How Meditation Changes Your Brain

You have heard probably a million times by now about the incredible effects of meditation. It's supposed to increase the amount of gray matter in your brain, improve cognitive performance, walk your dog, it slices and dices. It's supposed to do absolutely everything. But if you are like me, you've struggled with it. I know that every single time I've sat down to meditate and I've tried many, I find myself so bored and I don't get any of those awesome benefits. But I figure I run a personal development channel. I have to try this. So I'm gonna give it 30 days, and if I don't like it, I'm done forever. So this is what happens. Seven surprising things after 30 days of meditation. And the first thing that genuinely shocked me is that about two, three weeks in, I began to really enjoy meditating. And this was something that I looked forward to when I woke up in the morning, which is typically when I did it. It's something that I enjoyed while I was doing it. But really it was the effects later, as I was just carrying on throughout my day, that were the most useful. And this brings me to point 2, which is the type of meditation that you do really matters. Meditation isn't this monolithic thing where there's only one way to do it and you're clearing your thoughts. First off, you're genuinely not trying to clear or stop thinking in any kind of meditation. But second, there are so many different kinds, and they have different results. There's guided versus unguided, eyes open, eyes closed, sitting, laying down. There are different mantras that you can have, and these all have subtly different effects on your life. So it depends on what you're trying to get out of meditation, what kind is going to be right for you. And if you've tried one kind, and, like, not for me, that doesn't mean you want to throw meditation out entirely. Which brings me to the third point. The style of meditation that I found had the fastest results in my life was guided meditation. And this is often considered a beginner style of meditation, because it really does get you those results faster. Guided means that there's a person. In my case, there was an app that had a track and I was working on, on gratitude, because gratitude just feels good. So for 30 days, I listened and focused for five minutes on things that I was grateful for. And I found myself in my life in stressful situations when somebody was late or just I might have been peeved going, you know what? I'm really lucky. Even though he's late, to have this friend, or even though he is late, it's pretty cool that I have this cell phone and I can call him. Or you know what? My heart is still beating. That's amazing. I'm alive. Thank you, heart. I haven't had to do anything to make that happen. And as cheesy as it sounds, these little interruptions in those moments of stress do make your day better. But the thing that I probably liked the best from the guided meditations was a focus on joy. Now, we tend to think of joy as something that is ours. Either something good happens to us, we're joyous, or something bad happens and we're not. But the meditation encourage you to focus on the joy of other people. So I found myself walking around. I live in Santa Monica. It's pretty crowded outside. And just looking at people and going, wow, you have someone whose hand you're holding looks like you're in love. That's awesome. Or, wow, you've got a pretty cool beard, dude. I can't grow a beard. That's amazing. Whatever it was, I was able to tap into moments of happiness for other people. Whereas previously, I might have been jealous that that guy had a cool beard. Or it's just critical. In some other way, it conditioned me to see the good in other people, which just created more happiness and joy in my own life. Which brings me to the fourth thing. 4. This was probably the most unexpected of everything. And it's that mindfulness meditation, I believe, increased my athletic performance, at least when it comes to jump roping. So I jump rope a handful of times a week. I do about 20 minutes of it. And at the end, when I'm really tired, I do 30 seconds of double unders. Now, normally I get in that 30 seconds, 30 to 40. But I had just meditated. I'd done a mindfulness meditation, which is I would sit down, eyes open. I found tremendously helpful for me not falling asleep in a chair, staring at a wall. And I would just allow thoughts to come and go while I observe them. I would observe how my body felt. Wouldn't try to change. It would just kind of sit there and go, okay, that's my arm against my body. That's the feeling of my arm against my leg, my butt on the seat, whatever it was. So I'm jumping rope right after this, and I feel that feeling of burn start to kick in. And the feeling of, I don't want this. And normally I go, okay, just five more minutes. You're almost done. You're almost done. Instead, I Went, you know what, Dive into that feeling. What does the burn in your forearm really feel like? What is that tightness in your back? And as I went into this, I got taken out of that trying to finish jump roping. And so finally when it came time to do the double unders, I was counting, but almost in a just, you know, not paying attention, not trying to break a record. And I just did. I hit 50 when I normally do 30 or 40, and I wasn't spent or destroyed by the end of it. And I think it's because in athletic endeavors so many times, it's the fear of more pain that stops us from doing the best that we could. So I haven't read studies on it, but if you are in some kind of sports performance that requires mental grit, I think that mindfulness meditation could likely be very, very useful to you. Another thing, number five, which mindfulness meditation is probably going to do for you, which it did for me, is it showed me the nature of my compulsive, addictive thinking. We are all problem finding machines even more than we're problem solving machines. There's something all the time that we are trying to write, fix what's not working here. And as I sat down to meditate, I realized how often and how many ways I did this. But the useful thing was that it kind of in some ways started to liberate me slowly from some of those addictive thought patterns. So for instance, one day I had probably spent most of the morning waiting on a support ticket back for a piece of software that we used to run Charisma on command. I was frustrated. I was checking every five or 10 minutes. Where are they? Where are they? Where are they? I said, you know what, I'm just going to meditate. Did a mindfulness meditation for about 20 minutes. And then I didn't check it for another hour and then another two hours. And it seems subtle, but that allowed me to get some work done and it created a peace of mind. And eventually, of course, they did solve our problem. Which brings me to the next thing. The next thing is that I found that I was kind of returning to myself in some way. And I would say that meditation made me feel more comfortable being alone. Particularly this mindful style of meditation. That's where I sit, stare at the wall and just observe my thoughts and sensations. And I realized that I was probably, and am probably a born introvert. I learned at 18 years old and going on for the next 10 or 12 years to become more extroverted. But my more natural Style was introverted alone. And I liked that. But in the last 12 years, I've hated that. I've needed stimulation from other people. I want to be hanging out. I want to be contacting people on a Friday night. It's like I have to go spend time. Now that I've started to meditate, I find myself much more comfortable being alone, which I believe truly is a superpower. There's a quote that I love. I'm going to butcher it, but I think it's that all of man's problems are caused by his inability to sit alone in a room with himself. And I started to be able to do that, which meant that I was spending less time just trying to hang out with someone. And if you do that, you can often hang out with people that you don't really value or who don't value you. And I was able to pick and choose those social interactions such that they were the ones that truly lifted me up. So that is something that's truly phenomenal. I believe the last thing that I found that meditation did, which was really, really cool, is that it made me kind of hallucinate. And I didn't expect this. I was doing my mindfulness meditations, looking at the wall, and I saw that the wall kind of rippled. And then all of a sudden I felt like my body was on a roller coaster ride. And I didn't know what to make of it because it scared me at first. I googled it. What's going on? Apparently this is a fairly common thing that happens with beginning and even advanced meditators. They didn't say to make too much of it, but it was just fascinating to see how much of my perception can be altered by my brain. And it had a very profound moment of just things are not necessarily always as they seem in a very experiential way. So if you are considering meditation, I highly, highly recommend checking out different styles. I know a lot of people like me tried a few and they didn't work. So if you tried guided, try unguided. If you tried unguided, try guided. If you want the benefits of mindfulness, which I would say are clarity of mind, less addictive decision making, you can sit down anywhere and do that. You can Google videos of mindfulness meditation that will walk you through how to do that. If you liked the joy, the gratitude, cultivating particular states of mind, I highly recommend guided meditations. I have used Simple Habit. They're amazing. They are our sponsor for this video. I've used them and we asked them to sponsor this video because I like them so much. So what I've used is the gratitude meditation. That's one that I did for 30 days. I found that it just created those little moments of gratitude which made my day better. But the one that I highly recommend checking out even beyond that is seven. Seven Days of Joy starts with joy, with yourself, moves to people that you care about, even to people that you don't like, and then to people that you don't know. And this is what I'm probably going to keep coming back to because this is what I enjoy the most. Walking down, being happy for other people. Maybe my day isn't going excellently, but when I see that somebody else has something, I can tap into their joy in some way as long as I remind myself that that's amazing for them and I don't have to feel like I'm in competition. So I very much enjoyed that meditation. If you want to check it out, click on the link below. You can get a free week of the premium Simple Habit even without it. You can download Simple Habit. It's free. They have meditations that you can use. I think three out of seven of the seven days of Joy are for free, so you can check that out. But if you want to try the entire thing for one week, you can do those seven days along with me. Go ahead, click the link in the description to do so. And if you want to stick around with them, it's only 12 bucks a month. I found it to be tremendously worthwhile. And in case you're curious, I'll just let you know. My current scheme is that I started with probably five minutes of simple habit guided meditation and five to ten minutes of mindfulness sitting, looking at the wall. I'm up to about five to 10 minutes of simple habits, just one guided meditation, and 30ish minutes of mindfulness, which I'm trying to increase to 40 and maybe even to an hour. So I will let you know how that goes. So far it has been so good. No matter what, it's important to realize the last thing that I'll say meditation is a practice. If you feel the benefits kind of on day one of feeling more joyous and grateful. But you don't meditate on day two or day three. Well, don't expect them to be there on day three. This is something that you need to habituate your mind to. And when you do, it's extremely valuable because though the changes are subtle, they're at a deep level. We're not just talking about behavioral changes. We are talking about changes to the very strong structure of how you perceive the world and how you think, which is truly, I think, the value of meditation. So I hope that you've enjoyed this video. I hope you found these things as surprising as I did. And more than anything, I hope that you decide to check meditation out. That's it. Let me know if you do in the comments below and I will see you next week. Sa.