5 Minutes To Start Your Day Right In 2025 | Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:00 Habit number one, five minutes of movement every single morning. The neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki says that when you move your body first thing in the morning, you bathe your brain in neurochemicals. She actually calls it a bubble bath of neurochemicals for your brain. Dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, all kinds of chemicals that make you feel good, that elevate your moods. But you also release growth factors such as BDNF,

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:30 which goes to your hippocampus, the memory center of your brain. We know that exercise can help you with your short-term and your long-term memory. It can also help you with your imagination. Now, there's a really important point here. When it comes to changing our lives, people think it's gotta be difficult, and people say, "Well, what will five minutes really do?" Well, five minutes done consistently will absolutely change your life. I do this myself, and I've also utilized this with thousands of patients over the past two decades. Because when you move your body each day, you're making progress. You feel good about yourself. Your self-esteem starts to change. The way you view yourself starts to change. In many ways, it doesn't actually matter what you do. You can choose the five minutes of movement that work for you. I do a strength workout in my kitchen every single morning whilst my coffee brews for five minutes. Whilst it's brewing for five minutes, in that time I do a strength workout, either body weight or with dumbbells or with kettle bells, in my kitchen in my pajamas. But you've gotta find what works for you. It could be five minutes of yoga, five minutes of star jumps, five minutes of some martial arts. Whatever works for you is gonna make it much more likely that you're going to do it. But I promise you, five minutes of movement every single day as you get up, as you start your day, will start to change things. Now, I mentioned some of those neurochemicals that get released in our brain when we start our days with movement, but another thing happens. There's a part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex right here just behind your forehead, and that's the part of the brain that actually helps us make logical and rational decisions. When you move your body regularly, it helps to strengthen your prefrontal cortex. So there are all

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:32 kinds of incredible benefits we get with regular movement for our physical health, our mental health, and our emotional wellbeing. Now, one of the most toxic things you can do each day for your health, for your happiness, for your life, is to say you're gonna do something and then not do it. I mean, this is what people do all the time. We say we're gonna do something. We listen to a podcast and we say, "Yeah, I'm gonna do that," but we don't do it. Now, I wanna explain to you why I think that's so toxic. Every single day, you are asking yourself two questions. Number one, can I trust myself? Number two, can I rely on myself? Now, when you say you're gonna do something and you don't do it, what message do you think you're telling your brain? You're basically saying, "I don't trust myself. I can't trust myself, and I can't rely on myself." Okay? And that's one of the reasons why people struggle to make changes in the long term. They make the thing that they need to do way too big. We don't think about these small changes that when done consistently are going to have a big impact. That five-minute strength workout that I just mentioned that I do each morning, I have rarely missed a day in over five years, and it's got nothing to do with willpower or motivation.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:03 It's because I've made it easy, so even on my busy days, I can't say I don't have time. I can pretty much never say I don't have time to have a five-minute workout. And I've also done something that the behavior change research suggests is really, really important. I've stuck on that movement to an existing habit, which is my morning cup of coffee. So I want you to think about those two principles and think about a movement practice that you could bring into your life with you also applying those two principles. Now, for some of you who are feeling this may be too simple, right? What's five minutes gonna really do? Five minutes when you do it every day is life-changing. I once had a suicidal patient, okay, came to see me. There was all kinds of stuff going on in their life, but they felt powerless to make any change in their life. They thought, "No, I don't have energy. I don't have the motivation. Everything feels too hard." I broke it right down for my patient and started with five minutes of movement every single morning, and it completely changed their lives. Why? Because that five-minute practice done for a few days changed the way my patient viewed himself. Instead of being someone who actually can't make any changes, he suddenly became someone who can make changes, someone who actually does what he said he was gonna do, and little by little, that changed the way he viewed himself. He started to build up his self-esteem. He started to build up his self-image, and those five-minute actions quickly rippled out into other actions in his life. So two months later, he was doing way more than five minutes in many different aspects of his life, but he started with five minutes. Now, sure, someone who's got suicidal thoughts may seem like quite an extreme case, but I think there are elements of that story that apply to many of us. Many of us make our goals and our aspirations too high, or we think, "Oh, it doesn't count if I didn't go to the gym for 30 minutes." Hey, if you wanna go to the gym for 30 minutes, that is fantastic. I'm not saying don't do that. What I'm saying is a five-minute action done consistently will absolutely change the quality of your life, the quality of your health,

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:35 and how happy you feel. Habit number two, have a daily five-minute practice of breathwork. Okay. I love breathwork. I know we're hearing more and more about it these days. I'm gonna explain the science of it in just a moment. But before I get into some practices you can do, I wanna remind you that what I just said about five minutes of action each day in the context of exercise absolutely also applies in the context of breathwork. Now, I'm not saying you have to do all five habits that I'm sharing in this video. In fact, I think for many of you, that will probably end up being too much. I want you to pick one that you think, "Yeah, I could do that. I want to do that. I'm drawn to doing that." And then commit to doing it for the next seven days at the same time each day if you can. That's how you'll start to experience the benefits, the momentum, the change in self-image. Okay. So breathwork, I think, is one of the most important things that we can do these days. Here in the UK, a, a recent research study suggested that 88% of UK workers have experienced some degree of burnout in the past two years. I mean, that is a staggering statistic. But we know that stress, chronic stress, is playing havoc on our physical health, our mental wellbeing, and our relationships. In fact, about 10 years ago or so, the World Health Organization put up a statement on their main website saying that stress is the health epidemic of the 21st century. In fact, ask yourself now, how stressed would you say you often feel? How many times in your day, in your week, in your month, do you feel that sense of slowness and calm? Or is it something you can only dream about and maybe you can access only on that one week's holiday that you might take once a year? Well, breathwork is so, so powerful. It's arguably the simplest and quickest way to change the state of stress in your nervous system. And what I love about it is that it's completely free. Now, there are all kinds of breathwork practices out there. One of my very favorites is what I call the 3-4-5 breath. Now, I first wrote about it in my first book, which came out in 2017,

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:09 but I've been recommending this to my patients for well over a decade. Okay, and it's really, really simple. You breathe in for three, you hold for four, and you breathe out for five. Okay? Now, one of those breaths will take you 12 seconds. Five of them will take you one minute. Even just one minute of 3-4-5 breathing, not even five minutes, just one minute, will change your state. Why? Well, think about your nervous system as having two main parts, the stress part of your nervous system and the relaxation part of your nervous system. Now, what you ideally want is the vast majority of your life to be lived with the relaxation part of your nervous system, what we call the parasympathetic nervous system. You want that to be activated the most with only a little bit where the stress system is being activated. Unfortunately, for many of us in our modern world, it's flipped. We spend most of our life in stress state and not enough time in that relaxation state. Now, with breathwork, one of the key principles to think about is when your out breath is longer than your in breath, you help to switch off the stress part of your nervous system and promote the relaxation part. Okay, so let's go back to the 3-4-5 breath, okay? Breathe in for three, hold for four,

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:41 breathe out for five. The out breath is longer than the in breath, which means the more you do that, the more you're gonna calm down the stress and promote the relaxation arm of your nervous system. Now, listen, there's all kinds of questions often about should it be nose, should it be mouth. Yes, ideally, I would say do it in and out through your nose if you can. But I acknowledge that some people are habituated to mouth breathing, okay? And it may take a bit of time to convert back over to nasal breathing. If you are struggling with nasal breathing at the moment, okay, I would say do it with your mouth. That's fine. But over time, see if you can move it to being nasal breathing. Now, also, if you've never done any breathwork and you find 3-4-5 too long, you can't, you know, breathe in for three seconds, you can't breathe out for five seconds, that's okay. Don't worry. Think about that principle. The principle is your out breath should be longer than your in breath. Okay, so you could try the 2-3-4. Breathe in for two, hold for three, breathe out for four. If that's too much, knock it back to 1-2-3. Breathe in for one, hold for two, breathe out for three. I want you to find a breathwork practice that you can actually do. That you actually start to enjoy. And whichever practice you choose, I want you to pay attention to how you feel before you start doing it and after. This is what's really powerful when you start to bring in these new five-minute habits into your life. You can use the same principle for five minutes of movement, which of course was habit one in this video. If before you start doing any of these habits and practices, you just take a few seconds to ask yourself, "How do I feel at the moment? What's going on in my body? What's going on in my mind?" Then you do the five-minute practice and ask yourself the same things afterwards, you start to actually become your own expert, right? You start to go, "Wow, I was feeling a bit frazzled. I did five minutes of 3, 4, 5 breathing. I feel totally calm. I feel totally relaxed." And that 3, 4, 5 breath can be used first thing in the morning. It can be used at lunchtime. For those of you who struggle to calm down and wind down before you eat, you can do it before you eat. Even one minute of 3, 4, 5 breathing before you eat can be really, really powerful. I've been recommending it to my patients for years. Many of us, we're rushing, we're stressed, we're doing emails, and then we sit down at the dinner table. But you got to remember that your body is designed to properly and efficiently digest foods when your nervous system is in the relaxation state. So if you're rushing and you're eating that beautiful whole food organic meal that you've cooked for yourself but you're in a stress state, the uncomfortable truth is that you're probably not gonna absorb as many nutrients from it as if you were relaxed. Okay, you can also use this breathwork practice before you go to bed. If you struggle to sleep or switch off in the evening, maybe when you get into bed at night, you do a few minutes of 3, 4, 5 breathing. Now, I want to be really clear. There are all kinds of breathwork practices out there, okay? Probably hundreds. If you, uh, practice yoga, you know, depending on who you are learning from, they'll have all kinds of practices that you can use, okay? Yoga's been talking about this for 5,000-plus years. I'm just sharing with you the 3, 4, 5 breath because I found it really useful with my patients. Andrew Weil, another doctor, also talks about the 4, 7, 8 breath where you breathe in for four, you hold for seven, and you breathe out for eight. There's also box breathing when you breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four, and hold for four. Again, if that's too much, you can do 3, 3, 3, 3 or 2, 2, 2, 2. The key point here is that breathwork is really, really powerful, and if you practice for a few minutes each day, what you will do is learn how quickly you can change your state, how powerful it is. And then what I love about breathwork is then it means that

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:15 you've got a tool that you can put in your back pocket and take around with you in the world, okay? Whenever you feel you need it at work, you're in the car, traffic's mounting up and you're feeling a bit stressed, you can get out that tool from your back pocket. You can apply it. You can do the breathing practice. Often, no one around you has to even know that you're doing it, and you can start to calm yourself down. The other thing I want to say around breathwork and our nervous system is that because so many of us are this stressed these days and we're rushing around, we often don't think about this fact that we see the world through the state of our nervous system. Okay? So if your nervous system is amped up and you're really stressed and you're feeling, you know, a bit tight, your whole vision comes in, right? Your nervous system is activated at that point to look for threat. Okay? So everything comes in. You're looking for problems, and this is why you may notice that you could read an email on a Monday morning after a weekend where you've switched off and relaxed, and you'll interpret it a certain way, and you could read that same email on a Friday afternoon at 4:00 PM after you've had a busy week at work, and you will interpret that email completely differently. It's really powerful if you ask yourself, "Has that ever happened?" Or maybe you start paying attention now. The state of your nervous system influences how you see the world. The email was the same, but we interpret it differently because of the state of our nervous system. That's why breathwork is so powerful. Yes, this video is about five-minute habits, but even one minute or 30 seconds of an intentional breathing practice is gonna change your state, and therefore, you're gonna see the world very, very differently. That's why breathwork can have incredible effects on your stress levels, on your health, but also the quality of your relationships. To make sure you're taking action after watching this video, I've created a free Breathing Guide that's gonna help you reduce stress, calm your mind, and boost your energy. In this guide, I share with you six really simple breathing practices that work immediately. Even just one minute a day will start to make

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:47 a big difference. To receive your free guide, all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below. Habit number three, five minutes of journaling each day. Remember, you don't have to do all of these. I'm just trying to give you five daily five-minute habits that you can think about introducing, and if all you do from this video is choose one of them and do it every day, I pretty much guarantee that you're gonna feel differently about yourself within days Okay, so what's the big deal about journaling? Well, journaling has been shown to have all kinds of benefits. Focus, productivity, it can help lower anxiety, depression, it can help us with our decision-making, it can improve the quality of our relationships, reduce emotional stress, et cetera, et cetera. But like all these things, they only work if you take action. And that's why I'm so passionate about this five-minute idea. It's quite easy to take action when something's only gonna take you five minutes. Okay, so journaling can be done in a variety of different ways. And journaling is simply the act of writing things down, ideally on paper. Now, can you write things down on your notes app on your phone, for example? Yeah, you can do, and you're probably gonna get some benefit from doing that. But there is quite a bit of research that suggests that when we write, it's more powerful. And one of the theories is that because humans have been writing for so long that actually the speed at which our brain works is not dissimilar to the speed at which we write. So if you can, I'd encourage you to journal on a piece of paper. Old school, basically, rather than on your smartphone. But if it's a choice of not journaling or doing it on your smartphone, I say do it on your smartphone. Okay, so I wanna talk about two broad ways in which you can do a practice of journaling. One is just a

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:48 freeform way, where you basically just get up, and maybe first thing in the morning is a really good time to do this. You get a piece of paper out, get a pen, and you just write anything that's in your mind for five minutes. I mean, literally anything. It's not for you to, uh, read back necessarily. It's not for you to edit. It's not a, a, a manuscript that you're gonna hand to someone else to check. No, this is for you to clear out the noise in your brain. Now, one of the reasons why we struggle with our mental wellbeing and things like anxiety, and I recognize that everyone's case is slightly different and there are many different causes of this, but one of the reasons is, is that we never have any time to process the thoughts and worries that are whirring around inside our brains. So what do many people do first thing in the morning? Okay, they wake up, pick up these things, okay? And we go straight onto things like news, email, social media. Now, I'm not here to judge, okay? I'm moving away from calling things healthy or unhealthy. I think we need to understand that every action we engage in has a consequence, okay? The question is, is it the consequence that you want? So if you're struggling with your mental wellbeing and something like anxiety, for example, and you do nothing to process the worries and the thoughts that are whirring around your brain, of course it stands to reason that perhaps that's not gonna be helpful, right? It stands to reason that, hey, if I don't do something with those thoughts and worries, they're gonna just stay in there and cause me hassle for the rest of the day. So one of the reasons journaling can be effective is because you literally get those thoughts and worries literally and metaphorically out of your mind down onto paper. Okay, so freeform journaling is where you just write anything. And in my third book, Feel Better in 5, I remember when that came out in January 2020, a book full of five-minute health actions that you can do each day for your mind, your body, and your heart. I remember in that first week after the release, I got so many DMs on my Instagram page from people saying, "Dr. Chatterjee, I just started doing freeform journaling, and all kinds of things that I was really worried about in my life that I wasn't even aware of started to come out." And that's why it's so powerful. You're giving yourself space and time for these worries and the thoughts that are whirring around inside you to come out. Will one five-minute action where you do this on one day help? Sure. But it's more powerful when you do it every day. You do that for 5 days, for 7 days, for 14 days. You will find, or you may well find, that you feel lighter because a lot of this stuff is coming out. Now, that's one way you can do it. As I say, it's the freeform way. But

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:52 for some people, they prefer a bit more structure. Okay? And if you prefer a bit more structure, there are all kinds of methods you can use. One of the methods that I use each morning is to ask myself three questions every single morning. It's very targeted, and it has a specific purpose for me. I've used these three questions with many of my patients over the years. They also love them, and have found them really, really beneficial. Okay, so here are the three questions. What is one thing I deeply appreciate about my life? The second question is, what is the most important thing I have to do today? And the third question is, which quality do I want to showcase to the world? They're three very, very simple questions, but they're deceptively simple. If you answer those three questions every morning, ideally first thing or with your morning cup of coffee or tea, I'm pretty certain that your life will start to change for the better almost instantaneously. Why? Well, the first question is a question of gratitude. So you may have heard me say on this channel before that humans have a negativity bias, okay? Your brain is wired to look for the negative, and there's a very good reason for that. For most of your evolution, for most of my evolution, that negativity bias would've kept us alive. You had to know- If that rustling in the bush that you could hear, you had to know if that was a wild predator or the wind. And if you thought it was a wild predator when it was just the wind, and you took aversive action, you were handsomely rewarded by staying alive. If you thought it was the wind when it really was a wild predator, well, of course, you'd be in grave danger, and you may possibly lose your life. So there's a very good reason why you have this negativity bias. But in the modern world today, where many of us, not all of us, but where many of us are living relatively safe lives, this negativity bias is working against us. That is why a daily practice of gratitude is so powerful. And, you know, if you look at the science, gratitude has been shown to have positive effects on happiness, anxiety, depression, sleep quality, so many different things, but you've gotta do it. You can't just read about it or listen to it on a podcast, you know, me talking about it on my podcast, for example. You've gotta actually do it. How long is it gonna take to answer that one question every morning? What is one thing I deeply appreciate about my life? It's very simple, but very powerful. And so even if I've had a bad night's sleep or I've got a lot of work to do or the weather's awful, as it is at the moment in the UK, I just answer that question and, and think about, oh, I can afford to heat this house, okay, when it's freezing outside. I can afford to feed my family. I've got a job that pays me. Many people are struggling with that. Whatever it might be, okay? The more you practice gratitude, the better you get. So that first question is a morning practice of gratitude. The second question, what is the most important thing I have to do today? In a world of infinite priorities where everything feels as important as each other, this question helps you make a decision. Again, that's what's so powerful about it. Too often these days, we only do the truly important things in life when everything else is done. But the harsh reality for many of us is that everything else in life is never done. Our to-do list always has something else on it, and that's okay, right? Because that's the way of the world today. But this question encourages you to make a decision. What is the most important thing I have to do today? Some days it's gonna be a work thing, but a lot of the time it'll be, actually, today I must make sure I break and go for a 20-minute walk at lunchtime. Today I must make sure I switch off my screens one hour before bed because I'm a bit sleep deprived at the moment, and I think that will help. It could be I must today, if I'm working from home, make sure when my children come home from school that my laptop is shut and my phone is in another room so I can be really present and listen to what they have to tell me. What you put down as an answer to that question is gonna be highly personal to you. I don't know what you're gonna put down, okay? And that's what's so powerful. Your life is unique to you. You will have pressures going on in your life and responsibilities that I can't possibly know. But I promise you, if you answer that question every morning, you will feel a greater sense of control over your life. Okay, the third question in those three questions... And again, if you don't wanna do all three, and you feel that's gonna take too long, just do one of them. It will still make a difference. Do not fall into the trap of thinking it's all or nothing. That is one of the biggest traps out there with health and wellness. We think it's all or nothing. I'm either all in, going for one hour to the gym, training for a marathon, or I'm not gonna do anything. And it's that black-and-white thinking mindset that stops so many people from making progress, okay? So this third question, which quality do I want to showcase to the world today, is very simple but very powerful. Hey, guys. I really hope you're finding this useful. If you are, and you want more content like it, please do check out my book, MAKE CHANGE THAT LASTS: Nine Simple Ways to Break Free from the Habits That Are Holding You Back. It's in all the usual places as a paperback, e-book, and as an audiobook, which I'm narrating. Now, back to the video. The idea behind it is basically that so much of who we are today is just us repeating past behaviors, right? Just think about that for a minute. Have you ever thought about changing your life, being less reactive, less stressed, more present with your partner, more present with your children? What are you actually doing to help that occur? Do you just keep thinking about it? Or when you're a bit snappy, you go, "Wow, you know, I don't wanna be that person"? I get it. It's, it's hard when we're feeling stressed and burnt out. We are reactive. Remember what I said before. You see the world through the state of your nervous system. If you're rushing around, if you're chronically stressed, you're not switching off, your focus comes in, you start to look for threats. Your partner says something trivial, you interpret it as something combative. But it's not because of what your partner said necessarily, okay? It could be the state of your nervous system. And so this question is a bit about visualization. It's about saying, "Who do I wanna be today?" Okay? So for me, I'm often putting things down each morning like kindness, compassion. I wanna be patient. And it's just a gentle reminder each day that this is the person who I want to be in the world today. Does it mean I'm always gonna be that person? No. But does it increase the likelihood that I'm gonna be that person that day? Absolutely Okay? If you put down in the morning, "I wanna show the world the quality of patience today," and then later on something happens at work or you're tempted to respond and react to an email from your boss, because you put that down, you wrote that down with your morning cup of tea that morning, you're much more likely to take a pause and go, "Actually, you know what? I said I was gonna be patient today. I'm not gonna react to this. I'm gonna calm down. I'm gonna deal with this differently." And I promise you, if you do this every day, you start to change the person who you are. You become the person who you really want to be, and that will have a knock-on effect, yes, on your relationships, but also for your happiness and your health, because it changes the way that you see yourself. So give those three questions a go each morning. If all three are too much, start with one, but do it consistently and see what happens. Habit number four, five minutes of nature every day, okay?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:27 All the principles I've spoken about so far about why five minutes is so important, why five minutes literally can be life-changing if you commit, you can apply here. Okay. What's the big deal with nature? Well, we've evolved in nature for a long, long time, and what's really interesting is if you look at the scientific research, it shows you very, very clearly that nature is really, really good for us. So when you put a human being in nature, levels of your stress hormone cortisol start to go down. I mean, that's incredible, isn't it? You probably know that feeling. If you're lucky enough to live near a park or some areas of natural beauty and you go in it regularly, you will know that you feel differently when you're there and after. I mean, one of the reasons is that you are struck by awe. You see the world for what it is. You see the coastline, the trees, whatever it might be. You realize how small you actually are in the context of the world. Right? So nature, on that kind of philosophical viewpoint, has all kinds of benefits, but biologically it changes you. I've mentioned throughout this video about the toxic effects of chronic stress. Nature helps you de-stress. Okay, cortisol, the, one of the body's primary stress hormones, literally goes down. Now, why does it do that? Well, there's all kinds of theories, and there's probably all kinds of mechanisms within our body that we don't even know yet. But one of them is to do with something called fractals. Now, fractals are geometric shapes that you only get in nature. You do not get them in man-made substances. You get them in trees, rivers, coastlines, beaches. Okay? That's where you get fractals. And we know that when a human eye sees a fractal, something incredible happens, which then ends up with your stress levels and your stress hormones going down. Now, if any of you are thinking, "Well, I don't live near any outstanding place of natural beauty. I don't have a park nearby. I'm in the middle of a town, and there's no nature nearby," there's even more research which says actually you don't need to go in nature, you can just look at nature. So when a human eye sees a fractal, right, even if you live in the middle of a city and you look out of the window and you see a tree on the pavement, and you spend a few minutes looking at the leaves on that tree, you're still gonna get a reduction in your levels of stress. Isn't that incredible? Okay, of course it's great if you can go to a beautiful place, but look, we're becoming more and more urbanized all around the world, and the truth is, for many of us, we can't do that. I once had a, I think it was a 27-year-old chap who came in to see me, struggling with insomnia and stress. He lived in an apartment in the middle of a city. He couldn't really motivate himself to go out. He spent a lot of time on his phone and on his laptop. And I was trying all kinds of ways of connecting with him to try and encourage him to do different things, and it was a real struggle. And then I thought, "Wow, well, he likes being on his phone, and he likes listening to things." So I said, "Okay, what about if you listen to the sounds of nature for five minutes each day?" And this really connects with him 'cause he could still have his phone and his headphones, which he loved. And so together we found a soundtrack of natural sounds like waves and the beach and trees blowing. And he made a commitment to me that he would do that for five minutes every evening. Incredibly, it made a massive difference. Within days, he was sleeping better. He was feeling better about himself and the world. And that's something we don't often think about. Remember when I mentioned one of the other habits, which is a five-minute practice of breathwork each day. A lot of the time, we're so stressed these days and so busy that we don't actually know what calm feels like. For this 27-year-old chap, I cannot remember the last time he actually felt calm. I don't think he could. And just those five minutes where he would listen to the sounds of the waves crashing, okay, and the trees blowing, it kind of reminded him of what calm felt like. And because he reminded himself of what that feeling was, he was able to tap into it at other times in his day. And I've seen that so many times with so many patients over the years. So nature, being in nature is what we've always done. I get that we're living urbanized lives now, many of us. If you can get out into nature, great. Maybe that's something you have to do at the weekend. But can you have a five-minute daily dose of nature, even if it's staring at the tree outside your window?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:32 Or if that doesn't appeal to you, could you have some houseplants, some pot plants in your house, in your apartment that you can surround yourself with? These small things really do make a massive difference. Habit number five, reading. Can you commit to five minutes of reading every day? I think reading is probably one of the highest ROI things out there, return on investment. You invest five minutes of your day to reading, it will pay you back so much more than those five minutes. Now, why do I say that? Look, I've written six books. Okay? I know how difficult it is to write books. What the reader ends up reading is literally years of work. Okay? Years. You have so many ideas, so many thoughts, so many philosophies that you wanna share, but to actually put it into some sort of streamlined, articulate way that makes sense, that takes a reader on a journey, it's actually one of the hardest things I do in my professional career. I love it. I find it stimulating. It's very creative, but it's really, really difficult, and it's even more difficult to write a book that's easy to read. When you read a well-written book, you are getting so much wisdom and knowledge. In fact, there's this quote from Mark Twain that I really like. It's been attributed to Mark Twain. Sometimes it's hard to know if these things actually came from the person we, we think it came from, but it is believed that Mark Twain said this, "The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read." Interesting, isn't it? And I think there's something different about reading a book to reading posts on social media. Of course, there can be all kinds of helpful content on social media. I don't deny that. I do not dispute that. But I think there is something really powerful about reading well-articulated words in a book. And if you've seen any of my previous videos on this channel where I talk about my morning routine and the three M's of my morning routine, mindfulness, movement, and mindset, you will know that in that final part, uh, the third M, mindset, I'll do a bit of journaling, I'll do the three questions I've just mentioned, and then I'll read. In my kitchen, I have several uplifting books that get me thinking, and each morning, while I'm drinking my coffee, I'll make sure I at least pick one of them up. Yes, the minimum is gonna be five minutes of reading. Some days I'll end up doing 15 minutes, but it's a very powerful daily practice that helps you step out of your life so you can reflect on your life. Now, if you choose carefully, positive, uplifting, inspiring books, think about what that does to your psyche. You can do it any time of the day, of course, but if you do five minutes each morning, you set the tone on your day. Okay. You can have your own unique tastes in books. They may be different from mine, so choose a few books that you've read in the past. I mean, some of the classics you can keep reading. You hear that phrase, you know, "No man ever steps in the same river twice," right? Because you're not the same and the river's not the same. The same principle applies with books. If you get a timeless classic book, and you read it, and you reread it, it is amazing how many different things you will start to pick up. Okay, you're different each and every time you read that book. Remember what I said about the stress part of your nervous system. You know, you see the world [laughs] through the state of your nervous system. So if you're reading a book when you're feeling really stressed, you're gonna see certain things. If you're reading a book when you're feeling really chilled and relaxed, you're gonna pick up other things. You're also gonna pick up different things depending on what's going on in your life. So if you've just had a relationship conflict somewhere in your life, you're gonna probably pick out bits in that book that relate to that, whereas if you're not, those things may go over your head. So I think a daily practice of reading is really, really powerful. And the brain coach, Jim Kwik, who has been on my podcast on two previous occasions, both of those videos are here on this YouTube channel if you wanna check them out. He talks about the many powerful things that happen to your brain with a regular practice of reading. It strengthens your brain. It reduces your stress. It expands your knowledge. It enhances creativity and imagination. It improves your memory. It improves your concentration and focus. It improves your vocabulary, and reading can help you improve your communication skills. So it's a powerful practice that can yield so many different benefits. All you have to do is do it. Okay,

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:37 guys, there you go. Those are the five five-minute habits that I recommend you think about bringing into your life. And just remember, finally, that knowledge and inspiration will not lead to any change in your life unless you take action. Okay? It doesn't matter how busy you are, I believe there was at least one thing in this video that you can probably commit right now to taking action on. If you have a moment and wanna let me know what it is, I would love to find out, so leave a comment below. Not only is it fun for me, it's also fun for the rest of my YouTube community who can also read it and perhaps take a little bit of inspiration. If you're already doing some of these things, let me know what exactly you're doing and what benefits you get. And remember, you don't have to do them all. One five-minute action that you commit to, that you do regularly, consistently, will start to change your life. I've experienced it myself, I've seen it with my patients, and I know it's gonna happen for you as well. If you found these habits useful, I think you are really going to enjoy this video, so please do stick around and check it out. These tips are incredibly powerful. I figured out over two decades of medical practice that these are the tips and techniques that really move the needle