Gabor Maté: Five Steps To Stop Scrolling, Bingeing, and Self-Medicating — And Reclaim Your Brain
4/6/202654 min
Practical tools to break "automatic habits" and take back your agency.
Gabor Maté is a retired physician who, after 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience, worked for over a decade in Vancouver's Downtown East Side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. The bestselling author of five books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship of stress and illness.
In this episode we talk about:
- Practical strategies for dealing with both our addictive tendencies and scattered minds
- The real question to ask yourself when it comes to addiction
- Maté's relationship with ADHD
- The relationship between ADHD and addiction
- Tools for conscious harm reduction
- The practice of "Compassionate Curiosity"
- "Re-parenting" practices for your nervous system
- And more
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Clips
Showing 10 of 12Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Harris· Host0:00
[upbeat music] This is the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [upbeat music] Hey, hey, everybody. We're back today with a fascinating and somewhat controversial guest, Dr. Gabor Maté. Uh, 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, Dr. Maté'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 Dr. Maté'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 minds. And in my view, on this score, he very much delivers with lots of practical tools, including a