← Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
How to Stop Overthinking & Start Living a More Meaningful Life with Oliver Burkeman #580
02:00:47
Many of us feel under constant pressure to optimise every moment, to become more efficient, more productive and somehow more worthy. But what if embracing our limits could be the key to living a calmer, more meaningful life?
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- [00:01]
A
Yes, the attempt to do it all is going to make you feel incredibly anxious and overwhelmed. Yes, the demands that are made on us and the things that feel like they're essential we have to do them, will leave us feeling wiped out. That is not a war that any of us is ever going to win. And it's in that realization that you can then, I hope, begin to feel the first glimmers of a different kind of energy, which is like, okay, that's the way it is.
- [00:26]
B
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 More. Many of us feel under constant pressure to optimize every moment to become more efficient, more productive, and somehow more worthy. But what if embracing our limits could could be the key to living a calmer, more meaningful life? This week's returning guest is Oliver Berkman, someone who for many years wrote a popular psychology column for the Guardian newspaper and more recently, someone who wrote the wonderful book 4000 Weeks. His latest book, Meditations for Mortals, a four week guide to Doing what Counts, takes us on a liberating journey towards a more meaningful life. One that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves. Designed as a four week retreat of the mind, it offers daily wisdom, solace and inspiration to help us find a saner, freer and more enchantment filled way of living. In our conversation we discuss why the belief that life will finally feel easier once we clear our to do list is an illusion how shifting our focus from endless achievement to small present moments can transform the way we experience each day why the fantasy of perfect decisions keeps us stuck in indecision and how accepting the downsides of any choice can set us free how our fear of wasting time is often rooted in perfectionism and why many of us feel we have to earn our worth through effort. The liberating idea of daily ish habits, a flexible, compassionate way to keep showing up without turning routines into self criticism, why we don't need to wait for life to feel calm or under control before we start living with more intention and how embracing our limits and accepting that time is finite can help us feel more alive and connected. I was absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to speak to Oliver once again as he brings such clarity and compassion to questions that so many of us grapple with. Instead of offering yet another system for getting more done, this conversation is about stepping back, loosening our grip, and recognizing that a good life is not measured by productivity, but by presence, meaning and connection. In your new book, you talk about the kind of life that you would like to be living, and you describe it as calm and focused and energetic and meaningfully productive and connected to others, as opposed to anxious, isolated and overwhelmed. I think that's the kind of life, Oliver, that many people would also like to lead. So I guess my first question is twofold. Why do so many people struggle to lead that kind of life? And secondly, how are you getting on in your quest to do so?
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A
Great questions. Yeah. I mean, I think there are so many reasons why it's hard to live that kind of life. Right. Reasons to do with the society that we live in, reasons to do with the ways we were parented and the messages we give ourselves. I think the reason I really want to focus in on, and that relates to your second question, is there's a problem with seeing that as something that you're striving towards, something that's off in the future, and that you're going to work really, really hard, and then eventually that's going to be your life. There's a big sort of mistake involved in that approach as opposed to seeing it as something that you can actually claim for yourself right here in the moment. And of course, that doesn't get away from the fact that there's, like too much to do and too many emails and the economic system that we live in exerts all sorts of pressures. But there's something really important, I think, about the idea that we can actually enter into that way of being right here, at least to some degree, instead of seeing it as this thing that we're constantly chasing on the horizon. So, yeah, to the extent that I have succeeded in living a life like this, which is definitely only partial, is because I've found ways to sort of step into it now instead of sort of reinforcing this notion that it's always in the future, that I've always got to do more until I can get to it.
- [05:28]
B
Yeah. It's interesting through the lens of health, I think about what you just said in the context of weight loss and something I've realized over my career is for people who are looking for sustainable weight loss, for whatever reason that might be, too often it's put off into the future. When I lose weight and get to this weight, I'm going to be happy and go on holiday here and do this or do that hobby, whatever it might be. And I found it much more helpful for people to say, no, no, why don't you do those things now and then I think you'll find that the weight loss, obviously you have to do some things are gonna come quite nicely as almost like a second order effect of that rather than the other way around.
- [06:17]
A
Totally. I can totally see how that will work in weight loss. I think of it in the context of like overwhelm. Right. I have a huge tendency, I'm letting go of it to a large extent, but I have this huge tendency to say, right, okay, I want my life to be calm and peaceful. It feels incredibly overwhelming, overwhelmed with demands and obligations and emails and everything. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to really, really buckle down and power through and spend much more time on all the overwhelming stuff and actually have a less peaceful life and a busier life and a more stressed life because I'm going to get through it to this alleged vista of peace and calm on the other side. And I think where that connects to what you were saying is if instead you can see how you show up in the day today as some form of expression of the life that you want to live. Not a perfect one. It's never going to be a perfect one. But if you can sort of, if you say, like, okay, I want to get to this point where I've lost enough weight that I can enjoy myself. So what if I took that focus on what I want to enjoy now? And I think time and again, yeah. People find that what happens then is then you're living the life you want to live. And so it's exciting and fun to get better at living that life and to lose more weight and to be more calm and to handle more of the demands without sort of spinning off into overwhelm.
- [07:34]
B
Yeah. There's also a compassion to yourself in living this way. I know you do tackle that in one of the chapters. And you also acknowledge how self compassion can be a difficult term for British people to get our heads around. Right. But through the lens of weight loss, often people wanna beat themselves up, deprive themselves, restrict themselves until they've reached the goal of a set weight so that then they're gonna start treating themselves in the right way. And it doesn't work like that.
- [08:05]
A
All you're doing then, right, is yeah, you're reinforcing this notion that you're bad.
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B
Exactly.
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A
You need fixing. You can't really fully participate in life until you have achieved that fixing. And I mean, I had such struggle with this idea of self compassion because as you say, there's something about it that invites me to think I'm being told that I have to see myself as super, super special and much more deserving of love and cuddles than anyone. None of that. The thing that really made the change for me was when I came across this idea from a philosopher called Idolandau who talks about the reverse golden rule. So not treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself, the famous golden rule, but don't treat yourself worse than you would treat other people. And I think that was such a moment for me when I realized that I sort of went through my days often sort of berating myself internally in ways I would just never like. I would just never dream of doing that to, well, anyone, a friend, a person I met in a like day to day business context. It would be utterly outrageous to be that, that horrible. So all I was asking of myself, even if it gets labeled self compassion and triggers all sorts of cringe responses from Brits, like all I was asking of myself was equal treatment that I would already perfectly, that I was already perfectly good at giving to other people.
- [09:26]
B
In your answer to my first question, you said it doesn't mean that there's not gonna be too many things to do or too many emails. And it's kind of interesting that really landed and kind of has been whirring in my brain since then. So my question is, is that really true? Are there always going to be too many things to do in too many emails? Or perhaps could it be the way that we're framing those things to do in those emails?
- [09:54]
A
The answer is yes. Right? It's totally a question of perspective. And I think this is something that I've tried to find ways to articulate lots of times in my writing. It's like you have an incredibly finite capacity for doing things because you are a human and you have so much time on the planet and so many hours in the day and so much attention and energy. And so the amount of things that feel like they need doing is basically infinite. Right? There's no reason why your brain can't feel that your obligations to your family, the ambitions you have for your job, whatever it might be, that just keeps on expanding, whereas your finite capacity really doesn't. And so yeah, from that perspective, there's always too much to do. But because there's always too much to do and there's no way around it, that is kind of another way of saying that there isn't too much to do because this is not a war that you can win as a finite human. Being so. There's a quote that I really like that says, I'm going to mangle it, but says something like, the problem is not that we don't have enough time to do the things we need to do, it's that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And of course, this is a lot harder for some people than others. Right. You can absolutely feel like you have to do an impossible amount just to keep a roof over your head. And that's a very real and acute feeling. But actually, nobody can do an impossible amount. And so in the end, all you can ever really do with the time in your life is a handful of the things that you might feel you wanted to do with them. And when you see how totally inescapable that is, I think it's really liberating. I think it's like, oh, it's not because I'm a loser that I haven't figured out how to do all these things. It's not because I haven't found the right productivity system. It's because you don't get to do all the things.
- [11:51]
B
Your last book, just before this 4,000 weeks and this new one, Meditations for Mortals, I think one of the reasons they're striking such a deep chord with so many people around the world is precisely because of what you just said. This acceptance that I actually can't do everything, you know. Well, let me put it to you. Your last but 4,000 weeks became a global smash bestseller. Right. So first of all, congratulations.
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A
Thank you.
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B
But related to that is the question, why. Why do you think that book at that time made waves in the way that it did? What was it in that book?
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A
I mean, who knows? And I think a lot of it is just luck and good fortune. But I suppose I was going to try to answer it.
- [12:45]
B
I would say English modesty.
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A
Well, you know, but it's also true. Right. But I also think if you're going to try to. If I was going to try to answer that, I would say for various reasons, partly having to do with coming out of the pandemic, partly having to do with the stage, that kind of books, and thinking about productivity and stuff. At that point, it was time for something that sort of gently introduced people to this, to this, like, fact instead of this notion. So there'd been a lot of. A lot of the history of sort of time management advice is like, if you follow my system and you really try hard, then you're going to get to the point where you can do everything that needs doing. And then there was a bit of a rebellion that came in the form of saying, like, well, this is all rubbish anyway. Stop working for the man. Rebel, like, just chill out. Which I don't even necessarily object to. But it's not what a lot of people want to do or can do. And so I think it was time for someone to say, look, you can be productive and ambitious and you can make a difference in the world. What you can't do is get your arms around an infinite number of potential demands, obligations, ambitions. And there's a sort of a. There's a moment there where you can. I went through it myself, and I hope that the book has led people through it as well, where you can sort of just sort of relax into reality. I've compared it in a couple of places to that feeling like you're. You're out in. You're out in the street and you haven't brought the right, like, waterproofs. And it starts raining and for a while you sort of, like, keep trying to find ways, almost unconsciously, to keep the water off you. And the rain gets heavier and heavier and eventually you're just like, okay, I'm going to get wet. It's like, okay, I'm going to be finite in this ocean of infinite possibilities.
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B
And it's fine.
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A
And it's fine. Right. Yes.
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B
There are the problems when you resist there. Exactly.
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A
There is. Oh, my God, I don't want it.
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B
I don't want it. I didn't get the right clothes. That's where the stress comes.
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A
And then you're just soaking wet. Okay.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That's life.
- [14:50]
B
I would agree. I think the idea that you can't do everything, I think it particularly resonates now because of the world in which we live. You know, the amount of information we get exposed to on social media. We see all these incredible things that we could be doing and that some of your friends will be doing. Right. But you've only got 24 hours in a day. It's funny, as I've been reading meditations for morsels over the last couple of days, I thought maybe one of the reasons why there's an exercise that I call write your own happy ending that I wrote about in my book on happiness. And it really had a profound impact on me. I wonder if I could put it to you, actually, because I think it really embraces limitation and what matters at its heart. So there's two parts of the exercise. Part one is fast forward to the future. Imagine you're on your deathbed and look back on your life and imagine, you know, what are three things you will want to have done or spent your time on. And, you know, the truth is we probably know what a lot of these things are because people have written books about the regrets of the dying and what people actually do say on their deathbed. But for us individually, we can imagine. So for me, for example, last time I did this exercise was, I want to have spent quality time with my friends and family. I want to have had time to pursue my own passions, and I will thirdly want to have done something that improves the lives of other people. So that's part one. Then you go to part two, which is you come back to the present moment and you come up with three what I call happiness habits. So these are three things that I can try and commit to each week that will pretty much guarantee I get the happy ending I've just defined that I want. So how that worked for me was the three things that I put down are, I would specify how many undistracted meals with my wife and kids I want a week, and I think the current one is five. Okay, it might be different for someone else, but for me, it's a nice thing. If I can have five undistracted meals with vid and the kids where I'm not thinking about work, if I keep doing that week after week, come my deathbeds, I will have ticked off number one. If I get a chance to go for a long run each week or play my guitar and write a song and have a single, I will know that at the end of my life, I will have found time for my passions. And if I, you know, the third one was if I release an episode a week of this podcast, which I've been doing for seven and a half years, I know, and I keep doing that. I know I'm gonna be doing something to improve the lives of others. And why it's been so helpful for me is because it embraces this concept that your to do list is never done. There's always more you could be doing. But if I just do those three things each week, I'm winning at life and I have to just let go of the other stuff, and it's not there as a stick to beat me with if I have a busy week where I'm traveling and I don't get to do them. It's just a nice, gentle reminder. Hey, you only had one meal with Ben and the kids last week. Don't let that become A pattern where you're doing that for a second week or a third week. So what do you think of that? Do you think that speaks to some of the ideas in your book?
- [18:06]
A
No, I think it really does. I think one of the other things I love about that is that it sort of takes these goals that you have and brings them forward from the future into like. Well, the goal is in doing these things in the present. Now, I'm not saying that I, and some people whose minds work like mine wouldn't then be able to turn that into a stick to beat themselves with. It's like, have I done the five? Have I done the five? Whatever. And I think, you know, it's not the amount of the proportion of the week that that might take. I mean, podcast probably takes a lot of your week, but like, that's actually a relatively small number of the hours that you're awake. And that's very good too, because there's a strong tendency, I think, in a lot of sort of goal setting, life visioning approaches to try to account for every minute of the day. And then you get very depressed and frustrated because you realize that an extraordinary amount of the day just seems to go in like, you know, just the, just, just living, just like getting dressed and like, you know, whatever, just stuff that doesn't fulfill you. And so I think if you can take that alternative approach that says, you know, here are a few sort of pinpoints in the course of a week that would express that long term goal, I think that's fantastic. Yeah, that's very inspiring.
- [19:18]
B
I mean, you write about it beautifully in your introduction to Meditations for Mortals. When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that's when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly counts. That's life, isn't it? A handful of things that truly matter.
- [19:39]
A
I think it has to be. Yeah. And I think that the problem is not that that's the way it is. The problem is just always that we are tormented by the thought that it should be more and it should be more. One of the ways you can think about that that I've found very helpful is sort of seasonally, right? The fact that you're giving things up for now to focus on these few things doesn't mean you're giving them up for forever, right? So maybe in your focus on these three things, there's something that you don't get to do. Maybe you don't get to indulge your passion for some other Activity or, you know, something like that. But you can always like, this is for now.
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B
This is for now. Exactly, exactly. You know, it's not like when I'm 60, I'm going to beat myself. You said you were going to do that. You put it down in 2023 on your list. You're not doing it now in 2043. Whatever. All you can ever do is make a decision in the moment, and it.
- [20:30]
A
Means that you're approaching the reality of, you know, it's awful for any of us with kids at home to think about. One day your kids will be out in the world and, you know, maybe you'll persuade them all to live within, like, half a mile of your house, but maybe you won't. And you won't get so many meals in the course of a week, and that's fine, too, because that'll be that season. So instead of trying to optimize everything, you focus on what you have now and how that can give meaning to what you're doing right now.
- [20:58]
B
This idea of embracing our limitations, yes, I think it helps us be, you know, calmer, less anxious, you know, enjoy our lives more, which I think is one of these core messages that you talk about. But it kind of also applies, I think, to other genres as well. I think it helps with creativity. As I've become a creator over the last years, I'm like, those limitations that we impose on ourself, and frankly, life imposes on us, that's what leads to creativity. That's what leads to a meaningful life. Acknowledging that you can't do everything gives you the license to go, yeah, so what do I want to do?
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A
Yeah. No, and I think it's true. I think it's worth doing just as a thought experiment that philosophers have debated this, right? But, like, if you were actually going to live forever, not in any kind of religious sense that you may believe, but. But just in the sense of, like, your actual life here on earth going on and on and on forever. I think very possibly it would be terrible, right? It would be the question. Because the question, like, what should I do with my day? Would always be like, doesn't matter, right? There's always. There's always more days. And there's something about the fact that we are in these limited situations that gives value to the. The choices that we make. I've written before about, like, the joy of missing out, right? It's this sense that, like, it matters more if you're staying home for bedtime with your kids. It matters more to know that you in principle could have been somewhere else and you chose not to be somewhere else. That gives it value. And then the other thing that just on my mind when you talked about creativity, there is. I'm always at pains to try to emphasize, like, I think this way of embracing the truth about your finitude is completely consistent with, like, being very ambitious for your life. I think I am. And I think occasionally I've run into people who've sort of misunderstood and thought what I'm saying is like, ah, you can't do very much. Like, just settle for mediocrity. Like, there's no point trying to reach the heights because we're all just too limited. And it's like, no, no, no, it's the exact opposite. It's like, it is by acknowledging the limited reality of our. Of the reality of our limitations that that's how you can then like, focus your life for the most meaningful ambitions.
- [23:16]
B
That you're given is that because though it's. You acknowledge that I can't do everything, I'm a finite human with a set amount of years on this planet. So therefore I'm going to choose very intentionally and carefully what it is that's truly important to me. So is it that you're doing less better?
- [23:37]
A
It is. But again, there's also a danger there, right? There's a danger which is like, this becomes incredibly high stress. It's like, oh, my goodness, time is precious. I've got to make the right choices and it'd be terrible if I made the wrong choices. And I've got to watch myself like a hawk every minute of the day to make sure I'm doing really cool and important things. I went through a phase of thinking that. But where I have sort of ended up is actually, no, it's a bigger relief than that, right? If you really sort of feel your way in to this limited situation, you get to cut yourself an immense amount of slack because you get to say, okay, like, the fact that something is important or that somebody wants me to do it, or that it will please my parents, or that it would be morally good. That can't be enough to mean I've got to find time to do it because I'm just too limited for that. And something sort of falls away. And into that space you can say, well, okay, almost any choices that I make, as long as they're, you know, if I make them honestly and in being in touch with myself, they're going to be meaningful things to do. I don't need to sort of Go through life double checking and being incredibly sort of putting a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that I'm doing exactly the right things or extraordinary things or anything like that. It's like, no, once I really feel where I am, you know, helping a handful of people in your life matters, cooking a nutritious meal for your kids matters. Right. We don't need to. It's great. Some people change the world in huge ways and invent extraordinary inventions and have sweeping effects on humanity for the better. But that can't be the standard that you have to reach to live a meaningful life. So I find. I don't know if I'm expressing this properly, but it's sort of. It imbues more things with mattering, I think, to live in this way that's truer to our real situation.
- [25:35]
B
A few years ago, you made a very big life move, didn't you? You were working, I believe, as a journalist in Brooklyn and you have moved to North Yorkshire. Can you contrast for us what has the difference been? I guess what led you to go to Brooklyn? What was your, your life like in Brooklyn? And how does that compare to what your life is like in Yorkshire?
- [26:03]
A
I mean, as always, these things have more moving parts and they're more complex than it looks from the outside to a. I do come from North Yorkshire, but to a significant extent was led as much by my wife as me in terms of wanting to have a spell of time outside the city. To some extent, we're like a date, another data point. Cause it happened at the end of the pandemic when it turned out that almost anyone who could ended up making this sort of move. We thought we were being terribly unique and individual at the time, but it's just like just statistics. I think that when it comes to those kinds of big decisions, I've got more and more able to see that these are things you have to reach intuitively. Right. It's not going to work to make a list of pros and cons and try and add number scores to each thing and figure it out. I've been in a situation several times in my life where. And I've become more able to see that this is going on as I've gotten older, where clearly the direction of just sort of growth and generativity and enlargement is a phrase somebody, James Hollis, the Jungian therapist, uses. Lies in a specific direction. Right. So it's like actually to continue in this particular place right now doing this stuff, it wouldn't be challenging in the right way, it wouldn't be leading me into the next chapter of things. And it's. It's really hard to put into words because it is actually like all your unconsciousness as well, that has this kind of amazing amount of information in it that's very hard to express in explicitly. But, you know, if you want to put it another way, I was interested in being near my extended family. I have friends in the area that I wanted to reconnect with properly. I love the landscape of the North York moors where we live. I've always, since I was a child, felt a really deep connection to that sort of rather bleak and windswept place. So there were all these things that sort of pointing in that direction. We thought it would be a good place for our son, at least for sort of early years for his schooling. So, you know, all these specific things. But actually what it was on a deep level was this sense that, like, it might be fun in some ways and difficult in other ways, but all of those would be in the direction of something kind of juicy and something that was, like, alive. Whereas not doing it and coming up with all the good rational reasons why it wasn't sensible to do it right now or whatever would be against that spirit of aliveness. More and more, I come back to this thing called aliveness, which I don't even know what it is, but it seems like it is what we can navigate by.
- [28:54]
B
You had this inner sense that this is what you needed to do, that's what you wanted to do. Maybe you couldn't rationally argue it. A pro recon list and balance. It's got six pros, that's got four. It's like life doesn't really work. I mean, I really do feel more and more, even when it comes to health, I think the most important things are led by our intuition and that inner gut feeling that we just know. You write in the book about Sheldon Kopp's phrase, you are free to do whatever you like. You need only to face the consequences. Right? Let's use that phrase to examine your move from Brooklyn to North Yorkshire. You know, you were free to do it. What have the consequences mean? Has you know the theme in these, in these last few books of yours about living that more meaningful, calm, less anxious life. Has that move helped you towards that goal? And what have you lost by not living in Brooklyn? This episode is brought to you by whoop. Now, you may have heard me talk about Whoop on previous episodes of this podcast, but if not, Whoop is a screen free. Wearable Health and Fitness coach. Now I've been wearing a WHOOP band for over 12 months now and it really has had a transformative effect on my health and well being. I've gained so many insights how different types of exercise and life stress affect my recovery, how different evening routines affect my sleep quality, and overall I would say that wearing it has helped me understand my body much better. The all new WHOOP has many fantastic features including hormonal insights and on demand ECG readings. But I would say my favorite is healthspan, a clever feature that tracks how your daily behaviors affect your health using two metrics, age, a measure of your physiological age and pace of aging, which shows if you're aging faster or slower over time. For me, seeing this healthspan score regularly helps to keep me motivated and on track with my desired habits. Now I've been a doctor for over 20 years and honestly I don't think that health wearables or are necessarily for everyone, but for many people like myself they can be absolutely game changing. I think it's really important to use your WHOOP data as a tool to help guide you, not something to dictate your life. And it's also important to correlate what the data says with your own subjective feeling and what else is going on in your life. If you join WHOOP today, they are giving my listeners the all new Whoop 5.0 device. Plus they are giving you the first month completely free. And if you're still not sold yet, there's also a 30 day money back guarantee so you can try WHOOP out for free. To get your free Whoop 5.0 plus your free 30 day trial, head to join whoop.comlivemore that's join. Swoop.com live more this episode is sponsored by Thriver the personalized blood testing service that helps you listen to your blood and get personalized guidance on how to optimize your health and fitness. Now listeners of my episodes with guests like Peter Attia and Mark Hyman will know that regular blood testing can be a brilliant tool to help you take a more proactive and preventative approach to your health. Thriver is the perfect tool to help us do that because they make it really simple. You just take a blood test at home, which is really easy. Just stick a small device on your arm, click a button and it draws blood painlessly, send it off and then you get all of your results in a matter of days in an easy to understand app. And all of your results come with actionable advice from Thrivers doctors. You can then test again in a few months and learn what's working well and where you might need to make some changes. For example, one marker I find particularly useful is apob, which is actually a much better predictor of cardiovascular risk than typical cholesterol tests. I personally use Thriver to track my own health markers and make informed decisions about my lifestyle. And for listeners of my show, Thriver are offering an exclusive offer of 20% off when you enter the promo code LIVEMORE at checkout. Just visit Thriver Co to get started today. That's T H R I V A co Thriver, listen to your blood.
- [34:10]
A
It totally has helped me, I think, but it but has helped me partly because it's helped me understand the truth of that phrase. Right. You're free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences. We are not asked as human beings to make choices that have no downside. That is never a possibility for us. So whenever you face any kind of big decision or little decisions actually, like whether to stay at your desk for another hour of emails at 5:30 or to go home to your family if you have that choice, even that kind of choice is relevant here as well, Right?
- [34:42]
B
Sure.
- [34:42]
A
In every one of those moments, there's a downside to the choice that you end up making, and there would be a downside to the other choice. And what I find so amazing about that Sheldon Kopp quote, what helped me about it was it's like, oh, right. All I'm doing is choosing which set of downsides I want to take responsibility for. I don't have to worry about not having found a version of this life that doesn't have the downside. So, you know, in the context of the move, as you asked, I definitely miss a lot of people who I had become close to in New York and a certain kind of ease with which it was possible to just make a plan to see them and fall into deep, long, stimulating conversation. That was wonderful. There's a vibrancy to living in Brooklyn. A sort of real sort of energy in that place that I will always love. And I don't know, maybe we'll be back there, I don't know. But, but the. So these things really, like, once I realized that I didn't have to persuade myself they were, they didn't matter. That's what makes it possible to make a move. Right? Because you're saying, yeah, no, that will be a downside.
- [35:55]
B
That will be a downside.
- [35:56]
A
And also there's the whole disadvantage of uncertainty Right. Like maybe there'll be other downsides. One downside of a move from one country to another is that you don't know what all the downsides are going to be. So like, it goes on and on and on, but that enables you to enable me to let go of that tendency that I definitely had from a young age to constantly be second guessing myself and being like, ah, I messed up here because I'm not. Because there are downsides, right? Because I'm missing out on things. Or it wouldn't have been good for my career to be in this place or it would have been good for my son to have this benefit of living. It's like, no. Yes, it would have been. And also, right, and also there are wonderful, amazing, utterly unplannable advantages of being where we are. I've talked about the landscape, but the people as well, right? And you know, it's like, it's a different kind of amazing.
- [36:49]
B
I think, I think some of this frustration or this umming and ahhing comes from perfectionism. A belief that it is possible to make the perfect decision with no downsides. And it isn't. There's a consequence to everything. I think for me at least once you get good or better at recognizing that, number one. And then number two, trying to articulate them, trying to go, oh, yeah, as you said, there are things you miss about Brooklyn.
- [37:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [37:20]
B
You can't have that in rural Yorkshire. You have to accept that and go, yeah, and I've made my choice that at this moment in my life, this is what's happening. I mean, I don't know if you would necessarily agree with this, having read Meditations for Mortals. Well, I've got quite an interesting relationship with regret in the sense that I don't have any anymore. I think for many people, regret is a form of perfectionism. It's a belief that I could have made a perfect decision and I didn't. So I'm gonna berate myself. It's like, no, no, wait a minute. If you go from the starting point that a perfect decision is not possible, it's like, well, what is there to really regret? I mean, you do things based on who you are and hopefully you can learn from them and go, yeah, you know what? That possibly with hindsight now wasn't the best choice. But I didn't know that back then. No, I was the one who made it. But now I can go, oh, if I'm presented with that situation again, I've learned something. So for me, I've realized that Regret keeps me trapped in my previous perfectionist tendencies. And of course, you know, you are known as the imperfectionist, aren't you? You write about that a lot. That's the name of your newsletter, right?
- [38:35]
A
It is, yeah.
- [38:35]
B
The Imperfectionist. Well, perhaps you can elaborate. What is your perspective on regrets, but also what is an imperfectionist?
- [38:44]
A
It's so interesting to hear you talk about regret in that way because I too am someone who at this point in life does not feel like. I don't feel like I have significant regrets. I'm not one of the people who's sort of very weighted down by that sense of the lives unlived. But what I have been anxious about all my life, it's a lot better now. But like, is the fear of future regret. So the feeling that like I'm about to make a choice here, that I will come to regret, totally belied by the fact that I don't actually then feel the regrets, but always sort of having my life choices constrained by this sense of like, ah, but you're gonna regret this in future if this happens or this happens, and so release from that. I think if you are someone who's prone either to actual regret or to fearing regret in the future, is to see that in a certain sense, like, regret is inevitable. Another way of saying you never need to feel it is that you can't avoid feeling it. It will just depend on your personality. Right, but the. But if regret is the fact that you had to wave goodbye to like every single moment of life, if you want to get really philosophical about it, right, you wave goodbye to an infinite number of other paths, like, you know, branching off like a river delta, you know, just forever and ever and ever. And all you're doing at every single moment is just waving goodbye to possibilities that will always be closed to you forever. But again, it's so absolutely inescapable that it can become that. It can be quite liberating to see that. It's like there's no way of not doing that. There's no way of making a choice that completely protects you from future regret. And of course, even if you look at a decision and say, well, with hindsight, I wouldn't have done it that way. It's like, how did you gain the hindsight by making the choice and living through that bit of your life? So, you know, I don't see any reason that this is going to be true in the case of our move to Yorkshire. But if it had been that what we'd realized very Swiftly after getting there was that we'd made a terrible mistake. Like, in a sense, that wouldn't be a terrible mistake. That would be like realizing you've made a terrible mistake is a good thing.
- [40:58]
B
You know, I've been just playing around in my journal about the concept of wasting time recently and really questioning is it even possible to waste time? Because to say it's a waste is prejudging that you knew the consequences of that time. So if you are mindful of the time or you review it afterwards and you realize that it wasn't the best use of your time, is that a waste? Or actually, was it a very powerful learning opportunity?
- [41:28]
A
Right.
- [41:29]
B
Again, I don't know how relevant it is, but it's just what I'm playing around with at the moment. This concept's a wasting time. I'm like, I don't think I'm wasting any time. I'm just spending time and then trying to learn from it. Do I like it and I want to repeat it, or have I learned something? And like, yeah, I'm not sure about that anymore.
- [41:46]
A
Yeah, no, I think that's brilliant. I think it's totally in keeping with what we're talking about because it's because to think that you could know in advance is to feel yourself more perfect and more. More unlimited than we really are. But to realize that you can act on the basis of the accumulated information, that's being a really full, wholehearted, finite human being.
- [42:08]
B
Some people will call you a productivity guru. Are you one?
- [42:15]
A
Oh, I don't know what that I mean. You know, I think on the one hand, I hate the idea because I think productivity has come to mean, you know, just getting ways to get as many things done as possible. And a big part of what I'm. As you can tell, I think part of what I'm trying to get at here is that just doing more things is a not inherently valuable depends what the things are. Right? There are plenty of people in the world at large who I might like to be doing fewer of the things they do. I thought, well, would be a better place if they didn't, if they did fewer things and all of us can only do so many things anyway. But also because. But at the same time, rather, I think there is some meaning of the word productivity that I. That I think is important that I do want. I'm someone who wants to do cool things with my life that makes some kind of a difference. There's a danger whenever we talk about this kind of paths to more peace of mind and out of anxiety and all these things. There's a danger, which you occasionally see reinforced by certain kinds of spiritual teacher and spiritual book that suggests that there's either the life where you do all the stuff and it's kind of frenetic and overwhelmed and anxious and. Or there's the life where you just sort of float through your days and you don't care anymore about doing things because you've transcended to this level where all of that is irrelevant. And I feel like one way of expressing everything I'm trying to do is to say no. I think we can have both of these. I think we can have the peace of mind and the creativity and the generativity and the energy. Not in the spirit of trying to make ourselves feel like we're doing enough, but in the spirit of saying, okay, I am enough. But now what I want to do with this thing, person I am in the world is express this through creativity, through work, through building things.
- [44:08]
B
I think you are a meaningful productivity guru as opposed to a toxic productivity guru.
- [44:15]
A
I'll take that. I'll take that. The guru thing is interesting too. This is where, in terms of our profile as advice bestowers, it's even more of an interesting thing for you than for me perhaps. But I spent a long time being very sort of self deprecating about. I don't have anything special to say and I think it's important to be very honest. And I try to be in terms of that. I'm not living some perfect life and now you lucky, lucky people get to copy me. That's not the spirit of any of this at all. We're all just muddling through. But on the other hand, more recently, I have come to understand that this sort of knee jerk British self deprecation can be a little bit unhelpful and annoying. And you do have to hold some element of the authority that is vested in you. Like that's actually helpful to people. As I say, I suspect you know about this much more than me, but, like, you don't. It's not a useful contribution to the world to say, oh, I've got nothing to teach.
- [45:14]
B
Yeah, exactly. You know, this is such an interesting point for me. Let's take this podcast as an example. I've been very clear. I think, I hope over the many years that this show has been running that I didn't tell anyone what to do. I have no interest in telling someone what to do with their life because that would also imply that I know what is Best for their life. Their life. And I can't know. And I also don't believe that anyone does anything long term if someone else tells them to do it. I've seen that time and time. We all know that experience ourselves, right? So my goal on each show, each episode is to have a meaningful, authentic conversation that hopefully on occasion is going to connect with someone. And they go, oh, you know what? I recognize myself in that. God, you know, wrong. As guest this week. Yeah, God, I've got that thing as well. I'm interested in trying that thing that the guest mentioned as opposed to, you should be doing this.
- [46:20]
A
Right.
- [46:20]
B
You know, because. And also, you take that one step further. Let's say we look at your life from the outside and go, oh, well, Oliver was a successful journalist in Brooklyn and the pandemic hit and him and his wife decided that actually we don't want to be in the city now. We want to go out, be nearer your family in rural, you know, beautiful countryside of North Yorkshire. And then he went and wrote a global bestseller. 4,000 weeks. Oh, so from the outside, it can look as though that's the prescription I need to move from where I live, go out into the country. Then I'm also gonna write a bestseller like Oliver Bertman. But there's so many other factors in. So just cause it worked for you doesn't mean it's gonna work for me. It's not gonna work for anyone else. There's a subtlety there which, you know, I think about this a lot through the lens of patience. I think I spoke about this on my tour in March. I was saying that, you know, in an era where there's so much knowledge out there, we have to acknowledge that, you know, we've said for years, we need more knowledge. Knowledge is power, knowledge is information. I'm like, well, would you accept that there's more health information out there than ever before? But go, yeah, so, okay, so if information was all. And knowledge is all we needed, we should also get associated better health outcomes. But we don't. Physical health is getting worse, mental health is getting worse. So there's a disconnect. And I think for me it comes down to the difference between external knowledge and internal knowledge. Like, take the information in from the outside, but then put it through your own filter experiment and go, you know, does this work for me? How does it. That's how I see it.
- [47:55]
A
I think it's so wise. And I think, you know, there's.
- [47:57]
B
So.
- [47:58]
A
There's such a tendency. There's a sort of a collusion isn't there between certain kinds of guru advice, bestowing people and the people who are in their audience? There's a collusion to. To take that advice, to give advice, and then to take it and express it and, like, try and follow it to that. Everyone wants to do that. But actually, yeah, I think anyone who gets to the point where they have a sense that some of the things they do in their life work well and they might want to pass that information on has come to that in a whole journey that they had to go through to get through, to get to. And so actually, one of the things I do early on in this book, it's divided up into lots of small chapters over the course of four weeks. The idea is that you could do, like, roughly a chapter a day for a month. And I say, like, if you're the kind of person who I have been right, who gets a book like this and wants to try to squirrel away every bit of information in it or take detailed notes or put it all into practice, like, maybe instead of that, just sort of go through it and see what sticks. Because if something sticks, that's a really good sign that it's meeting you at the right time. And if something else is like, okay, well, that was much. Mildly entertaining, but it doesn't really resonate then, like, that's information. The idea that you should then take that and try and force yourself to do that thing in that chapter, even though it doesn't resonate, is a mistake.
- [49:19]
B
Yeah. It was interesting to see how you followed up from 4,000 weeks. I think the structure in this book is brilliant. It is such a beautiful. I think you call it a retreat for the mind. Just trust that if it resonates, it will stick. And I really like that as opposed to, you know, jot it all down, make notes, going, oh, you know, all of a sudden I must do this, and now how do I apply this? It's much more freeing, I think, than that.
- [49:45]
A
I'm glad you think that. And I think the other. The other thing that I was hoping to get at with that is like, I didn't want to create. It would have been totally contradictory and hypocritical of me to create a book where the feeling of it was like, you know, get all this into your head. And then when you get a free week in a couple of months time and you're through all this other stuff, like, then you can put it into practice. High energy, perfect, like, hit all the points. I wanted it to be something that you can read right now, before you've got through all the emails, before you've fixed your terrible problem with procrastination or distraction or whatever terrible problem you imagine yourself to have. Right. Just right here before the world calms down and the news headlines stop being so terrifying, because that might never be going to happen. And so just right here in the middle, that's this idea of retreat of the mind, right? Not you have to go on a retreat for a week when you can finally book the leave. But like, no, just in the back of your mind now, in the middle of it all. And so that required the chapters to be very short because, like, it's going to be on a commute or with a morning coffee.
- [50:49]
B
Well, that's. That's the best. That's. I think that's the gold in this book or one of the pieces of gold. And actually, you can make the case, or I'll make it for you probably to modestly, that you could just continue with your life the way it is and just read one of these short chapters each day for 28 days as you propose. And you're probably gonna get some quite profound benefits because it's just these gentle realizations, I think, that people are gonna get about the state of their daily life. And as you say, the important things are gonna stick because, you know, with the best one in the world, not everything, and I don't mean this in your. But not any. In my boss or anyone's boss, not everything is gonna resonate with everyone.
- [51:28]
A
Right.
- [51:28]
B
It can't do.
- [51:29]
A
Right.
- [51:30]
B
Because we all hear things differently.
- [51:31]
A
Yeah, no, totally.
- [51:33]
B
Okay, so can you just summarize? Then it's week one, week two, week three, week four, being finite, taking action, letting go, and showing up. Can you just give us a little paragraph on what each one of those means and why you chose that order to take us through this mental retreat?
- [51:52]
A
Totally. Although even saying I chose it seems a little bit too much. It was one of those discoveries where it just sort of like after going through lots and lots of permutations and long conversations with my two excellent editors in the US and UK like this just sort of. It was just obvious it had to be this way. Sometimes you'll feel like you're discovering things rather than willing them into reality. So, yeah, it seemed very natural by the end of that process to feel like you want to start with being finite, facing the truth of our limitations, sort of feeling what it's like to accept the fact that we are in this position of limitation, not just limited amount of time. But I think really important part of this is how limited is our control over how that time unfolds and our limited knowledge of the future and all the rest of it. And then the question that occurs naturally, I think is, well, okay, so how do I actually do the stuff I got to do in that context or that I want to do? And so that's the week two on taking action. One of the things that has been so important to me and that I have struggled with myself is the theme of week three, that actually a lot of the time, the way to bring more meaning into your life and to more create creativity, more meaningful productivity involves sort of getting out of your own way and letting things happen, rather than in that sort of dominating way, making them happen. So that idea of letting go is about letting go as a kind of an active practice. And it all seemed very naturally to end up in this place. Week four, showing up the idea that, like, what all this is for the destination of this, to the extent that there is a destination, because it's always an sort of endless unfolding process, but that destination is just like being more here for your life. Ultimately, I feel like what unifies all those things that you said in the exercise that you spoke about that you would want to be able to look back at from your deathbed? What unifies them all is that you were really here and present. It's a very strange idea to put into words, but yeah, that you were really alive for your life. So I guess that's where this four week journey reaches its conclusion.
- [54:15]
B
Yeah, I kind of feel so far, although there are more we could cover. I think we've spoken about this idea of being finite. Okay. So, I mean, I love the book. It's so good. I have written down lots of chapter things that I want us to talk about. We won't get through them all.
- [54:34]
A
Actually.
- [54:37]
B
I'm going to. Just before we get to week two, I just want to mention something there that I think really relates to one of your key messages about doing what counts, focusing on what really matters. And it also maybe clashes with some of our ideas of productivity. So, okay, so I host this podcast. Okay, I know many other podcast hosts these days. Podcasting is obviously blowing up and there's millions around the world now. And most podcasts of the size of this one tend to have researchers. So they have researchers who will go through the books and go through that person's work and then present the host with some research notes. And the host may do a bit as well, but A lot of the prep is done for them because it's time efficient. Okay, well, there may be other reasons as well, but one of the reasons is because you can be more productive. You can get more things done because you don't have to spend a day researching the guests. Someone could do that for you. So you could do other things, get more emails done or whatever it might be. And I had this realization a few years ago. Cause I've never had a researcher. And you know, I was starting to think, you know, God, everyone seems to have a researcher. You know, not everyone. You know, my friend Rich Roll who runs the podcast, he doesn't have a researcher either. And I thought it's kind of interesting. Even if a researcher would save me time, what if I don't want the time saved? Yeah, I know it sounds maybe perhaps a bit of a throwaway comment, but it was a real profound realization for me where I thought, actually that's one of my favorite parts of my week, is preparing for my guest. I love it. I literally love it. A I happen to believe it makes the conversations better anyway. Cause you're more invested. But even if it didn't, I just love it. So the question I often ask myself is, how would you like your experience of life to be? Yeah, let's imagine you got some crack hot researcher who could present you everything. Well, I wouldn't have watched some of your videos yesterday. I wouldn't have read pretty much the entirety of Meditations for Mortals. My life would be less good had someone done that for me. So it's almost the anti product, it's almost anti productivity hack to do it myself. But I'm like, no, damn it, I want to do it myself.
- [57:18]
A
No, totally. And I think this illustrates a really, really important point, which is that if you just follow the doctrine of optimization and you let yourself go along with the cultural currents towards optimization, then all else being equal, you will optimize out of your life precisely the things that make it worth living. Now that doesn't mean that there's not some other things that you know, you want to have other people do and that your position enables you to have other people do in that, in that ecosystem of producing a podcast. But it's like it's such a gift to realize, oh, I was on track to optimize away something that, and I think we do this to ourselves as a, as a wider culture. Right. I wrote in 4,000 weeks about how a lot of convenience culture has left us sort of feeling. I think a lot of people resonate with this notion. Right? Like, it's much easier to. Often, what's easiest to do is not what is most enjoyable for us as a matter of experience. So it's easiest to, like, get food delivered with an app and not have to talk to anyone and not have to go out and find the food yourself, or not have to cook a meal from ingredients that you bought. It's easiest to stay home and watch stuff on TV when you could have met some people and watched it at a movie theater. Right. There's always this kind of tension between what's the sort of smoothest life and what's the life that we want to live that we value the most in hindsight. And this seems like a good example of it, right? It's effort. You could. I'm sure that despite the fact that you love reading the books of the people that come on this podcast, there have been weeks when if you could just wish it away and save the time, you would have taken it. But actually, there's something really useful about saying to ourselves, like, no, I don't want to smooth my life out in this way, because smoothness is not my ultimate goal here. Maybe smoothness in certain areas of life.
- [59:11]
B
Exactly. It's about intentionality, isn't it? It's about really under. It's like, goes about, you're free to do whatever you like. You need only to face the consequences. Right. You can, you know, obviously, we're talking about through the lens of a podcast, but you can apply this to anything. You've got infinite ways you can do these things, but all of them come with a cost.
- [59:31]
A
And the ironic part, which I'm sure you have experienced, is that the more success you are fortunate to enjoy in the world, in a certain sense, the worse it gets. Obviously, in a certain sense, privilege that comes with success is fantastic and not to be sniffed at. But I'm guessing that where you are now, the opportunities that come your way are harder to choose between because more of them are good and enticing. So it's fascinating. It's like everybody who is human is faced by this, is faced with this situation. And becoming very successful or becoming super wealthy or becoming famous or whatever doesn't solve the problem, because the problem is called the human condition.
- [60:13]
B
Yeah, exactly. Be careful what you wish for, right? Because it may actually come true. And then it's a great point. And again, some people may be thinking, yeah, okay, you guys have got nice problems. You get invited to nice things because you're successful authors. But the point you're making is not that. The point you're making is that that applies to everyone on some level.
- [60:33]
A
Right. And they definitely have a nicer feeling to them. The problems when knowing where the next meal is coming from is not exactly.
- [60:44]
B
And we have to acknowledge that.
- [60:46]
A
But there's still problems in this fundamental way that we've been tracking through this conversation, which is that they are tough choices about finite time. And in certain ways they can be tougher because the things that you have to let go of are more obviously things that would have been great to do.
- [61:05]
B
A mate of mine's a filmmaker, right. And his dream is always to be in Hollywood and make feature films. But he's now got himself a regular gig just filming, you know, locally to his house, where he's got predictable ish hours, no travel. And I remember having a chat with him a few years ago about it really speaks to this, this acknowledgement of you can't do everything. You know, if he had gone to Hollywood and done the job of what he perceives Hollywood directors do and the busyness and all the things that come along with that, perhaps he wouldn't have the quality family life that he does have. Right, right. I feel a lot of your work is about bringing the. Is making the invisible visible, right? Yeah, it's the unmeasurables. You know, I think about this concept of unmeasurables a lot, that society is skewed now towards the things that we can easily measure, like your follow accounts or your income or your downloads. Right. But, you know, the gold in life comes from the unmeasurables, the sort of thing, you know, the quality of your relationships. You know, do your kids like you and want to spend time with you? Right. You know, if you, if you want to have a partner and you're lucky enough to have a partner, do you have a good relationship with them? You know, is that something that's worthy? You know, there's no scorecard for those things. And I honestly feel that's why that write your own happy ending exercise has helped me so much. And also living five minutes from where I grew up has really helped me as my public profile has grown. I'm still in the same town where I grew up. I'm five minutes away from Mum. You know, I see her pretty much every day. And that's a choice. You know, it's interesting, you know, we're recording this just pre the summer and it was Father's Day a couple of weekends ago and I was on the move and I thought, I'm going To share a post on Instagram. So I'd literally found a photo of me and my, the first photo I could see where you couldn't see my kids faces because I never share faces on social media. And I thought, and I wrote, I just wrote a post in the moment about what does being a father mean to me and what are the things I hope to not teach my kids? Cause I'm even skeptical that you can actually teach your kids anything now. Like, you know, sort of showcase right or you know, I don't know what the right word is, but what are the things I value as a father and the things I hope to do and showcase them that are important. I put a list of things that you might expect people to say, being kind, how you treat people, but things like, you know, how integrity is more important than money. But then what came to mind is I sort of shared that caring for my mother, their grandmother, is not another thing to fit into a busy life, but an inherent part of a meaningful life. And it's interesting, that's what really people resonated with the most. And it, and I never articulated that before or thought about it, but yeah, you know what, you're damn right it is. You know, I, I could not do that and in adverse commas, do more things with work and have more inadvertent commas, success. But if I, for me personally, how I value my life, how I was brought up, looking after my family is one of the most important things to me. So no amount of success is worth me not being able to do that.
- [64:40]
A
No, completely. I think that's, that's so well put. And it's like you said before about making the invisible visible. I often think about that in terms of making unconscious things conscious, usually in terms of negative stuff. So it's like you can like, you know, you can go through the day making choices. You're doing that anyway. You can either do it consciously or unconsciously. You can either be aware of the limitations of your time or you can be unaware of them. You can't not have them. You can, you can just know whether you're relating to them, why in a conscious way. But as you point out, like, it's also to do with becoming conscious of the things that like you have decided to have in your life because they, they matter to you. And then feeling much less bad about all the things that you could in principle be doing instead because you've found that, that those kind of end values, as it were. Right. You're not and you're in less danger then of the means becoming the ends, which is what happens otherwise, right? People just like think that doing more and more and more stuff is important or getting more and more money is important, regardless of what's happening to that money. Freeing up time, like even that is kind of not a very useful thing unless you're freeing it up for something that you want to free it up for. So again and again it's like, well, why? And I think once you've got that in place, you're well on the way.
- [66:00]
B
Okay, so week one, being finite. Seven chapters. Seven. I was going to say lessons, but you probably would urged me to not use the word lessons, but seven things to think about.
- [66:12]
A
Meditations.
- [66:13]
B
Meditations. Seven meditations. Okay, week two, there's seven meditations on taking action. Let's just cover one of them before we move on to week three. Rules that serve life. Doing things. Daily ish. I think this is great. What is daily ish and why is it so useful? Today's episode is sponsored by vivobarefoot. Now, more and more of modern life disconnects us from what is natural. Our food supply, our lack of movements, the constant distraction, but also our shoes. Now, much in modern footwear is actually a false promise. It markets comfort as freedom, but what it actually does is restrict natural function and dull your ability to feel. Vivobarefoot makes footwear uniquely designed for how humans are made to be free. They fit, flex and feel. Made for the wild or the wild at heart. An active choice, not a convention. Because when we're free to do what's natural, it changes how we live. Now, I myself have been wearing Vivobarefoot shoes exclusively for over 12 years now, and I absolutely love them. I've also been recommending them to my friends, family and patients for many years as well. And I can tell you that so many people find that when they start wearing Vivos, their movement becomes more enjoyable and free and often can help us move without pain as well. Why don't you start to free your feet so that you can feel more and therefore live more? Vivobarethoughts are giving my listeners an exclusive 20% off your order. All you have to do is head to vivobarefoot.com livemore so what are you waiting for? Head to vivobarefoot.Com livemore right now and get started. This is a paid advertisement for BetterHelp. Now, all of us need support from time to time, but of course, not everyone in our life is a trained therapist. I have been a medical doctor for over 23 years and have seen time and time again the transformative effects when people are able to talk regularly with a trained therapist. For many of us, the problems in our lives mount up and stay inside our heads. We get triggered by comments from other people and we don't realize how much our past experiences are affecting our present day interactions. Yes, it's great to get support from our friends or the hairdresser or the barista, but sometimes it can be really helpful to go that one step further and talk to a trained therapist about things like our relationships, our mood, and clinical issues like anxiety and depression. With BetterHelp you can get regular guidance from a credentialed therapist online One of the most important things about choosing a therapist is making sure you get the right one for you. One of the things I love about BetterHelp is that they do the initial matching work for you. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences. If you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different counselor at any time at no extra cost, and you can also pause your subscription whenever you like. With over 5 million people supported to date all around the world, BetterHelp is now also available in the UK with thousands of counselors who have expertise in a wide range of specialties. With a 4.9 out of 5 rating based on over 1.7 million client reviews, BetterHelp makes counseling affordable and convenient. My listeners get an incredible 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com livemore that's betterhelp.com forward/live more.
- [70:48]
A
So daily ish is a word that I got from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher and podcaster, although I think he has told me that he got it from someone else as well. So we're not doing a good job of getting this to its final attribution. And he uses that as a guideline for as an answer to the question how often should you. You meditate? Meaning, you know, formal meditation, which this book isn't really about. The title may be a bit misleading that my book, I mean, but he teaches formal following the breath. And he said, you know, people want to know how often should I do it? Do I really have to do it daily? And it's like, well, you should do it daily ish. And what I love about the idea of daily ish is that it's very gentle and flexible, right? The idea of doing anything daily ish. Reading the chapters of this book daily ish for a month, exercising, journaling, whatever it is you're trying to do as A habit. It doesn't mean just do it when you feel like it, right? It's not just like, ah, forget it, like, like the moment you don't want to do it, you don't have to do it. We all have a fairly strong sense of what counts as doing something daily ish. Like five or six days a week is clearly daily ish. And in busy times, maybe four days a week is going to count as daily ish. But if you only do something two days a week, you're not going to fool yourself that that's daily ish. Right? So we get past all these detailed questions of exactly how often should you be doing something, but you're still putting a sort of gentle kind of pressure on yourself to, to make sure you, you do it. And I think this is one example that chapter is, is about the idea of rules that serve life. I think it's really easy, especially in this space of health habits, personal development.
- [72:23]
B
All the rest of it.
- [72:24]
A
It's really easy to think that there exists some set of rules that if you could only find them and then you promise to follow them completely obediently, that will be it, your struggles will be over. The rules would effectively sort of live your life for you and you would be like the servant of the rules. And people fall into this all the time right now, from now on, this three times a week, this morning routine, this set of supplements, whatever, whatever, whatever. And it's not that it's bad to have rules, it's that you've put yourself in a power relationship with those rules, which sort of expects the rules to sort you out and then you have to be completely sort of obedient to those rules. And I wanted to explore this notion, which I think goes a long way back, including to sort of Christian monastic traditions, among many others, of rules that really matter. But they're there for you, they're there for the things that you want to achieve. Right. The important thing is not that you meditate every single day or even that you exercise every single day. The important thing is your peace of mind or your physical health. And then what rules serve that and what level of attachment to those rules is helpful for them to actually be sustainable part of your life.
- [73:41]
B
Yeah, it's beautiful. And I think this concept of daily ish really takes us away from this black and white thinking which massively leads, comes from perfectionism. And it's interesting, I was watching some of your interviews yesterday in the lead up to you coming to the studio today, and in one of the interviews I saw you were asked about non negotiables and it's a very common interview podcast question, you know, what are your non negotiables? And I, you know, I no issue with people asking that. I understand why they ask that. And it's the sort of thing that I would have thought about a few.
- [74:19]
A
Years ago that I'm wondering what I said now.
- [74:22]
B
Right, yeah, I can't remember what you said now actually.
- [74:25]
A
Please carry on.
- [74:26]
B
But the point was, is that I don't think non negotiables exist. I think it's a mirage. Everything's negotiable. Like everything is. You can't promise or guarantee you're gonna menstruate every day. Some days I don't know, your mum might be ill and in hospital and frankly you don't have time.
- [74:43]
A
Right.
- [74:43]
B
You know, everything is changeable. Depending on the circumstance, I could say a non negotiable is being kind and not using violence. Well, it kind of is, but if someone was threatening my two children, I might change my viewpoint on that. Right. So I think even embedded in the question of a non negotiable is perfectionist thinking.
- [75:07]
A
Right. Because the only actual non negotiable is our imperfectionism and our limitation.
- [75:11]
B
Yeah, exactly. So anyway, daily ish, I think is brilliant and hopefully helpful for people who are maybe struggling with health habits and go, well, what if you did it daily ish as opposed to every day? So let's get into week three, Letting Go, because there's just, well, all of them, frankly. I actually believe that you could do a whole podcast on just one of these 28 meditations. Right. Because they're really deep, thought provoking ideas that have resonance and relevance for all of us. What I really like in week three, Letting Go, the chapter entitled what if this Was Easy? The False Allure of Effort. Can you speak a little bit to this chapter and why it was so important for you to write?
- [76:00]
A
Yeah, and we're definitely in the terrain here. Of the things that I've sort of struggled with myself the most or that more recently understood compared to some of the earlier weeks of the book, I think that there is a very natural tendency that many of us have. It's partly to do with the culture that we live in. It's definitely to do the way we're raised. Maybe it's to do with religious traditions as well, sometimes to feel like if anything's worth doing, it's going to be pretty high effort. Right. If you go through the day and you don't put in an awful lot of effort, then you're kind of not being a full, adequate human being who gets to feel good about themselves. And obviously there's some truth in that idea. Right? Life calls for effort in certain cases, and you have to sort of put it in and it makes it worth living. We were talking about you putting in the effort of reading the books of your podcast guest as an example of effort that you find rewarding. But it's really easy to get to a point where you think you sort of approach life, braced for everything that you're trying to do to be like some kind of fight. And it's like, oh, no. Like, this project really matters. And therefore, you know, you assume it's going to be really hard, or you just sort of go through the whole of your day sort of, yeah, with this kind of expectation that you're going to have to fight your way through it and that you're not going to get to enjoy it and that you're not going to get to choose to do things that you like, because, like, that's not what life is about.
- [77:33]
B
You're postponing enjoyment for later.
- [77:36]
A
And just this incredible power of this idea, which has been articulated by many different people as famous quotes from Tim Ferriss and Elizabeth Gilbert to this effect, but many other people as well. Like, just the radicalism of asking yourself, like, what if this were easy? What if this thing I'm about to. Or what would this look like if this were easy? I think is Tim's version of it. And it's such a sort of weirdly subversive question for a certain kind of person, that I am that kind of person, like, historically, right. That sort of, like, what would actually happen if you did the things, some of the things today that you feel like doing? And is it really the case that you can't do that? There are limitations to it, of course, created by our situation in life, but it's. If I just did some things that I wanted to do, would I just definitely choose being a layabout and sitting on the sofa and eating crisps and wasting my life? Or maybe I can trust myself a little bit more than that. Maybe I can sort of take a subtly different attitude. And I write at one point in that chapter, I think, about an author called Julia Rogers Hamrick who has this idea of choosing Easy World. And it's this idea that felt. Struck me as just so New Agey when I first came across it. Like, oh, I don't want to go into this kind of terrain. But she has this idea that, you know, she writes about when she. The moment that she realized that you could sort of. You could just sort of choose to address a challenge in life, in easy world instead of in difficult world. And she doesn't mean, I don't think, like persuading yourself that bad things aren't happening or trying to sort of force yourself to think that something painful is not painful. It's that actually you either have to choose to sort of take the attitude that everything's against you, or you can choose to take the attitude that everything is at least potentially for you and working in your favor. And then the great thing about this is that even difficult experiences can be approached with a kind of ease, with a kind of readiness to have them go more smoothly than you were naturally or you were previously assuming. Have I made that clearer?
- [79:57]
B
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of interesting that, you know, as you were just finishing there, we know that when. I don't know, when people run at their fastest, they're not trying to go at their fastest. There isn't, of course, it's not completely effortless. Right. They're clearly expending energy and effort, but there is an effortless quality to it where they're not trying all out. They're flowing. I think it's an important idea because my kids, I think, are a little older than your son.
- [80:35]
A
Right. He's 8.
- [80:36]
B
He's 8. My kids are 15 and 12. And this idea that things have to be hard, I think gets subconsciously instilled by many parts of society. But schools, Right. Because I'm watching it going, yeah, but it doesn't need to be. It doesn't need to be difficult. Not everything in life needs to be hard. And I realized a few years ago that I had to artificially create internal stress by way of, let's say, a deadline or other things to make myself do stuff. So I had to create this sense that it was hard. I'm up against it, and now I'm going to do it. And I've bit by bit, started to change my relationship with difficulty. And actually, you can do some things that do feel effortless to a certain degree.
- [81:30]
A
Yeah, yeah. And you certainly don't need to make them harder.
- [81:33]
B
Exactly.
- [81:34]
A
Than they inherently are. I think it's in that chapter that I write about a friend of mine, the meditation teacher, Susan Piver, who wrote this blog. She's written lots of things, and I imagine she gets sick of the fact that I only always talk about this one blog post. But it made Such a difference. To me, its title was Getting Things Done by Not Being Mean to Yourself. And she writes about how she used to try to govern herself very strictly by schedules for what she was going to do with her day and with her work and how fruitful and liberating it was to ask, what do I feel like doing today? And to realize, obviously, people are in different situations. We have differing degrees of autonomy over how our work days unfold, but very many of us have at least some capacity to ask that question. Like, well, of the things on my plate, what do I feel like doing right now? And discovering again and again that basically she ended up proceeding through life that way. She did end up doing pretty much all of the things that she'd been beating herself up to do. Right. You don't actually want to be the kind of person who never pays your bills or who never keeps promises, commitments to friends, or who never cares for your physical health. It's just so much more motivating and freeing to do it in a context where you're not, like, presenting it to yourself as a sort of a terrible trial that you've got to get through before happiness is allowed to be yours.
- [82:54]
B
Yeah, I think when you wrote about her, I can't find a bit now, it was. She had this really elaborate morning routine, didn't she? This much meditation, this much journaling, this much that. This much. And I think it's a great example to use because I suspect there will be people listening who have perhaps tried that approach before. Maybe for some people, it works because, of course, it can do for some people. But for some people, what I found often happens is that they kind of think that there's some sort of flaw within them that I got. I'm trying. I'm doing the meditation, journaling thing. I'm doing the breath, but I can't stick to it. I'm not getting what I thought I would get out of it. And you write this in that chapter, which I think really speaks to this. Okay. When I fail to take action on the things I care about, the reason is sometimes that I lacked the time or couldn't summon the willpower, but it's at least as likely to be because I spooked myself with visions of the perfect result I thought I needed to achieve, or assumptions about the difficulties involved, thereby blocking action that would otherwise have flowed naturally. I think you have just summed up there, Oliver, why so many people struggle to make their health habits stick. I don't think they don't have the right information or the right knowledge or they need to learn about a new technique. I really don't. I think there's something in that we have in some ways a disordered relationship with that behavior, with that habit, what we think it should feel like or what it should give us. I really think you're on something with that.
- [84:34]
A
I'm really glad to hear it. And I think there's, I mean the thing that, that makes me want to say is like even the very idea of habit can get in the way sometimes. And I do mention this at a different point in the book. Right. Like if you're someone who's got into that psychological tangle with habits, it can be really interesting to ask, like, well, would you be willing to just go for one brisk walk today? Would you be willing to go to the gym, go for a swim, whatever it is that you do and enjoy doing and are capable physically of doing? Like, could you just do that today? Not could you do it for 10 minutes every day for the rest of your life, not even daily ish. But like, could you just do it once and just let yourself go and do it? Because I think that it's so easy to think like, well, this is a difficult thing. It's going to have huge rewards for me. I'm going to feel like a million dollars once I've really got into the swing of it. So it's a long term project. Better dig in, better buckle down. And like, it's especially harmful for those of us who've had like so much success with this approach in life. Like I got, I got great exam results because I was really good at like the patient work of endlessly working on schoolwork. And it's like, I'm not saying that was a bad thing at the time. It served me well in lots of ways. But like, there's a bad message in there which is like, if something's going to be worth doing, it's going to take a long time and be hard and pretty unpleasant as you go. And actually the moment that you just go for the swim or do whatever the thing is that you are willing to do, the moment you do it once you're doing it, like you're there. The bridge has been crossed.
- [86:12]
B
There's two things I'm thinking a lot about at the moment which I think speak to this, which is first of all about goals. I'm starting to come to the conclusion or the current viewpoints at least, because it's an endless journey and it may change again. But I really do think that for Many people, dare I say most of us, goals are a problem. And the reason I say that is because a goal by definition is somewhere in the future. And I think the way that we've been spoken to about goals in this western culture at least is that it's this thing that I work up to and then I achieve. But the problem is, and I've faced this on innumerous occasion, which is why I'm coming to this belief, is that it goes back to these habits. You're meditating because you've heard it's gonna help me with anxiety and depression and it's gonna help me with focus. Okay, but we really want to get to the point where we're doing it just because we like doing it right? Not for what it's going to give us. And the problem with goals is, or a potential problem, I should say with goals, because I don't think it's a problem for everyone, is that there's so much focus on the goal that. Okay, so what, let's say you achieve that goal.
- [87:43]
A
Yeah.
- [87:45]
B
What next? What should you do the following morning when the last two years you've been working up to that goal? You see this with Olympic athletes all the time where the morning after the Olympic race they don't know what to do themselves. The last four years was about that 110 second race. What the hell did you do the following morning? What? What? How is there a reason to get up? But I see this at my local parkrun, you know, where we're so focused on the goal of a time. Well, let's say you, you work hard and you get that time. So what, what happens the next day?
- [88:14]
A
Right.
- [88:14]
B
So, so I, I, where I'm sort of landing at the moment on goals is they're useful as a sort of compass or like a directing point. So go. Yeah. To help you then put into practice some behaviors. But just sort of loosely hold the goal, don't hold too tight because you know, be careful what you wish or what if you do reach that goal, what's next?
- [88:37]
A
Yeah, I think that way of, I mean, I was thinking before you said compass, I was thinking like the point is here that they can be things to navigate by. And, and so a good goal, or I would say even more maybe like a sort of good vision for your ideal expression of life that doesn't necessarily have to have like metrics in it, is very useful because it helps you make decisions in the present and it helps you decide what to do this afternoon. I think that is a much. Yeah. The problems that you outline with the traditional approach, I think are really true and I've certainly experienced them in my own life as well. I think it's a subtle thing because there's a chapter, I mean it's later in the book, so I guess I'm speaking out.
- [89:20]
B
You can get to week four, it's fine. We don't have to go sequentially.
- [89:23]
A
This idea, we sort of started with it, the whole conversation with it in a way. This idea of starting from sanity, right, which is this phrase that I use to. As one way of expressing this notion of like you decide who you want to be in the world and then you sort of go through life from that place, starting right now, as opposed to something that you're trying to get to in the future. And I think goals and visions can be incredibly useful. That is what it is to use a goal as a navigational aid. Right. You can certainly have a particular target that you hope in a few years time you're at. But in the meantime, the reason that that's useful is to ask like, how could I show up in the spirit of that today as opposed to I have to put aside all my happiness and enjoyment because later is when I'm going to do that. And especially when it comes to sort of money and prestige and status goals. We all know from all the research it doesn't work that way. You just get accustomed to the quality of life that you're building or the status or whatever it is, and then you just need the next one and the next one and the next one. So you don't actually come to rest in happiness in 10 years time anyway. You might as well start trying to express that.
- [90:30]
B
So what if you do achieve your dreams, then what? You know, basically when you're kicking it down the road into somewhere in the future, that is a great chapter, how to start from sanity. And you say striving towards sanity versus operating from sanity. It's a subtle difference, isn't there?
- [90:47]
A
Yeah, I think that's exactly what we're speaking about, Right. It's not taking the question of what you want your life to feel like as something that you have to strive towards very often by doing the exact opposite. Right. So you maybe you want a very restful life. So first of all you've got to work incredibly hard to get to the rest, but taking it as the sort of place from which you come. There's an author I quote in the book, Richie Norton.
- [91:15]
B
Yeah, I've got it.
- [91:15]
A
It's brilliant, right? It says like It's a two step process.
- [91:17]
B
Yeah.
- [91:18]
A
Number one, decide who you want to be. Number two, act from that identity immediately. And I love that. It doesn't mean like if who you want to be is like a sort of super high energy sports person, but you're right now completely sedentary and in a lot of pain or something. It doesn't mean force yourself to pretend to be someone you're not. It means like, what would the person who you are now do today if you're acting from the identity that you want to manifest in the world? So for that person, it might be some very gentle movement. I mean, I'm on your territory talking about physical advice here, but like, you know, if you want to be a novelist, it's not about sort of telling yourself that in the next week you've got to have the novel written or going around talking about. It's just like, what would that person, who I am now living from that identity do today? And you know, might be a few words of the novel.
- [92:14]
B
Yeah, I love that. You know, that two part process. Decide who you want to be and then. And to act from that identity immediately. I happen to enjoy journaling and I've seen journaling be very helpful for many people. And I ask myself three questions every morning. Let me rephrase that. Most mornings. And the third one is, which quality do I want to showcase to the world today? And I also have three questions in the evening, but they sort of piggyback off each other. So that question is about, I would say about Richie Norton's question one, decide who it is you want to be. Right. So often it will be, I want to be kind, I want to show the world the quality of compassion. I want to show the world the quality of patience. Right. For me it will be one of those things. I want to show the world the quality of integrity today. You know, whatever's top of mind for me or I feel I could do with a nice reminder off at that particular moment in time. And why I find it so powerful is because just by writing it in my journal while I'm drinking a fresh pot of coffee doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to showcase that quality. But I would say it makes it more likely because I've been a bit intentional that morning. So if later on in the day I'm tempted to be a bit short with someone or react, I'm just that little bit more likely to go, ah, you would get, hey, okay, showcase the quality of compassion. And then one of the two of the Evening questions are, well, what went well today and what can I do differently tomorrow? What can I do differently tomorrow is, you know, getting away from this perfectionist tendency. The acknowledgement there is that, yeah, even though I put that intention in the morning, it doesn't mean I'm a 100% perfect human who could do that all the time. So what I can do differently tomorrow might be, oh, I kind of, I wanted to be really patient today but at 5pm that last email really bothered me and I reacted. Tomorrow I'm going to try again and see if I can showcase the quality of patients which I love. Simple things like that, which in a very gentle way, in a non beating up way helps guide us because then you start to show up more and more. This is what I found myself and with patients who I recommended this to in the past is that they, you actually little by little start to change who you are in the present. And so those goals that you were looking forward to, you know, you become a nicer, a calmer, more like the person you want to be. And your behaviors actually that you're trying so hard to do and you're struggling to they follow suit as a natural consequence of you showing up as that person.
- [95:08]
A
Yeah, I think that, yeah, there's something very, very deep about this idea of what an intention is. Right. Because you've spoken about it rightly I think, as if it's something quite gentle and yet I think it might be more potent than a lot of kind of other more sort of willpower based approaches to change and transformation because you're planting it there. And yes, sure, it may not flower the way you wanted it to today depending on circumstances, but it's really there in a way that just sort of having it as a far off vision, as the kind of person you want to be or turning it into tasks that you're going to sort of grind through is not going to be. Well, it's a very opposite to something that I've definitely fallen into, still do sometimes, which is, you know, if you think about the times when you have been a jerk to other people or impatient or you know, or truculent and not done things that you should have done or whatever it is for me anyway, it's, it's not, I mean, I don't think it's because I'm an unpleasant person. It's because I've got these goals that feel to me very pro social, very generous and very good for the world. They're not just all about my own indulgence. And gratification. And everyone else is getting in the way of my attempts to achieve them. And so I'm snap at them or I fail to respond to their email or something. And so I'm in this ironic situation where precisely because I want to do good things, I'm showing up as the opposite of that person. And the intentional approach, the way that you're talking about it here, that sort of gets around that. That says, like my actual tasks for today, the part of me that wants a list of things I need to do or ways I need to be like is to manifest this thing you're much less likely doing, taking the approach you talk about to end up like snapping at people because you're too busy trying to build a world where you're compassionate and patient, which is so ironic and ridiculous. But we do it all the time.
- [97:10]
B
And I think about this through the lens of behaviors, right? So all the. You know, I really don't like the word good behavior, you know, healthy behaviors and unhealthy behaviors anymore. You know, it's a bit like time. You spend time, and it has a consequence. You engage in certain behaviors, there are consequences. If you like the consequences, you might want to repeat them. If you don't like the consequences, you might want to think about changing them. But that internal conflict, I think that many of us have when we. We're not really acting or showing up in the world as the people we really want to be and we know ourselves to be. That internal conflict is often what leads to the sugar and the booze and the down. For me, a lot of the time, they're downstream consequences for men in a conflict. And once you can sort of bring that into more alignment. I do find. I found this myself. I've seen it with patients. You know, you're actually starting to change your behaviors without actually trying so hard, you know, because you're not trying to do a behavior in conflict with a person. You know, you are being. Which I think is destined for failure. What are you just.
- [98:15]
A
Then you have to do things to take yourself out of your head because it's an uncomfortable dissonance.
- [98:19]
B
So I'm very much fascinated by root causes of everything. What is the root cause of your behaviors? And I think your books very much speak to. Well, one big root cause of many of our struggles. Health, happiness, productivity, meaningful life. Whatever it is you want come from this kind of these perfectionist beliefs that we have. And so that's upstream. We have this perfectionist. We have a belief that time is infinite and that Actually, we can get everything done because what social media tells us and you know, I can do that and that and that and have a good marriage and see my kids and be crushing it at work. Well, wait a minute. Well, what if you reexamined that root cause belief which your books are helping us re examine? Then you change that. You'll naturally have a ripple effect when things below that are going to start to change. Did that fully make sense?
- [99:17]
A
Yeah, no, I think it does and I think it did. And I think that that sort of, for me it's. And I think for a lot of people that perfectionism is. It's sort of a perfectionism that you've got to achieve in order to feel like you earned your right to exist, basically. Like it's got that very sort of moral self worth element to it. And so then, yes, the failure to do that, the failure to have life match up in that way is a painful thing that you need to find ways to not feel. So. Yeah, I think it reminds me also of the, just very briefly, the chapter called Don't Stand in Generosity's Way, which draws on the work of the Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein. And it speaks to this idea that it's really hard to make yourself into a better person. Lots of people think they need to be a kinder person or a better person than they are and that sets up all sorts of internal conflicts and issues. But Joseph Goldstein says he has this personal practice that when he feels a generous impulse arise, his practice is to try to act on it immediately. So he's saying, not I'm going to make myself a better person. I'm going to get better at recognizing when I'm already naturally being compassionate or nice or kind and just make sure that I follow through with sending the email or making the donation or whatever it is. And I think so often I've definitely had this experience, right. I feel like, oh yeah, I'd love to sort of. I'd love to sort of reach out to that person and tell them how much they appreciated their work or I'd love to make a donation to that good cause because it really, you know, reaches me in my heart. It's not that I'm a mean guy who doesn't want to do those things. It's that I'm really busy. I want to do those things really well when I have lots of time and energy and focus or I want to make sure that I'm giving the right donation to the right organization that's got a really good effectiveness rating. And then it just never happens because this life gets in the way. And so I really. It's another example of this, right, this lovely idea of Joseph Goldstein's practice, which is just like, you don't need to summon up more kind thoughts. You just need to spot when they're happening and get a little bit better at just doing the thing that's behind them.
- [101:25]
B
That's beautiful. And that's kind of, in some ways, real mindfulness, isn't it? That's like the art of being present and noticing what's going on in you and around you. That's kind of. I guess one way that we can think about mindfulness is being. Just be aware of that and then act on it. Not. Oh, I'll research the latest charity later. Running, you know, if you want to run, just start running. Don't wait until you've found the perfect running shoe or the perfect running outfit. It's like, no, no, you've got the urge now. Yeah, do it now.
- [101:58]
A
Yeah.
- [101:58]
B
When you got the urge.
- [102:00]
A
And by the same mindfulness. With the same mindfulness, you can not act on a sort of angry thought that you think you're going to regret later. Right. So you can send the lovely emails and not send the mean emails. You can go running and not necessarily engage in the sort of unhealthy habits so easily, just because, like, you already have the motivation to be that person.
- [102:19]
B
Yeah, exactly. I wanted to go to the Interruption chapter. It's one of my favorite chapters in the book, actually, for some reason. I just. I just love it. And it was when you. We were talking about that journaling exercise and you were sort of saying, when you can not. You. One could be short with someone because we're trying to do something else that we deem more important. And in that.
- [102:45]
A
Although me as well, many times. But anyway, yeah, carry on.
- [102:48]
B
But in that you sort of very openly share, you know, sometimes what goes to your mind if your son comes in to see you after school when you're trying to, I don't know, work between 4 and 5 or whatever it might be. Can you just explain that? I think there's such a deep, simple, but a very deep concept behind interruptions.
- [103:07]
A
Yes. I think there is a tendency that we have. I mean, part of the tendency I'm tracking all the way through the book is we want to have lots more control over our lives. And we think that having more control over ourselves and our lives is the path to freedom and peace of mind and all the good things. And I'm partly questioning that. And one of the ways we do that when it comes to our time is we sort of set ourselves these schedules, these very strong decisions about what we're going to use a portion of time for. And as a result, we actually end up creating a lot of the interruption problem. Like, of course, there are all sorts of things that happen unexpectedly all the time. Whether that is defined as an interruption or not is at least partly up to ourselves. So the example that I give is, you know, if it's one of the days of the week when I'm working from home, I'm not doing school pickup, so my son and my wife are somewhere else in the house. And if he bursts into the room to tell me excitedly about something that happened to him at school a day. Now, there are contexts if I'm right in the middle of recording a podcast or doing a live radio interview or something, where, like, that's higher up on the problem scale. But if I'm just sitting there, and the only problem is that I had defined that part of the day as being for deep focus, and then it becomes a problem that this otherwise totally wonderful thing that life is supposed to be about, which is moments of connection with your nearest and dearest. If that's only a problem because of the sort of overlay that I put on my day in an attempt to get control over it, then I think, you know, again, in a gentle way without beating. Beating myself up, I can suggest that maybe I've taken a wrong turn there in how I'm thinking about my time. There's also a lovely. There's a Dutch Zen monk called Paul Lumens, who I quoted a few points in this book, and he has this lovely observation about this as well, which is like, even if you do need to get back to focused work at that time, because maybe you do need to make that interaction as short as you can to meet a deadline. That's okay. It's not saying you should just let anyone interrupt you, even. Even for lovely reasons. But even when you do need to get back to that work, the way that works most smoothly in the flow of reality is to stop, put down what you're doing, look the other person in the eyes, see them for real and say, this sounds really wonderful, actually, I'm going to need to talk to you about it in a little while. That person feels seen, they go off. And that can work not only in a lovely interaction with your son, but with some really irritating co worker in the office or something. Right. It's not actually going to help, to try not to be interrupted and keep control. It's actually like, okay, this is what the unfolding of time has brought for me. I don't have to be a doormat and just go with it for the next hour and a half, but I do have to respond to what's really happening. And then, as Lumens points out, that is much. Everyone leaves happier in that situation. It's much smoother way.
- [106:01]
B
Most stress, I've realized, and some people may push back at this, but I really do believe this, that most stress, not all stress, but most stress, is internally generated within our minds by the way we're viewing situations. And I think that was a prime example. You know, on one level, what could be more lovely than your child wanting to see their father telling them about something that's happened? Right, right. What a lovely thing. It's only a problem because we thought I had to do this. And again, as you say, you acknowledge, you know, yes, there will be times, but, you know, creating. Getting frustrated by that interruption that, frankly, your son, I'm using that as an example. He's not a mind reader, like.
- [106:47]
A
Right.
- [106:48]
B
And he's a child.
- [106:49]
A
Right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
- [106:50]
B
They're not to know that. You could apply this to a partner who's interrupting or coming in when one is trying to work and you know somebody, yeah, I'm trying to work at the moment. Do you know I'm working? You know, it doesn't help you because A, the introductions happens, B, that friction to it that creates more internal stress that is going to make it much harder for you to get back to the work when it does need to happen when you want to get back to it.
- [107:16]
A
No, absolutely, Absolutely. And also, yes, you don't even know that the interruption. Like to call something interruption is to say that what should have happened is what was going to happen in your mind, and what did happen shouldn't have happened. And there are times that. That's true, but there are also times when it's like a wonderful serendipitous thing that is much better for everyone in the long run. And I do mention in that chapter, you know, that very famous moment, that sort of viral moment, when Robert Kelly, of course, career expert, was very famously interrupted during zoom by his kids. And then you see his wife in the background managing to sort of get them out of the room while this interview carries on. And he wrote a lovely little sort of reflective essay on the experience because he's become famous as that guy. Right. I mean, so many people saw this Obviously on some level that was something going wrong. But like, it. Everyone loved it, like, and it. And when it happened before the pandemic, but when the pandemic came, like, it was a sort of a. It got circulated again as a sort of a touchstone of like, what it's like trying to work as a family with all the kids in the, in the house at the same time. And like, he also writes about how he did pretty much think as he wrapped up that interview that he was never gonna be booked on a major media thing again. He's like, no way. More often now he gets way more bookings. Right. Because he's like, he's famous and everyone thinks it was kind of adorable.
- [108:40]
B
So he should give his kids a cut.
- [108:42]
A
Right, Exactly. So it's like nothing bad came from that thing that you would always have. If he'd had the choice in advance, should I stop? Do I want to make sure this doesn't happen or not, he would have chosen that it wouldn't happen. And all the things that came from it were good. And I think that is very, very common in our lives.
- [109:02]
B
Be careful what you wish for in that scenario. Be careful. You do that enough times, they're not gonna come and interrupt you and tell you.
- [109:12]
A
This.
- [109:13]
B
It's like, it's all these cliches. As you're a kid or a teenager, you hear all these, oh, time is short, passes so quickly. The kids grow up. You think, yeah, yeah, whatever. Oh, man, you become a parent, you're like, oh, my God, these are so true. I'm really feeling it at the moment as my kids are getting older. My son's 15. I'm like, oh, it's not long till he's 18. You know, how many summer holidays might we have left together as a family? I don't know, hopefully lots. But it really brings into that present day realization, just for me, at least be careful what you wish for. Do you really want lots of unbroken time when no one's disrupting you?
- [109:52]
A
Yeah.
- [109:52]
B
Well, you know, you could be fully isolated and have that life, or you could go, well, maybe, you know, going back to your thing of trade offs. Well, maybe a part of having a family and having children means that that is gonna happen.
- [110:07]
A
Yeah.
- [110:07]
B
So maybe you have to accept that. And I understand that sometimes you're in a job where you can't do that. Right. But having the humanity to explain it in the, in the right way is more helpful for the other person and, and yourself. And the truth is that that interruption thing is a really Big. I think this is why I like it so much, is that a close friend of mine a few years ago found out that his. One of. One of his children had a. Had a brain tumor. Non malignant, thankfully, but nonetheless a concern. And I remember him saying to me, since that moment, he never says no to that child. Now, anything can be taken to an extreme, right? So take that to an extreme. And someone could be someone who's completely spoiled.
- [110:58]
A
Right?
- [110:59]
B
Right. But I didn't take it.
- [111:00]
A
He. Can I have a 20th ice cream?
- [111:01]
B
Right.
- [111:02]
A
Is that right?
- [111:02]
B
Yeah, yeah. But what do you mean that. What are you. No. What are you really about? As if. If. And I'm being careful not to use names. If he or she wants to do something or wants to throw a ball in the garden or wants to go swimming or whatever it might be, his default has become yes. And since he told me that my default has become yes. Now, am I perfect? No. And of course, sometimes it's not appropriate, but for me it's been a really, you know, it's the. I guess in some ways the realization of mortality, even in a child, that reminds us of what is truly important in the present.
- [111:51]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And yes, I think that's so powerful. And it's interesting, isn't it, to see that when we do say no a lot of the time, sometimes there's the kind of no, which is that's not good for you. And it's my role as your parents try to steer you in healthy ways, which can go wrong as well, because it's important to make your own decisions and all the rest of it. But there's also the no that says like, well, that is a good thing, but I just can't do it now. We can't do it now because it's got to be later. And there's a beautiful line in a Tom Stoppard play which I quote in 4,000 weeks, which is in the context of child mortality as well. But like, you know, it's like later is always too late. And he's talking about how there's this other line in that same quote, which is that we treat children as if their purpose is to grow up into successful adults. And so we say yes or no to them on that basis. But actually a child's purpose is to be a child and later is always too late. Just this idea that if you're going to do these things that matter in your life, at some point, you're going to have to do them in a now. Right. And I think it's so easy to forget. It's then so easy to beat yourself up when you remember it as like, oh, no, from now on, I'm going to be perfect about this. That's also not where this is headed. Right. But just like, just to let that back in is very powerful.
- [113:11]
B
I think I cannot finish this conversation without talking about scruffy hospitality. I think it's. I think I. I think I'd demonstrate a bit of that today when he came to the house with the painters there, and you have to come in through the back. But what is scruffy hospitality?
- [113:30]
A
Scruffy hospitality. This is a phrase that was coined by an Anglican priest in Tennessee called Jack King. And he had this experience where he and his wife loved having people around to have dinner. He's written about this and gave a sermon about it, which sort of is where I first found out about this. They loved having people around for dinner, but they had sort of developed this checklist of all the ways in which the house had to be perfect before they could have people around for dinner, and how perfect the dinner had to be and well chosen and cooked and everything that it became a barrier to actually wanting to have people around for dinner because it's just so much work. And so he recounts how they became dedicated instead to this idea of scruffy hospitality, which is saying, like, okay, we're going to invite people around and the deal is going to be that you come and the house is the way the house is, and we eat the stuff that we can cook from the cupboards, more or less. And we're sort of understanding in this moment that the connections that come from the hospitality are more important than the putting on of the facade. And the sort of deeper point here, and I've definitely experienced this in my own life, is that it's not just a question of saying, look, it's okay, don't worry, it's forgivable. People are going to overlook the mess. It's that actually when we show up in this more, and not just in dinner parties, obviously, right. But when we show up in life in this more unvarnished way, we're more willing to talk about or display flaws. It's better, right? A lot of the time, it causes people to connect much more with each other. So I write in that chapter about how I often had noticed long before I came across this term scruffy hospitality, how if we were having people around for dinner and I noticed that there were crumbs under the fridge or unopened mail on the toaster for some reason I'd be like, oh my goodness, gotta sort this out before people come round. But if I ever saw things like that, or worse, frankly, at places that I had been invited, I would never be offended. Like, I would never think like, this is outrageous. This person hasn't got it together. I would actually be kind of flattered that I was being given the sort of VIP pass to their real lives. I was like, oh, I must be this person's real friend.
- [115:49]
B
So it's a bit like people pleasing, isn't it, in some ways where people pleasing is kind of trying to change who we are so that people think of us in a certain way.
- [116:00]
A
Exactly. It's that notion that. It's that notion specifically that like you, you have to be perfect in how other people. People pleasing example is good because the point about people pleasing is it doesn't please other people. Right. They find it really annoying. And there's a, there's a sense, there's a level of trying to make everything perfect in your presentation of yourself or your home or anything that actually causes a distance. Now, as I am aware and have also been had emphasized to me by one or two readers since first writing about this, firstly, there are plenty of people who really enjoy putting on a show when people come around for dinner. And I'm not trying to say that's bad. And secondly, this plays out, this is gendered, this plays out different ways. I think overall women feel more pressure for the domestic spaces to be really sort of spotless. And there's a sort of like, well, it's easy for you to say as a man aspect to this, which I also take on board. But the underlying point is just that, like thinking that things need to be presented a certain way that is different from who you really are before you can show up in the world. That's where the unnecessary self harshness comes from. If people like you as a person, they like you as a person and they don't need you to always be pretending to be a different person to just move it into a different domain quickly. There's research to show that when people are. There's been these kind of mentoring schemes to try to get people over. Imposter syndrome in academia, right? There was a whole set of schemes where young girl, young women, academics were paired with older female academics. And the idea was that like they'd get inspiration from the great success of these people, they wouldn't feel imposter syndrome anymore. And what the researchers found was that actually that just makes it a bit worse to be to when you're put in a position. It can make it a bit worse when you're put in a position where you're sort of looking at someone else's amazingness and you're comparing yourself negatively. And then actually when those people or people in that position started sharing about their own insecurities and failures and flaws, that was when the people who had imposter syndrome started to feel more empowered because there was a connection that came through behind those facades that was about how we are all human, we are all flawed and finite, and we are all in the same boat. And that's when you really get to feel a common bond.
- [118:09]
B
Yeah. Oliver, I love it, honestly. 4,000 weeks and this new book, Meditation Mortals, absolutely fantastic. Honestly, so, so helpful. So many insights and we've honestly barely scratch the surface in this conversation. If what is in Meditations for Mortals. I think the format is also really, really clever and very inviting for people. So I really appreciate that. Right at the end of this conversation, Oliver, I guess mirroring how we started.
- [118:42]
A
Off.
- [118:44]
B
For that person who is listening to us right now and feels that actually their life is out of control, they're knackered, they feel close to burnt out, they feel anxious. Given everything you've written about over the past years in your books, but also in your newsletter, what are your final words of wisdom to that individual?
- [119:16]
A
I mean, first of all, it is just to say that this is the most sort of fundamental, universal human experience, especially these days. Right. So there is, I hope that I can persuade the person in that situation at least not to make things worse by. By telling themselves that they shouldn't be feeling that way, that it's a sort of personal failure of discipline or character, or not having found the right methods yet that have left them feeling that way. No, this is a very, very, very understandable and forgivable response to just the sheer fact of being human, especially today. But then I suppose to it would be to suggest that this kind of set of awful feelings does have. In a sense, it's a portal to something, right? In a sense, it's an invitation to something very powerful. I've quoted in the book, and I keep quoting everywhere, the Zen master Gu Kennett, who used to say that her approach to teaching Zen students was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. And I just love this, which is why I repeat it endlessly. But you can sort of see, can't you? I think in like yes, the attempt to do it all is going to make you feel incredibly anxious and overwhelmed. Yes, the demands that are made on us and the things that feel like they're essential that we have to do them will leave us feeling wiped out. Like it's not just true, it's like so true. But that is not a war that any of us is ever going to win. And it's in that realization that sort of relaxing into that situation that you can then, I hope, begin to feel the first glimmers of a different kind of energy, which is like, okay, that's the way it is. So what would be something I could do with the next 20 minutes that would be one good way to spend 20 minutes of my life on the planet?
- [121:23]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Love it, Oliver. The new book is Meditations for Mortals, A four Week Guide to Doing what Counts. Thank you very much for coming back on the show.
- [121:32]
A
Oh thank you. This has been such a pleasure. Really appreciate it. Thank you.
- [121:39]
B
Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life and also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free@drchatterjee.com Friday 5 Now if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world covering all kinds of different topics. Happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change and movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check this them out. They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks and as audiobooks which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app and always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.
- [123:56]
A
SA.