Gabor Maté: Five Steps To Stop Scrolling, Bingeing, and Self-Medicating — And Reclaim Your Brain

This is the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey. Hey, everybody. We're back today with a fascinating and somewhat controversial guest, doctor Gabor Mate. We're gonna talk about his argument that childhood stress is at the root of some very common problems. Specifically, two problems that all of us deal with. The first is our addictive tendencies and this can range from full blown addictions all the way down to everyday addictions like scrolling and overeating. So that's one of the problems we're gonna discuss. The other is our scattered minds, our distractibility. And again, there's a spectrum here as well from a diagnosis of ADHD to a sort of garden variety distractibility that I think many of us deal with. Again, doctor Mate's assertion here is that both of these very common maladies, addictive tendencies and scattered minds, have their roots in childhood stress or trauma. Now, not everybody agrees with doctor Mate's assertion here, and you will hear me challenge him on this. But I don't spend too much time on the scientific debate because what I really wanted to talk to him about is how we deal with our addiction prone and scattered vines. And in my view, on this score, he very much delivers with lots of practical tools, including a five step recipe that you will hear him walk through in great detail. A little background. Gabor Mate is a retired physician who has worked in a variety of areas, including family practice and palliative care. He also worked for over a decade with inner city patients in Vancouver dealing with drug addiction and mental illness. He's written many, many best selling books, including In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal. Real quick before we dive in, I wanna say a word about taking care of your own mind. A lot of people worry that it's, self indulgent, especially at a time when it feels like the world is on fire. I, however, strongly believe that training your own mind is a community service because it allows you to respond more effectively to the various emergencies we're all facing in the world and in our own lives. And my team and I have built a new app around this principle, the geopolitical case for getting your shit together. Our mission is to lead you through this process with a growing library of meditations from world class teachers, ad free versions of this very podcast, exclusive livestream events every week, and, robust discussion threads that connect you to me, our teachers, our team, and one another. If this sounds good to you, head on over to danharris.com and sign up for the app. It'll be free for the first two weeks so you can try before you buy. And if you can't afford it, we'll give it to you for free. No questions asked. Okay. We'll get started with Gabor Mate right after this. Have you ever invested in something, …