WHOOP Podcast - Daily Practices to Reset Your Mind, Body, and Identity with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

On this month’s installment of the How To Series, WHOOP Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist Dr. Kristen Holmes sits down with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee to discuss the key components to behavior change and growth. Dr. Rangan Chatterjee is an author, physician, presenter, and podcast host from the UK, known for his stance on progressive medicine. He has over 20 years of experience in the medical field, receiving his concurrent medical and immunology degrees from University of Edinburgh in 2001. Dr. Chatterjee is one of the most recognizable physicians in British Media, known for his work with the BBC as lead resident doctor on BBC Breakfast and as a regular commentator on BBC Radio. Dr. Chatterjee is the author of six books since 2017. His overall goals in the health space are to simplify health to be comprehensive to all, approaching health using progressive medicine to reduce and prevent chronic disease, and challenge modern health tools and information.In today’s episode, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Chatterjee discuss the need to wake up to the things that are tying you down (0:40), the important role of solitude and self-reflection in growth (06:57), and how to find your inner calm (10:27). This episode investigates using WHOOP as a tool to increase internal knowledge on behavior change (13:41), the ways of reframing the mind to find the positive (19:17), and how this reframing can make habit forming easy (25:59). Dr. Chatterjee discusses the importance of anticipating adversity in your life (26:39) and how living with your values can lead to a happier life (33:30), the routine questions you should be asking yourself (36:20). Dr. Chatterjee walks Dr. Holmes through a few lessons from his latest book, like The Freedom Exercise (40:10), understanding your core truths (45:07), and the small changes that can lead to larger behaviour changes (48:22). Dr. Chatterjee and Dr. Holmes close out the episode by discussing the ways to create an active routine that works for you (52:51), the ability to embrace discomfort (1:01:48), using identity as a map for behavior change (1:07:03), and creating your identity by choosing your values (1:14:30). Order Dr. Chatterjee’s latest book here. Follow Dr. Rangan ChatterjeeInstagramYouTubeFacebookTikTokXSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

As soon as there's a gap between your external actions and your inner values, you create a void internally. Within that void that you create, that's where your problematic behaviors come in. When there's no void, those behaviors can't get in. You're just rock solid. Why do I feel like behavior changes relatively easy these days? I feel more than ever before. I'm sure I can improve. I was a people pleaser for most of my life. I'm not anymore.

Now, it's not about external validations, but internal validation. Can I look at myself in the mirror before I go to bed each night and go, yeah, actually, wrong. And you behaved in accordance with your values today. Dr. Chatterjid, yay. I'm super excited to be there. I know, me too. I have been following you for a very long time and have such deep admiration and respect

for the work that you do and the education that you put out online is just, you know, it's helping millions. And I recently had the opportunity to read, your new book, make change that lasts. And it's such an important contribution because being human is hard. Changing behavior is really, really hard. And I think, you know, there are so many wonderful subtext to the, to the book that we're going to get into. But I want to start by talking about waking up to what is tying you down. And I'd love for you to start from your own personal vantage point. You know, what was kind of tying you down? And how can people think about

that as a concept in their life and be more aware, because that seems like the place to start. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm sure people listening to this podcast are thinking about change all the time. How can I make meaningful and positive changes in my life? Okay. And when I think about change and habits, I think about them in two different levels. Okay, so level one is the creation of healthy habits. Okay, we hear this a lot. And there is some general principles that absolutely apply that I've written about before, I talk about, you know, things like, you know, make your new behavior easy, stick it onto an existing habit. You know, all these kind of simple tips, which I think are really, really valuable. And we can talk about those if you want, okay? But actually, there's a layer that's one step deeper than that. and I think this is where the goal is for each of us as a human being

because we've all tried to change our habits for years and we can get all these tips and we can go, oh, you know, I'll make it easy, I'll stick it on. And I do that in my own life. I have a five-minute strength workout that I do every single day and I've rarely missed a day in over five years. Okay, it's just five minutes a day while my coffee brews each morning. So I apply those principles.

But despite me applying those principles, despite many people out there trying to apply those principles of habit change and habit formation, they still keep reverting back to where they were before. People find change really, really hard. And I think it's because they're too focused on the behavior and not the energy behind the behavior. Okay, so the concept I write about in the new book is these reliances that we have, right? So you ask me the question, wake up to what's tying you down. What's tying all of us down are beliefs that we hold about ourselves and the world. What we don't realize, what I didn't realize for many years, is that our behaviors actually

follow our beliefs. And so if you're trying to change your behaviors without addressing those beliefs, you're going to struggle. It will never last in the long term. You'll make changes for a few weeks, for a few months, but you'll always head back to where you were before. And so I call these things our reliances, basically. And so you can think about reliances in many different ways. The way I sort of set it up in the introduction of people is, what do you need to go right in your life in order to feel okay? Oh, you know, I need my partner to be nice to me,

my email inbox to be manageable, the kids to have tidied up and left the school on time, there's to be no traffic on the way. It sounds simple. It sounds very trivial. But if we really examine ourselves and go, wow, I need all these things. And when those things, which are all outside my control, if they don't go right, I start to feel this kind of internal stress.

And once you identify what you are reliant on in order to feel okay, you unlock a really key part of yourself, which helps you change your behaviors. Does that make sense? It does. Yeah, it does. and what would that exercise look like if one were to try to make a laundry list of reliances and you know how do you discern kind of what to keep and what to let go of yeah because it's a great question because the idea is that all these things are fine right

I try not to use the terms good or bad anymore like there are just consequences if you have all of these reliances, okay, so if you don't feel good if your partner isn't nice to you in the morning. Now, that's probably quite relatable, okay? And of course we want our, let's say you're in an intimate relationship, but you have a partner. Of course we want them to be nice to us. Of course we want things, you know, there's been no traffic on the way to work. The problem is if we are overly reliant on things in the outside world going a certain way in order for us to feel good, then we are like a tough. put on a string. We can be blown around by the world around us. And the big missing piece and

behavior change for me is this idea that this internal stress we accumulate within us by the way we interact with the world is what drives our behavior. So for example, if your partner isn't as nice as you might want them to be first in the morning to you, and that frustrates you. what you don't realize is that you have created internal stress within you by the way you've perceived that situation and that internal emotional stress is not neutral okay you will seek to neutralize it in one way or the other you can seek to neutralize it in a helpful way go for a run go for a walk you know do what you need to do right or you'll do what most people do which is they get to work they go to the vending machine and get a chocolate bar an extra coffee, an extra bit of alcohol after work, those behaviours all serve a role.

So these reliances that we have are really, really important for us to identify. You ask me, how can we do that? I think the most important practice for any human being in 2025 is a daily practice of solitude. It's very hard to make changes in your life if you don't step outside of your life to reflect on your life. So, for example, for many years, something I would do every evening is ask myself, where did I get emotionally triggered in the day? Okay. I may not be able to affect it in the moment, but in the evening, I feel, where did you get

emotionally triggered? Because once you stop blaming the external world for your internal responses, it's like a superpower. You become a blackout in yourself. You take the control back. You take the control back. And that, you know, really what this book is about is about giving us a superpower. sense of control. When we're overly reliant on things outside of ourselves in order to make

changes, we feel out of control. That's why everyone every January is suddenly wondering about, you know, why, you know, this year it's going to be different. I'm going to try harder. I don't think people necessarily need to try harder. They need to understand what's behind their behaviors. I guess another way I can describe it to people, maybe a more relatable example, is, let's say you're driving to work, okay? So many people listening will probably be commuting to work. So you're driving to work, and there's a driver who cuts you up. Okay.

Now, what I didn't realize a few years ago is that I have a choice in how I respond to that neutral external event. A few years ago, I think I would respond, like many people, derisly and most people respond, which is to get angry. Stupid driver, they need their eyes to text. to have a driving license, whatever it might be, okay? That has a consequence, okay? The consequence is that you've created internal stress within your body,

that you will then have to neutralize. What you don't realize or what I didn't realize, and many people don't realize, is that you can train yourself to have a different response. You can train yourself to go, oh, wow, I wonder what's going on for that driver. You know, maybe their daughter had earache and the, the driver was up with their sick child last night. Maybe it's a mother who's already been late for work twice in the past two weeks. And if they're late again today, they're going to lose their

job. That decision you make in that moment, which you can train and change, would literally change your life. Because I've done it. And it would change your behaviours. And this is why I believe people struggle so hard to change their behaviours. They're too focused on the behaviour. and they don't understand the role that that behavior is playing in their life. So I'm really, I guess why I'm so passionate about this is because I've been a medical doctor for 23 years. I've seen tens of thousands of patients. 80 to 90% of what we see today is in some way related to our collective modern lifestyles.

I'm not putting blame on people. I understand that life is tough. People are stressed out, you know, and they're underslept. All the things that we help people with, right? We know that impacts. physical health and their mental health, so it stands to reason that the way I, as the medical doctors, can help people then is to help them change their behaviors. And I used to talk about habit formation and the principles of healthy habits, and I think

it's important, but it isn't the whole story, because what I didn't realize and what most people don't realize still is that effortless change is available to all of us. once you get to the root, you find your behaviour start to follow suit. So I have a real internal calm these days, Kristen, that I didn't used to have. And when you have this internal calm, you find that actually your behaviours kind of match that in a calm. So I don't find behaviour change difficult anymore. I used to. Five years ago, I'll tell you what would happen every January for me is this.

I'd wake up on January the 1st. and, you know, because I probably used to be quite an A-type person, I had very high standards. I would describe myself as the perfectionist in recovery now. I would be very demanding of myself, and I might have read all the research on meditation. That's why I'd go, right, okay, wrong good, come on, here we go. Meditation is going to improve your focus, your concentration, you're going to be calmer. Gray matter. Yeah, and I can list all about, right, boom, let's do it.

this is meditation year and I'd go 20 minutes a day every day this year and I would do it for the first week second week and then you know somewhere in the third week I'd skip it because I was busy or something happened with the kids or whatever and then my inner voice would be brutal like I would beat myself up about oh you you couldn't do it this year could you you had to miss a day like it was really really negative and then you never get back to that behavior it's something that you used to do, right? Whereas now I do meditate on those days, but not every day, right? And what I missed, I'm like, oh, I'm a better human being when I do meditate. I'm a better husband. I'm a better father. I'm a better doctor. Hey, tomorrow I'm going to get back to it. So it helps you live your

values. Yeah. It's this balance now between discipline and compassion. Before it was too much discipline, which led to when I missed, you know, it was a savage inner voice. So it's trying to get that balance. It's also trying to understand why did I miss? You know, what happened today? You know, why did I decide that it wasn't as important? So two questions I tend to ask myself every evening, and I've been recommending these questions to my patients for years, is what went well today and what can I do differently tomorrow? And what I love about this questions is a very simple. It's a very compassionate way of helping you just make gentle change in your life. So yeah, doing it for one night probably won't make much of a difference. Do it for 30

days. And the trajectory of your life is completely different after 30 days because you're making these small tweaks. And just to finish off this, because I'm sure you've got questions to ask me, But that meditation example, I think, teaches me and hopefully teaches your audience something really powerful, which is what I try and set up in chat to one of this new book, which is that many of us don't actually need more external knowledge. We need more internal knowledge. I think that's the missing piece. You know, most people who are drinking too much alcohol, it's not that, look, I'm in

Whoop headquarters having this conversation, right? So let's just unpick this, right? if someone wears the woup bands and they're drinking alcohol, they're going to see very clearly, very quickly what impact that is having on their sleep. And their recovery scores. Right. So they've got the information. And sometimes that's enough to change it.

I'm sure you've got tens of thousands of people who write in saying... I mean, 89% of the folks who are on our platform report drinking less alcohol over the course of the time frame that they're on our, yeah, in our system. And I think what's interesting about a Woot Band is that I haven't really thought about it through this lens, but actually, if I just sort of do it in real time, it's really interesting because you're getting external information, but I kind of think you're getting internal information as well, because it's no longer, oh, that expert out there, or that book out there says, alcohol does this. it's very different because you're realizing for you, right? Oh, when I do this, I don't sleep well, and you start to tune it. Oh, I'm more moody and reactive. I'm having more caffeine.

And so you're getting that internal knowledge that helps you change your behavior for good. Do you know what I mean? It's a very powerful feedback loop, you know, that we were talking offline about, you know, I think people often think that technology kind of pulls you further away from yourself, whereas it's the opposite, right? Like, I've never understood my body better than, you know, over the course of this last, you know, 10 or 12 years that I've been, like, tracking these metrics, right? Like, I understand how a long stressful commute, you know, impacts my ability to focus

and my stress levels. And, you know, I understand when I'm framing things as challenging versus threatening, how does that show up in my stress and my sleep, you know? like I'm starting, I've been able to connect the dots in a way that allows me to understand what is working for me and, you know, what is upgrading versus, you know, what is not working for me. And then I can make a choice, you know. I would say my experience has been very similar when you came on my podcast about, I don't know, six months ago or so, you actually said that to me. You said to me that it's helped you understand yourself better. And that locked into my

brain. I was like, oh, that's interesting. Because as a doctor, for many years, I have, you know, these are obviously modern wearables, these boot bans, okay? But we've had a form of health tracker in the form of blood pressure monies for years, right, which people can buy from their pharmacy. And so I qualified from Edinburgh Medical School in 2001. And so I remember maybe 10, 12 years ago, So patients would ask me often, hey, doc, shall I get a home blood pressure monitor? I would like, yeah, I mean, sure, I couldn't see any problem with it. I thought this is going to be a good idea. It's going to help you check the blood pressure, and it's going to help you be engaged

with the process. But I've learned very quickly that it didn't seem to work for everyone. So some people were really great. They didn't become reliant on it. They would check regularly. not obsessively, and if it was starting to creep up, they would use it as motivation to go for their lunchtime walk or change their behaviors. But I would say the other 50%, this is not a scientific study, this is just my broad, rough 50%, what they would do is they would check it

four or five times a day, they'd become stressed out, they'd call the practice, saying, oh, it's gone up a little bit, it's gone, you know, and I just think, wow, For some people, this is causing anxiety and stress and probably putting their blood pressure up. And so I went into trying out the wheat band a few months ago with an open mind thinking, okay, let me see. I don't want to become reliant on this, but can it teach me stuff about myself? And the answer was an overwhelming guess. You know, I feel I understand myself even better now.

I think it's helped me develop this sixth sense of interoception, you know, the ability to read you know, I was sharing with you just before we started recording. What I do each morning is I don't look at the score until I've actually tried to tune in and go, what do I think it is today? And I'm not perfect. I don't get to write 100% of the time, but I'm finding that that process is going, it's helping me understand myself and go, yeah. So look, let's say, here's the problem, right? you asked me before about what's you know we need to wake up to what's tying us down if you've got a whip back right and you love the data it gives you what happens one day when you forgot to charge your battery right are you getting stressed out by it because you I bet you there's people

listening right now who when that happens oh for sure yeah totally anxious yeah I would argue and I guess you guys might have a different view I would argue that if you you're getting anxious when it's not there, I would say that's a problem. You need to learn why is that making you anxious? Why can't you? What need is that data serving for three or four days without it? So I always try and reframe everything in life to make it a positive. This is not toxic positivity, right? This is understanding that I, with all my heart, believe that every single event in life pretty much is neutral. It's the perspective we take on that event that determines its outcome on us, right? Our actions are not neutral, but reality is. Exactly. This plays up for me

in so many different ways. Like, so if I, because that happens to me where I don't have, or I forgot my charger, and I'm away. And so I don't have it. So I ask myself the question, okay, great, what opportunity does this now present me with that I would not have had the opportunity. I would not have had the opportunity to do had I had my battery charger. Oh, okay, wrong. Well, you've got three days now to prove to yourself that you can survive that you're not overly reliant on this device. And I think it's a really helpful way to look at every situation in life. What is the opportunity here? There's always an upside. Yeah. But can you find the upside? Yeah. Yeah. I think that skill of reframing puts you, I think, to your earlier point, back in control, right, of the situation.

It really does, right? So my first book, which came out in 2018, in the UK was called the Four Pillar Plan, in the US was called How to Make Disease Disappear, which kind of tells you the different weeks. The UK and the US is how we message things, right? But in that book, I set out the case that the four most important pillars for our short term and long-term health were food, movement, sleep and relaxation. I'm sure principles that you guys at Wootke must be looking at and talking about all the time. Okay. And I still maintain that. And these four pillars not only have the most impact on our health, we also have a fair degree of control over them, okay, which I think is quite important because we could talk about air pollution and the problems

it's having, but it's quite disempowering. It's not that much you can do about it. But one thing I didn't put in that book, probably because I hadn't learnt enough about it yet, is that stress idea, right? There was a lot on stress and what we can do. But probably that book was more focused on external stress. But now when I look at stress, when I talk to patients or the public about stress, I say stress comes in two forms. There's external stress and internal stress. So people go, yeah, but you don't know my life. There's my emails and my boss wants me to do this and all these kind of demands. Okay, that's all external. But how you respond to those, things, that's arguably more importance. That's internal. And you have a lot of control over

that. And I know you've heard me talk about this, but for your audience, when I really, really got this, Kristen, was when I spoke to a lady called Edithiga on my podcast, maybe three or four years ago. We re-released it recently. Holocaust Survivor. We re-released it for episode 500 of my show as a celebration. But in essence, when I spoke to her, and I really would love your audience to really understand this because it's such a key point. And I would imagine if they really get this point and then look at their wute bands and actually see how their ability to stay internally calm affects their metrics and their HRV, I would be absolutely fascinated. We have a study in peer review that is looking with emotion right now. Hopefully it makes

way, but it's looking at threat and challenge and how we frame things and how that impacts our sleep and our stress. Yeah. Well, there you go. And I go. Yeah. I know. It's amazing. I know it because I can feel it in me. Yeah. I've never felt this. Our mind is so damn powerful. The mind is it. Like I actually I talk a lot about these physical health behaviors, but I actually believe they're downstream. If you really go to the root, it's your mindset. It's the way you approach adversity, the way you approach challenge. And if anyone feels that, yeah, yeah, but there are some really stressful things in my life, I accept that, but just hear me out for a moment. When I spoke to Edith Eager, she was 93 years old. She was just full of love, compassion, forgiveness and warmth. When she was 16 years old,

she grew up in Eastern Europe. And one morning, it's so stark. She was actually really excited. because she had a date with her boyfriend that night, and she was trying to figure out what dress she was going to wear in the evening. They get a knock on the door. Her parents, her and a sister, get put on a train to Auschwitz concentration camp. Within one to two hours of getting there,

both of her parents are murdered. Okay. She's a 16-year-old young lady. Later on that afternoon, so her parents have just been murdered, the senior prison guards there ask her to dance for them. You can't even imagine this, right?

She said to me, Dr. Chatsky, when I was dancing in Auschwitz, I never forgot the last thing my mother said to me before she was killed. She said, Edith, nobody can ever take from you the contents that you put inside your mind. So she said to me, when I was dancing in Auschwitz, in my mind, I wasn't there. In my mind, I was in Budapest Opera House. I was wearing a beautiful dress. The orchestra was playing. There was a full house.

It was a beautiful evening. I thought, this is crazy. You're literally in a death camp. Your parents should be murdered. She reframed her experience. While she was announced, which she said to me, I started to see the prison guards as the prisoners. They weren't free in their own minds.

I was like, okay, this is pretty incredible. And the last thing she said to me, Kristen, which I have never forgotten, I think about it less these days, because I think I've really embodied the message she taught me four or five years ago. But I used to think about it on most days. And I kind of feel that it is tattooed somewhere deep within my subconscious this message. She said to me, Dr. Chatsy, I have lived in Auschwitz and I can tell you the greatest prison you will ever live

inside is the prison you create inside your own minds. And I kid you not, Kristen, the penny dropped for me in that moment. I thought, oh, that's what we all do every day. We're walking around to go, oh, that stupid driver, oh, my boss did that. Like, we don't realize we're creating mental prisons and tying it into behaviors, the reason people struggle to give up sugar or they're drinking too much caffeine or they're spending three hours doom scrolling every night is they don't realize it's a lot of it to do with their mindset. They're generating internal stress by the way they are interacting with the world

and the natural consequences that they need those behaviors to help sued that internal stress, but you go right to the source or you go, oh, wait a minute, what if I didn't generate that internal stress in the first place? It's like a waterfall. You don't realize that actually a lot of these behaviors now, you effortlessly start to change them because you don't need them. There's a chapter in this book. It's one of my favorites called expect adversity. And I talk about it as being this over-reliance that many of us have on things never going wrong. We kind of expect our life just going to get better. And then so when something happens like, oh, there's traffic today, man, I can't believe it, right?

Damn traffic. I'm going to be late for work. We don't like to take responsibility that we probably left a little bit late. And actually, that's why we're going to be late for work. It's much easier to blame on the driver, right? But it's a really important concept because all businesses understand this. They've got a concept called shrinkage. In the US and in the UK, if you own supermarkets, they know about shrinkage, right? So if you're the boss, you could could hope that no one's going to shoplift that year and none of your stock or food is going to go off, right? You could hope for that. Or you could go, no, it's going to happen. We know that five or 10 percent, whatever it is, it's going to happen. So that's factored into the business plan.

They're not surprised when it happens. They go, yeah, we knew that was going to happen. It's cool. It's all built in. We're still going to be profitable. We don't apply that principles of our life as humans. We just assume that everything's going to go fine. And when things don't go well, we're shocked. I was surprised. And actually, we generate this internal stress, which we then compensate for with our behaviors. But the whole message in that chapter is, if you expect adversity and you're not surprised when it happens, your life will start to change. So the example I use in that chapter, which I think is a really powerful one for people, is a few years ago, maybe about four years ago or so, my mum, who lives five minutes away from me, would be falling quite a lot. Okay.

So she had an emergency alarm around her neck in case she fell and couldn't get herself up. And I'm the first number that when she triggers that on the intercom, I get the call first, okay? So one night, I'd gone to bed. I'd go to bed super early. I was half eight, nine, I'm normally asleep by. I think at about 10 or 1030, my phone rang. And I woke up, probably in a deep sleep, takes up the phone. It was a lady on the phone saying, your mother's activated her alarm.

we've just spoken to her on the intercom. She's stuck. She can't get up. Are you able to help? I said, yeah, tell her. I'll be there in the next few minutes, not to worry. So in my pajamas, I go downstairs, get my car keys. I drive around to my mom's house. I help her up. I check she's settled. It takes me about an hour. I'm happy that mom's going to be okay. I say, hey, mom, listen, I've got my phone on, call me and something happens. Otherwise, I'll come by tomorrow morning and check, you're okay. I got into my car, Kristen, and I reversed it straight into, the parked car on the other side of the streets. Now, the older version of me, or I should say younger and age, older in terms of my evolution as a human being, would have done something like this. And I imagine most people do some version of this. They tell themselves a pity story. Oh my God, I can't believe this happens. I've got so much work to do. On top of all my work now, I've got to sort out mum's health. I've got to now phone the insurance company tomorrow. And I'm not criticizing or judging. Just understand that that kind of reaction has a consequence.

And the consequence is you feel like a victim to the world. You feel like the whole world's against you, poor old you. And so the next day, you will engage in unhelpful behaviors. You'll allow yourself another sugary treats. Yeah, to compensate. You come and say, oh, you deserve it, right? Because hey. I call them parasympathetic fixes.

There you go. I love it. I love it. That's exactly it. What I did, and it's because I'd been practicing every night with this whole practice, where did I get triggered today? Right? Because by doing that intentionally, consciously for a few years, now it's become internal. I don't need to do it anymore. But in that moment, I remember, I crashed the car and I just sat back in my seat and I smiled and I was like, okay, look, no one's hurt. There was no one in that car. I'm not hurt. I've got insurance. And you know what, Rongan, if you keep coming around to pick mom up off the floor when you're half asleep, it was only a amount of time before this was going to happen. That one change in my response changes everything. Because the next few days, then, you don't need these parasympathetic fixes. Right. You shifted from a state of sympathetic activation to parasympathetic division on your own. Now you don't need anything external to shift your state. Exactly. It's amazing. I know. I'm so passionate about this idea because I see people, friends, family members, patients, members of the public, walking around each day, blaming everyone around them for the way that they're feeling.

Listen, I'm not saying that some people aren't guilty of toxic behavior. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying a lot of those things are out of your control. And the more you can internally regulate yourself and learn that actually your response comes from you. It changes your life. And why that Edith Eager conversation changed me so much, Kristen, because I would struggle initially sometimes. I'd go, yeah, but this is hard. Then I thought, you know what wrong? And if Edith can reframe her experience in Auschwitz, you as a medical doctor and you're pretty comfortable life, you can reframe it here. So I take her story as inspiration.

And although I wasn't wearing a Woot Band back then, I'm convinced, and I'd look, I can't wait till this study that you guys do and gets published. I know how I feel right these days by understanding this stuff, by reframing the way I look at life. I just have this inner, I don't know how to describe it, we just say this inner calm. Like, and I find behavior change really easy now. I understand that those behaviors were there for a reason. So it's not that I'm not passionate about food and sleep and alcohol and movement. I totally am. I'm really passionate about it, but I'm not, I find now that I'm just much more intentional with how I engage with these behaviors because I've changed my mindset.

What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain. And you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. It seems like you've cultivated a practice where you have created the conditions where you can actually listen to yourself. And that is, I think, such a powerful subtext throughout your book, you know, is this idea that, you know, we have to get inside.

You know, our answers are there. But, and you said it, you know, we need to, I wrote alone, you know, we need to carve out time where we can be by ourselves with our thoughts to actually figure out what it is that we care about, right? Like, you're so aligned because you know what you value. We live your values. I used to say this to my student athletes. We do kind of a similar a reflection at the end of the day and hopefully the being of the day is, how am I going to live my values today? That implies that you actually know what you value. But if you ask anyone on the street, you know, I worked with one of our employees for Christmas last year. I gave away, you know, six coaching sessions in, you know, an auction and we gave the proceeds to charity.

And, you know, I got one of one of the employees and started working with him. And, you know, we started as I would with any, you know, human. Let's figure out your values. He was like, What do you mean? No idea. I never really thought about what is I care about. His beliefs, and I want to pull this thread, because you talked about beliefs and identity, and that's all very intertwined with values, what we care about. But I think that really defines, it informs our decision making. It defines how we move around in the world, the people we associate with, like everything, whether or not we have, you know, autonomic control. Yeah. And so I feel like at a base, level, you know, that's kind of the first conversation we did have with ourselves. So how do you

think about that? In all of the folks that you've worked with over the course of the 23 years, you have a gazillion rep, you've worked with tens of thousands of patients. You know, how do you think about in this modern society where we are never disconnected? How does one carve out the time to reflect on the things that matter to the most and then live that? Yeah. You first of all need to set the intention that having some solitude each day is important. And whilst I recognize every single individual is different and has different pressures and different needs and maybe we'll respond to a different form of diets and all those things, something that you guys get here at WIP because everyone's an NF1, right? Right, right. You can see. And the one helps the individual figure out

what's working for them. But you have to understand that if you get up and the first thing you do is look at your phone and look at social media and emails and then you go to work. You've lost an opportunity to reflect on your life. You're constantly reacting to what the world around you is asking you to do. And again, I'm not saying good or bad. It just has a consequence. So I wake up each morning. I have a morning routine that one of the things that relates to this part of our conversation that I do is I ask myself three questions every morning. What is one thing I deeply appreciate about my life? Okay. Simple practice of gratitude. We know there's a ton of research on gratitude and how a regular practice of gratitude can help you with your mood, your sleep, your decision making, your focus. There's just a whole list of what it will do. Simple question takes me less than a minute. The next question, what is the most important thing I have to do today? And it's a very simple question, but it's deceptively simple. Because in a world where we feel that our to-do lists are never done, and because of the the human brain's negativity bias, which is there for a very good reason, but it's now affecting

us in the modern world. It's having a problem here where we always feel as if there's something else we could have done. Even if you get 90% of your to-do list done, you're still focusing on the 10% you didn't get done. What's so great about this question? It forces you. I don't like the word force, actually. It encourages you every morning to make a decision. Today, the most important thing is my 20-minute walk at lunchtime. Maybe it's a work deadline on one day. Sometimes for me, honestly, it is I'm working from home today. The most important thing you have to do today is when my kids come home from school at 4.30, I must make sure my laptop shut, my phone's in a different room, so I can be fully present to listen to what they have to tell me. It doesn't mean that

the other things that they are not important, but it brings that intention to your day to go. That's most important thing. So if I get that done, the days are when, right? And then the third question, which I think really relates to this conversation on values, is which quality or what quality do I want to showcase to the world today? And for me, it's usually something like patience or kindness or compassion. Those three questions will take you under five minutes to do. And my challenge to anyone listening right now, if you don't have a practice of solitude each day, okay, with your morning cup of tea tomorrow or coffee, just in a journal or your phone if you have to. I think it's better on pen and paper. But hey, listen, if that's going

to be an obstacle, sure, do it on your phone or your laptop. Answer those three questions. Do it for seven days. I promise you the way you feel about each day is going to start to change. Okay, so it's just, I've got loads of practices that I do, but that is one which really relates to values, because, you know, if I say today I want to show the world the quality of compassion, well, what happens when that driver then cuts me up? Well, because I, a few minutes before had written that down, I'm less likely to start reacting. I'm more likely to go, hey, Robin, I said today I was going to out with compassion. Come on, you know, look at this a different way. And again, if you don't managed to do it and let's say you do react or you know your boss send you an email you get really mad and you respond with an email that you probably shouldn't have sent then in the evening you can go with those two questions what went well today again you can list what one well said what went well what can i do differently tomorrow you know what i wanted to act with compassion today but in that moment i wasn't able to tomorrow i'm going to try and make sure if that situation presents itself again

I'm going to react differently. It's not difficult, Krista. It's actually not difficult. We just think it's hard. But you spend five minutes in the morning, five minutes each evening, asking yourself those questions. Your biomarkers are going to change, right?

Your habits are going to change. Let's take sugar and alcohol. There's two prime examples of things that people are always trying to reset their relationship with. And I appreciate with whoop, you might have, Imagine part of your audience as a high performance audience who will see the effects that alcohol is having on their sleep and their stress and their and their scores and their HRV and they just might flip a switch and go, I'm cutting that out. That is getting in the way of my performance. Great. There's a lot of people though who can't do that. They see it and go, okay, I'm going to reduce, which is still good. But I have this exercise that I've used with patients for years that I call the freedom exercise, the three Fs, which I I'm just going to share in case it's using it with people, right?

So let's think you're trying to reset your relationship with sugar and you're good in the day. Again, I'm trying to not use these words good and bad. And you're sort of, you've managed to do it in the day. You feel aligned. You feel aligned in the day. But then at the end of the day, somehow at 9 p.m. You're in front of Netflix and you feel like ice cream. Ever experienced that before?

Yeah, for sure. I think people, a lot of people do, right? I mean, 47% of Americans eat ice cream at night. Is that true? Yeah. I saw that. There you go. Jack is one.

It's really common. Oh, yeah, so common in the U.S. Yeah. Sugary snack. I will argue that let's call up almost 50%. So the half of America, the 50% or so of Americans who are doing that, I would imagine a large percentage of them probably don't need to read another book telling them the ice cream in the evening is probably not going to help.

No, it's not good for them. Yeah, right. But they're still engaging in it. So, I mean, there's many ways you can think about this. One way you can go, that's probably not in alignment with who they wish to be. In terms of their values, right, it's probably not. But in terms of helping them change that, this exercise, this freedom exercise of the 3F, I think, could be really useful. Okay.

So I've had this with patience loads and loads of times. I say, okay, next time you're sitting in front of the sofa and you feel like you need ice cream. Ask yourself the first F feel. What am I really feeling? Is it physical hunger or is it emotional hunger? Even if you just take a pause for one minute, before you put the spoon in, it's not easy. Just take a pause. Before you open the fridge. Actually, you know what? I had a full meal an hour ago. I'm not actually hungry. I'm a bit bored. I'm getting a bit of stress. I just had a row with my partner. The children's bedtime took too long. Whatever it is. No problem. Okay. If you want to go ahead and eat it. Go ahead and eat it. I ask yourself that first F, you've just created a little bit of a gap between stimulus and

response. Go ahead and have it. No problem. Next time it happens, go to the first F again, then go to the second F. First F again, as a reminder, what am I feeling? Second F is how does food feed the feeling? Okay, because the second F is to feed. Oh, okay, I'm feeling stressed. Oh, sugar helps me feel less stress, at least in the short term. Okay. Or, I just had a row on my partner, I feel a bit out of control. Having the ice screen makes me feel more in control. If it was, I've been on Zoom calls all day. I haven't seen another human being.

I'm feeling a bit lonely. When I have my ice cream or sugar, it makes me feel less alone. Okay, great. If you want to still have it, go ahead and have it. But you're now at least understanding on a really deep level why that spoon is in your mouth. Right? Because a lot of time people don't know. They just feel guilt and shame.

We go, why did it happen? I shouldn't have done it. You know, stupid me or whatever, which is never helpful. And then the next time you do the first two F and then you go to the third F. Okay. So the third F is what am I feeling? Second F is how does food feed the feeling? Third F is find.

Now that I know the feeling, now that I know how food feeds the feeling, can I find an alternative behavior to feed the same feeling? Oh, I'm feeling stressed. Sugar feeds the stress. What else can I do? Oh, well, I love yoga. Actually, maybe I'll just put YouTube on and do a 10-minute yoga sequence. Okay, you'll still reduce the stress, but in a different way. If you've not had any time to yourself and you feel a bit yucky and the ice cream is your treat, well, maybe you can run a bath and nourish yourself with a 10-minute bath. If you're feeling lonely and sugar helps you feel less alone, maybe you can phone one of your friends or phone

one of your parents, if you're lucky enough, but they're still alive, right? Once you truly understand the role the behavior plays in your life, you're much better able to change it. And I tell you, you can apply that 3F exercise to alcohol, to social media, to online pornography, to whatever you want, because it's going to help you understand yourself better. I think one of the reasons people struggle to make change that lasts in the long term, Hence the title, make change that lasts, it's because they don't understand this, what I would call it, a core truth.

Every behavior in your life serves a role. You'll never change the behavior in the long term unless you understand the role it's playing in your life. This 3F exercise helps you understand the role. People will say, what's the most important F? I get asked that a lot. Without question, it's the first F. Because once you have created the gap,

that's 90% of it. I know this from food with patients in the past, I remember one patient who couldn't stop eating fast food. I won't get into the whole story, but I just, it's so addictive. She didn't realize that she would drive home every night and she'd go through this roundabout on the UK and there was a fast food restaurant now and she could smell it. Right?

And she could smell it. And for her, it was a case of understanding that, hey, listen, all you have to do is take a different route home. it's so simple, I kid you not for that lady, it was a life changing. She hadn't even considered I can take a different route home. It'll take me five minutes more, but by not having that trigger, I'm going to completely change my relationship with food. That literally changed her life, right?

It is totally wild. And that's why my big message in this book is, let's get behind the behavior, right? Let's understand why it's there. And then I promise you, it will be so much easier to change it. And just to back up from the three Fs, you know, and just to solidify this point, like, you know, the evening exercise, the morning exercise that you have, like mindset, you know, and you said this in your previous book, like happiness is a skill. Mindset is a skill.

You have to build it. You know, like the reason why behavior change is easy for you is because you have this skill. And I've worked on it. Yeah. You do it every day almost, you know, probably at the, you know, at the reason. this point every day. I worked on it for years. I didn't used to be like this. I used to have a vicious and a voice. I used to struggle. Like when I, you know, when I would get stressed in the past, I would go to sugar. You know, I remember in the first lockdown in the UK back in 2020,

my sugar intake went through the roof, right? It's not that I didn't know a problem. I'd written three bestsellers by that point. And in each of them, I'd talked about the problems with excess sugar. I had all the external knowledge that anyone could want, but that's not what I needed. I needed to understand, oh, when you get stress, you go to sugar. And I know it, the thing is, as I say that, I think this sounds obvious. But I think for many people, they haven't drawn that connection on a deep, deep level. We know what to do. You know, this is another, I think, really valuable point. Like, you know, when you talk about experts, right? And we're both kind of in that world where we're giving advice all the time.

and we're experts in our, in our field of study and we're in a position to kind of dole out advice. But I think to your point is, you know, the answers are, are inside. And we have to kind to get back to trusting ourselves and figuring out, like, what are the little behaviors that we can do every single day that kind of set up the cascade of other behaviors, right? Like, what is kind of, what can we use as like the catalyst to kind of feed the other behaviors? Yeah. For sure. I need to write the start. I mentioned we can look about behavior change in two different ways and two different levels, you know, how do we create habits? But then also what are these deep underlying drivers behind our

behaviors? But they both feed each other. Nothing works in isolation. So I do this five-minute kitchen workout every day, right? So what do I do? So when I wake up and I wake up early, usually five o'clock at the latest, usually earlier, I will meditate for about 10 minutes. Okay. So I have this framework for my morning routine, the three M's, okay? Mindfulness, movement, and mindset. It's how I tend to start every day, usually, okay? But I want to focus in that middle one, that movement piece, right? So I will meditate for 10 minutes or so, which is my practice of mindfulness. Then I go into my kitchen. And I'm going to be really detailed about this because it's very important. I'm in my pajamas, right? In my kitchen. I'm a little bit obsessed with how I make my coffee. So I weigh out the coffee. I put it in the cafeteria and then I put a timer on for five minutes. In those five minutes, I don't go on email, I don't go on Instagram. I do a strength workout in my pajamas. Now, I've mentioned pajamas twice. Why? Because one of the most important principles of behavior change is to make it

easy. Why do you have to make it easy? The reason you have to make it easy is because of motivation. It's something that BJ Fogg calls the motivation wave. Motivation comes up and motivation comes down. When we make our new desired behavior difficult, we will do it when our motivation is high, the first two weeks in January. We will do it. But when your motivation drops, as it always does, you will no longer do the behavior unless it's easy. I can never say, Kristen, I don't have five minutes. Even if on my busiest day, I'd be lying to myself if I said, I don't actually have five minutes, right? Because I'm not going to miss my coffee. So in those five minutes, I would be doing something else, right? So I applied that first

principle. I made it easy. The second most important principle of creating habits is where are you going to put that behavior? Where are you going to put it in the day? All behaviors require a trigger. right so for me to be here in the whoop office with you today I need a trigger now I could have just relied on my memory memories a pretty unreliable trigger okay so I had the next best trigger which I had a Google calendar notification right so it was a notification say oh you have agreed to do a podcast with Kristen today okay the very best trigger as evidenced by the research is when we stick on the behavior onto an existing habit right so my coffee in the morning is a habit. I don't need my assistant to phone me at 10 past 5. Say wrong and don't forget to make

your coffee today. I don't need a Google calendar notification. It's going to happen. Therefore, by sticking on my workouts onto that, it happens every day. It's just like brushing my teeth. And as I say, I've rarely missed a day in over five years. Now, why that's powerful is because it changes my relationship with myself. Every single day, we're asking ourselves two questions. Can I trust myself? Can I rely on myself? By me showing up for myself each day with that five minute workouts and people could go with five minutes enough, that's a separate conversation, right? Sure, it would be better for me at the age of 47 to do more than five minutes of strength training a day, which is 35 minutes. Now I will do more than that. But it's not about that.

It's about the habit that I'm creating. It's about me showing myself every single morning that no matter how busy I am, no matter what my wife needs from me, or my kids need from me, or my patients need from me, I can trust myself and I can rely on myself. For someone listening, it doesn't have to be a five-minute strength workout, but I would say it has to be something. For me, it's like a keystone habit. That's the core starting point, and when I do it, I feel good about myself. I'm valuing myself. The truth is, I don't get to the gym all the time. I'm in the States for the moment, so I'm going to the hotel gyms in the morning. At home, I don't really go to the gym. I have like kettlebells kicking around.

I have sandbags kicking around. So I'm always, you know, trying to be as active. But I'm not someone who goes to my sort of three, 45 minutes sessions to the gym each week. Nothing wrong with that, right? It's just I do move my body. I do my strength training. But I think the reason I do it is because I have that five minute habit each morning. And why do I say pajamas? Because even the fact that I don't have to change into workout gear, I made it so easy. And then the third tip, I would say, which if we're talking about creating habits, right, is that we underestimate how much our environment influences our behavior. So how does that work in the context of my morning strength workouts?

Well, I have a kettlebell and a dumbbell in my kitchen. And no one of a lie. A few years ago, my wife did say to me, said, hey, baby, you're going to keep this. stuff in the kitchen. And I said to it. I said, yeah, I said, listen, if I put this stuff in the garage or in the cupboard, I'm not going to use it, right? If it's there each day, I'm being visually triggered by it, even if it's just to move it so I can get to the castle. And what happens, I'm a dad. My kids are 14 and 12. They start picking it up. My wife starts picking it up, right? So I feel not only is it good for me, I feel as a parent, I'm setting a really good

example in front of my children to also, for them to value themselves to go, yeah, look, daddy always, like, he seems to do that every morning. Like, I'm hoping, I mean, your kids, I think you're a bit older than mine. They are, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, we have kettlebells and I have a kettlebell in the office. Literally, there are kettleballs everywhere. There are weights everywhere. And sure enough, my son just, he'll be watching a football game and he's doing bicep curls. He's doing shoulder presses. Like, he's doing tricep, you know, like my daughter's watching, you know, gossip girls and doing sit-ups, like that, because that's I do, you know, and I've always done that. You know, so they just see it. And that's what you

call to me, you know, at this stage of my life. You don't need to go to a gym for 45. Like, you should be just build your movement in throughout the day. And that's where I love about your message. To be clear, I'm not anti-gims. If you love going to a gym, go for your life. The problem I found is that too many people love to do, sorry, too many people don't end up going to the gyms and so they end up doing nothing. They think it's either I go to the gym and work out or I don't. I'll tell you a very quick example of a patient I had maybe seven, eight years ago, right? He was in his mid-40s. This guy came in to see me. He was a little bit overweight. He was low in energy and low in mood. And he wanted help and he came in. And we

had a long chat. And it was really clear to me that there were so many things at his lifestyle that could well be contributing to all of his symptoms. So we built up with some rapport. And I said, hey listen, I think there's a few things that we can tweak, which are going to make a massive difference? So you're interested in me helping you with that. He said, yeah, yeah, okay, let's go through stuff. So I kept suggesting things. Nothing was landing within. He goes, no, I don't think that's me. I don't think that's me. When I mentioned strength training, his eyes lit up. He goes, oh, Doc, you know, I used to do that at school when I was about 15 to 16, but I haven't done it in years. I said, listen, I actually think if you could get back into some form of strength training, it could

help you with all three of these things. It could help you with your weight, help you with your mood and with your energy. He's not, I could doc, I'm in, right? I am in. What shall I do? Shall I do 45 minutes two or three times a week at the gym? I said, yeah, that would be amazing. Maybe this is even 10 years ago. I said, yeah, that would be absolutely amazing. And so I gave him another appointment to see me in a month's time. I said, yeah, go and do that. And I'll see you in a month's time. we'll see how you're getting on. One month later, he comes into my practice. I call him in.

His body language is really, you know, he's hunched over. He's not making eye contact with me. I said, hey, look, you know, how are you getting on? How was the gym? He said, hey, Doc, you know, I've not been yet. Work's been really, really busy. It's quite expensive to join the gym. And actually, it's not that easy for me to get to.

like when I go to and from work. And I always remember this case because I remember thinking, I don't know most doctors would think that or not, but I certainly didn't think what I think a lot of doctors think, which is they didn't follow my advice. Instead of that, I thought, Ronan, you've clearly not given him advice that he feels is relevant for him in the context of his life.

So I remember, I took off my jacket and I said, hey, listen, can I teach you some exercises that you can do without needing to go to the gym? he said sure so I literally look and to become I'm not a personal trainer right so I taught him five exercises like a press up you know squats these sort of things and I I modified them for him for his ability level I said do you reckon you could do that because yeah that's easy I said okay what I want you to do is do this for five minutes twice a week in your kitchen and he looked at me and he said what 10 minutes a week I said yeah can you

You do that? He goes, yeah, that's easy. I said, okay, I'll see you in four weeks. He comes about four weeks later. His body language is completely different. He has a smile on his face. His chest is puffed out. And I said, hey, how are you getting on?

He says, Doc, I feel fantastic, right? You said only do five minutes twice a week. But actually, I was finding it so easy and I enjoyed it so much. I now do 10 minutes every evening, whilst we're getting dinner ready, whilst the broccoli is steaming, right? I do 10 minutes every single evening before my dinner. What's so powerful about my story, Chris, is when he thought he had to do 45 minutes three times a week, he did zero minutes.

When he thought he only had to do 10 minutes at home for the whole week, he ends up coming back doing 70 minutes of strength training a week. And I saw that patient for many years after that. That one change changed his life. because what I write about, and this book in many of my books, I write about something called a ripple effect. That 10-minute workout each day changed the way that he viewed himself. Yes, it helped him with his weight, his energy, and his moods. But it does something more powerful that changed, his self-esteem, his self-worth as an individual, and then he started to engage

in other behaviours, not because I asked him to, because he felt like it. He had the energy. He said he cooked healthy food. He then would go for 20, minute walk at lunchtimes. A few years ago when I last saw him, he's now meditating in the mornings, right? If I had 10 years ago suggested these things, he would have left me out of the room, right? But by starting small, he's completely transformed his life. And I'm so passionate about that message, because whether you're a high performer, you want to be a high performer, do not underestimate the importance of small things done consistently. They will literally change your life. I've seen it over and over again. When in a work environment, we often have,

you know, 30 minute meetings or, you know, sometimes an hour meeting. I always make them 25 minutes or 55 minutes. And at the end of the 25 minutes or the 55 minutes, I'll do 10 kettlebell swings, 10 body squats, 10 sit-ups, you know, like, and it's just like you kind of build it in throughout the day. So you don't have this colossal pressure to like, you know, kind of get to a gym or you've basically removed the barriers, you know? And I think that's what I love about the story is that, you know, I mean, COVID was a really good example of I was so grateful that I had a home gym, you know, like I didn't have to rely on going somewhere. And it just made me, it kind of validated the notion that, and I love gyms too and I go to gyms, but I think

having a setup at home where you know that you can get in your movement reliably every single day is, I think, so important. You know, people still don't get this message, right? I met one of my old childhood friends in New York a few days ago when I flew out to America. And he's been trying to motivate himself to get into the gym for three years. He doesn't go. He says, just too busy with the childcare and work. I mean, just four minutes of high intensity exercise. Exactly. Three times a week can change your cardiovascular profile. And we know that people out there in the world have got home equipment. Why? Because in COVID, people have this equipment sitting, gathering dust in their garage or in a cupboard or somewhere, they don't understand how quickly five minutes adds up.

Like, it is unbelievable how quick it changes. But there's other things people can do, right? There's a chapter in this book on embracing discomfort. And I made the case in that chapter that a lot of the diseases that we suffer from today are diseases of comfort. For example, type 2 diabetes, you simply do not see in traditional populations where everyday life was a little bit uncomfortable. People shouldn't feel bad about their desire for comfort. We're wired to want comfort. You have to have a daily dose of discomfort. Not just for the physical benefits, I would say more for the psychological benefits. They teach you that you're a capable human being. Okay. And I sort of unpick that all. It's confidence, right? It's about how you view yourself. And at the end of that

chat, where I talk about some discomfort rules that you can consider introducing into your life. And what I like about rules is that they take you out of the decision making in the moment, shall I or shant I? So in my life, about five years ago, I made a decision and I internalized a rule that is, barring exceptional circumstances, I'm always going to take the stairs. I will always take the stairs. Unless, you know, sure, if I'm on holiday with my family and I've got all the cases and we're on the 20th floor of a hotel, okay, I don't take the stairs. But in most other situations, I do. Again, I don't have to go to a gym, but many of us, we are presented with opportunities in everyday life to take the stairs. And it can be as simple as a mindset ship where you go,

you know what, I'm going to take the stairs. And when I'm in London, I'm one of the only ones who's getting the stairs at the tube station, right? Not because I'm trying to say, oh, I'm better than anyone else. It's not like that. It's actually not for external validation. It's for internal validation, right? So me saying, no, you said that. You made a promise to yourself that you're always going to take the stairs. And then two months ago, I think I read this meta-analysis, which I, you know, please forgive me if I'm slightly off on the statistics, but it was something like people who regularly take the stairs. It's something like a 26% reduction in all-cause mortality. It's staggering. It goes back to this principle that we're

talking about. Nothing wrong with going to the gym, right? But there are, are lots of opportunities in everyday life. Movement snacks. Yeah, movement snack or, you know, building in discomfort, whatever it is, that if you look around with your mindset and look for the opportunity, it does exist. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Yeah, I love that. And I think that the intention around discomfort or the recognition that, okay, life is actually

pretty comfortable, you know, and I think when we. look at, you know, when we look at it through the lens of the autonomic nervous system and the nervous system, you know, we want a robust and resilient autonomic nervous system. In an order to facilitate that, we need stress, certain types of stress, right? And there is, you know, stress that is adaptive and there's stress that is maladaptive. And we've kind of talked about, you know, which is which. But, you know, things like cold exposure and taking the stairs, exercise, you know, these are homitic stressors that make us stronger, right? And we have to think really intentionally about how can I build in these stressors, these stressors that are going to allow me to adapt

to stress in a more functional way. And I think we, not everyone has a practice around that. And that's what I love in your book is, you know, you talk very, you know, very eloquently and very clearly about how in this modern world of relative comfort do we build in stress in a really intentional way. All the things I suggest, I say, yes, there are physical benefits. But I really do believe that the main benefits are psychological. I noticed for many, years, if I looked at my patients, a lot of them were walking around with what I call a low-grade state of anxiety, a sort of fragility. And again, I'm not saying this with any blame, just to be really clear, but what I would notice is that a lot of them didn't

have confidence or trust that they could handle difficult things, because they were never testing themselves, right? So I think many of us have this fragile identity that we've built up because we never encounter discomfort, we actually don't know that we can cope when that inevitable discomfort comes. So I think the powerful thing about always taking the stairs, you know, if you've got two capable legs that mean, you can do that, right? Because not everyone has that, I recognize that. Or let's say, you know, cold plunge, right? Yes, people can track on their wute band what that is doing to them over time, right? And, you know, we can talk about physical benefits, dopamine, nor adrenaline, those sort of things. And look, I've seen all that

research and it's interesting to me, but I still believe the most powerful thing, if a daily practice or regular practice of cold emotion is your thing. And if it's not your thing, I think that's okay as well. There's many other things you can do. If it is your thing, I would argue the biggest thing it gives you is that psychological benefit that I can do something hard and I can cope. It's priceless. And you can't. You can't buy that. It doesn't matter how much money you're only. You can't buy that. You have to do that through action, basically. I love that. Well, I want to finish the conversation talking about identity. You've mentioned it a few times. And when I think about identity, you know, I have two teenagers. So this is something that, you know, we talk about a lot. And I try to position as like, all right, there's fluid identity. There's rigid identity. And you want a fluid identity. You're going to evolve. You're going to change. But we get really attached to identities. I think especially teenagers, they kind of get this persona at school. I'm the girl that does this. I'm the guy that does that. And Sometimes it's awesome, you know, I'm the guy that leads teams, I'm the captain, you know, like, but it also can maybe be, you know, something that's not as positive, right? And I think this, this idea that we can change identity and that recognizing what our identity is and what we're attaching to our identity is also a really important source of insight and source of reflection. Because we want to practice being that person we say we want to be. And that needs to align with our values. Right. So I love how you think about identity in the book. So I'd love

for you just to give us some practical insights on how identity maps to behavior change and how folks can think about that. I think it comes back to values. I'm 47. I'm a father. I'm a husband. I'm a doctor. I'm a son who cares for my mom. I don't know. I'm athletic. I'm a runner. You know, all these things. But I would have called myself these things a few years ago. I kind of don't anymore, right? Because they're limiting. They're limiting. It's one. of those things ever changes, let's say I got fired from my job as a doctor, right? Or I had to retire to ill health as my dad had to do it 57 from being a doctor when he got lupus and then chronic kidney failure and he was on a dad's machine for 15 years. I'm sorry. I know he passed

away in 2013. Yeah. I mean, it was a huge moment. But I mean, I now see my dad's death as a gift on another note because the things I've learned through my dad, death, the things I write about the impacts I'm having in the world, I don't think I would have done any of those things of my dad was still alive. So actually now I've reframed even my dad's death. And to be clear, I'm almost 11 years on, right? So if someone's in the midst of, you know, grief, I'm not at all trying to suggest anyone else should do this. So I'm saying for me, going back to what we said before about the power of mindset, over the last couple years, Kristen, I've now seen my dad's death as a gift. I think my dad gave me a gift. So through my

death, I'm going to teach you all these lessons, right? You're going to learn all these lessons, and I'm not expecting anyone else to choose to look at their parents' death in that way, but this works for me, right? So I think that's, again, ties into what we were saying about mindset. But that, you know, dad's death really has impacts me in many ways in terms of how I live my life, because I do believe passionately that chronic sleep deprivation, my dad only slept three nights a week for 30 years. I mean, God knows what would have shown up on his Woot Band if that had been around. You know, Dad died in 2013. For 30 years, he slept three nights a week. He'd do his job as a physician in the day, come home, have breakfast, have dinner and shave, and then a car

would pick him up at 7 p.m. He would do primary care house calls all night, come back at 7 a.m., have breakfast, shave and then drive into Manchester and be a physician in the day. 30 years. I don't care what anyone tells me. I know why my dad got lupus. I mean, you're shot because you can't even imagine that someone could even exist and function like that. I don't know how you live. Like, humans are incredibly resilient. My dad did that for 30 years. So I've seen that. But as a result, his lifespan was cut short by probably 20 years. Massively. And from the age of 57 for 15 or 50, I can't remember now maybe 59 when dad got lupus. And then he lost his eyesight in one eye. He got kidney failure. He was basically changed.

chained to a dialysis machine for 15 years. One of the reasons I live where I live now is because I moved back from Edinburgh where I was at medical school and working as a junior daughter to help my mum and my brother look after my dad. So I had a huge impact on our whole lives, which again, it's fine. It is what it is, but it's one of the reasons why I take four weeks off every summer, right? And I really think about work-life balance. And I think about the things that my dad couldn't do, but because of his sacrifice, I feel I can now do, right? So going back to identity for a minute, I think it comes back to values. I think your identity should actually be tied to your values and not your role, right? So my three core

values are integrity, compassion, and curiosity. So that then insulates me from changes in identity because it means as long as I am acting in the world with you today, with the lady cleaning my hotel room this morning, with the barista in the coffee shop, with the person cutting me up in the streets, if I'm acting with integrity, curiosity and compassion, then my identity is rock solid. I'm living in alignment with myself. How does this tie up to behaviours, right? If you have your inner values, the person who you know yourself to be, and you have your external actions which are not lined up, as soon as there's a gap between your external actions and your inner values, you create a void internally. And I am convinced within that void that you create,

that's where your problematic behaviors come in, right? When there's no void, those behaviors can't get in. You're just rock solid. Why do I feel like behavior changes relatively easy these days? I feel more than ever before. I'm sure I can improve. More than ever before in my life. I was a people pleaser for most of my life. I'm not anymore. Right. There's a whole chapter on this. Chapter three of this new book is all about that and how I change that. Now, it's not about external validation. It's about internal validation. Can I look at myself in the mirror before I go to bed each night and go, you're actually wrong. And you behaved in accordance with your values today. If I can say that, I'm rock solid. right, my identity solids, I'm not going to engage in the sugar for three hours boomscrolling. Those are compensations for a lack of alignment. And I feel so many adults could benefit from really just even asking themselves, what are my values, right?

On my last book tour in 2022 around my happiness book, in the UK, I remember I was doing all these talks. And a couple of talks, I said, hey, guys, how many, how many of you have heard about values either on my podcast or on Instagram, everyone puts the hands up. Yeah, you think values are important. Yeah, values are important. I said, okay, how many of you keep your hands up if you've actually taken the title write down your three core values? Only 20% their hands up. 80% put their hands down. And this goes back to what we were talking about before, Kristen, this idea that we're getting all this external knowledge, right? We're liking all these Instagram memes. We think we've done something. We've not done anything. We've just moved our thumb. right I literally mean that we've liked the inspirational quote on Instagram by moving our thumb half a millimeter we think we've taken action no we haven't taken action and we need to do the work and if you don't know where to pick one value and then what you can do for seven days it's in the evening you can go when today did I not act in alignment with that okay maybe you were a bit mean

to someone at work or you got a promotion by pushing someone else down right these things happen. You can't hide from yourself. You think you're getting away with it. But in those dark moments when you're lying in your bed at night, you know who you were and how you acted. And as I say, when there's that misalignment, you will compensate for it in your behaviors. Now, people aren't going to just hear this podcast and go, right, now I know my values. I'm going to love by them. No, this is a process. You've got to practice. And actually, the fact that you can't do it straight away, it's not a bad thing. All the times I fell off, you know, over the last 10 years when I I wasn't able to live in alignment with my values and I realized that. I wouldn't trade that in

for anything. That's how I learned about myself. It's a comment on what matters. You weren't able to do it there because of A, B, and C. Okay, great. I've got something else to work on. But once you get that, it is the most valuable road you'll take because you become bulletproof. Well, this conversation has been a gift for me. And I know. know it will be for our listeners. So I can't thank you enough for sharing all of your wisdom and insight. And everyone needs to just literally sprint out to get this book because it is, it's life changing. Well, guys, thanks for having me here. I appreciate coming on the show and I'm looking forward to looking around the headquarters. Yeah, I know. I'm excited to give you

to her. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us podcast at whoop.com. Call us 508-443-49-5-2. If you think about joining whoop, you can visit whoop.com, sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members can use the code Will, W-I-L-L, to get a $60 credit on W-W-Acessaries when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.