5 Minute Habits to Change Your Life | Rangan Chatterjee on Health Theory

Knowledge is not enough to lead to action. Right? It's not enough. Inspiration is not enough. There has to be a structure. There has to be a system. You have to understand how to create new behaviors. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Health Theory. I am here with Dr. Rangen Chattery. Welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me Tom. Thanks so much. Dude, it is good to have you. And right now I think this is a pretty interesting time to be talking about your book uh which the US title anyway is feel good in five. Um the reason I think that it's so interesting is because of recording this in the middle of a pandemic certainly gives you a very clear perspective. You break the book into three parts. Mind, body, and heart. Um you said in the book and I've heard you say in other interviews that you think the heart of the mind, body and heart um that that one is the most important. Why is that? Yeah, look, the third and final section of the book is about heart. And when I say heart, let me be really clear what I mean by that. So, when medical doctors talk about heart, they're typically talking about the heart as a, you know, physical muscle that pumps blood and oxygen around your body, that's certainly what I was taught in medical school. But heart's got another meaning, hasn't it? you know, artists, poets, songwriters, they've been waxing lyrical about this idea of heart for many years, for thousands of years. And that's, I think, fundamentally what it means to be a human being, which is to connect with other people. On a superficial level, we feel good when we're connected to a human being, to another human being, when we feel uh that we're heard or seen, you've been listened to, you know, you've been connected with. But if we look at hard science, it's also there where we're now seeing a lot of scientific research showing that actually when we feel lonely, that feeling of being lonely may be as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. People who feel lonely die 50% earlier than people who don't. 30% more likely to have a heart attack or a stroke. You know, these are real real physical and biological problems when you're feeling lonely and not connected. Now this book came out in the UK before the pandemic and was having a huge impact already. But as you said at the top of this conversation in many ways it has a heightened relevance in lockdown times in pandemic times where you know this connection that we would usually get let's say at the local cafe at the Starbucks or whatever when we're just you know passing by having a chat with a barista or at work or in a yoga class or at the gym. Those things have been taken away from us in different countries in differing amounts. I accept that. But it's a big issue. But all I want people to think about is five minutes. But it's really important. So one of the five minute uh heart uh what I call health snacks is something called a tea ritual, Tom. And I guess it has a lot of personal relevance to me. And what is the tea ritual? The tea ritual is really about that idea that we're so busy these days. We're so distracted often that when we are with the people we love, when we're with the people that mean the world to us, we're distracted. We're not really together with and we might be in the same room, but we can be lost in our own worlds of Instagram and Netflix and YouTube. And so the tea ritual is this idea that for five minutes a day and typically because I've got two young children, typically this will be after our kids have gone to bed, my wife and I, before [snorts] we do anything else, we make a pot of mint tea. There's a bit of ritual around it. There's a nice green pot that we think we bought in Philadelphia the year after we got married. And we sit there and the only requirement is the five minutes, no phones, no laptops. we catch up with each other and ask um how we've got on right do you have like a standard opening question to that you know what we don't and I know some people like a structure for these things you know like you know three questions you may ask we actually don't we have found um that we respond better to a free form conversation that where it's simply a case of hey babe how was your day today and then she starts and one of the jobs I have to do is to try and listen attentive ly not interrupt, not give her my opinion on her day, which I used to be very good at doing, [laughter] but actually, you know, actually listen to what she has to say. And again, if we want to dive into relationships, it's kind of like I've had to learn through this process that she doesn't want me to fix her problems. She wants me to hear them. Does that drive you crazy at all? I was going to say that was a long pause there, Rangan. I I was going to say it used to, but I think if I'm being honest, it drives me less crazy than it used to. You know, we've been married, I think what, 12, 13 years now. It probably is only in the last year or two that I finally got the message, hey, she doesn't want me to fix it. She wants me to listen. Now, sometimes I I go back into old habits and I try and offer a solution. It is difficult for me. But this is what I think is is important about being an attentive listener and being switched on to the needs whether it's a partner or a friend or a work colleague. It's really trying to understand what they need. Yeah. It's interesting. This is obviously one of the most sort of cliche differences between men and women is that just wanting to express, wanting to have your feelings heard. And what's interesting is so I went through the same thing with my wife and we finally just had to have a rule where it was like cuz there were times where she actually did want me to help her solve a problem. And so I would like sketch out between which of these moments is this? And so in conversations now we just say look are you just asking me to listen? Which goes to one of the most powerful parts of your book which is this notion of habits. And so in the book you talk about aligning a new behavior that you want with like a an already existing habit. What's the power of that and how do you actually make that work with something like um trying to deepen the connection of your relationship? Yeah. So any behavior any behavior needs a trigger, right? So um you talking to me now we had an appointment. There would have been some trigger. It could have been your memory. It could have been a notification on your phone. It could have been your PA phoning you. It would have required a trigger of some sort. Now, when it comes to triggers, there's kind of three broad types, right? One is your memory, right? So, your memory works like it could be, oh, I heard that podcast. Meditation is really important. So, you go the next day, you think, I heard that on Impact Theory. I need to meditate. Oh, you're waiting for your memory to remind you. Now, that may work. If you remember every day, you may end up meditating, but it's very unreliable. So, the next best form of trigger is some kind of notification. It could be a notification on your phone. It could be a post-it note on your refrigerator or on your laptop reminding you to do something. That is better than memory, but it's not as good as the final type of trigger, which is when you stick on that new behavior onto an existing habit. Because that habit by definition means you're already doing it without thinking about it. I'll give you an example that I do. So I don't go to the gym. I've not been to the gym probably for about two years, but I stay fit, right? I do a workout every morning. So what happens in the morning, I do a couple of things as part of my routine, but the second thing I do is I make coffee, right? So in the kitchen, I'll weigh out the coffee beans. I'll pour it into the French press and the timer goes on for four to five minutes. During that time, I don't go on Instagram. I don't go on email. I don't make phone calls. I do a workout in the kitchen in my pajamas. Right? I've stuck it on to that behavior. So, every morning I'm going to have coffee. So, every morning I work out. I don't need to find time in my day to do it. I'm not saying that's going to work for anyone else, but it works for me. And that's what people have to do. They have to find what are those existing habits in their life that they can stick on new behaviors to. So if we apply that to something like a tea ritual. Okay. So I know that my wife and I, we know that our relationship is better when we commit to that tea ritual every day. And actually in during COVID in the first few weeks of lockdown, we actually stopped doing it. Our whole patterning had gone. Our our rhythm had gone and we noticed a subsequent decline in the intimacy and the quality of our relationship. So again, I wouldn't call that failure. I call that education. It's not you know every time you stop doing something and you're in tune with the impact it's like ah you know what when we do those five minutes a day actually our relationship is much better we feel closer we feel connected and why why is five minutes important right the five minutes it's not a gimmick right but the five minutes is the commitment we make to each other so why five minutes is so powerful is that it's small enough that even the busiest person feels that I can fit that into my day. It's only 5 minutes, but it's long enough that it's going to have an impact, right? So, it sounds too easy, too simple. So, on some days we're still chatting 40 minutes later. Some days it's five minutes. Some days it's a real quick check-in. Hey babe, how was your day? Yeah, you know what? I'm busy. It was okay. I'm a bit stressed out. I do actually have some emails to get done tonight. I'd love to. Um, but I'm feeling really stressed. And then I'll say, "Hey, cool. You know what? I'm feeling good at the moment. I get it that that's on your mind. So at the end of five minutes it's like yes she goes off and does her emails. So it's it's not that it has to be five minutes a day but the minimum requirement you know almost that minimum effective dose is five minutes because if we said Tom we've got to do it for half an hour every evening which is what a lot of people do with their health habits they're trying to introduce. I've got to meditate for half an hour a day. I've got to work out for half an hour or 45 minutes a day. What happens then is that on that busy day where you don't have time, that becomes an obstacle. That becomes a reason why you won't do it. So the five minutes means we always do it because we know there's no pressure to go beyond the five minutes. Does that answer your question? Yeah, it does. And I think that it's worth I want to get back to the tea ritual itself, but the um it's worth putting a really fine point. So the whole thesis of the book um using your language, you want to set the bar low, uh which not a lot of people are saying that, myself included. So you want to set the bar low to make sure that people do it, but there tends to be sort of this knock-on effect. Um why why is why is that so important that that's the title of the book? It's the core thesis of the book. And honestly, if I were to shove you as a thinker into one box, um the box I would put you in is simplicity. Why is simplicity so powerful? Simplicity is everything, right? It is it is the essence of actually being able to communicate with people, getting people to do the things that you are hopefully inspiring them, empowering them to do. There's so much knowledge out there in the world. There's podcasts, there's social media, there's, you know, people don't have a lack of information about how to improve their lives, right? That it's it's everywhere. But why do so many people struggle? Knowledge is not enough to lead to action, right? It's not enough. Inspiration is not enough. There has to be a structure. There has to be a system. You have to understand how to create new behaviors. And so the challenge I set myself was how simple can you make this, right? Let's say in my first two books, if I had an idea to work up, maybe it would take 11 or 12 pages to work up that idea. In this book, I challenge myself, can you do the same thing in two pages? What is the absolute essence of what you're trying to say? And I've been practicing as an MD now, Tom, for almost 20 years, right? And I have seen by and large what works and what doesn't work. Now, of course, I know that some people can make overnight change. They can completely transform their lives, but typically there has to be a big pain point. There has to have been uh really bad health issues, you know, bad depression, bad anxiety, uh chronic pain, low energy, or there has to have been some sort of significant life issue, a bereavement, a divorce, losing their job, right? Sure, people can often turn their lives around overnight when something that big happens. But for the rest of us who don't have that big pain point, what I see over and over again is people trying to make change. They think motivation is going to be enough. The motivation carries them through for one week, for two weeks, for three weeks. Then when the motivation goes down, health plan goes down as well. Um, you know, 42-y old chap I saw in my in my practice a few years ago, maybe six or seven years ago, right? This is a classic case which probably illustrates this. 42-y old chap a little bit overweight, a little bit of a low mood and struggling with energy. Okay, come to see me, we have a chat. It's very clear to me that his lifestyle by and large is contributing to the way that he's feeling. So, we went through a number of options and the one that lit his eyes up that he was like, "Yeah, I want it." Was was strength training. He said, "Doc, yeah, strength training. What? Strength training? It's going to help my mood. It's going to help me lose weight. It's going to help my physique. I used to do it as a teenager. I've not done it in years. I want to do it." I said, "Okay, great." He says to me, "So, what should I do, doc? 40 minutes three times a week." I said, "Yeah, that would be amazing. Can you manage that?" He goes, "Yeah, yeah, no problem." He walks out of my surgery door, big smile on his face. Hey, he's got motivation. He knows what he's going to do, right? And I make an appointment to follow up with me four weeks later. Four weeks later, he comes in, his shoulder slumps over, he looks a bit sheepish. I say, "Hey, look, how you getting on? How was the gym? What's it, you know, what are you how are you finding it?" You know what he said to me? He said, "Dr. Chassy, you know what? I've hardly been. Um, work's been really busy. I'm stressed out at work. The gym's quite far. It's not really on my commute. I don't always have the time and energy to get there. I've not really done much. Right. He feels like a failure. I I I didn't think why has he not done what I've asked him to do. I thought wrong, you have clearly not given him advice that he feels is relevant to him in the context of his life. So, I took my jacket off and I said, "Hey, look, right, I'm going to teach you right now a five minute bodyweight workout. Are you in?" He goes, "Yeah, sure." So, I taught him five exercises. I modified them for his ability level. And I said, "Do you think you can manage that?" He goes, "Yeah, that's fine. Easy." I said, "I want you to do this for five minutes twice a week at home." And he laughed at me. He said, "What? 10 minutes a week? Is that it?" I said, "Yeah, can you do that?" He goes, "Yeah, of course." I said, "Okay, that's all I want you to do. Do 10 minutes a week. I'll see you in four weeks. Okay. So, he goes out. Four weeks later, Tom, he walks in, body language completely different this time. He walks in, chest is puffed out, he's got a smile on his face. I said, "How are you doing?" He said, "Doc, you said just to do five minutes twice, but I found it so easy. It made me feel good. I've started doing it for 10 minutes every evening before I had dinner." Right? So, what's that? Now the now the guy's doing 70 minutes of strength training a week when he couldn't do 40 minutes three times a week he's now doing 70 minutes a week and then what happens right there's a ripple effect that I've written about it knocks on into other aspects of his life right he was doing that for at least five years right some days it will be 10 minutes some days it will be 20 minutes but it was consistent and then now he gets up in the morning he does uh breathing and meditation for 5 10 minutes he goes for a 1 hour walk every lunchtime he eats better, he sleeps better. So for him, it all started with that change. And I have seen that over and over again. And this is what the research backs up, Tom. Let's let's go to business for a second, Tom. Right. Business. Amazon understand behavior change. So the rumors are that five years ago or so when they moved to one-click ordering, estimates say that their profits went up by $300 million a year. So why is that? Well, in the past, what did you have to do? You have to um you know, you have to click on your on your basket, go to the next screen, confirm, go to the next screen, put in your card details. You know, there's three or four steps you have to take before you place your order. Every time you take a step, that's a reason to procrastinate. That's a reason to back out of actually doing the behavior. Amazon have figured out if they make it easy so that before you've blinked, you've got something arriving the next day, people do the behavior. YouTube, Netflix do the same thing. Why does one video go into the next video? It's so before you've realized it's midnight. I'm tired. I should go to bed. I have work tomorrow morning. The next episode has started. Right? So these companies and I I'm not criticizing these companies. They understand behavior change. So they implement it so that you buy more or you spend more time on their platform. I'm saying when it comes to health, why do we think we can ignore those rules? Why do we think health has to be about deprivation and about punishments? Why can't we apply those same rules and go, "Oh, if it's easy, I do it." So all the five minute workouts in my book don't require equipment. They don't require you to join a gym. They don't require you to get changed. And I I I honestly think, Tom, this is one of the problems these days. You can go and read a million health blogs, a million different health podcasts, and you can think, you know, yoga is great, meditation's great, strength training is great, keto's great, um, breath work's great. This is what it's like, oh my god, it's overwhelming. Do I spend my whole day just doing one after the other if I want to optimize my well-being? So, what I try to do is I try to flip it and go, how simple can you make this? And I think that's one of the reasons this book has been the most successful book I've written so far is I think because I have made it simple so people can actually do the behaviors. All right. So let's say that people buy into that notion. Let's get into the weed. So give us a thumbnail sketch of somebody who's doing a great job. They're keeping it simple. So they're not doing everything. In the book you talk about, you know, pick one of the um health snacks from each of those items and do that. But give us a couple examples from each of the three pillars so people understand exactly um you know what they should do. Sure. So there's about maybe 40 or 50 different five minute recommendations in the book. All you need to do is choose three. One from the mind section, one from the body section, one from the heart section. Okay. So the mind and do it every day. So I say when you're starting, choose one and do the same one every day at the same time. So like people get it when you talk about toothbrushing, right? So we we don't think with our you know our dental health example we don't think hey you know what I'm not going to worry about it in the week but you know on a Sunday I'm going to give it a a big one hour deep clean in my teeth you know we don't do that right but we sort of think we can do that with other aspects of our health physical mental and emotional health and I'm saying no the reason four minutes a day on your dental health looks after your teeth over time is because a it becomes a habit and it's a small thing done regularly That adds up. We just don't think about good habits in the same way as bad habits. So Tom framework is mind, body, heart. Mind is mental health. Body is moving your body for your physical health and heart is the whole connection piece. So in mind there are five minute breath exercises, you know, breathing exercises. say one is a Zen practice called breath counting that I was doing this for a good few months and I really found it not only helped me feel less stressed but it helped my focus and concentration in the day and it's really simple you just sit down you shut your eyes you breathe in on the out breath you count one in your head breathe in again on the out breath you count two and you do that up to five when you get to five you just start again at one and go to five now here's the thing Tom once I did it. I ended up at 30 before I'd even realized that my mind had wandered. So, what it does, it trains concentration, attention, and focus. So, that's one. Uh, there's also journaling exercises. So, I really feel that journaling is one of the most powerful things we can do, especially first thing in the morning. Often, we've got anxieties and worries worring around our brains, and we do nothing to process them. So, that then impacts the interactions we have in the day. It impacts how stressed we feel. It impacts the decisions we make. But five minutes of journaling first thing in the morning. And how do people journal? Like what what do they do? Stream of consciousness. Make a list. Well, I give people two options. I one is a free form one where I say literally write down anything that comes into your mind. Anything for five minutes. Just write anything. Even if it feels like complete garbage, unrelated thoughts. This is not a a book manuscript. This is not a a letter to your boss. This is just you're trying to clear out the junk in your brain. Now, it's really interesting to me. I've done this with patients, but when the book came out in the UK in January, I [snorts] got so many messages on Instagram a few weeks later from people saying wrong and it's really interesting. I didn't realize I was anxious about things. But when I started to do this, four or five things each day started to come out in my writings that that I was really worried about. So this is how good we are as humans about burying um into our subconscious, you know, things we're worried about. One option for journaling, and I've called it downloading in the book, it's like a it's like a brain dump, a morning download. It's free form. The other option is an exercise I've created called the five-step release. This is brilliant for people who've got anxiety. And you literally have these five questions to answer. And it frankly, it takes two or three minutes. It doesn't even take five minutes. You answer these five questions. What is one thing I'm worried about today? Okay, so you write that down. What's one thing I can do to prepare about it? Number three, what's one reason it won't be as bad? It probably won't be as bad as I think it's going to be. Four, what's one reason I know I can probably handle it. And five, what's one upside of the situation? Simple exercise, very easy to do, but very effective this. And I guarantee that for the vast majority of people, they will feel better. They will feel less anxious, less stressed because it's these small things done consistently that add up. So, I've given you a breath work example in mind. I've given you a a couple of journaling examples in mind. Um, you know, there's five minutes of flow. So, I know you've spoken about flow state on many of your uh shows before. Um, flow state is an incredible state where, you know, we're doing something that's challenging enough to keep us interested, but it's not so challenging that we switch off. It's when time sort of stands still. And that could be anything. It could be playing your piano, a guitar, it could be playing chess, it could be doing a puzzle. Uh, 42-y old lady I saw, uh, migraines. She's got three kids, husband's got a busy job. I felt stress was driving her migraines a lot, and she said, "I don't have time for this stuff." She tried yoga. She tried meditation. Says, "Doc, I'm busy. I don't have time for this stuff." It turns out she loved coloring books. Super easy to do if you do it. It's like all these things, they're great if you actually go and do it. So, she was struggling, right? So, I said, "So, what do you do in the morning?" She said, "I'll have a cup of tea. You know, the kids are causing mayhem and chaos, but I will go and make a cup of tea." I said, "Perfect. That is a habit that we can stick this on to." I said, "Do you need a notification in your phone to remind you to have a cup of tea?" She said, "Of course not. No, I have a morning cup of tea." I said, "Okay, perfect. So, what I want you to do before you go to bed in the evening, I want you to make sure you've got a coloring book and your crayons next to your kettle." And it sounds so simple. It sounds like we are children, but you know what? When you make something easy to do, people do it. So, she comes down, she puts on the kettle, she sees her coloring book and the crayon. If something is missing, if the coloring book is upstairs, if her kids have taken the crayons in another room, she may not do the behavior. It's like, "Oh, I need to go upstairs. I need to get that. I'll forget it. I haven't got time today." No, she started doing it. Within about a week, her migraines had gone down by about 50%. She was still getting them. They were just a lot better. 3 to four weeks later, she was hardly guessing them, apart from on stress on really stressful days. Now, it doesn't always happen that easily and that quickly, Tom, but I use that example because it was so powerful. Again, people may be skeptical listening. Five minutes, what difference will it really make? Well, that lady sort out her migraines. The patient I told you about at the start, that helped him lose weight, improve his mood, get more energy. These five minute interventions do work because if five minutes didn't work, then why are we wasting our time brushing our teeth for four minutes a day, right? Yeah, I think you're example of of how people can buy into it with bad habits. Like, oh, if I smash myself in the hand with a hammer for 5 minutes, I know that it would be problematic. This is, you know, one of my core thesis is that people don't recognize they're having a biological experience. And so, getting a coloring book and doing something that is essentially meditative, right? You're finding a way where you're totally absorbed in something and thusly your mind can't allocate resources to worrying about a problem. The thoughts that you think are obviously going to color your emotions, no pun intended. And so if your mind is worrying, to use your word, around these negative thoughts, then your emotions are going to be negative. But if on the other hand, you're coloring, you slide into neutral. And so if you're in a mental situation where you're never clicking into neutral and you're always worrying around these negative ideas, you're you're never actually getting out of those negative emotions. And it can be very simple, a coloring book, watching a comedy, um forcing yourself to laugh out loud. I mean whatever that thing is but doing something that shifts what zone your brain is in can be extraordinarily powerful. Um so yeah that makes a lot of sense to me and look you know we made it simple now why again simplicity is important because otherwise Tom people go okay I get it right I need to get into that zone they may then make the next leap which is I need to learn meditation I need to sign up for this class I need to do one hour a day I'm not saying those things can't work right of course they can work but more often than not that is the obstacle which means they do it for two weeks then they stop when life gets in the way. And that's because well, a couple of things. Motivation, right? Motivation doesn't last. We think it lasts, but it doesn't, right? There's something called the motivation wave in behavioral change science. Now, BJ Fog, professor BJ Fog from Stanford, he coined it the motivation wave. So, motivation goes up, motivation goes down. Most of us make our health plans or our New Year's resolutions at the peak of the motivation wave. We think, "Yeah, this is going to be my year. I'm going to lose weight. I'm going to meditate." And you know what? For the first two weeks in January or the first two weeks of September after the summer, they are in. But then, you know what? Life gets in the way. They're busy. They're stressed out. Oh man, I don't have time to go spinning four times a week. I don't have time to meditate for half an hour a day. So, they go from everything to zero. Whereas if you understand that motivation goes up and it comes down, the clever thing to do is to you make your plan for the trough for the lowest point in the motivation wave, you you plan for low motivation. And that's why you got to make things easy because if you make things easy, even when your motivation is down, you will still do it. So when I say as as you sort of said at the start, set the bar low, it's not that I only want people to do five minutes, right? And I'm not being deceptive either. I'm saying if you set the bar low and you do it consistently, you know what? Some days you will just do five minutes. Some days you'll do 20 minutes. Some days you do half an hour. But five minutes is your base because then each day you're ticking it off. So I think motivation is worth understanding. But then something I thought would be really worth exploring with you Tom. I wonder what you think about this. I think strongly if we think if we're thinking about values, if we think about our identity, what my book does, what this plan does, whoever you are, right, is this helps you shape your identity. Through action, you start changing your identity. So, if you remember that 42-year-old chap I mentioned at the start, he initially had the identity of someone who can't look after himself. I can't stick to a health plan. They're all too difficult. But when I made it easy for him and he does it, he starts to feel good. I helped him feel successful. I helped him feel good. And so his identity start to change. He starts to now become not someone who fails at every health plan. He's someone who's a success. And you know, I I've been thinking about this idea recently that often the identity we have is an identity that we wish to have, right? and our actions on a daily basis are not consistent with that. So that in that gap there's friction in our lives. There's this kind of constant friction whereby our actions are not matching up to this identity that we perceive ourselves to have. And what I'm trying to do with this book is to help people align those things together so that they can show themselves every single day. I am someone who prioritizes myself. I my relationship is worth it. my health is worth it. And another way to do this, and this is another part of behavior change, is you've got to celebrate each success, right? We often don't take time for this. So, we get it with bad habits. So, the example I often use is if you feel low and you feel down and you buy a chocolate bar, often you will feel good for a few minutes or maybe 10 or 15 minutes, you'll feel good, right? So you've wired in this idea of a very powerful emotional response which is I feel low, I eat chocolate, I feel good. That is very very powerful. And actually it's not repetition that creates habits. It's emotions that creates habits. So you really want after a positive habit, let's say you've done a five minute workout, let's say it's five minutes of skipping or five minutes of dancing, you want to almost luxuriate in that feeling of well-being for a few seconds. How how do you do that? Well, okay. So BJ will say you should say something like I am awesome out loud. Out loud. He says, "Say it, feel it, absorb it. I am awesome." Like he gets up every day and he says, "Today is going to be a great day." And he says it and absorbs it. That would make me feel like a total doofus. I would never do that. Right? As a Brit, there is no way in hell that people in England are going to say, "I am awesome." after doing a workout. We're too reserved for that, right? So, there are many ways you can do it. A simple uh kind of very non- tech way to do this, have a tick chart, right? Tick charts work. So, I have a chart like I am literally what 10 yards from my kitchen in there next to the fridge. I, my wife, and my two children, we have our own charts with our mind snack, our body snack, and our heart snack. And every day once we've done them, we tick them because it feels good. We tick them and have a little smile to ourselves, right? So even if my day has been bad or my week has been bad, I can look at the fridge and I go, I can see 21 times this week I have prioritized myself and done something proactive for my mental, physical, and emotional well-being. This works right. Tick charts work. It works beautifully well for children. A lot of uh parents contact me and say, "Oh, this is great, but can I do this with my children?" You can. You allow them to pick. I didn't prescribe which one to do. I didn't say you've got to do this one. Hey, look, pick the ones that you want to do and then you're going to do them, right? So, it sounds I love that. But I I'm I we we still have two more to go here and I don't want to run out of time. So, um we got mine. We rocked that. We know how to celebrate it. I'm with it. Um, now we're we want to go body or heart next. Okay, let's go body, right? Body. We all know I I you know, movement is important. Working out, our body super important. But why does so many of us struggle to do that? Like the patient I mentioned, he couldn't get to the gym. You got to make it easy. So, there are I don't know how many maybe 10 different five minute workouts. There's strength workouts, there's interval workouts, there's skipping workouts, there's uh yoga flows, there's whatever you want. But as I say, all of them, you don't need to buy equipment. You don't need to join a gym. You don't need to get changed. Talk to me about the classic five. The classic five is one of my favorite ones, right? It is I think it's the five most high impact body weight exercises that you can do. And that's the key, right? Body weight. Look, you can easily bring in things that require equipment, but I discipline myself to say wrong, no equipment allowed. Because equipment means it's an excuse for somebody not to do it. Oh, I don't have it. I'm not going to do it. It's simple, right? It's a press up. Um, it's uh squats, you know, it's lunges, it's reverse flies, which you can do with your arms and the glute bridge. You know, the bridge when you're lying and you sort of lift up your hips lying on your back. You're lying on your back with your sort of feet on the floor with your knees at a slight angle y and your arms flat on the ground and you lift up uh your your bum and your hips while contracting your glutes. So again, it's just trying to give people a balanced workout. So that's one. There are interval workouts. If people want something super simple, there's one in there that I call simple sweat. You pick a whole body exercise that you like. Let's say um jumping jacks or whole body exercise. Put a timer on for 30 seconds. Do jumping jacks for 30 seconds. Rest. Repeat five times. You've just done yourself an interval workout. Right? It is simple. You do that every day. You will feel a difference. You will see changes in your physique. You will feel better with your mood. And again, I'm not here to uh tell people not to join gyms or not to work out more than that. Sure, do more. I often do more. But this is the base framework. I may go for a run these days. I may go for a long walk. I may do some pull-ups when I'm on my walk in the in the kids play park. I may stop and do pull-ups and dips on the gym there. Right? I may do that, but I still don't that's not a replacement for this. This becomes a part of my day. So, even if I do that, I'm still doing my five minute body weight in the morning, you know. So, now heart heart I think is going to be the most troubling for people given the sort of remote nature of things. Um what what so we talked about the tea ceremony taking five minutes to reconnect. What are some things that people can do if they're living alone? How can they um tap into the heart stuff? Yeah. So connection um it's really interesting. A connection is not always to another human being. Connection can also be connection to yourself. Professor John Capiosha who I think he unfortunately died last year. He is probably the guy who's researched the most on loneliness. So what is loneliness, right? Is is human connection about being with somebody else physically? No. Because you could be in the middle of time square and surrounded by, you know, thousands of people back in the day when you could do that [snorts] and still feel lonely. Connection is about a shared experience. So, ironically, Tom, in this current pandemic, we're at a time where in many ways, we've got a leg up in terms of connecting people because we're all in some ways sharing a similar experience of the lives that we've lost, of the grief that we may be going through for what we're now missing out on. So, you can connect. Let's say you're living by yourself. It is not the same as human connection. I know on our last conversation, I spoke about human touch and how important that is. And that is something many people are being starved of at the moment with dire consequences. But you could call a friend each day, right? You could um you know call a friend and go hey how was your day today? You know lockdown is really bothering me now. Three months I was okay but now into the fourth and fifth month I find it really hard. If your friend goes yeah me too I'm really struggling. That is connection right? You don't have to physically be with someone to connect. Is it the same? Probably not. But it can go a long way. So that is one thing I tell people to do. One thing I was doing in lockdown a lot was in a WhatsApp group uh between my friends, my my really good college friends. We would get together at the same time every day for 10 minutes. We'd say, "Okay, at 8:30, we're all jumping on." And for those 10 minutes, we'd all just banter around. We'd have a laugh with each other. You know what? It feels good. It feels really, really good. And one of the one of the recommendations in the book is send a random text of kindness each day. So you literally go through your contact list, pick someone at random and send them a kind. Hey, you know what? I was thinking of you today. I remember when you helped me move my sofa 10 years ago. Just wanted to say thank you. Kindness is contagious. Kindness helps to reduce stress levels. Makes you happier. Makes you feel better. There's some studies which showing kindness can even help reduce aging. Right. It's absolutely amazing. So being kind to another person, doing something for another individual connects you to that person. It connects you to something greater than yourself, which again, I think is a really important part of well-being. So, you know, there are so many options. What I'm asking people to do is just choose one of those heart interventions. Um, you know, I do the tea ritual. Other one I do is a gratitude game that I don't know if I spoke to you about before or not, but it's something that's part of our family life, which is because of lockdown, I am at home every evening. So my wife, me and my two kids, we have dinner together every single evening. And as part of dinner, we go around the table. This is a game uh that Charles Pollockin actually taught me many years ago. Uh the strength coach uh you ask three questions. What have I done today to make somebody else happy? What has somebody else done today to make me happy? And what have I learned today? And I tell you, it's one of the most powerful things we do. It connects us. We hear things about each other that we wouldn't hear about if we had superficial level uh conversation. And this reminds me of that first question about the tea ritual. Tom, you know, my wife and I, we don't have a structure when we do our tea ritual. But you know what? This grass game is a beautiful structure, these three questions, but some people like to free form it as well. So yeah, Tom, I'm just I I just know because I've seen it for 20 years that this sort of plan works. I've seen it since the book came out. But of course, I would just ask people to trust it. Listen to what they've heard in this conversation. Pick one thing. If three habits a day is too much, you know what? Fine. Start with one. Start with one. You know, I I kind of like this idea of a keystone habit. like what is that one keystone habit that when you do it keeps everything else going online and for me it's very much my morning routine on the days that I do my morning routine if I start with breath work and meditation you know what it knocks on to everything else I do that day but on those days where I miss it I notice that it's just not quite the same uh I'm not as productive I'm not as calm I'm not is grounded. Um, so really the book is and this approach is about how do you take action and how do you really change your identity as well as your health through taking these small steps each day. Dude, that that is the perfect place to wrap it up, man. Uh, I hope that people dive in and use the book, which as you said is all that really matters. So, make sure you use it. Where can people find you, find the book, all that good stuff? Well, look, the book is available all over the place. You know, Amazon, in your bookstores, you can you can pick up Feel Better in Five there. Uh I have a weekly podcast called Feel Better Live More. If people want to hear more about this kind of stuff, um you know, audio and on YouTube or best social media platform is probably Instagram, Dr. Chaty. That's Dr. Ca Terle E. Love it. All right, guys. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.