The 4 Pillar Plan on drchatterjee.com.

The 4 Pillar Plan presents a set of lifestyle interventions to improve your overall well-being. Each chapter describes five different pieces of advice and focuses on one of four important pillars: eat, sleep, relax, and move.

The book heavily leans on the practical side and, as such, most suggestions should be rather achievable. For example, you don’t need to turn your diet on its head but reducing your sugar intake wouldn’t hurt. Or, going to bed at the same time every day won’t work, but you can at least try to get up at the same time every day.

Dr. Chatterjee even makes clear that one shouldn’t aim to check off all twenty interventions, only to perhaps end up achieving all Eat interventions but falling short on the Sleep ones. Instead, it’s better to pick two or three and keep a healthy balance across all four pillars.

After having recently read Cal Newport’s Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, I was glad to see an entire pillar dedicated to relaxation. Thinking back, downtime definitely fell short in those books and left me with the thought of tirelessly trying to increase one’s productivity whenever possible.

At under 300 pages, The 4 Pillar Plan is quite a quick read and its breakdown into 20 individual interventions helps follow along. Furthermore, each intervention is neatly summarized into one or two sentences and there are several succinct tips on how introduce some of the changes to your life. Dr. Chatterjee doesn’t strive for perfectness which makes his advice way more approachable and, ultimately, way more likely to stick.

Read in June 2020.