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House Calls Podcast
What's at the Core of Your Happiness? (Part 2)
With guest Dr. Rangan Chatterjee,
Physician & Podcast Host

Description

How well do you balance your ideas of success with your happiness? And do you really understand what makes you happy?  

In Part Two of their conversation about stress, the Surgeon General and Dr. Rangan Chatterjee talk about how our culture of striving for more can undermine our happiness. But if we can identify a few simple things that bring us joy, we can develop the skill of happiness. As an example, Dr. Chatterjee leads Dr. Murthy through a simple “core happiness” exercise we can all practice.  

 

This episode of House Calls gets deeply personal, as both doctors talk about personal challenges in their lives relating to family, love, and loss. This conversation is a powerful example of how connecting human-to-human can help us through hard moments. 

 

We’d love to hear from you! Send us a note at housecalls@hhs.gov with your feedback & ideas. 

 

Connect with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

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Transcript

Dr. Vivek Murthy

Hello and welcome to House Calls. I’m Vivek Murthy and I have the honor of serving as U.S. Surgeon General. I’d like to introduce you to Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, physician and host of the most-listened-to health podcast in Europe. Today we’ll be talking about how we can keep our bodies and minds healthy in a stressful world. This is Part Two of a two-part conversation. At the end of the last episode, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and I were talking about the healing power of listening. I started the second half of our conversation by asking him about the difference between happiness and success, as he believes happiness is a muscle that can be developed. He had a lot of helpful tips on how to cultivate what he calls core happiness. Rangan also had more to say about listening and the difference that really hearing someone can make, whether in medicine or in a marriage. To be honest, I was having a tough day when we recorded this, and I think he sensed that because before I knew it, he guided me through a couple of simple exercises that helped me reconnect with my sources of happiness. This conversation was a great reminder of why vulnerability is so important for real human-to-human connection. I hope all the House Calls listeners out there are as inspired by this conversation as I was, and I hope you find ways to bring these practices into your own lives and friendships. As always, we're eager to hear your thoughts and reflections. Reach out to us at: HouseCalls@HHS.gov Rangan, you have talked really beautifully in the past about the difference between happiness and success. And I'd love to take us here for a moment and ask you if you could say a little bit more about what the distinction is between these, and talk a little bit about the three-legged stool that you often discuss when talking about how to cultivate happiness in our lives.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Yeah, no, for sure. I just wanted to respond to what you just said there, which I completely agree with about listening. And you said you don't necessarily have to fix their problem, and that's right. It's a powerful thing to learn that listening is one of the most powerful things we can do, whether we are a doctor or not a doctor, whether it's with your children or with your partner, or with your work colleagues. In fact, when we can listen with our true intent being to listen and understand, rather than with the intent being so that I can now respond and give my solution or my opinion, it really is a very different flavor to the listening. And I've seen it in medicine be very, very powerful. But the truth is, in my own marriage, I've seen that to be incredibly powerful. You know, this idea that, I think this is often a male-female thing, but not always, of course. But my wife, sometimes she'll share a problem with me, and in the past I would, in my head, I can see the solution, so I would tell her, I would share with her what I felt the solution to her problem is. And I didn't realize why there was often friction and things would build up. And I've learned, I'm happily married, it's what, something like 16 years now. I have learnt over the last years that when my wife shares a problem with me, one of the things I will say is, would you like me to just listen, or would you like me to provide a solution? And just those simple sentences have dramatically transformed those interactions, because with the clarity there, often she went, I just want you to listen. And I'm like, okay, cool. So I may have solutions that I think are gonna help, but they're for me and I just keep my mouth shut, because she has said very nicely that she doesn't want that from me. And I think there's something really powerful about that is, listen, show that person you're listening, show them that you've respected them. And Vivek, a couple of weekends ago, I was in London. I teach a course, it's a Royal College of GPs accredited course. It's called Prescribing Lifestyle Medicine, where me and some colleagues, we teach doctors how to apply a lot of these principles in 10 or 15 minute consultations. And we've been teaching it for many years and at one of the courses someone said, "What's the most important thing you've learnt in your entire medical career?" I remember being on stage thinking about it, and I said, It's just four words. “Connect first, educate second." And I've realized that's what I try and do with all my patients. But all of us can do that with all of our relationships. The whole idea is, and it's hard with only 10 minutes in a consultation or 15 minutes, but the point is, if the patient comes in with a problem and you rush to give that solution, often it goes in through one ear and goes out the other ear. It doesn't land. But if you can just invest even five, six minutes at the start to make sure that they feel heard, that you understand that you empathize with them, you will find, and when I teach doctors, I say, "You will find your compliance rates go up dramatically, because the patient knows that you care. Now they're interested in what you know." And I honestly think, and I've said this before to people, I say, "that's a doctor-patient relationship." But frankly, what is that? It's a relationship. Any relationship is gonna work better when you connect first and educate second or provide solutions second. So I just wanted to respond to what you said, because I thought that was very powerful. With respect to happiness and success. Last year, I released my fifth book called, "Happy Mind, Happy Life," which was essentially all about happiness. And you know, the question is, why would a doctor write a book about happiness? And it speaks to some of the themes that we've had in this conversation, Vivek, which has been, all doctors, really, would love to know what is the root cause of their patients' problems. And right at the start, I said to you that I felt that chronic unmanaged stress is one of the big reasons why people struggle to make lifestyle change. And I was thinking for many years, I would say, 80 to 90% of what we see is in some way driven by collective modern lifestyles. But does that mean lifestyle is the root cause? Or could there be something that's even more upstream than lifestyle? And I really dove into the research. I reflected on my patients, and I thought, yeah, there is, there's something more important, it's our mindset. It's the way we approach the world. It's how we deal with adversity. In many ways, it's our happiness because there's a lot of good research now supporting this, that happier people are healthier, and healthier people are happy. I think the relationship goes both ways. There's some very powerful studies which really demonstrate that link beautifully. And I realized actually that happiness is actually a skill. It's not something that just happens one day when our email inbox is clear and then we like what's on the news and our boss treats us well, and there's no traffic. No, for me, yeah, that's a pleasurable day, that's a nice feeling, but that's not real happiness. So for me, in this book, I defined what I consider to be the happiness that people are looking for, really as core happiness, C-O-R-E, core happiness as opposed to junk happiness. And core happiness, I basically create a model of a three-legged stool. So each of these legs is essential. Each one is gonna help you strengthen your happiness stool. And the more of them you can do, and this is why I think sometimes we strengthen one of them, but maybe one or two of the other stool legs are a bit broken and wobbly, so our happiness isn't stable. And those three legs are alignment, contentment and control. So what is alignment? Alignment is basically when our inner values and our external actions start to match up more and more. So basically, the person who you really are inside, and the person who you are being out there in the world are one and the same. So that's what alignment essentially means. Contentment is what are the things that we can do that give us that deep feeling of contentment and calm? And the third leg is control. And it really speaks to what we said at the start of this conversation. It's about a sense of control. It's not about controlling the world, the world is inherently uncontrollable. I think the events of the last few years have shown us that, that we may want the world to go a certain way, but the world is gonna do what the world is gonna do, right? And if you are reliant on things being a certain way in order to feel calm and content and good in yourself, you are, you're like just a tree blowing in the wind. You know, whichever way the wind is blowing, you are gonna be vulnerable to that. As basically what's beautiful, or I think what's good about this model, and what has helped loads of people understand happiness better, is that you don't directly work on happiness. You just work on your alignment, contentment and sense of control, and the side effects of that will be, is that you are gonna be happier more often. And again, all the things that I talk about with respect to this are free. Because as I said before, I really believe that these concepts should be free and available to everyone. One of those concepts, as you've alluded to in your question, is the difference between success and happiness. And I kind of feel this is one of the big things for many of us to really confront and ask ourselves in our lives. We're brought up in a culture, particularly in the West of more, more, more, you know, get better grades, get a better job. We're sold marketing message. We think more money, a promotion, a better office, a nicer car, the latest iPhone, nicer holiday. We feel as we get these things, we are going to be happier. And it's a very, very common story. And with the explosion of podcasts around the world, we are getting now to hear from many successful people who are sharing how their success came at a huge internal cost. And that all the money and validation and success they got never actually healed that hole that they had inside their hearts. In fact, it made it worse. And again, I wanna be very sensitive as I talk about this, because I understand that at the moment, many people are really struggling with the cost of living. And I understand if you cannot afford to heat your house or keep a roof over your head or feed your family, yes, more money is gonna help you for sure. But for many people who have got those basic needs met, and a lot of the research does support this, I don't think it's black and white. I don't think we can say clear cut, but for many people, once those basic needs are met, we can't convincingly say that more money, is gonna lead to more happiness. And so I think many of us are chasing success, thinking that it's going to make us happy. But actually, we often find that it isn't. And I've certainly been guilty of this. And maybe that's why I wrote such a, I think a very honest chapter at the start of the book to explain to people, I share the story of my dad's, right? And this story will be played out in America over and over again. Dad came here in 1962 in search of a better life, but for 30 years, my dad slept three nights a week, for 30 years. He was a consultant at Manchester Royal Infirmary. He was a well-respected doctor. He'd work in the day, right? And I remember this clearly. Dad came back home, I don't know, maybe 5:30, 6 o'clock in the evening, and he'd come in through the door, he'd go upstairs, he'd shave. Mom would have dinner ready for him and he'd eat dinner, and then a car would pick him up at maybe 6:30 or quarter to seven, and dad would be out all night doing GP house calls. He'd turn up again at 7-7:15 in the morning after being out all night. Again, he'd come up, shave again. Mom would give him breakfast and he'd drive 45 minutes into the center of Manchester to do his job for the day. This was for 30 years. So to me, now with hindsight, my dad developed lupus, the autoimmune disease, when he was 58 years old. He had crushing kidney failure. So he never got a transplant. So he was chained to a dialysis machine for 15 years before he died. And dad had success, but he didn't have happiness. I don't think my dad was happy. Dad's not here, so I can't ask him that question. Now, I wanna be really clear. Dad may feel that he did what he had to do. He may say, if I had the chance to speak to him, now, you know what, I'd do it all again, because I gave you and your brother a fantastic start in life. I managed to get a house for my family at home. I managed to make sure they were taken care of. Maybe, you know, maybe my dad would say it was worth those 15 years of chronic ill health. I don't know, only my dad can answer that. But that may well be quite an extreme version. But actually, there are many less extreme versions of that story playing out in the US, in the UK, and many countries around the world. In Japan, They've got a term in Japan for death by work. I can't remember what the term is. There's actually a term, a Japanese term for it. And it's really quite incredible. And so many people, and I've seen many of my patients, their symptoms, their anxiety, their depression, their burnouts, their insomnia is actually because of what they're chasing. They're trying to keep doing more. They're trying to get that extra promotion. They're trying to get a bit more money when they've already got enough. Sometimes they've already got enough. You know the book, the Tao Te Ching, the old Chinese philosophy text, in the English translation, there is a phrase in there, which I think about most days. "True wealth is knowing what is enough." And I think about that all the time.

Dr. Vivek Murthy

That's beautiful. That's powerful.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

It is and I've seen patterns of my dad play out in my own life. And look, you're sitting there, Surgeon General in the United States, right? If your family in India could have predicted that 30 years ago, it probably would've been like a pipe dream. What Vivek's gonna end up being Surgeon General in America. Like the odds for that to happen was so slim. And I'm sure it's something that's a huge source of pride for you, your family, your wider family. I'm sure it is, right? You are regarded as someone who is very, very successful. I also, in a very different way from you, would be regarded by society as very, very successful. Medical doctor, five Sunday Times bestsellers, host of the most listened to health show in Europe, you know, whatever, all these things. But I've realized, and I know, I know it's almost a cliche to have a successful person saying this, and I'm aware of the irony of that, but I've actually realized that it really isn't the stuff that makes me happy. I think the, you know, the events since 2020, all the restrictions that many of us had to live through have taught me what really makes me happy. It's spending time with my wife and my kids and the relationships. And there's an exercise, I dunno if you're up for this, Vivek, but I have a very simple exercise in that chapter, which I'd love to maybe do on you now if you're up for trying it.

Dr. Vivek Murthy

Sure, sure. Let's do it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

It's a two part exercise, it's called, Write Your Happy Ending. So, the first part is basically to say, what are three things that you could do this week, that if you did them, would make you really, really happy?

Dr. Vivek Murthy

Hmm. So three things I could do that would make me really, really happy this week? One would be to spend time talking to my mother, recognizing she's been really stressed, caring for my grandmother, who's struggling with her health. And she's burning out my mother as a caregiver. And just to spend some time talking to her, listening to her, making her laugh, would bring me great joy. The second thing would be to spend time telling stories to my children. This is something that I try and do as often as I can, but I find that it gives them great joy when I'm sharing stories with them. And for me, it's my creative outlet to be able to make up these sort of fantastic, imaginary stories of new worlds and new characters. And the third would be to take my wife on a walk, and just have some time for us to talk, to be together. We have busy lives like so many parents and not enough time for the two of us to talk, for me to really just listen to her and understand how she's doing, which is something I need to do a better job of. But to be able to just take a walk and listen to her, and enjoy her company and be present with each other, that would bring me incredible joy. So those are three things that would make my life even better than it is today.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. That's really wonderful to hear. And those are three things that I would call happiness habits. So those are your current three happiness habits that if you did them each week would give you incredible joy. Now, the second part of the exercise is to fast forward now. Imagine you are on your deathbed. You're lying there. You're looking back on your life. What are three things you will want to have done?

Dr. Vivek Murthy

I will have wanted to love my family and friends deeply. I will have wanted to serve my community and humanity with my full heart. And I will have wanted to have been open to growing, to learning, and to receiving love from other people. Those three things would, if I can say that on my deathbed, then I will have led a fulfilling life.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Yeah. I love that. And your two things, the two answers, or three, are actually, they're quite aligned actually, and with some people then not. And I think what's really powerful about this exercise is that you have the present day, in the middle of all this craziness, what could I do? And then at the end of my life, looking back, what will I want to have done? And the truth is about at the end of our life, we kind of know what we're all gonna say, because palliative care nurses tell us over and over again that people say the same thing. Bronnie Ware wrote this wonderful book, "The Five Regrets of the Dying." And, these are the common things that people say at the end of their life. And it's things like, I wish I'd worked less. I wish I'd spent more time with my friends and family. I wish I'd allowed myself to be happy. I wish I'd lived my life, and not the life that other people expected of me. These are the common things that people say over and over again. And you're imagining on your death bed, it's about relationships. It's about serving others, and why this is so useful, and anyone listening to this, I really would encourage them to do this exercise. Not just imagine, write it out. I've done this several times and I actually have on my fridge, pinned up, my three happiness habits, and the three happiness habits are completely aligned with what I say I want on my deathbed. And I know if I do, for example, like on my death bed, I know I will want to have spent meaningful time with my wife and kids. I will want to have done something to help other people in the world. And I will want to make sure I had time to pursue my own passions. There are three things I'm pretty sure I'm gonna say on my death bed. And so my three weekly happiness habits are, number one, can I have five undistracted meals with my wife and kids? That's just what works for me. And it means five meals that I'm sat down with them and I've switched off from work. I'm not still thinking about the emails I was doing half an hour ago or 10 minutes ago. I'm actually present with them. Now I'm not a saint, I don't always manage to do this, but by having it written down there, my intention is brought to it every single day. Am I doing it? Oh, I only managed four this week. Five's the goal. So that's one of them. The second one is, if I record an episode of my podcast each week, which I have done now for over five years, I know at the end of my life I will have done something to help improve the lives of others. And the third thing is, if I have time each week to go for a long walk by myself, or play my guitar and write some songs or whatever it might be, I know at the end of my life I can look back and go, yeah, I had time for my passions. So I love exercises like this 'cause they're very simple. They don't cost any money, but I have seen time and time again, they can be really, really effective. And I think this exercise really highlights for many of us the true difference between success and happiness.

Dr. Vivek Murthy

Well, that's a beautiful exercise. And I just wanna thank you for doing it with me, because it helped give me more clarity and more conviction about the steps I need to take in my week. And I think the truth is, I think so many times that when we pause and reflect in the way that you have helped me to do today, we have great wisdom that can surface from within us that tells us where we need to go, what we are lacking, but actually doing that, aligning our intentions and the time we spend with how we're living our life, that's where there can be a gap. And I found that that has been true for me too. Like I know that I need to spend more times in the way I describe, supporting my mother and spending time with my wife, just the two of us. And I need to do a better job of that. And moments like this, like are moments where I can get some clarity. I will also say one other thing which is not directly related to it, but you've pushed me to a place of reflection here. And when we began this conversation, you asked me how I was doing, and I told you I'd love to just catch up with you some other time and tell you. But the truth is, like, I woke up this morning and I wasn't feeling great, and I actually know why I wasn't feeling great, and it had to do with the fact that despite having wonderful things in my life, I knew I was gonna have this chance to have this conversation with you, and you're somebody who I just have felt a great connection with from the first time we chatted. I've got two wonderful kids. I've got people who love me. I have an opportunity to serve and hopefully add something of help to people's lives. But despite all of these, what was weighing on me was I had, I'd had this meeting recently where I found that I was preoccupied with the impression I was creating on the other side of the table. I was preoccupied with what the other person was thinking. And look, there's nothing wrong in being aware of what other people are thinking. But I realized I had sort of crossed into this place where I was too preoccupied with the impression that I was making, and too worried about how the other person and the world would judge me, as opposed to being, as focused as I wanted to be on being who I was on speaking my truth. And that really has stuck with me for a few days, and it really made me feel poorly. And when I think about that test of looking at the end of life and looking back and understanding like how would I have wanted to live my life, one of the other things that comes to mind is, I want to be driven by my own truth and by my own conviction and my own beliefs and my faith. I don't want to be driven, and to have my life shaped by fear of judgment of others or worrying about what others may think. And that for me has been a challenge, since my time as a kid when I was very shy. I didn't have a lot of confidence, and I was often worried that people thought poorly of me. And over time I've been able to really anchor myself in my own beliefs and in my own vision of myself. But every now and then, that sort of worry about what other people thinks creeps back, as it did a few days ago, and it reminds me that we have to be vigilant, but also that we, that this work is hard to do alone. But when we have people with us, whether it's a spouse who reminds us of who we want to be, or a good friend who checks on us and asks us how we are so we can actually reflect deeply or a conversation like this, Rangan, where you helped me reflect, and reaffirm my commitment to actually living my truth. These are all moments where we can help each other to ultimately find the happiness and fulfillment that we all deserve.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Yeah, I mean, look, I appreciate you sharing that. I think it's important, people, men, share how they're feeling. There's so much there. It reminded me of when I was explaining to you the core happiness tool. One of the three legs was alignment, which is essentially what you were talking about. Are we truly being ourselves? And it's funny, it's one of the hardest things in the world to do, which on the surface should be the easiest. Just be yourself. But I don't think how many of us realize, and I'm speaking from firsthand experience as a people-pleaser in recovery. I have spent so much of my life making decisions and doing things to get validation from other people. And it's a game that you can't win, because you're constantly morphing and changing who you are to be perceived a certain way, and you don't feel grounded and you, you can feel frustrated or as you say, for days, you cannot feel good. And it's hard because, there's this conflict where humans are social animals. You wrote a book on loneliness. You know this, we are social animals. We want to get on, we want to bond and connect with the people around us. But it's like nothing is true in extremes. As I get older, more and more I realize that you can have two truths which are apparently contradictory, but they're not. It's just the way of the world. Like we want to be loved and liked by other people. Sure, we do. I do, but at the same time, if I completely change who I am in order to be loved and accepted by other people, I'm gonna end up being very unhappy, very resentful, and it's gonna cause me problems. So this is also a journey I've been on. And to tell you the truth, Vivek, I'm not going through a good time in my life at the moment. That's the truth. I've had a pretty awful few months. My mom was admitted, me and my brother since my dad died, we've had to look after my mom, which is why I still live in the northwest of England. I live around the corner five minutes away from my mom. And she was in hospital from Boxing Day morning for three weeks. She has come back home. I mean, they wanted to put, they said she should go into a care home. I didn't want that, my brother didn't want it. So I said, "Just tell me what I need to do and I'll do it, so that I can get mom home. So mom's now back at home with a huge level of care, but I thought mom was gonna die. For the first time ever I genuinely thought that's it, mom's gone. And it's funny, that, because when mom dies, I don't have any parents left. So I was thinking a lot about that. So what will it feel like when I no longer have any parents? And I think that day is coming, and I don't think it'll be that long. It could be a month, it could be later this year, it could be two years, who knows? But the point is, it is coming. And it's funny how it's made me appreciate my life in such a beautiful way. Like, I can't tell you the, I really feel that through all this adversity, through all this inner turmoil, I'm starting to discover more about the beauty of life. I had this quite wonderful conversation three weeks ago on my podcast with Dacher Keltner, Professor in Berkeley. He's been lecturing on happiness for years. He's written a wonderful book on awe. And he came to my studio when he was in the UK and we had the most beautiful conversation. And I had not slept much the night before, because there was some stuff going on with mum. And I ended up getting quite tearful at one point when we were talking about how death can actually teach us about awe. And I remember saying to Dacher, "Dacher, you know, there's something in your book about this. You wrote about the Japanese concepts of wabi sabi, where there are every living, I think creature or living object goes through five phases. Creation, birth, growth, decay, and death." And I said to Dacher that actually reading about that concept that's embedded in Japanese culture and Japanese language has actually been really, really helpful, 'cause I've been thinking this is the natural cycle of life, creation, birth, growth, decay, death. Mom's body and mind is now decaying. And although that's hard, there's almost like a brutal honesty in that, which has helped me. I think in western society, we very much hide death away. We, in Indian culture, I remember as a kid when Indira Gandhi died. I remember seeing on TV, the funeral with her on the pyre. You could see her body go up in flames. That is how it's typically done in India. You see the body. You see the dead body, you literally see what happens. Whereas very much in western society or lots of western societies, we can't talk about death, so we say, oh, they've passed. I've lost my dad. Again, I'm not criticizing anyone, but culturally, I haven't lost my dad, my dad's dead. I didn't lose him. I really feel that more and more, and I reflect on it with respect to my children and how I talk to them about death, because it's been really hard. It's funny that the death has really made me appreciate life. Like, because life is finite and it is going to end. Well that's what makes it so beautiful. And now when I mentioned to you that just before we recorded, I went round to see mom and, I picked up a jacket potato from the shop and we sat there and we ate it. And I didn't rush, right? Before mom went into hospital in December, sometimes I'd, you know, she's around there, I'd nip around and say, mom, I haven't got time. I'd just quickly do this. Gotta get back for this, I've gotta get back, and because I thought I was never gonna have a conversation with my mom again a few months ago, now I don't take any moment for granted. I'm like, you are still able to talk to your mom, see her smiling face. I didn't think I'd ever see that again a few months ago, so it's funny how I feel that that experience, although you could regard it as a negative experience, actually, if I'm honest, as I reflect now, it's been incredibly positive. Yes, it's hard, but the fact that life is finite, that's what makes it so beautiful.

Dr. Vivek Murthy

Rangan, first of all, I'm so glad that your mother is back home and then, especially after going through that incredibly scary ordeal in the hospital. And I just wanna thank you for sharing what you did. I mean, so much is happening in your life. The anniversary of your father's passing yesterday, and now dealing with everything that, all the care that you're providing with your mother, but also the worry about her, her own health and her frailty. And I just wanna say that what you've given me, the gift that I'm taking away from this conversation is a reminder to cherish those moments with family, and with our parents in particular. I moved back to DC to serve as Surgeon General, and President Biden asked me to come. And I'm grateful for the chance to serve, but I have been carrying with me for the last two years a tremendous amount of guilt at not being with my parents in Miami, Florida. And at a time where I know that they're aging, when they're struggling with certain things in their life. And I try to go down and visit as often as I can. But I admire what you have done, which is to be close, to see them often, to put yourself in a position to not take any moment for granted, but to actually spend those precious moments with them. Whether it's something as simple as eating together or simply just sitting together. So that is what I want to focus on, in my life, is being there for my parents, during this time that I have left with them. And I just want to thank you for reminding me of just how powerful and important that is. You know, each time we've talked these last couple of times, I'm just just struck by just what a beautiful soul you are, and how honest, how honest you are in your accounts and reflections on your own life, and how much wisdom you're able to draw from them, those experiences and share with others. Just so glad that we had the chance to talk today, Rangan, and I certainly hope it won't be the last time, but I appreciate you joining us today. I can't wait for us to share this episode with folks out there who I think will get so much from it. And I hope that you continue to do what you're doing, which is to bring inspiration and wisdom and hope to people all over the world who have been blessed to listen to you.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Yeah well, it's always an honor. I also, like you, have really fond memories of the conversation we had together. In fact, that conversation made it into my book on happiness, because it was so profound. Just when I was talking about vulnerability in my book and sharing how, because you were vulnerable with me, and shared some things about your childhood and your life, I ended up sharing something with you about, as I mentioned, you may recall about a publisher, and being an Indian doctor and not getting stalked in a shop and things that I hadn't really shared before, because of the vulnerability. And I think, to go full circle on this conversation about, we started talking about stress. Well, one of the very best ways to lower and mitigate stress is to be truly vulnerable, to open up. And if you are lucky enough to have someone in your life who you can do that with, and I know not everyone feels as though they are, and I sympathize with that, but if you do and you've been too busy to not do it, perhaps this conversation will serve as a reminder to pick up the phone, send them a text message, get a weekend in the diary with that person, so you can truly be vulnerable, open up and share what's inside your heart.

Dr. Vivek Murthy

What a beautiful way to end, Rangan. Thank you for being with me today. I'm sending love to you and your family, keeping your mother in my prayers as well, and wishing only the best for her health and wellbeing.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Thank you.

Dr. Vivek Murthy

That concludes our conversation with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. Join me for the next episode of House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. Wishing you all health and happiness.