BITESIZE | Dr Gabor Maté: 3 Life Lessons People Learn Too Late #688

Rangan Chatterjee (0:00)

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Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bitesize, your weekly dose of inspiration, insights and practical ideas to help you live well and thrive. Each episode brings you some of my favorite moments, useful tools and inspiring ideas from the many incredible conversations I've had on my podcast. Today's Bitesize is from Episode 440 of the podcast with fellow physician, author, speaker and friends, the incredible Dr Gabor Maté. In a previous episode, I had a wonderful conversation with Bronnie Ware, author of the Top Five Regrets of the Dying. In this Bitesize, I explore some of those life regrets with Gabor, and he offers some thought-provoking insights into what they can teach us about the way we live our lives.

I'd love to know from your perspective what each of these regrets says.

Gabor Maté (2:16)

Yeah.

Rangan Chatterjee (2:17)

About where we are, who we are.

Gabor Maté (2:19)

Yeah.

Rangan Chatterjee (2:20)

What things are important to us.

Gabor Maté (2:22)

Yeah.

Rangan Chatterjee (2:23)

The second regret that Bronnie wrote about was, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Yeah.

Gabor Maté (2:28)

That's an interesting one.

If I were to choose to live my life over again, I wouldn't live it in this way.

I wish I hadn't worked so hard. And what I wasn't aware of when I went to medical school, and when I was a physician for decades, is how driven I was to justify my existence in the world, and to prove how that 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 when you're driven to work too hard, you actually ignore what matters. And what matters is what you were telling me last night about how much it matters for you to spend time with your families every summer. You take a bunch of weeks away from your podcast and you just spend time enjoying your kids and your wife and your family.

And I didn't do that. For me, it was very hard to even take holidays. I always felt I had to keep working. If somebody was pregnant, my God, what if I would miss their delivery? Like the baby couldn't enter the world without me. So that drivenness is what makes people work too hard. And so nobody says, I wish I hadn't worked hard to achieve something in life. You have to work hard. What makes you work too hard, and that's what these people are saying, is you're driven by something that you're not even aware of. And that to part, the TOO part, comes from being driven by unconscious needs to validate your existence. Where why should any human being have to validate their existence? And so not a matter of working hard, it's a matter of working too hard. And where does that come from? Again, that comes from childhood trauma.

Rangan Chatterjee (4:14)

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

Gabor Maté (4:19)

Yeah.

Rangan Chatterjee (4:20)

What does that say?

Gabor Maté (4:21)

Well, do you know Winnie the Pooh?

Rangan Chatterjee (4:25)

Yeah.

Gabor Maté (4:26)

Okay.

Rangan Chatterjee (4:26)

Not personally.

Gabor Maté (4:29)

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

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