BITESIZE | How To Reinvent Your Life: 3 Powerful Habits That Really Work | Dr Rangan Chatterjee #556

Today’s episode is full of practical wisdom that will help you deal with stress more effectively, build your resilience, improve your mental wellbeing and transform your physical health. It will also help you with self-compassion, enhance your sense of calm and help you feel more in control of yourself and the world around you. 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 505 of the podcast which was a solo episode celebrating the launch of my latest book ‘Make Change That Lasts: 9 Simple Ways To Break Free From The Habits That Hold You Back’. In the full episode I shared 5 of the most important yet under-appreciated mindset shifts you could make right now, which will immediately improve the quality of your life. In this clip, I share 3 of those powerful ideas. And for those ideas that resonate with you as you listen, you could think about how to start applying them in your own life today. Order MAKE CHANGE THAT LASTS: UK version https://amzn.to/3Kt5rUK US & Canada version https://amzn.to/3RyO3SL Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore⁠⁠ Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/505 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com.⁠⁠ DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 0:41Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:20Rangan 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 505 of the podcast, which was a solo episode that I released to celebrate the launch of my sixth book, Make Change That Lasts: Nine Simple Ways to Break Free From the Habits That Hold You Back. In the full episode, I shared five of the most important, yet underappreciated mindset

• 2:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  shifts that you could make right now, which will immediately improve the quality of your life. And in this clip, I share three of those powerful ideas.

• 2:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Habit number one, reframe your relationship with your past. Okay, this is big. There are so many ideas within this concept that I explore in Make Change at Last, but for this podcast, the one idea I wanted to share with you was about regret. Are you someone who has a lot of regrets? If you look up regret in the dictionary, one of the definitions is a feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment over an occurrence or something that one has done or failed to do.

• 2:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's interesting, isn't it, this concept of regret, a feeling of sadness or disappointment? And I think for me, that's one of the reasons why I believe regret to be unhelpful for so many different people, because I think those feelings for many of us lead to guilt and shame. And if we are being consumed with guilt and/or shame, it's actually very, very hard to make meaningful change in our lives. It really, really is. Every single behavior in our life either comes from the energy of love or the energy of fear, and things like guilt and shame are downstream from fear. So when we try and change our life for the better, we try and

• 3:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  bring in new helpful habits and shed previous unhelpful ones. If it's guilt or shame that is driving us, that can be problematic. But this also relates to a problem that is widespread in society called perfectionism. Rates of perfectionism are rising rapidly in many parts of the world, you know, and I definitely suffered from perfectionism for much of my life. I would call myself a perfectionist in recovery. And I've actually come to believe that regret is a form of perfectionism.

• 4:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  At its core is the belief that we have the capability to be perfect and make perfect decisions. And the fact that we didn't means that we've somehow failed. But the truth is that all of us are imperfect. And when we do make mistakes, those mistakes are usually not apparent until sometime after. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't learn from our past and make better decisions going forward. Of course, we can. I'm simply saying that it doesn't really help us to look back on our past mistakes with negativity and guilt. I think it's much better to be compassionate

• 4:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  to ourselves and accept that we made certain choices in the past which had certain consequences. And if faced with similar situations again, we'll choose to make different ones. If we could have done better, we would have done. And now that we do, we will.

• 5:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think it's really, really important that you spend a little bit of time thinking about your own relationship with your past. Are you consumed with regret over things that you either did or did not do? And perhaps a slightly different way, and hopefully a helpful way to look at this, is with this idea that every single person is doing the best that they can. Well, that's a belief that you can choose to take. You can choose to apply to other people. You can choose to apply to yourself. And I genuinely do believe that we are always doing the best that we can based upon what we know and based upon the current situation in our

• 6:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  life. You don't have to choose to take that view on the world. After all, it's a belief that we can choose to adopt certain beliefs or not adopt them. The question is always, though, what is going to be helpful for me? I contend that if that's the view you take on the world, I think it's a much calmer, happier, and more compassionate way to live. And then let's just apply that to ourselves through the lens of regret. Let's say, I don't know, you're in your 40s right now, and you're regretting something that you did in your 20s. Do you think that's really fair? Are you the same person that you were five years ago? Or even one year ago? Or have you changed?

• 6:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Have you updated your beliefs somewhat about the world? I know I have. I'm constantly evolving and updating my beliefs. It seems a little bit harsh for me now in my 40s to judge my 22 year old self about something they did or did not do. Back then, I was doing the best that I could based upon what I knew. If I'm faced with a similar situation again now, sure. With my increased knowledge and life experience, I may choose to act differently. And I believe that for most of us, that is a much more helpful way to look at our past.

• 7:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Instead of regretting things in our past and being consumed with guilt and shame, I prefer instead to look back at our past to help us make better decisions in the present and in the future. If we could have done better, we would have done. And now that we do, we will. Habit number two, take less offence. Now, when you heard me say that, what came up for you?

• 7:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Did you think, what on earth has taking less offence got to do with me improving the quality of my life and improving my health? Well, it actually has a lot to do with it. Because I think it speaks to what I consider to be one of the most important and underappreciated aspects of making meaningful change. And that's emotional stress. We often don't think about that internal emotional stress that we create within ourselves by the way we interact with the world. And once you truly understand where this emotional stress is coming from, and how it's actually you that's generating it,

• 8:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  you really have a lot of power, a lot of choice, and you realise just how many of your habits, let's say, sugar or alcohol or three hours doom scrolling in the evening, you realise just how many of them are your way of trying to neutralise that emotional stress. And that's the key point. Emotional stress is not neutral. You will have to neutralise it in some way or another. You can do that in healthy ways, going for a walk, talking to a friend. Or more commonly, we turn to things like alcohol and sugar and more scrolling to compensate for that internal stress.

• 9:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you are someone who is regularly going around taking offence to the actions and the words of others, you are constantly walking around generating emotional stress. Now, a key point to understand here is that nothing is inherently offensive. Just think about that for a minute. Let's talk about a comment or an email, for example, that you may find offensive. You may take offence to. That email or comment cannot be inherently offensive. If it was, every single person reading that comment or reading that email would be taking offence to it.

• 10:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  The fact that not everyone does means that it's not the comment or email that is offensive. It's something within us that's been activated that has caused us to want to take offence. Now, once you truly understand that point, it's actually really liberating. Because it's very hard to make meaningful change in the long term in our lives if we're constantly blaming the world around us for our internal responses. Now, I want to make something really clear. I'm not saying that we need to like all the actions and comments from other people. I'm saying that you don't need to take offence.

• 10:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  You can train yourself to stay relatively emotionally neutral, which means if actually you do want to address the behaviour or the contents of an email by someone else, say your boss, you're much better able to because you didn't take offence and you stayed emotionally neutral. So I think this is a really, really important point. There's another reason why taking less offence is really good for our wellbeing. Stress. Chronic stress is thought to be behind 80 to 90% of what a medical doctor sees in any given day because chronic stress impacts every single organ system in the body.

• 11:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  And if you're someone who regularly is taking offence to the world around you, you are going to be experiencing a lot of internal chronic stress. So what can we actually do about it? The key point to understand is that it's you who's generating that offence. When you really understand what's going on, when you choose to take offence, it's actually very, very clear that it's not really possible for anyone else to offend us. It's our nervous system that is reacting, generating the response, not anybody else's. The fuse that is being lit resides within us.

• 12:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  And when we place the blame elsewhere, we give power to other people, even complete strangers on the internet. So if we want to thrive in the long term, we simply have to give up our reliance on blaming the external world for our internal responses. Now, in my book, I have a few practical exercises to help you take Less offence to help you deal with criticism in a much more helpful way. But one of the exercises I want to share with you right now is what I call in the book, the widen the gap exercise. The next time you find yourself wanting to take offence at something, see if you can take a pause.

• 12:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, you might be able to work through the situation in your mind right there in the moment. If not, you might want to do it at the end of the day in a journaling exercise, for example. Go through the following step-by-step process to help you gain clarity on the situation and your emotions surrounding it. Okay, number one. What is it that is causing you to want to take offence? Number two. What is it specifically that is bothering you? Number three. Is it the intention of that person to offend you? Number four.

• 13:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  What story about the situation could you write in your mind that would add compassion and understanding? Number five. Can you imagine a scenario whereby you would understand why that person has that point of view? For example, their childhood, early life experience, friends. Does this change how you feel about them? Number seven. Is there any possibility that you might have misinterpreted things and got the wrong end of the stick? And finally, number eight. What would happen if you did not choose to take offence here?

• 14:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  With regular practice of this exercise, you will find that you feel offended less often and are able to take a different, more empowering perspective in many situations. Now, we just want to go back to point seven for just a moment. Is there any possibility that you might have misinterpreted things and got the wrong end of the stick? This is a really important one, and it speaks to this wider idea that you may have heard me talk about before, which is this idea that we see the world through the state of our nervous system. So have you ever misinterpreted an email?

• 15:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  And again, this really speaks to this idea that most events in life are neutral. It's the perspective we take on them that determines its impact on us. So an email fundamentally is neutral. It's the perspective we take. And the reality is, if you stop paying attention, you will find that a lot of the time you interpret the email differently depending on your emotional state. For example, if you've had a weekend off and you've been totally relaxed and chilled, then you could get an email on the Monday morning and interpret it a certain way. Maybe you can see a different perspective. Whereas if that was on a Friday afternoon, that same email and you had had a busy work

• 15:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  week and a lot of stress, you would interpret that same email completely differently. Because it's within you. The state of your nervous system often determines how you view the situations in your life. And that's one of the wider points about why I'm so passionate about people training themselves and learning the skill of taking less offence. Because if you're chronically taking offence, you're walking around thinking, "The world is against you. Everyone else is acting in the wrong way. If they acted differently, I would feel better. People should be more careful about what they post on social media. Their comment is why I feel bad."

• 16:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  You are the one generating huge amounts of emotional stress by the way you are interacting with the world. And over time, that chronic stress is harmful to your health, your happiness and your relationships. Habit number three: do something hard every single day. Okay. What is your relationship like with discomfort? Are you someone who naturally likes to embrace it? Or are you someone who tries to avoid it at all costs? Well, look, if you are someone who tries to avoid it, please don't feel bad. Humans are hardwired for comfort.

• 17:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  We want to make our lives more and more comfortable. That's why today we've got apartments, houses with heating, air conditioning, all kinds of modern inventions that in so many ways have improved the quality of our lives. But I would say about 50 years ago or so, something changed in the world. Prior to that, our desire for comfort and to make our lives easier actually improved our lives. But I would argue today, our desire for comfort is not only harming our lives, it's actually killing us.

• 17:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Most of the chronic diseases that we are suffering from today can be directly linked to our reliance on comfort. Take type 2 diabetes, for example, which currently affects around 7 million people in the UK alone. Now, type 2 diabetes is a condition that occurs because excess fat has accumulated inside our bodies, which damages our metabolism. This causes our blood glucose levels to rise, which results in kidney, eye circulation, and nerve problems, to name just a few. Now, a condition like this can pretty much only exist in a world of comfort and convenience.

• 18:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you look at traditional societies or hunter-gatherer societies, everyday life is a little bit uncomfortable.

• 18:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  In fact, for most of our existence, humans have had to move their bodies every day to acquire their food and cook it. It would have been almost impossible for excess fat to build up inside our bodies over a long period of time, with all the damaging effects on our health that this causes. Our bodies still expect this kind of daily effort and movement. And the truth is, today, most of us live lives of excessive physical comfort, with our sofas, sanitary jobs, cars, and home deliveries of anything you could possibly imagine, and it's literally killing us.

• 19:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  The scientific research shows us clearly that a lack of movement is one of the leading causes of premature death globally, increasing our risk of cancer, obesity, heart attacks, strokes, and type 2 diabetes. As we rely more and more on things outside ourselves to solve all of our problems for us, the ability of our own minds and bodies to survive and thrive deteriorates. I said their minds and bodies. How does a reliance on comfort affect our minds? I think this is a really, really important point, and arguably one of the most important

• 20:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  reasons why we should embrace some form of discomfort every day. Let's think about our moods for a moment, and the relationship between our moods and discomfort. If we get used to certain things happening, if we become reliant, overly reliant on comfort, and then we don't get it for whatever reason, we can start to feel bad, we can experience a low mood and start complaining. It wasn't that long ago that I was on a train down to London with a friend who was actually getting really frustrated because the app that was supposed to get a bottle of water delivered to his seat wouldn't work.

• 20:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now honestly, I reflected on that situation and thought, this is absolutely absurd. There we were in a warm carriage in the middle of winter, travelling at over 100 miles an hour to one of the great capital cities of the world. And my friend's mood had been spoiled because he actually had to stand up and walk to the cafe in a different carriage to get a drink. And this is actually one of the traps of modern life, we're seduced into becoming reliant on companies and services which when they work, they make us briefly more comfortable, whilst at the same time putting us in a state of permanent dependency. And that's the issue when our lives become too comfortable, right?

• 21:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  When our lives are that comfortable, we start to get stressed out and frustrated when we have to experience even just a little bit of discomfort. And often those little bits of discomfort are things that we've always had to experience. We've just unconditioned ourselves from it. And this actually causes us a lot of problems because no matter how hard companies and services work to remove problems from our life, we will never stop experiencing them, no matter how easy life becomes. There's plenty more that I expand upon around this concept in chapter four of Make Change That Lasts.

• 22:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  But in terms of giving you some practical take homes right now, I always think about, how can you start to embrace discomfort every single day in your life? And please remember, this doesn't need to be something massive or a big gesture. There are simple things that we can do each morning that are basically us embracing discomfort. Doing your meditation each morning takes more effort than drinking your coffee while scrolling Instagram, but it will help you feel calmer and more in control. Turning your smartphone off one hour before bed takes more effort than watching YouTube

• 23:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  on it, but will likely improve intimacy with your partner as well as quality of your sleep. Taking the stairs to get to the supermarket parking lot is harder than taking the elevator. But over time will make you stronger and more resilient. Right, so there's all kinds of things that you can think about doing. You could take a cold shower, if that's your thing, at the end of your warm shower, even 10 or 15 seconds. Right, it doesn't have to be something really extreme, like a cold plunge with freezing cold water. Just a small cold shower each day is you intentionally embracing discomfort.

• 23:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, look, there is one study that actually shows that people who take a 30-second cold shower each day at the end of their warm shower reports fewer sick days than those who don't. But for me, the most important benefits are psychological. You're doing something hard when you don't need to, and that's where the value lies. That's why it's so important to regularly do uncomfortable things. Sure, a lot of those practices have physical benefits. But for me, their real benefit is psychological. It's about changing the way we feel about ourselves. How resilient do we feel? How capable do we feel?

• 24:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  And in the book, I have this whole section on creating your own rules for discomfort. I have a rule that I always take the stairs. And rules can be really, really important because they help get you away from constant decision-making in the moment. Shall I take the stairs? Or shall I take the left? Hmm, I don't know. Oh, you know, I'll just take the left. Though because I made that internal rule, I will pretty much always take the stairs now, unless there's a really good reason not to. So have a think about what would work in your life. Which daily act of discomfort do you think you could do and that you could do regularly? Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip.

• 25:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.