Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How to Stop Overthinking & Start Living a More Meaningful Life with Oliver Burkeman #580

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

Many of us feel under constant pressure to optimise every moment, to become more efficient, more productive and somehow more worthy. But what if embracing our limits could be the key to living a calmer, more meaningful life? This week’s returning guest on my Feel Better, Live More podcast, Oliver Burkeman, believes that accepting that we can’t do everything might just set us free. Oliver is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ and ‘The Antidote’, and for many years wrote a popular weekly column on psychology for the Guardian. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Psychologies and New Philosopher. His latest book, ‘Meditations for Mortals: A Four Week Guide to Doing What Counts’, takes us on a liberating journey towards a more meaningful life – one that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves. Designed as a four-week ‘retreat of the mind’, it offers daily wisdom, solace and inspiration to aid a saner, freer and more enchantment-filled way of living. In our brilliant conversation, we discuss: Why the belief that life will finally feel easier once we clear our to-do list is such a persistent illusion How shifting our focus from endless achievement to small, present moments can transform the way we experience each day Why the fantasy of perfect decisions keeps us stuck in indecision, and how accepting the downsides of any choice can set us free How our fear of wasting time is often rooted in perfectionism, and why many of us feel we have to earn our worth through effort The liberating idea of daily-ish habits – a flexible, compassionate way to keep showing up without turning routines into self-criticism Why we don’t need to wait for life to feel calm or under control before we start living with more intention How embracing our limits and accepting that time is finite can help us feel more fully alive and connected I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak to Oliver again as he brings such clarity and compassion to questions so many of us grapple with. Instead of offering yet another system for getting more done, this conversation is about stepping back, loosening our grip and recognising that a good life isn’t measured by productivity but by presence, meaning and connection. I hope you enjoy listening. 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.   Thanks to our sponsors: https://join.whoop.com/livemore https://thriva.co/ https://vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://betterhelp.com/livemore   Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/580   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Yes, the attempt to do it all is going to make you feel incredibly anxious and overwhelmed. Yes, the demands that are made on us and the things that feel like they're essential that we have to do them will leave us feeling wiped out. That is not a war that any of us is ever going to win. And it's in that realization that you can then, I hope, begin to feel the first glimmers of a different kind of energy, which is like, okay, that's the way it is. Hey guys, how you doing? I hope you having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rongan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast. Feel Better, Live More. Many of us feel under constant pressure to optimize every moment,

to become more efficient, more productive, and somehow more worthy. But what if embracing our limits could be the key to living a calmer more meaningful life. This week's returning guest is Oliver Berkman, someone who for many years wrote a popular psychology column for the Guardian newspaper, and more recently, someone who wrote the wonderful book, 4,000 weeks. His latest book, Meditations for Mortals,

a four-week guide to doing what counts, takes us on a liberating journey towards a more meaningful life, one that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves. Designed as a four-week retreat off the mind, it offers daily wisdom, solace and inspiration to help us find a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled way of living. In our conversation we discuss why the belief that life will finally feel easier once we clear our to-do list is an illusion, how shifting our focus from endless achievement to small present moments can transform the way we experience each day, why the fantasy of perfect decisions keeps us stuck

in indecision, and how accepting the downsides of any choice can set us free, how our fear of wasting time is often rooted in perfectionism, and why many of us feel we have to earn are worth through effort, the liberating idea of daily-ish habits, a flexible, compassionate way to keep showing up without turning routines into self-criticism, why we don't need to wait for life to feel calm or under control before we start living with more intention, and how embracing our limits and accepting that time is finite can help us feel more alive and connected. I was absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to speak to Oliver once again as he brings such clarity and compassion to questions that so many of us grapple with.

Instead of offering yet another system for getting more done, this conversation is about stepping back, loosening our grip and recognising that a good life is not measured by productivity, but by presence, meaning. and connection. In your new book, you talk about the kind of life that you would like to be living. And you describe it as calm and focused, energetic and meaningfully productive, and connected to others, as opposed to anxious, isolated, and overwhelmed.

I think that's the kind of life, Oliver, that many people would also like to lead. So I guess my first question is twofold. Why does so many people struggle to lead that kind of life? And secondly, how are you getting on in your quest to do so? Great questions. Yeah, I mean, I think there are so many reasons why it's hard to live that kind of life, right? Reasons to do with the society that we live in, reasons to do with the ways we were parented and the messages we give ourselves.

I think the reason I really want to focus in on, and that relates to your second question, is there's a problem with seeing that as something that you're striving towards, something that's off in the future and that you're going to work really, really hard, and then eventually that's going to be your life. There's a big sort of mistake involved in that approach, as opposed to seeing it as something that you can actually claim for yourself right here in the moment. And of course that doesn't get away from the fact that there's like too much to do and too many emails and the economic system that we live in exerts all sorts of pressures. But there's something really important, I think, about the idea that we can actually enter into that way of being right here, at least to some degree, instead of seeing it as this thing that we're constantly chasing on the horizon. So, yeah, my, to the extent that I have succeeded in living a life like this, which is definitely only partial, is because I've found ways to sort of step into it now instead of sort of reinforcing this notion that it's always in the future, that I've always got to do more until I can get to it. Yeah, it's interesting. Through the lens of health, I think about what you just said. in the context of weight loss and something I've realized over my career

is for people who are looking for sustainable weight loss, for whatever reason that might be, too often it's put off into the future. When I lose weight and get to this weight, I'm going to be happy and go on holiday here and do this or do that hobby, whatever it might be.

And I found it much more helpful for people to say, no, no, why don't you do those things now? Right. And then I think you'll find that the weight loss, obviously you have to do some things, are going to come quite nicely as an almost like a second order effect of that rather than the other way around. Totally. I can totally see how that will work in weight loss.

I think of it in the context of like overwhelm, right? I have a huge tendency. I'm letting go of it to a large extent. But I have this huge tendency to say, right, okay, I want my life to be calm and peaceful. It feels incredibly overwhelming, overwhelmed with demands and obligations and emails and everything. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to really, really buckle down and power through and spend much more time on all the overwhelming stuff and actually have a less peaceful life and a busier life and a more stressed life because I'm going to get through it to this alleged vista of peace and calm on the other side.

And I think where that connects to what you were saying is if instead you can see how you show up in the day today as some form of expression of the life that you want to live. Not a perfect one. It's never going to be a perfect one. But if you can sort of, if you say like, okay, I want to get to this point where I've lost enough weight that I can enjoy myself. So what if I took that focus on what I want to enjoy now?

And I think it time and again, yeah, people find that what happens then is like then you're living the life you want to live. And so it's exciting and fun to get better at living that life and to lose more weight and to be more calm and to handle more of the demands without sort of spinning off into overwhelm. Yeah, there's also a compassion to yourself in living this way. I know you do tackle that in one of the chapters, and you also acknowledge how self-compassion can be a difficult term

for British people to get our heads around, right? But through the lens of weight loss, you know, often people want to beat themselves up, deprive themselves, restrict themselves, until they've reached the goal of a set weight so that then they're going to start, you know, treating themselves in the right way. And it doesn't work like that. All you're doing then, right, is, yeah, you're reinforcing this notion that you're bad.

Exactly. You need fixing. You can't really fully participate in life until you have achieved that fixing. And, I mean, I had such struggle with this idea of self-compassion, because, as you say, there's something about it that invites me to think I'm being told that I have to see myself as super, super special and much more deserving of, love and cuddles than anyone. None of that. The thing that really made the change for me was when I came across this idea from a philosopher called Ido Landau, who talks about the reverse golden

rule. So not treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself, the famous golden rule, but don't treat yourself worse than you would treat other people. And I think that was such a moment for me when I realized that I sort of went through my days, often sort of berating myself internally in ways I would just never, like I would just never dream of doing that to it. Well, anyone, a friend, a person I met in a day-to-day business context, it would be utterly outrageous to be that horrible.

So all I was asking of myself, even if it gets labelled self-compassion and triggers all sorts of cringe responses from Brits, like all I was asking of myself was equal treatment that I was already perfectly good at giving to other people. And you answered to my first question, you said, it doesn't mean that there's not going to be too many things to do or too many emails. And it's kind of interesting. That really landed and kind of has been whirring in my brain since then.

So my question is, is that really true? Are there always going to be too many things to do and too many emails? Or perhaps could it be the way that we're framing those things to do and those emails? The answer is yes. Right, it's totally a question of perspective and I think this is something that I've tried to find ways to articulate lots of times in my writing it's like you have an incredibly finite capacity for doing things because you are a human

and you have so much time on the planet and so many hours in the day and so much attention and energy and so the amount of things that feel like they need doing is basically infinite, right? There's no reason why your brain can't feel that your obligations to your family, the ambitions you have for your job, whatever it might be, that just keeps on expanding,

whereas your finite capacity really, really doesn't. And so, yeah, from that perspective, there's always too much to do. But because there's always too much to do, and there's no way around it, that is kind of another way of saying that there isn't too much to do because this is not a war that you can win as a finite human. being. So there's a quote that I really like that says, I'm going to mangle it, but says something like, the problem is not that we have, don't have enough time to do the things we need to do,

it's that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have. Yeah. And of course, this is a lot harder for some people than others, right? You can absolutely feel like you have to do an impossible amount just to keep a roof over your head. And that's a very real and acute feeling. but actually nobody can do an impossible amount and so in the end all you can ever really do with the time in your life is a handful of the things that you might feel you wanted to do with them and when you see how totally inescapable that is

I think it's really liberating I think it's like oh it's not because I'm a loser that I haven't figured out how to do all these things it's not because I haven't found the right productivity system it's because you don't get to do all the things Your last book, just before this, 4,000 Weeks and this new one, Meditations for Mortals, I think one of the reasons they're striking such a deep chord with so many people around the world is precisely because of what you just said, this acceptance that actually can't do everything.

You know, well, let me put it to you. your last but 4,000 weeks became a global smash bestseller right? First of all, congratulations. Thank you. But relate to that is the question, why? Why do you think

that book at that time made ways in the way that it did? What was it in that book? I mean, who knows? And I think a lot of it is just luck and good fortune. but I suppose if I was going to try to answer it, I would say. English modesty, I like it. But it's also true, right?

But I also think if I was going to try to answer that, I would say for various reasons, partly having to do with coming out of the pandemic, partly having to do with the stage that kind of books and thinking about productivity and stuff were at to that point, it was time for something that sort of gently introduced people to this, to this, like, fact. Instead of this notion, so there'd been a lot of the history of sort of time management advice

is like, if you follow my system and you really try hard, then you're going to get to the point where you can do everything that needs doing. And then there was a bit of a rebellion that came in the form of saying, like, well, this is all rubbish anyway, stop working for the man, rebel, like, just chill out. Which I don't even necessarily object to, but it's not what a lot of people want to do or can do. and so I think it was time for someone to say look you can be productive and ambitious and you can do you can make a difference in the world

what you can't do is get your arms around an infinite number of potential demands obligations ambitions and there's a sort of a there's a moment there where you can I went through it myself and I hope that the book has led people through it as well where you can sort of, oh, just sort of relax into reality. I've compared it in a couple of places to that feeling like you're out in the street and you haven't brought the right like waterproofs and it starts raining. And for a while you sort of like keep trying to find ways almost unconsciously to keep the water off you.

And the rain gets heavier and heavier. And eventually you're just like, okay, I'm going to get wet. It's like, okay, I'm going to be finite in this ocean of infinite possibilities. And it's fine. And it's fine, right? The problem is when you resist it. Exactly. There is nothing long.

I don't want it. I didn't get the right clothes. That's where the stress comes. And then you're just soaking wet. Okay. Yeah. That's life. I would agree.

I think that idea that you can't do everything, I think it particularly resists now because of the world in which we live, the amount of information we get exposed to on social media, we see all these incredible things that we could be doing. And that some of your friends will be doing, right? But you've only got 24 hours in a day. It's funny as I've been reading meditations for Morsors over the last couple of days, I thought maybe one of the reasons why there's an exercise that I call Write Your Own Happy Ending

that I wrote about in my book on happiness. And it really had a profound impact on me. I wonder if I could put it to you, actually, because I think it really embraces limitation and what matters at its heart. So there's two parts of the exercise. Part one is, fast forward to the future. Imagine you're on your deathbed. And look back on your life and imagine, you know,

what are three things you will want to have done or spend your time on? And, you know, the truth is, we probably know what a lot of these things are because people have written books about the regrets of the dying and what people actually do say on their deathbed. But for us individually, we can imagine. So for me, for example,

last time I did this exercise was I want to have spent quality of time with my friends and family I want to have had time to pursue my own passions and I will thirdly want to have done something that improves the lives of other people

so that's part one then you go to part two which is you come back to the present moment and you come up with three what I call happiness habits so these are three things that I can try and commit to each week that will pretty much guarantee

I get the happy ending I've just defined that I want. So how that worked for me was, the three things that I put down are, I would specify how many undistracted meals with my wife and kids I want a week. And I think the current one is five. It might be different for someone else,

but for me, it's a nice thing. If I can have five undistracted meals with them, the kids, where I'm not thinking about work, if I keep doing that week after week, come my deathbeds, I will have ticks off number one. If I get a chance to go for a long run each week or play my guitar and write a song and have a sing, I will know that at the end of my life, I will have found time for my passions.

And the third one was, if I release an episode a week of this podcast, which I've been doing for seven and a half years, I know, and I keep doing that. I know I'm going to be doing something to improve the lines of others. And why it's been so helpful for me is because it embraces this concept that your to-do list has never done. there's always more you could be doing. But if I just do those three things each week, I'm winning at life.

And I have to just let go with the other self. And it's not there as a stick to beat me with. If I have a busy week where I'm traveling and I don't get to do them, it's just a nice gentle reminder, hey, you only had one meal within the kids last week. Don't let that become a pattern where you're doing that for a second week or a third week. So what do you think of that? Do you think that speaks to some of the ideas in your book?

think it really does. I think one of the other things I love about that is that it sort of takes these goals that you have and brings them forward from the future into like, well, the goal is in doing these things in the present. Now, I'm not saying that I and some people whose minds work like mine wouldn't then be able to turn that into a stick to beat themselves with. It's like, have I done the five, have I done the five, whatever. And I think, you know, it's not a, the amount of the proportion of the week that that might take. I mean, a podcast probably takes a lot of your week, but, like, that's actually a relatively small number of the hours that you're awake.

And that's very good, too, because there's a strong tendency, I think, in a lot of sort of goal-setting, life-visioning approaches to try to account for every minute of the day. And then you get very depressed and frustrated because you realize that an extraordinary amount of the day just seems to go in, like, you know, just living, just like getting dressed and, like, you know, whatever. Just stuff that doesn't fulfill you.

And so I think if you can take that alternative approach that says, you know, here are a few sort of pinpoints in the course of a week that would express that long-term goal. I think that's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, you write about abusefully in your introduction to Meditations for Mortals. When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that's when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things. that truly counts. That's life, isn't it? A handful of things that truly matter. I think it has to be, yeah. And I think it's, I think that the problem is not that that's the way it is. The problem is just always that we are tormented

by the thought that it should be more and it should be more. One of the ways you can think about that that I've found very helpful is sort of seasonally, right? The fact that you're giving things up for now to focus on these few things doesn't mean you're giving them up forever, right?

So maybe in your focus on these three things, there's something that you don't get to do. Maybe you don't get to indulge your passion for some other activity or, you know, something like that. But you can always, like, this is for now. This is for now, exactly. You know, it's not like when I'm 60, I'm going to beat myself. You said you were going to do that.

You put it down in 2023 on your list. You're not doing it now in 2043, whatever. All you can ever do is make a decision in the moment now. And it means that you're approaching the reality of, you know, it's awful for any of us with kids at home to think about one day your kids will be out in the world and maybe you'll persuade them all to live within like half a mile of your house but maybe you won't

and you won't get so many meals in the course of a week and that's fine too because that'll be that season so instead of trying to optimize everything you focus on what you have now and how that can give meaning to what you're doing right now the idea of embracing our limitations yes I think it helps us be, you know, calmer, less anxious, you know, enjoy our lives more, which I think is one of these

core messages that you talk about. But it kind of also applies, I think, to other genres as well. I think it helps with creativity. As I've become a creator over the last years and I'm like, those limitations that we impose on ourselves and frankly life imposes on us, that's what leads to creativity, that's what leads to a meaningful life. You know, acknowledging that you can't do everything, gives you the license to go, yeah, so what do I want to do? Yeah. No, and I think it's true.

I think it's worth doing just as a thought experiment that philosophers have debated this, right? But like, if you were actually going to live forever, not in any kind of religious sense that you may believe, but just in the sense of like your actual life here on earth going on and on and on forever, I think very possibly it would be terrible, right? It would be the question, because the question, like, what should I do with my day, would always be like, doesn't matter, right? There's always more days. And there's something about the fact that we are in these limited situations that gives value to the choices that we make.

I've written before about the joy of missing out, right? It's this sense that, like, it matters more. If you're staying home for bedtime with your kids, it matters more to know that you, in principle, could have been somewhere else and you chose not to be somewhere else. that gives it value. And then the other thing that just on my mind, when you talked about creativity, there is, I'm always at pains to try to emphasize. Like, I think this way of embracing the truth about your finitude

is completely consistent with, like, being very ambitious for your life. I think I am. And I think occasionally I've run into people who've sort of misunderstood and thought what I'm saying is like, ah, you can't do very much. Like, just settle for mediocrity. Like, there's no point trying to reach the height. because we're all just too limited.

And it's like, no, no, no, it's the exact opposite. It's like, it is by acknowledging the limited reality of our, of the reality of our limitations. That's how you can then, like, focus your life for the most meaningful ambitions that you're capable of. Is that because, though, it's, you acknowledge that I can't do everything. I'm a finite human with a set amount of years on this planet. so therefore I'm going to choose very intentionally and carefully

what it is that's truly important to me. So is it that you're doing less better? It is, but again, there's also a danger there, right? There's a danger which is like this becomes incredibly high stress. It's like, oh my goodness, time is precious. I've got to make the right choices. And it would be terrible if I made the wrong choices. And I've got to watch myself like a hawk every minute of the day

to make sure I'm doing really cool and important things. I went through a phase of thinking that, but where I have sort of ended up is actually, no, it's a bigger relief than that, right? If you really sort of feel your way in to this limited situation, you get to cut yourself an immense amount of slack because you get to say, okay, like, the fact that something is important

or that somebody wants me to do it or that it would please my parents or that it would be morally good, that can't be enough to mean I've got to find time to do it because I'm just too limited for that. And something sort of falls away. And into that space, you can say, well, okay, almost any choices that I make, as long as they're, you know, if I make them honestly and being in touch with myself,

they're going to be meaningful things to do. I don't need to sort of go through life, double checking and being incredibly sort of putting a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that I'm doing exactly the right things or extraordinary things or anything like that it's like no once i really feel where i am you know helping a handful of people in your life matters uh cooking a nutritious meal for your kids matters right we don't need to it's great some people change the world in huge ways and invent extraordinary inventions and have sweeping effects on humanity for the better but that can't be the the standard of that you have to reach to live a meaningful life so i find i don't know if i'm expressing this

properly, but it sort of imbues more things with mattering, I think, to live in this way that's truer to our real situation. A few years ago, you made a very big life move, didn't you? You were working, I believe, as a journalist in Brooklyn, and you have moved to North Yorkshire. Can you contrast for us, you know, what has the difference been? You know, what, I guess, what led you to go to Brooklyn? was your life like in Brooklyn and how does that compare to what your life is like in Yorkshire? I mean, as always, these things have more moving parts and the more complex than it looks from the outside to a, I do come from North Yorkshire, but to a significant extent,

this was led as much by my wife as me in terms of wanting to have a spell of time outside the city. To some extent, we're like another data point because it happened at the end of the pandemic when it turned out that almost anyone who could ended up making this sort of move we thought we were being terribly unique and individual at the time but it's just like just statistics um I think that when it comes to those kinds of big decisions I've got more and more able to see that these are things you have to reach intuitively right it's not going to work to put make a list of pros and cons and try and add number scores to each thing and figure it out.

I've been in a situation several times in my life where, and I've become more able to see that this is going on as I've gotten older, where clearly the direction of just sort of growth and generativity and enlargement is a phrase somebody, James Hollis, the Jungian therapist uses, like it lies in a specific direction, right? So it's like actually to continue in this particular place right now doing this stuff,

it wouldn't be challenging in the right way. It wouldn't be leading me into the next chapter of things. And it's really hard to put into words because it is actually like all your unconsciousness as well that has this kind of amazing amount of information in it that's very hard to express in explicitly. But, you know, if you want to put it another way, I was interested in being near my extended family. I have friends in the area. that I wanted to reconnect with properly. I love the landscape of the North York Moors where we live.

I've always, since I was a child, felt a really deep connection to that sort of rather bleak and wind-swept place. So there were all these things that were sort of pointing in that direction. We thought it would be a good place for our son, at least for sort of early years for his schooling. So, you know, all these specific things. But actually what it was on a deep level, was this sense that, like, it might be fun in some ways

and difficult in other ways, but all of those would be in the direction of something kind of juicy and something that was, like, alive, whereas not doing it and coming up with all the good rational reasons why it wasn't sensible to do it right now or whatever would be against that spirit of aliveness. More and more I come back to this thing called aliveness, which I don't even know what it is,

but it seems like it is what we can navigate by. You had this in a sense that this is what you needed to do. That's what you wanted to do. Maybe you couldn't rationally argue it, a pro-vecon list and it goes, oh, balance, it's got six pros, that's got four. It's like, well, I've just really will. I mean, I really do feel more and more. Even when it comes to health, I think the most important things

are led by our intuition. and that inner guts feeling that we just know. You write in the book about Sheldon Kopp's phrase, you are free to do whatever you like, you need only to face the consequences, right? Let's use that phrase to examine your move from Brooklyn to North Yorkshire. You know, you were free to do it.

What have the consequences mean? It has, you know, the theme in these last two books of yours about living that more meaningful, calm, less anxious life, has that move helped you towards that goal? And what have you lost by not living in Brooklyn? This episode is brought to you by WOOP. Now, you may have heard me talk about WOOP on previous episodes of this podcast.

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Just visit thriver.co to get started today. That's t-H-R-I-V-A.co. Thriver, listen to your blood. It totally has helped me, I think, but it has helped me partly because it's helped me understand the truth of that phrase, right? You're free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences. We are not asked as human beings to make choices that have no downside. That is never a possibility for us. So whenever you face any kind of big decision or little decisions, actually, like whether to stay at your desk for another hour of emails at, 5.30 or to go home to your family if you have that choice. Even that kind of choice is relevant here as well, right? For sure. In every one of those moments, there's a downside to the choice that you end up making. And there would be a downside to the other choice. And what I find so

amazing about that Sheldon Cop quote, what helped me about it was it's like, oh, right, all I'm doing is choosing which set of downsides I want to take responsibility for. I don't have to worry about not having found a version of this life that doesn't have the downside. So, you know, in the context of the move, as you asked, I definitely miss a lot of people who I had become close to in New York and a certain kind of ease with which it was possible to just make a plan to see them and fall into deep, long, stimulating conversation. That was wonderful.

There's a vibrancy to living in Brooklyn, a sort of real sort of energy in that place that I, will always love, and I don't know, maybe we'll be back there, I don't know, but the, so these things really, like, once I realized that I didn't have to persuade myself, they were, they didn't matter, that's what makes it possible to make a move, right? Because you're saying, yeah, no, that will be a, that will be a disadvantage. And also there's the whole disadvantage of uncertainty, right? Like, maybe there'll be other downsides, one downside of a move from one country to another

is that you don't know what all the downsides are going to be. So, like, it goes on and on and on. But that enables you to enable me to let go of that tendency that I definitely had from a young age to constantly be second-guessing myself and being like, ah, I messed up here because I'm not, because there are downsides, right? Because I'm missing out on things, or it would have been good for my career to be in this place, or it would have been good for my son to have this benefit of living. It's like, no, yes, it would have been.

And also, right? And also there are wonderful, amazing, utterly unplanable advantages of being where we are. I've talked about the landscape, but the people as well, right? And, you know, it's like, it's a different kind of amazing benefit. I think some of this frustration or this uming and a ring comes from perfectionism. Yeah, right? A belief that it is possible to make the perfect decision with no downsides. And it isn't.

There's a consequence to everything. I think for me, at least, once you get good or better at recognizing that, number one, or then number two, trying to articulate them, try to go, oh, yeah, as you said, you know, there are things you miss about Brooklyn. Yeah. Yeah, right. You can't have that in rural Yorkshire. Right.

You have to accept that. I go, yeah, and I've made my choice that at this moment in my life, this is what's happening. I mean, I don't know if you would necessarily agree with this. having read Meditations for Mortals, well, I've got quite an interesting relationship with regret in the sense that I don't have any anymore. I think for many people, regret is a form of perfectionism. It's a belief that I could have made a perfect decision,

and I didn't, so I'm going to berate myself. It's like, no, no, wait a minute. If you go from the starting point that a perfect decision is not possible, it's like, well, what is there to really regret? I mean, you do things based on who you are and hopefully you can learn from them and go, yeah, you know what? That possibly with hindsight now wasn't the best choice,

but I didn't know that back then. No. Those wouldn't have made it. Right. But now I can go, oh, if I'm presented with that situation again, I've learned something. So for me, I've realized that regret keeps me trapped in my previous perfectionist tendencies.

And of course, you know, you are known as the imperfectionist, aren't you? You write about that a lot. If that's the name of your newsletter, right? It is, yeah. The imperfectionist. Well, perhaps you can elaborate what is your perspective on regrets, but also what is an imperfectionist? It's so interesting to hear you talk about regret in that way

because I, too, am someone who this point in life does not feel like I don't feel like I have significant regrets. I'm not one of the people who's sort of very weighted down by that sense of that. the lives unlived. But what I have been anxious about all my life, it's a lot better now, but like is the fear of future regret. So the feeling that like I'm about to make a choice here that I will come to regret, totally belied by the fact that I don't actually then feel the regrets, but but always sort of having my life choices constrained by this sense of like, ah, but you're going to regret this in future if this happens or this happens. And so,

So release from that, I think, if you are someone who's prone either to act or regret or to fearing regret in the future, is to see that in a certain sense, like, regret is inevitable. Another way of saying you never need to feel it is that you can't avoid feeling it. It will just depend on your personality, right? Yeah. But the – but if regret is the fact that you had to wave goodbye to – like, every single moment of life, if you want to get really philosophical about it, right? You wave goodbye to an infinite number of other paths like, you know, branching off like a river delta, you know, just forever and ever and ever.

And all you're doing at every single moment is just waving goodbye to possibilities that will always be closed to you forever. But again, it's so absolutely inescapable that it can become, that it can be quite liberating to see that. It's like there's no way of not doing that. There's no way of making a choice that completely protect you from future regret. And of course, even if you look at a decision and say, well, with hindsight, I wouldn't have done it that way. It's like, how did you gain the hindsight by making the choice and living through that bit of your life? So, you know, I don't see any reason that this is going to be true in the case of our move to Yorkshire. But if it had been that what we'd realized very swiftly after getting there was that we've made a terrible mistake, like in a sense, that wouldn't be a terrible mistake.

That would be like, realizing you've made a terrible mistake is a good thing. You know, I've been just playing around on my journal about the concepts of wasting time recently and really questioning, is it even possible to waste time? Because to say it's a waste is prejudging that you knew the consequences of that time. So if you are mindful of the time or you review it afterwards and you realize that it wasn't the best use of your time, Is that a waste, or actually, was it a very powerful learning opportunity? So, again, I don't know how relevant it is,

but it's just what I'm playing around with at the moment. This concept is wasting time. I'm like, I don't think I'm wasting any time. I'm just spending time and then trying to learn from it. Do I like it and I want to repeat it? Or have I learned something and I'm like, yeah, I'm not sure about that anymore. Yeah, no, I think that's brilliant. I think it's totally in keeping with what we're talking about

because to think that you could know in advance is to, feel yourself more perfectable and more unlimited than we really are, but to realize that you can act on the basis of the accumulated information, that's being a really full, whole-hearted, finite human being. Some people will call you a productivity guru. Are you one? Oh, I don't know what that. I mean, you know, I think on the one hand, I hate the idea because I think

productivity has come to mean, you know, just getting ways to get as many things done as possible. And a big part of what I'm, as you can tell, like, a big part of what I'm trying to get at here is that just doing more things is, A, not inherently valuable. It depends what the things are, right? There are plenty of people in the world at large who I might like to be doing fewer of the things they do. I thought, it will be a better place if they didn't, if they did fewer things. And all of us can only do so many things anyway. But also because but at the same time, rather, I think there is some meaning of the word productivity

that I think is important, that I do want, I'm someone who wants to, like, do cool things with my life that makes some kind of a difference. There's a danger. Whenever we talk about this kind of paths to more peace of mind and out of anxiety and all these things, there's a danger which you occasionally see reinforced by certain kinds of spiritual teacher and spiritual book

that suggests that like there's either the life where you do all the stuff and it's kind of frenetic and overwhelmed and anxious or there's the life where you just sort of float through your days and you don't care anymore about doing things because you've transcended to this level where all of that is irrelevant and I feel like one way of expressing everything I'm trying to do is to say no I think we can have both of these I think we can have the peace of mind

and the creativity and the generativity and the energy not in the spirit of trying to make ourselves feel like we're doing enough but in the spirit of saying, okay, I am enough but now what I want to do with this thing, person I am in the world is like express this through, you know, creativity, through work, through building things. I think you're a meaningful productivity guru as opposed to a toxic productivity guru. I'll take that. I'll take that.

The guru thing is interesting too. though this is where, like, in terms of like, our profile as advice bestowers, it's even more of a interesting thing for you than for me, perhaps. But like, I spent a long time being very sort of self-deprecating about, well, I don't have anything special to tell, to say. And I think it's important to be very honest, and I try to be in terms of like that I'm not like living some perfect life and now you lucky, lucky people get to copy me, right? That's not the spirit of any of this at all. We're all just muddling through. But on the other hand, more recently I have come to understand that this sort of knee-jerk, British self-deprecation can be a little bit

unhelpful and annoying. And you do have to hold some element of the authority that is vested in you. Like, that's actually helpful to people. As I say, I suspect you know about this much more than me, but like you don't, it's no, it's not a useful contribution to the world to say, oh, I've got nothing to teach. Yeah, exactly. You know, this is such an interesting point for me. Let's take this podcast as an example. I've been very clear, I think, I hope, over the many years that this show has been running that I didn't tell anyone what to do. I have no interest in telling someone what to do with their life, because that would also imply that I know what is best for their life. And I can't No. And I also don't believe that anyone does anything long term if someone else tells them to do it.

I've seen that time. We all know that experience ourselves, right? So my goal on each show, each episode is to have a meaningful, authentic conversation that hopefully on occasion is going to connect with someone. I go, oh, you know what, I recognize myself in that. God, you know, wrong as guess this week. yeah, God, I've got that thing as well. I'm interested in trying that thing that the guest mentioned, as opposed to you should be doing this. Right. You know, and also, you know, you take them one set further.

Let's say we look at your life from the outside and go, oh, well, Oliver was a successful journalist in Brooklyn, and the pandemic here, and him and his wife decided that actually we don't want to be in the city now. We want to go out, be near your family, in rural, beautiful countryside of North Yorkshire and then he went and wrote a global bestseller of 4,000 weeks.

Oh, so from the outside it can look as though that's the prescription. I need to move from where I live, go out into the country, then I'm also going to write a best sell like Oliver Burtman. But there's so many other factors in. So just because it worked for you doesn't mean it's going to work for me

or it's not going to work for anyone else. There's a subtlety there which, I think about this a lot through the lens of patience. I think, I spoke about this on my tour in March, I was saying that, you know, in an era where there's so much knowledge out there, we have to acknowledge that, you know, we've said for years, we need more knowledge. Knowledge is power, knowledge is information. I'm like, well, would you accept that there's more health information out there than ever before?

Right. But go, yeah. So, okay, so if information was all, and knowledge is all we needed, we should also get associated better health outcomes, but we don't. Fiscal health is getting worse, mental health is getting worse. So there's a disconnect. And I think, for me, it comes down to the difference between external knowledge and internal knowledge.

Like, take the information in from the outside, but then put it through your own filter, experiment. I go, you know, does this work for me? That's how I see it. I think it's so wise. And I think, you know, there's such a tendency, there's a sort of a collusion, isn't there, between certain kinds of guru advice bestowing people

and the people who are in their audience. There's a collusion to take that advice, to give advice, and then to take it and express it and try and follow it to that. Everyone wants to do that. But actually, yeah, I think anyone who gets to the point where they have a sense that some of the things they do in their life work well and they might want to pass that information on has come to that in a whole journey that they had to go through to get to get to.

And so actually one of the things I do early on in this book, it's divided up into lots of small chapters over the course of four weeks the idea is that you could do roughly a chapter a day for a month and I say if you're the kind of person who I have been, right,

who gets a book like this and wants to try to squirrel away every bit of information in it or take detailed notes or put it all into practice like maybe instead of that just sort of go through it and see what sticks

because if something sticks that's a really good sign that it's meeting you at the right time and if something else is like, okay, well, that was mildly entertaining, but it doesn't really resonate. Then, like, that's information. The idea that you should then take that and try and force yourself to do that thing in that chapter, even though it doesn't resonate is a mistake.

Yeah, it was interesting to see how you followed up from 4,000 weeks. I think the structure in this book is brilliant. It is such a beautiful. I think you call it a retreat for the minds. Just trust that if it resonates, it will stick. And I really like that as opposed to, you know, jot it all down, make notes, going, oh, you know, all of a sudden, I must do this. And now how do I apply this? It's much more freeing, I think, than that. I'm glad you think that. And I think the other thing that I was hoping to get at with that is like I didn't want to create, it would have been totally contradictory and hypocritical of me to create a book where the feeling of it was like, you know, get all this into your head. And then when you get a free week in a, a couple of months' time and you're through all this other stuff.

Like, then you can put it into practice, high energy, perfect, like hit all the points. I wanted it to be something that you can read right now before you've got through all the emails, before you've fixed your terrible problem with procrastination or distraction or whatever terrible problem you imagine yourself to have. Just right here, before the world calms down and the news headlines stop being so terrifying because that might never be going to happen. And so just right here in the middle, that's this idea of retreat of the mind, right?

Not you have to go on a retreat for a week when you can finally book the leave, but like, no, just in the back of your mind, now in the middle of it all. And so that required the chapters to be very short because it's going to be on a commute or with a morning coffee. I think that's the gold in this book

or one of the pieces of gold. And actually, you could make the case or I'll make it for you, probably too modesty, that you could just continue with your life the way it is, and just read one of these short chapters each day for 28 days as you propose. And you're probably going to get some quite profound benefits because it's just these gentle realizations, I think, that people are going to get about the state of their daily life. And as you say, the important things are going to stick.

Because, you know, with the best one in the world, not everything, and I don't mean this in your book, in my books or anyone's thoughts, not everything is going to resonate with everyone. Right. It can't do. Right. Because we all hear things differently. Yeah. No, totally.

Okay. So can you just summarize then? It's week one, week two, week three, week four. Being finite, taking action, letting go and showing up. Can you just give us a little paragraph on what each one of those means and why you chose that order to take us through this mental retreat? Totally. Although even saying I chose it seems a little bit too much.

It was one of those discoveries where it just sort of like, Like, after going through lots and lots of permutations and long conversations with my two excellent editors in the US and UK, like this just sort of, it was just obvious it had to be this way. You know, sometimes you'll feel like you're discovering things rather than willing them into reality. So, yeah, it seemed very natural by the end of that process to feel like you want to start with being finite, facing the truth of our limitations, sort of feeling what it's like. to accept the fact that we are in this position of limitation, not just limited amount of time, but I think really important part of this is how limited is our control over how that time unfolds

and our limited knowledge of the future and all the rest of it. And then the question that occurs naturally I think is, well, okay, so how do I actually like do the stuff I got to do in that context or that I want to do? And so that's the week two on taking action. One of the things that has been so important to me and that I have struggled with myself is the theme of week three that actually a lot of the time the way to bring more meaning into your life and to more creativity, more meaningful productivity involves sort of getting out of your own way

and letting things happen rather than in that sort of dominating way making them happen. So that idea of letting go is about letting go as a kind of an active practice and it all seemed very naturally to end up in this place week four showing up the idea that like what all this is for the destination of this to the extent that there is a a destination because it's always an sort of endless unfolding process but that destination is just like being more here for your life like ultimately I feel like what unifies all those things that you said in the exercise that you spoke about

that you would want to be able to look back at from your deathbed what unifies them all is that like you were really here and present it's a very strange idea to put into words but yeah that you that you were really alive for your life so that I guess that's where this this four-week journey reaches its conclusion yeah I kind of feel so far although there are more we could cover, I think we've spoken about this idea of being finite. Okay. So, I mean, I love the book. It's so good. I have written down lots of chapter things that I want us to talk about. We won't get through them all. Actually, you know, I'm going to just, before we get

to a week two, I just want to mention something there that I think really relates to one of your key messages about doing what counts, you know, focusing. what really matters, and it also maybe clashes with some of our ideas of productivity. So, okay, so I host this podcast, okay? I know many other podcasts hosts these days. Podcasting is obviously blowing up, and there's millions around the world now. And most podcasts of the size of this one tend to have researchers.

So they have researchers who will go through the books and go through that person's work and then presents the host with some research notes. And the host may do a bit as well, but a lot of the prep is done for them. Because it's time efficient. Well, there may be other reasons as well,

but one of the reasons is because you can be more productive. You can get more things done because you're not going to spend a day researching the guest, someone could do that for you, so you could do other things, get more emails done or whatever it might be. And I had this realisation a few years ago

because I've never had a research here. And, you know, I was starting to think, you know, God, everyone seems to have a researcher. Well, I don't, you know, not everyone, you know, my friend Rich Roll, who runs a podcast, he doesn't have a researcher either. And I thought, it's kind of interesting. Even if a researcher would save me time,

what if I don't want the time saved? Yeah. And I know it sounds maybe perhaps a bit of a throwaway comment, but it was a real profound realization for me, where I thought, actually, that's one of my favorite parts of my week is preparing for my guests. I love it. I literally love it.

A, I happen to believe it makes the conversations better anyway because you're more invested. But even if it didn't, I just love it. So the question I often ask myself is, how would you like your experience of life to be? Yeah, let's imagine you've got some crack-hot researcher who could present you everything. Well, I wouldn't have watched some of your videos yesterday.

I wouldn't have read pretty much the entirety of Meditations for Mortals. My life would be less good had someone done that for me. So it's almost the anti-productivity hack to do it myself. But I'm like, no, damn it, I want to do it myself. No, totally. And I think this illustrates a really, really important point, which is that if you just follow the doctrine of optimization and you let yourself go along with the cultural currents towards optimization,

then all else being equal, you will optimize out of your life precisely the things that make it worth living. Now, that doesn't mean that there's not some other things that, you know, you want to have other people do and that your position. enables you to have other people do in that ecosystem of producing a podcast. But it's like it's such a gift to realize, oh, I was on track to optimize away something that. And I think we do this to ourselves as a wider culture, right?

I wrote in 4,000 weeks about how a lot of convenience culture has left us sort of feeling. I think a lot of people resonate with this notion, right? Like, it's much easier to, often what's easiest to do is not what is most enjoyable for us as a matter of experience. So it's easiest to like get food delivered with an app and not have to talk to anyone and not have to go out and find the food yourself or not have to cook a meal from ingredients that you bought. It's easiest to stay home and watch stuff on TV when you could have met some people and watched it at a movie theater, right? there's always this kind of tension between what's the sort of smoothest life and what's the life that we want to live that we value the most in hindsight and this seems like a good example of it right it's effort you could I'm sure that

despite the fact that you love reading the books of the people that come on this podcast there have been weeks when if you could just wish it away and save the time you would have taken it but actually there's something really useful about saying to ourselves like no I don't want to smooth my life out in this way because smoothness is not my ultimate goal here. Maybe smoothness in certain areas of life. Exactly. It's by intentionality, isn't it? It's about really, it's like, you're free to do whatever you like,

you need only to face the consequences, right? You can, you know, obviously we're talking about through the lens of a podcast, but you can apply this to anything. You've got infinite ways that you can do these things. Right. But all of them come with a cost. And the ironic part, which I'm sure you have experienced, is that, like, the more success you are fortunate to enjoy in the world, in a certain sense, the worse it gets. Obviously, in a certain sense, privilege that comes with success is fantastic and not to be sniffed out. But, like, I'm guessing that where you are now, like, the opportunities that come your way are harder to choose between because more of them are good and enticing.

So it's fascinating. It's like everybody who is human is faced by this, is faced with this situation, and becoming very successful or becoming super wealthy or becoming famous or whatever doesn't solve the problem because the problem is called the human condition. Yeah, exactly. Be careful what you wish for, right? Because it may actually come true. And then you're, you know, it's a great point. And again, you know, somebody will make me thinking, yeah, okay, nice, you guys have got nice problems. You get invited to nice things because you're successful authors. But the point you're making. is not that. The point you're making is that that applies to everyone on some level. Right. And they are, they have a nice, they definitely have a nicer, um, feeling to them, the problems, uh, when,

when it's, when, you know, knowing where the next meal is coming from is not part of the calculation. And we have to acknowledge that. Right. But there's still problems in this fundamental way that we've been tracking through this conversation, which is that they are tough choices about finite time. And in certain ways they can be tougher because, the things that you have to let go of

are more obviously things that would have been great to do. A mate in mind is a filmmaker, right? And his dream is always to be in Hollywood and make feature films, but he's now got himself a regular gig, just filming, you know, locally to his house where he's got predictable-ish hours, no travel.

And I remember having a shout with him a few years ago about, it really speaks to this, this acknowledgement of you can't do everything. You know, if he had gone to Hollywood and done the job of what he perceives Hollywood directors do and the busyness and all the things that come along with that, perhaps he wouldn't have the quality family life

that he does have. Right, right? I feel a lot of your work is about bringing the, it's making the invisible, visible, right? Yeah. It's the unmeasurables, you know, I think about this concept of unmeasurables a lot, that, you know, we, society is skewed now towards the things that we can easily measure, like your follow account or your income or your downloads, right? But, you know, the gold in life comes from the unmeasurables, the sort of thing,

you know, the quality of your relationships, you know, do your kids like you and want to spend time with you, right? You know, if you want to have a partner and you're looking at, you're looking at enough to have a partner, do you have a good relationship with them? You know, is that something that's worthy? You know, there's no scorecard for those things. Right. And I honestly feel that's why that write your own happy ending exercise has helped me so much, and also living five minutes from where I grew up,

really has really helped me as my public profile has grown. I'm still in the same town where I grew up. I'm five minutes away from mum. You know, I see her pretty much every day. And that's a choice. that's, you know, it's interesting, you know, we're recording this just pre the summer and it was Father's Day a couple of weekends ago. And I was on the move. And I thought, I'm going to share a post on Instagram. So I'd literally found a photo of me and my, the first

photo I could see where you couldn't see my kids' faces because I never share their faces on social media. And I thought, I just wrote a post in the moment about what is being a father mean to me? And what are the things I hope to not teach my kids? Because I'm even skeptical that you can't actually teach your kids anything now. Like, you know, sort of showcase. Or, you know, I don't know what the right word is,

but what are the things I value as a father and the things I hope to do and showcase them that are important? I'd put a list of things that you might expect people to say, being kind, how you treat people. But things like, you know, how integrity is more important than money. But then what came to mind is I sort of have shared that caring for my mother, their grandmother, is not another thing to fit into

a busy life, but an inherent part of a meaningful life. And it's interesting, that's what really people resonate with the most. And I never articulated that before or thought about it. Well, yeah, you know what? You're damn brighted this. You know, I could not do that. And in inverted commas do more things with work and have more in averticomber success. But if I, for me personally, how I value my life, how I was brought up, looking after my family is one of the most important things to me. So no amount of success is worth me not being able to do that. No, completely. I think that's so well put. And it's like you said before about making the invisible visible. I often think about that in terms of making unconscious things conscious, usually in terms of negative stuff. So

It's like you can go through the day making choices. You're doing that anyway. You can either do it consciously or unconsciously. You can either be aware of the limitations of your time or you can be unaware of them. You can't not have them. You can just know whether you're relating to them in a conscious way. But as you point out, it's also to do with becoming conscious

of the things that you have decided to have in your life because they matter to you. and then feeling much less bad about all the things that you could in principle be doing instead because you've found that those kind of end values, as it were, right? You're in less danger then of the means becoming the ends, which is what happens otherwise, right? People just think that doing more and more and more stuff is important

or getting more and more money is important regardless of what's happening to that money. Freeing up time, like even that is kind of not a very useful thing unless you're freeing it up for something that you want to free it up for. So again and again, it's like, well, why? And I think once you've got that in place, you're well on the way. Okay, so week one, being finite, seven chapters, seven, I was going to say lessons, but you probably would urge me to not use the word of lessons, but seven things to think about.

Meditations. Meditations, seven meditations. Okay, week two, there's seven meditations on taking action. Let's just cover one of them before we move on to week three. Rules that serve life, doing things daily-ish. I think this is great. What is daily-ish and why is it so useful? Today's episode is sponsored by Vivo Barefoot.

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Dan Harris the meditation teacher and podcaster although I think he has told me that he got it from someone else as well so we're not doing a good job of getting this to its final attribution and he uses that as a guideline for as an answer to the question how often should you you meditate meaning, you know, formal meditation, which this book isn't really about the title maybe a bit misleading

in my book, I mean, but he teaches formal, following the breath and he said, you know, people want to know, how often should I do it? Do I really have to do it daily? And it's like, we should do it daily-ish. And what I love about the idea of dailyish is that it's very gentle and flexible, right?

The idea of doing anything dailyish, reading the chapters of this book, dailyish for a month, exercising, journaling, whatever it is you're trying to do as a habit, it doesn't mean just do it when you feel like it, right? It's not just like, ah, forget it. Like the moment you don't want to do it, you don't have to do it.

We all have a fairly strong sense of what counts as doing something dailyish. Like five or six days a week is clearly dailyish. And in busy times, maybe four days a week is going to count as dailyish. But if you only do something two days a week, you're not going to fool yourself that that's dailyish, right? So we get past all these detailed questions of exactly how often should you be doing something. but you're still putting a sort of gentle kind of pressure on yourself to make sure you do it. And I think this is one example.

That chapter is about the idea of rules that serve life. I think it's really easy, especially in this space of health habits, personal development, all the rest of it. It's really easy to think that there exists some set of rules that if you could only find them and then you promise to follow them completely obediently, that will be it.

Your struggles will be over. the rules would effectively sort of live your life for you and you would be like the servant of the rules and people fall into this all the time right now from now on this three times a week this this morning routine this set of supplements whatever whatever whatever and it's not that it's bad to have rules it's that you've put yourself in a power relationship with those rules

which sort of expects the rules to sort you out and then you have to be completely sort of obedient to those rules And I wanted to explore this notion, which I think goes a long way back, including to sort of Christian monastic traditions, among many others, of rules that really matter, but they're there for you. They're there for the things that you want to achieve, right? The important thing is not that you meditate every single day or even that you exercise every single day. The important thing is your peace of mind or your physical health. and then what rules serve that and what level of attachment to those rules

is helpful for them to actually be sustainable part of your life? Yeah, it's beautiful. And I think this concept of daily-ish really takes us away from this black and white thinking, which massively leads, comes from perfectionism. And it's interesting, you know, I was watching some of your interviews yesterday in the lead-up to you

comes to the studio today. And in one of the interviews I saw, you were asked about non-negotiables. And it's a very common interview podcast question. What are your non-negotiables? And I, you know, I'm no issue with people asking that. I understand why they asked that. And it's the sort of thing that I would have thought about a few years ago.

I'm wondering what I said now, right? Yeah, I can't remember what you said now, actually. No, please carry up. But the point was is that I don't think non-negotiables exist. I think it's a mirage. Everything's negotiable. Like everything is. You can't promise or guarantee you're going to mend it every day. Some days, you don't know, your mum might be ill and in hospital and frankly, you don't have time. Right. You know, everything is changeable depending on the circumstance. I could say a non-negotiable

has been kind and not using violence. Well, it kind of is, but if someone was threatening my two children, I might change my viewpoint on that, right? So I think, think even embedded in the question of a non-negotiable is perfectionist thinking. Right, because the only actual non-negotiable is our imperfectionism and our limitation. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, daily issue, I think is brilliant and hopefully helpful of people who are maybe struggling with health habits and go, well, what if you did it dailyish as opposed to every day? Let's get into week three, let's and go, because there's just, well, all of them, frankly, I could, we could, I actually believe that you could do a whole podcast and just one of

these 28 meditations, right? Because I've really deep, thought-provoking ideas that have resonance and relevance for all of us. But I really like in week three, letting go, the chapter entitled, what if this was easy? The false allure of effort. Can you speak a little bit to this chapter and why it was so important for you to write. Yeah, and we're definitely in the terrain here of the things that I've sort of struggled with myself the most or that more recently understood compared to some of the earlier weeks of the book.

I think that there is a very natural tendency that many of us have. It's partly to do with the culture that we live in. It's definitely to do the way we're raised. Maybe It's to do with religious traditions as well sometimes. To feel like if anything's worth doing, it's going to be pretty high effort, right? If you go through the day and you don't put in an awful lot of effort, then you're kind of not being a full, adequate human being who gets to feel good about themselves.

And obviously, there's some truth in that idea, right? Life calls for effort in certain cases, and you have to sort of put it in and it makes it worth living. We were talking about you putting in the effort of reading, the books of your podcast guest as an example of effort that you find rewarding but it's really easy to get to a point where you think you sort of approach life

braced for everything that you're trying to do to be like some kind of fight and it's like oh no like this project really matters and therefore you know you assume it's going to be really hard or you just sort of go through the whole of your day sort of yeah with this kind of expectation that you're going to have to fight your way through it and that you're not going to get to enjoy

it and that you're not going to get to choose to do things that you like because, like, that's not what life is about. You're postponing enjoyment for the way to say. And just this incredible power of this idea, which has been articulated by many different people, as famous quotes from Tim Ferriss and Elizabeth Gilbert to this effect, but many other people as well, like, just the radicalism of asking yourself, like, what if this were, what if this were easy? What if this thing I'm about to?

or what would this look like if this were easy, I think is Tim's version of it. And it's such a sort of weirdly subversive question for a certain kind of person that I am, that kind of person, like historically, right? That's sort of, like, what would actually happen if you did the things, some of the things today that you feel like doing? And is it really the case that you can't do that? There are limitations to it, of course, created by our situation in life. but would I, if I just did some things that I wanted to do, would I just definitely choose being a layabout and sitting on the sofa and eating crisps

and like wasting my life? Or maybe I can trust myself a little bit more than that. You know, maybe I can sort of take a subtly different attitude. And I write at one point in that chapter, I think, about an author called Julia Rogers Hamrick, who has this idea of choosing easy world. And it's this idea that struck me as just so new agey when I first came across it.

Like, oh, I don't want to go into this kind of terrain. But she has this idea that, you know, she writes about the moment that she realized that you could sort of, you could just sort of choose to address a challenge in life in easy world instead of in difficult world. And she doesn't mean, I don't think, like persuading yourself that bad things aren't happening

or trying to sort of force yourself to think that something painful is not painful. It's that actually you either have to choose to sort of take the attitude that everything's against you or you can choose to take the attitude that everything is at least potentially for you and working in your favour. And then the great thing about this

is that even difficult to experience can be approached with a kind of ease, with a kind of readiness to have them go more smooth, than you were naturally, or you were previously assuming. Have I made that clear? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of interesting that, you know,

as you were just finishing there, we know that when, I don't know, when people run at their fastest, they're not trying to go at their fastest. There isn't, of course, it's not completely effortless, right? They're clearly expending energy and effort, But there is an effortless quality to it where they're not trying all out. They're just, they're flowing.

I think it's an important idea because my kids, I think, are a little older than your son. Right. He's eight. He's eight. My kids are 15 and 12. And this idea that things have to be hard, I think, gets subconsciously instilled by many parts of society, but schools, right? Because I'm watching it going, yeah, but it doesn't need to be. It doesn't need to be difficult. Not everything in life needs to be hard. And I realized a few years ago that I had to artificially create internal stress by way of, let's say, a deadline or other

things, to make myself do stuff. So I had to create this sense that it was hard. I'm up against it. and now I'm going to do it. And I've, bit by bit, started to change my relationship with difficulty. And actually, you can do some things that do feel effortless to a certain degree. Yeah. Yeah. And you certainly don't need to make them harder than they inherently are. I think it's in that chapter that I write about a friend of mine,

the meditation teacher Susan Piver, who wrote this blog. She's written lots of things, and I imagine she gets sick of the fact that I only always talk about this one blog post. But it made such a difference to me. Its title was Getting Things Done by Not Being Meant to Yourself. and she writes about how she used to try to govern herself very strictly by schedules for what she was going to do with her day and with her work and how fruitful and liberating it was to ask what do I feel like doing today and to realize, you know, obviously people are in different situations

we have differing degrees of autonomy over how our work days unfold but very many of us have at least some capacity to ask that question like, well, of the things on my plate, what do I feel like doing? right now. And discovering again and again that basically she ended up, proceeding through life that way, she did end up doing pretty much all of the things that she'd been beating herself up to do, right? You don't actually want to be the kind of person who never pays your bills or who never keeps promises commitments to friends or to who never cares for your physical health. It's just so much more motivating and freeing to do

it in a context where you're not like presenting it to yourself as a sort of a terrible trial that you've got to get through before happiness is allowed to be yours. Yeah, I think when you wrote about her, I can't find the bit now. It was, she had this really, um, elaborate morning routine, didn't she? This much meditation, this much journaling, this much that, this much. And I think it's a great example to use because I suspect there will be people listening who have perhaps tried that approach before. Maybe for some people it works, because of course it can do for some people, but for some people, what I found often happens is that they, they kind of think that

there's some sort of flaw within them. God, I'm trying, I'm doing the meditation journaling thing, I'm doing the breath eats, but I can't stick to it, I'm not getting what I thought I would get out of it. And you write this in that chapter, which I think really speaks to this, okay? When I fail to take action on the things I care about, the reason is sometimes that I lacked the time, or couldn't summon the willpower, but it's, it's at least as likely to be because I spooked myself with visions of the perfect result I thought I needed to achieve or assumptions about the difficulties involved, thereby blocking action that would otherwise have flowed naturally. I think you have just summed up

there, Oliver, why so many people struggle to make the health habits stick. I don't think this is the right information or the white knowledge or they need to look. learn about a new technique. I really don't. I think there's something in that. We have in some ways a disordered relationship with that behavior, with that habit, what we think it should feel like or what it should give us. I really think you're on something with that. I'm really glad to hear it. And I think there's, I mean, the thing that that makes me want to say is like even the very idea of a habit can get in the way sometimes. And I do mention this a different point in the book, right? Like, if you're someone who's got into that psychological tangle with habits,

it can be really interesting to ask like, well, you know, would you be willing to just go for a brisk, go for one brisk walk today? Would you be willing to go to the gym, go for a swim, whatever it is that you do and enjoy doing and are capable physically of doing? Like, could you just do that today? Not could you do it for 10 minutes every day for the rest of your life? not even dailyish, but like, could you just do it once? Like, and just let yourself go and do it?

Because I think that it's so easy to think, like, well, this is a difficult thing. It's going to have huge rewards for me. I'm going to feel like a million dollars once I've really got into the swing of it. So it's a long-term project. Better dig in, better buckle down. And, like, it's especially harmful for those of us who've had, like, so much success with this approach in life. Like, I got great exam results. because I was really good at, like, the patient work of endlessly working on schoolwork.

And it's like, I'm not saying that was a bad thing at the time. It served me well in lots of ways. But, like, there's a bad message in there, which is, like, if something's going to be worth doing, it's going to take a long time and be hard and pretty unpleasant as you go. And actually, the moment that you just go for the swim or do whatever the thing is that you are willing to do, the moment you do it once, you're doing it. Like, you're there. Yeah.

The bridge has been crossed. there's two things I'm thinking a lot about at the moment which I think speak to this which is first of all about goals I'm starting to come to the conclusion or the current viewpoints at least because it's an endless journey and it may change again

but I really do think that for many people dare I say most of us goals are a problem and the reason I say that is because a goal by definition is somewhere in the future. And I think the way that we've been spoken to about goals in this Western culture at least is that it's this thing that I work up to and then I achieve.

But the problem is, and I've faced this on innumerous occasion, which is why I'm coming to this belief, It's a it goes back to these habits you're meditating because you've heard it's going to help me with anxiety and depression

and it's going to help me with focus okay but we really want to get to the point where we're doing it just could we like doing it right? Not for what it's going to give us

and the problem with goals is or a potential problem I should say with goals because I don't think it's a problem for everyone is that there's so much focus on the goal that, okay, so what, let's see you achieve that goal. Yeah. What next? What did you do the following morning when the last two years you've been working out to that goal? You see this with Olympic athletes all the time where the morning after the Olympic race, they don't know what to do themselves. The last four years was about that

one 10 second race. What the hell did you do the following morning? How is there a reason to get up? but I see this at my local park run where we're so focused on the goal of the time well let's say you work hard and you get that time so what happens the next day so where I'm sort of landing at the moment on goals is they're useful as a sort of compass or like a directing point

to go yeah to help you then put into practice and behaviours but just sort of loosely hold the goal Don't hold too tight because, you know, be careful what you wish. Or once have you do reach that goal? What's next? Yeah, I think that way of, I mean, I was thinking, before you said Compass, I was thinking like the point is here that they can be things to navigate by. And so a good goal, or I would say even more maybe like a sort of good vision for your ideal expression of life

that doesn't necessarily have to have, like, metrics in it, is very useful because it helps you make decisions in the present. And it helps you decide what to do this. afternoon. I think that is a much, yeah, the problems that you outline with the traditional approach, I think are really true, and I've certainly experienced them in my own life as well. I think it's a subtle thing because there's a chapter, I mean, it's later in the book, so I guess I'm speaking out of term. You can go to week four. It's fine. We don't have to go sequentially. This idea, we sort of started with it, the whole conversation with it in a way, this idea of starting from sanity, right, which is this phrase that I used to, as one way of

expressing this notion of like you decide who you want to be in the world and then you sort of go through life from that place starting right now as opposed to something that you're trying to get to in the future. And I think goals and visions can be incredibly useful. That is what it is to use a goal as a navigational aid, right? You can certainly have a particular target that you hope in a few years' time you're at. But in the meantime, the reason that that's useful is to ask like, how could I show up in the spirit of that today,

as opposed to I have to put aside all my happiness and enjoyment because later is when I'm going to do that. And especially when it comes to sort of money and prestige and status goals, we all know from all the research, it doesn't work that way. You just get accustomed to the quality of life that you're building or the status or whatever it is, and then you just need the next one and the next one and the next one. So you don't actually come to rest in happiness in 10 years' time anyway.

You might as well start trying to explain. So what, if you do achieve your dreams? Then what? You know, basically, when you're kicking it down the road into somewhere in the future. That is a great chat to how to start from sanity. And you say striving towards sanity versus operating from sanity. It's a subtle difference, isn't there? Yeah, I think it's that that's exactly what we're speaking about, right? It's not taking the question of what you want your life to feel like as something that you have to strive towards, very often by doing the exact opposite, right? So maybe you want a very restful life.

So first of all, you've got to work incredibly hard to get to the rest. But taking it as the sort of place from which you come. There's an author I quote in the book, Richie Norton. Yeah, it's brilliant. Right. It says it's a two-step process. Number one, decide who you want to be. Number two, act from that identity immediately.

And I love that. It doesn't mean like if who you want to be is like a sort of super high energy sports person, but you're right now completely sedentary and in a lot of pain or something. It doesn't mean force yourself to pretend to be someone you're not. It means like what would the person who you are now do today if you're acting from the identity that you want to manifest in the world? So for that person, it might be some very gentle movement. I mean, I'm on your territory talking about physical advice here. But, like, you know, if you want to be a novelist,

it's not about sort of telling yourself that in the next week you've got to have the novel written or going around talking about it. It's just like, what would that person who I am now living from that identity do today? And, you know, it might be a few words of the novel. Yeah, I love that, you know, that two-part process, decide who you want to be and then to act from that identity immediately.

I happen to enjoy journaling and I've seen journaling be very helpful for many people and I ask myself three questions every morning let me rephrase that most mornings and the third one is which quality do I want to showcase to the world today and I also have three questions in the evening

but they sort of piggyback off each other so that question is about I would say about Richie Norton's question one, decide who it is you want to be, right? So often it will be things, I want to be kind. I want to show the world the quality of compassion. I want to show the world the quality of patience. For me, it will be one of those things. I want to show the world of quality of integrity today. You know, whatever's top of mind for me, or I feel I could do with a nice reminder off at that particular moment in time. And why I find it so powerful is because Just by writing it in my journal while I'm drinking a fresh pot of coffee

doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to showcase that quality. But I would say it makes it more likely. Because I've been a bit intentional that morning. So if later on in the day I'm tempted to be a bit short with someone or react, I'm just that little bit more likely to go, hey, okay, showcase a quality of compassion. And then two of the evening questions are, well, what went well today and what can I do differently tomorrow?

What can I do differently tomorrow is, you know, getting away from this perfectionist tenancy, the acknowledgement there is that, yeah, even though I put that intention in the morning, it doesn't mean I'm a 100% perfect human who can do that all the time. So what I can do differently tomorrow might be, oh, I kind of, I wanted to be really patient today, but at 5pm, that last email really bothered me, and I reacted. Tomorrow, I'm going to try again and see if I can showcase a quality of patience, which I love simple things like that, which in a very gentle way, in a non-beating-up way, helps guide us, because then you start to show up more and more.

This is what I found myself and with patients who I recommended this to in the past, is that they, you actually, little by little, start to change who you are in the presence. And so those goals that you were looking forward to it, you know, you become a nicer, a calmer, more like the person you want to be. And your behaviour is actually that you're trying so hard to do and you're struggling to. They follow suit as a natural consequence of you showing up as that person. Yeah, I think that, yeah, there's something. very, very deep about this idea of what an intention is, right? Because you've spoken about it rightly, I think, as if it's something quite gentle.

And yet I think it might be more potent than a lot of kind of other more sort of willpower-based approaches to change and transformation because you're planting it there. And yes, sure, it may not flower the way you wanted it to today, depending on circumstances. but it's really there in a way that just sort of having it as a far-off vision as the kind of person you want to be or turning it into tasks that you're going to sort of grind through is not going to be. It's a very opposite to something that I've definitely fallen into, still do sometimes, which is, you know, if you think about the times when you have been a jerk to other people or impatient

or, you know, or truculent and not done things that you should have done or whatever it is, For me, anyway, it's not, I mean, I don't think it's because I'm an unpleasant person. It's because I've got these goals that feel to me very pro-social, very generous and very good for the world. They're not just all about my own indulgence and gratification. And like, everyone else is getting in the way of my attempts to achieve them. And so I'm snap at them or I fail to respond to their email or something. And so I'm in this ironic situation where precisely because I want to do good things, I'm showing up as the opposite of that person.

And the intentional approach, the way that you're talking about it here, that sort of gets around that. That says, like, my actual tasks for today, the part of me that wants a list of things I need to do or ways I need to be, is to manifest this thing. You're much less likely taking the approach you talk about to end up, like, snapping at people because you're too busy trying to build a world

where you're compassionate and patient, which is so ironic and ridiculous, but we do it all the time. And I think about this through, the lens of behaviours, right? So all the, you know, I really don't like the word good, you know, healthy behaviours and unhealthy behaviours anymore. You know, it's a bit like time. You spend time and it has a consequence. You engage in certain behaviours. There are consequences. If you like the consequences, you might want to repeat them. If you don't like the consequences, you might want to think about changing them.

Yeah. But that internal conflict, I think that many of us have when we, we're not really acting or showing up in the world as the people we really want to be and we know ourselves to be. That internal conflict is often what leads to the sugar and the booze

and for me a lot of the time they're downstream consequences from their inner conflict. And once you can sort of bring that into more alignment, I do find it. I found this myself. I've seen it with patients. you're actually starting to change your behaviours without actually trying so hard. You know, look, because you're not trying to do a behaviour in conflict with a person you know you are being, which I think is destined for failure.

And then you have to do things to take yourself out of your head because it's an uncomfortable dissonance. So I'm very much fascinated by root causes of everything. What is the root cause of your behaviours? And I think your books very much speak to, well, one big root cause, of many of our struggles, health, happiness, productivity, meaningful life, whatever it is you want, come from these perfectionist beliefs that we have. And so that's upstream. We have a belief that time is infinite and that actually we can get everything done because what social media tells us and that, you know, I can do that and that and have a good marriage

and see my kids and be crushing it at work. Well, wait a minute, well, what if you re-examined that root cause belief, which your books are helping us re-examine, then you change that. You'll naturally have a ripple effect when things below that are going to start to change. Did that fully make sense? Yeah, no, I think it does, and I think it did. And I think that sort of, and for me, it's a, and I think for a lot of people,

that perfectionism is it's sort of a perfectionism that you've got to achieve in order to feel like you earned your right to exist, basically. Like it's got that very sort of moral self-worth element to it. And so then, yes, the failure to do that, the failure to have life match up in that way is a painful thing that you need to find ways to not feel. So, yeah, I think it's true. It reminds me also of the, just very briefly,

the chapter called Don't Stand in Generosity's Way, which is draws on the work of the Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein. And it speaks to this idea that like it's really hard to make yourself into a better person. Lots of people think they need to be a kind of person or a better person than they are. And that sets up all sorts of internal conflicts and issues. But Joseph Goldstein says he has this personal practice

that when he feels a generous impulse arise, his practice is to try to act on it immediately. So he's saying, not I'm going to make myself a better person. I'm going to get better at recognizing when I'm already naturally being compassionate or nice or kind and just make sure that I follow through with sending the email or making the donation or whatever it is. And I think so often I've definitely had this experience, right?

I feel like, oh, yeah, I'd love to sort of, I'd love to sort of reach out to that person and tell them how much they appreciated their work. Or I'd love to make a donation to that good cause because it really, you know, reaches me in my heart. It's not that I'm a mean guy who doesn't want to do those things. It's that I'm really busy. I want to do those things really well

when I have lots of time and energy and focus or I want to make sure that I'm giving the right donation to the right organisation that's got a really good effectiveness rating and then just it just never happens because this life gets in the way and so I really, it's another example of this right? This lovely idea of Joseph Goldstein's practice

which is just like you don't need to summon up more kind thoughts. You just need to spot when they're happening and get a little bit better at just doing the thing that's behind them. That's beautiful and that's kind of of, in some ways, real mindfulness, isn't it? That's like the art of being present and noticing what's going on in you and around you.

That's kind of, I guess, one way that we can think about mindfulness. Just be aware of that and then act on it. Not, oh, I'll research the latest charity later. Running. You know, if you want to run, just start running. Don't wait until you've found the perfect running shoe or the perfect running outfit. It's like, no, no, no, you've got the urge now. Yeah. Do it now.

Yeah. When you got the urge. And by the same mindfulness, with the same mindfulness, you can not act on a sort of angry thought that you think you're going to regret later, right? So you can send the lovely emails and not send the mean emails. You can go running and not necessarily engage in the sort of unhealthy habits so easily just because, like, you already have the motivation to be that person.

Yeah, exactly. I wanted to go to the interruption chatter. It's one of my favorite chatters in the book, actually. For some reason, I just love it. And it was when we were talking about that journaling exercise and you were sort of saying when you can, not you, one could be short with someone because we're trying to do something else

that we deem more important. And in that, although me as well many times. But anyway, yeah, carry on. But in that, you sort of very openly share, you know, sometimes what goes to your mind if your son comes in to see you after school when you're trying to, I don't know, work between four and five or whatever it might be.

Can you just explain that? I think there's such a deep, simple, but a very deep concept behind interruptions. Yes, I think there is a tendency that we have. I mean, part of the tendency I'm tracking all the way through the book is we want to have lots more control over our lives, and we think that having more control over ourselves and our lives is the path to freedom and peace of mind

and all the good things, and I'm partly questioning that. And one of the ways we do that when it comes to our time is we sort of set ourselves these schedules, these very strong decisions about what we're going to use a portion of time for. And as a result, we actually end up creating a lot of the interruption problem. Like, of course, there are all sorts of things

that happen unexpectedly all the time. Whether that is defined as an interruption or not is at least partly up to ourselves. So the example that I give is, you know, if it's one of the days of the week when I'm working from home, I'm not doing school pickup. up. So my son and my wife is somewhere else in the house. And if he bursts into the room to tell

me excitedly about something that happened to him at school a day. Now, there are context. If I'm right in the middle of recording a podcast or doing a live radio interview or something where that's higher up on the problem scale. But if I'm just sitting there and the only problem is that I had defined that part of the day as being for deep focus. And then it becomes a problem that this otherwise totally wonderful thing that life is supposed to be about, which is moments of connection with your nearest and dearest. If that's only a problem because of the sort of overlay that I'd put on my day in an attempt to get control over it, then I think, you know, again, in a gentle way without beating myself up,

I can suggest that maybe I've taken a wrong turn there in how I'm thinking about my time. There's also a lovely, there's a Dutch Zen monk called Paul Lumen, so I quoted a few points. in this book and he has this lovely observation about this as well, which is like, even if you do need to get back to focused work at that time, because maybe you do need to like make that interaction as short as you can to meet a deadline. That's okay. It's not saying you should just let anyone interrupt you, even for lovely reasons. But even when you do need to get back to that work, the way that works most smoothly in the flow of reality is to stop. Put down what you're doing. Look the other person in the eye.

see them for real and say this sounds really wonderful actually I'm going to need to talk to you about it in a little while that person feels seen they go off and that can work not only in a lovely interaction with your son but with like some really irritating

co-worker in the office or something right it's not actually going to help to try not to be interrupted and keep control it's actually like okay this is what the unfolding of time has brought for me I don't have to be a doormat and just go with it for the next hour and a half but I do have to, like, respond to what's really happening.

And then, as Lumen's points out, right, that is much, everyone leaves happier in that situation. It's much smooth a way of... Most stress I've realized, and some people may push back at this, but I really do believe this, that most stress, not all stress, but most stress is internally generate within our minds. By the way, we're viewing situations. And I think that was a prime example. You know, on one level, what could be more lovely than your child wanting to see their father?

telling me about something that's happened. Right. Right. What a lovely thing. It's only a problem because we thought I had to do this. And again, as you say, you acknowledge, you know, yes, there will be times. But, you know, getting frustrated by that interruption that, frankly, your son, I'm using that as an example, he's not a mind reader. Right.

And he's a child. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. They're not to know that. you can apply this to a partner who's interrupting or coming in when one is trying to work. Right.

And, you know, somebody, I'm trying to work at the moment. Do you know what I'm working? You know, it doesn't help you. Yeah. Because A, the interruptions happens. B, that friction to it. That creates more internal stress. It's going to make it much harder to get back to the work.

Yeah. Yeah. When it does need to happen. Well, when you want to get back to it. No, absolutely, absolutely. And also, yes, you don't even know that the interruption, like to call something interruption is to say that what should have happened is what was going to happen in your mind

and what did happen shouldn't have happened. And there are times that that's true, but there are also times when it's like a wonderful serendipitous thing that is much better for everyone in the long run. And I do mention in that chapter, you know, that very famous moment, that sort of viral moment when Robert Kelly, the career expert, was very famously interrupted during Zoom by his kids.

And then you see his wife in the background managing to sort of get them out of the real. room while this interview carries on. And he wrote a lovely little sort of reflective essay on the experience because he's become famous as that guy, right? I mean, so many people saw this. Obviously, on some level, that was something going wrong. But, like, it, everyone loved it. And when, it happened before the pandemic, but when the pandemic came, like, it was a sort of a, it got circulated again as a sort of a touchstone of like what it's like trying to work as a family with other kids in the house at the same time.

And, like, he also writes about how he did pretty much think, because he wrapped up that interview that he was never going to be booked on a major media thing again. And he's like, no, way more often now. He gets way more bookings, right? Because he's, like, he's famous and everyone thinks it was kind of adorable. So he should give his kids a cut. Right, exactly.

So it's like nothing bad came from that thing that you would always have, if he'd had the choice in advance, should I stop, am I, like, do I want to make sure this doesn't happen or not? He would have chosen that it wouldn't happen. And all the things that came from it were good. And I think that is very, very common in our lives. Be careful what you wish for, you know.

In that scenario, you know, be careful. You do that enough times. They're not going to come and interrupt you and tell you. Right. You know, honestly, you see this, it's like, it's all these cliches as you're a kid or a teenager. You hear all these, oh, time is short, it passes so quickly, the kids grow up.

You think, yeah, yeah, whatever. Oh, man, you come a parent. You're like, oh, my God, these are so true. I'm really feeling it at the moment. As my kids are getting older, my son's 15. I'm like, oh, it's not long until he's 18. You know, how many summer holidays might we have left together as a family? I don't know, hopefully lots.

But it really brings into that present-day realization. Just, for me, at least, be careful what you wish, Do you really want lots of unbroken time when no one's disrupting you? Well, you know, you could be fully isolated and have that life. Or you could go, well, maybe, you know, going back to your thing of trade-offs, well, maybe a part of having a family and having children means that that is going to happen. So maybe you have to accept that. And I understand that sometimes you're in a job where you can't do that.

But having the humanity to explain it in the right way is, is more helpful for that other person and yourself. And the truth is, that interruption thing is a really big... I think this is why I like it so much is that a close friend of mine, a few years ago, found out that one of his children had a brain tumour. Non-malignant, thankfully, but nonetheless, a concern. I don't remember him saying to me,

since that moment he never says no to that child now anything can be taken to an extreme right so take that to an extreme and someone could be someone who's completely spoiled right but I didn't take it he can I have a 20th ice cream right?

Is that right? Yeah but what what he doesn't mean that? No, what are you really meant as if if and I'm being careful not to use names if he or she wants to do something or wants to throw a ball in the garden or wants to go swimming or whatever it might be,

his default has become yes. And since he told me that, my default has become yes. Now, am I perfect? No. And of course, sometimes it's not appropriate. But for me, it's been a really... It's the... I guess in some ways the

realisation of mortality even in a child that reminds us of what is truly important in the present. Yeah, absolutely. And yes, I think that's so powerful.

And it's interesting, isn't it, to see that when we do say no a lot of the time, sometimes there's the kind of no which is that's not good for you and it's my role as your parents to try to steer you in healthy ways.

which can go wrong as well because it's important to make your own decisions and all the rest of it but there's also the no that says like well that is a good thing but I just can't do it now

like we can't do it now because it's got to be later and there's a beautiful line in a Tom Stoppard play which I quote in 4,000 weeks which is in the context of child mortality as well but like you know

it's like later is always too late like and it's and he's talking about how like there's this other line in that same quote which is that you know we treat children children as if their purpose is to grow up into successful adults.

And so we say yes or no to them on that basis, but actually a child's purpose is to be a child. And later is always too late. Just this idea that, like, you know, if you're going to do these things that matter in your life, at some point, you're going to have to do them in a now, right? And I think it's so easy to forget. It's then so easy to beat yourself up when you remember it.

As like, oh, no, from now on I'm going to be perfect about this. That's also not where this is headed, right? But just like, just to let that back in is very powerful, I think. I cannot finish this conversation without talking about scruffy hospitality. I think I'd like to think I'd like to think I'd demonstrate a bit of that today when you came to the house with the painters there and you have to come in through the back. But what is scruffy hospitality? Scruffy hospitality.

This is a phrase that was coined by an Anglican priest in Tennessee called Jack King. And he had this experience where he and his wife loved having people around to have dinner. He's written about this and gave a sermon about it, which sort of is where I first found out about this. They loved having people around for dinner, but they had sort of developed this checklist of all the ways in which the house had to be perfect before they could have people around for dinner and how perfect the dinner had to be and well chosen and cooked and everything. that it became a barrier to actually wanting to have people around for dinner because it's just so much work. And so he recounts how they became dedicated instead

to this idea of scruffy hospitality, which is saying like, okay, we're going to invite people around and the deal is going to be that you come in the house is the way the house is and we eat the stuff that we can cook from the cupboards more or less. And we're sort of understanding in this moment that the connections that come from the hospitality are more important than the putting on of the façade. And the sort of deeper point here,

and I've definitely experienced this in my own life, is that it's not just a question of saying, look, it's okay, don't worry, it's forgivable. Like, people are going to overlook their mess. It's that actually when we show up in this more, and not just in dinner parties, obviously, right, but when we show up in life in this more unvarnished way, we're more willing to talk about or display flaws,

it's better, right? A lot of the time it causes people to connect much more with each other. So I write in that chapter about how, you know, I often had noticed long before I came across this term scruffy hospitality, how like if we were having people around for dinner and I noticed that there were like crumbs under the fridge or like an open mail on the toaster for some reason, I'd be like, oh my goodness, God, I've got to sort this out before people come around.

But if I ever saw things like that or worse, frankly, at places that I had been invited, I would never be offended. Like, I would never think, like, this is outrageous, this person hasn't got it together. I would actually be kind of flattered that I was being given the sort of VIP path to their real lives. I was like, well, I must be this person's real friend. So it's a bit like people-pleasing, isn't it, in some ways, where people-pleasing is kind of trying to change who we are so that people think of us in a certain way.

Exactly. It's that notion that, it's that notion specifically that, like, you have to be perfect in how other people. People pleasing example is good because the point about people pleasing is it doesn't please other people, right? They find it really annoying. And there's a level of trying to make everything perfect in your presentation of yourself

or your home or anything that actually causes a distance. Now, as I am aware and have also been had emphasized to me by one or two readers since first writing about this, firstly, there are plenty of people who really enjoy putting on a show when people come around for dinner. and I'm not trying to say that's bad. And secondly, this plays out, this is gendered, right? This plays out different ways.

I think overall women feel more pressure for the domestic spaces to be really sort of spotless and there's a sort of like, well, it's easy for you to say as a man aspect of this, which I also take on board. But the underlying point is just that, like, thinking that things need to be presented a certain way that is different from who you really are

before you can show up in the world, that's where the unnecessary self-harshness comes from. If people like you as a person, they like you as a person and they don't need you to always be pretending to be a different person. To just move it into a different domain quickly, there's research to show that when people are, there's been these kind of mentoring schemes to try to get people over imposter syndrome in academia, right? There was a whole set of schemes where young women academics were paired with older female academics. And the idea was that they'd get inspiration from the great success of these people. They wouldn't feel

imposter syndrome anymore. And what the research has found was that actually it just makes it a bit worse to be when you're put in a position, it can make it a bit worse, when you're put in a position where you're sort of looking at someone else's amazingness and you're comparing yourself negatively. And that actually when those people

or people in that position started sharing about their own insecurities and failures and flaws, that was when the people who had imposter syndrome started to feel more empowered because there was a connection that came through behind those facades that was about how we are all here. human. We are all flawed and finite and we are all in the same boat. And that's when you really

get to feel a common bond. Yeah, Oliver, I love it. Honestly, four thousand weeks and this new book, Meditation to Mortars, absolutely fantastic. Honestly, so, so helpful, so many insights. And we've honestly barely scratched the surface in this conversation. If what is in Meditations for Mortars, I think the format is also really, really clever and very inviting. for people, so I really appreciate that. Right at the end of this conversation, Oliver, I guess, mirroring how we started off, for that person who is listening to us right now

and feels that actually their life is out of control, they're knackered, they feel close to burnt out, they feel anxious. given everything you've written about over the past years in your books but also in your newsletter what are your final words of wisdom to that individual I mean first of all it is just to say that this is the most sort of fundamental universal human experience especially these days right so that There is, I hope that I can persuade the person in that situation at least not to make things worse by telling themselves that they shouldn't be feeling that way,

that it's a sort of personal failure of discipline or character or not having found the right methods yet that have left them feeling that way. No, this is a very, very, very understandable and forgivable response to just the sheer fact of being human, especially today. But then I suppose to, it would be to suggest that this kind of set of awful feelings does have, in a sense, it's a portal to something, right? In a sense, it's an invitation to something very powerful. I've quoted in the book, and I keep quoting everywhere, the Zen master, Giu Kennet, who used to say that her approach to teaching Zen students was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy. that he or she would put it down and I just love this which is why I repeat it endlessly

but you can sort of see can't you I think in like yes the attempt to do it all is going to make you feel incredibly anxious and overwhelmed yes the demands that are made on us and the things that feel like they're essential that we have to do them will leave us feeling wiped out

like it's not just true it's like so true but that is not a war that any of us is ever going to win And it's in that realization, that sort of relaxing into that situation that you can then, I hope, begin to feel the first glimmers of a different kind of energy, which is like, okay, that's the way it is. So, what would be something I could do with the next 20 minutes that would be one good way to spend 20 minutes of my life on the planet? Yeah, absolutely love it. Oliver, the new book is Meditations for Mortals, a four-week guide to doing what counts. thank you very much for coming back on the show. Oh, thank you. This has been such a pleasure.

Really appreciate it. Thank you. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them. It also helps you learn and retain the... information. Now before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share

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