Shoshana Ungerleider
To live a meaningful, fulfilling life, you have to accept that it'll eventually come to an end, says Shoshana Ungerleider.
Over the years of caring for ill hospital patients, Ungerleider — a doctor who specializes in internal medicine — has observed regrets among people near the end of their lives, she tells CNBC Make It.
"Being proximate to the end of your life really allows you — pushes you — to be present because that's all you have," says Ungerleider, 44, host of the upcoming "Before We Go" podcast and founder of the nonprofit End Well Foundation. "That is true for all of us. Throughout our lives, this present moment is all we have."
Here are five regrets she says people often express:
- I didn't spend enough time with the people I love.
- I worked too much and missed out on life.
- I let fear control my decisions and didn't take risks.
- I wish I'd been braver in the face of uncertainty or opportunity.
- I focused too much on the future and lost touch with the present.
Ungerleider's advice for getting ahead of those regrets is simple: Remind yourself that your time is limited and unpredictable, and regularly ask yourself some big, important questions. How do I want to spend my time? What matters most to me in my life?
She particularly encourages young people, who often haven't yet faced significant health challenges — in themselves or their loved ones — to think of that reflection as "really integral to living for a long, healthy life — with good quality of life."
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"As a doctor, I'd recommend eating a balanced diet, and exercising regularly, and avoiding things like smoking and high-risk activities. Reflecting on mortality should really be on that list," she says, adding, "Reflecting on our own mortality throughout life, whether you're 20, 50, 80, whatever, allows us to live better every day with more meaning and purpose in our lives."
The mere acknowledgment that you're going to die is a helpful way to find meaning in "the little things that bring us joy," author Alua Arthur told "The Happiness Lab" podcast in a July episode.
"Grounding in my mortality means that at some point I won't have access to all these senses anymore," said Arthur, who's also the founder of Going With Grace, a Los Angeles-based end-of-life planning and support organization. "And so, how cool is it that I can feel cold on my hands? How cool is it that I have plates for me to eat off of?"
'Happiness is a choice'
Ungerleider's observations are similar to those of Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and Bronnie Ware, an author and former palliative care worker.
On their deathbeds, people often wish they'd expressed more love and forgiveness to people they care about, Mukherjee said in a commencement speech at the University of Pennsylvania in May. "Waiting [to express yourself] merely delays the inevitable," he noted.
In Ware's 2011 book "The Top Five Regrets of the Dying," she wrote that the most common regret she heard was "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."
"Many did not realise [sic] until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits," she wrote in a blog post. "Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness."
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