BITESIZE | Life Lessons People Learn Too Late | Dr Gabor Maté #515

Do you live with regrets? In today’s clip from episode 440, I’m joined by fellow physician, author, speaker and friend, the incredible Dr Gabor Maté. In this clip we explore some common life regrets through the lens of Gabor's thoughts and work and he offers some thought-provoking insights on each. Gabor shares that living with ‘no regrets’ isn’t about erasing mistakes but understanding them, recognising that you did the best you could at the time, and offering your past self compassion. As with all my conversations with Gabor, this one is packed with wisdom, heart, and actionable insights. Gabor has been a regular guest on Feel Better Live More since his first appearance way back in 2018, and we both agreed that this was perhaps our favourite conversation to date. Thanks to our sponsor https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore 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 Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/440 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's bite-sized episode is sponsored by AG1, a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over seven years. Now, this is the time of year when our immune systems are under the most pressure. It's natural to look for extra ways to support our immune defences. But most people don't want to juggle multiple pills. They want something simple, effective, and easy to stick with. AG1 is a daily health drink that provides key immunity-supporting nutrients: vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc, and selenium, all of which contribute to the normal function of the immune system.

• 0:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  These nutrients are included in highly bioavailable forms, meaning they are much easier for the body to absorb and use. And the best thing, of course, is that all this goodness comes in one convenient, tasty daily serving. For a limited time only, get 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.

• 1:20Rangan 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. In today's clip from episode 440, I'm joined by fellow physician, author, speaker, and friends, the incredible Dr Gable Mate. In this clip, we explore some of the common life regrets that people have at the end of their lives, and Gable shares his thought-provoking insights.

• 2:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  The second regret, I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

• 2:05Speaker 01

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

• 2:48Speaker 01

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

• 3:30Speaker 01

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

• 3:51Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does that say?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Well, do you know Winnie the Pooh?

• 4:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Not personally.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  The book is always one of my favorite books. The end of that book would bring tears to my eyes for years because how it ends is Christopher Robin and a little boy now has to go to school. And he's telling his friends, the toy animals, that he won't be able to play with them so much anymore.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  And in the end, Christopher and Winnie, the bear of little brain, who's the smartest of the whole lot, and they walk off together and the book ends with the statement, something like, "And whatever they do, wherever they go in the enchanted forest, the little boy and his bear will always be playing together." And that phrase would bring tears to my eyes for years.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Because play is so important and joy is so important. And that's what these people are talking about. And they didn't allow themselves to experience it. They sacrificed the play and the joy for all these other things.

• 5:08Speaker 01

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

• 5:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  In that regret, is the word happier?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does happiness mean to you?

• 5:50Speaker 01

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

• 6:12Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 6:18Speaker 01

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

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Rather than the heart-to-heart human contact with people that matter to me. And again, people are driven to be that way. And when they look back on their life, they regret it because nobody is as often be said, nobody ever on their deathbed regrets not going to the office often enough. But they do regret the heart connection that they sacrificed. One of my books, When the Body Says No, that's the title. And in the middle of normal, there's a chapter called Before the Body Says No. Where in your life are you not saying no?

• 7:37Speaker 01

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

• 8:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. You seem to be someone who has this love of life, this vigor, this message you want to share. You seem to be traveling all over the globe. But a lot of 80-year-olds are not doing that.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? And the longevity space within medicine has really exploded over the last few years. People love talking about longevity. Right? Yes, some people want to know, how can I not necessarily live longer, but be independent, mobile, vital as long as I live? So health span versus lifespan.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I get that.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  But there's a lot of talk these days about extending lifespan, living to 150 and beyond and all kinds of crazy stuff, right? And one of my fears is that in pursuit of living longer,

• 8:57Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  If we could live to 200,

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:12Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 9:17Speaker 01

  You know what? You're talking my language because, to tell the truth, to coin a phrase, all this stuff about longevity bores me to death, you know?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  I just don't care, you know? What really matters is what does this moment bring us? Or what can we bring to this moment? You know, let the future take care of itself. You know, like Jesus says, "Take no thought for tomorrow."

• 9:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 01

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

• 10:28Speaker 01

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

• 10:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  There's a huge difference. So I think there's a natural reverence for age that senior cultures would respect and modern society kind of...

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Dismisses, you know, now, do I wish that my hair was blacker and more curly the way it used to be? Yeah, I do, you know, and it wasn't gray and my hair wasn't thinning at the top and I sure I wish that, but.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  At the same time, I would not want to be as unconscious as I was.

• 11:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  When my hair was blacker and curlier, you know?

• 11:33Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  And the final question I want to put to you is about the word regret. I have been playing with the idea over the last 12 months or so that regret is actually a form of perfectionism.

• 11:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I actually now very much subscribe to the philosophy of no regrets, but not in the, not in the kind of derogatory way, you don't want to live my life my way, it doesn't matter who comes to my way.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:09Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Based upon where I was in life.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  At that time.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:18Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 12:37Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 12:51Speaker 01

  I think chronic regret is debilitating. It's a lack of self forgiveness. It's also kind of egotism of that somehow I'm that important.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  It's quite something to recognize, I do recognize that some of the way I parented my kids, the way I showed up, I've often talked about this on your program too, wasn't the best for them, but it was the best I could do at the time. So it's not the question of justify anything, but it's also not dwelling on the past. Regret is to dwell on the past. And what's the point? It's quite something to recognize. That I did things that had I known differently, I would not have done the same way. That's just learning.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Regret is an emotional state of that values the past more than the present. And it accuses yourself of

• 13:56Speaker 01

  doing things for which you had no consciousness to do otherwise. So that's where I stand with the regret.

• 14:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Gabor, you know what a big fan I am of your work. For someone who has heard us speak today,

• 14:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  something connected with them, something you said spoke to them and they thought, wow, yeah, I don't express my emotions. I'm not living a life that is true to me.

• 14:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  What are some of your final words for them?

• 14:28Speaker 01

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

• 14:48Speaker 01

  In a compassionate way. So you don't do an interrogation of yourself like you're prosecuting detective. Why did you or why did you not? But compassionately, why did you not? Why did you? And if you ask these questions compassionately and with curiosity, the answers will emerge as will the capacity for you to make yourself, for you to make different choices as you move forward. So where there wasn't choice before because you were compelled or driven, now you can have some freedom if you're willing to be curious. So curiosity is the word.

• 15:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  Gabor, you're now eighty years old. Does it in some way change the way you see yourself? Or I guess reflect differently on who you are and where you are in your life?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  On most days I can say this and not on every day for sure. But it's a kind of ease has entered my life. Even with all that's going on in the world, I'm just sort of more.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  I don't struggle with the way things are so much. I mean, like them or not like them, I may react or not respond or but there's not a struggle against just the beingness of things. I'm certainly noticing that. And, and the people I had a visitor a week ago who I hadn't seen for a few years and she says you've changed. And I said, oh yeah, she says you've become softer, you know? And if that's true, it's, it's good. It's a sign of kind of loosening inside.

• 16:31Rangan 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.

• 17:13Rangan 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.