Using Brainwaves to Improve Performance with Ariel Garten & Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. The topic of today is we're going to have a neuroscientist's guide to sleep and meditation. And by actually popular demand, we have a guest back, our good friend Ariel Garten. She's a neuroscientist and the founder of Muse. We've had her on the podcast before, and we're going to do a deep dive into mindfulness, meditation, and sleep. its effects on the brain, how to do it. How does it work? How does it improve your brain performance? And from a neuroscience perspective. Arielle, thanks so much for being back on our show.

Oh, my joy and pleasure to be here with you, Jim. Every conversation's a great one.

Yes. Now, we met years and years back. You, as the co-founder of Muse, you introduced me to this incredible technology that makes meditation easy. And it's something that I do on a regular basis. And I'm excited about this. I have the product right here. I'm gifting actually 5 of these for the holidays. Oh, thank you. This is a very, very, very, very, very, very popular— this is something I do actually every single year because it makes such a great holiday gift, giving people their sense of balance and harmony back, their own peace of mind, especially with the year most people have had. So I want to thank you for creating this incredible technology. For those who are interested, you can find out more of it. I'm going to just give you the link up front. I highly recommend it. It's jimkwik.com/muse, M-U-S-E. It's something that our family uses, and it's amazing how people of different ages and stages benefit from this. And I was looking at some of my notes for this conversation. Is it true that those who have a long-term meditation process, talking about, you know, our lives Their brain is actually younger.

Yes. So there's an amazing study from Dr. Eileen Lueders that demonstrates that people who have a long-term meditation practice, and this is defined as 5 years or more, have brains that look on average 7.5 years younger. So if you're like, oh, I don't have the time to meditate, you know, that's a great investment to make. 5 years of meditation, a brain that's 7.5 years younger. And that's just a short daily practice.

And that's one of the things to get at. It's kind of like you're adding years to your life and also some more life to your years. Now, a lot of people use the term— I'm going to get the terminology right here. Your background as a neuroscientist, is there a difference between meditation and mindfulness? Because sometimes we hear those terms used interchangeably.

Sure. So meditation is a practice or a training that leads to healthy and positive mind states. So it's a thing that you do regularly that improves your mind, and it also improves your brain, by the way. Now, there are many different forms of meditation. You might've heard of Zen meditation, walking meditation, focused attention meditation. A subset of those forms of meditation increase your mindfulness. So mindfulness is defined as the ability to pay moment-by-moment attention to your thoughts, feelings, sensations, And environment. And so when we practice meditation in forms like focused attention meditation or walking meditation, we are increasing our mindfulness, our ability to be mindful about our minds, our actions, and our lives.

Hmm. So what's actually happening inside the brain during meditation, if whether people have a certain practice or they're using a device like, like Muse?

So within your brain, meditation actually seems to be making real structural change. And this is so cool. So in a study by Dr. Sara Lazar at Harvard, she demonstrated that long-term meditators have an increased prefrontal cortex thickness. So bad news, as you age, your prefrontal cortex thins. Good news, if you're able to maintain a long-term meditation practice, you can maintain the thickness of your prefrontal cortex Even as you age. So your prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that governs your higher-order processing. It is your planning, your organization, your decision-making, you know, the thing that really sets us apart as humans. So meditation has been demonstrated not just to thicken your prefrontal cortex, but also downregulate your amygdala, which we'll talk about in a minute, increase the connections between your corpus callosum, which is your left and right hemisphere, And has even been shown to maintain or increase the size of your hippocampus, which is the area of your brain associated with learning and memory. And even a short meditation intervention of 8 weeks has been demonstrated to increase the volume of your gray matter, so the number of connections that you actually have in your brain. So that's all the cool stuff that meditation does to the brain. Now, why does it seem to do this? Well, there's 2 areas of your brain that I talked about. There was the prefrontal cortex at the front and the amygdala. So as many of you probably know, the amygdala is that part of the brain that is always scanning for danger. It's always looking for things that might be wrong. The prefrontal cortex is kind of like the parent, the part of your brain that's able to look around and say, hey, I think everything's fine. Just calm down. You know, little kid, you're just scared of the shadow on the wall. Little amygdala, calm down.

It's fine.

So when we do a long-term meditation practice, what we're doing is we are strengthening our prefrontal cortex, our ability to actually rise above a situation. It's called metacognition. It's something that you practice in meditation to look around, to make a better decision, and to actually downregulate your amygdala. And there's research that demonstrates that people with meditation practices long-term actually have an increased number of productions from their prefrontal cortex to their amygdala. So their prefrontal cortex is better able to regulate it, better able to downregulate that amygdala and have it calm down, which is why when you practice a long-term meditation practice, you feel feelings of calm. You're not as flustered. You're not in fight or flight. You're not anxious. You're better able to make decisions not impacted by the emotions that you have at that moment.

Mm-hmm.

And you're better able to sort of rise above a scenario, gain perspective. See what's going on and make a better move in your life.

That's outstanding. It's something that I have a regular practice for. And now for me, I do it, I do 2 sessions a day and I do one especially at night. I love this Muse here because it's so comfortable and the way I really, and some people are listening to this, they might be listening on Spotify or on iTunes. I encourage you if you can to subscribe to watching this on video on YouTube. That's where you also put more of the extended version of this conversation. When do you do your meditation process? Is it, is it a different time each day, or is it part of like a routine for you?

So this is a really common question. Basically, people want to know when is the best time to meditate. And the true answer is the best time to meditate is the time when you're going to do it. You know, for some people, If it fits into your schedule to do it in the morning and you love it and that feels good, great. People who do it in the morning find that it sets them up for the day. For others, the only time you can find is in the evening, and it's great for you because it lets you wind down and helps you sleep better. So you don't have to, you know, try to push yourself to be one of those people that wakes up at 6:00 AM and does an hour of meditation if that doesn't work for you and your schedule. Find when in your schedule it works, and you just need as little as 5 minutes to sit down, to focus your attention on your breath, To notice your mind is wandering and to return your attention back to your breath. And when you do this practice regularly, the cumulative effects are real.

I think a little bit, you know, the consistency definitely compounds, you know, little by little, it adds up to a lot. So can you actually, Ariel, walk us, walk us maybe through a basic meditation for those people who are listening?

Sure. So the most basic form of meditation that most people learn is a focused attention meditation. And in focused attention meditation, what you're doing is you bring your attention to your breath or something neutral. Now, eventually your mind is going to wander away from your breath and onto a thought. And at that moment, it's your job to say, oh, I'm thinking. That's okay. Notice that you have a thought. Let go of that thought and bring your attention back to your breath. So a lot of people have the misconception that meditation is just about your mind going blank. And if you sit there with the expectation that that's going to happen, you're going to be sorely disappointed and frustrated. Because all of us have thoughts all the time, and that's okay. What we're learning in the practice of meditation is to notice that we are thinking, let go of that thought, and move your attention non-judgmentally onto something else. Now, when you do this incredibly simple practice, it leads to some pretty profound transformation. Because most of us kind of go through our lives on autopilot. We go through our lives with a whole bunch of thoughts in our head, and we presume that because they're in our head, we're supposed to be thinking them. So we end up thinking a lot of thoughts that are not really helpful, that are negative, that are frustrating, that causes stress and anxiety, or just downright repetitive. But when you go through this process of meditation and you start to become aware of the contents of your own mind, the thoughts that you're having, and in that moment say, hey, I don't need to follow this thought. I don't actually need to think about this thing right now, even though it's in my head, I can make a different choice and bring my attention elsewhere. You're using your prefrontal cortex to do that. In that moment, you fundamentally transform your relationship to your thinking, and you now have a choice over the contents of your own mind. And so when a stressful thought repeatedly comes up, you can, A, have the presence of mind to look at that thought. You have the metacognition. Examine the thought and then say, you know what, just because it's in my brain, I don't need to be thinking it. I can let that go. I can bring my attention onto something that I care more about and put my energy and my focus there.

And it's, it's one of those things. I don't know if this is true, but I saw this, uh, something I read said meditation is not about controlling your thoughts. It's more about realizing that our thoughts don't have to control Us.

Very—

say that's something that's accurate.

Very, very well said. We are always going to have thoughts arising. And that's natural and normal and a really good thing. You then have the choice around what you do with those thoughts. Do you follow them? Do you let them take you down a rabbit hole? Or are you able to simply accept that, yeah, that was a thought that arose, that was a feeling that arose, that was an experience that I had. And rather than creating more drama around it and thinking and feeling it, you know, bigger and bigger, you can just say, yep, that happened, let it go and move on. And that principle is known as equanimity, a big meditation concept that means the ability to be okay with what is.

I love that. I love that word so much. So what we're— the main idea here, what we're talking, encouraging everyone to do is when— is to schedule time. The best time to do it is when you're actually going to do it. For me, it happens to be Around between 2 and 4 o'clock. Usually if I feel a little bit of a lull, that's where I'll take kind of disconnect so I can reconnect. And then for me, I'll do it a second time right before bed. It's a wonderful way— you're talking about the amygdala, sometimes it's on fire, it's in that fight or flight, you know, sympathetic kind of mode. And it helps me to really, really transition from sympathetic to parasympathetic at night. And the way that you design Muse, it's so wonderful because it's fun. Right. Maybe you could describe the process. I want to really encourage people, and for everyone listening, as a thank you for listening, I encourage everybody when you're done here to go to jimkwik.com/muse because Ariel put something very special together for you just as, as a Kwik Brain listener. It's kind of really exclusive for our groups. And not only we get a special offer as a thank you for listening, you're also going to get a bonus training that we're going to do. So if you do that this month, if you're listening to this the week it came out, if you do it by the end of the year 2021, you'll be invited to something coming up in the beginning of 2022. And Ariel, maybe you could talk about what we're going to do in that session for everybody.

Sure. Um, so anybody who gets a Muse prior to December 31st through Jim, this is a very special experience that we're putting together for the community. Everyone who does is welcome to join Jim and I in a live 1-hour webinar session where we'll answer any question you ever wanted to know about sleep, meditation, brain health, what goes on in your brain, and how to help you optimize your life. So it'll be an intimate deep dive just with the two of us answering all of the questions.

Everything from meditation to memory to your sleep. And everybody by then will have their unit, which is remarkable. I placed my order and I have 5 ready to be able to go for holiday gifts. It makes a wonderful, wonderful holiday gift, giving people their equanimity, their ability to— their agency back, which is really exciting. And so maybe you could explain for everybody when they get their unit, it's connected to an app, right? And for me, our family loves it because it turns into a game. Maybe you could describe people's experience the first time that they, they use their Muse.

Sure. So when you slip on your Muse, what's actually an EEG device, it's a clinical-grade EEG, and it's actually tracking your brainwaves while you meditate. So it's actually really tracking what's going on in your brain and translating your brainwave activity into guiding sounds. You are literally hearing the sound of your own mind. And the metaphor we use is your mind is like the weather. So when you're thinking or distracting, when your mind is wandering, when you're thinking or distracted, when your mind is wandering, you actually hear it as stormy. And as you're guided to quiet, focused attention, it actually quiets the storm. So you're getting real-time feedback during the experience to let you know when you're doing it right, when you're meditating, or if you have an existing practice, to give you a whole new level of insight into your mind during meditation. And then after the fact, you get data, charts, graphs, scores, things that show show you what your brain was doing and make it fun and engaging to keep you practicing session after session. Because meditation is great only if you do it regularly. So this really makes it motivating to stay on the meditation bandwagon.

You know, that's wonderful. That's part of making meditation easy for somebody is you make it simple and you make it fun and you make it rewarding. And, you know, I love it when I'm doing this and then I'll hear these— I'll get to a place where these birds will start chirping. Which is amazing. And it just puts a smile on my face. I've been just reflecting on that. But it's so easy to be consistent because so many people, our listeners and our viewers here in our community, sometimes they're sitting down or they're laying down or they're doing their form of meditation. And honestly, they'll send us messages saying, Jim, I don't know if I'm doing this right. And that uncertainty will keep them from being really mindful and getting in that place because they're talking to themselves, am I doing this correctly? Or am or I'm not. But with this, as you mentioned, you're getting all that data right there in your app. And so you know the results right away.

Yeah. And it's been extremely efficacious. So we have literally now thousands of researchers that use Muse, hundreds of research studies that have been published with it. Mayo Clinic recently did a study with breast cancer patients using Muse to overcome their cancer care process, demonstrating that reduced their stress, improved their of life and reduce their fatigue. So, it's been unbelievably gratifying to sort of see it in action, both helping people start their practice or go deeper into it, and now also helping people sleep.

Now, your device actually, does it help? Well, that helps me to slow down and go to transition to sleep. And I know you go through different stages as you sleep. Does Muse also support tracking your sleep as well?

Yeah. So our newest device, the Muse S Gen 2, really is an incredible sleep tracker. So it is a clinical-grade EEG in your bed. It is literally what they use in a sleep lab, and you're getting sleep tracking as effectively as you get in a sleep lab. You're able to see each of the stages of sleep. You're able to see not just how much deep sleep you had, but even the intensity of your deep sleep. So it really shows you the quality of your sleep. And then on top of that, we've built these amazing go-to-sleep interventions that help you fall asleep. So because the Muse is able to track your level of wakefulness as you're falling asleep, we can actually bring in specific guided biofeedback interventions that help you fall asleep based on where you're at. So you might be listening to a beautiful sleep story or a piece of guided content that's actually built from your body, a soundtrack built from your body that's entraining you to sleep. And as the system starts to notice that you move into stage 1 sleep, hypnagogic sleep, you're dropping your alpha waves, your delta waves are increasing, it starts to change the content of the audio, which further cues your brain to fall asleep. And in a recent study by Dr. Adrian Owen's lab, he demonstrated that using the Muse led to a 20% improvement in sleep quality, which was just a tremendous outcome.

Wow. So in general, you would say that meditation improves sleep, Yeah, meditation can dramatically help you improve sleep.

And then the interventions that we've built that are beyond meditation— we now call it the digital sleeping pill— add an even deeper layer to helping your brain quiet down and transition into sleep. And then we have this incredibly cool new feature because you're wearing the Muse throughout the night and it's tracking your sleep with its clinical-grade EEG. If you wake up in the middle of the night, The Muse will bring back in the same intervention that helped you fall asleep initially, the same guided content, totally automatically, and walk your brain back into sleep.

So it's a— it's an intelligent wearable that way.

Yes.

That's amazing. So everyone, I encourage everyone here right now, go to jimkwik.com, kwik.com/muse. You'll get the very special offer for the holidays and right in time for the holidays if you're listening to this when this episode releases. And also on top of that, Ariel is going to do a special bonus masterclass. And there we could discuss everything from deep sleep to REM sleep, to various forms of meditation to be able to improve your memory and so much more. And it's really great because by that time that happens, everybody will have their unit and we could do it together, which is outstanding.

Awesome. I so look forward to it.

Yes. Just really quick, Ariel. I know people, we talked about sleep and you talk about the different stages of sleep and the brainwaves and the fact that your device can actually track sleep. And this is so comfortable, by the way. And so this is our go-to. We'll do it right before bed. And then even if I end up waking up, which sometimes happens throughout the night, then it's wonderful because then it just takes me back into that place where I just feel the sense of safety where it calms down my amygdala. Do you have, just out of curiosity, do you have your favorite personal ways to fall asleep outside of using Muse, which is obviously a great, easy way to accelerate that?

Sure. One of the really interesting things about falling asleep is the initial phase of sleep. So you close your eyes. As soon as you close your eyes, something called your alpha block comes in and you see an increase in your alpha wave activity. And then as you move yourself into stage 1 sleep, you see a drop in your alpha wave, delta waves start to come in, and you're in phase 1 sleep. Now phase 1 sleep is super light sleep. So most people, if they came and woke you up while you were in phase 1 sleep, you'd be like, oh no, I wasn't sleeping, everything's fine. We're all kind of familiar with that sensation. But the cool thing that's happening in phase 1 sleep is called hypnagogia. So we start to have all of these images come into our mind that really feel kind of like trippy and psychedelic and like, you know, we're losing our grip on consciousness and reality. And from there, from that hypnagogia, we move into stage 2 sleep, which is proper deep sleep. It starts with your sleep spindles and K complexes. K complexes keep your brain, you know, really quiet, even if there's activity outside. And then into sleep So one of my lovely sort of hacks and experiences to get into sleep is to bring myself into hypnagogia by bringing in imagery. And that's part of how our Go to Sleep experience works. Part of it is beautiful guided visualizations that actually bring you into the hypnagogic state. But even on your own, if you're trying to get to sleep and you don't have any support, if you just start to visualize, imagine, make it weird, make it trippy, you know, you've got a lion on top of a soda who's doing a pirouette and just like let your brain go, kind of lose the consciousness grip and just go into a fun space that will facilitate that movement into hypnagogia and then down into phase 2 sleep.

That's outstanding. Yet another tool that you'll have at your disposal. And so, Ariel, I want to thank you so much for being back on our show. Right now, everybody, at the very least, I think everybody, if you're listening to this show, you, you, you're interested in something that was talked about, you know, whether you want a younger brain that's maybe 7.5 years younger, if you want greater enhancements for things like your prefrontal cortex, we mentioned your amygdala, we talked about the volume of your hippocampus. I think everybody here wants just a more robust memory. Also as well, if you want to enhance your sleep, if you have trouble falling asleep or if you have trouble staying asleep, check out this website, jimkwik.com. And when you do, you get a special offer. It's a holiday offer for our listeners exclusive. And join us for this bonus, this bonus masterclass, because this is a process, right? We're all on the journey, this quest to realize, to be able to reveal our fullest potential. And I honestly don't know anything better for— in terms of your brain performance than what? Than having that mindfulness, the time to be able to meditate, their ability to rest and restore through greater levels of sleep. And if you need support in that, check out Muse as a tool. Kind of like, yeah, I talk about superheroes a lot. You have some of my favorite superheroes like Batman and Iron Man. And what's their superpower? They're just very, very smart and they have technology to enhance their own abilities. And I want to make sure that everyone in our community is aware of and has access to these tools also as well. So, Ariel, thank you so much for joining us. Any last words for all our listeners?

Yeah, so when we talk about difficulty sleeping, there's this really virtuous loop between meditation and sleep, because when we meditate, we learn to quiet our anxiety, quiet our mind, which then facilitates our sleep. Now, one of the biggest reasons that people don't sleep is because they have anxiety about not sleeping. So if I can leave you with one massive tip to help you sleep better, it is when you lie in bed at night, don't worry about whether you sleep or not.

Hmm.

Don't think about how the day's gonna be tomorrow with or without sleep. Just allow yourself to be there and enjoy it. Close your eyes and meditate if you want. Lie there with warm, good feelings. Enjoy the coziness of your bed, and eventually sleep will come. You never have to worry about whether or not you're going to sleep because it is that very worry that robs you of that sleep. So look forward to deep diving further into this in the masterclass and engaging with everyone.

Yeah, thank you so much, Ariel. I'll see everyone at jimkwik.com/muse. That's M-U-S-E. All the information and all the links you'll find in our show notes always at jimkwik.com/notes. And I look forward to seeing everybody in the a special masterclass, and we'll talk to you soon. Hi, Kwik Brain. It's your brain coach. I want to thank you so much for watching this video. 3 things to do. Number 1, make sure you share this, because when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. Update your learning so you can update other people's learning as well. Number 2, make sure you subscribe to this channel so you don't miss a thing, because if you miss a video, you miss a lot. And finally, make sure you hit that bell so You're notified and you find out when we put out the latest and the greatest. One extra thing, if you want really close attention, then text me. Here is my phone number: 310-299-9362. Did you remember that number?

310-299-9362.

Shoot me a text and we'll stay in touch. Ask me your burning question. And I wish your days be full of lots of life, lots of love, lots of laughter, and always lots of learning. I'll see you in our next video. Bye.