Gabor Maté & Jay Shetty REVEAL The 4 Steps To FIX YOUR LIFE! | Rangan Chatterjee

it's the fundamental life that's being lived that needs to change not not the external behaviors that doesn't create happiness it creates more uncertain ground because we learned how to ignore our feelings as children now we learn to ignore them for the rest of our lives and that then creates problems for us [Music] in the introduction you say all drugs and all behaviors of addiction substance dependent or not whether gambling sex the internet or cocaine all of them either soothe pain directly or distract from it hence your mantra the first question is not why the addiction but why the pain and i think that beautifully sums it up um you know in in that you're liking you're likening addiction to drugs potentially to you know sex gambling alcohol maybe shopping so i've had my own shopping addiction and i can tell you that the what happens in my brain when i'm indulged in my shopping addiction is exactly the same that happens in the brain of the cocaine addict in other words there's an excitation of the reward incentive and motivation circuitry and what the addict is after is that temporary change in brain status really what it is all addictions are an attempt to regulate an unbearable emotional state internally but you're trying to regulate your internal state through external means and that's what an addiction is so temporarily you get a change in the state of your brain in a change of your physiology you can do that through drugs you can also do it to gambling or internet or sex or shopping but essentially after that same revitalization of your incentive and motivational circuitry of your brain and so from my perspective there's only one universal addiction process that dominates all addicted people the targets of addiction may be different the internal effects are much the same yeah and and i'm sorry i should add when you look at the the the sources of it the states that people are trying to escape are straits of emotional distress states of emotional pain enhance why the addiction not by the addiction but by the pain so some people who are listening to this or watching this right now might be thinking yeah i get that that all sounds fine um for those people who are addicted but i of course am not addicted to anything so you've got a rather beautiful definition i think of addiction which i think will be really helpful to sort of go through at the start here so that people listening can actually figure out if it does relate to them or not well when i speak to a room of people and i ask them how many are addicted most people will only think of drugs so some people put their hand up then i give them my broader definition of addiction and everybody puts their hand up and that definition is that an addiction is manifested in any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves but suffers negative consequences in the long term and is going to be able to give it up so any behavior not just drugs the key hallmarks are craving pleasure relief in the short term negative outcomes in the long term inability to to give it up that's what an addiction is and that could be to drugs nicotine caffeine alcohol the legal the lethal and legal substances or it could be to heroin cocaine crystal meth fentanyl cannabis any number of other substances but it could also be to sex to gambling to shopping to eating to work to exercise to the internet to gaming to pornography to political power to the acquisition of wealth to the hoarding of objects anything and by and when you give that definition and you ask people how many here would acknowledge some addiction in their life sometimes the vast majority of people would put their hands up which means to say that addictions are in a continuum it's on a spectrum and they're distributed dispersed throughout all of our society and so that the identified drug addicts make up only a small narrow segment of our addicted population really the whole way we we think about addiction the way we criminalize various forms of addiction really needs to change to a much more a more compassionate way of dealing with it but also really trying to understand what's the root cause because if you know i totally subscribe to your theories and i i and i think that ultimately if the root cause of all addiction or all addictive behavior is the same how do we tackle that and where does that come from what is that root cause so once you're asking not by the addiction but by the pain now you have to forget that it's a choice because nobody chooses to be in pain and you also have to forget the medical idea that it's an inherited brain disease you actually have to look at people's lives now in vancouver's downtown site in canada where i worked for 12 years with a highly addictive population these people had multiple addictions cocaine alcohol cannabis opiates of all kinds cigarettes in every case they suffered with hiv with hepatitis c they would die of overdoses suicide infections of all kinds and these people every single one of them had been heavily traumatized in childhood all the women i worked with over 12 years had been sexually abused all the men had been neglected or beaten or emotionally abused i'm talking about another severely addicted population which is also what the large-scale study shows that the greater the childhood adversity the greater risk for addiction in adulthood now the more severe the childhood adversity the greater the risk of substance addiction and injection use however if you look at my own case [Music] i wasn't beaten i wasn't abused in my family or origin um i wasn't neglected but i was a jewish infant born during the war in hungary um and spent my first year under the nazis nazi regime you can imagine underworld circumstances it's like a very unhappy stressed terrorized mother and children can be hurt in two ways shouldn't be children can be heard when bad things happen to them that shouldn't happen that's the abuse that's the violence in the family that's the parental addiction but children can also be hurt when their needs are not met now i had this need for an attuned empathetic emotionally responsive mother she couldn't be that not because she didn't love me not because she didn't do her best but simply she was too terrorized she was too depressed the lack of that joyful attuned loving mother who i shouldn't say loving because she loved me tremendously but her love couldn't be translated into responsive behavior that alone was enough to hurt me so in other words the source of addiction is always some kind of childhood hurt either because bad things happen that shouldn't have or because the good things that should have happened couldn't happen because of the parents emotional states both of these are enough to hurt the child in a way to driving them to self-suit through addictions so so do you think your own experience of trauma really as a as a young baby not even a child as a young baby has impacted your own health your own behaviors and therefore ultimately where you are today which is one of the world's leading voices on trauma and addiction do you think that has been instrumental in you getting to where you are today having to deal with the impacts of that has been instrumental i mean i really as an adult i was a successful physician you know i was much in demand a family practitioner i was head of a palliative care department at a major hospital i was a national medical columnist for canadian newspaper in my 50s and internally i was driven workaholic depressed affected by adhd anxious and unfulfilled and unsatisfied and it's when looking at those dynamics and wondering what the heck has happened to me here and what is the gap between my external persona and my internal experience of myself that's when i began to deal with trauma not to mention as a family physician and you and i were talking about this before we get to see patients before they get sick the specialists only see them after the illness has been diagnosed i get to see people before they get ill i get to see people in their context of their multi-generational family background so we have a much broader view of who gets sick and why and so both through my medical work and having to deal with my own stuff i began to realize the central role of trauma in shaping people's health or illness yeah since i've since i've been studying trauma myself um both with the work that you do but just other things that i'm reading around it it really helps me understand my patients and their behavior is much better i really start to you can start to tap in now as to what they're coming in with them or you think oh that's what's going on behind that not the symptom they're describing but but why they making those choices and some of you may not know gabriel i i a few years ago i did um a series of documentaries on bbc one called doctor in the house and what i would do on that is i went to live alongside families who had health problems they were already under gps they were already under specialists they were all taking medication pretty much already and they still weren't getting better and they were still struggling so i went in to sometimes i'd stay the night in their houses i'd live alongside them really get to understand you know what choices they were making with their lifestyle sure but also i'd get to see you know various dynamics in the family the sort of thing that would never come up in the consultation room even if you ask that question they would never even think to bring those things up but you just start to spot things and little dynamics and i found that with every single family pretty much now if i if i reflect back on all those families i stayed alongside i was very fortunate to get really good health outcomes with them all after about six weeks but there was a huge emotional component behind a lot of the illness now just to be clear i'm not saying that it was in their head at all they had proper physical symptoms that were that they were struggling with and obviously that in some ways can make people feel down a little bit about themselves because they're not feeling so good but i really got the strong sense that when you start to look at their lives and their upbringing and how they saw themselves it was just it was uncanny how many times their emotional health was absolutely tied into their physical health well so one of the books i've written which will be published in britain in a few months is entitled when the body says no the cost of hidden stress and i'm making the case precisely as i heard your articulators now is that when it comes to chronic illness and whether it's colitis or crohn's disease multiple sclerosis als or motor neuron disease in england malignancy chronic psoriasis eczema chronic fatigue syndrome the physiological symptoms which are not in people's heads in the sense that they're imagining them but it very much originates in people's heads in that it has a lot to do with certain relational and emotional patterns that they adopted in childhood in other words what i'm saying is that because of childhood programming people impose certain unconscious stresses on themselves and no stresses because of the unity of mind and body which unfortunately is not taught or recognized in the medical schools but which scientifically is not even vaguely controversial because the immune system and the emotional apparatus and the hormonal apparatus and the nervous system are part and parcel of the same system so when something occurs emotionally which it does on a chronic basis that has an impact of undermining people's physiology turning their immune system against themselves or suppressing the immune system so i absolutely agree that people's emotional patterns which reflect not individual choices or mistakes but multi-generational patterns in the family those emotional patterns translate into physical illness and and and and and if we can address those emotional dynamics we can actually have an impact on the physiological course of their illness which is again not something that anybody in medical school will ever tell you because there's this unfortunate separation of mind and body that you and i are trained in yeah absolutely i think the key one of the key things there for me was that you're not putting blame on people there's no blame yeah and i think that's really really a key point to maybe we can discuss now because a lot of people may be hearing that feeling you know maybe i've done this to myself or my mother did this to me for example and that's not what you're saying at all is it well this is an interesting conversation i make the distinction between blame and responsibility blame says that you did something that you could have done otherwise and so you're therefore you're at fault that's what blame says responsibility says yes you do this to yourself but not consciously or deliberately you did it because you're programmed to do it by your own childhood experience which in turn was programmed by your parents childhood experience so there's nobody at fault everybody does their best but we do pass these unconscious patterns on and you don't blame people for having unconscious patterns you try to make them conscious of it so they can take responsibility for it so there's no con there's no responsibility without consciousness and so and and there's no blame so i don't blame anybody for their illness i don't blame their parents either but i do say these unconscious patterns have been passed on and these unconsciously emotional dynamics have an impact on your physiology that's all and if you want to have an impact on your physiology you got to get conscious you have to realize what have you been doing unconsciously so you can stop doing it or do it differently so it's a matter of liberating people from these ingrained patterns for which they're not to be blamed so in my world there's no room for blame whatsoever but there's room for helping people to become responsible for helping people being responsible being able to respond to their circumstances and without awareness none of us are responsible yeah i think if i think to my own life and my own health journey over the last few years and i guess what's really changed for me over the last few years you know i've done a lot with my lifestyle i've done a lot with my nutrition my sleep and those things have been great and they've really helped me but over the last years i've really been focused on my emotional health you know i i see a therapist pretty regularly um and i can always feel when i've got something new some some deeper layer that's starting to come out you know i i have a session or i go through some sort of therapy and i i feel good i feel oh yeah you know i've got it now i get it i get it why i do this and it changes your behavior certainly but it's almost as a as if you as you do that there's multiple layers it's like peeling back a layer of the you know it's peeling back layers of the onion and newer things keep coming out um which has been it's been really rewarding for me because you know you talk about addiction and i i think back to my my own life and various things that i've done at certain points you know i don't think anyone who knows me well uh maybe my close friends but most people probably wouldn't think that i've ever had an addiction because we have all these connotations about addiction you know you know it's like you know being being on a street corner or being a drug addict or something but but everyone around me would know that i've got an addicted personality yeah and i used to think that that was my personality that's the way i was born what's weird that as i start to process my own emotional baggage and i start to clear it i'm no longer as an addictive person as i used to be and that's why i really i kind of feel i feel so strongly about the work that you're doing because i kind of feel that that wasn't my personality that was the behavior i had chosen to soothe something that i was missing so without how would i would put it i mean i agree with your concept i would just use a different language around the show that was your personality but it wasn't your person it wasn't who you were the personality itself is a defensive structure that we develop as a way of dealing with our pain so much of what we consider to be a personality is actually an overlay upon our two cells and so these weren't choices in childhood for example um with my add the tuning out i never chose to tune out but when i was an infant under the conditions that i described of being a jewish infant under the nazis i had plenty of stress on me and how does an infant deal with stress that they can't change they tune out and then the tuning out becomes programmed into my brain and then so many years later i'm diagnosed with aed it wasn't a choice that i made it was an adaptation so what i would say about the personality including what you described as your addictive personality it wasn't you it was an adaptation that you took on as a way of surviving your childhood as a way of soothing your pain it's when we got older that we realized that there's something more to us than a personality that the personality is actually a defensive cover for who we truly are and as we start like as you describe your own process you go through therapy and you go through layers and then you realize oh that's not actually me yeah and i'm freer without it then you realize that what we thought was the personality was actually just a defensive cover and and once we stripped that defense off and we find it no longer necessary we become much more truer ourselves more much more true to ourselves so become much more balanced and happier in our lives so yes it was the personality but you are not your personality that's right that's why i would formulate it yeah no i i love the way you put that actually it really helps me think about it in a slightly different way i think something came into my mind there which is you know and we were chatting a little bit about this before we got on air um about medicine and how in how reductionist it has become the practice of medicine and i think like something like high blood pressure for example i think of as an appropriate response from the body to the signals that it's been given absolutely and i think there's an analogy there with what you're saying which is if you if you're surrounded by stress as a young baby whatever that stress is your brain is going to adapt to that it's an appropriate response to the signals that your brain is getting is that fair to say that's right so so my next book is going to be entitled the myth of normal illness and health in an insane culture and when i seen in culture in saint culture i'm in a culture that doesn't meet human needs so if you take a condition like high blood pressure for which what's the medical term for high blood pressure hypertension hypertension all right and and doctors of course say our colleagues say well there's a few types of hypertension forces that cause like kidney disease or some kind of hormonal disorder but for most part we don't know what causes high blood pressure essential hypothesis essentially we've got essentially basically we don't know what the heck we're talking about that's what that means just take the word hypertension and slow down a bit hyper tension hyper tension hyper tension maybe there's too much tension in people's lives you know and if you actually look at the the rising rates of hypertension it's got to do with social pressure and social stresses and i know that usually when i take care of myself i have the blood pressure of a young person but there's been times in my life when i've been driven by stress and i've had the blood pressure ranges in the in the in the risky uh end of the scale so so for me when my blood pressure goes up it's a real warning buddy you've got too much tension in your lives you better do something about it all we do in medicine is we hand out pills or we tell people to lose weight but we never address the sources of real tension in their lives and i'd say that most hypertension and so for example if you look at a black black american males they're much higher risk of hypertension than say white american males what we say is genetic no it isn't their biological relatives in africa do not have high blood pressure right so it's an artifact of being a black male in essentially a racist society and james baldwin the american writer once said that being a black american male is to live in a condition of suppressed rage all the time yeah well that's suppressed rage will drive your blood pressure so hypothetically i drive other ill health yeah yeah so so high blood pressure is a great example of a socially induced physiological physiological condition which is mediated through our emotions and the impact of our emotions on our autonomic nervous system and our hormones yeah it's i mean i've never really thought about the term hypertension like that before you know hyper tension and it and it makes such sense yeah when we think about it like that you mentioned this this new book you're writing about how we've got a i think is it an insane society around us yeah and i think if i think of stress you know as i've mentioned to you i've i've just spent a few months locked away writing a new book on stress called the stress solution and i i feel strongly that when we talk about making changes so a lot of people when they try and improve their health they try and improve their lifestyle okay which is a pretty reasonable start but many people i find can't do that or they do it temporarily for a few weeks a few days a few months maybe but then they revert back and as a doctor i've always been intrigued as to why some patients keep coming back and why do some patients with the same so-called problem get better with the same course of treatment right and and i always think well if they keep coming back i'm clearly not getting to the root cause of the problem and the more i think about your work although people talk about you in in the realm of addiction and trauma i think your work doesn't only explain addiction and trauma it explains all human behavior and therefore has profound implications not only for trauma not only for pain not only for addiction but actually the whole of the health landscape well thank you and again in my various books i've written about that um it just so happens that it's my addiction book that's being published right now first in england um when you get down to it it's very simple either you raise human beings whose needs are met or you raise human beings in a way that you don't meet their needs when you don't meet people's needs they have to adapt in artificial ways those adaptations become the sources of illness later on there was a very interesting article in the journal pediatrics which is the official journal of the american academy of pediatrics published in january 2012. there was an article on childhood development generated by the harvard center and the developing child so species as you get and the inner abstract they say that human environments that because of scarcity or stress [Music] trouble young children cause these children to make adaptations which are psychological and physiological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation but which may come at a long-term cost to health behavior and longevity in other words the way that young children adapt to um to stress early on helps them survive that early stress but in the long term those same adaptations become sources of pathology so if you if you look at my own tuning out so the tuning out that i did as an infant under conditions of severe psychological strain is an adaptation it helped me as an infant survive a year where the situation was utterly impossible but that same tuning out gets programmed into my brain and now i'm diagnosed with the medical condition adhd decades later so what was that was adaptive in my circumstance becomes maladaptive later on i'm suggesting that much of illness uh begins with that that these are necessary personally adaptations however which then stress us later on and so that is a real so what's common to my work is that i look at the sources of adult functional dysfunction in our formative experiences and you know that's not controversial if you look at a gardener i mean if a gardener looks at their plants they know that how they treat that young plant will have a huge impact on the on the adult plant anybody who's in animal husbandry will realize that how you treat the young whether it's a dog or a horse will a huge impact on the personality and behavior of that animal later on why don't we get the same thing in human beings it's the same principle so it's essentially very simple yeah it really is isn't it when you when you break it down to the yeah like that it's super simple we need to we need a society that really supports children and babies and mothers and parents at a young age absolutely and then i guess what comes to my mind is and you may know the stats on this i don't but we here in the uk we always are talking about scandinavia and we talk about how they are really prioritizing those early years you know they give a lot of maternity leave a lot of paternity leave um you know yes they may have high taxes but it seems to me that their society there has prioritized family and bringing up children whereas i don't think we're quite as good here and but i don't think we're as bad as the us [Music] a really good friend of mine he married an american girl and she i i can't remember maybe after she gave birth to her first child she might have been back at work it might mean something like four weeks or something yeah something obscene like to me it sounds obscene to me absolutely and the child's in daycare yeah and i wonder i wonder if you could talk about that a little bit how society is set up now and then what that is doing because you mentioned your mum's clearly that's a huge trauma i mean that's hopefully the sort of trauma that most of us aren't experiencing but are there similarities in terms of what that's doing to the child oh absolutely so united states which to hear their politicians is the best and most glorious country in the world which itself by the way is interesting like if you met a person if your neighbor was always telling you how great he was and how he's the best and everybody wants to be like him what would you think of him yeah you think he's got a grandiose personality disorder and he's compensating for his real sense of deficiency well that's the united states and they have a lot to compensate for and what you say about child care is absolutely true is that they have a barbaric child care system a barbaric maternity leave system where women and often poor women on welfare have to go back to work after a few weeks of giving birth now if you look at human evolution or look at an ape culture the eight mothers hold their babies for months there's no separation the child actually develops by through being held by the mother and human societies until very recently were organized their own children being around their parents really all their lives certainly through a childhood and adolescence there was just no separation what we do in our culture more in the states than elsewhere but increasingly elsewhere as well we separate children from their plants in others will be depriving them from the natural conditions for healthy development now there was a study last year or two years ago comparing the crying of british german canadian and danish children lo and behold danish kids cried much less than these others what was the difference the parents were around much more and their parents were much likely to pick up the kids when they were crying that's what made the difference now that crying child is an anxious child when the child is crying it's not just a benign thing the child is crying because they're stressed when they're stressed their brains are suffused by stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol adrenal and cortisol interfere with your physiology interfere with healthy brain development so just the fact of holding a child which was historically and prehistorically the standard is is an essential aspect of childbearing which modern societies have denied and as a matter of fact i don't know what it's like in england but in north america we actually advise parents not to pick up their kids when they're crying at night we tell them not to pick them up help we sleep train the kid by not picking them up in other words denying the child's needs for connection and what's that doing to the child do you think well it does a number of things one is to give the child the message that his emotions don't matter and children take everything personally it's not true that babies don't have emotions and it's not true that babies are tabula rasa where you can write anything you want babies have certain defined emotional needs and when they get the message that they're not important that's the message they're going to imbibe unconsciously non-verbally and you can see that behavior in the adults you know the person who comes into your office and says doc i'm sorry to bother you i'm sure you have many people much more important than me but i have this little problem you know what kind of childhood they had yeah um number one so it gives that would be me going into the doctor okay or in in just various assets of my life and you know the people pleaser yeah always doing you know always yeah yeah no problem you know the amount of times i think just on a social thing you'd be like where do you want to go guys yeah no worries wherever you end up somewhere you just don't want to be in you're in a restaurant you hate the food in but yeah it's cool guys no problem and it's sorry i don't mean to trivialize what you're saying it's you're not realizing it what you're actually illustrating you're telling me exactly what kind of infancy you had yeah [Music] i think one of the first times i came across you was a few years back i heard you on an interview so i can't remember what the interview was i remember being really impacted by what you said i think who is this guy i mean this is pretty incredible what i heard and it was it wasn't one of your videos that you were talking a lot about i think identity and i think it was something about it really got me thinking about what is my identity i guess i was on a journey then anyway since i lost my father about what seven years ago now i think that was the one of the significant moments in my life that got me to start questioning everything thinking about well who am i you know am i living my life or am i living somebody else's life i think you expressed it so beautifully but then when i read your book i think you start off very early on with identity so i wonder if you could expand on identity what is it and why do you think many of us need to spend a bit of time thinking about it yeah so i i think i know exactly which interview you're talking about and what i say in it there the monks start with identity and at the root of the issue because a lot of what we experience in the world today as you know and and i know how holistic you are in the way you advise your patients when you were speaking on my podcast i was so impressed by you and how you're able to tie in so many psychological and natural practices and relational exercises that can improve people's health and well-being overall i remember you talking about encouraging your clients to see more friends as a way of changing the way they feel and i was thinking wow this person's got so many great ideas and the reason is because rangan you also have that monk mindset or if you go to the root of the issue it's really easy to just say oh well just take two of these a day or try this or you know maybe you need to do this but when you think about it from the root perspective where do our challenges arise and our challenges arise by how we see ourselves and what i believe wrong is referring to is there's this quote that i begin my book with and that i've shared in interviews for the last few years and it's from a writer named charles horton cooley who wrote this in the 1900s and what he said is that sorry i think it's in the 1800s at the end of the 1800s towards the 1900s and he said and and bear with me and you've gotta really listen closely to this so what he said that the challenge today is i'm not what i think i am i'm not what you think i am i am what i think you think i am now just let that blow your mind for a moment i will explain it i promise i'm not what i think i am i'm not what you think i am i am what i think you think i am which means we live in a perception of a perception of ourselves so i'll break it down if i think rangan thinks i'm smart i'll say i feel smart but if i think rangan thinks i'm not smart then i'll say i'm not smart and so the challenge is that we're basing how we feel about ourselves on what we think someone thinks of us and and the greatest challenge with that is how do you have any idea if what you think someone thinks about you is even true and whether that's even the best place to start so that's where our identity struggles we start pursuing things in life because we think other people value them it's almost like let's think of the most playground version of this if i remember wearing high-tech shoes from bhs to the playground right i remember my mom because my parents didn't buy me nike uh trainers or adidas trainers which i always wanted you know we didn't come from that background i couldn't i couldn't afford them and my parents didn't want me to have them so i'd walk in with my high tech trainers from bhs that were about 10 quid or whatever they were and and and you know to me it didn't make a difference i didn't really know at that time whether high-tech was good or bad they were just trainers that my parents bought me now everyone the cool kid at school had the latest nike trainers all of a sudden i start thinking that he's now surrounded by everyone everyone's talking about his trainers everyone's giving him adoration everyone's giving him respect everyone's talking about his trainers so now i think that if i want to have that same experience and love from people that i need to get that not realizing that i may be able to get deeper love from people by being kind and compassionate that i may actually be able to build a real relationship with people if i'm loving and and considerate and empathetic and it's so crazy how your life can become about pursuing something and that's why jim carrey puts it best and i'm paraphrasing he says you know everyone in the world should achieve everything they've ever wanted and accomplish everything they've ever pursued just to realize that it's not the point now that doesn't mean the monk mindset is not about not pursuing your goals it's actually about pursuing your truest goals your truest self and your most authentic aligned goals so it's not about not having goals it's about making sure that your goals are actually yours yeah and you know i get shivers when you say that cooley quotes oh me too and i think i've had it i've had a flashback i think i can't say for sure where it was when i heard that interview but i think i was on a train from manchester to london or london back to manchester and i think i pressed pause and i think i wrote it in my notes i think i'm pretty sure i wrote it and i i rewound it i played it again i thought hold on i've got the first part the second part what's that third part i really had to sit with it for a while and i would urge people if they need to press pause right now listen to it and really think about it and i think you know it's really interesting you know hearing that and i reflect on my children who i know you had a very brief lovely conversation with just before we started i might put that in at the end of the podcast maybe it was beautiful but i i think about this as they go through school and you know they start to see what other people have got and you know um we my wife and i were very keen to try and not put value on those things because i know i also had experiences like that when i say oh god man they're wearing those things i want to wear those because if i wear them i'm going to be happy i saw a maybe a year ago or so i saw a gary vaynerchuk video online when he was um telling someone at one of his conferences he was you know he was talking about a bmw and he basically said to the guy in his in and you know in his inimitable way which is wonderful um that i think you own a bmw because of what other people will think of you when you drive that bmw and the guy literally you know in that clip he just sort of sat with it and he said yeah i do i mean it's what it symbolized is to to people around him and again i'm not having to go anyone who who might be doing that you know we all do things at times to get that um that validation or what we think is the validation from people around them but i think what you're trying to get at is how do we find our own identity how do we live our own lives so so jay how do we do that if we spent a lifetime living someone else's life how do we in our 30s or our 20s or our 40s or our 50s how do we just decide oh i'm going to start finding out what my life is yes absolutely and and i love the tone you're sharing this in rangan because my tone's the same like you know i'm not i'm not coming at this from a point of view of you know we're wasting our lives or i've got it figured out like i i don't want to make this about you not getting your goals or not having pursuits or not wanting to become something because i want to do all those things too but it's about why you're doing it and it's also about making sure they're truly motivated by your inner desire right like that's the point it's like if you want to drive a bmw drive a bmw because that's the car you love don't drive it because you think if you want to be a doctor become a doctor because you think that's how you're going to serve humanity not because you think people will be impressed if you want to go to harvard or princeton or oxford or cambridge go there because you really want to study how to solve the world's problems not because you think it looks good on your resume right that's the point that we're going after so thank you ronga for like re-centering that that tonal piece and i i appreciate it so where do we start one of my favorite ways to start is looking at what we value and values are a very intangible word and so there's a very easy way to figure out what you value there's two things you have to look at you look at how you spend your money the most painful thing you can possibly do go through your bank statement and look at where your money is being spent that is what you value the other thing that we spend just like we spend money is how we spend our time those are the two most perfect ways to see what you currently value your value isn't what's in your head isn't what's in your heart it isn't what's in your mind it's how you spend your money and how you spend your time and so just to give you an overview and i share this in the book that research was done on how we spend our time and the research showed that we spent 33 years in bed right 33 years of our life in bed and seven years of that is spent trying to sleep not even sleeping right we spend one year and four months exercising across our whole lives these are by the way we spend more than three years on vacation and we spend a bunch of days trying to get ready and we spend a bunch of time you know standing in lines and queues and so much of our time just gets spent so the question we have to ask ourselves is where am i currently spending my time and where do i want to spend it now studies also show that people everyone has to go to work so this isn't about what you do for work people who had more meaningful purposeful lives and while healthier wealthier and wise invest their time in education over entertainment and wrong and your your audience is lucky because they get education and entertainment in one place but but that's the goal right like that's the goal that you're creating an opportunity for people to find education the the smartest the wealthiest the most healthiest the wisest people in the world reading books watching documentaries taking courses listening to podcasts learning to better themselves and so that's the first place to start the second place when we look at that value audit is i want you to write down three things that you're currently pursuing in life it might be a promotion it might be a new home whatever it is whatever it is that you are currently pursuing and then i want you to ask this question is that your desire and your dream or is it coming from something outside of you is it coming from a pressure of a family member is it coming from an expectation because your friend just bought something where is that desire truly coming from and the third and final question you want to ask yourself is do i still want to pursue that or do i want to change how i pursue it or do i not want to pursue it at all and if you go through that three-step questioning process you'll get to the truth of what you truly want to pursue and stop yourselves from building a sand castle which the waves of time will eventually wash away and so that's what we get lost doing we get lost building castles that we don't even want to live in yeah it's so profound and you know i really think that there's something unique about the times in which we live now there really is this dissatisfaction this lack of contentment you know you put it so beautifully at the start of this conversation i don't know if you've seen the documentary minimalism um or not which i think you'd absolutely love it i i really really enjoy it i've seen it a couple of times i've watched it with my kids again recently but again it's these two guys in their 30s who you know they've got success by society's definition they've got the job they're earning good money you know but there's a hole inside there's a feeling of is this all there is to life and so i really think you're tapping on something that is that is really out there at the moment and really if people can get their heads around this i think it can transform their own lives but also transform the lives of the people around them which i think is really really exciting now you call it a value audit and i thought that word was really interesting because i have been sort of i had i had sort of nearly three weeks off social media until two days ago like i didn't post i went offer i made a thing of it and i found that i i found it a lot easier to go inward in my life it was just one thing to switch off a bit of noise for me that i i'm not saying everyone has to do this it's just something i personally find useful i also like to i think it's a nice example to set to people that you can do it uh if you want to but what was really interesting is i've been doing a values exercise with myself i've been trying to write down five core values that i want to live my life by and it really struck me that a lot of people and probably include myself in this have got an idea of what we think our values are but unless we actually go and audit the process of what are we spending our time and money doing we have no idea if we really are living those values so i really like the term audit because it's not your perception of how you think you're actually spending your money or spending your time it's the reality of it and i think it's something that i haven't done it and i think i think i'm gonna do it i think i can actually see is it aligned with what you say you stand for are you actually spending time like that so is this a common thing do you think for people that they have a there's that there is a gap between their desired values and their actual values i genuinely believe first of all ranga thank you for sharing that too and i i genuinely believe that people are well intentioned and want to do good in the world i believe that i believe that people have a good heart they're smarter than we think they are they want to do good in the world and they want to put out good energy but you're exactly right that that intention needs to be converted and transferred into real behavior and this is where you'll find you know you'll hear a friend or someone you know say oh you know i really value loyalty and i really don't like gossip and then you find out that that person was gossiping about you and how does that feel it completely feels like someone's broken your trust and so often the way we see ourselves or want to see ourselves is amplified compared to how we actually behave so we'll spot something and there's a there's a beautiful story that i share in the book and there's lots of these across the book uh but there's these there's these old ancient indian and zen stories and there's this story of the evil king that goes to meet a good king so the evil king goes to the the castle the quarters of the good king and the good king being a good king invites the evil king inside for some dinner they sit down these servers bring out the plates the plates are placed in front of the evil king and the good king and they're just about to eat and as just about as they're about to eat the evil king switches the place and and the good king goes what's going on like is that some ceremony in your time like why are we doing this and the evil king goes well i don't know you might have poisoned my food you you might be trying to kill me you might have poisoned it and the good king just passed out laughing he's just like really like come on this like i've invited you for dinner like this is my team like you know whatever it is like let's start eating right now and just about he's about to eat the evil king swaps it back again and the good king goes well now what then and he goes well i don't know you might be double bluffing me and that night the evil king doesn't eat the good king happily eats his plate the point is that so often we think we don't have some of the mistakes that we make but we see them in everyone else we see those mistakes in other people so we'll say oh this person's not doing this right or i don't like the way he or she talk to that person but if we really do an audit in ourselves we'll realize that we have a lot of those same challenges and feelings that we may think others have and so for me it's sometimes a really scary and daunting task to do that values audit but it truly truly is a beautiful process that we all need to go through to really realign our map and get our compass right and start moving in the right direction i mean is it the sort of thing that people do once or is it the sort of thing that people should revisit and i guess you know if i was to ask you when was the last time you did that exercise on yourself yeah great question so i'd say that you have to revisit like gardening if you look at your garden outside and i can see a bit i can see a light little glimpse of rangan's garden but if if you have a garden how often do you have to garden maybe you mow the lawn i don't know once a week once a month i don't know you know whatever whatever you yeah i'd say once a week i like a nice you know shortish lawn i don't like it when it gets too long so there you go once a week and so i'd say that you have to treat this exercise like gardening because when you do a values audit what you're really doing is gardening your values and what that means is you're pulling out the weeds and you're planting new seeds that's really the activity that's happening here you're planting seeds in your mind values that are good values that are going to grow into fruits and trees and give shade to others and help other people or if you don't garden once a month let's say rangan leaves his he doesn't bother for the last six months during covid he just lets it be there what's going to happen that garden's going to be full of weeds it's going to be full of stuff that he doesn't want there right it might attract bugs or other things that are there that he doesn't want and that's what happens with our values that after a while our values start to attract dust they start to attract uh being covered over by so many other desires so i would say it's a regular habit i'd say that i do a refining values and intention exercise on myself about three times a week i used to do it every day but probably about three times a week and i'm not saying anyone has to do it that often i do it that often because i feel i live a life that is constantly moving constantly challenging and i'm presented with a lot of options and opportunities that i never imagined i'd have and so i have to really train my mind to focus on these value audits but i also know that every year i spend two or three years two or three weeks and i go back to the monastery in india and i spend time in the ashram with monks and so i feel this is both an activity that happens weekly or monthly i'd say once a month i i'd say the best way is to treat it like your accounts and your taxes look at it every month look at your bank statement every month and then once a year when you have to do your taxes and you're going through that tax return and getting it all right you kind of do a deep dive on it so i'd say if everyone could spend three days a year five days a year going really deep and then one hour a month a couple of hours a month that would be a great way to build it into your practice yeah now i just want to contrast it with taxes and uh accounts which can often be quite tedious and um you know tear your hair out type exercises for people full of pressure i would sort of say that the kind of practices that are that your book is jam-packed full of practical tools for people i once you get into this way of thinking once you start thinking like a monk these practices become fun yeah right yes yes you know like a lot of when it was a doctor one of the things that frustrates me is that everything around health let's say working out for example tends to be around you know punishing yourself and pushing yourself and suffering and so we start to associate things that are good for us as being difficult and as being punishing but actually all the tools in your book are going to be good for everyone they're really going to help people but i would actually say that they're fun and if i just speak to my own experience over the last seven years of really again since my dad died diving into personal growth not because it was like oh dad's not here now i'm going to do some personal growth no it was just in the trauma of dad's death in the sort of emptiness i felt afterwards that's where i went i i would i sort of needed that pain on one level to then get me to start asking questions but i love the process of getting to know myself better i love doing these audits i love trying to figure out my values i i like potentially almost getting addicted to it like it feels good and then you start to i feel you start to switch off from the the noise around you and you really start to become tuned in yeah to who you are and what makes you what makes you tick learning about ourselves is actually the most fun thing in the world it's the most enjoyable thing in the world when you find out about a new way that your mind works and how this value is going to unlock this opportunity in your life wrong and spot-on it's it's such a exciting thing to do and and i would encourage you to make it fun so i have i'll tell you an example of some of the fun activities that i love in the book so one of my favorite ones is i sometimes set my set self the challenge of not comparing not complaining and not criticizing and the way i like to do this test is i keep a jar of uh post-it notes of every time i compare complain or criticize i'll put it in there and then i have another jar of every time i'm collaborative uh supportive to others and grateful and what i love doing is almost doing a competition with myself because i love being competitive too i love engaging that in a competition with myself of how often can i make sure so what you find is the first day you realize oh no i i complained ten times today the second day you're like oh i only did seven times today and the third day you're like i only did four in the fourth day you're like oh only once and then on the weekend you binge complain again and it all goes up again but the point is that you make it fun and enjoyable because what you understand is that you are not your criticism you are not these negative thoughts you are not these negative beliefs they've just become conditioned and habits just as your garden is not weeds and what happens is we start thinking that we are our pain we start thinking that we are stress right we say things like i am just a stressful person right i am just a negative person and the truth is you're not you're just going through a negative space and time you just adopted a negative habit or a negative thought but you are not a negative person it's just in the same ways you are not unhealthy you've just adopted unhealthy habits and i think when you start making that disconnect between you and the habits you have you start to realize oh if i change the habits i naturally change [Music] you might liken modern society to a zoo where you take an animal from a natural habitat and you put them in a completely artificial restricted situation and you expect him to stay as normal as he was out there in the wild essentially that's what's happened to human beings in that in a very short space of time in a blink of an eye from the perspective of evolution we've been we've gone from the hunter-gatherer small band communal attachment based group to a society which is alienated disconnected and that this connection is uh is is accelerating at a tremendous rate throughout the world um urbanization it's taking people out of their villages into the big cities where they're alone uh here in britain there was quite a deliberate assault on community under the thatcher regime with the destruction of neighborhoods and communities and so on and that trend has continued so what we're having in is societies that are less and less natural to the actual makeup of human beings from the evolutionary perspective and which means that children are being brought up under increasingly artificial and disconnected circumstances and you know johan hari who's written a book recently on the uh on on depression called lost connections it's pointing exactly that's what happened in modern society so that these lost connections characterize the modern world and as they do you're getting the spread of autoimmune disease into countries that never used to have it before yeah so we think autoimmune disease is one of these or addictions for that matter so if you look at the rate of addiction now in in countries like uh china and india it's going up exponentially precisely because of the uh and it's not a question of idealizing the old way of life right we can't go back and and of course there's all kinds of benefits to to progress and industrialization trouble is that as we progress we forget the benefits of we forget what we've lost so instead of combining progress we're trying to hold on to what was best about some of the old ways we just throw everything out and and we think we can reinvent ourselves and as we do we're making ourselves sick yeah you're right i think it's a really great point to to to sort of bring up we're not saying we need to go back to hunter gatherer tribes we can yeah not only should we not we can't and then there are so many great benefits of the modern world and as you say industrialization i guess it's it's how do we learn from the past how do we learn from our evolutionary heritage and what can we implement from that within the constraints of the modern world that certainly that's how i see it and you mentioned johan hari's new book and you know i i write a huge quarter of my book on stress is about this um it's about relationships and our yeah our lack of connection these days you know one on one level we are we've been told anyway that we're more connected than we've ever been before and certainly in a digital sense that may be the case but you know when we talk about real human meaningful connection what i see around me with the public but what i also see in my practice as a doctor is i don't think we've ever been this disconnected and lonely we're more wired but we're less connected is how i would put it because genuine connection happens between people not between pieces of technology so as you and i are talking to each other there's a real interaction yeah when you speak i'm looking at you i'm listening to the modulation of your voice i may not in agreement or shake my head in disagreement vice versa but the communication is taking place so many different levels that's the connection if you're never having the same conversation online it'd be all different ball game and i have no idea actually who i'm talking to they'll just be exchanging words so we're right together but we're not actually connected we're actually disconnected in this world because people are isolated modules sending out messages via the ethernet or the internet um when it comes to addictions it's it's the disconnection again um that that leaves us so alone so we're traumatized in the first place we are then um develop be them develop behaviors that soothe our pain but which actually keeps us more isolated from other people because we're ashamed of ourselves and we hide it and and we uh furtively seek out our addictive pleasures and that disconnection then furthers our sense of isolation that isolation further our pain and that pain further drives our addiction so we live in a society that actually generates addiction in many of its members yeah it really does doesn't it i i did a um i did a post on my social media channels i think just yesterday actually about friendship and i was saying that look seeing your friends in real life so not over the internet in real life is um a necessity for human health not a luxury and i know myself i've neglected some of the friendships closest to me over the last few years because i've been busy with my career and my family and so you know and you sort of see on social media what your friends are doing so you feel less of a need to actually see them in real life and i was really surprised with how how how much that post on social media resonated with people so many people started interacting and saying yeah you know what i've not seen my friends in months you know yes i've maybe had a bit of a text conversation with them but i'm not seeing them in real life and this was me trying to sort of challenge everyone to say hey look get a date in the diary now even if it's in two months time with one of your friends email them call them text them whatever but put a date in the diary where you're going to see your friends absolutely in real life and it's crazy isn't it that we need to to say these things i mean these things have always been there in human culture yet we're now having to talk about them and remind remind us what has what has just been our norm for so many thousands millions of years and what's interesting of course is that on facebook we use the same language as we would in real life some facebook people have friends but these friends that we have these are people we don't know we have nothing necessary in common with except maybe certain cultural ideas or interests and so these friendships aren't genuinely supportive relationships they're pseudo friendships and we actually substitute the one for the other and then on facebook people like each other but but but but which are again is a substitute for genuine contact but it's not that they like each other they don't know each other you don't know somebody until you hung out with them and and so be substitute the language of friendship and we substitute the language of connection for genuine friendship and genuine connection and then we wonder why feel so lonely and why we were so dissatisfied and why we are seeking pleasure or seeking to numb that discomfort with the choices we're making whether it is heroin cocaine or shopping and sugar yeah yeah because i guess you know a lot of people listen to my podcast are trying to make lifestyle change and a lot of them feel inspired to do so by what they hear but some of them um i know are struggling well you know i'm very interested in language and even the phrase lifestyle change it's not lifestyle changes people make it's life changes people need to make yeah you can change the style but style is a rather superficial thing you know the style of clothing you know it's the life changes that people need and and we need to help people see the life changes that are required not the lifestyle changes they need to require it is the fundamental life that's being lived that needs to change not not the external behaviors and lifestyle largely refers to behaviors but not necessarily a transformation within and really to deal with addiction um it's not a question of dealing with the life style it's a question of dealing with the life and it's a question of really owning the life that this is my life and i'm the one who needs to be uh the agent of my own life and here are the reasons why the the the wound or the trauma is another word for wound actually so the wounding that i received as a child has had me behave in certain ways it's not those behaviors i need to change i need to heal that wound i need to change my life and then the the the the life behavior changes will automatically follow yeah you really you really got me thinking about language actually because two terms that i use very commonly in my work whether it's hypertension or lifestyle you've just you know in seconds we framed what those words actually mean and i wonder where that comes from you know you're an immigrant to north america where has this fascination with language come from well i think as an immigrant you get to see the language a bit more clearly than the people who are who are actually in it and you get to see the construction of language and by the way in my secret life i used to be an english teacher so i i did that with before i went to medical school so i've always paid a lot of attention to language and language very often unconsciously expresses realities and truths that when you pay attention to it are revealing yeah and so words should never even the word addict the word addiction actually comes from a latin face for slavery so a a a a a slave to the pain well uh the original meaning was in addictive it comes from the word to a sign now in in in the roman world when you couldn't pay a debt you would be assigned as a slave to somebody until you worked after that so you'd be an addictus somebody was assigned to somebody so that's the origin of the world so it implies slavery so we actually understand that that addict refers or originates in a word for slavery we realize that it's not a choice because who would ever choose to be a slave you know so i think language is absolutely revelatory if you understand the sources and meanings of words yeah yeah very much so gabriel i want to go to um something you you did last night in your talk which you know i went out for dinner with my friends afterwards we all attended it and we were all talking about it um which was you you peppered throughout the evening you said i if there was anyone in here who feels they have some form of addiction yeah without childhood trauma yeah and you're happy to talk about it please raise your hand and you know at the end you actually found someone who quite confidently put their hand up and was you know pretty nonchalant that they had her happy childhood and so you started uh inquiring into her childhoods and i remember the tone of her voice initially was very much you said you know you have a happy child yes happy childhood parents said yeah parents absolutely loved me you know really sort of very vocal about how great her childhood was and then it wasn't long before it became clear that actually she felt that her parents really loved each other and sometimes she was intruding on them that's right i think it was really powerful for the whole audience of 300 to see how you know how we all potentially tell ourselves a certain narrative stories that we continue telling ourselves and you know she obviously maybe is a fan of your work she's come here she's come to watch you speak but hadn't reflected on her own experience and i i wonder you know what's going on there so what's happened here is that this woman says she had this happy childhood but within a couple of minutes and you know my mentor is right not by the addiction but by the pain and so i always say that there's pain underneath it and i said to the audience it never takes more than three minutes to drill down to where the pain is you just have to ask the right questions so this is and i've got to say about a minute in yeah i thought maybe this is the first one who gable won't get to yeah you know i actually thought because she was so confident in her answer so anyway please continue well that confidence itself is a giveaway yeah because it's an assumed stance to protect herself from the pain that she doesn't want to feel or she's afraid to feel so she said well maybe i felt i was intruding on my parents and in other words really what she felt was that she wasn't accepted and loved for who she was and and when she felt unhappy there was nobody for her to be talked to to talk to and all you have to do is ask that person if your own child did the same thing how would you understand it and they totally get it so what's going on there she's not lying but believing that she had a happy childhood was her way of dealing with her pain because if she dropped that idea she'd have to realize that she suffered and she actually as much as her parents did their best and loved her but not blaming the parents but she herself got the impression that she was alone and unsupported and unloved for who she was but that's very painful yeah so we defend against the pain by suppressing those emotions and developing this ideology of the happy childhood and so that's just another form of self-defense and then given her ideology that she had a happy childhood she can't understand why she turned to an addiction but once she gets that yeah okay that belief that i was happy denies the fact that i was feeling isolated and alone and i felt myself as an ex as an intrusion on my parents yeah now she can understand what her pain was but but not feeling that pain was how she survived her childhood because as a child how would she survive if she believed that she was in love for who she was life would be intolerable for her so she has to deny and suppress that so she had an appropriate response to the signals that were given to her that's exactly what you said before and that's exactly what happened with her so that that suppression over pain and the denial of it is a completely appropriate defensive response these are not mistakes that we make these are these are essential survival adaptations the problem is then we spend a whole because we learned how to ignore our feelings as children now we learn to ignore them for the rest of our lives and that then creates problems for us so again it's that whole idea of an early adaptation essential adaptation brilliant adaptation but because it's unconscious it stays with us and now it limits our lives so we become imprisoned with our own adaptations or our childhood patterns become the prison through which we live our lives so hopefully last night for her might have been a a key step potentially and her now being able to really go out and seek real healing transformative healing uh hopefully touch wood um but i would say that the very fact that she came to the talk and the very fact that she raised her hand she was already working at it yeah because she didn't have to raise her hand yeah so if she did it meant that she already had a curiosity about it yeah so she'd already taken the first step yeah absolutely okay well in your in your book uh in the realm of hungry ghosts i think is it the second chapter where you talk about um a funeral you go to of one of your uh someone you were looking after an addict a 35 year old or overdosed yeah and i will let you tell the story but um one thing it really illustrates to me is how how you know addiction is on as on a spectrum of course but how powerful that addictive that that addictive drive is for some people and i just want if you could expand on that because that was really really interesting so this woman's real name was shannon which i can tell now she was 35 and she was a beautiful woman as a young woman when i met her she was already fading she was in her mid-30s or early 30s when i met her she had a severe opiate addiction and because she injected she had bloodborne infection in her one of her knees so she had osteomyelitis a joint infection or a bone infection in her knee bones she needed to be hospitalized for intravenous antibiotic care but she could never be hospitalized long enough because she had to leave the news and every time she left the news she was expelled from the hospital serostamilitis was never treated expelled from the hospital expelled to the hospital because she wasn't engaging in treatments well she was leaving the hospital to use right and therefore they wouldn't treat her so yeah so she wouldn't the the they they didn't want her using her iv lines for shooting sherman no since then we've developed a facility where people can have intravenous antibiotics and use if they need to but this is before the days of that particular facility yeah so out of the regular hospitals she'd be regularly kicked out before her six or eight weeks of antibiotics treatment was completed so by the mid 30s and they were actually talking about amputating the knee because there's nothing more they could do and so by the mid 30s she was in a wheelchair and she would quickly wheel her wheelchair down the street looking for her next hit she left the downtown east side for six months and she actually got clean and then she came back and within three days was dead of an overdose because what happened of course is that she used the same amount she had left to be she used before she left the daunt on his side but now she was detoxed so she lost her tolerance you would understand what i mean by that yeah so the same dose that she could tolerate prior to leaving the downtown eastside now that she was free of drugs the same dose killed her wow and so she so we go to her funeral and there's all these friends of hers each of them with their hiv or their hepatitis c or their chronic infections and they're at mourning their friend yeah and i'm thinking how powerful the drive of the addiction is that this young woman would would would shed her life for the sake of that next hit and her friends who are watching her being buried and memorialized are going to continue using despite this dire example yeah they're going to continue using despite seeing that that just seeing that wasn't enough to go right we're going to change our behavior now and which is why anybody who thinks this is a choice is out of their minds nobody would choose to to to blight and endanger their lives like that and and so this is what made me thinking well what is this powerful drive i mean it must be really deeply built in to the human brain and the human soul for people to engage in this behavior despite all this um deterrence that they witness around them and so what made that event powerful for me was the starkness of the experience of these people and the social idea that somehow this is any kind of a choice yeah wow i mean it's incredible to hear that actually and certainly me and maybe maybe all the listeners on some level in their lives may know not maybe not to the same degree as that but may know what that drive feels like when you when you know you shouldn't be doing something but you choose to do it nonetheless well i know that i mean i've had that in my own life and and there's something in you that knows you shouldn't be doing it it's almost recently i i became aware of a form of therapy called internal family systems oh my god that's what i'm doing at the moment ifs yeah it's incredible dick schwartz's stuff yeah yeah i've had two or three sessions and it's it's been brilliant for me so far amazing yeah so i i met the founder of it recently we become good friends and uh but but i've learned the technique to some degree i'm not an official practitioner of it but i i'm quick to catch on so in internal time systems you realize this is different parts of you and these different parts form like a squabbling family some of them like each other some of them don't like each other so there's a part of me that can watch the other part doing its thing knowing that he shouldn't be doing it but feels quite helpless to intervene so i watch myself like for example when i i'm supposed to be working looking after clients but instead i watch myself go to the store to engage in my shopping addiction i'm not unaware of what's happening there's a part of me that's watching it disapproving of it wanting me not to do it but that part is not strong enough to assert itself the part that's driving the behavior is leading is driving the boat and so it's a question of becoming friendly with all these parts finding out what is it they really want what are they after another part that's driving me to do the shopping when i should be looking after my patients yeah is a part that really is desperate for for me to desperate for me to feel good for a moment that's all i want he just wants me to be happy it's not an evil part it just wants me to be happy and and it's not a question of indulging it but it's a question of really getting to know it and understanding it understanding it and actually being compassionate with it and and then teaching it you know what it's okay but this guy can be happy without indulging in that behavior yeah he doesn't need to do that you may think he does but he doesn't i think compassion is um something that's coming up quite a lot isn't it as a society how do we deal with addiction no matter what it is instead of locking people up because we've demonstrated illegal addiction we should be treating them with compassion but we should also be treating ourselves with compassion i think and not beating ourselves up over the choices we make because often you know they're just a protective mechanism well so you mentioned a number of times the uh the question of the arbitrariness of the which drugs we choose to illegalize as physicians you tell me if you disagree with me but give me a thousand people who smoke heavily every day pack a day give me another thousand to drink heavily every day give me a thousand to smoke cannabis every day and give me a thousand to shoot heroin four times a day in a dose that doesn't create an overdose at the end of 30 years in which groups are we going to see more disease and death amongst those four groups alcohol probably alcohol and the smoking the cigarette smoking by far by far these are far more lethal drugs than the heroin and the cannabis okay aren't they they're legal yeah no they're not heroin it's true if you overdose it'll kill you but i'm talking about in doses yeah part of many of the overdoses happen because people are having to shoot up in back alleys with who know what impurities what if we gave them their heroin and as they do in some clinics in the uk at least they used to in in prescribed doses that keeps them from going into withdrawal but doesn't overdose them that group will be far healthier 30 years later so by what arbitrary standard have we decided that it's okay for the people for for people to murder themselves with cigarettes and alcohol but they can't use heroin legally what logic is behind that it has nothing to do with medicine for sure it has nothing to do with health yeah and now i'm not saying we should sell heroin in the streets i'm talking about the illegalization and the criminalization and the ostracization why is that drug addict more to be more reprehensible than the person who smokes cigarettes where do we get these ideas from it's the why not the what that's right you know it's and and really i mean we were talking about this before before we started recording but you know we're both um on one level we are both just gps we're just family physicians um yeah well the word just there's another meaning of what does it mean we're very just people we're very interested in justice yeah i like it i like it but what i find really interesting and it's something i talk about quite a lot is i think we've certainly overvalued the specialist within medicine for far too long and really undervalued the role of the generalists and i am very proud to be an expert generalist and one of the reasons i moved from specialism into general practice which you know was a rather uh unusual decision for for many and certainly and my father who was an immigrant to the uk and you know was was really shocked as to why his son would do that qualify as a specialist and then move to generalism and it was a demotion in his mind yeah i think he was just confused and i understand that you know and i i think you know i think the the the doctors of the future the health care practitioners of the future who are going to have the best outcome with their patients are the ones who are expert generalists and can see everything and um you know i know we're we're running short on time so we will hopefully continue this at another time because there's so much to talk about but i do find interesting that you're one of the world's leading voices on trauma and addiction and you're a family practitioner and a lot of what you do with your patients you have intuitively picked up and you've also got a skill at you know i think maybe the word counselling is the wrong word you've um you do a lot of emotional work with your patients and i'm finding the more i understand about the human body and the more i really understand what's driving my patients behavior i'm doing a lot of emotional work with them and yes of course referring them to an appropriate practitioner where where you know where it's where it's needed where someone's got that expertise but that wasn't my job i didn't train to do that but i figured out as someone who's really inquisitive as to how can i get my patient better yeah i find well i have to go there because it's really important well so i think you and i are both properly and dramatically impressed by the capacities and skills of our very specialist colleagues it's amazing what they can do so this is not without this is without any sense of diminishing or devaluing their work of course but they're trained in a certain ideology which is purely biologically based so they look upon the human body as a physiological entity divided into various organs and systems and that's what they deal with and what they're not taught is that human beings the mind and the body the emotions and the physiology are inseparable scientifically inseparable and we have the science to show the unity they're also not taught that human beings are social creatures so that our vague physiology is shaped by our social relationships and our very brains develop in a social context so that whether we talk about neurophysiology psychology or the physiology of the body we're talking about influences that go well beyond our genetic and physiological endowment they're not taught that and therefore when they see a a person what they see is a disease in a particular organ whereas if you're a journalist a properly trained or at least a journalist who's developed a broader view you see that human being in context you see it in a relationship to their lives in relationship to their to their environment and you see that the illness whether it's addiction or depression or anxiety or for that matter rheumatoid arthritis or scleroderma or anything else is a manifestation not just of a system but of an entire life and that life is lived in a context and we have to address that if we're going to deal with the illness and unfortunately both you and i have had the experience of having to come to that conclusion through our own work and through our own internal experience of this satisfaction with our our lives we're going but nobody taught this to us yeah and and and and yet this is the way that so the average medical student despite all the trauma that you and i have discussed today particularly in relationship to addiction and all the research showing uh how the addicted brain develops in response to the environment and how the addiction itself is a response to the environment the average medical student in north america and i would argue probably in britain doesn't even hear the word trauma once in four years of medical school i mean did you hear the word trauma when you went to school well i don't i don't i heard it until a few years ago frankly you know let's learn at medical school and and it's not it's not a word that they should hear it's a course they should have they should every physician should be deeply trained in trauma because everything they see virtually everything they see has got a traumatic connection to it particularly in the mental health field but i would say in the physical health field as well they don't even hear the word so essentially when a person goes to a physician they go to somebody with very deep but very limited knowledge who does not see the whole individual who's not trained to see the whole individual even the fact that we save physical health and mental health as two separate things is almost a reflection of that in many ways that's right you know because they're not different are they and again i heard world health is interesting because what's the origin of the world health it's wholeness wholeness so to talk about physical health is already a contradiction because you can't talk about physical wholeness wholeness means everything yeah oh i love it i love it thinking about it like that but gabriel for many people listening um we we've gone through some quite dark stuff hopefully illuminating for people but potentially dark and and quite demoralizing potentially for some people in terms of them thinking about their own lives potentially what they might have inadvertently passed on to their own children i know certainly the first time i saw you speak you you automatically start to think about your own ability as a father and what you could have potentially done better all the time remembering that you've done the best that you can at that time um i wonder if we can finish off with a few notes of positivity for people that there is hope and there are things that we can do to help change this well first of all um i don't see this as a gloomy discussion because i think for people to understand themselves they need to look at all aspects of their existence so to me this is illuminating and and and saint paul says somewhere that uh once you shed light into darkness the darkness itself becomes light and so that i just think we have to look at all these dark places we have to shed light onto all of them so we can fully understand ourselves to me that's a positive i'm always delighted to find out something about myself that that may have maybe i haven't seen so clearly before i always find it liberating and i believe people do as well number one number two what we haven't said though and i think probably probably both you and i would agree is that the human beings have a tremendous healing capacity and and one of the failures of modern medical training is that we put all the expertise and the hope for help into the hands of the physician the physician is the one who's going to deliver the cure but we don't teach people about the innate healing capacity of the human being and we don't learn how do you promote that healing capacity we may have to administer whatever treatments are appropriate and whatever genius treatments we've developed sure that's great but nevertheless that person still has an innate healing capacity how do we engage in it how we evoke it how do we encourage it that's not a question that we ask ourselves and yet there's many examples of people healing or doing much better with illnesses than medical prognosis would have told them now look at the recent case of the recent death of stephen hawking the physicist who i discussed in one of my works now he was given two years to live when he was 20 years old he outlived his diagnosis by more than five decades something in him allowed him to do that something in him that the medical mind could not have fathomed at the time so there's much more to people than we realize and so we have a lot we have to have a lot more faith and a lot more curiosity what is about what is it in people that allows them to overcome the challenge of addiction what is it that helps them live much longer than we had predicted what is healing what is hope becoming whole really all about these are the questions that medicine ought to engage with but unfortunately it does not so i i think your work and then and your podcast and your books if as i understand them and the same thing with me are designed to help people find within themselves that which can empower them to support their own healing and we can't say that strongly enough yeah absolutely now thanks for that cable um for people who are listening who you know maybe maybe something you've said has really deeply struck a chord with them about their own life and they want to go on that journey but don't know how have you got any words of advice as to how they can start you know even even listening to this and start to be aware of course is a very critical first step but um you know where can they go next well so you and i are both authors and i would highly recommend they check out our books first because i think and in my case i will check out my books because there's a lot of what i know and what i've learned that i've poured into my books and a lot of people find a lot of self-knowledge just by seeing the mirror that's held up in my writings or in my multiple youtube talks for example know where to go in their own lives i actually think that once people start asking these questions they find the answers in their own lives in other words there's an old saying that when the student is ready the teacher appears and and and i think there's many modalities of healing that are practiced here in britain uh anywhere else in the world that once you start seeing the limitations without rejecting the value but seeing at the same time the limitations of mainstream medicine start looking outside it a little bit or start finding practitioners within mainstream medicine that have a broader view in other words go where the help is and don't assume that because somebody's got a degree after their name that they know everything that needs to be known in other words become the become the agent in your own healing once people take that on generally they find help i find i i can't give them a specific go-to accept that once you start asking the right questions the answers will start coming yeah sorry to interrupt if you're enjoying this conversation there's loads more like it on my channel please do press subscribe and hit that bell now back to the conversation [Music] you mentioned gratitude and gratitude has come up uh on the show before but what i loved about your take on it was was if i remember the chapter right there you said gratitude is a daily practice that's the easy part i want you to be grateful in every aspect of your life and i love that and i've been sitting with that idea for the last week or so what if you could expand on it jay yeah beautiful i'm i'm really glad um you're asking me about gratitude before we do that though you sparked another thought do you mind if i kind of go back if you're okay with yourself where you want to go you're sparking so many great thoughts in my mind i can't ignore them this is such a you're such a great interview it's so much fun like i really feel like you've just we've gone in so many directions that i didn't even plan so thank you so much but uh when you were talking about the stories we tell ourselves i think that's so important because there's a there's a great study there talking about the book by amy braznusky from the yale uh university and what they found is that they tried to find a career that they felt people may find not sharing a positive story around and they found that hospital cleaners or hospital workers potentially have one of the toughest jobs and wrong and you're a doctor and you know i'm sure you've seen people having to do that work and it's a tough job and so they asked hospital workers how they defined their jobs and the majority of them defined it as low skilled defined it as um you know insignificant defined it as just a way to pay the bills and that their job wasn't useful or their job wasn't important and their role was basically describe like the personnel manual but then they asked another set of hospital workers the same people who did the same jobs different people who did the same jobs and they said how do you feel about your jobs and these people had completely different views they felt they were healers they felt they were caretakers they felt that they were able to transform the energy of the actual hospital they felt that they were carers for the people there and what they found is that these same people sorry different people who did the same job were telling themselves a different story and therefore they saw their role as integral to the healing of the patient and because they saw their role as integral to the healing of the patient they found the work that they did to be extremely meaningful and that's crazy to think about it that different people doing the same job could say different things about the same work they're doing the same exact thing daily but someone thinks it's meaningless and the other things it's so meaningful and this was a term by yale that was called the call was called job crafting the ability to assign meaning where you see it and all of a sudden your life becomes meaningful so if you're sitting in a job right now that you hate or if you've got a boss that you really don't like or if you're in a relationship that you don't want to be in if you can't leave for whatever reason right now because of kobit or lockdown or whatever it is financial difficulties if you can't leave and you really want to one of the things i recommend you do is called job crafting from the yell school of management do you start asking yourself where can i find meaning in this what can i learn what can i adopt what is this trying to teach me and that's actually where gratitude can be applied to every place because you start going there is some value in this i remember when i wanted to leave my corporate job and i wanted to live my passion and do what i do today but i'm so grateful i was at my corporate job because i learned so much there that is so useful to me now and we find it very easy to be grateful when things are going our way but we find it very difficult to be grateful when things are not going our way but what we have to learn to realize which is a really hard lesson to realize is that things are always going your way if you're moving in the right direction things are not going to always look like they're going your way and they could still be going your way we've all seen curses turn into gifts and gifts turn into curses but the problem is wrong and this is the challenge we have a projector up here of what we want life to look like and then we have the reality of what life actually looks like so there's this big discrepancy and so sometimes you're actually going in the right direction but because it doesn't look like your picture and your image of what it should look like you work less you become lazier you become complacent you try less harder because this doesn't look like the right direction but you get to where you want in life just not in the way you imagined it if you keep going if you keep pushing if you keep learning and that's what it means to be grateful in all areas of your life is trying to even in the toughest moment even in a challenging situation not gratitude like i'm so thankful to you for causing me the pain that's not what i'm talking about what i'm talking about is saying to yourself where is there meaning in this where is the lesson in this so i don't repeat this again if i can be grateful in this challenging situation and i can experience gratitude at all times then i'm always going to be coming at things from a positive space and positive energy yeah so powerful jay um would you recommend people start off with a particular daily practice as a way of getting good and developing the skill before they can start applying it let's say to you know aspects of their life that maybe aren't going as well as they want to where they have to reframe things i mean what has been your experience in trying to teach people about gratitude and how they should start that process yeah so you always develop your muscles in the training center and in the gym you don't go out and develop your muscles on game day right like no one gets thrown out onto the pitch and says oh yeah go and play a world cup final and you'll figure out how strong you are you'd never do that you you train in the gym you prepare you get ready and then you go you don't go i want to learn how to run maybe i should run in the marathon next year right you don't that's not how it works and so rangan's absolutely right that it starts in small bouts so i want to get more practical because me and ranga have spoken about a lot of concepts today when we talk about practicing thankfulness or gratitude and i talk about four habits in the book one of them one of the key daily habits or daily practices is thankfulness now thankfulness isn't just about feeling thankfulness isn't just about thinking it's actually about expressing so when rangan messaged me a few weeks back and he told me that he'd been reading my book he i sent him an early copy because he was going to interview me on the podcast and he sent me that message i was i was so grateful to him like genuinely because he was expressing gratitude to me and that's the amazing thing instead of just feeling gratitude let's say rangan felt it but he didn't say it to me if he didn't say it to me he would have not had the experience a of sharing it be of receiving my gratitude back to him and our relationship deepening based on that simple message he sent me and so gratitude becomes more powerful when you express it daily so every day ask yourself who's a person that you want to express gratitude to and go and tell them secondly what's a place that you're grateful for and spend more time in that place and what's a project that you're grateful for in your life and if you write these down every single day before you go to bed who's the person i'm grateful for and why what's a place that i'm grateful for and why and right now it may not be a place you can go to maybe a place that you visited and you're so grateful you got to go there before covet and the third thing is a project in your life and so when you express gratitude make sure that it's specific so i'll give you an example let's say rangan throws a party with his wife this weekend at their home and their friends come over and one of his friends uh wrong give me two friends names in your life and we'll pick on them for a bit uh okay i'll say jeremy jeremy i know he'll be listening yeah um you know what i'll get gareth okay so let's say gareth and jeremy and again uh i'm just going to add a disclaimer none of this reflects gareth and jeremy in real life but let's say gareth and jamie come to this party that uh rangana's wife throw and it's just um you know just a gathering to get people together the next morning rangan wakes up he doesn't look at his first thing in the morning his phone that's not what rangan does rangan looks at his phone about three hours later uh after he's exercised meditate spent time with his kids and then he looks at his phone and he sees these two messages from gareth and jeremy gareth uh sorry about this but here we go so gareth has messaged him saying thanks mate it was great right that was gareth's message and jeremy's message was rangan thank you so much like you and your wife just threw an amazing party and i loved all the games we played your kids are adorable and oh by the way you know you know that food how did how did you both make that the food was amazing thank you so much uh thank you for letting us have this moment together so those are two messages a or b which one do you think causes rangon more joy now running the grateful person so we'll be grateful to both of them but he's more likely and honestly all of us are going to be more grateful to the to jeremy in that scenario because he's gone into more depth and being specific about what he actually liked and learned and because of that he is now going to attract more love and gratitude back from rangan as well so that's why expressing gratitude is actually the key and if we can express gratitude to people places and projects we start to develop more gratitude in our life and that's something we can do daily and it can be an email it can be a voice note it can be a text it could be a video call but it can be as simple as just a text message but specific gratitude is scientifically shown to be better for you and better for the other person yeah i mean jay thanks so much for sharing that because you know gratitude gets spoken about a lot these days but i think that specificity piece i think that example beautifully demonstrates just i can feel it the difference you know you can you can feel it viscerally as you as you hear it it does something different and i remember so clearly i think i left you a voice a whatsapp voice message because i was literally i was thinking oh he's probably asleep now but he won't have his phone on at night you know there's that bit of insecurity at first i thought no just express the damn gratitude you know you you know i think the the wrong enough a few years ago possibly wouldn't have done it out of insecurity or will this be taken the right way or the wrong way or whatever but the that i would say the person i am today having done a lot of the work and having practiced a lot of these tools um you know there is so if not only did i as you're sharing does it feel good for you to get it but it feels nice to share i said i'm doing a lot of voice notes these days i'm finding i'm going to whatsapp pressing the the mic in fact someone told me during lockdown that you can actually press it and flip it up which is my friend jody thanks jody i didn't know you could do that i said you can talk without actually holding it i didn't know that either i hold it down thank you thank you so much that's actually jeremy's wife so it's all coming it's bringing it back together for those guys but you know i i find it's really so i'm a vocal kind of person i like talking and sometimes i find it hard to express what i want to on a text message so i'll just do a whatsapp voice message and um yeah i think gratitude's super powerful one thing i'm gonna add well i'll ask you actually do you do your gratitude practice by yourself or do you also do it with your wife so i do my gratitude practice by myself but then the expression may lead to me expressing it to my wife if she's the person that day that i'm being grateful for and now i'm probably grateful to my wife every day and so i express gratitude to her every day but i really find spending some time by myself to figure out my mind first it's almost like if you're both trying to solve a problem together you can help each other but one person can sometimes take shortcuts because the other person kind of carries the weight and it's really important to really be clear about who you're grateful for you can do it with your partner of course but make sure one of you are not kind of relying on the other person to come up with all the answers and do all the hard work when it really needs to be a personal feeling so you know yeah for me it's for me i feel gratitude is the easiest gift you can give someone and the easiest gift for someone to receive especially when it's genuine and specific and rangana i would encourage you not just with me but with anyone you know it was so genuine and specific that you know i recommend you continue to do that uh sharing of gratitude as you saw and you said it's visceral it is it boosts your mood when you're grateful to someone in a specific way and then you feel they love that do you feel or do you think as i do that many people have got hang-ups and insecurities and therefore to do what i did to actually express gratitude to someone they're fearful about doing it because insecurity is i think we all face insecurities right yeah and how would you help someone who says hey jay look i want to do that like i'd love to tell my work colleague that you know she was so helpful to me yesterday and she got me out of this jam and helped me do something but you know what will it come across wrong i don't really know what will they think i mean what would you say someone like that yeah i think you are right i think some of our insecurity comes from sometimes our insecurity can come from our ego which is blocking our gratitude so the ego says well i don't want to recognize that someone else is doing something good because it makes me feel inferior that's one of the ways that our ego can block us from gratitude and i believe in some traditions and in some circles i've heard ego being translated to eliminate gratitude out right it's like a limited ego so you know you can you can kind of lose gratitude through ego because you think oh if i tell them that they're good then that means i'm not good which is not true at all uh the other way the insecurity comes in gratitude is like well what if they think i'm just trying to uh i'm just trying to like get close to them or i'm just trying to say something nice for the sake of it or i'm just lying or pretending like what if they think i'm just trying to i suck up to them right like is that the reason and so sometimes we hold back how we feel what i'd say to you is i'd say that expressing gratitude if genuine if from the heart and if well explained and thought out should always be shared even when you feel uncomfortable because when it's shared from that place you've already got the benefits of feeling grateful and then if that person does or doesn't react in the way you expect them to and by the way there shouldn't be a need for them to react because you're just thanking them for what they've already done you're not thanking them for what they're about to do you're thanking them for what they've already done so now if they respond in an ungrateful way you haven't lost your gratitude because you're grateful for what they did in the past not what they did in the future so don't then go oh well they didn't even deserve me to be grateful because they did for that moment of what they did for you so uh share it because it's good for you don't worry about how they respond yeah and and i guess also if they do respond in that way or if they do think that that's their own issue right yeah yeah that's not your issue that you you've expressed it from your hearts how they react is kind of out of your control right and that's another key learning i think on this path to thinking like a monk i would guess is you know you're not in control of other people's thoughts right not at all and that's you know that's the biggest lesson is that you're not in charge of the results how people respond or what they think you never are so wasting your time trying to change how someone thinks of you is can actually be one of the most worthless pursuits in life but changing how you think about yourself is probably one of the most worthwhile pursuits in life but the one we spend less time on we're constantly trying to change how people think about us and we think if they think highly of us then we'll feel better about ourselves but that's not the case the case is we can change how we feel about ourselves by changing our behavior and being more in aligned with the person we want to be with our values as rangan said going back full circle so don't get lost in trying to change other people's perceptions of you because that could be a never-ending journey and and a journey that you never reach the destination of because you never will truly be able to control it yeah it comes full circle that's that coolly quite right i mean that is it is such a powerful quote because everything we talk about you can jen just back it up straight into that and it and again it brings out the the meaning of that quote so much more but jay when you were when you were just talking there about the insecurity that some people may feel when trying to express gratitude um i i was really i was struck by something i wrote down from your book and i can't remember which chapter it's in but you say it's impossible to build one's own happiness on the unhappiness of others yeah so i'm quoting daisaku ikeda who's a buddhist philosopher who says that statements i believe i can't remember which chap i think i start the negativity chapter with that quote so it's daisaku ikeda buddhist philosopher and he says exactly that that you can't build your own happiness on the unhappiness of others and i think what that truly means is we often believe that we can only be superior if someone else is inferior so we feel better when we say oh you know that person did you know that couple was getting a divorce ah did you know that marriage only lasted like two years and what you're really saying is well we've somehow managed to stay together for eight years like we've done pretty alright right and you're you're kind of gossiping about them or another way it goes it's like what did you hear about him he's totally messed it up like he's getting fired next week and all you're doing is you're making someone feel inferior to make yourself feel superior that doesn't create happiness it creates more uncertain ground because now you're constantly looking for someone else to feel inferior for you to feel superior and guess what god forbid someone's now outperforming you you're now feeling inferior and you're feeling all the insecurity of what you felt about someone else so it's never a stable ground right i believe it's in the bible but you know you you can't i think it's that you can't build your home on shifting sands but in the same way you can't build a stable identity of yourself on the gossip or the mistakes of others and so you've got to be really careful about not building a ground for yourself imagine you the ground you're standing on is built on blocks of superiority bricks of gossip and mud and cement of criticism that's not gonna hold and so you don't want to create your joy because other people are struggling or suffering you want to create your joy because you know how to deal with struggle and suffering yeah so so beautifully explained and and i think we often write the quotes down that really mean a lot to us and i certainly feel for me that was something i spent a lot of my adult life really trying to come to terms with and realizing you know i used to be so competitive you know you know if i won a game of snooker or table tennis or you know it would it would literally elevate me and if i lost man i would be down in the dumps like it would and i've really explored this and you know given the time we've got left i sort of probably can't go down this rabbit hole but you know i i know one component is that as a kids um you know how i did at school you know and and again i don't know if this is the same in your household i know a lot of immigrant families have this sort of mentality if you you know if you've got 98 it's like well why was it not 100 yeah you know you were like oh what you came second in that test why what happened who was first why didn't you come first yes and you know i actually think whilst i um and my mom will say because i've spoken to her about this recently she said well i knew you were capable so i wanted you to be the best you could and okay and i think she was doing the best she could i would say for me the way i interpreted it was that i can only be loved i can only be um feel good about myself when i'm number one and really i'd say the last sort of five years that's pretty much almost gone from me now i i'm pretty i'm pretty okay with it now like i don't feel and i think that that is i i think it's such an important quote that you've shared because i sort of think now and we should probably talk about social media a bit because you know you you're pretty much the king of social media uh in in so many ways and i think i'd love to know some of your thoughts on social media um but with respect to that quote i think one of the negatives and they've no doubt been a lot of positives to social media um you know you have shared such amazing wisdom in your videos to millions of people around the world which potentially may not have happened without social media right so it's not about saying it's either good or bad but i do think for some people it can magnify those insecurities so if you feel that you can build your happiness uh on the unhappiness of others people can get very focused on follow accounts and likes um and i certainly know in the in the uk medic world uh there's a lot of medics feel a pressure to be building up their profiles and have contacts with me saying you know i'm not sure what to do and you think wow it's causing such discontentment and it's just a metric that in so many levels i'm not i'm not going to say it's meaningless of course it's not meaningless but if you're trying to do it because how you'll be perceived by others going back to what we've been talking about throughout this conversation what are you posting for what are you hoping to achieve by posting is it in service is it to help people or is it to elevate yourself you know i don't know maybe you can untangle that some forest because i'm sure some people listening will will be thinking that yeah there's there's there's very few creators of content on social media that started out with a follow account in mind so me included a lot of my peers in this space a lot of people that i know that are extremely successful on different platforms none of them started at least the ones that i know none of them started to get followers they all started because they had something to share whatever that was whether it was comedy whether it's wisdom whether it was a workout plan a fitness plan whatever it was like they had something that they did that they were passionate about they wanted to share and i can only speak to myself fully but when i started i thought i was going to have a full-time corporate job and i was going to make videos on the evenings and weekends to share a message that's genuinely all i believed and i it after my first month i had about a thousand subscribers on youtube about four videos i'd made on youtube had about a thousand people that had subscribed to my channel and most of my friends were like great jay that's where it's going to end like congrats well done like you've got a thousand subscribers you kind of just crept in there in 30 days like well done that's cool like how far is this going to go and that's really the reality of what it felt like and the interesting thing is the question was never how do i get more followers the question was always how do i make more content that impacts people because and and that's the question with everything it's like if you make more content that genuinely impacts people you'll get more followers if you build a business that serves more people you'll make more money if you help a lot of people through your talents and gifts you will be famous and known for it like it's it's a byproduct of doing something properly and that's why i love the definition that peter diamandis gives that we should redefine the word billionaire to be someone who impacts the lives of a billion people why is jeff bezos the richest man in the world because he's created a product that we all say we want and that it solves a problem that we really need and so if you want to get followers don't look at the number ask yourself are you really creating the value that's going to help people and they're going to naturally want to follow you and and they're going to want to love your work and share it because to me that's the worthwhile pursuit in life because when you do that work that work is humbling when you do that creativity that's the part that makes you grateful for the success that you get because you go wow like people actually care about what i have to say but if you're just obsessed about numbers and metrics without being obsessed by the content the creation and the the service then then you'll never be satisfied because there'll always be someone better than you so for me when i set out to write this book so many people are like oh so do you want this book to be a bestseller and i said i want this book to be a bestseller of course i do but i'm not going to focus on it being a bestseller i'm going to focus on writing the best book in the world that i can possibly write given the skills that i have and that's why when i talk about dharma in the book which is helping everyone find their purpose dharma is broken down dharma means purpose loosely and has many different meanings but one of them is nature and purpose your true nature and the three aspects that i'll share now for the and there's more depth in the book the three aspects of dharma are your passion your skills and your compassion that's what it means when you have your passion plus your skills plus your compassion that equals purpose but for most of us if we're just looking at numbers and metrics and data i mean you'll be dissatisfied that and i'm saying that as someone who really values numbers i understand the value of followers social media i get the value of all those things and i'm highly strategic but i'll be completely honest with you i'm not focused on the number i'm focused on making content and and that's the message that if we're focused on really creating value in the world all of the other stuff will come naturally uh you know you don't have to go out and separately try and get it and uh you know rangan you've done a great job of this you've made content that's very organic to you you've made content that's very natural to you and and i think that's what people gravitate towards you and your podcast and your books because it's you being yourself you're not trying to sound like someone else you're not trying to be someone else and and if you look at the most successful creators in the world they're all like that they've just really shared their raw personality with others if you enjoyed that conversation i think you are really going to enjoy the one i had with peter crone it's just there so give it a click and let me know what you think i tell people you can't create the life of someone you don't yet believe yourself to be right it's not going to work because you're going against the grain of how you're fundamentally conditioned

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 50,835

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview, jay shetty interview, gabor mate interview, jay shetty find your purpose, gabor mate find your purpose, how to find your purpose

Id: oucfu_6iuDc

Length: 120min 57sec (7257 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021