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

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Today's episode is a bonus episode to celebrate the release of the audiobook version of my brand new book, Make Change that Lasts. Nine simple ways to break free from the habits that hold you back. Although the paperback version of the book is not out until January 2, 2025, the audiobook version, which I am narrating, has been released today, one week early. So if you want to get hold of it, it is available now in all the usual places. Amazon, Audible, Apple Books and Spotify. So in this bonus solo podcast, I want to share with you five powerful ideas or habits that will transform your life in many different ways. These are ideas and habits that I explore further in my book. But whether you choose to get the book or not, my hope is that by simply listening to these ideas and applying them in your life, you're going to be able to make meaningful changes in your life that will impact your health, your happiness and your relationships. So let's get to it. This is of course a bit different to my usual podcast episodes where I talk to a guest. But I'm sitting here in my studio, it's raining outside, I've got a pot of coffee and and I'm gonna share with you what I consider to be five of the most important ideas that you can be thinking about right now. That honestly they will change the quality of your life. So bear with me, listen to what I have to say, and the ones that speak to you, think about how you can start applying them to improve the quality of your life. Okay, so habit number one, take less offense. Now when you heard me say that what came up for you, that you think what on earth is 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, you really have a lot of power, a lot of choice, a lot. And you realize just how many of your habits, let's say sugar or alcohol or 3 hours doom scrolling in the evening, you realize Just how many of them are your way of trying to neutralize that emotional stress? And that's the key point. Emotional stress is not neutral. You will have to neutralize it in some way or another. You can do that in healthy ways. Going for a walk, going to the gym, burning it off, talking to a friend. Or more commonly, we turn to things like alcohol and sugar and more caffeine and more scrolling to compensate for that internal stress. So let's bring this back to taking less offense. If you are someone who is regularly going around taking offense 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 offense to it. 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 offense. You can train yourself to stay relatively emotionally neutral. Which means if actually you do want to address the behavior or the context of an email by someone else, say your boss, you're much better able to because you didn't take offense and you stayed emotionally neutral. So I think this is a really, really important point. Now, I mentioned already how this emotional stress that we generate leads us to a lot of these problematic behaviors. A lot of these behaviors that we're actually trying so hard to cut back on, reduce, maybe avoid. But there's another reason why taking less offense is really good for our well being 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. Your brain, your immune system, your gut function, your blood pressure, your blood sugar, all these things are negatively impacted by chronic stress. And if you're someone who regularly is taking offense 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 offense, 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. 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 offense, 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 offense at something, see if you can take a pause. 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, where you reflect on when you did take offense of the day and figure out why that bothered you so much. Either way, whether it's in the moment or in a journaling exercise in the evening, 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 offense? Number two, what is it specifically that is bothering you? Number three, is it the intention of that person to offend you? Number four, what story about the situation could you write in your mind that would add compassion and understanding? Can you imagine a scenario whereby you would understand why that person has that point of view? For example, their childhood upbringing, parents, 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, 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? 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 week and a lot of stress and you're a bit sleep deprived, 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 offense. Because if you're chronically taking offense, 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, people should be more careful about what they post on social media. Their comment is why I feel bad. I'm going to take offense to that. What you don't realize is that 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 two, stop complaining. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, once said, don't be overheard complaining, not even to yourself. Now, why is not complaining so important for our health, our happiness, and our relationships? Well, for so many reasons. But one of the big reasons is because of this idea that I have already been talking about emotional stress. People who regularly complain are generating huge amounts of internal stress within them, which they then need to neutralize, often with unhelpful behaviors. Right? So complaining less will help your behaviors. It's also going to help your relationships. Because people don't generally like to be around people who complain a lot. It's not that pleasant. So I think it's worth you asking yourself, and perhaps you've already done this, how much do you complain? I don't know if you've ever done that before. It's a very powerful exercise. You just try and go through the day and note down how much you complain. You can also do this over the course of the week, and it's very, very powerful. And if you want an even deeper insight into how much you complain, you might want to ask your partner or a friend or a work colleague. They may have a slightly different perspective to you, a perspective that can be very, very helpful. Because basically every time you complain. What are you saying? You are saying that I am disappointed and surprised by the natural order of life. What do I mean by that? Well, the natural order of life is that things are always going to go wrong. Things are always going to happen in a way that perhaps you don't want or you don't expect them to. And there's a chapter in my new book called Expect Adversity. And in that chapter I really talk about this idea that actually, if you can train yourself to expect adversity, when that adversity does arise, you're not stressed out by it because you knew it was coming. So let me frame that another way. Businesses really, really understand this idea. They have a concept which I think is really valuable for us to apply to life. It's called shrink. So let's take a supermarket, right? If you're a supermarket and you're trying to plan how much profit you're going to make in the year, you know that some things that you don't want to happen are actually going to happen. People are going to steal some of your stock, right? That's going to happen. Some of your stock, despite your best planning, is going to go off. They're not surprised by that. They build it into their business plan, right? That's their shrinkage they built it in. And we can actually apply that concept in our own lives, because we've all got shrinkage waiting for us in our futures. When we look ahead, we can't predict what adverse experiences are coming our way. The only guarantee is that they are coming for us in some way or another. But too many of us are reliant on this myth that nothing in our lives will ever go wrong. And basically, we set ourselves up for misery and sickness. Now, I want to tell you a little story about a close friend of mine, a gp, who had a complaint made against them about the misdiagnosis of cancer. Now, first of all, I want to acknowledge that if you're a family and that you feel that cancer has been misdiagnosed or was diagnosed too late. I totally understand why you wouldn't want to take that further and get some answers, but when I'm talking about complaining less, that's not really the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm trying to make is the impact that complaints had on my GP friends. Now, if you look rationally at the statistics, they show that in the UK, a doctor, on average, over the course of a 40 year career, will be sued four times. Okay? So this is the standard level of shrinkage that any doctor should really expect. It doesn't matter how good you are, if you see enough patients, you are going to get complaints. You can apply that concept to driving. If you drive enough miles and for enough years, the likelihood is, even if you are the best driver on the planet, at some point you're likely to get into a scrape or, or a crash of some sort. Okay, it's just a numbers game now, my friends. Even though he had nothing to do with the misdiagnosis of cancer, that complaint ran for two years. And during those two years, he really, really struggled. He was constantly stressed, he barely slept, he drank heavily. His emotional and physical health went through a slow but steady decline. And look, this may seem like quite an extreme case, right? Something like that is always going to be a little bit stressful. But it is possible to train yourself to take a different mindset. The thriving mindset is one that actually expects adversity and says, hey, look, I've been a doctor for two decades. I've seen tens of thousands of patients, sometimes in stressful time, pressured consultations. It was inevitable that one day I would be subject to a serious complaint. It is possible to actually train your mindset to not be surprised. And when you do that, you stay calmer, you say less stress, and you actually are much better able to navigate life. Now, my friend's example might appear to be quite an extreme one, but you can apply that same principle, like I've already mentioned, to an everyday activity like driving. We could choose to expect that we will never have a crash, or we could look at the odds and accept that if we drive for long enough, there is a strong chance that we will be involved in one at some point. Now, let me explain an incident from my own life that I think really lands this point. A few years ago, I was asleep in my house when my mom's emergency buzzer went off. So my mum, who lives five minutes away from me, she has a emergency buzzer around her neck. So if she is to Fall and she can't get up, she can call for help. So I was asleep one night and my phone rang. So in a haze I picked it up and it was a lady who'd been communicating with my mum over the intercom saying, hey, your mum's had a fall, she can't get up, she needs some help. Are you able to go around and help? I said, yeah, sure, just let her know over the intercom that I'll be there within a few minutes. So I just woken up, I was fast asleep in my pajamas. I got into my car, I drove round, I went to see mum, checked she was okay, helped her back up, got her into bed, got her settled, and when I was happy that she was okay, I said, hey Mum, any problems, phone me in the night. I'll keep my phone with me, but I'm going to go back home now, I'll see you in the morning. So I got into my car in mum's drive. I reversed out of the drive straight into a parked car on the opposite side of the street. Now, the older version of me, the one who would complain a lot and not expect adversity, would probably have done something like this. I can't believe that happened. Typical. I've got all this work on now. On top of all that work, I've got to sort out the car phone, insurance and that kind of mindset, the self pity mindset would have led to, to other behaviors, other habits, things like sugar, and that's a bit of sugar to soothe that internal stress, a bit more caffeine, a bit more indulgence because I deserve it, because the world is against me. But I've trained myself and I'll share the exercise or I'll share one of the exercises in just a moment that you can do. But because I've been changing actively my mindset around adversity, what I did in real time, which I was really pleased about, was I had a completely different response. Basically, I remember I went into the car, I just sat there and I said, oh well, first of all, Rongan, no one's hurt, right? No one's in that other car. I'm not hurt, no harm done. Secondly, I've got insurance, no big deal, they'll sort this out. And thirdly, I said, Rongan, if you're going to keep coming round to your mum's house to help her up off the floor and get her settled when you're half asleep, it was only a matter of time before this happened because of the way I interacted with that adverse situation. The next few days of my life go completely differently because I haven't generated a self pity story. I have no need to engage in a lot of those behaviors. So I was totally calm that evening when I went to bed. And the following day I don't need the extra caffeine, the extra sugar, the extra alcohol, the extra few hours scrolling because those things are so often, more often than not, in my view, they're there to alleviate this internal stress that we have created by the way we interacted with the world. And that's why I started off in this second habit talking about complaining. How often you complain is a really strong signal to how often you are being disappointed by the natural order of life. So let me share with you a very simple exercise from my new book that's going to help you reframe your complaints. Every time you catch yourself complaining about something without exception, I want you to stop and do one of two things. Every time you catch yourself complaining about something without exception, I want you to pause and either turn it into an action, basically you do something about it, or. Or reframe it into a moment of gratitude. This is such a powerful exercise and if you do it regularly, I promise you it will change the way you interact with adversity, the way you interact with life. If you choose gratitude, you are reminding yourself how much worse things could be and how lucky you are in so many other ways. And if you choose action, you are basically embracing your own power and agency and ability to make the situation better. Put more succinctly, choosing gratitude will stop you thinking like a victim and choosing action will stop you acting like one. So it's a powerful exercise. I encourage you to give it a go. And over time you will find that you start complaining less. Habit number three, ask yourself the anti busyness question every single day. Okay guys, so I'm very shortly going to explain to you what that question is. But before I get to that question, let me try and explain the problem that question is trying to address. Busyness, right? So many of us confuse busyness with success. Our culture equates being busy with being successful. This creates the toxic idea that if we have space in our lives, we are failing. And this reliance on busyness is widespread and it's incredibly harmful to our mental and our physical health. A recent survey showed that 88% of UK office workers have experienced some degree of burnout in the past two years. That's a staggering statistic. I don't think it's a very favorable take on the state of modern society. But I think many of us understand what that feels like to be busy all the time. Now, why are we so busy? Yes, there are external pressures on our time. Maybe there's lots of things that you have to do for your job, and I understand that. But I think for many of us, it actually goes much deeper than that. I'm not sure if you ever heard the conversation I had with Will Storr. It was episode 354 of this podcast. And in that conversation, Will told me about scientific research that has found status to be a universal driver in all humans. We all want status, but contrary to what you might assume, seeking status doesn't mean chasing wealth or celebrity or high powered jobs. It's simply the feeling that we're offering value to the world around us. I think that's really key. I think for so many of us, our reliance on busyness comes from a fear of insignificance. Right. Back in the hunter gatherer tribes that we evolved in, we would have received status for being a great forager of sweet potatoes, a great hunter, a wonderful storyteller, someone who guards the tribe at night. Right. We would know on a daily basis what value we held for the people around us. But I think for many of us in today's culture, where we've often moved away from our tribe, our communities, our families for job opportunities and maybe better pay, I think this creates a deep unconscious fear that we are not of value, which is one of the reasons why we are hell bent on trying to prove that we have status by always appearing busy. Now, the truth is, rather than being a sign of success, busyness can often be a sign of laziness. Now listen, I wanna make it very clear. Some people, of course, cannot help being incredibly busy. Perhaps you are a single parent struggling to pay your bills and bring out your kids. Perhaps you're a mother or father who's trying to run a business, spend time with your children, and care for elderly parents without much support. I understand that, but I'm saying for many of us, our reliance on busyness is a signal that we haven't organized our life properly and are too focused on one aspect of it at the expense of all others. And that's why I created this anti business question. It's very simple, it's very powerful. I do it every morning and I'd encourage you to answer it every morning as well. And it goes like this. What is the most important thing I have to do today? It's a simple question, but it's Very, very powerful. And one of the reasons I think it's so powerful is because in a world where our to do lists are never done, and just think about that in your own life, when was the last time your to do list was complete? Because we live in a time where let's say you have a lot of emails in your inbox and let's say that you managed to clear them all and get through your to do list and you take a break and go to your kitchen, make a cup of tea to switch off and chill out for 20 minutes or so. In those 20 minutes, you may have received 20 brand new emails. There is simply nothing you can do about that. Right? Those emails may or may not come irrespective of what you do. So I think this question becomes really, really helpful in this modern world where our to do lists are never done. It helps you prioritize, it helps you make a decision. It encourages you every single morning to choose and go, no, today this is the most important thing I have to do today. If you say in the morning what the most important thing that you have to do is and you make sure you do it, this is how your life starts to change. I promise you this is one of the most important and effective things you can do. And I'd really, really encourage you to actually do it. Don't just hear it and go, you know, that sounds nice, sounds like a good idea. And then get on with your day and your life. If this connects with you, why can't you today start answering that question right? Do it for seven days and make sure you do the thing that you said was the most important thing. And I guarantee your life will start to change. Some days you'll put down something related to work, sometimes related to health, sometimes related to family. And actually, by you choosing it doesn't mean that nothing else in your life is important. It just means on that particular day that's what you decided to choose as the most important thing. So on a Monday for me, for example, it might be a work related thing that I put down in my journal. Maybe on a Tuesday it will be, I haven't seen my wife properly for a few days. She was away at the weekend. Maybe tonight, once the kids are in bed, we must spend some quality time together. Maybe on another day it will be, oh, I'm working from home today. The most important thing I have to do today is make sure when my kids walk in through the door at 4:30pm that my laptop is shut, my phone is in a different room so I can be present and listen attentively to what they have to tell me. It doesn't matter what you put down, it's highly personal to you. But I promise you, by answering this question in your life regularly, you will very quickly realize what is truly important in your life. And in turn, this question will help you become less busy. Today's show is sponsored by Boncharge. Something I often cover on this podcast is the importance of sleep and how beneficial better sleep can be for many different aspects of our health and well being. And Bon Charge are a wellness brand who have an ever increasing range of products to help you sleep better, feel better and live better. Now some of my own favorite products from Bon Charge include their infrared sauna blanket, their blue light glasses which I've been using for years, and their bedside lighting range. They also have a range of really popular products like their red light face masks, other red light therapy devices, infrared PEMF mats, cold and heat therapy, massage guns and much, much more. And at the moment Bond Charge have a fantastic holiday sale going on until the 4th of January. To automatically save 25% off everything on their site, just head to boncharge.com that's B O N C-H-A-R-G-E.com and automatically save 25%. The sale ends on the 4th of January so don't wait too long. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and Zinc which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important especially at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. All of this goodness comes in one convenient daily serving that makes it really easy to fit into your life no matter how busy you feel. It's also really, really tasty. The scientific team behind AG1 includes experts from a broad range of fields including longevity, preventive medicine, genetics and biochemistry. I talk to them regularly and am really impressed with their commitment to making a top quality product. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order but until the end of January they are doubling the five free travel packs to 10 and these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is is go to drinkag1.com livemore that's drinkag1.com livemore habit number four reframe your relationship with your past okay, this is big. There are so many ideas within this concept that I explore inmate change that lasts. 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. 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 bring in new helpful habits and shed previous unhelpful ones. If it's guilt or shame that is driving us, then that can be problematic. Now 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. There was a 2018 study of over 40,000 people in the US, UK and Canada found that levels of perfectionism had risen substantially between 1989 and 2016. The extent to which people felt they had to display perfection to secure approval had soared by an astonishing 33%. This is one of the issues I have with regret, especially for people who suffer from perfectionism. 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. 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 not saying that. 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 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. 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. Where 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 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? Is the belief I hold around the world useful? I contend that if that's the view you take on the world, that every single person, including yourself, is doing the best that you can. 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? I mean, think about it another way. Are you the same person that you were five years ago or even one year ago? Or have you changed? 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 pasts. 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 five, 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. 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. 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. 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. If you look at traditional societies or hunter gatherer societies, everyday life is a little bit uncomfortable. 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, sedentary jobs, cars, and home deliveries of anything you could possibly imagine, from food to books to light bulbs. And it's literally killing us. 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. Now, this over reliance on comfort is not just affecting us as Adults. It's also affecting our kids. A scientific review of 50 studies that involved 25 million children from 28 countries found that today's kids take on average 90 seconds longer to run a mile than children did in the 1980s. 80s. This is a shocking but extremely telling finding 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, deteriorate. I said their minds and bodies. How does the reliance on comfort affect our minds? I think this is a really, really important point and arguably one of the most important 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 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. Now, honestly, I reflected on that situation. I thought, this is absolutely absurd. There we were in a warm carriage in the middle of winter, Traveling 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? 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. Now, evidence for this comes from the Harvard psychologists David Lavari and Daniel Gilbert. And they showed that the human brain will start looking for problems even when they don't exist. Lavari calls this phenomenon prevalence induced concept change, which basically means that as we experience fewer problems, we start to lower our threshold for what actually constitutes a problem. So they conducted a series of experiments that beautifully demonstrated this, including one in which they asked participants to identify faces that appeared threatening, which they did just fine. But as the number of threatening faces they were shown was reduced, they then started to classify ordinary faces as threatening as well. That's the problem here. If your life becomes really, really comfortable, yes, you're going to get physically weaker, you're going to be at risk of low moods, but you're also going to start finding problems where problems don't really exist. And I honestly believe this is one of the reasons, not the only one, one of the reasons why rates of anxiety are growing these days. Now, over the years, I've seen this with so many of my patients. Many of them seem to have a low grade anxiety that was built on this foundation of fragility. On a deep level, they knew that things in their life could get worse. But because they had never tested themselves, they didn't actually trust themselves to be able to handle whatever came their way. 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 our do we feel, how capable do we feel? There's plenty more that I expand upon around this concept in Chapter 4 of Make Change that Lasts. But in terms of giving you some practical take homes, right now I want you to 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 on it, but will likely improve intimacy with your partner as well as the 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. Now look, there is one study that actually showed 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. I mentioned taking the stairs before. That is something I've done for the last five years. I made myself this internal rule to basically say that I'm always going to take the stairs unless there's a damn good reason not to. And basically that means that my default has become taking the stairs. Sure. Do I do it 100% of the time? No. If I'm on holiday with my family with multiple suitcases and our room is on the 15th floor of a hotel, sure, I may not take the stairs, I may actually take the lift. But generally speaking, I will pretty much always take the stairs now, unless there's a really good reason not to. 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? I don't know. Oh, you know, I'll just take the lift now. Because I made that internal rule, it means my default has now become to take the stairs now whilst I think the majority of benefits for these practices are psychological in terms of what they do to how we feel about ourselves, our resilience, our trust in ourselves, there are also physical benefits. And just on climbing stairs, in April 2024 there was this research paper, a meta analysis of studies covering more than 400,000 people where they showed that climbing stairs was associated with a 39% reduced risk of death from heart disease and a 24% reduced risk of death of any cause, which is simply remarkable. So have a think about what would work in your life. Which daily active discomfort do you think you could do and that you could do regularly? Okay guys, I hope you found those five ideas useful. I've now finished my coffee. I hope it stopped raining outside. As a quick refresher, number one was take less offense. Number two, stop complaining. Number three, ask yourself the anti business question every day. Number four, reframe your relationship with your past. And number five, do something uncomfortable each day. Of course, these are all ideas that I expand upon in a lot of detail with loads more practical exercises in my new book, make change that lasts. As I mentioned in the introduction, the audiobook is now available. And to finish off today's episode, I want to leave you with a short snippet from the actual introduction of the audiobook. I hope you enjoy listening.