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welcome to feel better live more bite -sized your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend.
In today's clip from episode 440, I'm joined by fellow physician, author, speaker and friend, the incredible Dr.
Gabor Mate. In this clip, we explore some of the common life regrets that people have at the end of their lives and gabble shares his thought -provoking insights the second regret i wish i hadn't worked so hard yeah that's an interesting one if i were to choose to live my life forever again i wouldn't
live it in this way i wish i hadn't worked so hard and what i wasn't aware of when i went to medical school and when i was a physician for decades is how driven i was to justify my existence in the world and to prove that I was important and worthwhile and so on.
And that had to do with the loss of those, that confidence owing to early childhood trauma.
When you're driven to work too hard, you actually ignore what matters.
And what matters is what you were telling me last night about how much it matters for you to spend time with your family.
So every summer you take a bunch of weeks away from your podcast and you just spend time enjoying your kids and your wife and your family.
And I didn't do that.
For me, it was very hard to even take holidays.
I always felt I had to keep working.
If somebody was pregnant, my God, what if I would miss their delivery?
Like the baby couldn't enter the world without me, you know?
So that drivenness is what makes people work too hard.
And so nobody says I wish I hadn't worked hard to achieve something in life.
if you have to work hard.
What makes you work too hard, and that's what these people are saying, is you're driven by something that you're not even aware of.
And that to part, the T -O -O part, comes from being driven by unconscious needs to validate your existence, where why should any human being have to validate their existence?
And so, it's not a matter of working hard.
It's a matter of working too hard.
And where does that come from?
Again, that comes from childhood trauma.
the fifth one is i wish i'd let myself be happier yeah what does that say well do you know winny the poo yeah okay not personally no no the book uh it's always one of my favorite books the end of that book would bring tears to my eyes for years because how it ends is christopher robin that little boy
now has to go to school and he's telling his friends the toy animals that he won't be able to play with them so much anymore and in the end christopher and money the bear a little brain uh who's the smartest of the whole lot and they walk off together and the book ends with the statement something like
and whatever they do wherever they go in the enchanted forest the little boy and his bear will always be playing together.
And that phrase would bring tears to my eyes for years.
Because play is so important.
And joy is so important.
And that's what these people are talking about.
And they didn't allow themselves to experience it.
They sacrificed the play and the joy for all these other things.
I believe what's being described in that last regret is people sacrifice their playfulness, their joyfulness for the sake of being accepted and being successful and all that.
It's a huge one. Play is built into our brains.
Kids play spontaneously.
Infants play. And in that sense, we can all be Winnie the Pooh and Christopher.
We can always keep playing in the Enchanted Forest.
And that's just essential, I think.
and that regret is the word happier yeah what does happiness mean to you really it means the capacity to play and to be in the present moment and and and and you know the kids when my kids play they're just playing in the moment they're fully present to themselves in imaginative almost hypnotically
imaginative states so happiness just means being in the present and being allowed to be no matter what to have the capacity to play yeah fourth regret i wish i stayed in touch with my friends yeah well what we're talking there is and it goes back to the others about working too hard you know for example
um what are they discussing there is the need for attachment, for connection, for belonging.
And what these people are saying is, I was too driven by whatever factors impelled me to ignore my personal relationships and to port my attention on things that ultimately don't matter.
My acquisition, my attainment, my achievement, rather than the heart -to -heart human contact with people that matter to me and again people are driven to be that way and when they look back on their life they regret it because nobody as it's often been said nobody ever on their deathbed regrets not going
to the office often enough but they do regret the heart connection that that they sacrificed one of my books when the body says no that's the title um and in the myth of normal there's a chapter called before the body says no where in your life are you not saying no but there's a no that wants to be
said but you're not saying it for the sake of pleasing others can you just consider that one because that simple issue of not saying no can play havoc with your health because if you're not saying no when they when you when you're wanting to say no you're actually suppressing yourself and then you're
taking on more stress and more burden yeah you seem to be someone who has this love of life this vigor this message you want to share you seem to be traveling all over the globe but a lot of 80 year olds are not doing that yeah right and the longevity space within medicine has really exploded over the last
few years people love talking about longevity right yes some people want to know how can i not necessarily live longer but be independent mobile vital as long as i live so health span versus lifespan yeah and i get that yeah but there's a lot of talk these days about extending lifespan living to 150
and beyond and all kinds of crazy stuff right and one of my fears is that in pursuit of living longer are we missing something about the beauty and the essence of what life really is life is finite the fact that it's finite is what makes it so beautiful yeah if we could live to 200 yeah would we have even
more of these regrets because we'd keep taking life for granted you know what i You're talking my language because to tell the truth, to coin a phrase, all this stuff about longevity bores me to death.
I just don't care. What really matters is what does this moment bring us or what can we bring to this moment.
Let the future take care of itself.
Like Jesus says, take no thought for tomorrow.
And I really think that this longevity movement is a sign of deep social anxiety.
And especially you get these rich people in California with their cryo technology of freezing the body, hoping that 100 years from now they'll be able to unfrozen and there'll be treatments for the...
It bores me, you know?
what really matters is for me is what makes life meaningful and active and engaged in the present moment and it's interesting in English we talk about growing older we could just say like you said earlier get older which is just a chronological progression or growing older implies that this growth is actually
possible. So in what sense can we actually grow?
And I think actually, we can actually grow into the present moment and growing in our appreciation for life and what matters and knowing what doesn't matter and growing in wisdom.
Indigenous cultures, they don't talk about elderly.
They talk about elders.
There's a huge difference.
So I think there's a natural reverence for age that senior cultures would respect and modern society kind of um dismisses you know now do i wish that my hair was blacker and more curly the way it used to be yeah i do you know and it wasn't gray and my hair wasn't thinning at the top and i sure i wish
that but at the same time I would not want to be as unconscious as I was yeah when my hair was blacker and curlier you know yeah we've been talking a lot about these regrets the regrets of the dying yeah and the final question I want to put to you is about the word regret i have been playing with the idea over
the last 12 months or so that regret is actually a form of perfectionism so i actually now very much subscribe to the philosophy of no regrets but not in the not in the kind of derogatory way you know i'm gonna live my life my way it doesn't matter who comes to my way yeah no with this really compassionate
understanding that I've always done the best that I can.
Yeah. Based upon where I was in life at that time.
Yeah. So even the things that I look back on and go, actually, you know what?
If I was in that situation again today, I would act differently.
I don't see them as regrets.
I see them as situations that happened that have taught me something, which is allowing me to be a better version of myself today.
Exactly. So in my life today, there's, there is no room for regret anymore and i guess i would love to know you know right at the end here what's your perspective on the word regret um i think um chronic regret is debilitating it's a lack of self -forgiveness it's um also kind of egotism of that that that somehow
i'm important um it's quite something to recognize i do recognize that some of the way i painted my kids the way i showed up i've often talked about this in your program too wasn't the best for them but it was the best i could do at the time so it's not the question of justify anything but it's also not dwelling
on the past regret is to dwell on the past and what's the point And it's quite something to recognize that I did things that had I known differently, I would not have done the same way.
That's just learning.
Regret is an emotional state that values the past more than the present.
and it um accusers yourself of doing things for which you had no consciousness to do otherwise so that's where i stand with you yeah okay well you know what a big fan i am off your work um for someone who has heard us speak today and something connected with them something you said spoke to them and they thought
wow yeah i don't express my emotions i'm not living a life that is true to me yeah what are some of your final words for them well it's the word that you used curiosity so not why am i living this way But why am I living this way?
What happened to me?
What am I carrying here?
So the key phrase is the necessity to be curious in a compassionate way.
So you don't do an interrogation of yourself like you're a prosecuting detective.
Why did you or why did you not?
But compassionately, why did you not?
Why did you? and if you ask these questions compassionately um and with curiosity the answers will emerge as well the capacity for you make yourself for you to make different choices as you move forward so where there wasn't choice before because you were compelled or or or driven now you can have some
freedom if you're willing to be curious so curiosity is the word yeah gabber you're now 80 years old yeah does it in some way change the way you see yourself or i guess reflect differently on who you are and where you are in your life on most days i can say this and not on every day for sure but it's
a kind of ease has entered my life even with all that's going on in the world i'm just sort of more i don't struggle with the the way things are so much.
I may like them or not like them.
I may react or not respond or, but there's not a struggle against just the beingness of things.
I'm certainly noticing that.
And people, I had a visitor a week ago who I hadn't seen for a few years, and she says, you've changed.
And I said, oh yeah.
She says you've become softer, you know?
And if that's true, it's it's good it's a sign of kind of loosening inside hope you enjoyed that bite -sized clip do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family and if you want more why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest if you enjoyed this episode
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