I wish I'd let myself be happier yeah what does that say well that always reminds me of because I mentioned Dr PP and his concept of the brain circuits yeah one of them is for play and joyfulness and um do you know win in the Poo yeah okay not personally the book uh and uh it's always been one of my favorite books and uh I've talked about this before the end of that book would bring tears to my eyes for years because How It Ends is Christopher Robin by the way that's the whole other thing the relationship between a mil and his son Christopher was a very fraud and difficult one right and and Christopher actually resented the books because he felt that his father was buying these toys to write about rather than for his own benefit wow oh they had a very diff there a photograph of the two of them and the kid is looking so alienated he had a tough life and but that's a whole other story but the book in in the book Christopher Robin the little boy now has to go to school yeah and he has to learn about history and factors and Mathematics and so on and he's telling his friends the toy animals that he won't be able to play with them so much anymore and in the end Christopher and Winnie the bear of little brain uh who's the smartest of the whole lot and they walk off together and the the book ends with the statement something like and whatever they do or wherever they go in the Enchanted Forest the little boy and his bear will always be playing together and that phrase would bring tears to my eyes for years because play is so important and joy is so important and that's what these people are talking about and they didn't allow themselves to experience it they sacrific to play in the joy for all these other things you know and so um the good thing is you know um I inan my marriage the best thing you know the best thing in my marriage is the way we play together the first time I dated my wife Ray I knocked on the parents door and I said Can R come out and play and we've been doing it ever since and so um I believe what's being described in that last regret is people sacrifice their playfulness yeah their joyfulness for the sake of being accepted and being successful and all that it's a huge one play is built into our brains kids play spontaneously infants play M and um in that sense we can all be wi the PO and and Christopher we can always keep playing in the Enchanted Forest and that's just essential I think in that final regrets is the word happier yeah what does happiness mean to you uh really it means the capacity to play and to be in the present moment and and and and and you know the kids when when kids play they don't worry about the the appropriately they don't worry about the war wherever or or climate change they just playing in the moment they're fully present to themselves in imaginative almost hypnotically imaginative States so happiness just means being in the present and being allowed to be no matter what to have the capacity to play a lot of people today Gabor and I think you have struggled with this as well from what I know feel with so much heartache and suffering in the world yeah they feel that they have no right to be happy what's your take on that well um first of all Bob Dylan said somewhere that it's difficult to be completely happy when other people are suffering it's true so whe this this is a time of terrible suffering you know how I feel about Gaza and the terrible things that are happening there how can I be completely happy I can't be completely happy I can't because I can't not think about that the horror of it um but at the same time and this is why people might start get weirded out but I'm talking about a psychedelic experience this is three or four years ago I did uh I worked with psychedelics both as a Healer but also as a subject and I was having a mushroom experience and the same thing would happened with aasco once and I've always been one that felt that how could I be happy when owitz is possible when AST happened or my grandparents perished there how can I be happy what right do I have to be happy if that can happen in the world and that did happen in the world and both the plants showed me at some point that happened and yes you can be happy that the one doesn't detract from the other that that the capacity to be empathetic and to recognize the grief and to hold the grief does not obviate the capacity to be happy and one doesn't one do not one is not disloyal to the suffering in the world by allowing ourselves to be happy so there's no necessary contradiction and I've I've seen people on death row who if they win their appeal the best thing they can hope for is life in jail without life in prison without parole but they're happy and how do they become happy meditation working through their traumas having remorse for what they did connecting with other people and just connecting with the present moment and I'm thinking my God if people in that situation can be genuinely happy which I've seen I've I've had contact with the people then who am I to say that I can't be happy yeah so so there's ultimately there's no contradiction yeah now in this Society there's way too much emphasis on you know don't worry be happy Let's ignore all the bad stuff that's going on let's just concentrate on how we can make ourselves pleased or or or pleasured or whatever I'm not talking about that no I'm talking about being able to hold both at the same time yeah you have to and this is something I feel I've really grown into the last is that I actually can be very happy and content yeah whilst there is heartache in the world it doesn't mean I don't care I actually deeply care yeah but I realized that it's real skill it's an evolution of the self to be able to hold those two yeah I really do think that I think it's growth that's right I very much love the phrase uh that's attributed to Gandhi be the change you want to see in the world yeah I I I try my best to live my life by that and why that's relevant to this part of the conversation is I said this once at a live event I said listen if you watch the news and you allow this is a few years ago allow the heartache that's going on in name the country right to affect you so much so that you develop apathy you can't interact with your husband with your children you you you just drink more and more alcohol in the evening numb your pain yeah what does that do yeah right you're no good to the people who are suffering you're no good to those people around you and that then ripples to everyone around you whereas if you can learn to be content where you're at yeah if you then do want to go and help in whatever way you're much more able to you know volunteer send money whatever it might be yeah so I I think this is I think this is a really important point for people especially the way things are in the world at the moment a lot of people feel I've got no right to be happy yeah well I I no longer believe I used to believe that and somebody once said to be sent to me don't be so loyal to your suffering and um that's a lesson I've had to learn fairly late in life yeah um and as I quote in the midth of normal my friend Bessel Vander CL a trauma uh psychiatrist looked at me once this is about 10 12 years ago we have having lunch and he said gabo you don't have to drag arit around everywhere you go and what he meant by that is that you don't have to let that affect your present moment that you can be aware of it hold a memory of it but not let it determine your internal States you know and and it's true and I I understood intellectually at that time what he meant but it was only later that I was actually able to emotionally let go let's just talk about forgiveness then because a lot of time people say you know I just can't forgive what what happened to me was wrong yeah now I accept what happened to someone could can be wrong yeah but it doesn't necessarily follow that you can't forgive yeah what's your take on forgiveness well you and I last night we talking about a a woman that we both met and admired tremendously Edith Edgar yeah and Edith as I told you was 16 years old when I was 1 year old she lived in a town in what is not Southern Slovakia then was Northern Hungary called Kasha or kosida and her family were taken to owitz and um my grandparents would have been either on the same shipment to ashz or within the next day or so and her parents perished and she survived with her sister and she's become a psychother terapist she's written a couple of wonderful books that I know you've met her and interviewed her and in one of her books she describes going to the burkhoff in Bavarian Alps where Hitler used to have his lair and he went there she went there to forgive Hitler and um it doesn't mean that it was okay what he did she did that to liberate herself she didn't she said I don't want to keep him in his prison in my heart for the rest of my life I've worked too hard to attain happiness and joy to let this tension and this constriction control me so the Forgiveness wasn't making okay or or pardoning Hitler for his for all the evil that he perpetrated in the world but is her letting go of the emotions around it and of the tension and the tightness around it so forgiveness is not for the other person it's for yourself now when I work with forgiveness I don't advise people to forgive in fact as a matter of fact I do the opposite I say to people before you forgive allow yourself to feel the full anger that's in you let you let yourself fully experience the anger that's there cuz once you do it'll dissipate you'll let go Co it so don't do it in order to forgive do in order to liberate yourself now let's say I was abused as a child but let's say I find myself a fully liberated present oriented in contact with myself human being then what does that mean it means nothing was taken away from me it means that whatever happened caused me a lot of pain over the years but it didn't limit my capacity I wasn't robbed of anything so what's there to forgive so uh yeah and and and you can also ask yourself or anybody when you haven't forgiven what's in your heart what's in your body do you like that state that you're in uh the tension do you like that is that how you want to be do you think that's really helping you so I don't go out of my way to teach now I know that in a lot of spiritual practices there are forgiveness practices and I know in Buddhist practice and a lot of spiritual practices their forgiveness meditations and prayers my mind doesn't go there but my mind does say I yes also have to experience all the rage all the hatred all the anger that's in you and be with it and see what happens to it yeah and what happens to it once you pay attention to it it actually dissipates and so when Edith goes to the burov to forgive Hitler she's just saying I don't want to hold on to this stuff anymore it's not okay what you did but I don't want to hold on to the stuff anymore yeah it's fascinating I think curiosity is is often a very helpful Pathway to forgiveness because if you get curious about that other person to why did they act that way you know I'm not talking about Hitler here I'm talking about anyone but even with Hitler yeah what what were the conditions in that person's life that led to that if I was that person I'd be behaving in exactly the same way because I would have had their parents and their childhood experiences and they're bullying etc etc exactly once you look at the world through that lens your initial approach becomes compassion forgiveness comes as a side effects of getting curious that's totally right and there's an expression that you may be familiar with which goes to understand is to forgive yeah and uh it begins with curiosity yeah so I and I think that that curiosity is the essential quality that actually leads to compassion in the end now compassion doesn't mean tolerance of bad behavior no it doesn't mean validating or justifying crimes against um nature or crimes against against other human beings but it takes away that quality of tension where you make yourself Superior to reality and you make and you put yourself in a position to judge reality you know and I'm above it and I'm in a position to judge that's not a comfortable I mean actually it is comfortable for a lot of people to be there but it's a way of not dealing with their own stuff so I do think that curiosity is the key just to wrap this conversation up gabble we've been talking a lot about these regrets the regrets of the dying yeah and the final question I want to put to you is about the word regret I have been playing with the idea over the last 12 months or so that regret is actually a form of perfectionism so I actually now very much subscribe to the philosophy of no regrets but not in the not in the kind of derogatory way you know I'm going to live my life my way it doesn't matter who comes to my way yeah yeah no with this really compassionate understanding that I've always done the best that I can yeah based upon where I was in life yeah at that time yeah so even the things that I look back on and go actually you know what if I was in that situation again today I would act differently I don't see them as regrets I see them as situations that happen that have taught me something which is allowing me to be a better version of myself today exactly so in my life today there's there is no room for regret anymore and I guess I would love to know you know right at the end here what's your perspective on the word regret um I think um chronic regret is debilitating um it's a lack of self forgiveness it's um also kind of egotism of that that that that that somehow that important um it's quite something to recogniz I do recognize that some of the way I parented my kids the way I showed up I've often talked about this in your program too wasn't the best for them but it was the best I could do at the time so it's not the question of justifying anything but it's also not dwelling on the past regret is to dwell on the past and what's the point it's quite something to recognize that I did things that had I known differently I would not have done the same way that's just learning um regret is an emotional state of that values the past more than the present and it um accuses yourself [Music] of doing things for which you had no consciousness to do otherwise so that's where I stand with the great yeah K you know what a big fan I am of your work um it's just incredible to see the impact you're having on so many people around the world I'm very lucky to consider you a friend these days it's been great to get to know you over the last few years um for someone who has heard us speak today and something connected with them something you said spoke to them and they thought wow yeah you know what I'm carrying around old stuff with me today I don't express my emotions I'm not living a life if that is true to me yeah what are some of your final words for them well it's the word that you used curiosity so not why am I living this way but hm why am I living this way you know what happened to me what am I carrying here so uh the key phrase is precisely the one that you introduced the necessity to be curious yeah um in a compassionate way so you don't do an interrogation of yourself like you're um Prosecuting detective of why did you or why did you not but compassionately why did you not yeah why did you and if you ask these questions compassionately um and with curiosity the answers will emerge as will the capacity for you make yourself for you to make different choices As you move forward so where there wasn't Choice before cuz you were compelled or or or driven now you can have some Freedom if you're willing to be curious all behaviors of addiction substance dependent or not whether gambling sex the internet or cocaine all of them either soothe pain directly or distracts from it hence your Mantra the first question is not why the addiction but why the pain and I think that beautifully sums it up um you know in that you you're liking you're likening addiction to drugs potentially to you know sex gambling alcohol maybe shopping so I've had my own shopping addiction and I can tell you that the what happens in my brain when I'm indulging in my shopping addiction is exactly the same that happens in the brain of the cocaine addict in other words there's an excitation of the reward incentive and motivation circuitry and what the addict is after is that temporary change in brain status really what it is all addictions are an attempt to regulate an unbearable emotional state internally but you're trying to regulate your internal State through external means and that's what an addiction is so temporarily you get a change in the state of your brain in a change of your physiology you can do that through drugs you can also do it through gambling or Internet or sex or shopping but essentially after that same revitalization of your incentive and motivation circuitry of your brain and so from my perspective there's only one universal addiction process that dominates all addicted people the targets of addiction may be different the internal effects are much the same yeah and and I'm sorry I should add when you look at the the the sources of it the states that people are trying to escape are states of emotional distress states of emotional pain and Hance why the addiction not why the addiction but why the pain so some people who are listening to this or or watching this right now might be thinking yeah I get that that all sounds fine um for those people who are addicted but I of course am not addicted to anything so you've you've got a rather beautiful definition I think of addiction which I think will be really helpful to sort of go through at the start here so that people listening can actually figure out if it does relate to them or not well when I speak to a room of people and I ask them how many are addicted most people will only think of drugs so some people put their hand up then I give them my broader definition of addiction and not everybody puts their hand up and that definition is that an addiction is manifested in any behavior that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves but suffers negative consequences in the long term and he is going to be able to give it up so any Behavior not just drugs the key Hallmarks are craving pleasure relief in the short term negative outcomes in the long term inability to to give it up that's what an addiction is and that could be to drugs nicotine caffeine alcohol the legal the lethal and legal substances or it could be to heroin cocaine crystal meth fentanyl cannabis any number of other substances but it could also be to sex to gambling to shopping to eating to work to exercise to the internet to gaming to pornography to political power to the acquisition of wealth to the hoarding of objects anything and by and when you give that definition and you ask people how many here would acknowledge some Addiction in their life sometimes the vast majority of people would put their hands up which means to say that addictions are in a Continuum it's on a spectrum and they're distributed dispersed throughout all of our society and so that the identified drug addicts make up only a small narrow segment of addicted population so really the whole way we we think about addiction the way we criminalize various forms of addiction really needs to change to a much more a more compassionate way of dealing with it but also really trying to understand what's the root cause because if you know I totally subscribe to your theories and I and I and I think that ultimately if the root cause of all addiction or all addicted behavior is the same you how do we tackle that and where does that come from what is that root cause so once you're asking not by the addiction but by the pain now you have to forget that it's a choice because nobody chooses to be in pain and you also have to forget the medical idea that it's an inherited brain disease you actually have to look at people's lives now in Vancouver's done on his side in Canada where I worked for 12 years with a highly addicted population these people had uh multiple addictions cocaine alcohol cannabis uh opiates of all kinds cigarettes in every case they suffered with HIV with hepatitis C they would die of overdoses suicide um infections of all kinds and these people every single one of them had been heavily traumatized in childhood all the women I worked with over 12 years had been sexually abused all the men had been neglected or beaten or emotionally abused I'm talking about now the severely addicted population which is also what the large scale study shows that the the greater the childhood adversity the greater risk for addiction in adulthood now the more severe the childhood adversity the greater the risk of substance addiction and injection use however if you look at my own case um I wasn't beaten I wasn't abused in my family origin um um wasn't neglected but I was a Jewish infant born during the war in Hungary um and spent my first year under the Nazi Nazi regime you can imagine under what circumstances so I had a very unhappy stressed terrorized mother and children can be hurt in two ways children be children can be hurt when bad things happen to them that shouldn't happen that's the abuse that's the violence in the family that's the parental addiction which children can also be hurt when their needs are not met now I had this need for an attuned empathetic emotionally responsive mother she couldn't be that not because she didn't love me not because she didn't do her best but simply she was too terrorized she was too depressed the lack of that joyful attuned loving mother who I I shouldn't say loving because she loved me tremendously but her love couldn't be translated into responsive behavior that alone was enough to hurt me so in other words the source of addiction is always some kind of childhood hurt either because bad things happen that shouldn't have or because the good things that should have happened couldn't happen because of the Parents emotional states both of these are enough to hurt the child uh in a way to driving them to self soed through addictions so so do you think your own experience of of trauma really as a as a young baby not even in child as a young baby has impacted your own health your own behaviors and therefore ultimately where you are today which is one of the world's leading voices on trauma and addiction do you think that has been instrumental in you getting to where you are today having to deal with the impacts of that has been instrumental I mean I really uh as an adult uh I was a successful physician you know I was much in demand family practitioner I was head of a paliative care department at a major hospital I was a national medical Economist for a Canadian newspaper in my 50s and internally I was driven workaholic depressed uh affected by ADHD um anxious and unfulfilled and unsatisfied and it's when looking at those Dynamics and wondering what the heck has happened to me here and what the gap between my external Persona and my internal experience of myself that's when I began to deal with trauma not to mentioned as a family physician and you and I were talking about this before we get to see patients before they get sick the Specialists only see them after the illness has been diagnosed I get to see people before they get ill I get to see people in their context of their multi-generational family background so we have a much broader view of who gets sick and why and so both through my medical work and having to to deal with my own stuff I began to realize the central role of trauma in shaping people health or illness yeah since I since I've been studying trauma myself um both with the work that you do but just other things that I'm reading around it it really helps me understand my patients MH and their behavior is much better I really start to you can start to tap in now as to what they're coming in with more you think oh that's what's going on behind that not the symptom they're describing but but why are they making those choices and something you may not know gab i i a few years ago I did um a series of documentaries on bbc1 called doctor in the house and what I would do on that is I went to live alongside families who had health problems they were already under GPS they were already under Specialists they were all taking medication pretty much already and they still weren't getting better and they were still struggling so I went in to sometimes I'd stay the night in their houses I'd live a inside them really get to understand you know what choices they were making with their lifestyle sure but also I get to see you know various Dynamics in the family the sort of thing that would never come up in the consultation room even if you ask that question they would never even think to bring those things up but you would just start to spot things and little Dynamics and I found that with every single family pretty much now if I if I reflect back on all those families I stayed alongside I was very fortunate to get really good health outcomes with them all after about 6 weeks sorry to interrupt if you're enjoying this video and want to learn more you can download my free special guide containing six simple breathing practices that will help you calm your mind lower stress and improve your energy to get a hold of this guide all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below but there was a huge emotional component behind a lot of the illness yeah um now just to be clear I'm not saying that it was in their head at all they had proper physical symptoms that were that they were struggling with and obviously that in some ways can make people feel down a little bit about themselves because they're not feeling so good but I really got this strong sense that when you start to look at their lives and their upbringing and how they saw themselves it was just it was uncanny how many times their emotional health was absolutely tied into their physical health well so one of the books have written which will be published in Britain in a few months is entitled when the body says no the cost of hidden stress and I'm making the case precisely as I heard you articulated just now is that when it comes to chronic illness and whether it's colitis or Crohn's disease multiple sclerosis ALS or motor neuron disease in in England uh malignancy um chronic psoriasis eczema chronic fatigue syndrome the physiological symptoms which are not in people's heads in the sense that they're imagining them but it very much originates in people's heads in that it has a lot to do with certain relational and emotional patterns that they adopted in childhood in other words what I'm saying is that because of childhood programming people impose certain unconscious stresses on themselves and those stresses because of the unity of Mind and Body which unfortunately is not taught or recognized in the medical schools but which scientifically is not even vaguely controversial because the immune system and the emotional apparatus and the hormonal apparatus and the nervous system are part and parcel of the same system so when something occurs emotionally which it does on a chronic basis that has an impact of undermining people's physiology turning their immune system against themselves or suppressing the immune system so I absolutely agree that people's emotional patterns which reflect not individual choices or mistakes but multi-generational patterns in the family those emotional patterns translate into physical illness and and and and and if we can address those emotional Dynamics we can actually have an impact on the physiological course of their illness which is again not something that anybody in medical school will ever tell you because there's this unfortunate separation of mind and body that you and I are trained in yeah absolutely and I think the key one of the key things there for me was that you're not putting blame on people there's no blame yeah and I think that's really really a key point to maybe we can discuss now because a lot of people maybe hearing that feeling you know maybe I've done this to myself or my mother did this to me for example and that's not what you're saying at all is it well [Music] um this is an interesting conversation I make the distinction between blame and responsibility okay blame says that you did something that you could have done otherwise and so you're Therefore your fault that's what blame says responsi says yes you do this to your yourself but not consciously or deliberately you did it because you're programmed to do it by your own childhood experience which in turn was um programmed by your parents childhood experience so there's nobody at fault everybody does their best but we do pass these unconscious patterns on and you don't blame people for having unconscious patterns you try to make them conscious of it so they can take responsibility for it so there's no con there's no responsibility without consciousness yeah and so and and there's no blame so I don't blame anybody for their illness I don't blame their parents either but I do say these unconscious patterns have been passed on and these unconscious emotional Dynamics have an impact on your physiology that's all and if you want to have an impact on your physiology you got to get conscious you have to realize what have you been doing unconsciously so you can stop doing it or do it differently so it's a matter of liberating people from these ingrained patterns for which they're not to be blame blamed so in my world there's no room for blame whatsoever but there is room for helping people become responsible for helping people being response able being able to respond to their circumstances and without awareness none of us are response able yeah I think if I think to my own life and my own health Journey over the last few years and I guess what's really changed to me over the last few years you know I've done a lot with my lifestyle I've done a lot with my nutrition my sleep and and those things have been great and really helped me but over the last years I've really been focused on my emotional health you know I I I see a therapist pretty regularly um and I can always feel when I've got something new some some deeper layer that's starting to come out you know I I have I have a session or I go through some sort of therapy and I I feel good I feel oh yeah you know I've got it now I get it I get it why I do this and it changes your behavior certainly but it's almost as as if you as you do that there's multiple layers it's like peeling back a layer the you know it's peeling back layers of the onion and newer things keep coming out um which has been it's been really rewarding for me because you know you talk about addiction and I I think back to my my own life and various things that I've done at certain points you know I don't think anyone who knows me well maybe my close friends but most people probably wouldn't think that I've ever had an addiction because we have all these connotations about addiction you know you know it's like you know being being on a street corner or being a drug addict or something but but everyone around me would know that I've got an addicted Personality yeah and I used to think that that was my personality that's the way I was born what's weird that as I start to process my own emotional baggage and I start to clear it I'm no longer as an addictive person as I used to be and and that's why I really I kind of feel I feel so strongly about the work that you're doing because I kind of feel that that wasn't my person personality that was the behavior I had chosen to soothe something that I was missing well so how would I would put it I I mean I I agree with your concept I would use use a different language around it that was your personality but it wasn't your person it wasn't who you were the personality itself is a defensive structure that we develop as a way of dealing with our pain so much of what we considered to be a personality is actually um an overlay uh Upon Our two cells and so these were in choices in childood for example um with my add the tuning out I never chose to tune out but when I was an infant under the conditions that I described of being a Jewish infant under the Nazis I had plenty of stress on me and how does an infant deal with stress that they can't change they tune out and then a tuning up becomes programmed into my brain and then soon many years later I'm diagnosed with ADD it wasn't no choice that I made it was an adaptation so I would what I would say about the personality including what you describe as your addictive personality it wasn't you it was an adaptation that you took on as a way of surviving your childhood as a way of soothing your pain it's when we get older that we realize that there's something more to us than a personality that the personality is actually a defensive cover for who we truly are and as we start like as you describe your own process you go through therapy and you go through layers and then you realize oh that's not actually me yeah and and I'm fear without it then you realize that what we thought was the personality was actually just a defensive cover and and and once we strip that defense off and we find it no longer necessary we become much more true ourselves more much more true to ourselves so become much more balanced and happier in our lives so yes it was the personality but you are not your personality that's that's how I would formulate it yeah know I I I love the way you put that actually it really really helps me think about it and it's slightly different way um I think something came into my mind there which is you know and we were chatting a little bit about this before we got on air um about medicine and how how reductionist it has become the practice of medicine and I think like something like high blood pressure for example I think of as an appropriate response from the body to the signals that it's been given absolutely and I think there's an analogy there with what you're saying which is if you if you're surrounded by stress as a young baby whatever that stress is your brain is going to adapt to that it's an appropriate response to the signals that your brain is getting is that fair to say that's right so so my next book is going to be entitled the myth of normal illness and health in an insane culture and when I say in culture insane culture I'm inan a culture that doesn't meet human needs so if you take a condition like high blood pressure for which what's the medical term for high blood pressure hypertension hypertension all right and and and doctors of course say our colleagues say well there's a few types of hypertension for which there's a cause like kidney disease or some kind of hormonal disorder but for most part we don't know what causes high blood pressure essential hypertension ESS we call Essential basically we don't know what the heck we're talking about that's what that means just take the word hypertension and slow it down a bit hyper tension hyper tension hyper tension maybe there's too much tension in people's lives you know and if you actually look at the the rising rates of of of hypertension it's got to do with social pressure and social stresses and I know that b usually when I take care of myself I have the blood pressure of a of a young person but there's been times in my lives when I've been driven by stress and I've had blood pressure ranges in the in in the risky uh end of the scale so so for me when my blood pressure goes up it's a real warning buddy you've got too much tension in your Liv you better do something about it all we do in medicine is we hand out pills or we tell people to lose weight but we never address the sources of real tension in their lives and I'd say that most hypertension and so for example if you look at a black black American males they have much higher risk of hypertension than say white American males or we say it's genetic no it isn't their biological relatives in Africa do not have high blood pressure right so it's an artifact of being a black male in essentially a racist society and uh James Baldwin the American writer once said that being a black American male is to live in a condition of suppressed rage all the time yeah well that suppressed rage will drive your blood pressure so hyp and other ill health yeah yeah so so high blood pressure is a great example of a uh a socially induced physiological physiological condition which is mediated through our emotions and the impact of our emotions on our autonomic nervous system and on our hormones yeah it's I mean I've never really thought about the term hypertension like that before you know hyper tension and it and it makes such sense when we think about it like that you mentioned this this new but your right talking about how we've got a I think is it an insane society around us yeah and I think of I think of stress you know as I've mentioned to you I've I've just spent a few months locked away writing a new book on stress called the stress solution and I I feel strongly that when we talk about making changes so a lot of people when they try and improve their health they try and improve their lifestyle okay which is a pretty reasonable start but many people I find can't do that or they do it temporarily for a few weeks few days few months maybe but then they revert back and as a doctor I've always been intrigued as to why do some patients keep coming back and why does some patients with the same so-called problem get better with the with the same course of of treatment right and and I always think well if they keep coming back I'm clearly not getting to the route cause of the problem and the more I think about your work although people talk about you in in the realm of addiction and Trauma I think your work doesn't only explain addiction and Trauma it explains all human behavior and therefore has profound implications not only for trauma not only for pain not only for addiction but actually the whole of the health landscape well thank you and I again in my various books have written about that um it just so happens that it's my addiction book that's being published right now first in England um when you get down to it it's very simple either you raise human beings who whose needs are met or you raise human beings in a way that you don't meet their needs when you don't meet people's needs they have to adapt in uh artificial ways those adaptations become a sources of later on there was a very interesting article in a journal Pediatrics which is the official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics published in January 2012 there was an article on childhood development generated by the Harvard Center on the developing child so prestigious as you get and inner abstract they say that human environments that because of scarcity or stress uh troubl young children cause these children to make adaptations which are psychological and physiological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation but which may come at a long-term cost to health behavior uh and longevity in other words the way that young children adapt to um to stress early on helps them survive that early stress but in the long term those same adaptations become sources of pathology so if you if you look at my own tuning out so the the tuning out that I did as an infant under conditions of severe psychological strain is an adaptation it helped me as an infant survive a year where the situation was utterly impossible but that same tuning OD gets programmed into my brain and now I'm diagnosed with the medical condition ADHD decades later so what was an was adaptive in my circumstance becomes maladaptive later on I'm suggesting that much of illness uh begins with that that that these are necessary personally adaptations however which then stress us later on and so that there a real so what's common to my work is that I look at the sources of adult function or dysfunction in our formative experiences and you know that's not controversial if you look at a gardener I mean if a gardener looks at their plants they know that how they treat that young plant will have a huge impact on the on the adult plant anybody who's in animal husbandry will realize that how you treat the young whether it's a dog or a horse will have huge impact on the personality and behavior of that animal later on why don't we get the same thing in human beings it's the same principle so it's essentially very simple yeah it really is isn't it when you when you break it down to the yeah like that it it's super simple we need to we need a society that really supports children and babies and mothers and and parents at a young age absolutely and then I guess what comes to my mind is and you may know the stats on this I don't but we here in the UK we always are talking about Scandinavia and we talk about how they are really uh prioritizing those early years you know they give a lot of maternity leave a lot of paternity leave um you know yes they may have high taxes but it seems to me that the society there has prioritized family and bringing up children whereas I don't think we're quite as good here and but I don't think we're as bad as a the US MH um one a really good friend of mine he married an American girl and she I can't remember but maybe after she gave birth to her first child she might have been back at work it might been something like four weeks or something yeah something obscene like to me it sounds obscene to me absolutely and the child in daycare yeah and I wonder I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit how Society is set up now and then what that is doing because you mentioned your mom's clearly that's a huge trauma I mean that's hopefully it's sort of trauma that most of us aren't experiencing but are there similarities in terms of what that's doing to the child oh absolutely um so the United States uh which uh to hear their politicians is the best and most glorious country in the world which Itself by the way is interesting like if you met a person if your neighbor was always telling you how great he was and how he's the best and everybody wants to be like him what would you think of him yeah you think he's got a grandio personality disorder and he's compensating for his real sense of deficiency well that's the United States and they have a lot to compensate for and what you say about child care is absolutely true is that they have a barbaric Child Care System a barbaric maternity relief system where women and often poor women on welfare have to go back to work after a few weeks of of of giving birth now if you look at human evolution or or look at an ape culture the ape mothers hold their babies for months there's no separation the child actually develops by through being held by the mother and human societies until very recently were organized there around children being around the parents really all their lives certainly through a childhood and Adolescence there was just no separation what we do in our culture more in the states than elsewhere but increasingly elsewhere as well we separate children from their parents and other will be depriving them from the natural conditions for healthy development now there was a study last year with two years ago comparing the crying of British German Canadian and danish children lo and behold Danish kids cried much less than these others what was the difference the parents were around much more and the parents were much more likely to pick up the kids when they were crying that's what made the difference now that crying child is an anxious child when the child is crying it's not just a benign thing the child is crying because they're stressed when they're stressed their brains are suffused by stress hormones are dwelling in ctis adrenaline cortisol interfere with your physiology interfere with healthy brain development so just the fact of holding a child which was historically and prehistorically the standard um is is an essential aspect of child rearing which modern societies have denied and as a matter of fact I don't know what it's like in England but in North America we actually advise parents not to pick up their kids when they're crying at night we tell them not to pick them up help we sleep train the kid by not picking them up in other words denying the child's needs for connection and what's that doing to the child do you think well it does uh a number of things uh one is to give the child the message that his emotions don't matter and and children take everything personally it's not true that babies don't have emotions and it's not true that babies are tabular rasa where you can write anything you want babies have certain defined emotional needs and when they get the message that they're not important that's the message they're going to embibe unconsciously nonverbally and you can see that behavior in the adults you know the person who comes into your office and says uh doc I'm sorry to bother you I'm sure you have many people much more important than me but I have this little problem you know what kind of a chood they had yeah um number one so it gives that would be me going into the dot okay or in in just various aspects of my life and you know the people pleas her yeah always doing you know yeah yeah no problem you know the amount of times I think just on a social thing you'd be where do you want to go guys yeah yeah no worries wherever wherever you end up somewhere you just don't want to be in you're in a restaurant you hate the food in but hey yeah it's cool guys no problem and it's sorry I don't mean to trivialize what you're saying it's you're not trivializing it what you're actually illustrating you're telling me exactly what kind of infancy you had yeah and um physiologically what does it do the baby's crying and again he stress hormones now one of the things that Aboriginal peoples don't do is let their babies cry when I say it's not that they forbid them to cry they pick them up they don't even put them down to tell you the truth but should they cry they pick them up immediately we in our society we actually advise people that the babies cry when the baby's crying it's because they're stressed when they're stressed again their brains are suffused by stress hormones that interferes with healthy brain development you used to work in paliative care yeah and and I think you're familiar with the book by bronny we the pal of care nurse five regrets of the dying yeah what I thought would be interesting today for our fourth conversation on my podcast together yeah is to maybe go through each of those five regrets because I I just I'd love to know from your perspective what each of these regrets says yeah about where we are who we are yeah what things are important an to us yeah and so the first of those five regrets is I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself not the life others expected of me yeah and so let's keep in mind that like when I used to work in Pala of care which I did for seven years and this nurse who wrote the book she's Australian she wrote the book about 12 years ago now they weren't talking about people dying at old age they were mostly it's about people dying before their time and so the regrets that they had um as their terminal illness usually malignancy or perhaps chronic autoimmune disease um brought them to the end of their physical existence what did they regret and the top one was I wish I had the courage to live my own life rather than the one that people expected of me I would reframe that because there's a deep truth in it and as you know and perhaps we've talked about from my point of view very often the people that do develop chronic illness are people that have suppressed their own true selves for the sake of being accepted to others and that self-suppression has deep physiological consequences on the immune system on the nervous system on the heart and so on so that that self-suppression is also physiological self annihilation in some ways but when she talks about courage that's a self judgment they're saying to themselves I wish it had the courage as if it was a question of cardice it isn't it's a question of programming like you and I are both parents we know this no infant is born suppressing themselves no infant enters the first day on this Earth trying to please anybody they're just being purely themselves yeah expressing their Joy when it's there expressing their upset their distress when that's dominant but they're purely themselves so that what she calls courage or what these people call courage of being myself is actually a trauma imprint that for some reason they learned early in life that to be themselves is to court rejection by their environment so it's not a lack of Courage you can't talk about a one-year-old lacking courage or a 2-year-old it's simply an adaptation now later on they say courage but really that's a that courage is or the lack of it is a shorthand for something happened to me that I gave up my true self for the sake of being accepted and that cost me uh first of all it cost them in terms of physical illness but also cost them in terms of self-respect and and dignity it's a major one yeah are you living a life at the moment that's true to yourself I am now um uh I I sense that I have I believe that I am um that doesn't mean every second I do you know but on the whole I do and it feels really good and I know you know I had dinner last night and and and you were telling me that you're finding yourself far more self-expressed and and and comfortable with who you are than you used to so that's the good news people is that this is a process that can continue for a lifetime yeah but yeah um I I really see that people who suppress themselves really suffer yeah so that first regret I wish I had the courage to live a life trueu to myself um I'm really glad you picked out the word courage because that word also stands out out to me yeah it's very interesting to use that words yeah um well it's a self judgment isn't it it is yeah you know I could have done better I should have had the courage is what that kind of says yeah it's interesting you said when when you turn 80 or as a consequence of you turning 80 you realize that well 13 years ago you gave it your medical practice yeah will you be alive in 13 years that's very striking yeah are you afraid of death um in principle I'm not you know um but I don't really know till I have to face it I won't know how afraid I am until it confronts me you know at this point I feel healthy and I get to do what I want to do and I I have Vigor and I have interests and excitement and and love and and um likes and dislikes and I'm quite a liive you know what happens when I have to confront the actuality of it I have no idea how I'm going to respond so it's sometimes I get fear around it I mean there I don't want to give this up I don't want to give up this life but other times I say well if I do I've lived and it's been good and there's not much to regret you know so yes and no but I won't really know until I'm up against it you've spoken publicly before about your um your Journeys with plant medicine yeah does that change anything for you I guess or has that changed anything in terms of how you may view what happens at the end of human life because people many people will say for them it does change how they perceive themselves how they perceive death how they perceive what this experience of life actually really is well specifically as you're probably aware they've done studies on endol life anxiety with Sal cybin so-called magic mushrooms and um people report spiritual experiences yeah and people report a significant abatement of anxiety they had on these are people who terminally ill and uh nothing that the medical profession could offer to reversed the course of their fatal Illness but they had much less anxiety about dying as a result of those spiritual experiences that were induced by taking the mushroom yeah uh for me I've never face death in that sense when I think of some of my psychic experiences and if in retrospect I allow myself to sink into them I can say in that state I would not be afraid of death I'd say that there's a larger reality than the sorry cupt if you're enjoying this video and you want to learn more then do check out my free special guide which contains the six crucial steps you need to take in your life to not only build healthy habits but also to make them stick if you want to get a hold of this free guides all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below persistence or sensation of this particular lung represents you know I would say that if I project myself back into those experiences again how I will face it when it happens or when it becomes inevitable um I don't know yeah society's view or this society's view of people getting older yeah 80 seems to be the age where we often expect people to be doing less you know being less mobile less vital not everyone of course but but many yeah you seem to be someone who has this love of life this Vigor this message you want to share you seem to be traveling all over the globe at you know pretty regular intervals you you come to London for 4 days you're going to help me do some teaching with tomorrow which is incredible but a lot of 80-year-olds are not doing that yeah right and the longevity space within medicine has really exploded over the last few years people love talking about longevity right and I think we're missing something in our discussions about longevity well I think there's a couple of things what what do you think we're missing I think it depends what you mean by longevous first of all right so yes some people want to know how can I not necessarily live longer but be independent mobile vital as long as I live so Health span versus lifespan yeah and I get that yeah but there's a lot of talk these days about extending lifespan living to 150 and Beyond and all kinds of crazy stuff right and I don't want to be the I don't want to stand in the way of human progress at all my one of my fears is that in Pursuit Of Living longer are we missing something about the Beauty and the essence of what life really is life is finite the fact that it's finite is what makes it so beautiful yeah if we could live to 200 yeah would we have even more of these regrets because we'd keep taking life for Grants you know what I you're talking my language because to tell the truth the coin of phrase all this stuff about longevity bores me to death you know um I just don't care you know what really matters is what does this moment bring us or what can we bring to this moment you know let the future take care of itself you know like Jesus says take no thought for tomorrow you know and um I really think that this longevity movement is a sign of deep social anxiety when especially you get these rich people in California with their cryo technology of freezing the body hoping that 100 years from now they'll be able to unfrozen and there'll be treatments for the you know it bores me you know what really matters is for me is what makes life meaningful and active and engaged in the present moment and um it's interesting in English we talk about growing older now that's a very telling phrase because in significant ways when we get older we shrink you know like our bodies our skin starts to Sag our muscles are no longer as you know Supple and strong as they used to be so what does it mean to grow older we could just say like you said earlier get older which is just a chronological progression but growing older implies is that this growth is actually possible so in what sense can we actually grow and I think actually we can actually grow into the present moment and and and growing in our grow our appreciation for life and what matters and and knowing what doesn't matter and GR in wisdom indigenous cultures they don't talk about elderly they talk about Elders yeah there a huge difference yeah so um I think there's a natural reverence for age that senior cultures would respect and modern society kind of um dismisses you know now do I wish that my hair was blacker and more curly the way it used to be yeah I do you know and it wasn't gray and my hair wasn't thinning at the top and I sure I wish that but uh at the same time I would not going to be as unconscious as I was yeah when my hair was black and curlier you know yeah this is such an interesting point I've spoken to several menopause experts on the show oh yeah over the past years and I remember when doing some research on one of the conversations I came across research showing that in cultures where women are revered as they get older yeah their wisdom is respected they're seen as really important parts of the community right those cultures report less menopausal symptoms isn't that interesting I just so I'm not misinterpreted I want to be really clear I'm not saying that that means that all menopausal symptoms would go away if that was the case I just find it interesting that when the cultural view of growing old is different yeah we perceive ourselves as having I don't know a different symptom profile if if I can put it and and and and the degree of suffering is different so that maybe they have symptoms or maybe they have certain features but the suffering is not experienced the same way please expand on that because I think some people will go what do you mean if you're either getting symptoms or you're not getting symptoms explain what you mean by perception of you know the the suffering essentially well I was talking to somebody else about this today so in as you as you and I know in Western medicine we kind of medicalize everything and so we talk about premenstrual syndrome not which PMS it's a syndrome it's a medical entity what is it really is that under the impact of hormonal changes women get more sensitized so they might have more physical pain and more upset but we could see that as pathological or we could actually say that that it's a time of Truth telling that the hormones do sensitize them to things that are not functioning in in their lives which the rest of the time they curated to aquous with and to put up with yeah but the menstrual ferment in their bodies makes it less tolerable so instead of seeing it as a pathology we could see it as a time of insight and what if they actually listen to their bodies and listen to what their body is saying no to that the of the month they kind of suppress then that could be seen as a time of wisdom rather than a time of suffering so the the physical things are there but but it doesn't have to be experienced as suffering could be experienced is a time of Truth telling and actually a lot of women have told me that once to become aware of that their relationship the menstruation is totally different and I think that's what you're saying about menopause as well yeah this kind of speaks to the second regret which is I wish I hadn't worked so hard yeah and what I mean by that is I agree that for many women yeah and I can think of so many patients like this their their hormonal symptoms were actually showing them that the way you're currently living is not in harmony with your body exactly now of course sometimes people struggles to make change it's hard to make change maybe their life is Mega stressful and at that moment they can't change it for whatever reason and I totally I empathize with that I I understand yeah but for some people who are able to it's in sometimes it's one of the best things that has happened to them yeah now this thing of I wish I hadn't worked so hard that's an interesting one because I wish I hadn't work so hard and what do I mean by that like like uh speaking for myself and I don't know if this is true for you but I became a physician for some really good reasons one of them was I genuinely wanted to help suffering humanity and I thought medicine is a perfect pathway through which I could help people that's genuine and I meant it I also chose a profession where I was fairly confident of making a decent living so I could support a m a life for myself and my family that's legitimate but those reasons don't make you work too hard they make you work hard but they don't make you work too hard what makes you work too hard and that's what these people are saying is you're driven by something that you're not even aware of and what I wasn't aware of when I went to medical school and when I was a physician for decades is how driven I was to justify my my existence in the world and to prove her that I was important and worthwhile and so on and that had to do with the loss of those that confidence owing to Early Childhood trauma and so the it's not a question nobody says I wish I were hadn't worked hard to achieve something in life you have to work hard they're saying I wish I worked too hard and that two part the to part comes from being driven by unconscious needs to validate Your Existence where why should any human being have to validate their existence you know and so that's what they're saying and when you're driven to work too hard you actually ignore what matters and what matters is um what you were telling me last night about how much it matters for you to spend time with your families every summer you take a bunch of weeks away from your podcast and you just spend time enjoying your kids and and and your wife and your family and I didn't do that I for me it was very hard to even take holidays I always felt I had to keep working somebody was in pregnant my God what if I would miss their delivery like the baby couldn't enter the world without me you know so that drivenness is what makes people work too hard and so it's not a matter of working hard it's a matter of working too hard and where does that come from a again that comes from childhood trauma a lot of doctors and I have several friends like this they don't take their full allowance of annual leave sounds like you may have been similar I had that tendency yeah yeah and often people will say and I have a friend who says this yeah but my patients need me no they don't need them they need medical help yeah but I think we have to ask ourselves and this is very very common in medicine actually I'm sure it's common in other um professions as well yeah it's interesting when you don't take your full allowance of annual leave that your contract entitles you to it's often paid time off right it's part of your job when you're not taking it of course there can be reasons for that there can be reasonable reasons there can be work reasons but if you're not I think you I think it may be worth reflecting on some of those underlying you know that those real drivers of that well it occurs to me that what your friend is actually saying is not that my patients need me but I need my patients yeah to feel okay and when I'm not working to help them I don't know who I am and I don't feel comfortable myself so I need them now that means get the to a therapist and deal with it and and not only that even Your Capacity to help your patients over time will be eroded so by the way you're stressing yourself and you're not taking care of yourself and Physicians are notoriously programmed to ignore themselves and there was a very interesting study that I mention in the book The Myth of normal they looked at the fraying of the chromosomes um of people and you know when we're born we were born with certain structures called telome and telar are DNA structures at the end of our chromosomes and they fraying and their shortening is a mark of aging and of stress and they looked at the the telome of medical residents compared to other people their age they age faster they Fray faster and so Physicians are driven to actually um not spare themselves and to literally consume themselves in the work in the long term that may make you a very popular and very successful doctor but in the long term it's going to be at the expense of your marriage and of your children and of your own mental and physical health for me if I look at that situation and I reflect on society and culture what I see these days is a very it's very me focused culture where Community has been gradually eroded out yeah and therefore if we think about a human being a human being needs to feel that there of value to other people we need that it's in our tribes you know 50,000 years ago we would have felt of value because we would have a role and other people would see that role they would benefit from it and we would benefit from the things they were doing you know whether it's someone's hunting someone's Gathering someone's put on the fire whatever it might be in this me Focus culture where it's all me me me and what are my needs and what do I need to do and how can I better myself I feel that we often don't feel of value to others we don't feel important and so it makes sense that in that culture you might overwork you might keep pushing yourself because if you're not working and feeling important there then actually you may not have that sensation in any other aspects of your life well if well if you weren't given the um it's very simple if in Early Child childhood you given the sense that you're valued just cuz you existed your parents welcome you and validate you and value you and and celebrate you just cuz you are then you don't have to keep proving it afterwards but if you don't get that sense then you have to be important yeah so that sense of needing to be important has to come from missing out on being valued for who you are or being only valued for your achievements you know you're valued like look my parents blessed their soul gos but they valued my intelligence you know and so a lot of my Persona was caught up in being smart and and proving my value that way well it's good to be intelligent but your value should doesn't depend on or shouldn't depend on any one quality whether you're cute or cuddly or handsome or successful or good at sports or smart in school any of that you values intrinsic innate inherent because you're a human being in a society as you say it tends to Value people for what they do and so that can become very very addictive but again going back to your friend who says my parent my patients need me and you think about it and I'm not accusing them of anything but they're not realizing just the egotistical that statement is is as if it dependent on them their patients need good Med medical care but they don't need him or her or them specifically which means that they should be able to take care of themselves as long as they make sure that when they're not there their patients are receiving the care that they need so it's not about us and I used to think it was always about me if I'm not there for the delivery of this B Woman's baby oh my God you know like as if it all depended on me there's probably a control issue there as well isn't there that I I know how I would do it I need to be there cuz I know how I would manage this birth and that sort of stuff yeah which is an inability to let go exactly someone else can probably do this as well yeah or if they can do it as well so beard you know so you know yeah as I was walking to the studio this morning thinking about our conversation the word impressive kept coming up for me and I'm been reflecting on the word impressive because again I think culturally we we think it's a good thing to impress others okay that bit of work you did is impressive but actually if you if you really unpick impressive or certainly if I do it it implies to me and maybe this is my own bias because this is what I have done for much of my life yeah I've changed who I am in order to impress others yeah I didn't feel I impressed others by being myself yeah I impress them by changing yeah so what comes up for you when you hear the word impressive have we got it wrong has it been you know has it been taken to me something it's not like how how do you see the word impressive H well um impressive first of all has to do with what it has to do with our impact on other people how others see us so if I can just be myself and express my own truth and not drive myself into activities that are not good for me and people are impressed well that's great but if my intention is to impress other people if if I need for me to make a certain impression in somebody else's mind then where am I living that I'm living in their minds rather than in myself so the question is where do I want to live here or in your mind you know and uh our society is so um addicted to people being impressive in the minds of others that means that we live in the minds of others don't more than we live in ourselves so if I can if you can be yourself and find that imp if I find that impressive that's great but you're not doing it to impress me you're just doing it because that's you're expressing who you are if I'm impressed great if I'm not impressed that doesn't take anything away from you but to the degree that we dependent on impressing others we're robbing ourselves so that's how I see that word you know we're quite isolated now you know many of us have moved away from where we grew up we don't have friends we don't have a family Network around us so and often two parents are working y so you've got this really stressful situation where everyone's trying to do that the best that they can they're trying to you know make enough money to feed themselves to house themselves they also trying to spend enough time with their children yet they have no support so there's a huge amount of pressure then that goes on to the kids but also on the parents and I think I saw you talk last night um at the Tabernacle in London it was it was a you know an amazing talk and you mentioned a little bit about hunter gatherer societies and how for the bulk of human evolution we have lived and raised our children a certain way I wonder if you could expand on that well again human beings some version of human beings have been on the earth for millions of years they've been hominids for millions of years there have been human species for hundreds of thousands of years and only particular species probably for about 100,000 years Homo sapiens which is the latest and the only current human species that's extent for all of that prehistory until about 9,000 years ago virtually all human beings lived in small hunter gatherer bands this is a revolution this is how we became human beings so to think that no now you might like in modern society to AO where you take an animal from a natural habitat and you put them in a completely artificial restricted situation and you expect him to stay as normal as he was out there in the wild essentially that's what's happened to human beings and that in a very short space of time in a blink of an eye from the perspective of evolution we've been we've gone from the hunter gather small band communal attachment based group to a society which is Ali ated disconnected and that disconnection is uh is is um accelerating at a tremendous rate throughout the world um urbanization it's taking people out of their Villages and into the big cities where they're alone uh here in Britain uh there was quite a deliberate of salt on community under the Thatcher regime with the destruction of neighborhoods and communities and so on and uh that trend has continued so what we're having is societ ities that are less and less natural to the actual makeup of human beings from The evolutionary perspective and which means that children are being brought up under increasingly artificial and disconnected circumstances and uh you know Johan hary who's written a book recently on on on depression called Lost connections is pointing exactly that's what happened in modern society so that these lost connections character iiz the modern world and as they do you're getting the spread of autoimmune disease into countries that never used to have it before yeah so we think autoimmune disease is one of these or addictions for that matter so if you look at the rate of addiction now in in countries like China in India it's going up exponentially precisely because of the uh and and it's not a question of idealizing the old way of life no we can't go back and and and of course there's all kinds of benefits to to progress and industrialization trouble is that as we progress we forget the benefits of we forget what we've lost so instead of combining progress we're trying to hold on to what was best about some of the old ways we just throw everything out and and we think we can reinvent ourselves and as we do we're making ourselves sick yeah you're right and I think it's a really great point to to to to sort of bring up we're not saying we need to go back to hun gather at tribes we can't yeah not only should we not we can't and there are so many great benefits of the world and as you say industrialization I guess it's it's how do we learn from the past how do we learn from our evolutionary Heritage and what can we Implement from that within the constraints of the modern world that certainly that's how I see it and you mentioned Johan Harry's new book and you know I I write a huge quarter of my book on stress is about this um is about relationships and our yeah our our lack of connection these days you know one one on one level we are we've been told anyway that we're more connected than we've ever been before and certainly in a digital sense that may be the case but you know when we talk about real human meaningful connection what I see around me with the public but what I also see in my practice as a doctor is I don't think we've ever been this disconnected and lonely and well we're more wired but we're less connected is is how I would put it uh because genuine connection happens between people not between pieces of technology so as you and I are talking to each other there's a real interaction yeah when you speak I'm looking at you I'm listening to the modulation of your voice I may not in agreement or shake my head in disagreement vice versa but the communication is taking place so many different FS that's a connection if you're never having the same conversation online it' be a whole different um ball game and I'd have no idea actually who I'm talking to they' just be exchanging words so we're wir together but we're not actually connected we're actually disconnected in this world because people are isolated modules sending out messages via the Ethernet or the internet um when it comes to addictions it it's it's that disconnection again um that that leaves us so alone so we're traumatized in the first place we are then [Music] um develop then develop Behavior that soothe our pain but which actually keeps us more isolated from other people because we're ashamed of ourselves and we hide it and and we uh furtively seek out our addictive pleasures and that disconnection then furthers our sense of isolation that isolation further our pain and that pain further drives our addiction so we live in a society that actually generates Addiction in many of its members yeah it really does doesn't it I I I did a um I did a post on my social media channels I think just yesterday actually about uh friendship and I was saying that look seeing your friends in real life so not over the internet in real life is um a necessity for human health not a luxury and I know myself I've neglected some of the friendships closest to me over the last few years because I've been busy with my career and my family and so that you know and you sort of see on social media what your friends are doing so you feel less of needs to actually see them in real life and I was really surprised with how how how much that post on social media resonated with people so many people started interacting and saying yeah you know what I not seen my friends in months you know yes I've I've maybe had a bit of a text conversation with them but I'm not seeing them in real life and this was me trying to sort of challenge everyone to say hey look get a date in the diary now even if it's in two months time with one of your friends email them call them text them what but put a date in the diary where you're going to see your friends in real life and it's crazy isn't it that we need to to say these things I mean these things have always been there in human culture yet we're now having to talk about them and remind remind us what has what has just been Unown for so many thousands millions of years and what's interesting of course is that on Facebook we use the same language as we would in real life so on Facebook people have friends but these friends that we have these are people we don't know we have nothing necessarily in common with except maybe certain cultural ideas or interests and so these friendships aren't genuinely supportive relationships they're pseudo friendships and we actually substitute the one for the other and then on Facebook people like each other but but but but but which are again is a substitute for genuine contact but it's not that they like each other they don't know each other you don't know somebody until you hung out with them and and so be substitute to Lang of friendship and we substitute the language of connection for genuine friendship and genuine connection and then we wonder why I feel so lonely and why we we're so dissatisfied and why we are seeking pleasure or seeking to numb that discomfort with the choices we're making whether it is heroin cocaine or shopping and sugar yeah yeah because I guess you know a lot of people listen to my podcast are trying to make lifestyle change and a lot of them feel inspired to do so by what they hear but some of them um I know are struggling sorry to interrupt if you're enjoying this video and want to dive deeper into the topic of nutrition I have created a free special guide which contains the five most important changes I think we all need to make when it comes to our diet if you want to get hold of this free guides all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below well you know I'm very interested in language and even the phrase lifestyle change it's not Lifestyle Changes people make it's life changes people need to make yeah you can change the style but style is a rather superficial thing you know a style of clothing you know uh it's the life changes that people need and and and we need to help people see the life changes that are required not the lifestyle changes they need to require it's it's the fundamental life that's being lived that needs to change not not the external behaviors and lifestyle largely refers to behaviors but not necessarily A transformation within and really to deal with addiction um is not a question of dealing with the lifestyle it's a question of dealing with the life and it's a question of really owning the life that this is my life and I'm the one who needs to be uh the agent of my own life and here are the reasons why the the the wound or trauma is in another words word for wound actually so the wounding that I received as a child has had me behave in certain ways it's not those behaviors I need to change I need to heal that wound I need to change my life and then the the the the the life Behavior changes will automatically follow you you really you really got me thinking about language actually because two terms that I use very commonly in my work whether it's hypertension or lifestyle you've you've just you know in seconds reframed what those words actually mean and I wonder where that comes from you know you're an immigrant to North America where has this fascination with language come from well I think as an immigrant you get to see the language a bit more clearly than the people who are who are actually in it and you get to see the construction of language and and by the way in my secret life I used to be an English teacher so I I I did that before I went to medical school so I've always paid a lot of attention to language and language very of unconsciously expresses realities and truths that when you pay attention to it are are revealing yeah and so words should never even the word addict now the word Addiction actually comes from a Latin phrase for slavery so slave to the pain well uh the original meaning was an addictus it comes from the word to a sign now in in in in in the Roman world when you couldn't pay a debt you would be assigned as a slave to somebody until you worked off to death so you'd be an addictus somebody was assigned to somebody so that's the origin of the world so so it implies slavery so if we actually understand that that addict refers or originates in the word for slavery we realize that it's not a choice because who would who would ever choose to be a slave you know so I think language is absolutely revelatory if you understand the sources and meanings of words yeah yeah very much so gab I want to go to um something you you did last night in your talk which you know I went out for dinner with my friends afterwards we all attended it and we were all talking about it um which was you you you pepper throughout the evening you said I if there is anyone in here who feels they have some form of addiction yeah without childhood trauma yeah and you're happy to talk about it please raise your hand and um you know at the end you you actually found someone who you know quite confidently uh put their hand up and was you know pretty nonent that they had a happy childhood and so she started uh inquiring into her childhood and I remember the tone of her voice in ISS she was very much you said you know you have a happy child yes happy childhood parents said yeah parents absolutely love me you know really sort of very vocal about how great her childhood was and then it wasn't long before it became clear that actually she felt that her parents really loved each other and sometimes she was intruding on them that's right and I think it was really powerful for the whole audience to 300 to see how you know how we all potentially tell ourselves a certain narrative stories that we continue telling ourselves and you know she obviously maybe is a fan of your work she's come here she she's come to what you speak but h reflected on her own experience and I I wonder you know what's going on there so what's happened here is that this woman say she his happy childhood but within a couple of minutes and and you know my mentor is by not by the addiction but by the pain and so I always say that there's pain underneath it and I said to the audience it never takes me more than three minutes to drill down to where the pain is you just have to ask the right questions so and I've got to say about a minute in yeah I thought maybe this is the first one who Gable won't get to yeah you know actually thought because she was so confident in her answer anyway please continue well that confidence itself is a giveaway yeah because it's an assumed stance to protect herself from the pain that she doesn't want to feel or she's afraid to feel so she said well maybe I felt I was intruding on my parents and in other words really what she felt was that she wasn't accepted and loved for who she was and and when she felt unhappy there was nobody for her to would be talk to to talk to and all you have to do is ask that person if your own child did the same thing how would you understand it and and they totally get it so what's going on there she's not lying but believing that she had a happy childhood was her way of dealing with her pain because if she dropped that idea she'd have to realize that she suffered and she actually as much as her parents did their best and loved her were not blaming the parents but she herself got the impression that she was alone and unsupported and unloved for who she was now that's very painful yeah so we defend against the Pain by suppressing those emotions and developing this this ideology of the happy childhood and so that's just another form of self-defense and then given her ideology that she had a happy childhood she can't understand why she turned to an addiction but once she gets that yeah okay that belief that I was happy denies the fact that I was feeling isolated and alone and I felt myself as an ex as an intrusion on my parents yeah now she understand what her pain was but but not feeling that pain was how she survived her childhood because as a child how would she survive if she believed that she was in love for who she was life would be intolerable for her so she has to deny and suppress that so she had an appropriate response to the signals that were given to her that's exactly what you said before and that's exactly what happened with her so that that suppression of her pain and the denial of it is a completely appropriate defensive response these are not mistakes that we make these are these are essential survival adaptations the problem is then we spend a whole because we learned how to ignore our feelings as children now we learn to ignore them for the rest of our lives and that then creates problems for us so again it's that whole idea of an early adaptation essential adaptation building adaptation but because it's unconscious it stays with us and now it limits our lives so we become imprisoned with our own adaptations our our our our childhood patterns become the prison through which we live our lives so hopefully last night for her might have been a a key step potentially in her now being able to really go out and seek real healing transformative healing uh hopefully touch would um touch would but I would say that the very fact that she came to the talk and the Very fact that she raised her hand she was already working at it yeah because she didn't have to raise her hand yeah so if she did it meant that she already had a curiosity about it yeah so so she' already taken the first step yeah absolutely okay well in your in your book uh in the realm of hungry ghosts I think is it the second chapter where you talk about um a funeral you go to of one of your uh someone you were looking after an addict a 35-year-old or overdosed yeah and I'll will let you tell the story but um one thing it really illustrates to me is how how you know addiction is on a on is on a spectrum of course but how powerful that addicted that that addictive Drive is for some people and and I just wonder if you could expand on that because I that was really really interesting so This Woman's real name was Shannon which I can tell now she was 35 and she was a beautiful woman as a young woman uh when I met her she was already fading she was in her mid s or early 30s when I met her um she had uh severe opiate addiction and because she injected she had um bloodborne infection in her one of her knees so she had osteomylitis uh a joint infection um or a bone infection in her knee bones she needed to be hospitalized for interv antibotic care but she could never be hospitalized long enough but she had to leave and use and every time she left the news she was expelled from the hospital soitis was never treated expelled from the hospital expelled from the hospital because she wasn't engaging in treatments well she was leaving the hospital to use right and uh so therefore they wouldn't treat her so yeah so she wouldn't so they they didn't want her using her IV lines for shooting heroin no since then we've developed a facility where people can have intervened as antibiotics and use if they need to but this is before the days of that particular facility yeah so out of the regular hospitals she'd be regularly kicked out before her six or8 weeks of antibiotics treatment was completed so by the mid-30s and they were actually talking about amputating the knee because there's nothing more they could do and so by her mid-30s she was in a wheelchair and she would quickly wheel her wheelchair down a street looking for her next hit but she left the D East Side for six months and she actually got clean and um then she came back and within three days was dead dead of an overdose because what happened of course is that she used the same amount she had left be she had used before she left the D side but now she was detoxed so she lost her tolerance so you would understand what I mean by that so the same dose that she could tolerate prior to leaving the downtown east side not that she was free of drugs the same those killed her and so she so we go to her funeral and there's all these friends of hers each of them with their HIV or their hepatitis C or their chronic infections and they're at mourning their friend yeah and I'm thinking how powerful the drive of the addiction is that this young woman would would would would shed her life for the sake of that next hit and her friends who are watching her being buried and memorialized are going to continue using despite this dire example yeah they're going to continue using despite seeing that that just seeing that wasn't enough to go right we're going to change our Behavior now and which is why anybody who thinks this is a choice is out of their minds nobody would choose to to to blight and endanger their lives like that and and so this is what made me thinking well what is this powerful Drive I mean it must be really deeply built in to the human brain and the human soul for people to engage in this Behavior despite all this um um deterrence that they witness around them and so what made that event powerful for me was the starkness of the experience of these people and the social idea that somehow this is any kind of a choice yeah wow I mean it's incredible to hear that actually and certainly me and and maybe maybe all the listeners um on some level in their lives may know not May not to the same degree as that but may know what that drive feels like when you when you know you shouldn't be doing something but you choose to do it nonetheless well I know that I mean I I've had that in my own life and and there's something in you that knows you shouldn't be doing it it's almost recently I I I became aware of a form of therapy called internal family systems oh my God that's what I'm doing at the moment ifs yeah it's incredible the short of stuff yeah yeah I've had two or three session and it's it's been brilliant for me so far amazing yeah so I I met the founder of it recently we become good friends and uh but but I've learned the technique to some degree I'm I'm not an official practitioner of it but I I'm quick to catch on so in internal th systems you realize there these different parts of you and these different parts form like a a squabbling family some of them like each other some of them don't like each other so there's a part of me that can watch the other part doing its thing knowing that he shouldn't be doing it but feels quite helpless to intervene so I watch myself like for example when I I'm supposed to be working looking after clients but instead I watch myself go to the store to engage in my shopping addiction I'm not unaware of what's Happening there's a part of me that's watching it disapproving of it wanting me not to do it but that part is not strong enough to assert itself the part that's driving the behavior is leading is driving the boat and uh so it it's a question of becoming friendly with all these parts finding out what is it they really want what are they after another part that's driving me to do the shopping when I should be looking after my patients yeah is a part that really is desperate for for me to desperate for me to feel good for a moment that's all it wants it just wants me to be happy it's not an evil part it just wants me to be happy and and it's not a question of indulging it but it's a question of really getting to know it and understanding it understanding it and actually being compassionate with it and and then teaching it you know what it's okay but this guy can be happy without indulging in that behavior yeah he doesn't need to do that you may think he does but he doesn't I wish I had the courage to express my feelings my emotions yeah which is I guess not dissimilar to the first one about living a life that's true to yourself no and it again it again is the word courage that shows up and these people are judging themselves a more interesting way to put it is why is it that I didn't express my feelings you know now here's the thing um again in my writing in the MTH of normal I quote this great neuroscientist who died in his mid s of cancer a few years ago those of us who knew him still mour him his name was Dr Yak pank p and k p he was uh from the Baltic states whether he was Estonian I think he was but maybe laan you know and he was an effective neuroscientist so he studied the neurobiology of emotions and wrote a book called The archaeology of the mind it's one of the seminal books of modern science and he pointed out that we share certain emotional circuits with other animals so we have circuit and he capitalized these circuits these systems so the c a r e the care system MH and there was a system for anger system for fear for lust for playfulness for joy in other words for seeking which is curiosity um grief and we share these brain circuits with other mammals in other words these emotions are not luxuries they are emotionally I should say they are evolutionally determined aspects of who we are so if you take the care [Music] system it's essential because without care the Maman infant doesn't survive M there's going to be something in the parent brain that drives that parent to take care of the infant and something that's in the infant's brain that impels them to connect with the parent in order to be taken care of that's just evolutionary biology so we have all these emotional systems anger is one of them um as I mentioned fear grief or others and children one of the emotional needs of children when I studied and invest you know and interviewed experts on Child Development one of the things I learned and write about is that one of the needs of children for healthy brain development is the freedom to experience and express all the emotions that come up for them that's just necessary for health um now what happens in this Society where a lot of parents get the message that certain emotions on the part of their kids are not acceptable so you know a kid might experience a loss like a dog might die or grandpa might die and a child is upset and the parent can't handle the child's grief so snap out of it it's just a dog or or you know get over it people die you know um or a child experiences anger uh because you didn't give them a cookie before dinner you know and a two-year-old towards a tantrum and you can't handle it I think you know I've talked about this before then the child gets the message that in order to be acceptable to the parent they have to suppress their emotions so when these people talk about that and that suppression of emotion as I've often made the case with you and in my books actually undermine health and and our physiology in our immune system so when these people in their dying weeks regret not having had the courage to express their emotions what they're really talking about is that long time before when they were children they were forced to suppress their emotions for the sake of being accepted yeah and now they regret it because they they sense that they were forced to abandon themselves and so again I would remove the word courage and ask instead of judging them for lacking courage I would say what happened to them because again no infant lacks the capacity to ex their emotions yeah so if they lose it it's because they learned that they had to it says of something practical around this point gabo if if there's any parents listening and their kids let's say sometimes get angry or have a tantrum or whatever it might be yeah of course there is a certain conditioning in our modern certainly in Western Society here about what one should do about that yeah given your view in terms of what is important for a child and what you've just said what would you encourage a parent to do when their child is I was going to use the word playing up but that that's a ridiculous term because playing up is a societal construct a child is just expressing emotions we're calling it playing up because we don't like you know what it's doing or what the people next door are thinking or whatever it might might be right the North American drum is acting out acting out yeah do they use that phrase here yeah they do they use this phrase here yeah so so going back to that um the parent who may be struggling but wants to be a better parent wants to go actually you know what gab I really want to make sure that I allow my child to express their emotions yeah do you have any advice for me what would you say to them no I do well so you know there's um we could talk about three modes of parenting one is the permissive parenting where you allow any behavior and you don't interfere you know it's not that's the worst thing you can do kids needs to but that is allowing them to express themselves yeah but there's a difference uh they might Express themselves by hitting their sibling for example and you don't allow that parents need to kids need to feel that somebody's in charge yeah parenting is not a democracy it's a hierarchy um in a hierarchy there's a dominant Force the parent dominates the child not to exploit or to suppress but to nurture and to support you know so that you know you live in Manchester and I don't know how cold it gets in Manchester but if you have a one-year-old child they don't get to vote on whether they get to crawl outside in the wintertime in Manchester you know naked you know the parent says no you don't go outside naked you know you have to get put clothes on that's just how it is it's a hierarchy it's not a democracy the one-year-old doesn't get a vote okay and being going into the slush in the snow in the middle of December or whenever um so that's permissive parenting that's not very good U then there's repressive parenting which some experts that we've talked about Advocate that's authoritarian parenting in between them is the golden mean so there's permissive parenting here authoritarian parenting here then there's authoritative parenting in the middle authoritative parenting is I'm in charge I know it's good for you um I'm the authority um so I know what to do with you so if a child is upset you say oh you're upset you know you're angry with Mommy Mommy wouldn't let you a cookie before dinner yeah you're really upset about that yeah well come here I know how you feel in other words you validate the emotion you don't punish the child for it and you hold the child cuz the child needs to learn that they can go through these difficult emotions and get through them and still be loved and still be loved yeah now that doesn't mean you let them pull the cat's tail or to break the break the glass you know smash the furniture or hit their sibling but it doesn't mean you validate the emotions and you hold them and then they learn ah and and actually and when they and it's also age specific like there's no point saying to an angry one and a half year-old Let's find let's express it through words they don't have the words but to five-year-old you can say can we find some words for your anger in other words you can teach them to express their emotions in ways that are um socially appropriate yeah so at any age you have to be age appropriate but fundamentally you validate the emotions and you hold the child and you make them feel that you can have this emotions I don't want you to behaving that way but you can have the emotion and I'm not going to reject you for it it's not that hard and people do it intuitively sometimes yeah and the impact of parenting like that will be felt for the rest of that child's life well absolutely and that's the key isn't it you look look around Society it's very very hard to not make the case that we have to set up Society so that those early years are where the kids get good new nutrition they have calm environments they have present parents you know I'm always shocked at the amount of leave that um people in America get or mothers get in jobs in America I think one of my friends Partners in America got two weeks off oh which which I I I what two weeks off after giving birth well when I researched the myth of normal I found that 25% of women in the states go back to work within 2 weeks of giving birth which 25% of women no needless to say this is both economically and racially determined but it means that it's a massive abandonment of the child yeah because en from the point of view of the development of enzymes in the child the child's physiological unfoldment psychological security they need the mother for many many many many months and you try and take an infant away from a an orangutang at two weeks and see what happens yeah you know and uh in fact they've done some very cruel studies with monkeys that shows the impact of maternal deprivation at those early ages you know studies that are terrible to read about yeah and they prove what they prove that love and contact and connection is important something we should have known all along but the point is that that's statistic that 25% of women have to go back to work within 2 weeks of work within two weeks of giving birth it's a massive abandonment of children the impact of which will show up in their mental and physical health decades on yeah and then they wonder why there's so many problems tomorrow is the yearly prescribing lifestyle medicine course that I've been running uh with a colleague Dr a panga since 2018 and of course you're going to be the guest speaker tomorrow and I'm I'm really excited that we're going to be able to communicate with doctors and share your work and how they can bring your work into their practice it's really really exciting one of the things I'm [Music] hoping you're going to be able to share with the audience tomorrow is what I think is the biggest hole in medical school training if you'd ask me five years ago I may have said oh nutrition and sleep and we need to teach doctors about the importance of this stuff and we do yeah but if I had to choose one thing that I think is the biggest hole in medical training today for me it's that doctors a lot of doctors lead medical school without an understanding that our emotions oh I see what you're saying yeah that the way we think holding on to anger resentment not being able to forgive and move on I really don't feel within medicine there's an understanding that this can contribute to ill health yeah it's such a gap and um I think both you and I have had to discover it not as a consequence but despite our medical education yeah and uh when you're in practice and you I mean as a family physician um we do have an advantage over specialist colleagues and that we know people before they get sick yeah so we get to see who gets sick and uh I couldn't help but notice that people's emotional lives are so intertwined with the physiological health and as you suggest nobody in medical school told me that it's it's a huge gap it it it also has to do with how we relate to ourselves by the way because the way doctors are trained is very often very stressful and very um almost traumatic in significant ways so that in that's why I mentioned the word self-care because in being trained to stoically ignore ourselves we also are dismissing the importance of emotions in our clients yeah so that I wish there was more emphasis in medical school on dealing with our own stuff yeah for sure and in conjunction with that therefore the awareness of the importance of people's emotional lives yeah and and what's really interesting here is that some of the great pioneers of medicine have known this all along and they've said it hundreds of years ago well je Martin Sho who first described multiple sclerosis said that this is related to stress and grief and uh it is statistically and according to studies since then but he just saw it he didn't you know and uh there's a Great British surgeon James padet yeah you know padet disease and he operated in on women with breast cancer and he said that breast cancer is indubitably related to emotional factors that it's so evident that is hard to ignore and so these great pioneers said this and their teachings have been completely ignored yeah let's be really clear this is such a delicate area for people because many people perceive that as fault and as blame I know you don't mean it like that I don't mean it like that when I talk about it either yeah but often it's like what are you saying that I did this to myself right you must have had that before people must have said that yeah yeah just just clarify that for them please well really we've been talking about it that the um suppression of emotion nobody's born with it and it's not a lack of courage or wisdom it's a program the response to Childhood experience so people have got the message be before they uh had any choice in the matter that if they are truly themselves if they express who they are their emotions just like we've been talking about they won't be accepted so that's a programming that people um are ingrained in in their Early Childhood how is that their fault yeah it's just the way they adapted to the environment necessarily as a matter of fact it was an inevitable and unavoidable adaptation because the alternative of being rejected by their families or their Millar was not acceptable to a small child so therefore Nobody Does this to themselves in any cons ious of deliberate sense what I can tell you is that when people are diagnosed and they become aware of these Dynamics they find that liberating yeah so uh in the Mython normal I quote the um the American singer shell Crow who was diagnosed with breast cancer and she said that before the diagnosis I was always pleasing others and not expressing myself and there was always a voice in my head that I'm wrong and I have tojust myself to other people's expect I'm paraphrasing her but she but she said I've learned differently now and now I'm really paying attention to myself so again as this idea of disease as teacher no Sheryl Crow wasn't born like that and she didn't choose to be that way that was her response to her upbringing so nobody's being faulted here but we are saying people if you allow that disease to wake you up and to teach you something you might have a whole lot better life than you could have imagined yeah I think this is really really interesting we can first of all make the case to people that emotions matter the express the the ability to express your emotions is important if you repress them yeah it may well have some quite severe physical consequences yeah so let's say that a doctor accepts that goes okay so what do I do with that well what do doctors do with it well here's the thing depends how you're oriented like I'm kind of psychologically oriented I've always been I've always been interested in it um so for me it was a natural movement from Strictly focusing on the physical symptoms to dealing with the whole person another physician May recognize the value of this but not have the orientation to deal with it but at least they can say to their clients listen there's a lot of information now so when you come with your rheumato arthritis or your multiple sclerosis or your chronic eczema or chronic migraines or irritable ball syndrome or inflammatory ball disease or whatever you happen to present with there's a lot of information now a lot of scientific information information that uh shows the connection between actually in fact the unity of mind and body and the inextricable relationship between the immune system and emotions and so on I'm not myself trained in that I'm going to deal with the physical aspects of illness I'm going to prescribe for you the anti-inflammatories or the immune suppressants or the steroids whatever you happen to need to mitigate the symptoms but can I send you to somebody so you can talk about this stuff would that interest you you know so you can do that so we're not necessarily talking about every doctor having to become an expert on this but at least they should be aware of it so they can steer people to a broader approach to their illness number one number two there's certain simple things any doctor can ask like one of my books when the body says no that's the title um and in the MTH of normal there's a chapter called when before the body says no you can ask your client it's a very simple question where in your life are you not saying no but there's a know that wants to be said but you're not saying it for the sake of pleasing others can you just consider that one because that simple issue of not saying no can play Havoc with your health cuz if you're not saying no when when you when you're wanting to say no you're actually suppressing yourself and then you're taking on more stress and more burden so those simple questions any doctor can ask so it's not as complicated as all that yeah but the point is the first step is just to be aware of the connection that you mentioned between and Physiology then if the physician wants to take on a deeper study of it they can if they don't at least they can guide people to to to to to explore that connection somewhere else yeah completely agree thank you yeah fourth regret I wish I stayed in touch with my friends yeah well what we're talking there is and it goes back to the others about working too hard you know for example um what are what are they discussing there is the need for attachment for connection for belonging and what these people are saying is I was too driven by whatever factors impelled me to ignore my personal relationships and to P my attention on things that ultimately don't matter my acquisition my attainment my achievement uh rather than the heart-to-heart human contact mhm with people that matter to me and again people are driven to be that way and when they look back on their life they regret it because nobody is as often be said nobody ever on a deathbed regrets not going to the office often enough but they do regret the heart connection that that that they've sacrificed have you stayed in touch with your friends well you know uh that's where you could say that I haven't um I mean I have more much more recently it matters to me much more now but over the years um I put work and my busyness and my writing ahead of all that is it at all balanced out by the fact that your work and your writings yeah have influenced the lives of Millions of people I guess what I'm trying to get at is on a personal level you may have sacrificed your friendships yeah but perhaps the world has benefited from Dr matate doing that is is that fair to say it's fair to say and to some extent I accept that that I've made certain decisions and those decisions have benefited many and it means that there certain things I've missed out on um but not completely and uh I'm much more prone now to seek out those friendships and to strengthen them and to celebrate them and to Value them and have I I have some really good friends you know and the people that really care about me and I care about them and we're there for each other no matter what you know so that matters to me much more than it used to and uh to put it to the real test if I were to choose to live my life over again I wouldn't live it in this way yeah I would say yeah I I have some insights I have some capacity to articulate some truths uh that are really important and I'm not going to let that dominate how I live my life um and I think it would have been possible for me to express that voice and and and and to um put those teachings out in the world that I get the feeling feedback that it does help a lot of people but I could have done that without the drivenness without the sacrificing of the heart without the and and connection that sometimes that entails so you know again if I could live it do it over again I would do it differently and I don't think in the end that would have detracted from my message and if it did I would accept that yeah if that conversation resonated with you here is another incredibly powerful one that I really think you're going to enjoy give it a click if you actually went to the happiness gym several times a week you will actually have a happier life right and the happiness gym is very straightforward it's a set of skills H that you need to practice