The Gaming Monk with Psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia (@HealthyGamerGG) | Knock Knock Hi!

[Music] knock knock knock knock hi hello and welcome to knock knock high with the Glock fleckin I am Dr Glock fleen also known as Will flry I Am lady Glock fleen also known as Kristen flry and we are happy to have you here today i' I'm full of energy I've I'm caffeinated mhm and I'm ready to go you sure are and we have a very fun very yes fascinating so interesting guest today Dr K his full name is Dr Alo kenoia and he is the co-founder of healthy gamer I've seen him on YouTube on Tik Tok Twitte

r he's got all the social Discord he's got a interesting story which he gets into um on his path to helping you know shed light on you know gaming addiction he has lots of of thoughts just about technology in general how to navigate this techno world that we live in especially for those of us with kids yes and I think there's not enough of that in the medical space of like yes what do you do right because and and we get into this in the episode a bit but you know the the medical industry is is a

bout um you know disease and pathology for the most part but here's an issue that is affecting a whole generation of kids that it's not I mean it can be a pathology but for just the general person it's it's more just like how do we navigate this it's a new thing in our in our parenting experience as a society and we have one little correction that we will address now during our interview uh we mentioned AAP the American Academy of Pediatrics I believe that's AAP um uh we mentioned a 2hour per da

y limit on screen time that was their guideline when our kids were very young yeah that's pre 2016 though so correct we got on our research horse and we we looked it up after we finished recording and the in 2016 they got rid of that guideline they did um because there it was not evidence-based enough to be able to put a limit on screen time like a hard limit so yes anyway it's the guidelines now more of like oh just be careful with what they're watching and I feel like it's not really even a gu

ideline anymore like that's not helpful there's not much out there which is which is why it's so valuable things that that Dr K is doing uh to to try to just help us navigate that world he's got an approach that feels really tapped into the actual real world and like things you can do on a on a practical basis which I really like and he's a a a smart guy a Harvard trained psychiatrist he's the co-founder of healthy gamer uh he's they they've you know his programs the things he does has helped th

ousands of people um and he's worked with from the United Nations to the US Surgeon General and it just really kind of clued into this area yeah and it made me think about our own video game experiences yeah you like video games I do I I have you got me a PS5 I did uh well you tried to get me one like two years ago I tried for the I was checking for that entire time every once in a while eventually we did and but I grew up with him and what was the last video game you played consistently Super M

ario Brothers yeah maybe that was the only that one was kind of fun like I think it was Super Nintendo that was the one that Super Nintendo on yeah Zelda no a little mind sweeper I was around video games a lot because my my brothers really liked video games yeah um and then even my parents we talk about that in the interview a little bit but um but no I don't I don't connect with them in any way I don't know why love them I and our kids love them I fond memories of video games and I like seeing

you guys play together right like as a thing that they that they do with their dad you know I think that's valuable got lots of Mario going on in our house oh yeah lot of switch playing anyway should we get a lot a lot of Roblox too which I I'm not in I don't have a Roblox account it's it's a black box to me I don't I know you know that's what I don't like about like I feel like anytime there's a Black Box about about what our kidss are doing that as a parent that makes me very nervous you can t

ell Roblox has been on our mind because I come in hot with a little Roblox there at the beginning of the interview so should we get to it let's do it here we go here is Dr [Music] K we are here with Dr K thank you so much for joining us uh it really is a pleasure to have you on here thank you so much for having us or me I guess yeah you have other people I don't see anybody back there on the cou me and people me and the people my head yeah um so I I I want to start off here with a a question tha

t's very personal to Kristen and I what are your what is your opinion on Roblox oh are are you familiar with Roblox do you have an opinion on Roblox I'm just going to jump into this now because what about Roblox so so I I see that this is personal to you and and Kristen just gave a we we have an 11-year-old and an eight-year-old okay so we're coming at it from that context and they love it um and I feel like I'm just like out of my depth any time they I was never a video game person to begin wit

h I mean I grew up around it because I had brothers who were really into it and even my parents were really into it which is a whole thing um but I never W and so like they are really getting into games and specifically Roblox right now uh and and so I just don't know how to parent in a world where I don't understand any of this right like they'll come and they'll want to buy little pets and adopt me and things like that and it's it's like how do you know how any of this works it all just sounds

like how do you keep it safe like Monopoly money and yeah how do you keep them safe how do you keep your your uh credit card information safe yeah I so so I I think you know y'all are not the only one so this is like a generational problem and every basic Bally every adult that I've talked to who's kind of in our age range which I assume we're somewhere in the same ballpark we're like yeah talking like probably like who have young kids even like one or two year olds and people are like how ofte

n do we give them a tablet to older older parents or with parents with older kids or even older like teenage kids and stuff like that who you know they come home from school one day and they say I want to be a Pro Gamer I want to play fortnite or I want to start streaming or whatever how do you navigate that that's really hard right so I I I think the first thing to understand is I don't think the problem is in the game I think the problem is usually the way that we teach our children to relate

to technology and the reason it's so hard is I'm sure y'all know some of this stuff but you know like how do we learn how to parent right by watching our parents absolutely so this generation of parents has a unique problem is that we have to parent for technology which in the thousands or millions of years that we've been human beings no parents have ever had to deal with we're dealing with a new problem right and so I don't know that Roblox is good or bad because Roblox is enough it's it's it'

s a platform right there so there's like tons of different games inside of it um but I I think it's really about talking to your kids about what is this mean to you when you want to spend this money like what is the value of that money over time so right now you want to buy this cosmetic or whatever but are you going to enjoy the Cosmetic a month from now two months from now four months from now and I think it's really about because our approach and this is what I do with my kids I have a six-ye

ar-old and an eight-year-old it's about increasing their awareness of what technology does and once they understand it like if you say like okay fine we're g to buy this thing but let's see how long this $15 makes you happy right versus if we get a toy or a book which one is a better use of your money yeah and and so I I think this these are the skills that we really need to teach our kids is awareness around what technology does to them right speaking of what technology does like there our 11-y

ear-old's pretty good but the eight-year-old has a real hard time with the transition out of screen time you know out of the video games in particular she can watch TV and we can turn the TV off and she's fine but something about the game really and YouTube videos is kind of the same thing you know like just we call it a screen monster she just turns into a screen monster after that how I don't know what's going on there yeah I mean so so if we look at the brain right so basically all not all te

chnology like not like alarm clocks but if we look at the what we refer to as technology so anything you can find on a tablet like YouTube Tik Tok video games Netflix take your choice of whatever social media all of it suppresses is the amydala and the lyic system so when we're watching something all of our negative emotions are basically like shut off and so the second that we stop there is there's almost like a withdrawal period in our brain where there's like a bounceback so if you think abou

t mostly like medical people listen to this podcast yes okay right I I'd hope so I I think so I don't know why non-medical I hope I hope non-medical people watch it but yeah you can you can use all your fancy scientific words Mr psychiatrist so so if we if we look at like benzo diazene withdrawal or alcohol withdrawal there's like you know the second you take it away there is a kind of like a bounceback right we get hyperactivity of some some parts of our brain that can be lethal but anytime we'

re talking about technology when you take that technology away that artificial regulation of our emotions goes away so then there's like this torrent of hyperactivation which then naturally will equilibri and depending on the kid what they you know if they've got ADHD or other kinds depends on their frontal L function and all kinds of other stuff right the the time it takes for them to equilibri is different interesting what what helps them equilibri like is there something you can do to facilit

ate that or support them while they're doing that yeah so I I think so let me ask you when when you say that when you stop with the eight-year-old what does the process of stopping look like uh it depends on which parent is doing it when I'm I'll just speak for my own self when I'm doing and I try to give her like like a 5 10 minute warning maybe both right so she knows it's coming and then she's reminded it's coming and then it comes um I have I have learned to do that over time because it does

work better to give like a warning like hey this is this is going to happen here pretty soon and then sometimes it helps sometimes it doesn't yeah um and then and then it's just okay we have to turn it off and and let's find something else to do is usually how it goes yeah let okay and then she protests mhm Sometimes some well sometimes sometimes she'll turn it off she'll do that part fine but then she's just a nightmare after that right then it's like there's nothing to do and she's she's uh y

ou know throwing kind of temper tantrums about just being bored and then I recommend to her that she just instead watch my videos on Tik Tok and that makes her cry even more like she really is upset by that point but anyway I don't know no yeah I I think that's so when we said that that you know social media and content on the internet suppresses the limic system that's all the content except for yours yours it especially your stuff on the American healthcare system which is absolutely rage indu

cing yeah for real is it yeah that's true guess it's true um but kind of going back to your kid so I think a couple of things one is that you know five or 10 minute warning works well but I think even like a 15 minute warning okay really well setting expectations before they start yeah sometimes I will do that if there's like if it it doesn't always work out that way in the real world is the problem but yeah when I can I try to say okay what's your strategy for when it's time to turn it off how

are you going to basically regulate your emotions you know she talks about taking deep breaths or whatever yeah and I so I think just sort of letting them know like what is the role of technology in the day because I think the the broader problem that a lot of parents run into is kind of like what you are running into which is that there isn't a clear replacement once it ends and if we look at sort of the dopamine release of Technology it does all the work for you right you don't have to start p

laying anything you just like literally click a button and then you're engaged whereas what kids have to do especially the age of eight is they have to kind of ramp up towards a particular activity you know that creative play doesn't engage you the way that technology does right so I think really sort of thinking about when are we going to stop and what is the process of stopping like what's the point of of watching and playing like I know that you want to do it um and I think really raising tha

t awareness like matters a lot so even with my six-year-old and eight-year-old we'll talk about okay we're going to watch for an hour or how long do youall want to watch half an hour or one hour and then they'll say let's watch for an hour and then I'll go in at the half hour mark and I'll say we said an hour yall still having fun do you want to watch another 30 minutes and then even at the end of the hour I'll ask okay do you guys want to like you want to watch more and how much fun are you goi

ng to have over this next half hour and even they're able to understand and there will be some days where I'll say okay like we're turning it off and we're going to go to the playground I'm GNA ask you an hour from now whether that was the right choice are yall glad that we stopped so I think it's like a lot more about the before and after which a lot of parents we weren't taught this stuff right because our parents my parents never had a thought in the morning about what my experience was going

to be like an hour and a half and two and a half hours there was no like randomized control trial in terms of happiness and contentment and how we feel emotionally throughout our day but that's really what parents have to do we have to set up our own rcts and have the child be a part of it and look at and analyze the results yeah that is interesting I never thought of like having our kid talk about their own decision fulfillment in their activity like are is this enjoyable to you like I just ki

nd of assume it is but maybe it's not and and well I think you even adult experience it right when you're scrolling on your phone and at some point you're like why am I I've just wasted an hour just scrolling I'm not even this doesn't even feel good anymore like why am I doing this but kids might need a little more help yeah kids kids will recognize you'd be you'd be amazed at like what they can pick up and and that's sort of we like so I sort of think about what's the goal of a parent so I thin

k our goal as parents is to prepare our kids right and if you were thinking about preparing your child 10 years from now technology is just going to be more addictive so we can't really protect them from technology we have to prepare them and I think the most fundamental PR preparation we can make is having them develop an awareness of what technology is doing to them what parts they like what parts they don't like um and it really goes a long way that gets to I've always kind of the the recomme

ndations from the AAP of two hours of screen time a day right like that's always not quite sat well with me because it doesn't feel it feels removed from reality a little bit like yes sure that would be the ideal that would be great good luck having any family do that though right like it's very hard to be able to screens are everywhere like even to do your homework you need to be on a screen and you know it's it just doesn't feel realistic to me to think our kids are not going to interact with

screens more than two hours a day and to your point to prepare them for the world they're going to be adults in they're going to be on screens much more than two I'm on a screen way more than two hours a day already so what are your thoughts on those recommendations and like what do you recommend I think they're framed in a very challenging way so my reflex of reaction I didn't realize that AAP had a 2hour a day limit recommendation but I could be outdated by now I mean I looked at that a long t

ime ago it was at one point hours but yeah but it might it might be different now so just I think the biggest problem is like even the fundamental framing that sounds to me like the hardest thing to implement because when you have two hours a day that means they're getting something every day and two hours is just enough to like reinforce The Addictive nature so what I actually find is way better so people will ask me like what is the hourly limit that you recommend I don't recommend an hourly l

imit I don't think it should be used in an entertaining way on a daily basis so what I'll what I kind of do with with my kids and what we advocate for parents to do is once again awareness so even it's asking okay so like we work with a lot of teenagers who are like addicted right and then parents are like I don't know how to get them to stop all they want to do is play as much as they want to and so then I'll sort of ask the parents okay like you give your kid two scenarios you can stay up as l

ate as you want you can game all day FR Friday or you can game all day Saturday you can have a binge I'll order you Pizza you can get Mountain Dew you can play from the moment that you wake up till the moment you want to go to sleep but no gaming during the week or you can play for like an hour and a half or two hours a day you tell me what's more fun for you so this is the problem is that what parents run into so much resistance because we set these arbitrary limits but it's not clear to the ki

d like the kid may be fine actually not playing every day if they get something that they want right it's just like implementing diet recommendations for your spouse where it's like I'm going to say you got to eat brussels sprouts every single day and it's like okay what's the goal here the goal is like let's increase our fiber intake and reduce our risk of colon cancer so what goal that make you hate brussel sprouts that's that's that's that's the yeah and I think the the two hours a day sounds

really challenging because like at one hour they're going to start to get really grumpy and they're not going to want to leave like at the second hour you're way past the dopaminergic enjoyment point now it's just like it's going to be way more like addictive and emotional regulation and stuff like that I I think it's it's I would not recommend even daily usage yeah what what do you do with your kids what does it look like at your house if you don't mind sharing yeah so I mean I think uh we've

been at it for a little while but I would say they don't see a they don't touch a screen I would say five days a week usually um that's changed a little bit right now because we're actually like playing a particular switch game like in the evenings two or three days a week but that's like something that we're doing now an a it's like hey we got this new so while we're playing let's relax the guidelines a little bit and that is really important for kids to understand that you're not set in stone

and we can do this sometimes it's just it has to have the right reason to do it this way and then we're we're somewhat liberal um in the on the weekends and stuff so we'll kind of say like you know if you want to watch a movie in the afternoon but I would say total screen time is less than four hours a week and and a huge part of that is engag in this like what do yall want to do and then I think this this problem I think the biggest uh challenge the friction is that when you guys stop there isn

't something else there right so really showing kids okay like because now what's her experience every time I stop the game she suffers for 45 minutes right so from a pavlovian perspective you're actually teaching her that when you take the game away you're in for suffering for 45 minutes oh super oh man right that's why this is the crazy thing parents don't realize that a lot of what we do which instinctually to work is actually reinforcing the wrong behaviors yeah and and so then there are oth

er uphill battles like stopping during meals and in the car and stuff like that yeah I think I've just gotten more like parenting advice in like what eight minutes we' I know I didn't realize we were going to have a a therapy session this morning but here I was planning for it I was like let's we got it we got to figure this out right now um I have a feeling we're going to be digging into your work a lot more well I want to I want to get into you you've mentioned addiction a couple times and you

've been obviously very open with your own you know path to to the healthy gamer uh you platform that you have and the work that you do so can you talk a little bit about your origin story into this area and what addiction gaming addiction looks like yeah so uh my origin stories first of all I I skipped a grade and I think that's actually quite significant because when I was 5 years old I was competing against seven-year-olds in sports so early on the first thing that happened is I had this idea

that I was not athletic so I stepped away from a lot of like physical things and like when you're in elementary school or at least when I was a lot of your Social Status is also tied to your athleticism right so I was like the last kid to get picked on the team because I was playing basketball and I was playing against people who were like a foot taller than me and right and so so the first thing that happened is that I could only compete on a video game with my peers that's the only place wher

e the the playing field was level the other problem that I had in school was that um school was boring so there's a predeliction towards people who are bored at school and getting addicted to video games and the problem there is that school moves at the pace of the slowest kid right so and if you're like if you figured out you know how to do your worksheet in 10 or 15 minutes you just get bored for the rest of school whereas if you look at a video game it's really alluring for a kid who's smart

because when you beat level one level two is waiting for you right and if you don't beat level one you get to try again right whereas in school it's like if you fail you get an F on your transcript and then it's kind of fixed like you're you're done you're GG um so I grew up playing a lot of video games and then it really became a problem starting in high school and then College like I just straight up failed my first year was on academic probation and my parents tried everything they tried like

tough love they tried love love they tried encouragement and you know like help and support and punishments and yelling and they tried everything for a couple years and they just didn't know what they were dealing with and I didn't know what I was dealing with right um so failed out of basically two years of college and then my dad was like you need you need to go to India and I was like I didn't quite understand what he meant but he didn't really know what he meant he just knew that everything

we had tried was not woring maybe something over there will fix it yeah so and and it did so that was pretty cool so like I I went over there and I spent three months at an ashram and I learned like yoga and meditation I decided to become a monk I was like this stuff is amazing oh wow wow what what was it doing for you like I would have thought if if somebody puts that on paper I would say okay kid addicted to video games failing out of school goes do to do yoga and meditation like there if you

think School moves slow and is boring like you know how what was it that that was tapping into for you that that made you want to do it yeah so I think the way we teach yoga and meditation here is like a fraction of how fun it can be so we have a really watered down version I'll just share with y'all kind of what I mean so the first thing to understand is like I was incredibly frustrated with myself there were some days where I would sleep through my 8 AM class so here's here's the sequence of

events I I don't wake up on time so then what I do is I'm like okay let me sign up for an 8 a.m. class that way I have to wake up on time right I'm going to create an environmental thing to force me to wake up but then what I found is I just sleep through the class like my alarm would go off I'd hit the snooze button a couple times and I'd just turn it off some days I would wake up some days I wouldn't and on the days that I did wake up I wasn't really proud of myself because I was like my starc

adian rhythm is all messed up but on the days that I didn't go to class I was really frustrated with myself and I just didn't understand why I could not do like I know I'm failing out of college I know that's a bad idea I was Premed at the time and and you know was like this is bad like I'm not going to get into medical school oh my God like you know one F on a transcript basically ruins it and I've got one whole year of him so I was really frustrated because I didn't understand like how to wake

up on time I didn't understand how to stop playing even though I knew I should stop so I understood intellectually what to do but I did not understand how the body and mind work so that I can actually like point in a direction and have the mind go in that direction that's what I learned in India is how does a human being so we studied formally like so we'll study like pathology right or even psychology or Psychiatry if you take a psychology class they'll teach you experiments about General huma

n behavior they don't teach you how to wake up on time or how to eat healthy or anything like that you don't learn that in the psych nature so we don't have any class that teaches us about ourselves and how we work where do desire come from how do you conquer a desire where do emotions come from how do you manage your emotions what is the relationship between emotion identity ego desire wants needs Duty should all of these different things in the mind we don't learn about so I learned that and I

was like this is amazing now I understand where my desires come from and I can actually control them and I can understand you know what decisions are being driven by ego and then as I started like decreasing my ego and stuff like that like I started doing way better so I fell in love with that because it was like this is what I've been looking for I've been going through life and I don't understand how to control me and I learned how to control me so I decided to become monk when are you going

to write that book because I would like to read it so it's funny you guys met so I I wrote my first book which is coming out in March which is a parenting book yeah totally gonna and pre-ordering that after we're done here yeah so it's it's actually available for pre-order but um so it's about how to raise a healthy gamer so what I kind of realized is I'm helping all these Gamers and then I was like the best way to fix this is actually like from a public health perspective we have to equip paren

ts to prevent these kids for from ending up with our audience which is like these 25y old people who have fallen behind in life and video games have really like messed things up for them um but yeah that that's going to be probably book number three is my guess but I'm working on it well I will be impatiently waiting well impatiently waiting in India I think you're G to be going yeah it sounds like should we send you out there maybe all of us family family uh yoga meditation training I mean it s

ounds amazing ping me and I'll send yall Rex there you go to know yeah so so you're um at some point you went from wanting to be a a Buddhist monk you said Hindu but oh Hindu Hindu Hindu monk very similar to to going coming back and doing medical school so so what happened there well um I met my wife and uh that was also kind of interesting because I I had two years of just abysmal dating experience like just really unhealthy relationships and stuff while I was you know in college and all that g

ood stuff and then once I decided to become celibate I found that it really freed up my interactions with women there was no pressure and I could just be me and I wasn't looking for anything and turns out that it's way more attractive to women when you're just like a regular human being um and so I started dating my wife and because because I I tried to take my vows when I was 21 and my teachers said you can't yet they were smart and they realized that this was like kind of temporary and and so

they're like how long were you there at that point so I I spent three months there and then I came back and then for the next seven years I spent Summers and usually December so four months a year in India for about seven years so I'd always go back and kind of do advanced stuff but I basically met my wife and then decided I didn't need to become a monk um and that she also wanted to be married to a physician and we we're both Indian and it's a big part of what we do right sure yeah and actually

my teachers told me they're like you need to get a doctoral degree and then at the age of 30 if you want to take vows you can so my teachers didn't explain explicitly but they were like I'm like I'm ready to forsake my life and give everything up and they were like at 21 years old yeah and they're like bro like you don't have anything giving you're not giving you have nothing worth giving up so like go get something first and then give it up because that's really what it takes right so like bui

ld something up and then get ready to throw it away nine years from now and if you still want to do that and you're that committed then we'll take you yeah in the back of their mind you think they were thinking no he's he's not he's never this not going to happen maybe I think so I think they understood that my es was I AAL what me and she wants me to go to med school so I might as well honestly that's was a big part of it um and then the other piece was I I really wanted to understand people so

like I had understood this kind of yogic meditation sort of side and then I wanted to understand I was like okay like if I really want to understand every aspect of a human being like let me go to med school so the big irony is I ended up working way harder so one side sort of like given up on my ego and I was like this is a temporary thing but I learned how to just put forth effort where I wanted to so if I told my mind hey we're going to do this that it would actually listen which was super c

ool so then ended up applying to med school 120 times got accepted on application 120 wow I was going to say you must have had you must have had a hell of a personal statement man like yeah yeah I mean I guess it's an interesting path right it's it's really it I mean I think it shows because obviously you had to come back and you had all these bad grades on your transcript right so you had to overcome that which is the the the emphasis we put on on grades yeah is is I mean that that's a whole ot

her conversation what what the emphasis should be on but you still had to overcome that right yeah so I ended up getting three so I I graduated with like a 2.5 GPA so that was hard um and then I ended up ultimately getting like one interview a year because there was enough stuff so I and then thankfully in the third year of applying to med school I got one interview and got accepted so it just you know took a couple of I that's that's that's a lot it's you three three years of I mean that's a th

at's a a success story right there and right I mean that shows a lot of persistence and and dedication to this goal and I think you know all of your obviously all of the work you were doing in India would serve you well during medical school and and in your career so I think that's certainly one way to look at it but I I think the other side is a lot of stubbornness and stupidity so sometimes they're very related right they are right so what's the difference between perseverance and stubbornness

it's just if you win at the end they call you perseverant right and if you lose at the end they call you stubborn it's a good point now were you were you a Psychiatry all the way no I was going to do like holistic oncology that was the plan so I I geared up and and done some Neuroscience research and stuff and was working on like a taiichi and Immunology lab and all that kind of good stuff um and and so that was a thing that's yeah so so was was doing like evidence-based complimentary and alter

native medicine but mostly for physical illnesses and then it was actually in my Psychiatry rotation which was just mindblowing like and it took me a long time so I did it early right because in med school you want to do like your weak rotations first before you do like internal medicine and surgery and the stuff you want to get honors in so psych was my second rotation and I really loved it I didn't I had trouble coming to terms with the fact that I loved it um but it was so much fun and and uh

and then it took me a little while and then I ended up um sort of doing a suby in Internal Medicine and Psych in my fourth year so one of my mentors was like I was having trouble deciding and so fourth year rolled around and I was like I may seriously want to do psych so I was like 90 90% Internal Medicine 5% psych and 5% surgery at going into my fourth year oh you had a little surgery in there huh yeah sck you so I didn't like the O but I thought that a surgical ICU was like very engaging you

like that part yeah yeah gotcha that's still an area that I have no idea even though I'm a surgeon but I have no idea how things work in the sick speaking I don't even know what kind of what kind of what flavor of doctors I'm I'm an opthamologist okay so you know kinda so so yeah I actually there's probably surgeons listening to this like rolling rolling their eyes like but I do operate on and inside eyeballs which is an organ so I mean technically you are a surgeon that's correct but the hospit

al medicine was was never like my bags so okay um you know and I I agree with you actually on the Psychiatry rotation it was just because you know I had a required psych rotation and it was just so different than any other rotation you do uh a total change of pace uh and what I found talking to my classmates is like you either really liked it or you didn't that seemed to be the case you know I think there's there's a few and and uh Kristen I'm sorry what flavor or I I don't I am not a physician

actually I'm I'm here to provide the the non-med questions but um but I do relate to you a lot on this idea of you know being fascinated by people and and how the body works and how the mind works and and I studied kind of the interaction of that how they affect each other um I did my graduate work in social psychology and cognitive Neuroscience um and I was specifically looking at emotion so um so I'm with you on how interesting it all is but yeah I'm not a physician but I have a question about

so you're in this world of of technology and and interested in helping young people or anybody that that is you know into gaming but is our the way we approach mental health is it is it set up to help those people because it feels like it's a whole different world now right like is is the way we approach like therapy and and and trying to do is it I mean does video games for you know Freud and bulby and all these people that we've based all of our all of our um Psychotherapy on so what's so so

clarify your question for me I I guess what I'm asking is um have you the platform you have in helping people in gaming uh it seems very unique in a way that that traditional therapy right just fails to reach these types of people uh young people people into gaming and so um is I I'm curious to hear your thoughts about how to reconcile kind of society's approach to mental health and the the the upcoming generation yeah so it's it's a beautiful question and and this is where I know youall make a

fair amount of Public Health content so I also have an mph and and I think when I started HG that was a very formative part of like how I approached it so what I was seeing in the office is that and this isn't just about gaming that so if you look at our healthare system in general and this is true of mental health too we're really good at like certain things so we're really good at acute care but we're not very good at behavioral change we're kind of okay at population based medicine that is li

ke low touch so we're really good at giving people ssris cholesterol meds you have an appointment once every six months and 30% of the population will get 30% better from this kind of stuff so very very low cost really low lift and you get some really good value out of that right so we've got preventive medicine you know like metformin for diabetes kind of stuff eyes for anxiety or mood mood kind of stuff and then we're like good at hospitalization so we can you know help people with eect and an

d acute stuff and give them you know 5250 if they're distressed or whatnot but it's really in this middle area that we fall short and then the second problem is that we're really so our our system of Psychiatry I think has evolved in the wrong direction so the first is that it focuses on pathology which is what it's supposed to do so this isn't the fault of Psychiatry but if we look at behavioral change and understanding oneself this is actually not what psychiatrists are trained to do uh and th

is is why you see like this emergence of coaching which like a lot of therapists are like what is this stuff like and then I'll see you know things on on in Psychotherapy communities where someone will say oh their coach really helped them with this problem and like we've been working on it for three years and then all the other therapists will say like oh like it's not the coach it's you you've been doing it will all be very supportive but I don't think as a field therapists have asked why the

field of Co coaching is exploding right so there's a huge demand for it and why is that it's because in therapy we are actually trained to on a pathological model we're not trained to help someone at Baseline get better we're training to help someone who has a pathology achieve Baseline so if we look at like you know addiction treatment which makes sense it's like how do we get you to stop being an addict and be like Baseline normal human being how do we get someone with depression to no longer

be depressed and be able to go to work so I had one patient for example was very formative for me where we worked together for a couple of years and then he said like you know hey I'm not getting better like I still feel the same and we'd seen a lot of functional Improvement so he was like going to work and like was able to engage in relationships and stuff like that so he' like like move forward on a lot of like functional indicators and then one day we had a conversation about it's not that yo

u're not depressed anymore you're not depressed you're unhappy and there's a big difference between those two so I think the biggest mistake that we make in Psychiatry is that we use all of our tools to fix broken people instead of taking normal people and helping them become healthy helping them become happy and this is where the coaching stuff kind of grew up because the coaching was actually started by people who were experts in positive psychology these are psychologists who then realized ok

ay there's this like Performance Based stuff where now you have all these coaches like that work at Google and place like that places like that we have all these interventions that can help people improve their lives outside of pathology so I think when it comes to techn yeah go ahead will no go ahead yeah no keep so when it comes to technology I think this is the realm where it's not sufficient because our our standard models don't work anymore so if we look at addictions first of all like 95%

of addictions is substance use disorders okay right right so very few people like treat porn addiction or like sex and love addiction or whatever so if you think about the training that that yall got right chances are it's on substance use and you didn't spend you know I would be surprised if if Will saw a single patient who was addicted to sex no no I I can't say I have right so so now what's going on is we've got a whole system that is designed on substance use disorders and the goal of substa

nce use disorders is sobriety so all of our addiction research and our infastructure is based on sobriety but when it comes to technology that's not an option so this is a huge gap in the field of Psychiatry that the problem that we're facing is fundamentally different yeah and so what we try to do is help people build a life that is worth living that's the ultimate antidote to a technology addiction is when your psychological needs can be met in a more healthy way in the external world as oppos

ed to the virtual world that is when the natural desire to play video games will disappear and that's kind of what we shoot for which is not usually what Psychiatry focuses on yeah right so what is your approach how do you shoot for that what do you so I think we teach a lot of this Eastern stuff so it starts with really simple stuff like okay like what what does a game do to you and what are your goals like what kind of Life do you want and how can you go about building that life so we offer a

lot of like kind of Behavioral based interventions too where we'll teach people like okay like what's something that you can do that will help you feel better about yourself and stuff like that why is it hard for you to do that right so this is the other problem we have in medicine is that we'll make we'll have these studies that will say Okay exercise helps reduce video game playing or this kind of intervention these cross-sectional studies that show eating fiber pooping properly exercise getti

ng hugged having a cat all of these things will improve your mental health outcomes but in our system of research we don't help people how to do the how so how do I avoid eating crap like we don't teach people that so what we really try to do at HG is is the kind of the same stuff I was telling youall about parenting is inviting people to observe themselves and become aware and this is what's really fascinating is that people think so people don't understand neuroscientifically what willpower is

the circuit in our brain that gives us awareness is the same circuit as willpower willpower is not actually separate from awareness they're the same and so all you have to do is increase awareness and that gets kind of confusing but I can explain into more detail if you want but it's kind of weird because we think about willpower is a separate thing from awareness but they're actually not in the brain same part of the brain which part is it I don't CU um I think it's the front medial gyus yeah

medial okay medial gyrus that means nothing to me yeah it means something to me but not a lot anymore it's been a long time yeah got to refresh my neuro Anatomy yeah let's let's take a a quick break and then we'll come back with Dr [Music] K hey Kristen what do you know about Hearts well I know they need to beat that's true and you're really good at making them do that yeah I did that one you helped me with mine I did I was I still appreciate that by the way you're welcome you know help you lear

n even more about Hearts what the echo core 500 digital stethoscope with three lead ECG nice this thing is awesome how do I look how do I look look so fancy doesn't that look nice it's like like anybody who listens to hearts in your job could benefit from one of these that's right it's got 40 times noise amplification noise cancellation three audio filter modes and a full color display yeah so you can listen and see the ECG it's amazing right it it's really cool I what stethoscope allows you to

do that I know we live in the future it's incredible it's also the best sounding uh digital stethoscope that you're going to find out there trust me on that we have a special offer for our us listeners visit echohealth tocom KK and use code knock 50 to experience echo's core 500 digital stethoscope technology that's ekoh health slkk and use knock 50 to get a 75-day risk-free trial and a free case and free shipping with this exclusive offer hey Kristen do you mind if this little guy stares at you

while you talk well you know they're kind of growing on me I mean hopefully not literally but but these cute little guys you know what they are right yeah Demodex mites that's right they cause itchy red scaly skin on the eyelids because they live on the eyelash follicles y just eating up all your dirts and oils that's why it's important to get your eyelids checked out if you have those types of symptoms don't freak out get checked out to find out more go to eyelid check.com that's e l che.com t

o get more information about deodex [Music] leitis all right we are back with Dr K and I just have uh one more follow-up question I I have a a fun activity for us to play I think it'll be fun uh uh I I personally think it'll be fun I don't know if you guys will think it's fun but that's not what matters you got to just sell it you got to convince us it'll be fun that's right but first uh Dr K I want to just uh one more follow-up question you've mentioned gaps in medical training and Psychiatry w

hat what do you think we can do to to bridge this Gap and is it possible because it sounds like Psychiatry you're right is geared toward pathology and that's important right we still have to to to do that to to educate you know Physicians about that but what can we do to kind of bridge this Gap so I think a couple of things um the first is I think like you said we have to first of all acknowledge that Psychiatry is the goals are generally speaking a little bit more acute a little bit more pathol

ogical but I think what we're starting to understand is that the mind is an organ is like different from all the other organs so it's the only organ of the body that requires for example social interaction to be healthy it's the only organ that you know the Baseline level of Health if we look at what makes people's minds healthy it's not necessarily stuff that is done in an office so this is what's so tricky right so we can look at something like exercise where exercise has good outcomes for end

ocrinology for Cardiology for pulmonology every organ system of the body but we don't teach people how to exercise that's not what Physicians do but if you look at like you know the single I think the single most effective thing thing that you can ever do as a doctor is help your patient quit smoking in terms of outcomes and so in Psychiatry we sort of have to acknowledge that this is a problem when we have to train people to deal with acute stuff but I think it would be helpful if we really hel

ped at least psychiatrists be a little bit more aware of Technology's impact so I think that's the first thing that has to happen is we really have to teach more about technology the Neuroscience of it the psych psychology of it because I I think technology addiction is growing very rapidly I mean the high highest prevalence is like 22% in in some countries like in the Middle East which is staggering like alcohol is like 6% wow um is is the research there I mean I assume there's a lot of work be

ing done to to you know quantify and and kind of try to figure out the underlying pathophysiologic yeah so I think that there's a lot of research and it's not quite there and I think this is where the second thing that we need to do is change the way that we adapt to medical problems so right now we've got a system that's just way too slow so what happens is we do a bunch of studies right so each study like your one year in IRB you recruit human subjects the trial lasts three years you do data a

nalysis or let and then so four years after you start the study you have a a publication we wait for 20 to 25 Publications then we develop a guideline then the guideline gets taught to Medical students who then eight years later become psychiatrists and then enter clinical practice meanwhile that technology is now obsolete exactly so so that's the key thing you hit hit the nail on the head there Kristen because we have studies coming out about how to deal with Facebook and like Facebook usage is

already declined so much so the pace at which technology is advancing or medic medicine can't keep up and it I mean it takes a worldwide effort to get something like a CO vaccine in one year right which is the fastest medicine has ever moved right and so I think we need to change the way that we sort of do training a little bit and I think sort of like more like CME kind of stuff um where where we really need to we need people to understand that especially when we're dealing with technology tha

t it's going to be changing every six months and we need some way to keep up with that the closest thing in medicine I can think of is almost something like an antibiogram where oh yeah yeah you know the the h is unique each bacteria is unique and has unique resistances let's develop a system to create a personalized rapid approach that can Target this very specific thing and what we've sort of found in in VI with video game addiction and Technology addiction is that there's a subset of all thes

e different disorders so even the reason someone gets addicted to Instagram as opposed to Facebook as opposed to Tik Tok as opposed to a video game there are different fundamental psychological things going on and understanding those things I think is really important but I think we need to move faster and we need to have a slightly better emphasis on behavioral addictions and teach a little bit more Beyond sobriety is the only answer right do you do you still game do you do you what do you I'm

I'm curious what do you play uh right now I'm playing Elden ring if yall are familiar with it and I'm playing Mario with my kids we just we bought Mario as well and then you say we as if I'm involved in this because I love video games I grew up on video games I love playing and so we we bought the Mario game and it's it's it's a it's a fun I I've under underestimated how much fun it can be like to do that as a family yeah like to it's you know it's just a way to connect with the kids well what i

s this might this is a weird question given the topic of addiction but like I I think I'm broken in the other way like it does not I just can't get into it it does nothing for me I'm bored okay but also you do have a pathological lack of competitiveness yeah that's true it just there's no point I guess I'm a very practical person and to me it's like what is the point of this There's no practical I'm not getting anything by doing this stars and noises and stuff aren't doing it for me yeah so we k

now that uh there are different personality characteristics that make people addicted to different kinds of games so not I mean I have no idea but my guess is that there are games and we know that a lot of the normal games are masculine focused so they're like made for men designed by men right and that there are a lot of games out there like Animal Crossing or whatever that like sometimes women will enjoy more but my wife hates that stuff too because she's like this stuff feels like chores like

I hate this yeah exactly what women want to farm yeah exactly it's like I and so she's kind of that way and gaming isn't for everyone right and and that's what I kind of mean is that social media can sometimes scratch that itch for different people yeah yeah or podcasting I jump around too much I'm maybe I'm ADHD I don't know maybe I've undiagnosed I can't I can't sit and do something that long well we're not going to we're not going to make Dr K diagnosis anymore or or or provide any other adv

ice for us uh he's already done plenty but what I wanted to do before we wrap up here is um I have a game that Kristen You're Gonna Play okay and Dr K is gonna help us with okay awes um so I I try to come up with some kind of activity that's related to the topic that we're discussing and so obviously it's gaming today um and so uh you have to guess which so I'm going to give you a name okay and you have to guess is this is this the name of a of a medication or is it a character in a video game t

wo things I know nothing about yeah all right all right here we go oh boy this is interesting now we're gonna start off e because I know that you're not you're not into gaming at all um uh we're gonna start with an easy one Zelda okay that's a game everyone knows that one very good all right okay how about um lumac lumac that sounds like a medication it is it's a medication used to treat lung cancer okay all right how about dragon bloom well that's got to be a game that's that's a video game uh

it's a name from a monster hunter have you ever played Monster Hunter I have yeah so anyway I I've never played that one actually here's one that might be kind of tough oblon oblon oblon I'm gonna go medication are you familiar with that one oblon or Oblivion that's a good question this is a brand name medication yeah I would go I would go with this is actually a sedative that was uh launched in 1953 that beautiful sounds terrifying now that I know that oblon like like Oblivion and it's a cative

from the 50s I think you're not coming back from that one exactly Time Magazine described oblon as taking the fear out of visits to the dentist because you are completely dead that's right it was only available on prescription it was completely withdrawn in 1967 do you know why what happened with ob I actually don't know the answer to that um I I feel like it might be obvious reasons but I don't maybe people were um going unconscious at the dentist and they didn't like that I don't know okay he

re's here's here's one here's one okay Stellar oh that's medication I've heard commercials oh you've heard that okay I thought it I was going to get you on Stellar okay all right there's a game called Stellaris o very close what kind of game is that it's a turn-based strategy game in space Oh Goa okay all right here's one um zlex that's got to be a medication God you're okay all right here's I'm better at this than I thought I would be there they just kind of they have a sound to them they do bu

t some of them are all right all right here's one also sounds kind of like a Pokemon like some of these like medic Nam like Snorlax yeah Snorlax could be like some kind of laxative I don't know to help you stop snoring yeah what I don't know you can snore more when you're not having diarrhea with Snorlax or or something with the soft pallet snoring there we go okay yeah SX I think sounds like a good medication I think most pokemon right you're right yeah Pikachu Pikachu sounds like a sneeze medi

cation something to help you stop sneezing beautiful allergy medicine Pikachu there you go all right um a couple more okay Kus game yes that is a name from Warcraft 3 The Frozen Throne kelus is a blood Mage not to be trifled with you're familiar with Kus absolutely what is it sounds like the vegetable to me but yeah um okay also from uh World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade and shadowlands anyway um all right World of Warcraft I don't know all the twos and threes and whatnot but that was the one

that my parents yeah your parents were big into world Warcraft time while I was in high school it was a very my parents yes my par oh yeah they're playing into their probably their they still have accounts yeah they're into um all right uh let's see how about electo that's a tough that's that's I'm gonna go game ah you got it nicely done that's actually from a game I play it's probably that character is probably from it's like a a Greek uh like a mythology I think it's a one of the furies I bel

ieve electo um it's in Hades Hades yeah I love that game oh that game is so fun is that the shooter one you do yeah the one where I'm just yeah it's just chaotic and good stuff it's great it's fantastic it's basically like a video game about being in the emergency room oh yeah there just people come at you spitting stuff vomiting stuff [ __ ] stuff all over you you have to dodge you never made that connection but you're absolutely right all right last one um question medication God yeah all righ

t I don't know what it is but they do they they each have their own sound to them they do all right I've gotta I gotta I could have done better with this Kristen's really good I I don't think I would have I mean I know half the characters in medications and I don't think I would have gotten she her success rate is she's 100% right so far I know yeah cred it I was a straight A student yeah the last one I had which is probably too easy is Raptor gaze oh that's a game yeah from a game called Guild

Wars 2 anyway um I think it's more it's something from like the Reading Writing language pieces that that give it away for me but um all right so that was name that name I think right yeah nicely done um all right so Dr K we want to make sure we uh you know give you a chance to talk about some of the things that you're working on yeah tell us where everyone can find all of your things because I'm going to go look because I need to know how to fix so I I think if yall are like interested in you k

now most of the stuff that we're known for is our YouTube channel so we've got a YouTube channel that's healthy gamer forgg where we make just YouTube videos about all kinds of like applicable mental health stuff so sometimes we'll go into deep Dives of trauma and stuff like that um but oftentimes it's more practical stuff like you know how do I better understand my emotions how do I where does emotion come from um where does willpower come from what's going on in my brain when I'm unmotivated t

hings like that yeah go ahead no I just that's what I want to know yeah so I I think we try really hard to sort of combine like neuroscience and and clinical medicine with like some of these Eastern Concepts so like sort of combining East and West so subjectively what what's the meditation exercise and then what happens in your brain when you do it kind of thing um we also have a a guide to Mental Health Health which is for people that are interested in kind of like my approach to particular dia

gnoses like ADHD depression anxiety um I also have a meditation guide and then we have a book coming out how to raise a healthy gamer in March and you can get it anywhere you can pre-order stuff and is that book one or two because I'm waiting for three so I need to know where we are book one so first book is actually a parenting book which is kind of interesting because that's not really our target audience but I think just in terms of yeah how to do the have the biggest on video game addiction

I think we've got to equip parents because just like yall like parents don't know exactly what to do well that was the first thing we wanted to talk to you about I mean I think there's a lot of people that could really appreciate some guidance on this and I I think parents don't I think this may be the early time in history maybe not the first time where now yall have an industry like a multi-billion or even trillion dollar industry that is like invested in keeping your kid glued to the screen r

ight and and so I think it's really hard to parent when you've got someone who's like you know in the past we've had problems with like nicotine and stuff like that where there's like industries that are trying to addict your kids but gaming is just so much more prevalent it's so much more accepted it starts at one year old or two years old right and so it's really challenging for parents yeah well I'm GNA go yes subscribe to everything and purchase everything and you're on it looks like you you

have accounts on um most of the major platforms Here YouTube Tik Tok Twitter Instagram healthy gamer uh and the book how to raise a healthy gamer coming out in March so uh fantastic stuff is enlightening very interesting talking with you thank you so much for coming on Dr K thanks for having us or me thank you all for having me full circle there we are again with all righty take [Music] care I just learned a ton of stuff I know I feel like I could have asked him a million more questions but the

y would have all been like personal so I feel like I feel like maybe I came a little hot out of the gate with the Roblox you might have I've been thinking I was like but we've talked about it before it's like like what is going on with this thing it's it seems very addictive and I feel like I'm going to have my identity stolen I know I know it's really sketchy sometimes they want the they want the money with the to buy things trinkets the real money to buy the fake money to buy the things that a

re just pixels but is such good advice though like I've I I think I have some ideas of how we can like yeah help our right even just what he said in this episode and then I'm I'm really excited to get his book and see what else is absolutely let us know what you guys think um if you have also any ideas for guests anybody you want to hear on our show we love to get some feedback there's lots of ways to hit us up you can email us knock knock high-content docomo media platforms you can hang out wit

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uh medical shows and movies uh hang out with other members of the KNN High Community it's another family that's growing yeah yeah lots of children over there yep that's true maybe some grandchildren could be great great grandchild not sure the demographics we're there we are the patriarch and matriarch of the patreon so we're there uh early adree episode access interactive Q&A Liv stream events and much more patreon.com glocken fleen or go to glock.com speaking of patreon Community perks new mem

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u might have said Cory cor maybe I said cor cor corne who knows what I say I said it wrong anyway he knows who he is our editor and engineer is Jason porti music is by Omar benve to learn about KNN High's program disclaimer ethics policy submission verification licensing terms of hip relase terms you can go to glock.com reach out to us at nnumc content.com come with any questions concerns or fun medical puns or lims we got a limeri once we did it was an AI generated Limer yeah that's right that'

s right and I didn't realize still has a ways to go yeah it's it's you know I I think my job as a a comedian opthalmologist is secure I think so for is a human content [Music] production knock knock goodby [Music] by thanks for watching the episode you can find more on that playlist over there if you prefer to listen or you just had your eyes dilated you can bch full episodes wherever you get your podcast or join the party over on patreon where you get Early Access episodes hang out with us get

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