736. Dr. Rangan Chatterjee’s Three-Part Model for Happiness + Better Health This Year
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Welcome to the Almost 30 Podcast. I'm Lindsay. And I'm Krista. And we're your hosts, guides, and friends on this path. Almost 30 is not about your age. It's about the feeling. All of us are almost something, seeking community and resources to support the rumblings of transformation within us. Our conversations are deep dives, shepherded by our insatiable curiosity and desire for connection, enduring inspiration, and a sense of levity that we can all benefit from.

We're looking to find the magic in the human experience. Buckle up, baby. Your evolution is waiting.

Hello and welcome to Almost 30 Podcast. Hey everybody, welcome to the show. It's Lindsay and my best friend Krista. We're coming to you live from New York. We're so glad you're here. I'm really excited for you guys to hear this conversation.

It was such a dream conversation for me to have Dr. Rangan Chatterjee on the show. I love his YouTube. I love his interviews. I just think he's such a stand-up person. And really to have him come on the show, be so present, so attuned, be an amazing listener, amazing guest, an amazing human. We got to hang out after, which is so great. So I'm really excited for people to listen to this episode. I think they're going to find so much value from it.

Yeah, I think, you know, one of the foundational like parts of Almost 30 was like health and wellness. So when we get back to these conversations that are really like touching on the cornerstones of why we feel good, I think it's really important, especially at this time of year when we're kind of like kicking off the year.

Like getting into good habits again. Yeah. So the book he has out right now is Make Change That Lasts, which is incredible. I have it on my bedside. And what I really like about it, what I've noticed as a trend in our space is that so often doctors are now moving more to the mindfulness, moving more to the spiritual, moving more to the worlds that we're sort of in, in personal growth and self-development because

We realize that we can't just fix ourselves by pulling one lever. You can't just change your diet. You can't just start working out. It's like you can't start taking a drug. There's so many different things. So in his book, Make Change That Lasts, we actually talk about the ways that you can support yourself in making everlasting change or making change in general and why people can't stick to...

can't stick to things. Um, the lens that I always go at this, and we talked about this a little bit on the show was through parts work. So through internal family systems, you can really look at the part of you that sabotages your goals, the part of you that keeps you small, the part of you that fears your expansion, your bigness, the part of you that uses, um,

these bad habits as like a self-soothing mechanism. And then you can go at it that way. But there's such a really beautiful approach in this book on helping you to make change that lasts. Yeah. It's actually like a question that I quietly kind of reflect on myself all the time because I'm like, why? What would be a change you want to make that lasts? Why didn't I stick with that thing? I think for me, I've really quote, fallen off my like spiritual practices. What I really know to be true is that like,

this season of my life is incredibly spiritual. It just doesn't look like it used to, right? So I'm not meditating for 20 minutes a day. I'm not, you know, that whole morning routine I had, that hour and a half of just, you know, journaling and soldier, whatever, isn't really there anymore. And so it's been really important for me to kind of reframe what's

what that looks like now and that it's just as like powerful. Um, I think for me, some changes that I would want to make in the new year that I would love to stick to. So I'm excited to listen to this episode are, um, around just like my financial planning. I feel like I don't like think many months or years down the line when it comes to my finances. I feel like I haven't

It's not that I haven't had to, I just haven't. And so I'm not used to it. I'm not used to it. I also think though, babe, like a lot of normal people are making 80K a year and then the next year they make 90 and the next year they make 100. So it's a lot easier to plan when you're that. 100%. Ours is different every year. Up, down, all around. And my whole life has been like that. So it's like,

I think part of me is like very judgmental of like, well, your whole life has been like that. So you should kind of have a bit of a strategy even when it's up and down. But I, and I'm not really after a number. I think what I'm after is just kind of like a self-trust when it comes to that. Like just a very ingrained change and ingrained habit. Yeah. And then I think also, yeah.

Even just coming back to, I eat very healthy, but I think coming back to like being in my body, moving, having a consistent workout routine, again, the tiredness just kind of gets me. So I'm like, how can I even make that consistent? But as simple as it is, it's like that one thing could have just an incredible effect on everything else that I do. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. I think for me, when I'm thinking about changes I want to make,

I think I'm living my life at a seven. I think I'm like pretty good with things, pretty good with whatever, but it's like a seven. Like it definitely could be better. Sure. I could be so much more dialed

focused at work. I can be so much more dialed with saying no, with prioritizing things in my life. I can be so much more dialed with how I spend, how I plan for the future. You know, I think there's just like a dialing that I've been talking about that I need to do where it's like, I'm not eating bad, but I definitely, there's always room for opportunity and I don't want to be insane, but

I think I could take it to the next level next year and see what would happen or where that would take me if I like really saw what's possible through those habits. Yeah. What did, I'm curious about like just the human condition of like being comfortable in a habit and having that be so hard to change. A hundred percent. I think for a lot of people, their bad habits, and we talked about this in the interview, are

are coping mechanisms. And if we go to the extreme of addictions, like drinking, gambling, shopping, our phones, overeating, binging, those are coping mechanisms for, from trauma or from experiences in our life that required us to disassociate, leave our bodies, find soothing outside of us, find entertainment outside of us, whatever. So

That requires you to be aware of and acknowledge what needs to be healed before you can reach and kind of make a change that lasts. So changes are not always just by grinning and bearing it and just, I'm going to do this thing. Like even for me, if I was to think about, okay, why are you at a seven? What's the truth of that? Because if I was to grin just like

grin and bear it and be like, all right, we're going to eat perfect. And we're going to do all these things. Like that's not going to last. Right. Cause I'm not doing it from a place of love. And also it's like, what is the reason for me going at this level? So I'd say for, for my eating, I eat pretty well. I would say I definitely could nourish myself more. I don't take the time to nourish myself as much as possible. I eat a lot of food, but it's not like I'm sitting down and cooking. I'm just like picking something up or whatever. And so why am I doing that?

Do I believe I'm worthy of nourishment? Do I believe that my work is more important than nourishing my body? Do I believe that doing things with my friends and appeasing other people is more worth it than taking time for myself? So with each habit, it's like peeling back the onion of like, why am I doing what I'm doing? And like, how is it serving me in a way that helps? For me, it's serving me where I'm, you know, having more time to work, which I think helps me. But there's also like this dysfunction of it that I think,

If people can get clear about it, it's so much easier to make a change that lasts. Yes. Yes. And I think there's a part of me that's like sometimes, depending on what it is, is a little afraid of the up level because then I'm going to have to stay there. You know what I mean? Stay in the up level? That's true. Yeah. It's like... But that's been our whole lives, right? Yeah. Like where...

It becomes the new normal. It becomes what you do so naturally. But I think it's that like tipping point that feels really scary. And it's really not scary. It's just that, oh, I'm going to have to keep showing up consistently for this thing. Or, you know, what if I let myself down? What if I fail at this? Or...

I think that's my thing that I just kind of have to look at where I almost expect myself not to be consistent or follow through with certain things. Totally. Yeah. And I think with this type of thing, I'm excited to kind of prove myself wrong. Like this last year with like, I feel like with motherhood, I'm like, whoa, I can do so fucking, I can handle so much. Yes. So how can I apply that to like these things?

Very singular goals, inner habits that I want to change. Yeah. It's like if you can be a mom of a kid in a way that's like loving and patient, like you can do these other things. Yes. But...

I think too, it's like when we get afraid of maintaining the up level, that type of thought, and I've had that, is, and I'm thinking about myself too, not just you, is if we're doing it from strong arming it rather than becoming, you know what I mean, the person that does the meditation or does, you know what I mean? Discipline. And that's the thing I think about. I've been thinking about this with people wanting to change their habits or glow up or do all these things. It's like,

you know, when I lost weight or changed my body in the last two years or whatever, it's like I changed everything about my life. It was not just diet. It was not just exercise. Like

I talk to myself different. I like rest different. I'm in different relationships. I'm in a different reality. And so I think when people think about changes, it doesn't always happen in a vacuum. And I think we touched on that in the interview, but it's expounded upon more in the book. But it's like you become someone different when you're doing different habits. So you have to be okay with that change of who you are. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's profound.

Um, so this is, I, you guys, I just, and we had such a moment after like, he just said so many kind things about our podcast and about just because you weren't there, me as an interviewer in that conversation and, you know, to be seen and heard by someone like that, who's, you know, a bestselling author. He's huge in the UK, also huge in the States. His podcast over has over 240 million downloads. Um, he's just so well-respected. Um,

He was on the show BBC's Doctor in the House, which we talked about, which was game-changing for so many people. Someone that's well-respected, amazing, kind, deep man was just great. So this is so powerful. The way he speaks as a communicator is something I really look up to. So you guys are gonna be able to understand everything and apply it. And you'll be able to get the book, Make Change That Lasts, Nine Simple Ways to Break Free from the Habits That Hold You Back, which is out right now. So, so good.

Thank you, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. We appreciate you. Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the pod, welcome. We have a whole world for you to dig into. You can follow us on Instagram and TikTok at Almost 30 Podcast. We're also on YouTube. Yeah. So we're on video. You can check that out on YouTube, Almost 30 Podcast.

We have our book coming out next year, which we are so excited about, so proud of. We know this is going to be a guide for those of you moving through your 20s to your 30s. And also those of you moving through any change, any transition, we are...

have poured our hearts into this, our own stories, wisdom from the podcast, science and research. It's thick. It's so good. I was just kind of perusing through it when we were sitting here. I was like, wow, I forgot we wrote that. That was profound. It's kind of crazy. Thank you so much, Rangan. You are the best.

Find him on YouTube. I love his podcast so much. I just find him to be so incredible and warm. If you want a daily dose of Almost 30 or inspiration for your every single day, we have Morning Microdose, which is a daily dose of Almost 30. It's our inspiration channel. It has no ads. It's between five and 10 minutes available for you now. And thank you for sending this to a friend for inspiration, for insight, and to just get excited about a new year. We love you so much. Love you guys. We'll see you on the next one. We'll see you soon. Bye.

Just coming out of the holidays. Happy New Year, everybody. And ooh, I am determined to get better, deeper, longer sleep. And one of the ways I'm doing that is by using Beams Dream Powder. You've seen me talk about this ad nauseum on Instagram. And for good reason. I...

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Go to wildgrain.com slash almost 30 to start your subscription. You heard me, free croissants in every box. I know it's crazy. $30 off your first box when you go to wildgrain.com slash almost 30. That's W-I-L-D-G-R-A-I-N.com slash almost 30. Or you can use the promo code almost 30 at checkout. So what did you, what have you changed in the past three years of choosing to live your life more than to work?

Many things I've done and there's loads of journaling questions that I can share which hopefully will help your audience. You know, every summer we go on a four-week adventure around the world somewhere. So this year we went to Kenya for four weeks. I delete all the social media apps off my phone. I barely check email.

And my wife, me, the kids, we literally have the best time. And I come back completely recharged. Now, I also appreciate not everyone can do that. And so I acknowledge my privilege there. But also I saw my dad work himself to death. And he maybe as an immigrant to the UK felt he had to do that. Maybe he did have to do that.

But because of what mom and dad did for me, I don't have to do that. So for me, the tragedy would be if I replicate that and continue when I don't need to. So it is the best. Yeah. And that's like making the unconscious conscious. You're like, what am I doing here? Like, am I? Yeah. What, like...

it gets to a point where, look, like you, I've had so much success in society by societal metrics, you know, Sunday Times bestsellers, you know. Talk that talk. Yeah. We can talk about that on the show. So we'll save it for the show if you want, but I've had it all and it still didn't make me happy. I'm like, oh, it doesn't, it doesn't fix the internal stuff. You have to go there and fix it yourself. For sure. But you know what? So, and I, I, I,

Why is it that we all know that tried and true story, but we all want to figure that out ourselves? Because I could hear, everyone could hear, and we're going, everyone could hear you say that and they're like, sounds great. I want to figure it out for myself. So everyone could be like, you know, to hear you say that, be like, sure, you have all the success.

And then you realized it wasn't what made you happy. That's the tried and true story that we've all heard. But we could hear it from someone that's successful. And what is it that's stopping us from believing that? Because people still burn themselves out, push to the limit. Who knows? You know, I think that's the million dollar question. Can we actually learn these truths without going through it? I'd like to believe that we can. I think some people can. But I think also some people...

kind of have to go through and learn it for themselves. That's probably the hardest thing I find as a parent is this idea that I've learned the most powerful lessons in my life from adversity. But obviously as a parent, I don't want my kids to go through adversity. But at the same time, I know that the adversity has taught me so much and made me the person who I am today.

With parenting, how do you balance that? Do you watch and say, this is an adversity, that's okay? How are you in relationship to giving your kids exposure to adversity because you know it's going to help them? So I don't know if this is unusual, but my wife and I, we spend a lot of time chatting with our kids, right? So at the breakfast bar or over dinner, we talk about all these things. When I have a podcast guest come into my studio, which is in my house,

I'm talking to my children, even when they were like seven or eight, about who the guest is. And they said, daddy, daddy, who are you going to talk to? What are you going to talk about? So I'd bring up the ideas with them and see what they had to say. And often they'd come up with really smart insights that I'd be like, oh darling, that's awesome. I'm going to ask the guest that question. Thank you. Because it's through a child's eyes and they see things differently. But I'll give you a practical example. A couple of weeks ago,

My kids, after the summer break, they were chatting at home. My daughter was just about to start high school. So, you know, big school, basically. And my son has been there for a few years. And they were talking about class sizes and, you know, who's going to be in whose class this year. And I think it was my son saying, you know, I hope in these classes I'm with my friends. And I've realized that there's always a, there's upsides and downsides to everything in life.

So what I said to them is, okay, you want to be in a class with your friends. Okay, I understand that. I would be if I was your age. But if you're not, what's the opportunity? What can you now learn and experience that you would not have been able to had you been in a class with your friends? And my daughter said, well...

And she's only 11. She's like, "Daddy, well, I guess if I'm not in a class with my friends, I've got a chance to make new friends. And maybe I'll make some friends with people that I wouldn't have started chatting to if my friends were there." Now, I know that's a small thing, but for me, as a parent, I want to teach my children how to think.

Because I think how you think, what are your beliefs about the world, that determines so many of your behaviors. And I learned a lot of these truths in my 40s, not as a kid. So as a parent, I'm trying to impart this wisdom with my children at a young age, and I don't give them the answers. So I ask them the question.

because I want them to start thinking about it. Do you know what I mean? Yes. It's how to think, not what to think. Yeah. It's like, this is how you're going to be doing this process. I mean, when you were talking, I was like reparenting myself. I'm like, that would be my fantasy for my parents to come in, asking me curious questions, treating me like an adult, like kind of guiding you through lovingly, but allowing you to be in your own process.

On the adversity piece, I think so many of us avoid adversity. When we're in adversity, we don't want to be there. It's like something we want to escape or comfort ourselves through or soothe ourselves through. How can we have a better relationship with adversity when we're actually in it, knowing that it's going to serve us in the end? I think, first of all, you have to acknowledge, you have to listen to conversations like this and go, okay, adversity is not all bads.

We can't beat ourselves up, right? Because of course we're not naturally going to want adversity, right? We're wired for comfort as humans. We want our lives to be easy. That's what's led to these, you know, this kind of evolution of humanity. It's our desire to make our lives more and more comfortable. But adversity is part of the human experience. It is going to happen. In fact, in "Mate Change at Last," I have a chapter called "Expect Adversity."

If you expect adversity, if you know it's coming, you're not surprised when it comes. So I think even, you know, your audience love to journal, right? So even having a few thoughts each morning about adversity, you know, what am I going to do next time I come across a challenge? I always encourage people to say, well, what is the upside of that challenge? Like I said, with my kids, there's always an upside, right?

Even if you don't get a job, I had this with a patient once. They then three months later got a job that was much better. They never would have gone for that job had they got the first job. So you have to trust a little bit that the universe, and this is spiritual, right? And I'm a medical doctor, but the more I've lived life as a doctor, but also as a human being, I've realized that you can make a choice in life.

And it's a choice. You don't have to believe this, but your life will be better if you do believe it. And it's this, life is happening for me, not to me. Now someone can push back and go, yeah, prove it. Hey, I can't prove it to you. I can't give you a scientific study that tells you that that's the case.

I would encourage people to experiment. Try for four weeks living like that. Every single instant in life, even when it hasn't gone the way you want it, ask yourself, "What can I learn here? What's the opportunity here?

And it's a skill and you can get good at that skill. You can change how you interact with the world. And when you do, you will naturally find that you make positive changes. I promise I've seen it with my patients and I've experienced it myself. How can we expect adversity but not have negativity bias?

So negativity bias would be like, I'm always expecting the worst. What would be expecting the difference between the two? It's a great point. So we do have a negativity bias as humans, okay? We can't fight against that. It's who we are. It's what's kept us alive. I'm sure your audience are familiar, but in essence, we had to know whether that noise in the bushes was the wind or a predator. Yeah.

And we were rewarded to overreact. If it was the wind and we thought it was a predator, it doesn't matter. We've taken a verse of action, right? We live. If we've gone the other way, if it was a predator and we thought it was the wind, well, we could die.

So the negativity bias is there. And that's why I think people have to be so careful with what they consume these days. What you put inside your mind is as important as what you put inside your mouth.

but people still don't get that. We go online, we feed our brains with negativity and it's hardwired to focus on that negativity. In fact psychologists tell us that for every nine bits, well for every one bit of positive information that comes into our brain we're exposed to nine bits of negative information and that's why gratitude is so wonderful. That's why a daily practice of gratitude

I would argue will change your life because you get good at what you practice if you start each day and end each day, even if it's just one thing, one thing I'm grateful for. Yes, we know the scientific evidence, practices of gratitude can help lower anxiety, can help lower depression, can help you become healthier, happier. There was even one study where people wrote a gratitude letter for five days

Three months later, they were happier. Three months later, right? So gratitude is a very, very powerful practice. And I think if people, you know, it's easy to hear this stuff. We hear it on podcasts. We see it on Instagram, yet we don't do it.

And I start each day with three questions. The first question I ask myself every morning as part of my morning routine is what is one thing I deeply appreciate about my life? And the more you do it, the more you start to see good throughout your day. So going back to your question, how do we not expect adversity and then become really, really negative?

It's a balance like most things. You have to practice gratitude to know that there is good in your life. If someone's listening to this and they're super stressed out, okay, they feel they've got too much on their plate, which happens to all of us at some point, just start with gratitude. Don't worry about how you deal with adversity yet. Just start with, let me start focusing on the positives in my life. Everyone's life, no matter how bad they feel it is, there is something good there.

whether it's the sun that's shining, you know, here in California, whether it's the fact that they can afford a roof over their head when many people around the world can't. Like, focusing on this stuff is important, but then when adversity does happen, it's about not reacting too much in the moment. It's about being able to take a step back and go, "Okay, this has happened. Is it in my control or not? If it's not in your control,

Like you can train yourself to not give it much thought. You're wasting your time and energy when you're trying to get stressed about things that you cannot control. I used to be that person. It would stress me out, but I've trained myself out of it. And everyone can. They honestly can. They just need to practice. How can we do that? How can we do that?

I was going to go, there's other questions I want to ask, but I don't want to leave people wondering how we can do that, how we can train ourselves out of that. Yeah. The way we train ourselves out of that is with what I consider to be the most important practice that we can do each day for our health and happiness. And whilst everyone's lives are different and whilst we all have different preferences and there are different things that we need to move the needle in our lives, we

I don't believe that there's anything more important in 2024 and 2025 than a daily practice of solitude. Solitude is time for yourself. It's time where you shut out the external noise. It can be meditation. It can be breath work. It can be journaling. It can be a walk around the block. It can be having your morning coffee in your kitchen and not looking at Instagram or email at the same time.

Too much of our lives is spent consuming information from the outside. There's a barrage of noise. We get up, we look at our phones, there's email, there's Instagram, there's negative news headlines, and that goes on all day, often when we're in bed at night as well. And it's a big problem because it means that we're never taking any time to listen to ourselves. You're never gonna have a healthy relationship with adversity

if you don't know yourself. Chapter one of this book is called Trust Yourself. And the central case in that book is, is if you want to make changes that last in your life, and I believe we all do, the number one step is to start listening to your body. And half the debates online these days around health, in my view, are pointless. I'll give you an example.

These diet wars that exist online, you've seen them, right? Oh, what do you mean? I've participated. I've championed. I've been a part of, I've been consumed by. Yes. We all have. Of course. It's there. I think I was addicted to the confusion that it caused me. Yeah. Like I enjoyed that it made me confused where I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to, this is working, but then this, and, and I was just, and it was wasting my time as well.

Being confused and being addicted to the confusion leads to procrastination. In some ways, it's a really nice way of us not having to take action. Oh, the experts haven't decided yet. They don't know. I don't need to change. I can keep having my ice cream every night. We don't know if it's fat or carbs or sugar. I'm going to do nothing. And the problem is, is that we all know intuitively, I believe, when we're on the right diet for us.

And I'm saying this as one of these so-called experts, right? I have been a medical doctor for 23 years. I've seen tens of thousands of patients. And I can still say, I don't know

for your listeners the perfect diet for them. What I do know is what the right diet is for me. And what I also know are the principles of a healthy diet, okay? The principles are, yes, as little ultra processed food as you can manage, more whole foods, sure. That's a great principle for us all to apply. Having 12 hours in every 24 hours, ideally when we're not consuming, hopefully we're sleeping for eight of those hours,

It's a great principle that for most people works really, really well. But I have seen patients thrive on a vegan diet,

I've seen some patients actually not do so well. I've seen some patients thrive on a low carb diet. I've seen some patients thrive on a paleo diet. So 23 years of clinical practice has shown me there is no one perfect diet for everyone. So I'm not saying ignore external experts like me or the other amazing experts you have on your podcast. I'm saying, listen to them, but then put it through your own filter.

I would have on my podcast, and I still do, I'll have a credentialed expert saying this diet is really good and I've seen real benefits with this diet and they present evidence to support their view. One month later, I'll have a different expert, again, well credentialed, arguing for a slightly different diet and will present research to support their belief system.

and then I would get messages on Instagram. You're telling me this, now you're telling me this. Yeah. And I try and be very nuanced on my podcast because I actually genuinely from my heart, I want to help people find the right approach for them. That's why I became a doctor. That's why I'm a podcaster and an author is to help people. And what I say is instead of asking, because what they would say to me is, "Dr. Chastity, I'm really confused now."

This expert said diet A was better. This expert said diet B was better. I don't know which expert to trust, but I think that's the wrong question. The question shouldn't be, which expert should I trust? The question should be, why do I no longer trust myself? We've given up our inner expertise to external experts. No one out there knows the best approach for you. So I say, if you've heard two people that you like,

Talk about the benefits of two completely different diets, but they both make sense to you. Do you know what I recommend? Try them both. For four weeks, try one diet and pay attention to how you feel. What's your energy like? What is your sleep like? How is your gut? How is your bloating? How's your vitality? And then try the other one for four weeks and ask yourself those same questions. You will know.

which one suits you best. And I know it sounds so obvious, but I think all this health information out there of which I'm a part of, I think has been very helpful for humanity. I really do. But at the same time, I think there's been a dark side, which is that we no longer trust ourselves anymore. I mean, when I talked to some nutrition experts on my show, I said, you know, maybe half the problem is that we even need nutrition experts.

In the olden days, how do we learn about nutrition? Well, from our parents, from our grandparents. We'd eat what they'd been eating for thousands of years, right? We'd have the family meals. But I get it because the food supply is so toxic now and our food environment is so toxic. We need the advice because the society is sick. But the central case for this book and really what I'm trying to say to everyone is, look,

you know the best approach for you. Use experts like me, for example, to help guide you, but then you need to become your own expert. And the way you do that is with a daily practice of solitude. Did that make sense? 100% made sense. I love that you brought it back to like the how, because it is for a lot of people, they have been so inundated with giving their power away with people on social media that they actually

It's they can find the voice, but it takes a while. It's kind of filtering and sussing and sorting and having self doubt that they don't know the answers of the truth. But what I found so interesting, and you talking about health, you've been in this space for so long. What has been your journey like being someone that was a medical doctor and now really seeing the larger spiritual elements and patterns that are really going on with people outside of just what we're eating? Like, what was your journey like into the more spiritual realm?

I think I've had quite an unusual career. Okay, so I qualified from Edinburgh Medical School in 2001. And like all doctors, I thought I was leaving medical school with all the tools I needed to help people get better. And then you go out into the world of practice and I realized that wasn't the case. I realized that a lot of the time we just put sticking plasters on people's symptoms and give them medication for their symptoms

without helping them get to the root cause of their problems. And it's easy now with hindsight to look back, but in my twenties, I don't know, I just felt a discontentment, but I didn't know what it was. And there were a couple of key moments in my life and my career, which changed things for me. One of them was in 2010, when my son was six months old and he

My wife had been breastfeeding him for six months and we went on holiday to France just after Christmas. And basically he nearly died. We were staying in my friend's chalet. No one was there yet. It was just my wife, me and my son. And for some reason, my wife didn't want to put him down to sleep. Call it maternal intuition, if you will. So on the sofa in the living room, she kept him with her and I was just washing up in the kitchen.

And he had been sort of a bit sniffly all day, had a bit of a cough. And then at some point she shouted out to me, "Rongan, he's not moving." So I ran over to the kitchen. His arms had gone back. His body was as stiff as a board and he wasn't responding. My initial thought was that maybe he's choking on phlegm because he'd been a bit chesty all day.

I picked him up, I turned him over. I started slapping his back to clear his airway. Nothing was happening. My wife said, "Hey babe, we just need to get to the hospital." We rushed to the car. We were in a ski resort in Chamonix in France. I nearly turned the car over on the way to the ER because it had just snowed and it was slippy. We get there. The doctors, you could see were really worried because

It is not uncommon for children to have convulsions, but the common ones are what we call febrile convulsions. There's a fever, that's what causes the convulsion. And we know as doctors, it's probably due to an infection. Treat the infection, bring the fever down, everything gets back to normal. My son didn't have a fever. So you could see that they were worried. So they do what they need to do, shove needles in his neck, put lines in. He's just my six month old little baby.

Then they blue lights him in an ambulance down the mountain to a bigger hospital. My wife goes with him, I follow him in the hire car. And essentially we weren't sure he was gonna make it through that night.

What it turned out to be was that he had a very low level of calcium in his blood, which is why he had a convulsion. And that was secondary to something called a vitamin D deficiency, which you're probably aware of. So his vitamin D was really, really low. That caused his calcium to go dangerously low. And that's why he had his convulsion. Now here's the reality of what happened. Modern medicine saved his life, but that was it. They give him calcium, they give him vitamin D. It's like, okay, you can go now.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking, well, wait, hold on, hold on. Wait a minute. What is the impact on him having not had these nutrients in his body for a period of time? Could this be why he had a bit of eczema or he had an allergy, for example? There's a lot more to this story because I kind of wanted him treated with this mandia a month before and his doctor said, no, let's not go there today. We all need names. But in essence...

I had perfectionist tendencies 'cause I've worked on it. I think many of us do have perfectionist tendencies. I used to be very hard on myself

And in that moment, I remember leaving that hospital in France with my baby boy and my wife. I felt so bad. I thought I have let my son down. He has nearly died from a preventable vitamin deficiency. And I, with all my fancy qualifications, was unable to do anything about it.

I was at one of Europe's most prestigious medical schools. I've done my specialist exams, my general practice exams. I have a BSc, honors degree in immunology. I'm a professor at Chester Medical School. With all of this expertise, I still wasn't able to help my son and I felt so guilty. So as I left that hospital that day, I made myself a vow. I'm going to get my son back to full health as if this had never happened.

And so I became obsessed. This was back in 2010. I spent three or four hours studying every day. I was reading about vitamin D, the gut microbiome, hormones, skin problems, the immune system. I traveled the world in my vacation time to go on conferences and learn. And I would learn all of these tools that we weren't taught at medical school.

I would apply those principles on my son. He's now a thriving 14-year-old healthy individual. He's fantastic. I would apply the same principles on my entire family. We're feeling better than we've ever felt before. I start applying those same principles with my patients. They're getting more well than I've ever seen before, and I'm not using anywhere near the same amount of medication.

And it really transformed how I practice medicine. Now there's other things that happened in my career, but that was one of the key moments that led in 2015 to me having my own primetime documentary series on BBC One television, which went out to 70 countries. There was two seasons of that show. There's some of them on YouTube still. It was called Doctor in the House. And basically I went to live alongside families

for four to six weeks, they were all unwell. They'd all been under doctors and specialists and were on medication, but they still were struggling. So I go in with TV cameras for four to six weeks

And it's still probably one of the proudest things I've done in my career. I helped a lady reverse her type 2 diabetes in 30 days. A lady with panic attacks reduced them by 80% in six weeks. A lady with severe menopausal symptoms who did not want to take hormones, I helped to almost eliminate them completely in just six weeks.

a lady with fibromyalgia pains who was on 20 different medications. I helped her become pain-free in six weeks. And I did this all with nutrition, lifestyle, and mindset. I don't think that show has ever been replicated anywhere in the world. I was able to show the British public, 5 million people a week, and many more around the world, that these symptoms that we're struggling with

are a natural consequence of the way that we're living our lives. 80 to 90% of what we see as doctors is in some way related to our collective modern lifestyles. That's not me putting blame on people, but medication is not gonna be the answer for everyone. I'm not anti-medication, right? But I'm saying we often overuse it and we don't tell our patients that this is not getting to the root cause. This is just helping you with your symptoms.

But that experience filming Doctor in the House is really quite unique. Even if a doctor gets more than 10 or 15 minutes, let's say they get an hour with their patient, which is very rare, but let's say they do, you're still not going to see what I saw going into people's houses. You asked me, where does this kind of spiritual side to me come from? I think part of it is my upbringing. You know, my mum and dad are Indian.

Okay, we grow up with the concept that food is medicine, that your life is medicine. When I was a kid, if I had a cold, my mom would put extra turmeric in our food, give me grated ginger and honey to help me with my throat. The kind of things that Western medicine has sort of poo-pooed for many years. Whereas now I'm here in California, there's turmeric shots everywhere. We know the evidence on turmeric being anti-inflammatory, for example, right? So my background definitely influences me.

But I kind of feel that experience on Doctor in the House, I saw I would be in patients' houses and I thought, wow, they're coming in with these symptoms. But look at how the husband and wife talk to each other in the evening. Look at the conflict in the relationship. I got to see how every single aspect of our life contributes to our physical health. So when a patient comes in saying they can't sleep,

that may not be a sleep problem. That might be a stress problem. That might be a relationship problem. So I have, I think, a rather unique view in the sense that I'm always with my patients trying to understand them in the context of their lives. Health is not just health. Health is also happiness. Health is also your relationships. I've always had this rather holistic view. I

And I think my son's illness, my experience and doctor in the house and my Indian background, I think all contributes. Does that kind of make sense? No, that's incredible. I was just thinking when you thought, I was like, you're such a beautiful speaker in general. And just the way you summarize and make it so clear, you know, something that was coming up for me around perfectionism that I wanted to double click on because I think it's so big. I know you're a recovering perfectionist.

I think I still am in my process of it. I think I'm such a perfectionist. I don't want to say I'm a perfectionist because I'm not perfect. So it's like I kind of limit myself. A lot of the women of our community are perfectionists very much so they're rewarded for their perfectionism. Would you say that two questions that won't be too hard to answer together, but would you say perfectionism is led by fear or where does perfectionism come from? And how does perfectionism manifest in people's lives?

It's a great question. So we know that perfectionism is on the rise. Wow. How do we know that? From psychological research. Okay. So there's a really good study that has been tracking this and it is shown very clearly that since 1980, this has been going up. What do you think that is? Why?

Well, why that study surprised me is because my gut reaction would have been, oh, it's social media. And social media has definitely played a role, but it started before social media. It's modern culture, right? Chapter two in Make Change at Last is called Give Up Your Heroes, right? And the idea in that chapter, it's all about perfectionism, that chapter, basically. And this idea that we're surrounded by these fictional ideas of what we think is possible,

So as I very openly share at the start of chapter two, I don't know if you can even admit these. I didn't know that. I didn't expect that coming. When you told me that, I was like, I didn't expect this. But yeah, basically when I was a kid growing up in the Northwest of England, um,

I used to have a life-size flag of Jon Bon Jovi on my wall. I literally wanted to be Jon Bon Jovi. I thought, "If I'm Jon Bon Jovi, my life will be perfect." He's good looking, he's a great singer, he plays to full stadiums, like, people want to be around him. You know, as an insecure 14-year-old, I was like, "That sounds amazing," right? I became the biggest Bon Jovi fan in the world, saw them an incredible amount of times live,

But the reason I share that story is because many of us have got our own version of that. But our heroes are not real. They really aren't. And I really want to explain what I mean by that. As I become an adult and a parent and a lot more in tune with myself, I've realized that, oh, I don't think I really wanted to be Jon Bon Jovi. You look at the best part of his life or what you think is the best part of his life. And then you go, yeah, well, what's the downside here?

"Oh, what must it have been like for him to be away from his wife and kids for 300 nights a year? What has that done to his relationships?" For example, "What was it like to sleep on a sweaty tour bus every single night? It all sounds great, but I'm like, I'm not sure I'd like that. You know, I just love being at home with my wife and kids, right? Even, you know, being in a hotel for more than a few days, I'm like, I want to be back home. It doesn't matter how nice the hotel is.

So the point is, is that a lot of us, we have these fictional ideas, but the case I make in that chapter is that our heroes are not who we think they are, and they're probably not even who we want to be. It's not realistic. They don't exist. Taylor Swift, in very real terms, doesn't exist. What do I mean by that? This is nothing anti-Taylor Swift at all. I was like, you better be careful. Right? It really isn't. We don't know Taylor Swift. What we know...

is what we are fed about her life. She is a powerful international brand, okay? We get shown what the brand wants us to see. I'm not having a go at her for that. I get it. It's a business.

But we don't know, what is she like as a friend? What is she like as a girlfriend? What is she gonna be like as a mom? We don't know these things. And I think one of the reasons is that we have all these images around us of what we think our lives could be, and our lives always feel inferior compared to those lives. So I think that's part of the problem. And I think honestly, social media does make it worse because there's a phenomenon that's called perfectionist presentation.

whereby this idea is basically that people present the best of their lives online. Now we could criticize people or go, "No, I do that as well. Like I don't show you my dirty washing,

I show you the best part of my life. I don't think that's a human failing. The failing is, is that if you're going on Instagram and you're scrolling and you're seeing this barrage of what you think are perfect lives, oh, my friend's in Bali watching a sunrise. Oh, my friend's being interviewed by that incredible person. Oh, this friend's like, she's got a day off in the week and is having a nice lunch. Even if you know that this is not real with your conscious mind, your subconscious constantly picks up this idea

I'm inferior, I'm not enough. Everyone's got a better life than me. And that then drives us to perfectionism and never feeling like we're enough. Now you mentioned the negativity bias before. Let's like weave this back into the negativity bias. One of the problems today is our over-busyness, right? And I think the reason we're overly busy, and there's a chapter on this in the book as well, is I think that we're overly reliant on feeling important, right?

We all want to feel a value to the world around us, but what's different with humanity today compared to the past

is that many of us no longer live in our communities. Many people have moved away for better job opportunities or life opportunities. And so maybe we're not near our parents or our friends, right? So we don't have that sense of value. So the way we get that sense of we are important to the people around us is by overworking. And so we need to break that reliance on

on feeling important, right? It's important that we feel a value, but there's other ways to do it. So perfectionism, busyness, these are massively prevalent issues that are causing us to have a lot of struggle in our lives. And one of the ideas I'm really passionate about, which is kind of why I wrote this book, is this idea that the reason we can't change our behaviors in the long term, or many of us can't,

is because we're too focused on the behavior rather than the root cause of the behavior. Right, yeah. Right, it's a key point. An example. I'll give an example, okay? So we have to understand- Like scrolling on social media. Okay, right.

So the thing to understand is that all behaviors in our life serve a role. Too often we try and change the behavior without understanding the role it plays in our life. Okay, so someone listening to this might go, I spend too much time on Instagram in the evening. Okay, fine. Many of us do.

And they may keep hearing about it in podcasts, but then go, yeah, but I know it's not helping me and it's feeding my perfectionist tendencies, but I can't stop. Now there's many reasons. Yes, the platforms are addictive for sure. But next time that person sits on the sofa and is about to start scrolling, or let's call it sugar or have a sip of alcohol if they're trying to reduce those things. I have this exercise called the three Fs, right? Which maybe will be helpful for people.

Before you're about to engage in a behavior you don't want to engage in, or you're trying to cut back on, just take a pause and ask yourself the first F, feel. What am I feeling here? Oh, yeah, I just fancy looking at Instagram. Okay, great. I just fancy a bit of sugar. Let's say it is sugar, for example, because I think that's a really relatable example. Am I physically hungry or am I emotionally hungry?

Like maybe I had a full meal an hour ago. I'm not actually physically hungry, but I'm a bit stressed. I've had a row with my partner. I was on Zoom calls all day and I've had no time to myself. This is a treat for me. Hey, no problem. Go ahead and have it. Have your scroll, have your ice cream, but at least you've asked yourself the first F.

The next time it happens, do the first F again, but then go to the second F. So the first F is what am I feeling? The second F is how does this behavior feed the feeling? Oh, I'm stressed.

ice cream helps me feel less stressed. Okay, great. Now you're understanding why you've gone to the ice cream. Oh, you've had a row with your partner, or you've been stuck at home by yourself all day and you haven't seen another human being because you've been stuck at the laptop. Oh, that's why you want to go on Instagram. You want to connect. You have a desire for connection. Okay, go ahead and do it. But now you're really understanding the role that behavior plays.

Then the next time it happens, do the first two Fs, but then go to the third F. Remember the first F, what am I feeling? Second F, how does this behavior feed the feeling? Third F, now that I know the feeling, now that I know how this behavior feeds the feeling, the third F is find. Can I find an alternative behavior to feed that feeling? So that could be

I am feeling quite lonely today. I haven't seen my friends, my boyfriend's out of town or whatever it might be. And so I'm going to spend three hours on the sofa on Instagram because I feel lonely. Oh, well, how else could you nourish yourself? Well, you could phone your friends. You could phone your parents if you haven't spoken to them for a while. You could run yourself a bath and nourish yourself in that way. There's other ways of feeding that feeling.

You know, if you're stressed out and you've been stuck on Zoom calls all day, instead of having half a tub of ice cream, if you like yoga, for example, you could pull up YouTube and do a 10-minute yoga sequence. You have to manage that feeling in some way. There are helpful ways of doing it and there are unhelpful ways of doing it. And that 3F exercise, which I write about, I've been using that with patients for years and they love it.

Because even if you just do the first F,

And you still engage with the behavior afterwards. You know, I'm stressed, but I'm still gonna have the ice cream. You've done something very powerful. You've given yourself an awareness of your behavior and why you're doing it. And that awareness is the first step on successful long-term change. Without that awareness, you are never gonna change in the long term. This is why every January, people go on 30-day sugar detoxes, 30-day alcohol detoxes, and they do them.

But many of them, by the end of February, they're back to where they were before because they did not address the underlying cause behind that behavior. Let me just simplify it a slightly different way because I really want to land this point with your audience. If stress is driving your alcohol intake, right? If it is, then you've got two options if you want to change the alcohol intake in the long term. Either you need to reduce the amount of stress in your life

then you'll no longer need the alcohol to manage the stress because the stress won't be there. But often that can be hard for people. The other alternative is you need to find a different behavior to manage the stress.

And when you look at it like that, it's quite simple, isn't it? But I think often we don't look at behavior change like that. We just go, oh, I'm drinking too much. I need to stop. I listened to this podcast. It told me what it's doing for my teeth and my liver. More knowledge is not necessarily what we all need. Certainly not more external knowledge. What we need is more inner knowledge, more self-awareness, more insights. Mm-hmm.

And what I love most about that is something I learned in, do you know internal family systems? Do I ever? I've done two podcasts with Dick Schwartz, the founder. He's amazing. Changed my life, IFS. Changed my life. That's like my modality and what I teach a lot of. And what I loved about what IFS brought into my life was the seeing myself through the lens of love and self-compassion. And what you're talking about in the practice is,

say we're getting rid of sugar. It's like, how can I see this action that I'm taking as an act of self-love to myself? How can I see it as something that's actually really beautiful, that I'm trying to soothe myself, I'm trying to give myself love through this action that's dysfunctional? And then that liberated me to not be so looking at it through the lens of I'm doing something wrong, I am bad, there's something wrong with me. And I think when we come from that energy, when we're trying to make any change in our life, it's not going to stick. Yeah.

What I figured out over the last few years is it's the energy behind the behavior. 100%. That's the most important thing, but it's not the behavior. And all behaviors either at their core...

They either come from love or they come from fear. Yes. And the perfectionism is the fear. Yeah. Going back to that question you asked me, perfectionism is totally fear-based. Because I even heard you with your son, you're like, I'm going to study for four hours. I'm going to learn everything. I was like, I saw your fear body be like, oh, that is never going to happen again. I was. And actually, I'll tell you the negative consequences of that. Because as I said before, everything's got an upside and everything's got a downside. Okay. We can argue, we could say...

that the upside of that kind of mindset, although I would even challenge what I'm about to say, but you could argue that the upside is that it forced me to start studying hard, right? And learn new things that allowed me to improve his health and improve my health and improve the lives of many more now through my public sort of platforms, right?

But the cost of feeling like that was he had a guilty father for the first few years of his life, right? He didn't need a guilty father, right? And that would have had an impact on our relationship. Now, to be really clear, I'm very close with my children. I have a wonderful relationship with them. I spend lots of quality time with them. But a few years in, I realized, wrong again.

you need to let go of this guilt. It wasn't your fault that this happened. He doesn't need a dad consumed with guilt, constantly trying to correct things for him. And I've learned to let go of that guilt. Yes, internal family systems really helped me with that, but many other things also helped me with that. And would you mind if I share some journaling questions with your audience? Because we're talking about a lot of

Quite different concepts, but they're all sort of related. At their core, I think what this conversation is about is how do we develop self-awareness? How do we develop insight? How do we learn to trust ourselves? And there's many ways in which we can do it. I mentioned a daily practice of solitude, but to make it really practical,

I have three questions that I ask myself every morning and every evening, and they literally take minutes to do, but I think they help develop a real deeper understanding of yourself, okay? So I've already mentioned one of them. I wake up each morning. I have a little morning routine. I finish off the routine with journaling. So I'm sitting there in my kitchen with a cup of coffee with my journal, and I go through these three questions. What is one thing I deeply appreciate about my life, okay? That helps me.

In a world where there is a lot of negativity, it helps me focus on the positives. Then I go to probably my favorite question. What is the most important thing I have to do today? Now, why I think that question is so powerful. And if your audience take nothing else from this conversation, but doing that one question, I can almost guarantee it will change their experience of life.

In a world where we always feel that there's other things to do, there's plenty that we haven't done. Our to-do lists are never done. Let's say you complete your emails today, right now, and then you take a break for 10 minutes to make a cup of coffee. In those 10 minutes, you could have got another 20 emails. There's nothing you can do about that, right? Anyone who's got your email address can send you an email at any time of the day from anywhere in the world. Which is rude. Yeah. Yeah.

So you have to take control of what the most important thing in your day is. Now, when people start off with this question, they always go, well, there's too many important things. There's multiple things that are important. There's my work stuff, there's my family stuff. Okay, let me break it down. Did you know that when the word priority came into the English language in the 1500s, that it was a singular word? Priorities did not exist. The word was a priority.

But now we have multiple priorities. But the problem is, is if everything in your life feels equally important, it means nothing really is. Or you have to be able to prioritize. So if people are struggling with this, I say, okay, at first, maybe say, what's the most important work thing? And what's the most important personal life thing? But over time, you realize there is ever only one thing.

And if you give an example, let's say last week, how would I answer this? So on Monday last week, it was a work deadline that I had. I had to finish an article. So in the morning, I put down the most important thing I have to do today is finish this article for work.

That doesn't mean my relationship with my wife wasn't important that day or my relationship with my kids. It's just, I chose to focus that day on that thing. On day two, I think, I can't remember exactly last week, but I think it was, I haven't seen my wife much for the last few days. She was away with her friends at the weekend. I must make sure once the kids are in bed tonight, we spend a bit of quality time together in the evening. Great. Wednesday, I was working from home on Wednesday.

So what did I put down? When the children come home from school at 4:00 PM, I need to make sure that I've closed my laptop, put my phone away so I'm fully present for what they want to tell me so I can listen and be there for them. The day after, I think I put down, "I must go for a 20 minute walk at lunchtime today."

Why this question is so powerful is because in a world of infinite priorities, it forces you to make a decision. If you answer that question each morning and you act on the answer, so you say what's most important and you go and do it, it is inconceivable that your life will not change. After seven days, you will have done seven important things. After 30 days, you will have done 30 important things. After 365 days,

you will have done 365 things. So we have got this negativity bias we focus, especially if we're perfectionists on what we haven't done. This shows you what you have done, right? I said this was important. I did it. And therefore this day counts as a win.

I think it's really important. I love how with what you were saying of the examples, they both were career focused, but in family focused. Yeah. It was both like work and then also the true priority of family and, you know, your relationships. So it's like equally balanced. And when I loved about the ones you said about your kids, finishing closing laptop at four,

that's the number one priority, but it also creates priorities for the day that are kind of happening in your life where you're like, I need to get my work done before. So it kind of structures the rest of things. When there's all this noise there, when we've got, I've got to do this, I've got to do that. I mean, people will know what I'm talking about. Oh yeah, what do you mean? When you've got 10 things you have to do, you procrastinate, you're never sure what to start with.

Put down the most important thing. And if people struggle with it initially, that's okay. Don't push the adversity or the discomfort away, right? Lean into that. Go, why are you finding it hard? Okay, don't worry. Practice. Maybe start off with three things.

over time, you'll be able to put one thing down, I promise you. And it helps your decision-making in every other aspect of your life. It's really, it's such a powerful question. I love that. And I do it every morning. Sorry, please. What would you say? So I'm just kind of thinking, so for you and I that are self-led at this point, and I wasn't always self-led,

It's easy for me to, you know, not easy, but I can look at my priorities and be like, okay, what's the truth of my priority is family, you know, relationships are my work at this time. What about people that are living their life in this moment where they're led by other people's priorities? So they would have my number one priority is my boss says I have to get this thing done or my husband wants me to do this or that. How can they become more self-led in priorities rather than having the world dictate what they should do? Hey.

This question could even be more important when you're led by other people. Yes. Right? This isn't just, it really is even more important because sure, there may be certain things in your life that you have no control over. You may be in a job you don't particularly like. Your boss may be asking you to do things that you don't want to do and you feel it's a bit unreasonable. Okay. This question is not going to change that.

But that's an uncontrollable, right? Early on in this conversation, we were talking about when we spend time focusing on what we literally cannot influence. And I'm not saying you can't influence your boss. Perhaps you can, but let's assume that you can't. You're wasting valuable energy, right?

The more you focus on yourself, the more able you will then be to change your relationship with your boss. If you feel that your life is down to the actions of others and how you feel depends on how other people treat you,

You're basically making yourself a victim to life. And I say that with an open heart. Yes, of course. I'm not blaming anyone. Of course. I used to have that mentality. Oh, same. Oh, if people treat me well, my life will be... If they don't, it's not my fault. I was like, is everybody good? I'm good. Exactly. But once you learn that you don't have to get the validation from other people to validate yourself, your life will change. So let's use your example or the example we're talking about.

Your husband needs you to do something. The kids need you to do something if you have children. Your boss needs you to do something. Okay, still ask yourself, what's the most important thing you have to do today? And I would encourage you to focus on yourself, right? If those are things you're doing for other people,

Right? Fine. Do them if you feel that you have to, and that's where your life is. But you can still put in your diary or your journal, it's really important I go for a walk today. It's really important that I do my yoga practice. It's really important that I phone my best friend who's just been diagnosed with cancer. Whatever it might be, it's those little things, when you do them consistently, they very, very quickly change.

add up. I promise you, I've been doing this for years. In fact, it just reminds me of a patient I once had, okay? I think she was in her 40s and she had the autoimmune disease Crohn's, okay? Crohn's is very common these days. And

you know, it was really horrible for her. Okay. She'd have stomach cramps. She'd have to go to the toilet like 20 times a day. It was socially embarrassing for her. It was just horrible. And she had, this is before she saw me, she'd been seeing specialists. She'd been trying drugs. She was getting side effects. She didn't like it. And so she came to see me trying to have a more holistic approach.

And we did several things. I helped her make some changes to her diet to see, does this make a difference? Often it can, not always. It was making a difference, okay? So she got a little bit of an improvement, but then everything plateaued. And I remember one appointment, she came to see me and things had plateaued a little bit and she was still struggling. And I said, what do you do for yourself? She's like, what do you mean? I said, well, what do you do? Like, it seems like you're doing things for other people all the time.

So yeah, that's my life. I do stuff for my husband, for my children. I don't do anything for me. I said, okay, no problem. I think this chronic stress is contributing to your symptoms. Chronic stress contributes to everything, right? But for this patient, I said, your chronic stress is contributing to your symptoms. For the next four weeks before our next appointment, what I want you to do is for 15 minutes a day, I want you to do something for you.

Not for your husband, not for your children, something that you want to do. Okay. She's like, do you think that'll help? I said, listen, it's an experiment. I just want you to do it. Come back in four weeks and let's see where you're at. She came back in four weeks, like a different person. She had a big smile on her face. Her symptoms had gone down significantly. They hadn't gone completely, but they were a lot more manageable. I said, what did you do? Well, she says, Dr. Chastity, I first started off once I dropped my daughter at school.

Before coming home and doing the housework and doing whatever else I had to do, I went to the local park for a 15 minute walk and I love it. And within a week, your conversation with me made me think about other things that I used to love to do. She said, "I've always wanted to do salsa dancing, but I've never done it." And she signed up for a local class on Wednesday evenings and she told her husband,

"Darling, on Wednesday evenings, I'm going to this class." So she went out. I'm not kidding you, in four weeks, that changed her life. We don't understand that. There's research on this that I've written about.

regularly doing things that you love makes you more resilient to stress. At the same time, being regularly and chronically stressed makes it harder for you to experience pleasure in day-to-day things. It's a vicious cycle. It works both ways. So this is a lady who had a severe autoimmune disease

And simply taking 15 minutes a day for herself reduced her symptoms by over 50%. But that's powerful. Huge. Yeah? Huge. Changes her whole life. So I just want to encourage people when they do feel their lives are out of control or they're busy and they don't have time for themselves, even five minutes a day of doing something for you, like listening to your favorite song with your headphones on and forgetting about the world, watching your favorite comedian on YouTube and having a laugh,

doesn't matter what it is, but I want people to think about passion as being as important as journaling or as important as vegetables or whatever it might be. Like everything in life doesn't need to be hard and stressful. Joy is also a very important part of health.

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Joy is also productive. It's also important. Like, and I love that our culture is moving towards that. I think so. It's so beautiful that we're finally getting to this place where the joy is productive. The rest is productive, you know, and productive in the way of the word. But it's like, we're finally moving to acceptance and seeing things like walking in the park is valuable. Seeing things like taking salsa dancing for no reason is valuable.

something that you're talking about within her relationships, her dependence on others, you know, her, this woman in the example, she's reliant on her husband, her kids to kind of tell her who she is and what she's doing. How do you see codependency and sort of that reliance and relationships playing a role in people's ability to make change in their life that lasts? It's huge. Huge. It's arguably one of the biggest things. Many people struggle with people pleasing, don't they? Yeah.

Again, a perfectionist in recovery, a people pleaser in recovery, how I would describe myself. And these things really come, as we said before, from fear. They come from insecurity. I explain in the book, again, it's very personal, the stories that I've shared, because I feel ready. I'm not as insecure as I used to be. So I'm okay being judged. It doesn't matter to me. This is what happened. I remember when I started dating my now wife and we'd go out for dinner and

and we'd be in a restaurant and, you know, we'd be looking at the menu and she'd be like, oh, I can't decide what to order. Everything looks good. And I would say to her, I said, hey babe, why don't you order two things that you're not sure about and I'll have the one that you don't like. And after a few dates, you could see that this was starting to bother her. Yeah. Okay. So this is interesting to me. So that would bother you. Why would it bother you? Let me tell you. Okay. Why would bother me? It's

It would feel like pressure to me then. Like I would feel like pressure that I had to get two things and at least one of them had to be good so that you would choose it. And it would feel like I was the one that was leading the temperature of the mood of the dinner. Yeah, that's so interesting. Because you immediately were like, yeah, that would annoy you as well. I was so confused, right? When she was getting frustrated, and this is a girl I really like and things are going well. Yeah.

And you're like, I don't want you to do that. You're trying to figure out what to do. Yeah, I was like, I was wired with my upbringing to, and there's many reasons for it, to never put my needs first. It was always about the needs of everyone around me. So I thought I was doing a really nice thing. I'm like, hey, baby, you can't choose. No worries.

Take two, and then I'll have the one you don't want. What frustrated her, I've now found out, is that she wanted a man who knew his own mind, right?

that's what she wanted. She didn't want this kind of person who couldn't make a decision. It was, I know you do this. Like, and the truth is, and some people may push back at that. And there's a lot more to this story than, you know, without going into a one hour dissection of our early relationship. Um, there's a lot more to it than that. But in essence, that was my excessive people pleasing showing up, right? It was me. It was me

not wanting to validate myself because I wanted her to like me, right? So I was wired to do anything

so that people would like me. I was the guy at university, people wanted to know which bar do we go to, which restaurant? I don't mind, you go anywhere. Wherever you guys want, no problem. You'd end up somewhere you can't stand, but hey, you didn't make a fuss, right? I've dated so many men like that, not my journey anymore. Yeah, but I'm not like that anymore. And the key point, the empowering point I have for people is you can change this. Who you are today is not who you have to stay, it's who you became.

Once you really understand that, your life will start to change. Once you build up the self-awareness of, oh, I have people-pleasing tendencies. Okay, cool. Now that I know that, now that I've given it a name, I can start to do something about it. Remember the 3F exercise. When you don't know that sugar is your way of dealing with stress, you feel powerless to change. Once you know that it's your way with dealing with stress or loneliness or too many Zoom calls or whatever it might be,

You've created a slight gap between the stimulus and the response. And in that gap, that's where the magic happens. And now I know I'm a people pleaser. Oh, where else is this show? Oh my God, it shows up at work. It shows up at, okay, cool. How can I start doing something about that? Oh, well,

The solution really is to start understanding how to put in place boundaries. And boundaries is something I didn't even know what that word meant 10 years ago in this context. Honestly, like I grew up in a family and I love my family to bits. We weren't particularly good at boundaries, right? It can be difficult. What that lady did with Crohn's disease, you could look at it through the lens of a boundary, right?

She wanted to salsa dance. She realized that all she does is stuff for her husband and her children. And it's also easy for us who are people pleasers to put the blame elsewhere. That's a problem. We are always contributing in some way to the dynamic of a relationship.

and some people don't like to acknowledge that or appreciate that but we are what is our role here have we actually explained to our partner how important this is to us often we haven't we're just getting annoyed that we're having to do things for them but we don't realize that our behavior sometimes helps

It helps keep it in that pattern. Yes. A lot of times it's like psychic assumptions about people. Totally. And things. Not even like true conversations are had to determine something. You're psychically assuming something. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how this lands for you. Okay. This is something I write about. And it was interesting because I thought, God, are people going to resonate with this bit? When we started dating...

I was in the season of stag do's or what you guys call bachelor parties, right? So all my friends were at that age, right? And we had lots of bachelor parties. And in the UK, they tend to be in Europe.

So 30 years ago, they weren't. There was just one night in the local bar with a few of your close friends. Then somehow the norm became four-day trips to Eastern Europe. I was talking about this today, how the wedding industry has just... Oh my God. It's crazy. Yeah. Now, back then, I remember we just got married and Vid would say to me... Now, to be clear, Vid's amazing. And she never had a problem with me spending time with the guys at all.

But she would say, these stag do's feel a little bit over the top. Four days in a foreign city, everyone's drinking, you're in bars, and who knows what else. And I think she felt that as a married man, her feeling was...

is it appropriate for you to be in these environments anymore? Nothing to do with trust, to be really clear. Right, of course. And I pushed back at that back then because I was so insecure and I didn't know what a boundary was. I was like, in my head, I was like, "Baby, you don't understand. This is what everyone does. It's nothing. It's what we all do." But now on reflection, I actually think she was right. Genuinely, hand on heart. Again, I can only speak from my experience. I'm not saying there's anything wrong if other people want to engage.

But the truth is, is that all kinds of shenanigans happen on these things, right? That's facts. That is the truth. Yes. And a lot of alcohol gets drunk. People's inhibitions aren't there. The point I'm trying to make is going back to boundaries is that what I've always loved about my wife is that she was never afraid to tell me what she honestly thought.

Even though I found that difficult, and the reason I found it difficult was because I didn't know what a boundary was. So I was like, this is, you know, I really struggle with it, but I now don't. I've learned how to put boundaries in place. And that Crohn's disease lady, when she told her husband that she wants to go salsa dancing on a Wednesday night, she said,

That's her putting a boundary in place. But it doesn't mean she has to shout at her husband and say, everything you do all the time is for you. Now it's time for me. That's not helpful either.

But you can calmly say, hey, darling, listen, I realized that I don't really have much time for myself these days. I'd love to go to this local salsa dancing class. What do you think? You know, would Wednesday night work? Totally different conversation. And if you approach it like that, often your partner will say, hey, babe, I had no idea. Yeah, go for it.

Do you know what I mean? We make assumptions. Of course. But we never told them. How is your husband meant to know if you never told them? That communication piece in relationship is like what I've been really just obsessed with because on the other side of good communication and clear communication, like what you exemplified with your wife being like, hey, what do you think about this? Like, I don't think this is something I'm comfortable with. Is like greater intimacy, is the greater truth, is not having the space where people are acting unconsciously like the Crohn's disease.

where she's kind of assuming that they want her to do all these things. Exactly. You know, it's like the assumption. But what's interesting about the wife example, and I'm curious how this lands, is, you know, in the first example of the dinner, it's like you're people-pleasing her. And what can happen oftentimes is the...

I personally feel it feels unsafe because I know you're going to people please other people eventually down the line. So what the stag do, you're then people pleasing the friends of like, no, we do this. This is what we do. And so that feels unsafe because you're not prioritizing your own inner self.

like truth of like this stag do feels good or not. Yeah. I think you're spot on. And at the same time, I didn't know my inner truth. Of course. I didn't know my inner truth. That's why I'm so passionate about this idea of trusting yourself. Yes. We have to start tuning in again. We have to start knowing when we're acting in alignment with our values and when we're not. I think everyone has the right to live life in the way in which they choose to.

But too often we think that we want to do certain things because everyone around us does them. When you are people-pleaser, you end up doing things that aren't in alignment with who you are, but you think, "Well, yeah, everyone does them. That's why I do them." Well, is it what you want? What we really need if we want to be happy, contented, healthy, is we need to take time to get to know ourselves.

In my previous book on happiness, I created this model for happiness. I said there's three ingredients to happiness. You don't directly work on happiness. You work on these three things and the side effect is that you're going to be happier more often. So what are those three ingredients? Contentment. Okay, what are the things that you do that make you feel calm, content and relaxed? Okay, that's the contentment piece.

The next one is control. Now, let me be really clear what I mean by that. I'm talking about a sense of control. Okay. I'm not trying to, I'm not talking about controlling the world. The world is fundamentally uncontrollable, but

We know from the scientific research that when we have a strong sense of control over our lives, we're happier, we're healthier, we have better relationships, we even earn more money, right? And one of the ways you can give yourself a sense of control is with little routines and rituals like these three questions. I know we haven't got to the third one, we'll come back to that. But these little routines and rituals every day that people do, that I do,

They give you a sense of control. So even in a world where the news headlines may be negative, or you may have too much work to do, things might feel out of control. These routines and rituals, they give you a sense of control. And that is so, so powerful. Okay, so that's the second piece. The third ingredient to happiness is alignment.

Alignment is basically when your inner values and your external actions start to match up. When the person who you are on the inside and the person who you are on the outside start to become more and more aligned. And it sounds obvious, but many of us are not living those lives, right? Going back to that stag do or the bachelor party example, it's no problem if I want to do it, if it really is what I want to do.

But if I'm only doing it as a way of fitting in with people, well, that's when it starts to become a problem. Because if you start to betray yourself in terms of what you want out of life in order to be accepted and validated by others, that is a dangerous road to travel. Because in that void you've created in your inner being,

That's the gap in which all your problematic behaviors will come. Your Instagram scrolling, your sugar, your alcohol, pornography, whatever it might be, it comes in that gap. The more aligned you become with your life...

I promise you, your behaviors naturally follow. Effortless change is possible once you become more aligned. Now, bringing it back to those three questions, why I think starting each day with those three questions, well, frankly, these are just examples. If people have alternative ones that they like, go for that, right? I'm not saying these are the only questions in life that work. They

They work for me. I know they work for many of my patients and many people who follow me online have found them very, very powerful. So to refresh, first one was, what is one thing I deeply appreciate about my life? Second one is, what is the most important thing I have to do today? And then the third question, how I finish off my morning routine is, what quality do I want to showcase to the world today? I think it's a really beautiful question because so much of what we do each day

is a repeat of past behaviors, right? We think that who we are, we think, "Oh, that's who I am. I'm a bit reactive. I'm a bit stressed. This is what I do." Well, hold on a minute.

Maybe that's not you. Maybe that's just what you did yesterday and the day before and the day before, and you're just repeating it. We know about 50 or 60%, depending on which research study you look at, of what we do each day. It's just habit. It's just on autopilot. So this question takes you out of autopilot. And so I love it. I'm sitting there. It's the final part of my morning routine. And I'm thinking, what quality do I want to showcase to the world today? And often it's things like,

I want to show the world the quality of patience or compassion, grace, whatever it might be. And what it means by intentionally writing that down and thinking about it, what it means is if later on in the day, you're tempted to not behave in alignment with that, but you may still not because we're not perfect. We're all trying our best, but let's say

at work, something happens, there's a, I don't know, you receive an email from your colleague that you don't like and you're tempted to respond quickly. Know that feeling? Mm-hmm. Right? If you've said in the morning, I wanna show the world the quality of patience today, you're more likely to take a pause and go, no, no, you know what? I'm gonna be patient today. I'm gonna be compassionate today. And here's the magic. If you do that every morning,

and you try your best to exhibit that quality to the world and showcase it to the world, you will start to change who you are. It will happen. You will barely notice it. And in two or three weeks, people will notice it around you. Like, what's happened to her? Like, she used to be so stressful and reactive. Oh my God, I want what she's got. And that relates to one of the most common things that people ask me at live events or when they see me in the street, they go, Dr. Chastity,

I've got your books. I listen to your podcast each week. You've changed my life. I understand how important these things are and that's wonderful, but my boyfriend won't listen to me. My mother won't listen to me. How do I change them? Oh gosh, yes. Right? This is so common. So common. And what I've learned after 23 years of clinical practice is that you can't. People will change when they're ready and not a moment sooner. And the people closest to us

they often don't want to hear it from us. Oh my gosh. I was saying this the other day. I had someone close to me. It was like, someone told me this thing. And I was like, I've been saying that thing to you for months. And then someone else said it and they were like, this is groundbreaking. My wife recently, right? And to put it in context here, I've had a podcast for seven years. It's the most listened to health show in Europe, right? Lots of people listen to it.

I've got multiple Sunday Times bestsellers about health and wellbeing. And I think maybe a year ago, she said, hey, babe, listen, I think strength training is going to be really important for me at this stage of my life. You know, someone told me, or I heard this on a blog, I'm going to do it. I had to resist the temptation of going, baby, you know, I've written about this in multiple books. I've had so many conversations about this. You listen to these episodes, you edit these episodes. She doesn't want to hear it from me.

And so going back to this question, because I think much of your audience probably want to know, well, yeah, they listen to you. They put these things into practice. They live this intentional, happy life, right? Purposeful life. But my friends don't, and I want to help them. I said, don't try and change them. Be the change that you want to see in the world. I think that was first attributed to Gandhi. I love, love, love that phrase. It's how I try and live. I

passionately believe the way that we change the world is by changing ourselves. 100%. I think whenever I hear people having that question, I'm like, I think we all have enough to do. Like I know personally, I have enough work to do in the world. I have enough of my purpose. I have enough self-love to kind of focus on. And I think people are avoiding their own inner work when we kind of focus on the other. Yeah. And what happens when you start to change yourself? And ultimately, what are we all looking for? We all want to be

calm people who are kind, who are considerate, who do things for others. Not in an excessive way with people pleasing at the expense of ourselves, right? And I think there's a dark side to this growing awareness of people pleasing, which is we can go to the other extreme and go, I'm going to put boundaries everywhere and everything's all about me. No, no, no, no, no. There's a balance. Actually, sometimes it's okay to suppress your needs for the needs of other people around you. It is.

The problem is if it's happening all the time. And the problem is as if it's coming from an insecurity in you. But you know what? Sometimes if one of my friends or my mom or someone needs me, and sometimes I have to have a few late nights in order to help them, that's okay. And I think we have gone to a bit of an extreme sometimes with boundaries where we... I think we should think about boundaries...

or some boundaries as a little bit porous. Yes, and fluid. They're not fixed. Certain boundaries like physical contact, yes, they're fixed. I'm not at all suggesting that they shouldn't be. But others can be moved a little bit depending on the situation. Yep. I think one of the biggest signs of being emotionally mature is your flexibility.

Your ability to move and be flexible and be like, yes, this, not that. And I have seen that, you know, boundaries became really popular. It's a really beautiful thing because so many of us have been living very unconsciously without boundaries, but there is sort of a shift to walls and

And that for me just shows people's lack of ability to communicate, to regulate themselves and be in relationship where it can be fluid. You can choose to push yourself a little bit for family because you're going to do it in this moment, but you know you're going to recover later. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I think it's so important. And going back to this idea of how do we change the people around us? Yeah.

I agree with what you said about sometimes that's a way of us avoiding doing the stuff that we have to do. I completely agree. The other component there is humans are social beings, right? People pick up on our energy. If you become really calm, really present, non-reactive, the person who, you know, can stay calm whenever and around you is getting stressed, people see that. Yes.

And after a while, people go, I want that. What are they doing? And I've seen that with my own friends and family. After a while, it's not me saying, oh, you should do this. Have you thought about that? Hey, I've tried that. Believe you me, I've tried that. And I've realized it doesn't work particularly for the people closest to you. The people you want to help the most, it's the hardest. I go, no, no, I'm just going to be that person. And they all after a while go, hey,

You look great at the moment. You're like, so what are you doing? Oh, you know, I meditate every morning. I am, I'm eating this or whatever. They want to know, like, I haven't drunk alcohol in about five years now.

And it's no big thing. Like I wouldn't say I'm never going to drink again or I don't know, like I don't want to make it a big thing, but I just realized more and more, it just, it didn't do anything for me. Same. Right. I started drinking when I got to medical school. There's the irony, right? To fit in. Wow. That's when I started. I didn't drink growing up. My family didn't drink. I started at 18 at Edinburgh Medical School.

And Fresh This Week was about just getting drunk every single night. And before you know it, you're a drinker. You celebrate by drinking. You see your friends by drinking. Again, I've had some great times with my friends. But there comes a point when you start to live an intentional life, coming back to alignment, right? Everyone can have their own values. I'm saying you need to know your values and ask yourself, are you living in alignment with your values?

I just realized that my life was better when I didn't drink. My sleep was better. I was a better father. I was a better husband. I was more productive the next day. I had more energy. I thought, well, I quite like this. I quite like waking up each morning feeling fantastic, right? So I don't drink anymore. I don't force it on anyone.

It's funny, I've got a group of, my closest group of friends from university, there's four of us, we're on a WhatsApp group together. And we live like hundreds of miles apart in the UK. So we try and get together for two weekends a year. And I remember last November, we went to Wales for the weekend and we went walking in the hills. We never were doing that in our 20s on a weekend away, let me tell you. But it was really fun on the Friday evening.

We were all comfortable enough to let all of us do what we wanted to do. So what I mean by that, we were sitting around the kitchen in this Airbnb. I was drinking sparkling water with fresh lime all evening because I was feeling rock and roll. I put a bit of fresh lime in. My best mate, Steve, who's a surgeon, probably had about a bottle and a half of wine himself, right? So he was getting drunk. One of my other friends was having non-alcohol beer and the other friend was having low alcohol beer.

We had a great time. We all did what we wanted to do. We didn't expect our friends to change, to do what we wanted to do for ourselves. And we had a great time. And I thought, wow, this is really cool when you can get to that emotional maturity where you go, I'm going to live life my way.

And if people think that their friends won't accept them if they change, the question you really have to ask yourself is, are they a real friend? Because a real friend will accept you if you change, I promise you. But often we project that they won't. This same group of friends, let me tell you, about four years ago, we were getting together for a weekend and it was going to be a golf weekend. And I remember pulling up to the Airbnb and I was

maybe it's five or six years ago. I can't remember exactly when, but I had already decided that I don't really enjoy drinking much. But I remember driving there thinking, yeah, but I've got a weekend with the guys now. We always used to drink. And I said to myself in the car on the drive down, I'm not going to drink this weekend. And I remember pulling up at the house and my friends, one of my friends pulled up with his car and he got out these crates of beer, bottles of spirits. He said, oh guys, we're going to have a great weekend. And

And because I wasn't secure enough in myself, I didn't know how to deal with that. I remember that weekend, I didn't have much, but I think on the Friday night, I had two glasses of wine. I didn't sleep well. I didn't enjoy golf on the Saturday 'cause I was exhausted. I remember driving home on the Sunday and I was consumed with guilt and shame. Why?

because I'd gone out of alignment. I thought, "Wongy, you sat on the way, you didn't want to do this, but in order to fit in, you did it." And what I realized is that that wasn't my friend, that was all me. I projected. And the next year I went in feeling confident, saying, "Hey guys, I'm not going to drink. I just didn't..." You guys knock yourselves out, enjoy yourself. No one cared.

So sometimes we put out that energy. We're a bit nervous. We don't feel secure in our decision. People pick up on that. Yes. Do you know what I mean? I love that. We have to take responsibility. What are we contributing here? Yes. I love asking the question, what is true? What is true? What is true? If you go into that situation, what is true? You actually don't know if it's true that they're going to be disappointed or mad at you for drinking. You don't know because so much of the stress that we have is the conversation in our mind. They're going to judge me. They're not going to love me. It's like, what?

What is true? We actually cannot be guaranteed that that is true or not true. And I think something about us changing for ourselves being the change we want to see in the world, I think something that I want to kind of highlight is that we have to change ourselves

ourselves because we love ourselves and because we're internally motivated not to prove to other people. I think there was a period in time in my life personally where I was in a relationship and I wanted to change myself so much to prove to him that he wasn't doing enough. And my motivation to change was actually outward led, not like my internal fire of loving myself so much. I wanted to self-improve because of that fact. It's the energy behind the behavior. Is it coming from love?

or is it coming from fear? Yes. And if you are listening to this conversation and you realize, yeah, that's me. Yes. My energy behind my behaviors is fear. That's okay. Now that you know that, you're empowered to make a change. If you didn't know that, that's when the struggles happen. We're frustrated that we can't make changes because the changes we're trying to make are in conflict with who we think we are.

And that's why I'm such a big fan of solitude practices, journaling, meditation, going for a walk without a phone sometimes. So you can start hearing what your body wants to tell you. Your body's telling you, but most of us have become deaf to our body's signals. And that's why we struggle in this world where there's a never ending supply of new information and we don't know what to follow. We don't know who to believe. Believe yourself. Yep.

Being in solitude, getting off social media, spending time in nature. Again, it's so funny because all the schooling you've done is like in the nuance and the details of all these things. And then it's like back to the basics of what everyone's been talking about for centuries. It's always back to the basics. I was thinking that in my teaching recently. I'm like, I keep saying cliches, but they're so true. Oh,

All the cliches are true. Once you get to a certain level, all the cliches just become so deeply true. Yeah. And this guilt and shame, and really, which come from fear, like fear's the roots, then you've got underneath, you've got guilt, shame, envy, jealousy, whatever it might be. It all comes from fear at its core. I have two questions I ask myself every evening that I think really help here. The first question is, what went well today? And what can I do differently tomorrow?

And again, what I love about those questions is they're simple. They don't take long to answer. But what they do is in a very compassionate way, they help you just tweak what you're doing in your life. So it could be, for example, what went well today?

well, I had a huge workload today. I did so much. I helped my team. I got all my work done and I still came home. And instead of ordering an unhealthy takeaway, I still cooked myself a healthy meal or my family or my partner and I, whatever it might be. Okay. That went well today. Because if you hadn't asked yourself that question, you might think, oh my God, what a stressful day.

Yeah, I worked hard, but oh my God, my life's so stressful. I'm not saying your life isn't stressful, but if you say what went well today, you're again putting your attention on the positive, right? And then the second question that goes alongside that is, what can I do differently tomorrow? Now, there may be nothing you want to do differently tomorrow, but sometimes you go,

ah, yeah, you know what? I powered through today. I had way too much caffeine, way too much sugar. And some of that was also because I stayed up binge watching Netflix till midnight last night. So because I went to bed late, I was knackered all day and I kept needing caffeine and sugar. Okay. Don't beat yourself up. That happened. There was a reason that behavior served a role, right?

Once you can step back from that and go, okay, how can I change things tomorrow? You know what? Maybe I won't stay up till midnight tonight. Maybe tonight I'll make sure I'm in bed by 10 or half 10 so I don't need so much sugar and caffeine tomorrow. And again, I've been using those two questions with patients and myself for years. They are life-changing. People don't understand how

powerful, small things done consistently can be. We think transformation is about big change. I've been a doctor for 23 years, right? I've seen so many patients and yes, I have seen some people change their lives overnight. Generally though, when that happens, there's been a huge life experience, a divorce, a bereavement, a house loss, like something really, really significant has happened. Yeah, people can wake up and completely change their lives.

But if that hasn't happened to you or it's not current in your life, if you try and make too many big changes too quickly, it often feels overwhelming and you end up back to where you started. This is what we see every single January. January the 1st, people wake up and they go, right, this year is going to be different. It's going to be different from every other year. Why? Because

Who knows? Like we haven't, we're not having it. We think it's going to be different. No, if you don't look at the root cause, it's not going to be different. But if you say on January the 1st, I'm going to spin four times a week for the rest of the year. You know what? You'll probably do it for the first two or three weeks, but then things start to fall off. And it's because we're not getting to the root, right? And it's because we haven't

the why, the energy behind it. It's the energy. If your New Year's resolution is coming from a place of lack, it ain't gonna last. If you're trying to overcome the feeling of lack you have inside and you wanna punish yourself and push through in January, I'm telling you, in almost every single case, you may change in January and February. If weight loss is your goal, you may lose a bit of weight.

but you will revert back to where you were. But if the energy behind it is one of abundance and love and self-compassion, actually like the person who I am, that will be long lasting change. And honestly, speaking personally, about 10 years ago, I'd beat myself up in January. I'd say, I want to meditate. I'd do it 10 minutes a day or 20 minutes a day. Two weeks in, I'd miss a day. Oh my God, the negative self-talk. Oh, you couldn't stick to it. I knew you couldn't stick to whatever it might be. It was a struggle.

As I've worked on self-compassion over the years with these journaling practices, with time for myself each day, with all kinds of practices that help me like the person who I am, behavior change actually becomes quite easy because you're not trying to make a change that's in conflict with how you view yourself. If you love yourself, well, the natural thing is to make healthy choices. A person who truly loves themselves

doesn't tend to binge eat ice cream. And I really say that with an open heart. I promise you, I get that that's a difficult situation to be in. But when you love yourself, and that's, I used to find it really hard to say that as a British guy, right? In England, we don't talk like this, right? The fact that you could love yourself. In Britain, that sort of phrase feels quite uncomfortable. I don't know how it lands in America, but in the UK, it's not

Culturally, it's not something that we find that acceptable. But I've learned into that, I go, "No, you know what? I kind of like the person I am today. Dare I say, I love the person I am today. I am kind. I am compassionate. I think I do live a life of integrity, integrity to myself and integrity to the people around me." And so therefore, my behaviors naturally follow suit. I find it quite easy now

to make change that lasts because I've made those underlying changes. And that ultimately is the message of this book. It's how do you make change that lasts? You get to know yourself, you get to know the underlying drivers and it ain't as hard as you think.

Beautiful. That was like the perfect place to land. That was so beautiful. It was such an honor to sit with you. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I just love your work. I love how passionate you are. You're such a great speaker. I love the unique background.

perspective that you bring. And I'm so excited for our audience to get this book. I have it in my hand and it's literally stunning. It's got really beautiful pictures and like references to the podcast and it's really easy and actionable. And I love how much you put into this as far as your story and your truth. So I'm really excited for everyone to get Make Change That Last. And I approve of this cover.

Thank you. This is my cover vote. Did you vote? This is my cover vote. Thank you very much. I'm like, like deeply, this is my cover vote. I've never done this with any of my books before. Never done it. And just for your audience, just a quick, um, just a quick summary of what happened is that I announced on Instagram that guys, the book is available to pre-order and this is the US cover and this is the UK cover.

I've done that in the past, but I was getting all these messages from people saying, I much prefer the US cover. I much prefer it. I was like, we've never had that before. So I phoned my publisher. I said, listen, I think we just pause a second, pause a second. And I put it out to my Instagram audience. This is the situation guys. I've heard you. What do you think? We had, I think 22,000 votes, 92,000.

I think 90 or 92% said they preferred this cover because it's positive, uplifting, inspiring, which is basically what the book is. Yeah. And so I phoned Penguin in the UK. I said, we've got to change it. The other, I mean. You can be honest. Said with love and reverence and appreciation. The other one was not it. Yeah. It was very, it was like desolate.

I get it. And that's what people were saying. I was like, what? And a lot of people said to me, Rangan, look, we've been following you for years. You're always positive. You're always uplifting. You're always compassionate. That old cover or the UK cover at the time, it just doesn't feel aligned with who we know you to be. And it was really, the thing is, it's important that I don't fall into external validation. So I heard what people said, right? Yeah.

But I also wanted to tune into myself. I said, I don't want to just change it because everyone wants it changed. Because that will then fall into this old trap of needing external validation. I thought about what everyone said. I went for a long walk. I thought about it. I thought, you know what? They're right. This is the cover that feels right. And so therefore, I did change. And it's exciting that all over the world, this is going to be the cover now. It's so beautiful. Thank you for voting. I appreciate that. No, I was like...

I need my voice to be heard in this for sure. So I'm excited for people to get it. Where can people find you? Where can they find the book?

The book's available all the usual places, you know, Amazon, your local bookshop. It's paperback, ebook, and an audiobook. And I narrate the audiobook. Oh yes, you just did it. Just did it. How was it? It was great. You know, this is my sixth book, so I'm used to it. So I've learned. Have you done yours yet? We're recording ours in March. I cannot wait. Audiobooks are fun. They're long days. Yeah. And not that you're asking for advice, so I won't give any. I would love it. Okay. One thing I try and do in life is not to give unsolicited advice. Please.

You need regular breaks. Okay. Okay. Really important. Even if you're getting caught up in your material because you like it, because you wrote it. I think regular breaks are really, really important because it's easy to start sounding fatigued. You don't want to sound fatigued on your own book. For me, I've experimented over the years, but I take in a big flask with, I cut ginger in the morning.

I put hot water in and I sip on it all day and it keeps my voice nicely soothed all day. So if that helps you. That's everything. I can't wait to add some spice to the stories to make it theatrical. I'm like, I was reading this book on Audible by Marian Woodman about perfectionism. And the person that's narrating it

She's like, you could tell she was tired and it crushed me because I was like, I really want to enjoy this book, but she sounds tired. So it's... Well, you've got to remember that an audiobook environment, depending on where you're recording, these studios can be quite dry. I don't mean dry in terms of air quality, just a bit sterile. And boring, yeah. And boring, right? So...

Our environment influences our behaviors so much more than we think. That's something for people to think about when they're trying to make changes that last, is your environment supporting you, right? So let's take that to the audio book

If the environment is quite sterile, there's no pictures on the wall, after a few hours, it can start to impact how you read. So take some things in with you. Like there's a gorgeous candle there, right? I love that. Take a candle in. Videos, photos, the book. Videos, yeah. Because then the more lively it feels for you, the more likely you are to sort of bring that energy to the microphone. Yes. But also, I don't know about you, how long have you podcasted for now? Since 2016. Wow. I know.

We were OGs. You are an OG. No one was doing it when we were doing it on our closet floors. Well, I can see, I mean, you're an exceptionally good host, right? I really feel that. God bless. I go on a lot of shows and, you know, at the moment I'm on a book tour. Yeah. And some people...

Again, I say this with an open heart. Some people it's like interviews with set questions and they're not present in the conversation and responding, but I have really felt from you a presence and that you're listening and that I'm listening to you and it's kind of an authentic interaction. Thank you. I think one of the things I've learned, I started in 2017, so not quite as early as you. Close. But I'll tell you how my perfectionist tendencies used to play out in podcasting. Yeah.

the guest would leave my studio. Don't start. I'm going to literally, when you leave, I'm already off. Yeah. You're like, oh, I forgot to ask this. Oh my God. No, mine is like, I should have rounded it out. Did you hear him do this? Oh, you don't even have to start with me about that. But what I've learned, and this has really helped me and hopefully it will help you, but feel free to use it if it does. I've learned that there's no such thing as a perfect conversation. It doesn't exist.

All it can ever be is what it was. Yes. And if we were to have this conversation tomorrow or in two hours, it would be different because you'd be different. If I wasn't jet lagged, for example, I would say different things, but we can't try and manipulate that and change that. All it can ever be is what it was in that moment. And I think that's a really great lesson for life in that. Yes.

I have worked really hard to get rid of my perfectionist tendencies

And I feel by and large, I have. I can slip back, but usually it's a sign that I'm sleep deprived or working too hard. But I'm pretty good now. And I've learned to accept that, yeah, sometimes I didn't pick up on a key from my guest. But you know what? It doesn't matter. Yeah. I think it's interesting because before you came, I was kind of... And I'm witness to the perfectionist. So I'm kind of watching her talk. She was like, you know, because you're so knowledgeable. You're such an amazing speaker. And I was kind of getting in my head a little bit. And I was like...

My goal is to just be... I was like, but the one thing I do have if I'm not the most intelligent or well-spoken is I'm so loving. And I was like, I just want to be as loving as I can. That is something that no one can take from me. I can be more a better speaker, a better whatever, but

the amount of love that I have to give into the world and what I do is like, incomparable. I can feel that. And I felt it when I walked in. Oh, bless. Honestly, I really felt it when I walked in. And I also want to just pick up on something you said about you saying that perhaps you're not the most intelligent or the best speaker. I disagree. Yeah. I think you come across as really intelligent and a fantastic speaker.

And again, you may have your own internal dialogue about that. But I just want to say from my side... Oh, bless. I feel like that... None of that came across. It's just like levels. You know what I mean? I feel like that. But then there's like somewhat I get into like a bigger arena. Yeah.

And I'm like, whoa, can I like play there? Because when I hear you speak, you're just, I love the way you clearly explain things. There's always a nice story. We always summarize it. Like as someone that speaks for a living, like I'm very much listening to what you're saying. And also I'm taking cues of like, that's a really nice way to express a point that's even more impactful because my desire is to make impact with what I do, not just be here to do whatever it's like. But so you be me being a better speaker helps me make more impact. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. You're clearly making a great impact. Oh, yeah, I feel. Well, this was glad you guys could hear this part. This is the most important part of the interview for me. Yeah, me too. The compliments. I come in even on my own show. Yes. What I try and do, how I define success when I'm hosting a guest in my studio is was I fully present and did I have an authentic interaction? Yeah. Yeah.

And what I learned early on as a medical doctor doing a health podcast, and frankly, I consider it a life podcast. It's about health, happiness, purpose, meaning, longevity, whatever it is, like I cover it all. I realized that my podcast is not an information delivery service. And I know it may be confusing that, but-

In my head, I thought, "Oh, I'm a doctor. I have this knowledge." Yeah. "The podcast exists to give people information." And I figured out after a few months, "No, no, no, no, it doesn't." The style I do, which is about authentic conversations, I don't call them interviews, I call them conversations, is my job is to connect with my guest. If I can connect with my guests and have an authentic interaction,

The knowledge comes across as a side effect. The goal isn't to impart knowledge. The goal is to connect with my guest. And if I can do that, the knowledge becomes so much more useful and practical. For me, it was like a penny dropping moment. I was like, oh, don't worry about getting every point in. Just be present and try and connect with this human being. Yes. I love that so much. That's always...

my goal because I think people go to interviews, they're like, so this, and you'd be like, oh, and this woman with Crohn's disease. I was like, but what about this? And you're not attuned to what's actually going on here and what's actually real. So, I mean, I completely relate. And that's what I love so much about your show is you kind of never know where we're going to go. And the information is easy to obtain because it's not being told in a way that's preachy. You're like, I'm like, oh, I love that. I, again, I,

I don't think all doctors have this approach, but this is the approach I've always taken with my patients and I take on my podcast is...

that my job is not to tell another human being what to do. Right. Right? So in this book I write about, in a section I write about this idea that I've never told a patient that they must give up smoking. Yeah. Which surprises people. They're like, "Well, you're a doctor." I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. If a patient comes in and asks for my opinion," right? Okay. So it's not unsolicited advice. They're asking for it. "Then I will tell them what impact I think smoking is having on their health."

If I feel they've understood what I've said and they then say to me, Dr. Chastity, I understand what you're saying, but I get so much enjoyment out of smoking that I'm prepared to put it with the consequences, I accept their decision.

And I think the reason I get really good compliance with my patients and have done for many years is because I treat them like human beings. It is not my job to tell another human being what to do. Yeah. Right? And what often happens, they'll go away and three months later they'll come back and they'll be like, "Hey, Dr. Chachi, actually, I know I told you that I'm prepared to put it with the consequences, but actually I've decided to give it a go. I've decided to reduce it a little bit. I think you're right, actually."

And it's kind of like what I said before about be the change you want to see in the world. Nobody wants to be told what to do by anyone else. A patient does not want to be told what to do by their doctor. It may look like that and it may lead to short-term change, but it doesn't lead to long-term change. At some point, it has to come from you. Yes. You have to trust yourself. Yes.

Beautiful. Man, we could talk for hours. Honestly, I was like, you know what? We're just going to rip. You go for the rest of my life. Again, thank you. This was just a pleasure. And I'm so grateful that you reflected those things back to me because I'm just so grateful that oftentimes in life, I'm just being reflected back the information that I need at that time. And it's just such an amazing gift that I get. So thank you. I'm excited for people to see the book. Thank you. You've really energized me. You've helped me deal with my jet lag. Oh, good.

And go back to Air One. Now you got Air One. And go back to Air One. And if people do want to check out the podcast, it's called Feel Better Live More. So good, yes. And like your show, it's on all the platforms. Yes, it's great. It's on YouTube. It's like, it's so like, it's just, it's great. So I'm excited if you guys don't know to be welcome to your world. Thanks so much. Awesome. Love you guys. Bye.

Thank you so much to Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. I just really loved having him in the studio. It was such a pleasure. I'm so grateful to be able to meet with and speak to people like that. So the book is Make Change That Lasts. You can get it wherever books are sold and you can find him on YouTube, on Instagram, and all the places for his amazing content. We love you guys. Pre-order our book now.

The link is in the show notes as well as in our Instagram bio. We cannot wait to share this with you. And make sure you subscribe to the pod. We have new episodes every single week. We want to make sure that it's in your little pod inbox. And if you're looking for like quick clips from almost 30, just quick hits of inspiration, check out Morning Microdose. That's our clips show. We appreciate you. Love you. We love you. Bye, guys. Bye.

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