A Guide To Being Alone & Happy

Should we make societal changes? Absolutely. Should we try to make more friends? Absolutely. Should we welcome other people? Absolutely. All that stuff is great. And at the same time, the problem is all of that stuff requires someone else. And so do you want to leave your happiness and contentment in life to the RNG of someone else's kindness? I think not. One of the biggest challenges that's facing the world today is a loneliness epidemic. The Surgeon General of the United States released a bulletin earlier this year about how loneliness is a crippling problem for mental health and for people across the U.S. And we see that all over the world. Now, the biggest problem with loneliness is that as much as you try, you may not be able to fix that by yourself. Loneliness is a problem that requires other people to do something. Right? And we're seeing this all across the globe. We're seeing the loss of these things called third spaces where people kind of go and hang out. We're also seeing a lot of people living more and more online like me and you, which makes it hard to make new friends. And so it's becoming harder and harder to get socially connected. But there's this huge assumption, which is that social connection is required for happiness or a fulfilling life. But is that actually the case? As we turn to various forms of research on aging, as we look at people like monks who actually live arguably fulfilling lives all by themselves, can you actually be happy by yourself? And that's what we're going to dig into today. We all watch videos on the internet because we want to change. The problem is that even though we keep watching them, we don't necessarily change. I want to talk to you all about our coaching program. And if you're not interested, just jump forward 20 seconds and get straight to the video. But if you're someone who is ready to actually make change, if you want to see outcomes in 6, 8, 12 weeks, if you guys are struggling with problems like career stuff, burnout stuff, social skills, low self-esteem, if you're trying to struggle to motivate yourself to actually act, that's what we built a coaching program for. Check out the link in the description below to see how coaching can help you. And now on to the video. Let's start with the concept of a fulfilling life. So for most human beings, when we kind of think about, okay, what are we supposed to do in life? It involves relationships, right? So we kind of, we're in school, we make friends, we go to birthday parties, then we're teenagers, we maybe start to date, we end up getting married, we have kids, we have a fulfilling career, then we have grandkids, and then eventually, you know, we pass away, which is the end of life. Just because the default playbook on life involves relationships doesn't mean that you can't be happy without them. And in order to understand how to be alone by yourself, we actually have to tunnel down a little bit further into what each of these things do for us. Once we understand what having friends and what dating does for us in high school, in university, once we understand the role that children and marriage play in our lives, once we understand these things, we can start to think about how to satisfy those fundamental human needs without necessarily relying on someone else. So that's exactly what we're going to do. So in order to learn to be happy on your own, the first thing that we have to start with is understand what a human being requires in order to feel happy and fulfilled. And the challenge, once again, is that most of these things we kind of default to accomplishing through social relationships. And the three things that human beings basically need to be happy are a sense of identity. You got to figure out who you are. And once you figure out who you are, you have to build something in the world. You have to have something to show for your time on Earth. This is how you live a fulfilling life, right? You're not just hitting the fast-forward button on life until you die. You do something of meaning and significance. And then the third thing that we tend to do is reflect back on the work that we've done and then sort of come to peace with the things that we succeeded in doing and the things that we didn't succeed in doing. So we know from research on, for example, Eric Erickson and stages of life that this is basically what human beings need to feel like they lived a fulfilling life. Now the challenge, once again, is that for most of these goals, we actually like default to accomplishing them through relationships. So let's start with a sense of identity. How do most of us figure out who we are? When we're teenagers, when we're young adults, we're sort of trying to find our tribe, right? So we figure out which clique we're a part of in high school. When we go to university, we sort of define ourselves. Am I an anime nerd? Am I an emo kid? Am I a frat boy? Am I a sorority girl? Am I a jock? Am I a cross-country runner? So we try to develop a sense of identity. And since human beings are social creatures, the easiest way to develop a sense of identity is through relationships with other people, right? Depending on how people treat me, I have a sense of who I am. If I get bullied a lot when I'm growing up, I will think of myself as a worthless person. If I get treated with love and respect by a romantic partner, I will think of myself as being worthy of love. And so it turns out that as social organisms, it is very easy for human beings to develop a sense of identity through relationships with other people. But if we don't have access to other people, we can still develop a sense of identity. It's just that no one sort of defaults to doing it, right? We have to sort of figure out how to develop a sense of identity on our own. So let's take a quick look at that, right? So as a teenager or young adult, the main goal that we have is to develop a sense of identity. And socially, we do that through things like friends, romantic relationships, and finding our tribe. Now the question becomes, how do we develop a sense of identity if we're a loner? So it turns out that our sense of identity, we've got pretty good research on how this actually forms. It forms from developing a narrative of emotionally salient experiences. This is how human beings form a sense of identity. Now, what does that mean? A narrative of emotionally salient experiences. So what that means is that when we think about who we are, what we do is we take moments of our life that carry emotional energy and then we string them together and that creates our sense of identity. So if you think about the way that I sort of talk about who I am, people will ask me, okay, Dr. K, tell us about yourself. What do I say? I say, I grew up, I was bullied a lot, right? So that's an emotional experience. I went to school every day, was bullied a lot, was pushed. Every time I went to PE, people would make fun of me. It was like an absolute mess. Then I failed. I played video games, another emotionally salient experience of my life. I loved playing Starcraft. I loved actually winning at something that felt really good. Then I went to university. I failed out of college basically over the course of two years. Then I went to India to find myself, sort of discovered who I am, right? Which in that process of going to India was also very like emotionally charged. So I was really lonely for the first two weeks. I was there. I was crying every day. I wanted to ask my parents to send me a ticket so I could come home. I didn't know what I was doing there, but I stuck it out. So I sort of persevered internally and then I sort of discovered a source of strength. I started believing in myself, etc, etc. Then I came back, met my wife, went to med school, trained at Harvard, all that good stuff. And then now I'm doing this, right? So if you look at the story of my life, who I am, what I identify as, it is a narrative of emotionally salient experiences. Now, if we look at people who have relationships, a lot of times those relationships automatically give us emotionally salient experiences. Oh, I met this person. We had a really toxic relationship. I finally decided to stand up to my abuser and I left in the middle of the night and then I met this other person. I went to years of therapy. I met this other person. We got married. We had a destination wedding. It was lots of fun. We had a bachelor party. That was great. I started to have children and that was a really meaningful moment. So this is the key thing that we don't understand, is that we assume that the relationships are required for a sense of developing identity. But that's not actually what's important. Those relationships create emotional experiences because if we look at the emotional circuitry of our brain, half of our emotions, guilt, shame, pride, all of these emotions are social emotions. They require other people, or not require, but are usually triggered by other people. So if we want to be alone, what we need to do is have emotionally salient experiences that give us a sense of our identity, but we don't need other people. It's just other people make that easy, right? When you say, oh, I love you. And someone says, oh, I love you too. Let's be together forever. That's an emotionally salient experience, but you can climb to a top of a mountain. You can be huffing and puffing, feel great about yourself, really feel like you've triumphed, and you can feel great that way, like you can develop a sense of identity that way. So if you're someone who's struggling to discover who you are and you don't have a whole lot of relationships, my strongest recommendation to do to you is to do things that are emotionally charged and ideally challenge you in some way, you know, kind of push your limits a little bit, give you an opportunity for perseverance, give you an opportunity for triumph. Just do things that matter to you. A couple of other random examples. So I think like travel works really great. Finding yourself by going like backpacking in the mountains is really fantastic. I went to India and stayed in an ashram, but usually the people that I've worked with who are happy by themselves will engage in emotionally relevant experiences. So the second phase that we have is as adults, the main thing that makes us happy is generativity. So what does this mean? So this means that as human beings, we can't just like consume our whole lives. We have to produce stuff. And what is the simplest, easiest thing that you can produce is children and career. So if you look at an adult and you ask an adult, okay, are you happy in life? The majority of them, whether they're happy in life depends on two things. Do they have a relationship and do they kind of have kids and are they like building something in the world? Now, this is also where our default playbook means that kind of gives us this idea that in order to be generative as an adult, you have to do well at your job. Somewhere along the way, like jobs started to create a monopoly on like generativity and self-worth for adults. So we measure like how decent a human being is, how generative they are, how much they accomplish in life entirely based on their career. And the second thing that we do is like, have you had kids or not? And y'all will see this crap on social media, right? Where like there are people who are parents who make their whole identity about being a parent. I've even had some really unfortunate situations with patients where they've had abuse of parents. Like one that I mentioned before is, you know, someone who was like training to be an Olympic athlete and then got pregnant. And then as a result of the pregnancy, they were no longer able to be an Olympic athlete. I don't think that's actually the case. I think they kind of gave up on it and used the pregnancy as a convenient excuse and then proceeded to blame their child for all of the lost hopes and lack of career and all this kind of crap. The key thing though is if we sort of look at, okay, how do you know that you've accomplished something in this world? Having kids is a huge part of it. So a lot of human beings will just feel like, you know, once you have kids, it's like this whole different dimension of, you know, meaning and purpose and why you sweat, why you stay up all night rocking your baby to sleep, and it gives you a sense of like accomplishment. Second thing is career. So that's how we do it through relationships. But what if you're a loner? What if you're a freelancer? What if you're someone who doesn't date and doesn't have kids? Are those required to be happy? Thankfully, we're seeing a lot of, you know, dink couples. So this is double income, no kids. These are two adults who decide not to have children and they can actually live fulfilling lives. And the main question, main issue there is that you need to produce something. So when I work with patients who are not married, don't have kids, a lot of it comes down to things like creative pursuits. So what is your mark upon the world? Sometimes they'll do anything from like volunteer and have a major role in a nonprofit organization, try to make the world a better place. And sometimes that involves friendships and relationships of some kind, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes those people aren't actually very connected with the people that they volunteer with. But the other thing is that artistic or creative endeavors are really, really important here. So it's important to, and then DIY I'd say is the third thing. So when I work with people who are like not, you know, very career focused or they're not very like relationship focused, they can still have fulfilling lives. So I worked with a very, very successful musical artist who basically was a complete loner. They had one relationship with something who was, I'm not quite sure if they were like a personal assistant or a best friend or something like that. Like this person would go and even like get them groceries and like anytime they had to interact with the world, they would like go through this one particular person, but it's not clear to me that they had a deep emotional connection with this person. It was just they kind of focused on their art and they would create a ton of music and the music is very, very successful. And so like this, it's absolutely possible. I've seen this in cases of people who are like authors and stuff like that. So some kind of creative pursuit and then the other thing that I tend to see is that a lot of people will derive a lot of happiness out of DIY kind of things. And what this sort of means is like I've had people who will like garden, even I garden. I'm actually somewhat of a loner and we'll maybe talk about my aloneness even at this point in my life. But when you build something with your hands, when you do something like garden, when you like create something, your existence in the world has some merit, right? And this is the biggest problem that I see. It's not just that we're loners. It's that we're wasting our lives. It's that when we wake up every day, we feel alone and we hope that someone else will make this loneliness go away. But why is your day wasted? It's not just because you're lonely. It's because you don't do anything, right? And this is where once again, we get locked into this idea of like careers as a source of fulfillment because you look around and all the other human beings are grinding at their career. But the whole problem with with careers or jobs is that jobs are no longer like a source of fulfillment for the default person. You actually have to work really really hard to develop a career, right? There's a big difference between a job and a career. A job is something that you go to every day to pay the bills. A career is something where I have an aspiration. I have a goal. I have something I want to accomplish in life and the job is a means, a vehicle to that end. And so what we're seeing, what I'm seeing a lot of is like it's not just the loneliness, which sure if you solve the loneliness, it can solve a lot of these problems, but it's people who are having jobs instead of careers and it's people who are spending their time fast-forwarding life through video games, pornography, doom scrolling, take your pick. You're just hitting the fast-forward button on your days trying to extract as much random ass dopamine as you can get your hands on because there's nothing fulfilling in your life. These people are not gardening. They're not building things. They're not painting. They're not writing books. They're not making the world a better place. They're not volunteering. And when we start to do all of these things, it gives us a sense because our brain is pretty good at this. It looks at what you did today and it decides, okay, was this like a good use of our day or not? And we have this default assumption that okay, we need other people and the reason for that the reason that other people are so important is because once you have a kid like time becomes a blur like I have a nine-year-old and that went by like that, right? Like it goes by so fast because you were so focused on the day getting through the day getting through the day surviving the day and then your kid has a birthday and then you feel fulfilled because kids make it easy and this is the key thing to understand is when human beings when our brain evolved it evolved assuming a certain social interaction. So the more most optimal or easiest ways to feel fulfilled involve socialization, but if we tunnel down a little bit further and we understand, okay, how is it that having kids makes us feel fulfilled? We can actually replace it. Then what we do is go to the third stage of life, which is when we're older adults and then what we do is reflect on life. So at some point what happens is we look back, right? So we've like crossed the halfway mark. Let's say we're like 50 years old at this point. We look back on our life and we were grinding or doing whatever and then this is when people start to have things like midlife crises, right? So that can even be like around 40 or something you wake up one day, you spent 20 of your adult years doing something and you kind of look back and you're like, okay, was this a good use of time? And if you feel like it wasn't a good use of time, then you start to panic and you're like, oh my god, I've wasted my life. Sometimes you get, you know, hair plugs and you get your hair colored and you start wearing sunglasses and you get ear piercings and you buy a convertible. If you're a dude, I don't know what exactly what the female equivalent is, but you can go through a midlife crisis for actually I do know I've worked with women who have, you their lives because being parents and then once you're like 48 years old and your kids leave the house and they don't return your phone calls, you're like, all right, I just lost the best 20 years of my life for what now I've got like an empty nest, right? So we see these kinds of things. So this is a phase where we look back on our life and we reflect and this involves a process of grieving, acceptance, recalibration, right? So when we look back on our life, what we'll sort of do if we have relationships and we have children and stuff is we'll be like, okay, how are my kids doing? If my kids are doing pretty well, like I did a decent job, right? I as a human being existed on this Earth and since my kids are doing okay, and they have the capacity to make some impact on the world or they're happier and I look at my child's happiness. I can look at the work that I put in and feel pretty good about it. It's kind of this reflective approach this kind of retrospection and if we feel unhappy with it, then what we do is we'll start to panic. We have to grieve. We have to figure out. Okay. What am I going to do with the rest of my time? What do I want to do before I die? How am I going to change my life? And so relationships really like solve a lot of those problems because if I end up at 55 and I have a healthy married life if I have kids who are relatively successful, I can be like, all right, all look good job, right? At least I have this to show for it. Now, the challenge is that if we don't have those relationships once again, the default playbook is removed. So we actually have to work a lot harder. If we are alone to look at our life and really reflect and figure out what's missing and what isn't and this is where it's like really simple stuff and this is where it actually kind of starts to come together, but it's things like bucket lists, right? Really thinking about what do I want to do before I die? How do I want to make my mark upon the world? Right? Like what is what is what would someone say at my eulogy? So I think this is a really good exercise to do for yourself is to like, you know, if you had a eulogy when you passed away and someone's at your funeral, you know, if you if you picked one person to deliver the best eulogy like what would they say about your life and if you can be happy with what was said then you will actually be happy later in life and for some people that could be like, oh this person raised three wonderful children and maybe it's your child saying like, oh like this person was so great mom or dad was so amazing. We were so happy. We miss them so much like it can be relationship based, but it doesn't have to be right. You can have a eulogy where someone was like this person was an artist. They like, you know wrote so many books and they enhance the pleasure of the world and this person was like a scientist of some kind and they made discoveries on genetic engineering and like so many people have benefited from it. So there are all kinds of things that you can develop a sense of accomplishment from that have nothing to do with relationships and so overall like the biggest thing to understand is that if you want to be happy alone, first of all, it's an uphill battle. Second of all, a relationship is a way to fulfill basic psychological and human needs, but we don't need the relationship to do it. We're seeing this a lot. I've seen my patients who are cat ladies and are who are very happy. We're going to talk about cats later. I've seen patients. I've worked with patients who are artists who are creatives. There are all kinds of things that people can do. There are also all kinds of people who don't get married and have kids but still have like very fulfilling lives. So all that stuff is possible. It's just an uphill battle. Once you understand it involves identity. Once you understand it involves like accomplishment and generativity and then reflection. Once you do these three things you will be content. Now we can sort of say this right. This is the foundation of it. But then there are a couple of other things that we have to consider. So what about things like hormones and what about things like physiology? So we know for example that oxytocin is a bonding hormone oxytocin leads to a sense of contentment. So what is the relate like what about the physiology of like physical touch because we're seeing a lot of problems like touch starvation where human beings are sort of physiologically designed to be touched and if we don't get touched can we ever truly be happy? So this is where we're going to turn to some weird things to really look at this. So like we're going to start with something called post-nut clarity. Now this may sound kind of weird because you're like what so there's a very common phenomenon that oftentimes men experience called post-nut clarity. So this is after you finish having an orgasm whether that through masturbation or sex you have the sense of peace contentedness and then your brain is also like operating at like a super high level. So it's really interesting because the physiology and neuroscience of post-nut clarity actually gives us a really interesting insight and hypothesis into like the physiology of loneliness. So there are a couple of things that we have to understand. So the first is that generally speaking serotonin levels correlate with a sense of peace and contentment. Okay. So when our serotonin levels are low those are implicated in things like anxiety. Those are implicated in things like mood disorders and depression. So our first line treatment for anxiety disorders and mood disorders depressive disorders are our serotonin reuptake inhibitors. So that means they boost the serotonin in the brain the transmission of serotonin in the brain. So let's start with this kind of idea, right? So if I'm anxious and I'm depressed serotonin usually tends to help now, let's understand things a little bit more careful. So what about what does this have to do with relationships and sexuality? So this is what's really interesting when serotonin levels in the brain go up or serotonin transmission in the brain goes up libido goes down. Okay, even to a certain and we feel like more peaceful and more contented so we don't necessarily need other people to increase our serotonin level. So serotonin reuptake inhibitors actually have a side effect of like difficulty orgasming and decreased libido. So that this is one thing to understand is there's almost like this inverse relationship between being really thirsty longing for a relationship and serotonin. So the more thirsty we are the more our testosterone and estrogen is high. Generally speaking our serotonin will be low and then once we feel sexually satisfied all of those sex hormones and stuff kind of calm down. We also get a spurt of oxytocin. If we cuddle afterward and then our serotonin experience levels basically from a clinical perspective rise. Now, we don't really have great studies on measuring, you know, in like internal brain concentrations of serotonin immediately after orgasm. You have to biopsy someone's brain and it's like really hard to do things like that. Even doing things like a CSF tap, which is tapping your spinal fluid. Like this is very invasive and dangerous procedures that can result in like strokes and like screwing up your brain. So we don't actually have data on that. I'm talking about from a clinical perspective. The key thing to understand is that first of all as serotonin levels rise our libido and stuff goes down. And so the converse is probably true that as we get really really horny and as we long for relationships our serotonin levels are low. So as we figure out ways to endogenously boost our serotonin levels our needs for relationships actually go down and we sort of see this if we look at people like monks or even the elderly. So there are two major groups of people that are very happy despite the fact that they're relatively alone and that's old people and monks and both of these both of these populations tend to be a little bit less horny right and tend to be like kind of okay and peaceful and contented on their own. There are some studies that show that meditation or there's a lot of studies that show that meditation is evidence-based intervention for mood disorders and anxiety disorders. We don't exactly know how it works but it effectively boosts our serotonin level even if it doesn't boost our serotonin level. Okay, so that's like the clinical benefit if that kind of makes sense. So first thing to understand is the more horny you are the less happy you'll be and if we can boost our serotonin levels your need for other people will actually reduce that's one thing about post-nut clarity. The second thing to consider is that if we look at literally what happens to blood flow in the brain with post-nut clarity prior to post-nut clarity. We have a decreased amount of blood flow to our prefrontal cortex. So what this kind of means is like, you know, our blood the blood flow to the brain is going to parts of the brain that involve like enhancing your horniness and our prefrontal cortex is what allows us to think big picture allows us to plan and execute tasks allows us to like be productive right instead of impulsive and distracted. And so the really interesting thing is that when we feel like you know, very very like thirsty or when we feel very lonely we have blood flow going to these parts of our brain like our amygdala our sensory cortices our thalamus things like that and these are very like, you know engaged in the moment. We're not thinking long-term. This is why when people are like relatively horny they make stupid decisions, right? Like you don't think about the consequences of what we're doing. This is why we have unplanned pregnancies because when things are hot and heavy you don't like think about putting on a condom or like the condom isn't there and then like you weren't expecting this but you're not going to like stop this to drive an hour to grab a condom and then come back and finish the sexual act. So like when we're horny, we're done and the moment we're no longer horny. We literally see changes to our blood flow in different parts of the brain and our blood is like let's go back to the prefrontal cortex where we can plan and execute tasks and like be productive and all this kind of stuff. So this is also where what we kind of see is that that unhappiness comes from blood flow to these particular parts of the brain and then like you have to choose one or the other either. I'm going to be horny stupid and lonely or I'm going to be contented focused and motivated and we kind of see like some versions of this in the nofap community and things like that, you know that that celibacy is like a motivational superpower. And so there's probably some neuroscience and physiology to support those kinds of things. The key thing to keep in mind is that what we really want to focus on is develop a sense of inner peace develop a sense of contentment, which will kind of get to and there are a lot of other practices that we can do that will kind of get our physiology in place. Now, once again, if we look at people who engage in relationships, they have a very easy way of navigating this dynamic, right? So like since I'm in a romantic relationship that's sexually active I can engage in a sexual relationship. I can get my post-nut clarity and then I can like focus for the next one to three days. So they kind of have a way from solving that the issue is that if you're not in a situation like that your ability to solve it changes some and we have to really think about how to do that which we'll get to in a second. The other thing that I just want to mention for a second is that even if you're a loner one of the things that is actually really really helpful is that a lot of these touch related and hormonal related things don't have to be solved by humans. So we know for example that having a pet like a dog or a cat increases your like your survival rate. So having a pet reduces all cause mortality. So this is like a metric that we use in the medical system. That's basically like, you know, does this increase or decrease your chances of dying? So having a pet and it works through all different mechanisms people who have pets are more physically active. You got to take a dog for a walk every day, maybe twice a day you get more access to nature because you're out to the park you're out to the garden. You're taking your dog for a hike somewhere all of those like physical things can be very helpful. But we also know that like emotional relationships with pets can actually be very very helpful for our mental health. This is why we have things like emotional support animals. We literally will train animals to have a mental health benefit that is comparable to like antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication. We know that when we cuddle our pets, we will also get some degree of touch. We get some degree of oxytocin so you don't necessarily need humans to fulfill your touch based needs. So that's absolutely possible by all means become a dog person or a cat lady or a cat person like whatever but it seems like it really does work and we have plenty of data to support that we've kind of talked about two major buckets of stuff. Okay, so we've talked about the goals in life and how you can fulfill those goals without necessarily defaulting to other people. We've talked about a couple of physiologic concepts that are really important like boosting your serotonin level. And then we've also talked about animals. So now we're going to go into a little bit more of the how and this is when we look to monks. So now I'm going to explain something that I think is like really really hard to understand but once you understand that it's actually mind-blowing and transformative the biggest thing that monks do that allow them to be content irrespective of their circumstances is they figure out one very simple truth that most of us miss which is that our happiness is truly internal our suffering is truly internal now most of us go through life not really understanding that so if we take a scenario let someone breaks up with me or I don't get a promotion or take whatever negative thing that you have. So this is event an event in the outside world and then that event crosses over into us. This is the best way that I can describe it and then creates a reaction in here, right? So when someone breaks up with me that is an objective event, but then where do I literally where do I feel the hurt? I feel the hurt in here literally. What is the negative impact that it has it changes my thoughts it changes my emotions. It changes my view of the future and if we really stop and think about it all of the suffering that I experience is not outside of me. It is literally not outside of me. You can't I can't the suffering isn't in the microphone. I can't feel any suffering in here. The suffering is literally in here. It's in my mind. It's in my heart rate. It's in the nausea in my stomach, right? So anything bad that happens to me crosses the threshold from the outside world via our sense organs and then creates a change within us. Now the biggest thing that monks figure out is that when something crosses over into us, we have the capacity to modify it. We have the capacity to modulate it and this is scientific fact. The best example of this is research on mindset, right? So this is I really like this research. It's the work of Carol Dweck and what Carol Dweck figured out is that there can be a common event. I got a B on a test and depending on how I internally react to it that will determine how much I suffer and how much I'm motivated and how depressed I get like literally my reaction to things determines my degree of happiness or suffering. So if I get a B on a test and I have a performance mindset, I think to myself. Oh my God, it's a B. It's not an A. I lost my 4.0. Everything is over. There's no point in trying anymore because I can't get a perfect GPA anymore. I'm done. If I have a growth mindset. Okay. What are the things that I did wrong? How can I use this as a learning experience? How can I be better next time? Right? So these are two very very very different perspectives based on one reality, right? The reality is the same. I got a B but the way that I respond to it creates two very different mental outlooks motivational changes Etc. Okay. So even if we look at you know, like when someone goes through a breakup, what do we tell them? Oh, we have to like try to convince them that there are other fish in the sea. Why do we try to do that? What are we altering? Of course, there are other fish in the sea. We know that there are 8 billion human beings on the planet when you get broken up with it's not like you lose the information that other human beings exist. That's not what happens, right? So why do we try to convince people because the way that they're internally reacting to this information is actually what's creating the problem. And so if you look at people who are monks what they do is they train the faculty of internal modification training the faculty of internal modification is what's really wild is like some people may say, okay, maybe you can adjust things 50% I think you can adjust things 99% Okay, that's my my firm belief. I've been able to make a lot of changes in my life. And what do I attribute to failing out of college versus like training and teaching at Harvard Medical School? It's not like my IQ changed. It's not like my circumstances arguably change, but really what changed was my internal environment the way that I started to respond to things when I got a B what I did it when I got to see I was like, well screw it. There's no way that I can you know, like there's no way I can get an A in the class now. So I just stopped working versus like recalibrating when I was in med school. I didn't care what my grades are. I didn't even know what my grades are. I didn't even check my grades. I was like, I'm here to learn medicine, right? That's what school is for school is I know it sounds crazy not about grades. It's about learning things but oh how the world has changed. So this is what monks really discover is that anything that crosses the barrier into you can be modified, right? So if I feel lonely today, this is what's really fascinating is we have research on solitude and the research on solitude tells us that actually like you can be alone and this can be a painful experience or a pleasurable experience. We all love our alone time, right? Even if you're lonely, you love alone time. But hold on a second. How does that work? The research on solitude tells us that loneliness is an attitude that you have towards your external surroundings and solitude is seeking some degree of a loneliness. So the difference between loneliness and solitude is not what's surrounding you because that's all the same. It's no one the difference is the attitude that you have towards it. And if we kind of think about even like something as simple as leaving a job, you can get fired or you can quit. What's the difference? Tomorrow in both cases, you're not going to work. It's just whether you're in control. Did you instigate that kind of thing or whether it happened to you? So is this like a factor of your choice or is it something that like you're receiving from the outside world and fair enough people will say like, well, there's a big difference between getting fired because I didn't want to be there. Fair enough. Like I know that the analogy kind of falls apart a little bit, but I still think the key point stands, which is that you know, when we look at really what monks are able to do anything that happens in the outside world, they modify when it enters them and you're able to modify it a little bit. You're able to emotionally regulate a little bit. Maybe you do a little bit of deep breathing to calm down your emotions in the practice of psychotherapy. Literally what we train people to do is modify their default internal response. So we have something called exposure and response prevention for something for OCD. So this is a type of psychotherapy that is evidence-based very effective for OCD. It's kind of like exposure therapy. It's exposure and response prevention. So literally what is the scientific basis of treating people with OCD? It is here is this external stimulus. We're not modifying the external stimulus. What we are trying to do is prevent the default response when we look at situations like cognitive behavioral therapy. We're altering our cognitive structure. We're altering our core beliefs. We're altering the way that we see the world. So this is what's really wild is like literally if we look at how psychiatrists make human beings who are mentally ill and unhappy. How do we convert them to happiness? We do not fix their external circumstances because we can't people show up in my office for one hour a week. I can't give them a job. I can't make someone fall in love with them, right? So what do I do? I work on the internal environment and this is the biggest mistake that a lot of people who are crippled with loneliness make so I want you all to think about this when you are lonely where is the mechanism of your action, right? Are you focused on the outside world? Are you focused on the inner world? Oh, I need to find some way to make friends. I need to find some way to get people to like me. I need to figure out the perfect pickup line. I need to do all this stuff. I need to do all this stuff and you're focused on the outside focused on the outside focused on the outside. And if we look at the science of contentment, what we find is external focus doesn't lead to contentment. Literally all of our interventions for psychiatry are not externally focused. They're internally focused. This is why people who are lonely are so trapped in loneliness because their focus is on the one thing that they can't control. And even if you look at dating advice, what do people with dating advice tell most people? They're like develop your confidence. Be happy by yourself. Learn to be happy by yourself before you enter a relationship and a bunch of lonely people like but what's missing in my life is another human being. I don't know how to do that. I don't want to be content without a relationship, right? This is what's really wild and this is a principle that monks figured out. They figured out that you can sequentially modify your internal environment, which will lead to a state of peace and contentment. So if you want to be happy all by yourself, is it possible? I think so. Even though I'm surrounded by a lot of people today, even though I'm happily married and have children who love me. I'm incredibly alone. If you don't understand that you don't understand that. I don't need to explain it. If you do get it, you do get it for those of y'all that are loners, you know what I mean, and that's okay. And it's not those things that make me happy. I derive a lot of pleasure from them. I feel an intense amount of gratitude. I think I'm very very privileged and lucky to have a loving support structure, but I'm still alone. And the beautiful thing is I became content with my loneliness. Hell, I decided to become celibate and become a monk. I became content with who I was before I ever found a relationship before I left all my friends behind and found the contentness first. This is what's really frustrating and paradoxical about it. Is it is that contentness that oftentimes leads to the best outcomes in terms of forming relationships. So if y'all are alone, right and you feel incredibly lonely, do I encourage you to form social connections? Absolutely. Do we have a ton of data that shows that social support and social capital is good for your mental health good for your physical health good for a sense of fulfillment? Absolutely, because the default playbook of happiness in life involves other people. The challenge is that the world is changing. It is harder to find other people. If you look at 50% of one study, I saw that showed that talked about women on tinder showed that 50% of women on tinder use tinder for psychological meet needs to fulfill psychological needs that are have nothing to do with finding a relationship. I'm not saying demonize women or anything that women are bad. There's one particular study that looked at one particular platform, but this is what we're seeing all these people who engage in relationships or social interaction aren't actually engaging in relationships. They're getting some of their psychological needs met. We have nowhere to meet people nowadays. It's really hard to like meet people because if you walk up to someone and try to introduce yourself suddenly your creep the deck is stacked against us when it comes to loneliness. This is why it is an epidemic. Should we make societal changes? Absolutely. Should we try to make more friends? Absolutely. Should we welcome other people? Absolutely. All that stuff is great. And at the same time the problem is all of that stuff requires someone else. And so do you want to leave your happiness and contentment in life to the RNG of someone else's kindness? I think not. Strive for all of those things, but also understand how it is that relationships lead to human contentment and recognize that there are things that you can do to fulfill all of those requirements without a single other human being on the planet. One last thing. There's a lot of stuff that we didn't have a chance to go into a lot of detail on. So how do you develop identity? What do we mean about these emotionally integrated narrative experiences? How do you modify the internal experience? Highly recommend if you guys want more techniques and exercises more detail on those topics. Definitely check out Dr. K's guide, especially the trauma guide. It's the one that we just kind of came out with because that one goes into a lot more detail on those concepts.