I came across Dr. Gabor Maté’s conversation with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee on a Sunday afternoon when I was deep in one of those moods where everything feels a little too loud. You know the ones. I wasn’t even sure I was in the headspace to listen to anything meaningful — but within about ten minutes, I had tears in my eyes and a notepad open. That’s what Gabor Maté does to you. He says the quiet part out loud, and suddenly you realise you’ve been living with it for years without quite having the words for it.
Gabor is a physician who has worked in family medicine and in palliative care — which means he has sat with people at the very end of their lives and listened to what they wished they had done differently. In this conversation, he and Dr. Chatterjee work through the five most common regrets documented by palliative nurse Bronnie Ware in her book The Five Regrets of the Dying — and Maté examines each one through the lens of his decades of work on trauma, stress, emotion, and the body. It’s one of the most quietly devastating combinations I’ve come across.
The 5 Regrets — And What Maté Makes of Them
Bronnie Ware spent years working with people in the last weeks of their lives. The five regrets she heard most often became a book, and eventually a kind of shorthand for what matters. Here’s how Maté unpacks each one.
1. “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
This is the most common regret of all — and Maté is clear about where it comes from. From very early in life, many of us learn that being accepted depends on suppressing parts of ourselves. The child who figures out that expressing big emotions upsets their parent learns to hide those feelings. The teenager who realises that fitting in requires performing a version of themselves that isn’t quite real. By the time we’re adults, we’ve often been doing it for so long that we’ve lost track of which parts are authentic and which parts are armour.
From my own experience, so much of my twenties was spent in that performance. Not consciously — I genuinely thought I was just being responsible, being sensible, being likeable. It was only when things started to crack that I had to ask: who am I actually trying to please here?
2. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
Maté’s take on this is interesting because it goes beyond the obvious. Yes, overwork costs us time with the people we love. But he also asks: why do we overwork? For most people it isn’t greed or ambition in a pure sense — it’s driven by something underneath. The need to prove worth. The fear that slowing down means falling behind, or being seen as less than. The anxiety that is only quiet when we’re busy.
He talks about how disease can be a kind of teacher here. In his book When the Body Says No, Maté explores the profound connection between chronic stress, emotional suppression, and physical illness. The body, he argues, eventually says what the person cannot. And a lot of what it’s saying is: this pace is not sustainable. This suppression has a cost.
3. “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
This one lands hard for me. Not because I’m unusually bad at expressing emotions, but because I can trace so clearly where I learned to compress them. The situations where saying how I actually felt seemed like too much of a risk. The relationships where keeping the peace felt safer than telling the truth.
Maté is very clear — and this is central to all his work — that unexpressed emotion doesn’t disappear. It gets stored in the body. It shapes our nervous system. It drives behaviours we don’t understand because we’ve never looked at where they came from. He talks about how vital it is that children grow up in environments where emotional expression is safe, and how the absence of that safety echoes forward into adult life in ways we often can’t see clearly from the inside.
4. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
This one tends to get framed as a time-management problem — we got busy, we drifted, we meant to call. But Maté goes deeper. He talks about how disconnection — from others, from community, from meaning — is one of the most consistent features of suffering he has observed across his career. Not just emotional suffering, but physical illness too. The research on loneliness and health outcomes is bleak, and it aligns completely with what he has seen in practice.
When I was going through a particularly difficult period a few years ago, I withdrew. It felt like self-protection at the time — I didn’t have the capacity to hold up my end of friendships, so I quietly disappeared instead. What I didn’t understand then, and do understand now, is that the withdrawal was both a symptom and a cause. Isolation made everything harder, not easier.
5. “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”
Maté’s response to this one is thoughtful and honest. He doesn’t offer a simple answer, because the question is genuinely complicated — how do we allow ourselves happiness when there is real suffering in the world, and when so much of our internal architecture is set up to keep us vigilant rather than at ease?
What he does say is that happiness isn’t something you have to earn or manufacture. It’s more often something that becomes possible when you stop doing the things that block it. The performance. The suppression. The relentless self-criticism. The waiting to be enough before you let yourself rest.
He also makes a point I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: living with “no regrets” doesn’t mean making no mistakes. It means learning from those mistakes without being cruel to who you were at the time. You did the best you could with what you had and what you knew. Holding that with some kindness — rather than dragging it behind you as evidence of your inadequacy — is its own kind of freedom.
Why We Should Stop Trying to Live Longer
This part of the conversation stopped me completely. We live in a culture obsessed with longevity — biohacking, supplements, cold plunges, sleep tracking, all of it aimed at adding years. And Maté’s point isn’t that health doesn’t matter. It’s that we have the framing wrong.
The question we should be asking isn’t how do I live longer? It’s how do I live more fully? Because a longer life that is half-lived — anxious, disconnected, performing, numb — isn’t the goal. And yet that’s often exactly what we’re optimising for.
Maté talks about how the pursuit of longevity can become another form of avoidance. Another way of deferring the work of actually being present in your own life. The body is always in the now — it doesn’t know how to be anywhere else. It’s the mind that escapes into the future, into optimisation, into the next protocol. There’s a kind of tragedy in spending your healthiest years trying to engineer more healthy years, rather than actually inhabiting the ones you have.
I found this genuinely confronting. Not because it made wellness practices seem pointless — they’re not. But because it asked me to look at why I reach for them. Am I taking care of myself because I love this body and want to be present in it? Or am I trying to outrun something?
How Curiosity Leads to Compassion
This might be the piece I’ve returned to most often since listening.
Maté makes a distinction that feels almost too simple until you really think about it: judgment closes things down. Curiosity opens them up. When we approach ourselves — our patterns, our fears, our behaviours — with genuine curiosity rather than criticism or shame, something softens. We stop being the defendant in our own trial and start becoming a witness.
I’ve noticed this in my own life. When I’m in a difficult pattern — procrastinating, isolating, reaching for something to numb out — my first instinct used to be to berate myself. Why are you doing this again? What is wrong with you? That voice never helped. It just added shame to whatever was already there.
But when I started getting curious — asking what am I actually feeling right now? What am I trying to avoid? What does this remind me of? — something shifted. Not immediately. Not dramatically. But I started to understand myself a little better. And with understanding came something that felt a lot like forgiveness.
Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry work is built on exactly this. The idea that most of our problematic patterns make complete sense given where they came from. The child who learned to suppress emotions to keep their parent stable. The adult who keeps the peace at the cost of their own truth. The person who drives themselves into the ground because rest never felt safe. These aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptations. Once you see them as adaptations — once you get curious about what they were protecting you from — it becomes possible to have real compassion for yourself.
And when we have that compassion for ourselves, it becomes so much easier to extend it outward. Maté talks about how the most judgmental people are often the most self-critical. The harshness directed at others is usually first directed at themselves. Compassion, like most things, starts at home.
If You Want to Go Deeper
If this resonates, Maté’s books are worth your time. When the Body Says No is where I’d start — it’s a profound, accessible look at the connection between emotional suppression and physical illness. The Myth of Normal is his most recent and possibly most ambitious work, examining how the culture we live in makes us sick and what a genuinely healthy society might look like. And if attention and focus are something you struggle with, Scattered Minds reframes ADHD in a way that will change how you think about it entirely.
What I’m Taking Away
So much of our suffering comes from the gap between who we actually are and who we’ve decided we need to be. And closing that gap isn’t a project — it’s a practice. It’s the slow, sometimes uncomfortable work of getting honest with yourself. Of getting curious instead of critical. Of choosing presence over performance.
None of this is easy. I’m not going to pretend I’ve arrived anywhere. But I do think that asking the right questions — the ones Maté keeps gently, persistently asking — is more valuable than any optimisation protocol I’ve ever tried.
If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, I’d genuinely recommend it. And if you have, I’d love to know what stayed with you. Drop it in the comments — or share this with someone who needs to hear it today.
— Lucy