His latest book Feel Better In 5, which everybody should get a copy of. It’s incredible, Feel Better In 5. Five minutes is all you need to fix your health and well being. It’s a smash hit in the UK. It’s sold 100,000 copies in just seven months. It’s been published in the United States recently. Professor BJ Fogg, who’s one of the world’s leading experts in human behavior calls his book one of the best habit-change programs he’s ever seen. Deceptively simple, but remarkably effective. And I know you and I have both been inspired by BJ Fogg. I also liked the "mind-body" approach of focusing on mental, physical, and emotional health, even if the "mind" and "heart" categories kind of muddle together a bit (journaling everything that's on your mind is under mind, but journaling 5 things you're grateful for is under heart?). The physical workouts have a great variety from strength and HIIT to yoga and stretching. Toward the end he points out that if you already have an exercise habit, you can select a habit that complements it, like yoga if you're a runner (I wish this had been mentioned earlier, it's a great point). Rangan Chatterjee: The second most important rule, I think, is where do you put that new behavior that you want to do? Right? Because a lot of us don’t really think about that. We think, oh, we’ll fit it in when we’ve got time.

I really feel that when you take just 15 minutes a day to do three five-minute actions, you start to build up a picture of who you are. You start to show yourself that, hey, I’m someone that’s worth taking care of. I’m someone that no matter how busy work is or how much work I have to do, to take my kids to school, and do all the work and the housework, you know what? Despite all of that, I still give myself 15 minutes a day in three five-minute intervals, which is achievable for pretty much anyone, and it really helps to change the identity about how you feel about yourself. One of the things I love about this stage in my life is I’ve actually been seeing exactly what you’re saying. When I fit in that 10 minute yoga class, or when I do five minutes of my squats and my pushups or whatever, I actually feel even stronger in my body. It feels like there’s so much more flow and space in my life without that mental pressure of beating myself up.What if taking care of the rest of your health –– mental, emotional, and physical –– could also be that easy? We went through everything and I’m so excited to dig into this today, especially because where we are as a global society right now, at least from my experience and folks that I’ve been talking to, people are overwhelmed. It’s really, really hard right now for most of us to just find not only the time, but the energy and the mental bandwidth to kind of keep it all together. So I feel like this is really exciting.

It was the height of the scorching summer of 2018 and I could see how uncomfortable the heat was making Letitia. She was a forty-eight-year-old single mother who’d always struggled with her weight. She’d tried the gym and various workout classes but was concerned that people would stare at her because of her size. That day, Letitia had come in with her daughter, who was also overweight, and who she was worried about. Sixteen-year-old Namono seemed quite low and moody. At one point, she snapped at her mum, saying, "Well you never go out either. You’re just in the kitchen all day, listening to music." I got the strong impression that there were difficulties in their relationship. When it comes to health, we don’t think that. We think, oh, if I’m going to do yoga, I’ve got to do a one and a half hour in-person yoga session. Do you know what? It’s fine, do that if you want. But also do five minutes a day. It really makes a difference. I’m not saying it’s either/or, right? You may already have some good habits in your life. Brilliant. But I bet you this book will help you see a couple of your blind spots and go, ah, maybe I should work on this as well. Mind: The Brain Tap - writing down whatever comes into my mind for 5 minutes a day (I plan to use my Positive Planner). I'll do this before bed. You spend five minutes working on your mind, which might be a breathing exercise, a brief pause in nature, or a making brain-boosting smoothie. You know, I also think it just kind of builds out in every area of our lives. I know when I was working on my book, Everything is Figureoutable, just every single day, even if I just wrote a few paragraphs, it made me feel like a champion because I knew I was taking one next step on my journey to hitting a big goal. That was really important to me. So I love that celebration.Everyone wants to be healthy. But thanks to the unceasing distractions in modern life, virtually everyone also struggles to maintain this priority. And thanks to a flood of conflicting opinions and complicated programs, figuring out how to be healthy can be overwhelming. But what if all it took to make a real difference was five minutes of your day?

Dancing is one of the most underrated ways to work out and get your heart pumping. You don’t need to go to a class or wait until your next big night out with your mates. It’s free and available to each and every one of us on a daily basis. Gym and Zumba instructors know all too well that music helps to motivate and keep people going, but you don’t need to pay professionals to exploit this ancient and joyful activity.So if you make it easy, you actually take motivation out of the equation. You make it easy, then it means that even on a day when you don’t have motivation, if it’s easy, you will still do the behavior. That’s the secret, that’s what all the behavioral change science tells us, and that’s what I’ve found in my clinical experience.

Now, for some people they think that’s incredible. I remember the week after the book came out, a couple of people messaged me and they said, “Dr. Chatterjee, it’s really interesting. I didn’t realize I was worried about anything until I started doing this. There was four or five really key things in my life that I was worried about that I was writing down every day,” but it was buried inside their brain so they weren’t even aware of it. So, that’s another one that they could do for their minds. But if that’s to free form, if people prefer a bit more structure, I’ve created this exercise called the five step release. These are five simple questions you ask yourself, basically to help … And it’s really good if you’ve got anxiety or you really struggle with a lot of thoughts and you can’t quite focus. It’s called the five step release. If you’re interested, I can talk you through it. Rangan Chatterjee: Yeah, this book’s a little bit different from my first two. This one was really focused on action. So I’ve been a medical doctor for almost 20 years now. What has always interested me is why do some people manage to make change and why do others not? It’s something I’ve been observing a lot with my patients and trying to sort of piece together what’s the difference? Because if you ask anyone on the street if they want to be healthier, if they want to make change in their life, they’ll probably say yes. But a lot of people aren’t able to do that. Now Professor BJ Fogg, who’s probably the world’s leading expert in human behavior at Stanford University, he calls this the motivation wave. He says, motivation comes up and motivation goes down. Most of us make our health plan at the peak of the motivation wave. But what we should be doing is making it at the trough, because we know that motivation will go down. So many people think they are to blame if they find losing weight so hard. Which I get. It takes a massive amount of mental energy and focus and by the end of the day you are usually so drained that it feels not worth it. But it shouldn't be this hard and this book can help with that. So, yeah, I mean, I appreciate your kind words, Marie. I really hope it does as well in America as it has done in the UK, because I really think it’s very simple, very accessible, but also a free way to help you live a better and a happier life.The book is divided into three key areas of health: Mind, Body and Heart. Mind is about reducing levels of stress and anxiety –our modern-day epidemic. Body is about moving more, something so vital for our physical and mental health. And Heart is about strengthening all our essential, human connections, our relationships with others. If I had to choose one of the three areas that I feel is most important, and most often neglected, it’s this one. The majority of my patients don’t need a pill, they need a lifestyle prescription. My goal is to change the way we look at illness. Rangan Chatterjee: Thanks for that. It’s funny that this was the last thing that went into the book. I actually thought I’d finished the book, and I was like looking at my manuscript. I thought, yeah, okay, I’ve finally done it. Then it came to me, then I thought…