The 4 Reasons You FEEL LOST & How To FIND YOURSELF! | Gabor Mate & Rangan Chatterjee

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we think we can reinvent ourselves and as we do we're making ourselves sick when things happen in the present our response reflects some past experience it's the fundamental life that's being lived that needs to change not not the external behaviors [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 and 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 taking people out of their villages into the big cities where they're alone 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 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 is 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 and 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 yeah not only should we not we can't and 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 uh johan hari's new book and you know i i write a huge quarter of my book on stresses 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 um 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 that leaves us so alone so we're traumatized in the first place we are then [Music] developed 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 uh 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 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 necessarily 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 which again is a substitute for genuine contact but it's not that they like each other they don't even know each other you don't know somebody until you hung out with them and and so we substitute the language of friendship and we substitute the language of connection for genuine friendship and genuine connection and then we wonder why i 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 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 reframed 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 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 foods 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 i a a slave to the pain well uh the original meaning was in addictus 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 um you know at the end you actually found someone who you know quite confidently uh put their hand up and was you know pretty nonchalant that they had a child 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 childhood yes happy childhood parents said yeah parents absolutely love me you know really he's 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 and you know my mentor is right not by the addiction but why the pain and so i always say that there's pain underneath it and i said to the audience it never takes you 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 yourself 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 left 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 that's very painful yeah so we defend against the pain by suppressing those emotions and developed 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 wasn't loved 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 of her 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 our our 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 in her now being able to really go out and seek real healing transformative healing uh hopefully touch wood coach would 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 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 a blood-borne infection in her own 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 uh 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 now 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 a 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 dunt 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 it down to any side now that she was free of drugs the same those killed her wow and so she so he wrote 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 their 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 were 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 like 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 it's a part that really is desperate for for me desperate for me to feel good for a moment that's all i want he just wants him 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 deemed to have a 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 you mentioned a number of times the uh the question of the arbitrariness of the um 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 a 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 yeah 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 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 generalist 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 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 and 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 the uh 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 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 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 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 walked by you start to think about your own uh 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 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 saint paul says somewhere that uh once you shed light into darkness the darkness itself becomes light and so that i 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 uh 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 in 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 [Music] 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 their books first because i i think and in my case i will check out my books because of course 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 um 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 or 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 except that once you start asking the right questions the answers will start coming 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 distracts 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 cooking 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 motivation 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 sources of it the states that people are trying to escape or 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 not 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 on 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 so 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 a 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 i wasn't neglected but i was a jewish infant born during the war in hungary and spend my first year under the nazi's nazi regime you can imagine under what circumstances it's like a very unhappy stressed terrorized mother and children can be hurt in two ways children 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 uh 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 uh 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 got 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 health or illness yes since 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 are they making those choices and some of you may not know gabe 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 asked 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 those 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 um [Music] this is an interesting conversation i make the distinction between blame and responsibility okay 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 responsibly 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 have 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 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 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 how would i would put it i mean i agree with your concept i would use you 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 um an overlay upon our two cells and so these aren'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've 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 a tuning out becomes programmed into my brain and then so many years later i'm diagnosed with add it wasn't a choice that i made it was an adaptation so i would 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 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 to 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 um i think something came to my mind there which is you know and we were chatting a little bit about this before we got on air 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 insane culture i mean 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 hypertension 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 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 a socially induced physiological physiological condition which is mediated through our emotions and the impact over 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 he is an insane society around us yeah and i think of i think of stress you know as i mentioned to you 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 it 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 the 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 uh 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 it's an adaptation it helped me as an infant survive a year where the situation was utterly 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 an adaptive in my circumstance becomes maladaptive later on i'm suggesting that much of illness uh begins with that 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 is in animal husbandry will realize that how you treat the young whether it's a dog or a horse 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 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 uh 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 the us um when i 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 what 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 around children being around the 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 other words 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 more 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 childhood 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 uh 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 uh 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 hey 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 awareness is always key because many people i think are walking around oblivious to what this what signs that body is what signals the body is giving to them they just sort of medicating it or drinking the way through or distracting their way to the point where they don't feel it but you know you mentioned before you feel something you felt something before this kind of was it an uneasy feeling in your chest or abdomen i think you said mostly the chefs yeah and for someone who's thinking okay i can do that what should they then do like there's a there's awareness there's observing it and then is there something they can do after that or is it is the main thing just to sit with it and be aware well um turn that question around if your child was feeling anxious what would you do you would you know you you you'd have to ask them what's going on you would say you'd talk softly you'd treat them with compassion you say hey look you know what are you feeling anxious about says um you try and help them wouldn't you yes and all that's based on first of all just being with them like yeah you wouldn't you wouldn't ignore them you wouldn't just get on with your life and and and okay never mind your interest but i'm gonna go and you know just so it's that attention i think that's the biggest part of it and then the attention plays out in the ways that you just described you know what's happening what are you connected about but you'd hold them you'd be with them you'd accompany them [Music] it's your presence it's your capacity to be present with them that's the soothing influence on the child yeah and then what you say is actually secondary you know what you would not do is talk them out of it ignore them make them wrong for it um give them advice that they didn't ask for you know um [Music] so just attending i think is really the answer itself because when you once you attend and and and if you're gonna attend to yourself i mean i i teach this method called compassionate inquiry and and if you can just bring that compassion to yourself oh you got this feeling here okay well let's just sit with it let's just notice it let's just allow it let's not say there's anything wrong with you let's not um try and talk you out of it let's not ignore it i believe that that process and and then okay is this a familiar feeling have i experienced this before oh yeah it's not you know that attention i think that's the that's the healing part and and for the healing process and you might have to do that three or four times a day as you would with your child it doesn't take a long time yeah if the the big feeling that's coming up for me as we're having this conversation is that for some of us could this global situation for all the you know for all the the problems that that are there with it and of course there's going to be um you know rightfully people are concerned over the people who are going to get sick um and neither one of us is trying to minimize that but just just trying to look at the other side for a minute for some of us could this be the biggest opportunity for growth that we have ever lived through you know many of us have not stress tested the system certainly you know i'm in my early 40s i don't recall a time like this ever um i i actually before the the strict self-isolation rules came into the uk about a week and a half ago i went around to my um elderly neighbor who's 91 who hadn't really seen for about six weeks and i i thought well you should really just go and check that she's okay her kids don't live nearby she's by herself there's all this kind of isolation so i went round um i nipped and checked everything was okay and i said to her hey look does any part of this remind you of the war uh the second world war and she said no not at all i said really she goes yeah then for me this is what she said to me she said then we have this sort of common enemy we all came together we congregate we did things together this feels like it's invisible and i don't know where the enemy is and i found that really really interesting as an idea that you know coming full circles what i was saying it's this idea that we've never experienced anything like this before so if we look and if we pay attention we could maybe discover things about ourselves that we've never had the opportunity to observe in the past you know i was thinking about just before you talked about the word that's exactly the question that was coming up in my mind and then to go back to that person you you mentioned not only is the enemy invisible you're compassionate and and and and giving next-door neighbor who's bringing you your groceries might be carrying the enemy into your porch you know so that's really weird is in that sense this is this is something new isn't it um it may be too early to talk about what we need to learn here or what some of the lessons are but i mean i i can't help i mean i i think systemically and plus i'm writing a new book about my new book is the myth of normal illness and health in an insane culture that's the book i'm working on right now so i'm looking at the large cultural pictures so you're speaking to me from the uk well there's some questions that at some point will need to be asked and maybe it's not is not the time just yet but they occur to me to what degree does the the cutbacks in the natural in the national health service have have they impaired your country's capacity to respond to the current crisis and there's already been some questions and articles about that in the british press i've seen that to what degree does a [Music] society with huge um divergences uh of wealth and power high levels of inequality let me know from sir michael marmot and other british researchers the health impacts of of of inequality and of course it's the people that with underlying health conditions who are most prone to fall victim to this disease well that's not just the part of the virus that's not just a viral effect that's also social effect so i won't say more about that now except to mention that your question about what can we learn here is applicable not just at an individual level but also on the social level and i think it's very important that when we've dealt with the acute crisis that those conversations really begin in earnest and very very deeply on the individual level i think we're well i think certain things are becoming clear one is um as i said in another conversation recently isn't is just clarifying what our values really are what's really important in life yeah how much of what were you engaged in and thought was essential four weeks ago seems relatively trivial now compared to how we feel about ourselves how we feel about each other what commonality that we have how much solidarity we can experience and generate or receive uh how much love and compassion we can experience for ourselves and others aren't just on these just the most important things and doesn't it just warm your heart when you see these videos from italy with people serenading each other from their rooftops and their balconies you know yeah so so i i think that's already emerging is what's what's really important to us the other thing that's emerging is which goes along with the empiricalization that we've been having is what are our internal resources that we can contact together through this i mean this really is uh training in a certain sense it's like heavy lifting heavy lifting makes your muscles stronger if you don't strain yourself too much and and so what internal resources can we muster look to and find um to help us deal with this current um threat to our well-being as as individuals as a society so i think there's powerful teachings here we might be too close to it yet to know what the teachings will be but we can do what you're doing already which is to look upon this is a learning opportunity yeah and and and and and as we go through it keep buying ourselves keep asking ourselves uh okay what is there to be learned what is here to be learned what can i learn today yeah you mentioned inequality and you know we know all around the world but certainly here in the uk that you know depending on which postcode you live in your health uh outcome your your lifespan could be up to 10 years lower and it's to do with income and poverty and all kinds of other factors which are probably the biggest determinant of health actually and it's interesting for me that when we talk about equality and inequality in that context we can also look at it in a global context in the sense that we've been so individualistic as a society on an individual level it's all about me you know can i earn what i need to earn and actually buy the house and get the job that i want irrespective of what's going on around me countries have been doing that we need to make sure we're the strongest and we've got our everything in order but hold on a minute now we've got this global problem it doesn't really matter whether you're a rich country or a poor country in the sense that that virus can still come and penetrate in and therefore it's like well is it possible for us to be individually well whether you talk about a person or a country if all around us is unwell i don't think it is well and that's another big lesson here isn't it because we live our lives as you say as if we could just avert our eyes from what's happening in the rest of the world but if we're honest about it and i've said this before what if all of a sudden i told you that there's a preventable illness that kills 800 000 people in europe every year tens of thousands in the uk uh 15 000 here in canada eight million around the world if i told you that that's such a preventable disease you'd say well yeah what is it and how it's previously is brandable why don't we prevent it well there's such a disease it's called air pollution air pollution kills that many people every year the numbers that the coronavirus has claimed so far is nowhere i mean nowhere near that now which is not to say to minimize the the viral threat but it's to say that we do we love our lives most of the time oblivious to reality and this virus is making waking us up to the fact that we're all living the same world and what happens in one country affects what happens in another country now we're aware of that but that's true all the time so that so so so perhaps we can come out of this with more awareness of that generally not just at these um sudden catastrophes yeah that's the first point the second point is that uh all around the world there are many areas where there's illnesses that are rampant because of poverty because of um lack of health services and the lack of proper food and so on that claim many many many lives it's just that here in the west we are shielded from that so we don't have to uh make ourselves aware and then as a third level which which is to me where we're getting into the realms of evil um there are places in the world where illness is imposed because of war and intervention and occupation and and exploitation um i'm thinking of a place like gaza which i've visited and then i don't mention the political statement here except to say that in that small area there's all those hundreds and tons of people cramped together and because of the political situation and the blockade which is largely supported by the west um only five percent of the water is potable could we at least in these times lift those sanctions on those countries could they at least in these times not lift the sanctions on iran which is make it makes it hard for them to import medical equipment um and in other words could we be just com at least you know the i think the u.n some u.n maybe the director-general of the u.n or the secretary general called for an international ceasefire in areas of conflict they just took those viruses over let's just not not shoot each other but what if we called an international moratorium on anything that makes people suffer that that we're doing that makes other people suffer so so what just you know we can go back to your politics later if you want to but just now could we get come together as a human race and and and and and and just be kind so yeah these are big questions and i think the the virus is impelling us to ask these questions and and to remember these questions when the virus is gone that's the key isn't it let's remember this when we're through the acute phase of this and one thing i'm doing myself and i'm asking a lot of people to do who are asking me for advice is just write down a few of your thoughts every day like little things that you're now appreciative of and grateful for i did a post yesterday on my social media channels about five things that came at the top of my head that i just have maybe taken for granted in the past but really really value now you know going to a cafe to meet up with a friend like nothing i can't do that i'm like oh god wouldn't that be amazing or i do something called parkcon on saturdays um where you congregate in your local community and hundreds if you run together think wow just the ability to go and do that will be phenomenal my my elderly mother lives nearby which is meant to be selfishly for 12 weeks so just to give my 79 your mum a hug like the small things that were available to me three weeks ago that i probably took for granted and i think if we make a like a journal every day and write these things down when this is all gone when it's all over we can look back and reflect and go you know is it maybe that was something we should all try to do is write our own journal throughout this it's a way of sitting with ourselves understanding ourselves and also it's a way of not forgetting when it's all over was this samuel peeps i wrote the journal of the plague years i think so well i think it was why don't we all keep a journal of the plague days you know or maybe play weeks or for god forbid play months although it looks like it yeah that's a great idea i you know someone who's listening to this a few people think yeah that might be a good idea to do um kevin you you mentioned like let's be kind to one another let's at least now let's lift sanctions and just do the right thing and one thing that i've always been well i've always talked about it is something that i think is the most important skill for any human being but also certainly any healthcare professional is compassion is ability to connect and really non-judgmentally look at that person in front of you and it's really interesting to observe what's happening at the moment when it comes to compassion so you can you know there's people out there who um you know let's say people who are not practicing social distancing who are you know refusing to follow what the government have asked people to do and are getting together and congregating with their friends or people who are perceived to be panic buying and therefore the supermarket shelves are now empty it's really interesting that we can be quite judgmental about those other people who are behaving in that way um and it's something i've i've mentioned recently is that you know i think about i've thought about panic buying a lot recently and this idea that our people really panic buying i'm sure some people are but most people are probably just buying a little bit more than they would have done in the past and therefore when they go to the shelf the shell's full and the first person buys a little bit more the second person buys a little bit more then at some point there's going to be someone who empties that shelf but all they were doing was buying a little bit more than they would normally do and then someone will post a photo of that on social media and go god who are these people who are panic buying if they should be ashamed of themselves and i'm thinking i'm not criticizing people for saying that i'm just observing that you know this situation i think has brought out the best in humanity but also sort of it's also exposing the worst as well as any stress test would do and it's i'm interested in your observations on the judgment that we can have on other people particularly at times like this well it's great to speak with you because every time you speak my mind just starts generating thought bubbles start arising under the surface of my mind um first thing here in vancouver there was a couple who go around cleaning out all the shelves or the major stores of cleaning of cleaning fluid or cleaning wipes then they sell them at a profit you know you think who would do that you know um now there's two there's two way of asking there's two ways of asking who would do that one is who would do that as a judgment or curiosity oh well who actually would do that yeah and how insecure they must actually feel in the world and and how much they they must be cut off from their own communal sense of humanity so what happened to them these people that congregate and they ignore the recommendations where did they learn to distrust authority so much usually that's a that can be a trauma response as well like when when when early there's a whole lot of ways to respond to trauma but one way to respond is i'm never going to trust authority again i'm just going to do whatever i want yeah but because the authority that i did trust in when i was an infant really let me down yeah so if so so even we can look at these people compassionately as well and the other thing that came up for me is that there's such thing such thing as healthy shame so in writing my new book i'll be looking at aboriginal societies and in in in in in in what we call so-called primitive societies um which is how we actually evolved in small band hunter-gatherer groups and we lived that way for millions and hundreds and thousands of years that was our evolutionary niche when you look at them those societies that still carry those vestiges or those ways of life today fewer and fewer individual accumulation is seen as a weakness it's some kind of an illness and if somebody you know uh they go hunting and some young guy shoots his does his first kill you know everybody criticizes him and they they they ritually uh will make small of it why because they don't want anybody to get a big head right they want to say okay you're doing this for the community you know it's it's not malicious but they but it's not about individual achievement and individual accumulation that wealth for them actually lies in communality so that in a lot of these cultures including here in the west coast of canada big celebrations would involve people giving away their wealth to others yeah and real wealth was in how other people regarded you and how you connected with them so um this crisis again shows how far we've come away from our roots yeah and and and when you think of yourself or or or any of ourselves when do we feel best when we have gathered something to ourselves and when we've given it you know and most people will say i feel so much better about myself so much more peace so much more joy when i'm doing for when i'm giving not compulsively but out of free choice but that goes contrary to the way we're programmed in a society so again this this to go back to our theme of learning this this this viral crisis is really maybe teaching us something about our true human nature yeah are you and your wife dealing with this in different ways um well we do go for a walk every day yeah i'm just gonna out in the fresh air um i'm spending much of my time at my computer writing my book my wife's an artist so she draws a lot she paints she's not painting she's drawing a lot these days but she's also doing chris uh crossword puzzles she's just got a a great way to just relax i guess she's doing what she needs to but but if you're asking me are we dealing with it emotionally differently um and i guess let me just clarify the point of my question wasn't really to inquire um about you and her individually it was also more really the broader question do you feel and do you see that men and women of course there's going to be huge individual differences within that but broadly speaking do can we say that men and women tend to deal with these things in different ways are there some broad spro strokes that we can we can explain that with well there's a lot of work that's been done on the different emotional styles of emotional coping styles of men women and women tend to be more in touch with their emotions in general um they tend to come more from the right side of the brain which is more holistic and and and and inclusive uh whereas men tend to move towards the left side which is more uh this is this is not exclusive and it's not gender-based but in general um more um going through explanations and intellectual formulations and so on uh estoja showing up right now in the current viral situation that'll be an interesting study you wanted to to look back later on and say well how did men and women differentially if there was a differential how did they differentiate deal with what's going on i don't know that i have an answer to that right now i think another thing that would be really interesting to look at at some point in the future when the dust has settled is you know and it's that it's that it's that sort of slight seesaw that i was mentioning to you before this idea that okay all these measures that are being taken these kind of frankly never been seen before measures by countries all around the world are to limit the spread of the virus so we're asking people to isolate well certainly physically isolate themselves from each other not go about their everyday lives not congregate with other human beings as social beings you know in the uk at the moment we've been told we can go outside once a day to take exercise in the form of a walk cycle or run and we can also go to the shops once a week or we've been encouraged to i mean this is pretty restrictive compared to what normal life used to feel like um but what i'm interested in is are we gonna look back and or it would be interesting to look back at some point in the future for all the lives we may hopefully save from uh getting you know severely affected by the virus and then needing intensive care and all this kind of stuff on the flip side what sort of damage are we potentially gonna do to society with this isolation with this anxiety um because i feel that i so hope i'm wrong on this but i i i imagine that we may well see in a few months you know a litany of um mental health issues and anxiety and depression and all kinds of things on the back of this and then it's that whole acute versus chronic piece that we're not taking these chronic things like air pollution and mental health and all these things which kill millions of people each year seriously but we are with a virus and i think there's a really interesting thought experiment there is that you know will it have been worth it i don't mean to sound um you know i'm very conscious i don't mean to sound as though i i think we should be taking the measures to protect life right so i'm not saying we shouldn't be but will we look back and go what you know was there an unexpected consequence of doing that well i i've had the same question come up in my mind um let me tell you a quick story just before you called me a friend of mine called me another retired physician she on she goes on her bicycle and she delivers what's called meals on meals uh meals on wheels so they take food to it's a program here in vancouver they take food to shut-ins and old people and so on and uh my friend elaine who was delivering the food there's an elderly hunger and lady who is among her clients and they don't share language at all the woman does not speak english at all and elaine speaks new hungarian and uh she called me just now just before you called me because the woman wants her to come closer like she usually does but elaine won't really but because of the language barrier elaine couldn't explain why i can't come close to you and the woman's getting more and more upset so she called me and said would you talk to her in hungarian and explain and and i did and this woman had never heard of the of the pandemic because she speaks no english and so the media elderly woman the the english language media which is what happens here means nothing to her she was unaware and so imagine the the bewilderment also in the world changes and even this person brings you her food won't come near her you know so that's it's hitting a lot of people now the question that you're asking i think we're too close to it right now but it's occurred it's occurred to me as well at one point do we decide that the social disruption and economic disruption and the anxiety um well is more than we can bear and that how do you make the decision as to what's more important saving lives now or a functioning society in the long term and um i i even hesitate to raise the question because i just like you i am cautious not to undermine any anybody's um uh commitment to to to participate fully in exact and to follow the directions and advice of the authorities i think this is a time where we just have to really do that yeah so do i i don't want to you know just re-echo what you just said it was really just a thought experiment rather than we should do things differently um exactly and i've had the same thought and i think they'll be one of those long-term questions that once we're looking back in retrospect we'll be able to engage with and maybe learn from yeah but i'm i'm i'm certainly an optimist in the sense that i think i really hope that we have been given such a jolt and with so many of us have started to appreciate the little things in life that frankly most of us if not all of us certainly many of us took for granted in the past if we could hold on to that that could be something really beautiful on the other side of this potentially for society i certainly hope that's going to happen i i'm an optimist i always have been are you an optimist well um human beings have tremendous capacity for transformation and depth and spiritual and emotional growth they also have tremendous capacity for denial and forgetting and and and and distracting and and going back to business as usual i don't know how it's going to play out um i think it'll play out in both ways through a society certainly an individual level i think on individual level there'll be a lot of people that have learned a lot of valuable lessons here about what's important [Music] fundamentally your belief isn't it that uh comes down to our experiences in childhoods and you know when i say addiction a lot of people think oh it's about drug abuse or alcohol abuse but we're talking about something much broader than that about how how much of society is now addicted whether it's addicted to instagram or shopping or sex or drugs or alcohol or whatever it is uh is that a reasonable very very brief summary for people who are new to your work well that no okay and and the reason why not is is that it's a brief and reasonable summary of an aspect of my work yeah but but really right or wrong my i and i believe right my work was much better than that i'm saying that not just addiction whether to sex drugs dropping more substances but any kind of mental so-called pathology and not just mental pathology but much of physical pathology can be traced to childhood experiences and how we cope with those experiences and what those experiences did to our physiology to the functioning of our genes and to the functioning of our emotional apparatus which makes us behave in certain ways that either promote or protect us from illness so what i'm saying is that a lot of what to be physicians see in clinical practice whether it's physical or mental health issues can be traced to not exclusively because genetics always comes into it and other factors but that it can always be traced to um early experiences in life and not only early experiences in life but also experiences throughout life so that really the fundamental message if i can sum it up as briefly as i possibly can is that we're not separate physiological organisms we're part of a much larger whole which includes the entire family system multi-generationally that we're born into and the culture in which we grow up in and function in and so that when it comes to individual disease it is narrow reductionism to biology to think that phys the illness is only a physiological event in a separate individual when it really manifests an entire life in an entire context in an entire culture so really what i'm talking about is the unity of the mind and body and the interconnection between the individual and the environment i think that's the shortest way i can sum it up yeah for sure and i didn't you know i probably could have phrased it a little bit better and that was certainly one of the key aspects we discussed in our previous conversation rather than a summary of your entire work and as you know i'm a huge fan of um you know your your philosophy and i think you're at the heart of your philosophy is compassion and it's a real deep understanding of why people have ended up where they've ended up why they behave the way in the way in which they behave i think we're going to come into that i think compassion is something that is really interesting to observe what's happening in society at the moment when i think we are being quite judgmental um but what comes out a little bit later i think what you just said there about our childhoods and it's really interesting at the moment because many people are feeling that this is a very traumatic time for them and you use the word trauma a lot when talking about people's lives and i think it's probably worth defining what you mean by trauma right at the start of this conversation sure so trauma i think is much more widely experienced than the neuromedical definitions would allow for trauma is really the word comes from a greek word for wound so a trauma is a wound so when you think uh metaphorically of a wound what happens i mean either it's raw and painful and every time you touch it you experience extreme pain or you develop scar tissue over it and the scar tissue is thick and hard and it doesn't have nerves so it doesn't feel but it's also not very flexible and it does it has no capacity to grow so trauma is when there's a deep hurt so take the present uh coded viral crisis a lot of people are responding with extreme fear now fear is a natural response to a threat so there's nothing wrong with that as such but the fear is not universal and it's not shared but everyone to the same degree now people that were hurt in childhood and experienced assault on them they have fear built into their nervous system and into their immune system really and into their own physiology when something happens later on in life that is as a fearful connotation that old fear gets triggered in other words a lot of the the i'm not talking about the genuine concern and the genuine genuine alarm i'm not going to talk about that i'm talking about the panic that many people are experiencing that is the triggering of childhood fear rather than just a response to what's happening in the present so one of the impacts of trauma of that wound of trauma is that when things happen in the present our response reflects some past experience that's one of the that's one of the aspects of trauma the other aspect the other aspect is we're just not as flexible in our responses our our responses are more programmed rather than chosen by us consciously yeah so with that in mind um and given that a lot of trauma happens in childhood of course it doesn't exclusively happen in childhood but it obviously has a has a significant impact when it does happen in childhoods at the moment certainly here in the uk things have changed dramatically all schools are closed um all non-essential work has been closed down people are working from home often you have two parent families working from home and their kids are in the house at the same time and there is this kind of this cauldron now of emotion and stress and anxiety that probably didn't exist at least not in the same way just a few weeks back and i think that's going to pose and bring up a lot of interesting uh feelings a lot of interesting um dynamics in relationships over the coming weeks and months i think it's already happening so if we just dive into childhood for a minute how can we reduce or minimize the impact that this global pandemic is having on children both from a perspective of yes the virus or and and so far it looks as though children are seem to be minimally affected by the virus even though they can't get it and pass it on very very quickly without showing any symptoms but i'm talking about stress and if their parents are stressed around them and their parents are trying to work at home but their kids are around and they want to see their parents and the parents you know without realizing it are starting to put anxiety and stress on their kids that could have implications for the rest of that child's life so i don't want to alarm people but what i'd love to do is have a conversation with you about what sorts of things should we be watching out for and what can parents do yeah well i don't know that um it's such a broad issue and yeah you know and it's so collective that i don't know that anything we'll say here will be adequate to the situation but but let me just come from my perspective so first of all what you said about these emotions stresses didn't exist a week a few weeks before well that's one possibility the other possibility is that we've always carried these emotions and stresses it's just that we were able to distract ourselves from it so so one of the um because let's face it you know when i get to travel and like it so happens that right now i'm at home writing a book so this is not affecting my work situation but ordinarily i'll be traveling and speaking and and teaching and you know people will be grateful and might be engaged and so on well that's a great way for me to separate myself from my own uh internal distress in other words you know the work itself can be a distraction and i think it's for a lot of us you know and so is it that those emotions weren't there before or is it just that now we have no distraction from them we can't go out and have a drink we can't join our friends at the at the football game we can't go for the pub we can't gather around the water cooler at work or whatever you know so that's that's the one thing and so from that point of view i think it's an interesting time and i think it's time for people to know what is the emotions that arise for them and and to really question well okay i have this emotion the crisis is new it's a novel virus and it's a novel situation but are these emotions really novel or do i kind of know them from the inside already and to speak about myself i've been saying for some time now that even though i'm not that personally affected because i get to be at home anyway and i can go for walks and go for bicycle rides and so on but there's a strange feeling in my chest and tummy is like this um something here that isn't usually there and just this morning i was thinking well is that really new or does this really go back to my infancy perhaps when they were very strange and threatening times in the world second world war eastern europe jewish family and for the book that i'm writing right now i'm actually just looking at prenatal stresses and all the stress on the mother translates into stress on the infant in the uterus physiologically and that mothers were anxious prenatally their children their brain structure is different in by the time you get to preschool and their behavior can be affected so what i'm saying is i think a lot of us are programmed very early and a lot of what's coming out right now is the early programming and that's different from the that's different from the genuine response to an actual challenge that we're truly facing in the world yeah so i think it's an opportunity for us to observe what's happening so in terms of telling people what to do what i'm suggesting is let's be curious about our reactions let's really experience our bodies like if you feel this tension in your chest don't distract yourself actually pay attention to it and be curious about it and just sit with it and if we can sit with our own fear then we can sit with our children's fear if we try to push through it and pretend that it isn't there and just offer bland reassurances but at the same time we're roiled up inside ourselves our kids can sense that so i think the best thing we can do for our kids is to take care of ourselves yeah i mean just a as always just a wonderful answer and um you know something i've been thinking about a lot recently and i actually i spoke to johan hari yesterday and i was just saying to him that for me it feels as though our system is being stress tested at the moment so you know very similar to what you said in the sense that are these emotions really new or in life you know very much like i don't know let's say you've got a right hamstring problem and that only comes up when you run well if you're walking around in your life and you're walking everywhere you never experience that so you think everything's fine but when you start running you realize oh oh my hamstring's hurting it was always there but the running has you know taken you to that threshold now where it's where it's exposing itself and and very much i think it's it's what you're saying is that is that these emotions were probably there in all of us yet i love that um that whole idea about distraction is something i it's really something i sit with a lot over the last couple years it's thinking why do we do certain behaviors why does somebody go to the pub and drink eight to ten pints of lager or drink a bottle of wine every night and where does somebody else for example you know scroll instagram for three or four hours in the evening um and i i can't get away from the thought that for many of us whatever we choose ultimately it's a distraction it's a distraction from sitting with ourselves and sitting with our own discomfort and maybe the opportunity now is if you want to take this opportunity instead of distract yourself with the news endless news cycles on what's going on which is obviously an easy thing to do i love what you're saying sit with it understand yourself understand is this a new feeling and i guess what you're fundamentally talking about gabor is awareness i'm talking about awareness and we live in a culture globally but certainly in north america and the uk that's so so intent on distraction i mean you go to the restaurant there's a lot of music playing and five tv screens that are all showing different programs what's that all about it's about destruction rather than just sitting there quietly and being with each other and ourselves and um although we still have the internet and we still have the cell phones and we still have the uh television set still the possibility of distraction have been diminished now i think that for a lot of people even watching all the news about the virus is a distraction rather than being with how it is for them because really how much time a day do you have to spend reading about the virus to find out what's going on five minutes in five minutes you can get the latest information now when you spend three hours a day or first a day or or compulsively and i've done that myself because i'm not criticizing others but you know he's reading what does the guardian say about the voice what does the new york times say about it what is this canadian newspaper or that what am i doing i'm actually distracting myself from just how it is for me and so that even even reading about the virus can be a distraction from the feelings that the virus has triggered in it yeah it's interesting that the the system being stress tested at the moment so um you know a lot of a lot of people said after our first conversation and i've seen on other youtube videos that you've done you know well that's great but how do i deal with the trauma how do i deal with it and obviously that's in many ways a million dollar question was there there are multiple modalities i think certainly from my view you may have a different perspective that can help us process uh trauma once we become aware of it but in this kind of situation where certainly the volume on everything seems to be turned up to a max people who already were feeling anxious are feeling more anxious than ever before people who didn't realize or actually thought that they didn't have a problem with anxiety are now feeling anxious the process of dealing with that trauma can take time it can take weeks months years sometimes um as i've shared before i i'm on my own process with that with with a system called internal family systems ifs which i found incredibly helpful for me in terms of my own personal happiness my relationship with my wife my relationship with my children my ability to be a good or what i hope is a good doctor that has helped me no end and i realize now that i can look back on previous behaviors and look at the fact that oh you were distracting you weren't happy you were doing that to gain external validation to get whatever it was because i couldn't sit with what was actually going on inside me and so in this situation where families are rowing at the moment you know couples are spending more time with each other than ever before you know i think there's going to be some relationship um issues that are brought to the surface for many people um there is going to be you know with with children um i know this is happening because people have already reached out for help on this saying look i'm snapping at my children a lot and i think there's an interesting problem here where if we snap at our children and they're already scared by this situation let's say maybe they're watching the news but then if if the way we can help them is to be present with our own thoughts and and present with our own feelings and and sit with them that's a long-term process and i guess what i'm trying to get at it and i don't i don't think there are some simple tips but i'm wondering if a parent in that in that moment is feeling like why the kids not letting me work you know i've got all this work to do and they want to snap what is there something they can do is it like taking a step having a deep breath you know going outside and then or is it is it simply explaining to the kids hey guys look i'm really stressed at the moment i know you guys just wanna talk to me but i'm feeling really really stressed can i have five ten minutes to myself i mean i don't know have you got any practical guidance in the moment well before i get to that uh two things one is i'm just struck over here we are um you trained as a as an internal medicine specialist or is that yeah internal medicine initially and then i moved to family medicine um i know so i remember that um so between all the years of training and practice that you know i've had three over three decades of medical practice and all the three years of training between you and i we just nothing in our training prepared us for this did it i instead of say here we are having this conversation trying to come up with some wisdom for people i'm just turning people although people are listening to us ryan and i we weren't trained in this yeah no nothing i mean our experience we can bring bring to bear the experience and whatever wisdom we may have gleaned from that but nothing in our training prepared us for this this is just bigger than all of us that's the first point but the second point is i'm struck by your phrase about how the system is being we're being stress tested now that that has a specific uh um connotation in in in in medical uh language you put somebody who's you re suspect has heart disease or you want to rule out that they don't and you push them through a stressed cardiogram you put them on a treadmill and you have them run and you do a cardiogram how does the heart respond to the extra oxygen demand that you print on well that's what's happening to all those people i liked your phrase about that we're being tested now to see about our emotional oxygen supply yeah and so and so when we're at home snapping in our kids or or or being tense with ourselves or whatever happens with our spouses this is the stress test and and the the the distressed cargo and cardiogram will reveal which is walking to go back to your analogy of the hamstring um the stress cardiogram will reveal the real state of your heart whereas just lying in bed will not yeah or walking even slowly in the street will not you know unless you had really severe heart disease so yes i really like that way of putting it that the system is being stressed and stress tested and not just on individual but also on a social level now i haven't answered your question i notice it's easier for me to theorize than this to answer your question about what actually to do but yes i think awareness as you said and if i notice that tension in me that's a i don't believe in timeouts in parenting in terms of punitive timeouts but i certainly believe in a parent taking a timeout and saying you know i just notice how tense i am i need to go on a balcony and take a few breaths or i need to sit and just think or i just need to listen to a piece of music right now to calm my autonomic nervous system you know so in other words do something that we ordinarily don't do not most of us in our lives which is to allow ourselves to ever upset emotions and give them some space without acting them out on the people that are close to us so take that time and and do check in and don't be ashamed to acknowledge your vulnerability and your upset but don't make it you don't make it your chats problem yeah if you enjoyed that conversation i think you are really going to enjoy one that i had with esther perel all about relationships it's right there so give it a click and let me know what you think this notion sometimes that people have that you have to know yourself first you have to love yourself first and then you can go and be in a relationship never made sense to me because
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Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Views: 407,662
Rating: 4.8833818 out of 5
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, gabor mate interview, gabor mate trauma, gabor mate how to find yourself
Id: T7frvyrcpDU
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Length: 122min 5sec (7325 seconds)
Published: Fri Jun 04 2021
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