Rangan Chatterjee - Happy Mind, Happy Life

Photography by Chris Terry

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First published by Penguin Life in 2022

Text copyright Dr Rangan Chatterjee, 2022
Photography copyright Chris Terry, 2022

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover photography Chris Terry

Names and identifying details have been changed.
Any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental.

Colour reproduction by Altaimage Ltd

ISBN: 978-0-241-39787-9

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For Vidhaata,
Jainam and Anoushka

Id like you to take a few seconds to recall a moment from childhood when you felt truly happy. Imagine it fully: picture the colours, smell the smells, feel the weather on your cheeks and the ground beneath your feet. Where were you? Outside, perhaps? Barefoot on a sunny day, playing with a gang of friends, lost in the sheer pleasure of a game. You werent anxious about the future. You werent fretting about the past. You were living entirely in the moment, filled to the brim with the simple joy of being alive. So, what happened? Why arent you that person any longer? Where did all that happiness go?

I know that life can feel tough at times. Many of us feel overwhelmed and close to burnout, with too many things to do and not enough time to do them. But whether you are struggling to keep your head above water or you simply want to feel a little bit happier than you currently are, you have come to the right place. This book will help you improve your health and your happiness. And the good news is that its a lot easier than you think.

Ive been a practising doctor for over twenty years. During that time, Ive always been driven by a desire to fully understand, why is this patient sitting in front of me? Whats happened in their life thats led them to my door? Ive written in my previous books about the critically important role our modern lifestyle plays in the vast majority of cases I see. When people arrive with a set of physical symptoms and I do a bit of investigating, I usually find the upstream causes of their issues are to do with their food choices, a lack of regular movement, poor-quality sleep or unmanaged stress. Its amazing how often small tweaks in someones lifestyle can have massively beneficial downstream effects on their overall health. For example, helping someone sleep better and teaching them a simple one-minute breathing exercise can have a transformative impact on someone struggling with anxiety. And someone who struggles with debilitating gut symptoms can often feel significantly better by learning how to lower their stress levels and making a few changes to their diet.

But a few years ago I began to wonder if there could be a factor that lies even further upstream than a healthy lifestyle. Could there actually be something thats even more important than food, rest and exercise? This idea kept niggling away at me. I asked myself, what about the people who are making all the right lifestyle choices and still find themselves having problems with their health? Whats going on with them? Is there something they tend to have in common? And what about those patients who always seem to be walking a tightrope who manage to make helpful lifestyle changes for a few weeks, or even a few months, but then revert back to their previous unhelpful behaviours? And what is it that enables some people to effortlessly make healthy choices whereas others seem to find it painstakingly hard?

Most people would tell you this all comes down to motivation and willpower. Popular belief has it that if we want to get healthy badly enough, well find the inner strength to do so. Success comes from mental strength, and failure comes from mental weakness. I think this is wrong. Our day-to-day habits are not a reflection of our strength or weakness of mind. Theyre a reflection of how we feel about ourselves and the world around us.

This is how it works. When we think negative thoughts and allow the actions of others to influence the way that we feel, we bring stress into our body. And stress is implicated in about 90 per cent of what a doctor like me sees on any given day. But when we feel calm, content and in control of our lives, the opposite is true: we become healthier. Time and time again Ive seen this to be true: when we feel truly and deeply happy in our lives and with our lives, the knock-on consequences for our health are profound.

This link between happiness and health has been confirmed by many amazing researchers. When I spoke with the brilliant psychologist Professor Laurie Santos from Yale University she told me, If you look at peoples happiness, you see effects on their health and longevity. In one study, scientists brought people into the lab and measured their general positivity levels. They then shot rhinoviruses up their nostrils, which cause the common cold. Everyone in the study was exposed to the virus. The question was, who would get sick, the happy people or the unhappy ones? What they found was that three times the number of people got sick in the not-so-positive mood category, Professor Santos told me.

Part of the reason happiness impacts our health so much is that, if youre feeling good about your life, youre more likely to exercise, socialize and avoid comfort foods. Thats pretty obvious. But happiness goes much deeper than this. Incredibly, its been found that, even when these kinds of lifestyle factors are accounted for, happier people still live longer. One study looked at nuns, who all ate the same diet and took similar amounts of exercise to each other. When these nuns entered service and took their Holy Orders, they all wrote an autobiographical essay. These essays were rated by psychologists, who assessed them for the amount of positive emotion they showed. The researchers then separated them into four groups, with the happiest at the top. Of that happiest quarter, 90 per cent of the nuns were still alive at the age of eighty-five. In the unhappiest quarter, just 34 per cent were still alive.