Why Does No One Talk About This??!

1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

   I used to buy into a lot of the self-help hype, especially when I was younger. Hustle harder, sleep less, manifest more, grind now and live later. And for a while, it seemed to work, until it breaks you. If you're over 40 and you're still trying to fit in long two-hour morning routines, 20-step morning checklists, or you're trying to optimize your way out of burnout, you may not be on the road to building a better life. You might instead be running from the one you already have. You see, a lot of the self-help world these days is built for clicks and not actually built for your nervous system, and if you're over 40, the wrong advice isn't just unhelpful, it can actually be really dangerous. So in this video, I'm gonna walk you through three toxic self-help ideas that, if you're not super careful, can silently ruin your health, happiness, purpose, and joy, and I wanna share with you what I believe actually works instead. So the first idea that I think is really toxic is the idea that you are broken. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, here's the thing. If you're constantly having to change yourself to improve things in your life to get to some mythical place in the future, it's kind of predicated on the belief that you're broken. You're not okay right now, but if you do A, B, and C, you will become okay. Now, look, I'm part of the self-help world, okay? I think it is really good to see what we can do in our lives to improve ourselves, but we have to get the balance right between healthy striving and obsessive self-improvement. This constant idea that we're being fed that we're not enough, that actually the way we're living right now is not okay, that we have to change things in order to be okay, that's a really problematic idea because you never actually arrive, right? You keep doing what you're doing, but there's always something else you could be doing, so you live in a state of constant dissatisfaction. Even if you achieve the goals that you one day thought you wanted to, you're still not happy because you've been trained to think there's something better out there, that you never actually get there. I've seen this over and over again in my practice with patients. Let's take weight loss, for example, okay? I've been a medical doctor for 25 years. I've seen tens of thousands of patients, and of course, one of the common things patients would come in for help with was weight loss. And I saw an interesting pattern. A lot of the time, the motivation for losing weight was this idea that I'm not enough, okay? I'm not enough in who I am. When I lose weight and get to this particular milestone that I think I need to achieve, my life will be okay. But the problem is, is that I saw time and time again, it never would, because even when people got to their desired weight, because the underlying drive behind it was that I'm not enough, at some point in the future I will be enough, the old patterns came straight back. Often, the weight that they lost, they would put back on again. It was this yo-yo cycle. And you may not be watching this video because you want weight loss, but you might be watching it because you wanna improve your life, but the same principle applies, okay? I would ask you, when it comes to your self-improvement, you wanna know what is your motivation, okay? Why do you want to improve yourself? Is it because you accept yourself for who you are and you think, "Yeah, I accept who I am and the choices I made up to this point, and I wanna change these few things in my life," or is the motivation fear? Is the motivation one where I'm not enough? I'm not good enough. People don't accept me. Is it guilt? Is it shame? Because these are toxic drivers for change. They will drive you to make change, and in the short term, it can work, but it often doesn't last in the long term, okay? So this is a really big question that anyone who wants to improve their lives needs to ask themselves, in my opinion. What is the motivation? Is it fear or is it acceptance? And going back to weight loss for just a moment, I found that the patients who really were able to accept themselves, dare I say it, loved themselves for who they were, and the weight loss was a way of them improving their life as opposed to saying something about who they were, those were the patients who tended to do well in the long term. They weren't coming from a place of fear. They were coming from a place of acceptance. Now, I know this can be quite a challenging idea for some people, okay? This idea that I need to accept myself, but it's really, really important. We know from the research, okay, that people who are compassionate to themselves do better. They do better in a variety of different ways, okay? In my fifth book, which is called Happy Mind Happy Life, uh, this one here, I basically d- wrote a whole chapter on this, and I wanna read you a couple of paragraphs from that because it really illustrates this point. Okay. "It is just not possible to achieve long-term health or happiness if you hate yourself. A person who truly loves who they are is unlikely to engage in self-sabotaging behaviors such as devouring a whole packet of chocolate biscuits or drinking alcohol to excess, and the latest scientific research makes this really, really clear."A 2020 study that surveyed the work of many researchers found a strong association between self-compassion and physical health. Self-compassion has been shown to have positive effects on immune function, blood sugar, and aging, and it's also been found that people who are self-compassionate are much more likely to look after themselves and adopt healthy lifestyle habits. Now listen to this, okay? People who write themselves a self-compassionate letter every day for seven days are happier even three months later. In short, the links between self-compassion, health, and happiness are overwhelming. How compassionate are you to yourself? Okay, it's a term that a lot of us struggle with. Here in the UK, I mean, trying to tell people that you're compassionate to yourself and that you love yourself is not really the cultural norm here, okay? And I think it's a massive problem. That big question is the one you have to ask yourself, "What is behind my desire to change my life? Is it fear or acceptance?" Now, I've fallen into this trap before for years, okay? I felt that I wasn't good enough in who I was, that if I did this, if I achieved that, if I got my fitness up to this level, it would say something about who I was, but nothing I did seemed to last, and that kind of thinking leads to a black-and-white approach to life. Okay, I'll give you an example from my own life. I love meditation, but I've had a complex relationship with meditation for years. So I would say maybe 10 years ago, the way I would approach meditation was this. I'd read the scientific studies and I would see, yes, meditation can help me. It's good for focus, mood, concentration. It can help you with your sleep. And on January the 1st, I would say to myself, "Right, this is the year where I'm gonna nail meditation," and I'd set the bar really high. I'd say, "I've got to do 20 minutes every day." And you know what? I would for two or three weeks. I'd get up, start off, 20 minutes, real, real discipline, and then what would often happen is after three weeks, probably even after two weeks, I'd miss a day because, you know, sometimes life is busy or something happens with children or family that you don't expect. I'd miss a day, and then I'd beat myself up in my heads. Like [laughs] it's, it's kind of crazy to even think about it now, but I would actually say stuff like, "You're such a loser. You said you were gonna do it this year, and you couldn't do it, could you? You couldn't do it last year. You couldn't do it this year." Right? So what's going on there? This is a toxic inner voice. This is a belief that I'm not enough in who I am and that my meditation practice says something about who I am, and that's why meditation never used to last for me. I'd do it for a few weeks. I'd fall off. I'd re-get the motivation. I'd do it for a few weeks. I'd then fall off. Over the past few years, I've changed the relationship I have with myself. If you feel wired but tired, like your brain's foggy, your focus is gone, and your energy crashes for no reason, it's not your fault. You're likely stuck in one of five invisible habits that are quietly stealing your energy, wrecking your focus, and frying your nervous system. But here's the truth. These habits don't just drain you. They also rewire your brain to stay exhausted, and most people never spot them until it's too late. That's why I created this free guide, 5 Hidden Habits Killing Your Energy and Focus, Fix It Today. Scan the QR code and grab it now. Inside, you'll uncover the number one habit that blocks your brain from fully waking up, a 30-second pattern breaker I've used with many of my patients, and exactly what to do today to switch your brain back on. It's short, it's powerful, and it works. Click the first link in the description or scan the QR code and grab it now because if you don't fix what's draining you, it will become who you are. Truly, I'm very compassionate to myself these days, and honestly, I know some people don't like to hear this, but I can honestly say hand on heart that I love myself. I like who I am. That's not narcissistic in any way at all. It's just I really have learnt to value myself and my qualities over the past few years, so now I have a fantastic relationship with meditation. It is something I do on most days, but not every day. When I miss a day, I won't beat myself up anymore. I just say, "Oh, wow, you missed a day, and you weren't as present throughout the day. You're a bit reactive later on. You weren't as patient as you could be. Actually, you know what? Tomorrow I'm gonna get back on the horse." It's a very, very different relationship. So this key point here, this key idea that I think can be quite toxic in the self-help world, is that you're broken. You're not enough in who you are, and the only way you can become enough is by changing yourself. I wanna make something really clear. I am not against self-help. It's perfectly fine and very, very helpful to identify certain areas of our life that we wanna change things in, okay? There's nothing wrong with that. It's the balance, and it's what's the motivation behind your desire to change that's really, really key. A lot of the self-help ideas that are out there are built on the core belief that there is something wrong with you.Now here's the truth. There may be something wrong with your life that you want to change, but that does not mean that there's something actually wrong with you. There's a big, big difference. So what can you do about this? If you feel that actually that's a trap that you've fallen into in the past, like I have, I honestly have on multiple occasions, one of the best ways to get yourself out of that is with the practice of gratitude, but not necessarily gratitude for the things in the world around you. It's gratitude to yourself. Okay? When I was just reading from my book, Happy Mind, Happy Life, I shared some research that shows that when people write a love letter to themselves, it can have a huge impact even two, three months ahead, right? So writing a love letter to yourself is the sort of thing that can make a lot of people feel a bit cringey, right? I write a love letter to myself, come on. All we're talking about is writing down some of the qualities that you like about yourself, right? Now, you could probably do that about a friend of yours. If you're a parent, you can probably do that about your children. Okay? If you're married or you have a long-term partner and someone said to you, "What do you like about them? What do you love about them?" You could probably tell someone else the qualities that they have that you really like. So why is it that so many of us struggle doing that to ourselves? Okay, and if you are someone who struggles with that, I would say that's a really, really good sign that this is an area that you would benefit from working on. Okay? So I would say try and build up to maybe each day writing down five qualities that you have that you really like, and if five feels too much, I would urge you just to start with one. One a day. Okay? Can you do that? And you can start to change that relationship between fear and acceptance. Is fear driving your desire to change or is it self-acceptance? And I promise you, because I've experienced it myself, and I've seen it with so many patients, when it's self-acceptance that drives your desire to change, those changes are likely to be long-term and sustainable. The second toxic idea that exists out there is about hustle culture, and the truth is that hustle culture does not always represent ambition. It sometimes can be a slow form of torture. Honestly, I've seen it time and time again, right? So what is hustle culture? I guess it's this idea that we should always be striving. We have this grind set at work. We're squeezing everything that we can out of our work life, out of our personal life. But for many people, you know, hustle culture is not about chasing success, it's actually running away from stillness. Because for many people, stillness and slowing down would result in you actually feeling so many of the things that you've been avoiding. Right? The toxic idea behind hustle culture is that you can always keep pushing. Now, again, all of these things need to have a balance. Okay? I'm not against the self-help industry. I'm, I'm, I'm not. I think there's so many good things. This video is about some of the ideas that if we're not careful, can become toxic. That you can keep pushing, keep grinding, keep working. You know, what, what do they say? You know, um, "Don't take a day off. If you're taking a day off, you're losing to the person who never takes that day off," or something to that effect, right? But it's toxic, and I've seen it in my practice time and time again. You might get away with that in your 20s, maybe in your 30s, but over time it will come back to bite you. I have had so many patients over the years who kept pushing, who kept thinking that they could push. You know, the, the 53-year-old executive, okay, who kept working evenings, kept working weekends, kept traveling for work, kept pushing for that extra promotion even though they're already doing well. In fact, they're already doing better than they thought they could have done 10 years ago. But they're stuck in that mentality that there's always something more. This goes back to the toxic idea number one, that you're broken. That's the problem when that takes hold in our psyche. We're never satisfied. We are pushing success to somewhere in the future, but that future never arrives. You're always thinking that, "Oh, when that happens, when I get that, when I lose weight, when I get that promotion, when I can afford that house, life's gonna be okay." But that mentality is really, really toxic, and again, I've seen it over and over again in my practice. Being constantly busy and pushing is a problem, and one of the major problems that I've seen is it, that it does not allow time for rest. You are not a machine. You can't just keep pushing. You need time to switch off, to recover, to rest, and to relax. People think they can keep pushing, but it will always come back to bite. In fact, I spoke to someone called Professor Russell Foster a couple of years ago on my podcast. He's one of the leading neuroscientific researchers on circadian biology. He's been doing it for decades. Maybe 40-plus years he's been studying this. And he told me that there's some research now showing that pushing and not sleeping enough in mid-life, so he was talking about our 40s, is strongly correlated with an increased risk of dementia later on. Okay? So this stuff isn't neutral. Now, I get it.There may be things in your life you wanna change. You may not like your job, okay? You may think, "Yeah, on the side I wanna do some extra stuff so I can start to change that." I'm not saying don't do that. I'm just saying that you can't just keep pushing, be chronically underslept and overstressed, and not expect there to be an implication. The implication could be your health. I've seen so many women keep pushing and come down with autoimmune diseases in their late 40s. There's many factors that contributes, but we know that chronic stress and not resting enough is a factor that increases your risk. Okay, so this idea that you can keep pushing I think has been taken too far by too many people in the self-help industry. And so what I'd encourage you to think about is one full day's rest a week, and I guess some micro rest every day. What do I mean by a micro rest? Well, I don't know, could you dedicate 30 minutes a day to switching off and just rest and recuperate? And for many people, this will be the evening, maybe 30 minutes before beds. Can you switch off the laptop, switch off the stimulation that comes in, you know, about achieving and doing, and all the ideas on social media? Can you do something else? Shut that laptop. You know, do what I do, which is I shut that laptop, I go into the living room, I actually put on a red light. There's loads of good research now on the benefits of red lights. That red light that comes on in the evening completely changes the tone and the sort of dynamics in my living room, and I'll sit there with a book, an old-fashioned analog book, what I just read. Or I'll do some stretching, or some yoga, whatever it might be, something just to rest and recuperate. Even 30 minutes of recuperation each day can balance a lot of this pushing. And I accept you might have a busy life. You may have a lot of demands on you, right? So maybe you can't rest as much as you might want to, but what about for 30 minutes a day? Could you? You might have seen some previous videos on this channel where I actually show you that there's some research out there that's showing us that regularly doing things that we love makes us more resilient to stress. But at the same time, being chronically stressed makes it harder for you to experience pleasure in those things that you used to love. So in that 30-minute rest time, could you do something fun? Maybe you watch your favorite comedian on YouTube and have a laugh, something to stop the constant striving for more. I've found this incredibly helpful in my own life, and I've seen it with so many of my patients as well. The other thing I'd really recommend you think about is one full day's rest every week. Now, let's be honest. I'm in my 40s. When I was a kid, people naturally got this. All the shops were closed on Sundays. You couldn't go shopping on Sundays. You know, you'd be chilling with your family. You might be watching here in the UK Formula 1 on terrestrial television, whatever it might be. Whereas these days, Sunday for many people is like another day. You can work, you can do your emails, you can go to the shops. And I think we have to really think about the consequence of that. Now, I don't wanna dictate what you do in your life, okay? It's up to you. My whole approach with my patients and here on YouTube is to share ideas, share ideas that I hope you find helpful. If you do, you can think about utilizing them in your life. If you don't think it's gonna work for you and you don't want to, I'm completely okay with that as well, okay? It's not my job to tell anyone else how they should be living their life. But what I can share with you is that those patients of mine who take one full day off a week... So there's a tendency, isn't there, these days to just do a quick hour on Sundays, just clear up some of those work emails, whatever it might be. I've fallen into this trap in the past, and I really try and lock in that one day a week where I just switch off. I'm not thinking about work. I'm hanging out with my family. I'm going for walks in nature. And I find that that one day means that I get so much more out of the following week when it arrives. Okay? So the toxic idea here is this idea that you can keep pushing and grinding. Hustle culture, if taken to an extreme, can become really toxic, and what I'd love for you to consider is can you have 30 minutes of rest each day to help you recover during the week and one full day's rest at least once a week? The third idea in the self-help world that I think sometimes can become toxic are the content we consume around routines, and in particular extreme routines. Extreme routines are often control disguised as growth. And the truth is if your routines run your life more than your values do, it's probably not self-help. It's actually self-avoidance. Routines should enhance your life, not control your life, okay? So let's take morning routines. Okay, now, I'm a fan of morning routines, okay? Just to be clear. And the truth is we all have routines. We all have a morning routine, whether we think we do or not. There's a difference between getting up and meditating, and doing some breathwork, and drinking your coffee in silence, to waking up and scrolling TikTok and starting to get agitated by what you see on social media. You know, these are both routines. They're both things that you do every morning, but both of them are likely to have a different consequence. Now, sometimes what happens-In the self-help world is that we hear about elaborate, complicated two-hour morning routines. Now first of all, if you have the time to do a two-hour morning routine, I ain't criticizing. I'm like, "Good for you." I'm delighted for you that you have that time and space in your life to devote two hours to yourself. But a lot of people don't, right? So if you don't have that time in your life, which is most people, the problem can be that we look at that person sharing their two-hour routine and we feel that we're inferior. We feel, "Well, how am I ever gonna sort my life out when I can't do what they're doing?" They're getting up, they're doing 20 minutes of mobility, they're stretching, they're saunaring, cold plunging, then they're getting their red light therapy in, then they're reading, then they're journaling. All of those things are fantastic, and honestly, if I could do all those things first in the morning, I would love to. But with my job, with my responsibilities, with my wife, with my two kids, that's unlikely to be something that I can fit in at this particular moment in time. Maybe in the future I can, but I can't at the moment, and that's okay. So I just wanna reinforce this idea that be careful who you're comparing yourself to, and I include myself in that, right? You're watching at the moment a video from me. I'm sharing with you certain things that I feel can be helpful for you. I can perhaps share what I do every morning, but that doesn't mean you should do it every morning, because you're not me. There are many things about my life that you don't know, right? The pressures that I might be under or the pressures that I'm not under relative to you. And I, I mentioned this in a previous video a couple of weeks ago, this idea that when you compare yourself to someone online, it's a fundamentally unfair comparison because you don't know every aspect of that person online. You don't know the cost. That influencer, say, you're following who shares their two-hour routine... And I'm not criticizing the influencer for doing it. Good for them, but you don't know the cost that they're paying in order to do that, and I don't mean financial cost. I mean the time cost. What are they not doing by doing that two-hour routine? Okay? Maybe, just maybe, they do have a partner and they do have children, and maybe the cost of them doing that is that they're not properly nourishing their relationships. The point is, is that listen to these influencers if you want, watch the videos, but then you've gotta put it through your own filter and figure out, "Will this work for me? Does this fit into my life? What can I learn from that person that is relevant for me in the context of my current life?" And I see a lot of people falling into this trap in the self-help world. They think that the, the routine, the extreme routine they see or they read about or they watch a video about is something that they have to do, and they beat themselves up when they're not doing it, and they fall into the trap that was toxic self-help idea number one, that you're broken. "Yeah, I'm broken. I can't... You know, how can I possibly do well in my life when I can't do their routine?" So even if you watch that video from one of your favorite influencers, you go, "Actually, you know what? I can't do those 12 things, but there's one thing that they do that I really like. Yeah, I'm gonna bring that into my life." That's how you can use this stuff as being helpful and not harmful. So in summary, I'm not against self-help. I think self-help is fantastic if you look at your life and go, "Wow, what are some areas I might wanna change to get a different outcome?" All this video is about is trying to identify three toxic ideas that I've seen time and time again cause problems with people. One, that you are broken. You're not. Can you accept yourself right now for who you are and not think that changing yourself to become someone else will be the start of you accepting yourself? Okay? And I mentioned that can you start writing off some things each day that you like about yourself? Build up to five, but if you can't do five, start with one. The second idea was about the toxic nature of hustle culture. Make sure you're resting and recuperating regularly. Can you do 30 minutes every day of pure rest and recovery, maybe last thing in the evening before you go to bed? And can you have one full day off every week? And finally, just be careful with extreme routines, okay? Listen to them, watch the videos on them, read the books on them, but then ask yourself, "What aspects of that routine are really relevant for me in the context of my current life?" I hope you found this video useful. If you get a moment, please let me know which of those three ideas resonated the most with you in the comments. And if you enjoyed watching this video, do stick around because I think you're also going to enjoy this one as well. In this video, I'm gonna share with you some of the core life truths that I wish someone had shared with me when I was younger.

Episode duration: 29:51