Don't Wait for New Year! - 5 Steps To Reinvent Yourself Today | Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:00 In this video, I'm gonna cut straight to the chase and give you what I think are five of the most impactful habits that you can implement in your life that will immediately have a positive effect on your health, happiness, and your relationships. Habit number one, ask yourself the following three questions every single day. It will take you minutes to do so, but the impact is gonna be quite profound. Okay, so the first question is, "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, "What quality or qualities do I want to showcase to the world today?" Now, I'm gonna break down those three questions. I'm gonna explain why they're so impactful. But before I do that, I wanna contrast this

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01 kind of start to the day with a more reactive and unintentional start to the day. Right. So I've come to realize that a lot of the time, our thoughts, our behaviors, our actions are downstream from the content we consume. Okay, so let's imagine this. Maybe you don't have to imagine too hard. Let's imagine that you wake up in the morning, your smartphone is your alarm, and immediately you start going on the news. You see the negativity that's going on in your country or many countries around the world. You then go onto social media and see all kinds of negativity and conflict, and then you go onto your work email and realize there's a few things you didn't get done the day before. Let's just imagine that's your start. What does that do? Well, it starts off your day with negativity. I don't think it takes much to persuade you or convince you that if you start your day with that kind of negativity, is it any wonder that you're gonna have a more negative outlook on the world? Does it really surprise you that that kind of start to the day might mean that you're more reactive with your partner, that you have a row with one of your work colleagues, that a very simple email that gets sent to you by your boss gets misinterpreted? I don't think it takes much to really draw that connection because if you start your day with negativity, because the human brain has a negativity bias, which has been very good for us for most of our evolution, the problem is it sets the tone for the rest of the day. Whereas if you start the day with positivity... Now, I'm not talking about toxic positivity here, about pretending that everything is okay in our lives with the wider world. It's not about that at all, but it's about giving yourself a sense of control each day. We know that people who have a strong sense of control, they do better in

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 3:02 life. They're healthier. They're happier. They have better quality relationships. That sense of control is really important. So answering these three questions is gonna give you that sense of control in a world that is fundamentally uncontrollable, okay? So if you can start the day with that first question, "What is one thing I deeply appreciate about my life?" it's gonna really help you. I know it sounds simple, but that's a question that ultimately has gratitude at its heart, and there is so much research showing the benefits of gratitude. There are studies showing that a daily practice of gratitude can help our moods, can help reduce symptoms of anxiety, depression, can help you be more productive. Answering this question each day will help you start to take action, no matter the current state of your life. No matter who we are, pretty much all of us can say we're grateful for at least one thing, and I know that some people around the world are living very, very difficult lives. But I honestly believe that most of us can be grateful for at least one thing. And if you start the day by writing that down and really thinking about it, you know, "I'm grateful that I have a job. I'm grateful that I can afford to put the heating on and buy food for my children. I'm grateful for my wife," whatever it might be. I promise this will start to change how you feel about yourself and the world. And in this video, I'm not gonna go through all the research on gratitude. I've done that in some of my other videos here on this channel. But just know that a daily practice of gratitude is not only free, it has been shown to have so many positive impacts. In fact, some of the studies on gratitude said if you just do it for seven days, you can have positive impacts up to three months later. It really is quite remarkable, okay? So there's three questions to start your

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:04 day with. The first question is, "What is one thing I deeply appreciate about my life?" Second question, "What is the most important thing I have to do today?" I love this question. In many ways, I call this the anti-busyness question. Look, I know many of us feel overwhelmed. We feel busy. We've got too much going on. We know that chronic stress is on the rise. We know that rates of burnout are on the rise. There was a really alarming study here in the UK suggesting that 88% of UK workers have experienced a degree of burnout in the past two years. That is a quite worrying statistic about the state of our lives and the state of culture in this country and in many countries around the world. Now, answering this question is not suddenly gonna change how much work you have to do, but it is gonna change your relationship with your day. This question forces you to make a decision each morning. The power is in making the decision. What I don't want you to do is procrastinate and go, "Yeah, I've got a work deadline. I've got to take my kids to their after-school club. I've got to do the shopping. I've got to cook a meal." Sure, all of these things are important, but the magic in this question is that you make a decision. Now, if you're skeptical, just hear me out, okay? If you're skeptical, I want you to try answering this question for the next seven days first thing in the morning, right? I don't want you to believe me. I want you to believe yourself. Answer that question and act on it for the next seven days and just see if your life doesn't start to change for the better. I still haven't seen a single person where, by answering that question, they've not started to feel better about themselves and the world because you make a decision, you take action, and that daily action starts to build momentum, which is one of the most powerful forces for change. Now, I don't want you to take too long over this question. Okay,

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:06 I'll give you an example of how it looks for me. A few days ago, I had a really important work deadline, so in the morning I said, "The most important thing I do today is meet that work deadline." Yesterday, I wrote down, because it was a working from home day, I wrote down first thing in the morning, and I do this every morning, "When my children come home from school today, I want to make sure I put my laptop down so that I can be fully present to talk to them and hear what they have to tell me." Okay? Today in the morning, I said, "Actually, I've been busy for the last few days. I've not spent that much time with my wife. Tonight, once the kids have gone to sleep, let me make sure that my wife and I spend a bit of time together chatting and catching up." Now, these are small things, right? But by setting that intention first thing in the morning, I've actually gone and done those things each day. And here's the magic. If for seven days, or let's say even 30 days, you write down the most important thing you have to do that day and then you go ahead and do it, it is inconceivable that your life will not feel different. It is inconceivable that you won't feel better about yourself. I do it myself and I've seen it with so many people. It's a simple question that has a really powerful cumulative effect. Now, why I think that question is so important in the modern world is because today many of us feel like our to-do lists are never done. Right? You could complete your email inbox. You could get all your emails done and go to the kitchen, make yourself a cup of tea, and in that time where you've made the tea and drunk it, you could have received another 10 emails. There's nothing you can do about that. It's the nature of our modern communication. So you have to set the rules. You have to say what's most important to you because if you think that you'll do the important things in life when everything else is done, you're

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:08 gonna be waiting a long time. Everything else is never done. There's always something else to do. So this is a very powerful question that encourages you each day to focus, and little by little your life will start to change. Okay, so that's the second question. The third question is, "Which quality do I want to showcase to the world today?" Now, the reason this question is so important is because many of us are living quite unintentional lives and think the way we are is who we are and the way we have to stay, but it isn't. Most of who we are, or much of who we are, are simply repeated behaviors. We think we're reactive. We think we're the type of person to get stressed. No, we don't have to be at all. If you take a moment each morning to visualize and actually write down, "Who is it that I wanna be today?" For me, when I'm answering that question, I often put things down like, "I wanna showcase the quality of patience to the world today," or, "compassion to the world today." And why it's so important is by taking a moment to write that down that morning and just think about how I might show that to the world, it means I'm much more likely to exhibit that quality to the world when I face problems or adversity. Right? If I've said in the morning, "Right, I want to be patient today," well, if I'm tempted, right, to not be patient at the coffee shop or at work or to react to an email, there's a little reminder in my head to, "No, you were gonna be patient today." And it sounds simple. It doesn't mean you'll be perfect every day. It really doesn't. Some days you won't. But by answering this question each day, you're constantly reminding yourself, "Who is the person I want to be? Who is the person that I know I can be?"

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:11 And this sounds really, really simple and it is, but I can assure you, if you do it, you will start to change. The people around you will start to notice. Okay? So there's a lot more I could tell you about these questions. There's a whole video here on my channel, a one-hour video where I go through these questions in a lot more detail. But for the purpose of this video, habit number one is to start each day with those three questions. It will take you less than five minutes. You can do it whilst having a cup of tea or coffee if you want, or on the way to work, whatever it might be. But don't just hear this information and think, "Yeah, that sounds like a good idea." Nothing will change in your life if you don't take action. So answer those three questions. If you're thinking three questions is too much, okay, start with one of them. Which one of those questions spoke to you the most? Which one did you get a sense, "Wow, that could be quite an important question for me"? Just start there. And if 30 days feels like too much- Do

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:12 it for seven days and pay attention to how you feel when you are answering those questions compared to when you're not. Habit number two, stop listening to experts. Now, I need to explain, right? [laughs] I need to explain because I, as a medical doctor, would be considered an expert. And sure, I have a level of expertise from my training and my many years of clinical practice. That is true. But I still don't know what's best for you. Like a can't do. I don't know your life. I believe that you actually know what's best for you better than me. And I think one of the biggest problems these days and why so many people are struggling is because we've outsourced our inner expertise to other people. We're now in a position, we're now in a world where we're being bombarded by information. Health information, let's say, okay? On, on one level, this is a good thing. 20, 30 years ago, health information could only be gotten from, you know, a few select books, or from doctors, or from universities, but the advent of the internet has changed everything. Now anyone can have an opinion and can put out their expertise online. And don't get me wrong, I think that's a good thing. I really do think that is a very, very good thing, but there's also a potential downside, and the downside is that we are exposed to so many different opinions that many people just don't know who to believe anymore. I mean, is that something you have faced in your own life? Have you ever been confused by the opinions of experts? If so, let me know in the comments. I genuinely would love to know because this is something I'm so, so passionate about. Now, sometimes people will say, "Well, if you're gonna get health advice, make sure it's from a qualified expert." Here's the problem with that piece of advice. You could listen to a podcast or a YouTube video or read a blog by 10 different medical experts, and they could give you 10 different opinions. So you're following the advice to listen to the expert, but the experts all have different opinions. I get this on my podcast. My podcast, Feel Better, Live More, has been running now for almost seven years. Okay, we're just approaching conversation number 500, which is amazing. And one thing I've noticed, because I like to have a variety of different voices and views on my show, one thing I've noticed is that if I have a really well-credentialed expert talking about wellbeing or, let's say, diet, one of them may have a certain view on what the best diet is, and another one might have a different view. And then what often happens, whether it be in the YouTube comments or the Instagram DMs, people will say, "Dr. Chatterjee, I'm confused. I don't know which expert I should trust." And I think that's the wrong question. I don't think the question should be which expert should I trust? I think the question should be, why do I no longer trust myself? I want to, I want to explain what I mean by that. Right? I'm not saying ignore the opinions of experts. I'm really not. Listen to what people have to say, but then put it through your own filter.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:47 Only you know how that advice is landing for you, right? My latest book is called MAKE CHANGE THAT LASTS, and in chapter one, I talk about this idea of trusting yourself and how we need to get back in tune with our own bodies and what our bodies are trying to tell us. And in that chapter, there's a case study from a patient I once saw. Now, that patient, I think she was 54 years old, and she was an avid consumer of health information online, right? She liked to listen to podcasts and read blogs, and she really wanted to engage and be proactive about her health. And she had read and heard an expert say that you should have 30 different plant foods a week, right? So she was trying her best to do this by herself, and every time she was doing it, she'd get bloated, constipated, she'd have abdominal cramps. And she kept reading this advice from different experts, and she started to feel like a failure. Now, this is the big problem when we stop trusting ourselves and we put our faith in external experts, or we put too much faith in external experts, I should say, is that if something's not working, we think we're the failure. We think, "For some reason, I can't follow the perfect advice that that expert has dispensed to me." And we start to have guilt and shame. I've seen this over and over again. This is why I'm so passionate about this idea. Now, I saw that lady. She told me what she had been doing, and I said to her, "Look, no piece of health advice, no matter how good, works for every single person. It may be that this is not the right approach for you, certainly at this stage in your life." And so I helped her experiment with different ways of eating, and over a few weeks, we discovered together that when she's on a more low-carb style of eating and she only has 5 to 10 plant foods a week, she's thriving. When she was eating like that, she started to lose weight, like a bit of excess weight that she wanted to lose. She had more energy. Her sleep was better. She had more vitality. All her digestive symptoms had gone, and when I checked her blood tests, they were all looking absolutely perfect. Now, that doesn't mean the expert who dispensed that advice online was wrong. No, it doesn't. That advice is probably gonna be super helpful for many people, but not for everyone. And that's the whole point about this habit that I want you to think about bringing into your life. I want you to start trusting yourself a little bit more, okay? Not everything has to come from external experts. I believe, and I've seen this with patients over the years, they know when they're on the right diet for them. How do they know? Because their body tells them. They feel it with the way they feel, their energy, their cognition,

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:48 their focus, their relationships, how calm they are. They feel it. And so one practice that's gonna help you start listening and trusting yourself is a daily practice of solitude. Now, don't think about that as a negative thing. This is time for yourself. If you are constantly consuming information from the outside each day, like I mentioned in habit one, you're never gonna start to hear what your own body is telling you, right? So I would say for five or 10 minutes a day minimum, can you spend a bit of time with yourself? And this can literally be anything that you want. Not what I want you to do, what you want. This could be 10 minutes of yoga. It could be journaling. Maybe those three questions I've just mentioned, they could be part of your daily journaling practice. It could be meditation. It could be a 20-minute walk around your block without also looking at your phone. It could even be in the morning you sit with a cup of coffee or a cup of tea, whatever you like, and mindfully drink that coffee without consuming information on your phone or online. Anything that allows your innermost thoughts to come up. Now, this may take a bit of time because if you've spent many, many years not listening to your body's signals and trying to get all your advice from outside, yeah, it may take a bit of time. But I've got a friend, for example, who loves the sun salutation sequence in yoga, okay? He's done yoga on and off for years. But over the past couple of years, he's really committed to a 10-minute morning practice. What he tells me, and I experience that myself with my own personal morning practice, is that by keeping the 10-minute yoga practice the same each day, he starts to realize when he's starting to feel different. So on some days, his yoga practice feels really fluid. He feels flexible and free, whereas on other days, the same move starts to feel tight and restricted, and he doesn't feel as though he's got any flexibility at all. And by doing that practice every day, it helps him get to know himself better. For example, if he's feeling tight and not very fluid, he knows it's a sign that there's too much stress building up in his life, that maybe he's working too hard. Maybe there's an important conversation in one of his relationships that he has to have. Your body is always giving you signals. The question is, have you taken time to listen? Now, there's much more I could say on this topic, and if you're interested, let me know below and I'll make a whole video on this because I think it's really, really important. And if you do, let me know specifically what you want to know. But generally, the idea here is that I think these days we're overly listening to experts. We're not listening to ourselves enough, and a very simple way to start to change that is to have a daily practice of solitude. Habit number three, some form of daily breathing practice or a breathwork practice. Now, this partially relates to habit number two, which is a bit of time to yourself each day, okay? So you could definitely use breathwork as one of those practices, but I'm gonna explain to you why I think this is one of the most important habits you can engage with, and I have seen it time and time again change people's lives. 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.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:54 The way you breathe is information for your body and brain. Okay, let me explain what I mean by that. If you start to breathe fast, you send messages up to your brain that the world around you is not safe, that you're a bit stressed, okay? Your brain then responds and sends stress signals back down to your body, which starts off this vicious cycle. Now, you can actually hack that whole system. I do believe the word hack is overused these days, but I've got to be completely honest, I think it totally applies here because if you can consciously slow down your breath, you can then send calm signals up to your brain, and your brain then responds by sending calm signals back down to your body. Okay, so I think all of us need to have a few breathwork practices at our fingertips that, yes, we practice each day, but also we have in our back pocket in case things are happening in our life where we're getting stressed or we're feeling reactive or overwhelmed because it can very, very quickly change your state. Now, there was a study a few years ago, I think it was done in UCLA, that showed 80% of office workers change the way that they breathe when they're answering their emails, right? So I don't know whether you're in that 80% or not, but the chances are you are, right? But here's the important thing- When we change our breathing patterns, we're not aware usually that we're doing it. So you're at work, you're at your emails trying to get your work done, 80% of us change the way we breathe. So what happens? Well, three things happen. We start to breathe a bit more quickly, we start to breathe more from our chest than our abdomen, and our breathing starts to become a bit more shallow. These are very, very subtle things, but they are sending signals to your brain, and your brain is responding by sending signals back down to your body. So it's really important that we start to pick this up. Conversely, if you were to do the opposite of those three things, right? So you could slow your breathing down, breathe more deeply, and breathe more from your abdomen than your chest, you immediately start to change the signals that your brain is getting, and you immediately start to change your state and how you feel. Now, there's all kinds of breathwork practices out there that you can use. A lot of people procrastinate these days, like I've already mentioned, and that's

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:26 because we have too much information. And the truth is, for most of us, it kind of doesn't matter which practice we do. What matters is we actually do one of those practices, and we have one that we can take around with us in our lives, right? So I'm gonna share two breathing techniques right now, which I've seen be helpful for a whole variety of different people. Okay, one is what I call the three, four, five breath. It's dead easy, okay? You breathe in for three, you hold for four, and you breathe out for five. Now, one three, four, five breath will take you about 12 seconds. Five of them will take you a minute. If you do that for a minute, I promise you it will change how you feel. And if you don't believe me, do it right now. Press pause on this video. Just for the next minute, do that three, four, five breath, and then pay attention to how you feel. Usually people will say a few things. They'll say, "Wow, I feel so much calmer. I feel so much more grounded." And often people say, "Wow, I started to yawn. I feel really, really tired." Now, it's not that the breath has made you tired, it's just that the breath has forced you just to stop and pause, and the fatigue that was already there has actually come to the surface. That's all that's happened. And why the three, four, five breath is so powerful is because whenever your out breath, basically when you're breathing out, whenever that's longer than your in breath, when you're breathing in, in effect, you start to switch off the stress part of your nervous system, and you help to promote the relaxation part of your nervous system. So it's a very powerful way of promoting relaxation and switching off stress. Now, if the three, four, five is too difficult for you, try two, three, four, or one, two, three. It doesn't really matter. The point is, is that the out breath is longer than your in breath. I use that myself. I often do it in the morning. I'll often do it before I eat my meals to really calm everything down, and I've taught so many patients over the years to use that in stressful situations, including children who feel anxious before exams. So if you have children or you know people in your life who suffer with stress, and then their brain starts to freeze and they can't control their emotions, please do teach them that breath. It's really effective, and it's completely free to do it. The other breathwork practice I wanna share with you is something that I first heard about from the doctor Andrew Weil. It's the four, seven, eight breath, and again, there's a similar principle there. But in essence, you breathe in for four, you hold for seven, and you breathe out for eight. Again, play around with both of them. See which one you prefer. You know, the four, seven, eight, you know, some people struggle to do that initially. It takes them a bit of time to build up with that. If neither one of those suit you, that's okay. There are many others out there. There's something called box breathing, which the US Navy Seals use, and it's really easy. It's basically... Look, I'll show you with this box. You breathe in for four, you hold for four, you breathe out for four, and again, you hold for four, and you just repeat that. If four is too much, do it for three or do it for two, right? But it's just a simple way of getting you to focus on your breath. But one of the reasons why I think a breathwork

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:59 practice is so important is because the way we see the world depends on the state of our nervous system, and this is something I've really been thinking a lot about over the past few years. Okay? The way we see the world is through the lens of our nervous system. Now, much of the time, our nervous system is on, it's alerted. Now, if you're in highly activated nervous system mode, basically in a stress state, you literally see the world differently. You perceive threat where there is no threat. 'Cause let's think about what the stress response is there to do. It's there when there really is danger. So a few hundred thousand years ago, when our hunter-gatherer tribes, a wild predator is approaching, okay? We activate our stress response system because we know we need to do something. We need to take action. We need to hide. We need to run. We need to do something so that we don't die. So what happens? Well, many things happen in the body, but one of the key things is that our focus becomes narrow. We're not thinking about cooperation and what we have to do for the group. We're trying to keep ourselves safe, right? Lots of things in our body start to change, clotting factors, blood sugar, blood pressure, but our brain starts to change. Our amygdala, the reactive part of our brain, the emotional parts of our brain, goes onto high alert, so we're hypervigilant for everything around us. Right? These things are really good and necessary if there's a real threat. But if you're getting stressed out each day by your work, by your email inbox, by things that you've read on social media, by news headlines, for most of us there's no actual real physical threat. The threat is psychological in our brains, right? But our body responds in a very similar way. So when I say we see the world through the lens of our nervous system, what I mean is this. Let's say we could score the state of your nervous system from zero to five, right? Let's say zero is totally chilled, and calm, and relaxed, and you're present. You wanna bring people together. You feel compassionate. Let's compare that with when you're really, really amped up, when there really is a threat, your nervous system is at five. At that point, you're not cooperative. You don't care about the people around you. You're out for yourself. You see threat. Okay? You see danger. Your brain is wired to see danger. So many people struggle with social interaction these days because they're interacting with their nervous systems on high alert. The reason for many people why that 4:00 PM email from our boss bothers us so much is because we've been building up stress all day. So by the time we get that email at the end of the day, our nervous system is four out of five. We're seeing threat where no threat actually exists, whereas if you had read that same email at 9:00 in the morning where perhaps you're feeling calmer, you would have interpreted it completely differently. This has implications for your work. It has implications for your relationships, how you interact with your partner, with your children. And one of the fastest ways to either upregulate or, more importantly in this context, downregulate your nervous system is by a breathing practice. That three, four, five breath or the four, seven, eight breath or the box breathing technique will very quickly, within minutes, sometimes within seconds, start to change your state and start to reduce how activated your nervous system is. So I have seen time and time again with my patients and with friends of mine, frankly, that if you have a regular breathwork practice, and I'm talking a few minutes each day, you start to understand the state of your nervous system. And when you are feeling stressed in life, you can often take a pause and go, "No, no. Let me just, let me just do one minute of breathing and then see how I'm viewing the situation." So give one of those breathwork practices a try. Doesn't matter which one. Three, four, five breath, four, seven, eight, box breathing. Whatever speaks to you, give it a go and see how you feel after doing it. And if you've got your own favorite practice that's not on

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:32 that list, I'd love to know what it is, so let me know in the comments. And if you've also tried practices before that you haven't found so helpful, I'd also love you to share that with me below because it's helpful for me to see it and for this community here on YouTube, it's also, I think, really helpful for them to read your comments as well. Habit number four, lift something heavy every single day. Okay, why am I so passionate about this as a habit? Well, for many reasons. Number one, I do it myself and have been doing it every day for about five years. Number two, I've been recommending this to patients for years, and I have seen the transformative benefits time and time again. Okay, so most of us know or many of us know that strength training is really important. As we get older, we start to lose our lean muscle mass. If you're interested in health and you consume content online or you listen to my podcast each week, you'll probably know this already. But often what happens is that we take that advice and we go, "Right, I need to get to the gym maybe once a week or twice a week." Hey, nothing wrong with that. If you are motivated enough and you're able to get to the gym two times a week for 40 minutes strength training, fantastic. But I know many people struggle to do that. So the way I try and approach this in my own life is I do some heavy lifting every day. I'm gonna explain how I do it and how I'd recommend you do it if you don't think that you're lifting enough heavy things in your life. As I've already mentioned, above the age of 30, we start to lose muscle mass every year unless we're actively doing something about it. And the amount of muscle mass, the amount of lean muscle mass we have is one of the most important predictors of how we're going to be as we age. So many of the problems that come as we get older come from frailty, come from the fact that we have stopped doing the things that we did when we were younger, that we've actually lost a lot of our strength and power, right? So it's really, really important. 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: 9 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. Now, I want you to think about toothbrushing as your model for lifting something heavy. What do I mean by that? Okay, I'm guessing that you brush your teeth twice a day, hopefully two minutes in the morning, two minutes in the evening, so four minutes every day. What you don't do, I think, I hope- Is say on Monday, "Oh, I was so busy today, I don't have time to brush my teeth." Or on Tuesday go, "Ah, you know, I don't have time. Work's too much. I can't get my toothbrushing done. And so on a Sunday, let me see if I can motivate myself for a big one-hour deep clean of my teeth." You don't do that, do you? No. In fact, it feels laughable to even say that. But that's the approach we often take to other helpful behaviors in our life. We know that a little bit each day of toothbrushing, generally speaking, keeps our teeth in good health for life. Yes, there's other things as well, like flossing and dental checkups. I get all that, but I think you get the point that I'm trying to make. Now, what if we applied that approach to lifting something heavy? And I actually do adopt that approach. So you may, if you are a subscriber to this channel or you listen to my podcast, you may have heard me say this before, but even if you have, I'm gonna repeat it because it's so important, and I think this piece of advice is so impactful

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:34 for so many people. As part of my morning routine, when I'm making coffee in my kitchen in the morning in my pajamas, I put my coffee to brew for five minutes. Whilst it's brewing for five minutes, I do a strength workout in my kitchen, right? Sometimes it's body weight. I do have a dumbbell and a kettlebell in my kitchen. And look, I'll be honest, a few years ago, my wife said to me, "Rangan, are you gonna keep these things in the kitchen?" I said, "Yeah, I absolutely am," because if they go in the cupboard or the garage, they're never going to get used. But the fact that they're here means I'm visually being triggered by them every single day. Out of sight, out of mind. And I bet some of you have got some gym equipment at home or some weights. They're in a different room or in the garage or packed away in the attic. In fact, let me know if you actually have gym equipment at home but you're not using it. You see, we can make this really easy. Why is it that you toothbrush every day at the same time? Well, a number of reasons. Number one, it's really easy. It only takes you two minutes. And number two, when you get into your bathroom, everything you need is there. You don't have to go to the garage to find your toothbrush and your toothpaste, do you? No, it's all there. Because it's easy, you do the behavior. Because the weights are there, and because I've stuck on the lifting something heavy habit onto an existing habit, which is my morning coffee, it happens every day. Now, the reason I always talk about this example is because I think it's one of the most important things you can do. I do five minutes of weight training every day, which means I do 35 minutes a week. Now, that may not sound like much. It doesn't mean I never, ever go to the gym. It doesn't mean I don't ever do other stuff, no. But I'm not confusing the two. I know that strength training is important for me, so I do five minutes every day. It happens, and here's the magic. I've already mentioned momentum a couple of times. This is a habit that builds momentum quicker than almost anything else I've seen. Why? Because when you lift something heavy each day, it does wonders for your self-esteem. You feel strong. You feel powerful, okay? And by doing that every morning, I'm much more likely to engage in physical activity at other times in my day. I actually am in my podcast studio right now, and just outside it are some kettlebells. So whenever I'm going out to make a coffee or use the bathroom or whatever it might be, I'm passing some kettlebells, and often I'll just pick them up, right? So that morning habit leads to me also lifting heavy at other times in the day, and I think this is one of the big things we get wrong about behavior change. Again, nothing wrong with going to the gym twice a week for a 40-minute strength training session. I think that's fantastic if you can do it. I often don't find time to go to the gym. But by doing that morning habit... And it doesn't have to be in the morning. You can do it when you come home from work or at lunchtime. But I would say find something heavy that you like to lift, right? And what you regard as heavy and what I regard as heavy is gonna be different, right? So you're gonna have to use your own judgment there. Remember what I said in habit number two, you need to start becoming your own expert, right? We need to stop outsourcing what we need to to other people. Well, what feels reasonable to you, right? What feels like a good weight where you're pushing yourself a little bit but not too much where you might risk injury? If you need help with that, there are all kinds of YouTube channels that will help you with that. If you have someone in your life, a friend, a work colleague, a family member who knows how to lift weights and you don't, maybe ask them if they can help you. Most people who do this kind of stuff love

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:37 to share their knowledge to help other people, right? But that's the fourth habit, lift something heavy every single day. And habit number five is to connect with another human being every single day, and it kind of relates to the last thing I said in habit number four about asking someone in your life to help you if you don't know what to do about lifting something heavy. Humans are social animals. We really are. We do not thrive well in isolation. Yet unfortunately, loneliness is increasing massively all over the world. And there's a certain irony, isn't there, that we're supposedly living in this hyper-connected world, yet we're lonelier than ever before. And that's because a lot of this digital connection is not the same as real life. Face to face if you can, but not always, that real human connection. Now, I know you can get it online in some places, okay? But I think many of us, we kind of think we're connected 'cause we're on social media and we're interacting with people in the online world, but how many of those people that you're interacting with do you know, like really well, where you feel you can share who you really are? We know from the data that loneliness in some studies seems to have a similar impact on our health comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That's remarkable, right? Other studies have shown that the feeling of being lonely leads to premature death, increased risk of heart attacks, increased risk of strokes. I could tell you one thing for sure. If you feel lonely and isolated, you are much more likely to engage in behaviors like too much sugar or too much alcohol. So when we don't feel good in ourselves, we need to neutralize how we're feeling and that emotional stress in some way, and often we turn to things like sugar, time online, pornography, all kinds of things, right? So loneliness has a huge impact. In fact, in my book, MAKE CHANGE THAT LASTS, I deal with a lot of the root causes of why we struggle to make meaningful change. And there's one chapter in there on human connection, it's Chapter 9, and why it's so important on so many different levels. But what I want you to think about, and remember, this video is about helping you take action and move forward in your life. I don't want you feeling stuck and unmotivated. I want you to go, "Wow, even if my life feels tough, there are some small things I can do each day that will start to make a difference." Connecting with another human being is one of those small things. It could be that you phone up your mom or your dad. It could be that you phone up a college friend, you know, a work colleague. If you don't have friends, and I recognize that many people struggle with this, but maybe you like drinking coffee. Well, go to your local coffee shop and sit there and drink a coffee and say hi to the barista. Maybe read a book or do some of your work emails at the coffee shop. Even if you hear the hub drum of humanity and other people talking, that still is something really, really powerful. We know that there's so much data on this. In fact, you may have heard me talk in another video about the importance of talking to strangers. Okay, it's great to have deep connections with our family, with our partners, with our close friends, but also there's value in just simply saying hi to a stranger, and they say hi back. We know there's a part of your brain, there's a network of systems that acts as a sociometer, and it's basically scanning the outside world for threats. When you go to your local coffee shop and you order your latte, and the barista makes it for you, you say, "Hey, thanks so much. The latte you made for me yesterday was wonderful. I really appreciate that." And they smile back at you and say, "Hey, thanks. No worries. My pleasure." That sends a powerful signal to your sociometer that the world around you is safe. That makes you feel good. It makes you feel that things are under control. So when we talk about health, we're often talking about what are we eating, how much we're moving, how much we're sleeping. Hey, these things are important. I've written loads of books about that stuff. I get that that stuff is important. But

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:11 some of the ideas I've tried to introduce to you in this video are things that I think we're not speaking about enough. How can we reflect each day by starting off each day with three questions? How can we start to trust ourselves more and listen to external experts less? How can we start to change the state of our nervous system through breathwork, which will mean we naturally make better food choices, right? Something I've not really mentioned. How often do we use sugar in our lives to help reduce stress? It's a lot more common than many of us think. Sugar is one of the main ways that humans try and manage their stress. So if you can use breathwork as a way of managing your stress levels or lowering how on your nervous system is, you're naturally gonna consume less. Yes, I mentioned lifting something heavy each day. I think that's a physical health thing that's really important, that has powerful benefits for your brain and your mental well-being as well. Remember what I said. It helps build up a bit of confidence, self-esteem. It helps build momentum. But this final point of connecting with another human being in some way each day, I think is one of the most undervalued daily health habits that we have. And some of you will naturally do that, but some of you won't. And for some of you, I really hope this is a bit of a nudge to say, "No, this is really important." If you feel a bit scared, if you've got social anxiety, I get it, but please try and get outside your comfort zone a little bit and start interacting with other humans. I really hope you enjoyed that video. I've tried to make the habits as practical as I possibly can. If five habits feels too much, start with one. It doesn't matter where you start, but if you listen to this video, if you watch it and you feel inspired, but you don't go and take action, nothing in your life is gonna change. So maybe pick one thing that you wanna start with. Why don't you put it in the comments below? Let me know. I'd love to know which one of those five ideas resonated with you the most. If you wanna learn more about some of these ideas and about some other habits that you can bring into your life, do check out my book, MAKE CHANGE THAT LASTS. And whichever habit you choose to start with, I really hope it helps. If you found that content useful, I think you are really going to enjoy this video where I outline a simple framework for a morning routine that can immediately improve your health and your happiness. You've actually made yourself more resilient. You've actually lengthened the distance between where you currently are and your stress threshold and where you're gonna be after that morning routine