Switched ON Living is very action orientated. In our war against passive traditional retirement, we’re always asking members to do stuff that will make our lives better, more enjoyable, and deeply more satisfying.

Whatever turns us on, that’s what we should be doing well past the age of 50, and the harder we go for it, the better – to exercise, to learn something new, to start a business or to continue working if that’s what we enjoy.

But famously, the one action that could make us more Switched ON than any other is the one that many of us are most reluctant to do – to reflect, and especially to reflect on how we think.

Gabor Maté can help us to learn the difficult and sometimes unpleasant job of reflecting on some of our more unhelpful emotions, just as he helps Tim Ferriss is this video.

Tim is an entrepreneur, angel investor, author and online powerhouse. His podcast series The Tim Ferriss Show has had over 700 million downloads.

In this short clip from a much longer interview with Gabor, Tim talks about a recent episode where he felt anger at another person. Tim’s list of emotional responses is entirely predictable (anger, hurt, frustration and sadness), but with a few careful and respectful questions from Gabor, it soon emerges that Tim’s reaction was not so straightforward.

The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that often we react to our perception of what happens to us rather than the actuality of what happens, and worryingly, we often assume the worse in any situation.

In this case, Tim didn’t ‘choose’ from a suite of rational options, rather his brain defaulted to a conclusion that emanates from his mix of past emotions.

The lesson to learn is that we don't respond to the present, we respond to our past. The good news is that becoming aware of our emotional motivations can help us from being hapless victims of our unconscious self.

As we discover in the full episode, Gabor’s emotional mix includes a horrific Holocaust experience in his first year of life. Separation from his parents at such a young age caused a trauma to the infant Gabor that has never left him and helps to explain his own demons of depression and substance abuse.

It’s also driven his quest as the founder of compassionate inquiry, a therapeutic method that “ … unveils the level of consciousness, mental climate, hidden assumptions, implicit memories and body states that form the real message that words both express and conceal.”

Wow, that’s heavy, and no poor blog post could ever do justice to the complexity of that ambition.

Suffice that there’s so much to learn from Gabor Maté, and for sure we’ll add him to Brené Brown and Kristin Neff and other luminaries who help us to ignite our Switched ON emotional wellbeing.

As Gabor says, our problems are always our learning opportunities and when we can reframe situations so that our happiness comes from within ourselves, then we’re liberated.