Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #89 Why Connection Is The Most Important Aspect Of Health: Best Of 2019

Episode Date: December 26, 2019

Over the past 2 years, I have had the privilege of talking with some of the most influential and insightful voices in the health and wellbeing space. To celebrate, I have decided to release 3 very special compilation episodes at the end of the year, which also happens to be the end of the decade! In my new book, Feel Better in 5, I split up health into 3 main areas: Mind, Body and Heart. The 'Heart' section is all about nurturing your essential human connections. This is such a crucial, but undervalued, component of health. People who are lonely are 50% more likely to die earlier and 30% more likely to suffer from a heart attack or stroke. The feeling of social isolation is through to be as harmful for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. In today’s show, I share some of the best clips from my podcast about the importance and power of meaningful human connection. You will hear from Dhru Purohit on why we need deep meaningful friendships to thrive, and not just survive, the hypnotherapist, Chloe Brotheridge, on why being kind to yourself is so important and why life feels perfect once we accept the way that things are, the outspoken Nagoski Sisters, who discuss how to complete the stress response cycle, no matter what the stressor is in your life is and why a 20 second hug can be so beneficial. You will then hear from Peter Crone - without question, my conversation with Peter has proven to be one of the most popular and impactful episodes I have ever released on my show - I share a clip where Peter talks about how you cannot create the life of someone else you don’t believe yourself to be and how true happiness is the absence of the search for happiness. We then hear from the physician, Gabor Mate, who talks about social isolation and how addiction is a behaviour that we use to soothe our pain, and then finish off with the wonderful Johann Hari on the primal importance of human connection and why he defines home as being the place where somebody notices when you are not there.  I really enjoyed putting this episode together and I hope you enjoy listening, as much! There are plenty of 5 minute tips on how to nurture those essential human connections in my brand new book, Feel Better in 5. You can order your very own copy now - Feel better in 5; Your Daily Plan to Feel Better for Life. Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/89 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji, GP, television presenter and author of the best-selling books The Stress Solution and The Four Pillar Plan. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more. feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome back to episode 89 of my Feel Better Live More podcast.

My name is Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host. I hope you are all enjoying the festive season and have managed to spend some time relaxing and doing fun things with the people who you love. If you have not and you find this time of year difficult, I hope you are doing okay and it has not been too challenging for you. In fact, the topic of today's very special celebration podcast for the end of 2019 is connection and why it is so crucial for our health and our well-being. And before we jump into the conversation, just to let you know that today, the date of this podcast being released, the 26th of December 2019, my brand new book, Feel Better in 5, is now out in the UK. I am so excited that the book is finally available. It really is a super practical book that I'm really, really proud of.

Everything in the book takes a maximum of five minutes to do and I tackle physical, mental and emotional health. I really do think the content in this book is relevant for every single one of us, whether we have an existing complaint or whether we simply want to optimise our wellbeing and longevity. All you need to do is pick three of the five-minute health snacks to do every day from a huge variety so you can really personalize the plan to suit your own life. So if you want something super bright and cool to get your life on track for 2020 and beyond, please do go and pick up a copy of this book. The plan is easy to do, easy to maintain, and requires only the smallest amount of willpower. Now, in the book, I split up health into three

categories, mind, body, and heart. This week's episode is all about that heart section. Now, at medical school, I was taught that the heart is a physical organ that pumps blood around the body. But what about that other meaning of heart? The meaning that artists, poets, songwriters have been waxing lyrical about for years. That meaning of heart is all about connection. Connection with your friends, connection with your partner, connection with your work colleagues, and connection with yourself. Now, I am really lucky to have had some incredible guests on this podcast talking about the power of human connection. And in today's show, you will hear some of the very best clips.

You're going to hear from Drew Purhit on why we need deep, meaningful friendships to thrive and not just survive. The hypnotherapist, Chloe Brotheridge, on why being kind deep, meaningful friendships to thrive and not just survive. The hypnotherapist Chloe Brotheridge on why being kind to yourself is so important and why life feels perfect once we accept the way that things are. The Nagoski sisters will teach you how to complete the stress response cycle, no matter what the stressor is in your life and why a 20-second hug can be so beneficial. You will then hear from Peter Crone. Without question, my conversation with Peter has proven to be one of the most popular and impactful episodes I have ever released. We go to a clip where Peter talks about how you cannot create the life of someone else you don't believe yourself to be

and how true happiness is the absence of the search for happiness. believe yourself to be, and how true happiness is the absence of the search for happiness. Then we go to, in my opinion, one of the most important voices in global health, Gabor Mate, who talks about social isolation and how addiction is a behaviour that we use to soothe our pain. And then we finish off with the wonderful Johan Hari on the primal importance of human connection and why he defines home as being the place where somebody notices when you are not there. This really is a very special episode, particularly at this time of year. I hope you enjoyed listening. Now, before we start, I just need to give a very quick shout out to the sponsors of today's episode

who are essential in order for me to continue putting out weekly episodes like this one. Vivo Barefoot, the minimalist footwear company, continue to support my podcast. I am a huge fan of Vivo Barefoot shoes. I've been wearing them for many, many years, well before they started supporting my podcasts. I've also been using them with many of my patients and have seen incredible benefits on things like mobility, back pain, hip pain, knee pain, and even sometimes with balance, particularly with elderly patients. For listeners of my show, they continue to offer a fantastic discount. If you go to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more, they are giving 20% off as a one-time code for all of my podcast listeners in the UK, USA, and Australia. And importantly,

they offer a 30-day free trial for new customers. So if you're not happy, you can send them back for a full refund. You can get your 20% off at vivobarethought.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. 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 at the facility, right? At the facility where they're running the electricity through this building. Somebody made our food this morning that we had at the cafe that we went to, 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 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. 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, 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. One of my favorite sections that you wrote about inside of your book was the chapter on touch. The chapter on touch is so... The section on touch is so beautiful because you make the argument for and you present the science to actually support it. That touch, we live in a society now through a combination of a bunch of different factors, touch is not as part of our daily life as it once was. And what are the impact of those things? And how can sometimes just a small amount of regular touch with our partner, with our friends, our colleagues,

even sometimes with strangers, dramatically improve our health and prevent us from building up stress that's there, right? And I would argue in that same way that deep, meaningful friendships, what's the value of sitting down at the dinner, 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. that you're thriving in your life.

We do wait for perfection too much, don't we? And when all we're looking for is progress. Yeah, so just focus on it being good enough. Be kind to yourself. Know that you're going to fail at times and progress is going to happen. And I think at some point we do just need to try to let go. And actually, often things feel perfect when we accept them if we can have that attitude of just being more accepting and embracing things as they

are things start to feel as we imagine they would when they're perfect we get that sense of contentment and that sense of satisfaction so I think it's about yeah trying to cultivate some more acceptance how can people who are listening to this and who recognise some of the tendencies we're talking about say, you know, I'd love to change that, you know, I would love to be more accepting of myself, but I find it hard. What can they do? Yeah, so many of us find it really hard to accept compliments or even think about ourselves in a positive way. And I think a really key first step is to start to train yourself to think of yourself in more positive ways. We are often in a pattern of always beating ourselves up or, I mean, in terms of

negativity bias, which is just the way our brains are wired, we naturally look for the negatives and things or the criticisms because it was a survival mechanism in the past. But we can counteract that by thinking about what were three things that you appreciated about yourself today? What did you do well today? What do you like about yourself today? Did you overcome a challenge? Did you help someone? Did you complete a project? And getting into that habit of every day thinking of three things that you can appreciate about yourself starts to train your mind to look for more things to appreciate about yourself.

And you eventually start to think of yourself in a more positive way. And this can grow your self-esteem, your confidence. You can be kinder to yourself in a more positive way and this can grow your your self-esteem your confidence you can be kind to yourself as a result if you feel like you're getting close to burnout set the stressors aside for a moment and we i think in the book have at least seven concrete specific ways that you can complete the stress response cycle that include crying, laughing, watching a 20 second hug. People love the 20 second hug. With somebody you love and trust enough to hug for 20 seconds, 20 seconds is way too long to hug a colleague at work who you might like hug on their birthday for like two seconds with a pat on the back.

20 seconds is that it's not that hug. It's the hug of somebody that you can stand over your own center of balance or support your own weight in whatever way is comfortable for you. And you put your arms around each other and you let your bodies connect to each other. Wellness and health and all of everything that is your biology does not stop with your skin. Your skin is not the outside of you. Jonathan Haidt describes human beings as 90% chimp, 10% bee. We are partially a hive species, and we need other people. So this is how the 20-second hug works. You connect physically with

someone that you love and trust, and in 20 seconds, your heart rate lowers, your blood pressure goes down and you return to feeling like you are safe. Yeah, no, I love it. I absolutely love it, particularly the things on hugging and human touch. And I've interviewed previously on the podcast someone called Professor McGlone. He's a researcher, world-leading scientist from Liverpool John Moores University, who has really investigated in a profound way the human touch nerve fiber and you know he helped with one of the chapters in my book on stress it was all about the power of human touch and what it does and we we know we

don't give touch do we the same importance as we give you know food is important for our physical health but we we don't think of touch in the same way as as important for our mental health. Yes. I think that one of the reasons this has happened is a larger systemic problem where we have stigmatized the need to connect with others. There's a, especially in the US, but also I think it's here in the UK, a sense that the ideal is to develop from childhood to adulthood, to grow from dependence to independence. And complete independence and autonomy, we think makes us heroes and strong, the silent cowboy on the plane, completely self-sufficient. And we think that that's the heroic ideal. And that if we need to be touched, if we need to be close, if we need support,

that's more than just, hey, can you help me carry this thing down the stairs? If it's, hey, can you sit with me while I cry? It feels like that's a weakness and we're ashamed of that need. True happiness is the absence of the search for happiness i just want everyone listening to just sit with that for a couple of seconds true happiness is the absence of the search for happiness if you really get that that is true peace because what you're saying is i'm totally okay where I am I don't need things to be different and I'm not relying on some idealized one day future where I think that I'm going to be happy which would be the pursuit of happiness which ironically is in the declaration of independence in America the pursuit of happiness I'm like well how about you just be happy now now that's not to

say we lessen and rest on our laurels I'm creating a lot I'm very aspirational I'm an entrepreneur I'm building lots of things because it's fun to create. But I am simultaneously completely at peace and content with the way that my life is today. Yeah, I love that. That is something I will sit with this evening for sure. That to me is the greatest precursor to healing. Because stress, as you know, as as a doctor is synonymous with sickness right the inflammatory response the inflammatory response as maybe the precursor to all diseases

right but stress what is stress i'm saying that i am in conflict with my current circumstance i don't want things to be the way they are which is a i use the word resistance i'm in resistance with what that person said i'm in resistance with the way my bank account is. I'm in resistance with the way that my boss deals with things. I get it. I'm not saying any of them are ideal. I'm not saying that you want them. But your resistance to the way life is, is massively futile. And it is the precursor to the dis-ease psychologically and emotionally that then manifests eventually physiologically. If you can find harmony, I tell people I have an intimate relationship with reality. I'm at

peace with what is. It doesn't mean that it's ideal. I may be working on things to improve, but I'm not in conflict with the way that life is currently. And for that reason, my experience is freedom and peace. I tell people you can't create the life of someone you don't yet believe yourself to be. So again, this is one of my quotes that I use in my book, right? So it's like recognizing that if you're wanting to create a certain life externally, then if you don't emulate that internally in the way that you view yourself and the way that you speak about yourself, the way that you behave, then you're, you know, use the English expression, you're pissing into the wind, right? It's not going to work because you're going against

the grain of how you're fundamentally conditioned. I'll use a sports analogy because I think, you know, I work with a lot of professional athletes and it's a beautiful metaphor for life. So I was hired by a very successful basketball player here. And he was struggling from the free throw. Like when one of the players gets fouled, you go to the free throw, you know, it's a relatively easy shot. The league average is 75%. So when a guy is fouled,

he goes to the free throw line, usually makes the one point, you know, seven, eight times out of 10. This guy's average was 35%. So, you know, it wasn't even close to average, it was half the average. And you can imagine, he was, you know, losing sleep, it was affecting his personal relationships at home because of the stress, crowds were starting to boo, and here's somebody who's getting paid millions of dollars. There's literally millions of fans, you know, they're

fanatical here in the States about their sports. And it was costing him a lot. You know, he was really, really struggling. So the point about addiction and why I'm using this sports metaphor as a comparison is he had become addicted to the fact that he had a problem. So when I met him, I said, you're probably speaking to everyone you can from players, coaches, even sports psychologists. He's like, I'm doing everything I can to fix the problem i said and therein lies one of your biggest obstacles because you keep reinforcing the belief that you've got a problem you remember the movie men in black with bill smith and they waved the black wand after they'd seen the aliens to wipe their memory so i said to the guy i said if you had no memory

where's your problem just to start to give him an indicator that what he's fighting is his history. So now he goes up to the free throw line. He isn't even focused on what he's trying to accomplish, which is make the basket. He is trying to avoid his history of hurt, trauma, I'm not a big fan of the word trauma, but past failings or disappointments where we got upset. And now he's standing there literally trying to fix his history but that's only impossible so you know i mean i played with a guy as you can probably imagine i'm coming from a lot of love and compassion he's doing the best he can it's affecting him dramatically but i said once he got to see it i said i used a metaphor you're like

driving a car but the way you're driving the car is you're looking in the rear view mirror. So all you're seeing is what's behind you. And then you wonder why you keep running into shit. Yeah. Right. So anyway, so then I said to him, what if I told you that for the rest of the season, you shot league average, let's just be, you know, we'll be conservative. You shot 75% instead of 35, 37, his shoulders dropped. He had the biggest smile on his face. This guy's huge. He's like, you know, seven foot something. And he's like, I would feel amazing. I said, what I just presented to you is a future that is as real as the one you're concerned about. The difference is I recognize that as a possibility, whereas you're so busy trying

to avoid your history that you're actually standing in the line in a state of anxiety, which is self-perpetuating. It's self-fulfilling. Both the futures, you're worried about one. Mine is phenomenal, or at least better. They're both made up. Why? Because we're still sitting in your house. We haven't gone anywhere. But mine elicits joy, freedom, relaxation. If you're an athlete coming from freedom, joy, and relaxation, I don't care what sport you're relaxation if you're an athlete coming from freedom joy and relaxation i don't care what sport you're doing you're going to do it better than if you're coming from tension anxiety and worry that night he had a game he shot six out of eight you know so that was 75 and for the rest of the week he shot 68 way better than previous almost double if you're into that

kind of stuff, right? So what happened is, going back to the addiction, is most people are completely addicted to their history and then spending the rest of their life trying to compensate for it. Versus what are you committed to? What's the future you're stepping into out of pure creation versus reaction? And it's a distinction I make. Most people are reactive versus creative.

But let's wake up and find so much more joy and freedom for ourselves and come from a place where we're creating an extraordinary future that we're working towards versus trying to fix the history behind us, which we can't do anything about anyway. Two totally different worlds to live in. Just taking a quick break in today's conversation to give a shout out to the sponsors of today's show athletic greens continue their support of my podcast to be really clear i absolutely prefer that people get all of their nutrition from foods but for some of us this is not always possible athletic greens is one of the most nutrientense whole food supplements that I've come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics and digestive enzymes. So if you are looking to take something each morning as an insurance policy to make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of this podcast,

if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of athletic greens which is worth around 70 pounds with your first order you can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more i mean what about this whole idea that um you know we're quite isolated now? Many of us have moved away from where we grew up. We don't have friends. We don't have a family network around us. And often two parents are working.

So you've got this really stressful situation where everyone's trying to do the best that they can. They're trying to make enough money to feed themselves, to house themselves. They're also trying to spend enough time with their children, yet they have no support. So there's a huge amount of pressure then that goes on to the kids, but also on the parents. And I think I saw you talk last night at the Tabernacle in London. It was an amazing talk. And you mentioned a little bit about hunter-gatherer societies and how for the bulk of human evolution, we have lived and raised our children a certain way. I wonder if you could expand on that.

Well, again, human beings, some version of human beings have been on the earth for millions of years. They've been hominids for millions of years. They've been human species for hundreds of thousands of years and our own particular species probably for about 100,000 years. There have been human species for hundreds of thousands of years, and our own particular species, probably for about 100,000 years, Homo sapiens, which is the latest and the only current human species that's extant. For all of that prehistory, until about 9,000 years ago, virtually all human beings lived in small hunter-gatherer bands this is a revolution this is how we became human beings so to think that no no you might like in modern society to a zoo where you take an animal from a natural habitat and you put them in a completely artificial

restricted situation and you expect him to stay as normal as he was out there in the wild. Essentially, that's what's happened to human beings, in that in a very short space of time, in the blink of an eye, from the perspective of evolution, we've gone from the hunter-gatherer, small band, communal attachment-based group, to a society which is alienated, disconnected, and that disconnection is accelerating at a tremendous rate throughout the world. Urbanization,

it's taking people out of their villages and into the big cities where they're alone. Here in Britain, there was quite a deliberate assault on community under the Thatcher regime, with the destruction of neighborhoods and communities and so on. And that trend has continued. So what we're having is societies that are less and less natural to the actual makeup of human beings from the evolutionary perspective, which means that children are being brought up under increasingly artificial and disconnected circumstances. And, you know, Johan Hari, who's written a book recently on depression

called Lost Connections, is pointing exactly at what's happening in modern society so that these lost connections characterize the modern world. And as they do, you're getting the spread of autoimmune disease into countries that never used to have it before. So we think autoimmune disease is one of these, or addictions for that matter. So if you look at the rate of addiction now in countries like China and India, it's going up exponentially precisely because of the... And it's not a question of idealizing the old way of life.

We can't go back. And of course, there's all kinds of benefits to progress and industrialization. Trouble is that as we progress, we forget the benefits of... We forget what we've lost. So instead of combining progress, we're trying to hold on to what was

best about some of the old ways we just throw everything out and and we think we can reinvent ourselves and as we do we're making ourselves sick yeah you're right and i think it's a really great point to to to sort of bring up we're not saying we need to go back to hunter-gatherer tribes we can't yeah not only should we not we can't and there are so many great benefits of the modern world and as you say industrialization i guess it's it's how do we learn from the past how do we learn from our evolutionary heritage and what can we implement from that within the constraints of the modern world that certainly that's how i see it and you mentioned uh johan harry's new book and you know i i write a huge quarter of my book on stress is about relationships and our lack of connection these days.

You know, one on one level, we are, we've been told anyway, that we're more connected than we've ever been before. And certainly in a digital sense, that may be the case. But when we talk about real human meaningful connection, what I see around me with the public, but what I also see in my practice as a doctor, is I don't think we've ever been this disconnected and lonely. Well, we're more wired, but we're less connected, is how I would put it. Because genuine connection happens between people,

not between pieces of technology. As you and I are talking to each other, there's a real interaction. When you speak, I'm looking at you, I'm listening to the modulation of your voice. I may nod in agreement or shake my head in disagreement, vice versa. But the communication is taking place

on many different levels. That's a connection. If you're never having the same conversation online, it would be all different. but the communication is taking place on many different levels. That's a connection. If you're never having the same conversation online, it would be a whole different ballgame, and I'd have no idea actually who I'm talking to. They'd just be exchanging words. So we're wired together, but we're not actually connected.

We're actually disconnected in this world because people are isolated modules sending out messages via the Ethernet or the Internet. When it comes to addictions, it's the disconnection again that leaves us so alone. So we're traumatized in the first place. We then develop behaviors that soothe our our pain but which actually keeps us more isolated from other people because we're ashamed of ourselves and we hide it and and we furtively seek out our addictive pleasures and that disconnection then furthers our sense of isolation that isolation further our pain and that pain further drives our addiction.

So we live in a society that actually generates addiction in many of its members. I think the theme of connection is really important because you're saying, you know, we know this, when individuals see themselves as part of a kind of connected tapestry of wider meaning, right? Just like which would have happened in the tribes in which humans evolved. They feel much better about their lives. They feel much more satisfied. And actually, I learned so much from scientists,

some of the leading scientists in the world and reading loads of studies. I think the place that taught me the most about depression and anxiety were not those people actually. And I'll just tell you the story of what happened in this place if that's okay because it it's something i think about every day um so in the summer of 2011 on a big anonymous council estate in berlin um a german turkish woman called nuria chengis climbed out of her wheelchair and put a sign in her window she lives on the ground floor the sign said something like i got a notice saying I'm going to be evicted next Thursday. So on Wednesday night, I'm going to kill myself. Now this is at council estate. It's in a funny area. It's called Cotty.

It's a poor part of what used to be West Berlin. And basically no one wanted to live there for years. It was a mixture of recent Muslim immigrants like Nuria, gay men and punk squatters, right? As you can imagine these three groups didn't get on very well but no one really knew anyone right no one knew who this woman was people are walking past her window and they're worried about her and they're also pissed off could their rents are going up loads of people are being evicted so they know they might be next people start to knock on nuria's door they said do you need any help and at first nuria said fuck you i don't want any help shut the door in their faces right they're like we shouldn't just leave her what should we do and this was actually the summer

of the revolution in egypt and one of them was watching it on the telly and they had an idea right they thought well if we there's a big um road that goes through kotti into the center of berlin and he said you know if we just blocked the road for a day it goes right through this council estate they said if we just block the road for a day, it goes right through this council estate. They said, if we just block the road for a day and, you know, we protest and we wheel Nuri out, there'll be a bit of a fuss. The media will probably come. They'll probably let us stay.

They'll probably, you know, there might even be a little bit of pressure to keep our rents down. Right? So they decide to do it. Why not? They block the road. Nuri is like,

I'm going to kill myself anyway. I may as well let them push me into the middle of the street and they sit there and they protest and the media does come it's a little bit of a kerfuffle that day in Berlin and then at the end of the day the police come and they say okay you've had your fun take it all down and the people there are like well hang on a minute you haven't told Nuria she gets to stay actually we want a rent freeze for this whole council estate so when we've've got that, then we'll take it down. But of course they knew the minute they left the barricades that they put up, the police would just tear it down anyway. So one of my favourite people at Cotty, Tanya Gartner, who's one of the punk squatters, she wears tiny little mini skirts,

even in Berlin winter, she's quite hardcore. Tanya had this idea. In her flat, she had a klaxon, you know, those things that make a loud noise at football matches. So she went and got it. She came down and she said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to drop a timetable to man this barricade 24 hours a day until we've got what we want. Until Nuri gets told she can stay in until we get a rent freeze. And if the police come to take the barricade down, let off the klaxon, we'll all come down from our flats and stop them. so people start signing up to man this barricade people who would never have met right so uh this very unlikely pairing so nuria who's very religious muslim in a full hijab was paired with tanya in her tiny little mini skirt right

and i can't remember what night shift they got if it was it might be tuesday nights so they're sitting there tuesday nights super awkward they're like we've got what have we got in common we've got nothing to talk about as the weeks went on they started talking and Tanya and Nuria realized there's something really profound in common and Nuria had come to Berlin when she was 16 from her village in Turkey and she had two young children and her job was to raise enough money to send back for her husband to come and join her. And sitting there in the cold in Cotty, she told Tanya something she'd never told anyone in Germany. She'd always told people. So after she'd been in Berlin for 18 months, she got word from home that her husband was dead. And she'd always told people that he'd died of a heart attack.

He'd actually died of tuberculosis, which was seen as a kind of shameful disease of poverty. That's when Tanya told Nuria something she never talked about. she'd come to cotty when she was even younger when she was 15 she'd been thrown out by a middle-class family she made her way she lived in this punk squat and she got pregnant not long after she arrived so they both realized that they had been children with children of their own in this frightening place they didn't understand right they realized they had loads in common there were loads of these pairings happening over kossi of people who would never have taught there was a young uh a young lad who kept being a turkish german lad who kept being nearly thrown out of school they said he had adhd he got paired with a very grumpy old white german guy called dita who said he didn't believe in

direct action because he loved stalin but in this case he'd make an exception who started helping him with his homework he started doing much better at school and directly opposite this council estate there's a gay club called zud block it's run by a man i love called rick hartstein who to give you a sense of what he's like um the previous place he owned was called cafe anal okay this is pretty hardcore gay club right and when they when they opened it about two years before the protests began you know there's a lot of religious muslims there some of them had smashed the windows, people were really pissed off. And when the protest began, Zudblock,

the gay club, gave all their furniture to the protest and after a while they said, you know, you guys can have all your meetings in our club, we'll give you drinks, we'll give you free food. And even the lefties at Cottey were like, look, we're not going to get these very religious Muslims to come and have meetings underneath posters for things so obscene i won't describe

them on your podcast right it's not going to happen but actually it did start to happen as one of the turkish german women put it to me we all realized we had to take these small steps to understand each other after the protest had been going on for about a year one day a guy turned up at the protest called tunkai who was in his early 50s. And Tung Kai, when you meet him, it's obvious he's got some kind of cognitive difficulties and he'd been living homeless. But he has an amazing energy about him. And he started asking if he could help out. Everyone liked him.

And by this time, they'd actually, the barricade had turned into a physical structure with a roof, right? A lot of them are construction workers. So they started saying to Tung Kai, you know, you should come and live in this thing we've built right it's quite nice we don't want you to be homeless he started living there became a much-loved part of the protest camp and after he'd been there for nine months one day the police came they would come every now and then to inspect and tonka doesn't like it when people argue so he went to hug one of the police officers but they thought he was attacking them so So they arrested him. That was when it was discovered Tungkay had been shut away for 20 years in a psychiatric hospital, often literally in a padded cell. He'd escaped one day, lived on

the streets for a couple of months and made his way to Kotti, at which point the police took him back to the psychiatric hospital. So this entire Kotti protest turned itself into a free Tungkay movement, right? They descend on this psychiatric hospital at the other side of Berlin. And these psychiatrists are like, what is this? They've had this person shut away for 20 years, and suddenly they've got all these women in hijabs, these punks, and these very camp gay men demanding his release. They're like, oh, they don't understand it. And I remember Uli Hartmann, one of the protesters said to them, yeah, but you don't love him. He doesn't belong with you. We love him. He belongs with us. And many things happened at Cottey. I guess the headline is they got a rent freeze for their entire housing project. They then launched a referendum initiative to keep rents down across the entire city. They've got the largest number of written signatures in the history of the city of Berlin. They got Tungkay back. He lives there still. But the last time I saw Nuria, I remember her saying to me, you know, I'm really glad I got to stay in my neighborhood. That's great. I gained so much more than that. I was surrounded by these incredible people all along and I would never have known. And so many of the people there,

these insights were just below the surface. I remember Neriman Tankeir, who's another one of the Turkish-German women there, saying to me, you know, when I grew up in Turkey, I grew up in a village and I called my whole village home. And I learned when I came to live in the Western world that what you're meant to call home is just your four walls. And then this whole protest began and I started to call all these people my home, right? And she said she realised in some sense in this culture, we are homeless, right? There's a Bosnian writer called Alexander Heyman who said, home is where people notice when you're not there. By that standard, lots of us are homeless. And it was so clear to me in Kotti, think about how unhappy these people were, right?

Nuria was about to kill herself. Tunkai was shut away in a padded cell. Loads of them were depressed and anxious. In the main, these people did not need to be drugged. They needed to be together. They needed to be seen. They needed to be loved and valued. They needed to have a sense that they were part of a tribe, that they had purpose and meaning in their lives. And I remember sitting with Tanya one time outside Zublock and her saying to me, you know, when you feel like shit and you're all alone, you think there's something wrong with you. But what we did is we came out of our corner crying and we started to fight. And we realised we were surrounded by people who felt the same way. And to me, this is the most important thing I learned, right? I love these people in cottotty, as I'm sure you can tell, but in one sense, they are not exceptional. They were entirely randomly selected people, right? That could have been anyone. This hunger

for reconnection and for rediscovery of meaning and other people and meaningful values is just beneath the surface for all of us, right? And and arguably it's the most important thing as a society we should be trying to promote um that that quote is profound i can't stop thinking about at home is when someone notices when you are not there yeah that concludes today's episode of a very special compilation feel better live more podcast i really hope you enjoyed hearing those clips that my team and i had put together what was your favorite tip who was your favorite guest do let me know on social media on facebook instagram twitter and on linkedin of course some of you will be hearing these clips for the very first time for some of you it may well be the second third or fourth time either way if you want to actually go back and listen to the full

episode with one of the guests featured in today's show just go to the show notes page for this episode which is drchatterjee.com forward slash 89 and you will see clickable links to all of the original shows. Now, connection really is such a crucial component of health and one that I think is very much undervalued. People who are lonely are 50% more likely to die earlier and 30% more likely to suffer from a heart attack or stroke. The feeling of social isolation is thought to be as harmful for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. In my new book, Feel Better in 5, I outline a wide variety of five-minute health snacks that really will help you to nurture your essential human connections.

Many of my patients find these practical tips really really helpful and as I say this component of help is very much underappreciated you can pick up a copy of my new book feel better in five right now in stores supermarkets as well as the usual online retailers don't forget to celebrate my new book in January 2020 I will be hitting the road and speaking live and doing book signings in various cities around the UK, ranging from London to Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh. I'm still looking to put more dates in. You can see all the dates at drchatterjee.com forward slash events. I really hope to meet some of you in person this January. Tickets are going super fast and some venues have actually already sold out so do go onto the website and check which event you may

wish to come to. Now a big feature of today's conversation was community and there is nothing like the support of a strong and supportive community to help you reach your goals. This was the reason I set up my very own Facebook private community called Dr. Chatterjee Four Pillar Tribe last summer. It has very quickly grown to be an engaged and supportive space for people to share their own health journeys. One of the ideas that came from this amazing community, and I think it was Amelia Calvert that came up with the idea originally was to have

Feel Better Live More podcast meetup clubs. They're a bit like book clubs, but instead of talking about books, people are getting together in person to discuss each week's episode and share insights, learnings, and so much more. This is really exciting for me that many of you have decided to use this online podcast as a way of making local offline connections. If you're interested in getting involved, do head over to Dr. Chatterjee Fort Pillar Community Tribe on Facebook and see what is going on in your area or start your very own weekly podcast meetup yourself. weekly podcast meetup yourself. If you enjoy my weekly shows, please do consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you listen to podcasts on. These reviews make such a big difference in raising visibility of the podcast, which helps me get this information out and help more people. You can also spread the word on social media by taking a screenshot right now

or simply tell your friends and family about the show. I really do appreciate your support. A big thank you to Richard Hughes for editing and Vedanta Chatterjee and Joe Murphy for producing this week's podcast. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure you press subscribe and I'll be back in just a couple of days with the final episode of the year. It will be the third of these very special Feel Better Live More compilation episodes. I really think you're going to love that one. Remember, you are the architects

of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more. I'll see you next time Thank you.