How To Start A Meditation Practice And Create Healthy Habits

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

I think about it in general as it's lowering the bar. Don't have this high bar that you must clear. Lower the bar and embrace the fact that you succeeded in getting over the bar. If you do more than that, terrific. If you do 20 push-ups rather than two, awesome. But you don't raise the bar on yourself.

Yes.

Set yourself up to succeed.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. People always tell me they miss wraps and they miss sandwiches for lunch, and they're looking for a great alternative. Well, I found one, and it won't sabotage your health. They're called organic coconut wraps, and they can replace bread and grain-based wraps, and honestly, they taste way better. They contain three simple ingredients: organic coconut meat, organic coconut water, and organic extra virgin coconut oil. So I know I'm getting real food without the crap. They're also a great source of energy-boosting medium-chain triglycerides that power up your brain and your metabolism. I love using them with avocado, wild-caught salmon, spinach, and fresh basil for a simple but amazing lunch. Now, I know that sometimes it can.

Be hard to find new or specialty.

Items like this at your regular grocery store, but Thrive Market, they make it super easy. I order several packs of organic coconut wraps from them at a time, along with all my other favorite natural snacks and ingredients, and get them shipped right to my house. Thrive Market has different membership options so you can find the right fit for you. I go with the 12 month because it only adds up to $5 a month and I literally save hundreds and hundreds of dollars on my grocery bills throughout the year. And right now, Thrive is offering all doctors pharmacy listeners a great deal. You'll get an extra 25% off your first purchase plus a free gift when you become a Thrive Market member. Anytime you spend more than $49, you'll get free carbon neutral shipping. Just head over to ThriveMarket.com/Hymen to use the offer. That's ThriveMarket.com/Hymen. And now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hi, I'm Kaya, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Creating a new habit can be challenging, especially when it comes to our health. Most of us have at least a few items on our list of things we quote unquote should be doing. Whether you want to start meditating or incorporate any other new habit, there's amazing science that can help guide us to the results that we want. So what do we know about setting ourselves up for success when it comes to creating healthy habits? Dr. Hyman spoke to journalists and the host of the 10% Happier podcast, Dan Harris, about his own journey into meditation and how just one minute a day.

May be enough to get you started with a regular practice. I had been assigned to cover faith and spirituality for ABC News and I didn't want that assignment.

Exactly.

I was not interested in this stuff at all. It actually turned out to be great for me and I met a lot of interesting people. And that ultimately led me to reading a book by Eckhart Tolle. 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. 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, that was really interesting to me. 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.

And it's, it's 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.

And.

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's 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 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.

Don't actually.

A lot of people read diet books.

And don't actually eat differently.

Right?

So, it's really about the practice.

So, what were the things that you.

Noticed when you started meditating and what was the kind of meditation you did?

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 10 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 And 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. 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 ask 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 gonna 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.

When you look at the science around meditators, you've got Richard Davidson, who I know you've worked with and has done all this research with the Tibetan Olympic meditators who meditated 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. 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. 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 not because somebody's telling you to do it, but 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. The work of behavior scientist Dr. BJ Fogg illuminates why this idea of one minute a day can lead to lasting behavior change. He recently discussed his breakthrough method called Tiny Habits in a conversation with Dr. Hyman.

Well, I mean, in a way, your work is the antithesis of perfectionism. It's like the celebration of small little wins that sometimes seem silly but actually build a life of success, right? Floss one tooth, do one pushup, take one step, you know, say one prayer, whatever it is that you want to do.

I think about it in general as, lowering the bar. Don't have this high bar that you must clear. Lower the bar and embrace the fact that you succeeded in getting over the bar. And if you do more than that, terrific. If you do 20 push-ups rather than two, awesome. But you don't raise the bar on yourself. You set yourself up to succeed. Part of the trick, or not trick, or part of the skill of doing tiny habits effectively is picking the smallest new habit that will also have meaning to you. I mean, it can get so small that it's completely trivial, and that's not a good selection. So pick something that's really, really small, but will also have meaning and build from there.

So let's dig into it a little bit. So this is a very scientifically based model. It's not just some cockamamie idea you came up with, you know, while you were taking a shower, or maybe you came up with it then, I don't know. It's something you've studied extensively at Stanford. It's backed by enormous amounts of research.

And.

You really have created this whole fog behavior model. And talk about these three things that come together at the same moment and why they're important and sort of what you've learned, how it's so different.

Than.

Everything else that we see about behavior change.

A behavior. any behavior happens when there's motivation through the behavior, there's ability to the behavior, and then there's a prompt. And when those things converge, the behavior happens. If any one of those things is missing, it does not happen. And then when you graph it out in two dimensions, which I could draw or show poster, if I should, there's a relationship between motivation and ability. If something is hard to do, then in order to do it in my model, because there's a line that defines what action happens and it doesn't, something's hard to do, then you have to have high levels of motivation. When motivation drops, you can no longer do hard things. But on the other end of the model, if something's really easy to do, and this is what led to the Tiny Habits breakthrough for me, something's really easy to do. Your motivation can be high or middle or even low. When I saw that in my own model, I was like, oh, what this means is if I make a new habit really, really easy to do, then I don't have to worry about my motivation level very much. All I need to worry about is, Tom, you can do it and it's not about willpower or discipline. It's about design. You design new habits into your life. It's a design challenge, not a test of somebody's character.

I think that's so important to say that because I see this all the time as a doctor. People beat themselves up, they trash talk, they have self-loathing, they get discouraged.

And I just love this part of.

Your book, 100 Ways to Celebrate and Feel Shine. And you have like 100 ways to celebrate yourself and to celebrate the little successes and the tiny habits and builds and bills on a positive feedback loop. and I think that's a really key part of behavior change, these positive feedback loops and other behavior change models have been studied and it's one of the banes of existence. If you go to your doctor and he gives you a prescription, there's only a 50% chance that you'll fill it. And if you fill it, there's probably a 50% chance that you'll take it. And so doctors do all these great things. Unless you're a surgeon, you have the patient lying unconscious on the table, you can do whatever you want to them. To get patients to do what you think is right for their health or what you think will help them, whether it's take a pill, I mean, taking a pill is pretty easy, right? Forget eating better, exercising, meditating, getting eight hours of sleep, building your social network, relationships, all those things are so challenging. And it's why we're seeing this incredible global epidemic of chronic illness.

One of the systematic problems is focusing people or yourself on something abstract. Like, oh, I gotta exercise. That's an abstract thing. It's not a behavior. We'll often call those things behaviors, but they're abstraction. And then the next thing that goes wrong is people just think, I just need to motivate myself. But that combination of trying to motivate yourself towards something abstract does not work very well at all. whether you're changing your own behavior or somebody else's. In fact, with, this is kind of an oversimplification, but in my work in Tiny Habits, rather than motivating the distraction, you make something very specific, really easy.

And so that- so I do three jumping jacks, right?

Yep, and make it really easy to do. And so you're not worried about motivation. and you know exactly what the behavior is.

You've talked about this model. It seems pretty obvious. You have a motivation to do something, you have the ability to do it, and you have a trigger or a prompt. And that seems like a very simple model, and it is. It works. I've used it. But on the other hand, what is pushing against people that is limiting them?

Well, we talked about the idea of people even focusing on the wrong thing. Like if your aspiration is weight loss, and you think it's about, walking on the treadmill at the gym, focused on the wrong behavior. So that's one of the systematic problems. Another one of the problems is the idea that you set this really lofty goal, and then you just have to keep yourself motivated toward that lofty goal. You're not facing the reality that your motivation is going to shift over time. The idea, and we can come back to that if you want, and So the goal is setting people don't get super upset with me. I break it into aspirations and outcomes. So there's a type of goal that's an aspiration, there's a type of goal that's an outcome. So rather than using an ambiguous word, because I'm really big on precision, let's use, when it's an aspiration, like earlier Mark, you said you wanted to get stronger. That's an aspiration. And then you find behaviors, specific behaviors that will take you there. An outcome might be somebody might say, Wow, I want to lose 20 pounds. That's an outcome. Then you find specific behaviors that will take you there. So in either case, you start with what you want to achieve. This is part of the system in the book. And then you figure out what behaviors are the right ones for you to take you there. So you don't guess at the behaviors. There's a way to figure out what are the best behaviors for you. Now, when you look at what has worked, Your example is a great one, Mark. When it has worked, what will always be true is that there was an emotional component where you felt more successful or it relieved some negative emotion. And the better you are at feeling that emotion, that positive emotion on demand, the better you will be at wiring and habits.

So that's an interesting piece. So it's the B, which is behavior equals motivation, ability, and prompt, but there's also the emotion in there.

Yeah.

Yeah, let me sketch it out. So when I say behavior, I mean all types of behavior. Habit is a subset. So within, like if I were drawing a diagram, within the big circle, that is behavior. Motivation ability prompt applies to all behavior types. It applies to habits. It applies to stopping behaviors, it applies to one-time behaviors, it applies to temporary behaviors like taking an antibiotic. Then when you get down to the subset of habits, those are behaviors you do quite automatically. Those are different than the other types of behaviors. What creates the automaticity is the emotion. So the positive feedback, the emotion, I have people focus on the emotion of success, the feeling of success. That's what makes that behavior automatic and puts it in the category of what we call habit. So it's the feeling of success.

That.

Wires in the habit and also motivates you to continue. So it has those two functions.

Right.

Well, this is powerful and I think it sort of breaks us free from one feeling bad about ourselves because we don't change. because we have the wrong map, literally. And now we got a different map that we should try out and see if we can try to adjust our behaviors according to this model. Establishing tiny habits can lead to lasting change.

Setting ourselves up for success and intentionally designing the behaviors we want to adopt can be a game changer to our quality of life. To learn more about anything you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full length conversations with Dan Harris and BJ Fogg. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with your friends and leaving us a comment below. Thanks for tuning in.

Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is 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 help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed.

Healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad-free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.