Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #198 BITESIZE | Why We Need Friends to Thrive | Dhru Purohit

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

Life can be busy, and it’s easy to forget to make time to catch up with friends– but spending time with your friends is more important than you think. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 80 of the podcast with my good friend and fellow podcast host Dhru Purohit. In this clip, he explains why our friendships are so important, and why we need deep connections to others to truly thrive. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/80 Thanks to our sponsor http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 80 of the podcast with my good friend and fellow podcast host, Drew Parahit. Now in this clip, Drew explains why our friendships are so important and why we need deep connections with others in order to truly thrive. I think you have got a really beautiful way of talking about friendship. You've got a lot of actionable ways for people to think about friendship and how they can start to improve

those relationships. Why are you so passionate about friendship? I mean, it's a good question. I ask myself this a lot and my friends ask me like, why are you so passionate about friendship? Why do you write about it? Why do you talk about this? And I say that I'm so passionate fundamentally, because when I would give people advice, whether they would come to me about business advice, health advice, any sort of challenge in life, I saw that the fundamental theme of how people navigate the world is the sense of tribe that they're surrounded on. Friendships, connections, deep, meaningful relationships, they impact every aspect of our life from our health to our happiness. Every area of our life is touched by friendships, but just like stress, because it's not always obvious, it goes overlooked.

Most people don't realize that they have a friendship and a disconnection problem. We have people around us. We have friends online. There's people that we're following. We're not isolated. We're not in the woods somewhere living in a cabin by ourself, not seeing anybody. So most people don't even recognize that there's a challenge when it comes to deep, meaningful, connected friendships in their life and the impact that it has on everything else that they care about. For thousands of years, no human being could actually really survive on their own without a community, a village, friends, individuals that had their back. You couldn't fetch water, chop wood, make a housing, hunt. It was very difficult to do things

on your own that way. And that's where human beings are so reliant on one another compared to, let's say, solo animals. Over the years, what's happened is that as we've gone away from the villages into cities and our modern lifestyle and jobs and technology that we have now, the interesting thing that's happened is that today, we are not reliant on other people that we know for our daily survival. We're still relying on other individuals. For instance, we're recording this podcast in our studio over here. Somebody out there somewhere is keeping these lights on. Somebody made our food this morning that we had at the cafe that we went to, but we don't have connection to those individuals. We can actually, if you wanted to, a human being, especially in a major

city in the Western part of the world, could go an entire few weeks without seeing another human being interacting with somebody that they need to know. They can order food on their phone through an app and have it delivered to them. They could watch Netflix. They could do all their job and computer work by themselves. We're not relying on other people for our daily survival, right? So that's the first thing. But I would argue that actually, if you want to thrive, just because we're not relying on people that we know for our daily survival, the basics, shelter, housing, food, I actually would argue that if you want to thrive in life, if you have big dreams and goals that you want to give attention to, if you want to feel love and deeply connected to the people in your world, if you're going through a challenging time in your life, maybe you're a new parent for the first time, if you're starting a business and

you want to create something incredible, the bigger your goals and dreams are, the more you actually need deep, meaningful friendships around you to support you in that process. So we went from this time period in history where we were relying on each other for survival. Now we actually don't really need each other for survival necessarily. People that we know, intimately know friendships, but in a way people are a little confused. They're confused because, hey, I'm living, I'm doing my job, I'm driving to work, I'm getting through the day. And you can almost forget that you're missing out on something. What's the value of sitting down at in the morning, going to coffee with a friend and saying, you know what? I've had a really tough week and this is what's on my mind. And even if that friend doesn't give you advice,

just them listening profoundly lets your nervous system know that you are not alone. And that's why I'm raising the alarm when it comes to having us check in and saying, just because you're surviving doesn't mean necessarily that you're thriving in your life. Yeah. I mean, so powerful. And I guess what you're saying is for most of our evolution, having a tight-knit community, having really good friends was essential. It was critical. You wouldn't be able to thrive. You wouldn't be able to survive without it. So it's gone from being critical. It's now been optional. But if we don't start having a conversation about why it's important and how to start

integrating these deep connections and friendships and community into our life, we will start to suffer from the results of missing out. And Rangan, if I could tell you one other thing, there's a book, it's called The Five Regrets of the Dying. And it's written by this author, Bronnie Ware, who is a palliative care nurse from Australia. And in taking care of hundreds of patients in the course of her work who were near the end of their life, you start to see that people open up and share their biggest regrets that they went through.

And she started writing these regrets down with the permission of these individuals that she was taking care of. And she found there was a common theme. There was these five regrets that kept showing up regularly for these patients that were at the end of their life. And one of the top regrets that was so fascinating, and I see people read the book and they always are so surprised, but it makes sense retroactively. One of the top regrets in these top five was, I wish I kept in better touch with these golden friendships that I had over the years and didn't get so busy that I just let them go. Imagine that that's one of the top five regrets on people's death then. It's so important to be reminded of that because we all fall into the busy trap. We're all getting bombarded with things to do and demands and just all kinds of things. We all know how busy the

modern world is for many of us. And that is remarkable to think that that is one of the top regrets. And I think I can, I'm sure that people will be listening to that and thinking, you know, I've sort of deprioritized my friendships a little bit. I certainly know I had over a number of years. When you see firsthand the impact that having deep connections makes in your life, you start to realize that it's important to prioritize. No different than some of your listeners who are prioritizing their sleep or their mindfulness or their mindset or their diet. You make it a priority because you see the value of when it's there and you see the value when it's not there. And again, for anybody who maybe hasn't seen that, it's usually shows up

when we're going through challenges in our life. When we fall down, when we go through a tough time in our life, a breakup, you know, transitioning jobs or careers, a business idea not working out, a challenge that we're having with our kids or our spouse. It's usually then when we look up and say, do I have people around me that can lift me up when I'm down? And if you don't feel that you have that, that's step one is recognizing that maybe I have a friendship, community, and tribe problem, a challenge, right? So once you've recognized that there's value for it it just like integrating a morning routine that you talk about in your book it doesn't actually take that much time in our actual life it's not about running around and having the most amount of friends i love human

connection and i really get fueled by people not everybody's like that i have an amazing sister my younger sister who has a smaller group of friends, doesn't like being around a bunch of new people all the time. And yet the one thing that she does is she makes these regular occurrences in her calendar to check in on connection and say, how can I strengthen the couple, the few deep, meaningful bonds that I have. And it can be as simple as a coffee date that you do with individuals. It could be as simple as scheduling a phone call to chat with your best friend from college who you still consider your best friend, but they don't live in the same town as you. It's not about quantity. It's about that quality, but you will never make it a priority

if you don't firsthand see the difference that it makes in improving your life. When I have something that I've gone through in my week that's challenging and I can go to a friend and talk about it, that's when I make the connection that I'm so thankful for the friendships in my life. When I went through the hardest challenges in my life and I had a tribe around me that said, hey, how can we help you? Whether it was a death of a family member, whether it was a breakup, whether it was a business conflict that was there. When I am able to go to the people around me and say that I'm so thankful for having these individuals in my life, that's when I look back and reflect that I'm so thankful for having these individuals in my life, that's when I look back and reflect that I'm so glad I put all this time and effort and energy into friendships. And those are the

big situations. I don't want to just say that we rely on our friendships during these macro stresses as you talk about. How about just fun and enjoyment? My week is more fun when I take a few moments. I'm lucky that I am in an office building with one of my friends that is a few offices down for his company. Even if it's five minutes, I pop in and I say, hey, what's up, man? How's your day? Amazing. But I may not see him for the rest of the week. That actually leaves me with a little boost of energy that I come back to my daily life with. You know, I really do feel that the health and wellness space has been overly dominated or overly focused on diets and movements.

And I get that. You know, I'm not saying they're not important. I've written about this stuff. I, you know, I do think they're important, but I think we have overly emphasized them at the expense of other components of our health that are equally important. And you can sometimes make the case that are more important because when you get things like friendship right, as you've already alluded to, a lot of other

downstream things come back online. It's when we lean into connection that not only do we receive the benefits, but we help other people become a better version of themselves. I don't know. What would you say to someone who's listening to this who says, I don't have any good friends. What can I do? You know, if somebody's listening to this podcast, they are someone who probably has a growth mindset.

You know, they're interested in growing. And if you're interested in growing and you are looking around you and saying, okay, maybe I moved, maybe I'm in a different place than where I grew up. Maybe I lost the friends that I had before because we weren't on the same page or had similar values. How do I start? How do I actually go and find the community and the connections that I want to build in my life? And I'll actually steal a phrase that my friend Lewis Howe shared with me. He said, go to where people grow. Is it that yoga class that they're going to? Is it that local university or community college where they're just taking a class for fun? I think you said before, use online connections

to create offline connections. Exactly. Some of my closest friendships, I first met them online. It could be that I see that they're a local practitioner in the area who's also interested in health and wellness. It could be that they are into the same sports that I'm into. We have mutual friends that are there. So online is actually a great way to find people who have similar interests as you, and then use that online connection to schedule a hangout offline. I think that's really powerful for people to hear because technology does get demonized a lot in terms of what it's doing to friendships and connections. But again, I'm not sure it's the technology, it's more how we're using it. And if we can use it productively, it can be incredibly

beneficial. And, you know, we're in this health and wellness world and you see all the time people join forums, they follow the same people, they develop a connection. And then you see photos popping up saying, hey, we've been communicating online for two years and now we got together for the first time. I feel I know this person so well because we've had so many connections. And it is, you know, the world is evolving. You know, we're not living in those tightly knit tribes where we all have the campfire every evening, where we have these baits and rituals. So we've got to find new ways and new tools and tips on how we can make it happen. It's not about quantity. It's not about online or offline. It's

about intentionality so that you can feel understood, connected, and that especially when life gets tough, you can go to somebody. There's this bond that happens when we let people in and we both ask and offer. It creates deep connections. You know, I know that when I'm there for you, you're also likely there to be there for me. It's through asking and offering help that other individuals in our life let us know that both they can come to us and we can go to them. Leaning into gratitude, telling somebody that you care about them and why, telling them why they matter to you. The same things that make you great in relationship, make you good in friendship,

make you good in business, make you good in work. All these things affect each other. It's not like our friendships are in isolation in the corner somewhere, right? How good of a friend we are to other people impacts every other aspect of our life. This is what human connection is all about. Thank you so much for listening. This episode was the last bite size of the season. If you are a longtime listener of my show, you will know that every summer I take a break from the podcast for six weeks. Why do I do that? Well, my wife produces each week's show. I spend a lot of time

researching and having these conversations. And over the summer, it's really important for us as a family to take some time off so we can really spend some quality, undistracted time with our children over their summer break. There is one more long form conversations come next Wednesday. We finish off the season with a very special episode. Of course, I'll be back at the very start of September with the Wednesday full length conversations and the Friday bite-sized ones. If you have enjoyed my podcast, if you've enjoyed these bite-sized episodes, I'd really appreciate your help in spreading the words. My request to you this summer is if you found my podcast useful, if you found it valuable in your own life,

would you consider sharing an episode of this podcast with five different people? My goal with the information on the show each week is to inspire and empower as many people as I possibly can. And you guys can help me do that. If you help me spread the word together, we can help spread this message of positivity, compassion, and health. Thank you so much for your support this season. I hope you have a good summer

and I will see you at the start of September ready and raring to go.