DO THIS EVERYDAY To Reduce Stress & Completely CHANGE YOUR LIFE | Emily Fletcher

The number one misconception around meditation, because it's simple, people assume that they should already know how to do it. Meditation is like any other skill. I tend to work with a lot of high performers. I teach Broadway performers and athletes and CEOs and hedge fund managers, and they both say the same thing to me. Like all these types of high performers say in their own way, Emily, I need my stress. Like my stress is the thing that gives me my competitive edge. Or my actor or my artist clients will say, Emily, I need my stress. I need those herdy poos. That's the thing that I create from. But the reality is stress is not doing us any favors in the performance department. Stress actually makes you stupid. We don't like to hear that, but it's true. And yes, there is such a thing as good stress. Yes, there is like saunas or cryotherapy or high intensity interval training, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about good stress. I'm talking about chronic stress that most of us are suffering from. And doctors are calling stress the black plague of our century, and I don't think that that's an over exaggeration. So if you want to understand why the human body reacts to stress in the way that it does, we have to cut back in time a few thousand years. Say we're hunting and gathering in the woods and let's say that a saber-toothed tiger jumps out at us with the intent to kill. First thing that's going to happen is that our digestion will flood with acid to shut down digestion because we need all hands on deck to fight or flee this tiger. That same acid will seep onto the skin so that we don't taste very good if we get bitten into by that tiger. our bladder and bowels will evacuate so we can be light on our feet. That's what the nervous poos are before you have a big thing to do. Your immune system goes to the back burner because who cares if you're going to get cancer if you're about to be killed by a tiger? And your adrenaline levels increase and your cortisol levels increase. And those are actually acidic in nature and that can actually accelerate the body's aging. And we all know this intuitively, you know, if we're working too hard, not we look in the mirror and we look 10 years older than we are and we go on vacation, we're like, oh, I look amazing. And that's sort of real-time feedback of what stress is doing to the body. So that series of chemical reactions is very useful if your demands are predatory attacks. But if your demands are in-laws or kids or deadlines or text messages or, you know, emails, then this fight or flight stress reaction has become maladaptive and it's now disallowing us from performing at the top of our game. And this is where meditation really comes into play. meditation goes in and it gets rid of that adrenaline and cortisol, and it actually starts to flood the brain with dopamine and serotonin, which are bliss chemicals. So that adrenaline and cortisol, they're acidic in nature, accelerates aging, whereas dopamine and serotonin, they're bliss chemicals, they feel amazing and it actually can reverse body age. And this is some of the cool new neuroscience that's coming out around meditation. Not only does meditation feel amazing and improve your performance, but it also can reverse your body age by somewhere between eight to fifteen years. 15 years, which I think is nuts. And when I first heard about this, I thought, well, come on. It's not magic. It's not a fountain of youth. It's not a miracle, and it's not. But what it's doing is that meditation is actually lengthening your telomeres. And the way I like to think about telomeres is that they're like the little plastic thing at the end of your shoelace. And if that plastic thing unravels, then your shoelace unravels. Well, similarly, if your telomeres unravel, then that can impact your actual DNA. It can impact how quickly that unravels. and so we know that now over time the more you meditate the longer your telomeres become which is pretty rad. So there's lots of different styles of meditation and I think it's important to clarify because as meditation becomes increasingly more popular I think that we want to be really specific with our vernacular and so a lot of people are using the term mindfulness and the term meditation as synonyms when they're actually not synonyms. Mindfulness is derivative of styles of meditation that were made for monks and it's more of a waking state practice. Like, I'm gonna bring my awareness to my breath, I'm gonna bring my awareness to the body. I would call mindfulness the art of bringing your attention to the right now, which is really beautiful and incredibly powerful. And if you actually look at a brain scan of someone practicing mindfulness, then a very small part of the brain lights up, but very, very bright. Now, there's this whole other category called meditation, and I'm admittedly a meditation snob, but how I would define meditation is when you're accessing a verifiable fourth state of consciousness, something different than waking, sleeping, or dreaming. And in this fourth state of consciousness, the right and left hemispheres of the brain actually start to function in unison, meaning that if you were to hook your brain up to an EEG machine, in waking, sleeping, and dreaming states of consciousness, right and left hemispheres are functioning separately. But in meditation, all 16 leads of EEG rise and fall in unison, which I think is pretty cool that sitting quietly in a chair could actually change the signature of your brain Cool party trick, but who cares? Like, why do I want that to happen? Well, I think everyone should because the left brain, and that's sort of an oversimplification for the prefrontal cortex, but the left brain is the critical mind. It's in charge of math, language, navigation, balancing our checkbooks, all really important activities. For most of us, we've been taking our left brain to the gym for a very long time. Now, our right brain is the piece of us that's in charge of the right now. It's in charge of creative problem solving, intuition, color, music, connectedness, creative problem solving. And for most of us, our right brains have been atrophying for a while, right? We've just been thinking, taking action, achieving, making money so we could be happy in the future. And meanwhile, our right brains are like, hey, I have a creative idea. I have a suggestion. You're like, shut up, right brain. I have to think and take action and achieve and make money so I could be happy in the future. But if you look at a human brain, it splits right down the middle.

50-50.

And I don't think that nature makes mistakes. I don't think that nature would have given us 50-50 if it wanted us to use 90-10. And so in the style of meditation that I teach at Ziva, we're actually using a mantra. And a mantra is not a slogan, okay? It's not an affirmation. The mantras that we use, they're meaningless primordial sounds. And those mantras actually help to de-excite the nervous system, and they help us to start to take that right brain to the gym. So that pendulum swings for a little while, but over time, the whole brain lights up. so in mindfulness, it's a smaller part of the brain, but it lights up very bright versus the style of meditation that I teach at Ziva, the whole brain lights up, but not as bright. So that the whole brain lighting up leads to a level of neuroplasticity, brain cohesion, and over time, it actually strengthens something called the corpus callosum. Now, the corpus callosum is quite literally the bridge between the two hemispheres of the brain. And we've known for a long time that meditators have thicker. corpus callosums than non-meditators. But we weren't able to prove it was causal or correlated. But now we know that the longer you meditate, the thicker the corpus callosum becomes. Which again, cool party trick, but why do I want a fat corpus callosum? Well, everyone should, because it is the bridge between your critical mind and your creative mind. It is the thing that allows you to come up with all those creative problem-solving ideas when it's go time. Let's say you get into a fight with your partner and it starts to get pretty heated, and then after a while you just shut down and you retreat to the bedroom, and a few hours later, once you're calm, you start to come up with all these amazing witty comebacks and you're like, why? Why couldn't I have thought of that in the moment? Well, my hypothesis here is that the longer you meditate, the thicker your corpus callosum becomes, the easier it is for you to come up with those witty comebacks when it counts. For sure, the number one misconception around meditation is that people think that they have to clear their minds. People think that the point of meditation is to give the mind a command to be silent. and so if you're judging yourself at how good you are at meditation based on how good you are at giving your brain a command to shut up, then you're always going to feel like you're failing and you're definitely going to quit because none of us will do anything for very long that we feel like we're failing at. And so while there are different styles of meditation that are good for different use cases, the reality is what most people need is some training in how to meditate because really truly meditation is like any other skill. But because it's simple, people assume that they should already know how to do it. They think, well, yeah, I should just sit in a chair and close my eyes and be like, okay, Brain, stop thinking. And then it looks like this. I sure would like a snack. I love snacks. Snacks are delicious. I got a whole ring called snacks. Wait, now I'm thinking about snacks. Wait, now I'm thinking about how I'm thinking about snacks. I suck at meditation and I quit. And that's like the beginning and the end of most people's meditation career. And really, They're only quitting because they're judging themselves based on misinformation. I feel like there's this one dude going around telling everyone that in order to meditate you have to clear your mind and I wish I could find him and teach him how to meditate because it would make my job so much easier. And the analogy that I'd like to use here is let's say we were going to do a 21-day Portuguese challenge and for 20 minutes a day for the next 21 days we're all going to speak Portuguese. Now, if you don't know how to speak Portuguese, I think that's kind of a silly challenge to take. And yet that's what everyone's doing with meditation. They're like, I'm gonna have a 21-day challenge. I'm just gonna sit down and close my eyes and shut up, brain. But it doesn't go all that well. So I think if you have a little bit of training, if you have a technique that's designed for you, the meditation can be so simple and so beautiful and then it becomes something that you actually crave, something you look forward to, versus a torture device or something that your parents used to do to you when you were a child. so ziva meditation is a beautiful trifecta of mindfulness, meditation and manifesting the three M's if you will. And I'd like to think about mindfulness as the appetizer, meditation as the main course and manifesting as dessert. And the way that I use mindfulness is really as a runway because we tend to work with a lot of high performers, hyper achievers, people who really like to go. And it's hard to go from 60 miles an hour to zero. right away. And so I feel that people like to use that mindfulness as a little bit of a runway. And in the mindfulness techniques we use, it will be breath work or sensory work, just tools to help ground you in the right here, right now. And then the meditation is where you're accessing that verifiable fourth state of consciousness, and you're also giving your body rest that is five times deeper than sleep. And that's not an insignificant point because when we give the body the rest that it needs, it knows how to heal itself. And one of the things that it heals itself from is stress. Less stress we have in the body, the better able we are to perform at the top of our game. And then finally, we end the meditation with some manifesting tools. And I know that word manifesting gets a bad rap because we think of like the secret back in the 90s, but manifesting just means consciously creating a life that you love. It means intending the things that you want to have happen. And so I just give people some tools to utilize that juicy time at the end of meditation to help visualize a life that they dream of. Honestly, I think the single most valuable piece of advice that anyone could take with them as they start a meditation career is this: the mind thinks involuntarily, just like the heart beats involuntarily. So trying to give your brain a command to be silent is as effective as trying to give your heart a command to stop beating. And just to drive the point home, just on the count of three, try and give your heart a command to stop beating. Ready? One, two, three. And please don't die. Right, like we see that that's so silly. We can't command the heart to stop beating or the nails to stop growing. That's not up to us. Similarly, we cannot command the brain to be silent. So instead, you develop a technique, you learn a technique. I think you get a bit of training, you get a technique that was designed for you, and then you move towards the technique, not away from the thoughts. I first became interested in meditation during my 10-year career on Broadway. And my last Broadway show was a chorus line. And I understudied three of the lead roles, which means that you show up to the theater and you have no idea which character you're gonna play. Sometimes I would start the show as one character and halfway through they would switch me to a different character. Or I would just be chilling in my dressing room doing my taxes and someone would get on a loudspeaker and say, Emily Fletcher, we need you on stage. And I would start panicking because I wouldn't know which costume to put on. So I would just grab all three of them, run down seven flights of stairs, and sometimes I would be on stage before I knew which character I was gonna be. play. Now some people are very good at this job. I am not one of them. I was living my life in this constant state of anxiety and overwhelm and I started going gray at the tender age of 26. I started getting sick all the time. I was getting injured and it was really confusing to me why I was living my dream, doing the thing I had wanted to do since I was eight and I was miserable. And then thankfully the girl sitting next to me in the dressing room was a meditator. She had a harder job than I did but she was crushing it. And I was like, lady, what do you know that I don't know? She said, I meditate. And this is a decade ago. So no one was really talking about it then like they are now. But I thought, no, come on. She can't be this good at her job just by sitting in her chair and doing nothing. So I just kept having insomnia. I kept going gray. I kept getting sick. I kept sucking at my job. And then finally I was so embarrassed about my performance that I thought, well, let me try it. So I went along with this intro to meditation talk. I liked what I heard. I signed up for this course. first day of the first class I was meditating. To be honest, I had no idea what that meant, but I was in a different state of consciousness than I had ever been in before, and I liked it. And then that night I slept through the night for the first time in 18 months. And I have every night since, and that was 10 years ago. And then I stopped getting sick. I stopped going gray. I stopped getting injured. I started enjoying my job again. And I thought, why does everyone not do this? And so I left Broadway, I went to India, and I started what became a three-year training process teach and then I opened up Ziva five and a half years ago and it's been the best thing I've ever done. When I started to see how dramatically meditation improved my performance and my life, I felt really inspired and actually compelled to be able to share it with others. I was like, this thing is so good, why is everyone not doing it? I'm the kind of person that when I find something that works for me, I really want to share it with as many people who are interested. And to be honest, when I started my dive down meditation, I thought it would just be like a side interest. I was just going for my own benefit. But then when I got to India, I realized, I'm gonna teach this. I didn't know when or why or how, but I knew I was going to. And then I sort of arrogantly thought that I could keep acting and keep teaching acting and teach meditation. And so there was this one week where I was in final callbacks to play Velma in Chicago on Broadway. I was starting the world's first online meditation training, and I was teaching six people to be acting teachers at my studio. And I was like, Nobody wins here. And so that was when I made a very conscious decision to stop teaching acting, to stop acting and move into teaching meditation full time. And then Ziva has just grown exponentially since then. Really, the desire to teach came out of how dramatically meditation improved my performance. You know, people ask me sometimes if I miss performing on Broadway, and the answer is decidedly no. Selfishly, why I do what I do is that every single day I get to wake up to emails from people saying, Emily, my anxiety went away, my depression's gone, I was able to finally get off my meds, with the help of my doctor, my insomnia is gone, my IBS is gone, my skin cleared up, I broke up with that guy, I started writing that book. I mean, every day I get emails like this, and it's so rewarding to feel like I played a role in that transformation. It's not me, it's them, it's the practice, but I'm really happy to help facilitate that. And, but some stories that stand out to me, I taught a gentleman once, and he was in his late 60s, and we were doing a private, and he had Parkinson's, and it was pretty advanced. And I could tell that he was a bit self-conscious about it. He was, you know, holding his hands. And when we first learned, I gave him his mantra, and his tremors got very, very pronounced. And then he closed his eyes, and he started doing his mantra silently, and his tremors stopped immediately. And it was very dramatic. Like, I started crying because I'd never seen it happen before. It was very moving. And then afterwards, when he opened his eyes, I didn't want to make a big deal about it, but he said to me, he said, did you notice that my tremors stopped? And I said, I did notice that. And then the next day we meditated again, and for the whole 10-minute session, his tremors stopped, and afterwards about five minutes later they came back. The next day we meditated for 20 minutes, they stopped, and afterwards about 15 minutes later tremors came back. The next day, 20 minutes they came back, and the next day it took 30 minutes for them to come back. So it's not that meditation, I can't claim that meditation cures Parkinson's, but I did see firsthand that that dopamine and serotonin that the brain produces when you're meditating seemed to give him a bit of a reprieve and that reprieve lasted longer and longer. And that was the first time I'd ever seen anything so visceral and so instant. But the reality is our bodies are very fast. When you have the brain of fear, within 10 minutes you have the marrow of fear. And similarly, when you start meditating, if you have the brain of bliss, within 10 minutes you have the marrow of bliss. That's how long it takes from a stimulus to something to go to the most viscous fluid in our body, which is the marrow in our bones. 10 minutes. And so really every action that we take, every time we get stressed, every time we meditate, every time we eat food that's nourishing or food that's toxic, it's impacting every cell in our body within minutes. And so that was really exciting for me to see. I had a woman tell me that she got a $120,000 scholarship to a nursing program that she didn't even apply for. I said, I totally attribute this to meditation. That people finish their books, finish their films, book TV shows, win Oscars, win Tonys, win Grammys. My goal is to have the EGOT of meditation. So far I have Grammy, Tony, and Oscar award winners, but I think it'd be fun to have the EGOT of students. So almost every day when I tell people I'm a meditation teacher, they say, oh Emily, I really want to meditate. I know there's all this fascinating neuroscience coming out telling us how good meditation is for you, but I'm busy. My life is crazy. I don't have time to meditate. And my favorite thing to say to that is, okay, do you have time to feel like crap? Do you have time to have insomnia? Do you have time to have anxiety? Do you have time to get sick? Do you have time to not perform as nature designed your brain to perform? I think that we really very urgently need to move meditation out of this spa day for your brain category. Meditation is not a pedicure for your brain. this thing is not a luxury item. This thing is the single most important act of mental hygiene that you could perform. You're not going to leave your house without brushing your teeth. And my goal is to make leaving your house without meditating as rude as it would be to leave your house without brushing your teeth. And if you start to understand that meditation is not wasting your time, it's actually optimizing your brain performance, then you can't really imagine your day without it. And people who develop a daily routine, this again and again and again, that that second meditation is like a supercharged power nap. And if you schedule in the time to do it afterwards, you have this hit of creativity and productivity and energy even more so than if you took a coffee or a nap or had some chocolate. Because it's this self-sufficient sustainable means by which to optimize your brain performance instead of being dependent on chemicals to do it for you. So my top tips for enhancing brain health, aside from meditation, we'll go ahead and assume that meditation is my number one. But other than that, it's sleeping for sure. I used to be very much a night owl. 10 years on Broadway leads to late nights. So making your sleep earlier, according to Ayurveda, the optimal times are 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. So it's not just how much sleep you're getting, but it's when you're sleeping. The sleep that you get before midnight is actually better for you than the sleep that you get after midnight, because your body's running a whole host of cleansing operations. So sleeping and the timing of your sleep, eating a ton of raw fat. I eat so much raw fat. People are like, but Emily, you're so thin. Fat doesn't make you fat, rest doesn't make you lazy. Fat is actually fueling your brain. The brain runs almost exclusively on EPAs and DHAs. And if you're not getting that in your food, then your brain is actually going to suck that up from your body and it will create dry skin and a feeling of dehydration. And so eating lots and lots of raw fat has really helped my brain performance. And then taking the right supplements, figuring out what you are deficient in, what you have too much of, and then supplementing around that. And yes, ideally we're getting all of our nutrients from the food that we're eating, but the reality is that our soil has been depleted and a lot of our food isn't food anymore. So even if you're eating a healthy diet, sometimes you need supplement to bring us back to baseline. If you don't yet have a meditation practice, but you're having a high demand, high anxiety moment, I call them an OMFG moment, I actually have an OMFG technique. And that is simply inhaling through your nose for two and exhaling through your mouth for four. So you're just doubling the length of the exhale from your inhales, which is in through the nose for two and out through the mouth for four. And when we do that, when we double the length of the exhale, we actually strengthen and ease the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve is really the biggest connector between the mind and the body. And as we soothe that, it's easier for the body to move out of that fight or flight and start to move into what I call stay and play. And it's really quite simple, and it's a simple thing that you can move towards. versus a lot of people when they start having anxious thoughts or sad thoughts or angry thoughts, they try to move away from those. They try to say, well, don't think about my ex, don't think about my taxes, don't think about these terrible things, but then you're pushing against those thoughts and then they're gonna push back and they're gonna win. So instead, if you move towards this 2x breath or the OMFG technique, then it's a way to move towards the positive instead of away from the negative. So it's interesting, in the West we spend a lot of time naming and analyzing the different flavors of stress. You know, we have anxiety, we have depression, we have ADD, ADHD, PTSD, and not to diminish or oversimplify, but when I was training in India, they would just call all of this stress, right? That these are different symptoms of this underlying imbalance, which is stress. And so what we do with meditation is we start to bring the body back into balance and that can start to let some of those symptoms fall away. Now the reality is if you're dealing with very intense anxiety or very intense depression, then I really think it's important to make sure that you're working with someone one-on-one face to face. Even though I have an online meditation training, I recommend that people that are dealing with severe PTSD or severe depression, that if they do it, that they make sure that they're working with a therapist because there's nothing that can replace that human face-to-face contact. And the reality is that when people start a meditation practice, you know, we want it to be this spa day for the brain. We want it to be this magical cure-all. And it feels a little magical. It feels a little miraculous, but it's not. It's actually just taking all of the old stress that we've been accumulating our whole lives and it starts to bring it up and out. And so if you're dealing with depression, it's very possible that your symptoms can get more intense before they get better. And no one's really talking about this in the meditation world. And then it can be confusing or challenging when people start a meditation practice because they think it should just be sunshine and roses, and instead they have a lot of sadness or anger coming up and out. And so I think it's important to educate people that when you start a meditation practice, you can expect some degree of an emotional and physical detox, and that that's okay. but that's actually part of the healing. And my theme song for that is Better Out Than In. You know, better out than in, better out than in. Like, this is my nerdy dad joke, is that you want to have that stuff like in your tissues versus in your tissues. You know, it's better to cry that stuff out than let it stay in the body for decades and then we have to cut it out years later. I really think that we have an opportunity to learn our lessons on the spiritual plane. And if we don't learn them there, then we have to learn them on the physical logical plane. And if we don't learn them there, then we have to learn them on the physical plane. And so really, it's faster and easier and cheaper to learn it on the spiritual plane and meditate. If not, then we got to go to the therapist for a few decades. And if not, well, then we have to go to the surgeon. So I just think it's a way to reframe. But then I really just want people to know that if they start a practice and things get a little Messier before they get cleaner, that that's okay. There's nothing wrong with you. It's just like you've got to let your house get a little bit messier before it gets cleaner if you're cleaning out your closets. And that's part of the process. But the beautiful thing is that the stress is finite. And if you're really meditating twice a day and eating well and getting good sleep, there is an end date. There is a moment where you've eradicated the entire backlog of stresses that you've ever accumulated in your entire life. And then on the other side of that, you're able to be so present, so conscious, so mindful, you're able to enjoy each moment, and so your whole life really becomes a celebration, and that's why I think we're here. So my favorite raw fats to eat would be definitely avocados. I love me an avocado. I'll eat probably at least one avocado a day. I'll put like a cold-pressed organic olive oil in my smoothie, just like a teaspoon or tablespoon. I'll put olive oil on almost anything that I eat, a soup, a salad, I will eat sometimes like a raw nut butter. Yeah, just like, like I love an organic raw nut butter. And sometimes if I'm feeling fancy, I'll even do some raw dairy. I know that's super controversial, but I have a dairy dealer that comes to my house and I pay them in cash like a drug deal.

Then I had a panic attack and I didn't know why I had a panic attack. It was on Good Morning America in the spring of 2004. I was on the air and I had been, I was reading the news headlines that morning. There used to be a person on Good Morning America who would come on at the top of each hour and read the headlines. And we no longer have that position, but I had filled in in this job before and I didn't have any reason to foresee what was about to happen, which was that I just freaked out. You can see it if you Google panic attack on live television, it's the first thing that comes up. Yeah, I've seen the clip. It's unpleasant. Although what's interesting about the clip is that a lot of people, if you've ever had a taste of anxiety or panic, then Those people know exactly what they're looking at and it's very anxiety provoking to look at the clip. If you haven't, then you may think, oh, well, it's really not that bad. It doesn't make a difference, really, what it looks like. But inside it was horrible for me. It was horrible for me. And after I had the panic attack, I went to a doctor who was an expert in panic and he said he was asking me a bunch of questions to try to figure out what had happened. One of the questions was, Do you do drugs? And I said, Yes. And he's, you know, I often make the joke that he leaned back in his chair and gave me a look that communicated the following sentiment, okay, more on mystery solved. I think all he said was mystery solved. And he pointed out that these drugs artificially raised the level of adrenaline in your brain. And it made me more likely to have a panic attack, even though I wasn't high on the air that morning and I wasn't even using drugs that frequently. My career was pretty intermittent. Anyway, so I had this panic attack that morning after I saw the shrink, I quit doing drugs. And because quitting doing drugs is not easy, I agreed to go see him once or twice a week for years. That is what ultimately set me off on a long and winding and weird road that ultimately led me to meditation. And I write about it a lot in 10% Happier. I won't regurgitate the whole story right now, but the punchline is I started, I mean, I always thought meditation was ridiculous and had no desire to do it and no interest in it and I never really even thought about it, but to the extent that I did, I thought it was for, you know, crystal lovers and fans of Enya and...

Fans of it.

Sorry to any fans of Enya.

I used to like Enya, she's not so bad.

Well, okay. I can agree to disagree on that.

It's good to do yoga too.

Fine. Yeah, I'm not even sure I agree with that. That's okay. No offense to Enya, I don't even, I pick on Barry White. You could do Yoga to Barry White, I don't know. You could do Yoga to Barry White, sure. Cold play. So anyway, what ultimately changed my mind was I saw the science. I'm not a scientist, I'm not good at math, but my wife's a scientist, my parents are both scientists, and I was really convinced when I saw the science, which is, I don't wanna, you.

Know, did someone say, Hey, Dan, you should check out meditation, or the Dalai.

Lama came to town, you wanna hear him talk? What was the trigger? Well, the long story is, I won't make it too long, but I had been assigned to cover faith and spirituality for ABC News, and I didn't want that assignment. I was raised in the People's Republic of Massachusetts. My parents are both atheist scientists. As I often say, I had a bar mitzvah, but only for the money. So I was not-- the yamulka please. Exactly. I was not interested in this stuff at all. Peter Jennings, my boss at the time, was really interested in the subject and wanted me to do it. So it actually turned out to be great for me and I met a lot of interesting people and I saw my own ignorance about these issues and I really sort of, I didn't join a church or go kosher or anything like that, but I was interested in the subject and that ultimately led me to reading a book by Eckhart Tolle.

Ah, the Power of Now?

I think it was A New Earth. That was the first book I read, which I thought was really annoying and It triggered me in all the predictable ways as a skeptic. He uses a lot of gooey language and pseudo-scientific language about vibrational fields and stuff like that. But he was the first person I ever heard describe the fact that we have a voice in our heads. Yeah. This inner narrator that's yammering all the time at us, mostly thinking about the past or the future.

Crazy ant in your head.

Yeah, or the Buddha calls it the monkey mind. But I had never heard that theory before. And when I read that book, just to fight my overwhelming annoyance with him and his tone and some of his strange claims about how he lived on a park bench for two years in a state of bliss and blah, blah, blah, that was a major aha moment for me because I realized, okay, this is just intuitively true, A, and B, this theory about the human situation that we have this nonstop voice in our heads really explained why, how I had a panic attack. Because the voice in my head, my ego, my inner narrator, is what sent me off to war zones without thinking about the psychological consequences. Then I came home and I got depressed and didn't even really know it and then did this dumb thing of self-medicating. So that was really interesting to me. So I agreed One of my producers had recommended that I read this book by Tolle. So to her delight, I said, okay, let's go do a story on Tolle. And I did. And I found him, he's a very nice man, but I found him very frustrating in that a friend of mine has described Tolle as correct but not useful. In other words, he doesn't tell you much to do. He doesn't give you a lot of practical advice for dealing with the voice in the head, this phenomenon that he describes so well. I then spent a bunch of time sort of marinating in the self-help world and looking around for answers to this question of what do you do about the voice in the head? And that ultimately led me to meditation. My wife gave me a book about Buddhism written by a shrink here in New York City named Dr. Mark Epstein, who's written a series of beautiful books about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology. And that that is what pointed me toward meditation, which initially I didn't want to do. And then I started looking at the science, and then I started thinking, okay, maybe I'll try this. And as soon as I tried it, I realized, okay, this is not, you know, like hacky sack or, you know, lighting incense. It's not some hippie pastime. This is exercise for your brain. Been around for thousands of years. Yes, and it has a huge PR problem because it's the victim of the worst marketing campaign for anything ever. You know, it's been sold to us the wrong way. for a bunch of reasons that we can discuss. And I had this entrepreneurial, well, I had a personal selfish feeling of, oh, this would be really good for me. And I adopted it as a habit pretty quickly. I mean, immediately, really. But the entrepreneurial feeling was maybe if I write a book that uses the F word a lot and talks about this in a different way, it would make it accessible to skeptics. And so that's why I wrote the first book, and then it went on to become a podcast and an app.

Yeah, 10% Happier is really true. And it happens without effort. In other words, you just have to do the practice, it's like exercise. You do the exercise and your body will get in shape whether you like it or not. Yes. And that happens in that way.

Yeah.

And I actually came at it in a different way through exploring Eastern thinking. I read Thoreau's Walden and in that there was a lot of, you know, Asian and Eastern religious influence and Upanishads. And so I kind of navigated down there and actually studied Buddhism in college as my major. And essentially it's a phenomenology of the mind. so we have describing the operation of the mind, how we perceive things, the meaning we give to those things, how our beliefs determine our experience and suffering. And, you know, you can read about it all you want, but unless you begin to know your mind, which is what meditation helps you do, it's like slow down what's going on. It's not this, like, blank slate. You close your eyes and you're in bliss and Nirvana. That's not how it goes, right? It's a very, it's a very interesting way to sort of reset your relationship to yourself, to your world, to your experience, to the meaning you give things. And everything just sort of shifts whether you want to make it shift or not. It's just the act of doing it. And, I think a lot of people read meditation books, but don't actually do it. A lot of people read diet books and don't actually eat differently.

Right?

So, it's really about the practice. So, when I remember when I came back from Haiti after the earthquake, I was working in Port-au-Prince Hospital, it was just really rough. And, the 82nd Airborne there came in and they said, this is worse than anything we've seen in Iraq or Afghanistan. This is just terrific. 300,000 dead, 300,000 wounded. and, you know, I came back and I was in that same state of panic and anxiety and unreality and disassociation. How could the world not know what's really going on? Everybody's just in their little life. And it really. It was really a very powerful shift in sort of understanding this anxiety and panic I'd never had before. So I can relate to what you're saying.

I was there, too. Yeah. In Haiti. Oh, yeah, it was. It was. It was the worst thing I've ever seen.

It was.

I remember walking the first night, it was actually a 60 Minutes piece on it. We got off the plane with Paul Farmer and we went to the Port-au-Prince.

Hospital, General Hospital there.

My friend did that piece, Byron Pitts. Oh, yeah, Byron, yeah. Yeah, he was the guy. Yeah, so came and we went, I said, actually, I grabbed him and I said, Byron, let's go to the back. And there was this area where the morgue was and it was just full.

Of bodies on the concrete just rotting in the sun. I saw Byron that night. and they were using forklifts to dispose of the bodies. It was unbelievably bad. It was rough. So, I get it.

And, you know, when you have that, it's like, how do you get out of that? And, a lot of people have different types of trauma and different types of stress. And, you know, the question is, you know, we all are inundated every day with massive amounts of inputs that cause our psychology to be affected, our mood, our energy, our anxiety level, our sleep. And, meditation seems to be a way to help people navigate through that in a way that's very powerful. So, what were the things that you noticed when you started meditating and what was the kind of meditation you did?

Can I swear?

You can.

The first thing I noticed, the first data point that emerged was that I overheard my wife at a party telling friends that I was less of a shithead, which I thought was interesting because that was even before I saw any benefit for myself.

That's hardly a swear.

Yeah, it'll get worse now that I have remembered.

So.

There are two big benefits as I noticed showing up in my own mind after a couple of weeks, really, of doing. And I was just doing five to ten minutes a day. Yeah, that's it. And there, I really, that's what I recommend people start with. And I also believe one minute counts, you know, because time is the biggest. In the second book I wrote, I, I was really trying to, it was, is a how-to book, and I was really trying to figure out how do we get people over the hump from being interested in this to actually doing it? And the biggest obstacle, I believe, is time. And so if you tell people, look, what I tell people is one minute counts and try to aim for daily-ish. And what I've found, and we've tested this with, we do a meditation challenge every year for the employees at Apple. And we, meaning the folks from the 10% Happier app, and we set it up as a way to as, hey, do meditate, try to meditate for at least one minute, 25 out of 31 days in the month of October.

And if you don't have that minute, you got to look at your life and figure out what's wrong.

What we find is the buy-in rates are incredibly high. So we're actually, this challenge that we run for Apple, we're about to roll it out to the public. So anybody can take the challenge starting in January. And so, I see this as a really important sort of behavioral hack to tell people, Look, I get it. You feel time-starved. Here's how to get over the hump. But anyway, for me, what I found was just after a few weeks of doing this, the two big benefits are focus, really what meditation is, and you asked me what kind of meditation. So, when I talk about meditation, I'm talking about mindfulness meditation, which is derived from Buddhism, but secularized and stripped of all the metaphysical claims and religious lingo. Really the beginning instruction is sit, close your eyes, try to feel your breath coming in and going out. You don't have to breathe in a special way, just feel the breath as it naturally occurs. And then every time you get distracted, which is going to happen a million times, you just start again and again and again. And that noticing you've become distracted and beginning again is like a bicep curl for your brain. and it's what shows up on the brain scans of all these fascinating studies that have been done where neuroscientists look at the brains of people who meditate. This is the mechanism by which, or at least one of the mechanisms by which you change your brain and your mind and your life by extension. Anyway, focus was a huge thing for me because what meditation is, is a focus exercise in many ways. You're trying to focus on your breath, and then every time you get distracted, start again and start again and start again. And studies have found that this simple exercise changes the part of the brain associated with attention regulation. So for me, focus was a huge win. It doesn't mean I'm impenetrably undistractible or something like that. I'm still a Twitter checking, sort of email checking fool a lot of the time. I just think I'm less prone to that than I used to be. But the bigger benefit is called mindfulness, which is in our world of health and wellness is such a huge buzz phrase, buzz word. I fear that often people use the word without knowing what they're talking about. So mindfulness really is, it's an ancient word with a lot of different, and you know this from your days of studying Buddhism, the ancient word is Sati in the Pali language, which was the Indian language that the Buddha spoke. or said to have spoken, it actually has many meanings, but a very simple serviceable definition is the ability to know what's happening in your head without getting carried away by it. So mindfulness is just the scale of being able to see, oh, this is anger that's coming up right now. I don't have to be owned by it. I don't have to take the bait and act on it. It's lowered emotional reactivity, essentially, or another way of saying it would be emotional intelligence. And that is incredibly useful to know you're angry.

Less fights with your spouse.

For sure. Doesn't mean no spouse fights with your spouse. I mean, again, or how you show up in them. Absolutely. Absolutely. But again, I always want to give permission for people to mess up. This is the 10% idea is I think very powerful because it's not like you're going to start meditating and then you'll never have a fight with your spouse or you're never gonna show up in one of those fights in a way that's really nasty and vindictive. It just means you may catch yourself earlier. Actually, my friend Sam Harris, who has a great podcast called Waking Up, and he wrote a book about meditation called Waking Up, he has said, and I love this, that meditation doesn't mean you will never feel anger again, but it may cut down on the half-life of anger. You may catch yourself two minutes into a bout of fury rather than an hour into a bout of fury. and the amount of damage, as Sam says, that you can do in an hour of anger versus two minutes. Two minutes. I mean, like, that's just an incalculable difference. And that's really what meditation, in my experience, does.

It also helps you break the. It seemed like unbreakable, unbreakable bond between your feelings, your thoughts and your actions.

Yes.

So often we, we conflate the two. We have, but we have a feeling in that. or a thought and that creates a feeling and that creates an action. When you realize that everything you think in your brain is not necessarily worth listening to, you shouldn't believe every stupid thought you have, basically. Meditation helps you see that and you can break down that space where really it used to be one, it used to be thought, feeling, reaction. And that's a powerful set of tools to have in any walk of life, whether it's your relationship, whether it's work or anything.

In my experience, it's a massive game changer. because you're in the, this is the cliche, this is like the only cliche, meditation cliche that doesn't make me want to put a pencil in my eye. It teaches you how to respond wisely to things instead of reacting blindly. Because we have this nonstop conversation going on in our heads all the time that of course if we broadcast aloud, people would think we're insane. But we have this nonstop chatter and because we're unaware of it, it owns us. So every neurotic obsession that flits through our mind, We just act it out blindly because we're not aware that this is just a thought. What meditation does is force you into a collision with the asshole in your head so that you're not taking every shitty idea he or she is offering up to you. And that is what stops you from, you know, eating the 75th cookie or saying the thing that's gonna ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage or whatever. And it makes a huge difference. Again, we're not talking about infallibility here. We're just talking about reduced levels of the, you're moron quotient.

So, what's the dose? Because you talk about the one-minute meditation. I get that it's a way to get people over the hurdle of starting, but is it really effective? And for me, I noticed that the first few minutes is like being in a wild ocean in a storm, and then after a while it kind of calms down and things settle down and I get to a much different space of being aware. and I think, you know, when you look at the science around meditators, you've got Richard Davidson, who I know you've worked with and Dalai Lama has done all this research with the Tibetan Olympic meditators who meditated, you know, for nine years in a cave, for example, versus one minute here and there during the week. How, and their brains are different. They look different. Their brain waves are different. The shape and size of their brain is different. Their behavior is different. Their happiness is different. So what is that sort like Goldilocks dose that is really the right dose.

We don't know. I've asked Richie Davidson, the eminent neuroscientist who's really led the charge on bringing scientific tools to bear on these inner technologies of meditation and contemplative practices. I've asked him and many other neuroscientists who have been looking at meditation, and we don't actually know. The consensus that I've been able to generate among these folks is if you were to do five minutes a day, what I've been able to gather from these folks is that they are of the view that that would probably give you access to many of the advertised benefits of meditation. So, I think that's the good news. The better news, and now I'm in the realm of opinion, the better news in my opinion is that one minute truly does count because what are we trying to do in meditation? We're trying to wake up from the autopilot of being owned by this sort of malevolent puppeteer in our head, our ego.

The monkey mind.

The monkey mind, right? And so in a minute, can you sit and then try to focus on your breath and then get distracted immediately? And in that moment of seeing the distraction, what are you doing? You're waking up. You're waking up from this dream that we're in of just being controlled by this thought-producing machine in our head. And I think that can happen in a minute. I know it can happen in a minute. Do I think it would be better to do more? Absolutely. I think if I could snap my fingers and say, yeah, everybody in the world's gonna do five to 10 minutes a day, I would, but I can't. And we're dealing with the fact that we did not evolve, we did not evolve for healthy habits. Evolution didn't care about you flossing your teeth. Evolution cared about you getting your DNA into the next generation. And so we evolved for threat detection and finding sources of pleasure like mates and food. We didn't evolve to develop these long-term healthy habits. It's really hard. We're wired for failure. And so I'm always thinking of ways, little hacks, to get people over the hump. Because the best way to create a habit is to access the benefits so that it becomes blazingly obvious you should do it. Not because somebody's telling you to do it. Because your life is better. Because you like the act of doing it and because your life improves as a consequence. And so the little tricks I use are like one minute counts and daily-ish, et cetera, et cetera. And again, we're finding, and by we, I mean my team at 10% Happier, we're finding that this really does work with people. And so that's why I stick with it. But you're absolutely right. I think doing more would be better. And of course, as somebody who's done a not insignificant amount of meditation myself, it's totally clear that it takes a while for the mind to settle. And especially, for example, I've done a few meditation retreats where that's all you're doing for 10 days. 12 hours a day.

Yeah.

And then you really see the mind settle. And then when then actually you're accessing levels of happiness, well-being, contentment that were in my experience heretofore sort of unavailable. I didn't even know they existed.

Better than the best drug.

For sure.

I've done that too. I've done those and you come on, you feel like you're on acid or something. The world looks just so bright and clear.

That's right.

This is really quite amazing, the pharmacy we've got in there. And what's fascinating is in the West, we really focused on the outer world and mastering the outer world, science, technology, and we're good at it. We pretty much ignored the inner world, the science of the mind and the ability to actually work with it and control it and do things that are pretty stunning. And I don't know if you've ever read this book, it's called the Way of the White Clouds by Lama Govinda, who is an incredible Austrian, sort of man who went to the East and became a Buddhist, and then he became a Tibetan Buddhist, and he cataloged in the 30s and a time when was before the Chinese sort of decimated Tibet, what these Traditions were, what the practices were, what the powers they would get are from really mastering this, this inner technology. And I think we really have only sort of begun to scratch the surface of what that is. And it's happening in an interesting way. It feels like it's a meditation, and I 40 years ago when I was doing it, it was weird and strange and bizarre and wacky. But now it's sort of mainstream. You look at sports teams like the Chicago Bulls under Michael Jordan and the Cubs and the Seattle Seahawks all meditating.

You've got CEOs all meditating. Novak Djokovic. Yeah. 50 cent.

I mean, it was really interesting. Do you have a practice? I do, yeah. So I didn't for a long time. I did when I was younger and then I didn't. And then a number of years ago, I kind of got connected to a friend of mine who sort of convinced.

Me to try it again.

And I did yoga, I do this. this, I do that.

Within you playing.

Yeah, well, not always. Not for maybe 20, 30 years, I haven't. But I like Krishnadutt, actually. And I started doing 20 minutes twice a day.

Oh, TM.

Yeah, which is a version of TM. It's a Vedic mantra-based meditation. And it was profound. The quality of my energy, my focus, my happiness, the ability to not be reactive, to be present and clear to sleep better. Just, and now I'm sort of addicted to it because if I don't do it, I don't feel as good.

So that's when it's got its hooks in you.

That's the key point. Because you know, you really notice a difference in your performance and your happiness. And it's that, it is that happiness because it's like, okay, well things don't bother you anymore. You don't get stressed anymore. It's like, I was like, how come you never get stressed about anything? Like, what's the point? You know, it's like, I just tend, and there's some family stuff that does trigger me. But other than that, it's like, if you think you're enlightened, go home for Thanksgiving. Right. But it's, it's a very interesting phenomena when start to do it on a regular basis, you see the changes. Now, there's a lot of science behind this, right? Richard's worked on this and others have worked on it. And what are some of the scientific benefits that you become aware of?

I think it's really important, and I'll talk about this to say that at the beginning that the science is really in its early stages and some of the science is bad. And sometimes people- the methodology. Yeah, it's just the studies aren't rigorous. And Richie co-authored a book recently called Altered Traits.

Yeah, with Daniel Goleman.

Daniel Goleman. And they really tried to sort, you know, separate wheat from chaff in that book. And I think they did a really good job. So I think it's important to just to know that sometimes people in my position, and I would as you have described me as an event, Evangelists really at my core, that's I think what I'm trying to do is spread.

Most evangelists and journalists don't go in the same sense.

No, I know. They often don't. In fact, I would say almost never do. But the good news I'm trying to spread is not metaphysical, it's not sectarian in any way. It's just that there is a kind of exercise for the brain available to people. and at the core of the proposition is that the mind is trainable. And we think we're stuck with the level of happiness, calm, patience, emotional reactivity, generosity, gratitude, creativity that we were born with, that these are factory settings that can't be refigured. But in fact, these are skills that can be learned and trained. And that is a huge piece of good news. And so that is what I'm out there trying to sell. Sell, I mean, sometimes in the crass sense of, hey, subscribe to my app or sell in the more high-minded way, which I'm more comfortable with, which is, hey, you should investigate these practices and see which one works for you and go for it. Sometimes people in my position who are evangelists hype the science in a way that I think is irresponsible. So I just want to issue that caveat before I answer your question. That being said, I think what we can, I think the right phraseology is there's an enough science to say that it strongly suggests that doing short daily doses of meditation can confer a pretty long list of tantalizing health benefits from lowering your blood pressure, boosting your immune system. It's been shown to, and the strongest science is really about anxiety and depression, both of which I have suffered since I was a kid. And then there's the neuroscience, which suggests it can rewire key parts of the brain. I'll tell you about one study that was done at Harvard 2010 or 11. This is the study that convinced my mom, who's a physician at Harvard, to meditate. And she is a hardcore skeptic of everything, especially anything her son is interested in. Why is that? I don't know. But so what convinced her to meditate was a study at Harvard that they took people who never meditated before and they scanned their brains to get a baseline sort of reading of their neurological activity. And then they had them do eight weeks of a little bit of meditation every day. And then they scanned their brains again after eight weeks, and they found that in the area of the brain associated with self-awareness and with compassion, the gray matter literally grew. And in the area of the brain associated with stress, the gray matter literally shrank. That's amazing. That's really compelling. And there are a lot of neuroscience out there. Richie, again, is I think the leader in this field, and he's done incredible work to show that meditation can make a real difference. And you don't have to be an Olympic meditator. You don't have to be an Olympic meditator. And again, it's not gonna solve all of your problems. It's not magic. you have to do the work and it's not going to make you imperturbable. I get pissed off all the time. It's just, you know, it is. I told you right before we sat down, I was a little annoyed because I had to wait outside in the cold. And so, like, I still am susceptible to negative emotions. I just find that, you know, as we said before, that cutting down on the half-life can make a big difference.

That's huge. So you, you, you made it your mission to sort of go outside the typical journalistic framework and actually start to share this as something you really believe in and that you want the world to do. So, if you were sort of king for a day and you could change people's lives, habits, laws, what would you do? Would you make meditation mandatory learning in school as a basic like reading, writing, arithmetic, and meditation?

I'm worried about mandatory. Maybe that's the right move. Now, I'm thinking aloud.

It's a skill. It's a life skill.

It is a life skill. The reason I worry about mandatory is that I find that So one of the rules that I've adopted for myself is that I never talk about meditation unless people ask me to talk about it. So you come here and give me a microphone, I'll talk about it. I love talking about it. But in my personal life, I never bring it up because it's very annoying. There's actually a great cartoon that was ran in the New Yorker a couple of years ago and I had two women having lunch and one of them says to the other, I've been gluten free for a week and I'm already annoying. I think that is true for meditation. People start doing it and then they start recommending it to everybody, but this not so subtle undertone of the recommendation is you're broken or you're not good enough if you don't do this thing. And so I really try not to, I'm an evangelist but I am very careful about how I do it because I've learned the hard way that if you lecture people about it, and I did this with my wife at the beginning, It created a long lasting resistance and resentment on me.

Traumatized me.

Yeah. And so now I don't talk about it and I think she does some of it, but I don't ask. And so yes, if I had my druthers, would it be introduced in preschool and then taught all the way through school? Yes. Would it be taught in med schools, in workplaces, in basic training in the military? Absolutely, but I just think you want to be ginger about how you do it because you can turn people off if you force them. I have less of a problem of forcing kids to do it, especially if their parents don't have objections. More of a problem when you start talking about grown-ups and how you introduce it. So for example, people often ask me, I speak in a lot of corporations, how can we introduce this in the workplace? And I always say carefully because you don't, you want to offer it like you might offer a cold beer or something like that, but you don't want to force it down people's throats because then they'll rebel.

Yeah, at Cleveland Clinic, we actually brought someone in to train our whole team meditation. I met with the Surgeon General, last one, Vivek Murthy, and he basically got everybody in his Surgeon General's office to meditate every day. They take a break at three o'clock and they meditate together.

Wow.

That's great. Yeah, it's just very impressive. The thing is though, there may be a few people in the office who resent that or want to volunteer.

Sure. I mean, you really have to make them volunteer. I don't know them, but I think most people were into it and I was surprised how many people were into it. in Cleveland Clinic. And these are people from all socioeconomic strata, you know, from the medical assistants all the way to the doctors. And it was pretty interesting. And we set aside a meditation area in the office. We took one of the obesity exam rooms and they have these massive tables.

And we've changed that into the meditation room and it's been really powerful. Yeah, I've been really surprised. For example, our experience, Apple is an incredible company. They're pretty secretive, so I'm not allowed to say too much. But my in my experience, working with Apple doing this meditation challenge for their employees. And their employee base is incredibly diverse because you get people who work in the retail stores, you get people who work in the corporate headquarters. I've been just blown away by the level of adoption when introduced in the right way as, here, do this thing if you want. Do this thing if you want. And here's we're going to lower the barriers to entry in terms of the practice practicality and all that stuff, you find that lots of people want to do it. One of my concerns is that it's often people like us talking about meditation. We're wealthy, white, Manhattan dwellers, and we probably both shop at Whole Foods and probably no stranger to a SoulCycle class or whatever. And so, my worry is that it can get ghettoized in that way, that of this rarefied air that you and I breathe, But it's really important to point out that this was not invented by Whole Foods shoppers in the Upper West side. And I don't say that with any hate because I am somebody who lives in the Upper West side and goes to Whole Foods. But this was invented thousands of years ago by people on the Indian subcontinent and similar practices have been a part of every major organized religion, which is why we've made it a big On my podcast and on the app, I make a big effort to get people of all different backgrounds and ethnic extractions, etc., etc., because we want to send the message, this is for everybody, not just the elite.

And one of the side effects I think you're going to be writing about in your next book, which is kindness.

Yes.

And it sounds like a little woo-woo, but it actually helps you be more loving. And one of the foundations of Buddhism is loving kindness. It kind of emerges out of knowing yourself, knowing your mind, and being more compassionate. Can you chat just for a couple minutes?

Yeah, I mean, I'm really fascinated by the issue of kindness. I think it also kind of needs a marketing revamp.

Yeah, it sounds wimpy, right?

It's not just that it sounds wimpy, for sure it does potentially in some cases, but also it can just sound there's like a finger wag. It sounds like an exhortation, you know, or you're being lectured to, or it just sounds syrupy and boring. There haven't been a lot of self-help books that have around kindness that have sold. They're usually around weight loss or making more money or being happier. Kindness is we want other people to be nice, but we don't necessarily see the benefit to ourselves. So I'm trying to reframe it more as actually your life will be better. I wrote a chapter in my first book called the Self-Interested Case for Not Being a Dick. And I think that's the right way to talk about it. You probably got to change the language a little bit, especially on a field of women. But that's really what I'm thinking about in this new book. And there is a lot of research here that shows people who are kinder are more successful, happier, healthier, more popular. And there are right ways and wrong ways to do this. Our mutual friend, Adam Grant, wrote an excellent book called Give and Take about the difference between people who are wisely compassionate in the workplace and people who are sort of foolishly compassionate in the workplace. The Tibetans sometimes refer to this as idiot compassion, which is a great expression. So you can do kindness the wrong way in a way that does not redound to your benefit or perhaps anybody's benefit. But done correctly, meditation, I mean, kindness can be incredibly enriching. And the thing to know is that it's through meditation, having that self-awareness shows you that it feels better to be nice. Just think about the moment of holding the door open for somebody. That moment of courtesy. What does it feel like if you're paying attention? It feels good. Well, that feeling is infinitely scalable. That's huge. And that is what I, that's the way I want to start talking about this. I haven't figured it out. I love it. It's true. I mean, we are social beings.

In fact, you know, E.O. Wilson wrote a book called the Social Conquest of the Earth, which is that we we all need to work together and in altruistic ways to actually help us survive. And, one of the things we know now scientifically is that the brain in the area of dopamine stimulation, which is what we get from our phone or from cocaine or drugs, it is activated by altruism. So, our bodies and our brains are designed to get pleasure and satisfaction and even healing from kindness, which is kind of a crazy idea.

They call it the helpers high.

Yeah, that's how I've lived my life. And, you know, Adam Grant has really picked up on something that I've sort of learned just by intuition, which is that if you are kind to people, if you help them with no sort of looking for something in return, that actually it's a big cycle that keeps coming back and back. And I've seen that in my whole life over and over again. The less contracted I feel, the less needy I feel, the less grasping I feel, the more generous I feel, the happier I am, the more good stuff happens just automatically.

It's incredibly powerful and I don't know the mechanism.

Who knows, but it works. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. If you stop feeling suffering and you.

Stop feeling pain, you stop feeling guilt, and you start feeling elevated emotions like joy or inspiration or gratitude, not just in a momentary state like positive thinking, but to be able to self-regulate and maintain that.