Best Of Mental Health And Happiness Hacking: How To Reduce Anxiety And Depression, Elevate Your Sense Of Calm And Focus, Become The Master Of Your Thoughts & Much More.

Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life?

Let's do this.

Welcome to a very special episode, the best of mental health and brain performance. If you're feeling a little foggy or if you want to upgrade your memory, cognition, focus, and the like, or just get a little bit more smoke to come out your ears, this episode is for you. We are going to delve into everything from different types of nootropics and smart drugs to ways to address anxiety both naturally and using biohacks, the impact of music and how to use that properly, balancing sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system function, different types of meditation and neurofeedback and a whole lot more. First of all, if you want to access the shownotes for this episode, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/MentalPodcast. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/MentalPodcast. In this first snippet, you're going to learn how to stack paraxanthine with a special brain-boosting peptide, how to increase your dopamine and motivation using a very simple tactic, microdosing with psilocybin or a variant of LSD for creativity and focus.

Yes, you heard me right. Here we go.

Honestly, do it as long as it's fun. And, if the moment you start to tense up and worry about it, you probably have gone too far for that level or you need to switch something. And, while routine when you're experimenting with something is really helpful for the first time, so if you've never woken up to see the sunrise, it's good to do maybe a 30-day challenge. But, I really recommend not having a routine and the routine is not having the routine and that variation actually gives you a lot of physical, mental, and spiritual capacity. So, initially, recommend doing a routine challenge, whatever, with your neighbor, friend, online. And then, after that, try to get away from having a routine. But, the habit stacking and making it fun, making it playful makes you able to incorporate more things into your day and maintain them a lot easier.

Yeah.

So, the routine to kind of create the habit and then switch to intuition kind of as soon as possible. Yeah, I love that. Now, let's kind of switch in, I guess, back to the kava a little bit. As it relates to substances that can help keep us in the mental state or bring us into the desired mental state if we're out of it, I'd love to know some of your favorites to use both on a daily basis and on an occasional basis. Start with John.

Yeah.

I find breathwork to be one of the best things to really kind of clear my mind and connect me with the present moment. And, some of the biggest challenge I've had with breathwork is maintaining the motivation to actually sit down and do it. And so, this is where I think anchoring the joy with that and sometimes you have to force yourself to just sit down and do it. With breathwork, it's a— because your breath is controlled by both your autonomic and your volitional control. And, that autonomic nervous system is everything. If you take care of that, you're going to be extremely healthy, live a long life. And, it's something that's neglected. And so, it kind of ties into this whole circadian rhythm with sleep/wake. Because the part of the autonomic nervous system that's not supported is the parasympathetic. And, the most powerful activator of the parasympathetic is melatonin. Just like cortisol activates the sympathetic, it gets you up in the morning, melatonin is really important to be powerful. And so, we get and build melatonin by light going in the eyes. And then, there's a lot of subtle rhythms that that play into that where the amber light for sunrise and sunset. Because I would think about this little guy in a cave and all he has is a two-way radio and he's down there and you've got your radio and you're outside and you're seeing what's going on and you're letting your little guy know in the cave what's going on. And this guy's got all the levers to control all these different aspects of health. And you say, "Alright, the sun's coming up." And he's like, Okay, I got that. Sun's coming up. And then, the sun going down. And so, all these different points really create a reference point for your body to entrain to the sleep-wake where you're going to get that really powerful parasympathetic activation and that deep rest. And I think that this is more important than diet or exercise or anything else because it's foundational. Once you have that in place, then you're going to have the vitality to go and do all these other things. You're going to have the motivation, the neurotransmitters feeding dopamine where you're going to be like, "Okay, I can do this." I think John just admitted that he hears voices inside of his head.

You need to have that checked out. Absolutely.

I guess I'll get all practical with your question, Joe, because it depends when you ask me what kind of things I like for enhancing mental function or the smart drugs and the nootropics, et cetera. I would say top 3 for me right now, just to cut straight to the chase, There's a caffeine-like molecule that's pretty blissful called paraxanthine, P-A-R-A-X-A-N-T-H-I-N-E. I have had a great deal of success in terms of mental energy, thermogenesis, fasting, and appetite control, et cetera, stacking that with a peptide called tesofensine. Paraxanthine, tesofensine stack, I don't think a lot of people are talking about it right now, but you can crush a day on that. It's a very, very similar feeling to what you'd get from something like modafinil, aka vigil without it keeping you up for 24 hours. That's a good stack, paraxanthine with teslofensine. Teslofensine is a peptide, paraxanthine you can buy off Amazon. Second would be— there's a company called Nootopia that's making some interesting stuff right now. I just interviewed them this week. They have one called Dopadrops. They're dopaminergic compounds, and you take one, you take the next one about 20 minutes later. Dopamine is very motivating, Makes you just want to go crush your workout or crush your day or do something you might not otherwise be motivated to do. This company does an online questionnaire for your neurotransmitter balance, and then it's not cheap. It's like $400 for a month-long box of all their smart drugs and nootropics, but that one I've been impressed with. I think they're doing a good job. It's really interesting. I'm intentionally leaving Chris and Quicksilver Scientific out just because everybody knows about that right now, so I'm going to talk about something people don't already know about, even though his stuff is absolutely fantastic. And you can go ask them too because they got some great cognitive pick-me-ups as well. And then, I would say the last one would be microdosing with plant medicines. I think plant medicines are overused now. I think they're dangerous. I think there's a lot of people using too much of them or using in the wrong set and setting, but I think microdosing with psilocybin or microdosing with LSA primarily for creativity, for focus, et cetera, It's safe, it's effective. Obviously, the only risk is if you're microdosing, you have the stuff around, you could obviously take too much of it if you don't self-control and wind up, I think, in a dangerous place spiritually. But, I would say microdosing has a time and place as well. And, those would be 3 things that at this point in my life would probably be the top 3 things that I'm using to just upgrade my brain during any given day if we're actually talking about things that you would consume. And, I guess I'm leaving tarot mushrooms out of the equation, but my My wife and I are like mushroom junkies and do those almost every morning in our coffee or tea or whatever.

So, yeah.

So, don't feel bad, Tero.

We are using mushrooms too.

Yeah. And, I want to open it up to Tero and I also want to mention that this group really loves Four Sigmatic coffee. We went through 120 cups in 2.5 hours today.

Next up, your vagus nerve. It's important. Snakes through your whole body, innervates a lot of organs, is really impactful for nervous system performance. But, when it comes to how to use it to manage anxiety, to stimulate it and to improve performance based on your vagus nerve and a whole lot more. We're going to delve in with Go Super Brains, Andy Triana.

They just do intense oscillation to one of these fascial landmarks like your sternum. For example, we have two torpedoes of fascia in our thorax, one on each side, and then obviously a larger one where the actual skeleton superficially lies. But, the left and right have a little bit of their own fascial dynamics and they kind of meet in certain areas. Like the sternum where you can release both sides from the center. And, that's what they're looking to do there.

Okay. That's super interesting. So, RPR is just a manual therapy type of form. It's an acronym for some form of manual therapy. What about the rib— are you saying RibTac?

Yes.

What is that?

That's the name of the technique from the Czech Republic.

Oh, okay. Are there videos that one could find online if they were to Google RibTac of what some of those techniques look like?

Probably not videos, but you'd still find the research papers. It comes from the Czech Republic in the '90s. Just look for manual changes to the diaphragm. I think Google Scholar is the best thing on the planet. Growing up coming through school, I'm sure it was the same. Everyone was all big on bibliographies, but just like the lemon problem kind of dissipates with the internet, the more research and publications get out into the world, the less validity you have to things like that. So, you can have a conversation where you tell someone exactly what to research, the key terms, and you use key things like parentheses or pluses and minuses, in your Google search box, and you can actually find the paper faster almost than sorting through anyone's bibliography nowadays.

Yeah.

And it is RibTac, R-A-B-T-A-C?

I believe so. Yeah. Czech Republic, 1990s. I'm not sure if that term will come up in your search engine because I don't know how search engines work with sorting through the paper. That's the term in the paper, but the title of the paper has to do with the manual restoration of the diaphragm.

Okay, cool. I'm just writing a note to myself. I'll hunt down some links and put them in the shownotes for people. I got to ask you, by the way, I'm going to disappear here for a second and reach down by my office because I was standing on these this morning while I was working. And, this kind of reminds me what you're talking about as far as vagal nerve activation and potential downregulation of some of the sympathetic activity. These things arrived at my house last night. It's like this nail bed that you stand on that you would use as almost kind of like an ice bath for the feet for vagal nerve activation and it's a proprioceptive input. And, you've no doubt seen a lot of these acupressure mats and things like that that folks will lie on. What do you think about using that as a tactic to kind of downregulate sympathetic, whether a nail bed or acupressure mat or something like that?

Marc had something similar to that when we did the podcast recently. I think it's essentially the modern-day grounding indoors. I just had a conversation and a consultation with someone earlier today who had vision where we talk about grounding and doing some vision training outside is a massive return on ROI for something that you could just do inside. These types of things, it's really the increase in afferent and efferent signaling through our hands and feet. That's nature's way of ameliorating anxiety. You can view anxiety as spilling over electrical input into brain areas that don't need to be active right now. And mindfulness is using the 5 senses to quiet those. So, when you get outside and ground, obviously you're doing more than just getting afferent, efferent signaling from your feet, but additionally, you're getting light and all this stuff. But, let's say you're just at the desk or doing whatever, bringing something like that inside I think is honestly better than doing a whole stretching routine when you talk about return on investment per minute.

Yeah. Have you ever messed around with those vagal nerve stimulators that they use as electrical input to the to the sides of the neck or sometimes back behind the ears. They're typically these wearable devices that will vibrate or produce almost very similar, almost like a TENS unit, a mild electrical sensation over the vagal nerve area?

I haven't personally, but one of my best friends in the UK, Shane Jermaine, has with tons of success. I've seen his biometrics and know his routines in life really well. He loves it. I've experimented with the PEMF monitors that go through actual vibrational frequencies that resonate, but very similar concepts.

Yeah, yeah, those things are super interesting. They seem to relax you pretty well. Now, related to anxiety that you mentioned, for you, how would you define where anxiety actually comes from? And, I think about this honestly because one thing that I talked with a guy named Dr. Peter Martone about several podcasts ago was he said that he'll relax himself and fall asleep a lot faster if he avoids future processing. And thinks instead back to things that have happened in the past as almost the way to kind of shift a lot of activity in the frontal cortex, I suppose, away from that and away from dwelling upon the future, making me kind of wonder your whole take on anxiety and future processing. You ever thought about that?

100%. So, we don't have a center in our brain for the future. The most sophisticated anticipatory center we have is probably the hypothalamus with anticipatory insulin secretion and stuff like that. And we're looking at minutes to hours tops. You know what I mean? It's funny when we talk about the best coaches that are just known, they're planning 1 to 2, maybe 3, 4 years tops in advance. Our ability as a human brain to go into the future is frankly trash, but our ability to be present is quite good. So, if you look at anxiety from a philosophical perspective, a psychology-first perspective, I would say it's putting too much blood flow to future processing using centers that we don't have available for that. And if I was to look at it from a neurological perspective, I would describe it electrically like I just did a few minutes ago, being surplus electricity into unnecessary places in your brain. But we're always coming back to the concept of white noise or sacrificing electricity and blood flow to the key brain areas for it being turned on in inappropriate So, what do you do about that?

Obviously, golfing has a great deal of potential for anxiety or panic to cause issues. I do a lot of bow hunting and shooting and archery. They talk a lot about the target panic issue where you're anxious right before you do a high-risk or very important activity. What are your thoughts on management of anxiety and panic based on what you just described?

The first thing I would tell anybody is recognize it's never going away. It's a good thing. And even the best athletes on the planet, the best businessmen on the planet signing the biggest deals still experience it. And just being at peace with that sometimes gives people a lot of support because it's easy to believe that like, "Oh, the Walter Paytons of the world, they were never anxious. They just did what they did and they're tough, blah, blah, blah." And that's an appropriate mindset to have, but I promise you every single great athlete businessman ever felt just as nervous, if not more nervous, than you did. The difference was they had strategies and what I call buoys of objectivity to hang on to when they're in the ocean of anxiety drowning, and they were just able to survive. So, when you have these anxious moments, the first thing you need to do is reengage with the world around you from your 5 senses. Anxiety often has to do with losing touch especially like that term I just mentioned is a golf term. It's losing touch of how hard these fine motor skills things are happening. Or, we talk about it in wrestling too. Did you push someone so far that it actually negated the setup of what you were trying to do? The concept of touch goes a long way in every single sport across everything. So, if you lose mindfulness, your 5 senses, your ability to interact with the world around you, you're inherently going to lose vision. Peripheral vision and behavioral decisions and the 5 senses are a little triangle if will in their ability to function. So, being aware and accepting, being mindful and present are the two easiest concepts to chase after. If you want to do something like maybe pull out a few arm hairs or just lightly and gently stroke your hand and give yourself a light sensation, I talk about the world's smallest violin, rubbing your thumbnail over the little fingerprint ridges of your index finger and force yourself to feel that. It's going to bring you to present because that future-driven perception is certainly what's driven in anxiety.

How do you tackle the idea of, like, you know, visualization and motor imagery? And I've come across a ton of really interesting research lately on, you know, kind of like those old, uh, what was it, like the psychosomatic books, like the, like the Inner Game of Golf or the Inner Game of Tennis, where you could actually improve your stroke or improve your performance by using mental imagery. And, you know, as we all know, probably most notably with the story of Michael Phelps, the swimmer, getting to the point where he could visualize the individual drops of water coming off his goggles. You say that we have a very difficult time future processing or imagining what would happen in the future. I imagine that's a little bit different than visualizing what it is that you want to accomplish or an ideal performance metric. So, How do you deal with visualization? Is that something that you think is actually useful?

100%. The research proves it is. And, there's a balance between spatial ability, that's the skill to participate in visualizations, and the quality of the visualization drill itself. You need to be skillful enough. So, when we look at what that is, on simplest terms, it's like Rubik's Cube. It's like, can you do it in your head? Do you know what to do next? Can you see in 3D if we go from white to red or whatever's on the other side? That's spatial abilities as a skill in its most rudimentary sense. It's how can you manipulate these things in 3D in your head. Now, when you add that to Michael Phelps' visualization drill that we just talked about, you're actually decreasing the need to anticipate in the future because you're seeing right here in the present what you believe is about to happen because we understand that faith and belief are inherently actually tied to reality. You would love to believe that there's no research behind faith, prayer, and hugs, but there is very legitimate research behind all three of those things we've seen. So, not only are you using an actual tangible skill, you're actually able to process something that's about to happen better and get ready for it better because you have inherent belief that it's about to happen.

So, from a practical standpoint, how do you use visualization or use it with your athletes or your clients?

So, right away, 100% no matter what, you're starting a spatial skill training regime. And, that's separate from visualization. In my head, I think of visualization as being your sport-specific training and spatial skills are your GPP. So, every single day no matter what, you're going to do some type of spatial game that challenges your ability to manipulate scenes in 3D in your head. Then, we're going to do some sports psychology like work, conversing, getting to know your athlete self and create specific visualizations that help you deal with the negative performance-related things that can pop up on the field. So, it's maybe you realize that you just get fast and aggressive in periods of time where you don't need to be. We're going to practice a visualization drill that involves speeding up and slowing down time. So, maybe you see the drop of water come really slowly off Michael Phelps' goggle. And then, once it leaves the goggle, Boom, back to real time. So, there's a dual training modality that I kind of bring to the table when we talk about training an athlete's brain.

Ben Greenfield: You ever use visualization, I guess, for a non-high-performance athlete? Let's say the average person going to the gym, hitting the weights, just pursuing better health and fitness in general from preventive standpoint. Anything that you would use with visualization when it comes to those type of folks who might think this is just for the pro athletes?

Yeah, I use a drill that I call the chalk outline drill, and I force you to be able to manipulate your brain space related to what you're doing. So, maybe you have a real issue with lower back on deadlifts but literally nothing else and your back never hurts. We can approach that from a neurology perspective and look, you've had so many hippocampal memories associated with this part of your sensory motor cortex that we have substance P just slip into this motor pattern now because it's happened so many So, what I want you to do is make this chalk outline and envision the lower back portion of your chalk outline in a calming purple or blue and allow yourself to disengage feelings of vigilance, aggression, pain, or whatever negative you have pent up in that low back. Then, open your eyes, get ready, and perform a successful deadlift. And then, do it again back and forth until that pain degrades.

Interesting. Part of the performance piece that you hear thrown around a lot that I'm sure you've come across is this idea of getting into the flow state. Do you work with that much as far as practical ways to increase someone's ability to be able to get into flow state?

Yeah.

It's fun for me because you have to reverse engineer it. Where the research ends on flow state is the different flow states for different people in different sports. I've kind of come to my own categorization of We have dopamine and norepinephrine-driven flow states for individuals. Some rare people do both, but people are usually one or the other. The type of person where it's like having your best friend there and the euphoria of your friends and I made it, that ignites the ultimate performances in you. And, we see these people are anticipatory in nature just like dopamine tends to be. But, we also see people that function under the I need to get punched in the face first and then I'm amazing mindset. These are the norepinephrine people because when we look at Adderall-like drug studies, we see norepinephrine always comes to the party late. And, that's because it's a constituent of dopaminergic activation. So, what we're really looking at is some people slip into flow state because slip into is actually the terminology they use in the research because that's what happens. Some people slip into flow state as things are beginning. And, environment related to it causes it to them. And, some people attain flow state after that's already begun and they've stabilized. And, norepinephrine as a neurotransmitter has to do with focus. These tend to be your somewhat aggressive, stoic face, very kind of goal-oriented individuals where the dopamine people tend to be the types of carefree, fun-loving flow state individuals.

Individuals.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm totally norepinephrine. Like, for me to get into the flow state, I gotta be in a lot of pain, under a lot of pressure, or having been engaged in the activity for at least like 15 to 20 minutes before I really get into that alpha state where everything's starting to feel easy. Is that pretty typical for a norepi?

100%. You see this like whether it's baseball, football, or golf. This is the guy that needs to strike out once to hit a home run, the guy that needs to bogey the first hole, the guy that needs to have a shit first half so he can bounce back and have a killer second, third, and fourth half. There's pros and cons to everything. So, we see the norepinephrine people tend to have less control over their flow state because they're typically responding to something that needs to happen, whereas we see dopamine people oftentimes have work capacity and behavior efficiency issues. Like, "Oh, that could have been a layup, but you went in for a slam dunk from 8 feet out when you just didn't need to." You needed to take a bunch of caffeine and get all hyped up and get crazy sweaty just to actually ignite what you need to do. You, you know, all these different things play into the strategies that you nutritionally, training-wise, and psychologically need to employ, even supplement-wise.

Ben Greenfield: It's no secret, I don't think, that music has a pretty significant impact on your brain. Today you're going to learn how it can lower cortisol, release endorphins, reduce stress levels, different hertz frequencies that are most appropriate, and a whole lot more. Michael Tyrrell, who you'll learn more about in this snippet has sadly since passed. So, may he rest in peace.

His legacy lives on. Here we go.

When I got to some of the high-pitched parts of this song, Chad and I were sometimes working close to 10:00 p.m. My voice was cracking. I was tired after a week of recording, but I barely hit these notes. You'll hear in the song, which I wrote as an inspiration for you to be fully present to what the world is telling you right now. Eyes wide open, a fearless and hopeful spirit, and a knowledge deep down inside that God has a great purpose for your life. That's all woven into this song. So it's called Made For— this is what you're made for. Check it out.

There is a reason for all this. Don't close your eyes, you just might miss what life is telling you. Don't close your eyes. Don't let go of anything.

your eyes.

Breathe this all in. Be here right now. Take on this chance. You know this is what you made for. Hold on tight now. Just go all out. Find your Your own way, you know. This is what you came for. This is what you're made for. Oh, body, mind, and soul. This is what you're made for. Breathe in deep, but don't let go. Body, mind, Soren, this is all you. Be here right now. Take on this chance, you know. This is what you're made for. Hold on tight now. Just go all out. Find your own way, you know. This is what you came for. This is what you're made for. This is what you're made for. Be here right now. Take on this chance, you know. This is what you're made for. Hold on tight now. Just go all out. Find your own way, you know. This is what you came for. This is what you're made for.

All right, so now that you've heard that track, I want to delve into music for stress. Music for stress. I, I remember when I read this passage of the Bible about how when, when, uh, King, uh, Saul was super stressed, he had David come play music for him. And it turns out that listening to music can have really therapeutic effects. I actually did an interview with this composer may he rest in peace. He's since passed away. His name is Michael Tyrell, and he has these fantastic tracks called Wholetones, which he tunes to specific frequencies for sound healing and for decreased stress. What's also interesting is if you listen to that podcast I mentioned in the introduction with Blurry Creatures on the frequency of music, Michael actually reset the frequency hertz of the A note, I believe it is, in his music to be closer to 444 hertz, And there's a whole controversial story behind why that would be that you can listen to my podcast with Michael to learn more about. But it turns out that music, especially music that's tuned to the right frequency, has significant power to help reduce stress and anxiety and relieve pain and even improve focus. So, there was a 2020 overview of research in the music and stress, and it showed that listening to music can lower your heart rate, it can lower the amount of cortisol produced by the adrenal glands, it can release painkilling endorphins, which is why it can be useful even if you've had surgery that you're recovering from, uh, cancer-related pain, injury-related pain, etc. It can distract you from stress, thus reducing your physical and emotional stress levels. And they found in clinically meaningful ways it can reduce a variety of stress-related symptoms. So So, you know, when music sounds move through your ears as vibrations and your inner ear translates those vibrations into electrical signals, and then neurons transmit those signals to certain areas of what's called the cerebral cortex in your brain, dedicated regions of the brain can then detect the different elements of those signals like the tone and the pitch and the rhythm of the music. When areas of the brain get activated by the music, especially if it's positive uplifting music, Even though I had a fascinating dinner conversation just a couple of weeks ago with the lead guitarist of a band called Five Fingers Death Punch, I don't necessarily think that Five Fingers Death Punch, you know, hard metal or death metal, is going to be the best for stress. I, I don't think I'm, I'm revealing a news flash there, but the investigation into the right kind of music's health effects on its ability to calm us down and relieve stress is undeniable. So there was a 2021 study that showed that people who listen to personal selections of music, both at home and in a laboratory environment— again, the importance of self-selection here, not having someone else select the music, but you select the tracks you want to listen to— had significantly reduced cortisol levels. There was another overview of 349 different studies that occurred on music's usefulness as a mental health treatment for schizophrenia for bipolar, and for major depression. 68.5% of music-based interventions had positive results. Music therapy has also shown a significant benefit in preventing burnout in workers. Uh, there was one study that showed that having access to 30-minute music listening sessions during a break reduced stress, and less emotional exhaustion was a result of that. And this is interesting because I try to duck out after lunch every day and do about 20 to 40 minutes of meditation, and two of the ways that I do that involve music. One is an app called NuCalm, N-U-Calm, that plays these tracks that just lull you into this positive or relaxed or focused state depending on how you select the music. The other is a light sound stimulation machine that has musical tracks. It's called the BrainTap. What I really like about the BrainTap is some of my favorite sessions are indeed tracks that are from that composer that I talked about, Michael Tyrell, but they're specifically selected to have light and sound stimulation that shifts your brain in different directions for alpha brainwave, delta brainwave, or theta brainwave production depending on the level of relaxation that you want. Another 2018 survey revealed that 62% of people were responsive to music for relaxation, for sleep, and for insomnia. This is also interesting because, I mean, just this morning is a perfect example. I woke up at about 3:45 AM, I didn't quite feel like getting up and crushing the day right then, call me crazy, but I put on a 100-minute NuCalm track and kept my lazy butt in bed listening to that NuCalm track. And it's incredibly relaxing and restorative and often will lull me back to sleep. They've shown that music listening or music therapy reduces depression levels, increases confidence, increases motivation in children. They looked at all the studies in a 2021 review from 2009 up to 2019, they showed that music significantly reduces anxiety for children leading up to and during medical procedures. So once again, there's the medical stress-reducing, pain-killing effect of music. During the COVID-19 pandemic, uh, there was a survey of over 5,600 people from 11 countries that showed that music helped people cope during lockdown and to basically get through the pandemic, the loss of work, the being shut down at home. With your whole family driving you crazy and getting cabin fever. Turns out that music helps out quite a bit with that as well, or helped out quite a bit with that. They've also shown improved quality of life for people with Alzheimer's disease, showing that music interventions can have positive effects on the behavior and cognition of people with Alzheimer's disease. Music can, of course, assist with meditation, which decreases stress. And my— again, my two favorite ways to do that are the NuCalm app and the BrainTap light sound stimulation device. They've also shown that music music therapy with a therapist can really help enhance the efficacy of a therapy session if they have good music playing in the background, like good relaxing stress-relieving music. They've also shown that music can relieve pain. So post-surgical pain, physical pain, joint pain, you name it, especially if you're recovering or doing a recovery session. It turns out that music could help lower the amount of pain that you feel or the amount of soreness that you feel, whether it's a workout or a surgery or an injury or anything else. Now, are there some types of music that are better for reducing stress? Well, historically, certain genres of lyricless music like classical music and ambient music have been studied. And no surprises there, there's a great deal of evidence that those forms of music can reduce stress and anxiety. But that doesn't mean they're better than other genres of music. For example, rap music, you despite my hesitations about recommending that because sometimes the lyrics of rap music are not that uplifting, but it turns out that in rap music that actually is not chock-full of violence and dirty language, it can be inspiring and motivating when people are in a low mood or dealing with difficult life circumstances. Even heavy metal music, which I know I threw into the bush earlier, it appears to help in one study enhance what's called identity development. I am not quite sure I can fully define why that is or what it means, but they found that heavy metal enthusiasts did often experience traumatic and risky sex, drug, and rock and roll-oriented lives, but that identity that they had with that seemed to serve as a protective factor against negative outcomes like chronic disease or suicide. So, I guess what I'm saying here is it's like being able to identify with a strong form of music seems to help to reduce stress. This next snippet includes the link between the natural need to feel safe and stress and how psychedelics are used to reverse trauma and a little bit more including the power of breath, how trauma manifests in different people, children and antidepressants, and more with Dave Rabin of Apollo Neuro.

I'm studying some books on how to teach your children the spiritual disciplines like meditation and study and fasting and prayer and things like this. Um, in that book it talked about how preschoolers are now the number one growing demographic as far as needing targeted use of antidepressants, or at least they're being set up for that based on everything from school start times to homework to, um, to social media, to like all these things that preschoolers are now being exposed to. So even young children now, in an environment where you think that safety would be the treatment priority no longer feel safe.

Exactly. That's exactly right. I haven't actually seen that specific information, but it sounds consistent with and very interesting in terms of the way that we do see as clinicians, we see that these medicines like antidepressants and amphetamines get prescribed at a younger and younger age every generation. And part of that I think is because similar to what we were just talking about, about our bodies were not meant for the way that we work. The demands of modernity and the stresses that we're put on every day because of the responsibilities that we have in this current lifestyle and society that we subscribe to is extremely stressful and it takes a toll on the body. And so, I think the important part of this, coming back to the original question of safety is that by practicing techniques or strategies like deep breathing, meditation, yoga, biofeedback, positive thinking skills that we teach in psychotherapy, all of these different techniques, float tanks, there's lots of different ones, which all tend to improve heart rate variability as the best known current biometric that improves— that is a measure of our ability to recover or how recovered we are, our resilience and the effects of stress on the body over time, which we never had the opportunity to measure before, by practicing safety techniques like the ones I just mentioned, you can increase that and increase your recovery and your ability to recover from stress and decrease some of these issues that we're seeing that result from chronic stress or chronic perceived threat responses, which ultimately leads to depression, anxiety, PTSD, even metabolic disorder, diabetes, Injuries, if you're somebody who plays sports or in the military, there's sleep insomnia, chronic pain. All of these things are related to imbalances in the autonomic nervous system and low heart rate variability. Safety boosting techniques like Apollo being one of those strategies to make it accessible to the public, they all improve balance in the nervous system, which helps retrain the brain to not actually— to know that it's not actually running from a lion in that moment. And when you feel that calm, that pause, then you're able to regulate and perform at your best and recover at your best.

Right, right.

Yeah.

And we'll eventually get to Apollo, but I have a couple of thoughts. The first is, um, you know, the big picture here, really the takeaway for me, the more I think about this, is that, you know, like, I live in a comfortable house. Like, I don't— I was even talking to my, my son. I took him out on a dinner date the other night and I was telling him, dude, Mom, Mom and I used to go check the checking account before we would go out to dinner to see if we had enough money and what we might be able to buy off that list and if we could get a cocktail. And we also used to go over all of our bills at the end of the month to see how we were going to be able to scrape together rent and if we could afford to stay in the home that we were currently in it, etc., etc. And now it's like I don't have to think that much about buying an organic grass-fed ribeye, right? I don't have to think that much about my bed being comfortable at night, me having a roof over my head, me being able to take my son to, to dinner at a fancy restaurant and be able to just like take out the credit card and know that there's money in the account. But yet I can still at the same time be doing things to my body to make it feel as though it's not safe. The way that I approach my email inbox, the way that I interact with my employees, the way that I manage stress throughout the day, the way that, that I respond when I'm in traffic, what my body does that I'm not even in control of from a subconscious or an evolutionary standpoint when I step onto an airplane or walk through the airport or I'm in a big crowd of people. Like, we live these seemingly comfortable industrial, you know, post-industrial westernized lifestyles, but yet our bodies are constantly under a message, most of us, that they're not safe, even though we might feel as though we have houses and money and cars, etc. So, you know, I think that's a, that's a big thing for people, is even though you might feel safe, your, your body is technically under a lot of nervous system stress. And then the other thing I wanted to mention before I ask you a little bit about trauma, because I want to, I want to get into trauma and what this has to do with, with trauma. Um, the other thing is that, you know, I said that about elite athletes, but I don't want to make people think that exercise is bad because as a matter of fact, you know, research study after research study shows that, that regular consistent smart exercise actually lowers HRV in the long run and increases parasympathetic nervous system activity. And I suspect that part of that might be that you feel more equipped to take care of yourself. You feel more confident. I mean, I, I posted on Instagram this morning, you know, a photo of me flexing with my shirt off, and I, I commented that, you know, muscles aren't just for show, but that one of the benefits of, you know, having a fit body is that you just approach life with more confidence. And I would suspect that you also, even if it's again subconscious, you feel safer when you're fit. You feel like you can take care of yourself. So I don't want to discourage people from exercising. What I'm is, you know, don't overtrain and also know that if you choose to be an elite hard-charging athlete, that might fly in the face of taking absolute care of your nervous system. You know, performance is not synonymous with health and longevity. So now that I've prepared myself to step off my soapbox, I want to ask you about trauma because I know you studied it a lot. I know it has to do a little bit with what you just described about feeling safe. But I was guilty until probably— I mean, dude, like, I would say even like 6 months ago, I was guilty of kind of snickering when I'd hear people say they'd been traumatized unless A, they'd been to war and actually been like, you know, serving in the armed forces and been subjected to some kind of explosion or horrific war accident, or B, if they'd been like had a horrific childhood or an event that occurred in childhood or in adulthood that was just brutal, right? Like seeing someone in your family get murdered or being beaten by your parents or being raped or, or undergoing some horrific occurrence. I always thought that that's what it took to truly say that you had trauma or to say that you had PTSD. And I've personally kind of come around and realized that trauma is a little bit different. Than, than the way, you know, than my narrow-minded view of what it could be. And I'm curious if you could get into trauma and what you've studied on trauma, what you found trauma to truly be, and what trauma has to do with feeling safe.

Well, I think what you said earlier was a great segue into trauma, because what you're talking about before you ask me this question is, um, you're talking about building up physical endurance and physical stamina, constitution, for a sense of improved and heightened physical safety. And safety is— what we like to think of it is mostly physical. And, you know, I think ultimately to really understand what we mean when we say safety is to take a step back and look at a holistic picture of safety, which includes physical, of course, but it equally includes emotional, mental, and spiritual safety. And physical— part of physical safety and mental safety is of course, financial safety in our society. And so, focusing on all of those things, physical safety being a very important one that you can contribute positively to with good, smart exercise is a really great idea. You can also overtrain, which lowers heart rate variability in the long run. And so, obviously, everything with moderation. But I think the way that leads into trauma is that trauma is effectively one or many meaningful and intense negative or unsafe experiences over time. And that is a subjective experience for the person experiencing the trauma. So trauma can be something as little as you're crying when you're a little— when you're you're young and you need something and your parents ignore you and they do it multiple times over and over and over again. That could be a trauma, an emotional trauma. It's a trauma that we see a lot as therapists when we talk to people who have perceptions that they are unlovable or that they can't love others. And so that's a very, very common thing we see with lots of people, not just people who have a diagnosis, a mental health diagnosis. So, trauma can be anything from that to not having enough food growing up or to having to, as you said earlier, have to worry about finances all the time to the point where you're making all these decisions in your life directly related to the understanding of exactly how many resources you have. Whereas now you don't have to think about that. But for a lot of people, that can be somewhat traumatizing because it's a very negative or many negative meaningful experiences over time. And those create little stresses, sometimes big stresses that ultimately result in a reflective response in your autonomic nervous system. So, every time you experience one of those events, every time your mom ignores you when you're crying and you're in pain or you're not feeling good and you feel helpless, helpless or your parent ignores you, what happens is that your sympathetic nervous system goes up, inflammation goes up in your body, and your parasympathetic nervous system, the system responsible for all the good stuff like digestion and rest and energy recovery and creativity, all these things starts to decrease in activity and energy because you're perceiving threat, again, like we said earlier, and continuous perceived threat over time particularly when there's a strong emotional part of the experience, ends up resulting in what we now call trauma, which is something that's not just the Western word. It's been used by tribal plant medicine cultures for thousands of years to describe very similar experiences.

Ben Greenfield: Do you think that when it comes to trauma that something as brief as a single high-dose MDMA session or I believe that MDMA protocol full-on is several sessions of 90 minutes, then a longer session of 48 hours. Do you think that that's enough for many people to resolve a lot of this trauma?

So, I think there's multiple things there that number one, the way that you do have to access MDMA and psilocybin right now is through clinical trials only, just to make sure that everybody understands that.

But, you can go to Dr. Scott Ward's website.

You can say that, but I can say, as many folks are well aware, these days psilocybin and MDMA are becoming increasingly available if you ask the right people, just like being in your high school parking lot back in the day. There's a lot of this stuff happening behind the scenes and you just want to connect with someone trustworthy. And you can often— I mean, my wife and I, for example, we now do couples therapy with MDMA and psilocybin and some other similar analogs. And it's been absolutely transformative for our relationship. And so I will tell people, although I know you as a responsible MD-PhD, David, cannot, that even if you aren't in a clinical trial per se, that if these are the type of issues that concern you, you may want to look into hunting down a responsible facilitator for something like MDMA or psilocybin because I do think that it can be transformative. And this is, by the way, coming from a conservative libertarian Christian homeschooled kid from North Idaho. So, I'm about the least Burning Man type of person you'd ever run into but have indeed found this stuff to be highly transformative. So, that being said, I—

Frank.

Oh, yeah.

Sorry.

I interrupted a thought pattern that you were on. So, did I totally derail you again?

No, we're good. We can just jump right back in. I think that just, again, I think legally speaking, it is important for everybody to be safe when they have these experiences. And so, ketamine is a great first step for people, and I'm really glad that you talked about that experience that you had. Because ketamine, interestingly, going to the timing of the experience, it only lasts a half hour to an hour of your time. And so, it's not a huge investment and you can do it and know you're getting medical-grade ketamine and know that it's pure and know that you're getting a safe experience and then follow up with your therapist afterwards who understands what you're doing and why you're doing it and what you want to work on intentionally, what intention you're putting in to heal, what you'd like to get out of the experience. And then, you can have a very powerful and again transformative experience with that. And, I think that psilocybin and MDMA are right around there. Around the corner. They both have breakthrough status with the FDA, and so they will be available in 20— probably by 2021 into 2022. I think going back to your question about whether or not short experiences like this are able to cure or treat trauma that is deep-seated is, first off, that everyone has trauma. Every single person on the on the face of the earth has traumatic experiences. They're just manifesting in different ways. They look different on the surface. Sometimes trauma looks like depression because of extremely low self-esteem or fractured sense of self. And sometimes your sense of self is so fractured that you become psychotic or dissociated in schizophrenia. Other times it becomes anxious or looks like anxiety or it looks like OCD or it looks like PTSD or physical illness. And there's all these different manifestations of of trauma that we don't necessarily know about yet because we haven't had the opportunity to study them in this way through looking at epigenetics. And now that we're able to look at epigenetics, what I think we're going to find is that there are very specific characterizations of trauma. For example, people with PTSD-induced trauma may be somewhat different epigenetically than people with depression-related trauma or diabetes-related trauma like in the case of that great study you brought up, the Dutch crisis, which is fascinating. And so, what we're aiming to do with our study with these different groups is to look at the epigenetic markings before their psychedelic experiences, whether that's MDMA or traditional ayahuasca ceremony or psilocybin at Hopkins or Yale or what have you, or ketamine. And then compare that to their epigenetic profile afterwards and then over time, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, 2 years. And, Apollo is now— we're working on a protocol with MAPS to actually introduce it into the MDMA protocol after MDMA has been administered. Because what's really interesting is that when you— and, I think this will really answer your question— is ultimately, people are getting better from these treatments not because the medicine is they're reliant on the medicine to heal them. What the medicine is doing is it's empowering us to remember our own internal innate ability that we're born with to heal ourselves. And the reason we know that is because after the phase 2 trial with MDMA— I mean, the reason we know that to start is because people who use these medicines, they use them just 1 to 3 times oftentimes, and they have persistent and consistent improvements in symptoms over time. And, this was tracked in the MAPS MDMA Phase 2 trial with 100 subjects where 2 months after the last therapy session, which is— and, these therapy sessions with MDMA are 8 hours long. So, it's an 8-hour-long therapy session with 2 therapists. There's 3 of them spread out over 12 weeks. And, 2 months after, 52% are symptom-free, are no longer meeting symptom criteria for PTSD. 5 years out, 67% are now not meeting symptom criteria for PTSD and there's been no subsequent treatment. So, that is inherent— is probably one of the most paradigm-shifting things for us because when you are that much better at 2 months out but then you see continuous improvements where more people are more better at 5 years out. So, that means that the subjects, the patients are learning from their experience so much from just this 12-week experience, which includes a lot of integration of what they've learned during the medicine experiences that they take with them and they use that to continually make themselves better when they leave. So, yes, what we are seeing is that just 3 doses of medicine can be completely life-changing for people. But again, it's not always accessible. To everyone. These can take 100 hours or 80 hours of time, and they can take something like $12,000 to $15,000, and they won't be reimbursed by insurance right away. And so, we created Apollo as a way to help tap into the nervous system's fundamental safety pathway through the skin, through the sense of touch that could make these benefits of MDMA therapy like this radical safety experience and these flow state experiences something you could take with you on on the go and make it accessible and scalable to a much larger population.

So what does meditation really do? What's the impact of meditation on key areas of your brain like the hippocampus, which my experience with Transcendental Meditation— and where does something called the Peak Brain Institute fit in? You're about to find out.

Back to the moving meditation piece, the second part of that question: is that a thing? Does that count when my friends tell me that they go to the gym or go on a run and therefore they meditate?

So, it depends what your mind is doing during the practice. So, meditation is not about your mind going blank. Meditation is about being able to observe your mental space or observe one task very wholly and very fully, be able to be really absorbed into it. So, if you're going for a run in your day training—

It's not about your mind being blank because so many people have told me like, "Empty your head." So, wait. Okay, I got to ask you this. Let's say some thought comes into my head like a discussion that I want to have with my wife during a meditation session about us trying to figure out a way to where we don't each drink all the coffee in the morning and get mad at each other because somebody drank a cup and a half and then the other person because they woke up late only gets a half cup of coffee. Let's say that that enters my mind during a meditation session. And I just start focusing on that and finding a solution to that and dwelling on that for the next 20 minutes. Are you suggesting that that would actually be a form of meditation focusing on that one single specific thing for 20 minutes?

So, let me clarify a little bit. So, meditation is not simply having no thoughts. It's very difficult to have no thoughts. There are many different forms of meditation. The one I'm going to describe is focused attention meditation. Which encompasses mantra meditation, focused attention on the breath, even walking meditations, where you are fully engaged in one thing, but that thing is not your thoughts. But that thing could be the observation of your thoughts. So in the situation that you just described, you're sitting there meditating, your mind wanders off onto a thought. At that moment, this is the real work of the meditation, that it's called the attentional loop. You notice that your mind has wandered onto a thought, the thought of your wife, and you have the opportunity at that moment to either let your attention move away from the thought and back to the object of your attention, which could be a mantra, which is just some words, a mantra, a light, a feeling, a sound, something tangible and concrete, um, or continue on and think about your wife. If you continue on and think about your wife, you're no longer meditating. If you've noticed you had the thought and then move your mind away from it and back to your breath, you have just done a stellar meditation. You know, that is the thing that strengthens your attention. That's like the bench press rep at the gym, the noticing and returning, because it's unrealistic to have no thoughts. Our brains don't do that. What we're doing is we're building our metacognition, the awareness that our mind wanders, and then the choice to move your attention elsewhere.

That's kind of like TM because I actually took a whole Transcendental Meditation course. I did a whole podcast on it. I'll hunt it down and link to this one. Again, the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/MusePodcast. And, there were certain elements of TM that I thought were kind of woo, like having to offer the gifts to the flowers and some shrine or whatever before you go meditate and certain things that just felt a little bit weird to me. But then, The idea of being given a mantra that's your special mantra that you return to whenever your mind begins to wander during the TM session wound up being something that made a lot of sense. And, it was the first time I personally had been able to sit twice a day for 20 minutes and not have my head explode with flames because I had this little thing I could keep going back to that was my special little place during meditation, that mantra. So, is that kind of why TM seems to be so effective or at least one of the reasons?

Totally. And, that is just another version of focused attention meditation. And so, that mantra, that special little thing, in meditation speak, we call it the object of your attention. And, the object of your attention could be on your breath for breath-focused meditation. It could be on a candle. It could be on a mantra. It is the thing that you return back to to anchor your attention on. And, it's like going back to the gym analogy. You are working so hard to just stay on this thing, to just keep the bike moving, keep the bike moving, keep the bike moving, which is staring at your candle or listening to your mantra in your head. And, sometimes you go off the rails a little bit and then you just have to know this, gather yourself, and return. Now, this is a very, very simple activity, simply focusing on one thing, paying attention to one thing, and it leads to incredible transformation. And, I want to kind of just walk you through the steps a little bit if that's okay.

Yeah, sure.

Go ahead. Okay. So, when you focus your attention on your breath, the object of your meditation, and then your mind wanders off into thought and you notice that your mind has wandered into thought and you choose to instead bring your attention back to your breath, that little action leads to tremendous transformation. So, most of us just go through our life on autopilot, like the title of the book. Your mind just wanders away. You have thoughts in your mind and they're there, so you assume you're supposed to think them. You know, my brain's filled with stuff, I think it, that's how it works, isn't it? But as soon as you make the action of noticing your mind has wandered onto a thought and then choosing to bring it elsewhere, that is the moment when you have changed your relationship to your thinking. That is the moment where you have liberated yourself from this endless stream of thought controlling your life. That is the moment when you have become the master of your thinking rather than subject to it. And it is building what we call metacognition. You can see your thoughts. And now, when you go into the real world—

That's what metacognition means? You can see your thoughts?

Yep. The awareness of your thinking.

I've never understood that term, but that makes perfect sense. So, I'm just aware of what I'm thinking and observing it. And actually able to identify it, so to speak, as a skill.

Exactly. You're not caught up in the thought. You're seeing that you're having the thought. You're one level up. And when you do that, you can then start to make choices about your thoughts. Do I want to be thinking this thought or not? And the answer much of the time is actually no. And it may be a lovely thought that you want to have or a problem you want to work on, or it may be that this problem has returned to you 7 times and you don't have a solution and you're just going to say, "No, I want I want to move my mind onto something that's more important for me. I want to get my work done. I want to pay attention to the person in front of me. I want to have choice and agency over my life and my mind. And so, that is why meditation is so key. And then, once you do that, you move your mind out of thoughts that are stressful. It ends up downregulating all of your anxiety and fear systems because you don't have to think about these stressful thoughts. You eventually create the same mastery over your body as you had over your mind. You have tons of strong emotions that come up, you can simply label them a sensation and make better choices around them. And, you are now the master of your own domain rather than just subject to the whims and vagaries of your mind and body.

Ben Greenfield: Okay, that makes really good sense. I'm curious what you do, Ariel, when a thought enters your head, you observe it, you identify it, you're in that state of metacognition, and then you move on and return to your mantra, your breath, et cetera. But, if that thought is something that you know is a total breakthrough, you're all of a sudden a genius and you thought of something that you've solved a solution to the world's problems or at least perhaps some business issue related to copy on a website or something like that, you know you want to remember it but you know if you don't somehow get that out of your head, it's going to drive you nuts for the rest of the meditation. Now, I'm curious what you do about this. What I do is for longer periods of meditation, and I use massage, for example, as an example, I'll often meditate during a massage and I'll just be in and out of my breath the whole time. I have a digital voice recorder under the table and I'll literally speak that thought that I know I don't want to dwell upon or ruminate on for the rest of the session. And then, I play or upload that into Otter AI transcription afterwards so I've got any of those thoughts that I can return to so I don't have to worry about remembering them later. For shorter sessions, I use something very similar to the Memory Palace technique where if I remember during a meditation session that I forgot to ask my wife to pick up bananas on her way home from the grocery store, I will picture at my desk my wife sitting there holding a banana sitting atop my keyboard. And so, I generally remember those really insane visualizations when I come back to the world. I walk into my office, I'm like, "Oh, my wife's sitting there holding bananas on my keyboard. I got to remember to text her about grabbing bananas." And so, those are two examples for me of how I handle those thoughts that seem kind of important when you're meditating that you don't want to forget to address later. Do you have any solutions that you use for scenarios like that? What are they?

I'm laughing because I use basically the same ones. So sometimes I'll have a piece of paper next to me and I'll just jot down if something comes up, just one word that's really hard for me to read afterwards, but enough to kind of trigger what I was thinking. Or I'll give it a number. So if I have a thought that comes up that seems important, I will number it. And during a session I might have 2 or 3 of them, and then all I have to do at the end is remember that there were 3 things, and then that was enough of a cue to get me to go back into my memory. A lot of the time though, I just don't worry about it.

So, you like trust yourself to get back into the memory and you're like, "Hey, my brain is totally capable of remembering this. All I need to do is give it a number." Yeah.

And, it's something that I use in my life as well. If I'm going somewhere and I need to remember the things I need to bring or even things that don't have steps, if I put numbers to them, I know that I'll remember, right? There were 4 things and then I recall them. And if I only get to 3, I have to search really hard for the 4th. But I've also noticed— so I used to really do the writing it down on paper, um, and what I realized was most of the things that I wrote down really weren't that profound. So I'm now much more able to just be like, I'll let it go, and if it was really important, it'll come back to me later, or doesn't really matter.

I, I developed the voice recorder idea back when— I don't really do this anymore, but I got into journeying with plant medicines for a while. And, you'd be deep in ayahuasca or psilocybin or something like that and you know that you're not going to remember that or it's not going to make any sense later on. So, you just have a digital voice recorder there for the whole session and you speak it. And so, that became something that I would use during massage sessions. I developed the Memory Palace one when I used to be an open-water swimmer and I'd have these long forays in the open water. Staring at blackness and thoughts would come into my head and I obviously couldn't write them down. So I had to figure something other than writing to remember these later. And that's where I developed the Memory Palace technique, where I'd come up to the beach, I'd dry myself off with a towel, and there sitting next to me would be, you know, my assistant reminding me to set up that functional movement screen assessment for a client. And then, of course, maybe the bananas or the oranges or the grapes, or if you're ketogenic, the coconut oil. But anyways, that was how I kind of developed that. Now, I started asking about the moving meditation. And, to put a bow on that, Ariel, it sounds to me like it could count if you're having one singular thing such as your breath or your steps or something like that that you're focusing on.

Precisely. So, in a traditional walking meditation, for example, and walking meditation is a real thing, You are feeling the sensation of your foot on the ground. So you're every step you take very mindful and very aware of the foot on the ground. So this is actually a good point to bring in the idea of mindfulness. People are always like, what's mindfulness? What's meditation? So meditation is the practice that you do, the sitting, the going to the gym that builds the skill of mindfulness. And mindfulness is the present moment awareness of your thoughts, feelings, sensations, environment, in an intentional and non-judgmental manner. So a moving meditation is a great mindfulness meditation if you're doing it mindfully, that is paying very close attention, pouring all your attention into the sensation of your foot moving, or pouring all of your attention into the beauty of the world around you and intentionally staying with that experience. But if your mind is just wandering and dreaming, you're not meditating anymore.

Ben Greenfield: Okay, okay, got it. Now, before I asked you a couple of derailing questions and that led us into us delving into the neuroscience of meditation, amygdala, fear-based responses, then moving meditation and mantras and metacognition, you had explained point number 1 and then you were about to delve into point number 2. Remind the listeners in case they can't track what that point number 1 was and then what that point number 2 is that you were about to delve into.

So, point number 1 was about the prefrontal cortex and its ability to downregulate the amygdala and how in a long-term meditation practice you can maintain the thickness of your prefrontal cortex. Point number 2 was going to be— we hadn't started it yet— was going to be the impact of meditation on the hippocampus. This is very ironic that I can actually remember what you were trying to get me to talk about. With what point number 2 was, because meditation can help your prefrontal— sorry, meditation can help your hippocampus. So hippocampus, the part of your brain associated with learning and memory. As you age, it also shrinks, and it shrinks in large part because the hippocampus is highly sensitive to cortisol, and cortisol can cause shrinkage of the hippocampus. A long-term meditation practice, however, can significantly reduce your cortisol levels and in doing so preserve the function and the form, the meat, of your hippocampus. So that's also work that's been demonstrated by Sara Lazar and others. So meditation also has impact on your corpus callosum, which is the part of your brain that connects your left and right hemisphere. Meditation can improve the density of your gray matter. So the gray matter is the number of neural connections that you have in your brain. Dr. Lazar demonstrated that simply 8 weeks of meditation, so a short-term meditation intervention, was able to improve the density and the volume of the gray matter of average novice everyday individuals. So just a little bit of meditation goes a long way to strengthening your brain.

You probably are aware there's a lot of apps out there to increase focus, like to relax, even sleep better. I'm going to talk about one of them that's very unique in this next snippet. You're going to learn how focus mode can combat ADHD, how wandering mind leads to fatigue and mistakes, something called the sustained attention to response task or the SART, and a lot more.

What have you found regarding focus?

First off, we got a grant from the National Science Foundation to do this work. In particular, it was a remit was to look into how to make music to support people with ADHD and attentional challenges. And so, we took this money, we teamed up with an excellent academic team at Northeastern University here. They have access to the scanners, fMRI, EEG. And, what we did is we did a series of studies with brain and behavior. Let me first describe the task that we used, okay? So, we use something called the sustained attention to responses task, response time the Stroop times test. And it takes the form of a very simple video game. So imagine you're sitting there in front of a screen, numbers are flashing up on the screen one by one, 0, 3, 5, 9, and you hit the spacebar on every single number except one of them. And the special number, let's imagine the special number is 3, right? So 90% of the time you're hitting the spacebar, but only when you see a 3, you withhold your response. The most boring video game in the world because it's meant to be, right? And so this is a task that is basically mind-numbing. People sit here doing it for, you know, 10-20 minutes is about the length of our experiment while we play them different background music conditions, right? And I'll talk about what the music is in a second. But the idea is that when your mind wanders, you get fatigued, you lose your sustained attention, you lose your motivation for the task, you start making errors. Errors, right? You start hitting the spacebar when you're not supposed to or not hitting spacebar when you are supposed to, right? And that's just it. So, it's just a very simple, well-controlled video game for doing this kind of thing. And by the way, it's a gold standard test in psychology. It is used all over the place to test sustained attention in particular. And then, so what music do we play in the background? Well, we've done it a couple of different ways. One that we do is just our competition, right? Spotify music. We'll go on Spotify, we'll go on YouTube, we'll look up what's the best focus music to listen to and use that in comparison to Brain.fm. That's fine. But, an even better test that I'm proud of having done is the super controlled version of taking Brain.fm's underlying music without our science layer versus Brain.fm music with our science layer. So, you're purely just testing that added amplitude modulation. And we find that that test works as well. And so, in behavior, obviously, we find improvement in the start task over time over the course of the block with Brain.fm versus the other things, either no Brain.fm technology or Spotify. But, perhaps more interestingly, we find these effects in the brain that really jump out at you. So, the first thing is in EEG, you find much stronger entrainment with Brain.fm music versus other music even though all music is rhythmic. So, to be clear, any rhythmic stimulus will entrain the brain. All music, well, vast majority of music is rhythmic, also entrains the brain. The question is how strong can you get that entrainment to be and can you get it to be useful entrainment as in the right regime of rates? And, it's important to point out that the beta rate of things, 12 to 20 hertz or even alpha like 13 that's a weird speed of things to happen in the world. If you think about what 13 Hz actually sounds like, it kind of sounds like a helicopter or a pulsing or thrumming, like, right? And in normal music, that rate of stuff doesn't really happen. In normal music, you have things that are like drumbeats or singing that are much slower, like generally under 8 Hz, 5, 6, 7 Hz. And then you have really fast things that are like distortion roughness, fuzziness, fizziness, but there's very little stuff in natural music that's like at a helicopter-y sort of speed. So, it's a really unique thing that we're doing. And, it turns out that when you create music that is dominated by that stuff, the brain does respond really strongly to it. So, that's partially a sanity check but also partially a really cool result. And then, so that's EEG, right? You're looking at the brain's response over time to these stimuli. And then, importantly, you look at fMRI, why, right? So, you're looking now at the functional networks in the brain. What is the attention network doing? What is the salience network doing? And basically, what you find is that there's a much stronger response in the people getting Brain.fm obviously, but then in the people, particularly the half of the population with attentional challenges or the half that would need this product most, they have particular greater activity in exactly the regions that you would you would expect to be less functional in ADHD. And if it matters to anyone, this is the inferior cingulate gyrus and some parts of the insula. But it's just, it's a really cool thing to see that direct correspondence between, right, you know, brain regions directly reducing the "hey, look, a squirrel" mentality.

And you use the placebo control, like, like comparing what happens if you just use the music versus the music with the brain technology applied to it.

Exactly right. And that's the contrast in fMRI that's being set up is between the control and the brain FM test condition.

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