Dr. Calm walks through a focus test: close your eyes and count backward from 100 to 1 without your mind wandering. Most people can't do it. He uses the results to show how meditation trains attention and cuts stress.
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Why should we meditate? Yeah. We are saying these are all the things. You know what meditation is. It's going to help you calm your mind and all that. Why should we meditate? Why the heck do we even have a class today for meditation? Why is it so important? Because our minds are restless. And when our minds are restless, so many bad things happen. So we need to calm down our thoughts. And there are so many benefits of calming our thoughts. That is a core reason. Okay. Many people think meditation is a religious practice. It is a spiritual practice. You are going to feel some out of world experience and all those things. I don't know about any of those things. I'm talking as a physician, as a practical person. What can we do to reduce stress in our lives? Be calm, relaxed, so that we can focus, perform better, have better health. It is as simple as that. We talked just about restlessness, right? How many people are restless in this room? Let's say are you restless sometimes? Are you restless now or sometimes not right now? Oh, thank you. Wow, that's a great. Sometimes you. Sharon, right now you're focused. You're not restless right now. Jerry, you are restless right now. Yes. Oh, okay. He's the only one who is telling the truth. You liars. I'm going to prove you that you are restless right now. You want me to prove it? Okay, so what I did was more than a decade ago, people, I figured out, you know, how people can identify if they are restless or calm. So I created this litmus test for restlessness. So we are going to do it now. Okay? Everyone in the room, as well as who are watching me from their home online. So let us take a moment to do this. Okay? Sit down. Well, if you can sit down, it's okay. You can stand and do it or lie down, whatever position you're in, that's fine with me. Close your eyes and this is what you're going to do. Start from hundred. I'm going to give you one minute, maybe one and a half minute. Start from 100 and count back to one. In that process, you should not miss even one number. You should exactly know. 100, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95. And then sometimes our mind wanders somewhere. You start thinking about, oh my God, I'm hungry, I want to eat something or I have something errand to run in a couple of hours from now, whatever it is comes to your mind. So none of those things should come to your mind. Just the numbers. Let's start now. Count down from 100 to 1. Okay. So. Yeah. So tell me your experience. Okay.
Well, I'm very visual.
Yeah.
So I let the numbers roll.
Yeah.
And I stayed with every number as it came up.
Very good. What about you?
I did as well, kind of visualized them so that I could stay focused on. I got down to 19, but I counted kind of slowly. I was distracted by some voices out side of the room thinking, oh, they shouldn't be talking right now. But other than that, I was. Are you focused on.
Very good. Yeah.
I didn't really visualize it, but I did get down to zero. And I counted down pretty quick, I think, tried to isolate the noise. There wasn't a lot of background noise, which helped. Loud place, obviously probably would have been.
More difficult for me to focus. So while you are doing this, you didn't think about anything else? Nothing else?
I wouldn't say. I probably had a thought that went somewhere in the back of my mind about what you would say at the end.
Yeah.
How you would process something was back there.
Yeah. What about you?
I mean, I had a couple thoughts that popped into the. Tried to go back to counting when I realized, nope, better go back to count again.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you? Anything at all?
I really took it seriously.
Yeah.
I was really trying to focus on spinning on my numbers.
Good, good. So when you do this, this test for restlessness, you can use it anytime to check within yourself, how am I feeling? Am I able to focus? Or my focus is wandering from one thing to another. Most commonly people have trouble going all the way from hundred to one because their mind goes somewhere else and then we have to bring it back again, Go somewhere else, bring it back again. And depends on the state of mind that you are in right now. Okay. So a lot of times when I do this in conferences, the response is mixed. Some people are like, yeah, I'm able to count. Some people are like, I was thinking about what happened yesterday or what should I cook tomorrow? So so many other things. But a test that you could use anytime, the litmus test for restlessness.
