Before You Waste Your Life Away: 3 Lessons For The Next 50 Years Of Your Life | Rangan Chatterjee

1. 0:00 – 0:30

   Living on Autopilot: Three Life Lessons

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

      "We have two lives, and the second one begins when we realize we only have one." How do you feel when you hear that quote? So many of us are living our lives on autopilot. It feels like we're on a treadmill and just wasting our life away. In this video, I wanna share with you three powerful life lessons that have helped me become healthier, happier, calmer, and I feel more in control of my life. So the first

2. 0:30 – 7:09

   Regret as a Form of Perfectionism

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:30

      lesson is that regret is a form of perfectionism. Now, just think about that for a minute. Do you have regrets in your life? And are those regrets helping you? So many of us are consumed with regret. We wish we'd done things differently in the past. We regret the decisions we made. We are consumed with guilt and sometimes shame about the things that have happened. It's not a helpful way to move forward, and I passionately believe that regrets are a form of perfectionism, and I'm gonna explain to you why that is. I've had the privilege of talking to a wonderful lady called Bronnie Ware on my podcast. She wrote the book Five Regrets of the Dying, and she was a palliative care nurse and spent years caring for people at the end of their lives. And many of them were consumed with regret. And some of the common regrets the people would say to her, and say to other people all around the world, are things like this: "I wish I'd worked less. I wish I'd spent more time with my friends and family. I wish I'd allowed myself to live my life and not the life that other people expected of me." Right? So we know that regrets are really, really common, and the question is, are regrets helpful? Well, clearly on our deathbed regrets aren't that helpful, are they? Because it's the end of our life, right? So we can assume that those people on their deathbeds wished that they had lived their lives in a different way. But what can we learn from that? Well, I think there's plenty we can learn from that, right? If we just think about the regrets I've mentioned and apply them in our own lives, we can go, "Yeah, you know what? I don't want that to be me." But let's talk about the emotion behind a word like regret. For me, the emotion behind it is one of disappointment, right? It's one of sadness. You see, I think many people who are consumed with regret have this false idea in their heads that they could have been perfect, right? Is that the belief you have about your life, that you could and should have made perfect decisions? When you look at it like that, it's a bit ridiculous, isn't it? None of us are perfect. We all make mistakes. We continue to make mistakes, but those mistakes can be the best thing that ever happened to us if we learn from those mistakes. So I choose to have the belief in life, and I, and I use those words carefully. I don't need to take that belief, but I think choosing this belief makes you happier and more content. I choose to believe that everyone, including myself, is always doing the best that they can based upon their past life experiences, and I also choose to believe that if I was that other person, I'd be doing the same as them. That's a belief that you can choose to have. You don't have to have it, but I believe it's much more helpful for you and your interactions with other people if you decide to take on that belief. Now, for many years, I've taken on that belief, right? So if I believe that I am always doing the best that I can based upon my previous life experiences, right, well, there's nothing to regret. It's a much softer and compassionate way to interact with the world. It doesn't mean that bad things don't happen. No, not at all. It just means that things happen, and how we choose to look at them influences the impact that they have on us, right? So this idea that regret is a form of perfectionism, I think it's really helpful because I don't have regrets. It doesn't mean that everything I've done in my life was perfect. Not at all. I've made many mistakes, but I don't look back anymore at those mistakes with guilt or disappointment. I accept that that was who I was back then, right? I made certain decisions, and I've now learnt from those decisions. If I come across similar events now, I will choose to make a different decision. It's very different from people who say, "I have no regrets," and, you know, use that as an excuse just to trample all over people and just keep doing whatever they're doing irrespective of the outcome. I don't mean that at all. I do live a life of no regrets, but there's a different energy behind it. There's a, there's an energy of compassion. It's basically me saying, "You know what? Yeah, I have made mistakes, but I can learn from those mistakes. If I could've done better, I would've, but the fact that I didn't means that I couldn't," right? You can constantly keep learning in life. So this life lesson is about being kind to yourself and saying, "You know what? I can't be perfect. It's not possible." Perfection doesn't exist. No human being has ever been born who was completely perfect. Even the people we look up to and admire, if you look underneath the surface, there'll be plenty of things that perhaps aren't things that we would also aspire to. That's okay. That's everyone, right? So this is a powerful life lesson, I think arguably one of the most important ones because as a doctor, and I've been a doctor now for over two decades, a big part of my job is to help people make changes in their life. Right? Proactive with their lifestyle, with their choices to make them healthier and happier. And for many people, it's a struggle, and I think one of the reasons it's a struggle is 'cause people beat themselves up, right? And when you are consumed with guilt and shame, you can never make long-term behavior change. You can do for a few weeks, you can beat yourself up and drive you to change, but over time you end up back to where you started. But if the energy behind that behavior is one of self-compassion and understanding and forgiveness, that's the energy that's gonna mean that that change lasts in the long term. I have seen that time and time again. Now, a couple of years ago in this studio, the wonderful author Dan Pink came and spoke to me on my podcast, and he wrote a book all about regrets, and we had a great conversation. Dan was saying to me, and the case he makes in his book, is that regret

3. 7:09 – 9:42

   Self-Compassion, Dan Pink and Lasting Change

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:09

      is what makes us human, and he outlined all the different kinds of regrets that we have as humans. He said most people regret things that they haven't done, not things that they did do, which I found really, really interesting. But ultimately, me and Dan were kind of saying the same thing but with different language. He was saying, "Use your regrets to learn from the past." And I guess I'm saying that, but in a slightly different way. I think the word regret is tinged with what if. You know? I could have done better. I should have done better. But that's like beating yourself up. You couldn't have done better. If you could have done better, you would've done better. I used to beat myself up, go, "Oh, you should have done that." But underlying that was a belief that I could be perfect. That you know what? When I was 20, when I was 30, when I was 40, I should have been making perfect decisions. But it's not very kind to yourself. It's much more compassionate to look back and go, "Wow, you know what? With what I knew then, with the stresses that were going on in my life because of the way I was brought up and the way my parents raised me, I had certain beliefs, and those beliefs led to certain actions." That's okay. Right? But over time we can update our beliefs, and therefore our actions. Think about it another way, right? Think about when you were 18 years old. You thought you were an adult. You knew how the world worked. You knew what you wanted to do. And then just fast-forward another five, six, maybe 10 years to when you're 28. Did you have the same view on the world? No, I don't think you did. You'd evolved, right? You'd learnt. So basically, be kind to yourself, right? You've always been doing the best that you can, right? You might know more now than you did in the past. That's normal. That's what happens. That's how we grow. Embrace that. Right. Now, a really important point here. I'm not saying don't take any responsibility for things that you've done in the past that perhaps weren't ideal. No. It may be that with the knowledge you have today that you look back and go, "You know what? I actually did make a big mistake when I was 25, and I never took responsibility for it. I was never accountable." For me, a big part of growth is going back and taking responsibility, and it's those learnings that I want you to take and move forward.

4. 9:42 – 13:13

   A Journaling Exercise to Learn from Regrets

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:42

      And a practical idea that might help you apply this life lesson into your life is maybe in the evenings or maybe on a Sunday or a quiet day, you can spend a bit of time with a journal reflecting on a past experience that you're currently regretting. And go through it and go, "Okay, why did you make the choices that you did? What was going on in your life at the time? Why did you have the beliefs that you did?" Okay, write it down. But also write down what you can learn from it, right? There's always learnings from everything in life, and we really start to fast-track our inner growth, right, when we start to find the learnings. So I want you to write down, as well as what happened and why it happened, I want you to write down what you've learnt from that and how you can apply that in the future if you're faced with a similar situation. 'Cause that's what it's about. It's about living life, embracing our imperfections, but also learning from them, right? Start with something small, maybe something that's happened in the recent past. I don't know. It could be that you're a busy parent and you snapped at one of your kids last week before you left for work, right? And you don't feel good about it now, so you're regretting that decision, right? You're regretting that action, and I get that. No parent wants to be snapping at their kids, right? But write down what was going on then. What was the state of your nervous system? How stressed were you? What was going on at work? What was going on at home? What was the state of your life? Is it understandable that you were slightly overly wired and that you were a bit frazzled? Can you understand why you ended up snapping? Now, of course, you didn't wanna do that, right? So the next part of this is to go, "Okay, what can I learn from that?" Well, maybe you got up early that morning and were doing work emails to get ahead, and then your kids interrupts you. That's why you snapped. Maybe the learning is, you know what? In the morning is never a good time to do my work because at that time I need to focus on the kids, and if I'm trying to multitask and do work emails at the same time, it's almost inevitable that I'm gonna snap at them. Okay? It's just a small thing. But if you start to do that regularly, you start to reframe your relationship with your past, you start to reframe your relationship with yourself, you start to understand that you are imperfect, that everyone's imperfect, and that we all make mistakes. But the gold comes, right? And it really is gold. The gold comes when you learn from each of those mistakes. It's not about beating yourself up because it won't help you in the long term. It won't help you if you're a parent, it won't help you with your kids if you're feeling guilty, right? But it doesn't mean you ignore what happened. You use what happened to learn, and then you apply those learnings in the future. So look, you know, for many people, this idea that regret is a form of perfectionism may be new, right? And I'd love to know what you think. So if you agree or even if you have a different perspective, please do share it in the comments below. That's important for a couple of reasons. A, I wanna know what you think about this, but I think it's also important for other people who are watching this video. It'd be lovely to share your thoughts to help other people learn.

5. 13:13 – 20:51

   Keep One Promise to Yourself Every Day

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee13:13

      Lesson two, keep one promise to yourself every day, right? This is really important, right? When you are meeting a new person for the very first time, you're asking yourself two questions. Can I trust this person and can I rely on this person? But you're also asking yourself that question every single day. What do you think your daily actions tell yourself about whether you can or not? I think this is one of the most important things to understand if we wanna move forward with our lives, right? You've gotta make a small promise to yourself each day and keep it. How many times do we say we're gonna do something? Oh, I'm gonna, you know, work out. I'm gonna do gratitude every morning. I'm gonna meditate every day. And then we don't do it. Now I get it. Life's busy. We've got a lot of stress, right? There's many things that are competing for our attention. I get that. I'm not having a go at you. I'm simply trying to encourage you to ask yourself, when I say I'm gonna do something and I don't do it, what message do I send to myself? You say, "I can't trust you and I can't rely on you." Right? So the first lesson was about compassion. This is also about compassion because someone who's truly kind to themselves and who likes themselves, and dare I say it, loves themself, not in a narcissistic way, but in a very healthy and helpful way, they're gonna look after themselves, right? They're gonna do something each day that nourishes them. And I think this idea of making one small promise to yourself each day and keeping it is much more powerful than people think. People think that in order to change their lives, they have to change everything, right? They have to overhaul their workout regime, their diet, the way that they manage stress, et cetera, et cetera. But for most people, that's not really how behavior change works. For most people, you have to start small and build up. That's what all the science and the behavior change research shows us, and that's what my two decades of clinical experience working with patients has taught me. So when I say make a small promise to yourself each day and keep it, what I mean is this. All the things out there that you could be doing, from all of them, right, what is one thing that appeals the most? What have you said to yourself before? Was it meditation? Was it gratitude? Was it a 20-minute walk each morning before you go to work? You know, what was it or what can it be? What is one thing that you can do consistently each day? Now, you could change it up each day, but I think it's much more powerful to choose one thing. If you've seen some of my previous videos here on YouTube, I've shared that I do a five-minute kitchen workout every day. Basically in my pajamas while my coffee's brewing for five minutes in the morning, I do a five-minute strength workout. It's just what I do. Now what's so powerful about that is that every single morning it sends me a message, "Yeah, Rangan, you know what? You are worth making time for." No matter how busy your life is, no matter what the kids have got on or what's going on with my work, I still made five minutes to work on my physical strength and my brain, right? Because that's what strength training will do. Yes, it helps you get physically stronger, but it's also good for your mood and your brain and your cognition and your focus. So that's just one thing. It takes me five minutes a day. Now you're already doing one thing, aren't you? You're brushing your teeth, I hope. The two minutes in the morning and two minutes in the evening. That's four minutes a day. That's already ingrained in you, right? You've been doing that hopefully for many, many years, right? So I want you to choose one thing. It could be simple. It can be you're gonna wake up and do one minute of deep breathing. Maybe the three, four, five breath where you breathe in for three, hold for four, and breathe out for five. Do that once, it takes 12 seconds. Do it five times, it takes one minute. Really helpful for lowering stress, calming yourself down, improving your focus, but there's many other breathing techniques out there. It could be a five-minute workout, right? It could be a one-minute workout. One minute of star jumps or jumping jacks. It actually doesn't matter what it is that you choose. The important thing is that you choose something, you say to yourself you're gonna do it- And you do it. To make sure you're taking action after watching this video, I have 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 a big difference. To receive your free guide, all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below. And I would encourage you, if you struggle with things like this, to make it as small as you can. If it's meditation, can you meditate for one minute every morning? Let's say you use an app, right? Could you go onto that app for one minute every morning and then get on with your day? You will be surprised, dare I say shocked, by how quickly your image of yourself starts to change. If you can do that every day for seven days, let's say a five-minute workout or two minutes of meditation or one minute of star jumps, right? You start to change the way you view yourself. You suddenly become someone who says they're gonna do something and then follows through. You send yourself a powerful message, "I can trust you. I can rely on you. I always make time for my five-minute workout, always, because it's part of what I do. It's kind of who I am." And that shift in your self-identity, it improves your self-worth, your self-esteem, and that then ripples out into so many other aspects of your life. You're not looking for perfection, right? Like with lesson one, right? Perfection doesn't exist. Doing the perfect workout, having the perfect lifestyle every day for most of us just ain't gonna happen. So let's reframe it. We're not looking at perfection. We're looking at what can we do, right? So I really want you to think about that. Make one small promise to yourself, right? And if you want, let me know in the comments what it is. Yes, I wanna read it, but I also want this community here that we're building on YouTube, I want them to be inspired. I'm sure some of you have already done this, right? So pop it down. What one small thing do you do, do you say you're gonna do and you do? Because I've only mentioned a few ideas in this video. There's many more ideas out there, and you sharing some of your ideas I think will help people all around the world. So the final life lesson for this video

6. 20:51 – 22:25

   Examples of Small Daily Promises and Identity Shift

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee20:51

      is that busyness does not equal success. I'm gonna say that again. Busyness does not equal success. How busy are you, right? How busy are most of us these days? I think in most countries around the world, most [laughs] of us are feeling overly busy, right? The World Health Organization a few years ago said on their website that stress is the health epidemic of the st century. Okay? And I think over the last few years it's got even worse, right? So busyness is becoming the norm. Never used to be, but it is today, and it's causing all kinds of problems for our health and our happiness. In fact, there was a statistic here in the UK last year that said that 88% of UK workers had experienced some form of burnout in the previous two years. Now, it's a truly remarkable statistic, right? Because it kinda says that as a society we've got something wrong. We've got something massively wrong. Yes, our workplaces and our employers definitely play a role here in terms of what they're asking us to do, the way we're being asked to work. There's many, many factors here that are contributing. But the key life lesson here that I wanna share with you guys is that, that real understanding that being busy does not mean I'm thriving at life,

7. 22:25 – 24:00

   Busyness Does Not Equal Success

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee22:26

      right? That's the key message, 'cause many of us do. But for so many of us, busyness is a distraction from our life. And dare I say it, for some of us, maybe for many of us, busyness is actually a sign of laziness. Now, I say that with compassion. I completely understand that some people cannot avoid being busy, right? I get that. Let's say you're a single parent and you're having to work two or three jobs just to keep a roof over your family's head, right? So I understand many people have to be busy. But for many of us also, we don't, but we choose to be because we haven't yet prioritized what is truly important in our life. Remember what I said in the first lesson about regrets being a form of perfectionism. I mentioned some of those regrets that people have on their deathbed, that Bronnie Ware, the palliative care nurse, wrote about in her book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. One of those regrets was, "I wish I had worked less." Right? Do you wish right now in your life that you could work less? Of course, not all of us have that luxury. But I think if you start to reframe your life a little bit, you can become less busy. You really can.

8. 24:00 – 26:27

   Status, Value and Why We Overwork

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee24:00

      Now, on my podcast about 18 months ago or so, I spoke to this wonderful author called Will Storr, and he wrote a book called The Status Game. And when he came on my podcast, he shared with me that status is a universal driver in all humans. Now, when he talks about status, he's not talking about celebrity or money, right? That's not what he means. He defines status in that book as being of value, right? We want to be of value to others. Now, here's one of the uncomfortable truths about the way we're living these days. I think because our communities have separated, because now many of us have moved away from where we grew up and our networks and our parents and our siblings and our friends, right, the people who've always known us, often we move away for opportunity, for material gain, right? And I get that. I understand why we might wanna do that. But I think there's been a cost because we don't feel of value to others and the world around us compared to how we used to when we were living in tribes, where we had to be of value. We had to show others that we were contributing in some way. Because we live these isolated lives now where we can work by ourselves on our screen, right? I think the underlying drive for status, the underlying drive of I'm not of value, I think that drives us to be more busy than we need to be because we feel when we're being busy that we are of value. We're contributing. And that may be partially true for some people, depending on what your job is. But I think you've really got to understand that busyness does not equal success, right? You're gonna have your own definition of what success means to you, right? But I love a weekend where I have nothing to do, and I can relax and chill, or at least a Sunday. And I used to work through weekends because the state of the modern world means you can always work in some jobs, right? There's always another email you can send, another task you can get done on your laptop. Those barriers, those boundaries

9. 26:27 – 29:30

   Switching Off One Day a Week

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee26:27

      between work and home have been decimated with technology. There's some benefits of that. There's some downsides of that. You know, some of the benefits are we can work from home. Many of us can work from home in a way that we couldn't do. Okay, that is a, an upside. But you gotta understand that anything in life has upsides and downsides. The upside may be that you can work from home and not have to do the commute into the office. Great. What's the downside? Well, the downside is you can keep working into the evenings. You can keep working on a Saturday morning and a Saturday evening and a Sunday. So the way busyness has pervaded every aspect of our life, it is toxic. I mean, there are some religions out there, right? In fact, many of the kind of traditional religions around the world have got practices that really encourage people to switch off and not be busy for at least one day a week. Even that can be a start for some people. You know, maybe in the week you, you just got too much going on with your job and your children and your commitments, right? But can you, for three or four hours on a Sunday, switch off, turn the phone off? And I know families who observe this, and what I've noticed is that a lot of these families are really close because they have a rule in life that means that they're gonna switch off. Doesn't matter what the demands of the modern world are. My point of bringing that example up is not to say you should or shouldn't be religious. It's to say there are some helpful practices out there that if we can start implementing can improve the quality of our life massively, right? And really switching off for one day a week... When I do it, and I do it regularly now because I've learnt that I'm much better throughout the week when I have that switch off, it's transformative. You feel completely recharged. We know that resting is critical for your health, your longevity. It's critical to lower your stress levels. And I think that's one of the reasons so many people feel burnt out these days. There's just a low-grade input constantly. I'll do a few emails here. I'll get a bit done here. So we never get that complete switch off where our nervous system can reset back down to zero. So, you know, if you can, can you create some space in your week? I say Sunday because that tends to be, here in the UK at least for most people, the quietest day. But of course, depending on where you live, it could be different. If you can't do a whole day, can you do half a day, two hours, even one hour? I used to do this when my kids were younger. On a Sunday morning, my wife, myself, and our two kids would go out for, like, half a day without our phones, so we really just spent time together without any distraction. Okay, so that's an idea you might wanna consider. Another

10. 29:30 – 32:32

    Ask What Is the Most Important Thing Today

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee29:30

       tool I found to be really helpful when it comes to becoming less busy is almost to flip it. And at the start of each day, I ask myself a really powerful question, okay? What is the most important thing I have to do today? Now, it's a deceptively powerful question because it forces you to prioritize. It forces you to make a decision. And when I first started asking myself that question each day, I would be like, "Well, you know, I've got quite a few important things to do today, so, you know, I'm gonna choose one for my work and one for my home life." And over time it's become one answer. And again, right, it's not about the perfect answer. That's a theme that's coming in throughout this video in many of these life lessons. Perfection doesn't exist. The point of that question is that you're making a decision. Right? Me saying that my work deadline is important doesn't mean that my relationship with my wife or my children is not important, but it gives me focus as to where to direct my attention that day. So each day I'll put down a different answer. Some days it's the same, other days it's different. But it could be, for example, today the most important thing I have to do is go for a 20-minute walk at lunchtime. By setting the intention that morning, it means that I'm much more likely to do it. Now, it doesn't change my workload or the other obligations I have in my life, but it means if I say I'm gonna do that in the morning and I complete it, I know that the most important thing got done. It is the antidote to busyness because you feel a sense of completion. You know, I did it. There's always gonna be more things to do. Your to-do list will never be done in the 21st century. So having the goal that we're gonna get rid of our to-do list, I think makes people more busy 'cause they're constantly trying to firefight. Whereas if you simply say, "This is the most important thing I'm gonna do today," and you then go and do it, very similar theme to the last life lesson about making a promise and keeping it, right? Ju- just imagine, you answer that question every day for 365 days, and you do it. That means in a year, on 365 different occasions, what you identified was most important in your life, you did it. Like, you cannot tell me that that is not gonna transform your life. There's always gonna be stuff you didn't do. But this question, with a laser-like focus, hones down on what is the most important thing on any given day. And as I say, some days it'll be, I wanna go for a 20-minute walk. Other days it'll be, I must make sure I spend 10 minutes with my wife this evening where we're not distracted. On other days it will be, I wanna make sure when

11. 32:32 – 33:39

    Closing Thoughts and Next Video

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee32:32

       my kids come home from school that my laptop's down and I'm able to be present with them and listen to what they have to tell me. These are the important things in life, right? And when you pay attention to them and focus on them, before you know it, your life starts to change for the better. So I hope you enjoyed hearing about those life lessons. Remember, you don't have to do them all. Even if you just take one idea from this video and start applying it into your life, I'm convinced it's gonna make a difference. Please do let me know your thoughts in the comments below. It's helpful for me. It's also helpful for other people who may take inspiration from what you've chosen to do. And whatever action you decide to take on the back of this video, I wish you all the best. If you found those tips useful, I think you are really going to enjoy this video all about burnout, what causes it, and what you can do about it. One of the worst things in life is when you've got no energy. Every day feels like you're on a treadmill. I've been a medical doctor now for over 21 years, and this is one of the commonest complaints I see pe-

Episode duration: 33:39