How To Overcome Apathy

Apathy mutes your ability to experience life. It blocks you from enthusiasm, connection, creativity, and even knowing what to do with yourself. I speak about the root cause of apathy and the ONE thing that overcomes it.

Transcript

The Ruando Podcast is an exploration of the unconscious in the game of life.

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Hey what's up,

I'm in Changdao,

It's a little town north of Chiang Mai.

I'm getting out of the city for a bit so we might hear some animal noises,

Hopefully it's not too windy.

I'm walking through rice fields right now.

I want to speak about overcoming apathy,

Self expression,

And feeling connection,

All of which I'll put under the umbrella term of emotional constipation.

This is something that I think can affect people in many cases.

In fact the real core piece I want to touch on is the feeling of reduced aliveness.

I mean essentially that's what apathy is,

Right?

Like when the colors are muted in your life,

When you're not able to enjoy things,

Not necessarily feeling depressed but the things that should make you happy don't feel happy.

It's very hard to find direction when you're in an apathetic state,

It's hard to feel connected to people.

Obviously it affects relationships,

It affects dating,

It affects even casual social encounters,

It also affects creative expression.

So in this video I want to talk about a key point that affects all of these pieces together.

This came up because it was actually requested by a long time listener of the show,

Of the podcast,

Actually a client of mine who has dealt with this in different ways throughout his life.

But this came up for him recently in that he's in this relationship,

Seems like a great relationship,

They've been together for a while,

And over the last I guess months or recently he's noticed that his feelings of aliveness are actually reduced.

Super in love with his girlfriend,

They've had an amazing relationship so far but lately it's not that he's felt bad towards her or disliked her,

It's just like that in love,

Super passionate,

Super excited feeling to be with her or around her that they had for the beginning and for most of their relationship has kind of been inconsistent or going away and he was a little concerned about it.

He was worried,

It's natural if you've felt amazing feelings around someone and suddenly you don't feel that amazing feeling or you feel a little more neutral,

It's natural to wonder what the deal was.

So we explored it,

We speak with him,

And we identified that for him the core of it has been over the last period of time,

I don't remember exactly anything,

It was months or weeks,

There were all these little instances where he was either not expressing what he felt or he was shifting it in a certain way.

As an example,

When they got together he was very much in his masculine,

He was acting very stoically and that was great and it was actually very authentic of him being unaffected but in his case for various reasons,

Especially when things were uncomfortable or potentially contentious between him and his girlfriend,

He tried to go back,

He tried to keep returning to this stoicness and even though that was totally authentic of his expression last year,

Now it's not actually how he felt and because he's acting differently than how he felt,

It was actually reducing his feelings.

That's essentially what apathy is.

Feelings,

Whether they're emotional feelings or even physical feelings,

Sensations,

But let's start with emotion,

It's easier to grasp,

Feelings are kind of a use it or lose it substance,

A use it or lose it thing.

If you express your feelings,

You tend to feel more feelings.

If you don't express your feelings or you express them inauthentically,

I mean essentially whatever it is that your instinctual impulse is,

If you don't exercise that impulse,

It starts to go away and it's a very simple reason why that is because if you feel a certain way,

Let's use a very basic feeling like interest in something,

Let's use interest as the most basic thing,

You're super interested in something but you for whatever reason because of inconvenience or fear or shame or whatever,

You choose not to do this thing that you want to do,

Whatever it is.

That causes dissonance,

There's an uncomfortable perhaps frustrating feeling of not doing the thing that you're feeling,

So what is the natural thing to do?

It is to reduce the desire for it,

Right?

If you really want something that you can't have,

It's uncomfortable so that like the natural say coping mechanism is to want that thing less and that's essentially what happens but the thing is as Brene Brown says,

You can't selectively numb so if you really wanted a certain thing,

Really wanted to do a certain thing and you won't let yourself do it,

In order to not have to feel the discomfort of not doing this thing you want to do,

Of having this unmet need or this unexpressed impulse,

The impulse starts to go away and when you start to mute a certain internally driven impulse,

When you start to mute an instinct,

A desire,

It ends up muting everything across the board like in other episodes I've spoken about my past sexual issues,

I mean we call it impotence of a sort like my impotence when I was in my early 20s actually came from this,

Actually it was kind of driven by my introversion and shyness where I had all these things I wanted to express like totally,

I mean I'm not even talking about sexual things like just things I wanted to express and for whatever reason I didn't express them and because I had this strong impulse to express myself and I didn't listen to it and ended up muting all of my feelings so not only was I kind of robotic and phlegmatic I mean because I was suppressing my feelings all the time I didn't have a lot of like affect up here,

I mean a lot of people called me a robot at the time,

It also made my body numb,

It actually was one of the root causes if not the root cause of me having sexual dysfunctions because my body was numb because my feelings were numbed out,

It also made my reality and my experience of the world kind of dull,

I mean it was very hard to get interested in anything,

It was kind of hard to know what I wanted to do with my life day to day but also in a big sense because I was constantly saying no to the animal inside of me,

If you think of this as emotional constipation right,

Like you're backed up,

You won't let yourself release this thing that you're trying to release,

It's just going to harden and everything's going to be tight and it's going to wreck your insides you know,

The same thing happens with your feelings and your emotional expression and you see this a lot in relationships and this is like you know one of the reasons why I focus so much on sexuality in relationships,

I don't care about the sex stuff as much as sexuality tends to show what's really going on deep in our subconscious and almost all the time this is what happened,

What I noticed when I was a relationship counselor in New York and I had these couples that for the most part liked each other but for some reason they didn't want to have sex with each other like there's no sexual polarity,

It was these little tiny built up resentments and every time that one of the partners,

The husband or the wife or both felt a certain resentful feeling and they don't want to feel that resentment,

They had to numb it out right,

It's like oh I don't want to be upset at her for that mean joke she made about me at the party,

That kind of mean joke or I don't want to be upset at him for the way he doesn't follow through on his word so I'm going to actually numb out the fact that I actually care about that thing which makes my whole being a little bit numb which eventually actually one of the first places it shows up is in the bedroom where like if I don't want to feel my contempt for him,

I'm numbing that out which means I have to numb out my entire experience of him which means my body isn't going to get wet anymore or hard or whatever it is.

But anyway,

Back to the social side of this because you see this a lot with people who are introverted,

I mean as you get older you might find it hard to find direction in life if you're constantly saying no to that impulse.

So you might be wondering then what is the solution?

So if you take on this model that I'm suggesting that apathy is essentially emotional constipation and I mean all the things related to it,

Feeling disconnected from people,

Not knowing what you want to do,

Not having things to say,

Kind of like not being interested in stuff,

I mean that's essentially what apathy is.

If you consider this model that I'm offering,

If this is your emotions being blocked up then what is the obvious thing to do to solve this?

It is to express your emotions.

Express your emotions,

I actually want to be a little more clear,

It's not about blabbing how you feel to everyone every which way,

It's about being true to the impulses that you're feeling and expressing that which doesn't necessarily mean saying anything.

Expressing your instincts,

Expressing your feelings can a lot of times be doing what you think is interesting as opposed to doing what you think is collectively accepted or what you think you should do to be a good boy or even do the thing just because this is like the best way to be secure.

I mean very often the reason why people go into apathy mode is because they're following social expectations or following societal norms or following what they think is the more secure route which is tied into the whole trying to do what society suggests,

Again it's for security,

Herd security.

When people deny their individual impulse for the sake of that thing which is not themselves,

Everything has to become muted,

Everything becomes a little more dull and if someone constantly does that over and over again,

If you abandon yourself and your instincts over and over again for something external or something completely in your head or only intellectual,

Eventually your feelings are going to mute and even if you're doing everything perfectly on paper and your whole life is perfectly organized to be practical and you're doing things to be well liked and whatever,

Eventually you're going to lose that inner drive and maybe you'll wake up one day and you feel apathetic and you're not sure what actually is interesting to you and you don't really know what to do with yourself because you've said no to that impulse for so long.

So if you caught the episodes I did when I was in a cult,

There's many aphorisms they had that I actually think are true and useful and one of them is that the truth carries the most sensation.

That's a thing they would say over and over again,

The truth carries the most sensation and it's kind of a spiritual sounding thing and honestly it took me many years to really grasp what it meant but it very much applies to this.

The reason why the truth carries the most sensation or why telling the truth or being vulnerable or doing the thing that's really deep inside your heart for lack of better language raises sensation in your body,

Actually you feel more in your body.

It's the opposite of apathy.

When you tell the person you have a crush on,

You have a crush on them or you confront the person that you're upset with or you quit the job that you hate and it makes you feel like crap to do the thing that you actually want to do whether it's scary or not or very often it's scary which is why maybe you took the other route in the first place,

It actually does raise the sensation in your body.

The reason why that is is because you're no longer kidding yourself.

You're now validating that internally driven impulse and you're following it.

It's like you're finally taking a crap and the more you listen to your feelings,

The more feeling you have to work with because essentially your desire,

Your direction,

Your passions,

They're essentially a set of feelings with directions attached.

When someone knows what their purpose is,

It usually,

I mean people find out what their purpose is or the thing that really drives them when they've listened to their feelings over and over enough that their feelings now become really loud.

It's like they see something,

It's like yes,

That's the thing I want to do right now.

That's the thing I want to feel or in a social situation,

It's like this is the thing I have to say right now.

They don't hesitate.

They don't become diffident.

They don't second guess themselves because they've practiced listening to their feelings.

Of course there are situations where maybe there are actual consequences for doing whatever you feel like.

I'm not saying that you should just like punch people in the face or tell people off or quit your job when it's impractical.

But the more you do the opposite,

The more you withhold your instincts,

The more muted you're going to get and eventually it's going to negatively impact your relationships,

Your sense of being and your creative purpose.

I mean let's actually take each one of those things real quickly piece by piece because in relationships it makes sense,

Right?

If you care about someone,

You're close with someone,

Maybe you live with your partner and you know something that you're feeling is going to be a little abrasive.

Maybe you're generally feeling abrasive or like you disagree on something.

Sometimes it seems to make sense,

Right?

It seems to be practical.

It's like,

Okay,

This thing is not that important.

I'm just not going to mention it.

But that builds over time and in the long run,

If you do this every time in the long run,

It's going to be a way greater net negative on your relationship because you're not going to really be there.

You're actually going to be every time you deny that impulse,

You're putting a layer in between you and that person.

You're actually putting a block or an impediment in your connection and ultimately it's going to take away because very often,

Especially this is hard for a lot of intellectual guys to understand,

Is that very often your emotions,

Even if they're seemingly negative emotions,

Even if it's anger or sorrow or like something that doesn't seem convenient like a desire for power,

These are some of the things that are sometimes the most sexy because they're so real,

They're so raw and they're connected to nature,

Not like whatever our cultural values say we should be for convenience of other people.

And it's the same thing in your general day-to-day being or your more casual social experiences,

Right?

A lot of us hold back on what we actually feel because we don't want to turn people off.

We don't want to be ostracized.

We want to be liked.

We want to make everything convenient.

And you know,

Not that you need to blast your opinions out to the world every single moment because that's probably not truly authentic of you either,

Right?

I mean,

Our inner knowing knows the battles we care to fight.

But if you're trying to conform to a certain group,

I talked about this more extensively in the Breaking Social Constructions of Reality episode,

I mean,

You're creating a world for yourself where you fit but it's a world that you actually want to fit into.

And then you end up having a social circle that's not that interesting to you because you've had to fake being liked by them.

Because the thing is,

You are not a blank slate.

This is actually one of my favorite pieces from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

Towards the end,

He speaks about how you are not a blank slate.

You can't actually do anything.

You can't be interested in anything.

Of course,

We learn how to be and,

You know,

We're affected by our environment.

But there was a part of you that existed at birth.

There was like a set of interests.

I mean,

People call this your creative purpose in life.

Yes,

A lot of who we are comes from conditioning,

Comes from nurture.

But a huge part of us is nature.

Like,

There are certain interests that who knows where they come from,

Right?

And part of the creative process of going through life is discovering what that is.

What are the things that you actually love?

What are the ways of expressing yourself that are unique to you?

Because of course,

If you have siblings,

You know,

You're not all into the same things just because you have the same parents.

You're not all the people in your town or all the people in your grade or your workplace or you have similar experiences.

You're all into different things.

And part of life,

Part of the joy of being a creative person is discovering what that is that makes you tick.

And you can only do that by moment to moment,

Day to day,

Listening to the impulse as best as you can,

Right?

I mean,

There's probably plenty of days where like the most authentic instinct is that you don't want to go to work,

But you got to pay the bills.

Like I'm not saying you just,

You know,

Go into this entitled mode of like doing whatever you feel like every moment,

But at least be honest with yourself,

Right?

Because expressing yourself or validating your feelings doesn't mean you literally do everything literally.

It means that you don't lie to yourself because you know,

All of this stuff with apathy,

The worst part of apathy is that for apathy to exist,

You had to have lied to yourself.

You had to have lied to yourself like that this,

Whatever the thing is that you really wanted to feel,

To do,

To express the person you wanted to talk to,

The job you wanted to do,

The activity you wanted to perform.

When you don't actually do it,

When you lie to yourself that,

Oh,

I don't know,

I didn't actually want that because you want to avoid the frustration that comes with the cognitive dissonance of not doing what you wanted.

When you mute yourself and you lie to yourself,

You're actually losing a huge part of yourself as opposed to even if you don't literally do the thing,

You at least are identifying in yourself.

You're at least maintaining the truth and fighting for the truth within yourself and that's what's going to increase the sensation and give you more direction to find your purpose.

Because the thing is,

It's not even about just creative purpose.

It's like when you actually are living in high fidelity and high truthfulness to what's inside of you,

It becomes way easier to connect with people.

It becomes way easier to know what you want to say and you want to do moment to moment.

You will not have an issue finding your purpose or finding what we can spiritualize and call synchronicities or serendipities.

All of these things are simply you fitting well in with your reality because you're actually following what's inside of you.

Anyway,

That was a lot of words to say,

Express your feelings.

Hope this was useful.

Hope this wasn't too much noise.

I was getting a little frustrated there with all the farmers driving by.

And yeah,

I've got other cool stuff coming out but I'll share that for another episode.

Truth,

I dress in a foam booth I'm invulnerable Dutch no optimus,

Say optional The

Reviews

Psychological origins of apathy and tips on how to overcome it. Loved the content. It's a recording whilst the author is walking through rice fields and sometimes a little windy, but due to great content I still give 5 stars

This provided significant insight into how apathy begins. I've learned to express myself when a feeling arises rather than suppress. Don't say No to creative expression.