Read this transcription carefully.
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Title: Brainrot Explained: Why You Can't Stop Watching
Channel: HealthyGamerGG
Publish Date: 2024-09-12
Transcription:
our dopamine circuitry is like a big lemon that's full of juice we can do a very pleasurable activity and that's
like squeezing the lemon really hard right or we can do a very boring activity so it's like a slight squeeze
when I wake up in the morning and my dopamine circuitry is full of dopamine even a slight squeeze will give us a
fair amount of juice right when the lemon is full I can squeeze a little bit I get a decent amount of juice the
problem is that if I squeeze it really hard when I first wake up in the morning all of the juice runs out so there's
this weird stuff on the internet that kind of rots our brain this stuff like skidy toilet I don't even know what that
is like I don't know if it's like a song or a dance move or a picture or a
philosophy or religion I don't even know what skibbidy toilet is and the problem
is that the internet is getting filled with this kind of stuff and we spend our
times engaging with this stuff that like isn't a narrative it's not a story it's not a game we just spend our time on the
internet doing this weird crap but the weirder thing is is not just that we do it it's that we can't stop so today
we're going to teach y'all a little bit about what the hell is going on and also hopefully give y'all a foundation to
spend less time rotting your brain so the first thing is that the stuff that we're going to be talking about today is
going to be like really fundamental stuff we're going to be going to biological Basics and I know that that that may sound a little bit weird but I
think it's becoming increasingly important for you to understand how your brain actually works like what is it for
like why do we have these organs called brains once we understand that we'll understand what is going on with all of
this weird content on the internet which by the way is like a weird thing to call it right it's not a story it's not a
game it's not a movie it's content it's some weird lifeless amorphous pile of
whatever that is not like anywhere near an art form so we have to understand what's going on in our brain how this
content is affecting our brain and hopefully that will lay the foundation for us to understand how to actually get
over it so we're going to start with like really basic stuff okay which is like why do human beings have brains so
we have brains to help us survive and the circuitry in our brain is designed
to move us towards staying alive right and a lot of the stuff that we have in
our brains is kind of designed for that reason so a simple example is orgasm so
why do human beings or animals for that matter how why are they capable of orgasm why did we evolve this kind of
particular circuit so that we can experience this maximal pleasure it's because for the survival of the human
race we require sexual relations and so without this fundamental thing the human
race would die out therefore from an evolutionary standpoint we develop this
thing that gives us immense pleasure arguably the most immense pleasure that you can get from life is orgasm so we're
going to say like okay this thing is really important for us therefore we are going to maximize the pleasure circuitry
around it to induce the right kind of behavior and it's not just orgasm so this is also why for example we develop
social relationships when you get when you uh hug someone or when you receive a hug you get this Spurt of oxytocin
oxytocin improves your anxiety improves your mood helps you form bonds relaxes
you a little bit lowers your stress level and why is that it's because when human beings hug each other it forms a
bond with them and this sort of helps them increase their survival chances okay so this is the thing the brain is
all designed to help us survive even the negative things that we experience like hunger and thirst why are they negative
it's because the brain is sending us a signal hey this thing is against our
survival this thing unless we fix this problem we will die like drinking water water therefore I'm going to make this
experience of dehydration unpleasant so our brain wants to reward particular experiences that improve survival and
punish us for particular experiences that decrease survival simple enough
right now here's the problem a bunch of people out there have figured out how to in isolated ways activate some of these
circuits in our brain without actually providing us with the full benefit of
what that circuit is for now I recognized that that sentence was kind of long so I'll give you a simple analogy right so there's a difference
between calories and nutrition right so one of them is sure it's like energy and
fuel it's a partial way to stay alive right we can eat calories just plain
calories we can eat like a candy bar or a Twinkie but that's very different from broccoli now our taste buds and our GI
system and even our brain has started to send rewarding signals to us when we eat calorically dense food because it sort
of correlates with survival so someone came along is like hey I have a great idea let's make a candy bar and with a
candy bar what we're going to get is a maximum activation of this particular
Circuit of the brain but we're not going to include any nutrition in it right so what happens if you eat candy bars all
day you'll get a bunch of calories and you'll get arguably a bunch of pleasure but you won't get the full complete
experience of nutrition if you eat a bunch of candy bars you'll develop obesity you'll develop insulin
resistance you'll develop vascular complications you'll literally develop things like numbness in your fingertips
and Toes which results in like wound healing problems and all of these kinds of problems so this is the key thing
that we also need to understand about these circuits and when we inappropriately activate them anytime
you inappropriately or artificially activate a circuit it causes problems in
the human body and today what we're going to do is go over a couple of examples of those and really sort of
highlight why brain rot is so devastating and so addictive hey y'all if you're interested in applying some of
the principles that we discussed to your life to actually create change check out Dr K's guide to mental health the guide
synthesize my years of training as a monk along with years of clinical experience as a psychiatrist to cover
common topics like meditation ADHD and Trauma the guides include over 100
additional videos that can be navigated based on your needs or interests or in a
more open Choose Your Own Adventure format the guides are now available in the YouTube store below and if they're a
little bit outside of your price point you can check out a piece of them with our free resource packs which are also
linked below so definitely check them out so another good example of like when we artificially activate things is
actually medication so I can give you a medicine for lowering your blood pressure and that's on balance a good
thing but as I'm sure youall know what comes with medicine side effects and this is exactly what we see with all of
these brain rot kind of things right when I eat just candy bars when I take medication when I watch pornography it
activates my body or brain in a isolated way instead of a complete way we're
getting calories instead of nutrition and therefore that causes problems so
what are the big problems that are caused by brain rot the biggest problem with calories instead of nutrition is
that it destroys our hunger so remember hunger is used to help us survive so
when I fill up on candy bars I no longer feel hungry this is the driving force
for like health and survival and arguably happiness and what's going on
on the Internet is we have a bunch of people who are experimenting with stuff right and and this is the problem with
the Internet is that like the most brain rotting stuff is what Rises to the top because we have this darwinian
experience of okay there's like a bazillion Tik toks out there or YouTube shorts or whatever right Instagram reals
or we're being platform agnostic okay we have a thousand of these things and which one do you see you see the one
that rots your brain the most because this content is the stuff that activates
certain parts of your brain so the there's certain content that will be funny but will also like activate your
empathic circuitry and will also help make you feel like pity for someone else and it engages you in lots of ways we
also know that there's stuff like rage bait right and when we watch rage bait what we see is increases in heart rate
we see increases in blood pressure but when we see increases in heart rate and blood pressure without things like
physical exercise that actually damages our body and we'll show you a couple papers about that later so this is the
basic problem with the brain rotting stuff right so first of all there's this darwinian evolutionary kind of selection
for the most brain rotting stuff and the most brain rotting stuff actually activates a number of different circuits
but only partially and once we start to activate these circuits in a partial way
the biggest problem is that once we activate the circuit the drive to actually do something healthy disappears
when I eat a candy bar I no longer want to eat broccoli so let's run through a couple of simple examples of why this
stuff is so unhealthy for us so everyone knows that dopamine is kind of like this pleasure chemical we have this part of the brain called the nucleus accumbent
which anytime we do something pleasurable it releases a spurt of dopamine now we have a a really good video about we've got a couple of good
videos about dopamine y'all can definitely check those out but I'm going to kind of give youall a quick rundown of one of the really important points
here so when we wake up in the morning our dopamine circuitry is like a fresh lemon okay so big lemon that's full of
juice now there are two kinds of activities that we can do we can do a very pleasurable activity like playing a
video game and that's like squeezing the lemon really hard right so the more pleasurable the activity is the hard
hard The Squeeze or we can do a very boring activity like sorting our mail or
going through our mail or doing some kind of paperwork now this is not a very pleasurable activity so it's like a slight squeeze now here's the issue when
my lemon when I wake up in the morning and my dopamine circuitry is full of dopamine even a slight squeeze will give
us a fair amount of juice right when the lemon is full I can squeeze a little bit I get a decent amount of juice the
problem is that if I squeeze it really hard when I first wake up in the morning all of the juice runs out and then if I
try to do a slight squeeze nothing actually gets the juice out I need to squeeze very very very hard so this is
what we tend to find if you look at so I've worked with a lot of people who are you know addicted to video games and this is what we tend to find if you play
a video game in the first couple hours of the morning the reward that you get
from doing work that is important to you actually declines drastically we
essentially empty our dopamine through a video game and then there's no dopamine left to give us a sense of reward for
studying or going through the mail or organizing our bookshelf or whatever the
flip side is that if you wake up first thing in the morning and you start to do work you're squeezing out you get some
degree of positive reinforcement behavioral reinforcement and pleasure and then even after you're done doing
some amount of work then you can squeeze the lemon right so we've squeezed out half of the Juice by doing not very fun
things and then we can squeeze really hard by playing a video game at the end of the day and we still have fun so this
is the problem with brain rock is all of these activities that we do squeeze all
of the dopamine out and then they reduce our ability to experience pleasure from
other things when you watch shorts for about 3 hours nothing else feels
engaging right it's not fun to read a book it's not fun to hang out with other people there's no amount of pleasure
that we experience from work and I see this all the time where people people are like oh am I just supposed to like
work for 8 hours a day and then commute and then work out and do laundry and like this is what my life is for the
next 30 Years and I empathize with that we want life to be more than that but often times what I'm stunned by is when
I work with people in my office who are talking about how terrible life is I'll ask them one really simple thing hey can
I see your phone for a second and I'll flip it open and I'll look at their average screen time usage right I'll
tell them hey can we just like check out what your screen time usage is per day and I'm shocked because it's usually about 4 and 1/2 hours at the minimum up
to about 6 hours a day which is sort of the national average in the United States and so it's not just that our
life is like empty it's that we are engaging with things we are sort of eating so much so many calories without
getting nutrition that it messes up the way that our brain circuitry works so let's take another example relationships
and socialization so once again the internet offers us an opportunity to
scratch certain parts of our brain but not really do the whole thing and
anytime you get a partial activation of the brain this results in problems down the line so there's simple things like I
can socialize on the internet right so I'm going to talk to my friends and I'm someone who socializes on the internet I
have friends that I've been gaming with for years that I've never met in real life I consider them my real friends I
played Starcraft I started playing Starcraft with someone when I was 15 years old or maybe even 14 that the first time I met them was at at my
wedding so I'm not one of these people who's like oh my God internet relationships are fake they are real
they can be very positive in many ways and they are incomplete and they are a
little bit closer to calories than nutrition because there are some things that you can't do over an internet
relationship you can never receive a hug you can never have physical contact and
these kinds of things when we talk about the circuitry of Human Relationships these things are very beneficial for us
right we already talked about oxytocin anytime I hug someone I get a spur of oxytocin reduces my stress improves my mood
reduces my anxiety reduces my inflammation like my whole body inflammation goes down with something
like oxytocin so what we see with all of these like internet relationships is number one and then especially on the
brain rot side we see things like parasocial relationships and this is part of the reason why some of these platforms like twitch and only fans
become so popular because what's starting to happen is people are figuring out how to scratch more of that
itch and the more of the itch that they scratch the more addicted you will become so let's use a simple example
like only fans so it used to be that pornography would just activate your sensory receptors and sort of activate
some of your dopaminergic circuitry like that's it right so we're getting this we're seeing these naked people doing
things that are sexual we feel somewhat aroused and then maybe there's some amount of masturbation or orgasm
associated with it which is some amount of dopamine and that's kind of how it was but the issue was that with pornography you couldn't have a
relationship with this person right you are a consumer they are filming something right it's a film that you're
watching or whatever and then someone invented only fans and with only fans now you can have interaction you can say
to them good morning and they can say back to you good morning you can even create some degree of a transactional
relationship or some degree of reciprocity you send the money they make a special video just for you and so if
we look at what is this actually doing it is starting to activate additional parts of our brain the problem is when
we start to do this activation it's it's not actually like we're moving from uh
Twinkies or candy bars to broccoli we're actually just eating Twinkies for more parts of our brain now there is this
fake level of social interaction because when you're getting a DM from an only fans Creator chances are it's some 45
balding dude who's like been hired by the only fans Creator to make you feel special it is highly unlikely that it's
the only fans Creator themselves and even if you do this kind of stuff right so even if you're directly interacting
with them I don't know that you know I've never heard I've never heard of a
case of someone spending a ton of money on an only fans Creator and then actually forming a real relationship
with them but this is the way that people feel right they think okay like this is like this person really does get
me this person has a relationship this person cares about me a lot and why do we feel that way we feel that way
because these parasocial platforms engage more circuits of our brain and
once again the real problem with this stuff is that it decreases our drive to engage in real relationships and I've
even seen or heard and worked with people who have horror stories of ruining their real life relationship
because of a relationship with an only fans Creator so this is the core problem with why we're rotting our brains people
are figuring out how to AR artificially activate these various circuits and the
more circuits that they activate the more we get pulled into it right because remember all of these circuits evolved
to drive us towards survival so when our brain gets this stuff it's like hey this is good this is great we like this candy
bars are awesome we're getting a bunch of calories and this increases our survival the problem is that it costs us
so much the first thing that it costs us is it reduces our motiv it tanks our motivation to actually
build the real thing and I've worked with so many people who have so much Social Anxiety that they'll turn to
online relationships because they feel safer over there and there can be good things associated with that we're not
against online relationships but the problem is that you can get engender a dependence on that online interaction
and specifically with social anxiety the more online time you spend the more some circuits of your brain start to atrophy
right so we'll see things like um things uh circuits related to body language tone some of these like interpersonal
communication skills start to weaken when all you're ever doing is dming people or sitting in voice chats right
there's no there's no like how much there's no like understanding of like eye contact for example and so what I
see is a lot of these people then try to go socialize and since they don't have practice with eye contact they don't
know how to do eye contact properly and since they don't know how to do eye contact properly one of two things
happens either they get called a creep because their eye contact is really intense and they don't look away often
enough or they feel people feel like they're mentally checked out because there there's not enough eye contact and
they're always like kind of looking over here or looking over here and they never make eye contact with you so these eye contact circuits require some degree of
practice and if they're out of practice we end up feeling incredibly awkward then what happens I try to go socialize
and since I've been on this diet of candy bars this whole time when I socialize people call me a creep or they
call me awkward or I feel awkward and then I it's very hard for me to socialize again so this is literally
what's happening as we're activating our circuits we are sort of losing the capacity to engage normally we're losing
the capacity to engage in like romantic relationships right cuz we're eating this internet diet of like this weird
toxic whatever like uh pink pill red pill whatever kind of stuff right we have all these ideas about relationships
but we're not spending a whole lot of of time in relationships we have all this dopam energic crap that we're consuming
that messes with our behavioral reinforcement in motivational circuitry so we don't feel like doing anything we
have all of these problems with simple things like socialization and anxiety and all that kind of stuff but that's
not the end of it so I was looking at a bunch of research right trying to figure out okay what is the cost of spending
time on the Internet or playing video games and we'll just show you all a couple of papers like this stuff is wild
okay right so enhancement of allergic skin wheel response in patients with atop atopic eczema dermatitis syndrome
by playing video games or by a frequently ringing mobile phone so this is a study that looks at like literally
the like how video games and a ringing mobile phone will make your allergic
skin responses worse so if you have an atopic disease like asthma eczema these
things will get worse when you actually play video games so physiologic responses to playing a video game this is another um paper that kind of looks
both of these papers look at cardiovascular things so when we play video games we'll do things like we'll
see increases in heart rate systolic and diastolic blood pressure ventilation so these are normally things that are
associated with exercise so when we exercise we see all of these increases
the problem is that like when our physiology gets stressed in this way and
we're not exercising it actually causes damage so we see this like this gets really wild so it turns out that there's
this is a paper that looks at four cases of people people who have thromboembolic
events so sometimes human beings have these things called blood clots and
sometimes the blood clot is in a place like your brain and then you get something called a stroke and when you
have a stroke there is a part of your brain there's a part of a blood vessel in your brain gets blocked off by a clot
and when a a clot blocks off a blood vessel all of the tissue
Downstream from the clot that gets fed by that blood vessel actually doesn't
get blood anymore and then that tissue dies so this is normally a problem that
we see in older people right so strokes and blood clots are things that we see in people who are like 60 plus 70 plus
like not even 50y olds like the majority of people who have blood clots are like you know in retirement age now what's
super scary is as we play these dop and energic games and we're sitting on our ass all day we have young people who are
developing blood clots and things like strokes and this is insane right this is not what the body is is made for and by
the way there's also a correlation between um you know the the inappropriate activation of the
cardiovascular system and the development of blood clots like all that stuff is related like everything in the
human body is related we also see uh problems with things like insulin resistance like literally playing video
games I'll show you all the paper real quick right so associations of sedentary Behavior in screen time with biomarkers
of inflammation and insulin resistance so Leisure screen time was detrimentally associated with il6 this is an
interlukin that activates our immune system and leads to things like autoimmune disease leptin this is
something that has to do with our feeling of hunger and satiety insulin um
H we won't go over that and there's all these other things but basically like these are all like these are all
indicators of our energy metabolism our feeling of feeling full feeling hungry
inflammation and insulin resistance and insulin resistance leads to things like diabetes forget about forming bonds
forget about dopamine there are very real health effects from engaging with
this brain rotting content and so the question is like what do we do about this right how do we stop how do we
break this cycle and this is the real problem is like this is the reason it's so important is because as we consume
this weird content right this weird like AI generator like bot Farm rage bait
inducing crap the problem is that it destroys our motivation to actually like
build our lives because what happens is they offer us such a cheap and easy way
to get mentally satisfied the problem is they literally like not literally I guess no I I think I can say literally
right because it induces inflammation it induces thrombolic events it induces insulin resistance all of these things
are messing us up and then detract from our ability to actually improve our
lives and that's the real problem so what do we do about this so the short answer is I don't know right so this
stuff is so new that I don't have a very simple like okay just do this this this and this but here's what I would kind of
say here's when I work with people this is kind of what I focus on the first thing is that understand that there is a
difference between calories and nutrition and take a look at your life and start to ask yourself what am I
really getting from this what direction is this stuff moving me in now I know
that everyone sort of says like oh yeah like obviously I should play less video games obviously I should spend less time
on my screen but I just don't do that and then the question becomes why because when I work with people that
it's not like there's a generic answer this is where like the reason I love doing individual work is because people
have individual Solutions and so I I really start with sort of thinking a little bit about you know what do you
get from doing this and don't say I don't get anything it's a waste that's incorrect you know I wrote a book about
like parenting kids with video game addiction and one of the key things that I sort of found when it comes to
addiction is you have to understand what is driving the addiction why are we engaging this Behavior what am I really
getting out of this and then the real way to get off of this brain rot is to really think about okay what am I
getting out of this and how can I get this outside of the brain rot content
consuming only fans video game kind of world right how can I get this outside of that and here's what I tend to find
when I work with people is that when you start to work on getting it outside from
whatever the brain rot content is it actually reduces your dependence on the brain rot a simple way to put it is if I
eat a bowl of broccoli my desire for a candy bar will actually decrease right
so this is what's really cool is we can use the same principle of candy bar make if I eat a Cy bar I don't want to eat
broccoli the same is the opposite is also true if I start to eat broccoli I don't feel like having a candy bar if
I'm dehydrated and I drink water my desire for soda will naturally go down
okay so this is where what we tend to work on here at healthy gamer is building a life that is worth living so
take one or two things start very very small take one or two things and and really think about okay what am I
getting from this kind of thing is it social interaction is it a sense of joy is it a sense of accomplishment what is it and try to do those things as early
in the day as possible it can be something as simple as food right so even if I'm like spending three hours on
the internet and then I'm starving and then I order a pizza or like microwave something it can be something as simple
as eating something so steam some broccoli and eat it try to create whatever you can that sort of gets you
to satisfy some nutritional need in yourself that's the first thing second
thing we really want to focus on is inflammation and the third thing we want to focus on is sleep so anytime I'm
working with someone what I tend to find is that there's a very efficient path of like reducing their inflam inflammatory
burden so I know so the second thing that we're going to focus on is inflammation now this sounds kind of weird right because what does
inflammation have to do with this so all of these activities not all but the majority of these activities will increase our inflammatory burden now the
problem is that inflammation causes all kinds of Downstream effects that make it
really hard for us to stop the brain rot activities so INF has been associated
with depression inflammation is common in things like anxiety inflammation also makes it hard for us to sleep so I see
this cycle when I work with people where like they have they have a high inflammatory burden it's hard for them
to sleep so when they wake up in the morning their frontal loes in their willpower is actually exhausted a crappy
night of sleep means that you have very little willpower the next day which then makes it very hard to resist all of this
brain rotting activity so what I tend to and then it becomes like an impossible cycle right so if I can't sleep then I
have no willpower if I have no willpower I can't resist the activity if I can't resist the activity I can't sleep right
because then I stay awake all night I stay awake way too late spending time on the Internet or whatever so how do you break the cycle it's really interesting
but often times you have to kind of work tangentially so try to reduce your inflammatory burden as much as possible
so that means a couple servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day um you know there are some supplements and things like that have been that have been shown
to use inflammatory burdens strongly recommend that you'll talk to your doctors about things like that but even things like fish oil and omega-3 and
stuff like that has been shown to reduce inflammation can be healthy for your heart so do whatever you can to reduce
your inflammation another thing that's really good at reducing inflammation is actually exercise and you can even do
something like go for a walk for like 30 minutes the cool thing about going for a walk is it sort of activates your
cardiovascular system creates an energy expenditure causes you to do things like
sweat and then the cool thing about exercise is as you exercise you will start to Crave healthier foods so your
desire for drinking water will actually increase the more that you exercise so anti-inflammatory diet and exercise I'd
say spend one hour a day that's it right so we're going to do some activity at the beginning that we find nutritious
and then we're going to exercise for 30 minutes and cook yourself some kind of healthy meal and I know it sounds like but how does that tackle the brain rot
this is the key thing that I want youall to understand you need to leverage your physiology right you need to get your
physiology working for you instead of working against you and when we have a brain rot lifestyle when we have a
sedentary lifestyle our cravings for water actually decrease our desire for
soda can increase because we have insulin resistance so the you know we need more sugar to overcome that insulin
resistance so a lot of things can start to turn around the last thing that I would strongly strongly recommend if
you're stuck in this brain rot lifestyle is a decent night's sleep so I recommend things like Yoga Nidra about 1 hour
before you go to bed you can take things like melatonin and stuff that's definitely something to talk to your doctor about but this is the kind of
thing where getting a good night's sleep is about how you spend your day we have a whole video about that that hopefully
will help you all out quite a bit and this is sort of how we break free from the cycle so it's kind of scary but the
stuff that we that rots our brain is actually incredibly addictive and the reason that it's incredibly addictive is
because people have figured out how to hyperactivate certain circuits of our
brain that in the past helped us to survive which means that since these circuits were survival oriented anytime
we activate them we have a very strong behavioral reinforcement to engage with it again the biggest problem with
activating these circuits isn't even the direct damage that they do it's actually that it destroys our motivation to
satisfy those circuits in the way that they're supposed to be satisfied in a way that is way healthier and so that
reduces our motivation to actually put our lives together so I hope that this video has been helpful for you all I
know it's incredibly challenging and please let us know you know for what we said today what works what doesn't work
what are the additional challenges that youall run into and let us know because this is not the last video that we're
going to make on brain rot hey all if you've watched our content for a while you're probably pretty familiar with our
Core Concepts and that's why I'm excited about YouTube memberships memberships allows us to dive deeper in a lot more
detail on these Core Concepts we've also explored more advanced yogic or spiritual Concepts like vasana and Kisha
which will help you understand how habits form in your mind and how to break those habits memberships are also
community-driven which means that y'all get to vote on which lectures I will be preparing for the next month they're 10
bucks a month and if you don't like the vibe of it it's painless to cancel so I hope youall definitely check it out and
I hope to see yall next month
B

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