How Meditation Rewires Your Brain and Reduces Stress

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

It's the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment. And in this day and age, where we've all become bulimic of the brain, and we're all just ingesting technology day.

In and day out, I think that that skill is very valuable.

Yeah.

However, mindfulness- I can't really throw it up. It would be great if you could like purge it.

Well, that's actually what meditation does. Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Hymen Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website, supplement store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products. hi, I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, a practicing physician and proponent of systems medicine, a framework to help you understand the why or the root cause of your symptoms. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. Every week I bring on interesting guests to discuss the latest topics in the field of functional medicine and do a deep dive on how these topics pertain to your health. In today's episode, I have some interesting discussions with other experts in the field. So let's just jump right in. A lot of people hear about meditation. It's mysterious. It seems vague, it seems a little bit culty. And certainly I've seen that happen. My way is best, or this is the best way, or that one sucks. Or, you know, it's like the meditation Wars. Should you do, you know, Mantra based meditation, mindfulness based meditation? Should you do visualization? Should you do this? Should you do that? How much? How long?

When?

Where? Help us sort of navigate this landscape, because I think people get put off by that. And they also think it's tied to incense and candles and cushions and temples and. everything has to be perfect. And what I love about what you teach is that you can do it on the subway.

That's right.

Which I often do.

Yes. On a plane with your kids screaming.

In the next room. I get the headphone with this noise cancellation.

That helps, but... Yeah, it helps a little. So I think the reason why there are the meditation wars, or it feels a little culty, is that once you find something that works for you, and once you see the proverbial face of God, you think that, well, this must be it. This is the capital T truth. And I like to think about God as a disco ball, and we're all looking at the same thing, but you might see purple and I you might see red and someone else might see green, but if that's the truth for you or the first time that you've seen it, you think that that is real and you're willing to defend that. And so I think- you- the first.

Person you fall in love with, you think that's it.

Yes, this is it. And so I think if we pull the lens back a little bit and see that all of it, all roads lead to Rome, all of it is making us, moving us towards the most amazing version of ourselves. So to navigate the landscape a bit about meditation, mindfulness, which is what most people are practicing, most of the apps out there, most of the YouTube videos, most of the drop-in studios are what I would call mindfulness. And mindfulness, I would define as bringing your awareness, the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment, which is so powerful.

Like paying attention.

Paying attention.

Like Aldous Huxley's book where there was.

This.

Magpie that kept repeating, Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. Yes. It was like the siren call of his book and his community.

Or, you know, Marie Forleo's husband or My partner is a acting teacher and he has this technique where he says, I'm back, I'm back, I'm back. Because in acting, you know, your mind will go down a rabbit hole and you just, I'm back in my body, I'm back. And so yes, it's the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment. And in this day and age, where we've all become bulimic of the brain and we're all just ingesting technology day.

In and day out, I think that that skill is very valuable.

However, mindfulness- you- can't really throw it up. It would be great if you could like purge it. Well, that's actually what meditation does. So the mindfulness is very good at dealing with your stress in the now. My boss yelled at me, I'm going to do 10 minutes of my app and I feel better in the now, like a state change. Whereas meditation, which is, as I teach at Ziva, is different than what most people have experienced. That's actually inducing very deep healing rest in the body rest. That's about five times deeper than sleep. And when you do that, when you de-excite your nervous system, you create order and it allows that lifetime of accumulated stresses from your past to start to come up and out. Whereas meditation is all about getting rid of your stress from the past. And in that we're actually inducing rest that's about five times deeper than sleep. And when you do that, when you use the meditation tools, you de-excite the nervous system. When you de-excite something, you create order. When you create order in your cells, it allows for that stress, that backlog of accumulated stresses we all have in our cellular and now we know epigenetic memory, we allow that stuff to come up and out. And it's that accumulation of stress in our brain and bodies that makes us.

Stupid, sick and slow.

And- that doesn't sound fun. Stupid, sick and slow.

That's not how I want to go through life. No, stress makes you stupid. We're making t-shirts actually, stress makes you stupid.

It actually also makes you demented.

It's one of the causes of dementia, stress hormones, cortisol actually shrinks the memory center in the brain.

Such another reason to get your buns in the chair. And so then the third piece that you mentioned, which is manifesting, which is more of like the visualization or prayer, I would define manifesting as consciously creating a life you love. It's getting intentional about what you want your life to look like. And while that might sound simple, because it is, I'm always fascinated by how infrequently people are doing that, how infrequently people stop to really ask, well, how how much money do I want to make? Or what's my dream vacation look like? Or what's my dream partner look like? Instead, we just complain about our current circumstances instead of getting intentional. So that's really the trifecta of Ziva:.

Mindfulness, meditation, and manifesting.

-But there's mindfulness meditation. -Yes. -So people can get confused. What's the difference? -Yes. So I would define mindfulness like the technique-wise is where we are directing our focus. So if you're doing a guided meditation of any kind, I'm putting that in the mindfulness camp because by definition you are directing your focus. And in mindfulness, a smaller part of the brain lights up, but very, very bright, which is different than Ziva meditation because the whole brain lights up, but not as bright, because it's almost one is about focusing and the other is about surrender. One is about coming back to your body and it's a bit of a shorter leash. Mindfulness is actually derived of styles of meditation that were originally designed for monks. Thousands of years ago. And so it's a little bit more austere, it's a little bit more disciplined, it's a shorter leash. Come back, come back to the breath, come back to the work, come back, come back. Whereas in Ziva, there's a much longer leash. I call it the lazy man's meditation. because you are allowed to have thoughts, you are allowed to drift into that sleepy feeling, you are allowed to let the technique go and meditate. -I call that -Yeah, well, your wife has outed you out. -I can tell if I am actually.

Sleeping or if I am meditating in some deep state of consciousness, but it is fun.

-And if you look, if your life is getting better, then who cares?

-Yeah, so there have been very different techniques. You mentioned mindfulness, which is bringing awareness back to the breath. the present moment. There's mantra-based meditations, there's visualizations, and they've all been developed to help raise consciousness. They were never developed to really help you deal with your boss or your wife or work or bad situations or too much social media. And they all have different roles and purposes. Why is it that you sort of picked this mantra-based ancient style of meditation.

Well, to be very honest, the meditation portion of Ziva, that was the first style I ever found. And it was so profound. I mean, it cured my insomnia on the first day. And like I said, I didn't get sick for eight and a half years. And I always prided myself on being a seeker. I read every self-help book. I went to all the therapists and I was always seeking, seeking, seeking, and it almost became a part of my identity. And then when I found meditation, I was like, oh, I'm not a seeker anymore. I'm a listener. I found it. I'm a finder. It's right here. It's inside of me. And that's sort of an esoteric explanation, but what's happening neurochemically is within 30 to 45 seconds of starting, your brain and body start flooding with dopamine and serotonin, which are bliss chemicals. And so we stop looking externally for.

Our fulfillment and we start to be able to access it internally.

And- you- binge on mantras instead of binging on munchies and cookies? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And so that was, it was the meditation portion that really changed my life. But then when I looked around, I saw there were so many ex-meditators, right? The world is filled with ex-meditators. Every time I speak at a conference or go to a corporation, I was one. Yeah, you were one, right?

I mean, when I was younger, I would be in 10-day meditation retreats, meditating 12 hours a day and, you know, loving it.

But, yeah, but then we all get busy, right? So like every talk I give, I say, all right, I want everyone to raise their hand if you've ever tried meditation. and it's 2018, so almost every hand goes up. And then I say, all right, how many of you guys have a daily practice that you do no matter what? And about 90% of those hands go down. And that's why I wrote this book. I want to bridge that gap. It makes me sad. Stress. Stress less. Accomplish more. Accomplish less.

Right?

Like stress is making us stupid and it makes me sad that a lot of people start and quit based on either misinformation or doing a technique that wasn't originally designed for them, one that was designed for monks. So they feel like they're failing because they're trying to clear their minds and then they can't.

And none of us will do anything.

For feel, None of us will do anything for very long that we feel like we are failing at. -Yeah, you have to be in a.

Meditation retreat for eight days till you get 10 seconds of nothing.

-Exactly. But this, it is like within 30 to 45 seconds, you are like, Ooh, this is different and it feels nice. And then your whole life gets better because it is designed to make you better at life.

It is not designed to remove you from life. -So that is very interesting. These techniques often were developed by traditions like Tibetan Buddhism and other Buddhist traditions to help people achieve a state of awakening. They weren't designed to help you cope with stress. They weren't designed to make you happier. They were designed to actually train your brain into different states of consciousness that allow you to access places that most of us can't access. And you're saying there's a different approach that can actually take you to a similar place, but it's sort of a more sort of tricky route where you get to kind of bypass some of that being in a cave for nine years and you can actually be in your life. And like you say, meditation isn't about.

Getting good at meditation.

Getting good at meditation is about getting good at life.

That's right. And so, you know that delicious feeling for anyone who's ever taken a yoga class when you lie down at the end and you have that delicious shavasana. What the Ziva does is that it just fast tracks that hour-long yoga class. It allows you to get into that delicious headspace of the shavasana right off the bat. And that is valuable if you have a busy life because you might not have time to go and take an hour and a half yoga class. You might not have time to go to a 10-day silent retreat, but you need to handle your stress because if you're not managing your stress, it's managing you. And as you've said on this podcast before, stress is related to 95% of all disease.

Yeah.

And so it's not just I think we have to reframe meditation as, oh, well, that's a luxury thing. It's like a pedicure for my brain that I'll get around to when I have more time. It's like, no, we have to reframe this as the single most important piece of mental hygiene that we need to be practicing every day. One of my missions at Ziva is to make mental floss. It's mental floss. I want to make it as rude to leave your house without meditating as it would be to leave your house without brushing your teeth. It's like, that's gross. You need to handle that. And as Mama Maryann said, she said.

We need to be more disciplined. We need to take care. We need to strengthen our fortitude when it comes to these spiritual spiritual practices. Yeah. I mean, I always thought of it as a nice to have, you know, you gotta eat right, you gotta exercise, right? You gotta sleep. Those are non-negotiable for creating Health. But I recently come to believe that meditation, the training of the mind, is also non-negotiable well, when people say to me, it's one of those pillars of health that you. You can't replace with another. technique.

-I certainly agree. And when people say to me, well, I don't have time to meditate, I'm like, you guys, this is your brain we're talking about. It's responsible for printing every single cell in your body and making every single decision in your life.

So, what else are you doing with your time? -Well, I don't have time not to meditate now.

And I don't know that many people.

Who are busier than I am. -I don't know anyone busier than that. -Yet, it is something that I look forward to that without which I start to feel not well. Like I notice the level of agitation or fatigue or mental strain and I use my brain a lot. I feel like it's like taking my brain to a car wash. It's the most amazing thing. Like I've been working all day in meetings, did more podcasts. I'm like you, before you came over, I was like, I'm gonna go sit and meditate. And I could have like, you know, I could have taken a nap, but I, my wife last because I can lay down and I can't take a nap. I could lay there for an hour. I mean, I'm sit down, meditate, and sometimes within five minutes, I'll be napitating if I really need you to. And it's just fantastic. And I wake up and I feel more connected to myself, more connected to the people around me, more present. And I think that's part of the, the problem with life today is that we are in a state of constant activity, motion, and we can't easily stop and just be present and appreciate those things that are so important. It's the small little things, right? It's the taste of a cup of tea. It's this feeling of, you know, your partner touching you on your skin. It's watching the light or the leaves or stupid stuff.

The sound of your son's laughter.

Yeah, you have a little baby. And so we often miss those things, which are the actual beautiful things that make up life and make it Amazing and we can miss them. And I feel like I've missed often years just by being in the doing and not in the being. And it allows paradoxically by being in the being allows you to be more actually in the doing.

I mean, I always thought meditation was ridiculous and had no desire to do it and no interest in it. I never really even thought about it, but the, to the extent that I did, I thought it was for are, you know, crystal lovers and fans of Enya and-- Fans of Enya. Sorry to any fans of Enya. I used to like Enya.

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 just-- I pick on-- 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 want to, you know, you're... Did.

Someone say, Hey, Dan, you should check out meditation, or the Dalai Lama came to town, you want to hear him talk?

Or like, what was the trick? The long story is, and I won't, 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 envelope, 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.

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 pseudoscientific 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. 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 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 in psychology. And 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 a. 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. 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. It happens in that way.

Yeah.

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 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 it essentially is a phenomenology of the Mind. It's a way of 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 that it's blank slate. You close your eyes and you're in bliss and nirvana. That's not how it goes, right? 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 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, in Haiti.

Oh yeah.

It was the worst thing I've ever seen.

It was, I mean, 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, a 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 in the concrete. I was right there. Rotting in the sun.

I saw Byron that night and they were using forklifts to dispose of the bodies. Yeah. 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 different types of stress. And the question is, 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. That was even before I saw any benefit for myself. That's hardly a swear, that's... Yeah, it'll get worse now that I have permission. 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 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 was really trying to... It was 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. Absolutely. 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 the, 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. Buddhism. I fear that often people use the word without knowing what they're talking about. So mindfulness really is 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 is 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.

That's 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, 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 going to 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, I mean, 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 bond between your feelings, your thoughts, and your actions. So often we conflate the two. We have a feeling and that, you know, 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 know, 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 this is the cliche, this is the only cliche meditation cliche that doesn't make me want to put a pencil in my eye. It teaches you how to respond wisenly 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 eating the 75th cookie or saying the thing that's going to 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 your 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 got 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've meditated, you know, for nine years in a cave, for example. versus one minute here and there during the week. 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 of like Goldilocks dose that is really the right dose?

We don't know. You 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 is going to do five to ten 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. your brain is like a muscle that if you exercise in the right way, you can train it to be better at things.

It's called neuroplasticity. And science now tells us that the more you practice and work out a brain circuit like a muscle, the stronger the connections get, the better it works. So the basic move in meditation, say mindfulness, very popular these days. Mindfulness starts with watching your breath. You put your mind on your breath. You watch the inhalation, the exhalation, and you know what? Your mind's gonna wander. Wanders 50% of the time, Harvard research tells us. And you notice it wandered and you bring it back. That's the rep. The basic rep is noticing that it wandered and bringing it back. It's just like going to the gym. Every time you lift a weight, you make that muscle that much stronger. Every time you notice your mind wandered and you bring it back, you make the circuitry for paying attention that much stronger.

That's right. So that is a powerful idea that you can actually train your brain, like you can train your muscles. You can condition your brain like you can condition your body.

And this is one of the big differences I saw with the psychology that I knew at the time was that nobody thought you could change the brain. It was just a given. You worked within those parameters. You the limits that you had is how you'll always be. And these Eastern psychologies said, hey, no, this is just a starting point. But if you practice, it's interesting. They call meditation practice. Practice. Yeah. Because you're practicing.

Yeah.

You're practicing. You're getting used to making your mind more flexible, more focused, more calm. The bonus is if you do loving kindness meditation, it works out a different set of circuits, like working out different muscles.

Yeah.

And it makes the mammalian caretaking circuitry, which is a parent's love for a child, stronger. So people who do that kind of meditation actually become kinder. They actually are more generous, more altruistic. So it depends what you do as it does, you know, when you go to the gym. Whatever you work out is what you can improve. And same with meditation, whatever kind of meditation you do, that's where the benefits will be.

Yeah. And it's interesting because most people think, oh, meditation is a waste of time. What am I doing? I'm just sitting there, staring at my navel. But it actually has this powerful effect on so many different aspects of life. You wrote this book, Altered Traits, where you actually talk about how it changes who you are in a positive way.

Exactly. So the naive notion that working out mentally is a waste of time just doesn't understand what The benefits are, like I said, you get more calm, you get more clear and focused, you get kinder, calm, clear, kind. That's actually a better year. -Happier. -It's all about well-being, Mark.

-Yeah. I mean, it's true. I studied Buddhism when I was in college. I went to these 10-day Zen meditation retreats. You'd come out of there feeling you just took LSD. Everything was crystal clear. Everything just seemed magic and beautiful. and then I kind of went through having medical school and becoming a parent and I kind of fell off it. And a number of years ago, I picked it back up again in a way that is really profoundly impacted me. And I noticed that I don't get upset or triggered or angry. Well, there was one time my wife said I got angry. That was when we checked in a hotel, we were first kind of getting together. and there were two double beds and it was, I was super tired and I lost it. But other than that, I don't think I was meditating that much. I know I was, but I was like, I was sort of over the limit. But I usually notice that I, I'm not triggered even by stressful events.

That's another thing that the changes are subtle. All of a sudden you notice, I'm not getting angry. Well, you have to notice harder to notice you're not getting angry. But, you know, things that would trigger you in the past don't trigger you as much. or as often or as strongly, or if they do, you recover more quickly.

Yeah.

Which is the technical definition of resilience is how long it takes you to recover from peak of arousal to getting back to calm. And the studies that we looked at in altered traits make it very clear that this happens. And there's a dose response relationship. The more you do it, the stronger the benefits.

You know, what is interesting is, In your book, you looked at different kinds of meditators. So there's the beginners and there's a lot of benefit you get from just doing it.

We were surprised right away, like the first 10 hours of practice, you get benefits that are measurable.

You don't have to be in a cave for nine years, right?

No.

And the benefits accrue very fast. But then there's the kind of Olympic meditators, right? The guys have been meditating literally nine years in a cave. every day all day, and you put those people in brain scans, and you look at their brain waves, and you found some amazing stuff.

Their brains are different in good ways. One of them is, I really like, something called the gamma wave. We all get gamma, like when you have a great idea, or when you picture very vividly, like biting into a peach, and it's so crunchy, and the smell, and the sound, and the taste. When that comes together, you get a gamma for about a quarter second.

These yogis- that's why I eat peaches a lot.

These yogis have gamma all the time.

Unbelievable.

It's never been seen before. A couple of remarkable things about them. Another is I was in the lab when the first yogi was run and for statistical analytic reasons, this is in an fMRI. An fMRI is like a human cigar case. You know, you just put in this giant magnet that whirs around you. Some people are so frightened of the MRI, they have to go in a practice MRI to get ready for the real MRI.

Oh, it's scary. I meditate when I go in there.

Because I don't freak out. So this first guy, Yogi, who goes in, these yogis were flown over one by one. So the first one goes in and they say, okay, we want you to do four different kinds of meditation. And do the meditation for 60 seconds, then you'll hear a buzzer, then nothing for 30. And then 60 again. And then buzzer, nothing 30. Like four times for each meditation. I don't know about you, but if you or anyone listening, this meditates, it's like it takes my mind a little while to settle down. Yeah, but these yogis could do it instantly.

Wow.

And. And the readout showed that each of those four meditations, there was visualization, concentration, open presence. whatever it was, they could do it immediately. And there was a unique profile for each. So in other words, their brains are really flexible and they have them under just unbelievable mastery. And then there are things like, and.

Structurally they're different too, right?

What happens, this is really encouraging for someone in my age group, the brain ages more slowly. the more you meditate. And there was this one of the 14 yogis who was like the superstar, like when he did compassion, his circuits for happiness, interestingly, talked about well-being, activated like 7 to 800%. 7 to 800% has never been seen. It's not thought to be possible.

Like somebody lifting 2,000 pounds of weight.

But think about this, the moment he thought of being compassionate, he got happy.

Yeah.

Like big time.

Right. Well, that's an interesting point because what we know is that altruism, and in a sense that's compassion, triggers the same pleasure centers in the brain as heroin or cocaine. And it's much safer.

It's a little trick. So the Dalai Lama has always said the first person to benefit Compassion is the one who feels it.

Yes, that's right. That's very well put. Yeah, it's so true. And you know what's fascinating is, you know, I was listening to Michael Pollan who's going to be on our podcast talk about the effect of psychedelic drugs and the research going on around how they affect the brain. And he says they suppress something called the default mode network, which is this new area of the brain that was recently discovered that seems to be where the ego lives, where the sense of.

Separation from our thoughts of our self, my worries, what's wrong in my relationships, all of that is default.

-Right. It's the I, the little I of the little self, which is all about the threat to the ego, which is protective and defensive and fearful, and it's what we want to protect and control things with. And when that area gets suppressed, with psychedelics, it allows you to feel one with the world and, you know, connection to everybody and love and your little self gives way to the big self. And the same thing happens with meditation.

Well, there's a difference. It's a very big difference. We call our book Altered Traits, not altered states.

Yeah.

Because Michael is talking about an altered state.

Yes.

The minute that drug leaves your body, I'm sorry that self comes back.

Sure.

So meditation changes the brain in a lasting way. That's the altered trait. And it's a very important difference.

And that's what causes suffering, right? According to the Buddhist philosophy, suffering is your attachment to things being a certain way, which is usually drawn by your ego.

Yes. And liking or disliking this or that, and worrying about this thing and that person and all of that. The ego is the source of suffering. And that's one thing that we found is that the part of the brain where the ego lives, so to speak, gets smaller. It reduces in meditators, in yogis, in long-term meditators.

That's fascinating. So was there any other wisdom that came out of that altered traits book and things that people should really know?

Well, I think the bottom line is that meditation changes you in beneficial ways. And the very best kind of meditation is the one you will do. I don't recommend any brand. It's whatever you can stick with because they all seem to have the same general benefits.

And you don't have to be in a meditation hall in the Himalayas, you know, wearing a... You can do it on a maroon robe.

You can do it on a subway. Don't do it while you're driving, please. But if you're a passenger, you're free to do it. you can do it anywhere that you can put aside everything else.

Yeah.

And make a space for yourself, which it's in itself is a luxury these days. A time and a place where you're just there for yourself.

I've even meditated in lectures sometimes. I'm like, that's boring. I just closed my eyes wherever you can be. I put on my Bose headphones on the plane. It's.

Nobody's going to bother you. Yeah, that's the only. It has to be, because you don't want to have to pay attention to other stuff. That's the point.

Yeah, and just to touch back on what we said, you don't have to be an Olympic meditator to get the benefits. We know even in people who are beginners, who have done it for weeks or days, actually start to see benefit, and it seems to improve the immune system, increase stem cells, increase brain connections, increase neurogenesis, which is new brain cells, it helps to regulate inflammation in the body. It's pretty extraordinary.

And it's free.

And it's free. Meditation is medicine, just like food is medicine. I think it's so powerful. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow me on all social media channels@drmarkhyman. Hyman, and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm always getting questions about my favorite books, podcasts, gadgets, supplements, recipes, and lots more, and now you can have access to all of this information by signing up for my free Mark's Picks newsletter at drhyman.com/markspicks. I promise I'll only email you once a week on Fridays, and I'll never share your email address or send you anything else besides my recommendations. These are the things that have helped me on my health journey, and I I hope they'll help you too. Again, that's drhyman.com/markspicks. Thank you again and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the UltraWellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I'm the chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions and neither myself nor the podcast endorse the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for your help in your journey seek out a qualified medical practitioner. You can come see us at the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. Just go to ultrawellnesscenter.com if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner near you you can visit ifm.org and and search find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. Keeping this podcast free is part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to express gratitude to the sponsors that.

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