To Anyone Feeling STRESSED & STUCK In Life Right Now, WATCH THIS! | Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:00 Not only have you actually reduced the incoming, you've actually made yourself more resilient. You've moved yourself the other way. 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. [upbeat music] You wanna do something where you work on your mindset. Now, what do I do? Remember, I've done the breathwork, I've made my coffee, and during the coffee brewing process I've done my five-minute workout. So I finish the workout, I've got a nice hot cup of coffee that I brewed to my taste waiting for me. So I take that cup of coffee and I sit down, and I'll usually read. So I've got a few books in my living room, maybe five that are kicking around, and I'll just pick one of them. Right? So I just read a few pages on one day. Other days I'll read a whole chapter. But the point is, these aren't negative books. They're not anxiety-inducing books. They're uplifting books. They're sometimes philosophical books. They're sometimes health books. They're books that make me want to be a better person. They lift me up. They make me think about my life. And they're generally things that make me want to be a better parent, a better husband, a better doctor, and they help me feel calmer. They help me feel more content, and they help me experience more joy in my life. So what those books are gonna be are gonna be unique to you. Right? It's not for me to say, "You must read this book." No, you're gonna have different preferences to me. So just have a think. Are there some books that you've read in the past or books that you wanna read that you could make sure you've got around so that whenever you feel like it, you can just pick it up and read it? That's another thing about behavior change, right? Anything you want to do, you gotta make it easy, right? We mentioned that. One way you make it easy is by keeping it around. If I went into my living room and the book wasn't there, and there was no book there that I wanted to read, do you know what the temptation would be? With my coffee, "Ah, you know what? The book's in a different room. I don't know where it is. Let me just pull out my phone. I'll quickly check Instagram." And I've done that. I have. And I've learnt from it. Again, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with doing that. But if you wanna really set your intention at the start of the day, do something for you that helps you in every aspects of your life. I'd really encourage you to think about something that makes mindset easy. Now,

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:32 another way you might wanna do mindset is with affirmations. Affirmations are short, powerful statements in the present tense. Right? Some people are fans of affirmations. Some people say, "Oh, they're not for me." Hey, you know what? That's pretty much the same with all health interventions. Nothing tends to work for everyone. I find affirmations really useful. Now, I'm a father. I've got two young kids in the house. Now, I try and get up early so I can do my morning routine before my kids are up. But sometimes my son or my daughter will know that Daddy's up. They'll come down whilst I'm in the middle of my third M. The old me used to, I think, feel quite frustrated. "Oh, man, I need this time to myself." And I'd create this kind of disempowering story in my head. But I realized that just wasn't helping me. My kids wanted to see me. They wanted to see what I'm up to. So now when that happens, I love it. I embrace it. I go, "Okay, cool. What can I do with the kids?" Either we'll read something together or we'll do affirmations together. So I sometimes will sit with my daughter, we'll hold hands, and we'll say, "I'm happy, I'm calm, I'm stress-free. I'm happy, I'm calm, I'm stress-free." And we'll do that, I don't know, for a minute, maybe 10 times, maybe 20 times. And at the end of it, my daughter's got a big smile on her face, I've got a big smile on my face, and that feeling of presence and calm continues. It's not just there. That changes how I am over breakfast. That changes how I am as a doctor when seeing patients or how I interact with my wife. So that third M is mindset, something that puts you in a positive frame of mind. Now, I just wanna address something on affirmations. For some people, they are life-changing, and there is science supporting this. You know, there's a study showing that undergraduate students who did affirmations before their exams performed better. Now, there's other studies which show affirmations don't seem to work that well for some people. Okay, I'm fine with that, right? [laughs] Give it a go. See what happens. If you're skeptical, my challenge to you is try them for seven days and just see how you feel. If you feel no different, fine. Say, "They're probably not for me," or, "I'm not gonna listen to what that guy says." I'm okay with that. But I really would encourage you to give it a go and see how that makes you feel. Now, I wanna tell you about another patient of mine because remember I said earlier that this morning routine does

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:03 not need to take that long. I think if you've got 10 or 15 minutes, wonderful. You could do five minutes on each. Right? I've now altered my life around so that I can do about 30 minutes each morning. Not every morning, but usually, right? But it's taken me a few years to build up to that. One of my patients did only five minutes. I'm gonna tell you about her. So I think she was in her 30s. She had really bad eczema, which is a skin condition. And she'd seen various doctors. Um, she, she'd, she had various creams. Sometimes they would help. Sometimes they wouldn't. Again, I strongly felt that stress, chronic unmanaged stress in her life, was having a huge impact on her skin. I think it was contributing to her flares. And again, she was a single mum, right? She had two kids, I think, and she was working super hard. And of course, initially, she was like, [laughs] "I can't cut out time for a morning routine. I've just got stuff to do." I said, "Okay, fine." Well, let me try and help you figure out what we might be able to do. And it took a bit of time. I always spend time with my patients trying to understand them. I always make sure that they know that I really care and I'm really trying to find a solution that's gonna work for them. If they tell me they don't wanna do something, I respect that and I say, "Okay, fine. What else might we consider?" Now, after all that period of getting to know her, experimenting, we came up with a five-minute routine that worked for her. And I managed to help her figure out a morning routine that included all those three Ms; mindfulness, movement, and mindset, and it only took her five minutes. So what did she do? Well, she would wake up, and for one minute she would do this three-four-five breath that I taught her, that I shared with you at the start of this video. Breathe in for three, hold for four, breathe out for five. So she did five of those breaths and it took her one minute. Then for the next two minutes she went to the second M of these three Ms, which is movement. She loved yoga, and she learned a sequence that she could do that only took her two minutes. She did two minutes of yoga. And then for the final two minutes of her morning routine she did the third M, mindset. She would say affirmations. Right? So that's all she did. Five minutes. And what was the impact? What she experienced over the coming days and weeks was that five-minute morning routine set the tone for the rest of her day. Right? She felt less stress, less anxious. She was calmer with her children, and that feeling of calm continued for a lot of the day. She found that she was less reactive. Right? She wasn't blowing up with people at work or getting frustrated at emails in a way that she used to. And over the coming weeks her skin started to get better, significantly better. Her eczema didn't go away completely,

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:08 but all those flare-ups, the things that really made her life, uh, challenging and difficult, they reduced so, so much. So her eczema became really manageable. Really manageable and had very little impact on her life. And it all started with that five-minute morning routine. That is why I'm so passionate about teaching my patients, and as many people as I can really, how impactful it can be. Now, I wanna reiterate something I said at the start of this video. You don't have to do this in the morning. Yes, I find it much more useful for me to do it in the morning. Most of my patients find it much easier to do regularly when they do it in the morning before the demands of life start to get in the way; emails, work commitments, family commitments. But I do understand that the mornings are not for everyone. And if that's you, please don't see this as a prescription saying you have to do this in the morning. Use this 3M framework as a self-care practice that you can do at some point in the day. You know, one of my patients, she'd do it in the morning but she didn't do it first thing. She would do it after she'd dropped her kids at school and before she started work. That was when she found she had time to do it. So my question to you is, where in your day might you be able to fit in this self-care routine that we know can have a huge impact on stress, anxiety, mood, productivity, concentration, and

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:39 feelings of calm? So I now wanna share with you the reason why I think routines like this 3M routine can be so beneficial for so many people and with so many different conditions. And it comes down to what I call micro stress doses. Remember at the start of this video I said that around 90% of what a medical doctor like me sees in any given day is in some way related to stress. Stress can impact every organ system in the body. Stress can raise your blood pressure, it can make you feel more anxious, it can deplete your energy, it can cause gut problems, it can lead to low libido, it can exacerbate hormonal problems. As you heard with some of those case studies, it can make skin problems worse, it can make headaches and migraines worse, right? Stress affects so many of the things that commonly come into my practice as a doctor. But what does stress mean? Right, there's many ways you can think about that, and I'm gonna make another video on stress very shortly on this YouTube channel. But for the purpose of this video, I wanna teach you about what I call micro stress doses or MSDs. So what is a micro stress dose? Well, a micro stress dose is a little hit of stress that in isolation you can bounce off, no problems. The problem isn't the MSDs in isolation, it's when they mount up one after the other. So all of us have what I call a personal stress threshold, and this varies from person to person. Your threshold is gonna be different from mine, and our threshold may well change at different parts in our life depending on what we've got going on. But I want you to think about it like this. If this is your stress threshold, this is when you start to have problems in life, right? So let's say you wake up feeling pretty calm, right? You're far away from your stress thresholds, and then you start to accumulate what I call these micro stress doses or MSDs. Little by little, these MSDs start to accumulate and you get closer and closer to your stress threshold. And here's the problem. When you get to your stress threshold, that's when things start to go wrong. That's when an email from our colleague really irritates us, that's when we fall out with our partner or have a row with our children or our neck goes into spasm or our back starts to go. It's when we've hit our stress threshold, and people often think it was the last thing that caused it. You know, at 3:00 PM you get an email from your boss that you don't like. We think it was the email that made us blow up and react and lose our cool. Now, sure, the email contributed, but it wasn't actually that email. It was the buildup of micro stress doses throughout the day that got you close to your threshold. So anything we can do to keep ourselves away from our threshold makes us feel more resilient.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:44 Now, here's a typical morning that I've seen with many of my patients, right? They've stayed up late the night before because work's stressful and they wanna unwind, so they're, they're watching TV or videos till late. Okay, fine. So let's say they go to bed at midnight, and their alarm goes off at 6:00 AM, right? So they're in bed. The phone alarm goes off at 6:00 AM and jolts them out of their deep sleep. That's what I call micro stress dose number one or MSD number one, right? They've woken up from a deep sleep. They have a look at the time. They go, "Ugh, I need a few more minutes," so they press snooze. Goes off again. Six or seven minutes later, the alarm goes off again, MSD number two. Then they pick up the phone, have a look, go into their email inbox. "Oh man, there's three work emails I didn't reply to yesterday. I better do them now," MSD number three. Then they might jump onto Facebook or Instagram and someone's left a negative comment, MSD number four. They then go and scroll the news and see some worrying news about what's going on in the world, MSD number five. Then they might realize, "Oh man, I've just been looking at the phone for so long. I'm gonna be late for work. I need to get out of bed and get ready," MSD number six. And this continues on and on and on. So many of my patients end up exposing themselves to maybe 15 MSDs in the first hour of the day before they've even left the house. And what does that mean? That means that for that particular patient or for that particular individual, they are going out into their day, into the world, very, very close to their stress threshold, certainly a lot closer to their stress threshold than they might ideally want to have been. But what does that mean? It means that it won't take much in the day to tip them over. You don't have much resilience. You have no headroom left. So anything you can do to reduce how many MSDs you're being exposed to is gonna result in you being a lot further away from your stress threshold, which means you're gonna feel calmer, right? You're gonna be less stressed. You're gonna be more engaged and present in your life. You're gonna be a better employee or employer, right? You're gonna be more productive at work, and you're gonna be more resilient. It's gonna take a really, really stressful day to build up so that you hit your threshold. So when you engage in a morning routine like the one I've been suggesting, the three Ms, mindfulness, movement, and mindset, what you'll find is that you are much further away from your stress threshold. You'll have reduced how many MSDs you've been exposed to in the morning. Not only that, right, you've gone the other way. Not only have you actually reduced the incoming, you've actually made yourself more resilient. You've moved yourself the other way. You've actually lengthened the distance between where you currently are and your stress threshold and where you're gonna be after

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:45 that morning routine, and that's why I'm so passionate about it. As I said at the top, 90% of what we see as doctors in any given day is in some way related to stress. Stress rarely takes a day off in our lives, so I don't think we can take a day off managing stress. So I wanna be really, really clear here. I think most people, if not all of us, would benefit from an intentional morning routine. As I've described in this video, the benefits can be profound in all aspects of our life. I've seen it with my patients. I've seen it with family members and friends. I've also experienced it myself. On the days where I engage in my morning routine, I'm a better husband, I'm a better father, and I'm a better doctor. I've seen the same with my patients. On the days they engage, their experience of their day, and really their experience of their life, starts to change for the better. So what are you gonna do? Are you gonna hear this information and go, "Yeah, that was interesting. I like it," and then crack on with your day? Or do you feel inspired to say, "Hey, you know what? Maybe I don't like the way life is for me now. Maybe I wanna start to see some improvements in my health. Maybe I want more energy. Maybe I don't wanna feel so indifferent and lazy every morning"? Well, I promise this can help you. It doesn't need to cost any money, right? It really doesn't. The breathing practices that I mentioned, completely free of charge. Body weight workouts or some stretches, free of charge. Reading some positive pages in a book or doing some affirmations, pretty much free of charge. Sure, you might have to buy a book, but you may, I'm guessing, already have some books at home, or you might be able to borrow some books which help. So I don't want cost to be an obstacle, right? I've been a doctor in many different practices in many different areas. I've treated affluent patients, but I've also treated patients who don't have much. But it doesn't matter which patient I'm dealing with, I've always found these morning routines to be helpful. So I hope you found that video interesting. I hope it helps you sort of think about how you can bring that three-M routine into your own life. Now, two final words I wanna say to you is... Number one, doing something is better than nothing. Right? Maybe these three Ms feel too much for you at the moment. If that's the case, that's okay. Start where you're at. Pick one M. Pick the one that you like. Maybe it was movement, you think, "I'm gonna start each day with 10 squats." Great. Right? Start there. You don't have to do it all. Maybe you build up to that, or maybe you just like the idea of sitting in silence with your coffee and reading some positive pages in the morning rather than the news or social media. Great. I promise you, if you try this for seven days every day, and then pay attention to how you feel afterwards right then, but also pay attention to how you feel for the rest of the day, I'm pretty sure you're gonna feel a difference. Ask the people around you what difference are they see in you? Because sometimes we don't see it, but your partner might say, "Hey, babe, you're just a lot calmer, less reactive, more present." Those are the kind of things that are gonna help motivate you to keep going and to do more. The second point I wanted to make right at the end of this video is that one of the huge benefits that something like this does for you is that you show yourself that you're worth it. Right? You're basically showing yourself that it doesn't matter what's going on in the world, how busy work gets, how many family commitments I have, how many chores I have to do at home. But if you can carve out 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes for yourself each day, you show yourself that, "Hey, you know what? I'm worth it. Doesn't matter what's going on, I still manage to prioritize time for myself." And day after day, week after week, month after month, these small things make a difference. I promise. I've been a doctor for over 20 years. I've been using this with patients for so many years. I've experienced the benefits myself, and I really wanna inspire you to at least give it a go. I understand that you feel lost, that some days you wake up, you don't wanna get out of bed, some days you don't have the motivation to do the things that you know you want to do, the things that you said you were going to do. I get it. You know, I have days like that. Many of my patients have days like that. But even though you may feel like that at the moment, that's not the way it has to stay. Right? It's not that hard to change it once you identify what's driving it. Now, for many of us, what is often behind it is that we're not truly living our life, we're trying to live somebody else's life. And so we end up chasing the wrong things. We end up chasing our dreams, only to realize that actually [laughs] our dreams don't make us happy. Now, I know that sounds a bit cynical, but for many of us it's absolutely true. Well, I saw this patient a few years ago. From the outside, it looked as though he was crushing it. He had a nice car, he ran his own business, he was making good money. He also felt lazy, unmotivated, indifferent to life. I mean, he thought he had depression, and when I spoke to him and I got to know him, it was so clear he didn't need an antidepressant, he needed to spend time with his friends. And that was the prescription I gave him. I said, "Listen, every week, once a week, see one of your friends in person. And when you're with them, don't look at your phone." Six weeks later, completely transformed. Different energy, big smile, motivation back, energy back. Right? Completely different. He didn't need an antidepressant, he needed time with his friends. And what about you? How often do you spend time nourishing the important relationships in your life? I mean, who are those people? Partner? Children? Childhood friends? Work colleagues? Like, who it's gonna be for you, it's gonna be different for me. But we know that relationships are really, really important. They're the number one factor for our health and our happiness. Yet many of us, we're so busy trying to get more, do more, acquire more, that we forget about what's really important. I mean, let me ask you this. Imagine you're on your deathbed. Look back over your life. What are three things you'll want to have done? Three things you will want to have achieved? Go on, do it now. Ask yourself. Well, sure, you're unique. You've got your own desires, you've got your own preferences, but we're not as unique as we think. We know with a high degree of certainty what you are going to say on your deathbed. How do I know that? Because palliative care nurses have told us. They spent years caring for people at the end of their lives, and they all say the same things. "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 be happy. I wish I'd lived my life and not somebody else's." See, that's the big problem. That's what I did for much of my life. I thought that acquiring more, doing more, getting more, getting a promotion, right, was gonna make me happy. But I got all those things and it didn't. So what are you chasing? Are you chasing your dreams? Are you chasing what is truly gonna make you happy? Or do you think that getting a better job, getting more money, having a nicer phone, do you think those things are gonna make you happy? For most of us, honestly They don't. One of the biggest problems across society is that we confuse success and happiness. We think they're the same thing, but for most of us, they're not. Now, they can overlap. Sure, they can overlap, but for most of us, they don't. For most of us, they're two completely separate things, and therefore, we need to spend a bit of time asking ourselves, "What is it that success really means for me?" You know? "What is a successful life for me? What does a successful life look like?" And it's only by spending a bit of time thinking about it, defining it for you, not for your friends, not for your mate at work, not for me. This is for you. Right? Define what it means for you. So try this right now. On one sheet of paper, write down three things that you could do this week that truly make you happy. Well, I would say pause the video. Do it right now. What are three things? And ask yourself, could you do those three things every week? Right. The second part of this exercise is called write your own happy ending. Right. I've already said to you, imagine you're on your deathbed. Well, write down now, on your deathbed, looking back at your life, what are those three things that you will want to have done? Right. So now you should have two sheets of paper. Now bring them close together, and now ask yourself, if you do those three weekly happiness habits, will you get that happy ending that you've just defined that you want for yourself? If you do those three happiness habits every week, week after week, month after month, will you get that happy ending that you've just defined for yourself? You see, this is an exercise that's not about beating yourself up, make yourself feel guilty or ashamed. It's nothing like that. It's about awareness. Right? It's simply about saying, "Well, if at the end of my life I say I wanna have spent time with my friends and family," which is pretty much what we all say and what we're all going to say, and you look at your weekly life and go, "I'm so busy with work or commitments, with what I have to do, that I don't have time to nurture my friends and family," well, that's okay. Right? But at least now you know. Right? Can you make one small shift? Can you go, "Well, this week, actually, you know what? Yeah, work is busy, but can I carve out half an hour this week to see one of my friends?" Or go round and spend time with your mum. You know, whatever it is for you. So it's a, it's a very simple exercise, but it's deceptively simple, and it's one you can do regularly. Right? You can keep tweaking this, as I do. I know at the end of my life, I'll have wanted to have spent quality time with my friends and family. I'll want to have done something that contributes to the wellbeing of other people. I'll also want to have had time to engage in things that I'm passionate about. Right? Those are my three things. So I know each week, if I can go for a long walk with my wife and kids at the weekends, if I can be present for five meals to sit with them undistracted, then I know week after week, I'm gonna have nourished those important relationships. If I record an episode of my podcast every week, week after week, month after month, I know at the end of my life, I'll have ticked that second box. I will have done something that's contributed to the wellbeing of other people. And if I have time each week to go for a walk or play my guitar or practice playing snooker, right? If I get two or three episodes a week where I can do that, I know I'm having time to nourish my passion, so I'll get that happy ending that I want at the end of my life. I guess what we're talking about is an intentional life. It's about a life where you have specified what you want out of it, and then you've gone to go and get that. But for many of us, we chase the dreams of other people. We chase the idea that society has given to us. Right? That's the big problem. That's what happened to my dad. My dad worked so hard that he literally killed himself working. Right. Now, Dad was an immigrant to the UK from India in the 1960s. Right? He came over with nothing. His goal was to give himself, his family, certainly his kids and his wife in the UK, but also his family back home, a better life. And you know what? By certain definitions, Dad did that. Now, I love my dad. I'm so proud and glad what he did for me and my brother a- and our family. But he killed himself working. Right? Because he fell for the myth that many people fall for, that getting more is gonna lead to happiness. But the price we often pay for getting more kills us or makes us sick. Right? There's a part of our brain called the want brain, right? And it's basically this, this part of the brain that makes us think that getting more, getting a promotion, you know, getting more resources for us and our family, getting another slab of chocolate, another glass of wine, is gonna truly make us happy. Now, that part of your brain is a relic from the olden days, where actually, we probably did need to compete for resources, and actually, those things did help us. But for many of us, now I know not all of us, but for many of us these days, that's not the world in which we live. Right? Trying to acquire more at the expense of other people, it's not gonna make us happy. In fact, it just makes us feel empty and discontent. Now, Dad's desire for success was so great that he did more than his body could stand. It literally killed him. Dad was a consultant doctor in Manchester Royal Infirmary, and Dad would come home from his day job at around, I don't know, 5:30 or 6 PM in the evening. He'd have dinner, then he'd go upstairs, he'd shave, come downstairs. A car would pick him up at 7 PM, right? Dad would go out all night, do GP house calls, seeing patients, and he'd arrive back in a car at 7 AM. He'd come back in again. He'd have breakfast that Mum had made for him. He'd go upstairs and shave, and then he would drive maybe 30 or 40 minutes into central Manchester to do his day job. Now, Dad did that for 30 years. He only slept three nights a week for 30 years, which is why, no doubt in my mind, in his late 50s he gets really sick with lupus, which is an autoimmune disease, and kidney failure. It was overwork. Now, look, I get it. Dad did what he felt he had to do. Right? He didn't have connections in the UK. He didn't... He came here with nothing in terms of money. I understand that, but it came at a cost. You know, as a kid, I hardly saw my dad. Dad was doing what he felt he had to do, and I thank him for that, but I don't wanna make the same choices that Dad made. Right? I don't wanna have that life. I don't need to. And you could argue that because of the sacrifices he made, maybe I don't need to, and that's true. I don't need to in the same way that he felt he had to. But here's the thing, many of us are doing the same thing. We may have different pressures, we may have different motivations, but many of us are chasing more. We think it's gonna bring happiness, but it doesn't. You know, I've done the same thing. I took on the idea as a child that I was only of value when I achieved something or succeeded. Now, every situation in life has got multiple perspectives, and actually being able to choose the perspective that works for you is a really important skill for our happiness, for our health, for our wellbeing. I'm gonna teach you some things on that in just a moment. But when it comes to perspective, let me share with you an incident from my childhood which really demonstrates how every situation has got multiple perspectives. So if I came back from school with 19 out of 20 in a test, my parents would ask me, "Why didn't you get 20?" If I came back with 99%, they'd ask me, "Why didn't you get 100%?" If I came second in the class, they'd say, "Well, who came top? Why didn't you come top?" Now, I asked my mum just the other day why did she and Dad do that when I was a kid. Well, they did it from a place of love. They, like many immigrants, faced struggle, faced discrimination, right? They had a hard life, and they want to avoid their children having to do that. So in their eyes, if we prioritize academic excellence, if my son does really well at school, he goes to a good university, gets a good job, right, then he's not gonna have the same problems that we had. Now, I understand that. I love that. I love that place of love and desire that the children are gonna have a better life. But what did I take on as a little boy? I took on the idea that I'm only worthy of love, worthy of praise, worthy of anything if I'm top of the class, if I get full marks. Same situation, two different perspectives. So how does that play out for me? It means that actually I don't feel good in who I am unless I'm top dog, unless I have succeeded. And then, yeah, it can drive you on to huge levels of what society calls success. A good job, right, a nice promotion, a, a nice salary. But if the drive for those things is because you don't feel enough and you think those things are gonna complete you and make you feel enough, well, you may be in for a rude awakening like I was. Like, you get those things, and you realize there's still a deep hole in your heart that those things didn't fill. Now, that's going on all over the world these days. That may be going on in your life. What's your drive? Why are you pushing so hard to get the things that you think are gonna make you happy? Is it coming from a place of lack, or is it coming from a place of love? 'Cause that's the key question. That really is the number-one question. Where's your drive coming from? You see, if it's coming from a place of lack, if you think that, "When I achieve this, I'm gonna show them. I'm gonna prove to those people that I could do it," well, what you might find is that when you get those things, and you may well do, you may find that there's no pot of gold there, just emptiness. A few weeks ago, I spoke to Jonny Wilkinson on my podcast. Now, everyone in the UK knows who Jonny Wilkinson is, but if you don't, Jonny Wilkinson is probably one of the world's most famous rugby players. Now, what's really incredible about his story is that at the age of 24, he'd achieved all of his dreams. Right? So as a little kid, he writes down on a piece of paper, "I wanna play for England, and I wanna win the World Cup." At the age of 24, that's exactly what he's done. Not only has he won the World Cup with England, he does it in the most fairytale of settings. In the final minute of the game, he kicks the winning goal that helps his country lift the World Cup. All sounds great, doesn't it? He's got his dreams. Well, here's the problem. Those dreams didn't make him happy. He felt empty afterwards, lonely, a feeling of discontent. He talks about the following morning, he woke up feeling nothing. What's next? You know, all the focus was on the goal, right? So you get the goal, but then what happens? Many of us are chasing that same fallacy. We think when we get our dream, it's gonna make us happy. But if that drive comes from that place of lack rather than a place of love and fullness, you can have a problem. I've had that problem. Jonny Wilkinson's had that problem. We see that all over the world. So many people who you may look up to, right, they tell you the same story. The dreams didn't make them happy. So what's the solution? You gotta define what the right dream is for you. Then you start chasing the stuff that's gonna make you happy in your life, right? It's not that hard. That exercise I just mentioned, do it. Do it regularly. Write the three happiness habits down that you can do each week that you feel are truly gonna make you happy. Write down the three things that you're gonna say on your deathbed, and bring those two things into alignment. So maybe not this week, right? Maybe it'll take you a month or two to really get there. Maybe it'll take a bit longer. That's okay. It's a journey. Many of us are blind to this though. Many of us feel we're chasing the stuff that's gonna make us happy. Many of us feel if we work harder, we get a promotion, we get a better car, we get a nicer job, it's gonna do it for us, but it doesn't. And that's the reason why so many of us are feeling lazy. We're feeling unmotivated. We don't feel we've got energy. It's 'cause our life is not aligned with who we really are. Success, happiness, you know, we confuse the two. But what is happiness, right? Because you could say that term happiness to 10 different people, and they'll come up with 10 different interpretations of what that means. You know, what do you think of when you hear the word happiness? Do you think it's a smile on your face every day, seven days a week, you know, 52 weeks a year? Is that what you think happiness is? Do you think happiness is basically that feeling you're gonna get one day when everything in life goes perfectly? There's no more struggle. There's no more obstacles. The world is the way you would like it to be. Well, if you think that's what happiness is, you could be waiting a very long time, because happiness is an inside job, right? So when I say happiness, I tell you what I mean. I have this term that I call core happiness, and core happiness, I want you to think of like a three-legged stool, right? Each of the three legs is separate, but it's essential. If any one of those legs starts to fall down, your feelings of happiness will probably start to collapse. So what are those three legs? Well, the three legs are alignment, contentment, and control. Right? So what's alignment? Alignment is when the person who you really are inside and the person who you are actually being out there in the world are one and the same. That's alignment, right? That's basically when your inner values and your external actions start to match up, right? That's what alignment is. So how aligned are you in your life at the moment? The second leg is contentment. Now, contentment is that feeling of peace with your life and your decisions. It's that feeling you get when you do certain things, and you get that, that feeling of calm, right? That's contentment. And then the third leg is control. Now, control is a really important one. It's not about controlling the world around you or other people. Now, that's impossible. Like, we see that all the time. Like, the world is inherently uncontrollable. It's not about that. It's about a sense of control. What are the things that you can do regularly, ideally on a daily basis, that give you a sense of control over your life? Because we know that people with a better sense of control, they have more motivation. They have higher levels of success. They earn more money. They're happier. They're healthier. They live longer, right? So alignment, contentment, and control, these are the three core legs of the core happiness stool. Now, what I love about them, and the reason I designed this model of happiness, is to make it a really practical model, right? 'Cause otherwise, happiness feels like this impossible destination that one day we're just gonna stumble across when everything just happens to go right. But that's very disempowering. Happiness is a skill. It's a skill that you can practice, you can develop, you can get better at once you know what to work on, right? But do you know what to work on? Did someone teach you the skill of happiness? Like, no one taught me the skill of happiness. As a child, my parents didn't teach me. School didn't teach me. The world around me certainly did not teach me. As I've already mentioned, the world around me gave me the wrong idea. The world around me taught me- That more stuff, more things, more money, more status is gonna make me happy. But it doesn't. And that's why I'm so keen to help you understand that happiness is a skill that you can work on. And what's great about this three-legged stool is that each of those legs, you can work on it in your daily life. And as you work on them, the side effect is gonna be that you feel happier more often. So you're not directly working on happiness, you're working on the things that breed happiness. Right? And the things that I'm talking about are actually things that you can work on. And actually, most of these things, they don't cost any money. They just require a commitment from you to go, "Yeah, you know what? I actually want to feel better than I currently do. I want a bit more happiness in my life." Happiness is not about saying everything's gonna go perfect in your life. Obstacles, problems are an inevitable part of life. But once you understand that actually your inner happiness and your inner wellbeing is largely under your control, irrespective of how people are treating you, irrespective of what's going on in the world around you, that is a huge realization. Right? And I, I'm so passionate about this because until about five or six years ago, I honestly felt that my happiness was dependent on the world around me. If the world goes a certain way, I'm gonna be happy. If people treat me a certain way, I'm gonna be happy. But that's a very disempowering place to be because that effectively means that your happiness is dependent on other people. It's dependent on external things. Is that the place you wanna be in? No. I don't wanna be in that place. I'm not in that place, right? I am no longer in that place. I now know, because I've worked on it, because I've practiced it, I know that my inner wellbeing is kind of up to me. Sure, there may be things going on in the world that I would prefer were different to the way they are, but I still know that even in the face of that, I still have the inner resources and tools to make myself happy, and it's all to do with this core happiness stool. So let me talk about alignment, right? Because being the person out there in the world who you really are inside is really, really important, but many of us are not doing that. We're performing at life. We're trying to be someone who we are not in order to fit in. And sure, that may have served you as a child. You may have needed to do that depending on your upbringing, you know, how you were parented, what was going on at your school. I understand that. But just because that worked for you as a child, it doesn't mean that same strategy is gonna work for you now as an adult. In fact, for many of us, for most of us, for all of us, I think a key step that we take in life to move towards being that happier, calmer, more contented person is understanding those childhood strategies for what they were. I mentioned that I took on the belief that I'm only loved and worthy when I get top marks or I'm a success. That may have served me for some part of my life. You know, we can debate that. But I tell you what, now, at this stage of my life as a husband, as a father, that was not serving me at all. It was making me feel very, very lonely inside. And often when we've got this discontentment with who we are and how we're acting, we fill that gap with what I call junk happiness habits. Right? We've all got a junk happiness habit. Many of us have got several. It could be sugar. It could be alcohol. It could be gambling. It could be three or four hours on Instagram. It could be online shopping. Right? There's nothing necessarily wrong with these habits. The problem is, is if we engage in them too often or we make the mistake, we, we kid ourselves that those things are truly making us happy, and for most of us, they're simply not. They're a distraction. We go to them because we, we feel there's a void inside who we are, and we look to fill that void with those habits. And I tell you, as you work on the skill of happiness, you will find, as I have, that you engage in those junk happiness habits less and less. Because what we all need to understand is that all of our behaviors are there for a reason. They all serve a need in our life. And often we try and change the behavior without understanding what's driving it, which is why, you know, in the new year, people can give up sugar for three weeks. They can do a workout regime for three or four weeks. But almost always they revert back because the underlying drive that led to that behavior has not changed. Now, I've seen this firsthand with patients, I've seen it firsthand with myself. You will experience this as well. When you work on these three legs of the core happiness stool, you will find that a lot of the behaviors that you may well have tried to stop yourself using willpower and motivation, potentially unsuccessfully, you'll find it gets so much easier, and effortlessly a lot of them will fall by the wayside. So how do you live an aligned life, right? 'Cause it's easy to say that, "Live in alignment with who you are," but what does that mean? Well, a really simple way to start figuring that out is to ask yourself- Ask yourself right now, what are your values? What are the things that really encompass... You know, what's important to you? What is important to you? Is it kindness? Compassion? Family? Nature? The environment? Being curious? Having time by yourself? Spending time engaging in passions? Being enthusiastic? You know, what is it? Can you pick three things? In fact, if three's too hard, can you pick one? Was there one thing I said that you thought, "Yeah, that's kind of a value for me"? Okay, write it down. Right? If that's a value that sits well with you right now, then you write that down, and then you ask yourself, "Am I living by that value in every aspects of my life, in my personal life, in my professional life, in my social life?" Again, if you're not, that's okay, but you're bringing a bit of awareness now and intention to what's going on. Right? You're like, "Ah, I value kindness, but actually, you know what? At work, I don't like one of my colleagues, so I was a bit underhand to get a leg up on him in my office." Okay. I understand. I understand you may have done that. But here's the thing, right? You can't hide from yourself. In those moments in bed at night when you're lying there, you know what you've done, right? So if kindness is something that you truly value and you're not showcasing that in every aspects of your life, well, that's an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to go, "No, actually, that's not who I am. That's not really who I am." And as you do that, you close that gap. You're living a more aligned life. Then you engage in less junk happiness habits. Now, what does meaning and purpose fit in here? Right? 'Cause we're hearing that a lot, aren't we? That it's not about happiness, it's about meaning. Well, I think meaning and purpose are important things, but I don't think they're the same thing as happiness. If you enjoyed this video, I think you are really going to enjoy my new book, Happy Mind, Happy Life: The New Science of Mental Wellbeing. I've been a practicing doctor for over 20 years now, and I can tell you there's a very strong link between happiness and health. Happier people are healthier and they live longer. Now, happiness is actually a trainable skill that all of us can get better at once we know what to work on, and that's what my book is about. All the simple, free tools that you can use in your life to help you feel calmer, more content, more in control. Yes, happier, but also healthier. You can order the book right now. All you have to do is click the link in the description box below. How you start each morning can absolutely set the tone for the rest of your day, and many people find mornings really, really stressful. They've got their kids to get ready. They've got all kinds of things to do in the house before they get to work. They've got emails to send. Whatever it might be. And I found in my 20 years experience as a medical doctor that if I can help my patients make some small changes each

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:56 morning, it can have profound effects on, you know, their negative thoughts, uh, their moods, their stress, their anxiety. It can help them be more productive. It can help them feel more motivated. It can also help them feel happier and more content. So in this video, what I want to do is share with you some of the things that have worked really, really well with my patients, and my hope is that they work really well for you, too. It's thought that about 90% of what a medical doctor like me sees in any given day is in some way related to stress. Well, that's a remarkable statistic. Stress affects every single organ system in the body. It can have an impact on so many different systems. And actually, at the moment, we are living in incredibly stressful times. I wanna start off by telling you about one of my patients. Right. She was a 44-year-old lady. She was a lawyer. She was married, and she had three kids. Now, she would come in to see me with really bad headaches. When I saw her, I thought that these were migraines, and she had tried from previous doctors in the past lots of different migraine pills, and they might work a little bit, but she didn't like the side effects, and she didn't really like to take them. And as I was getting to know her, it was really clear to me that stress, chronic, unmanaged stress in her life was absolutely playing a role in her headaches. I couldn't say that stress was the only cause of her headaches, but I absolutely knew that stress was playing a key role. So I suggested various things to her, and she said to me, "Dr. Chatterjee, look, uh, yoga, that meditation, that ain't, that ain't my thing. I haven't got time for that. I've got a busy job. I've gotta get my kids ready." And I thought, "Okay. Okay, no problem." One thing I've learnt in all my years of seeing patients is that you've gotta meet someone where they're at. You can't just force them and say, "You must do this." You have to help them find what's gonna work for them. And we went through a number of options and she said, "I don't have time. I don't have time." I said, "Okay, what do you do first thing in the morning?" And she said, "Well, doesn't matter what's going on, if my kids are fighting, if they're not getting ready for school, whatever it is, I go downstairs and I make myself a cup of tea." And I thought, "Ah, okay." I said, "What do you do when you make your cup of tea?" She goes, "Well, nothing really. I just sort of jump onto my phone. I might look at social media. I might send some work emails." I said, "Okay, would you be interested in doing something different whilst you're having your cup of tea?" She said, "Like what?" I said, "How about journaling?" And she said, "What's journaling?" So I explained. Journaling is this, uh... It's the process where you write down various thoughts. It could be that you write down how you're feeling. It could be that you write down your anxieties. It could be that you write down the three most important things that you wanna get done in that day. Whatever it is, it's just a, a way of taking the noise in your mind and actually downloading it onto paper. Now she looked a little bit skeptical, and I said, "Look, why don't we try this? For the next week, each morning when you have your cup of tea, you're gonna have a journal and write down some of your thoughts." And she agreed to do that. So she went away. She came back to see me a few weeks later and I said, "How are you getting on?" She said, "Dr. Chatterjee, I don't know, but I feel different." She found that the act of giving herself five minutes every morning to do a, I guess a practice of mindfulness, of journaling, time for herself, irrespective of what was going on around her, made a massive difference. She found her stress levels were lower, she was calmer with her children, she was more productive at work, and it led to what I call a ripple effect, right? So within a few days she started to go out for a walk at lunchtime from her office in a way that she never used to before. She, she always used to think, "I don't have time. I'm gonna work through at my desk." And within a few weeks, the severity of her headaches had gone down by under 50%, and four months later she was barely getting any headaches at all. So that one small change, which for her was in the morning, had a ripple effect which impacted, yes, her headaches, but also her relationships with her children, relationships, um, with her husband, but also her productivity at work. So I just wanna start off by sharing that case study with you because, yes, she had headaches, and yes, she chose to journal whilst having a cup of tea, but it doesn't mean you have to do that. And it doesn't mean that you can only utilize that strategy

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:28 when it comes to headaches. There's all kinds of things that you can do, and in this video, I want to share with you what I consider are the three most important components of any morning routine. I call them the three Ms. Now, at this point I wanna be really clear. It doesn't have to be done in the morning. Yes, in my experience, with most people this works better first thing in the morning. But if for whatever reason that doesn't work for you, you don't have to do it in the morning, but I think this is a very useful framework to think about a practice of self-care that you can bring into your life that will absolutely have benefits for lowering stress, lowering anxiety, helping you feel calm and more content, make you feel more motivated. It will also help you be a lot more productive. So the first M of the three Ms is mindfulness. Right? The first thing I want people to think about doing is some form of mindfulness practice. Now, mindfulness is a broad term, right? I don't think we need to get too super focused, right? We can think about anything that helps us to be a little bit more mindful. So that could be breathwork, right? There's all kinds of breathing practices out there. We focus on our breath, we intentionally breathe with a certain rhythm and a certain cadence, and that can absolutely change our physiology. It can change how stressed we feel. Because one thing a lot of us don't realize is that breathing is information. It's information for our bodies. So if we're feeling stressed out, let's say you're looking at your email inbox and you're feeling a bit stressed out. You've got some deadlines to meet, right? You'll find that your breathing starts to change. You'll probably start to breathe a little bit faster, a little bit more shallow, and a little bit more from your chest rather than your abdomen, right? And the way you're breathing, that's information. So because you're breathing faster and more shallow, you're sending signals to your brain that you are under stress. The world around you may not be safe, right? And that in turn signals a message from your brain back to your body to keep breathing faster. So you get stuck in this vicious loop. And there's a study actually which showed that 80% of office workers actually change how they breathe when looking at email. Now, what I love about breathing is that you can actually hack that straight away. If you consciously slow down your breath and change the way you breathe, instead of sending stress signals up to your brain you can send calm signals instead. So there's all kinds of breathing practices. One of my favorite ones is what I call the 3-4-5 breath. It's really simple. You breathe in for three, you hold for four, and you breathe out for five. Right? Now one of those breaths will take you 12 seconds. In one minute you can get five of them in, and I, I challenge you to try that. Yes, as part of this morning routine which I'm going to be sharing with you, but at any time when you feel stressed in your life or anxious, try that 3-4-5 breath and pay attention to how you feel afterwards, because for many of my patients they found it completely transformative. Right? So the 3-4-5 breath is one kind of breathing practice, but there's many others. There's something that Andrew Weil popularized called the 4-7-8 breath where you breathe in for four, you hold for seven, and you breathe out for eight. There's also something called box breathing, which a lot of people say the US Navy Seals use to help them, uh, de-stress and to help them focus and concentrate better, and the idea is really simple. You pick a number, let's say four, right? You would breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four, and hold for four. And then you repeat it. Now, if four is too much and you're unable to do that, that's completely okay. Just move it down to three or even two. Let's not put obstacles up in the way from doing really helpful practices, right? Let's make them super simple so that we can start to engage in them. There's many others. You may have a preferred one that you'd like to use, but it doesn't really matter which one you use. So let's just back up a minute. I'm talking about the first M of the three Ms. The first M is mindfulness. Can you do a practice of mindfulness? That could be breathing, but it doesn't have to be. It could be meditation Right? Maybe you've never meditated before and actually an app like Calm or Headspace will be a brilliant way for you to start. It guides you through what you have to do. It could be a really beautiful and calm way to start each day. Or it may be that you've meditated for a while, or you used to meditate and you've, like, fallen out of the practice, and I completely understand. That was my life for many years as well. I've now got to the stage where I generally will meditate on most mornings because I've, I've done it for a bit, I've experienced the benefits. I stopped again, I got a bit lazy, and I noticed those problems come back. And, you know, every time you do that, you do a habit, you forget again. You do a habit, you forget again. That's not failure, that's education. That's learning, right? So don't beat yourself up if that's you. Use this as an opportunity to remind yourself that when we meditate regularly, we do feel calmer. We do become more productive. We do become more motivated. Many people find that meditation helps them feel less anxious. Not everyone, but many people. So as part of this mindfulness practice, you could do breathwork, you could do meditation. You could even try something really simple like making a hot drink, let's say a cup of tea or a cup of coffee. But let's say you're making a cup of tea. Right? You could put the teabag in your mug, boil the kettle, watch the steam come out of the kettle, start pouring it in, watch the, the color of the water change as it blends with the teabag. As you pour the milk in, if you take milk, watch the color change and then sit in silence for five minutes and drink it, instead of distracting yourself with Instagram or Facebook or YouTube or whatever. Again, I'm not trying to tell you what you should be doing, I'm trying to share with you that a practice of mindfulness as part of a self-care routine, as part of a morning routine, is really, really helpful, but you've gotta find the one that works for you. Remember the patient I mentioned right at the start of this video? That middle-aged lady who was struggling with migraines, and I felt stress was a big driver of the frequency and the severity of her headaches. What does she do? She journaled with a hot drink. I mean, you could argue that's a practice of mindfulness. She was being attentive with herself and how she was feeling, and the thoughts in her mind that she was putting down onto paper. Right? So I really like to broaden out these definitions so you can find the right one for you. So the first thing I want you to do is pick one of those mindfulness practices, or pick a different one and say, "Yeah, I think I could do that as my first M of this 3M routine." But choose one that fits you and your lifestyle. The second M of this 3M routine is movement. Right, so I want you to think about a practice of movement that you could do as part of your morning routine. And we don't need to be prescriptive. Right, what movement do you enjoy doing? That's probably the best place to start. Why is movement so important? Well, we know movement is really important for our physical health, but it's also important for our mental health and our emotional health. Because when we move our bodies, we change how we feel. In fact, one of the fastest ways to change your internal state... Let's say you feel tired, let's say you're procrastinating, let's say you're feeling lazy, you don't wanna do anything. Move your body and you will absolutely feel differently. Movement changes your hormones. It changes the structure of your brain. Movement helps to increase something that we call BDNF in our brain, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is like Miracle-Gro for the nerve cells in your brain. Movement is not really about burning calories. It's about what it does to your body, your mind, and your soul. It's such a great way to start each day is with a small practice of movement. And I want to be really clear here. I'm talking about a morning routine. I'm not talking about you devoting two hours every morning to this routine. If you have two hours, wonderful. But most of us don't. Most of my patients don't. I certainly don't. And very shortly, I'm gonna share with you the story of one of my patients who did a five-minute morning routine. Just five minutes, and she got all of my 3Ms in those five minutes, and she experienced profound benefits for her health and her wellbeing. So what kind of movement should we be thinking about? Well, it can be anything. It could be press-ups if you enjoy doing press-ups. It could be 20 squats. It could be a yoga sequence that you like. Pilates. It could be that you put on one of your favorite tunes on your phone or on your music player and dance. But some way of moving your body each morning is so, so powerful. It changes how you feel. It changes who you are. It changes the trajectory of your day. On those days where you have moved, you will find that you make different decisions and, I would argue, better decisions than on those days where you felt, "I don't have time to move. I can't be bothered today." And I do understand sometimes we don't feel like it. So very shortly I'm gonna share with you some really simple tips that you can use to make it much more likely that you are going to move each morning. So let me share with you what I do each morning, because as a doctor, it's something I take very seriously that I don't wanna ask my patients in general to do anything that I've not done myself. So I ask them to do these 3Ms. I teach them how they can fit it into their life, but I also do it myself. And on the days where I don't do my morning routine, I always feel it later. Always. On those days where I wake up and I feel, "You know what? I don't have time today. I'd just better crack on with my emails or get on with my day"... I notice it later. I'm more reactive. I'm less productive. I'm not as good a doctor. I'm not as good a husband or a father compared to those days when I do find time to do it. Now, I've been working on this for a while, so mine does actually take about 30 minutes now. But I wanna be really clear, if you do not feel you have 30 minutes in the morning, that is completely okay. Five minutes will get you some huge benefits. So what do I do for my first M? So I wake up. Now, I wake up early, typically around 5:00 AM, and I'll come straight downstairs in my pajamas. The first thing I will do is a breathing practice. Now, I used to do the three, four, five breath, but at the moment I'm working on a new breathwork technique that I've learned about recently, and I'm really enjoying it. Again, this is a framework. You can change what you do within the framework, but the framework is there to guide you. It's not there to enslave you and tell you, "You must do this. You have to do it this way." No. Use it as a framework and find something that fits that framework that works for you and your life. So I start off with breathwork, and currently, that takes me about 10 minutes, and that breathwork is a form of meditation as well. So really, my first M takes me 10 minutes. Then what do I do? Second thing I do is I come from my living room and I go into my kitchen, and in my kitchen, I'll make myself some coffee. Now, I really enjoy drinking coffee, particularly in the morning by myself when my wife and my children are sleeping. It's time to me, time for me to sit, be alone with my thoughts, time for me to really nourish myself, and I really, really value that time and I've realized how important it is for me. But I'm very particular with how I make coffee. So I'll weigh out my coffee, put it in a French press, and then I'll pour the boiling water in. Then I'll put a timer on for about five minutes. Now, in those five minutes, whilst my coffee is brewing, I'll have a workout, and that's the secret to my success is I understand behavior change. You see, there's a couple of rules you need to know about, which I'll share with you in just a moment, on how you can make it much more likely that any new behavior you do is gonna turn into a habit, and that's exactly what I do around that second M for me, movement. So I do a five-minute workout. Now, I used to do a body weight workout. In fact, there is a video on YouTube. If you google my name and five-minute kitchen workout, you will see the body weight workout that I used to do for years. Now, I sometimes change it up. I have got a kettlebell in my kitchen. I've got a dumbbell in my kitchen. But the point is, for those five minutes, instead of going on Instagram, instead of going on YouTube, instead of going on my emails, I work out and I work out in my pajamas. Now, let me break that down for you. Why is that strategy so helpful for me? And why is it that I barely missed a day of working out, at least when it comes to this five-minute workout, in over three years? Now, it's not because I've got more motivation than you. It really isn't, I promise. It's because I understand some of the key rules of human behavior. Rule number one is you have to make any behavior that you wanna turn into a habit easy. Now, why do you have to make it easy? You gotta make it easy because if you don't, you are overly relying on motivation. And when your motivation is high, sure, say you'll do a 30-minute workout, you'll do it. But on those days that you feel tired, you're feeling a bit lazy, you're procrastinating, you've had a tough day at work or a poor night's sleep. If the behavior you wanna do is really hard to do, you're not gonna do it 'cause your motivation won't be there, and that's a big problem that many of us face when we try and change our behavior. We overly rely on motivation, but motivation never lasts. Motivation goes up and motivation comes down. In the research, they call it the motivation wave. So what you need to do is plan for when your motivation is at its lowest. That's why you make the behavior easy. So for me, I have a five-minute workout every morning. It used to be body weights, which was so easy because I didn't need to buy any equipment. I also don't need to get changed. I do it in my pajamas. And I used to do the same body weight workout every day. Why? Sure, there's benefit from changing it around, but the problem with changing it around is that you introduce choice, and with that choice comes procrastination. So for months I wouldn't think about it. It was like, "Okay, put the coffee on, start the timer," and I'd go around my circuit. I'd press ups, squats, uh, lunges, dips, all that stuff. I didn't need to think. Now that it's locked in, I can change it about. But for many months I never changed it, and that's why it got locked in as a behavior. Very much like you toothbrushing every day twice a day. You don't change it up from day to day. You don't go, "Oh, I, I brushed my teeth yesterday. I'm not gonna do that today. Maybe I'll floss today. Maybe I'll just rinse today." No, the reason or one of the reasons toothbrushing is a habit that you don't need to think about is because you made it easy. You don't need to choose each day what you're doing, and it happens at the same time and the same place. Very much like my movement part of my morning routine. The second reason why I barely missed a day in over three years now of doing this five-minute kitchen workout each morning is because I've applied what I call the second rule of behavior change. Right? So rule number one was make it easy. It's only five minutes to do. I don't need to buy any equipment. I don't need to get changed. Rule number two is where you put that behavior in your day, right? Every single behavior we do in life needs a trigger, right? So what could that trigger be? Well, let's say you've got to have a meeting at work with one of your colleagues. Right? What trigger do you need? Well, it could be that you just remember, "Oh, I said at 1:00 PM I was gonna go to this meeting." Okay, that works. It just happens to be the most unreliable form of trigger. Okay? Another trigger might be a Post-It note that you put on your fridge or a notification on your phone reminding you, "Oh, I must go and get to this meeting." Okay, great. That's much better than just relying on your memory. But the research suggests that the very best trigger for any behavior, particularly these health behaviors that I'm talking about now, is to stick on that new behavior onto an existing habit. So by default, if it's a habit, it's something you are doing automatically without much conscious thought. Right? I make coffee every morning. That is a habit. I don't need a reminder on my phone. I don't need my PA to phone me and say, "Hey, Rangan, remember to make your coffee." No. It's something that I do. Therefore, if I stick on my five-minute workout onto that coffee routine, I'm much more likely to do it. So these days I don't even think about it. I make coffee. As the coffee brews, I do my workout. Just as when you go to your bathroom in the evening to get ready for the night, you pick up your toothbrush, you brush your teeth. It's that automatic. That's why you keep doing it, and that's what I wanna help you realize you can also do with your lifestyle habits. Now, just for a moment, think about something that's not health. Think about business. Right? Businesses understand the rules of human behavior, and they use those rules to encourage you to buy more or use their products more. Right? Think about Amazon. When Amazon moved to one-click ordering a few years ago, estimates are that their profits went up by over $300 million a year just from that one move, going to one-click ordering. So why would that be? Well, think about it. Let's say 10 years ago you wanted to make a purchase. What would you have to do? You'd have to click on everything you wanted, click onto the next screen, type in your card details, go to the next screen, check that it was okay, go to the next one, place order, confirm order. Multiple steps you would have to take before you would actually place that order. Now, of course it depends on where you live in the world, but if you have one-click ordering where you are, before you know it now, you've placed an order and it's coming the next day. It's that quick. Amazon understands that if you remove the friction, you remove the steps that you have to take, people are gonna buy more. So Amazon do that. Netflix, YouTube, why do they roll one video into the next video? It's not out of the goodness of their own hearts. It's because they know. Before you realize, "It's midnight. I need to go to bed and get up tomorrow at 6:00 AM for work," you're straight into the next video. You're straight into the next episode of the box set, and then you're hooked. Right? So these companies are using the rules of human behavior to help their businesses, and I'm not criticizing that. I think they should be doing that. But what I'm saying is when it comes to health, what I've seen in 20 years now of seeing patients, is that people don't apply those same principles. When it comes to our health, we think it's gotta be huge. "A workout can't be five minutes. It has to be one hour, five times a week at the gym. I have to buy special clothes. I have to change up the workout every day." Now, I'm not saying there's never any validity to changing up your workout. Of course there is, depending on what you're doing. But let's take it back to basics. Let's get ingrained in our life these basic habits that are gonna help us. And that second part of this morning routine, the three Ms, the second M is movement. So I want you to think about what small practice of movement could you do every morning that you enjoy? And it could just be like you like doing the sun salutation sequence in yoga. Great. It could be you just like doing some hamstring stretches or some hip rolls to limber up in the morning. It doesn't matter what it is. Just

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:14 find what works for you. Sorry to interrupt. If you are enjoying this content, there's loads more just like it on my channel, so please do take a moment to press Subscribe, hit the notification bell, and now back to the conversation. So what do you value in life? Do you know? Have you ever thought about it? Can you write down three values? Can you write down one? Well, look, let me share some common values with you, and just see if any of these connects with you. Right? There's, uh, curiosity, integrity, compassion, family, creativity, honesty, the climate, solitude, conscientiousness, wisdom, nature, standing up for other people, humility, loyalty, self-respect, intimacy, time for friends and family, empathy, being a good listener. Right? That's not an exhaustive list. It's just some ideas to get you going and started. You know, was there one in that list that connected with you? Fine, start there. Was it kindness? Right, write that down and then ask yourself, "Am I showcasing kindness in every aspect of my life, or are there parts of my life where I'm not able to do that?" Now, a big part of what I'm talking about at the moment is getting to know yourself, right? Spending a bit of time analyzing what's going on, who you really are, who do you really want to be out there? And I think one of the big reasons why you might feel stuck, why so many of us feel stuck in our lives... Is we don't have any time to ourselves, right? We're constantly consuming information, even good information, right? Many of us wake up. Like, do you wake up, and it's the first thing you do, you pick up your phone and you look at your email, and then you go to Instagram, and then you go to the news? And, you know, is that your whole day, right? And you get to work, and you're still looking at screens, and you're consuming, consuming, consuming. If we are constantly consuming, even if it's great content, well, we're never having any time where we're allowing our innermost thoughts and emotions to come up. A little while ago, one of my friends said to me that his old boss had a counter on his desk, and he would literally say things like, "Only 66 days to go till I'm in Florida on that beach." And it really got me thinking. That guy, like so many of us, like maybe you, is literally counting down until that one week when you're on holiday, when life is gonna be good, when you're on the beach, you've got the sun, you've got time. And it really made me think, well, what is a holiday, right? What is it that so many people love about a holiday? Now, of course, there's many things, right? Time away from work. It could be the sun. It could be, you know, nice food. Whatever. I think one of the big things holidays give us is perspective. You know that feeling when you're on a plane and literally as you start to take off, you start to get this 30,000-foot view on the state of your life. All those little things that you were worried about, they just seem trivial. You get that kind of real big-picture perspective on your life. And I've come to the conclusion that we don't need to wait for that one week a year for our holiday. We can all take a daily holiday from our lives. Every day we need to take a holiday, something that gives us that perspective on our life. Because without that perspective, how are you ever gonna find time to figure out what you're feeling? You know, are you living an authentic life? What your values are? How will you know if you're constantly consuming? So what does a daily holiday look like? It could be anything. Could be a walk. It could be a jog. It could be journaling. It could be meditation. It could be breathwork. It could be, I don't know, painting. Whatever you like. Something that is done by yourself, for yourself, right? This is a practice of solitude, basically. Intentional solitude. Not loneliness, right? Loneliness is different. This is intentional solitude to allow your innermost thoughts and emotions to come up. You know, my brother, he, each day, will either go for a walk or a run. And I spoke to him and he says, yeah, when he comes back, he's got a different perspective on all the kinda little problems in his life. Many of my patients tell me the same thing. So what is it gonna be for you? Do you take a daily holiday from your life? Maybe you used to. Maybe you go for a walk now and again, and you've never thought about it through this lens of it being a daily holiday. But that's exactly what it is. So many of these breaks, we think about calories

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:19 or energy consumption, what it's gonna do for our physical health, but I wanna reframe that for you. The reason so many of us are feeling lazy, unmotivated, struggling, you know, what many of us are feeling lost, is because we don't know how we truly feel. We're never giving ourselves time to understand that. You know, for me, I have to have... I say I have to have. I don't have to have it. I choose to have every morning at least 20 or 30 minutes to myself. Because I know when I do that, I'm able to take the pulse on the state of my life. I'm able to make changes. I'm able to feel when I'm stressed or when my workload's building up. Without that, if I went straight on Instagram and email, I wouldn't know that, and you end up blowing up later. You end up falling out with someone later because you weren't paying attention. Now, when I was a junior doctor in Edinburgh, I wanna guess maybe 20 years ago, right? I remember being taught about something called early warning systems, right? It was great. I was so mesmerized by this as a young doctor. And I remember the, the, the consultant saying, "We can predict who's gonna end up needing a high dependency bed or an intensive care unit bed three or four hours before they end up there." Because if we take regular what we call observations, so pulse, respiratory rate, oxygen saturations, and if we start to see them moving in a certain direction, we can predict with a high degree of certainty who's gonna need more serious care. And because we can do that, we can take preemptive action to stop that patient needing to go to high dependency or intensive care. And I see this daily holiday as the same thing. It allows you to take aversive action. It allows you to understand, oh man, yeah, you know what? Life isn't good at the moment. I'm struggling. Like, maybe I'm working too hard. I'm not prioritizing my sleep enough, right? Are you sleeping enough? You know, are you going to bed early enough? Whatever it might be, it allows you to start paying attention. Paying attention to the message that our body is always trying to give us. Since I started taking a daily holiday, I've realized that when my workload or stress load is building, I start to feel a tightness in the upper part of my right back. Now, that was probably going on for years, but I never would've known because I never [laughs] spent time paying attention. These days, and it happened just a few weeks ago, in my morning routine, in my practice of solitude, I could feel it. And for me, it was like, ah, okay, cool. There's a lot going on at the moment. You need to make sure tonight you go to bed early, or you need to reduce how many commitments you've got today. Because actually, if you don't, you're gonna struggle to get motivated. You're gonna struggle. You're gonna feel lost, like many people do. A lot of the time, that comes down to our, the fact that we're not paying attention, right? So I really, really want you to think about this. What do you do on a daily basis that allows you to pay attention to the signals that your body is trying to give you? It doesn't need to be hard. It doesn't need to cost money. It could literally be you have your morning cup of tea or coffee, and you just sit in silence whilst you're drinking it instead of looking at your emails or YouTube or whatever at the same time. Embrace the silence. Now, I understand if you're not used to doing that, you may find it tricky at first, right? Many of us are so used to distracting ourselves from our lives that we don't know what to do when [laughs] we don't have that distraction. So go easy. Start with five minutes. You don't have to suddenly go from nothing to 30 minutes meditation. Start with five minutes. If five minutes is too much, start with one minute. But I promise you, once you start to spend a bit of time with yourself, not with a screen, not with another person, not with information coming in from outside, you will start to understand what is going on in your body. That's gonna enable you to make better decisions. And if we look at it through the lens of that core happiness stool, a daily practice of solitude, right, you taking a holiday from your life every day, will strengthen all three legs of that core happiness stool. Afterwards, you feel more content, you definitely feel a sense of control over your life, and because of the learnings you get, you're much more likely to act in alignment. So it's one of those magic practices that works on all three legs of the

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:23 stool. Now, I mentioned before that perspective is a key skill for happiness, but I think it's, I think it's arguably the most important thing, that ability, that knowledge that actually I get to choose my response in any situation. It's liberating, it's freeing, it's empowering. But many of us, and for much of my life I was in this boat, we don't get that. We're programmed, we're conditioned to react a certain way. We think that if people around us acted in a different way, we'd be happier. It's not a great place to be because you're dependent on the world around you and people around you to be a certain way in order for you to be happy. And if that's what you're waiting for, you could be waiting a long time. Is that you? Do you allow the thoughts and actions of others to really affect how you feel? Can someone cut you up in the road with their car and it can ruin your day? Are you the type of person, when that happens, you get frustrated? "I can't believe that person did that. They shouldn't be driving." Um, you know, "They need a new driving test. They should be prosecuted." Well, what does that do for you? Do you feel good afterwards? You know, are you calm? You engaged in what you're doing? Or do you feel an emotional tension that you then have to somehow neutralize using whatever, sugar, online scrolling, you know, an extra beer after work, whatever it might be. That emotional tension is real, and that's something we don't realize. I don't think society realizes this. I don't think much of the medical profession have typically realized this, that emotional stress that we, we create. I get that's hard to get your head around, or it may be hard for you to get your head around, but that person has just cut you up in the road. That happened. But they didn't cause you to get stressed. At its core, you chose. Now, I know I say that with compassion. I honestly do. Like, if someone had told me this 10 years ago, I would've been like, "Well, what do you mean? Had that person not done that, I wouldn't feel like this." I mean, how empowering is that? [laughs] That I can only feel good when other people act a certain way. Now, you can train yourself to choose a different response, to choose what I call a happiness story in every situation. So that driver, for example, it could be maybe that driver is late for his job, and he's on his last warning, and that job is really important 'cause that's how he feeds his wife and his children. Maybe that driver, maybe their child was up with earache last night, so they're knackered, and they're being really unmindful, but maybe you might do the same thing in that situation. Right? There's all kinds of scenarios that you could come up with, and you can choose that perspective if you want. And when you choose a happiness perspective, you completely change how you feel in your body. We don't bring in that emotional stress, which leads to all kinds of compensatory behaviors. You feel calmer. You feel more content. You feel more in control of the world. And you can train yourself to do this. So on a daily basis, I train myself. I call it working out in the social gym, right? I- Look for bits of friction and resistance in my daily life, and I use it as an opportunity to try and reframe things. Now, look, let's just think about this for a minute. Right, what is truth? 'Cause I think this is a really interesting question to ponder. Right, so let's say a couple are having a disagreement or a fight, argument, whatever. What really happens? Well, I think it kind of depends on who you ask. Right? If you ask one partner, they will give you a report about the incident, and you ask the other partner, you walk round to the other side of the table, ask the other person, they're likely to give you a completely different report of the same incident. And have you ever been in that situation? Has that happened with your partner or a friend or a work colleague? I know for me it has. So that's really interesting, isn't it? One scenario, but two different perspectives. There was this great study that I, I loved reading about by these psychologists. They took football fans or soccer fans and they showed them an incident that happened. Same incident. They asked them, "Tell me what happened." Two completely different stories of the same situation. What does that teach us? It teaches us that there are multiple perspectives, and we can choose a perspective that makes us happy. You can train yourself to do this. I literally do this on a daily basis, and that's why I'm at the stage now where it happens automatically most of the time. I'm not perfect. Sometimes I'm unable to do it, but I have an awareness now. I go, "Oh, wow. Hey, Rangan, you could have chosen a different perspective there." Now, one of the things that's really helped me is this idea that if I was that other person, I'd be doing exactly the same as them. Now, just think about that for a moment. What that phrase means is if I was that person with their upbringing, with their childhood, with their bullying experiences, with their toxic first boss when they were 17 years old, I'd probably have the same worldview and programming as them. I'd probably be acting in exactly the same way. Now, you may go, "Well, that's not true," you know? "I'd act differently." I sort of invite you to consider [laughs] that there's a different perspective there, that if that person could have acted differently, they would have. But based upon their programming and their view of the world, that's why they acted like that. Now, you don't have to take this perspective. You could choose to judge them and think if you were them, you'd act differently. That's fine. It's your life. You're entitled to do and choose the perspective that you want to. But what's that doing for you? What's that judgment doing for you? What, what... How does it feel when you think that you're better than someone else and you would act differently than them? See, I know from my own life, from seeing tens of thousands of patients over the last 20 years, that that's never helpful. It keeps you locked in a cycle which leads to people feeling unmotivated, lazy, and lost. Right? You can train yourself to choose a different perspective. I've come to the conclusion that when it comes to your happiness, the truth doesn't matter. Your perspective on the situation is what determines how you feel about it. Now, that doesn't mean you should put up with stuff. Like, you can still prefer things to be different than they are. But when you start to choose a happiness response in every situation, you make better decisions. Right, so let's say your boss sends you an email that you don't like. Right? Let's say you think it was short, it was rude, it was curt. You thought things like, "I can't believe he sent that email to me like that. Does he not know I've worked the last three weekends? He should know I know how to do my job. I don't need to be told that." Pick a story. It doesn't matter. All of those are disempowering. Now, here's the benefit of choosing a happiness story, right? If you can go, "Okay, well, what else could have been going on here? Maybe my boss is under pressure from his or her boss. Maybe there's real financial pressure in the company, and they're taking that out on me. Maybe my boss is having a problem in his relationship or her relationship at the moment." Right, it doesn't really matter, but it just leads to compassion. You start to look at the world through different eyes, right? And then what happens is if you can do that, you're less triggered, you're less emotionally worked up, and that then allows you, if you want to, to say to your boss, "Hey, listen, um, hey, have you got 10 minutes on Friday? Just a couple things I'd love to talk to you about." Right? And you can then go into a meeting in a non-triggered and non-emotional way and probably engage collaboratively about making changes. But if you approach your boss with that feeling of, "You shouldn't have done that. I'm feeling triggered," you know, "You... I, I feel undervalued," and you bring that in with that emotional tension, how well is that gonna go? I mean, think about your own life and maybe a relationship you have at the moment or in the past. If you were feeling angry and triggered when you tried to address something, how well did it go? Or that it just add more fuel into the fire, and the other partner responds with more fuel, and before you know it, there's an inferno blazing. I think we all know that, right? So this is a very, very important skill for your emotional regulation. Yes, it will help your motivation. Yes, it will help you with your happiness. Yes, it will help you with your health. But it will also help you get more out of life, help you to change things that you don't like. It's a key skill to learn. Now, if you're thinking, "You know what? I like that in theory, but I can't do that. There are some situations in life where it's just not possible to do that." I understand that. That's what I used to think, and I get there are some situations in life that are really, really tricky to apply this in. But I wanna tell you about one of the most powerful conversations I've had in my entire life on my podcast with this wonderful lady called Dr. Edith Eger. Now, I spoke to Dr. Eger, I don't know, almost two years ago, and I think about that conversation every day. When I spoke to her, she was 93 years old, right? When she was 16 years old, she grew up in Eastern Europe. I think she had a date with her boyfriend that night. She was thinking about what dress she was gonna wear. Her family got a knock on the door, and essentially her, her sister, and her parents got put on a train to Auschwitz concentration camp. Now, within a couple of hours of getting there, her parents were murdered, and later that day, Edith, Dr. Eger, was asked to dance for some of the senior prison guards. And she said to me, she said, "Rangan, listen, I never forgot the last thing that my mum said to me," and she said, "Edie, always remember nobody can take from you the contents that you put inside your mind." So she said, "When I was dancing in Auschwitz, I wasn't dancing in Auschwitz. In my mind, I was dancing in Budapest Opera House. I was wearing this beautiful dress. Um, there was an orchestra playing. There was a full house in the audience." I thought, "That's pretty incredible." Then she said to me, while she was in Auschwitz, she started to see the prison guards as the prisoners. I was like, "What do you mean?" She said, "No. Well, in my mind, they weren't free. They weren't living the life that they wanted to. In my mind, I was free." I thought, [scoffs] "I mean, this is pretty incredible." In the absolute hell of a concentration camp, she was reframing some, some pretty, [scoffs] I was gonna say pretty difficult. I mean, that's an understatement. Some horrendous situations she was reframing. And one of the last things she said to me was, "Rangan, look, I've lived in Auschwitz, and I can tell you this, the greatest prison you will ever live inside is the prison you create inside your mind." That's the phrase I think about every day. When I think I can't reframe a situation, I think back to Edith Eger. I think, "Well, Rangan, if she could do that in Auschwitz, you can probably do that for this kind of small incident in your own life." And it's been transformative. I promise you, there is no greater skill I've learnt over the last five or six years than this. And the thing is, it's like any skill. The more you do it, the better you get. So if every day, or even once a week, but ideally I'd say every day, in the evening, reflect on your day. Reflect on one moment in your day when you got triggered, when you were feeling frustrated by the actions of somebody else, and just practice rewriting that story. Put a different slant on it. Put a different perspective on it. Now, try that. Try that for seven days, and just see how you feel. You don't feel any different? Fine. Say, "You know what? I'm gonna ignore that Dr. Chatterjee. I'm not gonna listen to what he has to say." Fine. I'm not trying to convince you, right? I'm trying to inspire you and empower you. I would humbly suggest that you give this a go, right, and see what difference it makes, because I'm almost certain that you will experience such big changes in how you feel, in your motivation, in your energy, in the way you see the world. It's very hard for me to make the case. You actually have to do it yourself to experience it. But I gotta tell you, it's ... It becomes almost addictive, because every day becomes a school day. Every day, instead of waiting for people around you to act differently, you're kinda taking control. And then before you know it, if you do this every day or even once or twice a week, within a few weeks, you'll be like a different person. Within a few months, you'll be completely transformed, and that will impact your health, your happiness, your relationships, your productivity. It will all get better on the back of that. One of the most powerful things about learning to reframe every bit of social friction in your life is that you start to view the world with a more compassionate lens, right? You start to lead with compassion in your interactions with others, which is always a good place to be, right? It feels good. I promise you, it will feel good for you. But there's another beautiful side effects, which is when we can

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:43:12 train ourselves to be more compassionate to other people, often- we find it easier to be compassionate to ourselves. Now, it doesn't always translate, but it can definitely help because, you know, if you can learn to put a different perspective on other people's lives, then you can sort of then take that next step of applying it to yourself. Now, one of the big reasons why many of us struggle with our health or our happiness is 'cause we don't treat ourselves very well. We treat other people much better than we treat ourselves. Now, the way many of us talk to ourselves in our heads, sometimes out loud, we'd never in a million years say that to our friend or our partner or our child, but we say it to ourselves. And again, we don't think it matters, but this emotional stress is real. It leads to physical health problems. It's one of the big things that I don't think we're talking about enough in health. Professor Kristin Neff, one of the leading experts in the world on self-compassion, has shown with her research that people who are compassionate to themselves, right, they have more motivation. They do better in their work. Their immune system functions better. They have slower aging, right? They're happier. All kinds of things happen when we're compassionate to ourselves, and her research has also shown when we talk negatively to ourselves in our heads, when you call yourself a loser or talk down to yourself, you're activating your body's stress response. Stress hormones like cortisol start to go up. This is real, and it has a really negative impact on our health and our happiness. Right, so self-compassion is the practice of being as kind to yourself, if not more, than you would be to your friends and family, and negative self-talk is a big part of that. Now, this is something I work on a lot with my patients. It's something I've had to work on with myself because the truth is this. It is simply not possible to be healthy or happy if you hate yourself, and many of us do. We try and kid ourselves that we don't, but the way we act to ourselves, the way we self-sabotage, the way we talk to ourselves, it's not compassionate. Right? I, I had this patient, 48-year-old lady who'd been seeing many doctors for a few years. She had some quite vague symptoms. She had some upper abdominal pain. She had some upper arm pain. She tried various medications. She wasn't getting better. She was very, very frustrated. She changed her lifestyle. She had a really good diet, really good movements. She was sleeping well, but she was kind of still struggling, and she ended up coming to see me. And as I got to know her, I noticed a pattern in her wider life, which was that she would always end up in relationships with men who were significantly older than her, and they were always married, and they'd treat her really badly. And we spent a bit of time talking about this stuff, and it was really clear where this came from in her childhoods. She always felt that her older sister had got more attention than her. She'd basically learnt to accept having less attention than she ideally would want or ideally deserved, right? That was a childhood strategy for coping that was no longer serving her in adulthood. So we tried a few things. I shared with her a few self-compassion exercises, right? And it took a while. This wasn't an overnight fix. But bit by bit, she started to do these exercises where she was learning to be kind to herself, and it took many months, but after doing them consistently, after changing the relationship she had with herself, she ended up in a relationship with a guy of the same age who treated her really well, and a few months after that, her symptoms pretty much disappeared. Right, emotional health, the way we feel about ourselves, the way we talk to ourselves is real. It makes a difference to our biology. It can make a difference to our physical health. And for many of us who are struggling in life and feel lost, one of the big things we have to learn to do is treat ourselves with respect, not talk down to ourselves. So what can you do? Well, there's all kinds of exercises you can do. Right? A really simple one that I did with that patient that I, that I think is really useful is to try and write down five things that you like about yourself. Now, I used to say five things you love about yourself, but for many people, that, they find that really off-putting. "I ca- I can't write things I love about myself." But that's essentially what I'm asking you to do. Can you do that? Do you think you could do that right now? Pause this video and write down five qualities that you have that you really like. Now, look, if five feels tough, can you do one? If you are struggling with this, this is a very, very good sign that this is something you really need to work on. Right? This really makes a difference. There was this great study in America that showed that people who can write themselves a self-compassionate letter every day for seven days, so a whole letter being compassionate to themselves, are happier three months later. Right? Three months later. This stuff is real. So how do you talk to yourself? It doesn't matter if you don't talk to yourself well at the moment. That's okay. But once you know, once you have that awareness, we can now start to make a change. There's another exercise I love called the mirror exercise. Can you go to a mirror in your house or your apartment? Can you look at yourself and stay looking? Or do you have to turn away? Do you have to look away, it's too painful? Now, I understand these things can be tricky and difficult, but if they are, it's a good sign that you need to work on them. You know? You can get better. And I understand for some people there is deep trauma and past experience associated and linked to the way we feel here. And of course, seeing a healthcare professional or a therapist can be really, really useful. I understand that. But I also understand that not everyone has access to that. So go easy. You know, maybe it's something you wanna aspire to, you wanna look into options around you to help you with that. But in the meantime, let's get started. Write down a few things you like about yourself. Do it every day. Do it for seven days, and just watch how this starts to change. The other thing that happens as you start to do this, you'll start to catch yourself when you say things like, "Oh, I'm such a loser." I used to say that to myself if things went wrong. I don't anymore. I don't think I've said that to myself, I don't know, three, four, maybe even five years. It's just not who I am anymore. It was a strategy that potentially served me in my childhood, but it was no longer serving me. And if you're a parent or if you're around kids, maybe this will motivate you to really take action here. If you talk to yourself negatively out loud, what message do you think your kids are taking on? If you call yourself a loser, what do you think your kids are gonna learn to do to themselves? Yeah, I've got to be honest, since I became a dad just over 11 years ago, that's been a big drive for me to make a lot of these changes, because I know the best way that I can be a good parent for my children is to sort all this kind of internal stuff out inside me. Because as I feel happier and calmer and more content, and I'm living more aligned, as I really feel I am these days, I'm a much better parent. I'm a kinder, calmer, more compassionate parent. Right? So I don't know what your motivation's gonna be for making these changes, but if you're a parent, do think about that. Now, if we bring this back to that core happiness stool, right, that I've been talking about throughout this video, again, treating yourself with kindness and respect, again, is one of those magic interventions that literally hits every leg of the stool. If that conversation resonated with you, here is another incredibly powerful one that I really think you're going to enjoy. Give it a click and let me know what you think.

Speaker 1:52:40 By 29, I had everything. Most beautiful woman on the planet agreed to marry me. I could print money on demand. I was trading in the stock market. I had the big villa, the swimming pool, and I was miserable. Miserable. Miserable. Completely clinically depressed