Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Become Happier Today | Mo Gawdat #365

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

Happiness is a choice. It’s a bold statement, but it’s one I wholeheartedly support.  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 275 of the podcast with Former Chief Business Officer of Google X, happiness expert and best-selling author, Mo Gawdat. The sudden and tragic death of his son, Ali, at 21 years of age set him on a path to make a billion people happier. In this clip, he shares why he believes that happiness is a set of skills and beliefs we can choose to practice no matter what obstacles may come our way. Thanks to our sponsor athleticgreens.com/livemore Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/275 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.

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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 275 of the podcast with the happiness expert and bestselling author Mo Gaudet. The sudden and tragic death of his son at 21 years of age set him on a path to make one billion people happier. In this clip, he shares why he believes that happiness is a set of skills and beliefs that we can choose to practice

no matter what obstacles may come our way. So the idea that happiness is a choice is very provocative for many people. It upsets so many people with me. Yeah. Now, I actually do agree with you firmly, as you well know. Perhaps you could explain to us, when did you first start realizing what happiness was, practicing the skill of happiness? Then maybe share with us what happened with Ali and how it all fits together. Yeah, I'm grateful that you asked the second part of it before we go back to the story of Ali, because some people may think that, you know, Ali left our world and then I jumped and said, hey, let's celebrate. We're very happy. No, happiness is your events minus your expectations, right? You look at life and events happen in your life

and you compare those to how you want life to be. If the event meets or beats expectations, you're happy. If the event misses the expectations, you're unhappy. And that's really very straightforward. So you could literally, we were talking about Aston Martins, you could actually buy an Aston Martin, sit in it. And then suddenly go like, ah, there is a problem on the stitching on the, you know, and then feel unhappy. Right.

Everyone else will look at you and say, oh my God, that's amazing. But the events is there is a problem with the stitching. Because what your expectation is that when I step into an Aston Martin. I should be perfect. Yeah. Which by the way, with all love for Aston Martins is never true. The thing is happiness in that case is being okay with life. I can bombard you with things. And if you're not okay with them, you're not going to be happy. Okay. So I have a very large number of friends. I speak to lots of them that will have a wonderful human being in their life, right? And that human being will be kind and loving and, you know, so many upsides,

but because of the world we live in, you know, there may be a little shorter than what the dreams of that person are, or people will go and say, but I want this and I don't want that. And as long as that's your way of looking at life, you're never going to be happy. Okay. Regardless, if I get you together with the most attractive person on the planet, regardless, you're still going to be unhappy because we're human. There always is going to be something missing. Now, if the expectation is the person I'm going to be with is going to be human, okay, he's going to be kind, he's going'm going to be with is going to be human, okay, he's going to be kind, he's going to be this, he's going to be that, but he's going to

be human, which means you finally find happiness. It's that calm and peaceful contentment of saying my partner is not perfect, but I love them as they are. This is why love is a question of acceptance. Now, take that and apply it to everything, including the loss of a child. And I think that's where people really get shocked. So as I said, you know, you lose a child, it's the most difficult. I swear to you, I swear to you, I wouldn't wish it on my enemies. It is so painful. Even now, I mean, as I remember, I swear, Rangan, I have a pain right here. It is physical.

I feel that a part of my heart is missing. Okay. And it just surfaces every time I think about it. And it's, and I'm proud of it and I love it. But the thing is, it's pain. And I think this is where people miss the point. There is pain and there is suffering. Okay. There is a difference between them. Pain comes from outside you. It comes because of the events of your life. And that's not a choice. That's unavoidable.

The design of the video game of life is that it will have challenges. It will have harshness. These are the moments like my son used to teach me. These are the moments where you become a better gamer. These are the moments when you actually strive and learn and stretch yourself and become better. And these are the moments that most often you look back at and you say, oh my God, look at how far I've come because of that bully in school. Or look at how happy I am with my partner now because of that bad person I was with that taught me something that harshness makes us better. So this does happen.

The pain will happen, and we will all have our fair share of pain in life. Suffering is a choice. Suffering is to feel the pain and then replay it over and over and over in your head. We were chatting over coffee about my dear friend, Dr. Jill Balty-Taylor. And Jill is an incredible neuroscientist, an amazing, amazing contributor to our world. And she did this research that will

tell you that between the moment an event triggers a negative emotion in you, say anger, between the moment anger is triggered in you, you get flooded with stress hormones, you react, and the hormones get flushed, or you don't, by the way, and the hormones get flushed out of your physiology, is 90 seconds. 90 seconds, that's it. You can only be angry for external stimuli for 90 seconds. What happens then is that stress cycle is repeated. And then the next cycle is that your rational brain starts to look at the situation and assess if there is an actual threat, if there is an actual reason to be angry and so on and so forth. And for most of us, what do we do? We reinforce the reason. So your partner says something hurtful on Friday at 4 p.m.

So your partner says something hurtful on Friday at 4 p.m. Saturday morning, you can wake up and say, oh, you remember that clip from 4 p.m. yesterday? Let's play it again. Okay. I openly call it the Netflix of unhappiness. It's unhappiness on demand. Right? So you simply tell yourself, okay, I can make myself miserable again over and over by playing those thoughts in my head. Now, that is a choice. You know why? Because you go to work and you're obsessing about what your partner told you on Friday. And then your boss says, hey, by the way, we have a very important meeting. We need to discuss A, B, and C. You'll tell your brain, okay, I'm going to come back to obsessing and being unhappy at 11 o'clock, but between now and 11, let's focus on the meeting. Okay. We all have that capability and yet we choose not to exercise it. Consciously or unconsciously? Definitely unconsciously. And even when we become conscious about it, I promise you there will be

people that will resist, right? Why? Because just like I said, there is a utility to ego. There is also a utility to becoming a victim, okay? There is a reason why we like to become victims, which stems from the days you were two years old, right? You were two years old, your brother took something and you cried and became unhappy. So mommy came and hugged you and said, okay, baby, don't worry. I'll get you ice cream. Right? So we get programmed that showing unhappiness or feeling unhappiness or feeling victimized gets you a tap on the back. So we want the tap on the back, but hey, you're not six anymore. Okay? And the reality, and I tell a lot of people that, I say, honestly, one of the easiest shortcuts to happiness

is to realize you're not six anymore. Yeah. What you've just beautifully articulated there is actually, for many people, I would say, a harsh, uncomfortable truth. Truth. It is a truth. We do have a choice in how we react. And once you become aware of that fact, you know, I say you can practice it. You can practice choosing differently. You can practice to choose the happiness story in any situation. to choose the happiness story in any situation.

Most events actually, they're really neutral. It's the- Ah, that's pure wisdom. It's the story we attach to it- Pure wisdom. That determines the outcome. And so many of us, and the truth is until about five or six years ago, I was conditioned to taking a disempowering narrative. and, oh, I can't believe they acted like that. If they acted differently, life would be better. But I've woken up from that. I have been jolted out of that,

where I take radical responsibility now to go, I own my emotions. I am choosing this story, right? So now that I know I have choice there, I'm going to practice choosing the empowering story. And I think this is, for me, Mo, this is arguably one of the most important skills to develop for anyone in life, is that understanding that we can choose. This is pure wisdom. I promise you events are neutral. They're neutral. You can charge them negatively or positively. Oh, and more importantly, you can react to them. Even if they're negative, you can react to them negatively or positively. A guest that I really recommend is Edith Egger, one of my favorite conversations in a lifetime. Okay. Yeah. You met, you hosted her. Yeah. I mean, look at that.

Someone that is in the ultimate harshness of the world, 16 year old, beautiful ballet dancer, you know, drafted to Auschwitz. And Edith, I, I, I asked her, I said, so what did you think of the soldiers that did that to you? And she said, I love them. Poor, poor them. I was like, what? I cried. I swear I cried in life. I said, what are you talking about? And she said, well, Mo, if I was born in Germany and told that it's now Germany and then the world, I would have shouted the same slogans too. Look at that. Look at the choice of how she looks at the story. And now she's changing our world. I was not the same person after that conversation as I was before. I can't unknow what I know. I can't unlearn what I've learned from her. And, you know, like the things you're sharing, one of the things that I think about every day is this idea that she said that,

Prongen, I've lived in Auschwitz, and I can tell you the greatest prison you will ever live inside is the prison you create inside your mind. And that's what we're talking about, isn't it? Really at its core, it's like, what prison are we constructing in our own mind? What disempowering story are we holding onto so tightly that's sending us down a certain pathway in life such that we then say, you know, you don't understand. You say happiness is a choice. You don't understand my life. So many of us, we live in stories that we stay stuck in and those stories can be changed they can be restated you're not saying suddenly that the situation is not harrowing or there's no pain generated by it it's there's always a way to subtly reframe something so it's better than it was.

You know, in many, many of the spiritual faith, I think specifically in Hinduism and Islam, it's actually most prominent, is the idea of surrender, not as a form of weakness, okay? But it's the ultimate form of strength is to tell yourself, look, if a train is coming on the track

and if it hits me, it's gonna kill me, it's absolutely stupid to tell yourself, but I'm gonna stand on the track anyway, right? The idea of surrendering to the nature of life, that the train is more powerful than you. That's the wise way to go through life. And you have to surrender to the idea that, yeah, it's very painful that Ali left, but he did, okay?

And what good is it to obsess about it and live through the pain of it over and over and over for the next 50 years. The happiness equation that you've come up with, that happiness sits in that space between events and our perception, right? I think it's a wonderful way that we can look at a lot of things. So, I don't know, to make it super trivial and day-to-day, if you have to drive to work each day through traffic, well, if your expectation is that you're not going to get traffic and you're going to have a smooth route to work each day, you're going to get pissed off every day.

Good luck, yeah. Right? Whereas if you go into it and go, hey, I know that most of these journeys, there's going to be someone pulling out in front of me. I'm going to be late sometimes. There's going to be traffic. Then actually when that comes about, you're like, yeah, I knew it was going to happen. I'm cool with it.

Even better, you take a good podcast with you or a good music with you and you enjoy it. Even better, you take a good podcast with you or a good music with you and you enjoy it. Exactly. You change your expectation and therefore suddenly everything becomes easier. If you define happiness accurately, it is that calm and peaceful contentment when you're okay with life as it is. Events minus expectations. It doesn't matter what life is. If you're okay with it, you're peaceful with it, you feel that calm. And that calm is how I describe happiness. So that definition of happy is within you. You can only spoil it. It's the

opposite way. You know, you can only add to it crap. You know, you can cover it with piles of stones and piles of loads and burdens. And the more you cover it, the more you cannot access it anymore. It's the opposite that needs to happen. You don't need to achieve anything to be happy. You come to life a billionaire, right? That's what you, you know, if you live to be 80, let's say, you have, I don't know, say 2 billion heartbeats to live. You start your life with a credit of 2 billion, okay?

And then you spend it, say 60 beats per second, just as an average. So every second that passes, you're spending from your credit, exchanging it for other things in life. You know that it's now almost mid 2022. And you know, in your mind that it doesn't feel like five or six months. You know why? Because you didn't live five or six months. You lived in the real world, in those real moments, maybe a month, right? If you're very good at it, the rest you're living inside your head. Look at your memories. Look at your memories. Your memories are the register of the moments you actually lived. Look at them and find which of them didn't have a human connection in it.

Find which of them didn't have love. Find which of them didn't have awe and a new experience. All of those moments, all of those heartbeats you wasted, don't register. You haven't lived. Only the ones that you lived and if you really take stock of them, they're beautiful moments that are really, really simple.

Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.