz it's not a problem and occasionally those $50,000 right we're g we're put bet placing bets of a,000 2,000 3,000 they turn into 100,000 we're up right so there's 20,000 people watching we're up from 50,000 to 980,000 are we going to go double or nothing what's happening in the audience people are flocking in they're texting their buddies everyone shows up $980,000 is he
44:00 - 44:30 going to lose it all or is he going to double it this is what's going on so it's not just that there are other things that are going on that are even like equally devious so it's it's not just gambling so there's different kinds of gambling that are that's not technically gambling so I think like crypto casinos are huge i don't know if you all like follow any of this stuff where like and then I've I've worked with people really sad situations of this is now we're not talking about kids we're talking about people our age who you know like hear
44:30 - 45:00 about Wall Street bats if you all know GME diamond hands any of this stuff internet memes no okay so there's there's you know a group yes one person's nodding in the back right so there are these like whole subcultures where people are like picking stocks that are meme stocks have you all heard of meme stocks and like Bitcoin and all these meme coins right so you have all these like weird other things that are basically gambling that are not even technically gambling that our kids are getting into i know it's like I'm telling you
45:00 - 45:30 guys all the stuff you all know but your kids know ask go home and ask your kids what a memecoin is what if they're like in second grade they may not know but if they're in like middle school or high school they probably know what a memecoin is so yeah like gambling is is a huge huge problem there's all kinds of loot box mechanics or a couple of other things that gaming companies do so if you had any kid that asks you for the the currency of the game right so they institute this where they have their own in-game currency that's like a currency like the peso but
45:30 - 46:00 it's like Robux and so when your kid is like spending a,000 Robux no one knows how many dollars that is right so they they they have a lot of sophistication which they kind of do this Darwinian AB testing where they'll like test like what is the right ratio of Robux to dollars and then they'll implement that so there's all kinds of stuff going on um which I could tell you all stories if you all want to hear but
46:00 - 46:30 yeah i have a follow question can you give some guidance on how to have a conversation with your kids yeah discussion yeah so this is kind of hard to understand but let's just like set the background for everybody so you know the cool thing about playgrounds is when
46:30 - 47:00 you're at a playground who is taking their kid to the playground yeah basically you take your kid to the playground they're playing with other kids you get to see who they're playing with imagine for a moment that there was an unshaven unckempt version of Dr k who comes to your playground 42-year-old man walks up to your kid and is like "Hey want to hang out?" this is what is h literally this is what is happening on the internet you have no idea who your kids are hanging out with the other thing is it's really hard
47:00 - 47:30 to tell them there are online predators out there right because then if I ask you you say okay so like you say hey there are online predators out there I was like show me where I hang out with these people all the time right so so I I think that there's a lot of fear and paranoia because like you know when you queue up for online games like sometimes they wind up with like Dr k on their team right which is like not all bad like I I mean I remember I was playing like a 16-year-old kid and his mom was like "It's time to go to bed." And I was like
47:30 - 48:00 "Bro you should go to bed right like trust me." So So I I think that there's a lot of legitimate concern and I think we underestimate the relationships that we form on the internet so when I was 15 years old I started playing Starcraft with someone named Error that was his name on on the game and I met him for the first time 12 years later at my wedding right so the interesting thing that I think a lot of parents don't realize and this is another huge thing about the internet is it gives us a
48:00 - 48:30 sense of community so when I graduated from high school what happened to my friends what do y'all think and I went to college what happened grew when I graduated from college what happened to my friends went all over the place when finished med school what happened to my friends guess who I still hang out with see the thing about the internet is you take your friends with you wherever you go so I think this is where the right answer is like a conversation with them
48:30 - 49:00 about you we don't really know who these people are you know what do you like about these people how do you feel about these people have they ever said I think a couple of good questions are have they ever done anything that's concerning to you like asking that kind of question is really helpful and then sort of saying if they ever do anything that that bothers you please let me know another really great tip that I strongly recommend who here has kids who have headphones when they play online games use speakers why
49:00 - 49:30 yeah and what are they saying cursing cursing is on the easy side right it gets We get really bad really bad things people are saying cursing is like I curse i did it today that so so I I think a big part of it is just being a part of your kid's life so how do you protect your kid from an online predator by you being able to hear what is being said by your child understanding that you're involved in their
49:30 - 50:00 life um and then I think there's also other things around like regulating social media and stuff where you you have to really be careful but it's challenging and it's a whole I could write a book about it so So just You're saying it is kind of normal if I hear my son talking and I do think they're talking about you know it what you said you make friends that that he's never seen before it's not that abnormal oh it's very common mo I would say n the exception is to meet your
50:00 - 50:30 friends from the internet like I have a group of people that I still play like I started playing games with them five or six years ago and like I've never met them they happen to be in Boston though which I'm going tomorrow so maybe I should text them am I correct in saying that YouTube yeah so I do Well so streaming YouTube is one thing but I tell them to stay away from YouTube i'm okay with them doing Netflix or Disney or whatever but YouTube is really So I tend to keep my
50:30 - 51:00 kids away from algorithmic content you all know what that means so if a video gets suggested to them because there's a there's there's studies on bizarest thing that I've ever done i got approached by about four years ago I got approached by the United Nations counterterrorism unit and they were worried about video games being used as a tool of online radicalization so if you look at a lot of what's going on even within your own feed right if you guys kind of go down like the the feminist feed or the the
51:00 - 51:30 toxic masculinity feed or whatever people will basically get indoctrinated without even realizing it so I I tend to keep my kids away from YouTube or I'll I'm a lot clearer about what they can watch so I also fight an algorithmic battle with them where I see what they're watching and if I don't like what they're watching I tell YouTube to hide it so they don't get that kind of content again so there's a lot of stuff emerging around body dysmorphia is getting way worse the interesting thing is that the rate of worsening is worse
51:30 - 52:00 for men than women so basically what we're seeing is an evening out of of mental health illnesses so body dysmorphia used to be primarily a female diagnosis turns out that a lot of these like fitness influencers and stuff like that have a huge amount of body dysmorphia in their audiences so I think um so this is why I think if we go back to the roots of why people play video games right accomplishment identity agency safety community social media scratches all
52:00 - 52:30 those itches as well and if y'all pay who used Facebook like 15 years ago show hands okay so if you guys look at social media look at how it's evolved and ask yourselves why is Facebook no longer Facebook why is it meta why are they why did they acquire Instagram what are they looking for and what you'll find is that over the trend of social media and gaming we are checking more of these psychological boxes right so now to have a certain number of friends on Facebook is an
52:30 - 53:00 accomplishment to have all these connections on Instagram gives us a sense of selfworth we can literally So I don't know if this kind of makes sense but you know if I was trying to gauge how how much do y'all like me right now i can't tell right i can't technically I can't tell but if I post a picture of me doing this we can literally quantify social approval imagine how addictive that is to the
53:00 - 53:30 brain because like I can walk out of here and because I'm so narcissistic I'm a YouTuber i can walk out thinking I did a great job and y'all love me but the moment that you start quantifying things you have a real answer and that's what the brain really wants so social media I think is very similar to gaming in that way and this is how like they're getting closer and closer together because now on video games you have friends lists you have profiles you have achievements right so the two are basically becoming very similar now uh so I I think does that
53:30 - 54:00 answer your question so I so I I think the approaches are the same right so ask your daughter why do you like Instagram what does it do for you how do you feel about yourself when you see all these pictures of these beautiful people on Instagram how do you feel about yourself is there some part of yourself that you would want to have different right and and so I think that there's a lot of like body image stuff that we've worked through where like
54:00 - 54:30 they say "Yeah like I'm not happy about my weight or I don't like the way my hair looks." And those are things that you can work on them with and then they can feel confident in themselves i think there was another question um and I'll get to you in a second there was another question that was sent earlier about like when my younger my older kid plays a lot of video games my younger kid I treat them differently right there was a question about like if my older kid like does all their stuff and plays video games and my younger kid looks at that and says that's unfair what I'd say is explain to them that if you want to play if you
54:30 - 55:00 want that degree of freedom you need to hold that degree of responsibility so I think the biggest problem that parents face nowadays is that you have the responsibility and they have the power is that confusing to anyone because when they are going to fail their test what happens you bother them who is remembering that they have a test who is forcing them to study right so you're bearing all of the responsibility and
55:00 - 55:30 they actually do whatever the hell they want unless you force them to do otherwise so what we want to do is flip that around make them responsible if you want to fail the test you can fail the test then you lose the video game and you have an F the challenge is this is what's really hard about what I say it's hard to let your kids fail emotionally really hard to let them fail but when we do everything for them right we're dooming them to
55:30 - 56:00 failure yeah you mentioned earlier about how you had this addiction when you were an early adult um did you have some sort of epiphany or or some moment where you realized that you had an issue i I have a middle schooler but I also have an adult son um who has quite a significant gaming addiction they had for quite some time and what did you have to get to at what point um before you realized that it was something that needed to be
56:00 - 56:30 addressed yeah so I remember the conversation I had with my dad it was 2:00 in the morning we had been talking for three hours and oh it's interesting because you know I say like talk to your kids and try to understand them this was the first time that I had had that kind of conversation with my dad and he came to me and he was like I don't know what to do i've tried everything and he's like "Your life is not moving in the right direction." He's like "What are we going to do about this?" It was like a very shared problem-solving approach and I knew that I I just finished my sophomore year technically I was still a
56:30 - 57:00 freshman second year of college took me 5 and a half years to graduate um and and I sort of knew that right like so here's the really crazy thing that a lot of parents don't realize when you are afraid about your child doing something wrong and you tell them that the more true it is the more they will resist you does that make sense they know deep down that they're ruining their lives too but if they admit it
57:00 - 57:30 that's a whole different ballgame so instead what they do and this is like normal psychology we deny right we enter the first phase which is denial oh it's not that bad it'll be okay i'll be fine these are the stories that they tell themselves every single day because they know their kids they're 16 they know that there's like validictorians in the class there's honors kids in the class they knew that their best friend and them used to get straight A's when they were in the sixth grade and now their
57:30 - 58:00 best friend is in honors classes and I'm in regular classes they know the difference and they are terrified and if you point it out to them they're going to dig their heels in more right when I have a patient who's an alcoholic and I'm like "Hey dumbass you're an alcoholic." They're like "No I'm not." Right so instead what I want to do is ask them "What do you think about your drinking?" "Oh it's not a problem." "Oh interesting why are you in my office my wife wants me to be here." "Oh what's going on there?" "Well she thinks I have
58:00 - 58:30 a problem." "Well what's her Why does she think that?" Man she sounds so controlling yeah tell me about it you tell me about it oh yeah like last time when I wrecked our car she was like "No more drinking." And I was like "Oh wait what?" Right so so so you want to you know when your kids they don't realize that there's a or they do realize deep down there's a problem and then there's a way of getting that out of them i don't know if I answered your question
58:30 - 59:00 well yes maybe there's a way but I'm curious about what Oh yeah so you Yeah so so father Yeah so I I think what happened with my dad was um a year of video game addiction y'all are seeing the brain that you end up with uh so so my dad had asked me like you know so the first thing that happened the first epiphany was like a serious conversation where he's like "Something needs to change." I was desperate and he didn't tell me I was going to fail he's like "What's your plan?" Which by the way I
59:00 - 59:30 think is a great question if your kids are doing really really bad in life don't tell them what to do ask them what their plan is and then what are they gonna say they're gonna say "I'll figure it out." And then they'll walk away let them tomorrow hey I know you I know it's hard to hear but like I'm worried about you you know I'm wondering if the reason that you keep on saying "I'll figure it out," is because you don't even know where to start would you like my help at trying to figure this out completely different attitude gets a completely different
59:30 - 60:00 response that was the first step the second step was I went to India and I stayed in an ashram for 3 months which is like a monastery decided to become a monk that didn't really happen but um and then what I discovered so I felt really frustrated because I knew I had to wake up to go to class so I remember there was a time where I was 18 and I'd missed so many days of Spanish class that each additional day cost me a letter grade and so I was at the D and I knew
60:00 - 60:30 if I skipped one more day of class I would fail and I knew I had to go all I had to do is just show up and I couldn't bring myself to do it i didn't understand why I couldn't control myself so the second kind of epiphany if you can call it that was when I went to India I found a system which is like yoga and meditation that teaches me how I work why I can't control myself and I fell in love with that decided to become a monk but then
60:30 - 61:00 met my wife so those are the two things and that's what I try to teach which I think really resonates with like you know the gamers on the internet i appreciate the topic earlier my question is I'm father cool
61:00 - 61:30 high level and first line is typically videos even though we are absolutely over their view it's such a great beautiful beautiful
61:30 - 62:00 question right so my kids get bored and the default you know answer is videos technology whatever so let me ask you all this what is boredom huh lack of stimulation sitting with your thoughts sort of so sitting with your thoughts is not necessarily boredom
62:00 - 62:30 right like right now you're sitting with your thoughts i don't know if you're bored maybe you are not knowing what to do next not knowing what to do next fair enough so here's crazy thing huh there we go so where does that What part of your brain does that feeling come from right right so when we're bored we seek stimulation what is stimulation so boredom is a signal to draw us to
62:30 - 63:00 something right what does hunger draw us towards what does thirst draw us towards what does boredom draw us towards huh video games what else accomplishment sometimes not usually boredom but some huh distractions not dist Well we call them distractions but what are the actions what do you do when you're bored look to see what other
63:00 - 63:30 people are doing sometimes yeah entertainment right we're bored so we want to be entertained when we're entertained which part of our brain is active dopamine so this is what I want y'all to understand boredom is a craving for dopamine y'all get that wild absolutely true it is our subjective experience of a part of our
63:30 - 64:00 brain that is hooked on dopamine so here's the crazy thing when an alcoholic is withdrawing from alcohol how do they feel terrible when we are starving how do we feel terrible so when our body and our brain doesn't get what it wants what does it do to us h punishes us give me that dopamine if you don't I'm going to
64:00 - 64:30 punish you i'm going to make you bored it's the most intolerant thing it creates a sense of intolerance so boredom is actually a craving for dopamine so if you guys want to understand this I'm sure you all don't do this so I'm sure this won't help you but next time you go to the bathroom leave your phone behind right so when everyone's laughing y'all know what I'm talking about it's such a simple thing like oh yeah like we're checking emails we're doing work in
64:30 - 65:00 there like we're not doing work in there right we're not even constipated we're just hanging out with our phones and watch the boredom so we have a beautiful technique that we do in our community which is a little bit sadistic i tell people in my community to stare at a blank wall for an hour one of the most transformative experiences for people who are addicted to technology all kinds of stuff comes up at the beginning you're bored you think this
65:00 - 65:30 you think that then people start crying and like trauma starts coming to the surface and all these feelings come it's really crazy it's like a right of passage for 15 million people that watch this cult that is Dr k on the internet y'all should try it too learn to tolerate boredom and your life will be completely different that feels like a ending kind of worked our way there i don't know right doesn't that feel like
65:30 - 66:00 a like we're kind of done I guess okay how are we doing on time okay thank you all dude this is fun so much better than playing video games [Music]