How Meditation Works & Science-Based Effective Meditations

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.260 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.900 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.060 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.060 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.900 | Today, we are discussing meditation.

00:00:17.300 | We are going to discuss the science of meditation,

00:00:19.700 | that is, what happens in the brain and body

00:00:21.820 | while we are meditating,

00:00:23.460 | and we will talk about the science of meditation

00:00:25.540 | as it relates to how the brain and body change

00:00:28.060 | as a consequence of meditation.

00:00:29.800 | That is, what you export or take from a meditation practice

00:00:33.420 | that can impact everything from your sleep to your mood.

00:00:36.680 | For instance, meditation has been shown

00:00:38.440 | to alleviate symptoms of depression,

00:00:40.940 | and we will also talk about how meditation can be used

00:00:43.280 | to enhance focus and other states of mind

00:00:45.980 | that are useful for work and other aspects of life.

00:00:49.000 | Now, of course, most of you have probably heard

00:00:50.420 | of meditation, and when we think of meditation,

00:00:52.680 | most often we think of somebody either sitting

00:00:55.020 | or lying down.

00:00:55.940 | If they're sitting, we might imagine them

00:00:57.580 | in the so-called lotus position, you know,

00:00:59.040 | sitting with legs crossed, very upright,

00:01:00.780 | with hands on the knees or, you know,

00:01:02.580 | crossed in our lap or something of that sort.

00:01:04.900 | Typically, we think of somebody who's in a very calm state,

00:01:07.580 | eyes closed, focused on their so-called third eye center.

00:01:11.080 | The third eye center is the area just behind one's forehead.

00:01:14.180 | There's no third eye there, at least there shouldn't be,

00:01:17.960 | but I'll tell you why it's called the third eye center

00:01:20.800 | and what the origins of that are

00:01:22.100 | and why it's relevant, actually, for a meditative practice.

00:01:25.180 | With all that said, it turns out that meditation encompasses

00:01:27.700 | a huge variety of different practices.

00:01:30.360 | Some of those practices indeed are done sitting

00:01:32.460 | or lying down with one's eyes closed,

00:01:34.220 | focusing on the third eye center.

00:01:35.920 | Other of those practices are focused on a body scan,

00:01:39.100 | you know, really focusing on one area of the body

00:01:41.340 | and its contact with whatever surface you happen

00:01:43.460 | to be sitting or lying on, or can be done walking.

00:01:47.020 | In fact, there are walking meditations done with eyes open.

00:01:50.200 | So there are many different forms of meditation,

00:01:52.080 | but today we are going to focus mainly

00:01:53.560 | on how specific types of meditation

00:01:55.740 | and specific areas of the brain that are activated

00:01:58.700 | during those meditations change our way of being

00:02:01.660 | in fundamental ways, not just during the meditation practice

00:02:04.860 | but afterwards as well.

00:02:06.900 | So if you're somebody who's interested

00:02:08.460 | in changing your default state of mood or of thinking

00:02:11.940 | or enhancing your ability to focus or improving your sleep

00:02:15.360 | or improving performance in some cognitive

00:02:17.400 | or physical endeavor, meditation is powerful,

00:02:20.140 | but you want to make sure

00:02:21.100 | that you pick the right meditation practice.

00:02:23.520 | So we will talk about picking a meditation practice

00:02:26.420 | that isn't just feasible because you'll do it,

00:02:28.620 | but is actually directed at the goals specific to you

00:02:32.400 | and what you need most.

00:02:33.760 | So to give you some sense of the contour of today's episode,

00:02:36.480 | first I'm going to talk about some of the underlying biology,

00:02:39.020 | the mechanisms and the brain areas,

00:02:41.600 | and also the areas of the body that are activated

00:02:45.260 | during certain forms of meditation,

00:02:46.880 | and equally important, which areas of the brain and body

00:02:48.900 | are shut down or reduced in their activity

00:02:51.040 | during specific types of meditation.

00:02:53.300 | Then I'll transition into

00:02:54.640 | how to best do a meditation practice,

00:02:57.100 | how to get the most out of that meditation practice.

00:02:59.940 | And then I will talk about

00:03:01.180 | how to change or alter your meditation practices

00:03:03.800 | according to your specific goals

00:03:05.400 | and as you get better at meditation.

00:03:07.480 | And this can get a little bit counterintuitive,

00:03:09.180 | but in a positive way.

00:03:10.500 | What I mean by that is for instance,

00:03:12.080 | a lot of people think that as you meditate

00:03:14.140 | and get better at meditating,

00:03:15.240 | you need to meditate more and more and more.

00:03:17.580 | Sort of like if you get better at running endurance races

00:03:20.020 | that you need to keep running longer and longer,

00:03:21.940 | first a 5K, then a 10K, then a marathon, then ultras.

00:03:25.500 | With meditation is actually quite the opposite.

00:03:27.660 | The better that you get

00:03:29.180 | at dropping into a particular brain state

00:03:32.180 | and the more your so-called traits of brain state shift,

00:03:35.660 | not just states as they're sometimes referred to,

00:03:37.820 | but traits, this is a theme that I've picked up

00:03:39.720 | from a terrific book that I'll refer to later.

00:03:42.860 | But the more that you can get

00:03:44.140 | into specific neural circuits quickly,

00:03:47.420 | actually the less you need to meditate

00:03:50.240 | in order to derive the benefits of meditation.

00:03:53.060 | So that's a wonderful aspect of meditative practices

00:03:55.460 | that's unlike a lot of other forms of mental exercise

00:03:59.260 | and cognitive enhancing exercises.

00:04:01.280 | So we'll talk about all of that today.

00:04:02.780 | And I promise that by the end of today's episode,

00:04:05.140 | you will have a rich array of meditative practices

00:04:07.520 | to select from.

00:04:08.360 | You'll know why each of them work

00:04:09.880 | and why they can be directed toward particular goals

00:04:12.300 | and how to do that.

00:04:13.540 | And you'll also know

00:04:14.380 | how to modify those meditation practices

00:04:16.920 | under conditions where you might get busier

00:04:18.800 | or where you're suffering from lack of sleep.

00:04:20.900 | I think a lot of people will be excited to know

00:04:22.460 | that today we're going to discuss

00:04:23.860 | a specific form of meditation

00:04:25.340 | that can indeed reduce your need for sleep

00:04:28.240 | and still allow you to enhance your cognitive

00:04:30.940 | and physical abilities.

00:04:32.340 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize

00:04:34.060 | that this podcast is separate

00:04:35.420 | from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:04:37.740 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:04:39.920 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:04:41.860 | about science and science-related tools

00:04:43.880 | to the general public.

00:04:45.140 | In keeping with that theme,

00:04:46.260 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:08:25.920 | Let's talk about meditation.

00:08:27.280 | As I mentioned earlier, we are going to talk about

00:08:29.880 | what areas of the brain and body are active

00:08:31.800 | during meditation and after meditation,

00:08:34.140 | and why that can be so beneficial.

00:08:36.180 | We will also talk about when and how best

00:08:38.440 | to meditate.

00:08:39.460 | This is a topic I've long been interested in.

00:08:41.880 | I was first given a book on meditation

00:08:43.660 | when I was in high school,

00:08:45.160 | 'cause to make a long story short,

00:08:47.120 | it was a bit of a wild one early in my high school years.

00:08:50.080 | And as a consequence of a program that I was in,

00:08:53.820 | somebody handed me a book on meditation.

00:08:56.320 | That book is still available now.

00:08:58.280 | That book is called "Wherever You Go, There You Are"

00:09:00.720 | by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

00:09:02.400 | He was one of the first, not the only,

00:09:04.280 | but one of the first people to really start popularizing

00:09:06.980 | meditation mindfulness practices in the United States.

00:09:10.640 | So this was in the late 1980s.

00:09:13.320 | And it was really only until recently

00:09:15.980 | that there were very few studies of meditation,

00:09:18.580 | although those really picked up in the '90s.

00:09:20.920 | Now you can find many, many thousands of studies

00:09:24.500 | on meditation and their mechanistic basis

00:09:26.460 | of brain imaging studies, changes in hormones in the body.

00:09:29.380 | But in the late 1980s and in the early 1990s,

00:09:32.720 | because functional imaging of the brain,

00:09:34.680 | so-called MRI or FMRI was really just starting to emerge

00:09:38.800 | as a popular tool in laboratories and hospitals,

00:09:41.640 | there really wasn't that much mechanistic understanding

00:09:43.740 | about how meditation worked.

00:09:45.220 | But of course, there was a deep understanding

00:09:47.540 | from cultures outside the United States

00:09:50.160 | that meditation was extremely useful.

00:09:52.600 | I should just mention,

00:09:53.440 | as long as we're talking about the history of meditation,

00:09:55.940 | any discussion about meditation

00:09:58.080 | is going to be a discussion about states of mind.

00:10:00.740 | And any discussion about states of mind

00:10:02.740 | invokes the word consciousness,

00:10:04.220 | a kind of a dangerous topic to get into in any format,

00:10:07.900 | because a lot of people talk about consciousness,

00:10:10.960 | but people use consciousness,

00:10:13.600 | the word, to mean different things.

00:10:15.140 | It doesn't have one standard operational definition,

00:10:17.660 | as scientists call it.

00:10:19.420 | However, discussions about consciousness

00:10:22.160 | are often part and parcel with conversations

00:10:25.060 | about things like psychedelics

00:10:26.960 | and kind of alternative therapies.

00:10:28.860 | And so in the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s,

00:10:31.980 | meditation and psychedelics were actually close cousins

00:10:35.880 | in the conversation about consciousness and states of mind.

00:10:39.180 | That conversation started to split

00:10:41.900 | into two different divisions,

00:10:43.500 | and I'll explain why in a moment.

00:10:45.580 | It gets to a little bit of interesting academic sociology,

00:10:48.540 | but what happened was there were a couple of guys at Harvard

00:10:51.220 | including Timothy Leary and others

00:10:54.180 | who got really interested in psychedelics,

00:10:56.540 | in particular, LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide.

00:11:00.140 | And at that time, that was part of the whole

00:11:02.180 | counterculture movement.

00:11:03.340 | It was considered very anti-establishment,

00:11:05.380 | and they were really encouraging students at Harvard

00:11:08.540 | to take LSD.

00:11:10.600 | They were also very interested in meditation,

00:11:12.780 | but what ended up happening is they essentially got kicked

00:11:15.000 | out or fired from Harvard.

00:11:16.900 | And there's a book that I'll refer you to

00:11:18.580 | in the show note captions,

00:11:19.660 | if you're interested in learning more about all this,

00:11:21.300 | but they got kicked out and fired

00:11:22.680 | for their emphasis on psychedelics.

00:11:24.740 | Nowadays, there's a lot of interest in psychedelics.

00:11:27.700 | We've had episodes with Dr. Matthew Johnson

00:11:30.020 | from Johns Hopkins University,

00:11:31.300 | who's running clinical trials on psychedelics

00:11:33.300 | like psilocybin and LSD

00:11:34.600 | for the treatment of depression and PTSD.

00:11:37.020 | We've also had Dr. Nolan Williams on the podcast,

00:11:39.700 | my colleague at Stanford, who's doing incredible studies

00:11:42.420 | on some of those compounds as well.

00:11:44.060 | So nowadays, the conversation about psychedelics

00:11:45.980 | is coming back, and it's somewhat divorced

00:11:48.620 | from the conversation about meditation.

00:11:50.700 | But in the 1960s and 1970s,

00:11:53.460 | the conversation about psychedelics and meditation

00:11:55.860 | was sort of one in the same.

00:11:58.580 | That changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s

00:12:02.740 | when people like Jon Kabat-Zinn started writing books

00:12:05.700 | that were purely about meditation

00:12:07.220 | and suggesting that people explore meditative practices

00:12:10.020 | for the utility to bring calmness, adjust stress,

00:12:12.660 | improve sleep, et cetera,

00:12:14.860 | divorced from the conversation about psychedelics.

00:12:17.460 | Now, that's not to say that the scientific community

00:12:19.620 | immediately embraced the conversation about meditation.

00:12:22.300 | In fact, it took quite a long while

00:12:24.680 | for schools like Harvard and Stanford

00:12:27.140 | and other universities around the world

00:12:28.780 | to start embracing and funding studies of meditation,

00:12:33.020 | asking what sorts of brain areas are involved,

00:12:35.040 | how it changes the body,

00:12:36.260 | and perhaps most importantly,

00:12:37.900 | how a meditation practice can shift the brain and body

00:12:40.560 | when somebody is finished meditating

00:12:42.560 | and is off in their life doing their everyday things.

00:12:45.700 | In the late 1980s and especially within the 1990s,

00:12:49.680 | the advent of brain imaging technology

00:12:51.460 | like magnetic resonance imaging, MRI,

00:12:54.180 | or functional magnetic resonance imaging

00:12:56.060 | was a way to look at the brain while it was active,

00:12:59.580 | not just to get an image of its structure,

00:13:01.380 | but also how it's functioning,

00:13:02.740 | the areas that so-called light up.

00:13:04.500 | When all of that technology became accessible and popular,

00:13:07.580 | well, that allowed a large number of laboratories

00:13:09.740 | to start asking how specific patterns

00:13:12.500 | of thinking and breathing,

00:13:14.020 | maybe people sitting in the lotus position,

00:13:15.680 | but more often than that,

00:13:16.640 | it would be people inside of an MRI magnet,

00:13:19.020 | because it is a magnet,

00:13:19.860 | sort of put you into a little tube

00:13:21.140 | and push you into the tube,

00:13:23.420 | not against your will, of course,

00:13:24.500 | but put people into the tube,

00:13:25.980 | have them meditate and then look at how the brain changed

00:13:29.000 | and to do that over time.

00:13:30.580 | When those studies were done,

00:13:32.080 | what was discovered was really quite miraculous, really.

00:13:35.660 | And now we don't think of as surprising,

00:13:37.640 | but what was discovered was a huge laundry list

00:13:40.580 | of brain changes.

00:13:41.820 | And then when people were evaluated in their outside life,

00:13:45.220 | so when they would fill out reports

00:13:47.100 | of their subjective feelings of happiness,

00:13:48.780 | or they would report their sleep,

00:13:50.040 | or even if objective measures were taken,

00:13:52.380 | like changes in hormones or markers of inflammation, et cetera,

00:13:56.260 | a large list of information fell out of that,

00:14:00.260 | which revealed that indeed there are many,

00:14:03.020 | a dozen or more clear benefits

00:14:05.700 | of a regular meditation practice.

00:14:07.600 | And some of those meditation practices could be quite short.

00:14:10.900 | So nowadays we think of meditation

00:14:12.840 | as pretty commonly accepted.

00:14:14.180 | And in fact, that has a lot to do with the fact

00:14:16.780 | that many of the major tech companies in the Bay Area

00:14:19.900 | during the 2000s, such as Google and Apple

00:14:23.200 | and any number of different social media companies

00:14:25.640 | and other companies and business ventures, et cetera,

00:14:28.140 | and investment firms all over the world

00:14:30.540 | started hiring people to train meditation

00:14:33.020 | or had online courses for meditation.

00:14:35.560 | So nowadays we think of meditation as this thing

00:14:37.820 | that almost everybody understands can benefit us,

00:14:41.180 | but we now sit at an interesting frontier

00:14:44.240 | where most people think of meditation as one thing,

00:14:47.500 | sort of like the word exercise,

00:14:48.780 | which of course could mean weight training.

00:14:50.340 | It could be running.

00:14:51.180 | It could mean high intensity interval training,

00:14:53.380 | all of which, as you know, will get you different results

00:14:56.900 | depending on what you do, how often you do it,

00:14:59.060 | and the specifics of what you actually do.

00:15:01.740 | So too, meditation can give you very specific results.

00:15:05.520 | It can give you more focus.

00:15:07.260 | It can give you better sleep.

00:15:08.580 | It can give you a combination of results

00:15:10.100 | just like exercise can, depending on the exercise.

00:15:13.020 | So what we are going to talk about next

00:15:14.580 | is the specific changes that happen in the brain

00:15:17.380 | with specific aspects of meditation.

00:15:19.640 | That is, what happens when you close your eyes?

00:15:22.180 | What happens when you focus your attention inward

00:15:24.900 | versus focusing your attention outward?

00:15:26.540 | Because as I mentioned before,

00:15:27.940 | there's third eye meditation where you close your eyes

00:15:29.820 | and focus on that spot just behind your forehead,

00:15:32.100 | and you focus on your breathing.

00:15:33.580 | There's also meditation practices

00:15:35.100 | where you're focusing on what you're eating

00:15:36.580 | with a lot of so-called mindfulness,

00:15:38.240 | being very present to whatever's happening,

00:15:40.140 | not letting your mind wander or think about yesterday

00:15:43.140 | or tomorrow, what's happening next,

00:15:44.820 | but really focusing on the present.

00:15:47.220 | There are also meditation practices, of course,

00:15:49.420 | where you are in a format of interpersonal communication,

00:15:52.720 | where you're really listening very intensely.

00:15:54.800 | That too is a form of mindfulness.

00:15:56.620 | So we're going to parse each of these things,

00:15:58.300 | and we are going to ask,

00:15:59.420 | what's happening in the brain and body

00:16:00.860 | during each of these meditation practices

00:16:02.960 | so that you can develop specific meditation practices

00:16:05.860 | that you can invoke in your real life on a daily basis,

00:16:09.260 | or thankfully, I would say for some who are pretty busy,

00:16:13.120 | that you could even do once a week or even once a month

00:16:15.900 | that will still clearly benefit you in specific ways.

00:16:19.340 | I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes or so

00:16:21.500 | talking about the neuroscience of meditation.

00:16:24.100 | I promise you, I'm not going to just list off

00:16:26.000 | a bunch of different brain areas

00:16:27.220 | that are active during meditation.

00:16:28.660 | That wouldn't be useful to you.

00:16:29.720 | In fact, I don't believe in throwing out

00:16:31.580 | a lot of nomenclature

00:16:32.860 | without also giving some mechanistic explanation

00:16:35.840 | as to what different brain areas do.

00:16:38.140 | And you could say, well, what good is it

00:16:39.660 | knowing what different brain areas do in their names

00:16:41.760 | if I can't actually manipulate those brain areas?

00:16:43.940 | But the good news is you actually can manipulate

00:16:46.080 | those brain areas.

00:16:47.300 | As I'll tell you today,

00:16:48.180 | you can turn up the activity in certain brain areas

00:16:51.280 | and turn down the activity in specific brain areas

00:16:54.020 | with specific elements of a meditation practice.

00:16:56.840 | So that's quite exciting and quite different really

00:16:59.300 | from other aspects of neuroscience

00:17:00.920 | that we might discuss on this podcast.

00:17:03.100 | So there are a few different brain areas

00:17:05.060 | whose names I'd like to arm you with.

00:17:07.220 | And again, the names themselves aren't essential,

00:17:10.220 | but if you can grasp even the top contour

00:17:12.240 | of what I'm about to say,

00:17:13.240 | you'll be in a much better position

00:17:14.540 | to parse and use the information that follows.

00:17:16.840 | There's an area of your brain

00:17:19.340 | that sits right behind your forehead

00:17:21.260 | that's called the prefrontal cortex.

00:17:23.240 | Basically, it's the front bumper of your head

00:17:25.620 | just behind the bone, okay?

00:17:27.660 | That area just behind your forehead

00:17:28.960 | that we call the prefrontal cortex

00:17:30.680 | actually encompasses a lot of different things.

00:17:32.840 | And actually you have two of them.

00:17:34.780 | You have one on the right side of your brain

00:17:36.440 | and you have one on the left side of your brain

00:17:38.220 | and they're connected to one another,

00:17:39.460 | but they actually do different things.

00:17:41.400 | The area that I'd like to focus on today for a bit

00:17:44.060 | is the so-called left prefrontal cortex.

00:17:46.940 | So if we were going to get really specific,

00:17:48.780 | we'd say the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

00:17:51.660 | Dorsal means up, lateral means to the side.

00:17:54.420 | So if you want to touch the left side of your head

00:17:56.500 | and move your hand just toward the midline,

00:17:58.820 | toward the sort of top of your head a little bit,

00:18:01.000 | so that's dorsal, and then lateral.

00:18:03.020 | As long as your hand is still on the side of your head,

00:18:04.580 | you're in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, okay?

00:18:07.580 | So you've got your hand probably right over

00:18:09.620 | your left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

00:18:12.500 | That area of the brain we know from lesion studies

00:18:15.240 | where it's been damaged in animals or humans,

00:18:17.940 | and we know from stimulation studies

00:18:19.880 | where it's been selectively stimulated in animals,

00:18:23.080 | or yes, indeed, also it's been done in humans,

00:18:26.780 | has an incredible ability to control your bodily senses

00:18:31.440 | and to make sense, that is to interpret what's going on

00:18:35.300 | in terms of your emotions and your bodily sensations.

00:18:38.440 | So from now on, unless I say otherwise,

00:18:40.780 | if I say prefrontal cortex,

00:18:42.500 | I'm specifically referring

00:18:43.700 | to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

00:18:45.940 | but I'm going to shorten that up

00:18:47.060 | just for sake of simplicity and ease of communication.

00:18:49.940 | If I'm going to talk about another area

00:18:51.260 | of prefrontal cortex, I'll talk about another area.

00:18:53.160 | But if I say prefrontal cortex today,

00:18:54.940 | what I mean is left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

00:18:57.920 | Stimulation of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

00:19:00.740 | or I should say more appropriately,

00:19:02.480 | when your left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is active,

00:19:07.500 | you are in a great position

00:19:09.940 | to interpret what's going on with you emotionally,

00:19:13.220 | to interpret your bodily signals of comfort or discomfort,

00:19:17.540 | and then to make really good decisions

00:19:19.340 | on the basis of that interpretation.

00:19:22.260 | And that's because the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

00:19:25.980 | is in direct communication with and is directly connected

00:19:29.820 | to another brain area

00:19:31.620 | called the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC.

00:19:35.020 | Now I'm just going to refer to it as the ACC, okay?

00:19:38.460 | The ACC is an area of your brain

00:19:41.300 | that is interpreting a lot of different things

00:19:43.300 | about bodily signals.

00:19:44.700 | For instance, how fast you're breathing,

00:19:47.280 | whether or not your heart is beating quickly or slowly,

00:19:51.840 | and more importantly,

00:19:52.980 | whether or not your heart is beating quickly or slowly

00:19:55.480 | for the circumstance that you are in.

00:19:57.620 | So for instance, if you're running up a hill

00:19:59.500 | and you're even in great shape

00:20:02.020 | and your heart is beating very fast,

00:20:04.060 | it's unlikely that you are going to be concerned

00:20:06.820 | about your heart beating fast

00:20:08.500 | because that is appropriate for the circumstance.

00:20:10.740 | However, if you're just walking along

00:20:12.660 | and all of a sudden your heart starts beating very quickly

00:20:14.500 | for no apparent reason,

00:20:17.500 | well, then you are going to interpret that

00:20:19.460 | as either pathologic or uncomfortable,

00:20:23.060 | inappropriate for the context that you happen to be in.

00:20:26.140 | The left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

00:20:30.040 | is the area of the brain that actually has some control over

00:20:33.420 | and especially can interpret

00:20:35.460 | what's going on in this ACC region.

00:20:38.660 | Now, most of you probably haven't heard of the ACC.

00:20:41.140 | Most of you probably have heard of a brain area

00:20:43.460 | called the amygdala.

00:20:44.300 | It's an almond-shaped structure

00:20:45.700 | on the two sides of the brain.

00:20:46.760 | People talk about it as the fear center, et cetera.

00:20:49.100 | But your ACC, the intercingulate cortex,

00:20:52.180 | gets input from areas like the amygdala,

00:20:54.180 | your threat detection centers,

00:20:55.340 | but it also gets input from an enormous number

00:20:58.580 | of other areas of your brain and body,

00:21:00.460 | including your heart, your gut.

00:21:03.900 | So it gets information about how full that is distended

00:21:07.700 | or how empty your gut is.

00:21:09.680 | It gets information about how quickly you're breathing

00:21:11.980 | from input from your lungs and related structures.

00:21:16.460 | It's an absolutely critical station

00:21:18.980 | for making sense of what's going on in your body.

00:21:21.220 | And it works very closely along with one other structure.

00:21:24.340 | And I promise it's going to be the third structure

00:21:26.500 | in this triad, and then I'll stop listing off names.

00:21:28.980 | We have dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

00:21:30.480 | Think of that as sort of the interpreter

00:21:31.960 | of what's going on inside of you.

00:21:33.860 | You have the ACC, or anterior cingulate cortex,

00:21:36.860 | which is the area of your brain

00:21:38.060 | that's bringing in all this information

00:21:40.060 | about what's going on inside your body

00:21:42.220 | and even on the surface of your body.

00:21:44.100 | If you have any pain or an itch or a mosquito bite

00:21:46.500 | on the surface of your body,

00:21:47.340 | your ACC would definitely register that.

00:21:49.740 | And then there's this other

00:21:50.740 | absolutely incredible brain structure,

00:21:52.400 | which is called the insula, I-N-S-U-L-A, insula.

00:21:55.780 | And the insula has a bunch of different parts to it,

00:21:58.100 | but the insula is another area that is interpreting signals

00:22:02.340 | of what's going on in your brain and body.

00:22:05.180 | So the ACC and the insula are working together

00:22:07.300 | to try and figure out what's going on inside me.

00:22:10.260 | And in addition to that, the insula is interpreting

00:22:13.240 | information about what's going on outside of you.

00:22:16.240 | So your insula is saying, for instance,

00:22:18.820 | hey, this is a steep hill that I'm running up.

00:22:20.900 | And as a consequence, whatever heart rate increase

00:22:24.020 | that I'm experiencing or heavy breathing

00:22:25.540 | or burning in my lungs, this all makes sense.

00:22:27.860 | I don't have to be worried, I don't have to be scared.

00:22:29.620 | I might want to slow down, but this makes sense.

00:22:32.100 | Whereas it, for instance, in the example I previously gave,

00:22:34.840 | where if you're sitting in a room

00:22:36.420 | and everything is pretty calm, and all of a sudden,

00:22:39.060 | you start feeling really uncomfortable,

00:22:40.600 | like your stomach doesn't feel right,

00:22:41.960 | or you start breathing quickly,

00:22:43.220 | or you start having a so-called anxiety or panic attack,

00:22:46.360 | in large part, that's because the shift

00:22:48.780 | in your bodily sensations doesn't match

00:22:51.340 | or doesn't correspond to something in the outside world.

00:22:54.220 | So there's this incredible triad,

00:22:55.900 | which includes the left or lateral prefrontal cortex,

00:22:58.760 | the cingulate or anterior cingulate cortex, and the insula.

00:23:01.900 | And those three are working together

00:23:03.940 | in a kind of conversation.

00:23:05.180 | It's a neural conversation, but a conversation nonetheless,

00:23:08.100 | trying to figure out, okay, what's going on inside me?

00:23:10.700 | How do I feel?

00:23:11.860 | What am I thinking about?

00:23:13.140 | And this could be thoughts about the past

00:23:14.600 | or the future or the present.

00:23:16.100 | They are also in a conversation

00:23:19.140 | as to whether or not the sensations

00:23:21.140 | that you're experiencing, meaning how quick your breathing is

00:23:24.340 | or how slow your breathing is,

00:23:25.900 | how your heart feels, how your skin feels,

00:23:29.020 | any sensations of pain or pleasure for that matter,

00:23:32.600 | whether or not that makes sense for the situation you're in

00:23:34.980 | and trying to determine whether or not

00:23:36.980 | you are doing the right things

00:23:38.620 | as a consequence of those sensations, okay?

00:23:41.500 | So again, if you can't remember the names

00:23:44.180 | of these different neural structures in the brain,

00:23:45.940 | don't worry about it.

00:23:46.860 | It's really not that critical.

00:23:48.340 | What is critical is that you understand

00:23:50.600 | that there's a conversation that's constantly occurring

00:23:53.940 | as long as you are awake,

00:23:55.720 | trying to figure out what's going on inside of you,

00:23:59.060 | whether or not it makes sense

00:24:00.340 | relative to what's going on outside and around you.

00:24:03.520 | Now, humans are smart.

00:24:04.900 | That is, we are to some extent conscious of the fact

00:24:08.780 | that we have memories of the past,

00:24:11.800 | awareness of the present and anticipation of the future.

00:24:15.360 | So we do realize, for instance,

00:24:17.300 | that we can be seated at the dinner table, excuse me,

00:24:20.100 | and have a thought about something tomorrow,

00:24:22.820 | maybe an exam that's stressing us out

00:24:24.920 | or something like that,

00:24:25.760 | and that will change our bodily state

00:24:27.960 | in a way that is not optimal

00:24:29.820 | for what we're doing in the moment,

00:24:31.560 | but that can still make sense to us

00:24:33.040 | because that exam is important.

00:24:34.420 | Maybe we're feeling some pressure

00:24:35.640 | about a hard conversation we have to have,

00:24:37.320 | or maybe we are very excited about the next day

00:24:39.980 | and we can't eat because we're so excited,

00:24:42.460 | and that can make perfect sense to us

00:24:43.820 | because we do have access to this knowledge about self

00:24:47.100 | that we can think about the past,

00:24:48.900 | the present, or the future.

00:24:50.580 | So that makes the conversation

00:24:51.860 | these three structures are in

00:24:53.860 | even more interesting and dynamic,

00:24:55.840 | because what it means is that we can be doing something,

00:24:59.800 | eating, talking, running,

00:25:02.280 | any number of different activities,

00:25:04.420 | and our bodily state may or may not match what we are doing

00:25:09.100 | in a way that's adaptive for that,

00:25:11.540 | and yet that can be completely okay

00:25:13.100 | or at least understandable for us.

00:25:16.420 | Now, a major emphasis of a meditation practice

00:25:19.820 | is to make us so-called more mindful.

00:25:23.060 | What is mindfulness?

00:25:24.020 | Well, again, there isn't one perfect

00:25:25.660 | universally accepted operational definition of mindfulness.

00:25:29.320 | That's basically nerd speak for saying

00:25:30.940 | people can't agree exactly what mindfulness should be,

00:25:34.700 | is, and means for everyone,

00:25:38.060 | but most people assume, and I think agree,

00:25:40.540 | that mindfulness includes something about being present,

00:25:44.840 | and when I say present,

00:25:45.900 | that doesn't necessarily mean present to one's surroundings

00:25:48.620 | because, of course, a lot of meditation practices

00:25:50.760 | that are designed to make us more mindful and present

00:25:53.160 | are designed to make us more mindful and present

00:25:54.780 | to what's happening internally

00:25:56.500 | while ignoring everything that's happening externally,

00:25:59.940 | but they are designed to make us more present

00:26:02.340 | to our bodily sensations and, in particular,

00:26:04.500 | our breathing and our thoughts in the moment.

00:26:07.940 | So let's now explore

00:26:09.420 | what a generic meditation practice looks like,

00:26:11.580 | and let's evaluate how that tends to change the activity

00:26:15.060 | of these neural circuits in the brain and body,

00:26:16.900 | and then from there, we can split the conversation

00:26:19.440 | into a couple of different bins,

00:26:21.100 | that is meditation practices

00:26:22.680 | that are ideal for enhancing focus,

00:26:25.660 | meditation practices that are ideal for improving mood,

00:26:28.860 | meditation practices that are ideal for improving sleep,

00:26:32.480 | and meditation practices that, believe it or not,

00:26:36.020 | benefit all of those things in one fell swoop.

00:26:39.060 | Okay, so what happens during a meditation practice

00:26:41.260 | at the neural level?

00:26:42.860 | In order to answer that question,

00:26:44.580 | we are going to be scientists.

00:26:45.900 | That means you and I are going to be scientists now.

00:26:48.460 | We are going to break down a practice

00:26:50.460 | into its different component parts

00:26:53.020 | and address what we know for sure

00:26:56.100 | about the brain activation states

00:26:58.500 | that occur with those different component parts.

00:27:00.700 | In order to do that,

00:27:01.520 | let's use a somewhat generic form of meditation,

00:27:03.940 | but it's generic and pretty far-reaching

00:27:06.340 | because I would say that for most people,

00:27:09.480 | about 75%, let's say,

00:27:12.260 | a meditation practice is going to involve stopping,

00:27:15.560 | meaning getting out of motion, sitting or lying down,

00:27:20.560 | and in most cases, closing one's eyes,

00:27:24.080 | although it is absolutely not required

00:27:27.000 | to close one's eyes during meditation.

00:27:28.640 | There are many forms of meditation that are done eyes open,

00:27:32.240 | but for most people,

00:27:33.160 | it's going to involve stopping our movement,

00:27:35.660 | that is not ambulating, not walking or running,

00:27:38.100 | so seated or lying down with eyes closed.

00:27:42.100 | When we do that,

00:27:42.940 | meaning when we sit or lie down and close our eyes,

00:27:46.080 | as trivial as that shift might sound to you,

00:27:48.780 | it actually is a profound shift

00:27:51.260 | in the way that your brain and other neural circuits

00:27:53.880 | in your body function for the following reason.

00:27:57.920 | When we close our eyes,

00:28:00.060 | we shut down a major avenue of what's called exteroception.

00:28:05.060 | What do I mean by exteroception?

00:28:07.040 | Well, very briefly,

00:28:08.820 | we are sensing things on our body

00:28:11.600 | and in our body all the time.

00:28:13.240 | We are also sensing things from outside of us all the time,

00:28:15.900 | so these could be sights or sounds, touch on our body,

00:28:18.880 | sensations with inside our body, et cetera.

00:28:21.420 | Now, sensation is distinct from what we call perception.

00:28:25.040 | Perception is, put simply,

00:28:28.640 | the sensations that we happen to be paying attention to.

00:28:32.080 | So at any given moment, you are sensing many, many things.

00:28:34.960 | There are sound waves hitting your ears,

00:28:36.460 | there are pressure receptors on the bottoms of your feet

00:28:38.860 | sensing your shoes or your sandals or the floor, et cetera,

00:28:41.960 | but you're not perceiving them

00:28:43.380 | until you place your attention on them.

00:28:45.840 | Now, the way perception works

00:28:48.580 | is that you have so-called spotlights of attention.

00:28:51.540 | You can't perceive everything all at once,

00:28:55.200 | every sound, every sight, every touch.

00:28:57.180 | That would be overwhelming.

00:28:58.180 | In fact, that would be terrible.

00:28:59.620 | Rather, you have spotlights of perception

00:29:02.540 | that can either be very narrow,

00:29:04.500 | so for instance, you could focus all of your perception

00:29:07.020 | right now on your big toe of your right foot

00:29:09.740 | and really pour all of your awareness, your attention,

00:29:13.780 | into what you're perceiving there,

00:29:15.260 | what it feels like if there's tingling or pressure,

00:29:17.900 | heat or cold, et cetera.

00:29:19.940 | Or you can broaden that spotlight to include both feet

00:29:23.040 | or all your toes on both feet

00:29:24.620 | and then your legs and your whole body or the entire room.

00:29:27.860 | Perception is like a spotlight, and I should mention,

00:29:30.760 | there are very good data that we can split our attention

00:29:33.620 | into two but probably not more than two spotlights,

00:29:37.520 | and we can make those spotlights of perception

00:29:40.420 | either very broad and diffuse or very narrow.

00:29:43.460 | You can practice this now if you like.

00:29:45.000 | You can pick a spot on the wall away from you anywhere,

00:29:48.580 | or if you're driving, you can look at some location,

00:29:50.480 | and you can focus intensely on one small location,

00:29:54.140 | for instance, a tree in the horizon

00:29:55.980 | or a person on the street

00:29:57.480 | or any number of different things outside of you,

00:30:00.740 | or you can broaden that spotlight

00:30:02.280 | to include the entire scene at once.

00:30:04.300 | You can also focus a spotlight of perception on your body,

00:30:07.700 | say on the left upper portion of your chest,

00:30:12.100 | and of course, you can focus

00:30:13.700 | on the left upper portion of your chest

00:30:15.460 | and something outside of you.

00:30:16.860 | You can split your attention

00:30:18.020 | between those two perceptual spotlights.

00:30:20.560 | It's very hard, although not impossible,

00:30:22.300 | to have three perceptual spotlights,

00:30:24.620 | but most people can split to two points of attention

00:30:28.020 | or perception pretty easily.

00:30:30.220 | The other thing that most people can do pretty easily

00:30:32.680 | is merge those two spotlights,

00:30:35.120 | or rather to have just one spotlight of attention.

00:30:37.560 | So you don't always have to have

00:30:38.600 | two spotlights of attention on,

00:30:40.080 | and here I'm using the word attention

00:30:41.360 | and perception interchangeably,

00:30:43.080 | but you could, for instance, have two points of attention.

00:30:45.980 | So you're talking to somebody and you're paying attention

00:30:47.600 | to whether or not somebody's walking in the door or not,

00:30:49.960 | so that's two, or you could be completely focused

00:30:52.340 | on the person you're talking to,

00:30:53.420 | or you could be completely focused on the stomachache

00:30:55.720 | or the great sensation of hunger that you have in your belly

00:30:58.600 | while talking to somebody.

00:30:59.640 | In fact, you're not even listening

00:31:00.880 | to what they're saying at all.

00:31:02.240 | Okay, so you have two spotlights of perception.

00:31:04.420 | You can split them or merge them into one,

00:31:07.520 | and this is very important.

00:31:09.480 | Those spotlights of perception can intensify or dim,

00:31:13.000 | and there I'm using analogy.

00:31:14.720 | What I mean by that is your perception of what's happening

00:31:17.660 | within those spotlights can be very, very high acuity.

00:31:21.880 | That is, you can register very fine changes in detail,

00:31:25.080 | like tingling on one side of your big toe

00:31:27.400 | of your right foot versus the other,

00:31:29.440 | or it can be somewhat more diffuse.

00:31:31.120 | You're just thinking about your whole toe,

00:31:32.640 | which in that case seems like a small area,

00:31:34.460 | but the point is that you can consciously adjust the acuity

00:31:38.760 | that is the fineness of your perception.

00:31:41.800 | All of this is under your power

00:31:43.560 | because of the incredible ability of a brain structure

00:31:46.400 | whose name you now understand and know,

00:31:48.940 | which is the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

00:31:51.840 | although there are other areas

00:31:53.020 | of your brain involved as well.

00:31:54.600 | Your ability to direct your attention

00:31:56.920 | to specific things in your environment or within your body,

00:32:00.480 | or to split those points of attention or merge them,

00:32:03.600 | or dial up the intensity

00:32:05.200 | of how closely you're paying attention

00:32:07.320 | to every little shift or ripple

00:32:09.680 | and change in sensation there,

00:32:11.900 | or to kind of dissociate, if you will,

00:32:14.760 | for lack of a better word,

00:32:15.840 | to disengage from that perception.

00:32:18.160 | All of that is under control because of your ability

00:32:20.880 | to engage this area that we call the prefrontal cortex

00:32:23.960 | and in particular,

00:32:24.800 | the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

00:32:27.440 | I'd like to take a quick break

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00:33:41.960 | Okay, so now if we look at the example of what happens

00:33:44.600 | when you sit or lie down and close your eyes

00:33:47.460 | and decide to meditate,

00:33:49.200 | you should immediately realize that that's a tremendous shift

00:33:53.280 | in your perceptual ability.

00:33:55.240 | Why?

00:33:56.080 | Because that spotlight of attention,

00:33:58.200 | while it can be oriented toward, for instance,

00:34:00.800 | what you hear in the room,

00:34:02.720 | or maybe the feeling of wind moving trees

00:34:06.080 | in the environment that you happen to be in,

00:34:07.980 | when we close our eyes,

00:34:09.560 | we shut down one of the major avenues for sensory input,

00:34:13.400 | which is vision.

00:34:14.380 | And when we do that,

00:34:16.680 | there's a tendency for those perceptual spotlights

00:34:19.780 | to be focused more so on what happens

00:34:23.160 | at the level of the surface of our skin

00:34:25.840 | and inside of our bodies.

00:34:28.440 | And that informs us about something very important,

00:34:31.540 | which is that there are actually two axes

00:34:33.880 | or two ends of a continuum of perception.

00:34:36.840 | Up until now, I've been talking about perception

00:34:38.420 | and intention as kind of the same thing,

00:34:40.060 | and indeed they are, at least for sake of this conversation.

00:34:43.180 | But within that word, perception,

00:34:45.360 | or within that word, attention, there's a continuum.

00:34:48.720 | And that continuum has, on one end,

00:34:51.500 | something called interoception.

00:34:53.420 | Interoception, spelled with an I,

00:34:55.760 | is everything that we sense

00:34:58.060 | at the level of our skin and inward.

00:35:00.600 | So the sensation inside our stomach,

00:35:02.280 | the sensation of our heart beating.

00:35:03.960 | Some people can sense their heart beating pretty easily.

00:35:06.020 | Other people have more challenge doing that.

00:35:08.500 | What we are feeling on the surface of our skin,

00:35:11.680 | how hot or cold we feel, that's interoception.

00:35:15.100 | In contrast, at the other end of the continuum

00:35:18.440 | is so-called exteroception, spelled with an E.

00:35:21.680 | Exteroception is perception of everything

00:35:24.760 | that's outside or beyond the confines of our skin.

00:35:28.800 | So by shutting our eyes,

00:35:31.000 | and in particular in a meditative practice

00:35:33.040 | where we direct our attention

00:35:34.680 | toward our so-called third eye center,

00:35:36.420 | this area right behind our forehead,

00:35:37.960 | which not so incidentally is the prefrontal cortex,

00:35:41.520 | or in some cases where people

00:35:43.200 | will focus on their breathing,

00:35:44.580 | so the movement of their stomach,

00:35:46.080 | or the movement of their diaphragm,

00:35:47.420 | or the lifting of their chest,

00:35:48.760 | or the extension of their belly while they breathe.

00:35:51.040 | By doing that, we are taking what ordinarily

00:35:55.480 | is a perceptual state that's split

00:35:58.160 | between the outside world, exteroception,

00:36:01.160 | and usually also toward our inner state.

00:36:03.960 | Most people are generally in touch

00:36:05.540 | with how they are feeling from the skin inward

00:36:07.900 | while they are also paying attention

00:36:09.560 | to what's outside of them.

00:36:11.000 | You can think about somebody, for instance,

00:36:12.560 | at a restaurant or sandwich shop,

00:36:14.060 | about to order a sandwich, and you're reading the menu,

00:36:15.960 | so that's exteroception, right?

00:36:17.360 | The menu is outside the confines of your skin,

00:36:19.560 | and little ideas or maybe big ideas come to mind

00:36:22.920 | about what the roast beef sandwich

00:36:24.280 | or the vegetarian sandwich will taste like,

00:36:26.700 | what it will do for you, what's in it,

00:36:28.820 | what you like, what you don't like, et cetera.

00:36:31.060 | That's splitting interoception and exteroception.

00:36:34.560 | But when we close our eyes, we stop, we slow down,

00:36:37.120 | we focus on our breathing or that third eye center.

00:36:40.280 | The majority of our perception then shifts to interoception.

00:36:44.080 | And when we shift down to that end

00:36:46.360 | of the continuum of interoception,

00:36:48.880 | something very important happens.

00:36:50.920 | What happens is that those two regions,

00:36:53.920 | the ACC, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the insula,

00:36:57.440 | really ramp up their levels of neural activity.

00:37:00.480 | And that should make perfect sense to you

00:37:01.880 | because those are areas of your brain

00:37:04.180 | that are registering and paying attention

00:37:06.320 | to the various sensations of how full

00:37:08.760 | or empty your stomach feels,

00:37:10.940 | whether or not the surface of your skin

00:37:12.420 | feels hot or cold, and on and on.

00:37:14.720 | So by just sitting down or lying down

00:37:16.400 | and closing your eyes, your brain undergoes a massive shift

00:37:19.920 | from exteroception to interoception.

00:37:22.540 | Now, that's not to say you can't be distracted

00:37:24.280 | by external events, and in fact, many people are,

00:37:26.620 | but the early stages of transitioning

00:37:28.400 | into a meditative state involve this shift

00:37:31.680 | down the continuum, or I should say

00:37:33.680 | to one end of the continuum, 'cause there's no down up,

00:37:35.920 | there's just the continuum.

00:37:38.040 | Shift along the continuum

00:37:39.640 | to heightened levels of interoception.

00:37:42.380 | Now, I mentioned this briefly before,

00:37:43.920 | but many people are very interoceptively aware,

00:37:48.920 | just naturally, even if they don't do a meditation practice.

00:37:52.360 | Other people are not, and there's a pretty good measure

00:37:56.000 | of whether or not you have high levels

00:37:57.660 | of interoceptive awareness or capability,

00:38:00.040 | and that is your ability to count your heartbeats

00:38:02.420 | without placing your fingers anywhere

00:38:04.780 | with any pressure to take your pulse.

00:38:07.340 | You can do this if you like.

00:38:08.480 | You can actually try and estimate your number of heartbeats

00:38:11.080 | simply by trying to feel your heart beat.

00:38:13.300 | Some people are very good,

00:38:14.740 | meaning they're very accurate at doing this.

00:38:16.660 | Other people are not.

00:38:17.880 | It does seem to be an ability

00:38:19.640 | that can be trained up quite a bit,

00:38:21.560 | and in fact, meditative practices

00:38:23.060 | will improve your interoceptive awareness,

00:38:25.480 | but, and this is a very important point,

00:38:28.640 | heightened levels of interoceptive awareness,

00:38:31.680 | while that might sound attractive,

00:38:33.640 | oh, but to be really in touch with your body,

00:38:36.820 | that is not always beneficial.

00:38:39.580 | Why?

00:38:40.420 | Because many people who, for instance,

00:38:41.760 | have excessive levels of anxiety

00:38:44.640 | have excessive levels of anxiety

00:38:46.720 | because they are very keenly aware

00:38:49.120 | of any subtle shift in their heart rate or breathing

00:38:52.000 | or change in the sensations within their stomach,

00:38:55.200 | whereas other people who are less aware

00:38:57.000 | of their bodily state, that can be beneficial, right?

00:39:00.000 | It can be adaptive or not, depending on the circumstances.

00:39:02.960 | It's probably not adaptive to be very, very aware

00:39:06.640 | of your internal state.

00:39:08.240 | If, for instance, you're doing public speaking,

00:39:09.920 | you don't want to be thinking about what's going on

00:39:11.160 | in your stomach or how quickly you're breathing.

00:39:12.920 | I'm certainly trying to ignore all those signals,

00:39:15.560 | those sensations now,

00:39:17.320 | but for somebody who has no awareness of what's going on,

00:39:20.680 | very little interoceptive awareness,

00:39:23.000 | that can be problematic too,

00:39:24.840 | because these are the very people

00:39:26.500 | who can ignore the fact that they're having a heart attack

00:39:28.460 | or can ignore the fact that they have high blood pressure

00:39:31.380 | and are caring about life focused on everything external

00:39:34.200 | with no awareness of their own body.

00:39:35.880 | They're "out of touch" with their body.

00:39:38.680 | So we want to be very careful about placing valence,

00:39:42.940 | which is a sort of value of good or bad

00:39:45.240 | on interoceptive awareness versus exteroceptive awareness.

00:39:48.240 | More importantly, we want to emphasize

00:39:49.840 | that when you undergo a meditation practice,

00:39:52.600 | if it's of the sort where you stop your movement

00:39:54.880 | and close your eyes,

00:39:56.300 | you are training for interoceptive awareness.

00:39:59.340 | This becomes important later.

00:40:01.220 | We get into discussions about meditation

00:40:03.880 | for reducing anxiety.

00:40:06.020 | Some people may opt,

00:40:08.400 | in fact, I would say some people ought to opt

00:40:10.680 | for a meditative practice

00:40:11.840 | which involves more exteroceptive awareness,

00:40:14.800 | actually a meditation like a walking meditation

00:40:17.040 | or even a seated meditation

00:40:18.520 | where they are bringing their focus

00:40:20.000 | to a place outside their body

00:40:22.640 | as opposed to inside their body.

00:40:24.520 | And in fact, there are examples of people

00:40:26.680 | who have meditated quite a lot

00:40:28.380 | who develop such a heightened state or awareness

00:40:31.100 | of their interoceptive components,

00:40:33.440 | that is just fancy again, nerd speak

00:40:35.400 | for so aware of their breathing and of their heart

00:40:38.360 | and of the state of their gut

00:40:40.180 | that it actually is intrusive for daily activities.

00:40:43.180 | So I will ask you to ask this question of yourself now.

00:40:47.240 | Are you somebody who tends to be very in touch

00:40:50.040 | with your bodily sensations?

00:40:51.880 | So for instance, from the skin inwards,

00:40:54.380 | or are you somebody who tends to be less in touch with

00:40:57.100 | or aware of your interoceptive state?

00:41:00.320 | There is no right or wrong answer.

00:41:01.800 | You don't get an A or an F or a D or a C

00:41:03.800 | depending on your answer.

00:41:04.840 | It's just a good question

00:41:06.360 | for each and every one of us to answer.

00:41:08.120 | And I think most people will answer that it depends.

00:41:11.240 | It depends on whether or not you are in a social setting

00:41:13.640 | or whether or not you're alone,

00:41:15.060 | but we are going to return to that answer.

00:41:16.940 | So keep it in mind because it will become very beneficial

00:41:20.280 | in building an optimal meditation practice for you.

00:41:23.640 | But for now, just know there's this continuum of perception

00:41:26.480 | interoception and exteroception.

00:41:28.180 | Closing your eyes increases interoception,

00:41:30.160 | opening your eyes dramatically increases exteroception

00:41:33.480 | just automatically,

00:41:34.920 | just automatically because so much of your brain,

00:41:36.800 | in fact, 40% or more is dedicated to vision.

00:41:39.340 | And this, I should say,

00:41:40.440 | for those of you that are low vision or no vision,

00:41:42.320 | and those of you that are blind or have poor vision,

00:41:45.000 | this entire process is translated to the auditory,

00:41:48.720 | to the sound domain.

00:41:49.820 | So it's true for people that can see

00:41:52.960 | and it's true for people that can't see.

00:41:54.880 | Of course, people that can't see,

00:41:55.920 | closing the eyes doesn't have this huge shift

00:41:57.620 | towards interoception,

00:41:59.480 | but there have been a few studies,

00:42:01.520 | not as many as I would have liked to find,

00:42:03.040 | but a few studies of, for instance,

00:42:04.180 | people who are blind or have low vision,

00:42:07.400 | don't see very well.

00:42:08.240 | And when they close their ears

00:42:10.120 | and they can't hear the external world

00:42:12.020 | or they put headphones on or noise canceling headphones,

00:42:14.440 | then the world inside of them becomes very prominent

00:42:17.900 | relative to the world outside of them for obvious reasons.

00:42:20.600 | So I asked you to ask yourself

00:42:22.040 | whether or not you are somebody

00:42:23.180 | who tends to be more interoceptively aware or not,

00:42:26.720 | more exteroceptively aware or not.

00:42:29.520 | And some of you might not be able to answer that question.

00:42:31.740 | And if you can't,

00:42:32.780 | chances are that you are effectively

00:42:35.120 | sliding along that continuum

00:42:36.720 | depending on the activities that you're doing.

00:42:38.880 | So you're probably the kind of person

00:42:40.480 | where if somebody comes over to you and starts talking to you

00:42:42.640 | you will engage in that conversation

00:42:44.440 | and you don't feel so inside your body

00:42:47.180 | that you're thinking about your heart beating

00:42:48.920 | and whether or not you're flushing red, et cetera,

00:42:50.560 | you're going to pay attention to what they say.

00:42:52.320 | Many people, however, when somebody talks to them,

00:42:55.580 | if they have social anxiety

00:42:57.280 | or even a slight bit of social anxiety

00:42:59.580 | will be thinking about

00:43:01.200 | whether or not their cheeks are flushing

00:43:02.480 | or whether or not they look right or sound right

00:43:04.880 | or whether or not they have something in their teeth.

00:43:06.460 | These are normal responses,

00:43:08.260 | but they really speak to this issue

00:43:10.240 | of whether or not you tend to shift more

00:43:12.040 | towards interoceptive awareness or exteroceptive awareness.

00:43:14.760 | And of course it's context dependent.

00:43:16.360 | It will depend on whether or not you're out on a date

00:43:18.700 | with somebody that you would loathe to find out later

00:43:21.800 | that you had food in your teeth

00:43:23.720 | or whether or not you're with somebody you're more familiar

00:43:25.460 | with where that would not really matter much

00:43:27.520 | or the other person would tell you this kind of thing.

00:43:29.880 | What does it mean to be at one location

00:43:32.340 | or another location along this continuum

00:43:34.840 | of interoception or exteroception?

00:43:37.040 | Well, we know what it means neurally, right?

00:43:39.280 | We know that if you are more interoceptively aware

00:43:42.460 | your insulin, ACC are active, but that's not very useful.

00:43:45.100 | That's not helpful as a tool, that's just a fact.

00:43:47.980 | Now there have actually been studies

00:43:50.080 | of what a meditation practice can do

00:43:52.900 | in terms of moving you along this continuum

00:43:55.960 | from where you naturally sit in order to help you function

00:44:00.480 | not just during the meditation, but at all times.

00:44:03.560 | And in order to illustrate this,

00:44:05.560 | I want to start with a description

00:44:06.700 | of what is now a classic study.

00:44:09.040 | It's a very cool study, has a very cool name.

00:44:11.560 | It talks about something very important

00:44:13.620 | that will come up again and again in today's conversation.

00:44:15.720 | That's something called the default mode network.

00:44:18.400 | The default mode network is a collection

00:44:19.960 | of different brain areas that essentially are active

00:44:22.560 | when we're not doing much of anything.

00:44:24.520 | And certainly is active when we are not focused

00:44:28.140 | on one particular task or conversation or activity.

00:44:31.680 | The default mode network can be thought of more or less

00:44:34.980 | as the network that generates mind wandering

00:44:38.200 | or our thoughts drifting from the past

00:44:40.480 | to the present to the future.

00:44:41.760 | Remember earlier, I talked about how

00:44:43.440 | your perceptual spotlight can either be two spotlights

00:44:46.380 | or they can merge.

00:44:47.760 | Well, similarly, human beings can think about the past,

00:44:50.980 | surely, the present, definitely, and the future.

00:44:55.200 | And it turns out we can also split our thoughts

00:44:58.400 | just like we can split our perception

00:45:00.420 | into two of those three things.

00:45:02.660 | So I can think about the past, a past event,

00:45:05.280 | and I can think about the present.

00:45:06.500 | I can split my thinking and my memory in that way.

00:45:09.220 | I can also think about the present and the future.

00:45:11.120 | I can also think about the future and the past,

00:45:14.140 | although it's very difficult, although not impossible,

00:45:17.700 | to split one's thinking and memory into the past,

00:45:20.640 | the present, and future simultaneously.

00:45:22.580 | Not easily done, but pretty easy to split one's attention

00:45:26.100 | and thinking into two of those three things,

00:45:28.880 | either the past, the present, and the future,

00:45:31.340 | or any two of those three things, okay?

00:45:34.080 | Just like with attentional spotlighting,

00:45:35.880 | you can place your mind, your thinking, and your memory,

00:45:38.740 | your cognition onto one of those things

00:45:41.580 | that'd be very, very present or the past and the present

00:45:44.780 | and so on and so forth.

00:45:46.280 | The default mode network,

00:45:48.520 | while it involves a lot of different brain areas,

00:45:50.580 | can be thought of simply as the network of brain areas

00:45:54.740 | that are active when your mind is wandering

00:45:57.440 | between these different time domains.

00:45:59.180 | And the paper I'd like to share with you,

00:46:00.740 | as I mentioned before, is now a classic paper,

00:46:02.860 | has a wonderful title, which is,

00:46:05.180 | "A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind."

00:46:08.180 | Now, that sounds almost like a news article

00:46:09.900 | or a news article about a scientific paper,

00:46:12.580 | but that's actually the title of the scientific paper,

00:46:14.780 | which was published in the journal Science,

00:46:16.900 | which is one of the three apex journals.

00:46:19.440 | Scientific publishing is competitive,

00:46:21.180 | but it's especially competitive to get manuscripts accepted

00:46:24.900 | into science, into nature, and into the journal cell.

00:46:28.020 | So it represents kind of one of the Super Bowl,

00:46:31.220 | NBA championships, and Stanley Cup, if you will,

00:46:34.300 | for you sports aficionados of scientific publishing.

00:46:36.640 | This is a paper from Matthew Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert.

00:46:39.540 | It was published in 2010,

00:46:41.580 | but it's still considered a classic.

00:46:43.060 | And this paper, "A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,"

00:46:45.680 | has a number of very important points.

00:46:47.100 | I'm going to paraphrase certain elements of it for you,

00:46:49.620 | because they say essentially what I would like you to know,

00:46:52.220 | far better than I could say.

00:46:54.920 | So first of all, they start out with a statement,

00:46:57.400 | which I confess I disagree with,

00:46:59.680 | which is, "Unlike other animals,

00:47:01.440 | "human beings spend a lot of time thinking

00:47:03.280 | "about what is not going on around them,

00:47:05.560 | "contemplating events that happened in the past,

00:47:07.640 | "might happen in the future, or will never happen at all."

00:47:10.800 | I agree with their assertion that human beings do that.

00:47:13.680 | That's certainly my experience.

00:47:15.260 | Although I must say,

00:47:16.500 | I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever

00:47:18.900 | that other animals don't do it also.

00:47:21.540 | So my apologies, Killingsworth and Gilbert,

00:47:23.840 | but I'd be happy to go toe to toe with you on that.

00:47:25.560 | I am not aware of any data that prove one way or the other

00:47:29.160 | what other animals are thinking.

00:47:30.920 | So let's set aside other animals

00:47:33.980 | and let's focus on the human animal.

00:47:36.440 | Now, their point is still a very good one,

00:47:39.040 | which is that humans have this wandering of the mind

00:47:42.400 | that they call stimulus-independent thought.

00:47:44.400 | That is, there's nothing happening to create these thoughts

00:47:47.220 | or anything happening in the immediate environment.

00:47:49.720 | These thoughts are just happening on their own internally.

00:47:52.420 | That's the default mode network.

00:47:54.880 | This study was important.

00:47:56.240 | In fact, it was a landmark study

00:47:57.540 | because they did it right about the time

00:47:59.260 | that smartphones became widely available and in use.

00:48:03.260 | So again, 2010.

00:48:04.600 | So they basically pinged people.

00:48:06.740 | They contacted people on their iPhones many times per day.

00:48:11.880 | And they did this for well over 2,200 adults.

00:48:15.960 | They had a mix of male and female people in this study.

00:48:19.780 | The mean age was 34 years,

00:48:21.240 | but there was a mean, of course, mean average,

00:48:23.640 | but there were a range of different ages and so forth.

00:48:26.560 | And at any moment they asked people,

00:48:28.120 | "What are you feeling right now?"

00:48:29.920 | And they also asked them, "What are you doing right now?"

00:48:32.540 | So they were looking for the match or mismatch

00:48:34.600 | between what people were doing and what they were feeling.

00:48:36.720 | They were essentially trying to probe

00:48:38.160 | what people were thinking about.

00:48:39.720 | And they also addressed that.

00:48:41.360 | And they came up with a kind of a bubble chart, if you will,

00:48:45.560 | where the bigger the bubble,

00:48:47.320 | the more answers came back about one particular thing.

00:48:50.420 | And they assessed whether or not people were happy or not

00:48:52.880 | in that moment or sad or not,

00:48:54.280 | whether or not they were focused

00:48:55.220 | on what they were doing or not.

00:48:56.660 | There are a lot of bubbles in this chart,

00:48:58.040 | so I'm not going to read them all.

00:48:59.440 | But the important points that came from the data,

00:49:02.320 | and again, there's a very large data set,

00:49:04.240 | was that, and here again, I'm paraphrasing,

00:49:06.100 | first people's minds wandered frequently

00:49:08.180 | regardless of what they were doing.

00:49:10.960 | In nearly half of the samples taken,

00:49:14.340 | people were generally thinking about something else,

00:49:16.680 | except it turns out there's just one little bubble

00:49:18.900 | sitting way far out on the horizon here.

00:49:21.540 | People claimed, and I'm inclined to believe them,

00:49:24.780 | that they tend to be very focused on making love

00:49:28.140 | if they were making love in the moment

00:49:29.840 | where they were pinged on their iPhone.

00:49:31.040 | Now, why their iPhone was there with them at that moment,

00:49:33.460 | I don't know.

00:49:34.300 | That wasn't included in this description of the study.

00:49:37.380 | But all the other activities, grooming and self-care,

00:49:39.820 | listening to the news, watching television,

00:49:43.200 | relaxing, working, et cetera, et cetera,

00:49:46.380 | during all those activities,

00:49:47.700 | people claimed that their mind wandered a lot.

00:49:49.900 | And then they also assessed, of course, their mood

00:49:52.340 | and how those people felt at any given moment,

00:49:55.920 | depending on what they were doing

00:49:57.100 | and how well their mind and their emotions

00:50:00.900 | matched what they were doing.

00:50:02.300 | And what they say here is second,

00:50:03.960 | they revealed that people were less happy

00:50:06.860 | when their minds were wandering than when they were not.

00:50:09.300 | And this was true during all activities.

00:50:12.420 | And then third, what people were thinking at a given moment

00:50:16.940 | was far better a predictor of their happiness

00:50:20.460 | than what they were doing.

00:50:21.880 | So this is interesting,

00:50:22.900 | and I think matches a lot of people's experience.

00:50:25.460 | In fact, I think as you hear about this study,

00:50:27.460 | many of you will probably just say, well, duh.

00:50:29.860 | I mean, if you're working and you don't like your work

00:50:32.060 | and you're thinking about something bad that happened,

00:50:34.200 | well, then of course you're not going to be happy.

00:50:37.060 | But the key point of this study is that

00:50:39.540 | it did not necessarily have to be the case

00:50:42.660 | that people were thinking about something unpleasant.

00:50:44.920 | In fact, if people were working

00:50:47.700 | and they were thinking about something else

00:50:49.460 | that was pleasant, that also made them feel unhappy.

00:50:53.660 | In other words, the mismatch between being in an activity

00:50:57.300 | and having our mind elsewhere led people to report

00:51:00.980 | themselves as feeling more unhappy in that moment.

00:51:03.640 | And when you total this up,

00:51:04.620 | what you find is that people are often not present

00:51:07.480 | to what they are doing,

00:51:08.660 | and that is a great source of unhappiness,

00:51:10.760 | even if their thoughts are those of happy, joyful thoughts.

00:51:15.760 | So this is interesting,

00:51:16.920 | and I think runs counter to what most of us have heard

00:51:20.580 | or have been taught, which is think good thoughts,

00:51:23.300 | try and suppress bad thoughts,

00:51:24.660 | have a good internal landscape, create a good narrative.

00:51:28.220 | That is all true.

00:51:30.000 | But equally, if not more important,

00:51:33.140 | is to have the ability to be fully engaged

00:51:36.060 | in what you are doing at a given moment.

00:51:37.980 | That is the strongest predictor of being happy.

00:51:40.980 | And there were several other studies

00:51:42.580 | that followed up on this,

00:51:43.540 | but their conclusion that they put

00:51:44.680 | in the final short paragraph of this paper,

00:51:46.380 | I think really captures it beautifully.

00:51:48.140 | They say, and here I'm quoting directly,

00:51:49.580 | in conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind,

00:51:52.900 | and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

00:51:55.620 | The ability to think about what is not happening

00:51:58.180 | in a moment, I added the in a moment part,

00:52:00.620 | is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.

00:52:04.900 | So I know I'm not alone in believing that this paper,

00:52:07.920 | a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,

00:52:09.380 | and we will provide a link to this paper

00:52:10.840 | in the show note captions,

00:52:12.140 | is absolutely key in understanding

00:52:14.780 | why a meditation practice is so important,

00:52:17.080 | because a meditation practice

00:52:19.380 | is really about adjusting your place

00:52:21.940 | along that interoceptive, exteroceptive continuum

00:52:26.180 | to what you happen to be experiencing in that moment.

00:52:30.540 | And while most people think of a meditative practice

00:52:32.800 | as focusing on what's going on internally,

00:52:35.460 | with your eyes closed, third eye center,

00:52:37.060 | focusing on your breathing, et cetera,

00:52:38.520 | for any number of minutes, or maybe even an hour or longer,

00:52:41.460 | there are other forms of meditation

00:52:44.180 | in which your exteroception dominates,

00:52:46.460 | in which you are actively focusing on things outside

00:52:50.380 | or beyond the confines of your skin and internal landscape.

00:52:53.620 | And that too is meditation.

00:52:57.180 | And if we are to take the work of Killingsworth and Gilbert,

00:53:00.700 | this wandering mind is an unhappy mind, seriously.

00:53:03.860 | And I know a number of other laboratories have

00:53:05.860 | and have supported this research with their findings

00:53:08.280 | again and again and again.

00:53:09.840 | What this means is that meditating

00:53:12.620 | is not necessarily a practice

00:53:14.180 | that we do divorced from the rest of life.

00:53:17.180 | Meditation and mindfulness in particular,

00:53:19.260 | being present to what we are doing in a given moment,

00:53:22.940 | is one of the essential keys to happiness and improved mood,

00:53:27.420 | even if what we are doing is unpleasant.

00:53:30.300 | So that brings us to a tool,

00:53:31.820 | and it's a tool that any and all of us can use,

00:53:33.860 | whether or not you tend to be interoceptively dominant,

00:53:37.140 | that you tend to pay more attention

00:53:38.600 | to your bodily sensations, or exteroceptively dominant.

00:53:42.120 | And again, if you don't know the answer to that question,

00:53:44.420 | there's a simple test that you can do.

00:53:46.140 | You can just sit down or lie down, close your eyes,

00:53:49.380 | and you can ask yourself or assess

00:53:52.980 | whether or not your attention tends

00:53:54.620 | to fleet to things outside of you, right?

00:53:58.820 | Cars honking or going by, people in the room,

00:54:02.100 | or whether or not you tend to be able to focus

00:54:03.940 | on your internal landscape to the exclusion of exteroception

00:54:06.860 | and attention to things outside the confines

00:54:08.680 | of your skin easily.

00:54:10.100 | Now, of course, this will depend on context and situation,

00:54:12.740 | even how well rested you are, et cetera,

00:54:14.820 | but that's exactly the point.

00:54:16.540 | This is the sort of thing you want to do

00:54:19.180 | every time you decide to do a meditation practice.

00:54:22.400 | In fact, I would suggest that you use this

00:54:26.300 | to determine what meditation you do at any given moment.

00:54:30.100 | So let's say you are somebody who is a regular meditator,

00:54:32.620 | or let's say you're somebody who's never meditated

00:54:34.620 | and you'd like to develop a meditation practice.

00:54:37.220 | I suggest that you do a test of whether or not

00:54:40.900 | you are more interoceptively dominant

00:54:42.900 | or exteroceptively dominant in that moment, okay?

00:54:46.340 | Again, this is not a personality trait.

00:54:48.460 | This is a question about where you happen to be in a moment.

00:54:51.260 | So let's say you're on a plane or you're in the car.

00:54:53.740 | If you're in the car, please don't close your eyes

00:54:55.020 | while driving, that's sort of obvious,

00:54:56.300 | but do this in a safe way, please.

00:54:59.460 | But stop, close your eyes, and assess whether or not

00:55:04.420 | you can access and focus your attention

00:55:07.080 | primarily on your internal state

00:55:09.740 | or whether or not your attention and perception

00:55:12.160 | gets pulled to something external, to exteroception.

00:55:15.900 | And again, that will vary depending on circumstance

00:55:19.020 | and who you are.

00:55:19.980 | Then I suggest opening your eyes

00:55:22.060 | and trying to focus your attention

00:55:23.880 | to something external to you

00:55:26.060 | and seeing or evaluating the extent to which

00:55:28.760 | you can divorce your perception from sensations

00:55:32.620 | that occur at the level of your skin or internally.

00:55:35.620 | Now, I should say that there's no technology,

00:55:37.700 | at least not that I'm aware of,

00:55:39.780 | absence of fMRI machine,

00:55:41.780 | in which case you are inside an fMRI machine

00:55:43.860 | while you do this,

00:55:44.700 | but unless you are in that experiment,

00:55:46.420 | and most of us aren't,

00:55:48.280 | there's no technology that can tell you, for instance,

00:55:51.420 | whether or not you are interoceptively dominant

00:55:53.480 | or exteroceptively dominant

00:55:54.860 | and whether or not the ratio is 75 to 25

00:55:58.140 | or what have you at any given moment.

00:55:59.880 | You have to assess this subjectively.

00:56:01.980 | However, if you sit down, for instance,

00:56:04.520 | and you notice that you can equally split your attention

00:56:06.600 | between internal sensations and external sensations,

00:56:09.780 | or whether or not you find yourself

00:56:10.940 | pulled into external sensations

00:56:12.480 | when you're trying to focus inward,

00:56:14.280 | or you find yourself pulled inward

00:56:16.740 | when you're trying to focus outward,

00:56:18.200 | well, that will dictate the sort of meditation

00:56:20.160 | that you perhaps ought to perform in that moment.

00:56:23.300 | Let me give an example of how you would do this.

00:56:26.420 | You would stop in some way,

00:56:28.060 | so sit or lie down,

00:56:28.900 | close your eyes,

00:56:30.180 | and evaluate whether or not you can essentially rule out

00:56:35.100 | or eliminate attention to all outside events.

00:56:38.500 | Most people won't be able to do that entirely,

00:56:40.500 | but try and focus your attention, for instance,

00:56:42.120 | on your breathing or the typical third eye center,

00:56:44.080 | you know, focusing at a spot right behind your forehead.

00:56:46.420 | If you feel you can do that reasonably well

00:56:48.180 | to the exclusion of what's happening around you,

00:56:50.600 | well, then an important question arises.

00:56:53.620 | Should you meditate in a way

00:56:55.220 | to enhance that interoceptive awareness?

00:56:57.700 | Or rather, should you meditate in a way,

00:57:00.020 | for instance, with your eyes open

00:57:01.600 | and your attention on a particular portion

00:57:03.380 | of the landscape you're in,

00:57:04.420 | like a tree or maybe even an object or a plant

00:57:08.860 | or something else in your immediate environment,

00:57:10.920 | to try and cultivate or enhance

00:57:12.780 | your exteroceptive awareness?

00:57:14.780 | That's up to you,

00:57:15.740 | but my bias would be one in which

00:57:18.260 | you work against your default state.

00:57:20.580 | Again, the default mode network

00:57:22.380 | is where you land on this interoceptive,

00:57:25.380 | exteroceptive continuum

00:57:27.440 | is going to lead to more mind wandering,

00:57:29.720 | whereas when you encourage,

00:57:31.880 | or we could even say force yourself a little bit

00:57:34.160 | to anchor your attention

00:57:35.780 | to either inside your body or outside your body,

00:57:38.280 | and you make that decision

00:57:40.520 | according to what you are doing less easily,

00:57:43.780 | well, then you are actively training up the neural circuits.

00:57:48.660 | You are engaging so-called neuroplasticity,

00:57:50.640 | the brain's ability to change in response to experience.

00:57:52.900 | You are deliberately engaging a shift along that continuum.

00:57:57.900 | To make this crystal clear, what I mean is this.

00:58:00.260 | Let me give an example.

00:58:01.760 | If I were to sit down and I want to do some meditation,

00:58:04.980 | let's just say three minutes of meditation,

00:58:06.600 | there's good evidence that even three minutes of meditation

00:58:09.020 | can be beneficial for a variety of things,

00:58:10.900 | including enhanced focus and enhanced anxiety management.

00:58:15.140 | Let's say I sit down and I notice

00:58:16.500 | that I can really focus inward on what's happening

00:58:19.940 | at the level of my skin and my internal organs,

00:58:23.800 | and I can rule out everything.

00:58:24.960 | Maybe that's 'cause the room is quiet,

00:58:26.340 | or maybe it's just because my brain is in a state

00:58:28.920 | that I'm particularly good at that at that moment,

00:58:31.900 | or maybe it's just a natural ability.

00:58:33.900 | Well, then I would opt for a three-minute meditation practice

00:58:36.980 | in which I deliberately exterocept

00:58:40.020 | that I build up the circuitry

00:58:41.840 | to focus on something external to me,

00:58:44.380 | because I want, and I think most people would like,

00:58:47.180 | to have an adaptive mechanism within them

00:58:50.340 | so that they can slide along that continuum,

00:58:52.460 | and they don't default to whatever happens to be easiest

00:58:55.860 | for them in that moment.

00:58:57.700 | Now, if I were to sit down

00:58:59.060 | and try and focus on what's going on internally,

00:59:01.060 | and I kept getting distracted by things happening

00:59:02.980 | outside of me, opening my eyes,

00:59:04.540 | or feeling like I need to reach for my phone,

00:59:06.240 | or paying attention to the sounds in the room,

00:59:08.300 | well, then I would actively engage a meditation practice,

00:59:11.180 | in this case, a three-minute example, but it could be longer,

00:59:14.040 | where I'm deliberately trying to focus my perception

00:59:17.780 | on events at the level of the confines of my skin

00:59:20.540 | and internally.

00:59:21.760 | Why do I say this?

00:59:22.600 | Well, I love to use the phrase anytime with kids

00:59:26.880 | when they say, "This is really hard,"

00:59:28.280 | or "Something's challenging,"

00:59:29.320 | or adults will say, "That's really tough."

00:59:31.120 | Well, as my graduate advisor used to say,

00:59:33.560 | "That means you're learning."

00:59:35.080 | If something were easy,

00:59:36.220 | if you can perform any activity or thought, et cetera,

00:59:39.180 | well, then there is absolutely zero reason

00:59:41.580 | for your neural circuits to change.

00:59:43.620 | It's the friction, it's the feeling that something is hard

00:59:46.340 | that turns on the enormous variety of mechanisms

00:59:49.520 | at the level of cells, et cetera,

00:59:51.160 | that allow you to potentially change your neural circuitry.

00:59:54.100 | So challenge and discomfort is the signal

00:59:58.200 | to your brain and body that something needs to change.

01:00:01.020 | So I'm encouraging you to embark on meditative practices

01:00:05.180 | that are not your default, okay,

01:00:08.560 | to essentially go against the grain

01:00:11.300 | of where your interoceptive bias

01:00:13.540 | or your extra receptive bias happens to be

01:00:15.640 | at a given moment.

01:00:16.700 | And again, this will change.

01:00:17.700 | For some of you, this will change across the day

01:00:19.980 | where early in the day, you are very, very good

01:00:23.240 | at doing an interoceptive biased meditation,

01:00:26.120 | and later in the day, you aren't.

01:00:28.420 | I actually believe based on the data that I've covered

01:00:30.560 | and we'll get into a few more papers about this,

01:00:33.060 | and my lab is actively working on this as well,

01:00:35.580 | that a meditative practice can be made far more effective.

01:00:40.580 | That is, it can invoke more neuroplasticity,

01:00:44.060 | more shift in brain states and brain circuitry

01:00:48.020 | if we do not take the easy path.

01:00:51.700 | That is, we go against the grain

01:00:54.740 | of what our brain would naturally do in a given moment.

01:00:57.780 | So if you're in a crowded airport

01:00:59.220 | and you're finding that everything's very distracting,

01:01:01.600 | well, then that would be a great time

01:01:04.140 | to do some interoceptive focused meditation.

01:01:06.860 | Whereas if you are really in your head,

01:01:09.060 | you're looping thoughts about the past and present,

01:01:11.160 | maybe you're even in obsessive thought,

01:01:13.100 | well, that would be a terrific time, an ideal time really,

01:01:16.400 | to do a short meditation

01:01:18.640 | focused on something external to you.

01:01:20.840 | In both cases, whether or not you're focused

01:01:22.800 | on interoceptive bias or extra receptive bias,

01:01:27.020 | you are going against, or I should say you're pushing back

01:01:30.160 | against your default mode network.

01:01:32.300 | I would argue it's going to be far more effective.

01:01:35.260 | That is, you're going to reduce or shift the activity

01:01:38.380 | of that default mode network far more

01:01:40.420 | and in a far more beneficial way

01:01:42.840 | if you actively try and suppress your bias

01:01:46.180 | toward being more interoceptive or extra receptive.

01:01:48.740 | Now, I think that's immensely beneficial

01:01:50.940 | both for the immediate changes that you experience,

01:01:53.340 | what others have called a state change,

01:01:55.820 | 'cause that's what it is.

01:01:57.280 | And it also can lead to, as we referred to earlier,

01:02:00.820 | more neuroplasticity, more changes in the brain circuits

01:02:03.920 | that underlie your default mode network

01:02:06.420 | and lead to what are called trait changes.

01:02:08.380 | And I want to be very clear that I am not the first

01:02:11.100 | to make this state versus trait distinction.

01:02:13.820 | That's a distinction that was raised

01:02:15.640 | in a really wonderful book.

01:02:17.100 | In fact, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

01:02:19.120 | The book is "Altered Traits,

01:02:20.580 | "Science Reveals How Meditation Changes

01:02:22.600 | "Your Mind, Brain, and Body."

01:02:24.940 | This is a book by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson.

01:02:28.000 | They've done a terrific work in many writings

01:02:30.180 | and many TED Talks, et cetera, about meditation.

01:02:32.620 | I would say that circa 2016, 2017,

01:02:36.340 | this book really captured what I believe to be

01:02:39.620 | the most essential elements of the science of meditation

01:02:42.460 | and a lot of the history of it as well.

01:02:44.620 | Today, we are focusing on much of what's covered

01:02:46.820 | in this book, but also a lot of things

01:02:48.020 | that have happened since 2017.

01:02:50.780 | In fact, most of the papers that I'm going to talk about

01:02:52.940 | are papers that were published after 2017.

01:02:55.780 | But again, there's a wonderful book

01:02:56.880 | where they very clearly distinguish

01:02:59.000 | between state changes and trait changes,

01:03:01.080 | trait changes being the more long lasting ones.

01:03:03.840 | My read of this book and the literature that follows

01:03:07.320 | is, again, that when you sit down to meditate,

01:03:11.060 | it is going to be most effective

01:03:13.200 | to do that interoceptive, exteroceptive bias assessment.

01:03:16.740 | Ask yourself whether or not you are more in your head

01:03:19.140 | or outside your head, if you will.

01:03:21.260 | And then to do a meditation practice

01:03:23.260 | that runs counter to where you happen to be at.

01:03:27.020 | That is, that pushes you more externally

01:03:29.300 | if you're in your head.

01:03:30.500 | And if you're more focused on what's going on around you,

01:03:33.060 | that pushes you more internally.

01:03:35.020 | Now, I think most people are familiar

01:03:36.440 | with how to do an interoceptive biased meditation.

01:03:39.240 | Again, that would be setting a timer.

01:03:40.580 | Maybe you don't even set a timer.

01:03:41.880 | You just sit or lie down, close your eyes,

01:03:43.320 | focus on that third eye center behind your forehead

01:03:46.120 | or focus on your breathing or your bodily sensations.

01:03:48.940 | That's typical and often discussed.

01:03:50.540 | Exteroceptive based meditations,

01:03:53.600 | you pick a focal point outside

01:03:56.820 | or beyond the confines of your skin.

01:03:58.620 | So that could be, for instance, a point on the wall.

01:04:01.020 | If you are indoors, it could be a plant.

01:04:03.440 | It could be a point on the horizon far away.

01:04:06.360 | What you will find is that your visual system

01:04:09.240 | will fatigue a little bit

01:04:10.280 | when you concentrate your visual focus at that location.

01:04:12.720 | I want to remind you that it is perfectly okay

01:04:15.080 | and in fact necessary to blink.

01:04:17.100 | So you should blink.

01:04:17.940 | You can relax your face.

01:04:18.840 | You can change your expression.

01:04:19.960 | There is no rule that says that you can't do those things.

01:04:22.600 | This is not just beaming a particular location in space

01:04:26.040 | and holding your eyelids open.

01:04:27.580 | I've been accused many times of not blinking very often.

01:04:30.060 | That's for other reasons.

01:04:30.980 | It's part of the way I access memory

01:04:33.140 | about what I want to say.

01:04:34.160 | I don't use a prompter here.

01:04:35.440 | So I'm accessing from a sort of an internal image in my head.

01:04:40.220 | That's how my memory works.

01:04:41.360 | But in any case,

01:04:42.580 | if you're going to do an exteroceptive biased meditation,

01:04:45.800 | there is absolutely no reason

01:04:47.180 | why you wouldn't look away from that location

01:04:49.380 | every once in a while.

01:04:50.220 | In the same way that if you're focused on internal thoughts

01:04:53.360 | with your eyes closed and focused on your breathing,

01:04:55.420 | every once in a while,

01:04:56.520 | your thoughts will skip away from that breathing

01:05:00.520 | or from your third eye center.

01:05:01.640 | In fact, and this is discussed in the book "Altered Traits,"

01:05:05.140 | but by many other people as well,

01:05:07.540 | one of the key elements of any meditative practice,

01:05:10.100 | whether or not it's interoceptively focused

01:05:12.260 | or exteroceptively focused,

01:05:14.200 | is that it's really a refocusing practice.

01:05:17.600 | The more number of times that you have to yank yourself

01:05:20.960 | back into attending or perceiving one specific things.

01:05:24.080 | In other words, the more times your mind wanders

01:05:26.120 | and you bring it back,

01:05:27.500 | actually the more effective that practice is.

01:05:29.840 | Again, if you can just focus on one location

01:05:32.080 | with laser precision and your mind never darts away

01:05:34.320 | from that and you don't have to bring it back,

01:05:35.720 | well, then there's no neuroplasticity.

01:05:37.440 | Nothing needs to change because your nervous system

01:05:40.100 | will effectively know it's performing perfectly.

01:05:42.300 | So if you're somebody who tries to do meditation,

01:05:44.160 | you find that your mind just wanders,

01:05:45.580 | just remember every time you scruff yourself

01:05:47.660 | and pull yourself back

01:05:48.620 | to focusing on some location externally,

01:05:50.820 | or focus back on your breath or your third eye center,

01:05:53.440 | each one of those are just opportunities to do better.

01:05:56.740 | They are essential to the improvement process.

01:06:00.260 | Think about them as ascending a staircase of refocusing.

01:06:03.460 | Every time you refocus, you're going up one more level,

01:06:06.500 | another stair, another stair, another stair.

01:06:08.900 | And I think that will move you away

01:06:10.980 | from the kind of judgmental process of thinking,

01:06:13.380 | oh, like I can't focus on anything.

01:06:14.880 | Pretty soon, what you'll notice is

01:06:17.280 | that the refocusing process will happen so quickly

01:06:20.520 | that you don't even perceive it.

01:06:22.140 | And again, this is something that's borne out

01:06:23.900 | in the neuroimaging data.

01:06:24.900 | A lot of people think that

01:06:26.700 | they can focus with laser precision,

01:06:28.960 | but actually what they are better at doing

01:06:30.600 | is refocusing more quickly and consistently over time.

01:06:34.040 | There's a classic study about this

01:06:35.960 | in very experienced meditators that was done in Japan

01:06:38.280 | where they had people

01:06:39.920 | with varying levels of meditation ability.

01:06:42.400 | So some who had never meditated,

01:06:44.280 | others who are really expert meditators

01:06:46.020 | with many hundreds, if not thousands of hours of meditation

01:06:48.840 | under their belt.

01:06:49.680 | And they had those people listen to 20 tones

01:06:52.860 | repeated over and over, the same tone.

01:06:54.860 | And they found that the expert meditators

01:06:56.860 | could really focus, and they did this by brain imaging,

01:07:00.160 | they could really focus on all 20 tones.

01:07:02.400 | Whereas most people kind of attenuate

01:07:04.260 | or what's called habituate to the tone

01:07:05.740 | so that by the 10th or 11th tone,

01:07:07.060 | their mind is really going to something else.

01:07:09.500 | Now that's wonderful,

01:07:11.220 | but that really just tells us

01:07:12.380 | that expert meditators have better focus.

01:07:14.280 | But it turns out that the more modern neuroimaging studies

01:07:18.000 | have shown that they don't have better focus

01:07:19.600 | such that they're staying in a very narrow trench of focus.

01:07:22.400 | What they're doing is they're exiting focus

01:07:24.100 | and going back in more quickly, more quickly, more quickly,

01:07:26.260 | over and over again.

01:07:27.480 | So rather than think about your ability to focus,

01:07:30.060 | think about your ability to refocus.

01:07:32.040 | And the more number of times you have to refocus,

01:07:34.180 | the better training you're getting.

01:07:35.720 | So earlier I mentioned doing this interoceptive biased

01:07:38.120 | or exteroceptive biased meditation for three minutes.

01:07:41.420 | Why did I say three minutes?

01:07:42.500 | Well, three minutes seems like a reasonable number

01:07:44.220 | for most people to do consistently, you know, once a day.

01:07:48.380 | And in fact, there are some studies of one minute meditations

01:07:51.260 | and three minute meditations and 10 and 60.

01:07:53.680 | My laboratory has been studying

01:07:55.060 | a five minute a day meditation,

01:07:56.780 | and that clearly has benefits.

01:07:58.660 | But I think it's also clear that by three minutes,

01:08:02.900 | many of the benefits are starting to arrive.

01:08:05.140 | And so, well,

01:08:06.300 | I'm not pointing to any one particular data point here.

01:08:09.420 | It's very clear that forcing oneself

01:08:12.980 | to direct one's perception, that is your attention,

01:08:17.220 | to your internal state or to something external to you

01:08:20.900 | is immensely beneficial if you do it consistently

01:08:23.220 | and is, again, especially beneficial

01:08:25.540 | if you're focusing your attention

01:08:27.660 | on the portion of your experience,

01:08:30.520 | either internal or external to you,

01:08:32.420 | that is not the one that you would default to

01:08:34.780 | in that moment.

01:08:36.100 | And some people have taken this to the extreme to say that,

01:08:38.660 | you know, you can even just move about your day

01:08:40.260 | and then every once in a while,

01:08:41.220 | just do a one breath meditation.

01:08:43.380 | To be honest, when I look at the whole of the data,

01:08:46.080 | it seems as if it doesn't really matter

01:08:49.720 | in order to derive most of the benefits

01:08:51.780 | of a meditation practice.

01:08:53.180 | Now, I'm a big fan of some of the newer meditation apps

01:08:56.260 | that are out there.

01:08:57.100 | One in particular that I've been using

01:08:58.840 | and that actually I started using

01:09:00.160 | because my dad is a big fan of it

01:09:02.020 | and he does now fairly long meditations.

01:09:04.180 | He's doing about 10 or 20 minutes

01:09:06.060 | at least every other day and often every day.

01:09:08.180 | And he convinced me to check out the Waking Up app

01:09:10.860 | that Sam Harris has put out.

01:09:12.400 | I looked at it.

01:09:14.740 | I think some of it sits behind a paywall,

01:09:17.000 | but you can access much of it

01:09:19.180 | or at least do a trial and try it out

01:09:21.480 | without having to get behind that paywall.

01:09:22.980 | They're not a sponsor of this podcast, I should mention,

01:09:25.260 | but I decided to use the Waking Up app.

01:09:27.020 | I think it's terrific.

01:09:28.140 | And I think one of the reasons it's terrific

01:09:29.920 | is that Sam includes short descriptions

01:09:32.140 | of what meditation is doing

01:09:33.940 | and what a specific meditation can do for you

01:09:36.580 | just prior to doing that meditation.

01:09:38.700 | So those meditations can be quite brief.

01:09:40.380 | Some of them are a minute long, two minutes long,

01:09:42.260 | some are longer or even quite a bit longer.

01:09:45.100 | That app I think includes a variety of meditations

01:09:48.080 | that really encompasses the huge range of possibilities

01:09:52.020 | that are possible with meditation

01:09:53.700 | and that at least by my experience of the Waking Up app

01:09:57.200 | has led to my most consistent meditation practice.

01:10:00.820 | And of course, I would love to get Sam on the podcast

01:10:03.100 | as a guest so we could talk about the sort of underpinnings

01:10:06.320 | of the Waking Up app

01:10:07.240 | and his views on everything from meditation

01:10:09.500 | to I know he's big in the discussion

01:10:11.500 | about free will and consciousness,

01:10:12.940 | some of the very deep and somewhat abstract discussions.

01:10:15.700 | Really hope to get Sam on the podcast

01:10:17.420 | at a time not too far from now.

01:10:18.980 | Meanwhile, we've never met in person,

01:10:21.340 | but I absolutely love the Waking Up app, Sam,

01:10:24.260 | and I know my father does as well

01:10:26.160 | and I know many of you already use it.

01:10:27.700 | If you haven't tried it already,

01:10:28.820 | I really do encourage you to check it out.

01:10:30.820 | I want to talk just briefly

01:10:31.960 | about this Third Eye Center business

01:10:33.980 | because it turns out to be pretty interesting.

01:10:36.360 | The third eye is actually a name

01:10:38.260 | that's been given to another neural structure,

01:10:41.360 | or I should say structure because it's not strictly neural,

01:10:43.720 | and that's the pineal gland.

01:10:45.400 | And this has an interesting history.

01:10:47.260 | I promise I'm not taking off on a tangent here

01:10:49.560 | that isn't relevant to meditation.

01:10:51.960 | So you have a brain, of course,

01:10:54.260 | and on both sides of your brain,

01:10:55.760 | you tend to have mirror symmetric representations

01:10:58.600 | of the same things.

01:10:59.440 | What do I mean by that?

01:11:00.260 | Well, you have a prefrontal cortex on the right,

01:11:01.600 | you have a prefrontal cortex on the left,

01:11:03.060 | and they actually do slightly different things.

01:11:04.780 | Language is sometimes lateralized to one side,

01:11:06.980 | but in general, for every structure

01:11:09.820 | that you have on one side of the brain,

01:11:11.400 | you have the same structure

01:11:12.240 | on the opposite side of the brain.

01:11:13.980 | There's one clear exception to that,

01:11:15.880 | and that's the pineal gland.

01:11:17.300 | The pineal gland is the gland that makes melatonin,

01:11:20.800 | which at night when it gets dark secretes melatonin,

01:11:25.280 | and that melatonin makes you sleepy,

01:11:26.840 | it helps you fall asleep but not stay asleep.

01:11:28.520 | Descartes, right, the philosopher Descartes,

01:11:30.820 | asserted that the pineal was the seat of the soul

01:11:33.400 | because it was the one structure in the brain

01:11:36.100 | that he saw was not on both sides of the brain.

01:11:39.160 | It was only one of them and in the middle.

01:11:41.780 | Now, I don't know if it's the seat of the soul or not.

01:11:43.960 | I'm not in a position to make assessments like that,

01:11:47.840 | but what do we know about the pineal?

01:11:49.540 | The pineal, as I mentioned,

01:11:50.740 | is involved in releasing melatonin.

01:11:52.340 | It does a few other things as well,

01:11:54.320 | but it is also considered the third eye

01:11:58.780 | for a couple of reasons.

01:11:59.980 | One is that it responds to light,

01:12:03.100 | although in humans, not directly.

01:12:04.920 | So in birds and lizards and snakes,

01:12:06.620 | they actually either have a thin skull

01:12:08.260 | or, believe it or not, two holes in the top of their skull

01:12:10.600 | that allow light to go directly in.

01:12:12.580 | If you look at the head of a snake,

01:12:14.540 | light can go directly into their brain through these holes

01:12:18.260 | and activate the pineal to suppress melatonin

01:12:21.460 | and control their wakefulness, sleep rhythms.

01:12:24.940 | In birds, they don't have holes in their skull,

01:12:26.780 | but they have very thin skulls,

01:12:28.220 | and believe it or not, light can penetrate

01:12:30.320 | the thinness of the skull in many birds

01:12:33.740 | and communicates information about time of day

01:12:36.820 | and even time of year,

01:12:38.100 | and that's translated into hormonal signals

01:12:40.180 | such as melatonin release from the pineal.

01:12:42.380 | And so the pineal has been called the third eye

01:12:44.980 | because it's a light-sensitive organ inside the brain.

01:12:48.260 | In humans, the pineal sits deep, deep, deep to the surface,

01:12:53.140 | and light cannot get in there.

01:12:54.540 | In fact, if light can get into your brain,

01:12:57.220 | unless you are part of a specific experiment

01:12:59.420 | where that's the intention,

01:13:01.220 | or you're having neurosurgery or something of that sort,

01:13:03.640 | then you've got serious issues happening.

01:13:06.440 | That pineal sits deep, deep, deep

01:13:08.620 | near what's called the fourth ventricle,

01:13:10.860 | and it absolutely should not see light directly.

01:13:14.760 | So the idea that the pineal is the third eye in humans

01:13:18.220 | is not true.

01:13:19.740 | It just isn't true.

01:13:20.580 | So anytime someone says, "Oh, the pineal is your third eye,"

01:13:23.260 | that's not the third eye center

01:13:25.360 | that people are referring to when they talk about meditation.

01:13:28.420 | Now, you'll see a number of different forms of art

01:13:32.520 | where somebody will, it will be a picture of a face

01:13:35.680 | and the eyes will be closed,

01:13:36.760 | or sometimes open, there'll be literally a third eye,

01:13:38.580 | like a cyclops eye in the middle of the forehead.

01:13:41.520 | That has been proposed for many thousands of years

01:13:44.780 | to be "the seat of our consciousness."

01:13:47.980 | Now, that's interesting because that real estate

01:13:51.280 | behind the forehead actually turns out

01:13:52.920 | to be the prefrontal cortex,

01:13:54.120 | which we know from lesion studies and stimulation studies.

01:13:57.200 | If you remove that brain area,

01:13:58.760 | people become very reflexive.

01:14:00.920 | They are not thinking intentionally.

01:14:03.520 | They don't become deliberate.

01:14:04.660 | In fact, and this is kind of an eerie result,

01:14:07.660 | but if you inactivate, you turn off the prefrontal cortex

01:14:12.660 | and you give somebody the opportunity

01:14:15.380 | to play a shooting game, for instance,

01:14:17.920 | their accuracy goes through the roof.

01:14:20.520 | They become essentially like a machine.

01:14:21.920 | They see a stimulus, they shoot out.

01:14:23.160 | They see a stimulus, they shoot at it.

01:14:24.780 | Their accuracy is exceptional,

01:14:26.620 | but their ability to distinguish between enemy and friend

01:14:31.620 | completely disappears.

01:14:34.120 | So they become a highly effective motor,

01:14:37.200 | or I should say sensory motor machine,

01:14:40.160 | but their assessment and their judgment

01:14:42.680 | about right or wrong completely disappears.

01:14:45.020 | This is also true for people that have prefrontal damage.

01:14:47.720 | They often will have inappropriate behavior

01:14:49.920 | or a hard time suppressing behaviors, et cetera.

01:14:52.400 | So the third eye center as the seat of consciousness

01:14:55.840 | and our intention is something that makes sense generally

01:15:00.240 | with what we know about the neuroscience and neurology,

01:15:02.720 | but there's something more to it

01:15:04.000 | that I think is especially important for all of you

01:15:06.200 | that goes beyond anything about ancient traditions

01:15:08.560 | or pineals or birds or snakes

01:15:10.160 | and pits in the top of the head, and here's what it is.

01:15:12.960 | The brain itself, meaning the brain tissue,

01:15:17.420 | does not have any sensory neurons.

01:15:21.400 | What do I mean by that?

01:15:22.280 | Well, if I touch the top of my hand, I can feel that.

01:15:25.560 | If I want to sense my heartbeat,

01:15:28.480 | if I work at it, I can feel that.

01:15:31.000 | If I want to sense how I feel internally

01:15:33.960 | at the level of my stomach, is it full, is it empty,

01:15:36.260 | am I hungry, is it acidic, does it ache,

01:15:38.320 | or does it feel pleasant, et cetera, I can sense that.

01:15:41.680 | And that's because we have sensory neurons on our skin

01:15:44.160 | and in our body, et cetera.

01:15:45.280 | We also have sensory neurons in our eyes

01:15:46.680 | that let us perceive things externally.

01:15:48.560 | We have no sensory neurons on our brain.

01:15:51.180 | This is one of the reasons why you can remove the skull

01:15:54.160 | and do brain surgery on somebody who's wide awake

01:15:56.480 | and be poking around in there,

01:15:57.500 | and they don't need any anesthetic on the brain itself.

01:16:00.200 | They need anesthetic for the incision site,

01:16:02.920 | but they don't need anesthetic on the brain

01:16:04.400 | because it has no feeling.

01:16:06.720 | You have emotions, but there's no feeling.

01:16:09.360 | So normally we are perceiving and paying attention

01:16:13.180 | to what we are sensing, either externally, sights and sounds,

01:16:16.140 | again, exteroception, or internally,

01:16:18.120 | interoception, touch, et cetera.

01:16:20.700 | But by focusing our perception and our attention,

01:16:24.060 | not on our bodily surface, like a body scan,

01:16:27.280 | but to a point a couple centimeters

01:16:29.800 | or inches behind our forehead,

01:16:32.360 | we essentially are bringing that attentional,

01:16:34.720 | that perceptual spotlight,

01:16:36.120 | to a location in which there is no sensation.

01:16:40.160 | There's nothing to feel there.

01:16:42.160 | And when we do that, by closing our eyes

01:16:44.040 | and focusing on that "third eye center,"

01:16:46.560 | which is the prefrontal cortex, to be quite honest,

01:16:50.240 | when we do that, something else happens.

01:16:54.200 | And what happens is when we are not thinking about

01:16:57.460 | and perceiving our sensations, because there are none there,

01:17:00.760 | our thoughts and our emotions and our memories

01:17:04.820 | sort of mushroom up.

01:17:06.500 | A better way to put it would be that they geyser up

01:17:09.380 | and take on more prominence in our perception.

01:17:12.840 | What I mean by this is that normally,

01:17:15.400 | I'm not thinking about the contact point

01:17:18.040 | between me and this chair,

01:17:19.780 | but as I'm speaking, I'm in contact with the chair

01:17:22.720 | and those neurons are firing.

01:17:24.480 | But if I focus my energy and attention on them,

01:17:27.500 | they're going to fire the same,

01:17:28.760 | but more of my perception goes there.

01:17:30.440 | Similarly, I'm thinking things all the time, you are too,

01:17:33.360 | and I'm perceiving things all the time,

01:17:35.000 | and I'm remembering things all the time,

01:17:36.420 | and I'm anticipating things all the time about the future.

01:17:39.240 | But by focusing my attention on the one organ

01:17:42.760 | for which I have no sensation, that is my brain,

01:17:47.520 | well then, thoughts, feelings, and memories,

01:17:52.100 | feelings meaning emotional feelings,

01:17:54.740 | start to grow in their prominence,

01:17:58.060 | in my awareness and in my perception.

01:18:00.320 | And so this is why,

01:18:01.640 | when you sit down to a meditative practice,

01:18:03.600 | if it's a meditative practice where you close your eyes

01:18:05.620 | or you're focused on that third eye center,

01:18:07.680 | where you're focused on your brain,

01:18:09.500 | as opposed to your bodily surface

01:18:11.960 | or something external to you,

01:18:13.900 | the thoughts seem to come by in waves,

01:18:16.880 | and they can almost be overwhelming.

01:18:18.240 | It's very hard to, as it's often described,

01:18:21.400 | just sit back and watch your thoughts go by

01:18:23.160 | because there are so many of them.

01:18:24.840 | Actually, the best way to stop thinking

01:18:26.380 | is to really focus on something external

01:18:29.660 | or to focus on sensation.

01:18:31.840 | That's less thinking than it is perceiving senses, okay?

01:18:36.040 | So I don't want this to get too abstract.

01:18:38.380 | When people talk about the third eye center,

01:18:39.860 | they're not talking about the pineal,

01:18:41.080 | they're talking about prefrontal cortex.

01:18:42.400 | And when you direct your own attention

01:18:44.360 | to the very area of your brain that directs attention,

01:18:47.280 | there's nothing to sense there.

01:18:49.460 | The only things that will become present to you

01:18:52.200 | are feelings, emotions, that is, thoughts, and memories.

01:18:57.200 | And they will often arrive

01:19:00.340 | in what seems to be a very disorganized fashion.

01:19:02.740 | And the reason they arrive in somewhat disorganized fashion

01:19:06.760 | is because normally we just don't perceive things that way.

01:19:10.520 | Normally we are splitting our attention,

01:19:12.820 | our perception, that is,

01:19:14.240 | to multiple things, our sensation and our thoughts.

01:19:17.420 | When we put all of our perception into our thoughts,

01:19:20.080 | we see how disorganized, how wandering they are,

01:19:23.320 | and how, in fact, how random and intrusive those can be.

01:19:27.480 | Again, random and intrusive.

01:19:29.360 | And much of what we talked about in that paper earlier,

01:19:32.020 | the one where they asked people,

01:19:33.280 | "What are you doing and what are you feeling

01:19:34.580 | and how happy or how unhappy you are?"

01:19:36.640 | What they discovered was that most people

01:19:40.300 | are sort of in their head a lot.

01:19:42.120 | They're not really present to what they're doing,

01:19:44.480 | which leads me to the statement that I believe,

01:19:46.920 | at least based on the data, that paper included,

01:19:49.360 | that most people have an interoceptive bias.

01:19:53.680 | They're focused more on what's going on internally

01:19:55.960 | than they are focused on what's happening externally.

01:19:58.560 | There are certainly people who, for the opposite, is true,

01:20:02.120 | but I think that this is an issue

01:20:04.720 | because we hear so often about the need

01:20:07.720 | to do a meditation practice that allows us to focus inward

01:20:11.600 | and that we're getting yanked around

01:20:12.840 | by all the stressors of life, et cetera, et cetera.

01:20:15.040 | And we are, we're getting yanked around

01:20:16.480 | by all the stressors and demands of life.

01:20:18.660 | But as we do that, we tend to be very focused

01:20:21.340 | on what's happening with us.

01:20:22.900 | The data clearly point to the fact

01:20:24.880 | that being mindful and being aware

01:20:27.160 | can enhance one's level of presence and happiness,

01:20:31.000 | but we can go so far as to say

01:20:32.880 | that being mindful and aware of what's happening,

01:20:35.040 | not just with us, but external to us

01:20:37.360 | in our immediate environment,

01:20:38.440 | that includes what other people are saying and doing,

01:20:40.760 | that also can really enhance

01:20:43.100 | our sense of wellbeing and happiness.

01:20:44.720 | At least that's what the data point to.

01:20:46.460 | Let's briefly recap where we've been so far.

01:20:49.240 | We've talked a little bit about the brain networks

01:20:51.760 | that are activated during meditation,

01:20:53.680 | which include prefrontal cortex, ACC, the insula.

01:20:57.280 | We also talked about the difference

01:20:58.440 | between interoception and exteroception

01:21:01.040 | and the importance of assessing

01:21:03.400 | where you are along that continuum.

01:21:05.760 | And I should mention, of course,

01:21:06.960 | that you can be right in the middle of that continuum.

01:21:09.640 | You might sit down to do meditation

01:21:11.140 | and find that you are smack dab in the middle

01:21:13.440 | of being able to attend to things outside of you,

01:21:16.040 | but also attending to things inside of you,

01:21:17.880 | in which case I suggest doing a meditation

01:21:20.880 | that is either exteroceptive biased or interoceptive biased.

01:21:24.400 | But as I mentioned earlier,

01:21:26.240 | if you find that you are more, quote unquote,

01:21:28.240 | in your head or in your body,

01:21:29.840 | well then focus on an exteroceptive biased meditation

01:21:33.520 | to build up that set of circuits,

01:21:35.960 | whereas if you are more exteroceptively focused

01:21:38.600 | at any given moment, well then I encourage you

01:21:40.680 | to do an interoceptively focused meditation practice.

01:21:43.880 | And as I mentioned earlier,

01:21:45.500 | there's this issue of how long to do a practice.

01:21:48.120 | There are a lot of different data on these,

01:21:49.640 | but some of the practices we've covered on this podcast

01:21:52.900 | before when we had guests, for instance,

01:21:54.800 | highlighted the 13-minute meditation

01:21:57.160 | that Dr. Wendy Suzuki from New York University's laboratory

01:22:00.480 | has popularized, and they popularized it

01:22:02.760 | because they have a wonderful paper

01:22:04.080 | that we will provide a link to,

01:22:05.760 | which shows that a daily 13-minute meditation,

01:22:09.220 | which is of the traditional third eye,

01:22:11.320 | interoceptively biased, focused on breathing

01:22:13.640 | and focused on that location

01:22:15.040 | directly behind one's forehead or both,

01:22:17.060 | that meditation done daily for about eight weeks,

01:22:19.980 | maybe shorter, but in that study, eight weeks,

01:22:22.720 | greatly improved mood, improved ability to sleep,

01:22:25.500 | improved cognitive ability and focus, memory.

01:22:28.160 | A huge number of metrics were looked at very specifically.

01:22:31.720 | So that's a terrific one, and you may be asking yourself,

01:22:33.780 | do you need to do the full 13 minutes?

01:22:35.420 | Could you get away with five minutes or three minutes?

01:22:37.340 | Well, my laboratory has shown benefits

01:22:39.420 | in stress reduction, improvement in sleep, et cetera

01:22:42.040 | with a five-minute-a-day meditation.

01:22:45.080 | However, in trying to establish how long you should meditate,

01:22:48.100 | I would ask yourself a couple of questions.

01:22:49.720 | First of all, what is a practice

01:22:51.440 | that you can do consistently?

01:22:53.120 | And by consistently, that doesn't necessarily mean every day.

01:22:56.720 | If you answer the question about consistency honestly,

01:23:00.380 | and you find that you can only do

01:23:02.000 | one meditation session per week,

01:23:04.020 | well, then I would encourage you to go a little bit longer,

01:23:06.020 | maybe 10 or 15 minutes, maybe even 30 minutes.

01:23:08.480 | Again, understanding that you're going to have

01:23:09.880 | to refocus repeatedly throughout that meditation,

01:23:12.820 | regardless of whether or not you're focusing

01:23:14.220 | on internal perceptions or external perceptions.

01:23:17.160 | If, however, you can set aside five or 10

01:23:20.160 | or 15 minutes per day, and you can meditate every day,

01:23:23.560 | well, then I think you have a bit more flexibility

01:23:26.300 | in terms of how long you meditate.

01:23:27.560 | Maybe it's three minutes one day, one minute the next day,

01:23:30.240 | 10 minutes the next, and so on and so forth.

01:23:32.480 | Just like with exercise, the key component is consistency.

01:23:35.940 | And this is borne out in all the data

01:23:37.540 | that's covered in "Altered Traits."

01:23:39.540 | It's also borne out in all the recent studies

01:23:42.040 | that have come out.

01:23:42.880 | Since that book was published, consistency is key.

01:23:45.500 | So ask yourself what you can do consistently,

01:23:47.860 | and also don't necessarily burden yourself

01:23:50.740 | with always having to do the same amount

01:23:53.000 | or duration of meditation.

01:23:54.560 | So earlier, we decided we were going to parse

01:23:57.100 | or fine slice the meditation practice.

01:23:59.600 | And indeed, we've been doing that.

01:24:01.000 | We've talked about interoceptive versus exteroceptive bias,

01:24:04.700 | and we've been talking about

01:24:06.200 | where you place your perception or your focus.

01:24:09.240 | Another key component of meditation

01:24:11.880 | is the pattern of breathing that you embrace.

01:24:14.340 | In fact, the pattern of breathing that you embrace

01:24:17.040 | during your meditation practice

01:24:18.740 | can itself be its own form of meditation.

01:24:22.520 | What do I mean by that?

01:24:23.600 | Well, these days, we hear a lot about breath work.

01:24:26.340 | Breath work has really grown in popularity

01:24:28.480 | in the last five, 10 years,

01:24:29.980 | and there are a number of reasons for that.

01:24:31.540 | First of all, I think we need to credit Wim Hof,

01:24:34.480 | or can we call him, I think appropriately,

01:24:36.240 | the great Wim Hof.

01:24:37.700 | Certainly, there were people before Wim

01:24:39.360 | who were doing deliberate breath work

01:24:40.720 | and talking about deliberate breath work,

01:24:42.560 | but it was really about 2015 or so

01:24:46.160 | that Wim Hof started to grow in recognition and popularity

01:24:50.360 | for a particular style of breathing,

01:24:52.200 | which in the laboratory we call cyclic hyperventilation.

01:24:55.340 | I know there are other names for it

01:24:56.820 | that come from ancient traditions.

01:24:58.420 | He named it, or people named it after him, Wim Hof.

01:25:02.520 | Wim Hof, for those of you that don't know,

01:25:04.640 | is a Dutchman who is known to hold many world records

01:25:09.400 | for deliberate cold exposure,

01:25:11.280 | including swimming under icebergs,

01:25:12.860 | longest period of time,

01:25:14.800 | buried in ice up to his neck, et cetera,

01:25:17.020 | but who's also expert in the use of breathing

01:25:19.560 | in particular ways in order to manage

01:25:21.520 | and maneuver through those challenges.

01:25:23.720 | And he started speaking

01:25:24.840 | about different patterns of breath work, in particular,

01:25:27.480 | the use of cyclic hyperventilation,

01:25:29.880 | deep, deliberate breathing, so big inhales, exhales,

01:25:34.540 | big inhales, exhales.

01:25:37.140 | In the laboratory, again,

01:25:38.020 | we call that cyclic hyperventilation.

01:25:39.540 | It's very clear from studies both done on Wim specifically,

01:25:43.280 | but on the general population as well,

01:25:44.960 | by my lab and other labs,

01:25:46.500 | that that pattern of cyclic hyperventilation,

01:25:48.640 | of deliberately breathing deeply and repetitively,

01:25:51.480 | typically in through the nose, out through the mouth,

01:25:54.020 | generates a lot of adrenaline

01:25:55.440 | or causes adrenaline release from the brain and body.

01:25:58.520 | It, quote unquote, heats up the body.

01:26:01.200 | Indeed, it raises body temperature,

01:26:03.040 | but the liberation of adrenaline does a number of things

01:26:05.580 | to shift the state of the brain and body.

01:26:08.520 | That more or less is what Wim Hof breathing is,

01:26:10.900 | although Wim Hof breathing,

01:26:12.260 | or some people will call it Tummo breathing

01:26:14.240 | or cyclic hyperventilation,

01:26:16.120 | is not a pattern of breathing typical of most meditations

01:26:20.500 | that have been discussed,

01:26:21.360 | at least not in the research literature.

01:26:23.320 | Now, that's not to say that cyclic hyperventilation

01:26:25.640 | can't be incorporated into a meditation practice,

01:26:28.200 | but Wim Hof breathing,

01:26:29.640 | AKA cyclic hyperventilation Tummo,

01:26:32.080 | is typically considered its own practice, okay?

01:26:35.600 | Its own breath work practice divorced from meditation.

01:26:38.860 | It might have a meditative component,

01:26:40.320 | but it's not often discussed as meditation

01:26:42.880 | or as part of meditation.

01:26:44.560 | More typically, a meditation practice

01:26:47.020 | involves slowing one's breathing,

01:26:49.400 | and this could be in the form of cyclic breathing

01:26:52.520 | of inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, which is cyclic,

01:26:56.120 | or in some cases, doubling up on inhales and then exhaling.

01:26:59.620 | So inhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, inhale, exhale,

01:27:02.340 | or controlling the duration of inhale, breath, hold,

01:27:06.180 | exhale, breath, hold, repeat, so-called box breathing,

01:27:09.480 | where the inhale, the hold, the exhale, and the hold

01:27:11.960 | are of equivalent durations.

01:27:14.520 | Any number of different breathing patterns,

01:27:16.680 | slow cyclic breathing, box breathing,

01:27:20.200 | a cadence of three to six seconds in,

01:27:23.240 | holding for two seconds, and seven seconds out.

01:27:25.740 | Regardless of what cadence of breathing one uses,

01:27:29.300 | there is a tendency during most meditative practices

01:27:32.820 | to slow one's breathing and/or control one's breathing

01:27:36.640 | in deliberate fashion.

01:27:38.440 | This is essential because when we default our breathing,

01:27:42.260 | that is, when we don't pay attention

01:27:44.840 | to how long we are inhaling relative to our exhales,

01:27:48.800 | when we don't deliberately exhale,

01:27:51.080 | that is, normally we just passively exhale,

01:27:54.340 | but we actively inhale.

01:27:55.600 | I repeat that.

01:27:56.440 | Normally, when we're not thinking about breathing,

01:27:58.720 | we deliberately inhale.

01:28:00.640 | There's a motor command that's sent to inflate the lungs,

01:28:03.680 | and then we passively exhale,

01:28:05.160 | but in many breath work practices or meditation practices,

01:28:08.360 | we actually actively exhale as well.

01:28:11.800 | Well, when we do that, a number of things happen.

01:28:14.000 | First of all, it forces us into interoception.

01:28:17.880 | Why?

01:28:18.720 | Because it's the diaphragm, the muscle that helps

01:28:21.320 | move the lungs, essentially,

01:28:23.040 | and create a specific cadence of breathing

01:28:27.040 | or depth of breathing, as one would with box breathing

01:28:30.560 | or deliberately slow breathing.

01:28:32.440 | Well, that muscle resides inside of us,

01:28:34.840 | and so when we focus on our breathing,

01:28:37.580 | more often than not, we aren't focused on the actual air

01:28:40.520 | leaving our nasal passages or mouth, maybe a little bit,

01:28:43.400 | but more typically, we are forced to focus,

01:28:45.980 | or we just default to focusing on the movement

01:28:48.520 | of our diaphragm or of our belly

01:28:50.280 | or the rising and falling of our chest.

01:28:52.280 | All of that is to say that by deliberately focusing

01:28:56.660 | on our breathing, we shift to interoception.

01:29:01.020 | So breathing and specific patterns of breathing

01:29:04.240 | sort of along for the ride in meditation,

01:29:07.120 | but the reverse can also be said

01:29:10.120 | that when we focus on our breathing,

01:29:12.000 | we shift to interoception and away from external events.

01:29:15.940 | Doesn't mean we can't still pay attention to external events.

01:29:18.800 | We can still exterocept, but at least some portion

01:29:22.000 | of our perception of our attention shifts to interoception.

01:29:26.520 | So we, of course, need to breathe to stay alive.

01:29:30.160 | We have to breathe at least every so often

01:29:32.420 | in order to stay alive.

01:29:33.420 | So of course, breathing is part of any meditative practice,

01:29:36.660 | just like it's part of any living activity, even sleep,

01:29:40.840 | but if the first component of meditation

01:29:44.080 | is to direct our perception in a deliberate way,

01:29:47.820 | using that prefrontal cortex to a specific location,

01:29:50.320 | either on the surface of or within our body

01:29:53.640 | or external to our body or both,

01:29:57.100 | but typically one or the other,

01:29:58.720 | then we can say that the second element

01:30:01.380 | of a meditative practice is the pattern of breathing.

01:30:04.860 | And we can ask ourselves,

01:30:07.080 | can it and should it be deliberate or not?

01:30:10.240 | In other words, we just default

01:30:11.600 | to however we happen to be breathing,

01:30:13.280 | or should it be deliberate?

01:30:14.360 | That is, should we be controlling the depth and the cadence?

01:30:18.300 | And I do believe that based on what we know

01:30:20.900 | about the capacity for specific patterns of breathing

01:30:23.520 | to shift our brain state,

01:30:25.980 | that controlling one's pattern of breathing

01:30:28.480 | during meditation can be enormously useful.

01:30:30.960 | And that is true regardless of whether or not

01:30:33.280 | one is focusing on interoceptive perceptions

01:30:36.280 | within our body or exteroceptive perceptions.

01:30:41.680 | So that raises the question,

01:30:42.720 | how should we breathe during meditation?

01:30:44.800 | Well, there's again, no simple one size fits all rule there,

01:30:49.800 | but there are some general rules of respiration physiology

01:30:53.600 | that can help us access and develop a meditation practice

01:30:57.200 | that is going to best serve our goals.

01:30:59.580 | And since this is not an episode all about respiration,

01:31:03.000 | and we will do one,

01:31:04.140 | but I simply want to give you the basics

01:31:06.880 | of what respiration can do

01:31:08.360 | to shift your brain and body state.

01:31:11.500 | Before I do that, however,

01:31:12.920 | I want to give a very specific instruction,

01:31:16.000 | which is when you sit down to meditate,

01:31:18.200 | or if you're going to do your meditation walking,

01:31:20.560 | that's fine too, I should just say,

01:31:21.800 | when you are about to begin your meditative practice,

01:31:25.280 | you need to ask yourself a question.

01:31:27.080 | Do you want to be more relaxed than you are at present?

01:31:33.320 | Or do you want to be more alert than you are at present

01:31:36.480 | when you exit the meditation practice?

01:31:39.040 | Do you want to calm down?

01:31:40.480 | Or do you want to become more alert?

01:31:42.220 | Simple question, you can decide from session to session,

01:31:46.480 | you could even switch within a session,

01:31:48.280 | but just as you need to assess whether or not

01:31:50.180 | you are leaning more interceptively or exteroceptively,

01:31:54.620 | you also need to ask yourself,

01:31:56.500 | do you need to calm down or want to calm down?

01:31:58.420 | Or do you want to be more alert

01:31:59.820 | at the end of your meditation session?

01:32:01.680 | Or maybe you want to go into a state of deep relaxation

01:32:03.900 | and then exit with more alertness.

01:32:06.640 | The way to do that is very simple,

01:32:08.620 | using breath work and specific patterns of breathing.

01:32:12.080 | And here is the general rule that is supported

01:32:15.060 | by all the respiration physiology that I'm aware of.

01:32:18.740 | I'm oversimplifying here,

01:32:19.940 | but I'm oversimplifying intentionally

01:32:22.220 | so you can simply apply the tool.

01:32:23.840 | And then, as I mentioned before,

01:32:25.180 | we will do an episode all about respiration physiology

01:32:28.060 | in the future.

01:32:28.900 | Essentially, if your inhales are longer

01:32:35.080 | and/or more vigorous than your exhales,

01:32:38.540 | then you will tend to be more alert,

01:32:41.740 | where you will shift your brain and body

01:32:43.020 | towards a state of more alertness.

01:32:44.540 | This is simply based on the way that the neural circuits,

01:32:47.880 | like the pre-Botzinger nucleus and the parafacial nucleus,

01:32:50.180 | they govern respiration physiology and alertness.

01:32:53.140 | It's simply the way they work.

01:32:54.200 | They communicate with brain areas

01:32:55.440 | that release noradrenaline, norepinephrine, et cetera.

01:32:58.300 | In contrast, if you emphasize longer duration

01:33:05.220 | and/or more vigorous exhales relative to your inhales,

01:33:10.220 | you will tend to relax more.

01:33:12.420 | You will tend to calm your nervous system.

01:33:14.840 | Now, you might be saying, okay, I understand what it is

01:33:16.820 | to make an inhale longer than my exhale,

01:33:19.440 | but how do I make it more vigorous?

01:33:21.080 | Well, it simply means drawing more air

01:33:22.900 | into your lungs more quickly

01:33:24.840 | than you allow yourself to exhale that air.

01:33:28.540 | So an example of inhale-biased breath work would be,

01:33:32.360 | [inhales and exhales]

01:33:35.800 | so there's an active emphasis on the inhale,

01:33:38.800 | and it's a little bit longer than the exhale,

01:33:40.680 | which is passive.

01:33:41.760 | Conversely, if you want to relax,

01:33:45.460 | then you want to extend your exhales relative to your inhales

01:33:48.240 | and you can even make them active exhales.

01:33:50.500 | So it can be inhale,

01:33:51.920 | [inhales and exhales]

01:33:54.300 | exhale.

01:33:55.140 | [inhales and exhales]

01:33:57.780 | That's going to shift your nervous system

01:33:59.700 | in a direction of more calm.

01:34:02.660 | And of course, if you would like to stay

01:34:04.940 | at the level of alertness, aka calmness,

01:34:08.300 | because those are two sides of the same seesaw

01:34:10.540 | or the same continuum,

01:34:11.860 | if you'd like to be right where you're at

01:34:13.860 | at the end of your meditation as where you started,

01:34:16.340 | at least in terms of levels of alertness and calmness,

01:34:18.860 | well, then you would just keep your inhales and your exhales

01:34:21.980 | relatively balanced in terms of duration.

01:34:24.760 | Now, the introduction of things like breath holds

01:34:26.680 | with box breathing or Wim Hof breathing

01:34:29.340 | typically it's 25 or 30 deep inhale exhales,

01:34:33.060 | deep inhale exhales, and then exhale all your air,

01:34:35.740 | hold your breath for 15 to 60 seconds and then repeat

01:34:38.620 | and so on, sometimes some inhales and holds.

01:34:41.220 | Well, that's a whole business into itself,

01:34:43.540 | but for sake of meditation,

01:34:46.040 | the key thing to understand is that

01:34:47.580 | if you are going to do a complicated breathing practice,

01:34:51.660 | it will by design, by necessity,

01:34:54.620 | shift much of your attention to the breathing practice,

01:34:57.860 | especially if it's not cyclic,

01:34:59.140 | if it's not inhales, follow exhales.

01:35:01.020 | Cyclic breathing is where inhales always follow exhales,

01:35:03.380 | follow inhales, follow exhales.

01:35:04.620 | It actually relies on a specific brain center

01:35:06.940 | called the Prebot-Singer complex

01:35:08.260 | discovered by Jack Feldman at UCLA.

01:35:10.020 | He was a guest on this podcast previously.

01:35:12.160 | However, if you are doubling up on your inhale,

01:35:15.660 | so two inhales and then an exhale,

01:35:18.180 | a pattern of breathing my laboratory has studied extensively,

01:35:22.940 | well, then that relies on a different brain center,

01:35:25.060 | the parafacial nucleus.

01:35:26.140 | The point is that if you are engaging

01:35:28.980 | in non-cyclic breathing

01:35:30.780 | or you are deliberately emphasizing inhales or exhales

01:35:35.300 | or the vigor of inhales and exhales, et cetera,

01:35:38.300 | well, then some portion of your attention will be devoted

01:35:41.620 | to making sure that you follow that breathing practice.

01:35:43.960 | We are very good at going into cyclic breathing practices

01:35:47.420 | by default and our attention can drift to other things,

01:35:50.500 | interoceptive or exteroceptive, doesn't matter.

01:35:53.820 | We can just drift into how our body feels

01:35:56.440 | or something we see or hear in the room, et cetera.

01:35:59.320 | When we are focused on our breathing

01:36:00.780 | and the breathing pattern is non-cyclic or complex

01:36:04.060 | in some way in that it involves

01:36:07.060 | deliberate voluntary commands,

01:36:09.260 | again, from those so-called top-down mechanisms

01:36:12.240 | of the prefrontal cortex,

01:36:13.640 | well, that by design requires some portion,

01:36:18.580 | often a significant portion of our attention

01:36:20.660 | to be devoted to the breathing practice itself.

01:36:23.540 | So what does this mean?

01:36:24.380 | This means that breath work itself

01:36:26.460 | can be a form of meditation

01:36:28.260 | and meditation can involve breath work,

01:36:31.820 | but one should know that the more deliberate

01:36:35.660 | and unnatural that pattern of breathing is,

01:36:40.140 | the less you will be able to focus on other things.

01:36:43.220 | Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

01:36:44.900 | You can actually leverage this.

01:36:46.020 | So for instance, if you're somebody who's very much caught

01:36:48.860 | in your own head, right, we talked about this earlier,

01:36:51.300 | you happen to be, or you're in a moment

01:36:52.780 | where you're really stuck in your head

01:36:53.820 | and you want to get out of your head,

01:36:55.300 | well, then that meditation practice that you do

01:36:56.980 | really should be focused on exteroceptive bias.

01:36:59.320 | You should really focus on something external to you.

01:37:01.320 | And I would encourage you to use

01:37:02.540 | a natural cyclic pattern of breathing

01:37:05.440 | where inhales follow exhales follow inhales follow exhales.

01:37:08.820 | If, however, you are finding that you're sort of caught

01:37:12.020 | in the landscape of things happening around you

01:37:14.340 | and you want to ground yourself as it's sometimes called,

01:37:17.020 | that's a loose language, not a scientific language.

01:37:19.320 | I know there's this practice of grounding

01:37:20.900 | and that's a whole thing people always writing to me

01:37:22.580 | is grounding a real thing, walking barefoot on the earth

01:37:25.320 | and magnetic fields and gravitational fields.

01:37:28.340 | Gravity is real, but grounding,

01:37:30.740 | there isn't a lot of science for it, to be frank.

01:37:33.420 | Does feel nice to walk on the ground, however.

01:37:35.720 | But if you are somebody who's kind of feeling pulled out

01:37:39.700 | of yourself a lot or in a moment

01:37:41.420 | and you want to bring your awareness into your body

01:37:44.860 | and sort of calm down, well, then I would encourage you

01:37:48.200 | to, yes, use a deliberate, somewhat unnatural

01:37:52.300 | or non-default pattern of breathing,

01:37:55.560 | which by definition will force you to attend

01:37:58.880 | to what's going on interoceptively.

01:38:01.840 | Again, I'm not aware of any place

01:38:03.220 | that this has been discussed in detail such as this before.

01:38:05.960 | If there is a research literature on this,

01:38:08.560 | please let me know.

01:38:09.400 | My laboratory has been working on this extensively.

01:38:11.140 | I'm always looking for new colleagues and collaborators.

01:38:13.720 | We, we meaning Dr. David Spiegel,

01:38:16.220 | who's an expert in hypnosis, again,

01:38:17.760 | who's been a guest on the Huberman Lab Podcast

01:38:21.140 | and my colleague at Stanford Psychiatry.

01:38:22.860 | In fact, he's our associate chair of psychiatry,

01:38:24.700 | world expert in hypnosis.

01:38:25.860 | He's been on this podcast before.

01:38:27.140 | We have an active research program focused on these issues.

01:38:30.820 | We are very much of the belief

01:38:32.140 | that a breath work practice itself can be meditative.

01:38:35.400 | A meditation practice can include breathing,

01:38:38.420 | but the more that that meditative practice

01:38:40.740 | focuses on the breathing itself,

01:38:42.580 | the more interoceptive biased it will be.

01:38:45.200 | Now, it's very important to understand

01:38:47.940 | that an interoceptive biased breath work practice

01:38:51.140 | will have a specific effect,

01:38:53.120 | which is to make you more interoceptively aware.

01:38:56.060 | And if you think back to earlier in the episode,

01:38:58.500 | for many people, that will be a wonderful thing

01:39:00.740 | and something that they are actively seeking

01:39:03.340 | or ought to seek because it can help people gain awareness.

01:39:06.940 | For instance, if they're stressed

01:39:09.240 | and they're not realizing it till the end of the day,

01:39:10.960 | they're just exhausted,

01:39:12.220 | more interoceptive awareness throughout the day

01:39:14.080 | can be very beneficial.

01:39:16.060 | If, however, you are somebody who is overly focused

01:39:19.220 | on your bodily sensations,

01:39:20.740 | well, then more exteroceptive awareness is important.

01:39:23.460 | And this brings us to a yet larger theme,

01:39:26.220 | but a theme that I think really emphasizes

01:39:29.120 | what particular types of meditative practices

01:39:31.300 | are going to be best for certain people,

01:39:33.620 | especially people who are using meditation

01:39:36.000 | to combat certain challenges,

01:39:37.720 | in particular, mood-based challenges

01:39:39.500 | or sleep-based challenges or focus-based challenges.

01:39:43.140 | I haven't listed off all the positive benefits of meditation

01:39:47.700 | yet in this episode, but they are many, many, many.

01:39:51.820 | In fact, there are now tens of thousands

01:39:54.200 | of scientific studies showing, for instance,

01:39:56.860 | there are known benefits of doing meditation

01:39:59.820 | for enhancing sleep.

01:40:01.320 | There are known benefits of a regular meditation practice

01:40:03.600 | for enhancing focus.

01:40:04.900 | There are known benefits of a regular meditation practice

01:40:07.280 | for reducing inflammatory cytokines,

01:40:09.940 | even improving outcomes in cancer, reducing pain,

01:40:13.420 | improving mood, reducing the symptoms of ADHD

01:40:17.060 | and clinically diagnosed ADHD and on and on and on.

01:40:19.980 | And again, rather than focus

01:40:21.980 | on all those beautiful studies today,

01:40:24.180 | which all basically point to the fact

01:40:25.600 | that some meditation practice done regularly,

01:40:28.760 | even if it's very brief,

01:40:29.880 | has tremendous, even outsized benefits on our health,

01:40:32.760 | even relative to some drug treatments that's been shown,

01:40:36.160 | rather than focus on all that,

01:40:37.420 | I've been more focused on what sorts of brain

01:40:40.180 | and body changes occur when we do a meditation practice,

01:40:42.660 | and perhaps more importantly,

01:40:43.800 | what really constitutes a meditation practice.

01:40:46.620 | We have this thing about a continuum of perception.

01:40:49.660 | We also now are talking about breathing.

01:40:51.540 | Well, there's another component that I'd like to raise now,

01:40:54.620 | which we could say is the third major component.

01:40:56.460 | The first one that I raised was interoceptive

01:40:59.100 | versus extroceptive bias or continuum.

01:41:02.340 | Second being breathing.

01:41:04.140 | Is it going to be default or deliberate breathing?

01:41:07.100 | Is it going to be natural cadence or unnatural cadence?

01:41:09.700 | Again, no right or wrong.

01:41:12.040 | It just depends on what your goal is.

01:41:13.920 | There's a third component.

01:41:15.940 | And this is a component, again,

01:41:17.340 | that hasn't really been formalized in the literature,

01:41:19.260 | but that Dr. Spiegel and I are working hard to formalize

01:41:22.260 | through some research and through an upcoming review

01:41:25.660 | that we will provide links to once it's out.

01:41:27.500 | And that's a separate continuum,

01:41:29.680 | which is the continuum

01:41:30.700 | between interoception and dissociation.

01:41:35.140 | So now all of you know what interoception is,

01:41:37.960 | but most people probably don't know

01:41:40.060 | or don't realize what dissociation is.

01:41:42.780 | Often we hear about dissociation,

01:41:45.120 | sometimes called disassociation.

01:41:47.220 | Some people pronounce it dissociation.

01:41:49.460 | Guess what?

01:41:50.960 | Despite being corrected many times

01:41:52.460 | for each of those pronunciations,

01:41:53.980 | I checked with my colleagues who are experts

01:41:56.140 | in dissociation or disassociation, and guess what?

01:42:00.240 | They're the same thing.

01:42:01.180 | Tomato, tomato, potato, potato.

01:42:03.740 | So I'm going to say dissociation.

01:42:05.660 | Some people will say disassociation, like I disassociate.

01:42:09.480 | Other people will say I dissociate, okay?

01:42:12.300 | Both of those refer to essentially the same thing.

01:42:15.540 | Dissociation is often talked about

01:42:19.180 | in the context of a negative event.

01:42:21.240 | And indeed dissociation is unfortunately,

01:42:25.440 | or I should say is adaptively associated

01:42:28.220 | with traumatic events.

01:42:29.860 | In particular, violent or sexual trauma,

01:42:32.000 | people report feeling out of body or out of the experience,

01:42:37.000 | during the experience

01:42:38.220 | or during a recollection of the experience.

01:42:40.320 | Dissociation has also been described

01:42:43.580 | in terms of people who are in a traumatic accident

01:42:46.940 | or they see someone killed right in front of them.

01:42:49.220 | First responders will talk about dissociating

01:42:51.240 | when they arrive on a scene.

01:42:52.440 | I don't want to provide gruesome imagery here

01:42:54.360 | 'cause I know people can be pretty sensitive to this,

01:42:55.980 | but showing up on the scene of a car crash

01:42:59.540 | and just seeing carnage or incredible damage to bodies

01:43:04.240 | or this sort of thing.

01:43:06.000 | Dissociation lies at the opposite end of a continuum

01:43:09.040 | with interoception.

01:43:10.520 | Now, earlier I said the interoception

01:43:12.440 | is on the opposite end of a continuum with exteroception,

01:43:15.220 | but it also is on the opposite end of a continuum

01:43:17.880 | with dissociation.

01:43:20.100 | We can provide some better definitions perhaps

01:43:22.400 | to make this crystal clear.

01:43:24.020 | And here I'm actually reading from an upcoming review.

01:43:26.540 | I feel comfortable reading from it

01:43:27.640 | because I'm an author on the review,

01:43:29.080 | but nonetheless, interoception refers to a process

01:43:31.900 | by which your nervous system,

01:43:33.180 | meaning your brain and connections with your body,

01:43:34.840 | senses, interprets, integrates, and regulates signals

01:43:37.860 | originating from within the body

01:43:40.500 | and thereby provides moment-to-moment mapping

01:43:42.800 | of your internal landscape

01:43:44.480 | at both a conscious and unconscious level.

01:43:46.440 | Okay, that's a lot of words to describe

01:43:49.000 | basically the process of perceiving what's happening

01:43:51.040 | at the level of the surface of your skin or inward.

01:43:54.100 | Dissociation can be thought of

01:43:57.280 | as the opposite of interoception.

01:44:00.460 | It's a lack of bodily awareness

01:44:02.240 | or a removal of one's conscious experience

01:44:06.000 | from one's bodily experience and awareness.

01:44:09.320 | Again, this is most often talked about

01:44:11.200 | in the context of something traumatic,

01:44:13.200 | but really, if we think about health and mental health

01:44:16.720 | and physical health,

01:44:18.040 | the optimal place to reside on the continuum

01:44:20.720 | between interoception and dissociation

01:44:22.760 | is somewhere in the middle.

01:44:23.900 | We don't want to be dissociated from life's experiences,

01:44:26.700 | but we also don't want everything that happens in the world

01:44:30.460 | to profoundly impact our heart rate and our breathing.

01:44:33.060 | We'd be yanked around by every experience.

01:44:35.880 | Okay, there are instances in which being yanked around

01:44:39.760 | or pulled into an experience

01:44:41.280 | is something that we desire and want,

01:44:42.640 | like seeing a movie that we want to see,

01:44:45.000 | or for instance, clinical hypnosis,

01:44:47.400 | or falling in love, wonderful experiences,

01:44:51.500 | and sometimes also sad experiences, right?

01:44:53.660 | Being able to feel one's feelings

01:44:55.000 | depending on life's events is important,

01:44:58.060 | but being too dissociated or being too feeling,

01:45:02.240 | that is feeling so much in response

01:45:04.980 | to everything that happens is also problematic.

01:45:07.680 | There are certain people, for instance,

01:45:08.980 | that have challenges with what's called narrative distancing.

01:45:13.060 | That is, they see someone in a movie getting hit

01:45:15.120 | and they almost flinch as if they are getting hit.

01:45:18.280 | They see someone who's scared or happy in a movie

01:45:21.820 | and they feel scared or happy in a way

01:45:23.640 | that seems like they're along for the ride

01:45:26.080 | a little bit too much.

01:45:28.140 | This is important because what it speaks to

01:45:30.480 | is the ability for that,

01:45:32.160 | remember way back at the beginning of the episode,

01:45:34.040 | that ACC, that anterior cingulate cortex and the insula?

01:45:37.240 | We've got a prefrontal cortex that can say,

01:45:39.840 | "Hey, let's be rational."

01:45:42.360 | That movie, that person who's happy or sad,

01:45:45.080 | that person in your environment who's breaking down crying,

01:45:48.400 | yes, they're sad, it's important to be sympathetic,

01:45:50.820 | maybe even empathic towards them,

01:45:52.920 | but let's not get pulled into the experience

01:45:54.880 | so much that we lose ourselves.

01:45:56.680 | And then, of course, there are areas of your brain

01:45:59.520 | that are also leaning on, and here I'm using metaphor,

01:46:04.160 | but they're leaning on the insula and ACC and saying,

01:46:07.640 | "Hey, there's somebody that I care about that's upset.

01:46:10.020 | I'm also going to be upset."

01:46:11.160 | Or, "Somebody I care about is happy.

01:46:12.400 | I'm also going to be happy."

01:46:13.700 | Or, "They're scared, so I'm also going to be scared."

01:46:15.300 | So it's a push-pull between our recognition

01:46:18.480 | that we are each distinct entities

01:46:20.700 | and also, of course, the very healthy desire

01:46:23.120 | to be attached to others' experiences

01:46:25.380 | and the experiences around us.

01:46:27.160 | So why am I raising yet another continuum, right?

01:46:29.980 | We already have the one continuum

01:46:31.900 | of interoceptive/extroceptive awareness.

01:46:35.400 | Well, if we want to think about how meditation

01:46:38.540 | can serve our mental health and our ability to focus,

01:46:42.700 | there's a very particular mental model that we can arrive at

01:46:47.980 | that incorporates this interoceptive/dissociative continuum.

01:46:52.340 | Again, if you are extremely interoceptive,

01:46:54.660 | you're feeling everything in your body,

01:46:57.780 | and those feelings in your body nearly completely account

01:47:00.300 | for all of your experience

01:47:01.380 | if you're that far into the continuum.

01:47:03.460 | On the dissociative end of things,

01:47:05.700 | you can see what's going on,

01:47:07.540 | you can react to what's going on,

01:47:09.660 | but your bodily response to that is essentially shut down.

01:47:13.220 | You could either be paralyzed, shut down,

01:47:15.040 | so in kind of no movement,

01:47:17.060 | or you could still be engaging in behaviors,

01:47:20.060 | but you're dissociated.

01:47:21.620 | Again, sadly, this is often what victims of trauma report,

01:47:25.300 | that they are able to just go through the motions

01:47:27.100 | but just shut off their emotions

01:47:28.620 | or their emotions just shut off.

01:47:30.440 | They aren't feeling the elevated heart rate or breathing.

01:47:33.080 | Sometimes they can even be quite scared,

01:47:35.740 | but they're not even perspiring

01:47:37.020 | or showing any signs of autonomic arousal,

01:47:39.480 | that is, fright or stress or panic.

01:47:43.280 | So let's talk about this model

01:47:44.500 | of interoception and dissociation,

01:47:47.220 | and then a meditative practice that can be used

01:47:50.260 | to try and anchor us at the right location

01:47:52.980 | or the healthy location along that continuum.

01:47:55.220 | Let's first imagine the ideal mental health state,

01:47:59.980 | and here I want to acknowledge nobody achieves

01:48:03.500 | or at least maintains this mental health state.

01:48:05.980 | Once you do imagine that where you are

01:48:08.260 | along this interoceptive to dissociative continuum

01:48:10.940 | is like a ball bearing,

01:48:13.220 | or you represent a sphere that can roll back and forth

01:48:16.140 | along the continuum.

01:48:17.220 | At one end, you have pure interoception.

01:48:19.260 | You're just feeling everything.

01:48:20.380 | At the other end, you're completely dissociated.

01:48:22.620 | Well, in this one version of mental health,

01:48:25.940 | we take that continuum and we fold up the sides

01:48:29.220 | so that it looks like a V, okay?

01:48:31.820 | On one end, you have interoception.

01:48:34.020 | On the other end, you have dissociation.

01:48:35.980 | I realize a number of people are listening to this,

01:48:37.520 | not watching this on YouTube,

01:48:38.740 | so they can't see that my hands are now,

01:48:41.140 | the heel of my hands are together,

01:48:43.540 | my fingers of my hands are apart, so it looks like a V,

01:48:46.180 | and you are like a ball bearing.

01:48:47.800 | Your state is like a ball bearing at the base of that.

01:48:50.180 | You are in a trench of perfectly balanced interoception

01:48:54.180 | and dissociation, so you can feel things,

01:48:56.420 | you can register what's going on in the outside world,

01:48:59.080 | but your feelings are not overwhelmed or overtaken

01:49:02.580 | by what's happening in the outside world.

01:49:04.000 | You are in a perfect place

01:49:05.180 | of being able to make rational decisions

01:49:06.980 | and yet still feel your feelings.

01:49:09.500 | Wouldn't that be lovely?

01:49:10.940 | Wouldn't that be lovely if we could be like that

01:49:12.380 | whenever we wanted to?

01:49:13.600 | And frankly, nobody is like that all the time.

01:49:16.060 | More typically, the model of mental health

01:49:20.320 | and mood and wellbeing and perception

01:49:22.980 | of self versus others and internal versus external states

01:49:26.580 | is one of more of a U, a U shape,

01:49:30.260 | where at one end, we have interoception,

01:49:32.180 | and at the other end, we have dissociation,

01:49:33.880 | and it's kind of U-shaped,

01:49:35.340 | and your state is more or less like a ball bearing

01:49:39.900 | at the base of that U that can, you know,

01:49:42.100 | it gets pushed from side to side.

01:49:43.500 | Maybe your heart races a little bit

01:49:46.020 | because of something bad or good,

01:49:47.940 | and that ball bearing shifts

01:49:49.060 | towards interoception a little bit more,

01:49:50.380 | and you notice that your heart is racing.

01:49:52.420 | Or perhaps at any given moment, you know,

01:49:56.160 | your mind drifts a little bit while watching a movie

01:49:59.120 | or while talking to your partner

01:50:00.660 | or while your child is complaining about something

01:50:03.660 | and you're thinking about something else,

01:50:04.820 | and that ball bearing shifts

01:50:05.740 | towards the dissociative state a little bit.

01:50:07.860 | That is a mild form of dissociation.

01:50:10.580 | And I think most people would agree

01:50:11.740 | that being mentally healthy

01:50:13.500 | would involve this kind of U-shaped model as well,

01:50:16.300 | where it's kind of, can shift back and forth,

01:50:18.480 | but it's not extreme.

01:50:19.420 | You're not going from interoceptive biased

01:50:21.700 | all the way to dissociated in any kind of extreme way.

01:50:24.960 | The ball bearing stays down near the base of that U.

01:50:27.560 | Then, of course, there are states that we all, frankly,

01:50:32.060 | go into from time to time,

01:50:33.860 | where the continuum of interoception and dissociation

01:50:36.480 | is essentially flat,

01:50:38.480 | where you are a ball bearing at one location or another,

01:50:41.420 | depending on whether or not you're watching a movie

01:50:43.560 | that you're very engrossed in,

01:50:44.940 | or you're in a conversation with,

01:50:46.420 | or in an activity with your partner or a friend, et cetera,

01:50:49.180 | has you very engrossed, maybe matching their state, right?

01:50:52.140 | There are a number of states you can imagine

01:50:53.280 | where matching one state is actually healthy and good.

01:50:56.180 | And then there are a number of conditions in life

01:50:58.000 | and situations in life where being matched

01:50:59.700 | to someone else's condition,

01:51:00.700 | like you're getting yelled at and they're angry,

01:51:02.320 | so then you're getting angry,

01:51:03.340 | and then pretty soon, you know,

01:51:05.020 | you're not in the best place along that continuum.

01:51:08.460 | And I think that for many people,

01:51:09.940 | they find themselves somewhere along that continuum,

01:51:12.640 | and a number of practices, including meditation,

01:51:15.760 | including exercise, including getting a good night's sleep,

01:51:20.000 | including therapy, including journaling,

01:51:23.200 | including just doing activities

01:51:24.760 | like social engagement that you enjoy,

01:51:26.380 | are designed to sort of bring up the edges

01:51:28.780 | of that flat continuum into more of a U or concave shape

01:51:32.620 | so that that ball bearing, meaning your state of awareness

01:51:37.540 | and your state of feeling your own feelings

01:51:39.540 | versus paying attention to what's going on around you,

01:51:41.940 | is somewhere, again, biased toward the middle

01:51:44.700 | by curling up the edges of that continuum on either end,

01:51:47.820 | it biases that state toward the middle.

01:51:50.060 | And then, of course, there's the extreme

01:51:53.160 | that I think almost everybody would agree

01:51:55.060 | is more or less pathologic,

01:51:57.260 | which is one in which that continuum

01:51:59.880 | is no longer shaped like a deep trench, like a V.

01:52:04.240 | It's not shaped like a U.

01:52:05.880 | It's not flat with the edges curled up a little bit

01:52:08.160 | or even flat.

01:52:09.000 | It's actually now convex.

01:52:10.920 | It looks like a mountain shape, a peak.

01:52:13.120 | And that little ball bearing at the top

01:52:14.800 | can either drop all the way to one side

01:52:17.560 | of pure interoception, just feeling beyond any ability

01:52:21.880 | to pay attention to anything else,

01:52:23.400 | just feeling one's feelings, being angry, being sad,

01:52:26.680 | being, or even happy, being so extremely happy or manic

01:52:31.560 | that you can't pay attention to the fact

01:52:32.880 | that it's totally out of context,

01:52:34.840 | inappropriate for what's going on around you,

01:52:36.400 | or dropping to the other side of the continuum

01:52:39.000 | where you're so dissociated that you're not engaged

01:52:41.740 | with what's going around you.

01:52:42.580 | You're truly, quote, unquote, checked out.

01:52:45.080 | That shape is one that I think almost all clinicians,

01:52:51.080 | if not all clinicians, and most people would say

01:52:53.680 | is pathologic because you are either completely checked out

01:52:57.940 | or you are completely absorbed in what's going on

01:53:02.460 | within you or around you.

01:53:05.300 | That mental model that I just created

01:53:08.240 | is a simple mental model.

01:53:09.500 | It is by no means exhaustive,

01:53:11.560 | but it does incorporate a lot of what we think about

01:53:13.840 | when we think about mental health

01:53:15.680 | and we talk about the ability to be mentally stable,

01:53:18.600 | to feel one's feelings, but to still be actively engaged

01:53:21.600 | in what's happening around us.

01:53:23.080 | And again, it's a continuum that spans

01:53:25.420 | from interoceptive awareness to dissociation,

01:53:28.600 | where the extremes are pathologic

01:53:30.700 | and somewhere in the middle is healthier,

01:53:33.440 | and then there are practices that bias us

01:53:36.800 | toward being in the middle by default.

01:53:38.980 | What are those practices?

01:53:40.100 | Well, we know for sure that being sleep-deprived,

01:53:44.100 | for instance, tends to take us away from that trench shape

01:53:49.100 | or U-shape continuum or even flat continuum

01:53:52.440 | and starts to make that continuum more convex.

01:53:54.960 | It tends to make us either feel

01:53:56.680 | like we're completely checked out and exhausted

01:53:59.320 | or that we are completely labile.

01:54:01.800 | We are yanked around by whatever experience is happening.

01:54:04.960 | We are just not able to manage.

01:54:06.520 | So sleep is, as I always say,

01:54:08.720 | the fundamental or foundational layer of mental health,

01:54:11.400 | physical health, and performance

01:54:12.640 | because it tends to put us in a healthier place.

01:54:15.260 | That is, when we're getting enough quality sleep

01:54:17.360 | consistently, it tends to put us

01:54:19.120 | in the middle of that continuum.

01:54:20.940 | Sleep deprivation does exactly the opposite.

01:54:23.360 | It pulls us apart.

01:54:24.480 | And when I say pulls us apart, that's not a real term.

01:54:26.640 | What it does is it tends to make

01:54:28.880 | that continuum less concave, right?

01:54:31.660 | Less bowl-shaped and more convex, more hill-shaped,

01:54:36.540 | if not a peak mountain shape

01:54:39.340 | where it drops us to one side or the other.

01:54:41.480 | In addition, a meditative practice done regularly

01:54:47.180 | because it can allow us to become

01:54:48.920 | more interoceptively aware,

01:54:51.500 | or it can allow us to become more exteroceptively aware,

01:54:55.420 | which is really just another form of dissociation.

01:54:58.900 | Again, dissociation isn't always bad,

01:55:01.200 | provided it's not at the extreme.

01:55:02.980 | A meditative practice can actually teach us

01:55:06.540 | to deliberately move along this continuum.

01:55:09.860 | So this is something, again,

01:55:12.640 | that hasn't been discussed a whole lot in the literature.

01:55:15.180 | It's been discussed, I should say,

01:55:16.380 | in pieces in different literatures.

01:55:18.460 | If you look in the clinical psychiatry literature,

01:55:21.200 | there's a wonderful collection of studies and reviews

01:55:23.840 | that will say that interoceptive awareness is terrific

01:55:26.740 | except for the person that is so aware

01:55:28.980 | of their internal functioning

01:55:30.140 | that they are not able to engage in the world.

01:55:32.340 | Similarly, you'll find a beautiful literature,

01:55:35.040 | research and clinical literature,

01:55:36.260 | that will say that dissociation is terrible

01:55:39.540 | in the case of trauma.

01:55:40.940 | In fact, it can put people in positions

01:55:42.620 | of repeating a behavior over and over

01:55:44.540 | that's damaging to them,

01:55:46.360 | but because they can disengage or they're dissociated from it

01:55:50.140 | that they continue the behavior,

01:55:52.380 | or dissociation can be very adaptive and beneficial

01:55:56.860 | if it allows people, for instance,

01:55:58.600 | to create some narrative distancing

01:55:59.980 | so they're not getting pulled into every argument,

01:56:01.900 | or if someone screams at them,

01:56:03.520 | they don't necessarily think that it's their fault,

01:56:05.940 | they are able to say, "Hey, wait,"

01:56:07.640 | use their prefrontal cortex and say, "Hey, wait,

01:56:09.440 | "just because you're upset

01:56:11.040 | "does not mean that I did something wrong.

01:56:12.960 | "Let's look at the evidence rationally."

01:56:16.000 | Okay, so in thinking about the positive effects

01:56:20.020 | of meditation on mood,

01:56:21.960 | there are two aspects that are important.

01:56:23.860 | The first one we talked about earlier,

01:56:25.260 | which is being present to one's experience

01:56:28.580 | correlates with increased happiness.

01:56:30.680 | Having your mind wander,

01:56:33.740 | having your default mode network be one of mind wandering

01:56:37.580 | actually is correlated with being more unhappy.

01:56:41.140 | That was the earlier study that we talked about,

01:56:43.700 | that study published in "Science."

01:56:45.840 | Now, of course, meditation can make us more present,

01:56:48.640 | but if we do not pay attention

01:56:50.620 | to whether or not we are becoming more present

01:56:52.660 | to interoception or exteroception,

01:56:55.900 | that is to interoception or dissociation,

01:56:59.220 | and we don't pay attention to whether or not our bias

01:57:02.020 | is one of dissociation versus interoception,

01:57:04.860 | we don't know where we are in the continuum,

01:57:07.520 | well, then the meditation

01:57:08.600 | actually can make things worse, not better.

01:57:13.140 | In other words, if you're somebody

01:57:14.200 | who has a tremendous amount of interoceptive awareness,

01:57:17.740 | well, then meditating on your internal state

01:57:20.140 | may not be good, and actually there's some evidence

01:57:22.060 | that it may actually be bad.

01:57:24.380 | I'll give you one little tiny example.

01:57:26.020 | I've talked about this previously in the podcast,

01:57:28.100 | but in that very study from Wendy Suzuki's lab

01:57:30.260 | showing that 13 minute a day meditation

01:57:32.040 | is beneficial for focus, mood, et cetera,

01:57:34.740 | it's also very clear that for a number of people

01:57:36.880 | that do that typical third eye meditation

01:57:40.140 | for 13 minutes a day,

01:57:41.460 | if they do that too close to sleep,

01:57:43.320 | or when they want to go to sleep,

01:57:44.580 | they have a hard time falling asleep,

01:57:46.320 | which makes perfect sense

01:57:47.260 | because they are becoming more interoceptively aware,

01:57:49.680 | they are ramping up their level of focus.

01:57:51.460 | A meditation practice typically

01:57:53.500 | is a focus and refocus practice,

01:57:55.940 | and falling asleep involves turning off your thoughts

01:57:58.820 | and your focus, and focusing purely on sensation,

01:58:02.320 | and then your thoughts kind of fragment

01:58:03.940 | and you drift off to sleep.

01:58:05.240 | This is why I'm a big fan of using non-sleep deep rest

01:58:07.780 | or yoga nidra, we will provide links

01:58:10.140 | to non-sleep deep rest and yoga nidra protocols,

01:58:12.380 | I've talked about them on the podcast before,

01:58:14.640 | but those protocols are not meditation per se,

01:58:18.220 | they tend to have people defocus,

01:58:22.500 | they are anti-focus practices,

01:58:24.420 | whereas meditation tends to be a focusing practice.

01:58:27.660 | Along those lines, a meditation practice

01:58:30.580 | that is one that is exteroceptively biased,

01:58:33.800 | where you focus on things that are outside your body

01:58:37.260 | can be wonderful for somebody

01:58:38.720 | who tends to focus too much on their inner landscape

01:58:41.140 | and their inner narrative, et cetera,

01:58:42.380 | can help get them out of their head and body,

01:58:44.960 | which can be very beneficial,

01:58:46.740 | but for people that are not in touch with their emotions,

01:58:49.080 | aren't in touch with how they feel,

01:58:50.300 | it actually can drive them down the exact path

01:58:52.740 | that's wrong for them.

01:58:54.280 | So today's discussion is about meditation,

01:58:56.220 | and we want to make sure that we are parsing meditation

01:58:58.700 | in a rational way that matches the neural circuitry involved

01:59:03.680 | and more importantly, for sake of practical purposes,

01:59:07.140 | that you are asking yourselves the right question,

01:59:09.700 | are you interoceptively or exteroceptively biased?

01:59:12.260 | Do you tend to dissociate

01:59:13.340 | or do you tend to sort of feel everything in a big way?

01:59:18.340 | I've heard this term of hypersensitive people

01:59:20.700 | or things of that sort,

01:59:21.540 | and some of those are clinical terms, some of them are not,

01:59:24.120 | but you need to assess this

01:59:25.140 | and you also need to assess where you happen to be at

01:59:27.260 | on a given day, which will be dictated, of course,

01:59:29.820 | by how well you slept, life experience, et cetera.

01:59:33.340 | So this interoceptive to dissociative continuum

01:59:36.100 | is one that you need to address

01:59:38.380 | prior to any meditative practice.

01:59:40.800 | And again, the solution or the answer of what to do

01:59:44.840 | in response to your answer

01:59:47.740 | of whether or not you are more inward focused

01:59:49.980 | or outward focused, again, is very simple.

01:59:52.340 | Just do the opposite of where your bias lies.

01:59:55.100 | That is, if you're tilted towards interoception,

01:59:57.020 | do an exteroceptive focus practice.

01:59:59.420 | If you are more dissociative and you're,

02:00:02.460 | that sounds sort of pejorative, it sounds bad, right?

02:00:05.480 | But again, if you are somebody who's more focused

02:00:07.420 | on events outside your body

02:00:09.200 | and you want to gain more interoceptive awareness

02:00:12.040 | and feeling state, if you will,

02:00:14.240 | well, then you want to do a practice

02:00:16.400 | that's third eye center practice or breathing focused.

02:00:19.120 | One of the reasons that many people meditate

02:00:21.600 | is that they've heard before or they've experienced

02:00:24.520 | that meditation can replace sleep

02:00:27.180 | or can reduce one's overall sleep need.

02:00:31.640 | So that's an interesting set of questions.

02:00:33.260 | And it's one that I dove into the literature

02:00:35.380 | to pursue an answer to.

02:00:36.780 | And I came up with an answer that was, frankly,

02:00:39.260 | a little bit complicated on the face of it,

02:00:41.120 | but boils down to some very simple protocols

02:00:43.220 | that I think any and all of us can leverage

02:00:45.860 | in order to sleep better and maybe even reduce

02:00:49.220 | the total amount of sleep that we need,

02:00:51.040 | something that I think most people would want.

02:00:53.340 | I, you know, I realized that we all

02:00:55.900 | probably should enjoy sleeping, I certainly do,

02:00:58.020 | but that it's hard to get enough sleep.

02:00:59.440 | And wouldn't it be wonderful, for instance,

02:01:01.180 | to be able to get by on a little less sleep

02:01:03.300 | and still feel alert and rested.

02:01:05.100 | First of all, I want to point to the recent study.

02:01:09.180 | And then again, this is one that I've raised a few times

02:01:11.560 | and we'll post a link to it entitled

02:01:13.980 | Brief Daily Meditation Enhances Attention, Memory,

02:01:17.380 | Mood, and Emotion Regulation in Non-Experienced Meditators.

02:01:20.740 | This is the work, again, from Wendy Suzuki,

02:01:23.140 | who was a guest on the Huberman Lab Podcast,

02:01:25.980 | who is now the Dean of Arts and Sciences

02:01:29.020 | at New York University and has run a laboratory

02:01:31.660 | focused on memory for a long time,

02:01:33.540 | is a terrific neuroscientist and researcher

02:01:35.860 | and teacher, et cetera,

02:01:37.140 | and was a terrific guest on the podcast.

02:01:39.480 | I keep returning to this paper

02:01:40.600 | because they used so many measures

02:01:42.780 | and they were very thorough

02:01:44.060 | and the results were really interesting.

02:01:45.240 | Again, this is the 13 minute a day

02:01:47.360 | guided meditation session.

02:01:48.960 | I should just mention that the control group in this study

02:01:52.660 | listened to a podcast for 13 minutes

02:01:54.640 | that did not improve attention, memory,

02:01:58.740 | mood, emotion regulation, et cetera,

02:02:01.780 | as much as meditation did,

02:02:03.220 | which is not to say that podcasts aren't useful.

02:02:05.360 | I won't mention which podcasts they use.

02:02:07.100 | Unfortunately, it was not the Huberman Lab Podcast,

02:02:09.920 | which I like to think at least increases understanding

02:02:12.420 | of certain key concepts of science and science-based tools.

02:02:15.940 | You're welcome to look at the paper

02:02:16.900 | and see which podcasts they used.

02:02:18.400 | It's a quite a well-known podcast,

02:02:20.200 | which is an interesting podcast,

02:02:22.380 | but it didn't change the brain in any fundamental way

02:02:25.120 | in this 13 minute session,

02:02:26.240 | whereas 13 minutes of daily meditation did.

02:02:28.600 | And again, something I mentioned earlier,

02:02:30.440 | but very important to reemphasize now

02:02:32.680 | is that they mentioned that if people in the experiment

02:02:37.680 | meditated too close to bedtime,

02:02:40.640 | they had trouble sleeping again, which makes sense

02:02:42.600 | because meditation, at least in its most common form

02:02:45.160 | and the form used in this paper,

02:02:46.260 | is a focusing and refocusing exercise.

02:02:48.840 | Falling asleep involves focusing less.

02:02:51.540 | There are other studies, however,

02:02:53.760 | that have shown, or that asserted, rather,

02:02:56.460 | that doing two 20 minute sessions per day of meditation

02:03:01.100 | can reduce the need for sleep.

02:03:03.600 | Those results are debated.

02:03:06.560 | First of all, understanding what sleep need is

02:03:10.160 | is very individual,

02:03:11.740 | and determining what people can manage on,

02:03:14.600 | meaning some people can manage to get by

02:03:17.960 | with six hours of sleep, but would do better with eight.

02:03:20.560 | Some people would actually manage probably better

02:03:23.820 | in terms of focusing and alertness

02:03:25.120 | if they slept a little bit less,

02:03:26.320 | because they might be waking up

02:03:27.480 | midway through a sleep cycle.

02:03:28.920 | If you want to learn more about this,

02:03:30.400 | you can check out any one of three different episodes

02:03:33.220 | that we've done.

02:03:34.060 | One is Master Your Sleep.

02:03:35.660 | You can find that at hubermanlab.com.

02:03:37.160 | Everything is timestamped in that episode.

02:03:38.960 | The other is Perfect Your Sleep.

02:03:40.560 | And then, of course, we've done episodes on sleep

02:03:42.600 | with expert guests like Dr. Matthew Walker from UC Berkeley.

02:03:45.800 | All of those can be found at hubermanlab.com.

02:03:47.920 | In all formats, they're all timestamped.

02:03:50.140 | With that said, this assertion that has been made

02:03:53.580 | many times over, and certainly in the popular press,

02:03:55.680 | that regular meditation can reduce one's overall sleep need

02:03:59.500 | is controversial for the following reason.

02:04:02.480 | Some groups find that indeed that is the case,

02:04:05.260 | and the interpretation is that the stress reduction

02:04:08.280 | that's brought about by regular meditative practice,

02:04:11.740 | and in this case, very regular,

02:04:12.960 | tends to be one or more typically two 20-minute per day

02:04:16.720 | meditation sessions.

02:04:17.720 | That's quite a lot, I think, for most people.

02:04:19.760 | If you think about 40 minutes, isn't that much time overall,

02:04:23.520 | but very few people will stick to that twice a day,

02:04:26.140 | 20-minute meditation practice very consistently.

02:04:29.040 | Well, the idea is that the stress reduction,

02:04:32.640 | which is clear and not debated,

02:04:35.540 | brought about by that type of meditation practice,

02:04:38.800 | is good at offsetting some of the cortisol increases

02:04:43.280 | associated with reduced sleep and leading people

02:04:47.340 | to be able to function cognitively and physically

02:04:50.600 | better on reduced sleep than they would

02:04:53.140 | had they not been doing the meditation practice.

02:04:56.580 | So the simple way of putting this is that

02:04:59.180 | if people meditate regularly, that's reducing stress.

02:05:01.720 | The reduction in stress is reducing cortisol.

02:05:04.540 | Again, cortisol is healthy,

02:05:05.680 | but it should be restricted to early part of the day.

02:05:07.540 | You don't want too many peaks in cortisol,

02:05:08.980 | especially not late in the day.

02:05:10.540 | By meditating, you get the healthy pattern

02:05:13.420 | of cortisol release.

02:05:15.360 | You sort of inoculate yourself somewhat

02:05:17.580 | against the unhealthy pattern of cortisol release.

02:05:20.380 | And as a consequence,

02:05:22.420 | either the sleep that people get is deeper

02:05:25.200 | and/or the total amount of sleep that they need is reduced.

02:05:28.480 | Now, a lot of people took that result

02:05:31.420 | and interpreted it as saying, well, if you can't sleep,

02:05:34.840 | then you can just meditate.

02:05:36.340 | So one night you don't sleep or you have trouble sleeping,

02:05:38.540 | you just meditate the next day and you'll be fine.

02:05:41.340 | Well, certainly that is not supported by the literature.

02:05:43.380 | However, there is a practice, and again,

02:05:46.020 | it's one that I've talked about on this podcast

02:05:47.640 | many times before, but if you haven't heard me talk about it,

02:05:49.700 | there's a practice called yoga nidra,

02:05:51.160 | which literally means yoga sleep.

02:05:53.040 | It is a practice of doing not so much a focus meditation,

02:05:56.360 | but more of a body scan,

02:05:57.500 | focusing on the sensation of the body

02:05:59.160 | and actually trying to turn off that prefrontal cortex

02:06:02.260 | or reduce its activity.

02:06:04.260 | Yoga nidra scripts can be found on YouTube and elsewhere.

02:06:07.240 | They are paralleled by a similar practice

02:06:09.180 | that I've talked a lot about called NSDR,

02:06:11.100 | or non-sleep deep rest.

02:06:13.140 | I put one out into the world,

02:06:14.260 | a short one that's 10 minutes long.

02:06:15.860 | You can just simply go to YouTube and put in NSDR

02:06:18.300 | and my last name, Huberman, there's one there.

02:06:19.900 | Again, all of this is completely zero cost.

02:06:22.060 | Yoga nidra and NSDR have been shown

02:06:25.960 | in a fair number of studies,

02:06:27.680 | not as many as been done on traditional meditation,

02:06:30.260 | or I should say third eye-centered meditation

02:06:32.680 | or mindfulness meditation,

02:06:34.380 | but have been shown to replenish levels

02:06:36.580 | of certain neuromodulators like dopamine

02:06:38.620 | and reduce cortisol, reduce a stress hormone,

02:06:41.680 | at least as much, and by my read of the literature,

02:06:45.100 | significantly more than with traditional meditation.

02:06:48.420 | And there's a nice paper that we will provide a link to,

02:06:51.220 | which is entitled "Yoga Nidra Practice Shows Improvement

02:06:53.740 | in Sleep in Patients with Chronic Insomnia,

02:06:56.140 | a Randomized Controlled Trial."

02:06:58.020 | Basically, this study looks at, as the title suggests,

02:07:03.120 | people with chronic insomnia,

02:07:04.900 | although the results certainly carry over

02:07:07.020 | or would carry over for people who don't have insomnia.

02:07:09.540 | The key result, I believe, in this paper,

02:07:11.980 | although there are many, is that, quote,

02:07:15.420 | "Salivary cortisol reduced statistically significantly

02:07:18.160 | after yoga nidra."

02:07:19.500 | What do I mean by that?

02:07:20.660 | There was a statistically significant reduction

02:07:23.160 | in cortisol levels, the stress hormone,

02:07:25.520 | immediately after the yoga nidra practice

02:07:29.520 | that we believe would be paralleled by a very similar,

02:07:33.040 | if not equivalent, practice of NSDR.

02:07:34.880 | NSDR is a lot like yoga nidra,

02:07:36.400 | but removes a lot of the kind of,

02:07:39.160 | let's just call it the sort of mystical language

02:07:40.700 | and the intentions.

02:07:41.540 | It focuses more on the physiology and the body scans.

02:07:44.440 | I want to acknowledge that yoga nidra has been around

02:07:47.460 | for thousands of years and was certainly there before NSDR.

02:07:50.860 | I also want to acknowledge that,

02:07:52.300 | and this was brought up also in altered traits,

02:07:55.140 | that sometimes language can be a barrier

02:07:57.420 | toward people embracing practices.

02:07:59.260 | In fact, this was recognized by Jon Kabat-Zinn

02:08:02.980 | when he created what he called mindfulness-based

02:08:07.700 | stress reduction practices, or MBSR,

02:08:10.860 | which was simply mindfulness meditation to reduce stress,

02:08:13.320 | but he called it MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction,

02:08:17.800 | as a way to bring it into the clinics

02:08:19.720 | that would otherwise perhaps be averse

02:08:21.220 | to something called mindfulness meditation.

02:08:22.900 | Again, this gets more to the sociology

02:08:24.660 | and the cultural aspects than it does

02:08:26.800 | to any specific utility of one practice versus another.

02:08:31.260 | Here's the takeaway point.

02:08:32.320 | If you want to get better at falling and staying asleep

02:08:34.780 | or falling back asleep if you wake up

02:08:36.280 | in the middle of the night,

02:08:38.300 | or if you are generally challenged with sleep issues,

02:08:41.680 | an excellent behavioral practice

02:08:43.100 | for which there are terrific data,

02:08:45.120 | meaning data that show that a stress hormone cortisol

02:08:49.800 | can be significantly reduced,

02:08:51.060 | as well as certain neurotransmitters can be replenished,

02:08:54.860 | as well as, and this is key and covered in this paper

02:08:57.700 | that I've mentioned a few moments ago on yoga nidra,

02:09:00.880 | that the total amount of sleep that you need

02:09:02.860 | can be reduced at least somewhat,

02:09:05.260 | well then yoga nidra or an NSDR practice

02:09:07.880 | done frankly any time of day is going to be beneficial.

02:09:12.880 | Whereas if your goal, I believe,

02:09:14.740 | is to increase your ability to focus,

02:09:17.660 | to improve your mood, and perhaps most importantly,

02:09:20.960 | to be able to maneuver yourself in a deliberate way

02:09:23.760 | along that interoceptive, exteroceptive,

02:09:26.780 | or interoceptive dissociative continuum

02:09:29.180 | that we've talked about so much,

02:09:30.580 | and to really shift your default mode network

02:09:32.840 | from one of being a mind wanderer

02:09:35.640 | to somebody who can focus and who frankly is happier,

02:09:38.960 | well then a more traditional third eye center type meditation

02:09:42.780 | or a more traditional exteroceptive focused meditation

02:09:46.980 | would be beneficial.

02:09:48.240 | Again, which one of those you choose,

02:09:49.800 | either focusing inward or focusing on a point

02:09:52.000 | outside of you, again, should be dictated

02:09:54.280 | by whether or not you tend to be interoceptively biased

02:09:56.800 | or exteroceptively biased.

02:09:58.360 | But if you want to get better at sleeping,

02:10:00.520 | you want to get better at falling asleep,

02:10:02.460 | and you want to replace sleep that you've lost,

02:10:04.780 | I put that in quotes so that my colleagues

02:10:06.840 | like Matthew Walker don't come after me with,

02:10:10.380 | what would you come after me with, Matt?

02:10:12.460 | Probably with an alarm clock and I don't know,

02:10:15.300 | blankets and a pillow or something of that sort.

02:10:18.060 | In all seriousness, it's very clear that replacing sleep

02:10:22.720 | that we've lost is an area of research

02:10:24.700 | that's still active and ongoing,

02:10:26.120 | but NSDR and yoga nidra are very promising,

02:10:28.680 | if not downright useful for replacing sleep that you've lost.

02:10:33.680 | Certainly the small amount of data that exists now

02:10:36.860 | point to the fact that they are,

02:10:38.400 | not the least of which is a beautiful study

02:10:39.980 | published out of Scandinavia showing

02:10:42.380 | that a 30-minute yoga nidra, aka NSDR practice,

02:10:45.520 | can replenish levels of dopamine,

02:10:48.140 | which puts people in a position to be more action-oriented

02:10:51.960 | and focused, et cetera, when they come out of the yoga nidra.

02:10:54.160 | So certainly very useful practice.

02:10:56.260 | It's a form of meditation.

02:10:57.980 | We could call it meditation-ish,

02:10:59.840 | but yoga nidra and NSDR are not typically

02:11:02.340 | what people think about when we talk about meditation.

02:11:04.540 | Of course, this is an episode about meditation.

02:11:06.280 | The reason I bring up yoga nidra and NSDR

02:11:08.200 | is that many people meditate to enhance their sleepability,

02:11:11.600 | to reduce their total amount of sleep need.

02:11:14.360 | It appears that meditation is probably not ideal for that

02:11:17.140 | in comparison to yoga nidra and NSDR,

02:11:19.120 | but meditation is excellent, if not superb,

02:11:22.460 | for adjusting the default mode network toward more happiness

02:11:25.200 | by being more mindful and present,

02:11:26.920 | and for placing oneself in that healthy model

02:11:30.440 | of interoceptive dissociative continuum.

02:11:33.520 | So we've covered a lot of information,

02:11:35.300 | and I like to think that I've given you some key decisions

02:11:38.320 | to make in developing a meditative practice.

02:11:41.360 | The most important one, of course,

02:11:42.400 | being what will you do regularly?

02:11:44.660 | And maybe you're somebody who just answers that question

02:11:46.480 | by saying, "Look, I'm not going to meditate regularly.

02:11:48.520 | I just want to do the thing that's going to allow me

02:11:50.620 | to feel rested when I'm tired,

02:11:52.200 | and is going to allow me to adjust my state of mind

02:11:55.620 | when I'm not where I want to be for whatever reason,

02:11:58.440 | too anxious or too exhausted, et cetera."

02:12:00.480 | And for those people, I would say a practice like NSDR,

02:12:03.560 | yoga nidra will be immensely beneficial,

02:12:05.720 | as will a more traditional form of meditation.

02:12:08.940 | I also want to just remind everybody that an app

02:12:12.260 | that guides meditation, also with some information

02:12:15.160 | and some intention setting,

02:12:17.340 | such as the Waking Up app from Sam Harris,

02:12:19.800 | can be immensely beneficial.

02:12:21.640 | I've certainly found it to be beneficial.

02:12:23.000 | I know millions of other people have as well,

02:12:25.300 | so I encourage you to check that out.

02:12:27.200 | We've talked about determining where you are

02:12:30.440 | on these continuums of interoception and exteroception

02:12:34.320 | in order to dictate what particular type

02:12:37.000 | of meditation practice you should do in a given moment.

02:12:39.500 | Whether or not you should focus your vision inward

02:12:42.040 | with eyes closed, or focus your vision

02:12:43.760 | and your attention outward, being a key component.

02:12:45.960 | Whether or not you should do cyclic breathing,

02:12:48.840 | which will allow your focus to be off your breathing

02:12:52.380 | somewhat easier than if you do non-cyclic breathing,

02:12:54.740 | if you're doubling up on inhales or exhales.

02:12:56.720 | Whether or not your breathing is going to be natural or not.

02:12:59.020 | And of course, you need to determine

02:13:00.600 | whether or not your meditation practice

02:13:02.220 | is designed to enhance your level of focus or to relax you.

02:13:05.160 | I would say that if it's designed

02:13:06.860 | to enhance your level of focus,

02:13:08.820 | that doesn't necessarily mean that it won't be relaxing.

02:13:11.960 | You could do slow cadence breathing,

02:13:13.320 | third eye meditation could be very relaxing,

02:13:15.640 | and yet it's a focus and refocus practice.

02:13:18.240 | Whereas something like yoga nidra and NSDR

02:13:20.980 | is going to be more along the lines

02:13:23.120 | of replenishing yourself, replacing sleep that you've lost,

02:13:26.940 | or maybe even reducing your sleep need.

02:13:29.420 | On previous podcasts, I've talked about hypnosis,

02:13:32.980 | and particularly the episode with Dr. David Spiegel,

02:13:34.960 | our associate chair of psychiatry.

02:13:36.600 | I don't want to get into hypnosis now,

02:13:38.000 | but just understand that hypnosis is distinct

02:13:40.520 | from breath work, from yoga nidra, from NSDR,

02:13:42.960 | and from meditation, even though it includes

02:13:45.420 | some of those components, like focusing your attention,

02:13:48.280 | it involves actually directing your visual attention

02:13:50.460 | outward than inward to go into the hypnosis,

02:13:53.140 | it involves some breathing of a particular kind,

02:13:55.120 | it involves a specific imagery, et cetera,

02:13:57.700 | but hypnosis is distinct because hypnosis

02:14:00.620 | is really designed to fix or address a specific problem.

02:14:05.100 | Whereas meditation, NSDR, yoga nidra, et cetera,

02:14:08.220 | typically are not.

02:14:09.920 | They can help fix problems such as anxiety,

02:14:13.280 | sleep issues, et cetera, but they generally are not directed

02:14:16.740 | toward a particular line of thinking.

02:14:18.480 | They can be, but typically they are not.

02:14:20.540 | Whereas hypnosis, almost always,

02:14:22.620 | especially in the clinical context, not stage hypnosis,

02:14:24.880 | but the clinical context for which there's a lot of research

02:14:27.820 | to show it can, for instance, help with quitting smoking,

02:14:30.840 | literally a quadrupling of the effectiveness

02:14:34.020 | for smoking cessation with something like the Reverie app,

02:14:36.880 | then if people just try and go cold turkey,

02:14:38.900 | or for reducing insomnia, or for reducing pain,

02:14:43.020 | or for any number of things, including trauma, et cetera,

02:14:45.180 | hypnosis is really great at dealing with specific issues

02:14:49.240 | and problems and tackling those.

02:14:51.040 | Meditation tends to be focused on other things,

02:14:53.460 | no pun intended.

02:14:54.680 | I'm guessing some of you are probably wondering

02:14:56.340 | where to start, or if you're already an avid meditator,

02:15:00.100 | where to go with all this information.

02:15:02.320 | For that reason, I just wanted to offer you

02:15:03.860 | a particular form of meditation that incorporates

02:15:08.040 | all of the features that I've talked about up until now

02:15:12.440 | in a single meditation practice.

02:15:14.680 | And it's a meditation practice that,

02:15:17.580 | for lack of a better name, I called STB,

02:15:19.880 | or space-time bridging.

02:15:21.500 | And the time component has to do with a very simple fact,

02:15:24.560 | which is when we focus our attention,

02:15:27.640 | visual attention or otherwise,

02:15:29.200 | on things close to or within our body,

02:15:31.520 | we tend to be fine slicing time.

02:15:33.580 | You can sort of think of your breath

02:15:35.240 | as more or less the second hand on your clock of existence,

02:15:39.620 | whereas when we tend to focus on things far away from us,

02:15:42.840 | we tend to parse or carve up time within bigger bins.

02:15:47.680 | If you've ever seen an airplane flying at a distance,

02:15:50.980 | it looks like it's moving very, very slowly.

02:15:52.520 | If you were right up next to that airplane,

02:15:53.960 | it's probably going five or 600 miles an hour,

02:15:55.640 | it would go by very quickly.

02:15:57.320 | This is not a coincidence.

02:15:58.760 | Believe it or not, how you slice the time domain

02:16:03.140 | of your life and your experience

02:16:04.680 | has everything to do with your vision.

02:16:06.260 | And the closer things are,

02:16:08.180 | the more finely you slice up time.

02:16:10.200 | The more closely your attention is placed on yourself,

02:16:12.440 | the more closely you slice up time.

02:16:14.740 | If you focus your visual attention very far,

02:16:17.200 | or you think about the other side of the world,

02:16:19.960 | for instance, and you envision that,

02:16:21.480 | well, then you're actually slicing time more broadly.

02:16:25.060 | Hopefully that makes sense.

02:16:26.160 | Fine slicing would be like slow motion, higher frame rate.

02:16:29.820 | Looking in the distance,

02:16:30.700 | you're actually taking bigger time bins.

02:16:32.440 | So even though things look like they're moving more slowly,

02:16:34.360 | it's because your fidelity, your precision of measuring time

02:16:38.880 | is actually not as good.

02:16:40.040 | It's as if you're only have the hour's hand on the clock.

02:16:43.920 | So it seems like it moves very slowly.

02:16:45.440 | Hopefully that makes sense to you.

02:16:46.700 | So there's a meditation practice

02:16:47.920 | that I call space-time bridging

02:16:49.320 | that incorporates everything that I've talked about today.

02:16:51.720 | It balances interoception and exteroception.

02:16:53.960 | It balances interoception and dissociation.

02:16:56.360 | And it crosses the various time domains

02:17:01.080 | that the brain can encompass using vision.

02:17:04.160 | And it's a very simple meditation.

02:17:05.820 | It's one that I've been doing for years.

02:17:07.280 | And it's one that we're starting to do some research on,

02:17:09.440 | but I'm just going to share with you

02:17:10.440 | because I think it's actually quite fun

02:17:13.200 | and can be quite informative.

02:17:14.840 | In fact, people have told me

02:17:16.200 | that it can even lead to some interesting insights,

02:17:18.480 | both during the meditation and outside the meditation.

02:17:21.140 | It's very simple.

02:17:21.980 | What you do,

02:17:22.800 | ideally you would do this outside or at a window,

02:17:25.080 | but what you do is you essentially close your eyes.

02:17:27.760 | I'm not going to do this now.

02:17:28.600 | I'm not going to close my eyes and do the meditation,

02:17:29.720 | but I'll describe it.

02:17:30.560 | You close your eyes and you focus your attention

02:17:32.240 | either on your third eye center or your breathing,

02:17:34.560 | and you try and put 100% of your perceptual awareness

02:17:38.160 | onto your breathing or your third eye center

02:17:40.780 | for the duration of three breaths, okay?

02:17:43.240 | So you're 100% or trying to be 100% in interoception.

02:17:48.240 | Then you open your eyes.

02:17:50.400 | You focus on the surface of your body someplace.

02:17:52.920 | I find that holding out my hand at sort of arms distance

02:17:56.060 | and focusing on the palm of my hand

02:17:58.100 | and focusing there visually.

02:17:59.640 | So I'm splitting my attention now between my hand,

02:18:02.320 | and I'm also going to pay attention to my breath

02:18:04.360 | for the duration of three full inhales and exhales

02:18:07.760 | while also focusing on my hand.

02:18:10.160 | So you're splitting interoception and exteroception

02:18:12.920 | as best you can, about 50/50.

02:18:15.400 | Then you subsequently look at some location

02:18:19.680 | in your immediate environment, maybe 10, 15 feet away,

02:18:23.360 | and you focus your attention on that location

02:18:26.100 | while also splitting your attention

02:18:27.700 | so that you're still paying attention to your breathing.

02:18:29.200 | You do that for the duration of three breaths,

02:18:31.520 | but now you are in exteroception and interoception.

02:18:35.300 | Then you focus your attention at some distance further away,

02:18:38.560 | maybe the furthest distance you can see.

02:18:40.140 | Now, this is why it's useful to do out of a window

02:18:42.700 | or on a balcony or outdoors.

02:18:44.840 | You focus on the furthest point, maybe a horizon,

02:18:48.140 | some furthest point for the duration of three breaths

02:18:50.860 | while also paying attention to your breathing.

02:18:53.300 | And sort of imagine a bridge between the two

02:18:54.980 | if you find it to be challenging to focus on both.

02:18:58.260 | And then, and this is where it can be a little tricky,

02:19:00.560 | but then what you actually focus on is the fact,

02:19:03.180 | and this is not an imaginary thing.

02:19:04.600 | This is a fact that you are a tiny speck

02:19:07.020 | on this big ball that's floating out in space, right?

02:19:10.220 | The earth that's floating out in space.

02:19:11.820 | And you try and focus on your three breaths

02:19:14.200 | while also acknowledging that you are a small body,

02:19:17.040 | literally, on this very seemingly large body, the earth,

02:19:20.580 | but that's floating in a much larger,

02:19:22.740 | larger expansive place, the universe.

02:19:27.460 | And you do that for three breaths.

02:19:29.500 | And then you close your eyes

02:19:30.740 | and you go right back into interoception.

02:19:32.780 | And you might want to, and you do that for three breaths.

02:19:35.000 | You focus on your interoception for three breaths.

02:19:37.360 | And you might want to march through

02:19:38.560 | these different locations a few times

02:19:40.160 | or back and forth if you like,

02:19:41.320 | but typically I will just do it for one segment

02:19:44.660 | at pure interoception, palm of hand,

02:19:48.880 | some distance in front of me, horizon, whole globe,

02:19:52.620 | universe thing, back into body, et cetera.

02:19:55.160 | Why is this useful?

02:19:56.500 | Why would this be useful?

02:19:57.780 | Why is it at all interesting

02:19:59.280 | or is this just some crazy idea?

02:20:01.040 | Well, the reason it's useful, I believe,

02:20:04.180 | is that it has you deliberately step your awareness,

02:20:08.900 | your perception, through every position

02:20:12.060 | along that interoceptive, exteroceptive continuum.

02:20:16.100 | Now, I did say to remain connected to,

02:20:19.180 | as they'll say in the yoga classes, aware of,

02:20:21.980 | I guess would be the more scientific way to state it,

02:20:24.560 | aware of one's breath.

02:20:25.600 | But if you wanted, you could actually try

02:20:26.980 | and put your awareness completely outside yourself.

02:20:29.620 | But most people will find that challenging to do

02:20:31.480 | if they're already paying attention to their breath.

02:20:33.300 | It's just hard to do.

02:20:34.200 | So I find it easier to just split my awareness

02:20:36.660 | from interoception to exteroception.

02:20:38.960 | But by stepping through these different locations

02:20:41.420 | and then deliberately placing your perception,

02:20:45.420 | your awareness back into pure interoception,

02:20:48.340 | what you do is you essentially are practicing

02:20:51.620 | or exercising this incredible ability

02:20:54.040 | that the human mind has to deliberately place

02:20:57.040 | your perception at specific locations

02:20:59.880 | along the interoceptive, exteroceptive continuum.

02:21:03.220 | And I think this is very useful

02:21:04.640 | because many of us, including myself,

02:21:06.520 | tend to get locked at one location along that continuum.

02:21:09.460 | For instance, if you're scrolling your phone

02:21:10.920 | for a long period of time,

02:21:12.640 | you may forget about your bodily sensations,

02:21:14.320 | but you generally forget about other things

02:21:15.980 | going on in the world.

02:21:17.220 | Or if you're very focused on things out in the world,

02:21:19.100 | you oftentimes can forget about your internal sensations

02:21:21.780 | and what's going on internally.

02:21:23.820 | And being functional in work, in life, in relationship,

02:21:27.080 | in all aspects, including your ability to fall asleep,

02:21:30.940 | involves stepping yourself along these different locations,

02:21:33.640 | which again are not just physical locations

02:21:36.280 | of third eye center or your breathing

02:21:38.400 | or your hand or horizon.

02:21:40.220 | Those are just stations within space.

02:21:43.060 | But remember, each one of those,

02:21:45.280 | just by way of how your visual system and the time domain

02:21:49.020 | are interlocked with one another,

02:21:51.720 | sets your mind in a particular time domain.

02:21:54.340 | And so much of what involves being a functional human being

02:21:58.040 | involves dynamically adjusting our attention

02:22:01.400 | from what we are doing on our computer

02:22:03.140 | to a question somebody asks and then back again,

02:22:05.480 | or from text messaging to listening to a lecture

02:22:09.200 | or a podcast, or from listening to a lecture or podcast

02:22:12.640 | and then going back into a mode of commuting,

02:22:15.200 | but making that commute either relaxing

02:22:17.280 | or maybe you do work on your commute

02:22:18.640 | or connect with family or friends, et cetera.

02:22:21.000 | So much of the fatigue of life and the,

02:22:25.080 | I should say the maladaptive behaviors and emotions

02:22:28.520 | that show up in life are really not about any set

02:22:31.760 | of behaviors or emotions being wrong or right,

02:22:36.240 | but rather inappropriately matched

02:22:38.240 | to the space time domain that we're in,

02:22:39.960 | which again is just fancy nerd speak for saying,

02:22:42.800 | being present and being mindful

02:22:45.160 | is a wonderful byproduct of a meditation practice,

02:22:49.280 | but it is but one of those stations

02:22:52.040 | along that space time continuum.

02:22:54.860 | The key element here is to step yourself

02:22:57.240 | through a practice deliberately so that you are flexibly

02:23:00.240 | and dynamically able to engage in conversation

02:23:03.000 | then disengage and focus,

02:23:04.480 | or focus and then disengage from the work you're focusing on

02:23:07.180 | and actually have a conversation or be in the world

02:23:10.080 | and move out of that interoceptive awareness

02:23:12.840 | to one in which you are dynamically engaged

02:23:15.600 | with the things around you.

02:23:17.500 | I realize this might sound a little bit vague.

02:23:19.440 | For that reason, I encourage you not to think about it

02:23:22.340 | too much, but rather to try the practice,

02:23:24.520 | see if it works for you.

02:23:25.460 | If it doesn't, that's fine.

02:23:27.620 | I think it is a good one for people that find

02:23:29.560 | that a third eye center or breathing focus

02:23:32.880 | and interoceptive meditation might be enjoyable to them

02:23:36.640 | or very beneficial to them,

02:23:37.680 | but they might want to try something new

02:23:39.160 | and other people who might find that that tends

02:23:40.760 | to put them too much in their own head.

02:23:43.020 | I think it also ought to be very useful for people

02:23:45.720 | that tend to be overly exteroceptive,

02:23:48.500 | more in the dissociative end of the continuum

02:23:50.760 | and need to bring in a bit more of interoceptive awareness,

02:23:54.300 | but either can't do that or uncomfortable doing that

02:23:57.840 | because they're simply not interested in

02:23:59.780 | or comfortable with feeling so much of their internal state

02:24:02.680 | because that can either be overwhelming

02:24:04.120 | or that's just simply not the way they want to feel.

02:24:06.260 | Now, as we round up, I do want to acknowledge

02:24:08.440 | that there are an enormous number of rooms within the house

02:24:13.440 | or rather I should say within the castle

02:24:15.300 | that is meditation, including for instance,

02:24:18.060 | intention setting and mantras and an enormous number

02:24:21.860 | of different features of meditation practices

02:24:24.000 | that we simply did not have time to go into

02:24:27.000 | and or for which the research on

02:24:30.120 | is not completely ironed out yet.

02:24:32.940 | For that reason, in future episodes and not long from now,

02:24:36.200 | I'm going to be sitting down with experts in meditation

02:24:38.680 | that include neuroscientists and clinicians,

02:24:40.660 | but other experts in meditation that certainly are versed

02:24:44.180 | in those topics and where they can't point

02:24:46.920 | to specific research studies can certainly point us

02:24:49.960 | toward the utility of things like mantras and intentions

02:24:54.140 | as they relate to getting the most

02:24:55.500 | out of a meditative practice.

02:24:56.840 | So I eagerly await those conversations

02:24:58.980 | and I hope you will join me for those as well.

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02:25:47.900 | Thanks again for joining me for today's discussion

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02:25:56.720 | [upbeat music]

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How Meditation Works & Science-Based Effective Meditations | Huberman Lab Podcast #96

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