Dr. Gabor Maté Reveals The Unlikely Link Between Stress, Trauma & Disease (E297)

0:00Watch it early on the High Performance App. Available now, Roman Kemp, the broadcaster, opens up a powerful conversation on success and mental health. If you had asked me what is the greatest value to me, I would have unhesitatingly said the well-being and happiness of my family. But if you actually looked at how I live my life, what you would have concluded is that this guy's highest value is advancement at work. There's such a thing called evaluation stress. What do we do to kids? when we're constantly marking them, grading them and demanding that they behave this way and that way and they perform this and they perform that.

0:36We're creating evaluation stress. In my 40s, I was alienated and depressed and I was successful, but I wasn't a happy camper. And, you know, I had to wake up and start dealing with it. It's an ongoing process. That was the voice of the globally renowned physician and author Gabor Mate. who joins us on this episode of High Performance, the show that explores the stories and the ideas of some of the most extraordinary people in the world. Hi there, I'm Jay Comfrey, and like a lot of human beings, I just love exploring ways to be more content and to try and get the most I can from my life. And I'm Damien Hughes.

1:18I'm an expert in the world of high performance. I've been lucky enough to work with professional sports teams all over the world, including the Scotland Rugby Union team and the England National Football team, as well as with leading business people to help them understand how to create environments that get the best out of themselves and others. So team, what can we tell you about today's guest? Well, he's an expert in a range of topics. You can expect to hear us discussing addiction, stress, developmental psychology, which is a topic close to his heart because at just five months old, Gabor's grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.

1:51And despite growing up in the shadow of that trauma, his family moved to Canada where he went on to become a physician and wrote several incredible best-selling books. I found it such an honour to be in Gabbo's presence. As any regular listeners to this show will know that I love understanding psychology and you'll hear in this conversation how Gabbo talks really eloquently about how identity definition affects us, both in childhood and in adult life, as well as how society itself can erode our sense of feeling whole. I think it's fair to say that both Damien and I finish this conversation thinking deeply about our lives and the way that we live them.

2:31And I really hope it does the same for you. So let's do it then. And welcome Gabor Maté to High Performance.

2:42Gabor, welcome to High Performance. Pleasure. I want to start with a question. I've heard you talk about the power of it in the past. And the question is, tell me who you are. So when I say to you, tell me who you are, what do you think? The only right answer I know to that question is that the question is much more important than the answer. Because any answer I give you would be limiting. I mean, I could say I'm a doctor, I'm a writer, I'm a husband, I'm a father. Any of those are only aspects of who I am. So I'm just a person who's sitting here now hanging out with your question. That's who I am.

3:17And why is that such an important question? because who we believe we are determines so much of our behavior and our reactions and perceptions and interactions you know whether it's in personal relationships whether it's in politics and so on so um if i'm comfortable not having a definitive answer and just being with whatever is happening at the moment, then I'm in the present. But as soon as I define myself by any of the categories of my existence, I'm limiting myself to that category. And that's going to limit my reactions. We were talking about sports before. You know, if you define yourself as, say, a Manchester City fan, if that's who you are, that's going to determine a whole lot of your reactions.

4:13And you won't appreciate a lot of things that you might really appreciate if you didn't have that narrow definition of yourself. So how have we ended up in a world where we say to each other, where are you from? What's your job? Do you have kids? Why do we not ask the question of everyone that we meet? Tell me who you are. Yeah. Or tell me what's happening for you right now. Because we live in a world of separation. We live in a world of definitions. Live in a world of categories. and we judge ourselves and others through those categories. And of course it's important to communicate those things, but it's important also not to allow ourselves to be defined by them.

5:00And in this culture, it's very much about, you know, tell me who you are, I'm a doctor, I'm a plumber. I mean, that's not who you are, that's just what you do. So we live in a society that limits us through all these categories. I think it's one of the sins of civilization. So one of your most famous concepts, Gabor, is around wholeness and how do we all develop this sense of wholeness. What are your tips on how we can do that then? Well, actually, it's more like how we lose it in the first place. Because I don't know if you guys are parents, but there's no one day old baby that likes wholeness.

5:41They're completely themselves. Whatever they experience, you're going to know about it. Whatever they feel, they're going to manifest it. Whatever is in them to communicate, they're going to communicate it. So it's more a question of how do we lose that wholeness and the English language is interesting that way because the world health itself derives from an Anglo-Saxon word for wholeness and wholeness is the natural state of any creature. You know, no animal loses wholeness in their healthy environment. So the more fundamental question is not how do we get to wholeness, but how do we lose it?

6:23Understanding that can help us get back to it. So how do we lose it? One of the needs of the child, we can talk about human needs and as defined by evolution, not by some arbitrary New Age conceptual framework, but just evolution. And so you might say that one need that we have without which we couldn't live is oxygen because we evolved in an oxygen-filled environment. If there was no oxygen, we wouldn't exist. So you might say oxygen is an expectation. It's a need that we have. We also have emotional needs and expectations wired into us by evolution. One of them is to be seen for who we are, to be accepted for who we are.

7:09That's just the need of the child. If that need is met, that child develops a sense of complete comfort with who they are and presence and wholeness. However, in our society, and as a parent I can certainly say this, it's so difficult for parents to really see their kids for who they actually are without projecting our expectations on them for who they should be or how they should be, how they should show up, how they should behave. And so that we're not seeing the child for themselves. We're seeing the child through our own expectations and anxieties. The child who's not seen for who they are, they don't see themselves.

7:50So they lose their connection to themselves.

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9:37It seems such a hard thing, right, to get parenting right. You know, all three of us are parents. I feel like we lurch from one mistake to another as a mum and dad, Harriet and I. So when you talk about seeing your child as they really are, I'm thinking to myself, you know, I've got an 11-year-old and a 9-year-old. Like, have I spent the last 11 years not seeing them as they really are? How do we go about doing this? Do you know that famous poem by the British poet Philip Larkin? About... Parents fuck us up. Yeah. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They don't mean to what they do, but they don't mean to what they do.

10:15Look, parenting has become far more complex and difficult than nature intended it. There's a lot of research and literature on how Aboriginal tribal peoples parent their kids. Much more healthy ways than we do today. And I just finished reading a book published maybe 40 years ago now called The Continuum Concept. It's an American model and writer who ends up in the Venezuelan jungle, six weeks away from civilization with these Stone Age people. And these people, they hold their kids all the time. They don't put them down to sleep in a different room. They don't let them cry. Not that they forbid them to cry.

10:52The child doesn't have to cry to be picked up because the parents are with them all the time. And they don't judge and they don't berate, they don't punish their kids. And these kids grow up with an innate sense of their own goodness and their own wholeness. And, of course, the parenting task is not forced upon isolated individual parents who both have to go to work and not see their kids the whole day. The kids are with the parents the whole day, and not just with their parents, other adults, other parenting figures. You know, it takes a village, as the African saying goes. The kids who grow up like that, they have a sense of their goodness, confidence in their bodies, connection to their environment, and a very positive sense of themselves.

11:37So civilization, for all its advantages, of course, we can't go back to being Stone Age tribal peoples, but we've lost so much. And if only we could understand what we've lost and do what we can in today's society to bring back as much as we can. So that civilization, of course, all these achievements, in scientific, technical, medical, cultural, whatever. But we've lost the plot when it comes to kids. Parenting should be much more multigenerational, much more communal. Parents should be supportive to be at home with their kids in the first months, for sure. Kindergartens and so on shouldn't be just about behavior and teaching of facts or skills.

12:25It should be about relationship. Because human beings are relational creatures by nature. So we could do a whole lot better. You know, and it's not up to individual parents. It's a real social question. And what have you learned then about how we ended up in this modern way of thinking about parenting where you put your kids in a room and you close the door and let them cry until they don't cry anymore. Yeah. You go back to work as quickly as possible to show your kids what a work ethic looks like. You put your kids in full-time nursery as early as you can so you can get on with the life that you wanted to live as a parent how have we ended up in in this way of thinking because we live in a society whose implicit but even overtly stated value is individual advancement and individual success and as soon as we put the emphasis on the individual we forget that we're relational creatures.

13:26So when you go back to work early to show your kids a work ethic, what you're really showing is that you don't care about them. Because if you care, you know, I'm talking about myself. You know, when I was a young physician, I was really a workaholic. And what really mattered to me as being successful in practice, what message did my kids get? Is that they didn't matter to me because if they mattered to me, I would have been there with them on the weekends and in the evenings rather than being on call all the time. So, inadvertently, we give our kids the message that they don't matter. And when we don't pick them up, I mean, why do kids cry?

14:02Kids are wired for connection with the parents. They're literally wired. Their brains are wired for it. Not just our kids. Birds, mammals. It's physiological, neurological wiring for connection. We're also wired for panic. We're actually wired for panic. Why are we wired for panic? Because what should I feel as an infant if my parents are not around? I should feel panic. Because what do I do if I feel panic? I cry. What does that crying do? It immediately should bring the parent running to pick me up, who shouldn't have put me down in the first place. Not according to ancient peoples. Now, what happens to a kid where they're having this panic, They're crying for the parent because they physically need the contact emotionally, and their parent ignores it.

14:59The panic is wired into the brain. And now you have a kid who's going to be anxious all their lives. So again, if you just understood the basic needs of kids, and like, you're a parent? Yeah. Okay. When I was a young parent, if you had asked me what is the greatest value to me, I would have, unhesitatingly, I would have said, the well-being and happiness of my family. And you'd probably say the same thing. Correct, yeah. But if you actually looked at how I live my life, that's not what you would have concluded. What you would have concluded is that this guy's highest value is advancement at work.

15:37Yeah. And his success as a physician. So that my declared value, which I would have been very sincere about articulating, was at complete odds with the value that I was actually living. So my kids get, what message do they get? And what about people who listen to this and go, well, I need to work all the hours, God sent, to pay the bills? That's certainly true for a lot of people. Partly that's a matter of how this society doesn't value young life. And we keep talking about our children and our future, but we're sure they don't behave that way. Given that this society is like that, then at least you should realize what the kid is losing by your absence.

16:21And when you're with them, really be with them. Don't spend your time looking at your cell phone, watching television, vegging out on the latest football talk show. Spend time with your kids. Be with them and invite them to be in your presence. So at least we should do what we can to compensate for what we've lost. What does it do to them when we're with them in body, but we're not with them in spirit? we're looking at our phones. What would it do to you if you're talking to me and my eyes were on the ceiling and I was looking at my cell phone? As an adult, what would it do to you? I would feel like you don't value me.

16:55Well, that's exactly what the child feels. And the difference is, Jake, you don't depend on how I value you. By now, you're hopefully mature enough and confident enough that whether this guy pays attention to you or not doesn't undermine your self-image, although very well might. But as a child, the self-image is just totally dependent on how the adults look at them. So it actually undermines and annihilates their sense of personal wholeness and value. And not expend their lives trying to catch up to that. It's that important. And so, again, if I ask most parents, what's the greatest value to you?

17:38They'd say the right thing. If I actually look at how they live their lives, I'd have to conclude that no that's not how they're living at all and it's true there's a lot of social pressures and financial demands but even given that if we're just aware of what our kids need if we're just aware of it we'd behave very differently I think in your writing Gabor especially your new book The Myth of Normal you pose some quite searching questions for the reader or the listener to ask themselves and I think one of the most effective set of questions I've read from your work is the compassionate inquiry questions that I think move us all closer to this sense of being who we should be.

18:22Would you explain about compassionate inquiry and why anyone can use it to their advantage? Sure. So it goes back to when I was a family physician and I began to notice that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental, that certain characteristics or character traits were showing up more and more frequently in the people who got chronically ill. And those character traits, suppressing emotions and being too nice to always please other people, just to give two examples, nobody was born with it. So these were traits developed in childhood in response to certain experiences, which meant that self-suppression of emotions and being too nice and taking on too much stress in order not to trouble others, stress the body.

19:16They lead to inflammation and illness. In other words, the physical illnesses that people were coming into my office with weren't just bodily phenomena. They represented emotional dynamics and how they lived their lives, which also meant that if somebody comes into me with an inflamed joint, I may have to give them an anti-inflammatory. I may have to give them a steroid. I may have to give them a medication to suppress their immune system, which is attacking their own body. But if I really was going to deal with it, I would also have to say, what's stressing you so much? Are you saying no? Do you know how to say no when the world is demanding too much from you?

19:58Do you express how you feel? which means it wasn't enough just to write a prescription. I'd have to talk with them. And now where I was working in that part of Vancouver, people couldn't afford private psychologists. And the psychiatrists who are medical doctors who were covered by the medical plan, they're not trained to ask these questions. Mostly they know how to prescribe medications. I don't mean to slander a whole profession, but mostly that's how they're trained. which means I had to talk to my patients so I learned how to listen so then I had to learn to develop certain questions and that's how compassionate inquiry arose now also I had to deal with my own neuroses my own dysfunctions my own workaholism, my own depression my own problems with my kids so I just learned to ask certain questions and then since then I'm not going to go into the long detail but compassionate inquiry has become a a therapeutic modality that we teach to thousands of therapists internationally.

21:01And it's also I write about in the book. And there's some very certain basic questions. And I do believe that we all carry the truth within ourselves. We may not have access to the truth all the time. I certainly don't. But ask the right questions. We'll find the truth in ourselves. So that's what it's based on. I think it would be really helpful for people if Damien and I ran through the six questions. and you can just explain why they are important questions to ask ourselves. Yeah. And then people can note them down and they can do this themselves at home. So the first question in your compassionate inquiry is, in my life's important areas, what am I not saying no to?

21:40Yeah. So compassionate, that's an example of compassionate inquiry. It doesn't encompass the whole thing. But I've mentioned this before. There was a book written by an Australian palliative care nurse about 12 years ago. It's called The Top Five Regrets of Dying People. Now, I used to work in palliative care myself. I looked after two male people. But she would sit with these people who were dying before their time because of malignancy, and she would get to know them. And the top regret was that I didn't have the courage to be myself. I spent too much time trying to please others rather than, you know.

22:22So that's what I found as well, is that people didn't know how to say no to other people's demands. We're suppressing themselves for the sake of being accepted by others. So therefore, this question, in important areas of your life, either in personal existence or in your work activities, where do you have trouble saying no? If I ask you guys, does anything come up? Do you have trouble saying no? That's a real issue for me. Okay, so would it be, I'm not asking for details, but work or personal life, or both? Both. Okay, all right. So then the next question follows. What is the impact on you of your difficulty saying no?

23:03It's often sort of leading myself to physical and mental exhaustion. Exactly. Now, are you both parents? Yeah. Okay. what's the word that the kid starts saying automatically at age one and a half? No. Yeah. Time to put your shoes on. No. Yeah, you're right. No, why is that? Because nature is smart. And nature knows that we have to develop a barrier behind which we can develop our own will and our own preferences. So that no, that the child says automatically at that age is their little fence behind which they can develop their own sense of self and their own will. if we don't crush it. A lot of people think, no, they have a monster on their hands.

23:48They have to crush it. None of you have people that don't know how to say no. So the impact is exhaustion, fatigue. It could be frequent calls. It could even be serious illness. So it's an important little thing that you're not saying there. So that's the first. The second question is, what is the impact? So I'm saying to people, identify where you're not saying no, write down the impact. This week, where did I not say no? What was the impact? I was resentful. I was tired. I had trouble sleeping. I got a cold, whatever it was. The third question is, what is the belief behind your inability to say no?

24:26So in your case, Damien, what is the belief there? If I say no, what does that mean? That people will reject me. People won't like me for saying no. Exactly. So that if I say no, I'll be rejected. That's one story that people say. Now, let's turn it around. If you called me up to go for coffee and I was up all night with a sick patient or somebody and I said, no, I'm sorry, Damien, but I'm not going to go to coffee with you, would you reject me? The opposite, yeah. Exactly. But you're afraid that you'd be rejected, which tells me something about your childhood, is that you got a certain message that you're only acceptable when you're compliant.

25:15And then you internalize that. And that becomes part of your personality. It's not who you are. It's just how you're programmed. So the belief is, if I say no, I'll be rejected. Okay, now the next question is, where did I learn that? And then we can go into your life. And the fifth question is, who would you be without that belief? if you didn't have the belief that if I say no I'd be joking who would you be? what's the answer? myself you'd be yourself you'd be free yeah you know and then there's the sixth question which is are there areas in your life where you're not saying yes where you want to say yes but you're not saying it maybe some passion some desire for self-expression some desire to be out in nature or go hiking or, I don't know, play sports or dance or write or draw or play music?

26:15Are there areas in your life where you're not saying yes but there's a yes that wants to be said? That yes that you're not saying is as impactful negatively as the no that you're not saying. Is this clear to you guys? Yeah, yeah, it's really clear. There's two questions that spin off from this, Gabo. I'd like to explore. One is quite a pragmatic question of how do we learn to say no better then? First of all, by doing this exercise. If you actually get the impact, if you really think about it, you realize how important it is. Secondly, if you realize that you'd be free, that's worth something.

26:58So basically, it's just by noticing, not by judging yourself, but by noticing where you have trouble saying no, what the impact is and that it's just a story that you're telling yourself. Now, it's true. There might be some people in your life that if you said no to them, they'd reject you. That might be true because you've trained them. You've trained them that you're the guy who doesn't say no. That's what they signed up for. And all of a sudden, you start saying no. Say, oh, this is not what I don't want. But then you have a decision to make. Who you'd rather please, them or yourself. and I can also tell you the people that really cared about you and really loved you, they'd welcome it they'd say it's about time so it's not that you lose anything in the end you'd find out who your friends were but the people that reject you when you say no in order to honour yourself, they were not your friends in the first place were they?

27:55True, yeah which leads to my second question how do we ask these questions is it better to ask ourselves or do we have somebody that can help us and guide us through this inquiry? You can do it both ways, but in the book Myth of Normal, we set it up as a self-conducted exercise. Sit down with these questions once a week. Write them out. Don't just run through them in your head. Take a piece of paper, not even a computer, but handwritten. Where this week did I not say no? What was the impact of me not saying no? It takes 10 minutes once a week. What was the impact? what was the belief if you do this regularly people have told me that that exercise alone has changed their lives if they do it regularly it's not that difficult i noticed that you leaned straight into damien the presenter right asking lots of questions to gabor when he was doing that bit of work with you let me just ask you like how it felt because when when gabor said people would say it's about time you can finally be yourself like even i felt a weight lift from me and i'm not even you.

29:00And the truth is, Gabbo, we've worked together now for five years. Really? We've had a conversation about Damien's overwhelm and saying yes to everything monthly for those five years. So what were you thinking when you were talking? I had my wife's face in the head, that idea of at last. It was her words saying what was coming out of your mouth. Because it's a frequent area of contention. So the freedom in my personal life of where conflicts will often arise is because I've committed to something. Because the fear of saying no. Well, do you know something? It was here in London, I think six years ago now, five or six, I was here for a speaking engagement.

29:47And my wife was here with me. And it was crazy busy. I was overworking. And she said to me, buddy, you've written a book called When the Body Says No. That's one of my books, When the Body Says No. And she says, no, you better write one called When the Wife Says No. Because she wasn't going to put up with it anymore. Yeah, yeah. You know? And partly I had a decision to make. Do I bring my life in alignment with what I teach? Or do I present one nice message on stage and live a totally different life, you know, in my personal existence? and it's an ongoing theme. See, but what I take real heart from that, Gabor, is that if you don't mind me referencing, you're 18 now.

30:31Yeah, yeah. And yet this is still a process that you're asking yourself this question. Yeah. Nobody has it figured, I suppose, is what I take some kind of solace from. When did you start asking yourself these questions? What happened for you to ask yourself these questions? What happened for me? that life wasn't working. In my 40s, I was alienated and depressed, and I was successful, but I wasn't a happy camper. And there were problems in my relationship. I didn't like the way things were going with my kids, so I was challenged personally. And I had to wake up and start dealing with it. It's an ongoing process.

31:13I often say this, that I'm 80 years old, and I'm glad I'm not as young and stupid as I was when I was 79, you know. So there's hope for you guys too. You know what I'm really glad you're sharing this is because a lot of people say the same thing to me when I meet them, which is, you know, this show is called High Performance, right? And they often say to me, you know, everything in my life is great, but I'm still searching for something, which is why I come and listen to your show. And I think that what you've just described there is someone who was outwardly hugely successful or inwardly was still searching.

31:50Well, they're searching for themselves, whether they know that or not. That's what they're searching for. They're searching for their truth. And this society reveres and rewards and valorizes external success. But all three of us know how many highly successful people in that conventional sense are totally miserable inside. I mean totally miserable you can see it see I would say 60 or 70 % of the people that sit across from us on this show are struggling quite heavily with life despite the fact they've been invited onto a show called High Performance and I think so often it's a self-esteem issue what would you like to share with our audience about self-esteem?

32:41there's two kinds of self-esteem you might say there's what we can call contingent self-esteem, which depends on how well you do and what other people think of you. Then there's genuine self-esteem, which says, I'm not worthwhile because I can do this, that, or the other. I'm worthwhile whether or not I can do this, that, or the other. Now, the people that you're talking about are very much caught in that contingent self-esteem. that how they feel about themselves depends on how they perform and how they perceive to perform by other people. But underneath that, there's a hole. And it can never be filled from the outside.

33:23But that's what they keep trying to do. So the more successful they are, the more success they need. I know that feeling. Oh, great, my book is a bestseller this week. What about next week when it isn't? Then who am I? And this society values, valorizes, and touts that contingent self-esteem. And we do it in school to kids. We do it in kindergarten to kids. And we don't understand that intrinsic, non-contingent self-esteem. That has nothing to do with looks, achievement, or external approbation.

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36:11How are we creating an environment of contingent self-esteem with our children? Well, by demanding, by getting the kids the message that they're only acceptable to you if they behave a certain way. Or get success at school. That they have to have success, and if there's success, you're so happy, you know, and otherwise you're not. by not seeing them, by not accepting their vulnerability, but by demanding that they be tough or resilient, by constantly evaluating them. Schools are constantly evaluating kids. I can show you the studies. There's such a thing called evaluation stress. You can do experiments with adults where they're being evaluated and there's stress hormone levels, even when it doesn't matter, even if they know it's only an experiment.

37:01And you measure their stress hormone levels, they're elevated for days. What do we do to kids? When we're constantly marking them, grading them, and demanding that they behave this way and that way, and they perform this and they perform that. Well, we're creating evaluation stress. What should we be doing? How should we be monitoring them at school? Again, if you go back to human evolution, how did kids learn in the first place? Did they sit in classrooms the whole day? Explored. They explored. They were outdoors with adults under the benign supervision of adults. They played, free play. Free play is one of the essential needs of childhood.

37:37Our brains are wired for play. We have play circuits in our brains. Not only we do. Have you ever seen kittens or puppies or elephant cubs or lion cubs? They play. Why do they play? Because play is essential for healthy brain development. and play is far more important for healthy brain development and learning than academic instruction. So we let our kids play, not with machines, but free play out in nature. And then they'd learn by watching us do things. Those kids will then develop a natural curiosity, which will make them want to learn about history or science or art, whatever they're interested in.

38:24So we get it backwards. We put the academic instruction and evaluation ahead of the child's spontaneous development. We both have daughters who are just starting at high school. Yeah. So they're now starting to see the world of social media, the world of celebrity. Yeah. What's that doing to their self-esteem? It depends on how well they're connected to the parents. If their primary connection is with the parents, then they're not going to be dependent on what their peers think of them. I mean, it might matter to them, but they're not going to be dependent on it. But there's a book that I helped to write, which is called Hold On To Your Kids, Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers.

39:08It's been published here in the UK as well and in 40 other languages. It's not my work. It's the work of a psychologist friend of mine called Gordon Neufeld. I did the writing with him because he's not a writer. But it's about the fact that in this society, kids get too hooked into each other way too early and now they get their cues on how to be in how to walk and how to talk and what's important from each other including they get the sense of value from peer evaluation and peer acceptance which means now immature creatures now have enormous influence on each other's development which is not how nature intended it there's so much of what i'm hearing as a subtext here here gaba around the three things that you spoke about that often trigger trauma for us which is the sense of uncertainty conflict and the lack of control yeah would you expand on those for us yeah these don't um trigger trauma deter your stress stress yeah so this is a research literature that says that lack of information uncertainty, conflict, lust of control, trigger the body's stress apparatus, which means that there's more inflammation, there's higher levels of stress hormones, and there are damaging effects on the body.

40:29So I'll give you an example. Unfortunately, in laboratories, they can do terrible things to animals. So I'm not saying this with any sense of approval. I'm just telling you one study that I read. They took pairs of rats that were yoked together and attached to their tail was an electrode, which delivers an electric shock. And both rats got the same degree of shock for the same duration of time. But one of them had a paw free that could turn off a lever that stopped electrical shock. Then they measured their stress hormone levels. Those rats that had the freedom to turn off the liver had lower stress in their bodies than the ones who received the shock, the same shock for the same period of time, but had no control.

41:20So loss of control is a major source of stress. Now in this society, where a lot of the large decisions are made far away by people you don't even know, but they affect your life. you know like Elon Musk decides to fire half the people that worked for Twitter which he did his first day on the job but what do those people feel? some guy who doesn't even know them makes a decision about their lives now that's the system we've got but I'm saying that it's the nature of the system to impose a lot of loss of control on people in Britain right now I've been reading the papers there's this debate about cutting off financial help for heating in the wintertime.

42:07The winter fuel payments. Those people have no control whatsoever. Somebody in Parliament, Starmer is urging his MPs to vote for this cut because we need to save those 20 million or whatever pounds. Now, we're not going to do that by taxing the rich. We're going to do it by taking it from the poorest. How do those people feel, quite apart from the cold they're going to experience, how do they feel about the loss of control in their lives? You know, and that's just one small example. They're going to get triggered. They're not just going to be cold if they can't afford the eating. Even if they can afford it, they're going to be triggered by the, you know, minimally by depriving themselves somewhere else.

42:56Yeah. But the loss of control, we're just pawns in somebody else's game. is tremendous in this society. And this is where our own, I guess, mental strength comes to the fore. And one of your most shared and repeated quotes is, we may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind which creates our world. Yeah. How do we go about doing that? Well, yeah, that's the whole thing. That's the key. And the Buddha said 2 ,500 years ago, basically, I'm paraphrasing him, that it's with our minds and our thoughts that we create the world that we live in.

43:35So if you live in a world where if you say no, you're going to get rejected and you can't handle that, that's very different than if you lived in a world where it's okay for me to say no. You're creating the world with your mind. You're creating your relationships and your life with these mind programs that was developed very early in childhood. So, you're not responsible for that mindset. I'm not responsible for my sense of abandonment. That was my first experience, early experience in life. But I can be responsible for the mind that holds those beliefs. And I can recognize that these beliefs were pro-dem-into me.

44:22They're not serving me anymore. I don't have to hold on to them. So that's what I mean there. It's very simple. It just means, well, no, it's not simple at all. Conceptually, it's simple. But it means that we don't have to be programmed and limited and predetermined by beliefs and mind states that we developed when we were kids and we had no choice in the matter. We don't have to be. So what would you say is the most effective way if somebody recognizes they have an unhelpful belief system? Yeah. What's the most effective way anyone can start to rewire it? Well, that is the first big step, is just to recognize it.

45:04Because until you recognize it, you actually think it's reality. And you think it's the only way reality can function. Once you realize that this is just a mindset, now you can do all kinds of things. But the first thing is to keep recognizing every time that mindset shows up in your life. So in my relationship with my wife, if I find her not as interested in me as I might want her to be, I can either indulge in self-pity and see myself as a victim and being abandoned, or I can notice, oh, I've got the same stuff happening again. That's curious. What's going on? So I can get curious about it. Turns out it's got nothing to do with her rejecting me.

45:51It's just got to do with she's got something else on her mind. you know so just by noticing these habitual reactions we developed the capacity to see ourselves a little bit from the outside and not be dominated by these old mind states that's the beginning of it but to believe that we can change those mind states we need hope right it's more than hope almost anybody that i meet almost anybody if i question them they'll be able to give me some example of where they used to believe something and that belief caused them grief then they saw through that belief and now they don't they don't I mean almost can you guys think of examples in your life of that can you not yeah where you had certain beliefs I also know people who will listen to this and think well I'm so broken I can't be helped yeah and I would say to them, I understand and that belief itself is a belief.

46:51That belief itself is a mindset. And it refers to a time in your life when you were truly helpless, and you were truly alone, and truly vulnerable. Is that really true? Is it true that you can't ask for help? Is it true that there's nobody out there who can possibly understand you? Is that actually true? In other words, I would take that belief itself, that they're hopeless, And by the way, nobody's broken. There's nobody broken. We talked about this conversation began with this idea of wholeness. We're all born whole. And that wholeness is health. That can be re-found in everybody. So nobody's damaged, nobody's broken.

47:34As long as they have consciousness, there's plenty of stuff to work with. That's not my assumption. That's what I know. We've reached the point where we're going to offer you some quick-fire questions. Sure. This first one might be a hard one to answer, quickfire, but having listened to this really interesting chat, what's the first thing that you would like people to do if they're interested in changing their mindset? Where do we begin? Read my damn book. It's a great ad.

48:07What's the first thing I want to do? Start questioning themselves. Don't take it for granted. Don't take your belief for granted. What's the greatest piece of advice you've ever received and why? When I was a family physician, I had this urge to write. And I used to have a patient, a great Canadian poet called Warren Tallman. And Warren would come in and I'd look after his medical needs and they would sit down and talk. And at one point I said to Warren, Warren, I was in my 40s or maybe early 50s. And I was really frustrated. and there was something in me that had a sense that I hadn't fully expressed myself, I haven't reached my potential yet.

48:47And I said to him, Warren, I want to write, but I don't know what. And he said, Gabor, you're right when you have something to teach the world. And that's the best thing anybody ever said to me. Because that's actually what happened. So he actually, the advice was really trust yourself. You've written so many popular books. You've been on the world's biggest podcasts. you've worked with some of the most famous people on the planet. Yeah. What are we still failing to understand about ourselves that is holding so many people back? That we're born whole and that wholeness can be regained. That's been the theme of our conversation today.

49:24But that's the biggest one. Great. What advice would you give to a young Gabor just starting out on that journey from Hungary to Canada? What advice would I give to myself? first of all respect yourself but never take yourself too seriously and you don't have to do it all and look more inside than to the outside because I used to look just to the outside all the time looking at myself was a long and difficult process so I'd say I also say don't take it so seriously you know just lighten up what's your biggest strength? what's your greatest weakness? How can you look at me and ask if I have any weaknesses?

50:07Come on. I thought it was a silly question.

50:12My biggest strength is my capacity to see connections between things in a way that a lot of people can't. That really is a strength, and to be able to communicate that. My biggest weakness, I'm still concerned about who I'll be when I won't be able to do all the things I can do now? Who will I be then when I'm not out there on the podcast and on the book circuit and talking and so on? Then who will I be? So my biggest weakness or biggest concern might be is just still who am I when I'm not all that? I can talk about it, but if I examine myself honestly, it's a concern of mine. And the truth is one that you'll have to find out.

51:00Eventually I'll find out. If you could go back to one moment of your life, what would it be and why? I'm not going to talk about this in detail, but there's certain decisions I made in my personal life that I would not make again, that I would make totally different choices, choices that create a lot of suffering for people that I really love. That's what I'd like to go back to. Without going into detail, obviously, from those, how have you learned to live with them? by doing what repair I could, but also by forgiving myself, by recognizing that that's who I was, that's how I was programmed. I did what I did out of what I believed at that time.

51:43So there's no point in keeping berating myself. The thing is to own it and take responsibility without allowing that to diminish my respect for myself. And the final question that you want to leave ringing in the ears of our audience. You're one golden rule, if you like, to living a high-performance life. Trust yourself. Trust yourself. Really trust yourself. Not your ideas, but your true self. Just trust that it's there. Let it guide you. Because high performance is obviously different for everybody. And for me, it's, have I done the best I can with what I understand and what I know and what my calling is maybe that's too many words follow your calling that's what I would say to people

52:40Damien Jake look I love the way the guy speaks I find myself just sitting and sort of hanging off every word it's hypnotic isn't it with the way that he can speak remember Chris Voss with his late suggesting that when we speak in our late night radio DJ voice. People lean in to hear us and Gabor's mastered that of getting us to lean in and listen and the wisdom he shares is incredible. Like the stuff that sticks with me is the idea of stress is caused when you're facing conflict, uncertainty or a lack of control. But I think what makes his messages even more profound and powerful is I think he's a man that's just sharing so much of himself and so much of his wisdom that I personally feel really privileged to have listened to it.

53:23I did wonder how you felt talking about your inability to say no and whether that extends from what happened to you as a child or your upbringing, because I know that you generally don't really like opening up too much on here, right? Well, you're not that comfy, are you, when you talk about yourself? It's not that I'm not comfy. I see my role on here is a conduit for the guest, not to come and necessarily share so much of myself. So it doesn't come easy to me is probably the best way of saying it. But, yeah, I think the stuff about saying no, is probably, I've got many Achilles heels, but that's a big one because some of it comes from, you know, I'm one of four children growing up in sort of a family where learning just to do what you're told, to get attention, trying to do the right thing because you want to get recognised, and often feeling saying no created more issues in the household.

54:14So just being compliant does it. And I do know it's tied up to a lot of self-worth, self-esteem, you know, worrying that if you say no to somebody, you'll be rejected and rejection can feel really difficult so that's something to explore deeper but I think again being on the receiving end of Gabor doing that you realise just how skilled he is at being able to extract those truths out of us Thank you mate Yeah no I loved it again like I say a real privilege to meet a man that has lived such an incredible life And that's it for today look thank you so much team for joining us for another episode.

54:51We appreciate so much that you continue to give us your time and you enjoy High Performance. I know many of you talk about this show in your own worlds, but please carry on doing that and do feel free to leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts and we're going to be back with another conversation that we've prepared to have as much impact as possible just for you. So please make sure you hit the follow button and we'll see you again soon for another episode of High Performance.

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