Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #237 BITESIZE | The Secret to Long-Term Happiness and Fulfilment | Matthew McConaughey

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Are you performing at life, or are you really living it? 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 134 of the podcast with the wonderful Matthew McConaughey. In this clip Matthew explains why authenticity is important to him and how, by understanding who we really are and showing up as ourselves more often, we can live a happier life. Thanks to our sponsor http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Order Dr Chatterjee's new book Happy Mind, Happy Life: UK version: https://amzn.to/304opgJ, US & Canada version: https://amzn.to/3DRxjgp Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com.   Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/134 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 134 of the podcast with the wonderful Matthew McConaughey. In this clip, Matthew explains why authenticity is so important to him and how by understanding who we really are and showing up as ourselves more often, we can all live happier lives. You say, you know, I've been in this life for 50 years i've learned how to be fair how to have

less stress how to have fun how to hurt people less how to get hurt less how to be a good man how to have meaning in life but then this is it for me this is the killer line, how to be more me. This is something I feel I've been on a journey with over the last five or six years. And so that line, how to be more me, that resonated deeply right into my soul. Hopefully that line resonates individually and originally with everybody individually. I mean, I, I'm open to argument, but I think isn't that what we're all trying to do, whether we know it or not. It's a, it's a constant, you know, adventure, sometimes extremely challenging. You know, I go,

I go into it in the book about, it's very hard to know who we are. It's very hard to know what it is we want to do. And so to take some pressure off that situation, maybe first let's eliminate the things in our lives that are not what we want to do. Um, this movie we're in that action was called one time, the day we were born and cut will be called one time, the day we die. Now, what can we do in this take we're in? It's a wonderful, wild adventure. But I've always been interested in interrogating and investing, investigating myself, you know, and it goes between.

Sometimes I'll write the headline first, who it is I want to be, who I'm trying to be, who I am in 10 years. And then and then I'll try to live the story towards that headline. Other times I'm like, no, I don't want to be aspirational right now. I just want to just be. Flaws, scars, bumps, warts and all. Let's just be that. Don't deny those things. Let's just look them in the eye and go from embarrassment to laughter about those things or from shame to forgiveness about those things.

embarrassment to laughter about those things or from shame to forgiveness about those things. So I usually try to balance between those two. Nothing's more entertaining for an individual to do than to get to know themselves. And that can start with getting to know who they're not. But boy, that never gets old and it's never going to change because we never have a moment where we go, ta-da, I got it. Now I know exactly who I am. No, because as soon as we get to that place, we're like, yes, I feel secure in who I am. I'm seeing the world clearly. The world is reverbing back to me what I'm giving to it. As soon as we hit that place, if we have any ambition at all,

we open up a whole new treasure chest of questions and evolution to live through. Yeah. In some ways, it should be the easiest thing in the world to be more of ourselves, right? The problem is many of us, and I certainly have been for a lot of my life, I kind of feel I'm on this fast track to discovering myself. I think it's the best journey I've ever been on. It's the best game in town. It's the one that keeps stimulating me and keeping me going day in, day out. But why do so many of us then perform at life? Do you know what I mean? What goes on that means we have to go on this journey to actually find out who we actually really are? Well, you know, the world is our mirror. You know, I said earlier

about how, when those times when, when I'm feeling the most me and the, and what I'm giving out is, is reverbing back to me, you know, what my soul's giving out, I'm getting a like response from the world. That reciprocity is when I'm like, oh, there's no gap between who I am and, and, and what people are, or what I'm doing and what people are receiving and what they're giving back. But a lot of times there is a big gap there. Expectations, you know, sometimes I love to say this. Sometimes we look better than we feel and sometimes we feel better than we look.

But what's really nice is when we look just about as good as we feel and we feel just about as good as we look. There's no gap between those two, you know? But it's a similar situation, I think, a relationship with the world. We have expectations of ourselves. Other people have expectations for us,

whether they're right on the money and accurate or not. That can sometimes be the battle. Many of us in our mid, you know, in our mid-lives start to try and find ourselves, right? Start to think about things like values. You're someone who's spent the time to really get to know yourself, what makes you tick, what is authentic for you, what is inauthentic, and therefore you now have systems and practices around you to make sure that the way you live is in alignment with that. To really understand our values, I think we need solitude. We need time where we switch off the

noise, right? So you started looking internally. Well, I don't know if you started with this, but you started journaling. I journal, but I didn't journal when I was 14 years old. Why did you start journaling? Was that something that you saw around you? Was it something that was intuitive to you? Because it's such a phenomenal life skill. It's such a phenomenal tool to start getting to know yourself. Where did that come from in you?

I didn't grow up in a family of writers or readers or voyeurs or viewers. We were a, if it's daylight outside, get outside and play. You can't watch TV or read a book because why would you want to read or watch somebody do something that you can go out there and do yourself that was my mom's kind of line so we were not an introspective family we weren't calloused introspecting we just almost we were so resilient we almost denied wintertime and and i always tell my mom this mom our greatest asset is resilient i said there's a loophole in resilience though if you get if you if you trip and fall down and every time you trip and fall

down you get up and you dust yourself off so quickly and move on you become a repeat offender of stepping in the same pothole that you tripped on because you never actually took time to go now why did I fall down right there so the why did I fall down right there was probably my original reason for diarying and writing in my journal but it was normal adolescent 14 year old oh Gretchen broke up with me my heart's broken you know that kind of stuff to begin with and then asking those wonderful, youthful questions, the big one, why finding myself, I think, because I didn't find answers to some of those questions until yesterday, you know, in the days since then. But the early, my teens were a lot of those questions. Then something interesting happened in my early 20s. I started to find my stride.

I was at university of Texas, Austin was making the grades. Mom and dad were happy. My relationships were healthy. I had a nice girlfriend. I was in the fraternity. I had a job at 40 bucks, my back pocket life was, I was looking forward to Monday morning. Life was kind of rolling. And I remember, I don't know where this came from but I remember going oh you're not going

to your journals as much and I was like yeah because I'm rolling what I need to go do I was like I got a hunch you need to keep writing about what you're doing now because it might help you out later and it turned out to be true meaning Meaning when I got in another rut, which we all do, when we need to remember that when we're all just rolling and on time and everything's just sunny for us, we need to, even though we think like to tell ourselves, well, this is the mean now, right? I'll never get off this. Cause I found it. Negatory. You'll get off it or someone will knock you off of it.

But what I found is I was able to go back when I was in a rut. I was able to go back to my diaries for when I was dissecting my success. So we're so taught to dissect failure. And what I found is I was able when at times I was in a rut to go back and go, what were your habits here in your life when you were rolling, when you were on your frequency, who are we hanging out with? Where were you going? How much sleep are you getting? What were you having to drink? How are you waking up in the morning? How are you looking at the world? How is your, did you have your wink? How is your sense of humor meter that? So I was able to look back and go find some older habits when things were going well that helped me recalibrate and get back in line yeah in times where i was off my frequency

or off balance i mean one of the first things when i was reading your book and researching for this conversation today was i thought that is so cool you journal journal when you're good. And so you can back reference when things aren't going well. Hey, what was I doing when I was flying, when I was rolling, when I was running downhill? What was I doing? And it strikes me that it's such a useful practice for people that really will help everyone understand because we never stay on top forever, right? There's always an up, there's always a down, there's a wave. Like it goes up, it goes down. And it's a nice little reminder. Greenlights, that's the name of the book. It's an awesome name. What is a greenlight?

A greenlight is very literally a thing on this highway of life that says, go, continue. I affirm your way. Carry on, sir. Freedom. More. Yes. Red and yellow light are hardships, crises, things that make us slow down, think, ponder, introspect, jackknife, interrupt, intervene, death. Someone gets sick.

They stop us, slow us down. We don't like them. Green lights in our lives are a lot about our own choices. We can engineer them. We have the choices we make. We can engineer them to have more of them in our future. When we are responsible for our present. I found that sometimes green lights just fall on our lap.

I don't have any science or reason about how or why they landed here, but damn, I'm glad they did. So what am I going to do with it? I found that green lights are sometimes about perspective. Sometimes the green lights can be about actually not even giving the crisis of the red or yellow light credit and blowing through them. Nah, that dart don't stick. I'm not letting that stick. That's false trauma. Nuh-uh.

I'm denying that because I've been in my own red and yellow lights for it. And you can dwell in a yellow light and turn that into a red light. You can self-sabotage and dwell in a yellow light and turn that baby deep red. Well, I prefer to go the other way, turning green. And while we don't want yellow and red lights i've found that most oftentimes they're actually giving us something that we need and when do we know or notice that the red and yellow lights in our life are actually have a lesson woven into them sometimes we realize it in the moment we may not know what it is,

but sometimes we realize, I know this is good for me somehow. I just don't know why. It's a good thing I'm going through this. Sometimes we notice it tomorrow, the next day. Sometimes we'll notice it on our deathbed. And I think that probably sometimes we'll notice the green light assets of a red and yellow light. We may not even notice them in this lifetime. It may be our great, great grandkids that realized what that lesson was three generations from now. There's also different kind of green light. Some of them are battery powered. They're short term.

That's fine. But what I'm really seeking, and I think most everyone in some level is seeking, is what are those solar powered green lights? The ones that are going to shine on for us longer and brighter in our future and continue to shine after we're gone from this life um that's the ones i'm trying to chase it's not the ones i always catch because here's the other thing if life was nothing but green lights literal green lights it'd be like well so what's it all about i mean all just entertainment you know which it's not so we need the yellows and the reds to have some form we need those resistances those things that slow us down gravity you know to red lights that stop us in our tracks

to help us grow and evolve. Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.