What's the problem with Reliances?
The problem with Reliances is that we are overly reliant on too many things in the outside world, which we cannot control.
And those Reliances, Chris, are tying us down.
So as a medical doctor, one of my main interests is how do you help people make changes that actually last?
Not changes for two or three weeks in January or maybe January, February, March, but actually long -term transformational changes.
And I realize that one of the reasons why people cannot or they struggle to make those long -term changes is because they're too reliant on too many things.
I'll give you an example, right?
So many people feel that they can only feel good and live the life that they want when everything around them goes right.
Okay. There's no traffic.
The emails are okay.
The coffee is given to you by your barista just the way you like it.
Okay. Your boss treats you nicely.
There's no traffic on the way home from work.
If those conditions are met, we can feel calm and satisfied, and we can get on with our life and make the choices that we want to make.
But if those conditions are not met, then actually we start to struggle.
We don't feel good in who we are.
And what I've realized, Chris, over 23 years now seeing patients is that usually the behaviors that we are trying to avoid or cut down on are there for a very good reason, and they're usually there to help us neutralize the internal discomfort that we feel.
So the reason I think that most people cannot or struggle to make changes that last is because they're not understanding the role that those behaviors play in their life.
They're too focused on the behavior, but I think we need to be focused on the energy behind the behavior.
How do you dig behind a behavior?
Given that it's quite hard to, we're not crystal balls to ourselves.
We don't know why we do the things we do all the time.
Yeah. It's not as hard as actually, it's not as hard as we might think, right?
Because let's take something super common and something that people are trying to reset their relationship all the time.
Let's say alcohol, for example, right?
So what I see a lot of in medicine is us trying to give public health advice to people saying, look, too much alcohol, frankly, a little bit of alcohol is probably not helping you that much.
And the way we'll try and facilitate changes by giving people more knowledge and more information, right?
You know, too much alcohol will damage your liver.
It's not good for your weight.
It's not good for your sleep architecture, whatever it might be.
And that can be helpful up to a point, but I submit that most people who are trying to cut back on alcohol or cut it out completely and you can substitute alcohol for sugar or online pornography or gambling or whatever you want, basically, it's a behavior.
What a lot of people who are trying to do that, they already know the damage that that is causing for them.
Not everyone, but a lot of them do.
What they're not understanding is why do they keep going to that behavior?
So instead of every January, for example, buying the new book on the alcohol detox or the sugar detox, anyone, Chris, can stop a behavior for three or four weeks and they think that they're getting somewhere.
But they're often not getting somewhere because that behavior was there for a reason.
So very simply, if you're drinking alcohol to manage the stress in your life, which many people do, then you can white knuckle it for four weeks and quit.
But usually you'll end up back to where you were unless one of two things has happened.
Either the stress in your life has to come down so you have less of a need, therefore, for the alcohol or you need to find an alternative behavior to alcohol to manage the stress.
When I put it like that, it sounds really, really simple and obvious, but I genuinely believe that when we think about behavior change, too much of it is about more and more external knowledge, right?
But I think what we all need is more internal knowledge.
And your first question, sweetie, was about reliances, right?
And I said about a lot of these everyday reliances that people have, which are tying them down.
In this new book, what I've done is go through some bigger picture reliances, right?
So chapter one, I think is one of the most important chapters I've ever written.
It's called Trust Yourself.
And I talk about this overreliance on experts, right?
So if I could just elaborate, I think it's a really interesting point.
You and me, Chris, we both host podcasts, right?
And we talk to a lot of experts, right?
And they give their advice.
Now, I don't know if you found this, Chris, but what I would find and I do find on my podcast is one week I could talk to, let's say, a medical doctor from Harvard Medical School, right?
So people say, you know, you must get your advice from experts.
But here's the problem in the modern world.
One week, let's say I talked to Chris Palmer from Harvard Medical School, which I have done.
Chris is great. And he will show evidence that a ketogenic diet can be incredibly helpful for some people with bipolar and other mental health problems, right?
He'll give you patient case studies and he'll give you published research to support what he's saying.
Two months later, I could talk to someone else.
Let's say Professor Felice Jaka from Australia, right?
And we can talk about her trial that showed a Mediterranean diet is really good for reversing depression, right?
And she'll present case studies and published research.
So what I would find often in my Instagram DMs is that my audience would say, hey, Dr.
Chastigy, I'm a little bit confused.
Chris Palmer said this, Felice Jaka said that.
They both sound really, really convincing.
I don't know which expert to trust.
Now, Chris, I believe in 2024 and 2025, that's the wrong question to be asking.
It's not which expert should I trust.
It's why do I no longer trust myself?
I think we have become overly reliant on external experts.
I'm not saying ignore external experts, but somewhere over the last few years, we've outsourced our inner expertise to these external experts.
So what I would say to people, and I've got 23 years of clinical experience behind me.
So this is real life experience with patients, not just published research.
Different things work for different people.
So I would say to people, listen, why don't you try what Chris Palmer is suggesting?
For example, for four weeks.
And in those four weeks, I want you to pay attention, pay attention to your energy.
Your sleep, your relationships, your focus, your concentration, your guts, your bloating, your bowels, pay attention, right?
And then for the next four weeks, try what the other experts saying and pay attention to those same things at the end of that eight week trial, you will actually start to know which of these diets feels right for me.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does. I mean, do you find it a difficult position to hold as a doctor writing a self -development book to say, don't trust the experts?
I think actually in some ways it makes what I'm saying even more powerful because I am a so -called expert, right?
So I'm a medical doctor, I've done my specialist exams, I've done my general practice exams, I've got an immunology degree.
I'm a professor at Chester Medical School.
Expertise. I've got the expertise, but I still would have to say, Chris, to you or any of your audience, I simply cannot know exactly what is the right approach for you.
I can give you frameworks and guidelines, but ultimately you have to determine what is the right approach for you.
Yes, we can help. I'm not saying ignore experts, Chris.
I'm saying I think the balance has shifted too far now and what's happened is when we basically think that the expert has the answer and I'm following their advice and I'm not feeling better, we never think they're the failure.
That's interesting.
We think we're the failure and we're struggling and actually we're not good enough and it makes us feel inferior.
And in that chance of there's a case study of, you know, a real life case study of a patient who came to see me once, she was very, very interested in health.
She would listen to health podcasts and read all the health books.
And she had heard a gut health expert say that you should aim to have 30 different plant foods in a week, because that will help you have a healthy gut microbiome.
So she's trying to follow that in her life and she feels awful every time she tries to follow it, OK?
And then she tries to go slowly and introduced really, really gradually.
She's getting bloated, she's getting constipated, she can't sleep properly.
She comes in to see me and says, Dr.
Chashy, I'm trying my best here, right?
I know that I need to have these 30 different plant foods for a healthy gut microbiome, but I just don't feel good.
And what I said to her, Chris, was, listen, I'm not criticising the advice that you read online at all.
I'm simply saying that no one piece of health advice holds true for every single person.
Would you like me to help you figure out what is the right approach for you?
It only took us about six weeks.
And for her, at that point in her life, Chris, she went on to a more low -carb type of diet with five to 10 different plant foods a week and she's rocking, she's thriving, she's got energy, her sleep's good, she's got a flat stomach, she's not bloated.
That was the right approach for her.
And why I'm so passionate about this idea, Chris, is that we're now living in this era where we're drowning in information.
And for all the good intentions about putting this information out there that you have and that I have and many people have, one of the things that we've neglected along the way, I think, is that an individual, I think on a core level, knows when they're on the right approach for them.
That's what I've seen in 23 years, I've seen patients, Chris, I've seen that actually somewhere along the line, the people who can make changes that truly last in the long term, at some point they've tuned in to themselves and gone, actually, you know what, dog, I know you said that, but actually I
feel better when I'm eating in this way.
There's this interesting Jeff Bezos quote where he says, when the data doesn't agree with the anecdote, I usually trust the anecdote.
The point being that, I've had this in my mind for a while, if you can't explain the mechanism of how something works, the fact that it works is derogated quite quickly.
It's like, look, that's not the particular way that this thing's supposed to occur.
And you go, that's fine, but this person's outcome is exactly what they were looking for in life.
If they lost weight or they improved their mood or the lift went up in the gym or whatever it might be.
That is the thing that you're trying to achieve.
I don't think we need to overcomplicate what the inputs are and we get so caught up on that.
It's interesting, this sort of treating yourself like an experiment approach, you know, holding the strategies that you use quite loosely, being prepared to move after you've had them either proven or disproven.
That seems like a good approach, but yeah, I mean, you know, health advice is pretty confusing, I think, in the modern world, more information than ever, but even less clarity.
Well, more health information than ever before and worsening health outcomes, right?
When I was sitting down for the last two and a half years writing this book, Chris, I was thinking on one level, it doesn't make sense.
More health podcasts, more health books, more health blogs, more online articles about health, yet at the same time, worse physical health outcomes, worse mental health outcomes.
I thought, what is this?
More knowledge, everyone says knowledge is power, we need more knowledge.
And the case I make in this book that I'm very passionate about that I don't believe has been made enough is that it's not just external knowledge we need, we need more internal knowledge.
What is that? Internal knowledge is insight, it's self -awareness, it's tuning into yourself.
There's, I'm sure you may have covered this before on your show, introception, you know, the ability to sense your own body's signals.
We know full well, there's so many research papers now on introception, it's almost like our sixth sense.
There's a study that was done with autistic individuals who had anxiety, and if they were trained to be able to sense their heartbeats and feel their heartbeats, they could actually get remission from their anxiety more than people who couldn't.
People who've had substance abuse with drugs and alcohol, if they have mindfulness training which allows them to feel their internal sensations and their signals, it reduces the rate of relapse, reduces the rate of depression, improves how they feel about themselves, right?
So this is, I sometimes wonder, Chris, why I have this approach to health that I do, because it's not similar to most doctors, right?
I think the way I look at health and I think there's a few things that have influenced the way I see the world.
One is my upbringing.
You know, I am the child of Indian immigrants to the UK, so my dad came in 1962 to the UK in search of a better life, and I grew up with this clash of cultures, right, at home, this Indian upbringing, where we very much see food as medicine, where if I have a cold or a sore throat, Mum is putting extra turmeric
in my food or making me hot ginger and honey and turmeric and saying, you have to drink that before you go to school.
And then at school, I was getting this more, you know, Western mindset, and I think that clash really comes when you get to medical school, where it is very much about what does the research trials show.
I'm not against science at all.
I think science is wonderful, but what I've realised over the past few years is actually what a lot of these traditional healing modalities like traditional Indian medicine, Ayurvedic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine had, which we don't so much have in Western medicine, is a real appreciation of the individual.
The individual, every individual is different.
They all need a slightly different approach, but the model we get taught, Chris, is what does the randomised control trials say, OK?
So, very simplistically, let's give 100 people this treatment and 100 people don't get the treatment.
On average, does it work or not?
And if enough people benefit, we say, yes, on average, this is a statistically significant finding.
This treatment works.
But the problem is, if you go under the hood there, you will find that even in the group where it wasn't statistically significant, some people still got better.
Right? So it doesn't account for the individual.
And I think this is why I'm so passionate about this idea, because science is great to help inform us, right?
But you may not be the person who was in that randomised control trial.
And going back to what you said, Chris, it's about outcomes.
What are we looking for?
We're not, you know, one thing we do get taught very well at in Western medical schools is we're not treating biomarkers, we're not treating blood levels.
We're treating a human being, a patient.
So going back to that patient I mentioned, as you said, what does she want?
She wants energy, she wants vitality, she wants good sleep.
Whether she's having five plant foods a week or 30 plant foods a week is actually irrelevant in terms of the goals that she wants.
Yeah, Rory Sutherland said yesterday, to economists, prices are number, but to customers prices are feeling.
And it's basically the same thing with medicine, right, that you can show me where this appears, show me the RCT on this, show me the double blind, whatever.
And you go, I don't have that, but I do have, I felt better when I did such and such.
And as a practising doctor for so many years, Chris, I can tell you the only thing that has ever mattered to me is helping the person in front of me get better.
And often I've helped people get better, not by using what the RCT said, because for me, medicine is an art and science, right?
Talk to me about the problems with perfectionism.
Well, it kind of plays in to what we're talking about, actually, in some ways.
So perfectionism is on the rise.
We know that from the 1980s, a lot of us think it's from social media.
Social media has definitely made it worse, but we actually know it was happening before that, this idea that actually we can be perfect, right?
And I think it's because of all these cultural myths that we have around us, the billboard image, what we might see on social media.
We think actually that attaining what we think these people have is possible.
But perfectionism is toxic.
It is literally one of the most toxic things that you can suffer from.
And I have had it for most of my life.
Until very recently, I would say I had quite serious perfectionist tendencies, which I think affected me in so many different ways.
We know that perfectionism is associated with all kinds of mental health problems, including suicide.
So this is a serious, serious issue.
But perfectionism makes you feel less than, right?
Often we are comparing the worst version of ourselves with the best version of somebody else.
And when we feel less than, we compensate with our behaviors.
This is why this matters to me, Chris.
So everything in Make Change at Last is this idea that every single person is capable of making meaningful change in their life.
I know that to be true.
I have seen it time and time again.
I have seen patients in the darkest places with suicidal thoughts and I've helped them turn their life around.
So I know that it's possible for every single person.
But in order to do that, we have to understand ourselves.
We have to understand that our behaviors follow our beliefs.
So if you have perfectionistic beliefs, that it is possible to be perfect, you will find that when you fall short, as you inevitably will, because none of us are perfect, we don't feel good.
And that's what drives us to the pornography, to the gambling, to the sugar, to the alcohol.
Those things are a consequence.
They're not the cause of the issue, they're a symptom of the problem.
So I think perfectionism is massive.
And, you know, it's something I've heard you talk about before and I write about, at length is in Chapter 2, which is the chapter title that's called Give Up Your Heroes.
I used to really put my heroes on a pedestal, Chris.
I don't know if you did as a kid or not.
I certainly did. And I don't know if one could admit this these days or not, but, you know, I started that chapter saying that when I was 14, I can remember a group in the northwest of England on my wall.
I had a life sized flag of John Bon Jovi.
Okay. Yeah. Okay. I don't know what that means from your facial expression.
I just wonder why you went so wrong.
Okay. Well, we could, we could talk about musical taste, maybe off the mic after.
Not musical taste, just in the career choice.
You had to flourish.
You've got the hair.
You had a flourishing career as an Indian Bon Jovi.
I don't know why I ended up.
I know, writing books and fixing people's health.
But why that's interesting and why I chose to open that chapter with that story is because I can see now very clearly how that kind of hero worship has been problematic for me.
Right. So I thought as a 14 year old boy, wow, God, if I could be John Bon Jovi, my life would be perfect, right?
Touring the world, screaming fans, writing killer album after killer album, if you like that sort of thing at the time.
Right? Whatever your choice might be.
But somewhere along the line, I believe that it was possible and many of us believe that perfectionism is possible.
I think it's got so much worse now with social media where we see these avatars online.
They're not real. Taylor Swift, our impression of Taylor Swift is not real.
Yes, she is real. She exists.
But actually what we've shown about her is carefully curated by a marketing machine.
I'm not having to go at them for doing that.
It is a business, right?
I'm not criticizing Taylor Swift.
If you love Taylor Swift and you like going to a concert, that is great.
But many of us are growing up with the belief that that is possible and it's not possible, right?
If I've learned as an adult over the last years, Chris, I'm 47 now.
And I think, wow, if I was John Bon Jovi, what would it have been genuinely like being on the road for 300 days a year?
What was it like for your wife?
What's it like for your children growing up?
What was it like sleeping on a tour bus with sweaty crew night after night?
Like genuinely, because I think I said to you just before we got on the mics, Chris, I'm in such a great place these days.
Like honestly, I've never felt this good.
Like I feel really, I feel grounded.
I feel calm. I feel that I've managed to come to a point where I get what's truly important for me, not for anyone else, but for me what's changed.
What's changed is I've cut a lot of these reliances that were tying me down that I talk about in this book, right?
Bit by bit, I've gone through the process of cutting them.
This reliance on perfection, realizing, no, perfect is a myth wrong and you cannot achieve perfect.
It's not possible, right?
So get really clear on what your priorities are this week.
Everything in life has a consequence, right?
Now this is something I truly get these days, Chris, in a way that I never got before.
We make choices in life and those choices have consequences.
Too often, we only think about the upside of our choices and not the downsides.
And so I think last time I came on your show a few years ago, I mentioned this little happiness exercise that I've used with patients for years.
I use myself, which is this very simple, write your own happy ending exercise where you imagine yourself on your deathbed and you imagine looking back on your life.
What are the three things I will want to have done in my life?
And for me, the last time I did that, it was I want to spend quality time with my friends and family.
I will want to have had time to actually pursue my passions.
And thirdly, I will want to have done something that has improved the lives of other people.
I genuinely think if I was on my deathbed now, those are the three things I will want.
Now, I can't say that for sure because I'm not there, but I'm imagining.
And then the second part of the exercise is you come back to the present where you then pick three happiness habits, right?
So what are three things I would need to do each week?
My happiness habits that will guarantee or pretty much guarantee I get the happy ending that I just defined that I want.
So for me, and I don't think it's changed in the last year and a half or so, it's literally, and I have it on my fridge at home because I want to be visually triggered by it every day so I don't get caught up in what I might be able to achieve or what I might be able to do.
I have, I put down on my list.
Can I have five meals each week with my wife and kids while I'm fully present and not thinking about work?
It's an arbitrary number that works for me.
It may not work for someone else, but it works for me, right?
Secondly, if I had time to play my guitar, write a song or go for a long run each week, then I know I found time to pursue my passions.
And thirdly, if I release an episode of my podcast each week, which I've been doing for seven years now, I will be doing something each week to improve the lives of others.
It's such a simple exercise, Chris.
But I tell you in a world where we have infinite things competing for our attention and we often think that we'll only do the important things when everything in our life is done and everything in our life is never done these days, it forces me in a really beautiful way to focus on these are my top
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Just going back to the perfectionism thing, regret.
Obviously people are going to do things.
We get toward the end of our lives.
We grow up, we accumulate regret.
Do you think regrets are a form of perfectionism in that way?
If only I could have threaded the needle perfectly.
If only I could have danced through this minefield without triggering one of them.
Yeah. This is one of my favorite sections in the book.
This is one of the latest editions before I submitted it.
Is this idea that regret is a form of perfectionism, right?
And I wanted to talk about this with you today because I've just seen your blog from Australia on YouTube, right?
And you're on stage and I don't know if this is still your viewing up, but my recollection of what I saw was that you said on stage or certainly the bit in the blog was about this idea that we choose our regrets.
So can I present my perspective, which I see it a little bit differently than that.
I think it is possible to live a life of no regrets.
I really do. I don't think we necessarily have to choose our regrets.
The definition of regrets is when we look back on something with sadness or disappointment, this idea that we could have done something differently.
I used to look back on many of my past experiences with guilt and shame.
And I think that's what regret can do, because the reason I say that regrets are a form of perfectionism is because at its core is this idea that I could have made perfect decisions.
It was possible and I'm a failure because I didn't.
The problem with that kind of thinking is that it keeps us trapped into the past and it leads to guilt and shame.
And it says in making changes that last, it won't allow you to do that because you keep beating yourself up in your mind over the things that you wish you'd done differently.
Now, you can live a life of no regrets in two different ways, right?
You can live it, and I'm not suggesting people do this in a way where it's like, yeah, screw everyone else.
It's my life, I'm going to be myself, do what I do and I'm going to put it with the consequences.
Now, when I say you can live a life of no regrets, I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about it a slightly different way, which is I can look back on my past and I can learn from past experiences.
I can choose to believe, which I do.
It's a choice. You don't have to believe this, but I would argue that your life is much happier and calmer if you choose to believe this.
I choose to believe that I was always doing the best that I could based on the information I had at the time.
If I choose to adopt that belief, then there's no room for regret.
I was making the best decision I could and now with hindsight, I go, yeah, you know what?
If I'm faced with that situation again, I can act differently and I will act differently because now I know better.
I will do better, but I couldn't have done better back then.
And in terms of your question before, Chris, why is it that at this stage of my life I feel so good?
One of the reasons, there's many.
One of the reasons is because I no longer have any regrets.
Every single one of my past experiences has led to me being the person I am today.
Without any of those experiences, I wouldn't be in the same person.
I'm informed by all of those things.
So I very much do look at my past, but I use it as a way of learning about myself.
I think the other way, well, I'll come see the other way in a minute.
What you said in that video that you think you have to choose your regrets.
I'm presenting a slightly different perspective, I think.
What's your take on that?
Yes, I like the idea that it's very equanimous to think I did the best that I could.
With the information that was available at the time that I made that decision, I can't go back and change it.
There's no, there's no usefulness to me having that.
I think maybe regret this sort of sadness or wistfulness or nostalgia, wishing that things had been different.
Perhaps that was a slightly imprecise bit of language that I used.
What I'm trying to refer to is that you will always have this open loop in the back of your mind that you wonder whether things could have been better.
Whether or not you could have done something just a little bit better or whether that was the right decision, new job or a relationship.
Or go to the gym or go to the theme park or whatever it is that you should have done.
Because opportunity cost demands that you do one thing to sacrifice another.
And because you don't get to run life back and split test it, work out if the theme park was better than the gym or the gym was better than the theme park.
You're always going to have that what if in the back of your mind.
So for me, this was a way for people maybe to arrive at probably not too dissimilar of a situation as yourself, which is, look, some degree of wistful uncertainty about the past is inevitable.
Holding on to it is pointless because you don't get to do two of those.
You don't get to run it back again.
And when you're faced with the decision, when you think, am I going to which route am I going to go down?
Consider which regret you could bear living with as opposed to which one you couldn't bear, which decision you couldn't bear living without.
Yeah, no, I like that.
I really like that.
I think this is really interesting topic.
The other way of looking at it, Chris, is, you know, at 47 now, am I going to really regret things I did in my 20s in the sense that I was a different person then.
But I'm a different person today than I was 12 months ago.
So am I going to now judge my 20 year old self through the lens of hopefully a wiser man who's become a father, who has much more experience in the world?
It seems a little unfair to judge my younger, the younger version of me.
Through my current lens.
Look at how lacking you are, a person that had two decades less of experience.
Exactly. So it's a choice.
I love the thought that.
The way we believe, the beliefs we hold about the world, Chris.
It is a choice, right?
We can choose them.
That's something I've been really playing around with recently in my head, is this idea that life is a set of experiences and it's the story we put onto those experiences that ultimately determines the quality of our life.
And what I didn't realize until a few years ago is that I get to choose that story.
That narrative, that comes down to me.
And that was taught to me on a very, very deep level by an Auschwitz survivor, Edith Eger, who I think I've spoken to you about before.
This incredible lady who, when I spoke to her at 93 years old and then again at 97, she was an Auschwitz when she was 16 and she said so many things to me, Chris, which I've shared before, so I won't go through it all again.
But in essence, she was able to reframe her whole experience in Auschwitz through the power of her mind.
So when she was dancing for the senior prison guards as a 16 year old young lady after her parents were murdered, she said to me, I wasn't dancing in Auschwitz, Dr.
Chastig. In my mind, I was in Budapest Opera House dancing with a beautiful dress on in front of a full orchestra.
She said, whilst I was in Auschwitz, Dr.
Chastig, I started to see the prison guards as the prisoners.
I was free in my mind.
They weren't living their life.
And the final words, Chris, she said, which probably is one of the main reasons why I feel so content, and Edith and her teachings are in this book like they were in my last one, she said, wrong and listen, I have lived in Auschwitz and I can tell you the greatest prison you will ever live inside is the prison you
create inside your own minds.
And I tell you, Chris, there are some conversations, as you know, as a podcast host, where you're not the same person afterwards.
That was one of those for me where pre that conversation and post that conversation, I wasn't the same person.
The penny dropped for me in that moment.
I was like, oh, my God, I get it.
We're all putting ourselves in mental prison every day, by the way we interact with the world.
People don't realize that let's make it really, really granular, let's take it away from Auschwitz or something maybe a bit more relatable for someone.
People don't realize that you're driving to work in your car and someone cuts you up on the road.
You have a choice in how you respond.
You may not think you have a choice, but you do.
If you decide to go, as I used to do, so I'm not judging, but everything has a consequence, if you decide to react like a stupid driver, they need to get their eyes checked, they shouldn't be on the road, they're a menace, whatever it might be, and you start screaming at them when they can't even hear
you, A, you're not changing the situation, but B, what you have done, and this really relates to the scene of making change that lasts, you have generated emotional stress inside your body.
And again, this is again, for me, is one of the missing pieces in the health conversation online.
Emotional stress is not neutral.
You have to neutralize it in some way or another.
Now, there are a variety of ways in which you can do that.
So you could neutralize that emotional stress with a workout in the gym or a walk around the block.
Or when you get to work, you will neutralize it by going to the vending machine and pulling out a chocolate bar, having another coffee with sugar in, having an extra glass of wine or a beer at lunch, whatever it might be.
Those behaviors are there to neutralize the emotional stress that you generated by the way you interacted with that moment.
You can also, and it's not that difficult, it just takes a bit of practice.
You can also choose in that moment to not interact like that and go, well, I can just let that go.
Like I said before about regrets, I choose to believe, it's a choice, that I've always done the best that I could with the information that was available to me and where I was in my life at that time.
I also choose to believe that about other people.
So therefore, I train myself now.
It took me a few months and years.
Now I do it in the moment.
It's default. But I had to consciously do it initially, where it's like, oh, what's going on with that other person?
What might be going on with that other person?
Oh, well, maybe it's a dad whose daughter was sick last night and they were up all night and now they're rushing to work.
Maybe it's a mother who's been late for work three times in the past two weeks and she's worried she's going to lose her job if she's late again.
The truth of the situation, Chris, for your well -being and your ability to make changes, doesn't actually matter.
It's the way you frame the situation.
Because in that moment, then you're not generating the emotional stress.
You're feeling internally calm and therefore you have lesser the need to engage in these unhelpful behaviors that were only there to neutralise the stress that you generated by the way you responded.
How do you ensure that you're not just telling yourself a pleasant just so story?
Because it sounds all well, something bad happens.
And I say, that didn't bother me.
And yet my heart rates at 110.
Yeah, that's a good point.
So. What I spoke before about introception and the importance of trusting ourselves.
One thing I didn't say, which I write about in that chapter right at the end, is I say, listen, I believe that although most of us are different and we've got unique lives and we need slightly different approaches, I believe that the most important daily practice that any one of us can do in the 21st
century is a daily practice of solitude.
I want to say solitude, I'm simply talking about time with yourself.
If you get up and the first thing you do is start consuming from the outside, whether it's news, whether it's social media, even if it's good quality information, you've lost an opportunity to listen to yourself, right?
Our body is always sending us signals and in this world of content and information, I think many of us are never getting that time to listen to ourselves.
So the only way you get to know if you're telling yourself a nice story and kidding yourself is by sitting with yourself every day, only for five or ten minutes if that's all you've got.
But that could be, it could be meditation, it could be breath work, it could be some yoga moves, it could literally be having a cup of coffee and not also scrolling Instagram and email at the same time.
It could be going to the toilet without taking a smartphone with you, something that many people find revolutionary.
Seriously, but it is the truth is, Chris, it really is for people because these little micro moments where you allowed your own thoughts to come up are being eroded out of life.
So I'm not putting all the blame on smartphones, right?
Ultimately, it's just a tool.
It's our relationship with the tool that determines the impact they have on us.
But if you practice sitting with yourself, it doesn't have to be in the morning.
I happen to think the morning is the best time for most people.
You will start to know when your heart rate is going up.
You will start to know when you're telling yourself, Ibs.
I mean, one thing I do every morning, Chris, well, there's a couple of things I do.
One of the things I do is a breath hold work meditation practice that I learned from, do you know the Move .net founder, Uman Lekor?
No. Natural movement guy.
He's been promoting natural movement for years.
About two years ago, I did his new breath work course online.
And it was twice a week for four weeks.
And it was probably one of the most life changing practices I've done for me personally.
And I remember because I was on a book tour, as it happened at the time.
I just arrived in Stockholm and I got to my hotel room.
I was running a bit late for the course and I got there and it was online.
And the first thing you asked us, and there was maybe about 12 of us on this Zoom together, said, all right, what I want to do is take a full breath in as much as you can.
And then time. How long you can hold it for?
And I did about 60 seconds, something like that.
OK, that was your benchmark.
Just to be really clear, this is nothing like Wim Hof and the hyperventilation before, and there's nothing like that.
It's purely take a breath and hold.
There's nothing to prepare your body for.
Within four weeks, Chris, I went from one minute to four minutes and 20 seconds.
And it's not like the Wim Hof, where you hyperventilate to blow off carbon outside first, which allows you to hold your breath for longer.
In fact, Erwin would say that's akin to doing cold immersion with a wet suit on.
That's his words, not mine.
But it was really powerful, Chris.
I'll tell you why it was so powerful.
Because I learnt that it was all to do with your mind.
My CO2, carbon dioxide tolerance, did not change that much in four weeks to go from one minute to four minutes and 20 seconds.
My physiology did not change that quickly.
What that caused taught me is that when you think you need to breathe, so you're lying there in silence and your body is screaming for you to breathe, if you can quieten your mind, if you can quieten the thoughts, which you can do, you can go for another minute.
All of those thoughts, all of those things that are going around your mind, any tension you have in your body, it's bleeding energy.
I think that that's the way that free divers often pass out under water.
They don't gasp and breathe air in.
They just are going and going and going and then lights out.
Yeah. So again, I wasn't doing this near water.
He wasn't proposing anyone was doing it near water.
But why I shared that is because this is a practice that I do each morning.
Right? It's not about the breath hold.
It's about knowing.
When your body is literally screaming for you to take a breath, which is probably one of the most primal things your body can say to you.
In that moment, I've learned I still got control over my mind and I can go longer, which basically means most things in life become quite trivial in comparison.
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You mentioned, uh, morning routines and stuff like that.
What is your perspective on non -negotiables now?
I don't believe in non -negotiables anymore.
You negotiated the non -negotiables away.
Well, I, we've spoken about perfectionism, right?
So let me try and draw a connection between this and perfectionism.
As a perfectionist in recovery, I don't believe that this idea of non -negotiables is helpful to me.
Because again, a non -negotiable implies that I will not negotiate on this.
I will always do this.
For me, there's hints of perfectionism there.
Right? Because everything in life is negotiable, Chris, everything.
Nothing is a non -negotiable.
So I could tell you, for example, though, um, I'm a calm, peaceful person, which I am, and I will never be violent.
Right? That's a non -negotiable for me, always going to be peaceful.
Well, hold on a minute.
What if I was out with my two children and someone was trying to attack them and threaten us?
My non -negotiable suddenly becomes negotiable.
I could quite easily believe in that moment I could become violent.
If it was to protect my two children who I love with all my hearts, yeah, I probably would.
That may seem quite extreme, but I love going to extremes, Chris, because I think it's in the extremes where you learn the veracity and the truth about a concept.
Edith Eager in Auschwitz at the extreme, she was living in hell.
And even in hell, she could reframe her experience using her mind.
I used that in my life to go, Hey, Rongan, you're struggling to reframe what that driver did or that email that someone sent you.
You know what, Rongan?
Edith could reframe stuff in Auschwitz.
You can probably reframe this in your life, right?
I use it as inspiration for me, not to beat me up to inspire me.
And so why non -negotiables, for me, can be a problematic concept?
I think, I've also got to be clear, Chris, different concepts land for different people in a different way, depending on where they are in life.
Right? So let's say you're struggling with your health and you're feeling lost.
You're feeling lonely.
You don't know how you're going to get any motivation to move forward in your life.
A non -negotiable might actually be really good for you, where you go, no, actually, every day I'm going to wake up.
I'm going to do that five minute workout and I'm going to go and have a cold shower for 30 seconds.
And by not missing for three months, you literally change your identity and how you view yourself.
But I've been through that process.
I'm in a different stage of my life now, where a non -negotiable to me ends up beating myself up in my head.
I'll give you an example of how that played out for me.
I actually find behavior change quite easy these days.
And I believe that one of the central ideas in this book is that effortless change is possible when you get to the root, but we're not getting to the root.
Right? So, I can imagine four years ago on New Year's Day, I would wake up and be like, right, that's it, Chatterjee.
You are nailing meditation this year.
Right? You've seen the studies, lower stress, lower anxiety, can increase the matter in your brain, the brain function.
Right. That is it. This year it's happening.
And I would nail it 20 minutes a day, first week, second week.
I wouldn't miss a day.
Let's say the third week of January.
Oh my God, Chris. I would beat myself up in my head.
Oh, you just couldn't do it, could you, this year?
Right? You know it's important.
You couldn't do it.
That was my pattern, right?
And so that was a non -negotiable for me, which meant that when I missed it, because I said it was a non -negotiable in my head, I felt less than, I felt bad.
I felt guilt. I felt shame.
It plays into perfectionism, which means I stopped doing it.
Right. I'm like, oh God, I'll try again next year.
This all or nothing type approach.
Whereas now I have a much kinder relationship with myself.
I don't have that negative inner voice anymore, unless I'm really, really stressed and sleep deprived, which again, it's a signal for me to go, oh wow, and he's stopped looking after myself.
Whereas now I do meditate most mornings, but if I miss, I'm like, oh, I'll go and I miss today.
I'm actually a better human being.
When I do meditate, I'm more focused, I'm more present with the people around me.
Actually tomorrow, I'm going to start meditating again.
It's a much healthier relationship with that behavior.
For me, it's a balance between discipline and compassion.
And Chris, another idea that I've been thinking a lot about, because I think a lot about behavior change, you know, 80 to 90 % of what doctors today see is in some way related to our collective modern lifestyles.
I'm not putting blame on people, Chris, when I say that.
I'm just saying the way we live, the food environments, our sedentary jobs, the chronic stress, the rates of burnout, sleep deprivation, the environmental toxins, whatever it might be, it's causing us to be sick.
And one thing I've realized, Chris, I really think this holds true in every situation.
It's not the behavior.
It's the energy behind the behavior.
And I actually genuinely believe that every single behavior either comes from the energy of fear or the energy of love.
Now that may sound really spiritual and I haven't becoming more spiritual as I get older, but I think too, you know, although you're in America now, or though you live in America now, you're still a Brit by birth, right?
Like me. Adopted. Right?
So this idea of love and that we can love ourselves is quite an alien concept, I think, in the UK.
We don't like to say that, but I can on this mic in front of you today say, although I still struggle to say it, right?
I was going to initially say, look, I really quite like myself, but dare I say I love myself, not in a narcissistic way.
Like I'm clear on what my values are.
My three core values are integrity, curiosity, and compassion.
Those are the three values I believe represent who I am and who I would like to be.
So I regularly assess in the evenings, maybe on a Sunday, you know, how much of this week, Rangan, were you in alignment with your values?
When did you behave?
When did you not behave, for example?
And when you get to that point, you find that everything within you is quite aligned, so behaviour change becomes quite easy because when I used to struggle with behaviour change, it was because the behaviours were coming from an energy of fear.
So what does that mean?
Guilt, shame, I'm not good enough.
What do most people do in January or whenever they're trying to make change?
They're trying to overcome the person who they think that they are.
Like a lot of the time in January, they're beating themselves up, Chris.
They're like, I'm not good enough.
My stomach is not flat enough.
I'm not enough. Let me beat myself up with my behaviours to overcome that.
That works for a few weeks.
It might work for a few months, but in my clinical experience, it never works in the long term.
At some point, that energy has to change.
Where you actually quite like yourself, you're doing it not because you're trying to avoid something, because you're trying to get towards something.
Actually, I want to have a stronger body.
I want to have a clearer mind.
I feel that it's the way I can become a better human, I can be a better father when I look after myself.
And again, going back to your earlier question, Chris, what is it about me now at 47, where I feel the sense of calm?
I think for me, becoming a father has been a huge part of that.
My son is 14, so I've been a dad now for almost 15 years.
And again, I want to acknowledge not everyone needs to have a child to see this.
A lot of people are choosing not to have children for a variety of reasons.
Hey, I'm OK with all of that.
For me personally, it's been transformative.
You know, suddenly having kids, you just can't be as me focused anymore.
You'd realize there's more to you than just you and your experience.
There's other people who depend on you.
So going back to perfectionism, let me sort of connect the kids and me as a dad to my perfectionist tendencies.
We look at these people, these heroes, we put them on pedestals.
You'll have people, Chris, in your audience who are putting you on pedestals, who are putting you on a pedestal.
They're like, Oh my God, Chris is an amazing podcast host.
They're too smart to put me on a pedestal.
But I reckon some will be, mate.
Right. And the reason why I think this is problematic, and I suspect you would agree with this, is because they're seeing one aspect of your life.
They're seeing you on the mic.
They're seeing your vlog when you're crushing it in Australia.
Unless you're showing this, and maybe I haven't seen this on your platforms, they're not seeing the mornings when you wake up absolutely shattered.
When you think I've got 12 podcasts to do in five days in London, why did I sign it for so many?
What is the consequence on you, your well -being, your relationships from doing that?
Now, I'm not here criticising or judging, I'm just simply saying if people want to be you, they can't have one aspect to you.
They need the whole aspect.
You can't just be one percent Chris Williamson, you have to be 100 percent Chris Williamson.
No one wants to be that, never go full Chris Williamson.
Do you get what I'm saying?
I do. It's something that I've spoken about for a long time.
The fact that you don't get to pick parts of people's lives, you have to take the whole.
George Mack has this great idea, the difference between call of duty and war, says you look at a lot of people's lives and you assume that that's what you get to do, but you're just watching them in the lobby of call of duty, dicking about, then they actually, you get and see their life and it's IEDs
and it's dust and it's like reloading weapons and it's like, it's war.
It's not fun. And for the most part, I think, yeah, we try to curate what we put out because we don't want to be a buzzkill because we don't want to come across as somebody that isn't enjoying their lives.
But yeah, I think, you know, we spoke about this last time.
I'm kind of interested in this line that you've hinted at a couple of times, which is sort of between busyness and success.
The sort of lineage between the two and the sort of need that we have to feel important and how a busy calendar can sort of be a hedge against existential loneliness.
What have you come to believe about busyness and success?
Let me just respond to what you just said, and I will come to that, I promise.
You can't just take that one aspect, like I mentioned about John Bon Jovi, like you've dismentioned, right?
You can't be Tiger Woods and just take the 15 majors without the painkiller addiction, without the public humiliation, right?
You can't. You can't take the 28 Olympic gold medals that Michael Phelps has without the depression and the suicide attempts.
You can't take Johnny Wilkinson's World Cup medal without the 10 years of pain that followed that, right?
So many of these heroes have paid a huge cost to get where they are, huge cost.
And we often just look at the upside and not the downside.
And that's where that write your own happy ending exercise I think can be so useful.
It sounds simple. Oh, just a little, what, a little three question exercise?
Yeah, just a little three question exercise.
These things can help us reframe our lives in quite a huge way.
Now, you mentioned busyness, right?
And chapter eight is all about business and this idea that business is success.
And the reliance, because everything in this book is about a reliance we have, right?
So I believe business comes from our reliance on feeling important.
So both you and I have spoken to Will Store before on our podcast, author of many great books, but The Status Game, it's a really good book that Will wrote.
And in that book, he makes the case that status is a universal driver in all humans.
But status is not the amount of YouTube followers.
You've got the amounts of Instagram followers.
You've got your celebrity status.
Will makes the case that status actually is that feeling that we are of value to other people.
Right? And I think it is what drives us all.
Now, I think many of us now in the 21st century are living these disconnected lives.
We've moved away from our communities, our tribes, the people that know us, the people that knew us, and we might have moved away for work opportunity.
Right? Which is fantastic.
But there's a consequence.
Sometimes we just don't feel a value in the old hunter -gatherer tribes.
You would know your value.
You were either, you know, you were the forager.
You were the hunter.
There was something that you were providing to the people around you.
This is probably one of the main reasons why people who follow religious practices, not are religious, but people who follow religious practices are happier and healthier than those who don't, because a lot of those religious practices, depending on which religion you're talking about, are about doing
things for others, showing you to be a value to others.
But I think we have a value deficiency in the modern world, where we don't know that we're a value to others.
So some of the way we get that is by overworking and pushing ourselves really, really hard, because then you can say, yeah, I am important.
You know, I have this reliance on feeding important.
And now I think that reliance, that over -reliance, I should say, is pushing many people beyond what they can cope with, and it's making them sick.
This is why this matters so much to me, Chris.
I have seen time and time again over the years in clinical practice people who thought they could keep pushing.
Nothing will happen to them.
They can keep pushing.
They're the superheroes, right?
Until they get hit with the autoimmune illness and they wish...
Man, I didn't need to do this.
I wish I'd stopped earlier.
Why do autoimmune illnesses come for people that push themselves too much?
OK, well, there's many theories on autoimmune illness.
The theory that makes the most sense to me is from Dr.
Asselio Fisano from Harvard.
And basically, he says there are three criteria that someone needs to get an autoimmune illness.
Genetic susceptibility.
Increased intestinal permeability and an environmental stressor.
Right, I'll explain what that means.
So you need to have the gene...
If you don't have the genes for an autoimmune illness, you're not going to get it.
OK, but that's not enough.
You need it, but it's not sufficient in and of itself.
You also need something that's called increased intestinal permeability.
Colloquially it's called leaky guts.
Basically when... You know, our guts are all a bit leaky, but when it actually becomes problematic.
OK, in essence, is a simplified way of saying that.
But even with those two things, according to his theory, you won't get it.
You need a third thing, an environmental stressor.
So for someone with celiac disease, for example, which is a allergy to gluten, that would be consuming gluten.
That would be the environmental stressor.
But a very common one for many people is stress.
Right? I would see my practice for many years, Chris, autoimmune illness.
I used to really enjoy seeing...
When I say enjoy, as a doctor, I was fascinated by the development of autoimmune illness and what you could do with your lifestyle to alleviate things, right?
So I would see a lot of it in my practice.
I would say in over 95 % of cases, in the six months preceding the diagnosis, there was heavy, heavy stress in that person's life.
Work stress, bereavement, losing your house, losing your job, something which might have been the final trigger.
And there's loads of case studies in the book where I share people who already had enough and they pushed past it for more.
I genuinely believe that the biggest disease in society these days, Chris, is the disease of more.
More money, more followers, more downloads, more, more, more is going to make us happy.
And the phrase that I think about a lot is from the Tao Te Ching.
It's one of my favourite quotes that I reflect on.
A lot of the time, I was on the train down from the northwest this morning.
I'm thinking about it.
True wealth is knowing what is enough.
I think that's the million dollar question for so many of us, Chris.
What is enough? Like, at what point do you have enough?
Why I feel so happy and content these days is because I have got very clear that I have enough.
I really do. Right?
So I've got a wife who loves me.
I've just passed 17 years of marriage last week and we're as happy as we've ever been.
I've got two kids who I love and who love me and want to spend time with me.
Right? I've got a job that I love and that provides me and my family a great quality of life.
I'm winning. Right?
And this may interest you, Chris.
Two years ago, my son at the time was 12 and I can't remember, so we can.
I was maybe uploading something to YouTube or looking at something related to my podcast.
Right? And I don't know how we got onto this topic.
But I remember saying to him something like, I said, oh, son, you know what?
I've heard from people, if I go to two episodes a week, you forex the show.
Right? Or something, maybe it's three years ago and you released two episodes a week, three episodes a week, you know what I'm talking about.
So he said, well, daddy, why don't you do that?
You know, the show will be even bigger and more successful than it already is.
And I said, hey, son, listen, if I go from one episode to two episodes a week, you know there's weekends where we play football in the garden or we go for a walk or we sit and play cards or we go on bike rides together.
I probably won't be around to do those things because I'll be in the studio recording intros, recording outros, whatever it might be.
Right? So I've had to get real clarity because as you remember from last time we spoke, Chris, you may remember I used to be very competitive.
But that came from a feeling of lack.
Because as a kid, as I explained to you last time, I took on the belief that I was only loved when I was top of the class and I got full marks.
That was nobody's fault.
I'm not blaming anyone.
My parents were immigrants to the UK.
Their way of having their kids not face the problems that they had was by pushing you to be a straight A student and become a doctor because then you won't have any problems in life.
I took on the belief as a young boy that I'm only loved when I'm top dog.
Right? But then you go into the world where you're now competing with eight billion people.
That's a very toxic belief system.
Right? And I'm no longer competitive because being competitive, Chris, was not who I was.
It was who I became in response to my upbringing.
And now that I understand that and I've done the work and there's loads of practices in this book that will help people with that.
I'm not competitive anymore.
It never was who I was.
So, I can, for example, look at my life and go, hey, Rongar, you know what?
I'm doing great. Right.
If you had told me ten years ago that Rongar, you're going to have five Sunday times bestsellers, you're going to be happily married, you're going to have two kids that love you, you're going to have a top ten podcast in the UK, the most listened to health podcast in Europe, right?
If you're going to have those things, I wouldn't have believed you, Chris.
But I have all those things and it's very easy.
I could look at you.
I could look at other people who are, you know, and I'm not saying this in a bad way.
I'm saying it genuinely in an honest way and go, oh, you know, be good to do that.
Or go to two a week or go to three a week.
And I'm like, oh, wait a minute.
It's the unmeasurables in life is where the goal is.
It's the unmeasurables, Chris.
I've really, really got that in my head.
The most important things in life I don't believe can be measured by society's metrics.
So I can't give you a number.
I can't give you an official measurement of how happy my wife and I are.
I can't give you a number like I can with my Instagram followers or podcast downloads that tells you what joy I get from my children.
And the reason why I keep coming back to the Dow to Gin quotes, True Weathers Knowing What is Enough, is the reason we keep pushing is that so many people and I've had patients who already had enough and they keep thinking that more is what they need.
Hey, we're all individuals.
We've all got to find this truth on our own, on our own path.
But I have pushed really hard in the past.
I don't want to do it anymore.
Like I feel like I'm winning.
I've got a job that I love.
I've got a family that I love.
I'm in great health.
Like, do you know what I mean, Chris?
I mean, you know, the sacrifices that you make in order to get to the place that you want to be is, and it's an interesting one to think about what you need to do in the beginning.
You're right. If somebody has 200 pounds to lose, having some non -negotiables might not be too bad of an idea, but if you're a little bit further down your journey, you're still whipping yourself into submission.
Even though you're already performing at a pretty high level.
Why did you put all of that working in the first place?
Was it not so that you can actually enjoy this a little bit?
Was it not so that you could be happy?
And I think that, you know, maybe this is part of the sort of phases of podcasting generally or whatever you want to call it, personal development information on the internet, that lots of people were probably first introduced to this type of content about 10 years ago, within sort of five to 10 years
ago. And there's this huge, big generation of people that have moved through it.
And I do get the sense that the work until your eyes bleed, optimize every second of your life thing is getting a little old.
Now, I've certainly found for myself that I'm less sort of compelled by that.
I'm much more compelled by trying to find balance, by trying to find enjoyment in the things that I do by optimizing for fun as opposed to just success.
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How do you find balance Chris, because from where I'm sitting here and you know that I think you're a wonderful podcast.
It's not you need that validation from me, right?
But I do. I think the way you conduct your shows is full of integrity and I really like the presence that you bring to these conversations.
But from the outside I'm like you're doing a lot right?
I've sent it this year.
Yeah, that's one way to put it.
Look I. But you may be aware that you're making a trade off at the moment.
I certainly am and you know at the moment no family no kids, etc.
That's not always going to be the case.
So I have in many ways a competitive advantage and other people do too.
That if you don't have that many responsibilities then perhaps you can.
We had a lot of questions at the Q &A's the live shows I did in Australia and some in London as well.
You know I'm 22 and I really want to achieve a lot in the world.
But I also know that sort of life balance and all the rest.
I'm like bro you can aim for life balance when you like in your 30s.
Fucking end some worlds for a decade.
Like go and see how much chaos you can create and see how fast you can grow and see how much stuff you can do.
And maybe not everybody is built for that.
Maybe you can say well you could front load all of the enjoyment early on.
I don't know. But for me I am actively prioritizing trying to make life more enjoyable and trying to have as much fun as I can as consistently as I can at the moment.
Trying to find ways to swim down stream instead of upstream.
The dangerous quest not for you I would say not because you're not asking me for advice and I don't give unsolicited advice.
I certainly try not to these days.
The danger of what I see and I've seen in patience is that we think this is just for a short period of time.
Right. So back in my 20s a friend of my friends was a banker in London.
He goes I'm just going to crush it in my 20s.
I'm going to go and hit it hard.
Do what I need to do.
Make enough money where I can then chill out in my 30s and 40s and 50s.
He's still there now at 47 you know overworking.
He's got loads of money but his relationship with his wife is on the rocks.
His kids don't want to spend time with him.
It's a cliche. Why do people not let go?
Why? Well, I think it's for a couple of reasons.
I think this overreliance on feeling important.
If you if you get that value only from your work and you've neglected the other things in your life, whether consciously or unconsciously, that will keep pulling you.
Right. Because you want to feel we all want to feel that we're a value to people.
I think sometimes we don't take stock of our life.
You know, I think, you know, there's a strategy in your 20s that may work but that may not work in your 30s and you have to constantly reevaluate and go, is the strategy that I was using still working for me?
That's what I do regularly.
You know, that write your own happy ending exercise, the three death bed questions, the three current present day questions.
That's a regular reflection activity.
Another question I ask myself every morning, I do three questions each morning with my morning coffee.
What is one thing I deeply appreciate about my life?
Very simple question of gratitude, which has a lot of science to back it up.
Okay, so that takes me a minute to answer that.
The question I really like is the second one.
What is the most important thing I have to do today?
And that question, it helps you cut through all the noise of your to -do list and it makes you choose what is the most important thing I have to do today?
And it's such a deceptively powerful question because like I said before, Chris, so often we only do the important things in life when everything else is done but everything else is never done.
So that question makes you choose one priority, right?
I don't know if you know this, I think Greg McEwen told me this for the first time that when the word priority came into the English language in the 1500s, it was only singular.
Yeah, priorities didn't exist.
Didn't exist. But now we've got I've got 20 priorities today.
Well, that's probably why you're overly stressed and busy.
You know, a standard a week for me, like the week before I went to America, I went recently.
I remember the week before then on the Monday, because my flight I think was on the Thursday, on the Monday, I put down because this book is coming out, I had an article to submit to Penguin.
So that morning it was the most important thing I have to do is complete that article and send it to Penguin.
It doesn't mean my relationship with my wife and my children wasn't important that day or my other work commitments, but I decided in the morning, that's a win today.
If I get that done, today's a win.
Tuesday was, you know what, I'm going to be away for two weeks.
My wife is just awake the weekend.
When the kids are in bed tonight, the most important thing I do is spend some quality time with my wife.
OK, on the Wednesday, I remember very clearly what I put down because I'm going away.
Not only because I'm going away, but what I felt like putting down there was I'm working from home today.
When my children come in at 430 from school today, the most important thing I have to do today is make sure my laptop is closed and my phone is in another room so that I'm fully present to what they have to tell me.
Because these things may sound really simple.
I can guarantee to anyone who's listening or watching right now, if all you do is answer that question each day for the next seven days, I guarantee your experience of life will change for the better in the next seven days.
Do it for 30 days, your life will feel different because that'll be you specifying 30 important things and doing those 30 important things.
And the sense of achievement and inner well -being and self -esteem that you build from doing stuff like that is so powerful because we have a negativity bias.
So our brain is always drawn to what we didn't do.
I didn't get that email done.
I didn't prepare properly for that podcast guest who's coming tomorrow, whatever it might be.
This goes on. This is the most important thing and I'm going to make sure I get this done today.
Again, I love simple things that don't cost any money because I've worked, Chris, for years in all kinds of practices.
I've worked in affluent areas, but I've also worked in very socially deprived areas.
And I, hand on heart, I believe that every single person should have access to quality information that helps them.
I said where possible, you know, because I live in this online health and wellness space and people will say, oh, this health and wellness world, it's for the middle classes.
It's for people who can afford all the fancy stuff.
Right. I was just in LA and Austin and LA must be like, and of course it was because of the people I was hanging out with on the podcast I was going on.
But, you know, if you live in LA or certainly where I was, it feels like sauna and cold plunge and red light is the norm.
But it's not the norm for most people around the world.
Nothing wrong with those things at all.
That can be absolutely very beneficial, but I'm always thinking, great, for people who can, no problem.
But how do you give health information to people who don't have the means, who maybe can't afford those things or don't have a cold plunge in their back garden.
Right. I also really, really want to help them.
And I'm one of the proudest things that I have for this book, Chris, is that every single thing I've recommended is free of charge.
Right. So it means everyone can basically apply it no matter who they are or where they live.
Can you talk to me about this relationship between taking offense and our health?
Man, this is my, probably my favorite chapter after chapter one is chapter five, which is called Take Less Offense.
Right. I'll tell you the opening story in there, because I think it really illustrates this concept well.
I remember when the news of the George Floyd death went around the world.
Okay. And I was in the UK.
It was in the middle of a psychologically taxing lockdown.
Whatever people's views are on lockdowns, no matter what your view is, these were challenging times for people.
Right. And everyone's feeling quite stressed because of the state of the world and everything's shut and everything's closed down.
And I'm very clear that I have a public profile to help people with their health, their happiness, and their well -being.
So I don't comment on certain things in general.
People want you to comment on everything, but I'm very clear on what my public profile is about.
I try and talk about things I have expertise and experience in, and I try not to talk about things that I think I can do.
I don't. But that did really affect me for evocative reasons.
And I spent two or three days thinking about it.
I accept I'm not an American, so I don't, I didn't grow up with this history of the race issues that have been there in America.
Right. I'm putting that all out on the table.
But I am from an immigrant family and, you know, there's been elements of discrimination that my family have faced in the past.
So I put out a post on Instagram.
A carefully thought out post where I explained that the imp, you know, I explained, you know, some of my thoughts, but then I explained the impact that racism can have.
Right. And I shared an example when my wife, so my wife is born and brought up in the UK like me, but of an Indian background like me.
I shared an experience that she had as a kid where she was living in North Manchester.
And basically one afternoon at the weekends, the BMP, the British National Party, threw a brick through their window.
So she's a young girl watching telly and a brick comes through the window.
That is a traumatic experience.
Right. And I shared that.
And what's really interesting is that most people were very supportive of the post and were happy that I had added my voice to what seemed like a very important cultural conversation at the time.
But there was quite a few Chris who took offense to what I had written and they were saying, you know, shame on me.
This is not an Asian issue, Dr.
Chatterjee. This is a black issue.
You have no right to comment or explain this at this time.
And initially I was like, have I done something wrong here?
You know what it's like now with the PC state, the world.
Have I done something wrong?
And I thought about it.
I thought this is ridiculous.
I haven't signed up to any code of conduct anywhere that determines how I should or should not respond.
To the killing of a man by a police officer 3000 miles away.
I'm fully entitled to respond how I see fit in a way that is compassionate, that is kind, that is full of integrity.
I'm fully entitled to, but a few people, quite a few people took offense to what I had written.
I thought this is really interesting, really, really interesting.
People are taking offense and I think this problem is just out of control now, Chris.
People are walking around, taking offense to everything that they see online and it's a problem.
Right. It's a real problem.
And I'm going to explain the relationship to our health and our behaviors.
When you take offense to something, usually you are generating that emotional stress inside you.
I can't believe they posted that.
They were so out of order for posting that.
You're working yourself up, right?
So, you're no longer calm inside.
You've elevated your sympathetic nervous system.
You've elevated the levels of stress and emotional stress in your body.
And you will need to neutralize that emotional stress in some way.
You will have to, it doesn't just dissipate, right?
And you can do it in helpful ways, you can do it in unhelpful ways.
So, for many people, the way that they do it, as I've already mentioned, is alcohol, sugar, pornography, gambling, three hours doom scrolling.
Right. This is why this sort of stuff matters to me.
I want to help people change their behaviors.
Yes, we can talk to them about sugar and alcohol, but what I think makes this book, I think, quite unique is this more philosophical approach to health and behaviors than we typically get.
If you're someone who is regularly taking offense, you are generating unnecessary emotional stress in yourself.
I did this for years, Chris, so I'm not judging.
I know what that feels like, but when you don't, right, because there's a certain amount of arrogance that is needed to take offense, and I'll tell you what I mean by that, right?
If you're taking offense to certain things, on some level, you're saying that person should think the same as me, right?
They have no right to think differently to me.
And in a world of 8 billion people, how can it possibly be, Chris, that everyone is going to agree with you?
They are not. At a point which I think a lot of people don't realize is that nothing is inherently offensive.
It cannot be. Why not?
If the thing was inherently offensive, it means every single person interacting with the thing would take offense.
But if they don't, it means it's not the thing that is offensive.
It's something within you that's being lit by that thing.
Once you get that, you get life, because you understand that instead of blaming other people for our internal responses, you own it.
You go, actually, no, no, this is something.
Why does that comment bother me so much?
What is it inside of me that is being lit by that?
You can apply the same thing to criticism, Chris, right?
It's hard for me to get out podcast host mode, because I really want to ask you questions even though it's your show, right?
So I do want to, I'd love to know your relationship with criticism, that whenever you face it on YouTube or on Instagram or wherever, because you can't have a successful show like this and not get criticism, it's simply not possible.
What I've learnt over the years, people used to say to me when I first started in the public eye, like 10 years ago, oh, you need to just grow a thick skin.
I don't necessarily agree with that, I don't think it's about a thick skin.
I think criticism can be really, really powerful if you use it in the right way.
Now, criticism can be a tool for learning.
You can go, wow, yeah, they've got a point there.
If you're not getting triggered and you get caught up in the emotions, you can step back and go, is there any truth to this person's criticism?
Like I've had that before, I put out a post on Instagram and maybe there's been a criticism and sometimes I'm like, actually, you know what, they've got a point.
Next time I bring up that topic, I could maybe take a little bit more care and caveat that a bit better than I did, right?
So you can learn something or you can go, actually, no, I'm OK with what I did.
This says more about them and their state of mind.
I would say the big thing, Chris, I've learnt is that criticism only bothers us to the extent we believe it about ourselves.
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In some ways, I would say that we're social creatures and a lot of what we're doing is.
Image management, optics management, reputation management, and that means that a untrue and knowingly untrue and knowingly untrue to you, accusation from somebody that you fear could be believed by other people, I think that's a salient thing to get angry about, even if you don't believe it yourself.
Got it. So that's that's I think that's that's a great point.
So I'm not saying when I say take less offense, when I say that criticism only bothers you to the extent with which you believe it about yourself, which I do believe to be true, generally.
I'm not saying that that makes what the other person said or did OK, right?
Someone can say something horrible, right?
I don't need to take offense to it.
So let's say let's use the example you just mentioned.
Someone has gone on your wall, let's say, and says something that is completely untrue about you that can damage your reputation.
I would submit that by you not taking offense, by learning to keep your emotional cool, you're going to be much better able to handle that situation and deal with it.
That's the key. It's a difference.
It doesn't mean you don't want to get that comment removed, perhaps.
It doesn't mean, let's take it away from a high profile influencer like you that people may or may not be able to relate to, right?
Let's say you got an email from your boss at 4pm that has really pissed you off, right?
How dare my boss write to me like that, you know, and undervalue the work that I've done.
Now, first of all, the first thing you have done to sound is that you will see the wall through the state of your nervous system.
So, had you got that email at 9am, you may not have interpreted it in the same way as at 4pm.
It's the same email, but you are different.
Your nervous system is different.
You may be tired, maybe didn't take a lunch break.
So, you may start to interpret a threat there where there was no threat, right?
But let's assume it wasn't a nice email.
If you train yourself to not get offended by that and just take a breath and go, OK, that's interesting.
I wonder why my boss sent that.
I wonder what's going on for them?
That's really unusual.
I come so valued normally by this company.
What on earth is going on?
If you start to interact with a situation like that, rather than thinking, I have every right to be pissed off and annoyed and have another coke now, and phone my friends to moan about it.
I've been there. I've done all that.
I'm simply saying, look, people can act in the way that they want.
I'm just another human being trying to share my experience with the world, right?
If people want to act like that, they can.
I'm just saying in my experience, there's a consequence of doing that.
You are not going to see the situation clearly for what it is.
You're going to be less able to change it.
Whereas if at 4 p .m.
you can have that calm, you know, this is really unusual.
What's going on? Are they sick?
Are they under pressure from their boss?
You're better able to send a calm email back that evening or the following morning.
Say, hey, listen, can we have a meeting?
At the meeting, you can say, hey, listen, you know, that email felt really rushed.
You know, when I read it, I actually felt as though I was undervalued at the company.
I'm not sure if that was your intention or not.
You could have a much more productive relationship with that situation if you don't walk around getting triggered by everything.
Does that make sense, Chris?
Because that's the point I'm trying to make.
There's a subtle difference there.
I'm not saying we're saying that that behavior is OK.
I'm saying, if you want to change that behavior, you're going to be much better at changing that behavior if you can stay internally calm.
And all you have to do is practice.
I believe that. Yeah, I like that.
It's interesting, the line between taking offense and complaining in life, the great British pastime that it is.
And I love an insight from you, which is complaining indicates that you're surprised at sort of the natural order of life.
I've got this Thomas Sowell quote, like fucking tattooed on the inside of my eyelids at the moment, there are no solutions, only trade -offs.
And yeah, the fact that a complaint for the most part is you railing against the fact that you haven't been able to fully optimize life and that you didn't expect it to be smooth sailing.
There are never to be going to be obstacles and things for you to navigate around and issues.
That is the natural order of your day -to -day experience.
Your complaint is you just saying, look, life again.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm really glad you picked that out of the book because it's one of my, it's one of my favorite, I'm not saying they're all my favorite, this is such a personal book, like it's literally my template of how I got to this place and why I feel so passionate about these ideas.
And one of the chapters is literally about this, you know, it's called expected versity and the reliance is a reliance on things never going wrong.
And I think many of us subconsciously hold that.
We're surprised when one day there's traffic.
Well, if you're driving up, there's going to be traffic, right?
We're surprised if you're a parent, I don't know you're not yet, but many parents or some parents were sometimes on the way to picking up their kids, will nip into the supermarket to get food for dinner on the way.
Well, you know what?
Sometimes there is going to be an elderly lady having a natter with a checkout assistant.
That is going to happen.
But if you in that moment get really frustrated and annoyed, you are rebelling against the natural order of life.
Now, there are things you can do about this and I want to share an exercise in a minute that I do that's been really helpful, but another way to look at this, I mean, I don't know if this is an extreme example.
It's an example I use in the book, right?
But I think it's quite powerful.
Current statistics say that a UK doctor will be sued on average four times over the course of a 40 year career.
Right? It doesn't matter how good you are.
If you see enough patience, you are going to get sued.
If you drive enough times, you're going to be involved in a crash, right?
It's going to happen.
It's not a matter of if, it's when.
So a really close friend of mine a few years ago, this is quite an extreme situation, but I think it illustrates the point.
There was a missed case of a cancer diagnosis that had nothing to do with my friends, but she got dragged into this complaint.
And of course, the family have every right to make a complaint, right?
Because it's a very emotive issue as serious consequences.
She got dragged in.
And for two years, her life was hell.
She was drinking to excess most night.
She was getting smashed at the weekend.
She was really, really struggling.
Now, it's always going to be hard to deal with a complaint like that, but if you look at it another way, it was going to happen at one point and you can train yourself to expect adversity.
That is quite a hard situation to do it in.
I acknowledge. But if you look at the stats, it is going to happen.
Look at it through the lens of business, right?
I don't know. Have you heard of the term of shrinkage?
Yeah. So my understanding of the term shrinkage from business is that it's kind of when businesses account for the stuff that's going to happen that they don't want, but they know is going to happen.
So, for example, a supermarket knows that with their best intentions, people are going to shoplift and some food is going to go off.
That's factored into their business model.
And I think from memory that UK businesses last year factored in shrinkage to the level of 11 billion pounds.
Right. It's a big thing, shrinkage.
But, you know, the UK supermarkets and the US ones are not surprised when it happens.
They know it's going to happen.
So they factor it in.
You are going to have adverse events in your life.
So you've got to factor it in.
You've got to not be surprised when it happens.
Now, there's an exercise you can do that I write about, which I talk about complaining, right, ask yourself.
And it's a really great thing for people to do.
You know, ask yourself how many times in a day do you complain?
Right. Because a complaint is, in essence, you getting surprised by the natural order of life.
Things are going to happen that you don't want.
Right. So you can do two things though.
And this is one thing I did for many years, Chris.
You turn the complaint into an action.
If you can do something about it.
And if you can't, you turn it into a moment of gratitude.
Right. So turning it into an action means you stop acting like a victim and turning it into a moment of gratitude stops you thinking like a victim.
You go, OK, this is going to happen.
This is how I'm going to handle it.
And I'll tell you something that happened to me about six months ago, Chris.
Right. So I still live in the town where I grew up in the northwest of England.
And for much of my life, I've had elderly parent caring responsibilities.
So my mum now isn't so well.
She has care every day.
And I live five minutes away.
Now, mum for many years has had an emergency alarm around her neck if she was to fall a few years ago.
No, this is actually, this was last year.
Was it last year or the year before?
It was in the last six to 18 months.
Right. This happened.
I was asleep at night in my house and the phone ran, picked it up.
And it was the emergency lady saying, Hey, look, your mum's pulled her trigger.
She's on the floor.
She can't get up. Can you go around and help her?
So I'm half asleep.
I'm in my pajamas, I get into my car, drive around to mum's, who's only five minutes away.
I go into the house, can't remember what time it is, but it's maybe 10, 10, 30 p .m.
Something like that.
And I help mum. I check she's OK.
I get her back into bed.
I get settled when I'm happy that things are settled and that she's safe at home.
I think, OK, all right, mum, I'll come check on you in the morning.
I go to mum's drive.
I get my car. I reverse out straight into the car that was parked in the street opposite mum's drive.
Just straight into it.
The older version of Rongan who hadn't been practicing these concepts, the older version of Rongan who didn't expect adversity would have done this.
And I submit, Chris, that many people listening, dare I say it, most people listening, unless they're your enlightened audience, who know not to do these things, would have done something like this.
Oh, my God. Typical.
I've got all this stuff to deal with.
Words are crazy at the moment.
I've had to go and sort this out with mum and now I've got to phone up the insurance and get all this stuff sorted.
Right. That is a very common response, but that response has a consequence, Chris.
The consequence of that is that you feel pissed off.
You feel annoyed. You're likely to consume more rubbish the next day.
You really are. I've seen this with patients over and over again because that's a consequence.
It's a downstream behavior based upon your emotional state.
What I did in the moment, and I was really proud of myself, I thought, wow, Rongan, maybe this stuff is working with you because I did it in the moment.
I was like, oh, well, Rongan, if you're going to keep coming around half asleep to pick mum up off the floor, it was bound to happen at some point.
No one's hurt. You're not hurt and I've got insurance.
That one way that I reacted with the same incident has multiple knock on effects, right?
I'm not trying to compensate anymore with my behaviors.
I'm not putting the guilt and the self pity, oh, poor me, I've got all this to do.
Every decision you make, every thought you have, it has a consequence.
And these ideas I'm trying to put forward in this book, I really believe Chris will be life changing for people because they don't realize so many people.
You can train this stuff out of yourself.
You don't have to keep reacting like this for the rest of your life.
And going back to Edith Eager for a moment, the reason why Edith has such a profound impact on me, Chris, I've already mentioned some of the reasons, but a practice that I would do for years.
I don't do anymore because I don't need to, but I did need to, right?
In the evening, it was when my kids were in bed.
I'd sit down in my kitchen and I'd go, okay, where did you get emotionally triggered today?
And I started putting the blame on the other person who I could say has triggered me.
I could own it and go, no, no, no.
Someone else might have done something, but you chose to get triggered.
When I say chose, it was you.
It was something within you that was lit up by that.
What was it? Oh, it's because it reminded me of something that my parents said when I was a kid.
Oh, this kind of hit on a little insecurity I have about myself or whatever it might be.
I would argue that that is the most important and powerful exercise I've ever done because what happens is you become a black belt in yourself, Chris.
Instead of blaming the world around you, these dependencies, reliance, instead of being reliant on everyone around you being a certain way and acting a certain way so that I can feel good, I don't know.
I don't want to be a puppet on a string where people around me and things that I've got no control of can blow me around.
No, I'm going to own it.
Right. Now, people will bring up trauma here, right?
Chris, we will say, yeah, what about people who have been heavily traumatized?
Don't they need therapy?
Sometimes it's a trauma response.
Yes, I agree. Trauma therapy can be really, really helpful.
But the round here is a lot of people cannot access trauma for a variety of reasons.
Availability, cost, access.
These are very common reasons why people cannot access therapy and again, I want to empower people instead of going, oh, well, there's nothing I can do because I can't get it.
I'm like, wait a minute.
Yes, you've been traumatized.
Yes, that was a horrible experience, but these practices are still going to help you.
They're still going to help you.
Dr. Rongan Chatterjee, ladies and gentlemen, Rongan, I appreciate the heck out of you.
Where should people go?
They want to keep up to date with everything that you're doing.
Well, the new book's called Make Change That Lasts, available in all the usual places as a paperback e -book and I'm narrating the audio book.
If people can put up with this voice anymore, they can hear the whole thing on an audio book.
But I also direct them to my podcast Feel Best of Live More.
It's been going for seven years now and like you, Chris, I try and have meaningful, authentic conversations so people like it, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, all the usual places.
Thank you, thank you, man.
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