Science-Based Meditation Tools to Improve Your Brain & Health | Dr. Richard Davidson

meditators.

“If you do it for 30 days and you do it just five minutes a day,”

you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety and symptoms of stress. We've shown that repeatedly in randomized control trials. You'll see an increase on measures of well-being or flourishing, and we can talk about what those actually mean.

You can even see just with this amount of practice, a reduction in IL-6. IL-6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine. Welcome to the Human Relap podcast, where we discuss science, science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Richie Davidson. Dr. Richie Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a pioneer in the study of how meditation impacts the brain,

both during meditations, but also how it changes your brain over time, what we refer to as neuroplasticity.

Today we discuss the incredible health and neuroplasticity benefits

that come from regular meditation, including very brief meditations of just five minutes per day. Dr. Davidson also dispels many common myths about meditation. For example, contrary to what most people believe,

“the point of meditation is not to clear your mind”

or to feel inner peace during the meditation, but rather to observe your thoughts and any stress you might experience during the meditation. And in doing so, it's kind of like the final hard repetitions of resistance exercise

or the burning you might feel during cardio, which comes from lactate. In that sense, the stress you feel during meditation and your ability to observe it,

acts as a sort of lactate of the mind and the current makes you adapt, it makes you more stress-resilient, focused, and peaceful outside of the meditation. Dr. Davidson also explains how your brain changes

during different types of meditations, such as open monitoring meditation or eyes open meditation, walking versus seated and standing meditations and more. I've been doing meditation over many years,

but this conversation with Dr. Richie Davidson changed my daily routine. Afterwards, I immediately started implementing a five minute per day meditation or at the Dr. Davidson describes,

specifically for stress resilience. And I have to say it's had a profound impact on my levels of mental clarity, focus, and sleep, and stress, just as he explains.

In fact, it's proved to be one of the most beneficial practices I've taken on, especially on days when I wake up with tons to do a little bit stressed or a lot stressed,

and if I didn't sleep quite as well as I would have liked. So today you're going to hear about

the incredible science of meditation,

the brain and bodily changes that occur, so how you can rewire your brain using meditation. Dr. Richie Davidson is a true pioneer in this field, being one of the first to bring brain imaging and studies of mindfulness and meditation to the west.

He is, of course, authored some of the most impactful research papers on these topics, but also popular books, including a new book coming out later this month entitled "Born to Flourish."

How to thrive in a challenging world, which I myself look forward to reading. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

And now, from my discussion, with Dr. Richie Davidson. Dr. Richie Davidson, welcome. Thank you, Andrew. I'm honored to be here.

I'm honored to have you here. I am a longtime fan of your research of what you've built at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the books you've written.

We'll talk about your new book. I didn't even know you had a new book. This wasn't a book tour. Invite, I had seen you give a seminar at Stanford. And I said, "Great, here's my opportunity

to finally get you on the podcast."

But you really transform the way that I think about not just meditation, but all states of mind and how that relates to our individual traits and how those can change over time.

Today, we'll talk about concept and protocols. But I'm curious how you think about states of mind generally.

“I think it's really important that we frame the discussion with this,”

because we all know what sleep is. Most people have heard that sleep has different components, REM sleep, et cetera. We know what it is to be awake, stressed versus calm.

But how should we think about states of mind? And then, once you tell us how you think about that, perhaps then we can better place this thing we call meditation into a particular bin. So thank you first for having me, Andrew,

and I just want to say, I've been a long-term fan of yours, so I'm really happy to be here. In terms of states of mind, I think that at the outset, it's really important that we also

And so we can't talk about states without also talking about traits,

and we'll get to traits in a moment. But I think with regard to states,

“we can think of them as organized patterns of activity”

in the brain that have corresponding, organized mental correlates, if you will, or subjective correlates. And there are certain states that occur with regularity that are part of our biological rhythms.

And so most human beings will have states of wakefulness of deep sleep and of REM sleep every day. And that is regulated by well-known kinds of biological rhythms. And there are other kinds of states that

are sometimes described that are states during

what we normally think of as waking, although I think honestly, the concept of state is often used loosely without rigorous boundary criteria for what constitutes a state and how it might be distinguished from another state.

“There are certain states which if they occur with regularity”

we'll lead to a trait, they'll lead to a shift in the baseline for the next state. There was a paper I wrote many, many years ago with my dear friend and colleague Daniel Goman, who I wrote the book Alter Traits with.

And the origin of Alter Traits is really in a sentence that we wrote in a paper 20 years earlier, where we said the after is the before for the next during. Yeah, after is the before for the next during.

Let's drill into that for a second.

Yeah, so what we mean by that is that how you are after a state. Say you do a little meditation practice and it leads to a state change. That state change may persist in some way.

And that becomes the next before for the next during. The during is the state is the say, the meditation state. And so it's a description of how a state can lead to a trait. In the domain of emotion you might think that frequent bouts of anger which you can think of as a state

can lead to the trait of irritability, which is sort of chronically having a low threshold. You can think of a trait in certain cases as altering the threshold for the elicitation of a state. So a trait of irritability would be a trait

where you have a lowered threshold for the elicitation of anger, for example. Yeah, I love that example because I know that many people will resonate with it because so much of what we see online nowadays is designed to capture our attention by engaging a negative affect, a mild anger, frustration

or even outrage. There's other content online too, of course. And this podcast is online after all. And many other sources of what I consider benevolent, educational information.

But it is so true that what we experience in one portion of our day impacts how we are in the rest of our day. And perhaps the simplest correlate for all of it for me anyway is sleep. I sleep really well for three or four nights in a row.

I wake up in a certain state that certainly makes my day go differently and the inverse is also true if I don't sleep well. I feel like we have such great nomenclature and understanding of brain activity and how that impacts emotionality for sleep.

We know that REM sleep-based dreams are a very vivid, slow-wave sleep-based dreams are less vivid, perhaps. We know the electrical activities associated with those different states of sleep. I'm aware of a lot less information about brain activities

and clear definitions of waking states of mind.

“Do you mind if we talk about this for a little bit?”

Sure. Just a few years since I've heard about it, and I don't think we've ever really talked on this podcast about alpha waves, beta waves, theta waves. You just educate us a bit on some of the waking brain states

that we've all experienced, perhaps are in right now. But we just don't hear about that much anymore. So yeah, we can talk about those oscillations of brain electrical activity and there are broad suggestions for what kind of state they may reflect

But it's also important to recognize that you can be

“showing alpha activity in one part of the brain and beta activity”

in another part of the brain simultaneously. And so it's a bit coarse to talk about these as general characteristics. But there could be times when we see predominantly one oscillation or another. And so talking about generalized states in that context may be more reasonable.

So with that as a caveat, let me say that in humans we see a broad range of frequencies that go from approximately one hertz,

one cycle per second, two approximately 40 hertz.

And from roughly one to four hertz is delta activity, that is typically not seen during waking. It's predominant during deep sleep. And there is data that suggests that the density of delta activity or slow-wave activity during deep sleep is actually

diagnostic of how restorative that sleep is, which is a whole separate set of issues and super cool. And there are actually some really interesting highly novel strategies now using nurse stimulation to actually boost slow-wave activity during deep sleep, which may actually help to

“potentiate some of the skill acquisition that we do during the day”

including meditation. And we're doing some of that work now, which is actually you had asked earlier before we started about some novel new work that we're doing. And that's also one of the really cool new things.

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Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman to save up to $350. I saw a paper recently that described a-- and forgive me if this was one of your papers. I don't think it was--

It described a pre-sleep meditation that one could do to significantly increase the amount of growth hormone that's released once one gets to sleep. I thought-- I thought this can't--

“And then I realized this makes a total sense, right?”

I mean, it has to do with, I forget the sentence you wrote, but that how we exit one state impacts how we encounter the next one. Yeah. And perhaps even our trait within that next event of life.

because I think that people vastly underestimate the extent to which different--

“let's call the meditations for lack of a better word right now.”

How that can impact how we show up to work, how we show up to relating, how we show up even to sleep. Absolutely. And it's not just about being calm so you can fall asleep. It turns out this meditation that was described.

Boost growth hormone in an incredible way

without altering some of the other features of sleep. I saw that paper, too. Okay. There wasn't hours. Yeah.

But yeah, super interesting. I agree. Yeah. So just to continue with the brain oscillations, I talked about Delta.

The next faster brain rhythm is theta activity, which is roughly between five and seven hertz. Theta activity is often seen during transition from wakefulness to sleep. And it's associated with these--

as you were saying earlier, these liminal states. It's also been associated with certain kinds of meditation.

Alpha activity is roughly between eight and 13 cycles per second

or hertz. And it's often characterized as, quote, relaxed wakefulness. Beta activity is typically defined as roughly 13 to roughly 20 hertz. And it's associated with activation if there is a cognitive task that a person is engaged in.

You will typically see increases in beta activity, particularly in the cortical regions that are engaged in those cognitive tasks. And then finally, there's gamma activity. Gamma activity is especially interesting.

We see that in meditators, long-term meditators. Gamma activity has as its peak frequency roughly 40 hertz. It is seen in a number of contexts. One of them is during what some have called insight.

“And insight is where I think most viewers have had the experience”

of working on a problem and all of a sudden, they just have an aha moment. And things sort of gel, they congeal. They come together. And there have been some clever experimental designs

where investigators have created tasks that increase the likelihood of aha moments. They are sort of trivial in the experimental context. They're simple cognitive tasks. We're all of a sudden you just recognize the answer.

It might be something like a crossword puzzle. And you're trying to get something a word to fit. And suddenly you get the word. It comes in a moment and it's kind of an instantaneous recognition. And you typically would see a burst of gamma oscillations

that is very short. The average duration would be around 250 milliseconds. Really short. What we see in these long-term meditators

“is the prevalence of high amplitude gamma activity”

that goes on for seconds and minutes.

When we first saw that, by the way,

there's a lot of interesting history here, but we first reported this in 2004 with very long-term meditators, where the average lifetime practice of this group was 34,000 hours. Listeners can go to the arithmetic later,

but 34,000 hours is a big number. And in these practitioners, we saw these really high amplitude gamma oscillations that actually were visible to the naked eye, which is unusual for this kind of measurement.

And in the original paper, which was published in PNAS in 2004, we actually had a figure of the raw EEG from one practitioner just to illustrate how prominent it is that you can see it with the naked eye. And we've subsequently replicated that,

it's been replicated by others. We've also seen that this gamma activity is found during slow wave sleep. It's actually superimposed on delta oscillations. Is there any evidence that meditation

can actually replace sleep or that it can offset some of the negative effects of sleep deprivation? This is a great question. I think about it a lot. I don't think that the evidence is clear on this at all.

And I'll give several examples. First, the Dalai Lama who probably meditates more than anybody I know. He has a practice of literally doing approximately four hours of meditation every day.

And he's been doing that for more than 60 years. I'm reassured by that. If you told me the Dalai Lama meditates for 40 minutes a week, I'd actually be concerned about

the role of Dalai Lama.

And he very proudly says, "I sleep nine hours a night."

Well, nine hours a night. And he gets nine hours of sleep. That's his regular sleep. And he gets it all the time.

“And I don't know whether he would say he needs it,”

but he gets nine hours a night. And he's very proud of that. That's one counter example. Myself, I have done a bunch of sleep science with collaborating with some sleep researchers.

And many years ago, one of these people said to me, Richie, you really should give up in a warm clock. They're just don't use in a warm clock anymore. And I was getting at that time between five and a half and six hours a night of sleep.

And I gave up the alarm clock

and my average length of sleep increased

by about 30 to 45 minutes. And I feel much better. Oh, sure. Especially since the extra sleep tends to be toward morning, you're getting more REM sleep.

So the difference for me between five and a half and six or six and a half is in terms of just subjective well-being and focus, et cetera, as a tremendous. Slightly related question. If one were going to choose to meditate

and had the option to do it at a sort of liminal state between, let's say, being awake and going to sleep at night or between sleep and shortly after one wakes up and starting the day,

versus in the middle of the day, or in the middle of the morning, is there any advantage to placing meditation in one of these what I'm calling liminal states or transition states between sleeping and awake

in either direction? I would say probably for most people, yes is the answer,

“but I think there's a lot of individual variability.”

In general, I would say it's useful to meditate when you're feeling most awake and less sleepy, sleepiness is an important obstacle and meditation, and there's a lot to say about that. Yeah, I'm surprised to hear that I expected you to say

that one should meditate at a time when the brain is closest to sleep because you want to be in a state of mind that's less about controlling your thoughts. But then again, I could also see an argument

for how meditation involves a redirective attention. So let's actually drill into this a bit. What is the meditative state that one is seeking for a collective meditation?

Yeah, so first let me say that just like there are hundreds

of different kinds of sports, there are hundreds of different kinds of meditation. They don't all do the same thing, they have different effects on the brain and the body. And so I think it's really important

“that we not lump all of meditation together.”

So that's one really important thing. Can we divide it up? So for instance, if we were going to draw the parallel with exercise, maybe we'll do that several times today. We can broadly lump exercise into cardiovascular

and resistance training. There's also mobility work, and then there's a bunch of other stuff. With meditation, can we create some broad bins? Yes. And what are those broad bins? And then we can go into specific practice.

Yeah. So yes, we can create some broad bins. And we've done that. We've published some papers that offer typologies for classifying different meditation states. So one kind of meditation we call focus detention meditation.

And focus detention meditation is where you are narrowing your aperture of awareness to a specific object. It could be an external object. It could also be an internal.

It could be, for example, your aspiration. It could be a sound. And there is a narrowing of the aperture. And this is all broadly within the category of practices that we would say are cultivating aspects of awareness.

So another awareness practice is what we call open monitoring meditation. And open monitoring is where there is no specific focus. But rather the aperture is broadened. And there is no specific intention to focus on any one thing or another.

The invitation is to simply be aware of whatever is arising as it arises. One of the aspirations there are the invitations is not to try to get rid of thoughts because our minds and our brains are built to generate thoughts.

So there's no goal if you will to get rid of thoughts. But rather to, if thoughts arise, that's another object that you can be aware of. You know, we talked about sleep and sleepiness and that earlier.

You can be aware of being distracted. The goal if you will is not to change or to fix anything. If you will, the invitation is to shift from a motive doing to a motive simply being. I want to talk about this thing about doing to being

because the language can sound a bit mystical and vague to people. But as a long time practitioner of yoga needra, I've talked a lot about on this podcast. There's this instruction inside of yoga needra

to shift from thinking and doing to being and feeling. Exactly. Which is beautiful language, poetic, et cetera. But also as neuroscientists and for the general public,

“I think it might be useful for us to just”

maybe just double click on that for one second.

As a neuroscientist, I think of thinking and doing as doing is action. So that would, the opposite of that would be stop moving the body. I'm thinking, well, there's a whole discussion

to be had about what is thinking and neuroscience. But certainly you wouldn't want to plan. You wouldn't want to be ruminating on the past. Presumably you would want to be more in a state of sensation and perceiving what's happening right now.

So is that inappropriate breakdown or is it wrong? Is it insufficient? I'm not trying to score an A with the professor here. I'm just trying to figure out when we hear move from thinking and doing to being and feeling. What does that mean in terms of actionable steps

that people can take? Yeah, so I think that the way you describe it is basically hack your it with a little bit of perhaps tweak. So if, if, when, if one is invited to do this

and one finds oneself ruminating or planning, for example, which is supposedly an activity you're quote, not supposed to be doing. You know, rather than trying to stop it, it's simply to be aware of it.

Wow, I'm now planning or I'm now ruminating about something that happened in the past.

What really is most important is the invitation

not to change it, not to actively try to shift it, but to simply be aware.

“And one of the I think conjectures in all of this”

is that there's so much going on under the hood that we're typically not aware of. You know, our lives are moving at such a pace that the information that is transpiring is occurring at such a rapid rate

that we are typically aware of only a small fraction of that. And this is a practice that's inviting you to simply be aware of that. And, and, you know, not doing is a helpful kind of thing

because if we're acting in the world, we obviously need to navigate and there are things we obviously need to do to be safe and to protect ourselves and so forth. And so that will engage other mechanisms.

I'm interested in the possibility, or maybe you've seen this in the data, that there are at least two different types of people, people who, for instance, go through life, feeling, doing, being thinking,

and projecting things out into the world, or maybe they're quiet people, and they don't project much out into the world, but they're just doing their thing, and they're not thinking about, they're thinking,

they're not thinking about they're doing, they're just doing. We know people like this.

Then there are people who are always

multi-tracking. Like, you know, they're self-conscious. They're very self-aware. And I'm wondering whether or not a form of meditation where somebody arrives at the meditation,

very self-aware. Like, oh, there's my thought about that again. There's my thought about that again. And working perhaps on not judging it, could be beneficial,

but perhaps what that person, quote-unquote, needs, or would benefit from, was just being in a state of freedom, of freedom from their self-monitoring,

whereas the other person, perhaps could, you know, finish in here. I'm going to for it to be a little more self-aware, and realize, oh, you know,

I'm in this mode where, and see they're thinking a little bit. Totally. And you're naming something super important.

“And, you know, I think that the way you characterize”

the second person who is more self-aware, there's more than just self-awareness in your description. There's a kind of holding back there. It's not just monitoring, but there's a kind of suppression almost.

It's a lot of work. And it could be stifling for the free activity. Absolutely. We had my friend David Cho on the podcast Now We're Friends.

I was actually the first time we had met,

but we've become a good friends, and he's a brilliant artist, brilliant artist. And he talks about how the best art comes from, just forgetting what anyone thinks, or wants, you know,

recruitment talks about this, just getting the audience out of your mind and just letting it flow through you. Yeah. And I think great artists do that.

And it's what we pay money to see. We want to see that form of expression. We don't want to see the self-monitoring artist. Yeah, that's great. And I totally resonate with that.

And there is a phrase in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition

that is called undistracted non-meditation. Undistracted non-meditation. And that's said to be the highest form of meditation. Well, you just drop all the crap. You know, all the techniques,

all the control, all the tightness. This is my goal in life. Watch out folks if this ever happens. But you're totally awake. You're fully aware.

Yeah. But there's no artifice. There's no, it's just complete freedom. And there are, you know,

“I think I've had the honor of just hanging out”

with some people who I think are really in that as a trait that that's who they are. Rubens like that is a close friend. And I can tell you I've spent a lot of time with Rick. And how he appears to people and his kind of mythical status.

I think a lot of people, his magnetism is because that's real. Yeah. He can be in very, very close proximity to things. Online in person. He can see all of it.

He's in real touch with it. But he's still him. It is somehow it doesn't invade him in a way that changes the way he shows. Yeah. You know, like if we were to paint little beams of energy.

Now we're really sounding good coming out. They're stuff coming out, they're stuff going in. And they're interacting, but they're not contaminating one another. Where they interact, it just makes both things better. Yeah.

And that's a very, very rare trait. Yeah, I agree. You know, there's a term that I often use. Which, you know, I can talk about how we can define this more technically. But for lack of a better word, I call stickiness.

And it's kind of an affective history, so if you will. It's kind of where, you know, you're hanging onto emotions that may not be useful. You're carrying stuff from a previous experience into a current experience. And it muddles things. And, you know, the emotional lives are so infused with this kind of stickiness.

But with, like with Rick Rubin or with other people who are showing this. There's, there's no stickiness. There's no stickiness.

“And, you know, that's a kind of a freedom that I think is very much what we're talking about”

as the trait manifestation of these kinds of practice. Yeah, it's interesting. I think a lot of people mistakenly use drugs to try and access that state. And I also think that we have a real, as a species. As a culture, but also as a species, we have a real affinity to people who can embody this freedom

that you're talking about. Great comedians, like when Richard prior was on. You're just like, I mean, maybe he had a subscript in there. Maybe he was devoting like 2% of his prefrontal cortex to monitoring. But it just seemed like we call it flow.

But we're in there flow there and ours, whatever it is.

There's a powerful interaction there that there seems to be very little self-monitoring.

Then there are a few other, I mean, we see it in athletics. Yeah, totally. We just see it, we can feel it, and it's super powerful. Yeah. And that's from the perspective of performing arts or comedic arts.

But for people who want to approach meditation,

“do you think it's useful at all to ask themselves before they go into the meditation?”

Are they in a mode of self-monitoring or are they in a kind of, or are they feeling more free, more present to just whatever they're, it is they're experiencing it, experiencing not questioning it. I'm asking them for... Do you think it's useful in order to get the most out of a meditation practice?

I guess what I'm getting at indirectly here is

maybe you're open eyes, but typically, I think people either sit or lie down, close eyes and start focusing on their breathing and trying to, quote, unquote, get present. Is there anything... Well, the kind of practice that I most often do is actually with eyes open. Really?

Yeah. Oh, well, then just tell us about that. What would be a good, let's use the parallel to a cardio again. I would say if somebody is really out of shape and wants to get in shape,

I would say the first thing is take 220 minute walks a day.

And then we could talk about getting on a exercise bike.

“And then maybe doing some resistance, you start layering things in, right?”

But what would be the equivalent of the 220 minute walks a day, so meditation? So this is the protocol question, I guess. You know, I would say it's really important to start modestly. And we often will ask a person, what's the minimum amount of meditation that you think you can commit to every single day and do it for 30 days consistently?

Five minutes. Perfect. Whatever that number is, perfect. Start with that.

And then the next question is, are you comfortable doing it formally as a seated practice?

Or would you prefer to do it while you're walking? Or while you're doing another non-cognitively demanding activity? It could be commuting. It could be washing the dishes. There are lots of those kind of activities that we often do on a daily basis

that you can actually intentionally use your mind in this way while you're also doing those activities. And by the way, we've shown, we actually have really good data on this, that at least for beginning meditators. It doesn't matter if you're doing it as a formal meditation practice, or as an active practice, the benefits are absolutely comparable.

And what are those benefits?

So if you do it for 30 days and you do it just five minutes a day,

you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety and symptoms of stress. We've shown that repeatedly in randomized controlled trials. You'll see an increase on measures of well-being or flourishing and we can talk about what those actually mean.

You can even see just with this amount of practice a reduction in IL-6.

“IL-6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine that is important in systemic inflammation.”

And with just this minimal amount of practice, you see a significant reduction in IL-6 over the course of 28 days, five minutes a day. We've actually seen changes in the microbiome, and we've seen changes in the brain. With just this minimal amount of practice,

but the important point is that you're doing it every day. When people ask me what's the best form of meditation that they should do if they're just beginning, I say, the best form of meditation that you can possibly do is the form of meditation that you actually do. So figure out what that form of meditation is and then stick to it.

Do it every single day. I love this. I actually am going to challenge our podcast audience to five minutes a day for 30 days. I'll put something out on social media. Rob, please remind me. To put something out on social media to do five minutes a day for 30 days. Because what you describe are significant health effects.

Yeah, totally. And as you describe them, it made me remember this set of experiments

“from neuroplasticity. Do you mind if I share these?”

Because this is a theoretical/practical question as we move into these protocols. But before we do that, what should we call this protocol? It's the Richie Davidson five minutes a day. Five minutes a day. A Richie's five. It's the Richie's five meditation. I'm going to start that later. I'll share what I've been doing.

But it's not even that. I've been doing 10 breaths upon waking. 10 breaths before I get out of bed. I'm like if I can just do 10 breaths of focused meditation before I get out of bed. The whole day will go better and it tends to. There's this wild set of findings in the neuroplasticity research

that most people don't talk about because it's very inconvenient for neuroscientists. We're all familiar with the enriched environment thing. Where you give rats a bunch of toys or mice a bunch of toys or monkeys a bunch of toys. And the idea would be if you give kids a bunch of toys or listening to Mozart that their brains will develop more, you see more physical connections.

You see improved cognition, et cetera, et cetera. A really smart guy down at University of California, Irvine, Ron Frosting.

Maybe the normal cages they live in without all these toys are just deprived environments.

And it turns out that's probably the case. So all this enriched environment stuff. It's not that it's BS. It's just that the experimental conditions were so deprived that what you had was most animals just deprived in a certain way. Then you give them what they needed naturally and all of a sudden you saw more connections, et cetera.

If we applied that to meditation, something that we think of as kind of an enriched mental environment. Okay, I'm going to now do this exercise. I'm going to do five minutes a day or ten or twenty. We think of it as kind of adding exercise, but writing a treadmill, doing resistance training. I mean, we used to just farm and go get water and do things. So in some sense, all of that is a replacement for a, quote, unquote, deprived environment.

So is it possible that what you're describing? Is not something that people developed over time. But rather something that was core to our experiences humans and that the brain needed. But that with the advent of technologies and business or whatever, we've gotten away from. And so when you talk about doing five or ten or twenty minutes of meditation and seeing all these health effects,

what we're doing is we're actually just putting back what needed to be there in the first place.

This is like a equivalent of you getting your thirty minutes more sleep because alarm clocks weren't really a thing. Two thousand years ago. Does that make sense?

“It makes sense, but you know, and I think that there's an element of truth to it.”

But I also think that there's some additional discussion that we should have about it and dialogue. So first of all, these practices have been around for, you know, twenty, five hundred years or more. It's not like they've been invented in the modern era to deal with the, the separation that has occurred between humans in the natural world that is a distinctly modern kind of invention.

So that's one thing. The second thing is that, yes, I agree with you that the characteristics that we're talking about as,

the traits that are outcomes of these practices, there are many ways to get there. And there are probably natural ways to get there that don't require meditation. In fact, you know, when we, in our early days we interviewed these practitioners around Darmsala India who were, practitioners that the Dalai Lama referred us to, who were spending 30 years in retreat at their cold hermit monks, and, you know,

“you have to hike for three hours to find their cave.”

And we interviewed these, these people, you know, they, they told us, well, you know, I need to meditate, but many others are just born or they're just naturally have these qualities. I need to meditate as much as me. I'm just a simple, you know, poor monk who really needs to do this because I'm inferior to those people, if you will. And it's kind of modesty, but also, you know, there may be some truth to that. And so I think that that is is real, but I also think that the qualities like, for example, kindness. I believe, and this is the subject of this new book that I wrote with my colleague,

Kurt Lindahl, born to first, qualities like kindness are innate. They are part of our innate repertoire, but in order for them to be expressed, they require nurturing, and it's very similar to the way scientists talk about language. Language is innate. I think most scientists would agree with that, but we know that there have been case studies, for example, of feral children who are raised in the wild, and they don't develop normal language. So in order for the language to develop normally, it requires nurturing of some kind.

And kindness is the same thing. It requires nurturing in order for it to be expressed, and similarly for other qualities that were cultivating when we meditate, I think those qualities are innate, but they require nurturing. And in certain cases, I think that in order for those qualities to really be expressed at high levels, if you will, intentional nurturing may be required.

“For at least the vast majority of people, there may be statistically very rare people who emerge, who are like this, from the start, for whatever reason. But for most of us, I think this kind of nurturing is important.”

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Again, that's drinkag1 with the numeral1.com/huberman to get 6 free travel packs and a bottle of vitamin D3K2 with your subscription. Why do you think it is that so many people find it challenging to maintain a meditation practice? I mean, five minutes a day is nothing. Ten minutes a day is barely anything, even for the very busiest of person, and the positive effects that you describe. And we can also layer it and reduce stress, anxiety, lower resting heart rate, increase feelings of well-being and on and on.

There are just so many great studies now, including like you said, double-blind trials.

“I mean, it's incredible. So why do you think it's so hard for people to maintain this practice of just saying, "Okay, you know what?”

Just go into this atypical state. It's not being stimulated by anything in my environment." I have to do this internally. There aren't gems to go to for this. I mean, there are, there are breath work classes and things like that, but people don't tend to stick to it. That's the channel. So I do have a theory about it, which I'll share. But before I do that, let me just say that I often use the analogy of brushing our teeth.

When humans first evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth. And somehow a very large swath of humanity has learned to brush their teeth every day.

It's not part of our genome.

“I think most people brush their teeth so that their breath isn't bad.”

I think they like the idea that their teeth look cleaner and they get less gum disease, et cetera, but all the scary stuff is actually very ineffective public health messaging. I mean, that's my guess. Yeah, so actually that's quite interesting, that view. But getting back to your question, why do people find it so hard? So there was a study published in science, not too long ago, by a group of social psychologists.

And it was a study of, quote, boredom. And what they did essentially in this study, the core of it, was they took people into the lab and they said, "We had a little problem and you guys are going to have to wait for like 15 or 20 minutes before the experiment starts while we fix some piece of equipment." And they were in a waiting room. There were magazines and books around.

And they also said that their, you know, social psychologists are really good at creating these scenarios. And so another experiment I came in and said, you know, they're from another research group and they understand that they have to wait a little while. And we have another experiment that you can do in the meantime in involves receiving electric shocks. And of course, it's completely voluntary. You are free to participate or not.

The bottom line is that this is particularly male undergraduates in the United States prefer to shock themselves than to sit alone and not do anything.

It's a robust finding. People could not sit without doing something is the bottom line.

“And the reason I think is that once we actually begin to inspect our own minds,”

most people are frightened at the chaos that they see. One of the things we found when we look at a very granular way is that when people start to meditate, we see a statistically reliable increase increase in anxiety in the first week. Interesting. And that's often when people say, "I can't do this. It's making me crazy." And you know, what we tell them is that's exactly what you're doing exactly the right thing. You're noticing the chaos in your own mind.

Yeah, exactly.

But people know to associate the soreness with, "Okay, the exercise was effective. It's going to lead to an adaptation."

And we haven't changed the narrative yet about this, but we're trying to, where we say,

“"This is great that you're feeling anxious. It's exactly what you should be feeling."”

Forgive me. I'm doing all this in real time. So if I'm slow, there's a reason. The analogy to exercise feels ever more important now, because thankfully, the narrative has been embedded in people's minds that you lift objects, or you cycle or run, or row, or swim, et cetera, to stimulate an adaptation. I think the exercise scientists, the fields of health and wellness, whatever it is, has been very effective in getting the message out, but the burn in your muscles is the thing that's going to lead to an easier run the next time, to more fitness, more longevity, more well-being, et cetera.

But it's discomfort in the moment. For a long while now, I've been trying to convince people, because it's true, that the agitation that one feels, trying to solve a problem, or read a hard page, or a passage in a book, the one thing you have to return to three times that you can't wrap your head around, that that agitation is the stimulus for neuroplasticity. You could just breeze right through it, the brain has no reason to change. It's not stimulated to change. I can, after all, just do the thing you're trying to do.

So it becomes sort of a duh when you compare, when you look at exercise, or you look at cognitive development.

“But somehow when it comes to meditation, maybe we can accomplish this today, I think you're doing this for us.”

Just knowing, for me, just knowing that in the first week, anxiety is going to go up. But that's the equivalent of lactate accumulated. Exactly. Of the lactate of the mind. The burn is the lactate of the mind.

Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Perfect.

I believe that languageing and messaging is so critical to get people to adopt practices that require this discomfort adaptation loop that needs to be repeated over time.

I love that. I know, I know we'd get someplace in that, and that one, thanks to you. So glad you're here. So week one, five minutes a day, expect and embrace the anxiety. Yeah.

“Is it the thing that's going to produce the adaptation?”

I think it's contributing to it. Yes. And you know, it's also being aware of the anxiety without being hijacked by the anxiety, without being lost in the anxiety. So being able to see the anxiety as it's arising. And that's, you know, this is training in meta awareness.

meta awareness is super important. I actually think meta awareness is a necessary prerequisite for any kind of human transformation, mental transformation. Could you define it for us? Tell us a bit more about it. I'm very curious.

Yeah. So I would say meta awareness is the faculty of knowing what our minds are doing. And to some listeners that may sound a little strange, but how many of you have had the experience of reading a book where you might be reading each word on the page?

And you read one page, a second page.

And after a few minutes, you have no idea what you've just read. Your mind is lost somewhere else. And then you wake up. The moment you wake up is a moment of meta awareness. And it turns out that that's a trainable skill. And that is one of the really important prerequisites for all other forms of training, of mental training.

Do we know where this meta awareness resides in the brain? Is it prefrontal cortex? You know, it's a network of prefrontal cortex, anterior, singular, insula. I think those are all structures that are participating in meta awareness. It's interesting because I feel like as we were discussing earlier, people crave for getting about themselves and just being in experience.

It's just such a powerfully and I think positive, seductive thing. I often think about, you know, like at a party dancing. Like people who can just dance and enjoy themselves versus people who are self-conscious about how they're dancing. Even people are good at dancing. You can be meta aware without being awkwardly self-conscious, if you will.

So, you know, you talked earlier about flow. I didn't jump in then, but flow can occur with or without meta awareness.

So, you know, chicks of a high who first studied flow.

He studied rock climbers and like a rock climber who is, I mean, think about this. Why do people do stuff like rock climbing?

“I think that the reason why people do stuff like that is to produce this state of flow where most of those kinds of states of flow.”

I think are states of flow without meta awareness. Where you're completely absorbed in the activity and for a rock climber, if there's even a momentary lapse in attention, it could be potentially lethal. And so, by arranging one's physical environment in that way, you are basically forcing the default mode to be suppressed.

And the default mode is a mode that we know is associated with a lot of self-referential thought. And self-referential thought often is anxiety-provoking. And so, this is a way to transiently suppress the default mode. But flow can also occur with meta awareness. And so, and it doesn't diminish the quality of the flow and one analogy that we can use is in a movie theater.

I mean, viewers have had the experience of being in a movie theater. And I'm sure people have had the experience of being in a movie theater, where you're so engrossed in the movie that you may actually, you're not aware that you're in a theater. And you may not be even aware that you're watching a movie. You're so, you are totally absorbed in the plot.

And we've actually come up with a term to define that. And we call it experiential fusion, where you're fused with the experience. And that is a kind of the analogous to flow without meta awareness. But imagine being in the movie theater, where your attention is riveted, there's absolutely no lapse in attention, but in the kind of penumbar of awareness,

you're aware you're in a movie theater. You're aware that you're watching a movie. But that doesn't diminish the quality of your attention. I want to ask about this thing about chaos noticing the chaos of one's mind.

Because you said that who sits at the seat of the anxiety that people will feel when they first start to meditate.

Now everyone knows in the routine meditation, to push through the first week. Expect the lactate of the mind, push through it. I love that so much. Thank you.

The idea that the mind is chaotic and getting comfortable with that. And not reacting to it, not feeling like we have to get away from it.

“We've heard this before, but I think it's somewhat of a novel concept to me”

to think that a goal of meditation is to be able to see that and sit with it, not necessarily eradicate it. You know, I think you said you know the Dolly Lama. I think for most of us, we see the Dolly Lama and other monks in robes. And you say he sleeps nine hours per night,

and he's meditating for hours per day. And we think, oh, he looks very blissed out. And that's great for them. Do you think he has chaos in his mind? Is the idea that extreme meditators or even, you know,

well-practitioned meditators are free of the chaos, or that they're just comfortable with the chaos? I would say that it's a developmental process that changes longitudinally.

“So initially there's a lot of chaos and I think he gradually subsides.”

I don't think it's like a step function. I think it really occurs gradually over time. And the chaos just sort of naturally diminishes. But that's a long-term process.

And I think for most of us, there's always going to be some chaos.

But part of the chaos also is, I think, a source of creativity. And you know, when we talk about mental awareness and awareness of all that's going on in our mind, you know, I often give my students the permission to, even if they're not meditators, to just spend a couple hours a week inspecting your mind. Just inspect your mind.

Pay attention to what's going on in your mind. Don't do stuff outside, but, and if you come up with some interesting thought, write a little note to yourself as you're doing this, you know, not a lot of words, but just a note to remind you when you're finished with this session. And I have a conviction that there's a lot of creative work

Most people don't remember their dreams.

But they occur reliably.

“And I think that there's a lot of creative thought that occurs on a regular basis,”

but we just don't pay attention to it and we forget it, just like we forget our dreams. But if we have the invitation to really inspect our mind in that way, I think this chaos actually often contains the seat of real creative insight that potentially could be valuable. I do too.

I mean, I wake up every morning with at least one idea from the transition from sleep to waking. Sometimes it's from a dream. I often will record my dreams as voice memos after I die if somebody ever finds these voices. But they're so crazy.

Everyone's a wild journalist and I'm like, this is crazy.

But I don't want to forget things. Sometimes I don't want to wake up and turn the lights on and I'll go back to sleep and just record something in the voice memo. Sometimes write it down. I think there's so much learning to be had from what's coming up from the unconscious mind in dreams.

But also just having a mode of capture during the day. Some way to just capture the things that spring to mind. The great Joe Strummer from the class, he said this. He said, you know, if you are walking along and an idea comes to mind,

“you have to write it down because you think you'll remember it later.”

But you will remember it in a form that is not nearly as potent. You said something like that. That this is the mind throwing you ideas that you have to capture. I love that. I think it's wise advice.

Friends of mine who are songwriters, poets, they do this all the time. They're constantly writing things down. They may or not develop something from. But they understand that there's information being thrown up to the surface for them. If you don't write it down or capture it in some other way, it goes.

It's an evidence. I actually have, I mean, this may seem contrary to views of how meditation is done. But when I meditate every morning, I actually have a little note pad by my cushion. And occasionally, I don't do this every session, but maybe twice a week. I'll actually write down something during the meditation.

One or two words, just to remind me, because something comes up in my practice. Maybe an idea. And I want to remember it. I know also that I won't remember it after in the same richness. And so I'll just jot it down and then go back to my practice.

“Is meditation something that kids can do and benefit from?”

Has that been studied in a form or way? Yes, it's been studied. We actually developed a, what we've called a, a mindfulness-based kindness curriculum for preschool kids. preschool. preschool.

And we've actually published a randomized controlled trial in a public school system of this curriculum. And the curriculum is available freely on our website in both English and Spanish. So if any teachers are out there or you know teachers and want to use it, please, please feel free to download it and see how it is. But yeah, so it looks very different. So for example, what we do with a three year old, one of the exercises that they love is we ring a bell in a classroom.

And we have them, listen, tell them, listen to the sound. And as soon as you no longer hear sound, raise your hand.

And it's, it's amazing to see this because you can get 25, three and four year olds sitting perfectly still for around 10 seconds.

But you know, they could taste it. There's a palpable, you know, sense of of quiet in that 10 seconds. And then they all raise their hand excitedly, but they can really taste it. And so I do think it's possible. The other thing is, and this is something really important. There's something we've discovered empirically recently, which is that flourishing is infectious.

It's contagious. Flourishing is contagious. You explained what that means and how you study that. Yeah, so in the example of US about meditating in kids and the reason I'm bringing up in this context is one of the best things I can think a parent can do for a kid is not to have the kid meditate, but meditate yourself and just be with the child and be fully present, be connected. And really show up in that way. And you will automatically transmit through your demeanor and your interaction.

And that's what we mean when we say flourishing is contagious, but how we studied it.

So let me actually share one of the, this is a finding that we're super excited about. And it's not yet published, but its paper is just under review.

“So one of the things we're deeply interested in these days is, how can we scale human flourishing?”

So we're doing this kind of sector by sector. And one sector that we're doing a lot of work with is educators. And educators around the world and particularly in the US, what we've done this in Mexico too, so it's not just US base, but they're super stressed. They're not well paid and all of that. So we did a study with public school educators in Louisville, Kentucky.

And there are many reasons why we went to Louisville, but Louisville is a complicated school system.

It's diverse, you know, a lot of problems in it, and it's a big urban school district, the Jefferson County public school district in Louisville. And we did a randomized control trial with 832 educators in Louisville. And we had them use our Healthy Minds program, which is a digital offering, which is freely available as the Healthy Minds program. Where we had them cultivate 4 key pillars of well-being, awareness connection inside and purpose.

“We can take a deeper dive into each of those after.”

But they practiced for around 5 minutes a day. The average was a little less than 5 minutes a day, over the course of 28 days. And we measured, standard outcomes like depression and anxiety and stress and measures of flourishing. And we find what we found in other studies, which is that depression and anxiety and stress went down and measures of well-being and flourishing went up. But the real kicker is that we, by prior agreement, had access to the student level data in the school system.

So we were able to look at the performance of the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the well-being training. And we compared them to students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to a control group. The students had no idea that there was any research going on. And what we found is that on standardized tests, this is in middle school children, and the sample size for the students was around 13,000. And what we found is that the standardized math scores of the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the well-being training was significantly greater.

Then the scores of the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the control group. Same curriculum. Identical. So what do you think is being transmitted there? Is it that the teachers are calmer?

Therefore, the students are calmer? Is it that the teachers are calmer? Therefore, they're clearer, so the students are. I mean, they're a lot of variables. A lot of them.

And we don't need to isolate them. I mean, this isn't a, we're not trying to, you know, from a college here. But what do you think could be going on?

“Yeah, I think everything you said is likely to be going on.”

I think the teachers are likely calmer. They're more connected. And what we know is that, you know, it was interesting because we looked at reading scores. And the data for the standardized reading measure was in the same direction, but it wasn't as robust. The biggest signal was in math scores.

And we know that math performance is degraded by stress, more than reading performance in this age group. And so it, you know, could be is something as simple as the kids who were taught by teachers that went through the well-being training are simply calmer unless stressed when they take the exam. And so their true competence is more likely to be reflected in the test. And not have it degraded by this kind of added stress and anxiety. So, so this is, you know, an illustration that flourishing is contagious in this way.

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To learn more, visit JuveSpellJ-O-O-VV.com/Huberbin. Again, that's J-O-O-VV.com/Huberbin. So interesting, and again, I can think of so many different variables that could be at play. We did an episode, one of our most popular episodes ever, with a guy named James Hollis. Are you familiar with James Hollis?

No. He's a probably by now 85-year-old Jungian analyst. Brilliant guy. He wrote, he's written a number of books, The Eden Project, which is about relationships and relating under Saturn's shadow on the trauma and healing.

Just an incredible soul and incredible human and just incredible educator and I'm not alone in believing that, just spectacular.

And I said, "You know, he's a Jungian analyst."

“So I said, "You know, what's the key to a really good life?"”

But can we talk protocols? And he said something really interesting that I think will resonate with what you're saying and perhaps shed some light on what happened with these students and flourishing in general. He said, "It's so important that we wake up each day and we suit up and we show up and we work in school and relationships in life." But it's also just as important that we take a short amount of time every day and get out of stimulus and response. Because by getting out of stimulus and response and I'm not being nearly as eloquent as Hollis,

we come to know ourselves in a certain way that lets ourselves show up so much more effectively for everything else. And so maybe just maybe what these teachers achieve is by sitting in this anxiety, because now I'm thinking about the lactate of the mind. They're doing a practice which lets them experience the anxiety, not respond to it. They're getting out of stimulus and response. And perhaps in the classroom, they're able to teach more effectively because they're not paying attention to the things that don't matter.

Or maybe it's because they're also paying attention to the things that do matter. They're signal the noise as higher. Yeah, so to speak. Anyway, I couldn't help but reference the Hollis thing because to not do that would would be remiss. But also, you know, here's a guy who's saying you got to go to work each day.

“This is essential to building a good life and you have to do all these things.”

And he's also saying, but getting out of stimulus response is what makes you effective in everything. And of course improves your self understanding. I think what you're saying, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but what I think you're saying when you talk about meditation is that it's a way of getting out of stimulus and response. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great analogy. Yeah.

He deserves all the credit for all that. You deserve all the credit for running all these experiments because I feel like what's been so frustrating over the years has been to hear how powerful meditation is. But that for people in the West, the word meditation brings up ideas of mysticism and ancient things and people think, well, that's not for me. That's not going to benefit me now in this world. But I would argue we need it even more so now.

I agree. I think that, and I think that the divisiveness and polarization that is just eating away at our society is underscores the critical importance of this.

I think it's needed now more than ever before in human history.

“I think that it will, you know, with just modest amounts of practice and one of the other, you know, kind of slogans that we think is really important is that it's easier than you think.”

It really is. I mean, it's a day has a measurable impact. And so I think that if we really take this to heart, you know, if everyone practice for five minutes day, I have the strong conviction that this world would really be a different place.

I think the challenge is convincing people and you know, you're doing it where we're trying to do that little by little.

“I mean, for a zero cost tool, it's just outside as positive effects. I think most people come to the table because it will lower their blood pressure.”

They hear that it will reduce their stress, maybe make them more effective, make them smarter or sleep better. But there are also the higher order effects that people talk about being gaining some understanding of consciousness and what it may or may not be. When do those effects tend to arrive? If they ever do. Is it true that by meditating, by getting out of the stimulus in response and just watching one's thoughts and not responding to them and just non-judgment that we can actually gain some fundamental insight into how our minds work?

“I do think that that's possible and I think that it does occur and you know, I think that if we're really good scientists, there is an important element of humility.”

As we approach this, that underscores really how little we know and I think that these kinds of practices help us tap into something that I think is part of what it means to be a human being.

And part of it is, honestly, you know, we can use the words spiritual in some way and, you know, or transcendent, and by that I mean something connected to something larger than oneself. And I know that this is getting into a little bit of woo-woo territory, but people do have a taste of this and it helps to give their life more meaning and to infuse it with a kind of purpose that I think is really beneficial. I wonder and I love your thoughts on this, whether by doing meditation and seeing that the mind is chaotic and that it's difficult to control and that perhaps the best thing we can do is just observe and not respond to it but not try and control it.

That inevitably, in one's meditation practice, that the reality surfaces that we're all going to die.

“And I think for a lot of people, the fear of death is terrifying, I mean it's inevitable and it's terrifying.”

And I do sometimes feel that a lot of the stuff in the world that we're offered, whether or not it's drugs or alcohol or excessive work or whatever, that just all the stuff is that a deeper layer of that offering is that it distracts us from that reality. Because it's terrifying.

Right, and any healthy person doesn't want to die.

Although I don't think it's terrifying for all people and I think that this is actually one of the dimensions that is shifted by long-term meditation practice. Unquestionably. Is it shifted because people come to some understanding of energy and the fact that they will likely become part of something else? Or do you think it's that they can just accept the reality that we're here then we're not here? I think it's more the latter and also imagine that this is the last day we're living right now.

Friday the 13th of all days. That happens to be Friday the 13th. And are we showing up in a way that feels right for us and making the most of our lives and not squandering the opportunity that we have? And if we can live every day in that way, it really will change, I think, how we approach our mortality. And I know from me personally, I feel very differently about dying today than I did like 15 years ago.

That's one dimension where there's been a dramatic shift. Would you mind elaborating on that? How did you feel about it 15, 20 years ago? Yeah, I was terrified, you know, in the same way I had a family, I have two kids that have all these responsibilities. And I've reflect on this, I really do.

And if I died today, I would feel like I've lived a very fulfilling life and I'm fine with that.

I don't think most people would probably be able to say the same wholeheartedly.

“And you attribute some of that sense to meditation.”

Definitely, but it's been gradual. I've been at this my very first meditation retreat was in 1974. And I've been practicing daily ever since every single day. Well, I may have missed one or two days a year when I had a 6 a.m flight, but other than that, yes. And what is your most consistent practice been?

You know, my practice has changed many times over these, the course of these years and very different traditions in which I've practiced. So what about time of day is it typically morning?

Well, it's always been morning for me. You get up to use the bathroom, have a drink of water and start or you go right into it.

No, I get up and I make myself these days a cup of strong black tea. And I drink the tea which takes maybe 15 minutes. And then I meditate. Got it. Do you set a timer or a chime? Yeah, I do set a timer and you know, I meditate at various lengths.

But my modal time sitting is about 45 minutes a day. Sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter, but usually around 45 minutes a day.

And maybe three or four days a week, I do a really short practice at night, maybe five minutes before I go to sleep.

Since everyone that takes on the five minute a day, 30 day meditation challenge will do it.

“Once they reach 30 days, what does it make sense to update that to a longer meditation?”

Or would you just suggest that people stay with that as long as possible? What I would suggest is check in with yourself and see how you're feeling about it and how it's resonating with you. And if you feel like you can't really do much more, just stick with five minutes a day and keep doing that. The important thing is to stick with a daily practice. And one of the things that we talk about in this new book born to flourish is a lot of people have a really difficult time coming up with really being able to do this daily.

And one of the things that we talk about based on our finding that it doesn't matter, at least in the early stages, whether you're meditating as a formal practice or doing it while doing other activities of daily living that are not demanding like walking or commuting. You tie this to regular activities that you do every day, whatever those activities are. And we talk about this idea of social zeitgabers as zeitgabers as you know is an environmental event, a signal that is that marks a in the classical literature of biological rhythm like light is a zeitgaber to set our biological rhythms.

But we in the modern world we have social zeitgabers that are human created zeitgabers. So eating, for example, is a zeitgaber. We eat typically at roughly similar times every day, at least most people. And that's an opportunity. You do that every day, you compare a little practice with that.

And one of the practices that you can do, which I do every time I eat virtually, unless I'm meeting with someone in its awkward. But I do it at home is do a little appreciation practice, spend just a 30 to 90 seconds reflecting on all the people it took to have food on your plate. And it also gives you a sense of interdependence. And when I sit down and have my breakfast, it's a cue for me. It's a social zeitgaber.

I do my appreciation practice every single time. And then there's crazy things you can do. Like I have a cat at home. I'm the one who scoops the litter every night. I actually do that as a practice.

And it literally takes no extra time. I do it while I'm doing the scooping of the litter.

“But I honestly do this in a very authentic, genuine way I reflect on.”

You know, the cat really appreciates this. My wife appreciates this. And people who go into the room with the cat litter appreciate that it's clean and scooped on a regular basis.

It doesn't take much. It's easier than you think.

Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, I don't want to contort the message you're offering because it's a powerful one about a bringing awareness to the things that we have to do anyway.

And allowing that to make us more effective and happier and more present. But there's also this idea around disciplines. And the word discipline gets is kind of heavy. Nobody really likes it because we got disciplined or something. But I used to pride myself on working longer hours and everyone.

And as the years have gone on, I pride myself in just I can consistency as my superpower. I may not show up with the most intensity every time, although sometimes, but intensity kind of waxes and wanes. But there's something about just showing up anyway. I'm just doing it anyway, that is so powerful. I sometimes wonder whether or not the mind is just it's our foe until we embrace that piece. It's kind of a little bit of what you're saying.

Yeah, and I love the consistency theme and also the discipline.

“And yes, I think you're naming something real and important.”

And there's a delicate calculus that ranges between kind of letting go. And discipline. And each person, I think, falls at a different point in this continuum. And what works for one person may not work for another.

You know, with regard to meditation, I always say that what's best for one person isn't necessarily what's best for others.

And we have to discover what works for us. You know, what we do know is that in terms of meditation, the consistency is really important. You know, it was never particularly good athlete or bad athlete, but I've just been really consistent at exercise. And I mean, I'd play fewer sports these days than I did. But just continuing to show up allows you to be the person among your peers.

Not that it's competitive where you, everyone else seems to have quit. And they're talking about how much this hurts and that hurts. And all that you really had to do is just keep going. And I sometimes think that the people that are max intensity and they, you know, it's like gold medal or bust. They're always the ones are often the ones that we don't hear from anymore.

They're gone. Yeah.

So I love the examples of the Dalai Laman, you know, the Michael Jordan's of every domain.

But I don't know. I mean, I'm more interested in being the person that at 50, 60. I mean, you're in your mid 70s. You look incredible. You're super vital cognitively sharp.

You're in shape. You're excited about life. You're not afraid of death. Clearly you're on to something. You know.

So, and I doubt it's just the black tea. I'm guessing it's to some extent. I mean, there you have all the other aspects of your life. But this consistency of meditation practice. Yeah.

No, I think it's been super important. I do think that the discipline that you're talking about is really important. And it is part of it.

“But again, I think we need to find the right balance for each person.”

And initially, it's really important to have people invite them to taste this with the lowest possible friction so that they can really experience the benefit. And then it can gradually progress and they can, you know, harness some discipline which eventually will be important. I'd like to talk about online culture and social media just briefly because I don't want to demonize

it. I teach on social media. This will be aired on various online platforms and clips of it will appear on social media. But I think this sneaking suspicion that by going online, the mind starts to believe this thing that's not true that if we're not online either posting or looking at what people post or both,

that somehow will disappear. And it gets to this idea of the anxiety that one feels when you just go into your own mind and it's chaos in there for so many people. It's chaos in here and then just learning to sit with that.

“I think a lot of people go into the world because the chaos of the world can occupy their attention”

and then it's not about the chaos that's in them. Exactly. Again, I don't want to demonize online platforms because I use them. I educate on them. I learn from them and I'm, and again, entertainment from them too.

has been to trick the mind at an unconscious level into thinking that if we're not on there, we're going to miss out.

But it's not phomo of not like we're not going to be included. But that I actually think it may run much deeper than that. That it's that we don't exist.

“That life is there and if we're not aware of it, we don't exist.”

Because I see parents looking at their phones while their kids are running around them.

So you can't say, oh, this is only, you know, well, we have kids in your tending to your kids and some parents are great parents. But I see a lot of kids that are clearly being, you know, baby sat by devices. And the parents will say, listen, it's the only thing that quits them down and gets them to settle down while I can tend to think so. I can relate. But, you know, what do you think about the idea that the internet while powerful and can be used for great good may have convinced billions of human minds that they don't exist if they're not observing or engaging on there?

“I mean, I think that that's something super important and I think, you know, with regard to attention we talk about two big buckets.”

One is stimulus captured attention and the folks who design products online have been really good at capturing our attention.

And our attention gets hijacked by that. And it leads to the kind of inference that you're talking about, which is that people feel that they may not exist unless they're online. And I read some survey study that was done within the last year that reported that the average American opens their phone 152 times a day.

“I think most people would agree they don't need to open their phone 152 times a day, but we do it for those kinds of reasons.”

And, you know, I often say we are all part of a grand experiment for which none of us have provided our informed consent. And I think it's serious and I think that we don't know what the long term consequences are going to be, but we do know that, you know, the short term consequences, at least in certain cases are not very good. And I'm someone who is also like you and your great believer in the potential value of technology and I believe that technology is is basically neutral and we can use it for the good and we can also it can be used for harm.

And the previous Surgeon General of the United States, who I miss, the Vekmerty issued a health advisory in 2023 on social media, the title was social media and youth mental health. And he has scary data that was reported in that report. Some of the data show that the psychiatric problems in adolescence scale linearly with the hours of social media consumption per day. And so it is really eroding the mental health of our youth, not to say of our adults too. Yeah, I think a lot of adults now are hitting those, hitting the black ice of internet.

Like even among peers of ours and professionals, I mean, it was wild to see how many people who were chairs of departments brilliant creators, academics, people from all domains of life. They demolished their careers by getting caught up in stuff online and not being thoughtful about what they were posting. I can't believe it. I mean, they, they threw away their professional lives with their thumbs. I mean, I think it is wild, right? If you think about it, this is happening less now it is, but just people just nukeing their careers that they had spent 20, 30 years building. These were very successful, very smart people.

But somehow got caught up in it. We see that less, but I do see a lot of people getting into the whole polarization thing to the point where there really is no common ground online. Well, you, you can't take a nuanced perspective on something. I try, you know, I said, "Oh, I thought the new food guidelines could afford to include a few more vegetable suggestions and some fermented foods."

So it's like you can't win, but getting offline is not an option. It's not an option. And the younger generation has been very clear with me about that. It is not an option to not be on social media platforms, to not be texting much of the day, is to not exist in the social milieu.

“And so how do we reconcile that? Yeah, so these are really complicated issues. I think that, you know, I certainly don't in any way pretend to have the answer, but I do think that we need to take digital hygiene seriously.”

And we need to figure out ways of as part of standard school curricula of educating our youth in how to change their relationship or how to be to say the different way how to be in healthy relationship with their digital devices and the products and features that are available on those devices.

I have the conviction that it's a trainable skill, but we need particularly in youth to start early before they get their first phone.

So there are any evidence that meditation because it allows somebody to sit with the lactate of the mind can also afford someone less impulsivity and sort of being less prone to getting hooked by the chaos of the world around them. I don't think there's any hard data on that, but I think it's a great question.

“I think it's actually empirically tractable. I think it's really worth studying. My conviction is yes. I think it would be helpful, but the data don't exist.”

What would an experiment look like that look like? I feel like we should run that experiment.

I'd love to collaborate. I feel like there's got to be established in lab measures of impulsivity. Yeah, there are good measures of impulsivity. And actually with impulsivity, there are measures that go beyond self-report measures. There are behavioral measures of impulsivity, which may have more validity. And so it would be extremely interesting. And you know, with device use and with a person's consent, you can actually get back in data. So you don't rely on self-report. So it can be really robust kind of evidence.

The word discipline comes to mind again, and I think so many people, when they hear discipline, they think about doing certain things, waking up at five, exercising, meditating, eating, cleaning, etc. But to me, the most interesting aspect of discipline are the don't do. It's all the stuff you don't do. You know, we're in the winter Olympics now, and I haven't been watching. I like the summer Olympics, but inevitably when they do the Olympics, they interview the people who win gold medals.

“So they'll do a day in the life of, and they'll say, you know, they wake up at five a.m. And then they train, and they always want to say, what do they eat?”

Yeah, they go, I have four eggs in my oatmeal or whatever it is. What they really need to show is all the things they don't eat, right? Because sure what they eat is interesting perhaps.

But far more relevant to their performance is all the things they don't eat. It's all the things they're not doing. And of course, that makes for much less entertaining shows, so they don't do that. But I feel like the training that would be so valuable is to train up the no-go response. One of the things in my own life that I'm very aware of is an apropos not doing is not taking out my phone. And I'm very intentionally aware of that. I actually do a little practice of feeling my phone in my pocket, and I really will not take it out unless I actually need it.

I remind people when I have meetings at our center, you know, often it's just the cultural habit, particularly with young people, you know, they put their phone on the table. And there are data showing that even if you have all your notifications turned off, the simple presence of the device is enough to impair the interaction in some way to have a discernible impact. There's this really, I don't know if you've seen this study. It's pretty cool. They looked at cognitive performance and people that had the phone upside down on the table in their backpack beneath their chair or in a different room.

And only by having it in a different room, do you see the the normal level of cognitive focus, not even an improvement. It turns out that people can focus just as well. It's really interesting. They focus just as well if the phone is on the table or under their chair in their backpack.

So the phone is really a cognitive detractor under those conditions. I think about that a lot. It's also why I have a lock box for my phone. I keep it in a separate room. It's one of the reasons I love this podcast more and more with every passing week because no phones in here.

“We can really drop into things. Yeah, I think that training the no-go response having that level of discipline is the superpower.”

Yeah, all the other stuff that to do is I mean, yeah, it's it's important. You can't just not do anything obviously, but we focus so much on what to take what to do people always want to know what should I take you know what should I do. What's the ideal workout routine. What's the.

And here we have this five minute a meditation great, but it's also all the things you're not doing when you can sit for five minutes. You're not responding to the impulse to get up.

The discomfort of body that can come up during meditation a pain in the back.

“Your hip getting tight should we look at those as an opportunity to train up the mind and our ability to not go into stimulus response or should we get comfortable.”

That's a great question and you know my very first meditation retreat in 1974. I just went into this cold and it was like meditation boot camp. It was kind of retreat where we were practicing for 16 hours a day and my body was on fire. It was so painful physically. That was you know the most predominant experience I had it just intense intense physical pain. And then in this style of practice after the third day you had to make a vow that you're not going to move during each hour long session. So the meditation sessions were hour long and you had to make a vow that you're not going to move. Man the pain was so intense the physical pain. And you know eventually after the like the fourth day there's a kind of breakthrough that most people have, which is this remarkable kind of experiential insight where you directly look at the pain.

“And you see that it's not exactly what it's cracked up to be and it's actually much more differentiated and you begin to see all of its constituents. And that's when there's a kind of release.”

The other thing to say is that we've done imaging work with physical pain and meditation. It's one of the most robust kind of probes that you can use to interrogate the quality of the practice and also the longer term trade effects if you will.

And I liken it by the way, you know when you go to a cardiologist you often do a cardiac stress test. And so one of the best ways to probe the integrity of the system is by challenging it.

And not just looking at it at baselines so to speak and it's true of the mind and the brain and one of the best challenges is physical pain. So we've done work where we've primarily used heat as a painful stimulus because it can be delivered very precisely and very safely. And imaging data, there is a signature that is quite specifically tied to the physical pain itself and that there's another signature that is associated with the emotional reaction to the pain, the interpretation of it, the interpretation of it.

And when we subjectively experience distress and response to pain, it's actually mostly contributed by the secondary response that is the emotional response to the initial noxious stimulus itself.

And that is the set of neural changes that we most dramatically see transformed by meditation as a trade effect. It's particularly in this this is published data we've we this was done with long term meditation practitioners and we show that actually it's specifically retreat practice. So we can have two people who are matched on the total number of hours that they've practiced in a lifetime where in one person it is much more during retreat compared to another person. And it's specifically retreat practice where you're doing more intensive practice that contributes to the transformation of this emotional pain signature.

What would a good retreat practice look like it would be presumably a course, but I guess if somebody didn't have the resources they could take a weekend and what does that look like they're meditating a couple hours a day.

Because you're more likely to comply with the with the expectations of like not checking your phone and things of that sort and being silent.

I'm always impressed by people that can sort of self direct so much discipline. It's pretty cool.

I have rules in my house like I have a study area of my basement where I draw and prepare podcasts and I don't allow phones down there. Mine or anyone else is wonderful.

It's an electronic free zone. I also now I noticed I like working out. It's a pleasure for me.

And I have a gym and I noticed that my workouts would take much longer if I brought my phone in. So now I allow myself to turn on an album or two and leave the phone outside, but there's no phones allowed there either.

“And now I'm thinking about also making that the rule for the loft for the bedroom. No phones. So there's fewer and fewer areas where where things are allowed, but I think unless you set real constraints that it just starts to permeate everywhere.”

And I don't think I'm alone in that and I grew up in Silicon Valley. So I'm not anti-technology. I just I want to have the richest experience of life possible.

And so I just find that harder and harder to do when it's like inviting all these other things and people into the room when you when you have a phone there. Well, I love those examples and I think you know you are setting an inspiring example for others.

“And I think that things have gotten so bad with the deleterious impact of technology that you know we've we've been led to to do those kinds of things which I think are so important. And I think the more examples of that the better.”

I feel like it took us a while to to become the country with such excessively high rates of obesity that we finally went. Oh my goodness, you know, and we need to do something about this. So better eating exercise of course critical. The GLP drugs have been I believe in very helpful for a lot of people. I don't I would hope people first embrace lifestyle tools and then and in any case embrace lifestyle tools, but I don't think we're going to have the so called those epic for. Addiction to devices. There's going to be something that come along and knock us off that place. I think it just requires a lot of self control. But I can promise everyone that the work your workouts get way better way better.

I actually think that for the younger generation. It's become easier than ever to excel simply by not doing a lot of the things that other people around you are doing. You know it's it's used to be you know how do I succeed how do I succeed and you're the joking these days the shortest. You know how to become the best at your craft book is going to be by turning off your phone 22 hours a day you will become best in class. I know it. I absolutely know it people say well then you can't access certain things their ways around it.

Because it's really the the presence that you bring to things that allows you to be effective. Yeah absolutely and regarding self control I think that self control is a trainable skill and it is a byproduct of flourishing and one of the

“central capacities I mean we talked about meta awareness earlier and I think meta awareness is really a key ingredient for self control and self control will or self regulation will improve as a consequence of that and that's a superpower.”

You know there was a study done by these two psychologists, Muffet and Caspy who are developmental sort of life spans psychologists and they've been studying this cohort in deniden New Zealand. It's a birth cohort so these folks have been studied since birth they're now I think in their 60s but there's amazing longitudinal data on these people and they had a paper in PNAS a number of years ago that looked at measure behavioral measures of self control in in these in this cohort when these people were four and five years of age at this particular paper was looking at outcomes when there are 32 years of age and what they found is that the individuals who are in the upper quintile of self control at four four and five years of age

had significantly less drug abuse were significantly less likely to be involved in in court proceedings they earned on average six thousand US dollars more per year and they were matched on socio economic status of their families of birth

strategies which will improve self control will lead to all these these important outcomes and safe tax payers money. I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors waking up.

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“Super impressive and I do think that nowadays we hear so much about the do's exercise, eat this and five minutes a day meditation. I think the self-control component that's an outgrowth of meditation seems like a distinct benefit of meditation.”

Because when you're exercising I suppose if you really hate it and you're constantly forcing yourself not to quit that's a form of self-control. I feel like most people once they get going they're kind of moving through it but who knows.

I do want to use this notion of self-control as an opportunity to look at the other side of it and I was planning on doing this at some point I think now is the point.

I'm fundamentally confused about something about life. Maybe you can help me. I'm still not sure how much of life of a really good life should be forcing ourselves to do things versus kind of quoting quote honoring what's right for us. Obviously with respect to morality, with respect to the big stuff in life those are easy answers. But when it comes to moving through the day we're now talking here today about starting the day doing something that you probably don't want to do or that you would reflexively not do as a means to gain some other larger benefit.

“We're talking about going against the reflex against the impulse in the Buddhist traditions in the field of meditation. How is this kind of thought about and just personally how do you think about this?”

Because I think a lot of people listening are probably thinking, "Okay great. I'll do this if it gives me some benefits. I'll lower my heart rate. I'll have less stress. I'll learn some additional self-control. But I think people are also feeling overwhelmed with all the stuff they feel like they have to do and fight themselves. And I think people are tired of fighting. And I think part of the reason they're tired of fighting is that they're not picking up the phone and going, "Oh, this is cool. This is great. This is great. I think that they feel slightly out of control.

They're just can't resist it and it's just happening." And so we've lost the muscle, so to speak the mental muscle of resistance, but I think that overcoming resistance.

“But it's also kind of a philosophical question. How much of our lives should we be forcing things upon ourselves to be better and how much of life should we just live and be free like a bulldog, which is the best breed of dog?”

First started meditating. I was fighting with my mind. And I thought that that was great. This means I'm really doing the work that's necessary and sitting through the physical pain, forcing myself to sit for an hour while feeling like my knee was on fire. And my back was killing me. And I had a sense of pride. I'm able to just tough this out. And I was miserable.

But, you know, at some point I discovered that maybe there's another strategy that can be effective, that is that's not about fighting with your mind and not about fixing anything.

But it's the invitation is really to make friends with your mind to welcome this, to have a completely different stance toward it. And to do it with ease, rather than with, you know, this kind of attention-ridden stance.

“I think that that is possible. And the approach that we are taking in the Healthy Minds Program, for example, is we're trying to do that. So there's a bit of discipline involved, but it's kind of really at the most minimal.”

It's inviting people to be where they are and not, and to really make friends with their mind and not to fight against it. It's not about pushing away thoughts.

It's not about, you know, sitting down to meditative. If you, if you're restless and can't sit, that's fine. Do it while you're walking.

So the discipline is the intentional use of the mind. And there is discipline involved in that, but it's kind of, what is the minimum level of discipline to begin to get these networks going? And that's kind of the question that we've asked. Yeah, because your lab has been focused heavily on the neuroimaging and understanding what brain networks are activated, as well as the positive outcomes. So this five minute a day meditation could be done, eyes open, could be done, eyes closed.

Could be done while you're walking while you're commuting.

And it shuts down the sort of default mode network and brings higher levels of activity in these awareness and attentional networks. I mean, broadly speaking, I'm a neuroscientist, but I want to translate this for people. So because the names of the structures actually are somewhat meaningless, right? Unless we're exactly what we've got someone in a stereotypes, right? Just to be transparently honest, there's been very little imaging work on the five minutes per day. We've done some. And what we've seen in the work we've done is the biggest, and in general, I think this is true. The biggest changes that you see, particularly in the early stages of practice, are in measures of connectivity.

And it could be functional connectivity, which has to do with the functional integration across different networks. Or it could be in measures of actual structural connectivity that we can image with diffusion weighted imaging and looking at white matter connectivity. And what we've actually seen with the five minutes a day is changes in diffusion weighted imaging. Looking at, I mean, the biggest change we see is in the superior longitudinal speculus, which, as you know, Andrew connects the prefrontal and the bridal regions, and it's basically a major pathway through which the central executive network is interacting with the default mode.

“And that's what we see with just five minutes a day of practice. We can see measurable changes in diffusion weighted parameters with just five minutes a day for a month.”

It's super impressive. More and more incentive to doing the five minutes a day meditation. I guess that's the protocol we're weaving through this entire episode. And of course, people could do seven, could do ten. I'd like to see people do six months every day. That would be impressive. That's what I'm going to shoot for six months every day. Just do five minutes a day for, you know, hit 30 days. And then six months later, I don't know. I feel like if it's just the repeated showing up. That's really it. I mean, I have a prayer practice. I do every night before I go to sleep. If I fall asleep, I get out of bed. My girlfriend knows this. I get out of bed and I pray. Like, I've not missed a night since I started doing this.

“I think that's beautiful. And I, you know, I'd love to see a study done with pre sleep prayer and see how it affects sleep.”

My sleep is definitely better than ever, but they're probably a variety of reasons. I'm sure. But sometimes I find that I'm falling asleep while I'm praying. And I just tell myself, hey, just the consistency is like, I have this script in my head that I'm showing devotion by showing up. It's just the repeated showing up. And it's one of the few areas of my life that I was able to really remove the need to do it perfectly.

So for me, I wouldn't even say that the pride in it, the joy in it is from the consistency. I love that. And I feel exactly the same way in my consistent practice.

“I think that's so important. I wanted to mention one thing about sleepiness, because you mentioned that sometimes when you're doing the nightly prayer, you're asleep in.”

And sleepiness is often something reported when people are meditating, and particularly in the early stages of practice. And, you know, I've dealt with sleepiness a lot. And particularly before I change my routine of, and when I gave up the alarm clock, because I was getting too little sleep or sleep, you're perhaps. Yeah, exactly. And I felt it, and I struggled with it. So I have this meditation teacher, Mingyu Rinpoche, who, one of the things he's taught is sleepiness meditation. And sleepiness meditation is simply to be aware of sleepiness, just be aware of sleepiness, and don't try to fight it.

Just simply notice what it, what is sleepiness, what is, how is it feeling, and investigate it with curiosity, and that completely changed things for me. There's just, even to be this, this thing where when we fight our state or our nature, it gains power. But when we, we don't want to give into it, but when you acknowledge it, but you don't completely give into it, somehow it changes.

Martha Beck was the first person to really teach me this first in her books, and then on the podcast.

This idea that, like, if a feeling sucks, where you don't want it to be there, that rather than trying to suppress it, you really look at it and let yourself feel it until it changes shape just a little bit her language. And then you start to look at it through that different slightly different lens, and then it morphs and it goes away.

“I think in her, I didn't, again, didn't describe it as well as as she did or wood or could, but what we're talking about over and over again today is the mind looking at the mind.”

And it does seem to have this ability to, you know, humans have this ability. Do you think other animals have this ability? I know you can't answer that question for sure. Do you think one of the reasons dogs are so wonderful is because they're not self-conscious? My conjecture is that our ability to look at our minds is way more developed than in any other species. And there may be some rudimentary kinds of meta-awareness in other species, and, you know, some scientists have suggested that it may be correlated with successful performance on the self-test.

You know, recognizing yourself in the mirror, you know, there's a recent report of elephants passing this self-test. So they are smart after all. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that's an interesting story.

They did this actually in the Bronx Zoo in New York and they had a constructive mirror that was the size of an elephant. How do they know if the elephant knows it's itself? Because they don't attack it if it's itself. So they put Rouge on the trunk and they expose the elephant to the mirror. And if the elephant touches the point where the Rouge is, it's recognizing itself in the mirror. And there are very few species that pass the self-test in that way. Most species don't. We were talking offline a little bit earlier about a course that you're teaching about this very thing that you're calling flourishing.

“So what do the students get in that course? And what components could you possibly educate us on right here right now so that we can benefit without having the opportunity to take the course?”

Yeah, absolutely. So the course is built on a framework that we've developed on the plasticity of flourishing. It holds that there are four key pillars of human flourishing. And each of these pillars exhibits plasticity. And these are the key trainable ingredients that constitute human flourishing.

So what are these four pillars? The first pillar is, and we've talked about some in the course of our conversation already.

But the first we call awareness. And awareness is where mindfulness would be, it's where voluntary attention, the capacity to focus, resides. And it also includes our capacity for self-awareness and for meta awareness, which we've spoken about.

Qualities like appreciation and gratitude and kindness and compassion.

“You can think of the opposite of that being at least in part social isolation and loneliness. Again, these are elements that we know can be trained. They are importantly connected to our well-being.”

The third pillar we call insight. An insight is about a curiosity-driven understanding of the narrative that all human beings have about themselves. The narrative that we carry around in our minds. And we know that we all have a set of beliefs and expectations of ourselves. And we know that at one extreme of the continuum, there are people that have very negative beliefs and expectations of themselves.

And of course, that's our prescription for depression. But what's really critical for well-being is not so much changing the narrative, particularly at first.

But it's changing our relationship to the narrative. So that we can see the narrative for what it is, which is a set of beliefs and thoughts and expectations. And then finally, the last pillar is purpose. And purpose here is not necessarily about finding something grand to do with your life that's more meaningful and purposeful.

“But rather, how can we find meaning and purpose in even the most pedestrian activities of daily living?”

And we actually talked about some of this earlier, but can taking out the garbage be connected to our sense of purpose. Laying the kitty litter, cleaning the kitty litter. And of course it can be, it just requires a little bit of reframing and that's a learnable skill.

There are really three things that we've discovered in this work that can be easily summarized. The first is that flourishing is a skill.

The second is that it's easier than you think. And the third is that flourishing is contagious. So that when you're flourishing, it's going to have beneficial impact on the people around you. And our course, the art and science of human flourishing is built on each of these pillars. To give students not just an intellectual understanding, but an experiential practice, a taste of what these pillars actually are.

“One of the important insights that the course is built on is that there are two major forms of learning that we know from modern neuroscience.”

One we can think of as declarative learning, which is learning about stuff. It's conceptual learning. The other we call procedural learning and procedural learning is learning that is skill-based. It's a quarry through practice. And we know that it's instantiated in different brain networks compared to declarative learning. And human flourishing requires both. And most of the academy privileges declarative learning over procedural learning. And so this course that we teach is an unusual course because it includes a lab every week, so to speak, a little section where students do the procedural learning for the stuff that they're learning declaratively in the lecture part of the class.

I love that. I've long wanted to do a course that had information and practices involved. Sounds like you've built that course. If people who are not able to take the course wanted to access these different bins with some practical tools, you already gave us a tool for awareness. Meditation, five minutes would be a great place to start, done daily, and just to be aware of what's of the chaos and be able to observe it, but not go not follow it. How does one incorporate connection? So I actually talked a little bit about connection in earlier, but there's a lot more to say.

But one kind of connection is doing a little appreciation practice when we eat. That's when I talked about earlier. Where we connect to the people, even if we don't know them, who have brought us food to the table. Some we may know, some we might not know. There are formal kinds of connection practices that we their meditation practices that we call loving kindness and compassion practices. So we can we've shown in a randomized controlled trial that just a few hours of this practice over two weeks is sufficient to produce a measurable change in the brain.

And then cultivate the strong aspiration that they be relieved of that difficulty and that they have a life of ease.

“That's it. And you can use a simple phrase that you can repeat to yourself that embodies that captures that theme.”

It could be something as simple as may you be happy, may you be free of suffering. But the words don't matter whatever words are most well suited for each person. But then you move on to different categories of people. So you start with a loved one. You then move on to yourself.

And then move on to a category of person that we call a stranger. And a stranger is someone you recognize who's face you recognize. But you don't know them well.

It could be someone that works in the same building that you work in. It could be a classmate. It could be a bus driver. It could be the cashier at a local store that you go to a burista. You don't know anything about them, but you recognize them. And you can envision a time in their life when they may have had some difficulty. Even if you don't know anything about their life. So you do that with the stranger.

“And then finally you move on to what's probably the most important category, which is a difficult person.”

Someone who pushes your buttons. And you genuinely bring them into your mind in your heart. And you recognize a time you imagine a time when they have been having some challenge. And you cultivate the aspiration that they be relieved of that suffering. And that practice just done a few minutes a day can change your brain and it changes your behavior. And it changes the brain how makes it capable of more empathy.

“So one of the key regions of the brain that's been implicated in empathy is the temporal parital junction.”

What we see is that in this kind of compassion practice there's significantly enhanced activation of the temporal parital junction, particularly in response to stimuli of people in distress. There's also networks in the brain that are involved in positive affect that are activated by this kind of practice. And behaviorally, we've shown using hard-nosed tasks that are derived from behavioral economics and neuro-economics. We actually have demonstrated and other scientists have demonstrated this that people behave more altruistically using these hard-nosed behavioral measures.

We've also shown that on a hard-nosed behavioral measure of implicit bias, that there's significant reductions in implicit bias. And those reductions are sustained for at least six months after the formal period of practice ends. So there's really hard-nosed evidence to suggest that both the brain and behavior change. So the third pillar inside is really about, and I should say, just backing up for a moment, that two of these pillars, connection and purpose, are found in virtually every other framework for understanding well-being.

Two of them are unique, and the two that are unique are awareness and insight. And I should just go back to awareness for one moment to just point out one other thing. There was a very famous study that was published in Science many many years ago by Killing's Worth and Gilbert, two psychologists at Harvard, and they did a study with around 3,000 people, and they texted them at different points during the day with their consent over the course of several days, and they asked three questions.

The first question they asked people is, "What are you doing right now?" And they checked off from the list of activities. Second question is, "Where is your mind right now when I query?"

And the third question is, "Right at this moment, how happy are unhappy are you?" And the finding from this study, the two key findings are that the average adult on these measures reports that they're not paying attention to what they're doing,

If their mind is distracted, they're less happy. And the title of this paper is, "A wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

Does that mean that a focused mind is a happy mind or a happier mind? I would say a happier mind, but not necessarily happy. I love that study. Ever more important with each year that we have more opportunities for distraction.

“Which also, to be fair to social media means that if you want to sit down with your phone and handle some texts or scroll social media for a bit, there's nothing inherently wrong with that.”

And it's the intrusion of that stuff into other activities that's likely to be the issue. Exactly. Totally agree. Totally. So just to finish this insight, so practice that is easily accessible, that can really help with insight is, if you're in a difficult situation, whatever it is at work, in a relationship, imagine what a person who is different from you, that you may know or could be some famous person who you know something about, imagine how they would view the situation from their perspective.

And just allow yourself to get a taste of how their view of the situation is different from your view of the situation. That's it. And that is really helpful in giving us some distance from our own beliefs and expectations and helps us recognize that when we see the world, we're actually not seeing the world. We're seeing how we construct our own construction of the world through our filters of beliefs and expectations. And so it helps us become less fused, less identified, which is really an important ingredient for well-being.

And finally with purpose, you know, a simple practice is whatever you're doing, whether it's a pedestrian activity like washing the dishes or doing your laundry,

just simply reflect on how this is beneficial, not just to yourself, but to others in your ecosystem. That's it. Simple. So much of what you just said, which, by the way, was spectacular awareness connection insight and purpose, who wouldn't want to cultivate more of those, especially given that awareness is correlated with more happiness, lack of awareness and presence with less happiness. So much of it seems to be about getting outside ourselves. And at the same time, not letting the things outside ourselves pull us away from ourselves.

You know, and I feel funny even with that language. I mean, the language becomes so loop-deluped. We don't have, unfortunately, we don't have real language for this. I love lactate for the mind because it's simple, it's accurate and it's actionable.

“But so much of what I think you're describing in these four bins is, you know, I think it is, I kind of ride the crest of a very kind of, some kids is choppy terrain until you're there, right?”

We can get pulled into the, you know, the news. And it's important to be aware of what's going on in the world, but pretty soon you just be lost in it. And then carry forward the angst, the feelings of despair, having gotten one over on the other team, whatever it is. On the other side of things, we're in our heads in our problem seems so monumental that we forget that we have agency that there things we can do right there and then to handle ourselves and show up better. So it's, you know, it can feel like a pretty narrow bridge to walk.

And I'm wondering if any of the data from meditators shows that that bridge gets wider with time. And maybe even easier to access. In the same way that somebody who's fit, right? I mean, they can do a really hard workout for them, but somebody who's really fit. They know, okay, I get there. I'm kind of achy, but I know after five minutes of warming up, I'm going to be fine.

So there's less resistance to the warming up and therefore there's more energy for the actual workout and then it goes much better.

“Yeah, I think what you're saying is so important. One of the things you're saying in the exercise analogy is that you're becoming more familiar with what happens.”

And as you become more familiar, there's less resistance because you know that the initial, I mean, I do, when I go out on a bike ride, you know, the first 10 minutes are agony for me, honestly.

And I asked him, do you feel good when he run? He's like, no, usually for the first 20 minutes, I feel like garbage and then I feel great.

Oh, God, that good because I thought I was the only one. Yeah, although for me, it's a little bit shorter, but I don't run the way that he runs. I don't cycle the way that you cycle. And out there, just do, you know, do it, not to, you know, perform an instrument. But I know that because I'm familiar with it, I know that, you know, at a certain mild distance, it's going to change. And it does very reliably. And we also similarly can become more familiar with our own minds. The familiarity is the same kind of concept. We can become more familiar with our own minds. And when we come more familiar with our own minds,

our capacities become more readily available, more spontaneously available. And one of the challenges when we first start this work of intentionally cultivating flourishing is that we forget.

We know the things that we could do to be helpful, but we forget to use them in the moment. In the friction of the moment, or even if the moment is not so friction like, but, you know, I've seen people, even meditators, you know, when they're, if they're coming to a meal and they sit down, they just immediately start, you know, very unconsciously. Instead of just taking a moment, you know, for a little appreciation. But the more you do it, the more it becomes spontaneous and literally the sitting down to the meal is a cue, which elicits this response.

And it really becomes more spontaneously available. It takes some time, but I think that this is really a reliable outcome of doing this with regularity. Fantastic. Yeah, I'm a big fan of ritualizing things. I have my prepodcast ritual, doesn't matter what it is.

“And the consistency is what matters, because I think it probably, the neuroscientist in me wants to say that it probably allows a lot of networks that don't need to be active to be less active”

and probably allows the networks that do need to be active to get some of that energy. Literally, I mean, we had Martin Picard on here. He's an expert in mitochondria. He's a good friend of mine. Oh, yeah. He's terrific. And you know, when we used to talk about energy, it's on a kind of woo, and you know, but it's mitochondria. I mean, we're talking electrical and chemical signaling between neurons and mitochondria or handling. So much of that. And so we're no longer living in the space where the names don't have substantiation in the textbooks and in biophysics and in molecules.

“And while that might not be the most important aspect, I think, people that would otherwise say, oh, well, you know, this meditation stuff sounds kind of kind of out there.”

Now, this is the stuff of biology. It's the stuff of physics. It's the stuff of chemistry. Speaking of chemistry, I'm curious what your thoughts are on psychedelics.

We've talked about them before on the podcast, and I always use the usual disclaimer that there's some very, very compelling clinical trials.

Well, I begin very dangerous unless done correctly with correct, you know, health monitoring. So, has been shown to be helpful for trauma for addictions, MDMA and empathogen on a psychedelic for trauma, but that we still don't have FDA approval on these things. Many of them are still schedule one, so no known medical application and a still very illegal to possess or sell, so that's the warning, and certainly populations that shouldn't go near them. People with predisposition to psychosis or mania, that's very, very clear.

With all of that said, the data are pretty exciting. People's ability to access an understanding of patterns in their unconscious mind to rewire their default mode and resting networks to reduce anxiety and on and on. And psychedelics and meditation have somewhat overlapping past.

“I'm curious what your thoughts are given all the disclaimers, what your thoughts are, and is there a place for combining them with meditation to achieve more accelerated results?”

Yeah, those are great questions which I have thought a lot about as I'm sure you suspect. So I have a few nuance views of this. First, I'm excited about the new research in the way you are, and I also completely agree with you that they are really promising data from some of the clinical trials.

I'm less sanguine about the use of psychedelics in, quote, normal people, or individuals who are doing it for kind of their own self development or flourishing or spiritual development.

Unless sanguine for the following reason, I think that psychedelics can produce a kind of glimpse of a different mode of being which could be helpful, but I think a lot depends on what happens after that, so to speak, and how that experience is actually worked with and integrated.

“One of the things that concerns me about the stuff happening with psychedelics today is the relative lack of training of the folks who guide psychedelic sessions.”

And you can look in the United States today and see that many major universities, including my university, not through my involvement, are offering these one year kind of certificate programs to become a psychedelic guide for people with very little prior training.

This is something that's occurring all over the place. It deeply concerns me because I wouldn't trust the kind of people who, I mean, it's not to disparage these people.

“I'm sure that they have good motivation, but I just don't think that taking a person with no prior training and putting them in a program for a year is sufficient to cover all of the issues and nuances that are going to arise.”

The other related issue is that when a person has a psychedelic experience, what happens after and what is, what is kind of the residue of that and what, what I sense is the residue is that they have a memory of the experience.

And so they remember aspects of what happened during the experience and the recollection of an experience is very different than the embodied transformation that is required to produce real change.

“For me, there's a simple question you can ask. Is this person kinder? Does their spouse report that they're more enjoyable to be around?”

Are is there flourishing contagious? Those are the questions that I think can be asked and I haven't seen a lot of convincing evidence of that. I'm a big fan of the research going on and continuing to use these substances for treating people who are in various states of significant distress. But I'm cautious about their use in a broader way to promote human flourishing at scale. Thank you for that. Very, very thoughtful response. Yeah, I'm enthusiastic about these compounds. I just still have a lot of questions, but you know, like what proper integration really looks like how to standardize that.

And then of course, there are many people who perhaps are hearing this and will say, well, you know, there's a longstanding tradition of how to do this correctly and now people in standardized medicine in the West are now trying to, you know, overtake this or change it and raises a lot of interesting questions. I think clearly it's growing in its use. I haven't heard of any standard ways of meshing it with meditation. Certainly there are people also at Stanford combining it with trans cranial magnetic stimulation because they these compounds to open plasticity to some extent and the idea that one could direct the plasticity towards specific networks in the brain is pretty exciting.

I mean, what's cooler than that, right, combining chemistry and brain machine interface to and people's self-report and a really good practitioner and driving the neural circuit changes so that they can emerge from that better. But yeah, we're not quite there. We're not quite there.

We're doing some research right now combining neuromodulation with meditation to see if we can boost the impact of meditation with some targeted neuromodulation and it's specifically neuromodulation to help facilitate sleep. What device are you using to stimulate? So we are using this. I'm sure you know something about it, but it's actually there are very few groups in the world currently using this. It's called trans cranial electric stimulation with temporal interference. And the basic idea of this is that if you have two electrodes that are stimulating at a very high carrier frequency, say 15 kilohertz, which is essentially from all we know the brain is not responsive to a 15 kilohertz signal.

So that's the carrier frequency and the way it works is we're stimulating one electrode at 15,000 kilohertz and another electrode at 15,000 one kilohertz. So there's just a one hertz offset and the geometry of the targeting is such that we can target deep brain structures where the delta frequency is maximal.

“We are targeting structures that are specifically structures where we know slow waves are generated and are therefore an important ingredient in deep sleep.”

And we're doing and this, the other cool thing about this stimulation is you cannot feel it. It has no subjective sensations. So it's very different than TMS, which is, you know, you feel it big time. You don't feel a thing. So we are delivering this during sleep. People don't know when they're getting stimulated. They of course know they're being stimulated because they're giving informed consent, but it doesn't wake them up. And it increases slow wave sleep.

We've definitively demonstrated that it increases the density of slow wave activity during deep sleep.

“How do they feel in their wakeful subjective life better? Yes. And how do I become a participant in the study? I mean, I get plenty of slow wave sleep. My sleep is greatly and has been for a while, but what are you recruiting subjects?”

This is a, yeah, it's a big complicated protocols. I don't care. You recruiting subjects. We are. I'm just getting on just kidding. I do care. I'm just teasing people are probably thinking, how do I get that? Well, maybe this pre-sleep meditation, so that call should be looked at because that's something anyone can do. I'll provide a link to that paper. Yeah, and that's exactly what we're doing in this study now. We're using a, this is a little technical, but we're using a micro-errandomized design. We're, so in a single participant on some nights, they get pre-sleep meditation, just before sleep, just a five minute practice.

And in other nights, they do not receive that. And we are looking at the impact of that on slow wave sleep, and also looking at the synergistic effects of pre-sleep meditation with the testy stimulation to increase slow wave activity. And we're getting experience sampling measures during the next day to see if the pre-sleep meditation has a demonstrable impact on their mood, the next day, and how that interacts with our boosting of slow wave activity.

Very, very cool. I should just say, this is work that's being done collaboratively with Giulio Tenoni and his group at Wisconsin. He's a very well-known sleep and consciousness scientist, great lab.

“Yeah, great lab. Are you able to share any preliminary findings about what the pre-sleep five minute meditation does to deep sleep?”

We don't know yet. And honestly, it's not me being super cautious. We just, this is a new study that we're just in the middle of where we have roughly 20 something participants who've completed the protocol, but it's ongoing right now.

We'll give in what you just described and given that this other paper described that some pre-sleep meditation can have a really impressive impact on growth hormone release.

I'm encouraged to do the five minutes before sleep. So I suppose that if you want to double up on the benefits, you could just do the five minute pre-day meditation folks in the hour before sleep. Why not? I think it would be great.

Honestly, the data on open monitoring meditation for that matter, any meditation creativity, I would say, are very limited in part. It's because, you know, the measures of creativity that are used by psychologists typically are, honestly, I think, pretty crappy measures of creativity. So we're quite limited by the measurement tools that we have.

Having said all that, I do think that open monitoring meditation can really boost creativity primarily by helping people become more aware of the associative thoughts that they have.

This relates to something we talked about earlier, I often tell students of mine to spend time inspecting their own mind, just watching their own mind and writing down thoughts that may occur that may be interesting. The kind of open monitoring meditation, it's having no specific object and just being open aware, awake and not distracted, not getting lost in a train of thought, but simply being aware, I believe that we probably have much more creative thought occurring than we give ourselves credit for and it's simply because we forget.

“And I think this can really improve that, but the data are pretty meager, but you still recommended if people want to increase their creativity.”

Yes, I do, because this is one of those things where there's essentially no downside to it.

There'll be, we know there'll be other benefits that have been empirically documented. Awesome. Well, Richie, thank you so much for coming here today and educating us on meditation, but really much more than that you've educated us on states of mind, how to access different states of mind, what they mean, how they impact the state of being and our traits that we will enter after we meditate and now everyone should be inspired to do. At least five minutes per day of meditation, maybe in the morning, maybe before sleep, would love to get the update on this study that you described, looking at slow waves sleep.

“And I'm really excited about your book. It's so great that you have a new book coming out because I of course read alter trades. I've talked about on the podcast. I love love love the book. We'll put a link to that, but born to flourish.”

How new science and ancient wisdom reveal a simple path to thriving by you and we should give credit to your co-author, Cortlandol. And he is a neuroscientist as well. Yes, he's a neuroscientist, contemplative scientist and chief contemplative officer of our nonprofit, human.org. Awesome. Well, you're a real pioneer in the space that field as it were of meditation really needed a serious scientist to break in and study and share so that everyone can learn about and adopt meditation. And you've just done so much to educate so many people and coming here today. You've just done more of that. So I have immense gratitude for you. And I know millions of other people do as well. So thank you so much.

And I want to express my immense gratitude to you for bringing science that can make our lives better to so many people. And that is such a gift and such a wonderful service that you're providing. So thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Richie Davidson to learn more about his work and to find a link to his new book born to flourish. We see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us.

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Some of which overlaps with the content of the human lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the human lab podcast. Again, it's human lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcasts summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.

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“Do you still have this schoole-flashback at home and then do you hear that?”

No, not at all. It's my z-space.

Do you think it's all right? Yes, exactly. This stoiya is so deep-stoiya app that you just understand. Egalobstudium, Job, or umzug. Stimmt, crass. It doesn't feel like stoiya, right? Stoiya is in the lead.

Save. With this stoiya.