Meditation and Stress Reduction

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Emily Fletcher
It's the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment. And in this day and age, when we've all become bulimic of the brain and we're all just ingesting technology day in and day out, I think that that skill is very valuable. Yeah. However, mindfulness

Dr. Mark Hyman
throw it up. It'd be great if you like purge it.

Emily Fletcher
Well, that's actually what meditation does.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website, supplement store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products.

Hi. I'm doctor Mark Hyman, a practicing physician and proponent of systems medicine, a framework to help you understand the why or the root cause of your symptoms. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. Every week, I bring on interesting guests to discuss the latest topics in the field of functional medicine and do a deep dive on how these topics pertain to your health. In today's episode, I have some interesting discussions with other experts in the field.

So let's just jump right in. A lot of people hear about meditation. It's mysterious. It seems vague, it seems a little bit culty, and certainly I've seen that happen. Mhmm.

My way is best, or this is the best way, or that one sucks, or, you know, it's like the meditation wars, should you do, you know, mantra based meditation, mindfulness based meditation? Should you do visualization? Should you do this? Should you do that? How much?

How long? When? Where? Help us sort of navigate this landscape. Because I think people get put off by that.

And they also think it's tied to incense and candles and cushions and temples and everything has to be perfect. And what I love about what you teach is that you can do it on the subway

Emily Fletcher
That's right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which I often do.

Emily Fletcher
Yes. On a plane with your kids screaming in the next room.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I I get the headphone with this noise cancellation. That helps.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But

Emily Fletcher
Yeah. It helps a little. So I think the reason why there are the meditation wars or it feels a little culty is that once you find something that works for you and once you see the proverbial face of God, you think that, well, this must be it. This is the capital T truth. And I like to think about God as a disco ball and that we're all looking at the same thing, but you might see purple and I might see red and someone else might see green.

But if that's the truth for you or the first time that you've seen it, you you think that that is real and you're willing to defend that. And so I think the

Dr. Mark Hyman
first person you fall in love with, you think that's it.

Emily Fletcher
Yes. This is it. And so I think if we pull the lens back a little bit and see that all of it, all roads lead to Rome, all of it is making us moving us towards the most amazing version of ourselves. So to navigate the landscape a bit about meditation, mindfulness, which is what most people are practicing, most of the apps out there, most of the YouTube videos, most of the drop in studios are what I would call mindfulness. And mindfulness, I would define as bringing your awareness, the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment.

Just so powerful.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like paying attention.

Emily Fletcher
Paying attention.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like an Aldous Huxley book where there was this, magpie that kept repeating. Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention.

Emily Fletcher
Yes. It was

Dr. Mark Hyman
like the it was like the siren call of his book and his community.

Emily Fletcher
Mhmm. Or, you know, Marie Forleo's husband or partner is a acting teacher, and he has this technique where he says, I'm back. I'm back. I'm back. Because in acting, you know, your mind will go down a rabbit hole and you just I'm back in my body.

I'm back. And so, yes, it's the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment. And in this day and age where we've all become bulimic of the brain and we're all just ingesting technology day in and day out, I think that that skill is very valuable. Yeah. However, mindfulness

Dr. Mark Hyman
throw it up. It'll be great if you, like, purge it.

Emily Fletcher
Well, that's actually what meditation does. So the mindfulness is very good at dealing with your stress in the now. Like, my boss yelled at me. I'm gonna do 10 minutes of my app, and I feel better in the now, like a state change.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Emily Fletcher
Whereas meditation, which is as I teach at Ziva is different than what most people have experienced. That's actually inducing very deep healing rest in the body. Rest that's about 5 times deeper than sleep.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. When you

Emily Fletcher
do that, when you de excite your nervous system, you create order, and it allows that lifetime of accumulated stresses from your past to start to come up and out. Whereas meditation is all about getting rid of your stress from the past. And in that, we're actually inducing rest that's about 5 times deeper than sleep. And when you do that, when you use the meditation tools, you de excite the nervous system. When you de excite something, you create order.

When you create order in your cells, it allows for that stress, that backlog of accumulated stresses that we all have in our cellular. Now we know epigenetic memory. We allow that stuff to come up and out. And it's that accumulation of stress in our brain and bodies that makes us stupid, sick, and slow. And That

Dr. Mark Hyman
doesn't sound fun. Stupid, sick, and slow. That's not how I wanna go through life.

Emily Fletcher
No. Stress makes you stupid. We're making t shirts, actually. Stress makes you stupid.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It actually also makes you demented. It's one of the causes of dementia. Stress hormones, cortisol, actually shrinks the memory center in the brain.

Emily Fletcher
So another reason to get your buns in the chair. And so then the the third piece that you mentioned, which is manifesting, more of like the visualization or prayer, I would define manifesting as consciously creating a life you love. It's getting intentional

Dr. Mark Hyman
about what you want

Emily Fletcher
your life to look like. And while that might sound simple, because it is, I'm always fascinated by how infrequently people are doing that, how infrequently people stop to really ask, well, how much money do I wanna make? Or what's my dream vacation look like? Or what's my dream partner look like? Instead, we just complain about our current circumstances instead of getting intentional.

So that's really the trifecta of Ziva, mindfulness meditation and manifesting.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But there's mindfulness meditation. Yes. So people can get confused. What's the difference?

Emily Fletcher
Yes. So I would define mindfulness, like the technique wise is where we are directing our focus. So if you're doing a guided meditation of any kind, I'm putting that in the mindfulness camp because by definition, you are directing your focus. And in mindfulness, a smaller part of the brain lights up but very, very bright, which is different than Ziva meditation because the whole brain lights up but not as bright because it's almost one is about focusing and the other is about surrender. One is about coming back to your body and it's a bit of a shorter leash.

Mindfulness is actually derived of styles of meditation that were originally designed for monks.

Dr. Mark Hyman
1000 of years ago.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Emily Fletcher
And so it's a little bit more austere. It's a little bit more disciplined. It's a shorter leash. You know, come back, come back to the breath, come back to the work, come back, come back. Whereas in Ziva, there's a much longer leash.

I call it the lazy man's meditation because you're allowed to have thoughts, you're allowed to drift into that sleepy feeling, you're allowed to, you know, let the technique go and come back

Dr. Mark Hyman
to it. Not meditating.

Emily Fletcher
Yeah. Well, yes, your wife has outed you out sometimes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If I'm actually sleeping or if I'm meditating in some deep state of consciousness, but it's fun.

Emily Fletcher
And if you look, if your life's getting better, then who cares?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So there have been very different techniques. As you mentioned, mindfulness, which is bringing awareness back to the breath, the present moment. There's mantra based meditations. There's visualizations.

And they've all been developed to help raise consciousness. They weren't ever developed to really help you deal with your boss or your wife or work or bad situations or too much social media. And and they all have different roles and purposes. Why is it that you sort of picked this mantra based ancient style of meditation?

Emily Fletcher
Well, to be very honest, the the meditation portion of Ziva, that was the first style I ever found, and it was so profound. I mean, it cured my insomnia on the 1st day. And like I said, I didn't get sick for 8 and a half years, and I always prided myself on being a seeker. You know, I read every self help book. I went to all the therapists and I was always seeking, seeking, seeking.

It almost became a part of my identity. And then when I found meditation, I was like, oh, I'm not a seeker anymore.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm a listener.

Emily Fletcher
I found it. I'm a finder. It's right here. It's inside of me. And that's sort of an esoteric explanation, but what's happening neurochemically is within 30 to 45 seconds of starting, your brain and body start flooding with dopamine and serotonin, which are bliss chemicals.

And so we stop looking externally for our fulfillment and we start to be able to access it internally.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And binge on mantras instead of bingeing on munchies?

Emily Fletcher
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So that was it was the meditation portion that really changed my life, but then when I looked around, I saw there were so many ex meditators. Right?

The world is filled with ex meditators. Every time I speak at a conference or go to a corporation I was one. Yeah. You were 1. Right?

And you were

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean,

Dr. Mark Hyman
I would when I was younger, I would be in 10 day meditation retreats, meditation retreats, meditating 12 hours a day and, you know, loving it. But Yeah. But then we all get busy. Right? Yeah.

So, like, every talk I give, I I say,

Dr. Mark Hyman
alright.

Emily Fletcher
I want everyone to raise their hand if you've

Dr. Mark Hyman
ever tried meditation.

Emily Fletcher
And it's 2018, so almost every hand goes up. And then I say, alright. How many of you guys have a daily practice that you do no matter what? And about 90% of those hands go down. Yeah.

And that's why I wrote this book. I want to bridge that gap. It makes me sad Stress less

Dr. Mark Hyman
accomplish more.

Emily Fletcher
Accomplish more. Right? Like, stress is making us stupid, and it makes me sad that a lot of people start and quit based on either misinformation or doing a technique that wasn't originally designed for them, one that was designed for monks. So they feel like they're failing because they're trying to clear their minds and then they can't

Dr. Mark Hyman
and

Emily Fletcher
none of us will do anything for feel. None of us will do anything for very long that we feel like we're failing at.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You have to like be in a meditation retreat for 8 days till you get 10 seconds of nothing.

Emily Fletcher
Exactly. But this, it's like within 30 to 45 seconds you're like, Oh, this is different, and it feels nice, and then your whole life gets better because it's designed to make you better at life. It's not designed to remove you from life.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So that's very interesting. So these techniques often were developed by traditions like Tibetan Buddhism and other Buddhist traditions to help people achieve a state of awakening.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
They weren't designed to help you cope with stress. They weren't designed to make you happier. They were designed to to actually train your brain into different states of consciousness that allow you to access places that most of us can't access. And you're saying there's a different approach that can actually take you to a similar place, but it's sort of a a more sort of tricky route where you get to kind of bypass some of that being in a cave for 9 years, and you can actually be in your life. And like you say, meditation isn't about,

Emily Fletcher
getting good at meditation.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Getting good at meditation is about getting good at life.

Emily Fletcher
That's right. And so you know that delicious feeling for anyone who's ever taken a yoga class when you lie down at the end and you have that delicious shavasana? What the ziva does is that it it just fast tracks that hour long yoga class. It allows you to get into that delicious headspace of the shavasana right off the bat. And that is valuable if you have a busy life because you might not have time to go and take an hour and a half yoga class.

You might not have time to go to a 10 day silent retreat, but you need to handle your stress because if you're not managing your stress, it's managing you. And as you've said on this podcast before, stress is related to 95% of all disease. And so it's not just I think we have to reframe meditation as, oh, well, that's a luxury thing. It's like a pedicure for my brain that I'll get around to when I have more time. It's like, no.

We have to reframe this as a single most important piece of mental hygiene that we need to be practicing every day. Yeah. One of my missions at Ziva is to make it floss. It's mental floss. I wanna make it as rude to leave your house without meditating as it would be to leave your house without brushing your teeth.

It's like, that's gross. You need to handle that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Emily Fletcher
And as mama Mary Anne said, she said, we need to be more disciplined. We need to take care. We need to strengthen our fortitude when it comes to these spiritual practices.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, I always thought of it as a nice to have. You know? You gotta eat right. You gotta exercise.

Right? You gotta sleep. Those are nonnegotiable for creating health. But I recently come to believe that meditation, the training of the mind is also non negotiable.

Emily Fletcher
Well, when people say to

Dr. Mark Hyman
me It's

Dr. Mark Hyman
one of those pillars of health that you you can't replace with another technique.

Emily Fletcher
I certainly agree. And when people say to me, well, I don't have time to meditate, I'm like, you guys, this is your brain we're talking about. It's responsible for printing every single cell in your body and making every single decision in your life. So what else are you doing with your time?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I don't have time not to meditate now, and I don't know that many people who are busier than I am.

Emily Fletcher
I don't know anyone busier than I am.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yet, it is it is something that I I look forward to that, without which I start to feel not well, like I I notice a level of agitation or fatigue or mental strain, and I use my brain a lot, I feel like it's like taking my brain to a car wash. It's the most amazing thing. Like I've been working all day in meetings, did more podcasts. I'm like, you before you came over, I was like, I'm gonna go sit and meditate. And I could have, like, you know, I could have taken a nap, but I I my wife laughs because I can lay down and I can't take a nap.

I could lay there for an hour. I mean, I'm sit down and meditate, and sometimes within 5 minutes, I'll be nappitating if I really need to. And it's just fantastic. And I wake up and I feel more connected to myself, more connected to the people around me, more present. And I think that's part of the problem with life today is that we are in a state of constant activity, motion, and we can't easily stop and just be present and appreciate those things that are so important.

It's the small little things. Right? It's it's the taste of a cup of tea. It's this feeling of, you know, your partner touching you on your skin. It's watching the light or the leaves or stupid sound.

Emily Fletcher
Of your son's laughter.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You have a little baby. And and so we we often miss those things, which are the actual beautiful things that make up life and make it amazing, and we can miss them.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And I

Dr. Mark Hyman
feel like I've missed often years just by being in the doing and not in the being. Mhmm. And it allows paradoxically, by being in the being, allows you to be more actually in the doing.

Dan Harris
I mean, I always thought meditation was ridiculous and had no desire to do it and no interest in it. I never really even thought about it, but the to the extent that I did, I thought it was for, you know, crystal lovers and fans of, Enya and

Dr. Mark Hyman
Not not fans of it.

Dan Harris
Sorry. To any fans

Dr. Mark Hyman
of I used to like Enya. You're not so bad.

Dan Harris
Well okay. Oh, we can agree to disagree on that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's good it's good to do yoga too. I'm fine.

Dan Harris
Yeah. I'm not even sure I agree with that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's okay.

Dan Harris
No no offense to any. I don't even I just I pick on on

Dr. Mark Hyman
You do yoga to Barry White. I don't know.

Dan Harris
You you could do yoga to Barry White. Sure. Cold play. So, anyway, I what I what ultimately changed my mind was I saw the science. I'm not a scientist.

I'm not good at math, but my wife's a scientist. My parents are both scientists, and I was really convinced when I saw the science, which is I don't wanna you know, your

Dr. Mark Hyman
Did someone say, hey, Dan, you should check out meditation or the Dalai Lama came to town. You wanna hear him talk? Like, what what was the trick?

Dan Harris
Well, the long story is, and I won't I won't make it too long, but I I had been assigned to cover faith and spirituality, for ABC News, and, I didn't want that assignment. I was raised in the People's Republic of Massachusetts. My parents are both atheists, scientists. As I often say, I had a bar mitzvah, but only for the money.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So I was not

Dr. Mark Hyman
The envelope, please.

Dan Harris
Exactly. I was not interested in this stuff at all. Peter Jennings, my boss at the time, was really interested in the subject and wanted me to do it. So I it actually turned out to be great for me, and I met a lot of interesting people, and I saw, you know, my own ignorance about these issues. And and I really sort of I didn't I didn't join a church or go kosher or anything like that, but I I was interested in the subject, and that ultimately led me to reading a book by Eckhart Tolle.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The power of now?

Dan Harris
I think it was a new earth. That was the first book I read, which I thought was really annoying, and it was you know, triggered me in all the predictable ways as a skeptic. He uses a lot of gooey language and pseudoscientific, language about vibrational fields and stuff like that. But 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Crazy ant in your head.

Dan Harris
Yeah. Or the Buddha calls it the monkey mind. But I had never heard that theory before. And when I read that book, just to fight my overwhelming annoyance with him and his tone and some of his strange claims about how he lived on a park bench for 2 years in a state of bliss and blah blah blah. That was a major 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 why how I had a panic attack. Yeah. 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.

I so I agreed. There was one of my producers had recommended that I read this book by Toley. So to her delight, I said, okay. Let's go do a story on Toley, and I did. And I found him I he's a very nice man, but I found him very frustrating in that a friend of mine has described Tolley as correct, but not useful.

In other words, he doesn't tell you much to do. He doesn't give you a lot of practical advice for dealing with the voice in the head, the this phenomenon that he describes so well. I then spent a bunch of time sort of marinating in the self help world and, looking around for answers to this question of what do you do about the voice in the head, and that ultimately led me to meditation. My wife gave me a book about Buddhism written by Yeah. A shrink here in New York City named doctor Mark Epstein Yeah.

Who's written a series of beautiful books about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology. And that is what may that is what pointed me toward meditation, which initially I didn't wanna do, 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 hackysack or, you know, lighting incense. It's not some hippie pastime. This is a this is exercise for your brain.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Been around for 1,000 of years.

Dan Harris
Yes. And it has a huge PR problem because it's the victim of the worst marketing campaign for anything ever. You know, we it's been sold to us the wrong way Yeah. For a bunch of reasons that we can discuss. And I had this entrepreneurial well, I had a personal selfish feeling of, oh, this would be really good for me, and and I adopted it as a habit pretty quickly.

I mean, immediately, really. But the entrepreneurial feeling was maybe if I write a book that, you know, uses the f word a lot and talks about this in a different way, it would make it accessible to skeptics. And so that's why I wrote the first book, and then it went on to become a podcast in an app.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. 10% happier. It's really true. And it 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. And just that happens in that way. Yeah. No.

I I I actually came at it in a different way through exploring eastern thinking. I read Thoreau's Walden, and in that, there was a lot of, you know, Asian and eastern There

Dr. Mark Hyman
is.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Religious influence and Upanishads. And so I kind of navigated down there and actually studied Buddhism in college as my major, and it and essentially is a phenomenology of the mind. So it's describing the operation of the mind, how we perceive things, the meaning we give to those things, how our beliefs determine our experience and suffering. And, you know, 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 this, 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 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

Dan Harris
actually do it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A lot

Dr. Mark Hyman
of people read diet books and don't actually eat differently. Right? So it's it's really about the practice. So when I remember when I came back from Haiti after the earthquake, I was working in Port au Prince Hospital. It was just really rough.

And the the 82nd airborne air came in, and they said, this is worse than anything we've seen in Iraq or Afghanistan. This is just terrific. 300,000 dead, 300,000 wounded. And, you know, I came back, and I was in that same state of panic and anxiety and unreality and disassociation. How could the world not know what's really going on?

Everybody's just in their little life. And it really, it was really a very powerful shift in sort of understanding this anxiety and panic I'd never had before. So I can relate to what you're saying.

Dan Harris
I was there too

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dan Harris
In Haiti.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, yeah.

Dan Harris
Mhmm. It was it was it was the worst thing I've ever seen.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It was. I mean, I I remember walking the first night. It was actually a 60 minutes piece on it. We got off the plane with Paul Farmer, and we went to the Port au Prince Hospital, general hospital there.

Dan Harris
And My friend did that piece, Byron Pitts?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, yeah. Byron. Yeah. Yeah. He was the guy.

Yeah. So came and we went. I said actually, I grabbed him, and I said, Byron, let's go to the back. And there was this this area where the morgue was, and it was just full of bodies in the on the concrete just rotting in the sun.

Dan Harris
I saw Byron that night, and they were using forklifts to dispose of the boat. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It was unbelievably bad.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It was it was rough. So I I get it. And then, you know, when you have that, it's like, how do you get out of that? And a lot of people have different types of trauma and different types of stress. And, you know, the question is, you know, we all are inundated every day with massive amounts of inputs that cause our psychology to be affected, our mood, our energy, our anxiety level, our sleep.

And meditation seems to be a way to help people navigate through that in a way that's very powerful. So what were the things that you noticed when you started meditating, and what was the kind of meditation you did?

Dan Harris
Can I swear?

Dr. Mark Hyman
You

Dan Harris
can. My the first thing I noticed the first data point that emerged was that I overheard my wife at a party telling friends that I was less of a shithead, which I thought was interesting because that was even before I saw any benefit for myself.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Hardly a swear. That's

Dan Harris
Yeah. I'm it'll get worse now that I

Dr. Mark Hyman
have permission.

Dan Harris
So, there are 2 big benefits as I noticed showing up in my own mind after a couple of weeks really of doing, and I was just doing 5 to 10 minutes a day. That's it. Yeah. That's it. And then I really that's what I recommend people start with.

And I also believe one minute counts. You know? Because time is the biggest in the second book I wrote, I I was really trying to it was is 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. Yeah.

And so if you tell people, look. What I tell people is, one man accounts and try to aim for daily ish. Yeah. And what I've found, and we've tested this with, we we do a meditation challenge every year for the employees at Apple. And, we meaning the folks from the 10 Percent Happier app, and we set it up as a way to as, hey.

Do meditate try to meditate for at least 1 minute, 25 out of 31 days in the month of October.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And if you don't have that minute, you gotta look at your life and figure what's wrong.

Dan Harris
Absolutely. What we find is the buy in rates are incredibly high. And so we're actually this challenge that we run for Apple, we're about to roll it out to the public. Mhmm. So anybody can take the challenge starting in January.

And and so we 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 2 big benefits are focus, you know, really what meditation is, and and you asked 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. And, 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 1000000 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 the 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 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. It doesn't mean I'm, you know, impenetrably, you know, undistractable or something like that. I'm still a Twitter checking, sort of, email checking fool a lot of the time. I just think I'm I'm less prone to that than I used to. Yeah.

The other but the bigger benefit is is called mindfulness, which is in our world of health and wellness is such a huge buzz phrase buzzword. I fear that often people use the word without knowing what they're talking about. So mindfulness really is it's an ancient word with a lot of different and you you know this from your days of studying Buddhism. It it's you know, the ancient word is sati in the in the Pali language, which was the Indian language that the Buddha spoke or said to have spoken. It hack actually has many meanings, but a very simple serviceable definition is the ability to know what's happening in your head without getting carried away by it.

Yeah. The mindfulness is just the scale of being able to see. Oh, this this is anger that's coming up right now. I don't have to be owned by it. I don't have to take the bait and act on it.

It's lowered emotional reactivity Yeah. Essentially. Or another way of saying it would be emotional intelligence. And that is incredibly useful to know you're angry.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Less fights with your spouse. For sure.

Dan Harris
Doesn't mean no fights with your spouse. I mean, again

Dr. Mark Hyman
How you show up in them.

Dan Harris
Absolutely. Absolutely. But again, I always wanna give permission for people to mess up. This is the 10% idea is I think very powerful because it's not like you're gonna start meditating, and then you'll never have a fight with your spouse or you're never gonna show up in one of those fights in a way that's really nasty and vindictive. It just means you may catch yourself earlier.

Actually, my friend, Sam Harris, who has a great podcast called Waking Up, and he wrote a book about meditation called Waking Up. He has said, and I love this, that meditation doesn't mean you will never feel anger again, but it may cut down on the half life of anger. Yeah. You may catch yourself 2 minutes into a a bout of fury rather than an hour into a bout of fury. And the amount of damage, as Sam says, that you can do in an hour of anger versus 2 min 2 minutes, I mean, like, that's just an incalculable difference.

And that's really what meditation, in my experience, does.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It also helps you break the, it seemed like, unbreakable unbreakable bond between your feelings, your thoughts, and your actions. Yes. So often we we we conflate the 2. We have a feeling and that, you know, our thought, and that creates a feeling and that creates an action. When you realize that everything you think in your brain is not necessarily worth listening to, you know, you shouldn't believe every stupid thought you have, basically.

Meditation helps you see that, and you can break down that space where really it used to be 1. It used to be thought, feeling, reaction. And that that's a powerful set of tools to have in any work walk of life, whether it's a relationship, whether it's work, or anything. Because it

Dan Harris
In my in my experience, it's a it's a massive game changer because you're in the this is the cliche. This is like the only cliche meditation cliche that doesn't make me wanna put a pencil in my eye. Because it it it teaches you how to respond wisely to things

Dr. Mark Hyman
instead of reacting blindly. Yeah. Because we have this nonstop conversation going on in our heads,

Dan Harris
all of Because we

Dr. Mark Hyman
have this nonstop conversation

Dan Harris
going on in our heads all the time Mhmm. That, of course, if we broadcast aloud, people would think

Dr. Mark Hyman
we're insane. But we

Dan Harris
have this nonstop chatter, and because we're unaware of it, it owns us. So every neurotic obsession that flits through our mind, we just act it out

Daniel Goleman
Right.

Dan Harris
Blindly because we're we're not aware that this is just a thought. What meditation does is force you into a collision with the asshole in your head so that you you're not taking every shitty idea he or she is offering up to you. And that is what stops you from, you know, eating the 75th cookie or saying the thing that's gonna ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage or whatever, and and it makes a huge difference. Again, we're not talking about infallibility here. We're just talking about reduced levels of the your moron quotient.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what's a dose? Because, you know, you talk about the 1 minute meditation, and I I get that it's a way to get people over the hurdle of starting, but is it really effective? And and for me, I noticed that the first few minutes is like being in a wild ocean in a storm, and then after a while, it kinda calms down and things settle down, and I got to I got to a much different space of of being aware. And and I think, you know, when you look at the science around meditators, you've got Richard Davidson, I know you've worked with, and Yeah. Dalai Lama has done all this research with the Tibetan Olympic meditators who meditated, you know, for 9 years in a cave, for example, versus one minute here and there during the week.

How 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?

Dan Harris
We don't know. You know, I've asked Richie Davidson, the the eminent neuroscientist who's really led the charge on 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 5 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. This 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 the this dream that we're in of of just being controlled by this thought producing machine in our head.

And 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, your everybody in the world's gonna do 5 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. Evolution didn't care about you flossing your teeth. Evolution cared about you getting your DNA into the next generation. Yeah. And so we evolved for threat detection and finding sources of pleasure like mates and food.

We didn't evolve, you know, to develop these long term healthy habits. It's really hard. We're wired for failure. And so I'm always thinking of ways, little hacks to get people over the hump. Yeah.

Because the best way to create a habit is to access the benefits so that it becomes blazingly obvious you should do it, not because somebody's telling you to do it, but because your life is better Yeah. 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, etcetera, etcetera. And, again, we're finding and by we, I mean, my team at 10 Percent Happier. We're finding that this really does work with people, and so that's why I stick with it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Your brain is like a muscle that if you exercise in the right way, you can train it to be better at things.

Daniel Goleman
It's called neuroplasticity. Yeah. And science now tells us that the more you practice, and work out a brain circuit like a muscle, the stronger the connections get, the better it works. So the basic move in meditation say mindfulness, very popular these days. Mindfulness starts with watching your breath.

You put your mind on your breath. You watch the inhalation, the exhalation, and you know what? Your mind's gonna wander. Wanders 50% of the time, Harvard research tells us. And you notice it wandered and you bring it back.

That's the rep. The basic rep is noticing that it wandered and bringing it back. It's just like going to the gym. Every time you lift a weight, you make that muscle that much stronger. Every time you notice your mind wandered and you bring it back, you make the circuitry for paying attention that much stronger.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. So that is that is a powerful idea that you can actually train your brain like you can train your muscles. You can condition your brain like you can condition your body.

Daniel Goleman
And and this is one of the big, differences I saw with the psychology that I knew at the time was that nobody thought you could change the brain. You could you it was just a given. You worked within those parameters. You took, you know, the limits that you had is how you'll always be. Mhmm.

And these eastern psychology said, hey. No. This is just a starting point. But if you practice, it's interesting they call meditation practice. Practice.

Yeah. Because you're practicing. Yeah. You're practice you're getting used to making your mind more flexible, more focused, more calm. The the bonus is if you do loving kindness meditation, it works out a different set of circuits like working out different muscles.

Yeah. And it makes the, the male mammalian caretaking circuitry, which is a parent's love for a child stronger. So people who do that kind of meditation actually become kinder. They actually are more generous, more altruistic. So it depends what you do as it does, you know, when you go to the gym.

Whatever you work out is is what you can improve and same with meditation. Whatever kind of meditation you do, that's where the benefits will be.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And it's interesting because most people think, oh, meditation is a waste of time. What am I doing? I'm just sitting there, look, staring at my navel, But it actually has this powerful effect on so many different aspects of Ralph. You you wrote this book, Altered Traits, where you actually talk about how it changes who you are in a positive way.

Daniel Goleman
Exactly. So the the naive notion that, working out mentally is a waste of time just doesn't understand what the benefits are. And like I said, there you get more calm, you get more clear and focused, you get kinder. Calm, clear, kind, that's that's actually a better year to be. Makes you happier.

It's all about well-being, Mark.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I I mean, it's true. I I, studied Buddhism when I was in college. I went to these 10 days and meditation retreats. You'd come out of there feeling you just took LSD.

Everything was crystal clear. It was just you everything just seemed magic and beautiful. And, you know, then I kinda went through, you know, having medical school and becoming a parent, and I kinda fell off it. And a and a number of years ago, I picked it back up again in a way that is really profoundly impacted me. And I noticed that I don't get upset or triggered or angry.

Well, there was one time my wife said I got angry. That was when we checked in a hotel. We were first kinda getting together, and there were 2 double beds. And it was I was super tired, and I lost it. But other than that, I I don't think I was meditating that much.

I know I was, but I was like, it was sorta over the limit. But I usually notice that I I'm not triggered even by stressful events.

Daniel Goleman
That's another thing that the changes are subtle. All of a sudden you notice I'm not getting angry. Well, you have to notice harder to notice you're not getting angry. But, you know, things that would trigger you in the past don't trigger you as much or as often or as strongly, or if they do, you recover more quickly. Yeah.

Which is the technical definition of resilience is how long it takes you to recover from peak of arousal to getting back to calm. And the the studies that we, looked at in altered traits make it very clear this happens. And there's a dose response relationship. The more you do it, the stronger the benefits.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. What is interesting is is, in your book, you looked at different kinds of meditators. So there's, you know, the beginners. Right. And there there's a lot of benefit you get from just doing it.

Daniel Goleman
We were surprised right away. Like like, the first, you know, 10 hours of practice, you get benefits that are measurable.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, it's been in a cave for 9 years. Right? No. No. And and the benefits accrue very fast.

But then there's the kind of Olympic meditators. Right? The guys who've been meditating

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Literally 9 years in a cave every day, all day, and you put those people in brain scans, and you look at their brain waves, and you found some amazing stuff.

Daniel Goleman
Their brains are different in good ways. One of them is inter I I really like. There's something called the gamma wave. We all get gamma, like, when you have a great idea or when you picture very vividly, like, biting into a peach and it's so crunchy and the smell and the sound and the taste. When that comes together, you get a gamma for about a quarter second.

These yogis That's

Dr. Mark Hyman
why I eat peaches a lot.

Daniel Goleman
These yogis have gamma all the time. Unbelievable. It's never been seen before. When if you, a couple of remarkable things about them. Another is I was I was in the lab when the first yogi was run, and for statistical analytic reasons, this is in an fMRI.

An MRI is like a human cigar case, you know, you just put in this giant magnet that whirs around you. Some people are so frightened of the MRI. They have to go in a practice MRI to get rid

Dr. Mark Hyman
of the MRI.

Daniel Goleman
Oh, it's scary.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I meditate when I go there because I just don't freak out.

Daniel Goleman
So this first guy, the yogi who goes in and these yogis were flown over 1 by 1. So the first one goes in and they say, okay we want you to do 4 different kinds of meditation and, do the meditation for 60 seconds then you'll hear a buzzer then nothing for 30 and then 60 again and then buzzer nothing 30, like, 4 times for each meditation. I don't know about you, but if you or anyone listening to this meditates, like, it takes my mind a little while to settle down. Yeah. But these yogis could do it instantly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Daniel Goleman
And and the readout showed that each of those 4 meditations, there was visualization, concentration Mhmm. Open presence, you know, whatever it was. Mhmm. They could do it immediately, and there was a unique profile for each. So in other words, their brains are really flexible, and they have them under just unbelievable, mastery.

Yeah. And then there are things like

Dr. Mark Hyman
And structurally, they're different too. Right?

Daniel Goleman
What happens this is really encouraging for someone in my age group. The brain ages more slowly the

Dr. Mark Hyman
more you

Daniel Goleman
meditate. And, there was this one, of the one of the 14 yogis who was like the superstar, like, when he did compassion, his, circuits for happiness, interestingly, talked about well-being, activated, like, 7 to 800%. 7 to 800 percent has never been seen.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Daniel Goleman
It's not thought to be possible.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like something somebody lifting 2,000 pounds of weight. Right?

Daniel Goleman
Think about this. The moment he thought of being compassionate, he got happy. Yeah. Like, big time.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. Well, that's an interesting that's an interesting point because what we know is that altruism, and in a sense, that's compassion

Daniel Goleman
Yes. It is.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Triggers the same pleasure centers in the brain as heroin or cocaine, and it's, much safer.

Daniel Goleman
It's a little trick. So the Dalai Lama has always said the first person to benefit from compassion is the one who feels it. Yes. That's right. That's very well put.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's so true. And, you know, what's fascinating is, you know, I was listening to Michael Pollan, who's gonna be on our podcast, talk about the effect of psychedelic drugs

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the research going on around how they affect the brain. Yes. And he says the they suppress something called the default mode network, which is this new area of the brain that was recently discovered that seems to be where the ego lives, where the sense of separation from

Daniel Goleman
thoughts of our self, my worries, what's wrong in my relationships, all of that is default.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. It's the I, the the little I of the little self, which is all about the

Dr. Mark Hyman
threat

Dr. Mark Hyman
to the ego, which is which is protective and defensive and fearful, and it's what we wanna protect and control things with. And when that area gets suppressed with psychedelics, it allows you to feel one with the world and, you know, connection to everybody and love and and your your little self gives way to the big self.

Daniel Goleman
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the same thing happens with meditation.

Daniel Goleman
Well, there's a difference. There's a very big difference. We call our book altered traits, not altered states. Yeah. Because Michael is talking about an altered state.

Yes. The minute that drug leaves your body, I'm sorry, the

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's it.

Daniel Goleman
Self comes back.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Sure.

Daniel Goleman
So meditation changes the brain in a lasting way.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Daniel Goleman
That's the altered trait. And it's a very important difference.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And that's what causes suffering. Right? According to the Buddhist philosophy, suffering is your attachment to things being a certain way, which is usually driven by your ego.

Daniel Goleman
Yes. And liking or disliking this or that, and worrying about this thing and that person and all of that. Yeah. The ego is the source of suffering. Yeah.

And that's one thing that we found is that the part of the brain where the ego lives, so to speak, gets smaller. Yeah. It reduces in meditators, in yogis, in long term meditators.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's fascinating. So was there any other wisdom that came out of that altered traits book and things that people should really know?

Daniel Goleman
Well, I think the the bottom line is that meditation changes you in beneficial ways, and the very best kind of meditation is the one you will do. I don't recommend any brand. It's whatever you can stick with.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Daniel Goleman
Because they all seem to have the same general benefits.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you don't have to be in a meditation hall on in the Himalayas, you know, wearing a

Daniel Goleman
You can do it on a maroon rope. On a subway. Don't do it while you're driving, please. Yeah. But if you're a passenger, you're free to do it.

You can do it anywhere that you can put aside everything else Yeah. And make a space for yourself, which it's in itself is a luxury these days. A time and a place where you're just there for yourself.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I've even meditated in lectures sometimes.

Dan Harris
I'm like,

Dr. Mark Hyman
that is boring. I slipped my

Daniel Goleman
eyes. Wherever you can be.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I put my Bose headphones on the plane. I it's

Daniel Goleman
Nobody's gonna bother you. Yeah. That's the only thing. It has to be because you don't wanna have to pay attention to the other stuff.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Daniel Goleman
That's the point.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's about and and and just to touch back on what we said, you don't have to be an Olympic meditator to get the benefits. We know even in people who are beginners, who have done it for, you know, weeks or days actually start to see benefit. And it seems to improve the immune system, increase stem cells, increase brain connections, increase neurogenesis, which is new brain cells. It helps to regulate, inflammation in the body.

It's pretty extraordinary. And it's free. And it's free. Meditation is medicine, just like food is medicine. I think it's so powerful.

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Dr. Mark Hyman
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Dr. Mark Hyman
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