BONUS | 3 Practices to Improve Your Life In a Week

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1:12Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:26Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: so i start each day with several practices as part of a morning routine okay one of the things i do at the end is a journaling practice where i answer three questions right which i'll share in just a moment but going back to what i said about happiness before and this kind of deep what i call core happiness as opposed to junk happiness the happiness that i think we're all really looking for not the happiness that we might think we're looking for those three ingredients that I mentioned, alignment, contentment, and control, I think they're all important. They're all equally important to me. But that control one, I think, is really, really important, particularly in the world in which we live today.

2:04Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: When I say control, I'm talking about a sense of control. I'm not talking about controlling the external world, which is fundamentally, in so many ways, uncontrollable. And a lot of people, I think, get really frustrated and disempowered by the state of the world, politics the news headlines you know whatever it might be and i understand that but there are ways around that and giving yourself a sense of control each day through your actions is a very powerful way to ground yourself and insulate you and we know from the scientific research people who have a strong sense of control over their lives they're happier they're healthier they have better social relationships.

2:47Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: They earn more money. There's a very strong relationship. So I have been teaching my patients for years about little five, 10, 50 minute rituals that they can do each morning, but helps to ground them. And even when I'm in America now, I'm traveling on this book tour. I've been in LA for 10 days. I'm in Austin for a couple of days. I bring a few things with me like my coffee pot and my cafetiere. So I make coffee in the hotel room. and in the five minutes that it brews, I do a little strength workout in my pajamas. It's something I do at home and it sounds simple and it sounds a bit unnecessary, but actually it's very helpful for me because it's a grounding practice that helps me feel, oh, I've got a sense of control over my day.

3:30Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: So those three questions that I ask myself each day, I think really speak to your point, which is this idea that justice, virtue, being the person you want to be is an action, right? So I start off with my coffee. And the first question is, what is one thing I deeply appreciate about my life? Okay, really simple question. You know, there's a lot of science on gratitude in terms of what it can do. And, you know, humans have this negativity bias that's kept us alive for many, many years. But the truth is that we take in nine bits of negative information for every one bit of positive information.

4:04Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: So I say to a lot of my patients that you do have a morning routine, even if you think you don't, the question is, are you intentional about it? If you wake up and in bed, you scroll the news and Twitter and your work emails, you're entitled to do that, but it's going to have a consequence. If you infuse your brain with negativity first thing in the morning, is it any wonder that half an hour later, you're a bit negative about the world? You're a bit reactive with your children or your partner, right? I'm not saying that's the only thing but if you put that input in first thing of course the output 30 minutes later one hour later is going to be hugely dependent on what you put in so instead if you let's say start off with this practice of gratitude what is one thing i deeply appreciate about my life it changes the focus and it's so simple i can never say i don't have time to write that down and i really challenge anyone and i'm sure your audience ryan are already familiar with journaling.

5:04Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: And I'm sure much of your audience already are doing a journaling practice, right? But hopefully these three questions might give them a bit of a question. So the first question is, what is one thing I deeply appreciate about my life? The second question is, what is the most important thing I have to do today, which I love? It's probably my favorite question. The third question is, which quality do I want to showcase to the world today? And I tell you, those three questions are so simple, but they really change your relationship with your day and your relationship with yourself, right? So that second question, what is the most important thing I have to do today?

5:41Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: It's incredibly powerful because what I would see with patients and I've experienced myself is that these days, we often only do the important things when everything else is done. But you've sucked out all the energy. Yeah, but our to-do lists are never done, right? And I've been heavily influenced by these regrets of the dying over the past few years. And I had a beautiful conversation with Bronnie Ware, the palliative care nurse, on my podcast maybe three years ago. And she wrote the book, The Five Regrets of the Dying. And, you know, she basically said, at the end of people's lives, they all say the same things.

6:16Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: I wish I'd worked less. I wish I spent more time with my friends and family. I wish I'd lived my life and not the life that other people expected of me, etc., etc. So for me, it's like, okay, that's what people say at the end of their lives commonly. I've also, with my clinical experience, seen many, many patients who kept thinking they could push through, work through evenings, work through weekends. and for many years i would kind of see a lot of autoimmune disease and in over 95 of cases when you do a detailed history of their lives you would see within the six months leading up to the diagnosis heavy heavy stress i'm not saying it was the only cause but a huge contributor to the onset of symptoms and so i think well what is it about us as humans that we have to get sick before we start addressing the reality of life, or we have to wait till our deathbed to affect the reality of life.

7:15Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: So for me, that question is a very simple way of focusing my attention on what is the most important thing I have to do today in a world where there are infinite things that we feel we have to do. And I think you may already know this, Ryan, given sort of all the research you've done over the years, but I learned from Greg McKeown a few years ago that when the word priority came into the English language in the 1500s, that it was only a singular word. Like it didn't exist in its plural form. Yeah. And so I think many of us are drowning in our to-do lists. And that question just cuts through all the noise and goes, what is the most important thing I have to do today?

7:55Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: So in the week before I left for America, as I knew I was going to be away for two weeks, which is quite a long time for me to be away from my wife and kids. It's the longest I've been away from them in a long, long time. Okay. So I remember on the Monday of that week, when I was answering that morning question, it was a work deadline, right? So that's what I put down. I wrote down, I've got to get this blog back to Penguin that they need for the book, right? That doesn't mean that my relationship with my wife wasn't important that day or my kids or my other work. No. But the focus that day was, that's the most important thing I have to get done.

8:32Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: On the Tuesday in the morning, again, this takes minutes to do, it was, you know what, my wife is away at the weekend. I'm going to be away for two weeks. I must make sure when the children are in bed that I spend some quality time with my wife. On the Wednesday, I remember clearly because I was working from home that day. And I thought to myself, and this is what I commonly put down on working from home days. It's I put down at 4 p.m. when the children walk through the door from school. The most important thing I have to do today is make sure my laptop is shut and my phone's in a different room so I can be fully present with what they have to tell me.

9:10Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: Right. So it's a very simple question that just helps me focus each day on actually, you know what? That's the most important thing. That's the most important thing. and I would challenge Ryan your audience and say listen if there's nothing else you take from this conversation but just answer that one question each day and you then act on what you write down it is inconceivable to me that your life will not feel different in seven days there are always things for most of us that we haven't done yeah right so your brain is hardwired at the end of it oh god I didn't get that done I didn't get that done I didn't get that done okay okay you need to do something, you need to take action each day in some way to sort of insulate yourself against that.

9:53Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: There are always going to be things that you don't do, but you identify the one thing, you do it, and it means you start to change your relationship with yourself because you start to feel like, yeah, I'm a winner. Like I'm winning each day. That third question, which quality do I want to showcase to the world today? What I love about that is we often think that the way we are is the way we have to remain. And it's simply not. Most of what we do each day is just repetition. We're repeating our past behaviors, our past thought patterns, and we can change that with intentionality. So for me in the morning, if I spend a minute going, what qualities do I want to showcase to the world today?

10:34Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: Okay. Like today, when I wrote it in my journal, it was compassion. I want to show the world today, the quality of compassion. that means i'm just a little bit more likely right when i come across maybe an email that i don't like from my team or someone who pulls in front of me if i'm driving or whatever it might be yes i could react but the fact that i've said this morning i want to show the world the quality of compassion it makes it a little bit more likely that i'm not going to react

11:07Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

11:35Thank you.