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

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, everybody, we're back today with a fascinating and somewhat controversial guest. Dr. Gabor Mate, we're going to 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 going to discuss. The other is our scattered minds, our distractability. And again, there's a spectrum here as well from diagnosis of ADHD to a sort of garden variety distractability that I think many of us deal with. Again, Dr.

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 Dr. 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 minds. 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.

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