How to Unsuppress Emotions | Healthy Gamer Webinar #6

Okay I think we're good now so it looks like we are able to screen share there we go okay we back sorry about the technical difficulties guys let's go ahead and dive in okay I'm still just my mind is boggled that like I do this everyday and I set it up the same way every day and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't it's like if I connect to reflector and then it like goes into sleep mode it like can never Connect again no matter how many how much we do that's okay we can lose

viewers okay so let's start with emotions okay so this is what we're talking about today so we're gonna start off actually by thinking a little bit about behavior and how we work so a lot of times we're gonna dip a little bit into mechanics of mind so a lot of times we make decisions right but then the question is what goes into decisions so like what are the Components of decisions so sometimes even if something is irrational it may not eat just because something is is rational doesn't mean that it is actually that you do

that thing so you're even if you something is rationally a good idea it doesn't necessarily mean that you do it so what are the three things that kind of go in decision-making one is rational and there are habits and other stuff that we're not going to get to today but These are essentially components of the mind so even if you know something is good rationally you may have an emotion that keeps you from doing it so a good example of this is social anxiety so let's say that like in social anxiety you know rationally you

can say everyone likes me because they're your friends right so let's assume that you're going out with your friends and then but your emotions say no one likes me [Music] Okay and the third thing that makes decisions for you the third part of your mind is your ego or sense of identity but then this then you have this kind of thought I am an unlikable person and so these are I mean the other kind of emotional thought is like another way to think about this is this may not even be a thought necessarily it's just

you know a sense of fear or worry so this this could actually be an ego ego statement as well the point here is that like These are the three things that happen right so you have like physical sensations of anxiety you have kind of just this emotional you have like a pit in your stomach or you have sweaty palms or things like that and so all three of these things are in conflict and so a big problem is that you know when I work with people and technologies social media gamers etc they say I know

what I need to do but I just can't do right you know you need to study you know you need To apply for a job so this is part of set with the question is this is insufficient to get you guys to do what you need to do and so the question is like what do we do about that right like I can sit here and then like the problem is that youth like when you think about your problem solving strategy here you focus on number one rationality number two rationality and number three rationality right

number four maybe you work on habit five willpower you can do All kinds of stuff over here actually but most of the arguing that you do with yourself is in your head and and is on an intellectual level but that's kind of insufficient because the problem actually is not here the problem is here or here and we don't really get trained to deal with these two things so today what we're gonna talk about is emotions okay so question is if you're unable to do what you want to chances are it's not The rational that's holding

you guys back because in my experience most like gamers and like you know people tend to be smart it's not an issue of IQ it's an issue of like not understanding that there are things holding you back in your mind that are irrational because if it you know that those are those are emotions so so then let's think about you know why or why is it hard to deal with emotions so why are emotions hard to deal with so the first reason is Because most of us are Alexa thymic in alexithymia is the inability to

determine your internal emotional state so a lot of gamers that I talked to say that they're in control of their emotions they feel like they're in control of their emotions and when I kind of ask them like what do you mean by that and they'll say like okay so so give me an example of being in control they're saying like I can watch a sad movie and I won't cry I can watch a scary movie and I won't feel scared I like tend to be you know like emotions don't affect me I can go to

the funeral and like I'll be sad but I'm not gonna be like crying like other people and so what they mean by in control you're not really in control of your emotions you're just suppressing them and the interesting thing about emotions is if we look at the brain our emotions essentially we can turn up the volume or Down the volume on our emotions affects all emotions so if we look at like gamers this is also why they don't feel that positivity like they look at other people and they're like wow that person really has a

zest for life I don't have a zest for life I feel kind of stuck I feel like a lack of fulfillment and part of that is because you know imagine there are different like channels right so they're different twitch channels you can watch but if Twitch is muted it doesn't matter what kind of twitch channel you're watching you're not gonna be able to hear what you know what they're saying you're gonna get you like just a fraction of what other people are capable of feeling because your emotions are just turned all the way down if

the question is why do we suppress our emotions and or why are our emotions suppressed so then the question is why suppression there are a couple reasons for this one is that it's Adaptive and protective so a lot of gamers will have various things that happen to them when they're young um that that the emotions hurt and when you're young unless you have someone who can help you navigate those emotions you're going to learn how to suppress them especially through video games so let's say go sample is you get bullied you know you have abusive

neglectful parents is another good one or people around you then even if you don't get Bullied and you don't want to have abusive or neglectful parents you have parents that talk about your potential and how smart you are and then this actually makes you feel what right it makes you feel bad unless it makes you feel good and the question is what what what is this bad it makes you feel shame makes you feel fear that you can't live up to expectation and so then the question is like when they tell you you're such a

smart kid so like if the Odd thing is that even parents can be sort of like loving and kind it's just love is not a substitute for like emotional competence right they can be supportive or do what they think is supportive and it can still place a burden on you this is why like we all have kind of little emotional traumas or psychological complexes or some scars and it doesn't mean that our parents did a bad job it just means that we weren't taught how to deal with them like deal With the what they did

to us and what they did to our psyche so if we think about it like we don't want to feel this so what we end up doing is all of this results in suppression because if you suppress then it goes away so how do we suppress okay first is video games so there are studies that show that when you play a video game it does a couple of interesting things there are there the two parts of the brain that are sort of govern emotional and especially a Negative emotional experience or the amygdala and hippocampus okay

so when we're feeling bad these two parts of our brain are like kind of lit up and so these two parts of our brain are lit up whenever we're feeling bad and then when we play a video game there's studies that show that the activity in these regions actually end up getting the activity goes down so when we play video games these turn off and when we spend a lot of time playing Video games we learn how to turn these these things off and they they start to turn off all the time we also suppress

the rest of our emotions so we kind of get that dopaminergic satisfaction from playing a video game so it's kind of like rewarding and addictive but it doesn't make you feel happy or excited do you guys get that so video games reward us without necessarily like creating positive emotion so there there are like Moments of positive emotion in video games right like you can like win a match of like let's say you're you're down and League of Legends or something and then you guys they could come back and then you feel like excitement at the

end and there's there is somewhat of an emotional rollercoaster when you play those games there's also a lot of rage in Tulsa City that bubbles up and if you think about it like if you don't really care about a game of League of Legends Like why is it that you feel so frustrated or toxic or angry with your teammates it's because you have this gigantic pile of emotions that are like that you've been suppressing for a while and it starts to come out so if we really look at video games what they actually train us

to do is suppress our emotions that's neurologically like what they do to our brains they just turn off those parts of our body and then what happens Is like if a brief a part of our body is turned off if we shut off a part of our brain we lose competence with that part okay so let's think about this like good examples of this or forgetting a language other things are like you know just skill decay in general like whether it's like learning that forgetting to play music or you know forgetting certain information or knowledge

and remember the brain is an efficient organ so if it's not using some thing it's Gonna like stop prioritizing it so over time is video games or other forms of like social media or technology suppress our emotions suppress our emotions suppress our emotions then we like forget we don't understand what we're feeling another important part about suppression is kind of cultural so there's a cultural impact and what do I mean by that and maybe actually if we think about it what I should do is this take This move it down here okay we're gonna take

this up here so this is a second so why do we suppress because of a cultural impact to so men are taught to suppress most emotions right so if you think about the traditional like guys locker room right like we don't express shame or fear we're basically taught to only express one emotion which is anger and so like you know when when when you get rejected by a girl if you say like yeah I'm if you tell your bros that you're Like yeah I'm afraid that I'm never gonna be loved and that like no one

will ever love me like no dude says that right when you get when you ask her girl out she says no that's not what you say because you don't even understand that you feel that like you feel some sense of badness and then you get pissed and you're like yeah [ __ ] her you know like and then your bros are like they're completely fine and they get like toxic and they're like yeah like she sucks Like forget about her man like you're better than that like all this kind of language but we don't talk

about what you actually feel so we suppress fear shame you know all these kinds of other emotions like we even suppress sadness like you don't tell your friend like hey yeah man I'm feeling like super sad today you're you know what what we do is we like so we detect these emotions within each other we recognize them and oftentimes men use physical language To express emotion so we don't know like we don't know these words these are like questionable toss but physical language were very familiar with like how did it feel when she dumped you

man felt like a kick in the nuts you say that and then all your you're like I friends are like yeah man I know exactly what you mean right when you saw her for the first time how did she make you feel I felt butterflies in my stomach right so that's like a physical representation of All kinds of emotions apprehension excitement vulnerability right this is one that especially men don't talk about you feel vulnerable you feel exposed there are all kinds of emotions that go into this you just don't know what they are and so

this kind of like this leads to a big problem because not only are games reinforcing our brain to not experience or understand emotion but then we also have like all of these physical sensations because the emotion Is gonna come out in some way so your body is psychosomatic and what I mean by that is that your mind and your body are connected and so like physical thing ental representations are gonna have physical effects and physical effects are gonna have mental representations and what do I mean by that like if you're sick mentally how it like

if you have the flu mentally how do you feel you feel crappy right mentally you feel crappy you don't feel interested in Things things aren't quite as fun like you don't even like anger and irritability and stuff like that is gonna all kind of be suppressed and on the flip side if you're mentally not feeling well that's gonna manifest with okay where is where is the rest of my family there's the family can you close the door thanks I'm so so what was I saying yeah so mentally you're gonna have physical Representations too so if

you feel anxious like you have to if you have worried thoughts in your head the other day when we talked about anxiety we didn't really talk about physical anxiety but it's gonna have physical senses sensations right yeah where my teammates is right and so these two things are intrinsically linked and men tend to experience a lot of emotion physically like if I asked someone what emotions are you feeling right now They're gonna say I don't know but if I ask them physically what do you say they're gonna they're gonna definitely be able to say things

like pit in my stomach tightness in my chest [Music] etc and then oftentimes on stream or after meditation I'll ask them what happened to the pin in your stomach what happened to the tightness in your chest and people will feel better it'll feel less so we're actually gonna hang on to This we're gonna bring it down okay and now we're gonna go to the next service and then the question is how so the first thing that we've got to do so let's assume that all this is true right so let's go back to this for

a second and remember that our goal here is to make better decisions or not make better decisions to implement better decisions and so if we think about what's keeping us from implementation it is actually it's not that rationally we don't know What to do it's that emotionally we're not sure what to do or like our emotions are controlling part of part of our behavior so that's why this is important so the first thing to understand is that why is it hard for us to function emotionally and that's because we're LexA finding we literally like it's

hard to control something or deal with something if you don't know what it is or where it is so the first thing to understand is that we're Alexa thymic Which means that we don't understand what our emotions are and if we don't understand what they are you can't do anything about it because good diagnosis precedes good treatment actually there are some things you can do but it's it's ineffective it's not like a long-term strategy and so why are we Alexis I make that has to do with a lot of our brain and using some technological

tools that create suppression and the more our brain gets Suppressed the more we become color blind to our internal emotional state we're also for the most part especially men more so than women are culturally like taught to not understand or express their emotions so not only do we have technology but we also have this cultural impact and that results in our our feelings of alexithymia so the question is what do we do about it right fine dr. K I accept everything you're saying what do I do about alexithymia [Music] it's allergies not covet guys don't

worry so the first thing is to recognize that you are feeling an emotion we're not even going to try to define it yet the first thing that you've got to do is figure out oh there like it there are emotions at play here okay there are some things that you can do to clue yourself in what that emotions are at play and what are those things okay so the first thing is physical sensations [Music] so let's say you're waiting for like a job interview or you wake up one day and you know that your parents

are gonna call and you feel stuff okay that's why I've been hanging on all that for all this time so the first thing is physical sensations so if you start to feel physical sensations understand that there is an emotional equivalent so this is a clue that you're feeling something so then You can go look for it right so we can leverage our rational mind to hypothesize what we could be feeling okay the second thing that the second clue is umbrella terms and what do I mean by that we have ways of conveying in general that

we don't feel good stressed frustrated overwhelmed and unfortunately nowadays anxious a anxiety has become a catch-all term for all kinds of emotions now it's not even necessarily worried and so a lot of Times since we don't have the resolution to capture the emotion we're aware that we feel stressed but like what does that even mean like what does it mean to feel stressed like what is the emotion that you're experiencing when you're stressed and there are all kinds of things there could be like uncertainty around the future there could be fear that you're gonna fail

you're you're gonna lose your job there could be concern that people are gonna ostracize you there are all Kinds of things right you could be pissed off at someone you could be ashamed about something like Oh everyone's gonna find out that you're an impostor all of these things like like you say that you're stressed and then you someone asks you how's work going and you say work sucks sucks is another good one right what does that mean like what's bad about work what is the negative emotion that work causes you to experience is it a

is it a sense that You were being taken advantage of or is it that you were victimized is it that you feel powerless is it that you feel hopeless there are all kinds of things that that could make work suck but we don't understand so that's the first thing that we've got to do is recognize when we're feeling emotion and these are our clues so step one is recognize that you're feeling an emotion step two is try to diagnose that emotion okay and so then what we do is we say Like okay we take something

like stress and then we're gonna hypothesize so you can do something like you know you can ask yourself okay about shame fear anger sadness what else hope or hopelessness feelings of power or agency or powerlessness right any of this stuff could be going on and then like literally go down the list and then ask yourself so I do this on stream and you guys may grieve that's another good one right so regret that there's another Good one there all kinds of yeah so so and someone saying that frustration is a lower form of anger I

completely agree so frustration is like mini anger and then another one oh this is another umbrella term embarrassment it's usually shame right so we have like lighter versions we've got the diet version of shame which is embarrassment we've got the diet version of anger which is frustration and so like you if you're feeling stressed out you just literally You ask yourself are you feeling any of these and you can like literally just go through the list and then if that doesn't work there's even another option that you can do so this is one thing that

you can do if that doesn't work you can ask yourself what would someone in my situation feel and the crazy thing is that we're way better at asking this question okay and this has to do with us being sort of more cognitively empathic than emotionally empathic two kinds of Empathy cognitive empathy and emotional empathy emotional empathy is what we sort of think of as regular empathy like you're someone who has a lot of empathy but then there's another kind of empathy which is cognitive so it's not that you actually feel what other people are feeling

it's that you can rationalize or analyze what someone else would be feeling so you can like sort of analytically predict emotions but you Don't actually feel them and so if you ask yourself what would someone else in my situation feel like if someone was applying for a promotion and they they may not get it because there were two other candidates who maybe are more qualified how would they feel they feel maybe a shame they feel hopeless they feel powerless and so if you ask yourself what someone else would be feeling you can get like you

can check off a couple things oh maybe it's this One maybe it's this one maybe it's this one maybe they feel regret because they could have worked harder earlier there are all kinds of things okay so then once you sort of figure out okay like maybe I'm feeling shame maybe I'm feeling hope maybe I'm feeling power powerlessness then the question is how do I deal with it okay so now the question is like okay let's say you go through this process and you understand that you're Alexa thymic and you figure Out okay maybe this is

what I'm feeling how do we actually check this box so that your decisions aren't as impacted by your emotions so the short answer is that you have to process it so I want you guys to recognize that like in your decision-making process we have rational thoughts - emotions and then let's say + - ego equals decision right or not even decision maybe if actually action is maybe better and so what that means is that like you can Increase this variable as much as you want to right but if this variable is like you want to

decrease this and then your action will be what you want in the case of negative emotions the opposite is also true right we can have emotions like head over heels in love - rational thought + - ego equals action so this is also true right so head over heels and love is the emotion and then the rational thought is person is not good for me right we can think these Things - and this is absolutely a common occurrence but my point is that these two things are oftentimes opposed and then sometimes they're not opposed right

and when they're not opposed then action becomes very easy so when your your rational mind and your emotional mind are aligned if your ego is also aligned or your identity's line then action becomes easy and this is the thing that I want you guys to understand like a big part of what I advocate for so people Think that you need remember y'all solution is this this is a crappy solution in my opinion like sure habits are good sure willpower is good but what I'm saying is just make the decision easier for yourself by reducing this

variable if you reduce the impact of this or you reduce the impact of this then your decision making process is going to get way easier it's just gonna like don't need willpower if your emotions in Your rational thought are aligned so if you digest your emotions like decisions just start to become easy for you like it's just easy I don't know how else to describe it it's just easy so for example when my kid walks in I experience different emotions I experience some amount of joy and I experience some amount of frustration and whether I

let those emotions control me or not depends on my awareness of those emotions so if I just recognize And I'm like okay you know like I'm feeling a little bit annoyed and then like that thing loses power over me okay so how do we process it so the question is how does this happen how so the first thing awareness and this is because awareness proceeds control you cannot control that which you are unaware of just think about that for a second okay if you've ever had dental work done and you've had your mouth numbed up

your control over the Numb of your mouth just goes out the window like you can try to control it you can sort of move your tongue around but like your capacity to control it properly and not bite your tongue if your tongue is numb like you can sort of roughly direct it but you lose all of your fine like motor capability you lose all of your precision so I want you guys to realize that you're moving through life without any kind of emotional like control emotional precision or any Control like that is precise over your

emotions so your emotions are just running amok within you and as your emotions start to run amok and they're just doing whatever the hell they want you then the only solution that you know how to do is just turn it off right it's like if I can't control like what direction like let's say I turn on a garden hose and there's a lot of water coming out of the garden hose the garden hose is going all over the place and This is how you feel like when you try to ask a girl out or you

go you apply for a job or your parents ask you how you're doing or whatever like there are all kinds of situations that just turn up the emotional knob and then there's a garden hose that's like just flopping all around getting everything wet and the only solution you have is to turn the water off you go and replay video and so you're just like oh my god I can't deal with this I can't deal with This like I'm gonna go home that's all you can do so you have to become aware right you have to

understand where the garden hose is you have to understand where you know when the water is coming out and like just think about this for a second how easy is it to control the water out of a garden hose if you're holding it with three fingers right the amount of effort that's required to actually control the water flow out of a garden hose is Minimal provided you're actually holding it in the right place right like does that make sense to you guys it's like it's actually quite easy you just need precision and this kind of

comes back to this like I don't like it when people use willpower because willpower is an imprecise solution I don't know what the I don't know what the analogies is with the garden hose I'm just saying that like controlling something once you're aware of it and you understand how to Hold it properly becomes very very easy and so that's what I really think you guys should focus on so the first thing is to become aware of as crazy as this sounds this accounts for like do I actually write out like honestly between 25 and 40

percent in my estimation just being aware something accounts for 25 to 40 percent in some cases some believe that this is sufficient for 100% I think over time it is like right now when I when I felt my emotions I just felt them And then they went away oh you acknowledge it and it's gone so once you train yourself it can get close to a hundred percent but let's start with it's gonna at the beginning account for 25 to 40 percent and I know that's crazy all you need to know is what the problem is

and you can think about that like you know awareness precedes control is another example of diagnosis precedes treatment and I say this all the time and I think it's a beautiful lesson to Learn from medicine is that it's hard to treat a disease that you've been properly diagnosed and so like diagnosis is half the battle like treatment afterward it becomes relatively easy if you have a problem with your car and you're just saying like yeah my car is busted and then like you take it to a mechanic in the car is like and then the

mechanic is like what's wrong with it you're like yeah I don't know it's busted Whereas if you say yeah I mean whatever I drive I hear this clunky sound or it makes this noise or one of the tires seems way smaller than the others you guys can clearly tell that like awareness of the problem is very very efficient at solving the problem the second thing that you can do is work on the body okay so what I mean by that is we know we are physical sensations so this is where you can do stuff physically

so I think this is why Yoga Is good so yoga improves anxiety depression and by the way this is not just because it's physical so this is a mind-body practice so in clinical trials yoga tends to outperform exercise so exercise is great for anxiety and depression but evidence suggests that Yoga is superior in even some amounts of trauma so I've worked with some people who like will do sort of yoga informed trauma programs and it seems to help a lot so in addition to therapy and stuff They add yoga and somehow like we don't know

exactly how it works but we do have clinical evidence we have scientific trials where that will take a hundred people with anxiety and we'll have 50 of them do yoga 50 of them do exercise and 50 of them do nothing and we'll compare the results and what we'll find is that exercise and yoga outperform nothing in yoga performs outperforms exercise in some studies so what we mean by that it's like work on the body so they're Also meditative techniques that specifically work on the body so I think yoga is a good example of one but

another thing that I recommend people do is that they breathe into the emotion okay so like if you're feeling so we can kind of do this very quickly okay so if your feet whole months right so if you're feeling [Music] if you're feeling a tightness in your chest or a pit in your stomach or Constriction in your throat then all I want you to do is just breathe into that space so when you breathe in notice that you can feel the breath in your body like you can focus on the temperature and you can kind

of feel the cool air kind of going down and into your body and literally what I want you to do is breathe in to the tightness in your chest and then breathe out so it's actually relatively simple you just focus on that sensation with your Attention and then you breathe into it and then you breathe out you breathe in that coolness and you breathe out the warmth like you breathe out that negative energy and that technique is actually pretty good like it literally dissolves the emotion within you because remember guys that the the physical sensation

that you have correlates is somewhat equivalent to the mental emotion right so if we reduce this then we're going to reduce this that's just How it works and then so we can work on the body then the third thing that we can do is is sort of met work on the mind what I mean by this so therapy is a good example of processing emotions but you can also have like conversations with friends you can work so like you know this is why what we're training recovery coaches to do so recovery coaches you can like

talk to people on our discord just trying to think about what's available to you guys right talk To people on discord and so like you can you can also do other kinds of you know processing activities like you can join a men's group or a women's group I pick men first because I think our audience is still like 70% male you can just submit a support group it doesn't even have to be gender specific you know if you've got an addiction problem then you can do something like refuge recovery or AAA or even if you're

addicted to video games You can do CGA a I mean they're a good organization I don't really agree with their methodologies but not to say that their methodologies are wrong it's just not what I choose to do so like you know you can do and you can also meditate for sure you can also do other exercises like journaling or like writing reflects ur sizes right so like Jordan Peterson's self authoring program I think has a lot of emotional processing that kind of comes along with it I would imagine so I Don't really know too much

about the program but yeah so that there's like this kind of stuff right so then like like then people kind of ask how do I deal with these emotions like this is how you deal with them first you notice them second you work on the body and third you work on the mind and so let's go ahead and take we're gonna have time for a couple of questions okay so we're gonna do mani Seth Tony and Connor and we'll do two Questions okay [Music] it looks like we've got Connor oh hey hey so you can

give the example of Alexa make thick there any other examples of emotions besides that what do you mean besides what uh one example that you gave Alexa mythic yeah Alexa thymic yes the next by mimic what other emotions besides that are there if well so alexithymia is not an emotion alexithymia is being color blind to your Emotion yes yes sir does that here question I think the emotions are like fear shame anger frustration grief regret and the problem with people who are Alexa thymic is that they can't detect any of them mm-hmm does that work

yeah yeah I think does that answer your question yeah so is it so is it with like we talking about the brain is there like a like a different set of like that kind of philosophy or is it just that particular what do you mean by jet in The brain is there a different set of philosophy um let me think like um so you give the example is there um let me think Israel uh I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say do I think okay why don't you tell moment to compose your thoughts

sometimes it can help to write out your question and let's move on to someone else Connor uh yeah can you me yep cool so lately I've been doing trauma processing and it kind of set off this like chain effect of like Oh boy the opposite of like lack of emotions right and so yeah um so I kind of got to this state of like like for instance I went to a friend's yesterday and had like this initial like just shutdown of everything like I would like tunnel vision and it was like just automatic right it

was like and yeah and so that happens quite frequently video games was actually like it helped quite a bit in the kind of like reducing a lot of the physical Actions and stuff but now I'm kind of in this state where it's like I don't even know like I don't feel like any emotions or like if occasionally I'll be like in bed at night and I'll just be super sad but that's like the only emotion that I can ever feel and I think like yeah so I guess just like how to combat the or not

even combat but like that automatic response because it's like almost like I don't even have a choice in it it's just like yeah you you don't you don't have a Choice in it I don't think you should come bat it so what you're doing so people have a history of trauma oftentimes dissociate during the trauma and after the trauma and dissociation is an adaptive and protective mechanism just like video gaming so when the emotional when when when your garden hose it's not even a garden hose it's a fire hydrant when your fire hydrant is busted

open and there's water all over the place your brain is like oh crap Let's just shut it all off they're like pulling the plug on like all of the emotional circuits and that's absolutely protective and and adaptive and it's probably because you started like turning that on right through doing like trauma focused work right so this is ideally where you have an expert like a therapist who will help you through this because it's really hard to manage on your own which I do yeah yeah so I think that the issue there is that what you

Want to do is like bring up emotions in a controlled environment where you feel safe and then like it's hard to stop a fire hydrant on your own but if you've got like two people working together you may be able to manage some of those emotions right and even as it comes to the sadness so it sounds like you you're you know your fire hydrant is mostly closed up but there are some cases where there's like water leaking out right which is like when you're laying in bed At night you start to start and feel

a sense of overwhelming sadness so I'd say that all of the things that we talked about you can do when you feel that but I would not go like you know walking around and opening up that fire hydrant on your own because your bodies your body or your mind are telling you hey man that's too much for us right now yeah and and there are other things like you know going to a retreat or like going for a hike or things like that can Also be really good at emotionally processing it all happens kind of

subconsciously in that in the background but you know a lot of people deal with trauma through like finding themselves kind of activities right yeah I think in your case I think you're actually on the right Road and unfortunately part of the process of processing that trauma like in order to process the emotion what we're doing is we're actually shining a Light on it so you experience it more and then you can try to sort of explore that sadness a little bit but be careful I would start really with physical stuff because physical stuff tends to

be pretty safe cool yeah I can do that for sure great question man good luck to you bye thank you appreciate it I'm glad you're seeing a therapist it's I mean you're you know taking taking control of yourself and taking control of your life Sometimes it's not a solo player thing I mean solo that's all again same good luck to you man I wish you the best thank you do we have Seth yep can you hear me yep I'm okay so I just had two questions or it's just I could ask one if you want

but uh so is there like a thing we're over time like as a child I generally felt I don't know if this is alexithymia or not but like over time I felt that emotions and just my general sensations And feelings and experiences have lost like like their potency almost like it almost feels like yeah it feels like um you know like I I guess like over time I even would lose track of like positive experiences because like I would be either maybe too analytical like I would start to notice like oh you're having a good

time you're smiling you're laughing and then it would take away from it so it's almost like you're you say awareness precedes control It's like awareness also kind of scrutiny unless it's like a synthetic faulty form of awareness that I'm you know at me like my mindfulness or something er so what is that that like could you explain that sure so there are two things I think that are going on one is that like I mentioned earlier generally speaking when we suppress emotions we suppress all emotions right so like what I want you to imagine that

you yourself like you have an internal Volume control for all of your emotions in order to protect us from the bad sounds we're gonna turn down the good sounds to because we just we just know how to turn down the volume mmm so what you're describing about like over time you've lost like a zest for life or things seem to be less fun for you that makes sense to me and I have that I see that experience a lot with video gamers and it's just because they turn down the volume on everything Yeah and it's

a dramatic sorry yeah god it's not even dramatic either it's it's almost subtle like it's just part of the existence it's it's almost absolutely right so like if you think about if if you gradually turn down the volume on your TV over years and you don't turn it back up at some point it becomes normal to have like a muted or very quiet TV yeah like you think it's max volume right you don't even recognize that volume control as a thing because it's Entirely subconscious you just think that's how the TV works hmm I wouldn't

even think that you recognize its max volume it's just you you don't you think that that is the only volume that the Catena TV is capable of it's not max or it's not low it's just the volume of the TV period right yeah that makes sense right yeah so so so that's one thing that's going on the second thing that I'm glad you noticed is that this is What happens when you start to develop awareness of feelings is it creates distance between those feelings and those feelings have less power over you right so there's actually

a fourth variable to the equation of intention like you know intention to complete an action and that's so the three variables right now we're like rational thought emotions an ego in the fourth one is awareness and as awareness increases the value of everything else goes down Relative to awareness and then when you become perfectly enlightened then your awareness is a hundred percent and then your actions are can be like instantly implemented hmm so in your case you may actually be experiencing both that as you gain awareness of excitement the feeling of excitement kind or not

the feeling of excitement the impact of excitement starts to go down which is normal see I think yeah like an early age I Think like say order to understand like it was because of social like capital or whatever like I wanted to be popular in this and out whatever I tried to start understanding other people through myself so I don't know if like I taught myself some type of mindfulness or awareness or something this was like in seventh grade or like middle school I tried to start like I would witness what made me feel insecure

and then I look inside myself to see the process And then I would try to like reverse-engineer it by seeing other people and so like I started to distance myself from like maybe social interaction in like a weird way because they're just breaking everything down yeah so that's that's you stepping away from emotional empathy and stepping towards cognitive empathy hmm so your understanding of emotions has become more and more analytical which in turn increases your colorblindness because You can analyze your emotions but you're not exactly sure like what you feel or how you feel yeah

huh so I think you should continue doing you know the mindfulness stuff and it's okay for you to you know be mindful towards your positive emotions and it kind of like you and then over time as you kind of do that sort of stuff you can actually start to control how much you want to feel that emotion hmm the last thing is like when you're fully Aware you can kind of choose to jump into the water or get back out whenever you want to and that's when things get fun so is the the like autonomous

process that I've created is it possible that maybe it just kind of filters that posit because I generally feel that it filters out the positive ones and then the negative ones stay so like if I'm at a party having fun it'll take they'll create a distance from the having fun but it won't be I don't really create a Distance to negative things I only create a distance to the positive you you do create a distance to negative things the difference is that your your amount of positive emotion is like 10 and your amount of negative

emotion is 90 oh and you're subtracting 80 from both sides does you so it's just that you have more negative emotion built up which makes sense because you haven't been processing emotion for what sounds like years and years and years and years Because that [ __ ] is just piling up yeah got it yes cool thank you all right good luck man thank you okay mica or Tony Mike are you ready to give it another shot I mean I think so so um um there's no a word or phrase that identifies certain groups of emotions

that you feel are suppressed so whether it be on like the few or whatever that might be so I don't think that there are groups of emotions that You suppress I think like I said alexithymia turns down the volume on all of your emotions so I get and and so I don't think that there's like differently it's not like there's a different word for like suppression of anger and shame in a different word from some fresh thing like happiness and excitement I think it's just suppression oh just all of them in general although it can't

be a specific one that you just feel like no I mean it could be right so your brain could have adapted to being very good at suppressing a particular emotion mm-hmm like it's possible right so like the guy earlier who's talking about trauma there are some things for example that triggered dissociation and that dissociative process could be triggered by specific emotions in fact we know that mm-hmm so like that's what the idea of triggers so your brain can't find you to a particular thing and I guess the Closest thing to what you're describing is trigger

would be the word that yes yes yes sir yeah yeah so actually now that I think about it I mean yeah but I don't think there's a specific word for like suppressing anger okay but your brain can trigger dissociative or suppressive mechanics with some emotions around moreso than others absolutely okay thank you great question man Tony you around yeah can you hear me yep so my question is is Kind of dealing with like previous emotions so I kind of resonate a lot with your eStore in terms of I had struggles with college and dropped out

and like my thing was to basically completely dissociate to the point of like not even eating or like it was bad but now I feel pretty good but to use your analogy it feels like I kind of just like leveled up past the debuff so I still feel like I have that like yeah like some scar there so how to deal with That when like I feel pretty good I made a lot of progress but it's still holding me back yeah so I think first of all I agree with you that it is holding you

back right so you're doing pretty well and what I'm telling you man is like once you cleanse that debuff you're gonna be like an absolute beast in real life so I think you should absolutely work on that right just doing good in life is not actually like what we're shooting for where she asked for Cleansing all the debuffs and where you end up is where you end but like as long as the debuff so that you should work on so question is how so I think like I said you know there are a lot of

different things that you can do I think therapy is a great example of something that you can kind of talk to someone about when you were feeling bad and work through and process those emotions and tell your story and things like that I think narrative is another good example so you know doing narrative exercises about like sort of just writing about that time of your life will probably bring things up for you and you'll feel that emotion and then it'll kind of affect you and then it'll kind of like wither away yeah so the other

thing I want you guys to remember about emotions is like you don't feel them forever so if I if I'm walking down the street And then you know I get scared of a dog I feel that dog creates a certain amount of fear in my mind like let's say it creates a fear of 20 and then the more I feel that fear the more that fear kind of goes down because our mind naturally like you don't stay scared forever right our mind naturally sort of processes processes that fear we return to equilibrium the problem is

that we feel 20 we process - and then we store 18 and the next day you're failing out of College you feel more shame so you get plus 20 shame you process - and then you Bank 18 and so what you have is like you have all this banked stuff which all you have to do is like process it and feel it and like you can breathe into it or whatever I don't know if there's some way that you can evoke it can you evoke the feelings that you used to feel uh it's very much

like like it's completely blanked out it's almost like I was saying about this Saturday like I don't Even remember like like any of that and I try not to think about it at all instead of processing it so I probably could but it's like it's difficult because I don't want to feel that crap that I felt yeah so if you're if you're not so I would really say like in your situation you should work with someone mm-hmm right so that can be a coach through us or a therapist and and it kind of depends on

on you know whether you have a clinical diagnosis that you Want to work on or not because if you have a clinical like diagnosis like PTSD or trauma or things like that then that's really something that you should see a mental health professional about but yeah I mean I'd say like it's hard to do it solo like the other thing that you could I mean if you want to do it solo I'd say the things that you can do you can drive try journaling so you can just start by writing about that part of your

Life and then kind of focusing on the feeling so what are the emotions that you felt and then the other thing that you can do is just continue to meditate and do yoga and stuff like that and then you'll start to process those emotions on your own because remember that your body like naturally wants to return to a healthy state and you don't after like if you get a cut like you don't have to direct the healing you need bodies just you just don't have to get in the way And if you facilitate healing by

like you know keeping it clean and stuff like that and just kind of practicing positive stuff if you do yoga and meditation for a period of two or three years it'll clear out a lot of that crap yeah makes it a smell yeah awesome in thanks for your question yeah thank you thank you for all you're doing so alright guys so we're gonna wrap up for today I'm sorry we don't have sort of as formal of a meditation practice Hopefully you guys can do sort of that breathing into the the chest or just breathe into

that part of your emotion and a combination of you know we got a little bit interrupted but I really do have to run but we'll see you guys tomorrow let's do a quick poll what do you guys want to talk about tomorrow I think communication was at the top of the list we can do I are better we can do what else can we do with mental Health stuff so we can talk about you know my perspective on depression or ADHD or trauma we can do mechanism of the mind so this is understanding like what

are the pieces of the mind or we can talk about kovin how to manage yourself in communication is like how to talk to people okay so it still looks like it's predominately communication okay I can get behind that all right so it looks like it's heavily in favor of of Communication but that the mechanism of mine IRL and mental health are evenly split insecurity ego okay let's let's try this again I'm just gonna knock over it off the list and let's put you go in there see what happens now oh man it's close looks like

egos winning okay so we have a new winner which is ego okay okay so we may still do communication and the reason for that is because I'm just thinking through what order to do things in that kind of So I don't want to treat things like individual topics right I want things to build on each other and I think talking about emotions and then link like well I wanted to do emotions before communication for sure and so then the question is is it better to do ego before communication or communication before ego what's gonna be

better so let me think about that we'll definitely do those two over the next two days it's just what Order we want to do them in communication with people that have a big ego right so then the question is do you want to e go first so you want to do communication for it will not only do those two so thanks for coming guys let me just think about it let me think about how I want to structure that and which one should come first but will definitely hit both of those up and Alex you

keep on sending me these gigantic messages but buddy I don't I can't read That during a live seminar so good luck buddy I'll try to get to it if I can so I'll see you guys tomorrow thanks for coming and you know I think we really appreciate all of the donations and stuff on on Kofi there was a question about are we gonna continue this it just depends so whether we continue this or not us frankly depends on how much people get out of it and like how many people use it right so right now

I'm just thinking about how to spend my time And I want to spend my time to do the thing that helps the equation for how I spend my time is most value for most number people so if it's like super super valuable like I could I could with one person at a time and helped them immensely over the course of six months or I could do a webinar where I could do a twitch stream so basically depending on how popular this is we're gonna prioritize it more or how unpopular is we'll prioritize it less so

If you guys want to see more of this than what I suggest that you do is you tell people that you know or you talk it up or you advertise it for it right so we haven't asked you to do that yet and I wasn't planning on asking for it but I'll just let you guys know from my perspective you know five hundred people or six hundred people or seven hundred people do this and four thousand people watch our streams were more likely to prioritize streams over this so I'm Trying to kind of figure out

how to work but if the numbers for the webinar get higher and higher and higher then we'll do more and more webinars because that seems to be what what helps people so sort of a simple mathematical equation we have a limited resource so how should we invest it that that people will decide so tell your friends and then if our numbers go up then we'll probably do more but it at this point you know I don't know how much longer we'll Definitely do the two weeks but then we'll kind of reassess and maybe try something

else or maybe continue this we'll see so take care guys