Vatas have angular features and scant facial hair. They use their hands a lot while they are talking. Their mind jumps around a lot as well, similar to behavior exhibited in ADHD. Vatas can see all angles of a situation because their mind blows in every direction, just like the wind. Using a gaming analogy, Vatas are mages/dynamic rogues.
Vatas have memories and mindsets that are like the wind as well. They get passionate easily. They are like a gust of wind — it blows hard in one direction and then dies down, only to switch direction rapidly. Their mind gets super excited about stuff, and then randomly dies down, so follow-through is very difficult since their interests change very quickly. They learn fast but it is harder to retain information because they forget quickly as well.
Since they get bored very easily and lack follow-through, doing as many things as they can is a viable strategy in life. They should juggle as many balls at the same time as they can without dropping a single one. A lot of gamers are very Vata.
When someone gets stuck, the most common advice given to them by people is to pick up one thing and just focus on that. That is very bad advice for a Vata. The reason a lot of Vatas get stuck is because they listen to advice that is for a brain with a different cognitive fingerprint than theirs. Their brain is not wired like that — it is somewhat ADHD. Therefore, they need to build a life that is somewhat ADHD. For example, one strategy would be to start a business, enroll in classes, find a job and start writing their book. They should dive right into it, and do as many things as they can. Finding the right balance takes time and practice.
Dr. K’s advice for gamers who are extremely Vata is to try to do more than one thing. They go back to video games because they get bored of doing just one thing. But if they have something else that is interesting and exciting that they can turn to instead of a video game, then they are going to do way better. If they only enroll for one class and get bored of it by the end of the first one, then they will pick up a video game (which has its particular addictive properties and is not easy to give up).
Video games are very satisfying to Vatas, especially if they play a lot of different video games. If you’re addicted to an MMO and the only thing that you did all the time was PvP, then you are not a Vata. A lot of people fall into MMOs very easily because MMO offer a variety of activities that engage their minds in different ways. If Vatas think about their life like an MMO, and structure it accordingly, then they will probably start to do better.
People with high Vata need to prepare themselves for when they eventually get bored. Being bored is completely fine — just move on to the next productive thing on your list. If Vatas structure their life to have a lot of variety, then their mind is going to be satisfied from it and it won’t need to turn to an MMO for variety.
Our society has a standard of maturity. Vatas come across as immature, because if you have stats for a mage, and if you try to do melee DPS, then you are going to be bad at it. You’re going to label yourself with being immature.
Immaturity is a label of “badness” — it means you are doing a suboptimal job at living life. Vata minds have certain strengths and weaknesses and until they structure their life to align with their stats, they are going to appear immature.
For example, Dr. K does a bunch of different things. Some colleagues of his are hardcore researchers — they are experts in one field. They have no idea how Dr. K can manage to do all the things that he does. They say that if they try to do all those things, they would be pretty bad at it. Dr. K feels the same way about their work — if he were to do the same thing day in and day out, he would be bad at it.
Vata (wind type) minds are dynamic, which means their mind is all over the place. They are also prone to ADHD and anxiety. They get very excited about one thing, and lose interest equally quickly. A lot of people say that their motivation comes and goes, and so they lack follow-through. They think that this is a problem to be fixed, and that is when they get stuck.
Vata motivators need to acknowledge that they will get excited about something, and then bored of it too. The solution is to rotate what they are working on. Instead of jumping from task 1 to task 2 to task 3 to task 4, and so on until task 12, what they can do is to rotate back to task 1 once they get bored of task 4.
While they can lose interest quickly, they can count on getting excited about things again. Additionally, from a daily perspective, they should do multiple things a day, and take frequent breaks. Vatas should have intense periods of studying with frequent breaks i.e. 30 mins to 1 hour periods and alternating topics.
For example, Dr. K is a clinician, streams three days a week, sees patients a couple of times a week, has meetings for Healthy Gamer, does research, and consulting. His schedule is all over the place.
Vatas should also be careful about anxiety. Since their mind is all over the place, they predict problems very easily, and these predictions can hamper their motivation. Meditation techniques like Alternate nostril breathing and Bellow’s Breath can help with this.
The simplest solution to Vata problems is to get your bowels moving regularly. If you’re constipated, fix that. The Vata dosha is characterized as being cold and dry, so you want to eat foods that are warm and moist. If you have an option between a soup or a salad, pick soup.
Vatas have weak digestion, so you want to cook foods before you eat them. If you think about a cooked carrot versus a raw carrot, both of them are very sweet, but a cooked carrot is much sweeter. This is because some of the process of digestion has already been done for you. Cooking breaks down the walls of the cellular structure of the carrot, so the sweetness is more available for you.