In this interview, the guest explains that mental resilience is declining, especially since the rise of social media, citing Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation as evidence of worsening mental‑health trends. The discussion reframes stress, arguing that not all stress is harmful; “nice” stress (e.g., a roller‑coaster ride or a first date) can be energising, while trying to eliminate stress altogether leads to numbness. Fear is similarly presented as a useful signal, referencing The Gift of Fear and emphasizing threat analysis rather than avoidance. The guest positions resilience as a learned skill that enables humans to adapt and evolve without waiting for millennia of natural selection, using examples like Bruce Lee and Mike Tyson to illustrate cultivated adaptability. Meditation is described as a “super‑power” because it builds resilience, which in turn expands personal freedom and prevents the internal oppression of rigid thoughts and beliefs. Overall, the conversation links social‑media‑driven anxiety, the proper handling of negative emotions, and meditation‑based practices as pathways to restore and strengthen mental resilience.
Chapters
I've always been very fascinated about your research, and I've actually read quite, quite a bit of it, and you always mention the word resilience. So as for your research, what have you found out about resilience, and how do you help people build this mental resilience?
So the first thing is resilience is declining. Since the advent of social media, you know, you can read books like The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, H-A-I-D-T, Haidt, and he talks about that something changed in the graph of mental health once social media became extremely accessible. And as the non-substance abuse increases, as the attention span decreases, as we start to feel more isolated in a connected world, as faith decreases, even resilience will decrease. And as resilience decreases— see, it's not about not facing anxiety in your life. It's a very natural process, and everybody feels anxiety or stress. The problem is not that we face stress. The problem is how we deal with it. Because stress is a beautiful thing as well. When we go to Disneyland When we go in the roller coasters, it is a stress-inducing activity, but, but that stress is a nice stress. I remember the first date I ever went on. I was so stressed physiologically. If you would, if you would have studied my heartbeat, if you would have studied my hormones, you would say, oh my God, this, this person is in stress. But it's one of the happiest memories of my life. And if a person starts to have an aversive relationship towards stress— and I don't want stress, so I'll just pop a pill that just switches off all my stress receptors— then I'll be numb through life. I'll be living life like a zombie. So stress is not evil, and it is not that our journey should be that we do not face stress or we eradicate it altogether. How do we deal with it? How do we deal with it? How do we deal with anxiety? How do deal with fear? Because even there's a book called The Gift of Fear that how even fear can be a great gift. It can make us more cautious, it can teach us about threat analysis. So you can't just say, you know, get rid of all these negative emotions. How do you deal with them? And resilience teaches us a very positive way of dealing with these perceived negative emotions. It teaches us how to empower ourselves with these emotions as they come in our life. So resilience is a way that allows us to evolve, be better, so that the same thing that stressed us in the past does not in the future. And evolution is a, is a birthright because Human beings are probably the only animals in the environment that do not need hundreds or thousands of years of natural selection to bring changes. We are the ones who can live a certain life and allow ourselves to evolve and adapt. No child is born Bruce Lee, no child is born Mike Tyson. If they are having such skills, if they are such specimens of human adaptabilities, because they've worked on themselves. It's not like, you know, 1,000 years of something happening where a bear becomes a red panda, or I think red panda is from another family tree, or a brown bear becomes a polar bear. It's not like suddenly we will start giving birth to Shaolin monks who just do backflips when they are born. It's human beings. We learn, we adapt, we evolve, and that can only happen if we have resilience. So that's why somebody asks me that what's the one skill that meditation can give us? And yes, peace is beautiful to hear, fashionable to say, I do meditation to be in peace. But for me, meditation is a superpower because it gives us resilience, and resilience is a superpower because it enhances and increases our capability to adapt and evolve. If we do not have resilience, we will not be able to adapt and evolve, and we will be stuck in a loop. And I think that is very sad for a human being to be stuck in a loop, because every human being thrives on being free. And freedom should be a birthright. And sometimes freedom is not just oppression that is outwardly It is oppression, bondage of our own thoughts and beliefs.
