Why I Meditate

Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. I'm here with my good friend Daniel Goldman, who many of you know, he's the author of the book Emotional Intelligence, which was on the New York Times best sellers for a year and a half in 40 languages. And it's really changed our thinking about what intelligence is. It's not just your iq, it's your eq. And Daniel's really the guy who put that on the map. He also was a science writer for the New York Times for 12 years about brain and behavioral scientists. He really comes from a unique perspective. Went to Amherst, Harvard, was at UC Berkeley back in the heyday, went to India, studied with Ram Dass teacher Neem Karoli Baba, and just has a very eclectic view of the world. And I've known him for many years and he's really an extraordinary man. And I really want to share with you what he's learned about meditation over this last, I don't know how many, 50 years or something. And you know, it's pretty amazing. You and Richard Davidson wrote this book. It's called Altered Traits. Can you see that everybody? Altered Traits. And this is a very powerful view of meditation. It's really the science behind the meditation. So meditation has been around for thousands of years. The Buddha said, wait, this is my cat making a lot of noises. This is Yoda, my cat. Ow. And he scratched me. And anyway, we have really an extraordinary opportunity to dive deep into the science of meditation and also, you know, what it is what it is and the benefits of it and little things we should know if we want to learn about it. So, you know, what are the common beliefs that people have about meditation that aren't necessarily really true? Let's start with that.

Well, you know, there is a lot of hype around meditation. This actually was one of the motivations for doing a book that looks at the hard science. And some of the things are that, you know, this is going to like, make your days beautiful. This is going to change your whole outlook on life. And you know, just sit down for five minutes and it's all different. Not true. It takes, takes time and it does make a difference, but it doesn't make that huge difference. This is going to mold your brain in the most wonderful ways right away. Well, it seems that some of that is true, but not all of it is true. In other words, there's a lot of over exaggeration about the findings on meditation. And it's used to, you know, sell an app, sell a book, sell a whatever, you know, Mindfulness in business. And I think it's a little dangerous because there's bound to be pushback because the people are exaggerating. That's why Richard Davidson and my friend the neuroscientist and I went through the 6,000 peer reviewed articles on meditation and we found the 60 that are rock solid and they have good news for everybody. From someone who just starts out to someone who does it for years and years.

That's so fantastic. You know what's really amazing is not, it's not just a theoretical thing for you guys. You guys have been betting this for decades. And I know Richard Davidson has brought over these Olympic meditators from Tibet and look at their brains under MRI scans and looked at sort of beginning meditators and longer term meditators and you've seen a whole range of things. So what were the sort of highlights that actually came out of that research that you reviewed and also the research that you guys have done about what happens in the brain when you meditate?

Well, first of all, you're right, Mark. This whole interest of ours came because we're both meditators and we noticed this really makes a difference. We wanted to demonstrate empirically what that difference was. And so some of the work is by myself, much of it is by Davidson. And then there's dozens of other investigators at Harvard, at Berkeley, at the best university centers. We pulled that all together. So let's say you're starting out, you're doing mindfulness. I'm going to do it five, ten minutes a day. Does it make a difference? Yes, it turns out right from the start, if you do 10 minutes a day of mindfulness and then you're on your computer, you're doing your stuff and oh, I've got to check my Facebook, my email, my text, you know, we get distracted. Usually what that does is lower the concentration level, you do more things less. Well, yeah, but interestingly, mind you, kind.

Of like a bunch of baloney then multitasking, right?

Well, the brain doesn't actually do things in parallel. You don't multitask.

I mean, the computer can multitask, but the computer can multitask, but your brain really can't.

Exactly. And so you lose concentration as you go on unless you do mindfulness. And interesting, mindfulness is a direct exercise. It's like a mental workout to enhance concentration, enhance your ability to resist mind wandering. Notice when your mind wandered off, bring it back. So we find that attentional measures improve across the board the longer you do it. You know, if you've done it for a year, done it for five years. We see a dose response relationship. The benefits become wider, bigger array, just for attention, for example. And the longer someone has done it, the stronger they get. So if you.

It's like any exercise, the more you do, the more fit you get. It's like brain fitness.

Precisely. And one of the other benefits, particularly in this day and age, you know, you hear the news from, oh my God, this crazy guy has an atom, you know, a ballistic missile or you know, the hurricane here or the. Yeah, you know, the daily dose from D.C. it's like, you know, people are so agitated these days. But one of the great effects too is calm, your ability to react less strongly and also recover more quickly when you get upset. This is another benefit that shows up from the start. And the longer you do it, the more years you've done it, even the stronger that ability becomes. So you get more equanimous. You're able to pay attention to what's going on but not flip out about it. I think that's really important.

That's pretty key.

Another wonderful finding comes from a meditation on kindness, loving kindness, compassion. Turns out if you cultivate an attitude toward other people, and there are meditations that help you do this, of really caring about them, wishing them well, good feelings, first of all, you benefit, you become happier, but also you become more likely to notice when people are in need to be able to help them, want to help them, so you become more generous. And then to top it off, there are the therapeutic, psychotherapeutic and some medical benefits from meditation. And Mark, I know you're very up on this, but just for the people watching this, from psychotherapy point of view, there's very strong evidence that meditation works as well as medications for anxiety and depression and possibly ptsd. Yeah, they're looking into that. And then medically, so far there's no study that I know, maybe you do, Mark, that shows that meditation will end a disease. But if you have a chronic disease, chronic pain, it helps change your relationship to the experience of that so that your quality of life is better, which I think is absolutely important. You know, medicine generally does not pay much attention to quality of life. That's up to you. Here's something each of us can do, and the best research is on what's called mindfulness based stress reduction. John Kabat Zinn's method out of Worcester. But it shows, you know, that doing this a half hour a day, and it's basically mindfulness, which means you can track what's going on in your mind, but you don't get swept away by it. You're able to see it happening and just notice it instead of letting it take you over.

Yeah.

That is what changes your experience and your quality of life day to day. So there you go.

Dan Harris wrote This book called 10% happier, which is about his panic attack on national television in front of 5 million people and how he began to look at his life. And I started meditating and realized that actually this have a real impact on his experience and reaction to things. And I think it's true. Like most of us have this monkey mind. We're reactive in life instead of proactive. We don't actually know how to manage our impulse experiences. And it does. It's like turning down the volume on the excitability factor that we all have so that we can actually meet things directly without a lot of noise. And it's a very powerful thing. I noticed when I meditate. It's just such a powerful way to sort of be happier, to be less reactive to things that normally make you anxious to be able to listen better. It just slows. It's like slows everything down. Like there's a space between your thoughts and your emotions. And usually for people that's like a millisecond. Right. But this actually kind of widens that space so you can actually go thought, oh, emotion. Well, wait a minute. I don't actually have to have that emotion related to this. I can shift my thinking around it, which is super powerful.

It's powerful, Mark. I don't know if you remember. There's research at UCLA that shows the moment you notice what's going on in your mind instead of letting it be what you're doing, automatic. But you have that little gap and then you say, oh, there's that thought, there's that feeling again. You actually lower the energy of activation in the part of the brain, which is like flipping out about it. And you increase the activation, the prefrontal area, executive center, the part of the brain that can be more thoughtful, more reflective and make a better reaction, make a better decision.

Yeah, Some of the research was sort of fascinating to me. You know, I talk about food as medicine, but it's clear to me that meditation is also medicine. That the impact, you know, on our experience as human beings and the quality of our life is real. But there's also biological things that are underlying that. Increasing stem cell production, reducing inflammation, changing your hormones. All these things actually happen as a result of how you regulate your mind. And I think most of us know we need to exercise, but most of us don't understand that mental tasks that we do are influenced by all these biological factors. And meditation is a doorway into sort of accessing that. It's like brain, it's like a brain exercise. But what are the goals? I mean, you know, people didn't start meditating so they can concentrate better and have better relationships and like, you know, not get stressed out at work. Right. So what is that really? What are the ultimate goals of meditation?

Well, you, you can have goals at many levels. I started meditating because I was anxious in college, you know, and it helped me relax. That's got like a minor league goal. But there. These things matter very much in our daily lives. But the big leagues, the Olympic level meditators that you mentioned, Richie Davidson, flew them over one by one from Nepal and India. They are in the classical traditions of meditation that have as a goal minimizing our self focus, our preoccupation with my this. I have to do that and be more open to other people, being more present, being more equanimous, being more kind. And I've been with people like that. Their presence is nourishing. And Richie found that their brain activity is really, really different from ordinary. For example, when we have a creative insight, we get a wave into the EEG called a gamma. We get it for about a half second at most. Yeah, it's that light bulb. But these yogis have gamma all the time. That's where they are. I can't imagine it, but it's a qualitatively and quantitatively different way of experiencing life. That's why we called the book Altered Traits, because these are lasting changes. States happen. You know, during my meditation, I had a nice feeling. That's great. But then it goes. When you stop, it's like getting off of, you know, a drug that makes you feel good. When the drug goes, so does the feeling. But with meditation, it seems to re figure, reconfigure the brain. And that's so important because that means that the changes you're doing during that mental workout, as you put it, is going to last. Just like when you go to the gym and strengthen a muscle, that strength is there during the day anytime you need it. It's the same with the mind in meditation.

Yeah. So people listening might be a little discouraged. Well, I don't want to live in a cave for nine years meditating, so I could meditate thousands and thousands of hours. Does it matter how much? Where's the sort of 80, 20 on this in terms of benefit.

Okay, so there's benefit from the beginning. This is the good news for all of us. None of that time you put in is wasted. It all pays off. The payoff gets bigger and bigger as you go. But the payoffs matter in our lives. You know, being able to focus better when you're under pressure and you have to get this thing done. Not being so, you know, upset by things all the time, but being more, even more able to take in what's going on and react with some forethought rather than a knee jerk reaction that you're going to regret or being able to be more present to the people you love instead of tuning out of them. These are everyday benefits and they come for anyone right at the start.

That's so great. So when you were writing the book with Richie, I mean, you guys, this is your world. What surprised you about meditation? What were the things that you didn't expect and that you learned?

Sure. Well, there are two things come to mind. One is that this meditation on kindness or loving kindness has strong payoffs. Right at the start. The payoffs are the people themselves feel better. Turns out that if you feel kind toward other people, it makes you happy. So the Dalai Lama said, that's the first beneficiary of compassion is the one who feels compassion. But it seems as though the brain is primed and ready to learn to be kinder and learn to be more caring. That was a surprise. And the second has to do with something that happened to genes for inflammation. And this is very relevant to your mark. I know genes for inflammation. One day of practice by people who are somewhat experienced, one day of practice lowered, in fact, the technical terms down regulated hundreds of inflammatory genes. And you know, I have to look to you to say, and how might that matter?

Oh my God, it matters because inflammation is the root of everything, right? Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia. I mean, pretty much every age related disease is inflammatory. So we call that inflammaging. And if you can impact that, that's tremendous. This is a tremendous thing. And I think that's not why I meditate, although it's a nice fringe benefit. But I think for me, I did a lot of meditation. I majored in Buddhism when I was younger, kind of got off track, crazy medical school and kind of got back into it a while ago. And it just really made me realize I didn't think that I was anxious or stressed before, but the change was so dramatic from, you know, what I was feeling to how I'M feeling now. And it's true. Like, I go, you've got so much going on. You got this and that. How do you do it? Are you stressed? I'm like, well, I just know I'm kind of just do it. And I think it really has helped me to kind of just sort of have this place that I go to every day that sort of disconnects from all the busyness and then puts me in a state where I can just be present. And it's sort of automatic. You just have to do it. You don't have to really understand it, you have to do it. And then it just works its magic. And over time, you know, things don't seem as big a deal. And you put things in perspective. And so it's got a lot of very practical benefits. But I think, you know, waking up is really what you're talking about. How do you wake up to wait, the way things are and the nature of things and that the side effect is all this other great medical stuff. But it's kind of more about, like you said in the beginning, the quality of your life.

Exactly. And waking up is a beautiful way to put it because, you know, the classical traditions of meditation basically say our daily lives are lived on automatic. We're a little bit asleep. And this is a way to be present to your own life, to be in it more fully.

It's so powerful. So why do you meditate?

Well, I meditate to be present to my life, to my wife, to be kinder. I originally started, as I said, to be less anxious. And then I found that that's been taken care of pretty much. But then I got very interested in the states I would get into during meditation. This was after some years. I'd go on retreats and it was, oh, that's amazing. And that felt great. But then I noticed, well, that was that. Now it's gone. That's where we got interested in Altered Traits, the name of the book, which is what are the lasting benefits? What are the payoffs during your day? And, you know, for me, I find, as you said, I'm more relaxed doing all the stuff I do when I'm upset. I recover very more quickly. I'm hoping that those medical benefits you point to, the lower inflammation, will pay off. Who knows? I don't have a clone, so I have no control for that. And also I feel that I actually am able to be kinder, which for me is a big goal.

Well, you mentioned the whole compassion, loving kindness meditation. Well, we found, I think I'VE told you this before, but in the brain there's a center which is the sort of pleasure center called the nucleus accumbens. And this center is critical in feeling joy and pleasure. And it's also what gets stimulated by bad stuff like sugar, cocaine, heroin. Right. But it's, it's, we found that it also stimulated by altruism. So by doing good for others, thinking good for others, just compassion actually creates that. And I get that experience all the time. You know, as a doctor, you think you're giving, giving, giving, giving, but you're getting, getting, getting, getting all the time. And it's, you know, it's really fascinating to me. And it's been my life of being in service, right. Being a doctor, helping people, writing books, all that is really in service of others to try to help them become happier, healthier. And I just noticed, for me, there's tremendous benefits to that. That make me joyous, that make me happy, that make me satisfied. And when you're thinking, me, me, me, me, me all the time, then it creates a lot of unhappiness.

You know, there's research that was done at Harvard. They published a paper in Science called A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. You know, the more focused our minds tend to wander to the things that are upsetting us, you know, when we're just kind of ruminating. That's not helpful. Meditation actually reduces that mind wandering quite a lot. But I think helping people, what you describe is really the root of it is the fact that you, by helping other people, are actually helping yourself too. Yeah, yeah.

So powerful. So if people want to learn more about how to meditate, like, where do they start?

Okay, so I would recommend first of all, in the book Altered Traits, we tell you why it helps, what the science says, what it will do for you. And then you could go to morethansound.net I have some instructional tapes on. It's called Focus, but it's basically meditation. I recommend the works of Jon Kapat, Zinn. Mark, do you have a meditation tape?

I don't. Well, I have a CD called Ultra Comm. And I guide people through a little bit of, you know, breathing and stuff. But it's not a full meditation tape, but it's a key part of the work that I do. And I, you know, I think they can also go to your book and get all this information, right?

Absolutely. It's all in there.

I encourage everybody to get this book. And I also working at Amazon, Barnes and Nobles pretty much everywhere. Right?

You get it everywhere. If you like to listen to books more than Seun has the audio and any bookstore should have the book.

Great. Thank you. Where can they learn more about your work?

Daniel danielgoleman.info that's my website, danielgolmann fo. Check it out.

Thank you for joining us and enlightening us about the amazing benefits of meditation. And all your decades of work in this has just been so great. And thank you, Mark.

It's always a pleasure to be with you.