Dr. Rangan Chatterjee’s Essential Daily Practices for a Healthier, Happier Life

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1:19Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down. Be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:10Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Let's see what's happened since I talked to you guys last. Kids finally got out of school, So the holidays actually started. I went later this year, like to like the 19th or something. But yeah, I feel like it's not really Christmas until Christmas break starts. But we're officially that. I went deer hunting with Philip Meyer, who has a great episode on the podcast. We got a nice buck together. My shooting was embarrassing, but always good. And then to, you know, sit down and have lunch with my kids today and have venison that we harvested and butchered ourselves.

2:51You know, it made me feel like not just a primal parent in a way, but sort of a true rural Texan who lives out here. Most of the time I don't, but that felt nice. Anyways, here we are. End of the year is in sight, very much in sight. And as you know, this is when we start to think about, like, who do I want to be next year? maybe you've got some last minute questions from your accountant, you're, you know, wrapping up some paperwork for the year and you're thinking about who you were. And then you're thinking about how you want to do things differently. You know, again, kids not being in school, the commute's different.

3:30Maybe you're in a different place. Life's slowed down. You got a couple of days off. Hopefully. I don't know what all of you do. I know it's actually been a bit crazy over here with Daily Stoic. This is like our Super Bowl, this crazy period of year. Everything's crazy, especially now having the bookstore. But I talked to James Clear about building new habits in 2025, how to stick with New Year's resolutions. And I also talked to today's guest about exactly that. He's been a doctor for 20 years. He's the author of six books. He actually just wrote a book called Make Change That Lasts, Nine Simple Ways to Break Free from the Habits That Hold You Back.

4:07I'm talking about Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, who I've known for a long time. Actually, he did me a huge solid a couple of years ago that you were all the beneficiaries of. He introduced me to one of my favorite people, an author who changed my life, Dr. Edie Eager, who wrote The Choice. Yeah, just a lovely person, the Holocaust survivor. I'll link to that episode. She's awesome. But anyways, back to today's guest. He came all the way out from London, and we had an awesome conversation. He's passionate about simplifying health. He has a great podcast called Feel Better, Live More. And he talks about like really little things you can do.

4:45Like he was talking about his five minute strength workout that he does every day. Like little things that can have a big impact on your life. And that's what we're doing in the Daily Stoic New Year New Challenge. Also, you can sign up dailystoic.com slash challenge. That's why we do the 21 consecutive days of challenges. It's to help you come up with little things, little ways of thinking about things that hopefully they stick. Over the course of the three-week challenge, you pick up one or two things that keep with you compounded over the year that can be enormous. I have my own like little pushups, squats workout that I picked up from one of the days in the challenge.

5:25I have a little note card here with words, like little sort of core priority words, like my epithets for the self, as the Stoics talk about, that's on my monitor from a Daily Stoic New Year to You challenge day back probably six or seven years ago. So it's awesome. You can sign up there at dailystoic.com slash challenge. You can follow today's guest on Instagram and on Twitter and on YouTube. He has a huge YouTube channel. That's Dr. Chatterjee. I'll link to all of that in case you can't spell it. He's at Dr. Chatterjee on Instagram. And you can pre-order his new book, Make Change That Lasts, which is out December 31st.

6:05Perfect timing for a new year. He signed a bunch of his books while he was here at The Painted Porch. You can grab Feel Better in 5, Feel Great, Lose Weight, Happy Mind, Happy Life at The Painted Porch. Thank you to Dr. Chatterjee for coming out. It was a great chat. And I'll see you all in the daily stoic new year new challenge in just a couple days all right be well everyone

6:32usually it's like the first time you would meet someone you would hear their name said for the first time but then if you just interact with someone over email for like years you just have your your own butchered pronunciation of their name yeah you've even got a butchered interpretation of who that person is like you you have a perception based upon this two-dimensional communication you meet people you're like oh you're completely different yeah like not in a not in a good or bad way just different well i realized like i've had relationships with people for like 10 years over email and then they come they go like hi my name's tom smith and i go okay and they're like no tom smith from the email thing for 10 years and i'm like oh yeah i like forgot you're a person you're just this like thing that pops up in my email and i interact with you we talk but then like i'm not thinking of you as like out in the world do you know what i mean and then like i'm having to go oh yeah that's how your name sounds and this is who you are you're not just this like disembodied thing i've you know what i mean yeah it's probably weird but it's even like when you see someone and how they appear on social media yeah and you get a certain impression of who that person is and then you meet them in real life and sometimes i've met people where I felt online, they're quite combative and argumentative.

7:55And in real life, they're just really nice and human and kind and compassionate. I've had that quite a lot, which makes me think the online world is so different from the offline world. Yes. Well, I find that to be not a complimentary thing to say about someone. Like if your online persona is compatible and aggressive or unkind and then you're like, and then they're so nice in person. I'm like, well, then why are you professionally being an asshole? It's like, hey, I thought you'd be standoffish and you're much nicer and funnier or whatever. That's different. But there is something I think about the algorithmic world where it really brings out the worst in people and some people are okay with doing that professionally.

8:41I don't want to be my worst self professionally. That seems weird. I agree. And I'm very intentional as much as I can when I go online, because I would like my online persona to reflect my offline one. And I'd like to think by and large it does. You know, I kind of feel that I'm pretty kind and compassionate guy. I don't really crave disagreement or I don't need people to like me anymore. I don't want to make other people wrong. I just want to put my message out to the world in a kind and compassionate way. And I'm always trying, you know, for me, one thing I've tried to do online is if I'm ever not feeling in a good place or I feel that I've emotionally reacted to something, I know now don't respond.

9:29Yeah, sure. This is not the time to comment in a public forum. Sort your own emotions out first before you engage, if you choose to engage. And frankly, that's a good lesson that applies online and offline. Yeah, there's something that seems even about the sort of doctor world, the doctor personalities, where the algorithm, like when you see where they started to where they end up, it's not always a good trajectory. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? I guess it's true for all things, but it's just fascinating to watch the work that the algorithm and fame and being a personality can do on a human being.

10:07I've seen that loads. And you said before, it's not complimentary. And I get that. At the same time, I think, unless you're really intentional about how you live each day, a lot of influencers end up playing to the algorithm. So they end up playing to what they know is going to do well, which, as I'm sure you've said multiple times in this podcast, drives you to perhaps not being the person who you want to be. And so I think for influencers, let's say, but frankly, it applies to everyone. I think you can, let's say with a practice of journaling each morning, you can reflect a little bit and decide intentionally, how do I want to show up today in the world?

10:48yeah you know well also you should be making what you think is good not what the algorithm says is good now obviously with anything that depends on an audience you have to be aware of the audience but i i generally think like stats should not be your compass just like money should not be your compass in life do you think i think about this a lot do you think at all it's easy to have that viewpoint because i share that viewpoint once you've had a degree of success because i think people might go yeah ryan it's all right for you wrong and it's okay for you you guys are pretty successful so you can now make decisions from your heart yeah right but i do think about that you know my podcast now we're coming to seven years since it started and we're about to pass 500 episodes and what i've got really clear on over the years is that the best way i serve my audience is actually not to think about them yeah and it it kind of sounds a little bit selfish at first but i don't mean it i don't mean it like that at all i've learned that if i selfishly choose the guests that i really really want to speak to that's how i best serve my audience which is kind of what rick rubin says in his book isn't it in terms of you you cannot you can't make the best art with the audience in mind but it's funny because you said you know it's easy to say because you have an audience but i think like why do you have an audience like when i went when i went to my publisher and said hey i want to write about an obscure school of ancient philosophy they were not like that sounds like the greatest idea ever like almost every person who has an audience did so because they yeah they invented that audience right they they were uniquely themselves that very few people sort of backed themselves into an audience by doing what everyone else was doing or by following the algorithm so it's this kind of weird thing like there's a famous henry ford quote where he says you know if i if i you know did what my customers uh wanted i would have just made a faster horse you know like you get where you got by doing something new you obviously have to have empathy and understanding.

12:55And I thought a lot about how do I make ancient philosophy interesting to people who are not interested in it, but I was operating by my own interests and, you know, like, yeah, following my heart in that I thought it could be made interesting, right? So it's like, I have a good sense of my own judgment and, and yeah, like you can't, You can't operate in total disavowal of the audience or in actively antagonizing the audience. But if you are trying to tell people what they want to hear, I think that gets very old very quickly. Yeah, I think there's a danger also in becoming successful and having an audience in the sense that, and I've seen this with many people, is that you start playing to that audience.

13:41You try and conserve what you have. And I think that's a real problem. and actually with this book, my sixth one, I actually had long chats with Penguin. I said, guys, this is going to be a different book. Okay. And there was a little pushback in the sense that, of course, you know, in the UK, I have very successful books. And for Penguin, I'm not having a go at them. There's going to be a conservatism where we want to play to that audience. We know what your audience is like, but I've really followed my heart. And I'm like, no, I'm not going to repeat what I've already said. I have to break new ground.

14:15I have to go into new spaces and I want you guys to back me. And they've been amazing. So yeah, we'll back you. And I said, I want everything about this book to be different because it feels like I'm now bridging the gap from sort of a more traditional health book into a book that's a bit more about philosophy and happiness and how these things all weave together. But it's funny. I mean, it's the exact same size. So you find the areas that you change like that you're going to reinvent or experiment. And then you also want to find a way that it's palatable and doesn't, you know what I mean? You don't throw everything out.

14:54It's not a giant middle finger to the audience. You still think about what's going on with them, what their needs are, what's interested, but you're looking for the overlap between what's exciting to you and what is going to resonate with people. And that's different than, oh, X, Y, and Z is doing well right now. So I'm going to do that. Yeah. And the truth is, I don't know how interesting this is to people, but I know in this kind of online influencer, author, podcaster world, I know full well that some people are literally choosing their guests based upon how they're going to perform on YouTube.

15:35And I try to not judge anymore. It's one thing that I've realized in my life. It doesn't help me. right so i just observe and i'm like oh that's interesting choosing guests like that is going to have a certain outcome there's going to be a consequence the question for that individual or those individuals is am i happy with that consequence am i happy with that outcome and for me i've realized no if i only choose based upon how it's going to perform then i'm kind of losing my soul along the way totally and i'm you know i was with a mutual friend of ours rich roll last week we were chatting about the same thing about how do we go about choosing the guests who we want to speak to and this actually there was it's not just for people who've got big audiences right we all have a circle of influence in our lives it's how you interact in everyday life how how do you make choices you know in my in my previous book i had this framework for happiness And I said there's three ingredients to happiness, alignment, contentment, and control.

16:35Each one of those is not enough in isolation. They're all important and you need balance between those three. And I think what we're talking about speaks to that alignment piece, right? Which is when I say alignment, I mean when the person who you really are on the inside and the person who you are being on the outside of one and the same. So when your inner values and your external actions start to match up more and more, I think at any point in our life when we start to create a void there and a gap between who we are and who we are being in the world that will come to bite you at some point I really believe in that void that we create there's a fracture internally and I believe having been a doctor for 23 years that a lot of the problems that we see to do with let's say our lifestyle and the habits that we're to change i actually think that if you go to the root cause when does that internal fracture in who you are you will put in things like sugar and alcohol and online scrolling for three hours or pornography whatever it is it's there in the cracks to fill that hole

17:46we just took our kids to an outdoor performance the nutcracker they had a snow cone and then uh They went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

18:23Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

19:05And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns.

19:48There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour.

20:25And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

20:56Yeah, in my first book, I riffed a little bit on this word disintegrated. When you hear the word disintegrate in English, you think it means like coming apart, right? Like it disintegrated upon entering the Earth's atmosphere. But like, if you think about it more as disintegrated, like not integrated, I find that's the state that a lot of people exist in. So you have different parts of yourself and they're not integrated with each other. So you might have a set of values. Like this is how I was in my 20s. You have a set of values. You have what you think is important, who you want to be. And then you have your job, which is maybe in an industry or it's being done in a way, or it's forcing you to perform in a way that is not in those things.

21:38are not integrated, right? The other word for this is compartmentalization, but you can't really compartmentalize, right? You just have these different things and eventually they kind of, they find some way to conflict or you have to find some way to reconcile them. And so I think a lot of people that particularly in something like sort of the internet ecosystem where, where you're like, if I have this person on, it will get a lot of engagement. It might not be true. It might be bad for the world. They might be a crazy person who's spreading a harmful message, but I have to get a certain. So I think you see that.

22:14And then what happens is those people tend to spiral because they have that person on, they engage with this sort of energy, and it does so well that it becomes harder and harder for them not to do more and more of that. And then you kind of watch that person almost get radicalized by the people they bring into the circle. And we see it. And so, you know, I used to be driven a lot by external validation as a kid, as a teenager in my 20s. And over the last five or 10 years, I've really changed that by intentionally, you know, doing daily practices to change how I show up in the world, to change how I see myself, to change my external actions.

22:51and I kind of feel that a lot of us because we have this reliance this over reliance on being liked by other people we start to change who we are in order to be accepted by others but that's very very dangerous because and I think the online world magnifies it this to a great degree you can change who you are and get validation so then you start performing in life rather than living authentically you perform and you get rewarded for that performance so you keep doing that but again you're creating this internal void and i think it's better the truth is it's better to be yourself and not be liked by some people but be authentic to yourself in the long term and frankly in the short term you're going to feel better you're going to find there's a contentment there's of peace.

23:44And in terms of this idea of making changes that actually last, I think it's going to be much more likely when you're actually becoming much more aligned with who you are. I've been thinking about this with this idea of virtue. We tend to think of virtue or who we are as this thing. It's like, I'm a good person. I'm a generous person. I'm whatever. We think it's this thing that we are as opposed to this thing that we do, right? And Aristotle was very clear that virtue was an action, not like a state of being, that it's a verb and not a noun. Yeah, love that. So people will say, well, I'm a good person, but this is what I do professionally, or this is what I believe, but I'm going to engage with or interact or platform all these things that I don't really believe.

24:34That's not how it works. As you're trafficking in this stuff, as you're engaging it as you're doing this thing because it's what the algorithm wants or what you think your boss wants or just how this industry operates. You are becoming that thing and you're becoming not the thing that you see yourself as or believe that you are because you're not doing that thing. And so the idea is like, if you want to be something, if you want to see yourself a certain way, it has to be rooted in the actions that you take the day-to-dayness, which the good news is means you can change positively also. You can just start doing that thing.

25:08It's like not faking it till you make it. It's bringing it into being by doing it. Yeah. So I start each day with several practices as part of a morning routine, okay? And 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. Yeah, not the happiness of smiling or laughing, but of contentment and self-fulfillment.

25:46Yeah, exactly. And so 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. 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.

26:21And 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 they earn more money there's a very strong relationship so I have been teaching my patients for years about little 5, 10, 15-minute rituals that they can do each morning that helps to ground them. And even when I'm in America now, I'm traveling on this book tour.

26:59I'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. 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.

27:37So 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. 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. 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.

28:16But 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. 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.

28:50I 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. 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 - What's the third 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. And the third question is, which quality do I want to showcase to the world today?

29:22And 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? 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 after you've sucked out all the energy and - 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.

30:01And 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. 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, et cetera, et cetera. Right? 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.

30:38and 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? 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.

31:19And 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 McEwen 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 and it's where a tease is funny yeah sure and so i think many of us are drowning in in our um 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 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 for two weeks it's yeah it's the longest i've been away from them in a long long time.

32:03So I remember on the Monday of that week when I was answering that morning question, it was a work deadline. 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. 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. 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.

32:39On the Wednesday, I remember clearly because I was working from home that day, I thought to myself, and this is what I commonly put down on working from home days. I put down at 4pm 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. 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.

33:28One thing I would add to that, obviously, some of them are more personal than professional, but whatever your important professional thing is that you have to do that day, the thing I add to that is one of my rules is I do the hard thing first. Exactly. So the problem is people say, let's say you have to write something, you have to review something, you have to sit down and go through some bit of paperwork. You're not going to bring your best self to that task at three in the afternoon. You have to do it. From what I understand, the studies that sort of willpower and concentration, these are like finite resources that we have.

34:01You have to bring your freshest self to that thing. And so for me, it's usually like, hey, what is the writing thing I have to do? Because that's my job. I don't schedule breakfast meetings and podcasts and running to the DMV. I don't schedule administrative bullshit before I have to do the hard concentration, heavy task first. I do that first. So the other thing is when you have a, hey, what's the most important thing I have to do today? Professionally, personally, whatever. If you do that thing, you won the day. Yeah, exactly. How many people win their days? Very few people. So by lowering the stakes, by making it about the one thing, the main thing, then you not only, it's reasonable you're going to do it, But then you build the identity and the sense of momentum that you're just like, several days in a row, I'm fucking crushing it.

34:54Momentum's the key force, right? That's the key underlying energy behind any of this long-term change that we're all looking for. And connecting this to what we said earlier about the negativity bias, there are always things for most of us that we haven't done, 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. hey, you need to do something. You need to take action each day in some way to sort of insulate yourself against that. 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.

35:36And when you having those little practices, hey, this is what I do, all the coffee's being made, you know, those are small wins that you're front-loading your day with. It's very unlikely that the day is going to be so haywire that from the second you woke up, you didn't have five minutes to do push-ups or five minutes to do this gratitude practice. By making it small and simple and entirely in your control, then again, you can give up on the momentum, but no one can take it from you. Yeah, and this works on so many levels. Let me just finish on that third question. And then I want to explain why I feel that these five-minute practices are so powerful.

36:14Yes, I've experienced it myself. I've seen it with patients year after year, even patients in the depth, suicidal patients. If you can, for some of them, help them with these five-minute actions each day, you build momentum. You build self-esteem. They change the way that they view themselves. 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.

36:53So for me in the morning, if I spend a minute going, what quality do I want to showcase to the world today? 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 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 now the power isn't doing it once you do that every single morning for 7 days, for 14 days, for 21 days you start to change the person who you are you become i would argue more aligned with the person you want to be because the truth is yes we're all different but there's some really good psychological research showing that actually when we're kind and compassionate and we practice and show patience we just feel better about ourselves we do improve our self-esteem that's who we ultimately are i believe underneath all the societal conditioning underneath what the algorithm is driving people to do, like you were mentioning earlier, I think we all feel better when we're kind and compassionate.

38:09So I love those three questions and I've shared them with my patients over the years. I've shared them with my Instagram audience, my podcast audience, and the feedback I consistently get is that they really, really help. Now you don't have to do those three. You might have a better version or, you know, in your journals, Ryan, you've got other options for people, but do something, right? Do something. And just bringing in the science of behavior change for a minute because i think i think it really adds to what we're talking about i do several things each morning in my ideal morning okay i have i have a framework called the three m's mindfulness movement and mindset okay and the journaling practice those three questions come under the mindset piece for me right but the one thing i haven't missed in probably five years now that's rarely been a day is my five minute strength workout every morning and it's got nothing to do with willpower.

39:01Absolutely nothing to do with willpower. I apply the same principles that we all apply to brush our teeth every day to have a five minute strength workout. And people go, what's five minutes gonna do? It does a lot. It's momentum. It makes me feel that even if my life is super busy and my wife needs me and my children need me and my team members need me and my patients need me, I still found five minutes for myself. And what I do is the two most important rules for any behavior, in my view, are number one, make it easy. Number two, you stick on that behavior onto an existing habit. So I make it easy by making it five minutes.

39:41I can never say I don't have five minutes. I'm in my pajamas when I do it, so I don't have to get change or anything fancy. You don't have to go somewhere. In my kitchen at home, I have a dumbbell. I have a kettlebell. They are in the kitchen. Yes, a few years ago, my wife said, hey, baby, you're going to keep this stuff in the kitchen. I was like, yeah, it's going to stay in the kitchen because if it goes in the garage or the cupboard, it's not going to get used. And the funny thing now is that my kids use it. She uses it, right? So you make it easy. And number two, you stick it onto an existing habit.

40:14So what is that? A habit is an action that you do without conscious thoughts, right? So my coffee is going to get made at 5.30. I don't need my assistant to phone me to remind me. I don't need a Google calendar notification. It's going to happen, right? So by sticking on the workout there, it happens. But it's the same thing that we do with toothbrushing. Do you know what I mean? It's so small and simple. And again, that's the kind of stuff. I've had so many patients over the years with depression, with bad anxiety, suicidal thoughts. And yes, there are many things that you might have to look at.

40:51So I'm not trying to oversimplify. How do you get movement going in the right direction? Exactly. And that, for me, is one of the best ways to do it. What do you think about New Year's resolutions? Because I think when people are thinking about change, they're like, I want to be a different person in 2025. Or I want to be a better person. I want to be closer to the person I know I'm capable of being. How do you think about resolutions? Because the reality is a lot of people have that sensation, that feeling, that desire. And then most resolutions go nowhere and people spend another year as exactly the same person.

41:22I mean, I spent a long time thinking about this because why is it that, you know, depending which research study you read, 80 to 90 % in New Year's resolutions have fallen by the wayside by the start of February, right? Okay. And I've got 23 years of clinical experience. So I've seen tens of thousands of patients. So I kind of feel I've got a good steer, certainly from my own experience and what I've seen. I think there's a few things that people get wrong. Okay. I think they try and make it too big too quickly, which I have seen people do that. Generally speaking, the people who can transform their lives overnight, they've generally had some really, really big life experience, a divorce, a bereavement.

42:04They've lost the house, something big. Yeah, you can do it. But if you don't have that driving you, I think if you make it too big, you're never going to make it last in the long term. Right. So, so there's a couple of things to say about these resolutions, right? So one thing I don't think people understand enough is that every single behavior in our life serves a role. Too often we try and change the behavior without understanding the role it plays in our life. So I'll give you a really practical example. If your alcohol consumption is your way of managing stress, right, you can white knuckle it for the first two or three weeks of January and you will stop.

42:44And you'll think, yeah, I've got more energy. I'm sleeping better. Great, great, great. I have no problem with that. But if it's your way of managing stress, the only way you'll change it in the long term is by one of two things. Either the amount of stress in your life has to change, so then you'll no longer need the alcohol, or you need an alternative behavior to alcohol to help you manage the stress it sounds so obvious ryan when i put it like that but most people in my experience are caught up in their lives and they're they're focused too much on the behavior instead of being focused on what role does behavior play and so i've come to the conclusion that and this is really one of the primary theses in make change that lasts my new book is this idea that it's not necessarily the the behavior you need to focus on it's the energy what's it doing for you why are you doing and the other way i i look at it for news resolutions is all behaviors i believe come from either love or fear right at their core sure so if you feel bad about who you are you're consumed with guilt and shame and jealousy and envy or whatever it might be these are all things that come from the energy of fear if your changes are coming from that kind of energy I don't think they're going to last in the long term because you're trying to overcome like the behavior is in conflict with who you consider yourself to be this was me a few years ago right so I would say right this year I'm going to meditate and I'd do 20 minutes of meditation every morning until like the 16th of January then I'll miss a day because work gets busy and I'd beat myself up in my head negative self-talk I'd be wrong and you couldn't do it because you're year, you know, you're a loser.

44:30I used to have a really negative inner voice. I've completely changed that over the years with these kind of intentional practices. And now I find behavior change really, really simple because I've focused on the underlying energies behind that behavior change. And one of the things I try to kind of address in this book, Ryan, is I'm a doctor, right? So through the lens of health, I think we're living in a world where we've got more information than ever before. More health podcasts, more health books, more blogs, whatever it might be. But why, despite all this increase in information and knowledge, is it not translating to better health outcomes?

45:09We know what we should, most of us know what we should do or not do. Exactly. So, you know, I really tried hard with this one. It's good. No, no, no. There's a lot of what we should be doing out there. I've written books on what we should be doing this book addresses the why why are we still doing the things that we know are harming us yeah and i think a lot of it is internal it comes to our internal world and people don't want to go there but that's where the gold is it's funny uh so every year for daily stoic we do this thing we call the daily stoic new year new challenge it's like 21 days of stoic inspired challenges it's different every year but it's just a bunch of cool stoic practices the idea is like one or two will stick with someone and they'll take it through the year one will get them to think about something differently but it's funny like we'll start talking about it in early december the first day you announce it a bunch of people sign up second time you announce a bunch of people sign up and then it sort of dips and then the it starts on january 1st but like the second biggest sign up day is always like january 2nd so like people want to change like at some level they heard about this they want to change and then what we do i think this is the most insidious part of uh what gets in the way of so much what we're capable of doing is we go okay i'm gonna do it tomorrow they go okay that's that starts on january 1st so that's a couple weeks from now so in a couple weeks from now i'll get serious about thinking about signing up yeah and then i'll miss that like which is the stoics talk about about how we know what we need to do but then we say we tell ourselves this huge lie which is like i'll do it in the morning i'll do it after this i'll do it when things calm down by just moving the timeline up a little bit we let ourselves off the hook and then most of us don't do it it's i completely agree it's what i've seen in patients for years it's it's always next week or next monday or next month but when the kids are older yeah it starts today so another five minute practice i try and do each day is what my wife and I call the five minute tea ritual.

47:15Like many people, if you're not intentional about it, you can live in the same house, but you get so busy with work and the children and you're like passing ships. Right. So a few years ago we decided, yeah, listen, yeah, life gets busy from time to time, but we really need to intentionally focus on our relationship. So we have this practice called the five minute tea ritual every night when the kids were younger, we still try and do it now when they've gone to bed before we do anything else we come to the kitchen we make a pot of mint tea so non-caffeinated and it's not the rule the practice is that for five minutes we catch up yeah right so it's only five minutes it's it's the requirement so we're just going to ask each other about our days right instead of uh we got to get a babysitter we're going to book a restaurant reservation we're going to you make it too big and then you're like we You can't do it this way.

48:07Yeah. And it's like, before you know, it's a few months before you did anything. And what's really interesting is, and I think this builds on this five-minute action each day principle that we're talking about. It's not that some days those five minutes don't become 30 minutes or an hour. More often than not. More often than not, they do. Because it's actually, oh, this is much more fun than going on Netflix or YouTube, whatever it might be. It's like, oh, this is why I married you, right? We actually want to spend time together. Wait, we like each other? Yeah. Yeah. but some days one of us will say actually it's just going to be five minutes a day like i've actually got a few emails to do or whatever it might be whenever we felt either one of us oh we're too busy and it's been a few days without that practice it's really interesting you can feel it in our relationship the niggles the small things start to bother us it's there's less intimacy there's less connection but when we are quite disciplined about the five minute tea ritual everything else in our relationship and therefore our lives and our health starts to get better right and so i'm a huge fan of these small things that we do consistently i have found time and time again with me and with thousands of my patients these are the things that i think move the needle for most people

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50:02I mean, there's a writing rule of two crappy pages a day. Yeah. It seems like the opposite of how you would get good writing to set a goal to do bad writing. But what it's doing is it's dramatically lowering the stakes. It's making it attainable. And it's actually hard to do crappy pages. But the idea is you got to do crappy pages and to do great pages. They share one similarity, which is that you have to show up. Yeah. And so by lowering the stakes, you can create the room to create positive momentum. And then the other thing, which I think is a rule we don't or I guess a factor, a fact of life we don't talk about enough, which is that I think quantity is a way to get to quality.

50:45Yeah. So it's like, let's say every day for a month, you sit down with your spouse and you have five minutes. A lot of those are going to be five minutes of nothingness. But one of those or a handful of those are really going to be significant, which you only could have had by having the larger number. Right. Like and so the more you sit down and do the thing, what you're doing is increasing your chances of having those really transcendent days. And so, but people focus on like, you know what, like for writing, they're like, I'm going to rent a cabin. I'm going to go there and I'm going to have two great weeks in a row.

51:20No, you're not. You're not. First off, you're not going to do it. And then second, like you're going to have five of those days be crappy. And as a result, like you're not going to return with the things that you needed. So it's more about the day-to-dayness, the consistency and the quantity that gets you. You see this with health, right? So let's use the example of working out, which is a desire that many people have at all times, but particularly at the new year, right? It's like, I want to move my body more. I'm spending too much time at the desk. People start to get paralyzed with choice, right?

51:53Oh, what, you know, am I going to run? I'm going to do yoga? I'm going to do Pilates? I'm going to, you know, what is that I'm going to do? And I've had patients before where they've literally got angina pains in their heart. we talk about physical activity a month later they're still coming back saying hey doctor i can't decide which one to do right and i understand that i have sympathy but the point is frankly any of them are going to help you walked here and that would have and that would have helped you through the lens of my five minute strength workout people say what do you do the same thing every day actually for many years i did because if you have to decide every morning oh what am i going to do today, that's procrastination.

52:33That's choice. That leads to indecision and inaction. And we know this in business, in the business world. When Amazon moved to one-click ordering about 10 years ago or so, estimates say their profits went up by$300 million a year. Because back then, I don't know if you can remember this, but there were four or five steps to take before you could purchase. You have to confirm order, put in your car details on a news screen. There's three or four sets. Each time you have another option, it's a reason that you can pull out of the behavior. And so the reason we brush our teeth each night, well, one of the reasons is because it's the same action every day.

53:14On Tuesday evening, we don't go, you know what, I brushed yesterday. Let me do something different today. I'm going to floss today. And then on Wednesday, we don't go, I brush and I'm just going to rinse today. We don't do that. What if you had to assemble the toothbrush or you had to unpackage it? If you had to make the toothpaste? Wouldn't do it. Yeah, right. And so that's why my dumbbell and kettlebell lives in my kitchen. My cafeteria is there. It all works together. It is so easy. I can barely not do it. Now, going back to news resolutions, there's another, I think, for me, it's a big idea that I don't think we're talking about enough, right?

53:47And I think it is a way of connecting a lot of your writings and practices with health. which, and I think sometimes people don't see the connection, right? So I believe that a lot of the reason why we can't make changes that last is because we don't understand the internal drivers that are leading us to those practices. So let me give you a really practical example. Let's say someone's trying to cut back on sugar, right? Which is a lot of people, right? It's not great. So you've got the knowledge that too much sugar is affecting your teeth and your liver and your skin and your health, whatever, right?

54:22And you think that just knowing that is all you need to make the change. But most people who are trying to cut back already know that. They don't need another book telling them on the negatives to sugar or the negatives to alcohol. They already know that. So the way we interact with the world massively influences our behaviors. So let me try and give an example. If you are the kind of person who you're driving to work in traffic and another car cuts in front of you, you think that you're entitled to react in a certain way. And of course you are entitled to, but if you start making all this mental noise in your head, stupid driver, they shouldn't have a license, and you start screaming at them.

55:07You can do that, but it's going to have a consequence. What people don't realize, Ryan, in my view, is that you are generating emotional stress in that instant by the way you've reacted with an external event. That emotional stress is not neutral. You have to do something to neutralize that stress. And what usually happens is that you get to work, you could do it in a healthy way and walk around the block, but most people don't. They go to the vending machine, they get a chocolate bar, they get an extra coffee, they get the donuts, or they need an extra drink of alcohol after work because they need to soothe the emotional stress that they generated by the way they responded to that event.

55:50Now, you can cultivate with practice, and I've had a practice for years since my conversation with Edith Eager on my podcast, right? The choice. The choice, yeah. You chose to interpret it this way and have this feeling about it. I mean, that's the definition of stoicism. It's not events that upset us. It's our opinion about the events. Exactly. And we can hear this stuff and people who've read your books will know this. This is a central idea in my new book, but I don't think people are connecting that to their health and their health behaviors. And I can say with my own experience, since I spoke to Edith Eger, and you're wanting to probably know who she is, 93 year old lady when I spoke to her a few years ago.

56:31No, you connected me with her. I did. Yeah. I remember. And she was like, when she was 16, years old, shall I just briefly tell the story or your audience familiar? Out of 500 conversations on my podcast, I would still say this is the one that has impacted me personally the most. And that was because I was ready for that message at that point in my life. Maybe if I'd heard it 10 years earlier, in through one ear, out through the other. But at that point, I was like, oh, I get it now. I can now see life for what it is. Every event in life is essentially neutral. it's my interpretation on that event that determines this outcome.

57:07So Edith, when she was 16 years old, growing up in Eastern Europe, she was excited. She was going for a date with her boyfriend that night. She was trying to think about what dress is she going to wear. And her family get a knock on the door. Her sister, her and her two parents get put on a train to Auschwitz concentration camp, right? Within two hours of getting there, both of her parents are murdered. An hour or two later, she is a 16 year old girl Gets asked to dance for the senior prison guards And there's many things from that conversation that have never left me, Ryan One of the things is what she said to me then She said, Rangan, I never forgot the final thing my mother said to me Edith, nobody can ever take from you the contents that you put inside your own mind And then she says, Rangan, when I was dancing in Auschwitz I wasn't in Auschwitz So in my mind, I was in Budapest Opera House.

58:00I had a beautiful dress on. The orchestra was playing. The crowd were cheering. I thought, okay, this is pretty incredible. Then she tells me, whilst I was in Auschwitz, I started to see the prison guards as the prisoners. They weren't free in their mind. I was. And there's much more to that story, right? But I thought, this is pretty incredible. And the final thing she said to me, and I kind of feel, Ryan, that these, you've got these tattoos, right? on your arm. I feel that these words from Edith are internally tattooed onto my soul because they literally changed how I view the world. She said to me, Rangan, I have lived in Auschwitz and I can tell you the greatest prison you will ever live inside is the prison you create inside your own mind.

58:45And why the penny dropped for me, like it literally dropped for me in that moment. Oh my God, we're all creating these stories every day. We're going online, we're taking offense to these posts by the people. We're getting annoyed by the driver or our boss. And we don't realize that we can train ourselves. It's a skill that you can cultivate, get better at. You can train yourself to not take offense. There's a whole chapter in this book saying, it's basically don't take offense. And I explained the health outcomes and the health benefits for your behaviors. What people don't realize is that no event is inherently offensive.

59:23Because if it was, we'd all be offended to the same comment or the same event. But the fact that we didn't hear it, you wouldn't be offended either. Right. You know what I mean? It's not, it's not like it's registering on the seismic machines. Like it's only because you heard it and you decided it meant X, Y, or Z. A rude tone does not register in like a recording device. You know, you can't see, people look at the audio of this podcast, you can see the sound levels, but you could not tell from the sound levels, whether we're having a nice conversation. are not nice conversations. It's an interpretation.

59:55So you can train yourself to go, oh, nothing is inherently offensive. Something in me is being lit. It's been activated by that comment. I wonder what it is. So after that conversation with Edith, I would do a practice, maybe for two or three years. I don't do it anymore because I feel I had to consciously do it. Now it's my unconscious. It's there. It's my default. Like when I'm 47, I can honestly hand on heart say, I've never felt this good. Yeah, that's amazing. Like I feel I've got this inner calm these days that I didn't have before. And a lot of it is from these kind of practices. So for a few years, I would basically in the evening in a journal, I'd write down, oh, where today did you get emotionally triggered?

1:00:46and instead of looking at the outside world and the person who sent the email or the person who left the comment or the driver who drove a certain way because frankly if I'm reliant on those things to go well to feel good I'm going to be waiting a long time to feel good I end up being a puppet on a string you know I'm just gonna be blown around by the actions of others and I thought no that's a very vulnerable place to be in I don't want to be dependent or overly dependent on the actions of other people. And so I would write down, why did that situation bother you? What was brought up inside of you?

1:01:21Oh, it reminded me of what my mum said to me when I was a kid. Oh, it reminded me of how my boss treated me or whatever it might be. Like both of us, Ryan, we have pretty large public profiles, right? So if we choose to look, we can see a lot of comments on us, good and bad. And in the early days, when my BBC One TV show first came out in 2015, where I went into families' houses and helped them all reverse their conditions using nutrition, lifestyle and mindsets, when I did that, I'd never experienced public commentary before until that show came out. And whoa, was I not well-equipped to handle it, right?

1:01:58No one is. And people say you need to grow a thick skin. I don't think that's necessarily the way I would frame it. I don't think it's about growing a thick skin I think it's about really being able to emotionally detach yourself from that comment and looking at it rationally so for example I've I've learned over the years one and I'd welcome your perspective on this I've learned that for me and I think for many people that criticism only bothers us to the extent we believe it about ourselves if you think it's preposterously off base it doesn't right it doesn't bother you it's got to be in the ballpark if there's something in it it's like ah maybe they've got a point there and actually instead of pushing it away if they do have a point and i've had posts before where someone has criticized and i've instead of pushing back i've gone actually you know what they've got a point right they've got a point next time i post about this topic i can take a little bit more care so you can use criticism to learn or you can go you know what i i don't see it that way like you know they've got a completely different perspective on the world they're entitled to but i'm very happy with what I've done.

1:03:02I think it's this inner work that the Stoics talk about, that you talk about. I think this is the missing link for our health. I really believe that, that we're still wanting more external knowledge, like sugar, alcohol, what sort of diet should I eat? I'm not saying external knowledge has no value. It does, but it's not enough in and of itself. We need more internal knowledge, more self-reflection, more insights. No, I think that's an interesting connection because I think most of my audience would totally buy the connection that if you have an opinion about something that's not up to you, if you've interpreted something that you've chosen, the least charitable interpretation, the offensive interpretation, that's going to cause distress or suffering in you.

1:03:49And I think both the Stoics and the Buddhists say this, right? Exactly. Our opinions, our expectations, our judgments are the source of our suffering. But I think what you're saying is that it's not just kind of existential spiritual suffering. You're creating a need or an energy that's going to have to find an outlet. And that outlet is going to be food or bad habits or addictions or whatever. and and yeah just the idea that okay because you you interpreted this thing as affecting your value as a human then when you see some tasty thing that's going to make you feel good as a human you're going to be much more susceptible to doing i have seen this for so many people and i've really experienced it myself like i i a few years ago i thought well why are you still eating a bit too much sugar when you've written three sunday times bestsellers so far on each of them at the time, I was writing about the problems with excess sugar because external knowledge is not in and off itself enough.

1:04:50It's that internal knowledge, right? So you will need an outlet for the emotional stress that you generate. So it's not just about how you feel, it's then about how you act. But let me give you some research to actually present it from a different perspective. Professor Fred Luskin at Stanford University, he's in charge of the Stanford Forgiveness Project. And he has shown with his research that actually, if you are unable to forgive and let go of things that have happened in the past, which is kind of the similar things to what we're talking about, that can have serious health outcomes. So he has shown that when he can teach people to forgive, your blood pressure can go down, anxiety can improve, depression can improve, all kinds of things.

1:05:36I've shared research in this book gabble matthew has shared research where actually there is ample research showing an association with people who hold on to resentment can't let go of things which is a lot of things we're talking about have there's an association between those traits and things like autoimmune disease things like cancer now i say that very cautiously i'm not blaming anyone right these things are chronic diseases. There are multiple inputs. There's genetics, there's food, there's stress, there's sleep, there's environmental pollution, but there's also emotional components, right?

1:06:13So these things are all linked and we have enough clinic. I've got enough clinical experience and there's enough published research evidence to show us that these things really matter. Because, you know, Ryan, you know, I've been a doctor for 23 years, right? I've already written five books before this one and i wanted to write something fresh i didn't want to i didn't want to write something that i feel it was already out there otherwise what's the point and i thought there's more and more health information out there but it's not translating to better health yes there are structural reasons for that in society for sure but that's the external yeah there's also the internal reasons why we're not able to on an individual level and once once you understand the things that you write about so beautifully and the things that I hope are going to connect with your audience in this book, once you understand that you can actually cultivate a calmer inner world, not only are you going to feel better, you're going to act better with your behaviors as well.

1:07:13No, I think that makes total sense. Yeah, it's not, your lack of change is not for, is not due to a deficiency in raw willpower. It's something deeper than that. The behavior serves a need. Want to go check out some books in the bookstore? I'd love to. I've got to get a couple for my kids as well, for sure.

1:07:40Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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