BITESIZE | Dr Gabor Maté: 3 Life Lessons People Learn Too Late #688

Today’s guest brings warmth and wisdom to every conversation we have. Today’s Bitesize is from episode 440 of the podcast with fellow physician, author, speaker and friend, the incredible Dr Gabor Maté. Gabor is respected the world over as an expert on trauma, stress, addiction and childhood development. He has worked as a family doctor as well as in palliative (end of life) care. In a previous episode, I had a wonderful conversation with Bronnie Ware, author of The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. And, in this clip, I explore some of those life regrets with Gabor, and he offers some thought-provoking insights into what they can teach us about the way we live our lives. We also talk about regret. Gabor says that living life with ‘no regrets’ is about learning and understanding from your perceived mistakes, but not being unkind to who you were then. Instead we should recognise that we did the best we could do at the time. Like all of my previous episodes with Gabor, this is a conversation full of compassion, knowledge and wisdom. I hope you enjoy listening. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at ⁠drchatterjee.com/440⁠ Feel Better, Live More Bitesize is your weekly dose of inspiration, insights and practical ideas to help you live well and thrive. Each episode brings you some of my favourite moments, useful tools and inspiring ideas from the many incredible conversations I’ve had on my podcast. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's bite-sized episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something, and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals. And for me, one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system.

• 0:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right now, AG1 is offering listeners of my show a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers. All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of inspiration, insights and practical ideas to help you live well and thrive. Each episode brings you some of

• 1:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  my favourite moments, useful tools and inspiring ideas from the many incredible conversations I've had on my podcast. Today's bite-sized is from episode 440 of the podcast with fellow physician, author, speaker and friend, the incredible Dr Gabor Maté. In a previous episode, I had a wonderful conversation with Bronnie Ware, author of The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. In this bite-sized, I explore some of those life regrets with Gabor, and he offers some thought-provoking insights into what they can teach us about the way we live our lives.

• 2:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'd love to know, from your perspective, what each of these regrets says about where we are, who we are, what things were important to us. The second regret that Bronnie wrote about was, "I wish I hadn't worked so hard."

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's an interesting one. If I were to choose to live my life over again, I wouldn't live it in this way. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. And what I wasn't aware of when I went to medical school and when I was a physician for decades is how driven I was to justify my existence in the world and to prove that I was important and worthwhile and so on. And that had to do with the loss of that confidence owing to early childhood trauma. And when you're driven to work too hard, you actually ignore what matters. And what matters is what you were telling me last night about how much it matters for you

• 3:10Speaker 01

  to spend time with your family. So every summer, you take a bunch of weeks away from your podcast and you just spend time enjoying your kids and your wife and your family. And I didn't do that. For me, it was very hard to even take holidays. I always felt I had to keep working. If somebody was pregnant, my God, what if I would miss their delivery? Like the baby couldn't enter the world without me, you know? So that drivenness is what makes people work too hard. And so, nobody says, "I wish I hadn't worked hard." To achieve something in life, you have to work hard. What makes you work too hard, and that's what these people are saying, is you're driven by something that you're not even aware

• 3:53Speaker 01

  of. And that TOO part, the T-O-O part, comes from being driven by unconscious needs to validate your existence. Where why should any human being have to validate their existence? And so, not a matter of working hard, it's a matter of working too hard. And where does that come from? Again, that comes from childhood trauma.

• 4:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. The fifth one is, "I wish I'd let myself be happier."

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does that say?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Well, do you know Winnie the Pooh?

• 4:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Not personally?

• 4:29Speaker 01

  The book. It's always been one of my favourite books. The end of that book would bring tears to my eyes for years. Because how it ends is Christopher Robin, that little boy now has to go to school, and he's telling his friends, the toy animals, that he won't be able to play with them so much anymore. And in the end, Christopher and the oneie, the bear of little brain, who's the smartest of the whole lot, and they walk off together. And the book ends with the statement, something like, "And whatever they do or wherever they go in the enchanted forest, the little boy and his bear will always be playing together."

• 5:13Speaker 01

  And that phrase would bring tears to my eyes for years. Because play is so important and joy is so important. And that's what these people are talking about. And they didn't allow themselves to experience it. They sacrificed the play and the joy for all these other things. And so, the good thing is, you know, I mean, in my marriage, the best thing, and you know what the best thing in my marriage is? The way we play together. The first time I dated my wife, Ray, I knocked on the parents' door and I said, "Can Ray come out and play?"

• 5:52Speaker 01

  And we've been doing it ever since. And so, I believe what's being described in that last regret is people sacrifice their playfulness, their joyfulness, for the sake of being accepted and being successful and all that. It's a huge one. Play is built into our brains. Kids play spontaneously, infants play. And in that sense, we can all be Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin. We can always keep playing in the enchanted forest. And that's just essential, I think.

• 6:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  In that regret, is the word happier.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does happiness mean to you?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Really, it means the capacity to play and to be in the present moment. And you know, the kids, when my kids play, they're just playing in the moment. They're fully present to themselves in imaginative, almost hypnotically imaginative states. So happiness just means being in the present and being allowed to be, no matter what, to have the capacity to play.

• 7:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Fourth regret, "I wish I stayed in touch with my friends."

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, what we're talking there is, and it goes back to the others, about working too hard, you know? For example, what are they discussing there is the need for attachment, for connection, for belonging. And what these people are saying is, "I was too driven by whatever factors impelled me to ignore my personal relationships and to pour my attention on things that ultimately don't matter. My acquisition, my attainment, my achievement, rather than the heart-to-heart human contact with people that matter to

• 7:49Speaker 01

  me." And again, people are driven to be that way. And when they look back on their life, they regret it because nobody, as often be said, nobody ever on their deathbed regrets not going to the office often enough. But they do regret the heart connection that they sacrificed. One of my books, When the Body Says No, that's the title. And in The Myth of Normal, there's a chapter called, "Before the Body Says No." Where in your life are you not saying no? Where does a no that wants to be said, but you're not saying it for

• 8:30Speaker 01

  the sake of pleasing others? Can you just consider that one? Because that simple issue of not saying no can play havoc with your health. Because if you're not saying no, when you're wanting to say no, you're actually suppressing yourself. And then you're taking on more stress and more burden.

• 8:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Gabor, you turned 80 a few months ago. You seem to be someone who has this love of life, this vigour, this message you want to share. You seem to be travelling all over the globe. But a lot of 80-year-olds are not doing that.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? And the longevity space within medicine has really exploded over the last few years. People love talking about longevity, right? And I think we're missing something in our discussions about longevity. Well, I think it's a couple of things.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  What do you think we're missing?

• 9:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think, it depends what you mean by longevity, first of all, right? So, yes, some people want to know, "How can I not necessarily live longer, but be independent, mobile, vital, as long as I live?" So, health span versus lifespan. And I get that. But there's a lot of talk these days about extending lifespan, living to 150 and beyond and all kinds of crazy stuff, right? And I don't want to be the, I don't want to stand in the way of human progress at all. One of my fears is that in pursuit of living longer...

• 10:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Are we missing something about the beauty and the essence of what life really is? Life is finite. The fact that it's finite is what makes it so beautiful.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  If we could live to 200,

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  would we have even more of these regrets? Because we'd keep taking life for granted.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  You know what? You're talking my language because to tell the truth, to coin a phrase, all this stuff about longevity bores me to death, you know? I just don't care, you know? What really matters is what does this moment bring us? Or what can we bring to this moment? You know, let the future take care of itself. You know, like Jesus says, "Take no thought for tomorrow."

• 10:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And I really think that this longevity movement is a sign of deep social anxiety. When especially you get these rich people in California with their cryo technology of freezing the body, hoping that 100 years from now they'll be able to unfrozen and there'll be treatments for that. It bores me, you know? What really matters is for me is what makes life meaningful and active and engaged in the present moment. And it's interesting, in English, we talk about growing older. We could just say, like you said earlier, get older, which is just a chronological progression.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  But growing older implies that the growth is actually possible. So in what sense can we actually grow? And I think actually, we can actually grow into the present moment and growing in our appreciation for life and what matters and knowing what doesn't matter and growing in wisdom. Indigenous cultures, they don't talk about elderly, they talk about elders.

• 12:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  There's a huge difference. So I think there's a natural reverence for age that senior cultures would respect and modern society kind of dismisses, you know? Now, do I wish that my hair was blacker and more curly the way it used to be? Yeah, I do, you know? And it wasn't grey and my hair wasn't thinning at the top. And I'm sure I wish that, but at the same time, I would not want to be as unconscious as I was

• 12:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  when my hair was blacker and curlier, you know?

• 12:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. We've been talking a lot about these regrets, the regrets of the dying.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  And the final question I want to put to you is about the word regret. I have been playing with the idea over the last 12 months or so that regret is actually a form of perfectionism. So I actually now very much subscribe to the philosophy of no regrets, but not in the kind of derogatory way. You don't want to live my life my way, it doesn't matter who comes to my way.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  No, with this really compassionate understanding that I've always done the best that I can.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Based upon where I was in life at that time.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  So even the things that I look back on and go, actually, you know what? If I was in that situation again today, I would act differently. I don't see them as regrets. I see them as situations that happened that have taught me something, which is allowing me to be a better version of myself today.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 13:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  So in my life today, there is no room for regrets anymore. And I guess I would love to know, you know, right at the end here, what's your perspective on the word regret?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  I think chronic regret is debilitating. It's a lack of self forgiveness. It's also kind of egotism of that somehow I'm that important. It's quite something to recognize. I do recognize that some of the way I parented my kids, the way I showed up, I've often talked about this on your program too, wasn't the best for them, but it was the best I could do at the time. So it's not the question of justify anything, but it's also not dwelling on the past. Regret is to dwell on the past. And what's the point? It's quite something to recognize that I did things that

• 14:49Speaker 01

  had I known differently, I would not have done the same way. That's just learning. Regret is an emotional state of that values the past more than the present. And it accuses yourself of doing things for which you had no consciousness to do otherwise. So that's where I stand with the regret.

• 15:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Gabor, you know what a big fan I am of your work? For someone who has heard us speak today, and something connected with them, something you said, spoke to them and they thought, wow, yeah, I don't express my emotions. I'm not living a life that is true to me.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  What are some of your final words for them?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Well, it's the word that you used, curiosity. So not, why am I living this way? But hmm, why am I living this way? You know, what happened to me? What am I carrying here? So the key phrase is the necessity to be curious.

• 16:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  In a compassionate way. So you don't do an interrogation of yourself like you're prosecuting detective of why did you or why did you not? But compassionately, why did you not?

• 16:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Why did you? And if you ask these questions compassionately and with curiosity, the answers will emerge, as will the capacity for you to make different choices as you move forward. So where there wasn't choice before because you were compelled or driven, now you can have some freedom if you're willing to be curious. So curiosity is the word.

• 16:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Gabor, you're now 80 years old.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Does it in some way change the way you see yourself? Or I guess reflect differently on who you are and where you are in your life?

• 16:58Speaker 01

  One always knows that the time is limited. Intellectually, we understand is that nobody lives forever. And we never know when the reaper is going to come knocking on your door. But at the same time, once you get to be 80, you realize that whenever it's going to happen, it's going to happen within a fairly short period of time. And when I think of when I retired from active medical practice, it was 13 years ago now. Well, will I still be alive 13 years from now? And it seems like this is a short period of time. So when you think about it, it's quite dramatic. But on the other hand, from the moment to moment and day to day, it just doesn't make any difference.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  On most days I can say this, and not on every day for sure, but it's a kind of ease has entered my life. I'm just sort of more, I don't struggle with the way things are so much. I mean, like them or not like them, I may react or not respond or, but there's not a struggle against just the beingness of things. I'm certainly noticing that. And people, I had a visitor a week ago who I hadn't seen for a few years. And she says, you've changed. And I said, oh, yeah. She says, you've become softer, you know? And if that's true, it's good.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  It's a sign of kind of loosening inside.

• 18:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  I really hope you enjoyed this week's Bite Size. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why don't you go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest? I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe. And I'll be back next week with my new conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Size next Friday. I am really excited to share that I am bringing my Thrive Tour, Transform Your Health and Happiness, to Canada and Europe this September and November.

• 19:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's a live, interactive, uplifting show that over 20,000 people came to last year across the UK and Australia. I'll be sharing powerful stories, life-changing insights, and simple tools that will inspire you to feel better, think clearer, and live with more intention and joy. To get your tickets right now and see all of the dates and venues, go to drchatterjee.com/live. I really hope that you can join me.