Pod Insights Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee BITESIZE | 5 Life Lessons Everybody Learns Too Late (And How to Live With Fewer Regrets) | Bronnie Ware #601 About this episode What do you think you might be saying on your deathbed? Will you be looking back at your life with a sense of joy and completeness, or, do you think that perhaps you might be consumed with regret?
As today’s guest shares, “It’s easy to assume that you will live with great health to a ripe old age, then die peacefully in your sleep wearing your favourite pyjamas but it doesn’t work out that way for most people…”
Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.
Today’s clip is from episode 383 of the podcast with former palliative care nurse and author of the best-selling book ‘The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying’, Bronnie Ware.
In this clip, we reflect on some of the meaningful lessons Bronnie learned from those at the end of life, and she shares some thought provoking insights that could help us live better lives right now.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:20 Rangan Chatterjee? See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 383 of the podcast with Bronnie Ware, former palliative care nurse and author of the bestselling book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. In this clip, we explore some of the life lessons that people often learn too late, and she shares some thought-provoking insights that could help us live better lives right now.
2:05 Rangan Chatterjee? There's something about the truths that people share on their deathbed that teaches us about life. I mean, reading them for me caused me to reflect on everything in my life, not just my work, family balance, everything. How am I living my life? And I would also say that I think I came across it when I was ready to receive it.
2:31 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:32 Rangan Chatterjee? And so I wonder, could you just outline those top five regrets of the dying?
2:37 Speaker 01 Sure, sure. I spent eight years looking after dying people and the most common regret during those eight years was I wish I'd lived a life true to myself, not the life that other people expected of me. And we'll unpack it. It's a pretty powerful one. The second most common was I wish I hadn't worked so hard. And then the third was I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. And then I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. And the fifth one, I wish I'd allowed myself to be happier.
3:12 Rangan Chatterjee? I mean, there's so much there. I was rereading them again this morning.
3:18 Rangan Chatterjee? Because for me, I'm always trying to look at root causes. So I'm trying to think, what's the root cause of a particular problem? Not necessarily downstream symptoms, what's upstream from that? And I looked at these five regrets and I asked myself the same question. Are they all separate? Or actually is one more of an umbrella where the other four feed underneath? And to me at least, I felt that first one you shared is almost like an umbrella. I wish I had the courage to live my life, not the life that other people expected of me.
3:58 Rangan Chatterjee? To me at least, I feel if we get that right, like spending time with our friends, not working so hard, choosing happiness. To me, they feel downstream of that kind of central idea. Now, you wrote the book. When I say that to you, does that land or do you see it differently?
4:18 Speaker 01 It absolutely lands. And despite the amount of interviews and conversations I've had over the decade, no one's ever put it that way before.
4:28 Speaker 01 But it absolutely lands because if you are honoring that first one and living a life true to yourself, you are going to prioritize life, work-life balance. You're not going to work as hard. You're going to do things that make you happy, like stay in touch with your friends. You're going to do those other things. And so, yeah, I think that's, that's very well perceived that if you're honoring your own life, then you certainly have less chance of having those other regrets as well.
5:00 Rangan Chatterjee? Let's go to the second regret. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
5:08 Rangan Chatterjee? Now, as a doctor, I've been very alarmed for many years at the growing rates of chronic stress, the increasing rates of burnout. And there was one, I think, recent UK study that suggested that 88% of UK workers had experienced some form of burnout in the past two years. Now, this is just one study, right? So I don't want to make a generalization.
5:35 Speaker 01 No, but that's still a lot of.
5:37 Rangan Chatterjee? Whether it's slightly exaggerated or not, that's an alarming signal in terms of what it says about our culture, about the way that we're living our lives. So there will be people listening right now, Bronnie, who probably feel that they work too hard.
5:55 Rangan Chatterjee? For that person who can't see a way out, how is that regret going to help them?
6:02 Speaker 01 A lot of people will think there's no choice but to work hard because of their responsibilities. And, you know, I'm a mom, I have to provide for my daughter. And I get that, I get that there's responsibilities. But around that regret was not making work your whole life. And that was the regret that the patients shared, that they had let their work become their whole identity and their whole life. And then when work was taken away, there was nothing left. And they hadn't spent the time with their family that they wanted, or they hadn't achieved other personal dreams that they had hoped to. And so I think it's a case of just creating a little bit of space. And when, you know, I'm guilty of it, you're guilty of it.
6:47 Speaker 01 I think any of us who have really gone for our dreams or and or been having responsibilities. We've all worked too hard and we've all worked ridiculously unhealthy hours at some point. But it's about like navigating that, pulling that in a little bit and thinking, okay, well, I'm actually going to show up better for my work if I have a bit of a break sometimes. So I find now, I always say space is medicine, so space is medicine to me. If I leave space in, and I actually have to schedule it in sometimes to have unplanned time that has no agenda, just to allow myself to be in and let the day take me wherever it wants to.
7:31 Speaker 01 When I do that, I return to my work with so much more efficiency and clarity. So I get things done in a shorter time than what I thought I needed. And if you can at least just take an extra two or three hours a week off from work, the world will keep going. And the more you can do that and make a habit of that, of honoring some part of your life that you're craving, whether that's more time with your family, whether that's getting out on a golf course, whatever it is. If any of us can just think, what would I love to do if I didn't have to work so hard? And then cut out, even if it's like three hours a fortnight or something like that,
8:11 Speaker 01 but commit to it and create that habit of it, then life tends to expand and support us because we've shown the courage and the commitment to actually having a better life and living how we want.
8:25 Speaker 01 And so I've found that in doing that, life gifts us with more space or more time to do those things and everything else copes. And if it's a case of I'm working sixty hours a week, if I don't work that, I'm going to get sacked, well, you're probably in the wrong job.
8:40 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
8:41 Speaker 01 You know, get sacked, find a job that's forty hours a week or thirty five hours a week and actually try and create some space for your life. It's like building a muscle. And the more you do those little things, and when I say about this, creating the space, it's space with no agenda. So it's space to lie in your backyard, in your back garden or whatever, and look at the sky, or it's, you might sort of feel like, okay, I've given myself two hours today, I might just go to a cafe and not be on my phone, just sit and have a cuppa and watch people go by, or I certainly turn my phone off a lot.
9:18 Rangan Chatterjee? Me too.
9:19 Speaker 01 It's really important to acknowledge that that regret around not working too hard isn't about not loving your job, it's just not making your job your, your whole life and that you do, you do take that other time off. You've got to believe, or you learn to believe, that you'll be okay if you do it your own way. And the more that we can actually face the fact that we're going to die and realise the sacredness of our time, the more courage we have to trust in that.
9:50 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
9:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:53 Rangan Chatterjee? I love that idea, space is medicine. Do you remember one of the first moments when you heard something from someone who was dying, when you actually stopped and reflected on your own life and thought, wow, I'm sort of guilty of that, I could maybe make a change here. Do you, do you remember that first moment?
10:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, I definitely, it was with Grace, who was one of my, my favourite patients. And she had stayed in a very unhappy marriage for decades and she'd wanted to travel around Australia. And her husband didn't want to, and he was a bit of an ogre. And he ended up going into a nursing home. And so she went straight off to the travel agent. She was in mid eighties and picked up a catalogue, a brochure for bus tours around Australia. But it turned out that she had lung cancer and she'd never smoked and he'd smoked in the home all those years. And so I was looking after her. She never went anywhere. She hardly even left the house after that, or didn't leave the house once I arrived.
10:54 Speaker 01 And so she squeezed me, she was a tiny little lady and she squeezed me in my hand in her tears and said, "Promise me, Bronnie, that you'll always have the courage to live a life true to yourself, not the life others expect of you." That's why my ears were open to hearing the same message, but in different words through other people to come, other patients to come. And that's when I sort of really stopped and thought about it. And I was really trying hard to get going as a singer songwriter then. And so I was doing gigs at singer songwriter nights and open mic nights while I was looking after the dying people. And I didn't have a lot of confidence. I was a non drinker. Uh, my, my father was, had been a very successful musician.
11:36 Speaker 01 He was just knocking me down like crazy and telling me I was wasting my time. But I remember the anguish and the heartache of Grace in that moment. And I thought, what does that mean? Like, what, what does that look like to live a life true to myself, not the life that other people expect of me? And because I'd left the banking industry a good career, I'd sort of been really condemned in the family from that as well.
12:02 Rangan Chatterjee? A good, in inverted commas.
12:03 Speaker 01 I had a good job.
12:04 Rangan Chatterjee? A good career.
12:05 Speaker 01 I had a good job and a good career, you know, what are you trying to do now? And, you know, it used to be a running joke, oh, where is she now? What's she doing now, you know? And, and all I was trying to do was find my way. And I think that time with Grace was a real turning point because I stopped in question, what does that even look like for me? And I thought, well, dear, I think I could be a creative person and make a living as a creative person because that's, that's what I want to do. Yeah.
12:32 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah. It's so powerful. I guess just that experience, whether it causes us to overnight transform our lives, which it probably doesn't for anyone. It just opens a door, doesn't it?
12:47 Speaker 01 Yes, it's a start.
12:48 Rangan Chatterjee? Just opens a little door to go, oh, wow, that, there may be another way.
12:52 Speaker 01 Hmm.
12:54 Rangan Chatterjee? You say in your book, this is in your year for change, right? It is easy to assume that you will live with great health to a ripe old age and then die peacefully in your sleep, wearing your favourite pyjamas. It doesn't work out this way for most people, however. No one wants to face the fact that they may not live past sixty, they may not even live past forty, but this is the truth of life.
13:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is, and we all assume we're going to live a long time. We also assume we'll have time to reflect and make changes and that sort of thing. And it's not the way of life. I mean, you look at animals, there's always young ones die, there's, there's old ones die, there's middle aged ones die, and it's exactly the same with humans. And so when a child dies or a young adult, everyone says they died too soon. And of course, you know, it's heartbreaking. I've had friends that have lost children under ten and it's just devastating. But that is actually how life works. And I've had quite a few friends die in their thirties and forties.
14:03 Speaker 01 And one of them, he, he rang me and he'd just been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. He was a songwriter and, and he said, when I get through this, let's write some songs together. And I said, sure, you know, and so he'd been diagnosed three weeks earlier. Three weeks later, he was gone, just like that. And so the more we can actually understand that we may not have those years in retirement and retirement may not look how we think it's going to look anyway. Because what, what plan in life ever turns out exactly as we think anyway? Life always throws some curveballs to stretch us and help us grow and help us prioritise things that light us up.
14:45 Speaker 01 And so we can sort of think, yeah, at sixty five, I'll be all cashed up and I'll retire and I'll go off and play golf or travel the world. But a year before you, you retire, you may end up in a wheelchair for some reason or, or you may end up dead.
15:04 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
15:07 Rangan Chatterjee? We can hear that.
15:10 Rangan Chatterjee? We can hear these things. We can watch films where we see this stuff and then we can almost compartmentalize it and get back on with our lives and then not make a change. But that is so real, the fact that you could step out of your front door and get knocked down by a car.
15:25 Speaker 01 Yes.
15:26 Rangan Chatterjee? It's by acknowledging that you're going to die.
15:28 Speaker 01 Yes.
15:29 Rangan Chatterjee? That you get to truly live life.
15:31 Speaker 01 I think it just lands where any message just lands when we're ready to hear it. We can hear things repeatedly beforehand, but sometimes, like I'm sure in your time of looking after your dad, raising your family, working really hard, there were other messages similar coming to you from different angles, but you weren't ready to hear them. And so sometimes the message has to be articulated in the right choice of words or in the right language for us to actually hear them. And I think that's where the readiness and timing lines up as well, that life can be saying to you, slow down for a long time, but suddenly you hear it a certain way and it just lands and you think, oh.
16:12 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
16:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:14 Rangan Chatterjee? But it's interesting to me that you've written these five powerful regrets of the dying. Each one of them, I think, can help us reflect on our own lives and encourage us to make some maybe gentle changes that over time can become bigger changes.
16:32 Rangan Chatterjee? I also know though, that not everyone you cared for in their dying days had regrets.
16:44 Rangan Chatterjee? Are you able to articulate what the difference was in people who did have regrets at the end of their life compared to those who didn't?
16:53 Speaker 01 Sure, yep. I noticed three things and I didn't realize at the time, they were just, but there were three common things. And one was their relationship with their family. If they had good communication with their family, then they, they weren't in that category of regrets. I think.
17:13 Speaker 01 Just the support of family perhaps helped them have a go at their life or they were content in the, in the life. Another was humour, that they could laugh at their mistakes, that they could laugh at the winding road that life can become without taking it on too heavily. And the other was faith, that they just trusted there was a, in the bigger picture, that everything was fine the way they'd lived. And they had a faith to go home to, sort of thing. So.
17:49 Rangan Chatterjee? Do you mean religious faith?
17:51 Speaker 01 Yes, yeah. And so I'm not saying that every person who had faith didn't have regrets. There were plenty of people that had regrets, that had a religious faith. But of those who didn't have regrets, they believed in something larger, and not always religious, but a spiritual belief, and humour and family connection. Yeah. Which is interesting, like, you know, it's a whole.
18:14 Rangan Chatterjee? So, relationships.
18:17 Speaker 01 Yep.
18:18 Rangan Chatterjee? Humour.
18:19 Speaker 01 Yes.
18:20 Rangan Chatterjee? And a belief in something greater than themselves.
18:22 Speaker 01 Yes, yep.
18:25 Rangan Chatterjee? It's really interesting to me, because
18:29 Rangan Chatterjee? I always wonder about how we can tackle issues, like are there
18:35 Rangan Chatterjee? ways we can focus on particular ones, or can we still address those issues by focusing on something else? So I wonder if instead of focusing on those five regrets, which I think would help anyone anyway, but as a thought experiment,
18:51 Rangan Chatterjee? if you didn't look at those five regrets, and instead you looked at, what are the three qualities that people who have a regret-free life exhibit? I find it really interesting to go, okay, number one, I need to focus on my relationships. How many times do we need to hear that relationships are what make up life?
19:12 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:13 Rangan Chatterjee? You know, whether it's Robert Waldinker from the Harvard Study of Happiness, who over eighty-five years, they say the number one factor for health and happiness is the quality of your relationships. Right? So we can see that from scientific studies, we can also feel it intuitively ourselves. We kind of know, you don't almost need the science to teach us that. Right? So that makes sense.
19:36 Rangan Chatterjee? Humour. I guess that's not what I'd thought about, but that's really interesting to hear that that's what, that's a commonality you found. Why do you think that is?
19:47 Speaker 01 Well, they just had a different approach to life, so they didn't take life seriously.
19:50 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
19:51 Speaker 01 And so if you're not taking life so seriously, then you're not judging yourself so harshly either.
19:55 Rangan Chatterjee? Got it.
19:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:56 Rangan Chatterjee? So that makes sense, so we can focus on bringing that into our life. And I think that last one, a belief in something greater than yourself. I mean, again, how many times do we need to hear that? It can be for some people through religion, for other people through spirituality. For some people, it's through nature.
20:17 Speaker 01 It's through nature, that's right.
20:20 Rangan Chatterjee? Two of the regrets, the way you've written them down at least, have the word courage in them, okay? I wish I had the courage to live my life, not the life others expected of me, and I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. So the obvious question is, what does the word courage mean?
20:45 Speaker 01 I think it just, for me, it means breaking through the resistance. And any fear is just resistance to either what is or what could be. And so to me, courage is that force that can say, I'm scared, but I'm still going to do this. It's like the dismantling of the walls that stop us doing things.
21:14 Rangan Chatterjee? And what stops us
21:18 Rangan Chatterjee? from having courage?
21:20 Speaker 01 Being scared of our potential, being as amazing as we can be. Yeah. So, and that can be being scared of what other people think of us. It can be scared of failing, which really just comes down to what other people think of us. It can be scared of wasting time, trying for something and it not landing how we think. But we're still going to grow through that and we're still going to become a better person as a result of anything like that. And all of us make mistakes. That's part, that's how we learn. We learn by our mistakes and it's part of the imperfection of being human. And so.
22:04 Speaker 01 You know, none of us are going to go through life without making mistakes, unless we don't live a life, unless we don't live, we just stay on the lounge and watch Netflix and we don't have a go at honouring our dreams and then, well, there's a mistake in itself. But if we're actually going to have a go at living our dreams and finding, and when I say living the dreams, it all sounds, you know, all very trendy and cliched, but it's different for everyone. It could just mean living a slower life, living a simpler life. It might be travelling the world first class, but it may just be to be more present with your child or to be a happier person or to learn an instrument in old age, whatever.
22:43 Speaker 01 But, you know, you're going to make mistakes if you're going to grow and try and be the, become the best person you want to be or as close to that as possible. But whether a mistake turns into a regret is really only our opinion on it. That's, that's all it is. It's us beating ourselves up for years and years and years over a mistake and all of us have made mistakes. We can all look back and cringe over stuff we've done. I'm sure I certainly can, but it's only self judgement. And so if we can have a bit of compassion for our younger selves, then they're just mistakes. They're not regrets.
23:23 Rangan Chatterjee? Hope you enjoyed that bite sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest? If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles of books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small, yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend.
24:05 Rangan Chatterjee? You can sign up for it free of charge at drchattity.com/fridayfive. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.
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