Your Brain On Meditation: How Meditation Can Change Your Mind and Life Forever with Ariel Garten - Genius Network Episode #117

So let's take a moment and imagine your perfect way of being in the world. Maybe for you, your perfect way of being is calm and in control. You're planning, you're organizing. You're in control of your day in your mind. Or maybe your perfect way of being is compassionate. You're caring, you're empathetic, you're listening. When you have a conversation with somebody, you want them to feel like the only person in the room.

Meditation is a technique that will help you do what's important and in less time. Every day. One of the best things anyone can do is experience more stillness, focus, and happiness. Here's a look at your brain on meditation. Remember to subscribe to Genius Network so that you don't miss a Future episode. Visit geniusnetwork.com subscribe for more.

If you're a member of Genius Network, you know that at every meeting I talk about the benefits of meditation. By a show of hands, how many of you in the room meditate at least 10 minutes every day. Every day. That's probably maybe 15% of the room, I guess. Okay, for those of you that have raised their hands like me, you know how wonderful meditation can be, and it can absolutely change your life for the better. It certainly has for me. That's why I wanted Ariel Garten to share her expertise with you on this very important subject, meditation. Because if you're not doing it, you should be. Arielle is a neuroscientist, was a practicing psychotherapist for almost a decade, and is now a world renowned expert on meditation. To help her maximize the benefits of meditation, she created a device called Muse, which many of you may have heard of. Muse is used by hundreds of thousands of people every day around the world to teach them how to meditate or if they know how, help them maximize the benefit of their meditation sessions. This device has tracked over 5 million meditation sessions and is used by places like NASA, the Mayo Clinic, and Harvard University and Fortune 500 companies to teach their employees how to meditate. Arielle's company has now created an even more advanced version called Muse 2, which was just released. This is the first time she'll be publicly talking about Muse 2, and we are honored to have her launch it at Genius Network. There's a booth outside that I highly recommend you check out, especially if what she says in this session makes sense to you. Arielle's title is your brain on Meditation. Help. How meditation can change your mind and your life forever. Give it up for my friend Ariel Garten. Thank you awesome.

Okay. It is wonderful to be here at Genius Network and see all of your shining faces. So everyone in the room here is an optimizer. So let's take a moment and imagine your perfect way of being in the world. Maybe for you, your perfect way of being is calm and in control. You're planning, you're organizing. You're in control of your day in your mind. Or maybe your perfect way of being is compassionate. You're caring, you're empathetic, you're listening. When you have a conversation with somebody, you want them to feel like the only person in the room. Or maybe your perfect way of being is maximally productive. You are laser focused on what needs to get done. You do what's important, and you do it in less time every day. So all these ways of being are amazing, but we're not all these ways every day. What if there was a technique that could help you get there each and every day? And there is. It's called meditation. So most people think that meditation is just kind of letting your mind go blank. It's not. Meditation is a practice or a training that leads to healthy and positive mind states. Sounds pretty good, right? Practice that leads to a healthy mind. There are lots of different forms of meditation. The most basic one is a focused attention on the breath. In focused attention on the breath, you focus your attention on your breath, your mind wanders, which all our minds do. You notice it, and you bring it back to your breath. So you focus on your breath, your mind wanders again, you notice it wanders, and you return it to a neutral object. This very simple, simple thing has profound impact. So the first thing you notice when you start to do this exercise is that you can take your mind off of your thoughts, which are often negative, repetitive, and stressful, and put them on a neutral object. This is huge. You can actually have control over your mind. Most people just sort of feel like every day your mind has stuff going through it and it's kind of thinking you. But with meditation, you learn that you can have control over the contents of your mind. You can get off the thought train. And once that happens, something really amazing happens. If you recognize that you have control over your mind and the contents of it, you can also make decisions about what's in it, and you don't need to be defined by it. You realize that you are not your thoughts. And so all those stories that you may have about yourself and what you're capable of and what your limitations are in the world around you, this can go out the Window, you can make the choice about what's inside your head. And then you realize the same thing can happen with your emotions. If you feel an emotion, it would in the past trigger an uncomfortable thought, which triggers more uncomfortable feelings. With a meditation practice, you realize that you can get off the emotional roller coaster, that rather than having a feeling and having it rule you, you can simply experience it as a sensation, let it rise and let it fall and, and not give it the attention to control your life. So as an example, you are an employee and maybe you just made a big mistake at work. Your boss starts walking up to you and you feel your heart rate starting to raise and your breath is getting kind of shallow and you don't realize it. And you're realizing you have all sorts of sensations of fear and shame and guilt. And this really sucks, these feelings. And so maybe you'll just blame your colleagues so you don't have to feel this stuff. Well, if you have a longer term meditation practice, you can begin to start to work with those feelings and as they start to rise, not be ruled by them, not be triggered by them, and then make a more appropriate choice in that scenario. Another place where meditation has fantastic impact is in your productivity. So you may not realize it, but every time your mind wanders off task, you're actually micro procrastinating. Each and every one of those little mind wanders is actually something that's sucking up time from your precious day. So one of the things that I noticed when I started meditation practice is I got incredibly efficient. Early on, I had a long format essay to do, and I was the boss of a company. We sat in an open office. Everything was distracting me because everybody's problem was my problem too. So I was writing this long format essay, which normally took me a few hours, and everything was distracting me. But once I started a meditation practice, those long format essays just became really efficient. Because each of those distractions I could say, nope, don't care. Back to the task at hand. You're a distraction. Don't care about you. Back to the task at hand. I finished one of those things in 45 minutes. All of these great benefits that we've discussed, improved productivity, better emotional responsiveness, they actually have corollary changes in your brain. Meditation makes real change in your brain. So let's dive into our brains to find out how. So let's start at the top. One of the first ways that meditation can change your brain is it affects your prefrontal cortex. Fantastic news. We have this area at the front of Your head called your prefrontal cortex. It's your attentional control center. It helps us plan, it helps us process and organize. It's amazing. Bad news, as you age, your prefrontal cortex thins. Good news, if you are able to maintain a long term meditation practice, you may maintain the thickness of your prefrontal cortex as you age. In one study, a 50 year old long term meditator had the prefrontal cortex thickness of a 23 year old. Meditation can also help you down regulate your amygdala. So if you remember in that example with the employee when his physiology was flying all over the place, well, that was his amygdala in hyperdrive. Meditation helps you actually calm and down regulate your amygdala so you can calm and manage your body's emotional responses. Meditation also can increase the volume of your hippocampus. The side of your brain, right there, right in the middle, your hippocampus is the area responsible for learning and memory. And who couldn't use more learning and memory in their life? Meditation also impacts your temporal parietal junction. Why does that matter? Well, your TPJ is an area responsible for compassion, empathy and perspective taking. And a meditation practice actually impacts that area of your brain. Meditation can also, and this is the coolest one to me, eight weeks of meditation can increase the density of your gray matter. Why is that meaningful? Well, Einstein had more gray matter than the average individual. Just saying. So if all of these things are so amazing, why don't more people meditate? We saw that only a portion of you do it, and the ones that do, fantastic. But the ones that don't, why not? Or why do you start meditating and then you stop? Well, it turns out that meditation is actually hard to do. There's no one sitting inside the black box of your mind to tell you what you should be doing in there or to guide you and coach you. And we wanted to change that. So we set about a few years ago to create a tool called Muse that would actually give you real time feedback on your mind during meditation so you could know what was going on in there when you were focused and when your mind was wandering. As you heard, it's been used by over millions of sessions, hundreds of companies and institutions. And then we stood back and we said, we want to really ramp this up. We want to build something new. And today, for the very first time on stage, I'm going to present to you. Muse 2. It's a beautiful, slim little device, slips on just like a pair of glasses. It has sensors that track your mind and your body during meditation to give you real time feedback to start, deepen and enhance your practice. So those of you who know Muse one will know that Muse one had EEG sensors to track your brain during meditation. Muse two add sensors that track your body, your breathing and your heart to give you real time feedback on your brain and body to guide you into a deeper practice. So Muse's body sensors track your body's movements to guide you into stillness and to help you find a pain free posture for meditating. For a lot of people, this is the first place to start. Muse2's breath sensing technology tracks each and every one of your breaths and guides you in breathing exercises to calm yourself or to energize yourself. Within this very same device, there's also a heart sensor that tracks the beating of your heart and gives you real time feedback on it. It's a beautiful experience. It's not simply a number on your wrist, you actually hear the sound of your heart translated every beat into the beat of a drum so that you can tap into your heart's rhythm and learn what helps you calm it. Our classic brain feedback, still in this device, actually lets you know what your brain is doing during meditation, gives you real time feedback so you hear when your mind is wandering and when you're focused. The metaphor we use is your mind is like the weather. So when you're thinking distracted, you hear it as stormy, and it guides your brain into calm. So not only is there real time feedback that actually guides you into an ability to harness and hone and calm your brain and your body, but there's also data, all this rich, beautiful data that's actually showing you what your brain and body is doing so that you can understand it, truly track it, and improve it. It's like having a little coach right inside this device. So meditation is amazing, but you need to actually build a daily practice. So we have a motivational architecture in there that helps you build a practice and even lets you schedule your meditations. Because meditation really is amazing. It's one of the best things you can do in your life, but so few people actually do it. And in order to get this benefit, you need to actually do it each and every single day. It's like going to the gym. You go to the gym for your body, you go to the gym for your mind. And when I asked Joe why does he meditate every day, what are the benefits that he experiences, he said that meditation helps me respond versus react. So you owe it to your mind and your body to teach it how to shift its responses so that you can live more productively, more compassionately, more happily, and so that you can make the choice of how you want to show up in the world every day. Thank you.

Awesome.

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