Find the Right Meditation for You, with Dr. Andrew Newberg

Every kind of practice seems to have a benefit depending on who's doing it and in what kind of context. What I think is also important for people to realize is that idea that it's something that has to kind of resonate with you. And if it doesn't resonate with you, then it probably isn't going to work very well.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Five Journeys podcast, Live like youe Matter. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo, and my co host is Dr. Edward Levitan. And our guest today is Dr. Andrew Newberg. Andrew Newberg, M.D. is the research Director of the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health and a professor in the Department of Integrative of Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University. That's quite a mouthful, I have to say. He's the author of 10 books and.

I thought it's you saying that.

I know it's me. The author of 10 books, including the bestseller How God Changes your Brain and is regarded as one of the most influential neuroscientists working today. Welcome, Andrew. We're so psyched you're here.

Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on the program.

So you have mindfulness, you have Buddhist insight in meditation, you have Vipassana, and.

Then there's the people, like headspace or heart math. I mean, there's so many options.

Is there a better meditation? Or has science shown that there's a better meditation or.

But we don't talk about politics in the show. So you've literally asked the most political question, which is like, what's the best? All the meditative forms, like, we're the best.

I'm sure all of them are studied.

Well, you know, I. This is a great. I love talking about this topic because you're absolutely right. I mean, and one of the things that has been, you know, has been of concern to me and a little bit of why I got into these kinds of questions in the first place is, you know, feeling a little funny about the fact that, you know, some people feel like this meditation is the right meditation or that meditation is the right practice or whatever. You know, what. What the data has Generally shown is that every kind of practice seems to have a benefit depending on who's doing it and in what kind of context. What I think is also important for people to realize is that idea that it's something that has to resonate with you and if it doesn't resonate with you, then it probably isn't going to work very well. But what is also certainly lacking is the data to address the very question that you're asking. And it's something that I have really been lamenting in terms of the overall field of the study of meditation, which is if you have an infection, I know that if you have an ear infection, I'm going to give you a different antibiotic than if you have a skin infection or if you have a urinary tract infection. Because there's different organisms and there's different antibiotics that work for those specific things. I don't have data where there's a cross comparison, where if you said, here's a 20 year old college student who's worried about their finals, mindfulness is the right practice for that person and you're a 50 year old divorce, say, who's dealing with the stressors of life in that kind of context, yoga is the best for you or something. So we don't have that data. We don't have a way to tell people what is the best way to, to do a particular meditation. And of course, for the most part, the people who find a practice that works well for them, they do feel strongly that it's great and it's good and it's going to be the one that's going to work. So it's not a surprise that we wind up in these sort of camps of people feeling strongly about the practices that they have. But again, to me, what the data at the moment show is that all of the practices can work. Again, it's a matter of figuring out what works best for you as a person. In our book Brainweaver, part of what the advice that I typically give to people is to say, if they say I want to do something, I want to do some kind of meditation to improve my brain. Ok, well first of all, what are your goals? And that is important because some people may just want to de stress and other people may want spiritual experiences and other people. So there could be different kinds of things that people may want. So that's the first thing that you have to think about. And then you do have to do a little bit of homework, look at different practices that help with stress, that help with different aspects of what you're looking for. And if you're really looking for something that provides a spiritual experience, then a very secularized practice may not be the best one for you. And then also think about other elements of those practices. Are you someone? I get patients who say, I can't sit there for a half hour, I got to move. Sitting still is terrible for me. Well, then a movement based practice, yoga, tai chi, something like that might be better. If somebody else says, I hate moving around, I can sit still for hours, then a practice that can do that might be beneficial. I also recommend that people talk to the teachers that they may be going to who are going to guide them in that practice and make sure that the way they're talking and the way they're communicating, what the practice is about and how it's going to work feels right, feels good, is consistent with your ideas and beliefs. And then ultimately it's a little bit of trial and error. You have to sit down, you have to try a practice and you have to give it a fair shot. You got to do it and engage it pretty actively for at least several months and see how it's going. And if it really feels like this is not right for you, there's thousands of others. And if it does feel right, that's great and you can continue. And sometimes people find that it's not just one, they like to do mindfulness sometimes, but they like to do yoga another time and they like to do a breathing practice a different time or something like that. So, you know, there can be. People don't have to, you know, they're not mutually exclusive either. So, so. And I think ultimately that's the best way to try to help people figure out what works best for them.

So what's the magic number for meditation for people? And how deep do they, how perfect do they need to be on meditation to get the benefit?

Yeah, well, you know, again, I mean, this to me is a really important point too, because a lot of times when we have a patient who comes in and they'll say, well, I looked into this program and they want me to meditate 45 minutes a day, I don't have time for that. I said, actually what the data show is that even a very brief meditation, meaning 30 seconds or a minute, actually has physiological effects. If you're at work and you're about to go into a stressful meeting, you spending 30 seconds or 60 seconds at your desk, just relaxing, taking several deep breaths, focusing on your breath, focusing on a mantra, whatever works for a person can be very effective. Now, obviously, the longer you do it, the more pronounced the effects will be. It can have longer term effects over time. But the other piece, which is also important, and it goes back a little bit to my point about the individualized aspect of things. We've done several studies that have looked at how people do these practices. And I think another very, very important point for all the people listening is that you have to do things that you feel good about that you can fully engage. If you go to a yoga class and you do your stretch and you do that and you sit there because they tell you to sit there, and you breathe because they tell you to breathe, but you're not really into it, then you're probably not going to get all that much out of it. Whereas if you do the pra. If you do a practice that you really feel good about and you like and it's, you know, becomes a part of who you are and it's a part of the way you live your life, then that's the kind of practice that will really have an impact. And we see this, we were doing studies on different spiritual practices like prayer. And if you just say a prayer without it really, you know, without really focusing on or having a whole lot of meaning to you, it doesn't really change your brain very much if you're doing a prayer because it really, you know, it resonates with you, it feels good, it's an important part of what you think and believe and so forth, then it's going to have all kinds of changes on the brain. And so that is an important part of all of this, which is that people have to do things that really work for them that they can fully buy into, engage as fully as possible.

So is this the psychological or the spiritual or a little bit of both when you're referring to any type of meditation and mindfulness?

Right.

Well, I mean, ultimately it really cuts across all those dimensions because, you know, many practices, first of all, can be done as a group. So there could be a social component and people can feel good about that. And having the support of other people around can sometimes be very beneficial. Yet again, take stock in who you are. Do you like that? Do you like that? Are you extroverted? And being around other people, doing the same practice makes you feel better? Are you introverted? And I just want to sit in my room and just do my practice and that's a good way to do it, so that's important. It certainly can have a spiritual component depending on the practice. And Some are designed to be spiritual, obviously. And certainly prayer practices and various religious traditions have programs that really try to engage the spiritual part of it. Some practices are more secularized, and people don't want that. But it certainly can have a spiritual piece to it. And then we know for sure that these practices affect our psychology. They reduce anxiety and depression, for the most part, and stress. Again, though, if you go into it and you're feeling after a week or two, you're like, I'm really stressed out about this meditation. It's making me crazy. Then it isn't the right. In general, it's probably not the right one. And then, of course, ultimately this is my research over the years and published a couple hundred articles on different meditation practices and prayer practices. They affect the biology of our brain. And we know. I have a very comprehensive model of the different areas of our brain, the concentration areas that are part of the beginning practices of meditation, where you have to concentrate on breath, on an image, for example, the emotional centers of the brain that might be turned on if it's a very emotionally stimulating practice or quieted down if it's a more calming practice. Another area of our brain, the parietal lobe in the back of our brain, which is very involved in our sense of self and how our self connects to the world. This can be affected by very intense practices where we lose that sense of self and we have that sense of oneness or connectedness with the universe or with God. It's a very complex network of structures. It's not just one little part of our brain that turns on when we meditate. It's a very active process and can really lead to very intense experiences for people. That's why historically, meditation has been at the heart of so many different religious and spiritual traditions, both. Both Western and Eastern. So.

So I don't know if this is part of your research, but my old meditation teacher, he did research, or at least he published a couple papers on awakening and gamma waves. How that the synchrony of the brain. Is that part of your research or is that really.

Well, I haven't specifically done a lot of studies looking at the eeg, the electrical changes in the brain that have to do with the delta and theta waves and so forth. Most of my research has been with using different imaging techniques. But there's clearly a relationship between the findings that you get with EEG and the findings that we get with our brain scan. When we talk about areas like the frontal lobe or the parietal lobe being affected by these practices. While we see that on a functional MRI scan, your mentor and other people who are looking at the EEG part are finding changes in those same basic areas. But they're looking at it in terms of the different waveforms and different wave patterns. They're just different ways of looking at how the brain is operating. In fact, nowadays with things like functional mri, we look at a variety of different physiological processes, and it does, you know, yield kind of the bigger philosophical questions about, you know, well, so how does our brain put all of this together into our thoughts and our experiences? This is the thing I always challenge my students with that, you know, if you. To get philosophical for a moment, you know, when you look at the brain, you have the EEG changes that you have all the electrical changes, and they're being caused by sodium and potassium rushing in and out of the cell membrane, across the cell membrane. You have the changes in blood flow that I measure on a. On a mri, you have metabolic changes, you have dopamine changes and serotonin changes and releases across the synapse and so forth. So where in all of that is your thought? Where in all of that is the experience that you actually have? I think most of us would agree that a single molecule of dopamine isn't happiness. A theta band amplification on meditation isn't happiness itself, but those are the things that are correlated with happiness. But where is the happiness that actually that a person feels?

That's the ultimate question. Right?

Right. So that gets back into the sort of the neurotheology piece of, when we start to look at all of this, how do we start to understand that? But also, one other answer to your question. I published another book several years ago called how enlightenment changes your Brain, which does deal with those kinds of awakening experiences. And actually, even our most recent book, which is the Varieties of spiritual Experience, a lot of the data for that grew out of a survey that we did where we asked people about their most intense experiences, those awakening moments. And part of what we were trying to do is characterize them and characterize the elements that are part of them. Feelings of oneness and connectedness, feelings of intensity, feelings of clarity and so forth. All of these are the elements of these experiences. But then we can start to tie those elements into what's going on in the brain itself. We can talk about unity as being related to the parietal lobe. We can talk about the intensity of the experience related to the emotional centers of the brain, like the limbic system. Again, we tie all of that together between the Biology, the experience, and then also the spiritual aspect of those experiences.

Tell me about nuns, because that's what's the research on nuns.

So we did a study with a small group of nuns a bunch of years ago where we had them do a kind of prayer called centering prayer, which is a Christian based prayer, but it is a meditative type of prayer where you folk, where they focus on a particular prayer itself or a phrase from the Bible. And it's not quite a mantra practice. You don't repeat the prayer over and over again, but you kind of contemplate it, you think about it, you think about its meaning, you think about the words and so forth. And the whole goal of it is to ultimately have a kind of experience where you feel more deeply connected to God at one with God at one with the prayer. And so when we scan their brains, both at baseline and then during the practice, we saw changes that were consistent with a number of other practices, that their frontal lobes became more active. Because typically your frontal lobes turn on when you are concentrating, when you're focusing on something. Their parietal lobes, as we were just talking about, actually quieted down as they felt that sense of connectedness and that sense of oneness with God in that particular context. Incidentally, your question also reconnects to your earlier question about, well, which practice. Well, they all engage the brain in slightly different ways and that. So there's this network, you know, the way I look at it is there's this whole network of different structures that can become involved. And that includes not just the structures themselves, but neurotransmitters as well, all the different chemicals in the brain. And then depending on what you're doing and how you're doing it and what you're experiencing, you turn on this network in different kinds of ways. So again, there's not like a best way. It's just which way, you know, kind of works for you and helps you to feel the, and experience the things that you are striving to, to feel and experience.

So looking at experienced meditators, like in the, let's say the Buddhist school that people have been meditating for 20, 30, the monks are meditating 20, 30 years. If you look at their functional MRI and then you look at nuns that have been practicing and meditating and are praying for 20, 30 years, is there, is there a significant difference? Is it, are they coming to the same pace or are they really, because their practices are different, they're activating different parts of the brain, etc. Is there a difference let's start there.

Well, I think there are differences and I think your question is very well taken. And it is this sort of balance between kind of the universal characteristics of what all people are striving for. I mean, I would argue that we all have that spiritual drive. We all have that goal of trying to find the happy life, the life that is good and sustains us, the sense of meaning and purpose and so forth. So there are common elements in all of them. But how we go about that is different. And so my. There have. I mean, the short answer is that no one has really done the direct comparison between those two different types, you know, any groups, as far as I know, you know, we certainly have had people from different groups that have had those different character, you know, who we theoretically could start to compare. But even there it becomes very murky from a scientific perspective because, because of all the different things that are going on in their, in their different lives and their different traditions and how they do things. So my guess is that you're going to see differences, but it'll be very difficult to say whether those differences are ultimately better than or worse than one another. They're just, they're just differences.

Also, I'm not aware that people generally go for studying women, right? They're like looking for men?

Well, you know, no, but that actually that's a really good question and something that I have been very interested in looking at because. And we have tried to do that we want to look at the differences between men and women. And that certainly, you know, certainly with regards to nuns is one particularly important related issue. But the nature of spirituality and the kinds of experiences that people have, what are the differences across many different factors, males versus females, older people versus younger people, people who are deeply religious versus non religious individuals. So, you know, that, that's all to me, that's all part of the future of what this whole field of neurotheology can help us to explore, which is, you know, how does each person kind of find the path that works for them? And again, my guess is, and again, this gets back to what we talk about in Brainweaver, is that, you know, there is not a one size fits all. Each person does have to kind of find the paths that resonate with them, the paths that make sense to them. And most likely, you know, what I have gotten from all of my research, I think, is a deep appreciation for every tradition and every perspective. Because for the nuns, for the Buddhists, for the Pentecostals, for the Muslims, for the Jews, I mean Everybody who we have ever come in to study, they genuinely feel very strongly, very passionately about what they do and what they believe and the value and the importance of what they practice. And so, you know, and from my perspective, we see changes in their brain, and there are certain similarities. You know, if they all feel love, then they activate the areas of our brain that help us to feel love. If they all feel one or connected, then we see those changes being consistent. But then there are a lot of distinctions as well. And. And I think that that, to me, is one of the important pieces that comes out of all of this, which is that there are in many ways, because we're all trying to sort of figure it out, and we all have our own individual brain looking at the universe, it isn't a surprise that we come to different conclusions, whether they are meditation, the politics of meditation or the politics of politics or whatever it is that we all come to different conclusions. And what I hope comes out of all of this is that appreciation and perhaps the compassion that we understand that people are going to have different perspectives than ourselves, and that that's actually kind of expected and probably okay, you know, that people come to those different perspectives. Yeah.

So what I'm getting from this, I just want to make sure we're on the same page, is one kind of the biggest message that I heard from you is everybody's different, and you get to do what feels right to you. And I would say within the boundaries of, you might not. You might not like to eat your broccoli, but to eat my broccoli. I wasn't talking to you.

Okay.

I was talking to somebody.

I like broccoli.

Yeah, me too.

But one might not like to eat their broccoli, but maybe they'll eat their carrots or whatever else. But. But not necessarily. I'd say maybe the sugar may not be the best choice, per se, or they have a yoga practice or Pilates practice or a walking practice or whatever it is, and looking at really all their different levels and their creativity and their meditation. It's. Whatever. It's important to have a practice versus what the practice is. Is that.

I think, as a general statement. Yes. You know.

Let me. Let me.

Let me pick up on a couple of important points, too. I mean, I do want to emphasize that while I agree completely with what you said about the individualization of things, as you're also alluding to, we still, you know, all of us need the vegetables. So, you know, whether it's broccoli, carrots, you know, whatever, and in the context of these practices, you know, ultimately we have a lot of similarities in our brains, too. I mean, we all have frontal lobes and temporal lobes and parietal lobes, and they all kind of operate in the, you know, same basic kind of way. So so many of these practices really utilize a lot of those same fundamental elements of concentration and focus and breathing and so forth, because they do work. And so, you know, a lot of the ritualistic elements of all of these traditions have a lot of commonality. The specifics will be different. And when we did our survey of spiritual experiences, we were able to find that there are about four or five core elements that are almost reproducible in everybody's experience. The sense of connectedness, for example, and oneness. But what you feel connected to, what that sense of oneness feels like and so forth, those are where the distinctions come into play. Somebody might feel connected to God, somebody to Jesus, somebody to Buddha, somebody to nature, somebody to their community. And exactly how they feel it is a little bit different. But they all have that feeling of connectedness and oneness, for example. So there are, you know, while we can look at. While we want to talk about how each person finds their own path, there's a lot of commonality that occurs across those paths. And in that context, that, to me, is what we're really seeing. So there are universals, but there is a lot of distinctiveness within them. And that's, again, part of why, I guess I hope that we come to the realization that while we all have our slightly different ways of thinking about things, there's a lot of commonality in who we are as human beings.

You know, it's a great message.

I think that's perfect.

So where can people find you? Because I think this is amazing. It sounds like you have some amazing books and research out there. So love to have people connect and get this information out there.

Sure. So my website is probably the best way. It's Andrew Newberg. Any wberg.com and there you can find information about all of our latest books like Brainweaver, and also a lot of the research studies and articles. If people want to take a deeper dive into what we're finding and the nuns versus the Buddhists and so forth.

I expect our next conversation to have that answer, please.

I will work on that. I just need a few million dollars. If you've got a few million dollars, I will be more than happy to do that study. I would love. I mean, honestly, there are some wonderful studies that we really talked about, like. Like comparing different practices among different people and so forth, and really trying to compare, you know, across groups and within groups and things like that. There's so much.

Right. I mean, there's. There's even like, from a Buddhist point of view, there's how many different practices within.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's. It's not.

So that's. But that's for those. Just pick something. If you enjoy it, do more of it, start low, build up, enjoy yourself, have it bring you joy, and go from there. Okay, this has been great. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Five Journeys podcast live. Like you matter. Our guest today is Dr. Andrew Newberg. Andrew, thank you for being here. This is a really great topic that I think people are going to want to dive into.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you. It's been a lot of fun.

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