A Doctor's Prescription For Happiness - Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #454

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr Rangan Chatterjee. He's a physician, author, television presenter and a podcaster. Working out what makes us happy in life is difficult. Distinguishing between our goals and the things that other people want us to have as goals isn't easy. After seeing thousands of patients in the NHS and reflecting on his own journey into the public eye, Rangan has turned his attention on happiness and what genuinely fulfills us in life. Expect to learn why your dreams won't make you any happier, how the definition of happiness you use largely influences the way you pursue it, why external success can only go so far in filling internal problems, Rangan's lessons from a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor, my insight around why fame is a useless signal in 2022, and much more. But now, please welcome Dr Rangan Chatterjee.
Rangan Chatterjee, welcome to the show.

**Rangan Chatterjee** (1:16)
Chris, delighted to be back on.

**Chris Williamson** (1:18)
Welcome. How is it in the UK? What's happening?

**Rangan Chatterjee** (1:21)
It's hot at the moment. It's sunny. I'm very warm in my studio at the moment, so that's a good thing. You're definitely missing some British sun at the moment. But yeah, life's pretty good, mate, if I'm honest. Life feels good a lot of the time these days.
And yeah, I've got to say, I feel this kind of level of calmness and contentment that I don't think I've really had before. So yeah, yeah, I'm feeling in a pretty good place if I'm honest.

**Chris Williamson** (1:50)
You say in your new book that you think happiness is a skill, and it seems like that's been something that you've worked at here as well, right? That calmness is something that you've had to cultivate. It's not something that you've randomly stumbled upon.

**Rangan Chatterjee** (2:03)
I've not felt this way for most of my life. Absolutely.
I think I've really thought about happiness in the early part of my life. I think like many people, I thought happiness was this vague concept that I knew I wanted, but I didn't know how to get it. I thought at some point in life when everything goes my way, and I've got a smile on my face the whole time, I'll probably be happy. But as you've from reading the new book, it's not that at all. I think we get happiness wrong. I think society gets happiness wrong. Certainly a lot of society, I think society confuses happiness with success. All we often think that happiness is, it's that billboard image where we see the smiling couple on a beach with their kids and the ocean behind them, and we think that's happiness and that's our aspirational idea of where I want to get to one day. And I am convinced more and more that happiness is a skill. It's a skill that we can develop. It's a skill that we can get better at. We can practice it every day. And the more we practice it, the happier we feel. And I think fundamentally, especially when we be very clear what we mean by happiness, I think fundamentally that's what every human really wants.

**Chris Williamson** (3:29)
What do you mean by happiness?

**Rangan Chatterjee** (3:34)
For me, happiness has three core components.
Alignment, contentment and control. And this is the model of core happiness that I've really been working on over the past couple of years and that I've been writing about.
Because a lot of people say things like, you know, it's not about happiness, it's about meaning and purpose, you know. It's not happiness, it's joy. It's not happiness, it's this. And I thought, well, okay, you can say the word happiness to ten different people. I think they will have ten different interpretations of what that word means to them. So I thought it's really important at the start of a conversation or a book that you define what you mean. So for me, I have this concept called core happiness, as opposed to something that I call junk happiness. So junk happiness, I think, is what we often mistake for real, deep, meaningful happiness. And that's stuff that we might have a few beers with our friends, or spend a few hours scrolling Instagram, or go to the casino and gambling. And again, to be really clear, context is everything because I'm not saying that those things are necessarily good or bad. The problem with those things, I think, is if we do them too often, so too frequently, and if we confuse them and think that that's what's giving us that deep level of happiness, I think that's where we run into problems. So, core happiness has these three components, right? Alignment, contentment and control. So, what do I mean by that? Alignment, this is when your inner values and your external actions match up. It's when the person who you really want to be, the person who you actually really are inside, and the person who you actually show up as in the world are one and the same. That's alignment, right? So, the more we can become aligned in our life, I'm saying that we're going to strengthen that alignment leg of this core happiness tool. The second leg is contentment. So, contentment is about feeling calm, feeling at peace with your life and your decisions. So, what are those things in your life that give you that sense of contentment? And then, the third leg is control. Now, Chris, I thought long and hard before using the word control, because control, again, is another word that can feel problematic to some people and can be misinterpreted. When I say control, I'm not talking about us controlling the world, right? The world is inherently uncontrollable. I mean, it always has been, but the last couple of years have really shown us that, no matter what we may want to happen, the world is going to just keep going the way it wants to keep going, right? So this is about a sense of control, right? What is it that you can do in your life that gives you a sense of control? And we know from the research, a sense of control is linked with academic success, social maturity, health, longevity, happiness. So I designed this concept of happiness to try, and I really wanted to come up with a complete model, but also a practical model, because I do think sometimes we have this vague concept of what these things are and we can be philosophical about it and think about these things as ideas. But my drive to write this book was to help myself and also to help my patients, because there's a strong link between happiness and health, which I think is very much underappreciated in society, it's very much underappreciated in my profession. So I wanted to make something practical, that people can kind of take with them in their back pocket and take around with them in their life and try and figure out, oh, this is why this feeds the contentment leg of the stool. That's why it's helping me with my happiness. Oh, when I do this, man, I'm not acting in alignment. That's why afterwards I feel really crap and I can't sleep and I keep replaying that over and over again in my head. And so I've used this model with people and most people I've come across who I've talked about this model to love it. And they find it a very simple and practical way of helping them get more out of their lives.