Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #252 BITESIZE | The Simple Habit That Can Transform Your Health and Happiness I Michael Acton Smith

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode two of the podcast with co-founder of the meditation app Calm, Michael Acton-Smith. Michael admits he wasn't initially convinced about trying meditation until he researched the science. And since then, the practice has transformed his life. And in this clip, he explains how we can all experience the many benefits of meditation by making it an enjoyable daily habit.

Starting point is 00:01:57 I was super stressed. I wasn't eating well. I was sleeping really badly. I had headaches all the time. I was just exhausted. And a friend took me aside and said, why don't you try meditation? And I wasn't in the right mindset. I was like, go away. That sounds ridiculous. I had these preconceived ideas that meditation was religious or woo-woo or a little bit weird. I'd have to get dressed up in weird outfits and whatnot. But I did something I'd never done before. I took myself off on a solo holiday and I started to research meditation. I read the science behind it. I read some amazing books and a light bulb went on and I realized that there was incredible neuroscience behind meditation. This wasn't woo-woo. This was real. This could really rewire your brain in many ways. So that was the moment when I realized, wow, I want to devote the next many,

Starting point is 00:02:43 many years of my life to helping spread this incredibly simple but valuable skill. I think you've really touched on something very important, which is one of the obstacles I see with my patients to doing meditation, which I'm a huge fan of, is the preconceptions that it might be religious. They might have to sit cross-legged somewhere. They might have to say a mantra over and over again. And I think it can be a bit off-putting for people. You know, the term meditation or even mindfulness often gets used interchangeably these days.

Starting point is 00:03:12 And for me, it's really a practice of stillness. And I think in our modern busy world, it's never been more important than having that pause button. What did you find yourself when you first started meditating that convinced you of the benefits? I found it really difficult, I'll be honest. I think a lot of people do. The mind does not like to switch off. It's constantly whirring and swirling away. So even sitting down just for a few moments, my mind would just fill with all sorts of thoughts and ideas. And one of the triggers that helped me reframe it and think about it in a new way was that meditation is like going to the gym.

Starting point is 00:03:52 You know, we lift weights to strengthen our muscles. And by meditating, we're strengthening the attention muscle in our mind. We sit, and it's not about clearing the mind and zenning out. I think that's a misconception. Whenever thoughts come, which they will, we acknowledge them and we gently move them away and go back to focus on a constant such as our breath. And then new thoughts will flood in and we'll do the same thing and again and again and again. And that repeated practice, that's what it is, a practice, helps strengthen that attention muscle and brings so many different benefits to our everyday life when we're not meditating. So that was key for me, thinking of it more as almost mental fitness and been hugely valuable for many

Starting point is 00:04:37 different areas of my life. You have to go slowly at first. You know, you wouldn't, if you're trying to run a marathon, you don't start by running 10 or 20 miles training. You get off the sofa and maybe you walk around the block. And I think the same is true of meditation. Even just breathing consciously and being aware of your breath for a few seconds is a good place to start. In the Calm app, we encourage 10 minutes every morning. But even that can take a little bit of time for people to work up to. So for me, it was just very gently beginning with a few minutes and then lengthening from there. I love your marathon analogy because that's the exact analogy I use with my patients in my practice every single day.

Starting point is 00:05:19 Because many people come back to me and say, you know, Dr. I don't think meditation is for me. You know, I can't do, I can't switch my mind off. And the first thing I say to them is if I said to you, you have to run the London marathon next year, you wouldn't go on one or two jogs and try and do 26 miles and then come back and say, Hey doc, I can't do it. I think you would naturally understand that, you know, you have to train yourself to be able to get to that level. And if we've spent our whole lives busy with information overload and we never actually had to pause and think about our mind and our breath, it's really unrealistic to think we're going to be able to do it straight away.

Starting point is 00:05:56 I don't think there's that knowledge yet that actually these small changes in our lifestyle can have such profound effects. It's so true. I think we tend as humans to overcomplicate things. We think we always look for the most tricky, complex solution. But you're right, simple, very simple lifestyle changes can make massive, massive differences. Just getting a little bit more sleep every night or spending 10 minutes every morning to meditate can transform someone's life. And what I love about your book and your philosophy is that none of these in isolation are silver bullets. But when you combine them, that is when the magic really starts happening.

Starting point is 00:06:34 You know, if all you were to do was meditate and ignore the other areas of your life, you wouldn't see these benefits. But they compound when you do them together. It can be like a vicious cycle for people, you know, either towards poor health or actually a feed forward cycle towards great health. Because, you know, you take an example of someone who can't switch off in the evening, can't sleep, therefore feels tired and sluggish, craves sugary foods the next day to keep them going, feels sluggish, so doesn't want to actually be physically active,

Starting point is 00:07:11 it then becomes this vicious cycle where, you know, they find good health too difficult. Whereas if you pick the right thing for the right person, and this is what I say, you know, you've got to work out what's the right entry point for that individual. Some people like to change their diet first and when they do that, that makes them feel better. So they want to be more physically active. They then want to, you know, look after themselves and meditate and switch off. And then that helps them sleep better. But sometimes, as you've sort of alluded to, people will start with this whole what I call relaxation, this whole switch off, doing meditation. That can be the ticket. And I would say to people listening, you know, just pick one thing and actually commit to it for that one week and just see how you feel at the end of it.

Starting point is 00:07:50 Yeah. Meditation is such a valuable, almost foundation to help other areas of life. You become more aware and conscious of the things you're doing. So instead of instinctively, almost on autopilot, going to the fridge and, you know, taking out something unhealthy, you can check yourself and mindfully say, do I actually really need to do this? Same for so many other areas of your life you might want to change from giving up smoking to social media addiction. It's an incredibly valuable skill. You're able, one of the great ways of framing it, I think, is when you meditate, the decisions you

Starting point is 00:08:26 make in life are responses instead of reactions. You're not going from the oldest part of the brain, the amygdala, just reacting instinctively to things. You're thinking. You have that fraction of a second longer to make conscious choices, and that changes everything. It really does. And when you find that new level of awareness, and this is what I've found, I look back on the way I used to behave in certain situations, I think, wow, I was just reacting. Now I hope I sort of can make better choices

Starting point is 00:08:58 because I'm a little bit more aware. So Michael, for me, I try and meditate every day, although I must say out of my four pillars, I find the relaxation one the hardest. I find food, prioritising sleep and movement pretty much okay for me. I've really sort of got them drilled down in my lifestyle. But the relaxation element I struggle with, and for me, if I do not meditate first thing in the morning, it doesn't happen. Yes, you're not alone. Most people are like that. For all the goodwill, for all our intention, if we don't put a routine around it

Starting point is 00:09:32 and try and schedule it, it's very hard to kind of slip into the rest of the day. So we encourage people. We think the morning is a great time to try and meditate. And there's a principle called anchoring, where you try and do a healthy habit next to something you do instinctively. So we all brush our teeth in the morning. You could say you will meditate after doing those activities and before leaving the house. That's one way to do it. Or some people will do it at their lunch break and they'll know before they go and eat, they'll find a quiet place to meditate for 10 minutes. So establishing that routine every day makes it much, much easier to groove and turn it into a healthy habit. When I posted about

Starting point is 00:10:10 meditation via apps before on social media, some people have said you don't need an app to meditate, that's part of the problem. And look, I think you've got to meet people where they're at. The device and the technology is not the problem. That's merely a tool. It's how we use it that matters. And by learning to meditate, by being more mindful, we can use our phones and our devices the way we want. Rather than being yanked around on autopilot, we become masters of our devices rather than slaves to them.

Starting point is 00:10:40 The average person checks their phone over 100 times a day. Now, I guarantee most of those times will be on autopilot. Far better to do it consciously when we want, how we want, where we want. And again, when you have that control over your device, it improves your life in traumatic ways. I used to go to bed every night doing emails and then would check social media and like an owl would fly by. And I'd find it tricky to switch my mind off unsurprisingly. My dreams would be filled with tweets and Instagram posts. And so now I never use my phone in bed. And when I wake up in the morning, it's hard to do, but I make sure I don't check Twitter or WhatsApp or emails until

Starting point is 00:11:20 I've left the house. And it's incredible the difference it makes going into the shower, not thinking about, you know, why my last Instagram post only got four likes. Again, just daydreaming, thinking, just starting the day in a much lighter way is really powerful. Really hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. But I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday, and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #252 BITESIZE | The Simple Habit That Can Transform Your Health and Happiness I Michael Acton Smith

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.