You Can’t LOGIC Your Way Out of Depression

You Can’t LOGIC Your Way Out of Depression

I want to talk to you all today about why logic is not effective at treating depression [Music] and this is a really important problem because a lot of people out there who struggle with depression or even subclinical depression where they don’t necessarily have a diagnosis will struggle to pull themselves out of it they’ll analyze their situation and they’ll recognize okay I need to do this or I need to do this but they can’t seem to despite all the logic bring themselves out of it and on the flip side we also have something incredibly scary which is that sometimes when people are really really depressed or even things like suicidal they’re actually really logical about it they sort of reach the logical conclusion that actually there’s no reason for me to live right now right because I’ve done the analysis I don’t have a bright future generally speaking day to day I suffer a lot I’m in a lot of pain the only bright points in my life are like these dopaminergic activities like gaming or porn or whatever but like there’s objectively no reason for me to be alive right now and this is what’s really challenging is if you try to talk to these people you’ll oftentimes find that they their logic is actually really sound and even in the cases when it’s not really sound you can try to convince them otherwise but it seems like you sometimes hit a brick wall and if you’re struggling in this way you may have noticed that you may try to argue against yourself but your mind always comes to the same conclusion so we’re going to talk a little bit about first of all understanding what the relationship between depression and logic is and also why it is that logic sort of doesn’t work and what the real problem is with depression hey there thanks for watching and I’m glad these videos have been helpful a lot of times I’ll read the comments and see people asking well what do I actually do about it which is such a great question and unfortunately my experience has been that the resources out there aren’t actually that good at helping people create sustainable change which is why I started HG in the first place he coaches are trained on a curriculum that integrates all of my understanding into what is motivation what paralyzes Us and how to create lasting behavioral change so if you’re ready to take the next step he coaches are ready to build the life that you want they’ve helped people build careers find relationships build networks of friends discover what their passions are and pursue their Hobbies so if this sounds like something that you’d be interested in check out the link in the description below and so what we’re going to talk about today is the relationship between logic depression and even IQ and what we’ll sort of discover is actually a little bit bizarre first of all not only is it that logic doesn’t really work for depression but the more intelligent you are or the more logical you are there’s a good chance that your depression will actually get worse not only does it not work it’s actually fuel for the fire so let’s start by understanding the relationship between IQ and depression because we tend to think about IQ as a positive thing right and this is sort of a situation where like generally speaking the higher your IQ is the easier life becomes that’s the way we sort of think about it is that it’s unilaterally a positive thing but if we look at studies on IQ and depression we discover something that’s actually really bizarre which is the higher your eye IQ is the more likely you are to be depressed so if you look at the general population about 9.5 percent of people are depressed there are some studies where researchers have looked at the top two percent of people in terms of IQ so they took the smartest two percent of people in the world and they assessed how depressed they are and if you’re in the top two percent of people you’re actually you have a 36.6 chance to be depressed we’re talking about a four-fold increase in risk of depression and that’s like absolutely insane right like how on Earth does that work even though these Studies have some methodological problems there’s a there’s some really interesting supporting evidence on sort of understanding why is it that smarter people are more likely to be depressed there’s a series of trials that really look at something called Insight which is your awareness of what your problems are it’s what they sort of discovered is that if you have a debilitating neurological disease like let’s say you’ve got like ALS right which is Lou Gehrig’s Disease or um it’s like a degenerative nerve disorder if you’ve got Parkinson’s or something like that if you get diagnosed with something that’s like really bad like cancer the awareness that you have your ability to analyze and accurately assess your situation correlates with suicidality so the greater your Insight is the more aware you are the more suicidal you are there are also situations where they’ve looked at diseases like schizophrenia and they’ve also found that like when you have people with schizophrenia the more aware of the problem they are the more damaging the situation actually is and the more suicidal they become so that sounds kind of weird but like let’s kind of dive into a little bit of like why is that why is it that IQ can worsen depression and kind of like worsen suicidality and things like that so let’s start by understanding first of all what do we mean by Logic we start with a set of assumptions and then we take those assumptions and then we can run some kind of analysis and then we come to a conclusion and generally speaking the smarter you are the more logical you will be the more analytical you will be and the more faith you will have in your analytic process because if you’re smart and you are very good at logic it becomes a useful tool right so we use logic to solve problems in life and if logic comes to a particular conclusion we trust that conclusion because it tends to work so if I’m trying to figure out okay how do I get a better grade this is what I need to do I can kind of logic it out and figure out what the right move is if I’m having trouble at work I can run through an analytical process and I can figure things out and the higher your IQ is the more likely you are to become dependent on logic now let’s take a look at depression so there’s a lot of really interesting Neuroscience which helps us understand like what goes on in the brain of someone who’s depressed and as we understand what happens in the brain of someone who’s depressed we’ll start to see how that can impact logic and even hijack it so the first thing to understand about depression is I sort of think about it as the autoimmunity of mental illness so if we look at autoimmune conditions we have this thing called the immune system and the purpose of the immune system is to fight off infections right these are the soldiers of our body in autoimmunity what happens is these soldiers start attacking us so if you look at things like allergies this is a situation where there’s a benign particle which we’re inhaling and our immune system is like this is the enemy let’s attack it in other cases of autoimmunity we will actually attack our own tissues and cause things like rashes or inflammation or things like that so what happens in depression what happens in depression is our brain gets turned against us so this is what’s really terrifying is the stronger our brain is the worse the depression is because if you have a really powerful logical fallacy but something in your brain has changed to always blame you or look at the negative or feel guilt or shame or whatever it’s going to leverage that brain against you and this is why it’s so hard to kick so how does the brain actually do that let’s understand a couple of things the first thing in depression is we see that there is amygdala hyper reactivity what does that mean so we have this part of our brain that senses through rats and and sort of detect negative things when the amygdala is hyper-reactive it does a couple of interesting things it changes our perceptions so if there is a benign stimulus if someone says hey I’m busy today sorry I can’t meet in the depressed brain the amygdala being hyper-reactive will interpret that in a negative way so it Alters our perceptions we become hypersensitive to negativity so even if someone says Hey thank you so much for inviting me I loved the meal that you cooked it turns out though I wasn’t able to enjoy the alcohol because I don’t drink because of my religious beliefs but I loved the appetizers the the fish was delicious you have a lovely place I had such an amazing time and so if you look at that that sort of experience this is a statement where someone is saying you know five or six positive things and one negative thing they’re not really blaming you for it they’re like hey I’m sorry I wasn’t able to enjoy this thing I just don’t drink and in the brain of a depressed person that person will highlight that one piece of information there actually is a cognitive filter that will knock out neg positive information and will actually amplify negative information and this is all due to literally amygdal or hyperreactivity as signals are coming into our body and our brain our brain is literally ignoring like 90 of them and just focusing on the 10 most negative the second thing that we have to understand about the brain and this comes a little bit more from Eastern psychology it’s validated by Western studies but I think the Eastern perspective is easier to understand is we have to understand the relationship between emotions and Analysis so oftentimes when we’re feeling emotional we will try to logic ourselves out of it we’ll try to analyze our way out of it but there’s a really interesting feature of the brain which is that when we are highly emotional our emotions hijack our logic so if you look at a political debate these people are emotionally charged and they are both convinced that they are logically correct a hundred percent of the time right and the more emotionally charged the debate becomes the more sure someone is that they are thinking logical you may have engaged in arguments with people where the person that you’re arguing with is really really emotional and not thinking clearly but if you ask them their perception is that they are perfectly logical and let’s be fair if you’re arguing you’re probably emotional and you’re probably thinking that I am 100 right and they are 100 wrong so we have to understand this really key relationship between emotions and Analysis which is that the more emotional we are the more likely we are to actually hijack our analytical circuitry and then the emotions are actually in control and they’re pulling the strings of our logic and we absolutely see this in depression as well now that we’ve understood a little bit about okay what’s logic we’re sort of taking a set of assumptions we have to start with axioms we’re doing some kind of analysis and then we arrive at a conclusion great in depression we’ve got something that filters the information that we get so it filters our inputs and then it we also see in depression that our emotions can hijack our analytical circuitry what does this result in so let’s take the take a look at someone who has high IQ who is very logical and what that means for them if they end up depressed so the first thing to understand is that if someone is has a high IQ there’s a developmental component which we’ve got to dive into so when I’m smart am I if I’m a kid and I’m smart I start to lean on logic more and more and more so what we sort of see is that kids who are smart and are quite logical will use logic to solve their problems it makes sense right so if I’m logical and if I’m smart I’m going to use my intellect to solve problems what that means though is that we tend to have underdeveloped faculty when it comes to emotional awareness and emotional processing so if you look at kids who are very logical they will use their logic to overcome their emotions they will sort of set their emotions aside they will sort of like suppress their emotions and they’ll approach things in a very cold and logical manner that’s just how we work and the way that you can sort of think about this is if I grow up and I’m right-handed and then what I’m going to do is I’m going to like learn oh this is a Sharpie so I don’t want that to fall off and I start writing with my left hand what is going to happen to my capacity to use my left hand the better I am at writing with my right hand the worse I will get at writing with my left hand so this is exactly what happens in development is that if we have something that we’re good at we lean on that a lot to the exclusion of other things now let’s compare that to a child who does not have super high IQ so if they can’t use their intellect to solve every problem what do they have to do instead when they approach problems they have to use some of these other things like EQ or emotional quotient they develop more emotional awareness they sort of work with other tools right so if I’ve got an an S-Class IQ I’m going to just be owning things right and left with my S-Class IQ I’m not going to use my B level emotional circuitry and so over time I don’t even level that stuff up so the first thing to understand is that kids who have a high IQ will sometimes in a weird way have a low EQ because they just don’t have that emotional development this may also explain for example like if you’re a smart person who’s very logically oriented like you may notice that you have like some deficits like there are some things in life that seem really harder to you which you know people who are not as smart as you are and they seem to have no trouble with it and you’re like kind of confused like why if I’m so smart why is this so easy for other people and so hard for me and then you sort of result in some kind of conclusion which is that like IQ can be a curse but if you ever say that to people they’re like law Cry Me a River like IQ is a curse oh my God you’re so smart you think you’re so smart ah LOL right so like no one ever actually listens to that but that’s actually the case it’s really bizarre but it’s actually the case the second thing which you all may have already figured out is if we are using logic but our amygdala is shaping our perceptions what that means is the the assumptions that I start with are flawed and this is the core of the problem in people who are depressed and why logic doesn’t work it’s because the assumptions are incorrect so you can run that analysis as much as you want to but the assumptions are where the problem is because analysis and logic is completely separate from the faculty of perception right this is actually one of the things that I think is sort of missing in Western science we don’t really know how to like fix cognitive biases or perceptions we sort of focus on once we have a particular belief how do we work with that belief we’re sort of focused on logic but we’re not focused on perception so the biggest challenge with people who are depressed they’re logically correct but they’re operating from the wrong assumptions and that’s not something you can you can’t logic yourself out of your assumptions or it’s very difficult what you really have to do is change your perception so if you start getting new inputs it will start to change some of your logic and that’s really what needs to happen but this is the key problem with like logic and depression is that the information that you’re starting with is fundamentally flawed and biased so you can try to logic your way as many ways as you want but I if I give you a set of building blocks that is busted and can never build a house there’s no Arrangement that you can put together that will result in a house the last thing to keep in mind is we sort of talked a little bit about how emotions hijack logic and this is the real problem of sort of the autoimmunity of depression so once you reach a conclusion internally and emotionally that I am a bad person or I will never be successful in life once you lose faith in yourself once you feel shame or guilt or hopeless once that that energy is there it will hijack your logical circuitry if someone feels hopeless you can try to argue with them as much as you want to about hey here are the reasons you can live here’s why you should believe in yourself you can try to reassure them you can try to convince it doesn’t work because this is where the logic is actually being controlled by the emotion and so what we really need to do is unpack that emotion or disarm that emotion and then the logic will actually like normalize by itself and you’ll feel a lot better and this is the real tragedy of people who are smart who struggle with depression is that their ability to digest that emotion is underdeveloped right because they’ve been smart their whole life so they never developed emotional awareness and in fact half the people that I talk to who struggle with depression who are very smart if I ask them why are you depressed they don’t even mention an emotion they don’t say I feel ashamed about myself that’s never what they say they say the reason that I’m depressed is because of this this this this this this this this is why my life is hopeless I can logic it out to you I can argue I can convince you this is truth it’s not emotion it’s actually the exact opposite this is objective it’s not subjective and why do these people believe that because their emotional awareness has been underdeveloped because they’ve relied on IQ their whole life now if you’ve reached this point you may be a little bit concerned does this mean I am screwed right so does this mean like you were telling me Dr K holy crap so 9.5 of the population is depressed normally and I use logic a lot and my depression rate is 36.6 percent that’s scary um also that like the more I understand about life the more suicidal I will become that scary does that mean I’m screwed and this is the beautiful thing actually absolutely not in my experience as a clinician has been awesome because when I work with patients who are smart or I help people in general who are smart so far the the biggest problem is that their intelligence or logic is being leveraged against them and amazing stuff can happen when your logic starts working in the right direction instead of trying to feed your hopelessness which is what the logic does it’s amazing when you can really use it to tackle the hopelessness instead and so what are the steps to that so the first thing that we’ve got to do is understand that this is primarily driven by emotion so when I work with these kinds of people what I really focus on is building emotional awareness and so the more that we build emotional awareness then we can start tackling the emotions on their own so we don’t have to logic our way out of them that’s not really going to work we really have to do is like validate and process those emotions so this involves three steps so this is like awareness of emotions so do you feel ashamed about yourself what do you do with that feeling I don’t know what to do with it I can’t fix it right so I ignore it and then I try to logic my way to success so that’s the exact problem is you can’t logic your way out of emotion it’s not really the way that the brain works it’s just not how we’re wired in fact emotions can Trump logic it’s usually not the other way around so what we have to do is first of all recognize the emotions that we’re feeling the second thing that we have to do is oftentimes name them and really understand when we’re feeling them and the third third and fourth things that we can try to do is tolerate them and process process them so this is where when that emotional energy comes up if we can tolerate it without reacting to it it’ll start to feed our logic a little bit less okay the next thing is there’s a beautiful thing is if we can do emotional processing then as the emotional energy decreases the amount that it hijacks our logic will decrease and if we’re no longer hijacking our logic then we can use logic to start helping us but as long as logic is serving the master of hopelessness it’s not going to work so how do you do this this is where we’ve got some community events like we did this right in the fields event where we sort of helped you know thousands of people in our community build emotional awareness our coaches are also kind of familiar with that but this is really where if you’re struggling with depression I’d strongly recommend that you see a therapist right so because therapists are trained in this sort of emotional processing kind of stuff the second thing that we can really do and this is a little bit trickier is work on our perceptions so this is where when we sort of look at like meditation mindfulness and yoga we know that these things are effective at treating depression and one of the key things that meditation mindfulness and yoga really do psychologically that we don’t really do a whole lot in our West in the west is learn to purify our perception so we have for example in Dr K’s guide we’ve got a whole section on you know how to purify your sensory organs so how can you better receive information how can you remove the cognitive biases that you have by sort of like removing the filters through which you get information we also have Dr K’s guide to depression which y’all can check out where we dive into a lot of this kind of stuff but this is what the short answer is if you want to purify your perception meditation I think honestly is like one of the best ways to do it and if y’all can sort of add these two elements what I’ve seen is a lot of progress so when I’ve worked with people and I’ve worked with hundreds of people who are depressed hundreds of people who are very capable and depressed which is what makes it so confusing right so these are people like bankers at Goldman Sachs or CEOs of startups that are incredibly Intel and Incredibly capable and struggle with like crippling depression and the reason is because they’re missing some of these things and if you sort of think about that like how can meditation help so what we do with meditation is observe the breath we’re not judging it we’re not saying that breath is good or breath is bad right and sometimes I’ll even do a practice with with someone where I’ll tell someone bring in a food that you dislike and try that food and put it in like eat take a bite of the food and pay attention to where your dislike comes from and inevitably what happens when people do this is that oh wow this is not as bad as I thought so what we’re really doing in those moments is we’re changing the way that our brain interprets stimuli and the second thing that we do when we when I do therapy with people right and y’all may have seen this on stream is we’ll talk to people who are hopeless and then we have a good cry and after people have a good cry they feel better their mind is calmer their logic starts to move a little bit better that is emotional processing so the other thing that you can kind of do is by all means like you know use everything that we have available go see a therapist but the other thing you can do is like just like process those emotions like try journaling or just have a good cry talk to someone about you know hey like I’m really struggling right now and I really feel extra ashamed and this is the other problem is that the more intelligent you are and the more capable you are the worse you feel about yourself for not being able to fix the problem and that’s the real tragedy right if you’ve got a high IQ and if you’re very analytical you’ve used this to fix so many things and this is the one thing that you can’t fix and you should be able to fix it and if you should be able to fix it what does that mean that means that you feel shame because you should be able to do something and you’re not able to do it which in turn makes you stupid right makes you worthless makes you pathetic and this is an example of how if you kind of think about it but hold on a sec what’s going on here we start with depression I should be able to fix it I’m I’m not able to fix it therefore I’m ashamed therefore I’m worthless what does that do it feeds the emotion so we’ve got to break that cycle by recognizing okay hold on a second I feel ashamed of myself in the first place how can I sit with that how can I tolerate it and how can I process it so when it comes to logic and depression it’s a really common problem because people who are very logical and very intelligent have actually used their logic and IQ to solve problems the challenge is that when it comes to depression this is a situation where we are turning our powerful logical ability and the depression actually turns it against us so it’s not just that it doesn’t help us so that it’s ineffective it’s that actually logic and IQ can make depression worse in their scientific data that supports that and so then the question becomes okay then what do we do about it and this is where we have to develop our emotional awareness a little bit develop our emotional processing and also remove that cognitive filter and as you’re able to do these two things your experience of feeling sad or some of this logic will actually start to get way better

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In this video, Dr. K explores why logic is not effective in treating depression and suggests that flawed assumptions and emotional processing are the underlying issues that need to be addressed instead.

Many individuals with depression, including those with subclinical depression, may try to analyze their situation logically to pull themselves out of it, but they often find themselves unable to do so. Moreover, some people with depression may be highly logical and reach the conclusion that there is no reason to live. Dr. K explains that this is because the amygdala becomes hyper-reactive in people with depression, causing them to become hypersensitive to negativity and amplify negative information.

To address depression, Dr. K recommends developing emotional awareness through therapy, meditation, and journaling. These practices can help individuals process emotions and change flawed assumptions, which can ultimately help them tackle hopelessness and use logic to find lasting solutions. Dr. K emphasizes the importance of recognizing the limitations of logic in dealing with depression and the need to address the emotional aspects of the problem to find effective solutions.

▼ Timestamps ▼
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00:00 – Introduction
03:49 – IQ and depression
06:41 – What is depression?
07:57 – Amygdalar Hyper-reactivity
09:44 – Emotions and analysis
13:18 – IQ and EQ
17:04 – Does this mean I’m screwed?
23:00 – Conclusion

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