Hacking Happiness: Tools For Anxiety, Find Calmness, And Elevate your Focus

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 show notes for this episode, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com MentalPodcast that's BenGreenfieldLife.com Mentalpodcast in this first snippet, you're gonna 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, like, do it as long as it's fun. And if the moment you start to tense up and worry about it, you're probably 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 like a 30 day challenge. But like, I really recommend not having a routine and the routine is not having the routine. And that variation actually gives you a lot of like 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 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.

And start with John.

Yeah. I find breath work 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 you know, sometimes you have to force yourself to just sit down and do it. You know, this is, you know, with.

Breath work it's a. Because your breath is controlled by both.

Your autonomic and your volitional control. And that autonomic nervous system is everything. You know, you, if you take care of that, you're going to be extremely healthy. You live a long life.

And it's something that's neglected and so.

That it kind of ties into this.

Whole circadian rhythm with sleep. Wake up.

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. Cause 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, all right, 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 gonna have the vitality to go and do all these other things. You're gonna have the motivation, the neurotransmitters feeding dopamine, where you're gonna be like, okay, I can do this, I Think John just admitted that he hears voices inside of his head. You need to get that checked out. I guess I'll get all practical with your question, Joe. Cause 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 three 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 like mental energy thermogenesis, fasting and appetite control, et cetera. Stacking that with a peptide called tessofensine paraxanthine.

Tessofensine 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 get from something like modafinil.

AK vigil without it keeping you up for 24 hours. That's a good stack. Paraxanthine with tessofensine. Tessofenstein 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 like dopaminergic compounds.

And you take one, you take the.

Next about 20 minutes later. And dopamine is very motivating. It 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.

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 this 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 three things that @ this point in my life would.

Probably be the top three things that.

I'm using to just kind of upgrade.

My brain during any given day, if.

We'Re actually talking about things that you would consume. And I guess I'm leaving Taro's.

Mushrooms out of the equation, but my.

Wife and I are like mushroom junkies and do those almost every morning in our coffee or our tea or whatever. So don't feel bad. Taro, we are using mushrooms too. Yeah, I don't want to open it up to Taro. And I also want to mention that this group really loves Four Sigmatic Coffee. We went through 120 cups in.

Like two and a half 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. Like, 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. RPR is just like a manual. Manual therapy type of form. Like it's an acronym for some form of manual therapy. What about the. The rib. Are you saying rib.

Tack?

Yes. What is.

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

Republic. Oh, okay. Are there, like, videos that one could find online if they were to, like, Google rib tack 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. If you. I think Google Scholar is the best thing on the planet. You know, like 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 plus and minus in your Google search box and you can actually find the paper faster almost than sorting through anyone's bibliography.

Nowadays. Yeah. And is RibTech 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 trying to note to myself. I'll hunt down some links and put them in the show notes 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. 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 like 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 like 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 rely on. What do you think about using that as a tactic to kind of like down regulate sympathetic. You know, whether a nail bed or an acupressure mat or something like.

That. Mark 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 problem where we talked 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 the nature's way of ameliorating anxiety. You can view anxiety as, like, spilling over electrical input into brain areas that don't need to be active right now. And mindfulness is using the five 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 like, at the desk or doing whatever. Bringing something like that inside, I think is honestly better than doing like a whole stretching routine. When you talk about return on investment per.

Minute. Yeah. If you're messed around with those vagal nerve stimulators that they use as like, electrical input to the. To the size of the neck or sometimes like back behind the ears, they're typically like these wearable devices that will vibrate or produce almost like, you know, very similar, Almost like a TENS unit, like a mild electrical sensation over the vagal nerve.

Area. I haven't personally, but one of my best friends in the uk, Shane Germain, 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, like, 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, like, how would you define where anxiety actually comes from? You know, 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, like back to things that have happened in the past as almost the way to kind of like 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 like, anticipatory insulin secretion and stuff like that. And we're looking at like minutes to hours, tops. You know what I mean? It's funny, when we talk about the best coaches like that are just known they're planning one to two, maybe three, four 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 like 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 and inappropriate.

Ones. So what do you do about that? Like, obviously, like golfing has a great deal of potential for anxiety or panic to cause issues. You know, I do a lot of bow hunting and, you know, shooting in archery. They talk a lot about, like, you know, the, the target panic issue where you're, you're anxious right before you do a, you know, like a high risk or very, very important activity. What are your thoughts on, 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, sometimes gives people a lot of, like, support because it's easy to believe that, like, oh, you know, like the Walter Paytons of the world, they were never anxious. Like, they just did what they did and they're tough, blah, blah, blah. And that's, that's an appropriate mindset to have. But I promise you, every single great athlete and 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 onto 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 five 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 five senses, your ability to interact with the world around you, you're inherently going to lose vision, peripheral vision, and behavioral decisions and the five senses are a little triangle, if you 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 thumb nail over the little fingerprint ridges of your index finger and force yourself to feel that, you know it's gonna 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, 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 the point, we could visualize, like 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 cubes. 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. And it's like most rudimentary sense. It's how can you manipulate these things in 3D in your head? Now when you add that to Michael Phelps's 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 sports specific training and spatial skills are your gpp. So every single day, no matter what, you're into 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's goggle and then once it leaves the goggles, 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. You ever use visualization? I guess, I guess for like a non high performance athlete, let's say the average person like going to the gym, hitting the weights, you know, just, just pursuing better health and fitness in general. From preventive standpoint, anything that you would use with visualization when it comes to, 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 like a real issue with like 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 kind of slip into this motor pattern now because it's happened so many times. 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. You know, part of the, 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 like practical ways to, 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 like 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 the 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. Yeah. Oh, I'm totally norepinephrine. Like for me to get into the flow sag, I'd 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 first half so he can bounce back and have a killer second, third and fourth halves. You know, there's pros and cons to everything, right? 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 eight 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 know, all these different things play into the strategies that you nutritionally training wise and psychologically need to employ, even supplement.

Wise. 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 Tyrell, 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 like 10pm 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's 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.

Look for the signs and everything.

What the world is telling you.

Don't close your eyes.

Right now. Take on this chance. You know.

This is what you're made for. There is a light just up ahead.

Hope has a name. Don't miss it.

Life personified.

Don't Close your your eyes.

Breathe this all in Be here right now Take on this chance you know.

This is what you meant for hold on time now Just go all out Find yourself Go away now.

This is what you came for.

This is what you meant for.

Oh body, mind and soul this is what you're meant for Breathing deep but don't let go Body, mind and soul so bring this all in Be here right now Take on this chance you know.

This is what you meant for hold on tight now Just go all out Find your own way now.

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'll make For a whole long time now Just go all out Find your.

Own way.

No.

This is what you came for.

This is.

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 King 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 since passed away. His name is Michael Tyrell, and he has these fantastic tracks called Whole Tones, 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 444Hz. 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 into 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 cancer related pain, injury related pain, et cetera. 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, 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 Finger death Punch, you know, know, hard metal or death metal is going to be the best for stress. 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. 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 sound stimulation machine that has musical tracks. It's called the brain tap. 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 3:45am 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 enduring medical procedures. So once again, there's the medical stress reducing painkilling effect of music. During the COVID 19 pandemic, 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 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 lyric less 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 know, despite my, my, 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, and you know, dirty language, it can be inspiring and motivating when people are in a low mood or dealing with difficult life circ. 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, that seem 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. And 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.

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 ultimate priority, no longer feel.

Safe. Exactly. That's exactly right. I haven't actually seen.

That specific information, but, 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, our bodies were not meant for the way that we work.

The demands of modernity and the stresses that were put on every day because of, 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, but also 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, things are related to imbalances in the autonomic nervous system and low heart rate variability. Safety boosting techniques like Apollo.

Being.

One of those tech strategies to make it accessible to the public. They all improve balance in the nervous system, which helps retrain the.

Brain.

To know that it's not actually running from a lion in that moment. And when you feel that calm, that pause and 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, 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, et cetera, et cetera. And now it's like I don't have to think that much about buying an organic grass fed rib.

Eye.

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 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 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, 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 if youryour 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 get into trauma and what this has to do with trauma. The other thing is that 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, research study after research study shows that regular, consistent, smart exercise actually lowers, 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 posted on Instagram this morning a photo of me flexing with my shirt off. And I commented that muscles aren't just for show, but that one of the benefits of 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 saying is don't over train. 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. Performance is not synonymous with health and longevity. So not a. I've, I've prepared myself to step off my soapbox. I want to ask you about trauma because I, I know you studied 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 six 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 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 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 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 as mostly physical. And 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. 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 having a 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 over train which lowers heart rate variability in the long run. And so there, you know, 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 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 that's a very, very common thing we See, with lots of people, not just people who have 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, 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 a Western word. It's been used by.

Tribal plant medicine cultures for thousands of years to describe very similar.

Experiences. Do you think that when it comes to trauma that something as brief as like a single high dose MDMA session or. I believe that a MDMA protocol full on is several sessions of 90 minutes than a longer session of four to eight hours. Do you think that that's enough for many people to resolve a lot of this.

Trauma? So I think so. I think there's multiple things there that, number one, you know, 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, you can say that, you can say that, but I can say, as 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. 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, you know, 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, you know, a responsible facilitator for something like MDMA or psilocybin, because I do think that it can be transferred 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 interrupt 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, 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, you know, psilocybin, MDMA are right around the corner. They both have breakthrough status with the FDA. And so they will be available 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 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, 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 Academy, 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 two trial with mdma, I mean, the reason we know that to start is because people who use these medicines, they use them just one to three times oftentimes, and they have persistent and consistent improvements in symptoms or over time. And this was tracked in the Maps MDMA Phase 2 trial with 100 subjects. Where two months after the last therapy session, which is, and these therapy sessions with MDMA are eight hours long. So it's an eight hour long therapy session with two therapists. There's three of them spread out over 12 weeks. And two months after, 52% are symptom free, are no longer meeting symptom criteria for PTSD. However, five years out, 67% are now not meeting symptom criteria for PTSD and there's been no subsequent treatment. So that is probably one of the most paradigm shifting things for us because.

When you're that much better at two months out, but then you see continuous improvements where more people are more better at five years out. 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 three doses of medicine can be completely life changing for people. But again, it's not always accessible. 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. 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 states. Experience is something you could take with you 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, like empty your head. So wait, okay, I gotta, gotta 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, you know, 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 like 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, 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 as 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 is 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.

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@BenGreenfieldLife.com Muse podcast. 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. And the idea of being given a mantra that's like 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, like, little thing I could keep going back to. That was my special little place during meditation, that mantra. So. So is 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, you know, 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. Life, you know, 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. 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 seven times and you don't have a solution and you're just going to say no. 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 down, regulating all of your, you know, 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, you know, 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. Okay, that makes really good sense. I'm curious what you do, Arielle. 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. Like, 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 gotta 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?

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 two or three of them. And then all I have to do at the end is remember that there were three. Three 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. So you, like. 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. Like if I'm going somewhere and I need to remember the things I need to bring, or this. Even things that don't have steps, if I put numbers to them, I know that I'll remember. Right. There were four things, and then I recall them. And if I only get to three, I have to search really hard for the fourth. But I've also noticed, so I used to really do the writing it down on paper.

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 developed the voice recorder idea back when I don't really do this anymore, but I got into like journeying with plant medicines for a while and you'd be like 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, 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 they're sitting next to 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, you know, 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 a 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.

More. 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 one and then you were about to delve into point number two. Remind the listeners in case they, they can't track what that point number one was and then what that point number two is that you were about to delve.

Into. So point number one 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 two 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, what point number two was because meditation can help your prefrontal if you, 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 Sarah 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 eight 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, light to relax, even sleep better. I'm going to talk about one of them that's very unique. In this next snippet it you're going to learn how focus mode can combat adhd, how a 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, 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 used something called the sustained attention to responses task. Response time times task. 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 10359 and you hit the space bar on every single number except one of them. And the special number, let's imagine the special number is three, right? So 90% of the time you're hitting the space bar, but only when you see a three, you withhold your response. Now that sounds like, like 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 fatigue, you lose your sustained attention, you lose your motivation to the task. You start making 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. This is used all over the place to test sustained attention in particular. And so what music do we play in the background? Well, we've done it a couple different ways. One that we do is just, 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. Right. And so in behavior, obviously we find, you know, improvement in the start task over time, over the course of a block With Brain FM versus the other things, you know, 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, Right? So to be clear, you know, any rhythmic stimulus will entrain the brain. All music, vast majority of music, is rhythmic, also entrance the brain. The question is, how strong can you get that entrainment to be and can you get it to be useful in trainment, as in the right regime of rates? Right. And it's important to point out that, like the beta rate of things, right, 12 to 20 hertz or even Alpha, like 13 hertz hertz, that's a weird. That's a weird speed of things to happen in the world. If you think about what 13 hertz actually sounds like, it kind of sounds like a helicopter or a pulsing or throwing, like. Right? And in normal music, that rate of stuff doesn't really happen. In normal music, you have things that are like drum beats or singing that are much slower, like generally under 8 hertz, 5, 6, 7 hertz. And then you have really fast things are like distortion and roughness, fuzziness, fizziness. But there's very little stuff in natural music that's like at a helicoptery sort of speed. So it's a really unique thing that we're doing. And it turns out that when, you know, when you create music that is dominated by that stuff, the brain does respond really strongly to it, right? 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, 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 region that 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 brain regions directly reducing.

The. Hey, look, a squirrel mentality. And you use the placebo control. Like comparing what happens if you just use the music versus the music with the Brain FM 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.

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