How To Reclaim Your Attention (and your life) - Dr. K

Now let's talk about technology. Okay, so that's the background. So what does technology do? The first thing that it does is it diffuses our attention. We love technology because it concentrates our attention for a little while, right? So when I'm like watching a fantastic Tik Tok about like a cat meowing in a really cute way, my mind becomes completely one-pointed on that. So over time, what we're actually doing is the mind becomes weakened because the onepointedness is triggered by a sensory experience. Forcing your mind to focus is hard. Getting it to focus automatically is really easy, but the more that I take the elevator, the weaker my legs get. So what's happening is the more we use technology, the more our mind becomes weakened in terms of focusing. And that's literally what we see. So if we look at increases in anxiety, increases in depression, increases in loneliness, literally we have a society of people that cannot control their attention, what they hate more than anything else is boredom. And everything is boring except for Tik Tok. And the moment that you lose control of your attention, then if you have anxious thoughts, you cannot rein them in. You can the moment you have depressive thoughts, so then what happens is I can't control my attention. So if I start to think anxious thoughts, start to think depressive thoughts, I go down a rabbit hole of that kind of stuff. The only way I can get out of it is to watch another TikTok. So now this feels bad to be anxious. I want to run away from my anxiety. I'm going to turn to my phone. Then once again, the phone pulls my attention away from all of the negativity. So now what's happening is it's almost like a mental cycle of becoming addicted to opiates where my body hurts. I have to take a pill to make it go away. But the more opiates that I take, the more it alters my mu receptors and the more sensitive to pain I become, the more dependent I become. So what we're sort of seeing is like addiction to technology because there is a weakening of our attentional capability and then if we're not using the technology, we're suffering and the only antidote we have is this. So we turn to this again and then we get weaker and weaker and we're really hitting a critical state here which is why we have you know mental health epidemiology. There's global pandemics of loneliness, suicidality, anxiety, depression, all these things are getting really bad and I think it's due to this fundamental attentional loss. So any practice that trains your focus is going to help. So dharana is a focusing practice. So meditating on something and what that fund, let's get to fundamentals, okay? So dharana is when you tell your mind to do something. It's like training a dog. You tell it I'm going to look at this and the mind is like I don't want to look at that and then you pull it back like a leash. You pull it back. That's the fundamental thing that needs to be trained. And this is what we know from studies like fMRI studies and EEG studies on various types of meditation that that's the common element is restraining our mind. So that's one thing. So the reason I like tratika for a couple of reasons. One is that Tratika is interesting enough from a sensory practice and is not just focusing on your breath. So it's a different anchor. A lot of our energy is in our eyes. is we're very like visually focused right now. If you look at cell phone usage, you know, sure people listen to audiobooks, but we're using our eyes a lot. We're like a very eye-heavy society. So, I think that's a good pillar to use. So, I like using the eyes. It feels cool to do. It also feels challenging in a way that evokes some good like ego activation because I want to be able to stare at a candle flame without closing my eyes. That feels badass. it it's very easy to get a sense of accomplishment when you do it for a long time. The other thing that's really good about is it gives people a very quick example of a sensory experience that is that technology cannot give them. So we think that there are seven colors that the human eye can visualize. If you do thikica, you will easily realize there are more seven more than seven colors that we can see, which sounds like a wild statement, but when you do untha, which is you stare at a candle flame for somewhere between 1 and 5 minutes without blinking, then you close your eyes and you'll see colors in your mind that are not quite the same colors that we can see in the visual spectrum. It's like a negative inversion of it. Yep. Exactly. Right. So, it looks like a negative. So, it's this weird purplish, greenish, bluish. It's absolutely a color, but it's not a regular color that you can see. So, those are three of the reasons that I like it. So, it's something that feels different from breath meditation, which people get bored of. It's not really mindfulness. It kind of feels badass. It's challenging to do and it feels difficult to do in a non boring way. You really have to strain yourself. And then the fifth reason that I've never explained to anyone is that thratika is also a shudi practice for the agna chakra. That means it's a cleansing practice for your third eye. Which means that if you do thratika, we don't tell people this, but if you do thratika, their connection to the intuition and the Brahman

and their own understanding of their problems will increase. So they will start to realize they're doing wrong things in their life. So it'll push them in the direction of spiritual growth whether they like it or not. So I think the first thing to understand is that our attention is being farmed. Okay. So like literally we have become attention farms. So if you look at ad revenue from a platform, how does any social media, Tik Tok, YouTube, whatever, how do they make money? They make money by having your attention. So they generate advertising revenue. The other thing that people in advertising have understood for a long time is if I can control your sensory organs, wants. You as a human being have one resource which is probably the most valuable thing you have in your whole life which is your attention. If you can focus your attention on a book in a study guide, you will get an A. If you can focus your attention on work, you will make money. Your attention is literally the most valuable thing. And if other people can get your attention, if they can get your eyes, attention, they can get you to buy things, they can make money. So literally the most valuable thing you've got is your attention. So the reclamation of our attention is essentially life. Absolutely right. And that's in a very literal sense. I don't mean that metaphorically. And right now what we're seeing is that people have claimed your attention. And once they have your attention, algorithms start this process of what's called online radicalization. Happens to everyone. It's called online drift actually. So over time your thoughts will be shaped by these algorithms. And then you'll vote a particular way. you'll get angry with a particular group of people. And so the key thing that's going on there is first of all, they're shaping your attention 100%. You're losing control of your life, right? Because you don't want to spend 6 hours on TikTok, but you end up doing it anyway, and you're not even sure how or why. So what what's happening is as people take control of your attention, they're taking control of your life. They're inducing certain kinds of behaviors. They're making money. Your life is objectively getting worse. And I mean objectively as in this is correlates with increases in mood disorders and anxiety, things like that, loneliness, suicidality. So it's terrible. You know, idle time is really important. So I think a really good example of the value of idle time is dreams. So when our brain gets to idle, we have dreams. So if you literally look at the way that we sleep, we have four stages of sleep and then we enter REM sleep. And at the beginning of the night, you're mostly stage one. And at the end of the night, as you go through multiple sleep cycles, the percentage of your REM sleep increases. So the first two hours that you sleep, you get maybe 5 to 10 minutes of REM sleep. The last 2 hours, you get way more. I don't know exactly what the number is. I'd guess 30 to 45 minutes. When we look at REM sleep, what's going on? That's when we dream. We see a lot of emotional activation. Your brain, in the same way that like if you eat something, your gut is going to pull out the good stuff and literally discard the bad stuff. Our mind does that as well. Our brain does that as well and it does a lot of emotional processing with idle time. When you're idle, your brain is not idle. It's not like the blood flow to your brain decreases when you're doing nothing. It actually stays about the same, even increases rapidly when you're literally asleep and not doing anything. So idle time is time that the brain uses to clean things out, especially things like emotional processing, consolidating things into memory. And so I think what we're starting to see getting to your question of like anthrop society what's happening as the idle time of our mind decreases we are no longer processing the emotions of every day. So I'll give you an example what I mean. So like back in the day we would go hunting and you and I would go hunting. Let's say I shoot my arrow and I miss the deer and then you shoot your arrow and then you hit the deer and then I feel I'm like damn that Andre guy he's so he's better looking his hair is better. He's better with accuracy. this girl that I like is going to like him more. And then you and I, you're we're carrying the deer and we walk back to our camp and we've got 2 hours for my mind to do nothing. Basically, it emotionally processes on its own. And we know this because the brain has the ability to detain homeostasis. That's what we do. And we do homeostasis with emotions as well. Emotions don't last forever. They normally just equilibriate. Um, and my favorite example of this, which I've said a thousand times, is the perfect wedding day doesn't last for a lifetime. The happiness of a perfect wedding day does not last for a lifetime, right? You were happy. You had a great birthday party when you're seven. It's not like you're still happy. So emotions just naturally go away. So in the past, what used to happen is we would process those emotions. They'd go away and then I'd be okay by the time we get to camp. Now what's going on is that throughout the day, we have no idle time. So when I have idle time, I pick up my phone. When phone, it both suppresses certain emotions. And once emotions get suppressed, they do not get processed. So, I'm storing them away in my unconscious. And then it also evokes other emotions. So, when I'm looking and you'll notice this if you look at your like algorithms, you're not going to feel good all the time. They're going to show

you something that makes you feel really good and then next they're going to show you something that pisses you off and then they're going to make you feel good and bad. They're going to make you feel all kinds of things because what these algorithms are figuring out, I don't think it's like intentionally evil, by the I think they're just learning that the more engaged you stay with something is the more emotionally activated you get. So now what's happening is we have a life where something bad happened at work but instead of processing it I'm using my device which is evoking more emotions and suppressing those emotions so they don't get processed and then over time these emotions just pile up pile up and that's why we see societal depression societal anxiety you know South Korea's birth rate is super low because people like I think on some level they don't have the capacity to fall in love anymore that's a foreign thing even if we look at dating nowadays like people don't fall in love very easily anymore. So there are huge negative effects of losing our idol time because our brain used to use that