The Truth About Stress, Belly Fat, Alcohol and Journalling & How To Tune Into Your Body & Mind with Neuroscientist Tara Swart (re-release) #516

For today’s episode, I’m pleased to welcome back the wonderful Dr Tara Swart. Tara is a neuroscientist, a former medical doctor & psychiatrist, a lecturer at MIT, an executive coach and author of the bestselling book, The Source. She also hosts the podcast Reinvent Yourself with Dr Tara. If you’ve listened to my previous episodes with Tara, you’ll remember her unique talent for using neuroscience and behavioural psychology to probe ideas, theories, and practices that many believe work, but we’re not sure why. This insightful and often unusual episode takes a deep and meaningful look at stress - what exactly it is, what impact it has on health and how it predisposes us to storing fat. We also discuss the most effective ways to manage stress, the best ways to build resilience and the benefits of practices like journalling. We really do cover a whole variety of different topics today including metacognition, the definition of spirituality, what exactly intuition and interoception are, and how we can use them to get to know our minds and bodies more intimately. We talk about rituals, the incredible power of creativity, beauty, and time spent in nature. And finally, we ask some big questions around the topic of death and consciousness, which Tara is increasingly drawn to studying. If you’re someone who’s interested in alternative thinking and new ideas, but likes the reassurance of scientific backing, Tara’s warmth and wisdom will tick all your boxes. If you’re a sceptic - well, this conversation might just open your mind. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. This January, try FREE for 30 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/516 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. 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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  What characteristic do you most dislike in other people? Because the chances are that the opposite of that is your most strongly held value.

• 0:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better Live More.

• 0:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  This podcast is getting so many new listeners at the moment because of the global release of my brand new book, the number one Sunday Times bestseller, Make Change That Lasts: Nine Simple Ways to Break Free From The Habits That Hold You Back. And so for the next few Sundays, I will be re-releasing some classic evergreen conversations from this podcast's back catalogue to give new listeners a real flavour of what my podcast is all about. And today's re-release is a quite wonderful conversation with the neuroscientist and former psychiatrist, Dr Tara Swart.

• 1:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  In today's conversation, we talk about so many different topics, including the relationship between stress and the fat we store on our bodies, the best ways to build resilience, the power of rituals and practices like journaling, the importance of creativity and spending time in nature, and we also explore some big questions about spirituality and death. If you're someone who's interested in alternative thinking and new ideas, but likes the reassurance of scientific backing, Tara's warmth and wisdom, I'm sure, will tick all off your boxes. And if you're a skeptic, well, this conversation might just open your mind.

• 1:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Tara, you have been a medical doctor, psychiatrist, executive coach, you're a neuroscientist. And I think one of the topics that people are talking a lot about these days is stress. So, right at the top, I'd love to understand, when you hear the word "stress", what does it mean to you?

• 2:26Speaker 00

  So, when you introduced me like that, like, you know, you're a doctor psychiatrist, it made me feel a bit like, "Oh, I'm just like a jack of all trades", but as soon as you said the word "stress", each of those roles made sense to me. So, I define stress as when the load on your body or mind is too much for you to bear. So, as a medical doctor, as a junior doctor, if I saw somebody in A and E that was having a heart attack, that is that stress on their cardiovascular system. As a psychiatrist, if I saw people who had a breakdown of their psychosis or their depression, that's stress on their mental state.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  And then, I changed career to really interesting time because, having been a psychiatrist and starting, you know, from the bottom of the ladder into executive coaching, the fact that it was the time of the financial crisis when people were under a lot of stress, there were high-profile suicides in Canary Wharf in London, there were a lot more people having heart attacks caused by stress, that was actually something that I could address. So, it sort of made sense that a psychiatrist and medical doctor would come into the executive coaching space and financial services at that time. And then, as a neuroscientist, I would say that's where the stress piece really lands for me.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Because- Your brain's perception of what is going on is going to have this cascade effect on the rest of your body. So if you perceive, basically your brain perceives that, you know, there's a threat to your survival, then it's going to signal for your cortisol levels to rise. So your adrenal glands will release more cortisol. That goes around in the blood, it crosses the blood brain barrier, and the receptors in the brain can see that you're on high alert all the time. And so that process is pro-inflammatory. So that has all sorts of knock-on effects on your cardiovascular system, your immunity, your gastrointestinal system. And it's very dehydrating. So, you know, that can show up on your skin

• 4:35Speaker 00

  and your hairs, your scalp. And, and the other thing is that as a very ancient survival mechanism, that encourages storage of fat in the abdominal fat cells. So basically, you would kind of have very dry skin, frizzy hair, a bigger belly that you can't shift, sleep disturbance, probably some kind of digestive problems. And it's all, you know, what's behind all of that is stress.

• 5:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. It's incredible, like when you really understand the physiology of the stress response and how it affects every single organ system. Then you understand why many doctors, including myself, say that 80 to 90% of what we see in any given day is in some way related to stress, right?

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 5:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Stress has such a massive impact on physical health, mental health, emotional health. You mentioned stress and belly fat there. And I think if we just, if we just stay on stress and physical health for a moment.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Clearly, many people around the world are trying to lose excess fat on their bodies for a variety of reasons, sometimes vanity, sometimes health, whatever it might be, right? And there is this obsession around diet. And of course, diet is important. But I think we underestimate how much stress is behind our weight, the amount of fat that we're storing, you know, and so many other things. Would you agree with that?

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally, because again, referring particularly back to the time of the financial crisis, this was happening a lot more then. People would report to me that they had gained weight, that as a result of that, they had started to eat a bit differently, whether it's a bit less or a bit more healthily, and they started doing some more exercise, but they still couldn't shift the weight. And as soon as I heard that, I knew that it was promoted by cortisol. So even if you eat less, or you move more, or both, if you've got these high levels of cortisol, it's still driving that, you know, depositing the fat into your belly. So it's kind of, you know, we have subcutaneous fat and then we have visceral fat. So you're not getting fat all over, but it's mostly the belt that people would say, you

• 6:58Speaker 00

  know, I've had to like undo it a notch and I just can't shift it. And that's definitely driven by the stress hormone.

• 7:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  I once heard you say in an interview that you have seen quite a lot of people have stress-induced heart attacks as well.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. I was teaching a class at MIT where I was talking about exactly what we've just mentioned, and a really young woman stood up and said, when I was in a really busy, stressful job, I had a heart attack. And it was interesting because in your mind, when you're talking about the kind of people that have heart attacks from stress, you are imagining like an older guy, maybe someone a bit overweight. So to see this, you know, just woman that looked so young and slim and healthy, to hear her say that actually had a really, you know, kind of big impact on me. But it was when I was working with a really big global bank in several different capacities. So I had seen their employee engagement survey.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  And then they came and told me that they were seeing a lot of either deaths from or or heart attacks that didn't cause death on the trading floor. And they wanted, because I was a former doctor, wanted me to help them, you know, deal with that. And I said, but I've seen your employee engagement survey, so I know people are really stressed. So I know those two things are connected. So we actually need to deal with that. They couldn't understand that. I mean, it was like 15 years ago now. So the whole idea of the brain body connection has evolved quite a lot since then. But what was so obvious to me as a doctor was really not obvious to them. To the point that they wanted to help these employees, but they could not understand that you had to deal with the stress, you couldn't just deal with the heart attacks.

• 8:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. It's interesting that that client who you saw with a stress induced heart attack was a woman. It reminds me of a patient that I had 10, maybe even 15 years ago.

• 9:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  She was in her 30s. She was slim and she developed pre-diabetes from stress alone. And the reason I know that is because A, I knew that she looked after herself with her diet and her exercise, but her job was mega, mega stressful. And when we helped her address that, when she realized that she needs to address that, within a few months, without changing her diet and her exercise, her blood sugar came back into the normal range.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Really?

• 9:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it's kind of stresses.

• 9:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Impacts on our physical health, I think is profound. And I don't think the public know enough about it. And frankly, I don't think our profession knows enough about it.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  No. It's because it's kind of behind whatever inflammatory, you know, marker you're seeing. It's almost like it's hidden. So, you know, even if we.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Understand that a certain disease is kind of like underpinned by inflammation. We're still not necessarily taking that step back and saying, what are the stress factors in your life? We're much more likely as a profession of doctors to say, keep a food diary, you know, how much exercise do you do? How do you sleep? And keep focusing on those physical things. And I think, I think that's a problem. But I also think it's, do you remember when we did the episode during the pandemic, early on in the pandemic? And I said to you, this is either going to be a mental health crisis or a spiritual revolution. I think we've still got our options open. So I feel like some of the things that we learnt during the pandemic, whether it was just the benefits of being

• 10:51Speaker 00

  in nature more, or whether it was understanding mental health better, I think is opening the door to the medical profession and, you know, and educating the population about stress and how big an impact it has on all of those other things.

• 11:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I do remember you saying that. There's a lot to unpick there. Spiritual revolution, nature. I definitely want to get into all of that. Because we focus on women a little bit, we've said, you know, your client, my patient, and what happens on the back of stress. I'd love to know, in your experience, do women and men handle stress differently?

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Obviously, these are generalisations.

• 11:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  But I would say, you know, what I hear when I'm, you know, in a taxi, talking to the taxi driver, or just, you know, me with my girlfriends, or whatever, is, is still this idea that men don't talk to each other about things like stress and mental health as much as women do. But on the other side of the coin, I think that because of this myth that women are better at multitasking than men, women put a lot of pressure on themselves to do everything, be everything, you know, be the mum, the wife, still have a career, you know, do your fitness. Often with the kind of type A personalities that I work with,

• 12:25Speaker 00

  they've got a super stressful job, like they're a law firm partner, and they go and do really high intensity exercise. And I'm always telling them that is spiking your cortisol. So actually, you are exactly the kind of person that should be doing more gentle exercise because of your, like, you know, your personality type and the stress of the job that you've got. And I think that women under stress can either, you know, skip meals, or because of the pressure of being a certain weight, they can be dieting in a way that's not actually healthy and helpful. So I think that contributes to, you know, stress on the system. Because if you're not properly fuelled, then it's really hard to do all the things that you need to do. So

• 13:08Speaker 00

  I think there are different issues for, you know, the two genders that we're talking about. And there is some research that shows that men are very good at adaptive stress responses. So if there's a crisis, they can deal with that and for, you know, a short period of time. But they need then to like, just, you know, go away and hide in the cave and recover. Whereas women find ways to recoup their resilience better during long periods of stress.

• 13:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Wow, that's interesting. You mentioned men, and it's a bit of a cliche, but it also is true from what I've seen, both as a doctor, but also in my personal life, or what I have experienced and what I've seen in my friends. You said that men.

• 13:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Traditionally haven't opened up as much as women. Why is that important, especially if we think about it through the lens of the brain?

• 14:06Speaker 00

  Because there's two main ways to offload stress from your system. One is physical exercise, which sweats out the cortisol from your body. And the other one is speaking out loud or possibly journaling as well. But I think speaking, you know, speaking with someone, because then you've got that sort of social connection piece. But instead of ruminating on your thoughts, if you actually get them out of your brain body system, that reduces your cortisol levels too. And I think, you know, I imagine that you confide in your wife. I think a lot of men confide in their wife, but I think that confiding in other men is still not happening as much as it could.

• 14:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Look, the truth is, Tara, this is something I've realised is an issue in my own life over the last few years, because my best mates are still the mates I made at university.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  And they live hundreds of miles away from me. And so, literally, four weekends ago, we got together, we went to Wales for a weekend.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it was a very different weekend from how we might have done it in our twenties. So we went walking in the hills.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it was amazing. It was just three of us, actually. But I think we really opened up and shared things with each other that I don't think we, we have done in ages. And I think we all felt lighter when we left and, you know, drove home and returned home to our families.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  So that would have been, you know, the being, being in nature, don't underestimate the power of being in nature. I know we're going to come to that later, but yeah, you know, being with people that you trust, that you've got such a long history with, that you can share things with, that maybe you find that some of the issues that you're facing in life, you're not alone in them, you know, there's just so much benefit from that.

• 15:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  What's the impact of stress on our ability to make decisions?

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so basically, when those receptors in the brain sense these high levels of cortisol, another thing that they do is they reroute the blood supply. Because they're perceiving an imminent threat to our survival, they don't want to give up resources for things that are not crucial to our survival. So basically, thinking flexibly, regulating your emotions, suppressing your biases, solving complex problems, being creative, being imaginative. You don't need to do any of that to survive. So I call it going into low power mode. You know, the blood supply is really just going to the parts of the brain that need you to wake up in the morning, do the minimum amount of self-care, make sure you don't lose your job.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  But in terms of, you know, that complex decision-making, where normally the prefrontal cortex is regulating the emotions that are coming from the amygdala, that regulation becomes less good. So in the stress state, we're likely to experience emotions like fear or anger or shame. And that has a very negative effect on our decision-making power.

• 17:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  You mentioned two terms there, the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. What are they?

• 17:19Speaker 00

  So the amygdala, amygdali are two almond-shaped structures that are in the limbic system, which is the, so it's the sort of size and shape of your clenched fist, it's deep inside your brain. And then the cortex is the part of the brain that's around that. And in that system, there are these two almond-shaped structures, which is where all of our basic emotions start from. But the limbic system and the cortex, they're talking to each other all the time. And the prefrontal cortex is just the part of the outer cortex that's here at the front. When we experience an emotion, the prefrontal cortex can kind of regulate that so it's not too extreme.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  But when we have high levels of cortisol, then we're experiencing more of these what we call survival emotions and the prefrontal cortex is getting less of the blood supply with the oxygen and the glucose in it, so it's less able to regulate those emotions.

• 18:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's become very clear to me over the past few years that if who we are in the world is essentially related to the tuning of our nervous system, then it kind of means that if you are chronically busy, overworked and overstressed, you are literally becoming a different person. And then, if you follow that logic, it begs the question, like, who are we? Like, do we even know who we are if we are that stressed all the time? From my perspective, if I think about who I am today compared to, let's say, 12 years ago,

• 18:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  when my dad was alive and I was in the thick of caring for dads, whilst, you know, I was married, had a family, a job as a busy GP, and I was also helping my family care for my father.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  I cannot believe what I used to do. Now that my life compared to back then is so much calmer and more under my control than it was back then, I think I was a different person. I think the same elements of Rangan were still there, but actually, the way I saw the world, how I might take on a more victim mentality to the world, as opposed to I'm in the driver's seat of the world, I think was very, very different. And a huge part of that, I think, was due to the state of my nervous system.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I love the way you've put that, that, you know, if you're stressed all the time, you're literally becoming another person. I mean, I've never heard it put like that before. Obviously, I speak a lot about neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the brain to grow and change throughout life, but that sort of...

• 20:06Speaker 00

  You know, that's like a longer term learning, but what you're talking about is the day to day stresses and aggressions that can grind us down and stop us from becoming the best version of ourselves. So I would say, yeah, I think over life, we evolve as people, but also at every stage, there is the choice to be the best version of yourself or be a stressed version of yourself. And, you know, there'll be shades of grey in that, it'll be a spectrum. So absolutely the point that you made, which is that if you're chronically stressed all the time, then you're going to be at the lower end of that spectrum. But also just day to day, I mean, I was sharing an example with

• 20:46Speaker 00

  a really close friend the other day that I noticed that on days that I'm feeling stressed, I look in the mirror and I think I look terrible. And the next day, just because I'm in a good mood, I'm like, oh, I'm looking really good today. But I can't have looked that different from yesterday to today. But, you know, the thought that goes through your mind is like, oh, you look terrible. But that's starting, starting with stress, then it's like, you know, the negative self-image. And then that's just going to spiral, isn't it? Because if I look in the mirror and say, I look terrible, then my day's not really going to get better. And it did, it was just what, it doesn't always happen one day to the next, but it was interesting because it did. And because I tried to do to practise

• 21:30Speaker 00

  metacognition as much as possible, which is thinking about your thinking. So even when that thought went through my head, I was able to step back from that and say, okay, wow, you must be stressed today because that is like, you wouldn't say that to your best friend, you know. And it did actually kind of, I got the insight into it because the next day I was like, oh, I'm looking really good.

• 21:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  But we'll come back to metacognition.

• 21:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Another way of looking at that is through the lens of sleep, right? Because sleep deprivation is a huge stressor on the body. And if I just take me today compared to yesterday, on Wednesday night, I actually had a really bad night's sleep for a variety of reasons.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, you said to me yesterday you were tired.

• 22:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, we had a long chat on the phone yesterday and I, my brain just wasn't working. Like, I felt that it was just a bit mushy yesterday. And, you know, things looked bleak and my workload was getting on top of me. And I thought, wow, how am I going to get all this done? And all this kind of stuff. I slept really well last night and I'm like a different person today.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  I feel on top of the world, I have a workload, no problem. At least I get that done.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, the world's great. I mean, it's pouring down with rain, it's dark.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  I know.

• 22:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I'm like buzzing today because of my sleep. So we can be a different person, literally, I think we can be a different person, depending on whether we slept well or not.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  We can be a different person depending on the levels of stress that we're carrying.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think getting as much insight about yourself out of that is really important because I'm at the stage now where if I'm on that day where the workload is just, just seems so overwhelming, I actually now say, okay, there's going to be a day soon where you've had a great night's sleep or you're just in a better mood and you're going to just get that to-do list done in like minutes. What seems like a mountain now, it's not going to feel like that every day. So that's fine, don't do it today, just wait till you have a good day. Because I've got so much evidence of this now, you know, of times where I was thinking, oh, I've got so much to do and like it's creeping close to the deadline and haven't done anything and I keep putting it off.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  And then finally I do it and it's like, oh, that's not as bad as I thought it was. But it's much more related to what you're saying, which is that, yeah, the state of your nervous system.

• 23:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does this meta-cognition term mean? You sort of gave us a brief explanation, you know, thinking about the thoughts. I know you're a huge fan of journaling. We've covered that in the past, but I'd love to talk about it again because I think it is such a powerful tool for people

• 24:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  to improve their physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is journaling a type of metacognition?

• 24:32Speaker 00

  It is if you read back over your journal entries. So just the act of writing into it may not be enough because you're writing in that moment where you believe what you've written is absolutely true. Or it is just a representation of what you're feeling in that moment. When you read over it, that's when you can practise metacognition, which is to question what you've said. It's very difficult to question it in the moment that you've just written it because you wouldn't have written something that you didn't think was the case.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  So I think that a few things here. If there are people who say, for whatever reason, I have nobody that I would confide my, you know, deepest mental, emotional issues to, then journaling is a good way to get that out of your brain body system. So I just, you know, I mentioned earlier about speaking out loud, preferably with someone, but journaling is a good second option.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  So in terms of just, you know, gaining self-awareness and practising metacognition, reading back the last three months or six months or something, seeing if there are patterns, seeing if what you wrote then still feels true now, that's a good practice. And you mentioned that journaling is good for physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. But I think it's really great for spiritual evolution as well because even if you just do 10 things I'm grateful for, you're practising gratitude through your journaling. So you're kind of, you know, actually doing a spiritual practice as well and and you could do more than that. You could. You know, whether it's, whether you made a decision with your intuition or your logic, or whether it's, you know, recording that you've been practicing some chanting

• 26:20Speaker 00

  or some drumming, or what, you know, what your experiences are mentally and physically of spending time in nature, if you record all that, then you're kind of evolving spiritually as well.

• 26:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does spirituality mean to you?

• 26:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's 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 suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling, and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals. And 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. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous

• 27:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering 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.

• 28:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's 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 suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals. And 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. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement

• 28:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering 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.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  So when I do my quadrant exercise with people, which is physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, the way I describe it is physical is what you feel in your body, mental is what's going on in your thoughts, emotional is how you're feeling in your emotions and spiritual is something that's not described by those other three. And is just a sense of how you are in your spirit or your soul.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  And if you're not comfortable with words like soul or God, then it can be, you know, how you feel your values are being upheld. Because having your values crossed in any way is kind of like, it's a boundary transgression and that hurts like deeply. You know, it's not just emotional, mental or physical. It's something more than that. It's your integrity. So, and I say that, you know, I mean, spirituality means a lot more than that to me personally, but in terms of the way that I've posed it in the source was to take away any, you know, any conflict that someone might have about their own religion or faith or lack of, and just think, you know, there is something more than

• 31:05Speaker 00

  what you feel physically and what goes on in your thoughts and what goes on in your emotions.

• 31:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  We've been talking about stress

• 31:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  and the impact that chronic, unrelenting stress can have on us, right?

• 31:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you just mentioned about spirituality and how if our values are being crossed, that's a boundary transgression.

• 31:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  One thing I've been thinking about recently is the causes of burnouts. And obviously it's, you know, we can say, yeah, it's too much work. There's not enough time to rest and recover. And of course, those things are important. But more and more, I'm led to the belief that

• 31:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  a huge cause of burnout for people

• 31:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  is not living a life in accordance with their values.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 32:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I think that was so interesting to me, this boundary transgression. I think we can link that to chronic stress. And yes, I recognize that some people don't have much choice or autonomy in their work, let's say.

• 32:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  I recognize that. But I think for many people, it ain't just the workload.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  No.

• 32:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's also what they're doing on a daily basis.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think it's two things. One is that.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  So you could take two people, let's say you and I, and we could have the same job like we've actually had in the NHS as junior doctors. And one of us could burn out and the other one doesn't. Why is that? So partly, there are things that you can do to build your mental resilience, to build your resilience to stress. So if you have those tools and practices, if you've been doing them for years, or you incorporate them now, that can help you to withstand stress. But the other thing is that there's clearly different thresholds for different people of what causes them to actually burn out. So let's say someone

• 33:12Speaker 00

  gets divorced. Someone might find it a difficult experience, but get through it, move on, and somebody else might completely break down. So basically, two things. One is that we each have our own starting point or threshold. And two, we can do things to build that up.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  And I really found that, actually, in the pandemic, around the time that we last spoke on the podcast, is that because I had been practicing yoga and meditation and walking in nature and bathing with salts and just all the thing, journaling, because I'd been doing those things for so long, I could really immediately draw on the help that I can get from those things. But a message that I kept putting out there is that even if you've never done these things before, if you start now, it will help you.

• 34:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  If someone says to you, Tara, like, I hear all this stuff that you're saying about values, I know how important they are, but how do I find my own? What do you say to them?

• 34:26Speaker 00

  The first thing I say is what characteristic do you most dislike in other people? Because the chances are that the opposite of that is your most strongly held value.

• 34:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love that question. See, it's interesting. When I hear that question, I think that, but I also think something else, right? I think that many of us dislike qualities in other people that we have within us as well. And the reason we dislike it so much is because we don't like it in ourselves, but it's easy to not look inward and change something in ourselves. It's much easier to make a judgment of someone else.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  What do you think to that?

• 35:09Speaker 00

  I mean, there's obviously truth to that because psychologically that would be described as, you know, something that's in your shadow, the shadow of your personality. So what tends to go in there are the things that you worked out as a child that if you did those things, you would get rebuffed by your primary caregivers. So you would hide those things away into your shadow. You know, things like, oh, don't show off or stop being so bossy or, you know, share with your brother, you know, stop being so mean.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  So those things, yeah, that can absolutely happen. But I think you have to separate that. And because, okay, let's say generosity is my top value. So if I thought that that's because I actually feel like I'm not very generous, I think I would know. But, you know, and I'm not, I'm not just talking about money. I think, you know, generosity of spirit, generous with your time. When I see people who could do something for somebody else, but they don't do it, that, you know, I really notice that. And I don't think that I'm guilty of that one, let's say.

• 36:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  So let's say, let's say you, right? You've, you've, you've shared that generosity is one of your, your top values. How does the knowledge of knowing that help you in your day to day life?

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Well, for instance, it makes me,

• 36:41Speaker 00

  you know, sort of preempt things like if I was going to go out for a coffee with you after this podcast, I would want to pay. Or, you know, even something that you said today, which is that, you know, hey, if you want to, you know, stay for a couple of hours after we finish the podcast, I can drop you to the station unless that's too late for you, you know. And, and I thought, well, I will get home a bit later than I had planned. But actually, how often do I get to see you? I haven't seen you for years.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  It's quite a long journey, so I'm not easily necessarily going to see you again like as soon as I would like to. So, you know, sharing my time with you, I think is, you know, I see that as a gift.

• 37:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is it something you constantly are assessing? For example, in your journaling practice, I think your daily journaling practice, unless something's changed over the last few years.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  Oh, it's not every single day.

• 37:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so your, so your regular journaling practice, do you ask yourself, or do you know, does generosity come up somewhere? You know, am I living in alignment with this value? Or is it not quite as, I don't know, is it, is it as specific as that?

• 37:49Speaker 00

  No, I think that one, because I've identified that one a long time ago. And I, you know, I do feel like it is a strong characteristic for me. So what's more likely to happen is if I, if I feel like somebody's not being generous towards me, whether it's with their time, listening, or, you know, somebody owes you money or whatever it is, you know, like I, I feel like that would make me question,

• 38:15Speaker 00

  is this person a true friend? Is this person somebody that I want around me? And, you know, I remember when, you know, I was in my twenties, I had a friend who literally gave me her last five pound note, you know, we had no money. And she was, oh, I've got a fiver left, but you can have it, you know. And so it's, but to me, I will never forget that that is a really generous person. And then there are people with lots of money that wouldn't do that. So it's about your attitude.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  It's not even about being equal because I think you pay things forward, you get a lot of help from one friend here and you give in a different way to somebody else. But it's just, if that value is so important to me, then it's more about making sure that I feel that in my social circle.

• 39:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  What are some of the other values that are important to you?

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Trust is a really important one, mostly because what I usually say to my team is, I mean, we do sign contracts, obviously, but mostly I say, I operate on trust. I make my decisions on trust. Somebody could break that, but I choose to live my life based on trust.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  So obviously then, if I feel like there's somebody in my life that isn't trustworthy, that would be a serious boundary transgression for me.

• 39:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love what you just said and I love it because

• 39:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  you're making a very intentional choice about how you want to live your life.

• 39:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  You are essentially controlling what you can control, right? You're basically saying, I'm going to go into things based on trust. Now, if someone chooses to break that trust, you can't do anything about that. That's out of your control. Whereas taking this back to stress states, right? Because trust,

• 40:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  you can't really operate from trust if you're stressed.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  No.

• 40:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? Because the fear response, I'm in danger. You don't want to trust people if you feel in danger, right? So trust is that you have to have a calm, regulated nervous system to operate from trust, first of all. But what I really love the most about what you said is that, look, yeah, people may cheat on you, people may break that trust, people may do those things. But if you choose to live because you're scared of that happening, well, you change who you are and you can't even control it anyway.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  No. And let's just use that example because you used it. If somebody cheats on their partner.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  At the end of the day, the problem is theirs. You know, they've let themselves down as a person. They've, you know, had the impact that it's had on the relationship. I can walk away from that and say, I'm not a cheat. Thank, you know, thank goodness, I should feel really good about myself.

• 41:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  But the problem often is then, if we take a relationship as an example, that experience of, let's say, someone in a, in a relationship, one party has cheated, for whatever reason, okay? The party who hasn't, yes, as you said, they can walk away. They know that they didn't cheat and maybe, you know, integrity, trust, these are, these are core values to them. So they know they didn't break that. But unfortunately, because of how our brain is wired, often what happens is that that then impacts how we show up in the future.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because we were cheated on once, it's less likely we want to trust in the future.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. So I want to go back and pick up on something that you said about, that you, you know, you, you can't operate based on trust when you're in, when you're under a lot of stress. So they're actually opposite states. So the survival emotions, fear, anger, disgust, shame and sadness, which correlate with the hormone cortisol. At the other end of the spectrum, we have joy, excitement, love and trust. And they correlate with the hormone oxytocin. So you can't be in those two states at the same time because one of those hormones is higher than the other. So you literally cannot like trust yourself, trust anyone else, trust your decision making when you're in this stressed state.

• 42:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you say you trust your gut a lot, I think, when you make decisions. Right, so.

• 43:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  If we're going to follow everything we've just said throughout the course of this conversation so far, right, in order to trust your guts, you can't be stressed, rushing around, overly busy.

• 43:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  How do you then, because so many people really struggle with this. The reason I'm spending a long time on this chronic stress is because I've seen firsthand how many people this impacts, right? Physical health, mental health, emotional health, the whole shebang when we're chronically stressed. And I genuinely believe that a lot of us don't even realise how stressed we are.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 43:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  We've just got used to that as our normal state. So our decision making comes from that place of stress, which is why I think we find it hard to operate from love and trust and joy and compassion. Because of that, what can people do? How do you do it? How do you know when you're making a decision if it is really coming from trust or it's coming from fear?

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, I can tell the difference. I can feel physically when I'm making a decision, like what state I'm in.

• 44:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  In your head or in your body?

• 44:18Speaker 00

  In my body.

• 44:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  So what happens?

• 44:22Speaker 00

  So maybe both, but like, if I'm, because, you know, even I go between those, I'm not constantly like walking around in a love bubble. You know, if I'm smiling, if I'm feeling calm, if I'm like, you know, moving relatively more slowly, then, you know, I can tell that I'm in parasympathetic, which is basically like rest and digest or rest and relax. When I'm feeling agitated, you know, my facial expression is not, you know, it's kind of like down.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  When my thoughts are racing more, then I know that I'm probably not going to be making the best decisions that I can. And often, it comes with that feeling of I can't decide, I can't, you know, like, something that, a decision that you need to make, you just feel like you can't make it. It just feels very cloudy. Whereas when you're in the trust and love state, things feel very clear. What I tend to do, what I've learned to do at that time, is think of three people, you know, family or friends that I trust, who would have a relevant opinion to the decision that I'm trying to make. So, you know, it's

• 45:45Speaker 00

  three, it could be three different people each time. And I ask each of them what their opinion is. And then I will use that to try to inform my opinion. But also, I'll try to wait till I'm, you know, in a better state before I make a final decision.

• 46:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  When you are asking your family or friends, are you literally calling them and asking them?

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  And the reason I ask that is because I had Shane Parrish on the show a couple of months ago, who's just written this book called Clear Thinking. And in that book, Shane talks about having a board of directors that we can always refer to. But those board of directors could be dead. There could be fictional characters from the past. So, he, you know, he wouldn't be against what you just said, but he would be, you know, I guess he would make the case that, let's say, for example, someone doesn't have access to friends or family, and they feel really, really isolated. Maybe this board of directors side is super helpful for that person. You've got friends, you've got family, you couldn't call and ask for help. But it's almost like imagining, well, you know, let's say someone

• 46:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  had you on their board of directors. Well, what would, what would Dr. Tara do here? What would she say in this situation? You know, what would, I don't know, what would my grandma who died 10 years ago, what would she say about that? I guess, in both examples, what's going on? In some ways, we're getting out of our own heads, and our bodies and minds, and we're getting a bit of distance?

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's basically coming back to that idea of metacognition, which is that when you're embroiled in your own thoughts and feelings, it can be very difficult to be... Rational and have perspective. But if your brother came to you with the same issue that you're experiencing, you would be able to give him some advice. So by having either the actual friends or the fictional board of directors, you're stepping like one step aside from yourself. Another thing that I say to people is what would your sister or best friend say to you? Or, you know, what would your wife say to you? And another exercise I do on my own is I, you know, I sort of acknowledge that I am here

• 48:00Speaker 00

  in the present today, the age that I am. And I pose a question to myself seven years in the future. And then actually walk seven steps forward and turn around. And as if I'm looking at Tara today and I identify myself as Tara plus seven years. And then I answer the question. And that is accessing your intuition. And sometimes it's incredible that you literally feel like a different person. Like you're looking at that Tara and just thinking, if only you knew what I know now.

• 48:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does intuition mean to you?

• 48:41Speaker 00

  So basically, it means wisdom from all the life lessons that we picked up, you know, throughout our life, but don't necessarily consciously remember. So, you know, let's start with just that basic fact, which is we cannot remember everything that we've experienced in our whole life. But we will have, you know, we didn't quite finish off with that cheating example. So let's use that as an example. We may have been in a relationship that we thought was going to last forever. And then the person cheated. And, you know, you took us up to the point where that leaves the person that's been cheated on less willing to trust people in future.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  And if that happens three or four or five times, then yes, that is your, that's your pattern. But if you say, maybe it's because I'm choosing the wrong kind of person for me. Maybe it's because I'm choosing someone that doesn't have the same values as me. Then you can use your judgment to make a different decision the next time round, or to make it very clear that that is a deal breaker for you. You know, sometimes these things aren't actually said out loud beforehand. So intuition would be, in that example, a way of making your own judgment based on relationships that you've had before,

• 50:07Speaker 00

  people that you know, you know, examples of relationships that you have in front of you, of whether this is likely to be a trustworthy person. And then just in all other scenarios, it's the knowing that you have, not based on anything logical or, you know, obvious data, but based on a sense that you have of the world through the experiences that you've built up.

• 50:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love that. I asked my wife this question yesterday. I said, what's intuition to you? And she just had a couple of seconds' thoughts and said, a knowingness not based on logic. And then she got up and went and put the kettle on. I was like, that's amazing. I love that. That's really, really good. I kind of like that. And it sort of echoes what you just said, right?

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 50:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  But where does that knowingness come from?

• 50:59Speaker 00

  Well, it comes from all the experiences that we've had in life, but we don't necessarily remember. So it comes from, you know, like, again, let's take up this cheating example. It comes from the relationship that you witnessed between your parents when you were a kid. It comes from the way your parent of the opposite gender, you know, whatever it was that they did to contribute to or belittle your self-worth.

• 51:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, I'm loving this, Tara, right? So let me continue on that thread, right? So it goes, it's based upon your past experiences and what you've learned, because of course the brain doesn't forget. It logs all of this stuff. So let's keep on that cheating example. So that's individual who has been cheated on five to 10 times, let's say.

• 51:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Ten years on from that, when they make a judgment based on intuition, their intuition is predicated on the fact that they've been cheated on for 10 years.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  So, which kind of makes sense because the brain is always trying to predict the future based on past behaviour, right? So it kind of all makes sense. But that can also be problematic because that person can be tapped into their intuition, which says, hey, when you get into relationships, someone's going to cheat on you. But actually, that's probably not that helpful. And I guess we believe, a lot of us, that intuition is a good thing. So help us unpack that puzzle if you can.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I wouldn't actually call that intuition because that is based on data. So if you've been cheated on five or 10 times, that's, those are facts. So I would look more then at what is it about the choice of partner that you're making? Or the dynamic within the relationship, your self-worth, you know? I would look at more of, you know, what is it about you? And your, how you behave in a romantic relationship that is repeatedly leading to this outcome?

• 53:12Speaker 00

  So it would be logical for that person to think that the next person they choose is not going to be faithful to them.

• 53:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  It totally makes sense, doesn't it?

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think intuition is more, an example of that is when a relationship is, it's obvious to everybody else that it's going to end soon. But the person is clinging on because they're afraid of being single or they, you know, feel ashamed that they couldn't make it work. There are so many times where the two people in the relationship are so unhappy that they should just say, you know what, we used to make each other happy once. We're actually now making each other unhappy. We should probably just let each other go. But, you know, that period tends to be quite drawn out. And that, that leads to like more negative experiences.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  And you know, that can, that can definitely then like damage your, your self-worth, which is the thing that you must fight for really at all costs is your self-esteem, your self-worth, because that's really the filter that shows you whether the world is safe or not, whether a person's trustworthy or not. But what the brain tends to do in a stressed state is, so the amygdala, which I mentioned before, the emotional centre, gets together with the hippocampus, which is where our memories are stored, and brings up every example of, oh, the last time someone dumped you, you were single for, you know, six years, which makes you want to like, hold on to

• 54:52Speaker 00

  the status quo out of fear, even though you actually know that you're not happy.

• 54:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 55:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  How do we tap into our intuition? If we want to get better at it, if we want to go, look, I like the sound of that tar I want, I've forgotten what intuition feels like, what it looks like for me, how can I retap into it? What would you say to them?

• 55:19Speaker 00

  So if, I'll just finish off with that example, and then I'll speak a bit more generally. With, with that example, I would say, if you recognise that you have been in that situation before, and maybe you've, maybe you've been in that situation, and you've said, you know what, if I get to the stage in a relationship where we're, we're actually both miserable, it's not going to last forever, it would be better to like, end it quick, sooner, you know, it's less painful for everyone, that you remember that the next time, and that you act on it, and you do something differently to demonstrate to yourself that you're not just repeating the same pattern. But more generally, I do think journaling is a really great way to hone your intuition.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  That's how, I think I was, I was using intuition, but when I first started journaling, that was really how I built my intuition into a superpower, was through journaling. So what I would do with every decision that I had to make, I would write down what logic was telling me, and I would write down what intuition was telling me. Now, if they were saying the same thing, that was fine, that's easy. If they weren't, then most people's tendency is to go with logic. So what I would suggest is that in a low-risk scenario, if your logic and your intuition aren't aligned,

• 56:36Speaker 00

  Do an experiment and go with the intuition and see what happens and write it down. And then as you become more confident in your intuition, do it with something that's a bit more, you know, high stakes. And through pretty much, you know, experimenting like that, a period of trial and error for me, I got to the point where I had, I could convince myself with the data that my intuition was always more accurate than my logic.

• 57:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love that. So you ran an experiment on yourself, basically. I love that. In low risk situations, give it a go because who cares? Doesn't really matter.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I guess, you know, what's a common scenario? It might be, I don't know, applying for a job or someone's got three job offers or three jobs that they can't decide, right? So that's a, presumably for most people, quite a high stakes decision. But I guess the lesson is if you've been practicing for a period of time, let's say with journaling, then when that high stakes decision comes into your life, you've got evidence.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  To kind of say, hey, listen, I know that usually my intuition is correct.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 57:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's really interesting when we think about that in relationship to decisions that we have to make in our life.

• 58:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  One thing Tara, I've been thinking a lot about recently is

• 58:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  this idea that people, I think, especially today, because we live in this era of information overload, right? Let's even talk within our, you know, our wheelhouse, health and wellbeing, right? There's a million experts online.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? We're not all saying the same thing. And

• 58:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  What I see often happening is that people have an overreliance on experts. And what I mean by that is not that they shouldn't listen to experts, but that let's say you were saying one thing and they like you and they trust you and they go, wow, you've got all the minerals. You've got all the qualifications and the experience. And let's say you have a particular perspective on one thing.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  And then they also like me and go, yeah, but you've also wrong and got the minerals and the experience and the qualifications, but you're saying different things.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. So let's, let's give a concrete example for that. So I don't eat breakfast. So I only eat between 12 and eight. So let's say, I'm not, I'm just saying what I do. I'm not saying everybody should be doing that. But yeah, let's say that you, I say, I don't eat breakfast and you say you do eat breakfast and we've both got the same qualifications. So I think what you're trying to say is that then each person has to think, okay, there are pros and cons to eating breakfast or not eating breakfast. What is right for me?

• 59:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  Each person should know their body better than any doctor or expert.

• 59:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Agreed. It's exactly what I'm trying to say. Yeah. And so I guess what I'd love your perspective on is for people who are listening to this right now, who do get into a jam on those things and go, man, I find it confusing when, I don't know, this guy says low carb and this person says plant-based and I don't know what I should do. How do you help that person become their own expert?

• 1:00:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's 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 suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals and one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over 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. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is

• 1:00:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  that they are committed to continuous improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering 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.

• 1:01:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends. Today's 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 suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals. And 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,

• 1:02:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and

• 1:02:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  It is quite hard because even with the team of people that work for me, they'll, they come to me for the latest on what should you be eating? What should you not be eating? And I remember one of them asked for Christmas to get one of those food intolerance tests that you can get. And I said, why don't you just listen to your body? And she said, well, I'm not you, Tara. I'm not a doctor. Like, I can't, I can't do that. I think it's important for people to know that intuition is often referred to as the sixth sense. But the actual sixth sense that we have is called interoception, which is our sense of the physiological state of the inside of our body. It's how we know when we need to go to the loo

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  or how we know when we're hungry or tired. But you can hone that even further. So, you know, a very, very simple thing to do is keep a food diary for a week, write down everything that you eat and then make some notes about whether you were bloated or whether you went to the loo or not, or how your mood was or how you slept. And just try to get to know yourself better. It's kind of not directly related to this, but I did notice again during the pandemic and since that that book, The Body Keeps the Score, has gone back into the bestseller list. So I think people are realising that a lot of their trauma or psychological stress was somatised into their body.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  So it was coming up as aches and pains and changes in posture. So the more we can educate ourselves about our own body, which only means listening to and looking at, do you look dehydrated? Are you bloated? You know, when you eat a certain food, do your lips tingle?

• 1:05:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think one of the most powerful things that people can do to become their own expert again is to have some form of daily solitude practice where they're actually practicing. So, you know, it's a great book, The Body Keeps a Score. Bessel came on the show last year. We had a wonderful conversation together. And I know you're a practitioner of yoga. I believe that you've said in an interview before that yoga is one of the things that really helped you learn about your body. And I think for many practitioners and people who love yoga, it absolutely does that. I don't think it's the only way. I think there's many ways, but that is

• 1:05:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  certainly one way. But you mentioned interoception. I think we all need some form of practice, I think, daily, even if it's just five minutes, where we are practicing that, whether it be a five-minute yoga sequence in the morning. And I guess for me, and I've sort of been advising this to patients for years now, I like people to have the same practice every day.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:06:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because I think the consistency of the practice allows you to start detecting what's different. So if you do the same five yoga moves first thing every morning, on some days, it's going to feel fluid and easy, and your body's going to feel light. And on other days, it's going to feel tight, or one part of you is going to have a bit of tension, which wasn't there the day before. My belief is if people do that regularly, they start to develop the skill of interoception. And I think that helps them build intuition because they're tuning into themselves.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  There's so much. I love what you said. There's so much here. So when I'm really,

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  you know, very strict about doing a daily yoga practice, then on a day where I think I actually can't, then the minimum I have to do is lie on my mat for five minutes. So, because it still means I did something every single day. I mean, ideally, I would do, you know, much more than that. But if I, for some reason, I can't, I have to lie on the mat, have to make contact with the mat. And so I, it's funny, sometimes I lie on the mat and I, I think of myself on a sort of seesaw. And I think, how do I feel? Do I feel like my feet are above my head or, you know, which way around do I feel? And that tells me something about myself. But I would suggest a body scan is a really good thing to do for this.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  And, you know, we usually do the body scan sort of about the outside of the body. So we go through like the toes and the knees and the hips and the, you know, head and everything. But you can actually then go inside and you can say, how do I feel in my brain? How do I feel in my throat? How do I feel in my lungs? How do I feel in my stomach? How do I feel in my bladder? You know, so you can, you, you're not, you're not getting necessarily physical sensations from those, but you can start to think like that more so that, you know, you are more aware of what's going on on the inside of your body. And then what I wanted to connect that to, where you were talking about interoception being connected to intuition,

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  is to remind us about the two-way connection between the brain and the gut itself. And the gut, well, you could almost argue the gut, the gut microbiome and the brain. So there's also a physical, a biological impact on intuition. Because if your gut is inflamed or depleted of good bacteria or leaky or bloated, then, you know, you've got to start thinking that's going to have a psychological impact too. And we know that the brain signals to the gut and the gut microbiome and they signal to the brain.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  We've, you know, we've known for a long time about the vagus nerve, but now we know that they also use other nerves in both directions.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  Anteric nerves, they send hormonal signals in both directions. They said, send other chemical messages in the blood called cytokine messaging. So there's a lot going on between your brain and your gut. And both its physical condition and you know, your psychological sense of, of the inside of your body are really important to that.

• 1:09:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love that. And I think it's really important to be able to just really understand that what you just said about interception, you know, you feel, how does your brain feel? How does your bladder feel? How do your lungs feel? Someone may go and try that tomorrow morning. Okay. Look, I, Tara, I'm wrong. I, I, I can't feel anything, right? I don't know what you're talking about. It gets easier with time if you practice, doesn't it?

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like suddenly you start to, I think we've lost touch with our bodies, certainly in the West, right? We're, we're a head focused society. I have been for many years and, and lost touch with what your body is telling you. But your body can tell you so much, but you've got to practice. So I think the reason why, or one of the reasons why people struggle with this tsunami of expertise out there is because they've lost touch with themselves.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you simply cannot, in my view, regain that without some intentional time alone each day.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  No. And I think that if someone said to you, oh, well, like, you know, I can't feel anything from my lungs. Well, a good signal of how your lungs are doing is how you're breathing.

• 1:10:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  So even if you just focus on your breath for five minutes.

• 1:10:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Totally. What is journaling fitted here? And I guess what I'm, what I'm getting at is that there's many ways to tune into ourselves, right? You can do it, I guess, bottom up, sort of through the body. I've got tightness in my abdomen. When I breathe, my left side's a bit tighter than my right. So you're building up that body awareness, but journaling is almost top down, isn't it? Where you are using the incredible prefrontal cortex that humans have.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you're learning about yourself with the mind as opposed to the body. Like, I think those things can work beautifully in harmony with each other.

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  But you know, what's your perspective on, on those two different approaches? Or are they different?

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  I mean, I think they should definitely be combined. You know, the brain body connection is something that I've been speaking about for a long time. And again, you know, like the brain gut connection, it's a two way thing. So yeah, if you were doing those two things in combination, I feel like you would actually get more than double the benefit of doing one of them.

• 1:12:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Are you open to sharing what you do on a daily basis to keep yourself in check with yourself?

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  So as soon as I wake up in the morning, before I, you know, start to have, start to think things like, oh, what's the time? And, you know, what do I have to do today? I immediately give gratitude for my pillowcase, my pillow, my mattress, my mattress topper and my bedding. So I, so I'm, I'm intentionally pushing myself towards that oxytocin state rather than the cortisol state. As soon as I'm aware that I become awake, I then do deep breathing whilst I'm still in bed. And I really feel into like all the directions that I'm breathing in. And I just see like, is there any tension somewhere or?

• 1:12:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you're tuning into your body immediately?

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  Immediately. Yeah.

• 1:12:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're not allowing yourself, I guess, often into the emails, the social media, the news where, you know, you suddenly, you've lost touch with your body and you write into your brain and your thoughts, right?

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I, I don't have my phone in my bedroom. So I, and it's several floors down. So it's quite a while till I can get to my phone. And yeah, I got, I got an old fashioned alarm clock because I just didn't want to like have to, you know, that's people's biggest excuse, isn't it? I use my phone as my alarm clock.

• 1:13:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  So gratitude.

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  Breathing.

• 1:13:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Breathing. And then?

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  Then I get up and I, I take my probiotic first thing because I have to give a 10 minute gap before I can eat or drink anything.

• 1:13:39Speaker 00

  And then I will look at my phone.

• 1:13:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  But what I love about that is what you have just said you do as a neuroscientist, former doctor, coach, right, with all your knowledge and experience of helping people, you have built into your life a practice, dare I say, a ritual each morning whereby within minutes, it's not much, that gratitude is not much, that breathing is not much. And, you know, 10, 15 minutes later, you're on your phone, right? That's very achievable for people.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I'll add that because I have that 10 minute gap until I can drink my cup of tea, that's why I look at my phone, because I'm kind of waiting. But making my cup of tea, whether it's regular tea or matcha tea, whether I'm using mushroom powders or not, that is a ritual for me. That is like a sacred moment, like the phone is left behind and I do that almost like a form of meditation.

• 1:14:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why?

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  I like rituals.

• 1:14:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  What is a ritual?

• 1:14:48Speaker 00

  A ritual is something that you do intentionally. So it's not just a routine. It's something that you do regularly, but you do it very intentionally. And I actually stopped formally meditating when I realised that if you regularly meditate, then for 15 or 30 minutes in your day, you are being mindful and for 23 and a half hours, you are not. So I try to bring rituals into my life so that I've got, it's like a patchwork quilt. There's moments of mindfulness throughout my day and that to me is one of them. And also then when I drink the cup of tea, I savour it so much.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  Like, so that, you know, that's, okay, I've looked at my phone for a few minutes, but I've got another pause there.

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  And you know, then I'll go and get like, ready for the day. But it's something that became like a real demarcation between work time and home time was the way that I would prepare my vegetables, peel them, chop them, think about what I'm going to cook, cook.

• 1:15:56Speaker 00

  You know, I've always done mindful. I don't know if you were raised the same way as me, but we had to like, you know, say thank you to God before we took the first bite of food.

• 1:16:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, very, very similar. And obviously in our culture, there's also, depending on which family you're in, of course, you know, there's also about not cooking in a stressed state, right? You know, it's massive that the state you're in. I mean, we've been talking throughout this conversation about the, the state in which you're in.

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Impacts who you are in the world.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  But our culture would have the belief, I think, that the state you're in when you cook impacts the quality of that food.

• 1:16:34Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:16:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, a skeptic will hear that and go, what a load of rubbish. You guys are doctors, you're a neuroscientist. What the hell are you talking about? What would you say to that person?

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  I would say to them that when you've got high levels of cortisol, the cortisol actually leaks out of your sweat into the atmosphere around you. So if you're in a bad mood and you're cooking and your family are about to come to the dinner table, then simply your elevated levels of cortisol that are leaking out, the particles are going to go in through their skin and stress them out too. And also, it's an opportunity for you to stir something mindfully. Like, I love making risotto because you've got to be so patient and measured. That, to me, that is like the best form of cooking meditation.

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  So there's an opportunity there for you to chop things slowly, to think about the, you know, the size of the piece of vegetable that somebody's going to put in their mouth, to stir it, you know, intentionally. But what you're doing instead is being agitated and, you know, banging things and doing it quickly and, and making yourself more stressed out. And You know, yeah, of course, you could argue that it doesn't physically have like an impact on the food, but it's, it's just not, it's not ideal.

• 1:17:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I, I, I love it. And look, for that skeptic, right? Well, we all know that feeling when we've walked into a room at work or at home, where something's going down, right? Where there's been an argument or there's, you can feel it.

• 1:18:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you, all you're doing, walking into a room, there's people there, there's air, right? But you can tell what the energy is in that room.

• 1:18:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, that's real. We all know that.

• 1:18:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, and that makes me think of what you just said about cortisol leaking out.

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  You mentioned as part of your morning ritual, you go to a cup of tea. Now, I go to a cup of coffee. And in my book on stress, I referred to caffeine and alcohol as forms of liquid stress.

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  Oh, nice term.

• 1:18:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  And so I'm interested, we, we spent a long time so far talking about stress, the brain, how it affects our physical health, our emotional wellbeing, all these kind of things.

• 1:19:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  How did caffeine and alcohol affect these things?

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I did think about giving up that morning cup of tea, but in the end, the enjoyment of it for me was so great that I just thought that's not going to benefit my life to give that one up. I only have one caffeinated drink a day and I never have it after 10am.

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  So the reason for that is that the quarter life of caffeine is 12 hours. So 12 hours after you've had your last caffeinated drink, a quarter of it is still circulating in your blood and going to your brain and potentially disturbing your sleep. Now, the way that caffeine could contribute as liquid stress is that if you're already stressed and agitated, what drives agitation is basically caffeine and sugar. So in that state, if you are using coffee to keep you going or you're drinking a lot of coffee because you're not really eating properly and you're trying to fill yourself up, then you're also like accumulating the amount of caffeine that's in your system.

• 1:20:06Speaker 00

  That, you know, is not good. And I, I do see people who are stressed, like drinking a lot of coffee. And I definitely advise them to. Cut it down, but mostly focus on the last time slot that you would have a caffeinated drink. Alcohol. So people will, you know, think that it relaxes you. They may even use it proactively to try to reduce stress. But actually, it, you know, suppresses activity in your prefrontal cortex. So your ability to regulate, regulate your emotions actually becomes lower and your decision making ability, you know, is negatively affected by that.

• 1:20:49Speaker 00

  Alcohol is a neurotoxin, so it will actually be killing off brain cells. And the other thing is that, you know, obviously because of COVID, COVID, we all know that we used alcohol gels to kill bacteria. So basically alcohol, like antibiotics and processed food, affects the good bacteria in your gut as well. And we've already talked about how that connects with, you know, your intuition, your decision making. And the effect on sleep as well.

• 1:21:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Of course.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  Although I have to say, from heart rate variability monitoring, I can tell you that not leaving a two hour gap between finishing eating and going to bed is as disruptive for your sleep as drinking alcohol before you go to bed.

• 1:21:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, I know what heart rate variability is, but for someone who doesn't, please explain that first and then let's elaborate on what you just said because that's huge.

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So heart rate variability monitors are, I was using them during the financial crisis, I was using them on, you know, on my banking clients. And at that time, they were quite clunky jaillects.

• 1:22:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I remember.

• 1:22:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. But nowadays, you know, people have those bracelets that basically are monitoring your heart rate and also an element of your heart rate, which is called the variability. So you and I, we may both have a heart rate of 60, but mine might be like a metronome, one a second, and yours might get faster sometimes, slower sometimes, you know, and just vary. And the description that I've just made of you is a healthier state because you've got variability.

• 1:22:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's counterintuitive, isn't it? Because you would initially think, I want my heart beating like a metronome. I don't want any variation, I want it to be but, but, but, but, you know, right on time, but it's the opposite that we want.

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  That seems to correlate more with being in the sympathetic state, which is more the fright, flight, fight. And the fact that like you're adaptable, you're very, you know, you've got variation. If something good happens, it's, you know, then it changes. Something bad happens, you can adapt to it, you know, that's kind of a benefit. So these sorts of monitors, they can give you trends over time, but the ones that I used to use show like down to each 15 minutes, whether you're in stress, recovery, light physical activity or heavy physical activity. And so the recovery period is like psychological relaxation. And yeah, so I did, I, you know, did a few experiments on myself, like I did a few with jet lag and different types of sleeping aids.

• 1:23:29Speaker 00

  And I did one where I had no alcohol, one unit of alcohol and three units of alcohol. And I compared them. And I didn't do this one intentionally, but I went to see, you know, I went to the theatre with someone and they were happy to eat afterwards, which, you know, I finished eating by eight. So this was kind of starting to eat really late. And by the time I got home, it was late and I couldn't, well, at that time, I didn't, I didn't know this, I came home, it was late, I went to bed, couldn't sleep for two hours. And when I looked on my heart rate variability monitor, it looked like I'd had three units of alcohol because it was just like two hours of red stress before I actually fell asleep.

• 1:24:12Speaker 00

  And now that I know that, I'm very, very conscious that if I haven't digested my food, I know I won't sleep. So I'm conscious of always trying to leave that gap. When it's not possible for various reasons, like recently I was filming on the Neverho Nation, you know, basically living out of a van. And when we got to a motel.

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  We hadn't eaten like for a long time, so we had to eat. And I worked out that I needed to get eight hours of sleep to be good for the filming the next day, but ideally I needed to stay awake for two hours to let my food digest. And I had this book about the Navajo people that I needed to get through as well. So I thought, okay, I'm going to end up going to sleep at one, which is really, really late for me, but I can read the book for two hours because I'm not going to sleep anyway. And I'll still get eight hours sleep because we're not having an early start. So, you know, I kind of work it out like that.

• 1:25:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love that. I mean, what it, what it really speaks to to me is that you have spent time getting to know yourself.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, so you know what works for you.

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  What you said about caffeine and you knowing that finishing before 10am works for you. I, I think there's a wider point here Tara, which I love your perspective on, but this is kind of, this idea that we'll hear coffee is good or bad. Okay, the research shows that two cups of coffee a day does this for your health. It's the biggest source of polyphenols in the American diet. We, we, we read all this stuff and then we go, yeah, so coffee's good.

• 1:25:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, it kind of depends.

• 1:25:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, if you're chronically stressed, overworking and anxious, and you're using caffeine to prop you up, I don't think it matters how many polyphenols it's given you. Like, it's probably not going to be good for you.

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:26:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  In the context of your life, but for someone else. And to be clear, you know, I drink coffee. Like, I think that, you know, caffeinated drinks can absolutely form part of a healthy, balanced life.

• 1:26:18Speaker 00

  I completely agree.

• 1:26:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  But you've got to tune into yourself and figure out what works for you, don't you?

• 1:26:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, there, there is some evidence that a small amount of caffeine is actually like beneficial for your, you know, your brain as well. It's just like, it's, it's the too much and the, you know, what time that's the issue.

• 1:26:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  We touched on nature earlier. We haven't gone into depth on nature. And there's a term you texted me about yesterday, neuroaesthetics, which I thought, that is a wicked term. I haven't heard of it.

• 1:26:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:26:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  So we've been talking a lot about stress, right? And the damaging effects of too much stress. One of the antidotes is nature, right?

• 1:27:04Speaker 00

  Hmm. So neuroaesthetics is basically the science of the impact of beauty on our brains, on our health, our mental health and our longevity. And so within that, you're frowning.

• 1:27:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  No, I'm thinking, I'm taking it in because I love it. And I've never heard the term before. I absolutely love it.

• 1:27:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  The impact of beauty.

• 1:27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  I, I, I love it.

• 1:27:28Speaker 00

  So it basically says that creating, making or beholding creative activities is good for your health. So that's art, dance, music.

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

  And it's both doing a painting or going to an art gallery. It's both, you know, singing in the shower and going to see a musical.

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  And it's, you know, it's both dancing around your living room or going to the ballet. And there are, you know, differential benefits of making and beholding. Both are good for you, but you know, ideally you would do a bit of both. And so within that, you and I might have the same taste in art, but different taste in music.

• 1:28:21Speaker 00

  But nature is the palette that we have existed in since the beginning of time. And so we all feel a sense of beauty when we're in nature. And, you know, we know that when we're in nature, our blood pressure goes down, our heart rate goes down. There are certain trees that secrete chemicals called phytonsides that boost the natural killer cells in our immune system. So there's a lot of good stuff going on when we're in nature.

• 1:28:50Speaker 00

  And yeah, that's, that's pretty much it that, you know, basically thinking of nature as like a beautiful, you know, scenario and understanding that beauty and creative activities are so beneficial to us. And if you think about it, when we lived in the cave, we, you know, we lived with the seasons, we looked at the stars in the sky at night, we walked barefoot, like you try to. And we danced around the fire, we beat drums, we, we chanted. And people, you know, okay, once it went dark,

• 1:29:33Speaker 00

  you know, there was not, it's not like you could be hunting or whatever, but it's, you know, people didn't, there was no excess time for luxurious activities. When you lived in the cave, it was all about survival. So we really believe that these sorts of activities are somehow crucial to our survival, whether it's the social connection, or whether it is like the benefit on your cardiovascular system of, you know, lowering your blood pressure and heart rate.

• 1:30:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's such a, it's a beautiful idea. It's a reassuring idea. We all feel good when we're in the forest or in nature.

• 1:30:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? Generally speaking, it's, it's hardwired into us, isn't it?

• 1:30:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  For a number of reasons. I don't know if you've read the book by Dacher Keltner, Or. He's a Berkeley professor. He's been studying happiness for 20 plus years. And he released the book about a year ago, I think it was called Or, or The Science of Or. You'd love it, right?

• 1:30:36Speaker 00

  I'll look into it.

• 1:30:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  And really unpicked.

• 1:30:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  What happens to humans when we experience awe, which of course we do in nature, right? And it lowers stress, it improves mental wellbeing, improves physical health. I think it is with longevity as well, which is absolutely incredible, isn't it? So how much nature does one need to get these benefits?

• 1:31:03Speaker 00

  I mean, in the field of neuroaesthetics, they say ideally 20 minutes a day of either a creative activity, making it or beholding it or being in nature. Personally, when I used to go for a walk in the woods every day, and for like, you know, just physical purposes, I would do 30 minutes. When I started doing an hour, the effect on my mental health was so noticeable, it was incredible. I didn't realise it would make that much difference. And we don't always have the luxury of being able to go for a one hour walk. But both physically and mentally, I could tell the difference between half an hour and an hour.

• 1:31:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Wow.

• 1:31:50Speaker 00

  And I can also tell the difference between walking for an hour in really beautiful nature, like in ancient woods, versus walking for an hour by the river in London.

• 1:32:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which is better?

• 1:32:05Speaker 00

  Definitely the, you know, really beautiful nature, like no concrete jungle.

• 1:32:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  The difficulty there, of course, is that the world is becoming more and more urbanised. Many people are living in mega urban environments. And, you know, a lot of the time, it's people in deprived communities, right, who we know have worse health outcomes anyway, for a variety of different reasons. And I think it's important to acknowledge that, you know,

• 1:32:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm lucky, I live in Cheshire, right? There's, there's nice nature everywhere. It's very easy, within five minutes of my house, to, to, to, to get that nature.

• 1:32:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  But not everyone has that, right?

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:32:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  So for that person who doesn't have it, what would you say to them?

• 1:32:52Speaker 00

  So even just having more plants in your house is, you know, has the effect that I mentioned of the trees in the forest. Yeah, you're doing well.

• 1:33:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  We're trying to in this studio.

• 1:33:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:05Speaker 00

  And, you know, I mean, one of the examples that the, you know, the neuroaesthetic researcher that I spoke to gave was just having a small vase of flowers by your bed so that when you wake up, that's the first thing that you smell and see. You know, that's, that's a neuroaesthetic day, starting, you know, with a real piece of beauty.

• 1:33:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is harder if you're living in an, you know, an urban environment, but there are amazing parks in most cities.

• 1:33:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Speaker 00

  So trying to get to them.

• 1:33:36Speaker 00

  But even just, you know, noticing the trees that you can see in the skyline, kind of thing, or a body of water.

• 1:33:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it makes a difference. I've, I've seen research on fractals, which are these, of course, as you know, these geometric shapes that we only get in nature, that when a human eye sees a fractal, you lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

• 1:34:00Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:34:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, so I think that's one of the, one of the many reasons why nature is so powerful.

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? And there's research also showing that just looking at a picture of nature will lower levels of cortisol. I don't think it's to the same degree, but it still does it.

• 1:34:18Speaker 00

  I was gonna say that, I was gonna say, if you really, literally cannot get to a park near your house, then it's probably not as good. But if you look on, on your phone or on, you know, TV or whatever, and just look at naturescapes, I mean, one of the things I'm planning to do next, planning to do later this year is, um, release a series of meditations, guided meditations with my voice, but that are, um, played over some really stunning nature time lapse photography.

• 1:34:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love it. Look forward to that, might become part of my morning routine.

• 1:34:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  I want to talk about death, Tara.

• 1:34:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  I've watched quite a few of your Interviews recently online and they've been truly, truly fascinating. And death is something I've seen you talk more and more about over the past, I'd say, year, maybe. Why is that?

• 1:35:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say a year or two because you know how at the beginning of the pandemic, I said to you, I feel like this is potentially a mental health crisis. What I came out of it feeling like was there were so many people that experienced loss. And I do mean, you know, loss through actual death of loved ones, but also a lot of relationships broke down. A lot of people, you know, really suffered during the pandemic, either because they were isolated or, you know, things in the way that they work changed, so that loss of sense of self. So I feel like there's a lot of suffering in the world at the moment.

• 1:35:59Speaker 00

  And I also feel like we are more lost and disconnected than I think we've ever been before.

• 1:36:07Speaker 00

  And so as part of, you know, my personal spiritual practice, I made season two of my podcast more about ancient wisdom. Cause I wanted to learn about sufism and, you know, South African traditional healers and, you know, Tibetan Buddhist beliefs and things. Yeah. So, but as part of that, actually our friend in LA, Drew, he suggested,

• 1:36:34Speaker 00

  a guest for my podcast who was a Austrian doctor called Alexander Bathiani, who works on terminal lucidity. And terminal lucidity is when people who have some kind of brain damage or reduced consciousness, because they've had a stroke or they've got dementia, suddenly become lucid, completely lucid. So people who've forgotten that they even had children, suddenly remember the names of their children and tell them that they love them and have a conversation with them that was like completely normal until a few years ago. And that really got me thinking about.

• 1:37:13Speaker 00

  Whether it's possible that consciousness can exist outside of our physical body. Basically, is your spirit still around somewhere after you've physically died?

• 1:37:24Speaker 00

  And then there was this documentary on Netflix, Surviving Deaths. I kind of went down a rabbit hole. You know, I get into a topic and then I really, I get into it. But I felt very passionately that this could bring a lot of comfort to people. And, and something else which I'll come on to. So after I interviewed Alexander, I said to Drew, this fascinating topic. And he gave me another guest who is a professor of psychiatry from the University of Virginia, who works on near death experiences. So these are people who, you know, their, their heart stopped and the number of minutes that went by is enough that we would know the brain was starting to decay.

• 1:38:05Speaker 00

  But they somehow returned to physical life and could, could describe the experience that they had had. He's also got a colleague that works on past life memories, but I've, I haven't been able to, to speak to him, but he works with children who remember being somebody else before.

• 1:38:23Speaker 00

  And then I spoke to a Tibetan doctor who does dark retreats, which is the closest experience to a near death experience that you can have without actually nearly dying.

• 1:38:35Speaker 00

  So you're in complete darkness for seven days and seven nights. And actually the, the monks do it for 49 days. Oh, wow. Yeah. So that led me, what has led me into thinking is, you know, you said to me that you're very interested in intuition at the moment. I've been interested in intuition for a long time. But all of this, you know, potential research that can't prove anything, but points to the fact that the mind and the brain could be separated. Makes me, I mean, the way that Dr. Grayson put it is,

• 1:39:12Speaker 00

  That the brain is essentially filtering down the mind because the mind is capable of so much, but to survive in this material world, we can't be overwhelmed like that. So the brain actually makes our mind fit for purpose for this material world. So if you think about the fact that bats and dolphins can see and hear things that we can't see, that means a biological model has a range in their consciousness that's outside of our range.

• 1:39:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:41Speaker 00

  So if we believe that it's true that the mind is being filtered down by the brain, is it possible for us to expand our consciousness in this life, in this lifetime, in this world? And, you know, he said that, again, bringing us back to the ancient wisdom, that the Greeks and the Egyptians, they had people that discovered that and they were the seers. You know, they were the people that predicted the future or, you know, knew if someone was going to die or become unwell. So I'm just very fascinated by this fact that I didn't think that the ancient wisdom

• 1:40:24Speaker 00

  and all of the kind of death stuff would be, you know, potentially connected. But, you know, I am tempted to look into things like telepathy and extrasensory perception and, you know, from a neuroscience point of view, always with that, that lens of trying to explain it to people in a way that might help them and, you know, not wanting to be too woo woo, really wanting to see if I can create that same balance that I did with the source.

• 1:40:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I mean, that was a great book and you did such a wonderful job. As you say, creating that balance, there was a scientific rigor there as well, you know, which is very important, I think, for many people. Do you know Anil Seth? He's a bona fide neuroscientist who spent decades studying consciousness. And when he came on my podcast last year, we spoke about near death experiences.

• 1:41:25Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 1:41:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Just we touched on it. And, you know, because you can't ignore the reports. There's plenty.

• 1:41:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's thousands.

• 1:41:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  There's so many people who are reporting these experiences. And a lot of people are saying that.

• 1:41:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's changing how they experience the world. They come back from it and they're making different decisions. They know what's important now, right? And he was great because he said, listen, these things have really powerful meanings. And I don't want to, he didn't want to take away from that. But he also said, but you could also explain them through the lens of the visual cortex getting less oxygen. Because he says often what people will describe is a white light that's very focused. He goes, well, if your visual cortex is having less oxygen to it, the periphery of your vision starts to shut down. So he was, you know, he was great.

• 1:42:23Speaker 00

  And people do say it's like a tunnel as well, which also makes sense from what he said.

• 1:42:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so he was kind of saying, well, both things can be true. There can be a physiological, biological explanation, and it can have a transformative effect on people. I guess he would probably, and I don't want to speak for him, stop short of some of the things that you're talking about.

• 1:42:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  As someone who has been to medical school, who has lectured at MIT, who is a neuroscientist, it's really interesting to me that you just spoke about those things on a microphone. Would you have done that five years ago?

• 1:43:06Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:43:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why?

• 1:43:10Speaker 00

  Well, five years ago, I think I'd written the source, but it hadn't come out yet. And so at that stage, by writing it, I was like, yes, I know, I can use cognitive science to explain things like manifestation and visualization. But I was still.

• 1:43:34Speaker 00

  Unsure about whether those two things should be together in my career as a scientist and particularly as representing MIT. It was when the book came out, the response that it got that really had a big impact on me. So, you know, it had an impact on me to see that I could make sense of things like that with cognitive science, but it had more of an impact on me, the sort of comments that I got from both from people I know and, you know, just on Instagram. And I think the pandemic, you know, you could say allowed or pushed me further down the spiritual route. I also have a friend who used to be a client of mine, who I met at MIT when he took my

• 1:44:19Speaker 00

  class, who's got this like eclectic, fascinating background with a lot of spiritual knowledge. And we started speaking a lot. That got me really interested. So I would have to say with that, I'm going to answer your question with something that we've discussed, which was my intuition told me I cannot keep doing corporate work. I have to go down this road. I still can't tell you why. But I think, you know, I think it's becoming a bit clearer. I don't, and also I think something that's been really helpful for me is that I have a lot of icons who are either a doctor or a scientist or both that have gone down a very spiritual path.

• 1:45:01Speaker 00

  Deepak Chopra, Daniel Siegel, Bruce Lipton. And I remember when I was younger thinking, like, you know, why have they done that? Or how could they have done that? Or, you know, kind of, and now it makes sense to me because it's a natural persuasion for me, but also I've got evidence of these, you know, other people. And I think it is because I love science, but it's possible that it is reducing our human experience.

• 1:45:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  100%. But we're all biased by our own experiences, right? We can try not to be, but I think most of us are, you know, as we mentioned, you know, we build up a pattern of things that we see and that then becomes in many ways how we view the world.

• 1:45:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Through the lens of medical school training.

• 1:45:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  The amount of patients I've seen over the years who medical school training didn't help me get better. Right. That's the truth. It's like, I don't know what's going on here, but I've not got any tools from my training that's going to help this person. So let me just sit and listen and try and learn something and try and see if together we can make sense of this.

• 1:46:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love science, right? But science does not explain everything about life. In fact, you can argue that that's the job of science is to try and understand the reality of life.

• 1:46:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it's a best guess based upon the data you have at that time.

• 1:46:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's not fact. It's not like a proven truth that can never be questioned.

• 1:46:38Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:46:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it often is put out like that these days. It's like, well, sometimes we don't have science to prove something. It's like, yeah, it doesn't mean it's not true. It just means we, we don't know yet how to explain that. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:46:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. I mean, you know, 20, 20, 25 years ago, we didn't know about neuroplasticity.

• 1:47:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:00Speaker 00

  So, you know, but what we knew at the time was the truth at the time. But science is continually evolving.

• 1:47:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Just give us a one liner on neuroplasticity.

• 1:47:10Speaker 00

  So, so we used to believe that by the time you stopped physically growing, that your brain was then fixed and that it never changed. So that your personality, your IQ, your creativity, those things couldn't change throughout your life. But now we know that the brain actively grows and changes till we're 25, about 25. And that if you, you know, take on new experiences, you learn new things, then you can keep, you know, changing your brain. So the, the fact that the brain is flexible, what we in science terms call plastic. I mean, I remember when I was at medical school, which was a bit before you, there was a discovery about the pancreas that we'd never known before. And I remember thinking, we've all, humans have had a pancreas for like thousand, you know, tens of thousands of years.

• 1:47:55Speaker 00

  And, but we never knew this, these particular cells existed in the pancreas.

• 1:48:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  I don't know if you heard this at medical school. We were told in first year by one of our professors that 50% of what you learn is going to be shown to be untrue. The problem is we don't know which 50%.

• 1:48:15Speaker 00

  Oh, no, no.

• 1:48:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I actually love that because actually. You can either, and as a young, you know, as eighteen, young, as a young eighteen year old,

• 1:48:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  you know, you probably don't want that uncertainty. You want to believe that you are being told everything and everything you're being told is the truth.

• 1:48:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I actually think that pattern

• 1:48:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  mis-serves our profession. I think there's a lot of doctors out there who still believe that everything they learnt at medical school is absolutely true.

• 1:48:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  And things have moved on. Some of it, some of it's partially true. Some of it is not quite true in the way we learnt it. We've evolved our understanding.

• 1:48:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you have to be okay with not knowing. You have to be okay with thinking, well, there's something more here. I mean, let's just, let's just go back to death for a minute, Tara, right? Because I think what you said is really interesting.

• 1:49:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  My first real experience with death was when my dad died, just over ten years ago now. And I was a mess for a long time because looking after dad was my identity. So it was a huge hole for me. It was the first time I'd ever really had to deal with death.

• 1:49:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, personally.

• 1:49:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Personally.

• 1:49:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:49:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now,

• 1:49:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  the last year has been incredibly challenging for me, for a number of reasons.

• 1:49:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  As we record this,

• 1:49:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  you know, twelve months ago, today, mum was actually pretty good.

• 1:50:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  And on Christmas Day last year, everything went, it took a turn for the worse.

• 1:50:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  She went into hospital for three weeks and since she's come out, she's not the same as she was. And it's interesting as we come up to that one year point.

• 1:50:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  I was reflecting yesterday of how different my life was twelve months ago because I live very near to mum and I see her most days.

• 1:50:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  And when she was in hospital,

• 1:50:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  She had delirium. So she was in A and E for three days.

• 1:50:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  The hospitals were slammed. And it was, it was such a traumatic experience to see someone, you know, be, you know, if people have seen delirium, I've seen it in patients. It's clearly a different matter when you see it with your mother.

• 1:50:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  And then since mum's come home, which she's been home for ages now.

• 1:51:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  I've really been questioning my, myself this year as to what is the human experience? Right? Because

• 1:51:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  mum's still there, right? So I can see her, I can hold her, I can hold her hand. I can't talk to her in quite the same way as I used to be able to.

• 1:51:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  But actually, for the last few months, there's a stability there and mum seems really calm to me. Right? So she's, she's pretty dependent on help for, for most things. Well, for everything, frankly.

• 1:51:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I've been questioning

• 1:51:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  what the hell is the human experience? Right? Because now when I go and see mum, it's variable from day to day. But there's a calmness. There's a really beautiful calmness and warm energy. I think, God, for much of mum's life, she's been busy. She had dad to look after, me and my brothers to look after, go, go, go, go, go. There's a real calm and I'm experiencing that not through words.

• 1:52:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Through just sitting there and trying to connect with what am I feeling here?

• 1:52:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  I feel a calmness from my mum who isn't as, she's not the same person, I would say, in some ways as she was 12 months ago. But what does that mean, not the same person? But it still looks like mum, she's still in the same room. I'm still able to go and be with her and enjoy my time with her. So I don't know, help me through all that. What does that mean? What, what can we learn from these experiences?

• 1:52:42Speaker 00

  I mean, this is exactly the reason that I'm looking into the stuff that I'm doing because, you know, clearly this is like very upsetting for you. And please don't underestimate how traumatic it is for a doctor to see their own family really sick in hospital. It is. I think actually worse than if you're not a doctor.

• 1:53:04Speaker 00

  And I'm not, you know, belittling anyone else's experience, but when you've been used to being a doctor and caring for people and seeing all sorts of things, there's something extra traumatic about that being one of your loved ones. And, you know, you really need to acknowledge that because I think that will help you to heal, you know, better than if you didn't, if you didn't think about it like that. So, yeah, so this, you know, that, like I said, there are, there isn't really anyone I know that didn't, hasn't lost someone in the last, you know, or, you know, lost in a way, like you said, your mum is still here, but it's not the same. Um, you know, and then, then there are people who physically aren't here

• 1:53:44Speaker 00

  anymore. That, as I've looked into death and grief, that there does seem to be a period, a sort of a peaceful period, that can be for, you know, very varying lengths of time.

• 1:54:00Speaker 00

  For some people, it's a matter of days, but it can also go on, you know, for a very long time. And, you know, what I was thinking, and this is probably something you're going to say, like, really, you said that on a mic, but as you were speaking about your mum and like not necessarily being able to communicate verbally, remember, like, you were physically inside her body at one point, you shared her immune system for the first, probably six months minimum of your life. You and her can communicate with each other without words. I am, I'm so sure of that. I can't prove it, but that, that is why I'm doing

• 1:54:41Speaker 00

  the research that I'm doing, because I think we are capable of so much more with our consciousness than we, than we know. And I think, I think we've actually forgotten stuff that we knew. And I hope, and please tell me if this is true, that, you know, later today or tomorrow, when you next go and see your mum, that you might feel that there is some other kind of communication that's possible.

• 1:55:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, I'd definitely let you know, I think what this encourages me to do is next time I'm with mum is to.

• 1:55:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Just sit there. Like, it's really interesting what I've learnt.

• 1:55:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's interesting. Like, you can learn through science and knowledge, or you can learn through experience, right? And they're not always the same thing. So I know the science of touch and how powerful, you know, safe affectionate human touch is, and how these C T afferent nerve fibers go all the way into our limbic system and our emotional brain and help lower chord soul. I wrote a chapter on it in my book in Stress, right? So I know the science of it. But I think you could look at this and go, we default to verbal communication because that's what we're trained in. That's what's easier. So this is really interesting. I've not really thought about it like this before. Because that is no longer

• 1:56:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  where it used to be.

• 1:56:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I can't change that.

• 1:56:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  My only option is, if I want that deep connection, I can't do it with words.

• 1:56:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I've made a real effort to not be rushed around mum. When she was more able than she is now, and was walking around and doing her stuff, you know, I was busy and rushing around and I'd pop in to see mum and do a few things, but I was always rushing to get out and all this kind of stuff, right? But I never do that. Like, I literally never do that anymore.

• 1:56:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because I'm like, no. You know, in fact, last week, I was working from home on one day and I was out for a walk. I thought I'd just drop in and see mum for 10 minutes, but I've got to get back. I've got work to do.

• 1:57:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  And mum was having a good day and she said, oh, you're going?

• 1:57:03Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:57:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  I said, oh, mum, you know, it's kind of Tuesday. I've got, I've got a bit of work to do.

• 1:57:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Said, oh, you know, I said, oh, do you want me to say, oh, yeah, because sometimes I'm just, I'm just by myself.

• 1:57:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you know what? I just thought, you know what? Screw it.

• 1:57:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm staying here.

• 1:57:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  And yes, on that day, I was able to make that decision. I recognize as I say that, that some people are in jobs or they have days in the week, but they can't do that.

• 1:57:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I could.

• 1:57:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I could have made the case to myself, you've got to get this work done. And would it have been better to get that work done?

• 1:57:39Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:57:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, for my work, it probably would have done, but for me and my mum, and I'm so aware that there's not many more days like this left.

• 1:57:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  And so I want to be present for them all.

• 1:57:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  And just finishing the loop of what I was saying before is, I'll just sit there and I'll hold and I'll stroke.

• 1:58:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because you can have a, a deep level of communication through touch.

• 1:58:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  You absolutely can. And you can see mum smiling, right? And it's lovely, but I never would have done that in that way if she was speaking. So I like to look at everything in life as an opportunity, but well, the opportunity of verbal communication is not what it was.

• 1:58:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  So what's the opportunity? The opportunity is, well, I can get better at communication through skin.

• 1:58:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. But also you can talk to her, right?

• 1:58:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:38Speaker 00

  Which, you know, she would like, even if it's a bit of a monologue sometimes.

• 1:58:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's interesting, isn't it?

• 1:58:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think, you know, I imagine that in that, you know, in that state, just things like silly things that the kids did or like, you know, what you had, what you cooked for dinner last night, you know, it's, if, if she said, because sometimes I'm on my own, then basically she's probably a bit bored and just wants to hear about normal life.

• 1:59:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I mean, there's some deep rabbit holes to go down on death for sure.

• 1:59:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, and I think maybe it's a reflection of getting older and coming across death that makes us actually think about it more, right?

• 1:59:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  On your last season of your podcast, when you

• 1:59:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  went down this rabbit hole,

• 1:59:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  is there one moment, is there one person, one guest where you heard something where you thought?

• 1:59:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  I didn't know that. I didn't think that was possible, but now you're making me think.

• 1:59:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was. It started with with Alexander Bathyany, the Austrian psychologist. And actually, I recorded him quite late on, but I brought him up into the number two slot because I was so excited about that. And it was and a similar message was kind of repeated by Dr. Bruce Grayson. But, you know, I really pushed him on this point of can the consciousness exist after physical death? And he said, you know, even my friends and family are like, it's okay, Alex, you can tell us if you won't tell anyone. And he and, you know, he again said, it can't be proven, but I have a strong impression. And then he talked for a while. And I said, yeah, you've just said quite a lot without really saying anything. And he said, Tara, no one has

• 2:00:26Speaker 00

  ever pushed me this hard to actually answer this question. And, and I said, from what I'm not going to put words into your mouth, but from what you have just said, I am going to say that the answer to that is yes.

• 2:00:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Let's look at this a different way.

• 2:00:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Does it actually matter?

• 2:00:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  And where I'm coming from with that question is,

• 2:00:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  let's say

• 2:00:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  that this is all nonsense, right? And it's not real. Okay. And again, to reiterate, you have said, oh, many times, this can't be proven, right? Or you don't have the proof for it. This is just

• 2:01:07Speaker 00

  No one does.

• 2:01:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Your investigation and research and your, your passion, or whatever it might be.

• 2:01:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  If we think about what you said earlier about the brain,

• 2:01:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  and we were talking about the brain and how it's logging all of our experiences, right? So it may not be conscious, but within our subconscious, we have all this experience.

• 2:01:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  And therefore, at an appropriate time in my life, maybe it's just all internal and not anything external. You could say that, couldn't you?

• 2:01:41Speaker 00

  You could absolutely say that. What I'm trying to say is,

• 2:01:45Speaker 00

  because currently, we don't believe that it's possible to have any communication with a lost loved one, right? What if it is possible, but because we don't think it's true, we're not doing it? That, that's the question that I'm posing.

• 2:02:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's a whole nother podcast.

• 2:02:03Speaker 00

  I know. And I don't, I'm still looking into it. I don't have the answers yet.

• 2:02:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  And when you do, I look forward to that conversation.

• 2:02:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Just changing direction slightly at the end of our conversation.

• 2:02:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  A lot of people listen to this show because they want help at

• 2:02:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  they want help in leading more meaningful, happier, healthier lives, right? We've covered a lot. I think there's been lots of practical guidance woven in throughout our conversation. I certainly hope so. To finish off though,

• 2:02:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  I want to talk about why people struggle to make changes in their life.

• 2:02:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Let's take New Year's resolutions as an example.

• 2:02:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  They are notoriously unsuccessful.

• 2:03:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? What is it? Is it 80% of people who make them by the first week in February are no longer doing them? Something like that, right?

• 2:03:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  In your opinion, what is the biggest obstacle in people's lives that stops them from moving forward?

• 2:03:27Speaker 00

  That the goal that they've set is too big. And so it's not achievable.

• 2:03:34Speaker 00

  So it's not so much to do with the sustainability of it. It's the fact that it's too big in the first place. And therefore the effort that is required for that bigger change is is so much effort that you're more likely to give up quickly. So the year that was a game changer for me was the year that I decided to add in two or three micro habits per quarter. So I started the year and I identified three things that I was going to do. And also knowing that some quarters, one of those was just going to fall by the wayside and not actually get incorporated. But what it meant was, because they were such easy things that by the end of, you know, by the end of March, I was like, okay, like, what else can I do? So another three.

• 2:04:17Speaker 00

  And it meant that by the end of the year, I looked back and I had 10 things I was now doing without question that had not been habits the year before. But you know, when I've set something bigger than that, I don't come to the end of the year and say, oh, I've, you know, achieved that New Year's resolution.

• 2:04:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  So on a, on a kind of rational, conscious mind, practical, through that kind of lens,

• 2:04:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  that is very consistent with what I found in clinical practice. That's very consistent with, let's say, Professor BJ Fogg's research on behaviour change from Stanford. This idea that it's tiny habits, it's small changes that actually are the ones that we manage to introduce into our life and make sustainable.

• 2:05:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. There's also the subconscious patterning within us though as well. I believe, and this was definitely true for me, that the reason why a lot of behaviour change fails, I completely agree about the small habits. But I think one of the reasons, for example, why New Year's resolutions fail is because I think they come from an energy of lack rather than an energy of abundance.

• 2:05:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? So what can I do to punish myself? I'm not good enough at the moment. There's, you know, my life isn't going the way I need to make this big. Yes.

• 2:05:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  But also, I'm not doing it because I like who I am and I like the person that I'm being in the world. I'm doing it in some way to punish myself.

• 2:05:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I used to do that. I used to be damn good for 21 days on meditation for 20 minutes a day. I'm like, yeah, this year I'm rocking it. I'm doing it. I thought I'd miss it one day.

• 2:06:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  This is a few years back. Oh my God, the self-talk about what a failure I was and how I couldn't even stick to it that year. Right?

• 2:06:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  That, that I've realised was the issue.

• 2:06:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  The issue wasn't the meditation, it wasn't the wrong habit. The issue was the energy behind that decision. Whereas now I don't make them. I actually really like who I am, you know? I know that sounds ridiculous, but I don't think I did 10 years ago. I like, I like the person. I've had to do a lot of work to get to that point.

• 2:06:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  So now I don't beat myself up. And now the changes I choose to make, whether it be in January or July or November, tend to be sustainable because of the energy behind them.

• 2:06:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I love that.

• 2:06:50Speaker 00

  The, the lack and abundance point is a really, really good one. And very commonly in my coaching practice, I will see people, you know, miss a day or, you know, miss whatever. Miss the regularity of the habit and then say, oh, that's it. You know, I've messed that up now. And I'm always like, don't put any energy into beating yourself up. Just start again.

• 2:07:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, because next time it will be 31 days and then maybe you'll miss a day. And then, you know, next time it'll be 41. But I think the point is that

• 2:07:25Speaker 00

  when we start, we're like, if I'm doing this, I've got to do it every day. Why do you have to do it every day? Like when you said to me at the start, oh, your daily journaling practice. I thought, I'm not going to lie about that. I don't do it every day, but it is a practice in my life, you know? And that's okay.

• 2:07:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  I also love what you said before about your yoga practice, which is if you don't have time, you'll still go on the mat. And I think that's really powerful because that's keeping the momentum going, isn't it? That, that's almost the antidote to what some of your clients say.

• 2:07:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:07:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's like, sure, you don't have your 20 minutes or however long you like, but you're still going to get on the mat.

• 2:08:00Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 2:08:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Tara, I love talking to you. This conversation certainly went in some areas I wasn't expecting it to. I, I have learned over the years not to expect anything on these conversations and just trust and see where it goes and see what the energy is between us on any given day.

• 2:08:18Speaker 00

  And I don't think it could have been better than this.

• 2:08:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  So. Well, I, I loved it and I think people are really warm to you. I think, I think they really do. I think they like your knowledge and your wisdom, but also the way you put it across. So, no, I, I think I and many other people appreciate that.

• 2:08:35Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for trusting me and going into some areas that I know that you weren't necessarily willing to.

• 2:08:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  No, well, look, there meant to be two-way conversations. To finish off, simple question. In all of your experience, doctor, neuroscientist, coach, lecturer, whatever it might be, what are some of the most impactful changes and lifestyle choices that people can bring into their lives that will improve the quality of them immediately?

• 2:09:12Speaker 00

  I'm going to start with some really simple, basic ones because I think it's always worth repeating these. So things like drinking enough water. I mean, just going from being in a slightly dehydrated state to being in a properly hydrated state all the time will make you feel different. Changing your diet today will start changing your gut microbiome and you'll notice the benefits of that within a matter of days, if not, you know, a week. Getting enough sleep and going to bed and waking up at regular times has been shown to be really important. But then I'd like to slightly switch and say that the more recent research on the benefits to your mental health,

• 2:09:57Speaker 00

  your health and longevity of spending time in nature and having really positive, meaningful social connections and having a purpose that transcends yourself. These are the three things that I'm more focused on now, having kind of, you know, got the basics mostly right.

• 2:10:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Love it. Brilliant advice. Thanks for coming on the show, Tara.

• 2:10:19Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:10:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I be

• 2:11:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatge.com/friday5. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics: happiness, food, stress, sleep, behaviour change and movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out.

• 2:11:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks, and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And before you go, I just wanted to let you know about an exclusive January offer. If you want to listen to every episode without having to hear any of the adverts, you can do so with an Apple subscription. We're extending the free trial from seven days to 30 days. So if you want to take advantage of this offer and support the podcast and enjoy every

• 2:12:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  single episode advert-free for an entire year, just go to the Apple Podcast app and subscribe. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.