The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Dr Rangan Chatterjee: 3 Steps To "Core" Happiness

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

Rangan Chatterjee is the host of the Feel Better, Live More podcast, author of The Four Pillar Plan and Feel Better in 5, host of BBC One’s Doctor in the House, and a doctor unlike any you have heard or seen before. Because what Rangan cares about is an all-encompassing concept of your health, not just if you are well. Disillusioned with the priorities of medicine and the healthcare industry, Rangan struck out on his own to to try ways not just to make you feel better, but be the healthiest version of yourself. Rangan’s new book is Happy Mind, Happy Life, where he opens up about the defining moments in his journey like never before. Follow Rangan: Website - https://drchatterjee.com/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Rangan’s book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Happy-Mind-Life-Simple-Great/ Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I internalise this idea that unless I get 100%, unless I win, I'm not good enough. I'm not loved. Doctor and broadcaster, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. Your first book was a huge success. My guest today is the perfect guest. It's a really big honour to have you on my podcast. My son, Janem, getting sick at six months old, changed the course of my career.

You see, we need to evolve the way that we practice medicine. Sleep deprivation is associated with pretty much every single chronic disease we have. Compared to about 60 years ago, we may have lost up to 25% of our sleep. The way society is set up now is making us lonely. We've moved away for work. We've moved away from our families. We don't have the tribes around us. And it's very, very damaging for our health. It took me ages to figure this out as adults. I think you can always make a change, right? You can use these moments of adversity in your life to teach you something. It's the best journey you'll ever take, but it's a journey. It's not a one hit. The first step in any change is. So without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is the Diary of a CEO.

I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, I have to say, I have to start this conversation by saying it's a really big honour to have you on my podcast because you are someone, when I started taking my podcast seriously, who I looked up to and admired for so many reasons. Not because you are, you've really kind of paved the way for these long-form conversations in the UK, but because you have the same, very similar subject matter and apparent interest in the conversations you have with your guests to the point that it inspired me in a really big way to start this platform and so when um when i found out that you were coming in today it felt like you know it felt like a bit of

a it felt like christmas day for me because the the conversations you have are the things that i would spend my spare time sort of watering my brain with. So thank you first and foremost for coming in today. It's a huge, huge privilege. I mean, Stephen, I appreciate you saying that. And likewise, I feel really honoured and excited to come on your show because I think long form conversation matters.

And I don't think there's that many people in the UK doing it like you are, like I am. And, you know, I think you're doing great things with your show. So I'm really excited just to have a long conversation with you. I don't know where it's going to go. But yeah, thanks for having me. So take me back to the foundations. Who were you? So I grew up in the northwest of England. And either mom and dad were immigrants from india you know dad came over in 1962 for a better life to the uk mom came over in 1972 i grew up got an older brother and you know like many immigrant families education was king right it was about get good grades at school go to a good university get a good job

right that was the kind of drive from home my experience was very much man the culture at school is really different from the culture at home and I didn't really think much of it at the time but you know now in my early 40s looking back and reflecting as I've done for this new book is, that was incredibly problematic in many ways, because you end up pretending to be somebody you're not in order to fit in. And I can see now that's been a pattern for most of my life. I've not been myself. I've tried to be someone else. I've tried to do things to get validation and love from other people. And I've got to say, it's only been in the last few years where I've managed to kind of let that go. Another piece there, which i think is really relevant to your question is

because education was such a big thing you know because mom and dad dad in particular so much discrimination he faced right when he came here in his job he had to change career change speciality as a doctor because he just couldn't advance. And so ultimately he ended up moving to a speciality he didn't like, he didn't enjoy, to give his family security. So what do they want to do? They want their children to not have to go through that. So I grew up with this kind of idea that I'm only loved when I'm top of the class, right? I'd come home, if I got 99% in an exam, my mum would say, why didn't you get 100? Right, if I came out with 19 out of 20 in a test, okay, what happened? Why didn't you get 20? Now, what's really interesting about that is I'm not criticising my parents, right? I love my parents. I think they brought me up really well. But it speaks to a situation,

there's different perceptions, right? So I spoke to mum recently. I said, hey mum, why did you ask me those questions? You know, why did you push me so hard? And she said to me, because I knew you were capable, I wanted you to be the best that you could be. So mum did it with me from a place of love, right? She wanted the best for me, but walk around to the other side of that story. I internalize this idea that unless I get a hundred percent, unless I win, I'm not good enough. I'm not loved. And I can now see that drove me my entire life. This need for external validation. What are other people saying about you? People say nice things, you feel good. People say nasty things, you are literally broken inside. So, you know, a lot there

that I've come to terms with over the past few years, but for me, understanding that I can go back and rewrite those stories, put a different perspective on all those events has given me this real sense of freedom calm contentness and ultimately you know it's resulted in me feeling really really happy one of the things you you've said is that you believe the purpose of life is really finding out who you are because when once you find out who you are then you can go on the journey of finding out what is what it is you want so my question for you is what did you then pursue as a consequence of believing that external validation was true validation that was true truly your purpose what was your how were you misguided or led astray yeah so i went to university at edinburgh went to ed to Edinburgh Medical School you know left home

having the time of my life partying you know whatever you know people when they they get that sort of sense of freedom for the first time a lot of my uni life was spent playing in bands right so music is a big part of who I am what I do um you know so I'd be practicing loads we'd playing loads and loads of gigs and then it all changed i must have been 20 21 i think mum phoned me at like 10 30 at night and said hey look dad's in intensive care the doctors don't think he's gonna make it through the nights can you come back home and i remember seeing dad's in the intensive care unit and you know he ended up surviving the nights his kidneys failed He went on kidney dialysis for the next 15 years. But basically, dad getting ill changed the trajectory of my adult life. So yes,

I was in Edinburgh. I finished off. I worked there for a couple of years. But my mind was always back in the Northwest. And I moved back to the Northwest, which is one of the reasons I live there now, to help my mum and my brother look after dad. And it was incredibly stressful, particularly in the last years before dad died, really, really stressful. And I would escape periodically. So coming back to your question about how does that impacted me, I wanted to do well. Like I got my specialist exams. I got good jobs in prestigious hospitals, right got those things i thought oh that's what i'm doing i'm doing the right thing and then when dad died in 2013 march 2013

it was like there was a big hole in my life and so i would just go walking right i was just trying to make sense of everything and the truth is the amount I learned from dad's death was just profound. I'm not sure I would have learned these things. I was asking myself, whose life are you really leading? I don't regret any of it. Now that dad's not here, I'm glad I spent so much time with him. But I think there was a real cost to me, my inner peace, well-being right and dad's death here's the irony steven the things that my dad would have been proudest of right indian immigrant to the uk his son with his own bbc one show in 2015 2016 right his son with four sunday times bestsellers dad would have literally been phoning all the relatives you know being the embarrassing dad

telling everyone dad never got to see any of it but i know if that was still alive i'd be doing none of it why if i was still in the mindset that i was when my dad was sick i wouldn't have any time to engage in this stuff like life if there's anyone listening to this, who's a carer for someone in their life, they'll know what I'm talking about. You don't have time. You don't have physical time. You don't have mental space. It just, it encompasses the entirety of your life. You're just trying to keep your head above water. You're just trying to get through day to day. You are firefighting. So I wouldn't have had the physical time, but also I think a lot of what I'm able to give to people these days through books, through podcasts,

through one-on-one with patients is the learnings. They're the learnings that I've acquired from going through dad's death, from going through that pain, from coming out the other side, from going, what can I learn from this? So I'm not sure if what I would have had to offer people back then would have been as valuable as what I feel I have to offer them now. Why did you choose medicine? Was that, again, part of this broader thing of thinking that was success and that would satisfy parents or society? Because again, there's a bit of a stereotype, isn't there, with an Indian immigrant coming over.

And when I sit here with people from that background, typically the narrative is, and to be fair, in my case as well, as an African immigrant, that success is doctor, lawyer, etc. 100%. You know, it is a stereotype, but it's largely true for many families. You know, as an Indian immigrant's child in the UK, the three careers that generally are available to you are doctor, lawyer, engineer. That's what is valued. Of course, just to be clear, that's not every single family, but just by and large, I think that's true. But I'll tell you this, Stephen, I know loads of them

who are so unhappy as doctors, so unhappy. They compensate for the tedium of their work, right, by getting smashed on a Friday and Saturday night, right? And they wonder why they can't give up boozing or why they enjoy it so much. Well, because that's a symptom. The drinking isn't the problem. The drinking is the symptom. You don't enjoy your job. You've gone into the wrong career because you thought it was what you should do. Sometimes you're stuck now in your 30s. You've got a mortgage. You've got a lease on your car. You feel trapped. But you can free yourself from that trap. You absolutely can. But you have to be honest. You have to get to know who you currently are now before you've got any hope of becoming the person that you ideally want to be.

It's so unbelievably true in every way. I mean, so much of that I can relate to for so many reasons. And, you know, you were talking there about your, your, almost your parents' misplaced love. What you've clearly managed to figure out later in your life is that actually came from a place of love. Yeah. That's why I call it misplaced love because they were trying to protect you because they loved you.

But it turns out that that misplaced love, what it's doing is it's stopping you from being your truest self. And the long-term consequences of that, when you end up living someone else's life is what you've spoken to there, the symptoms of addiction and drinking and impulsive behavior that we see in people.

So my overall conclusion there was this urgent need as soon as possible in your life to get in touch with exactly who you are and defend it at all costs. If you can do it at 16, if you're 45 and listening to this, now is the second best time. Yeah. I mean, I've got so much to say on that. You're never too late to start on this journey, but how does someone start on that journey, right? I think it comes down to values, right? Values is what, I think, what sews it all up together, right? So, you know, for this new book, I've created this new model of

happiness I call core happiness. So core happiness has three components, alignment, contentment, and control. We can talk about those if you want, but one of those legs is alignment. Alignment is when your inner values and your external actions are the same. When the person who you want to be inside and the person you are actually being in the world are one and the same. That's one component. It's not everything, but it's one component. So if someone has heard what we're talking about and say, okay, I want to start, I'm not living the life that I want to lead, but I don't know where to start. There's this exercise in the book called the identity menu. And the goal is really that you go through,

and I picked a number three because I think it's quite a realistic number for people. Out of the list of all these possible identities and values, which three do you think feel kind of the most true to you? And I've been doing this for a little while and the three that have been pretty static with me for the past few months now, I'd say, and they're right at the top of my Instagram profile because I think this is what I want to give to the world and say, let's lead with our values. Integrity, curiosity, and compassion. So this is who I am, right? I'm not a doctor. I'm not a father. Now, I think this is such an important point that I've been thinking a lot about over the last few years. I have a role as a doctor. I have a role as a father, but it's not

who I am. Because when we cling too tightly to our identities, we put ourselves in a very fragile position. Let's say, you know, I go around, I'm the doctor, you know, I'm Dr. Chatterjee, you know, and I sort of absorb that and I think that's who I am, then what happens if I get fired? Right, what happens if I get sick and I can't work as a doctor? What happens when I retire? This is real, this happens to people. They lose their sense of who they are. What about my role as a father, right? To be really really clear me bringing up my kids well is one of the most important things to me more important than my work 100 but being a good father is not who i am if i cling too tightly to that what happens when my kids are teenagers and they get annoyed and they call me a crap dad. I've seen this happen. I've

had patients come in, say, oh, they call me a crap mum, but you know, that's all I do. I do everything for them. I've given everything up for them. It's like, wait a minute, you are much more than your roles. You know, let's talk about cars, right? You said when you were 20, you wrote down what you wanted, right? There's nothing wrong with having a nice car. The problem comes for your happiness, at least, when you identify with that car, where that car says something about you. And the problem is you drive around, I don't mean you, one drives around in their flash BMW, let's say. And they think, you know, that says something about me, who I am. What happens if you lose your job? What happens if you prang it? What happens if you have a divorce and you can't afford it anymore? You go from what I call core happiness to junk happiness. Junk happiness

is what many of us think happiness is, right? We think it's that momentary hit of pleasure. You know, buying something online, Instagram, chocolate bar, hit of booze, right? These things can be pleasurable things. They may have their role from time to time, but don't mistake that for being real core happiness. Core happiness is, I think, what we are chasing, but I think we misdefine it. We think it's something it's not. Happiness, it's not a destination that we one day get to, right? It's a direction that you can choose to take in life. It's a choice, right? I heard your conversation with Mo in the hotel room last night, which was fantastic, so good.

And I agree with what you and mo was saying happiness is a choice when you understand what happiness really is what is it it's not a thing that you can get to it's not something that you can pursue directly it's something that ends use when you do the right things and the right things for me are when you focus on the three, I call core happiness this three-legged stool, alignment, contentment, control. You can apply it to anything in life. I think that's what happiness is. And I think we are pursuing it. Like people say, we shouldn't be going after happiness. We should be going after meaning.

Have you heard that? Yeah, all the time. Right. I have a different perspective. Meaning and purpose is really important. No question. But I don't think that's happiness. It's meaning, right?

It's a necessary ingredient for happiness, but it's not happiness in and of itself. And I don't mean to be controversial, but let's say a soldier fighting in World War II against the Nazis, right? One might make the case that that has meaning. It doesn't mean they're happy. 100%.

Right, so meaning hammers are subtly different. Have you heard of the Japanese concepts of ikigai? Yes, yeah, yeah. Right, I love ikigai. This idea that, you know, we should be looking, not should be, but we could be looking for something in our life that we enjoy, that we're good at, that's what the world needs,

and that what pays us money, right? That the kind of holy grail, as it were. And I remember writing about this in my second book on stress. I remember the book came out and I was in London. I was giving a talk. And at the end of the talk, we were doing Q&A. I remember the back right of the hall, this young lady had a hand up. And she said, Dr. Chastity, I'm an 18-year-old Japanese student

living in London. I've grown up with the concept of ikigai my entire life. And frankly, I found it demoralizing, demotivating, too high a bar for me to get to. And that stuck with me, mate, because I thought since then, okay, that's so interesting because I love this concept of ikigai. She grows up with it and finds it off-putting. I think the problem with these grand ideas of meaning, purpose, ikigai, as much as I like them, they're not for everyone. Someone might be hearing that in a call centre right now that don't like their job, they're doing it, and they like, what icky guy? Are you kidding me, mate? I just want to get through and pay the bills, right? So I think I bring it all back. Is this core happiness tool that I've created, is it applicable in all situations? I think it is because if you look at it through

the lens of what we're talking about, this comes under alignment. So that chap working in the call center, they do the exercise and they figure out kindness is something that's really important to them. Then if on the way to work, they stop in the coffee shop and they're kind to the barista, they get on the bus to work and they're kind to the bus driver, they go to the job they don't particularly like, but they are kind to their colleagues and their boss. They're living an aligned life. They're living with meaning. It doesn't mean that the job that they're in currently is the job that they love and they're going to be in forever, but they're living in harmony with who they are. And that's going to mean that meaning and purpose come naturally as a byproduct. So I want people to really focus on alignment. It's one pillar of happiness. And

I think your meaning and purpose will come. Can you talk to me about control as well? I thought long and hard about this word control. And I am the nod. Was it the right word to use? And I spoke to some of my patients, I spoke to some of my friends. I spoke to some of my friends. And I really think it is, when we understand. It's about what are the things that I can do in my life that gives me a sense of control. We know from the scientific research, when you have a sense of control, right, you have better relationships, you have longer relationships, you're healthier, you have lower stress levels, you live longer. So it's that sense of control. And that could mean many things to different people. You know, for me, I'm really big on

morning routines, right? I know for me, if I get up early, if I have time to myself to have a little routine, I've almost got this like resilient bubble around me. Doesn't matter what's going on in the world, doesn't matter how bad work may or may not get that day. I've got an element of control because I've sort of nurtured that routine for myself. So that's one way that people can think about control. And another way people might want to think about control is, and there's a chapter in the book called Talk to Strangers, which is basically this idea that actually relationships are very important, of course, but there's kind of two different kinds of relationships. There's the deep, nurturing, intimate relationships, but there's also those kind of almost trivial interactions that we have day to day, right? So when you say hi to the barista, or, you know, I said hi to your work colleagues when I got here, those little things,

they are not trivial. There's a network in your brain called the sociometer, right? It's constantly detecting your external world for threats. And when it receives positive information, like a smile, like a bit of a nod, a handshake, it sort of relaxes. Your stress levels go down. You feel a sense of connection with the world around you. Coming back to control, you feel that the external world is safe. I've got a degree of control. There is order in the world. Let's focus on these simple things you can do each day. If you say hi to the Amazon delivery driver and smile at them, say thank you to the barista and say a few nice words to them, say hi to the bus driver and smile at them, thank the postman, you are working on your happiness you know it seems trivial but it's not the research is so

so clear right because it gives you a sense of control second pillar of the three and we've got to touch on the third pillar before i start getting into all of these topics because so it's so interesting that these are the things that you know we're talking about today because i think i spent all weekend um reading about on the importance of, you call it the sociometer in the brain, but just that thing that connects you with your tribe. But please do get into the third point, which I think you said was contentment. Contentment, yeah. Contentment is about feeling calm and that sense of peace when you're at peace with your life and you're at peace with your decisions. So what things in your life and you're at peace with your decisions so what things

in your life give you that sense of contentment and i and i really feel it's these three things when you put them all together the side effect of doing them is you're happy yeah right but but also happy. But also happiness is not often what we think it is, that big billboard image of the happy family on the beach with a smile on their face and the ocean behind them. Right? That to me is not happiness. That's a pleasurable experience. It can form part of a happy life, but that's not happiness. You can be sad and happy. The way I look at happiness, core happiness, I was thinking about this last week. I was chatting to someone who was going through grief. Someone very close to them had died. And we were having a really long, deep conversation,

but they were present with their grief and they were able to share with me exactly how they were feeling. No masks on at all in terms of these kind of metaphorical masks that we put on. They were just being themselves. That's core happiness because they're aligned, right? Their inner thoughts are, I feel sad,

upset, frustrated for my loss, and their external actions are completely aligned with that. So I kind of feel really what happiness is about is living an intentional life it's about taking the time to understand who you are defining for yourself what happiness is or what success looks like not using society's definition you posted a few days ago don't use society's definition of fun but it was a great post you know just because society says to have fun, you need to go to a bar, have loud music on and get drunk. Well, if you like to sit at home in the bath reading a good book, that's great. If you don't, that's fine as well, but it's got to be you. It's your value. So I can't tell someone what they need to necessarily do in all aspects of their life to be happy. But be intentional about your life. You know, when people give advice in their books and, you know, when I do it online with my content, there's something which I realize has to be done first.

So as much as you could have told me to get into alignment, the counterforce that was saying, fuck that, was this deep sense of insecurity and that piece of work I had to do, as you describe it, to heal first, before I could start looking with a clear view at the way I was living my life. Because if you'd asked Steve Bartlett at 18 years old what his values were, you know, he would have said Lamborghini. Next question. He would have said money, right? I know those aren't even values but that's what what he would have said right so i'm interested to know how you think someone can go on the journey of healing and understanding themselves and self-awareness which i think is the foundation and then all the the pillars you mentioned of happiness it's a great question um i don't think it's going to be, you listen to this conversation, you watch it on YouTube,

you get the book, whatever. I don't think it's that you do that and then you're like, oh, I've got it. I figured it out now. I know my values. Okay, great. No, this is a journey. It's the best journey you'll ever take, but it's a journey. It's not a one hit. The first step in any change is awareness. All behaviors serve a need. Every behavior we have is there for a reason. I can't just tell the patient you should drink less alcohol without helping them understand why do they need to be drinking that alcohol in the first place? Right? It took me ages to figure this out as adults. I think, why am I struggling? Why do they stop for two weeks? Then they get back on the horse. It's like, oh, we've not dealt with the underlying need. It's like New Year's resolutions, right? No one has a problem

going spinning four times a week for the first two weeks in January. But third week, fourth week, when life gets busy and life gets stressful, or they can give up booze for a couple of weeks, and then they just can't keep it going. It's like, you know, I need it to unwind from my workday. That's because your alcohol consumption is a symptom of the way you're living your life. If you want to change that, you can try and white knuckle it and reduce it. Sure, you might be successful for a short period of time, but you'll always go back unless you understand the behavior. Same thing kind of works for food cravings a lot of the time. So if someone's listening to this and they go, okay, I want to know what to do. But even if they're starting to challenge themselves already and go, you know what, I'm pretty interested in what these two guys are

saying. You know, I don't kind of know what my values are, but I've got a feeling that I'm not living life in accordance with them. Like I think I'm chasing the wrong stuff, but I don't quite know what to do about that. Even that awareness is progress, right? So i think it's really important we can't always just find it out get to the solution go and live happy lives it doesn't work like that so step one is awareness now if you have that awareness and you want to go further a simple thing you might want to do is what i call the identity menu in the book you might literally want to try and write down three values or even one value. Start with one, right? Start with one, right? Just write down one value. And then in a week's time, ask yourself, how often in that week did you live in accordance with that? How often in that week

did you live in a way that was not in harmony with that? Okay. It's not about beating yourself up. It's not about holding yourself to this unattainable ideal. It's just ask yourself the question. Just gently start compassionately probing what's going on, right? So I think that's a useful exercise and build up to three values if you can. And, you know, these things need reassessing. The other exercise I like, which i think is really practical it's got two parts it's called define your happiness habits and write your happy ending right and if if you want we could try it actually let's do it if you're up for it so i would ask you steven think of three things yeah that really bring you a sense of happiness, deep calm and contentment and make you really feel good?

So I think one of them, which I've actually read about in your book is about serving others and helping others. It feels to me like a happiness rush or a sense of fulfillment or contentment that I can't seem to get anywhere else. The other one is like pursuing my artistic interests. So things like when I can see my DJing anywhere else. The other one is like pursuing my artistic interests. So things like when I can see my DJing equipment over in the corner there, when I do my DJing or when I give time to myself to write or create. I call that like expression.

That's like, yeah. And then I think the third one is what I think you call in your book, like movement. So moving, so exercise. When I go to the gym and I, and I'm not sure why that is because this might fit into a number of categories because in part it's like meditative when i'm on the running machine or on the on the peloton it's really meditative on the other part it's has there's obviously physiological impacts and biological impacts of the exercise and then on the third part it might just be because i'm giving time to myself so i'd say

those are the three that came to mind straight away. Yeah. Okay. So you've picked what I call three happiness habits, right? So each week, and please correct me if I've misinterpreted any of this, each week, if you could do something that serves others, if you could engage in your artistic passions and you could do a form of movement you enjoy yeah there are three things that would give you you know a real sense of happiness so i believe okay no no i i think they probably are and i'll share mine in just a second second let's go to the second part of the exercise okay it's called write your happy ending so imagine now you're on your deathbed yeah okay so at the end of this is it right look back on your life what are three

things you will want to have done so that's really interesting because it's funny because the answers are different um one of them is definitely about connecting with others my friends so like my friends my family my niece that's like that's in fact so central to my happiness um the third is helping others that gives me a real sense of um that i spent my time in a worthwhile way and sorry the second and the third would be the third is a personal one it's the feeling that i've i've done my potential justice yeah lived up to your potential lived up to my potential done myself justice yeah yeah i love them i mean first of all thanks for sharing that um so what's really interesting when you do the second part now you can go back and redo the first one and what's really beautiful i think

there's i think there's a real deceptive simplicity with this exercise It gives you the sort of granular day-to-day look at your life and happiness, and it gives you the 30,000-foot kind of big picture view. And you can see if they're aligned. So if you do the three happiness habits each week, doing something for someone else, sorry, serving others, engaging creatively, and moving moving will that get you to your happy ending no so i was missing one you're missing one yeah the relationship piece yeah exactly yeah and so this is not about catching anyone out this is something i think we can all benefit from myself including on a regular basis it doesn't mean you can automatically change the entire trajectory of your life but it does mean this is my intention right it's like if that's what the

goal is at the end well like for me i know three happiness habits for me are what number one spending undistracted time with my wife and my children each week. That's really important. Number two, doing something that helps improve the health and wellbeing of others, really important. Number three, having time to pursue things that I'm passionate about. That's kind of my three. I'm doing the final piece.

The 30,000 foot. Yeah, so I know each week then for happiness habits, if I have, let's say five meals around the dinner table with my wife and kids, that's where there's no phones and we're totally undistracted and in the moment, right? I know that I'm doing that. I know if I record an episode of my podcast each week,

I know that I'm doing something that's gonna if I record an episode of my podcast each week, I know that I'm doing something that's going to improve the lives of other people. And if I have time to, I don't know, play guitar, play snooker, you know, whatever, you know, I've got all kinds of creative passions each week. Then I know that if I just consistently do that just a little bit each week, I'm getting to the happy ending that I want. And for that person who may be listening to this and struggling, that may be something else that they can start doing. And what's really interesting, Stephen, is we think we're all quite different. There was a study from last year which showed us that actually, despite all our differences, we feel as if we're being our true authentic selves when we're being

kind, compassionate, doing things for others, enthusiastic, present, and in the moment, right? All of us. And what I love about these exercises, they really bring awareness and intention to your life. You could say, yeah, I really value health. I really value my health and wellbeing. And then they can assess their life and go, I'm doing nothing each week to support that. I say that's who I am, but I'm not. You can say, as I did for many years, I valued my friends. You know what?

I got so busy with work, I wasn't making time to see them. And again, it's not about beating yourself up. This is really, really important point. This is about honesty and awareness, right? You're never going to become the person who you want to be until you know who is the person you are right now. It's not about guilt. It's not about shame. It's about just transparency going, okay, all right, I'm not aligned at the moment. Okay, fine. No problem. I'm going to take one step this week.

I'm going to make an effort once a week. I'm going to phone one of my best mates just for 10 minutes, just to say hi. Even that is, it's helping you become more aligned. It's helping you get to that happy ending. So, you know, maybe there's some useful stuff in there for people to kind of take and actually start applying. It's so funny because when you said that exercise, you know, I could spend a lot of time as I think I have in the past trying to figure out who I was and the techniques are complicated and they're largely influenced by um who society thinks I should be and what my values are the minute I did that exercise it was so clear it was so unbelievably easy to do and so clear and then

as you said when we zoomed out to my deathbed and said, like, what are the things on your last days that you're going to value? To see how obvious it was that I'd left out something so, so, so fundamentally important, which is like my friends, my family, my relationship in my sort of, you know, the things that make me happy was like alarming to me. It was like, how are you not living in alignment mentally? How did you not know that that was so fundamental but i think you just beautifully straight seem that we can see it yeah brilliantly in other people oh 100 man i could see it in you i could see it in my patients but you know what it's pretty hard sometimes to put the mirror up and see it in yourself do you know what i mean i think i think the other you know i think think you've asked a brilliant question. What can that person do?

I think the other thing, probably, arguably the biggest, this is the biggest thing I think that's had the most impact on my happiness and wider health over the past few years, is this understanding of perspective. That there are multiple perspectives on the same situation. And I think this is a really important point for people to get. So let's say someone's stuck in their life. And they go, look, I don't know what to do. I'm trapped here, right? I don't know. I get up, I go to work. You know, I try and look after my family. You know, I don't know this stuff about

values and all that kind of stuff. Okay, fine. If you just forget all that stuff for a moment and go, okay, let me just see if I can start broadening my perspective. Because once you start broadening your perspective and start seeing things from somebody else's perspective, it changes everything. So one of the ways I do this is to understand that this phrase, yeah, I'll go as far as this. This phrase has had the most impacts on my health and happiness above anything else. If I was the other person, I would be doing exactly the same as them. Again, a very simple phrase, but when you really, really get it, you're basically saying, if I was that person with their childhood, with their parents, with their life experiences, I would be acting in exactly the same way as them.

And if you think you wouldn't, I would very gently invite you to consider that this may be your ego talking. If they could act differently, they would. And what that does is it brings such a deep sense of compassion to every single day of your life. You can start to have a perspective for them. For example, it could be maybe their daughter was sick last night and up and they didn't get much sleep. Maybe they think they're going to lose their job when they're late for work. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. The truth doesn't matter, right? For your happiness, the truth, I would say, doesn't matter. Again, I don't mean to be controversial, but I think some people will take that. I think that's quite controversial. You're a football fan, right? There was a study done, football match, one incident,

right? Two sets of fans, they were interviewed about the incident both of them had a completely different perspective on the same incident right we all know that there's a foul or you know one seems that's definitely foul that's a foul on a yellow card the other side that was nothing you didn't touch him we know that anyone who's got a partner right or had a partner you have a row you have a disagreement well depending on which side of the table you're sitting on, you have a completely different perspective of the same situation, right? So I say in any situation, choose a happiness story, right? I'll give you another example. One of the most profound conversations I have ever had on my podcast was with this lady called Edith Eager. When I spoke to her last year, she was 93 years

old. At the age of 16, she was getting ready. That evening, she had a date with her boyfriend. Knock on the door, her parents, her and her sister get put on a train, taken to Auschwitz. Within a couple of hours of getting there, Edith's parents get murdered. Somehow she gets through the next few years. She survives. What she has taught me is that you can always create a different story on any single event. She said when she was in Auschwitz, she was totally free. The prisoners, they weren't free. They were the ones who weren't able to act and behave the way that they wanted to. They were trapped in her mind. She was free. After her parents had died, she had to dance for the guards, right? And she said, the last thing my mum said to me was, Edith,

nobody can ever take away from you what you put inside your mind. So she's dancing there. She knows her parents are dead. But in her mind, she said, Ranganai was dancing in Budapest Opera House. There was a full orchestra. There was a full crowd. I was dancing there, right? The other thing she said to me is, I've been in Auschwitz, but I can tell you the greatest prison you will ever live in is the prison you create inside your mind. So for people who are listening who struggle to forgive, who struggle to see the other side, who see someone put a tweet up and then spend an hour getting agitated and frustrated, I humbly suggest to you, if Edith Eger can write a different story in the hell of Auschwitz, I kind of feel we probably can as well.

It's so true that the greatest harm we cause to ourselves is our own negative or illogical or self-harming stories. As you were saying that, I was thinking about even the stories I've told myself in the last 24 hours or the last week which have like tormented me mentally in the sense of they've just like bothered me unnecessarily and how much of a choice it was for me to focus on those stories if you know what i mean like as you say like someone tweeting something or leaving a comment and then that you then give 48 hours of your happiness to just this when you could as you've expressed so eloquently choose compassion for the person and you know you could you could choose to try and find the best intentions in any behavior right yeah the way i i put it in the book there's a little section called make

everyone a hero i think it's such a great sentiment in life whenever something happens you don't like make them a hero make them a I challenge people, try that for seven days. If your life has not been improved in any way, fine. Forget it. Say the guy was spouting nonsense. I'm not interested. I'm getting back to my cynical nature. I'm going to see the worst in everyone, right? Fine. It's up to people. Make them a hero. The person who cuts you up Find a way to make them a hero in your heads Right? March 2020, what happened? Everything's getting locked down

Toilet roll shortage on the shelves Right? So what do people do? Now I understand that was a very unique situation People are getting triggered People are getting scared I understand that But let's look at what was happening

People were bad-mouthing triggered. People are getting scared. I understand that. But let's look at what was happening. People were bad mouthing. Who are these people who are taking all these toilet rolls? It's so inconsiderate. You know, they shouldn't be doing that. Okay. Okay, fine. Let's just see. Could we write a different story? What might have happened? Well, it could be that every shopper that day took one extra roll. And so by the end of the day, when the TV cameras came in, no one actually did anything that bad. They just took one extra roll. And so by the end of the day, when the TV cameras came in, no one actually did anything that bad. They just took one extra roll. And the supermarket stock was all planned around average shopping habits and behaviours. Okay. It could be that someone was really, really scared and anxious. And let's say they've got ulcerative colitis and they have to go to the toilet 20 times a day and

they're petrified. So maybe they did go and buy 10 packs. Or maybe, let's take it to another extreme, maybe someone is skint, right? They've got no money, they've got no prospects in life. They thought, you know what, I can make a fortune here, right? So I'm going to get them all. I'm going to sell them on eBay. Okay. Whatever you think of that, if you can have compassion for that person and understand if I was them, I'd be doing the same thing. It changes everything. It changes your physiology. It changes your perspective. And why I think that's so powerful, particularly now more than ever, Stephen, like we seemingly we're in a very divided and toxic world, right? Seemingly. What we need is more compassion, right? But how do you get compassion? We can't just say, you know, I want to be more compassionate. That can work for

some people. Use this, right? Make them a hero. Ask, say to yourself to yourself if i were them i'd be doing the same thing you know it really helps humanity it helps you feel better individually but it will help connect you with people around you people who've got different views and perspectives it allows you to sit alongside them so this is probably one of the things that i use the most along with which sort of goes along with this um and this is sort of the big heading in Chats of Fiverr, the book is called Seek Out Friction. Right? Look, this is when you become a master of your own happiness, right? The whole goal of my work at the moment is to, I don't want people to be dependent on the actions of other people for them to be happy, right? If you're constantly getting triggered and frustrated by the tone of your colleagues' emails

or the way that your partner is talking to you, right? If you're waiting for them to change in order for you to be happy, well, you could be waiting a long time. If we go back to my core, well, you could be waiting a long time. And if we go back to my core happiness stool, you've lost control. You have no control because you're dependent on other people. So I talk about this as social friction, right? Just as in the gym, you know, you can do physical friction, you can push up, you can press up against your body and you get stronger. I'm saying you can press up against other people and also get stronger. So every time you get triggered, I actually do this,

I do this every single day. Let's say social media. Let's say you get a negative comment. Let's say I get a negative comment. In the past, five years ago, when I was first on BBC One, seven years ago now actually, I would have got triggered, got so frustrated, I would have felt really bad, what's going on, why is this happening, you know, all I'm trying to do is help people, would have created this narrative. Now it's like, ah, why is this triggering me? Is there some truth to it that I can learn from? Or is it because the other person's having a bad day and they're taking it out on me? And you become a master if you practice this every day, right? Because what happens is that you take control over your inner thoughts. You take control of your own happiness because it's like, okay, it doesn't matter. You're being given opportunities every day to learn something.

For me, I can speak, but I know this to be true for most people. It's because it's pressed on one of your insecurities, right? When you get truly secure in who you are, what other people say, it doesn't affect you. Like I've noticed this in my own life, right? We started off the conversation talking about external validation. Like the problem when you need external validation for your self-worth Is that when you get it you feel great or you think you feel great. It's a very fragile Way of feeling great But when you get criticism you go to the other extreme where you feel

Worthless and you turn to whatever your junk happiness habit is instagram gambling drink porn, whatever it is, right? You turn to that as a way of compensating. But when you do the work, when you look for social friction and you allow it to become your teacher, you start to process your insecurities. And then if people praise me now on social media, say, oh, wrong in that podcast changed my life, or, you know, your book has really had an impact on me and my mental well-being i like hearing that but it doesn't artificially elevate my ego like it might have done a few years ago but at the same time if i get criticism right if i get criticism it doesn't drag me down to those depths either i can i'm just a lot more level. Did that make sense?

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. As you were saying that, once again, my mind sat there and thought, how does he know all of this stuff? And how has he gotten to a place where he can be so empathetic and he can understand others to the point that you can, as you say, make them a hero and practice that, what seems like a pretty radical form of empathy in situations where others would resort to blame and, you know, antagonism and attacking others. And it appears to me that is because you've understood yourself and actually being able to see the, you know, what people might describe as the insecurities or the flaws in others or the triggers in others is only possible once you've understood yourself and it's funny because when I put certain things on Instagram

I know that I'm going to get backlash so if I say personal responsibility is really important you can choose for example in the case of what you've said there you can choose to make someone else a hero if someone cuts you off it's a choice as to whether you're happy or you're triggered. I know there's a small proportion of people who will slide into my DMs and go, you're wrong. If they've cut me off, that's forced me to be unhappy, or I'm not at fault for being unhappy, right? And it tends to be the case that those that are able to make that person a hero or to practice empathy are those that have actually done the work to understand why they are triggered why they were insecure and why they react in the way they do so again it feels to me that this really underlying foundational piece of work that is

the catalyst for being able to do all of these amazing things that you've written about and that you understand again is that like that awareness as you described it? Yeah, I think he's spot on, Stephen. It also comes from having lived through the mental turmoil of taking a different path, of blaming others and seeing yourself as a victim. And often we absorb these sort of patterns from our parents, right? I can see clearly now how mum and dads would react to the world. And I can see how I absorbed a lot of that.

And I thought, that's how you show up with the world. But we can all choose to approach the world differently. Just because you have approached the world a certain way for all the years you've been on this planet let's say until this conversation right everyone listening or watching has a choice at the end of this conversation they can decide whether to act on something they've heard or not can i just press you on that one on that point there about your parents because i think it's it touched on something that i really relate to in my in one of my parents which is um and this might be an immigrant thing my mom was pretty badly racially abused for for you know living in plymouth she's

a nigerian woman you know i really didn't see anyone else in my in my city that looked like her if i'm honest once upon a you know once in a while i might a year, but she was an anomaly in appearance. She was a Nigerian woman with long, you know, Nigerian hair. And I grew up, I have to say, because she was often racially abused, seeing a kind of bias in her towards thinking that the world was out to get her. And I don't think that served her her if i'm going to be completely honest if you do you know what i mean there that and you see in other people that kind of sense

that they are a victim oh do i ever you know i would say this is how my mum very much has shown up with the world. And similar stories here, there is all kinds of reasons for that. And you absorb that. You think that's the way, that's what your parents, how they react. It's often what you absorb as a child.

You think that's the way. It's like, I can't believe they did that. If they did that differently, I would feel differently. And it's really understanding that you have a choice in how you share with the world. You have a choice in how you feel about a situation. You can choose a different story. To be fair to mum, mum's now 81. She's pretty immobile. Me and my brother give her breakfast on most days. She is changing, right? It's so wonderful to see sometimes. It's like, well done, mum. Like, you're not, it's just so wonderful to see that any one of us can change at any age, right? We can make subtle choices, small things that make a big difference. You know,

I also grew up very protective, you know, you'd see things that weren't there. You know, man, if someone cut me up in my twenties, I'm not sure I should even say what went through my mind, right? You know, I wasn't calm and content, you know, at all. I'd get triggered. I think they were, you know, they were you know whatever you know i may even shout in my car you know for the sake of my career i should probably just not go any further but i'm just joking you know i i'm saying i probably said things in my head or scream them out that i'm not particularly proud of now but i can see that i didn't have the emotional maturity and the emotional awareness to do anything different. What is that? Is victimhood, in your view, often like an ill-thought-through form of self-defence?

Because I'm thinking about why, say, our mothers, who were subject to a lot of abuse or whatever, why did they make the choice that the world was not on their side? Because that seems like maybe in the short term, it might help you. So if something happens to you, you're unsuccessful in business, you can say, well, it was the bank, they're racist. What is the cycle the psychology there and the human that's choosing to default to victimhood and you see it in a lot of my i see it in a lot of my friends actually when they fail at something it appears that they use

they use blame as a way to protect their self-esteem or i think you just nailed it that's what it is it's protection it's it's to give you that feeling of safety that's what we're always craving we want to feel safe so it makes you feel safe actually it's not it's not me it's out there it's not in here it's out there that's the problem if that changed i think that's part of it so but is that because those people can't they could they can't deal with more that they're too they're too fragile that they can't deal with more. That they're too fragile, that they can't deal with more what they perceive to be evidence of their inadequacy. Yeah, absolutely. And it also comes down to any trauma

that they may be carrying from their childhoods. This is the other thing I've learned, Stephen, is that, you know, without getting into details on mum and dads that I don't have permission to share, you know, there were traumatic things that happened early on in mum's life. And so now I can look at that with a deep level of compassion that, oh, that's why mum behaves the way she does, because actually she got programmed at a young age that I have to be a certain way, right? And then you pass it on. And that thing you said about

your mum and my mum, let me share something from my life that maybe just fits in there a little bit, which is we create these behavioral patterns usually in childhood, right? Because we want the love and affection of our parents. We want the validation because they're our caregivers, right? We need that to feel safe. So touching on what we said earlier, I knew that if I came out with 100%, there'd be smiles at home, right? Everyone's happy, wrong has done well, right? So I internalize that. I think that's the way to be loved in life. Fast forward, I'm at university and there's a pattern here in all aspects of life. Like whether I was seven and if I lost at Ludo, my mum says I would literally toss the board up and storm out the room. Like I was furious if I lost at Ludo,

right? And it sounds like a funny thing that your mum embarrasses you with from time to time. Now actually, now that I've unpicked it, it's actually very serious. I remember I was at uni, maybe second, third, fourth year at uni, can't remember, on a Sunday often after the passing of the Friday and Saturday night, we'd end up in Diane's pool hall in Edinburgh. I gave with one of my mates and I'm a pretty decent pool sneaker player, right? If I was ever losing, I'd go into the toilets and look at myself in the mirror, give myself a talking to, sometimes give myself a little slap on the face, come back out. More often than not, I would go on and then win the match. And I thought I just liked winning and I was competitive.

That was all a story, complete nonsense. It wasn't that I liked winning. It was that the pain of losing was too great because it reminds me on a deep primal level, I'm not loved when I lose, when I'm not the best, right? So it's that feeling of safety. And here's the other thing. If I did win, I wasn't happy that I won. I was just happy that I didn't lose, right? And then you compensate. You don't realize it. It might be a bit more sugar that evening, a few extra beers that night, a little cheeky trip to the casino on the way back, because you've got this discomfort in your body, in your soul, right? That you need something. You need a junk happiness habit to deal with it. We're all going through that my parents your parents right they've they've also had childhood programming that they're playing out

and i think when we really get that we can be compassionate i have to say that was just outstandingly beautiful the way you've articulated all of that and it really did bring me back to this sense of empathy which links to something you said earlier which is if I'd gone through what my mum had gone through coming from Africa to the UK at you know god knows what age she did I think maybe 17 having left school and then having to fight for survival in the way that my mum did and I what you know my mum is the single hardest working person i've ever met in my entire life i would have behaved in the exact same way yeah and that really it does a remarkable thing for your perspective on them how you know how you view their struggle and how you view their current behavior which i think is actually a really good

pathway to engaging with them and then being able to have conversations. And it is such a beautiful sentence that one of, had I been through what they've been through, I would have behaved in the exact same way. And that is completely true of my mother. I did not have to struggle in the way she did because of her struggle. It's true for all of us, actually. I think we can all apply that to every single interaction in our life. And in fact, my challenge would be, try it, suck it and see. See what life feels like. See what your experience of life, physically, viscerally, emotionally, see what it feels like when you start to show up like that day to day Right if you're skeptical, okay, I hear your skepticism

My challenge to you if you're skeptical is try it for three days Just try it Because i'm not here to try and convince people i'm not here to tell people what to do I know this has literally transformed the way I show up with the world. And try it with your enemies, right? Yeah, sure, try it with your parents who hopefully you love. Try it with your enemies. Try it with that person at work who you don't like. Try it with that boss who really pisses you off and riles you up every time. try it. Maybe you can't do that straight away. Maybe you have to work up to that. This is a skill, right? Happiness is a skill. You can get better at it.

But how would you know how to get better at it? When did you get taught the skill of happiness? I didn't get taught it, right? They don't teach it at school. They don't teach it at university. I didn't learn it from my parents. I didn't learn it from society. In fact, the lessons I learned from society were that you need to earn more money. You need to get a better job. You need to get a nicer car, a nicer holiday. Those things are signs of success and therefore happiness. And it's a myth. I think that's the biggest myth we fall for. We think that's what happiness is. Success is success. Happiness is happiness. They can sometimes coincide, but they don't always. But they can do if you back up, if you

take a pause, you start to do some of the things that we're talking about. You start to have a bit of time to reflect. You know, solitude, Stephen, is so important, right? Every bit of our free time now is sucked up. Like, I went to this gorgeous coffee shop next to your studio just before I came in, right? Now, I imagine 15 years ago, you go into any coffee shop in London, you'd be standing in the queue, you'd be waiting. You know, there might be five people in front of you, fine, you'll be looking around. You might bump into someone you know, you might be daydreaming. Now what happens if you go into any coffee shop? Everyone's head down, stuck in their phone, right? You're looking, you're trying to catch up with your emails, just

have a quick cheeky look on Instagram. I'm not criticising anyone for doing that, but that comes at a cost. It means these little micro moments of downtime where your brain is trying to solve problems for you and process life, they're being lost. If you're constantly consuming, right? If you're constantly consuming content from outside, whatever it is, even good content, right? Even nourishing content. If you're constantly consuming, you're not allowing your own thoughts and emotions to come up. You know, every summer now, I take a social media break. I tried it two years ago for the first, I think three years ago for the first time. It took me a few days to really get into it. Then after two weeks, I didn't want to go back on. Now, I'm not anti-social media, right? I can see the value that it has. I use it to try and spread helpful

messaging as you do. But I felt really good. And what I really experienced even as I allowed these deep innermost feelings to come out, I started to figure out what I think. What I think, not what the world thinks. Because that's half the problem. Going back to what you said, that person who's confused, right, and doesn't know where to start, here's another tip for them. See if you can have 10 minutes a day without your phone, without music on, right, without an app that you're looking at, without distraction, just sit. Maybe with a journal if you want, but just sit, see what comes up. Because often we're so scared of what's going to come up, we distract. And I would say, you know, for me, a daily practice of solitude, for me, typically it's first thing in the morning, is so needed, right? The way I

describe it to people, it's like an early warning system right so when i was a junior doctor in edinburgh i remember being taught when you're looking after sick patients if you do regular what we call ops so heart rate respiratory rates um you know temperature depending on what parameters they fit into, we could detect several hours beforehand who was going to end up needing high dependency beds or intensive care. It was like, it was a really simple concept that by doing these regular checks, we can then take a verse of action and make sure that person doesn't end up going downhill. And I see my daily practice of solitude as my early warning system. Like it allows me to see what's coming up, right? I know for years, Stephen, I say I know, I know now,

but I didn't know then. When my stress load was going up, work, family, pressure, I'd feel this real tightness in my right upper back, but I was so busy, I didn't even notice it. Now I notice, I know. If in the morning when I'm doing my solitude practice, I feel it, I'm like, oh, okay, there's stuff going on, right? What is it? Is it work? Is it emotional? And it allows me to intentionally say, okay, do I need to cut out some commitments I've got? Do I need to have a conversation with my wife about something that's been bothering me and I haven't said anything yet? Everything I recommend Stephen is simple. I don't think anything I've suggested so far costs any money at all. None of them actually take that much time. I'm really, really passionate about making sure this information is accessible to everyone. I've worked in affluent areas. I've

worked in some very, very deprived areas, right? And actually we're all, of course there are different pressures, but actually we're all having the same universal human experience. The same ingredients are there in all of us that when we apply them, they make our lives better no matter where we are, right? Someone, when I was working in Oldham, right, an area of low socioeconomic status, a lot of my patients were on benefits, very poor income levels, you know, you would say a very, you know, struggling area financially. I can't take away their poverty and their stress from life but if I can help them have 10 minutes of themselves each morning and do some breathing practices or even write in a journal what they're feeling that is going to lower their stress load and that means they're going to be better able to

show up in their life and deal with their stresses right so when people say, oh, health, happiness, it's the preserve of the middle classes and the wealthy, I disagree. I absolutely disagree. And I'm so passionate to get that message across. Health and happiness can be accessible to everyone. Yes, it can be challenging for some people, no question. There could be lots that you want to change. There'll be lots that you ideally would wish it wasn't the way it is. But you can choose your response to every single one of those things. You absolutely can. And when you learn to do that, that's freedom. You know, what's the Victor Frankl quote? In between stimulus and response is a space. In that space lies your power to choose your response and with your response lies your growth and your freedom one of the things you touched on there which was really is really foundational to everything you went on to say was this idea of a morning routine and um you know when i do q and a's and stuff like that on social media, people will always ask me,

Steve, what's your morning routine? My morning routine is pretty shitty. I'm going to be completely honest. I would never lie to anybody about that. It's really, really shitty and it's inconsistent and it's quite, it's unthinking. So it's kind of being dragged into the day. You described these, the three M's of a really good morning routine. What are those three M's of a good morning routine? What can I do today? How long is it going to take me? And what do you believe a good morning routine contains? So big picture view here. I have a bias towards morning routines

because I have found in my own life, they've really, really helped me. So let me just talk about stress for a moment, because this really plays into why I think morning routines are so important. I've got this concept of micro stress doses and stress thresholds. So every one of us have got our own unique personal stress threshold, right? That depends on your life, how you deal with things and what's going on. And when we get to that threshold, that's when things start to go wrong. That's when we, um, we snap at someone, we have a fight with our partner, our neck goes or our back goes into spasm, right? That's when you're at your threshold, right? So I'm saying to people,

and I've, I've really found this to be true for pretty much everyone. Let's say you wake up and you are far away from your threshold. You've had a good night's sleep, right? So you're feeling good. What's the average morning for a lot of people these days? Okay, let's say the alarm goes off at 6.30, right? So they're in a deep sleep. Alarm goes off, jolts them out of that sleep. They have to get out. Okay, that's micro stress dose or MSD number one. Okay, pick up the phone. Oh man, I'm just going to put it on snooze. You know, I need a bit more. Snooze, put it back. Six minutes later, it goes on again. MSD number two. You pick up your phone, you go,

I'm just quickly going to check email. Oh man man there were these three emails i didn't get back to yesterday oh man i need to do that msd number three um have a quick look on instagram someone's left you a snarky comment msd number four then you realize oh man i've been in bed for 10 minutes i had to get up get ready i've got a guest coming to shoot a podcast with i'm not talking about your life i'm just saying anyone's life you are talking about right and so here's the point. At me, Roman. Each one of those things, right, is a micro stress dose. And each one of those is getting you closer and closer to that stress threshold. The mistake we make is that when something happens at three o'clock in the afternoon,

right, when that email from your colleague frustrates you, you think it was that email, but it wasn't the email. It was the fact that you've already acquired 20 micro stress doses. You're right at your threshold. You've got no capacity to deal with it. So that email now bothers you. So what I suggest to people is many people leave the house in the morning having already accumulated about 15 micro stress doses. So they're already a lot closer to their threshold than they would have otherwise been, which means they've got less resilience. They won't take much for them to get triggered, right? So why I think morning routines can be so valuable is they can reduce how many micro stress doses you're exposed to first thing

in the morning. So you are going into your day with much more headroom and much more resilience. But I think they're also useful if you're feeling quite stressed when you wake up and anxious. I think they help almost undo the damage of micro stress and bring you back to baseline. Was that clear? Perfectly clear. So that's my kind of overarching view on why they're so important so for me i know if i do that morning routine yes it gives me perspective on my life it allows me to reflect but it also um feeds the control leg of the core happiness stool but it also means that i'm not exposing myself to micro stressors. In fact, I'm getting back

to baseline or I'm going into negative. I'm actually giving myself a lot more resilience and capability to face the day. So I always try and simplify things for people. So I think a complete morning routine for me has got these three M's, mindfulness, movement, mindset. And that's how I orientate my own morning routine. So I started with mindfulness Now i've been doing this for a few years, right? So currently my morning routine is about 30 minutes, but that's because I've created a life where I can do that and it works for me and I get up silly early That's also because my kids have always been early risers. And I know if I don't get that time to myself, I'm just not as good a dad and I'm not as good a husband. So my bedtime has got earlier and earlier so I can get up earlier and earlier

before my kids do. Right, so I start off with mindfulness, which at the moment is a practice of breath work and then meditation. Then what I do, I go to my kitchen and I put coffee on. Now, very particular with how I do my coffee. I weigh out 15 grams in the French press, I pour 250 grams of water in and I put a timer on for five minutes. Why is that important? It's not, it's the way I like my coffee. But the point is, I know for five minutes, my coffee's going to brew. In those five minutes, I don't go on Instagram. I don't check my email. I do a workout in my kitchen in my pajamas, right? I'm in my pajamas. I'm not to put on any fancy gear. I might do a body weight workout. I might have a kettlebell

kicking around. Whatever I feel like, I will do. And then I get the gorgeous rewards of a hot, fresh cup of organic coffee that I like And I sit there and i'll read something um Positive like i've got a few books kicking around in my living room I'll just pick one that i'm drawn to i'll probably read for about 10 minutes while sipping coffee something that's not negative that's uplifting Right. So that's what it looks like for me. Now, sometimes my daughter is currently nine. She's got a sixth sense that daddy's up and she creeps in with me. If she gets in with me,

well, two things I want to say about that. The old wrong in from a few years ago would have got frustrated. Man, I kind of need, I want my own space. You know, why? You know, I should have got up earlier. I don't do that anymore. I'm a lot more compassionate to myself. I use that. I go, okay, great. Okay, great. She's here. Okay. Okay, darling, just sit here. Daddy's just finishing off my meditation. And she sits there and I think, okay, this is cool. I don't need to look at it as a problem. This is life, right? If we think life is going to be great when everything goes our way, we're going to be waiting a long time. So I embrace it now and go, oh, fantastic. And then I also think as a dad, well, she's also now seeing daddy prioritizes his health. He thinks it's important to look after his mental wellbeing every day. I'm hoping that she also absorbs some of these ideas as she grows up. But the mindset piece, I don't sit there and read

if my daughter's there. We instead do affirmations together. So there's really good research on affirmations in terms of what they do for us. Just short, positive, powerful statements. So the one we do together is we just say, I'm happy, I'm calm, I'm stress-free, right? So the two of us sit there, we hold hands, and we say that for a minute. At the end of it, I feel brilliant. She feels amazing. Now I get it. Some people hear that. Okay. That is cheesy as anything. And maybe it is, but you know what? There's good research on it. Undergraduate students who did affirmations before their exam perform better. Right. You know, how you program your mind matters. So that's what mine looks like, right? It used to be about five, 10 minutes. Now, yeah, I can do half an hour, right? But I've also become aligned. I've now, I go to bed earlier,

right? And let's not forget, Stephen, you're at a different stage in life to me, right? I'm in my early forties. I'm happily married. I've got two young kids, right? You're in your late twenties, right? Was I doing morning routines when i was 29 no i wasn't slight clue that i texted you at 2 a.m last night isn't it yeah well i woke up it's like oh man like i'm getting up to do my routine and steven's just gone to bed but but let me tell you about a patient who i saw many years ago. I can't remember how old she was. She was probably around 42. Really bad skin. And I strongly felt that stress was exacerbating and really aggravating her skin. And she said, Dr. Chachi, I don't have time for any of this stuff, right? I'm busy. I've

got two kids. I've got to get out to work. And we tried various things, but I managed to persuade her and inspire her to try a five-minute routine. And this is what she did. She did the three M's in five minutes. It's just one minute of what I call three, four, five breathing, right? So you breathe in for three, you hold for four, and you breathe out for five. Anytime your out-breath is longer than your in- in breath, you help to lower your body's stress response and activate its relaxation response. Okay, there's many ways you can do that, but I like this breath that I call the three, four, five breath. So she did one minute of three, four, five breathing. She did two minutes of yoga, right? She has some of her

favorite sequence, two minutes of yoga. And then she did two minutes of affirmations. That's it. And she got on with her day. She came to see me a few weeks later and she said, Dr. Chachi, I just feel so much better. And her skin complaints had gone down by over 50%. And over the course of the next few months, she was hardly getting any flare-ups at all because it was a ripple effect. It wasn't just that, but by doing that and giving her that little bubble of resilience first thing in the morning, she would then go out for a walk at lunchtime instead of just sitting in the canteen on her phone. She'd go, I'm going to go for a 10-minute walk around the block. So for me, it's just you showing yourself right at the start of the day, you know what? I'm worth it. I'm worth spending a bit of time on

today. And for me, I've got to bias it because if I don't do stuff like that in the morning, I don't do it. Once the day starts, forget it. And something that might have value for your audience, Stephen, and I, you know, I guess I'm coming in thinking, Stephen Bartlett, successful businessman, loads of entrepreneurs listening, thinking about business and stuff. And I kind of want to help people. And let's zoom into the middle M, movement. Why is it that I'm able to do a five-minute workout every day? Like I've rarely missed a day for three years. That's not because I've got more motivation than anyone else. It's because I understand the science of behavior change, right? I think it's going to, I hope it's going to have value for people. There's two big rules that I've learned about

human behavior. Number one is if you make something easy, you will do it. So what's that got to do with my morning routine? Well, I made it so easy for me to do, right? I don't need to buy any equipment. Everything's there. I don't need to get changed. I don't need to look up a workout. I don't need to do it. It literally happens because I don't have to think. I've made it really easy. And to zoom this out to business for a moment, it's reported that when Amazon went to one-click ordering, it's reported their profits went up by $300 million a year, right? So let's rewind 10 years when they didn't have it. What did you have to do? Put in your order, go to the next screen, you know, type in your card deals, go to the next screen, confirm

order, right? Every single step is a reason to procrastinate, pull out and not make the purchase. So what do they do? One click ordering, boom, before you blinked, something's coming that evening, right? So they're doing what I think they should do for their business. Why did Netflix roll one video or one show into the next one? It's not out of the goodness of their own hearts to go. Oh, you know, let's help people No, they're using the science of human behavior before you realize it's 12 30 at night I need to go to bed. I've got to get it for work. You are straight into another episode. You don't stop That's why youtube roll into the next video Right. So these guys understand human behavior when we as humans try and apply it to our own health

We throw it out the window. We think, oh, it's got to be hard. It's got to be really tough. I've got to go running one hour, four times a week. And we, again, first two weeks in January, we managed to do it. Then we fall off the wagon because we think motivation is going to last forever. And it doesn't. In the science, it's called the motivation wave. Motivation comes up, motivation goes down. Plan your behaviors for when your motivation is down, not when it's up, then you will still do it. So number one is you make it easy. I've made it easy. Number two, which is just as important is where are you going to put this behavior? You can't just think about it. Oh, I'm going to meditate. I'm going to move. No, you need to be very intentional. Now, every single behavior we do needs a trigger, right? So a trigger could be,

oh, I remember to do it. Sure, that works. It's just the most unreliable trigger that exists. The next best trigger is like a notification. Like, you know, oh, you've got to be here to record a podcast with Stephen. Okay, great. I know I've got to do that. Or you put a post-it note on your fridge. That's great. But the very best trigger, as evidenced by the research, and a lot of this comes from Professor BJ Fogg at Stanford. Instagram was literally invented in his class as an assignment, essentially. He has shown that if you stick on your new behavior onto an existing habit, it's much more likely to happen. Like the coffee. Like the coffee. I don't

need my PA to phone me at five in the morning and say, hey, Rangan, listen, you must remember to make your coffee. I don't need my Google calendar notification to pop, say, hey, don't forget to make your coffee. I'm going to do that. It's locked in as a habit. I don't have to give it any conscious thought. It's going to happen. So therefore, if I stick my workout on there, I vastly increase the likelihood that it's going to happen. Add on to the fact that I keep kettlebells and dumbbells in my kitchen. My wife used to say, can we not just put these away in the cupboard? And I said, listen, babe, here's the thing. And I've seen this with patients. If you put this stuff out of the way so that the kitchen looks nice, right? I'm never going to lift up that weight. Out of sight, out of mind. We need to

constantly trigger. So the kitchen's not a mess. It's just in the corner. There's a kettlebell. So as I'm making the coffee, I can see it. It's looking at me. Even if all I do is pick it up to move it, I've picked it up. And what it does, Stephen, is that on a very base primal level, it shows me each morning that I have value,

that I'm worth treating with respect. You know, chapter three of the book is all about treat yourself with respect. Many of us, as I've done for much of my life, don't. We struggle with compassion for ourselves. We struggle to be kind to ourselves, right? But the research is really clear. People who are more compassionate to themselves, they're healthier, they're happier, they're more successful at work. We think we've got to beat ourselves up inside to do stuff. Right? It's a myth. It's a short-term win. It's a long-term fail. And there are simple things that

we can do. A lot of people, when they talk about health and happiness and those topics, you know, they tend to focus on things like what we eat. You know, that seems to be a really big factor in health. One of the things we've talked about there that I also read about in your work is you would actually suggest that the maybe the most foundational thing to all of our lives. And it's kind of clearly one of the things

that I've not been so consistent with is sleep. So why is sleep so foundational and so important? I actually read that you said if there was one sort of health recommendation you would make to everybody, it would be to try and get more sleep. Why do you prioritize that so highly? Why is that so important? I think the reason why sleep is so important for society at the moment is because of how much we've lost. So depending on which study you read, you'll have a slightly different result. But essentially compared to about 60 years ago, you know, we may have lost up to 25% of our sleep, right? So on an eight hour sleep cycle, we may have lost, you know, two hours of sleep,

right? Now, when you think about what sleep does for the body and the brain and the mind, you'd be like, well, actually that is going to have a consequence. So in the short term, we all know, what does it feel like when we haven't slept well? Okay. Do we feel like our best selves? No, we're a bit irritable. We're a bit moody. What are we like with those closer to us when we haven't slept well? Are we patient and calm? Are we a bit ratty and a bit angsty? What do you crave when you haven't slept well? You don't crave fruit and vegetables and whole foods. You crave sugar and cakes and candy, right? Because your hormones change when you haven't slept properly, right? You're less able to resist temptation when you haven't slept, right? You're much more likely to get emotionally triggered when you haven't slept. So sleep is

really, really important in the short short term but in the long term sleep deprivation is associated with pretty much every single chronic disease we have heart disease alzheimer's autoimmune disease all these things now we're pretty sure are directly not just associated with sleep deprivation is thought to be causative, right? So this is why we think, oh, I'm just going to crush it in my twenties, thirties. You know, I'll sleep when I'm dead. I'll sleep later. I get there are phases in our life where we have to probably work harder than we would ideally do. We get opportunities. We have to take it. We feel we have to take advantage of them. Fine. I get that. I'm not saying you're going to sleep seven to eight hours every single night. I don't manage to,

and I do prioritize my sleep. But by and large, the biggest problem we have with sleep is that we don't prioritize it. We've never lived in a society where there are this many distractions from sleep. A million years ago, you didn't have, you know, what do you do? It gets dark, you have a campfire, you sit around and chat and then, yeah, you go off to bed, aren't you? It's so true. We live as if sleep is the only optional thing. It's the thing that can, we could do one hour, two hours, three hours, but we then over-prioritize, but I can't miss that appointment. I can't miss that work commitment, but the sleep can come and go It's optional. Yeah, and it's and I get the temptation. There's always something you could do

You could watch a youtube video. You could watch a new boss series, you know, I understand that there are distractions I totally get that But if you are struggling in life if you can't focus as much as you want to at work, if you've tried going on diets before and you can't stick to eating the right kinds of foods that you're trying to choose, you may be better off focusing on your sleep. I've helped people lose weight. I've helped people improve so many aspects of their health by not changing their diet. And I'm a big proponent of whole food-based diets, right? But I've gone, what's the lever I need to turn here? Not what can I lecture the patient about? What is the lever I need to turn here? So I talk

about these four pillars of health, certainly for physical health, food, movement, sleep, and relaxation. And when my first book came out talking about this about five years ago, people say dr where should i start and i said well look we're all different ask yourself this question ask yourself which of these four pillars do i need the most help with because we all kind of intuitively know for me it's probably stress right my diet movement pretty good. I'm pretty good in my sleep, but if I could do more to manage stress, that would have a huge impact on my health. But we don't do that. We go to our favorite bit, right? So people who've already pretty good with their diet, they try and make it 5% better, negating the fact that they're only sleeping

four and a half hours every night. But go to your weakest link, make a small change there. I'm not talking about seven eight hours if you can even sleep for 15 minutes more a night You will have a noticeable and measurable impact on your physiology and the way that you feel And the other thing we're now learning about Sleep particularly I think it's the rem the rem phase of sleep Is it's what sleep researchers are calling emotional first aid. It allows you to process and, you know, kind of regulate emotions and memories. So we are living in this time of a mental health epidemic. I'm very concerned over what the impact of the last

couple of years is going to have on people's mental well-being. But a lot of people don't realize that sleep, when you sleep more, when you sleep of better quality, you actually do emotional first aid. You actually are better at processing emotions. Your relationships will be better. Your mood will be better when you sleep more. So the number one thing we don't do is prioritize it. So for most people, if all't do is prioritize it. So for most people, if all they do is prioritize it, that would be a big start. And then I always think I need to say when I'm talking about sleep, I don't want to stress people out because some people may hear that, Stephen, and go, oh my, now I'm stressed out, right? I've heard what you just said sleep's going to do, or I've got a young child. I can't sleep through the night. That's okay. We all have phases like that. This is day in, day out over a period of years I'm talking about in terms of chronic disease.

But there are small things that you can do, right? Getting outside in the morning for even 10 minutes and seeing natural light, that will help you sleep better at night. That is free and it's accessible to everyone, right? Why? If you think about what I said about a million years ago, we have evolved as humans to have a big differential between our maximum light exposure and our minimum light exposure, right? So typically in the day we'd be outside and at nighttime it'd be completely dark, right? So light is measured in a unit of light called lux, right? Completely dark room, zero lux. If you go outside on a cloudy day in the UK, overcast cloudy day for 10 or 15 minutes, you're going to get about 10,000 lux

through your eyes. Go out on a sunny day, you're going to get about 20 or 30,000 lux through your eyes. Go out on a sunny day, you're going to get about 20 or 30,000 Lux through your eyes. Go into the most brightly lit office building in the UK, you're probably going to get between 500 and 700 Lux. It's not much. Even on a cloudy day, you're getting so much more than you would get inside. So for some people, all they have to do is get outside in the morning for 10 minutes or even at lunchtime, go for a walk outside for 10 minutes. That will help set what's called your circadian rhythm, which helps you sleep better at night. So that's a simple one. Caffeine's a big one, right? You know, I love coffee, but I don't drink it after midday, right? I'll drink it in the morning. I won't drink it after midday. There? I'll drink it in the morning. I won't drink it after midday.

There are genetic differences between different people and how we process it for sure. But, you know, by and large, the half-life is six hours. So that means if you have a large coffee at midday, at 6pm, half of that caffeine is going around your brain. And it could be at midnight, a quarter could still be going around your brain and it could be at midnight a quarter could still be going around your brain so this is not about lecturing this is about hopefully empowering people to go oh maybe that 3 p.m coffee i take to get me through the afternoon oh maybe that's why i can't sleep well and then i'm even more tired the next day and i'm stuck in this vicious cycle where i need the caffeine to keep getting me through. And again, if someone's listening to this and they're not sure, I would say, okay, why not try for seven days only having caffeine in

the morning? And just see what happens. Observe. Do you feel better? Does it help? Do you have more energy? Great. And if you think you're somewhere and you really think it's a problem, you might want to wean down and try seven days without. I never tell my patient to stop drinking coffee or to stop drinking alcohol. I want to help show them the impact it's having, right? So let's say a patient's drinking too much alcohol for their health. I want to help persuade them to go for seven days without and see how they feel, right? If they can experience how they feel differently and then they go, yeah, I love it, but you know what? The amount of fun I get on a Friday night hanging out with my mates, having a few beers, it's worth the hangover and the fatigue and the irritability on Saturday, if they say that they're happy with that trade-off, okay, fine. But a lot of people are not aware of

the trade-off. Like with coffee, we are drinking so much. We are a nation of caffeine addicts. We're a world of caffeine addicts, frankly. It's a psychoactive stimulant. It's a beautiful one, but it's a psychoactive stimulant. So all I'm saying is that if you're struggling with your sleep, you know, you might want to reduce it. You might want to knock it back a bit. And there's plenty more we could talk about with sleep. But all I want to say to people is small changes to your sleep make a difference. Don't set the goal that's going to be eight hours a night. Sure, if you can do that, wonderful. But even 15 minutes more a day will absolutely make a difference. One of the moments in your book that you describe as being really pivotal, and you've referenced earlier as being pivotal to your life, was

the moment your child got ill. Your six-month-old child became and the kind of that became a catalyst in your life for I guess many things can you talk to me about why that was so um pivotal and and and why when your child became ill you you know that was in part what I understand is part of the inspiration behind many of the thoughts in the book? My son, Janem, getting sick at six months old, literally changed the course of my career. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today had that not happened. So rewind, 2010, I become a father for the first time, right? Super excited, right? It's amazing. We're new parents. Everything's going well, blah, blah, blah. And that December, the end of December, we decided to go on holiday for a week in France. I've got friends out there. One of them's got a

house out there. We were going to go and stay there. And we flew out just after Christmas, my wife, myself, and my son. And we got to my friend's house. They weren't going to be there till the next day. And we're meant to sleep downstairs there. That was the room that we'd been allocated at my friend's place. And normally my wife would have probably gone and put him to sleep, but she said she didn't feel she wanted to. He was a bit sniffly. He wasn't, you know, mother's intuition, call it whatever you will. She didn't do it. Anyway, we're upstairs in this kind of open-plan kitchen.

I think I'm doing some washing up and then she calls out to me. She says, wrong and he's not moving. I drop everything, turn around, see him. And I think he's probably choking because he's had a lot of phlegm all day. So I take him, turn him over. I try and clear his airway. Nothing's happening. I probably froze. I can't quite remember now with clarity, but my wife said, look, we just got to get into the

hospital. So we got to the hospital, which was two minutes away. We got in and you could see how scared the medics were because it's not uncommon for children at the age of six months to have a convulsion. It's something we call a febrile convulsion. There's a fever that causes the convulsion, but he had no fever. They're like, well, why on earth is this six month old kids just stopped moving and had a convulsion. So he got blue lighted down the, because it was a little mountain resort down to the valley. My wife's going in the ambulance. I'm like following in the car thing. What on earth is happening? We get there, you know, he's motionless. We're super scared. We thought we might lose him that night. He had two lumbar punctures. He had all kinds of blood tests. Then it turns out later that he had very low levels of calcium in his blood, which is why he had a convulsion.

But why has that happened? And there's a lot, we're still waiting for more tests. A few hours later, it comes back. He's got no vitamin D in his body. Well, very low levels of vitamin D. That's why his calcium dropped. Thankfully, he got a calcium infusion. He got vitamin D. Five days later, you know, we get discharged. But why did that have such a big impact on me? Well, A, of course, my son nearly died. But I thought I'd let him down. That's the truth, Stephen. I thought my son has nearly died from a preventable vitamin deficiency. I've gone to one of Europe's most prestigious medical schools, Edinburgh. I've got an immunology degree. I've done my specialist exams, done my general practice exams. With all my so-called qualifications,

I was unable to prevent my son from getting sick. So I took it personally as if I had messed up. And actually, weirdly enough, a few weeks before that, I'd become aware of vitamin D. I'd gone. I remember thinking, shouldn't my son be on vitamin D? This was years ago. I remember phoning my wife from work, said, hey, can you go and take him to the doctor? We're told as doctors not to make medical decisions for our own family. It's not deemed good practice. I sent her a protocol to just show that to the doctor say your husband's a gp you know he's just thinking about about this and the gp just laughed her out said you could have just printed you could have just typed this up on word this is nonsense he

doesn't need anything anyway two weeks later he's in france convulsion nearly dies why does that have such a big impact on me why has it had such a big impact on me? Why has it had such a big impact on me? Because I thought I'd failed, right? My whole identity is around being perfect at that point. So I want perfection in every aspect of my life. I wanted perfection in every aspect of my life. Of course, my darling son, I thought so guilty, Stephen, I became obsessed. Modern medicine saved his life, but that's it. Modern medicine often stops at that point. I was asking him, well, what happens if he's not had vitamin D in his system for the last few months, which he didn't? Vitamin D is critical for our immune system.

It's critical. Could this be why he's got eczema? Could this be contributing fats to this? Look, he's fine now. And I thought, this is not good enough for me. So I made it my mission. I said to myself, internally, I don't think I ever verbalized it out. I said, I am going to get my son back to full health as if this had never happened.

I became obsessed. I'd read up about vitamin D. That led me to the gut microbi D. That led me to the gut microbiome. That led me to all kinds of stuff that I never learned at medical school that I've used to help him. He is a thriving, happy, healthy, strong 11-year-old boy. Okay. The principles and the tools that I've learned are what I've been using with my patients for years. It's what I used on Doctor in the House on BBC One to show people all around the country, and it's gone to 70 countries around the world, that all kinds of conditions, type 2 diabetes, fibromyalgia, panic

attacks, anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, can all be either reversed or significantly improved by making small changes to our lifestyle. That moment drove me to learn all this stuff, which I now share and help, you know, arguably millions of people now. And for years, I wished it didn't happen, but I've changed my view for two reasons. One reason was that guilt I felt, Stephen, I carried in as a dad. He doesn't need his dad feeling guilty. That doesn't make me a calm, present, attentive father. That brings baggage into the relationship. And I could see that. I'd like to think, particularly these days, I've got a high degree of self-awareness. I could see that. See, Rangan, this is guilt.

It's not his fault. He doesn't need a guilty dad. So that was a stimulus to go inward and figure some of this stuff out, to figure out where does this come from. But it all plays in, Stephen. As we talk, you can see the theme in the start of our conversation, in the middle, now talking about my son. I have expected perfection of myself in everything I've ever done, right? That's been my identity. With my son, I felt as though I let him down. Now, I've let go of pretty much all of that. I say pretty much, because it still pops in. So in my role as a father, I think I do a good job. They're kind, considerate kids. They're happy. But could I do a better job? Probably. I'm not going to beat myself up on that anymore, but I want to work on that. So now I look back and I've now told myself a different story, right? Is this true? You can tell me if you

think it's true. I now think that was meant to happen. That happened so that daddy could learn all of the tools that I've learned to help him and now help thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, you know, as I say, arguably millions. I wouldn't have had those learnings had it not happened. And when I started thinking like that, I would think, yeah, but why did he have to go through that in order for me to learn this? But again, that's me putting a story. What do you mean go through it? Maybe he doesn't know he's been through anything. Maybe that's his life journey. Maybe he's going to learn loads from that experience. Do you know what I mean? And that's the perspective choice, I guess, you talked about

earlier. It's almost like making an incident, a negative incident, the hero of your own life, as opposed to the, you know, shrouding it with guilt and blame and resentment. Yeah, it's choosing a happiness story about it. Because ultimately, I can't change the reality of what happened. Whether I wanted it to or not, of course, at that moment, would I want it to happen? No, of course not. But now, given that it can't be changed, given that it has happened and is now in the past, how now to show up in my everyday life and be happy, be content, help people, serve people, serve my children as a good father. Well, it's to let go of that and move on. Choose a happiness story. We can all do it.

It's hard sometimes, but it doesn't mean it's not possible. And what is your mission now? As you look ahead to the future, you've achieved so much across such a diverse range of of pursuits you know everything from your tv to podcast to books and everything in between your work as a gp your medical practice everything what is your mission now as you look ahead to your future the mission that i have stated publicly for the last few years has been over the course of my career i want to help 100 million people live better lives i want to help them with their health and their happiness but you know over the last few months that's not been sitting that well with me anymore

like i mean i'm really good friends with my videographer, Gareth, who films every podcast that I do. We've been chatting a lot about it. And when I first stated that publicly for the first time, I was so scared. Well, people think he's got a big ego. I didn't want, part of me didn't want to share that. I thought, what will people think of me? Why that's been so good for me is it's helped me make decisions. As you know, the amount of incoming into our inboxes and what we could be doing is vast. So the 100 million figure allows me to think, okay, is this going to get me closer to 100 million or not? So I think it's served a really good role. I think missions can do at particular

moments in life, but we don't need to be stuck to them forever. So, you know, that figure, you know, I thought, well, 5 million people each week are watching Doctor in the House and BBC One. Okay. That means if only 1% of people watch that and make a change in their life, that's a lot of people, right? And now that's gone to 70 countries around the world. I'm like, okay, so this is how you can use the media to amplify your message and help people with hopefully a strong, simple message all over the world. Right now, I think, and that's helped me do things like, you know, I'll be honest, like when I started my podcast, it was just a bit of fun, right? I didn't have a name. I didn't have a logo. I just thought, okay, this would be cool. I didn't know what the name was

when I was interviewing people, like the first six interviews. But it's evolved into, you know, like your show, I guess, like a juggernaut show, which has a huge following that impacts the lives of hundreds of thousands of people each week. Right? So the mission served me, but it's not sure, like I don't have a new replacement one at the moment, but I almost think a hundred million is limiting. Well, why a hundred million, right? That's not said with any level of arrogance. It's just like, well, every human has unlimited potential. You know, this is what I always try and do. I want every person who reads my books or listens to my podcast to feel

that they can be the architect of their own health and happiness. That's not me diminishing the fact that your environment, that society plays a role. No, but even if it does, I still want that person to feel that they have agency and they've got an element of control. So if I think about short-term goals, you know, I very much want this book to be a success, not so that it can feed my ego, but because I genuinely think the 10 chapters, the 10 life lessons are universal. So whoever you are, wherever you are in life, I think these 10 chapters, these 10 lessons hold true for everyone. If anyone disagrees, I'd welcome a conversation about it, but I really think they do.

And I think they're sort of things that people can revisit. They use them, then in a few months when life goes off track, they can come back. That's one immediate goal. But I think going beyond that, the mission's about conversation, right? Conversation matters. Long-form conversation, like what you do on this show, like what I do on my show, that matters. We need that now more than ever. Everything is reduced down to that smallest soundbite that we can get out there. The problem is that comes at a cost because we lose perspective. It doesn't make us compassionate. It makes us angry, right? People are isolated. There's a lack of community. People feel lonely. It's driving them to junk happiness habits. I've got so many young men who've come to see me who've

got pornography addiction, right? They can't even look me in the eye when they tell me they're that ashamed and embarrassed. They've not told anyone. They've not told their friends. They've not told their parents. There will be someone, Stephen, listening to this right now, who's got an issue with pornography and they don't know where to turn. Picking up on that point of loneliness, I think in our society, we view loneliness as a sad thing in the sense that when someone's lonely, it almost feels like it's a sign of their inadequacy, or their lack of attraction, or they're not a compelling human being, they weren't able to forge interactions. So although I've now come to learn that it's in fact a signal to get back to our tribes, we don't treat it like other signals. We don't treat it

like thirst. We don't treat it like hunger. We will say if we're thirsty or we're hungry, but we won't say if we're lonely because it's stigmatized, right? I came to learn from the research I've done, and I saw similar stats which were terrifying in your work, is that loneliness isn't a sad thing, it's actually a really dangerous thing. So can you speak to the negative consequence of loneliness? The way society is set up now is making us lonely. We've moved away from work. We've moved away from our families. We don't have the tribes around us.

And it's very, very damaging for our health, right? Some research suggests that the feeling of being lonely is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes per day, one five. Right? Increases our risk of heart disease, strokes. You're more likely to die earlier if you feel lonely. Why is that? Right? Think about it.

A million years ago, you're with your tribe. You're with your community. Right? If a wild predator is approaching the tribe, stress response kicks into gear that's a good thing it's going to help you take action to keep you safe brilliant all kinds of things happen in the body when that happens loneliness is also a signal think back a million years ago if you were out by yourself you don't have your tribe around you, your body is clever, your body knows you are at risk, you are vulnerable to attack. So it activates your stress response,

your blood sugar goes up, your blood pressure goes up, your blood becomes more prone to clotting, right? Your amygdala, your emotional brain goes onto high alert, so you're hypervigilant, you become anxious, right? All these things happen when you're hypervigilant You become anxious Right? All these things happen when you feel lonely Right? You have physical changes in your body Now, loneliness is hard If people are suffering, I understand

Right? I really understand But small things make a difference You can start off by saying hi To the barista at the coffee shop right but maybe you've got a friend you haven't spoken to in a while maybe you've got busy with your life they've got busy with their life give them a call right that's all it takes it's a ripple effect start small and i promise you will start to feel the difference dr rungan i i have to i couldn't thank you enough for the

wisdom and for the time that you've given me today. It's really, really, really special. I sit here sometimes with guests and I think, you know, I think, you know, they've written a book and it's very nice and everything, but having experienced the way that you've done the self-work and having had a taste of the way that you have empathy in your approach to causing behavioral and lifestyle change to people, I feel like this book is just critically important. You know, it's funny because I was thinking, I'm going to end this podcast by giving the book a compliment, but I don't think I have to.

I think if people see who you are today, the wisdom, the empathy, the experience, the vulnerability, I think any person that is sound of mind and that wants to improve their life will know that this book is critically important to them that it is inclusive that is that is relatable and that it will hold their hand through change in a in a way which is empathetic and that's that those are my favorite books and i was sat here and i'm going to be completely honest because i don't bullshit people i just don't say things i don't believe them i was sat here thinking fuck steve because i be completely honest because I don't bullshit people. I just don't say things. I don't believe them. I was sat here thinking, fuck, Steve, because I've

only been, I've only, I was only given a small taste of the book by your publisher. I need to read this book. And if that's the impact you've had on me, I know it's going to be the impact you've had on my listeners. So thank you because, you know, that really, really is, you know, understanding where we are in the world and culture, we need more books like this. We have a tradition on this podcast, which is the last guest writes a question for the next guest. And I don't actually get to read on my mother's life. I don't read it until I open the book. So I've just opened the book and seen what our last guest has written. So my last guest wrote the question and I've not read it yet. So here we go. But he's got great handwriting. So what is something that people value that you no longer value?

An attachment to truth. I no longer value being white. I no longer value having to know the right answer. I no longer value thinking this is the truth and I'm going to hold onto this at all costs. And I think many people do. I now value curiosity and being the learner. I just want to learn. I want to explore. I'm happy for pre-existing assumptions I've had in my life to be shown to be incorrect. I'm not attached to being right. I'm not attached to being wrong. What I am attached to is learning and that's working for me at the moment. Dr. Rangan, thank you. You are simply amazing and you are really the gift that keeps on giving. So I can't wait to read the book in its entirety. Happy Mind, Happy Life, 10 Simple Ways

to Feel Great Every Day. Thanks for having me. Thanks. I can't wait to read the book in its entirety. Happy Mind, Happy Life, 10 Simple Ways to Feel Great Every Day. Thanks for having me.