Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The 5 Regrets of the Dying: Life Lessons Everybody Learns Too Late | Bronnie Ware
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Episode Date: February 9, 2024

What do you think you might be saying on your deathbed? Will you be looking back at your life with a sense of joy and completeness, or, do you think that perhaps you might be consumed with regret? As today’s guest shares, “It’s easy to assume that you will live with great health to a ripe old age, then die peacefully in your sleep wearing your favourite pyjamas but it doesn’t work out that way for most people…” 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 383 of the podcast with former palliative care nurse, internationally acclaimed speaker, and author of the book ‘The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying’, Bronnie Ware. Appreciating we are going to die can be the first step to getting more out of our lives and, in this clip, Bronnie shares some of the life lessons that people often learn too late.  Thanks to our sponsor https://www.drinkag1.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. Find out more about my NEW Journal here https://drchatterjee.com/journal and click here https://drchatterjee.com/events to join me at an exclusive event on 29th February. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/383 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 383 of the podcast with former palliative care nurse and author of the book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware. Appreciating we are going to die can be the first step to getting more out of our lives. And in this clip, Bronnie shares some of the life lessons that people often learn too late. There's something about the truths that people share on their deathbeds that teaches us about life.

Reading them for me caused me to reflect on everything in my life, not just my work, family balance, everything. How am I living my life? Could you just outline those top five regrets of the dying? Sure, sure. I spent eight years looking after dying people. And the most common regret during those eight years was I wish I'd lived a life true to myself, not the life that other people expected of me. The second most common was I wish I hadn't worked so hard. And then the third was I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. And then I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. And the fifth one, I wish I'd allowed myself to be happier.

I mean, there's so much there. Let's go to the second regret. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Now, as a doctor, I've been very alarmed for many years at the growing rates of chronic stress, the increasing rates of burnout. And there was one, I think, recent UK study that suggested that 88% of UK workers had experienced some form of burnout in the past two years. Now, this is just one study, right? So I don't want to make a generalization. No, but that's still a lot. Whether it's slightly exaggerated or not, that's an alarming signal in terms of what it says about our culture about the way that we're living our lives so there will be people listening right now bronnie who probably feel that they work too hard for that person who

can't see a way out how is that regret going to help them? A lot of people will think there's no choice but to work hard because of their responsibilities. And, you know, I'm a mum, I have to provide for my daughter and I get that. I get that there's responsibilities. But around that regret was not making work your whole life and that was the regret that the patients shared, that they had let their work become

their whole identity and their whole life. And then when work was taken away, there was nothing left. And they hadn't spent the time with their family that they wanted, or they hadn't achieved other personal dreams that they had hoped to. And so I think it's a case of just creating a little bit of space. And I think any of us who have really gone for our dreams and or been having responsibilities, we've all worked too hard and we've all worked ridiculously unhealthy hours at some point. But it's about like navigating that, pulling that in a little bit and thinking,

okay, well, I'm actually going to show up better for my work if I have a bit of a break sometimes. So I find now, I always say space is medicine. So space is medicine to me. If I leave space in, and I actually have to schedule it in sometimes to have unplanned time that has no agenda just to allow myself to be in and let the day take me wherever it wants to. When I do that, I return to my work with so much more efficiency and clarity. So I get things done in a shorter time than what I thought I needed. And if you can at least just take an extra two or three hours a week off from work, the world will keep going. And the more you can do that and make a habit of that, of honouring some part of your life that you're craving, whether that's more time with your

family, whether that's getting out on a golf course, whatever it is, if any of us can just think, what would I love to do if I didn't have to work so hard and then cut out, even if it's like three hours, a fortnight or something like that, but commit to it and create that habit of it, then life tends to expand and support us because we've shown the courage and the commitment to actually having a better life and living how we want. And so I've found that in doing that, life gifts us with more space or more time to do those things and everything else copes. And if it's a case of I'm working 60 hours a week, if I don't work that, I'm going to get sacked, well, you're probably in the wrong job.

Yeah. You know, get sacked, find a job that's 40 hours a week or 35 hours a week and actually try and create some space for your life. It's really important to acknowledge that that regret around not working too hard isn't about not loving your job. It's just not making your job your whole life and that you do, you do take that other time off. It's like building a muscle. And the more you do those little things, and when I say about creating the space, it's space with no agenda. So it's space to lie in your backyard, in your back garden or whatever

and look at the sky or you might sort of feel like, okay, I've given myself two hours today. I might just go to a cafe and not be on my phone, just sit and have a cuppa and watch people go by. Or I certainly turn my phone off a lot. You've got to believe or you learn to believe that you'll be okay if you do it your own way. And the more that we can actually face the fact that we're going to die and realize the sacredness of our time, the more courage we have to trust in that. I love that idea. Space is medicine. It's mine. That's exactly how I treat it.

Do you remember one of the first moments when you heard something from someone who was dying, when you actually stopped and reflected on your own life and thought, wow, I'm sort of guilty of that. I could maybe make a change here. Do you remember that first moment? Yeah, I definitely, it was with Grace, who was one of my favorite patients. And she had stayed in a very unhappy marriage for decades and she'd wanted to travel around Australia and her husband didn't want to and he was a bit of an ogre and he ended up going into a nursing home and so she went straight off to the travel agent she was in mid-80s and picked up a catalogue a brochure for bus tours around Australia. But it turned out that she had lung cancer and she'd never smoked and he'd smoked in the home all those years. And so I was looking after her.

She never went anywhere. She hardly even left the house after that or didn't leave the house once I arrived. And so she squeezed me. She was a tiny little lady and she squeezed me in my hand in her tears and said, promise me, Bronnie, that you'll always have the courage to live a life true to yourself, not the life others expect of you. That's why my ears were open to hearing the same message, but in different words through other people to come, other patients to come. And that's when I sort of really stopped and thought about it. And I was

really trying hard to get going as a singer songwriter then. And so I was doing gigs at singer-songwriter nights and open mic nights while I was looking after the dying people. And I didn't have a lot of confidence. I was a non-drinker. My father had been a very successful musician. He was just knocking me down like crazy and telling me I was wasting my time. But I remember the anguish and the heartache of grace in that moment. And I thought, what does that mean? Like, what does that look like to live a life true to myself, not the life that other people expect of me? And because I'd left the banking industry a good career, I'd sort of been really condemned in the family from that as well. A good, in a virtue of commerce. I had a good job.

A good career. I had a good job and a good career, you know, what are you trying to do now? And, you know, it used to be a running joke, oh, where is she now? What's she doing now? You know, and all I was trying to do was find my way. And I think that time with Grace was a real turning point because I stopped and questioned, what does that even look like for me? And I thought, well, dear, I think I could be a creative person and make a living as a creative person because that's what I want to do. Yeah. It's so powerful. I guess just that experience, whether it causes us to overnight transform our lives, which it probably doesn't

for anyone, it just opens a door, doesn't it? Yes, it's a start. Just opens a little door to go, oh, wow, there may be another way. Hmm. You say in your book, it is easy to assume that you will live with great health to a ripe old age and then die peacefully in your sleep wearing your favorite pajamas. It doesn't work out this way for most people. However, no one wants to face the fact that they may not live past 60. They may not even live past 40, but this is the truth of life. Yeah, it is. And we all assume we're going to live a long time. We also assume we'll have time to reflect and make changes and that sort of thing.

And it's not the way of life. I mean, you look at animals, there's always young ones die, there's old ones die, there's middle-aged ones die, and it's exactly the same with humans. And so when a child dies or a young adult, everyone says they died too soon. And of course, you know, it's heartbreaking. I've had friends that have lost children under 10, and it's just devastating. But that is actually how life works. And I've had quite a few friends die in their 30s and 40s. And one of them, he rang me and he'd just been diagnosed

with stage four pancreatic cancer. He was a songwriter and he said, when I get through this, let's write some songs together and I said, sure, you know. And so he'd been diagnosed three weeks earlier. Three weeks later, he was gone, just like that. And so the more we can actually understand that we may not have those years in retirement and retirement may not look how we think it's going

to look anyway, because what plan in life ever turns out exactly as we think anyway? Life always throws some curve balls to stretch us and help us grow and help us prioritise things that light us up. And so we can sort of think, yeah, at 65 I'll be all cashed up and I'll retire and I'll go off and play golf or travel the world. But a year before you retire you may end up in a wheelchair for some reason or you may end up dead. Yeah. We can hear that.

We can hear these things. We can watch films where we see this stuff and then we can almost compartmentalize it and get back on with our lives and then not make a change. But that is so real. The fact that you could step out your front door and get knocked down by a car. Yes. It's by acknowledging that you're going to die. Yes. That you get to truly live life. Two of the regrets, the way you've written them down at least, have the word courage in them. Okay. I wish I had the courage to live my life, not the life others expected of me. And I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

So the obvious question is, what does the word courage mean? I think it just, for me, it means breaking through the resistance. me it means breaking through the resistance and any fear is just resistance to either what is or what could be and so to me courage is that force that can say i'm scared but i'm still going to do this it's like the the dismantling of the walls that stop us doing things. And what stops us from having courage? Being scared of our potential, being as amazing as we can be. Yeah. So, and that can be being scared of what other people think of us.

It can be scared of failing, which really just comes down to what other people think of us. It can be scared of failing, which really just comes down to what other people think of us. It can be scared of wasting time trying for something and it not landing how we think. But we're still going to grow through that and we're still going to become a better person as a result of anything like that. And all of us make mistakes. That's how we learn. We learn by our mistakes.

And it's part of the imperfection of being human. And so, you know, none of us are going to go through life without making mistakes unless we don't live a life, unless we don't live. We just stay on the lounge and watch Netflix and we don't have a go at honouring our dreams. And then, well, there's a mistake in itself. But if we're actually going to have a go at living our dreams and finding, and when I say living the dreams, it all sounds, you know, all very trendy and cliched, but it's different for everyone. It could just mean living a slower life, living a simpler life. It might be traveling the world first class, but it may just be to be more present with your

child or to be a happier person or to learn an instrument in old age, whatever. But, you know, you're going to make mistakes if you're going to grow and try and become the best person you want to be or as close to that as possible. But whether a mistake turns into a regret is really only our opinion on it. That's all it is. It's us beating ourselves up for years and years and years over a mistake. And all of us have made mistakes. We can all look back and cringe over stuff we've done. I'm sure I certainly can, but it's only self-judgment. And so if we can have a bit of compassion for our younger selves, then they're just mistakes. They're not regrets. This podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of our lives. Now, of course, when we can appreciate,

like really appreciate the idea that we're going to die, arguably that's the most important thing we can do to help us be present and get the most out of our life. Do you have any final words of wisdom for people who may feel a bit stuck and a bit lost? Yeah, I would just say that they're allowed to be happy, that they deserve their own permission to be happy. And more than anything, to realise that you are going to die and every single day is a gift. There's people that can't even get outside today,

they're not well enough and they don't even get fresh air. So if you can find gratitude in whatever is going on, find some sort of gratitude in your life right now, then you're already on your way to living a regret-free life. 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.