Good Life Project - 7 Ways to Find Calm | Kickstart 2023

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

In a world that seems to be constantly in motion, it can be difficult to find calm. Whether it's the never-ending stream of news notifications on our phones or the constant pressure to be doing, it can feel like we're always on the go. But it is possible to find calm amidst the chaos. Here are 7 ways to do just that.You can find the 1-page worksheet HERE.Find All Of The Episodes In This Series:How to Succeed at Anything Worth Doing | 2023 KickstartA Simple Model for a Really Good Life | 2023 KickstartWhat Should I Do With My Life? Start Here | Kickstart 2023Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED: We’re looking for special guest “wisdom-seekers” to share the moment you’re in, then pose questions to Jonathan and the Sparked Braintrust to be answered, “on air.” To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey there. So as we head into 2023, so many of us are feeling this uncomfortable blend of hope and possibility, but also caution and concern. And while there's this sense of emergence, it's also still coupled with a perpetual sense of groundlessness, high stakes, uncertainty. And I think we're all starting to realize that that new normal, the one we've all been waiting for where you get to go back to a place of relative calm, it's actually never happening. And the truth is the old normal for so many, it was never a place of peace and ease, calm or grace. So what do we do with this? When the circumstances of our lives, our relationships, our work, health, sense of security are perpetually in flux? Well sure, some things we can control. So

we step in and we exert whatever agency we have in those domains. But still, so much of life is and will remain a swirl. So how do we come back to a place of relative peace and ease, of relative inner calm, regardless of what the world delivers to our front doors? Our ability to do this is so central to the ability to live good lives and also to our ability to access a state of presence and grace and gratitude that lets us even notice what is good and true and nourishing even when much around us remains hard or uncertain. So how do we cultivate a sense of calm, of grace and ease, both on demand when we need it and in a more sustained way, even when the world around us seems to keep tugging it away? How do we reclaim control over our ability to access peace? That is what I'm talking about in this installment of your 2023

Kickstart series. So if you've missed any of the earlier episodes that focus on succeeding at big, meaningful things, understanding what to focus on to live a good life, and how to find and do work that makes you come alive, be sure to download those in your podcast app so they're teed up to listen to right after this episode. You'll find links to all of those episodes in the series in the show notes.

And just like those earlier episodes, we're also including a link in the show notes to a free downloadable PDF that shares all seven techniques that we'll talk about today. So you can really just listen in and not worry about having to take notes or remember everything. Oh, and one last thing, towards the latter part of this episode, I'm going to share a brief guided visualization designed to bring you back to a deep state of calm

that you can listen to and return to whenever you want. So be sure to listen all the way. And you may want to also tap that icon to save this episode in your podcast app. So you can return to it whenever you want and drop into that peaceful place on demand. So excited to share these seven ways to find calm. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared

to previous generations, iPhone XS are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what's the difference between me and you? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. Okay, welcome back. Super excited to dive into the seven ways to find calm.

Now, does that mean there are only seven ways in your life, in your world, to find calm? No, of course not. But what I'm sharing today, these are seven different tools or strategies or practices that I have personally experienced, explored, many of them deepened into for years, if not decades, and found to make a real, lasting lasting and profound difference in my life. And there's also fascinating science behind these different ideas and tools and strategies that show that this isn't just about me. This is not just about an N-1 one-person experiment. These are things that can make a real difference and do make a real difference in the lives of millions and millions of people, no matter who you are or where you are or where you've come from.

So let's drop into the first one. But one last thought before we do that also. I'm going to offer these seven different ideas or strategies. Does that mean that every single one of them is appropriate and accessible and available to every single person? Maybe yes, maybe no. Some of you may say, wow, all seven of these as you're walking through them, they all feel like I could say yes to them. Some of you may say, well, some of these sound more interesting or accessible to me and some of them not so much. And some of them you may just kind of say, that doesn't sound all that interesting to me. I don't even want to try it. The idea behind not just giving you one tool or two tools, but seven is that I want to deliver a bit of a toolkit to you. So you can kind of pick and choose what feels right, what is available and accessible to you, and work with the things

that you're most called for and feel most available and effective for you and your unique circumstance. Okay, let's dive in. So, tool number one, breathing. Yes, I actually said breathing. You may think to yourself, wait, what? Breathing. That's that thing that I do all day, every day. It's the thing that if I stop doing, I cease being. It happens automatically in the background. I don't wake up in the morning and think to myself, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. I don't consciously will this to happen on a daily basis. It just happens in the background. It's automatic. In fact, it is controlled largely by a part of our nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, that just kind of goes, runs in the background, runs a script without us having to think about it. It's automatic.

But here's the fascinating thing. We also can exercise intentional control over our breathing. It's one of the few sort of internal life-sustaining systems in the body where we have the ability to override the automatic process in a very simple and immediate way that's happening and control it. Question is, why would we want to do that? I mean, why mess with something that seems to be kind of rolling, doing okay in the background without me doing anything about it?

And the answer is because our breathing, more particularly our rate of breathing and our depth of breathing, is directly related to other systems in the body that upregulate our state of agitation, and that also can include anxiety and alertness or down-regulate our state of being into a place of calm and peace and relaxation. So what many of the longest-standing healing traditions, philosophical traditions, even spiritual traditions that have been around for thousands of years, practices of mind and body have known for millennia is that breath is sort of the gateway to regulating state. In yogic literature, the practice of harnessing breath in order to regulate energy states, it's known as pranayama, which is a Sanskrit word. It's actually a blend of two Sanskrit words, the word prana, which is the word for life force or energy, and the word

yama, which is the word that translates roughly to restraint. So the blended effect is using the breath to shape or control or to manage life force or energy. And the mechanism is the breath. This was known literally thousands of years ago. Little did they know, fast forward, extensive academic peer-reviewed published research now validates this connection that we have seen in many of these ancient practices. So the science on the connection between breath patterns and state of mind varies. Some of it shows that the depth and

the duration of breath ties directly to our nervous system regulation. So it ties into the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. When we are in a sympathetic nervous system state, this is commonly known as a fight, flight, fawn, or freeze place where we're super activated. We're usually also reflects as having very shallow, fast, upper chest-based breaths. And what we know is that just as when we're in a fear state or an anxiety state or an agitated state, that affects our breathing. Our breathing also can put us into that state or take us out of that state. So we know that our breathing rate and depth actually has a direct linear relationship with our nervous system and whether we are in a parasympathetic, calmer, relaxation state or in a sympathetic, agitated, activated state.

And we can use the breath to regulate which we want to be in and to bring ourselves back down to a place of calm. So over the years, we also know that if you can use the breath as a tool to regulate your nervous system, that the nervous system also regulates the other systems in the body, including the endocrine system, which releases chemistry into the body, which causes those feelings of either profound agitation and anxiety often, or deep relaxation and calm. So the breath controls the nervous or electrical system, which then controls our internal chemistry plant, which then controls how we feel. The cool thing is we can use the breath as a switch to turn it up and turn it down. And that is what all these practices

that have been developed over so many years effectively do. So what we know, for example, is that when we take longer extended gentle exhales, it tends to down-regulate or calm down our body. It activates the parasympathetic part of the nervous system and it brings us into a much more relaxed place. When we take shorter, quicker breaths, it does the exact opposite. So how can we use this to access a state of calm in the moment? The cool thing about the breath is that some of the practices that I'm going to talk about,

well, they have more of a long-term effect. They build over time as a practice and contribute to more of our ability to be in an enduring or persistent state of calm. The cool thing about the breath is it is much more of an intervention. It works literally in seconds when you want to get back to a calmer place. In fact, some of my early exposure to breath work as a way to regulate my state of being and bring myself back to a place of calm. Actually, touchdown. I want to say in a past life, it's probably a number of past lives at this point. When I was a large firm lawyer in New York City in the late 90s, yes, you may not know that about me, but that was my life for a

chunk of years, working incredible hours under huge amounts of stress with incredible stakes. And it was not unusual for me to pick up the phone and on the other side, either have a client or a senior partner, somebody basically in a highly agitated, sometimes adversarial state, wanting to talk to me, sometimes in an aggressive way. Now, I'm somebody who tends to react very visually and very quickly in a negative way, causes a huge amount of stress. And I started to ask myself, I said, you know, how can I equip myself with some sort of tool or strategy so that I can be in this work. I can know that I'm going to be in potentially confrontational or adversarial contexts and still not only do good work, but also feel like I'm okay just as a human being. I can come back to a place of relative calm.

And that, more than about 25 years ago now, is when I started actually researching pranayama and then eventually yoga and a whole bunch of other things. And it worked so incredibly that it started to lead me down that rabbit hole. And in part, I would even say, led me out of the practice of law because I was so fascinated with these practices. I wanted to know more about it. What I started to do was I would very intentionally slow down my exhales whenever I was at a moment where I wanted to very rapidly come back to a place of feeling relaxed and calm. And there are a whole bunch of different techniques that you can do from a yogic standpoint, but I'll share one of the sort of like most fundamental ones that you may have read about or heard about. People generally shorthand it as box breathing. And it's this notion that if you

think about a box or a square, it's got four sides and each side are equal. When we think about box breathing, the first thing we have to understand is that breathing is actually not just inhale and exhale. There are two other components to a full cycle of breath. There is the inhale. There's a momentary pause. There's the exhale. There's a momentary pause.

So what box breathing posits is that if you actually take those four components of the breath, inhale, pause, exhale, pause, and you breathe in a way where they're all about equal length, that is one of the techniques that can upregulate the parasympathetic or calming part of the nervous system and get you to a place of relative calm fairly quickly. So that might look at your sound like inhale, two, three, pause, two, three, exhale, two, three, pause, two, three. That would be one box breath. And you could cycle through that for a few minutes if it's comfortable for you. Again, we all want to think about these practices and everything that I offer in the terms of does it feel comfortable? Does it

feel accessible? Is it safe for me, my own unique physiology and circumstance? Make those decisions intelligently based on your unique situation. So box breathing is one way to sort of slow the cycle of breathing and allow yourself to drop back into that deeply calming parasympathetic state. What we also know, and some other techniques that have been really effective for me, are extending the exhale. So another technique is what would be called trapezoidal breathing, where you actually extend the length of the exhale, often to twice the length of the inhale. So that might look like inhale, two, pause. Exhale, two, three, four, pause. Right?

So we're basically doubling the length of the exhale. So if the inhale is for two, the exhale is for four. Now, a quick note about the pause between breaths. If you want to explore this or play with it, try it a little bit. And that is when we say pause, we're not talking about closing the back of your throat, closing your ladders, or putting any kind of pressure or exertion behind it. We simply pause calmly with an open throat, with no forced effort. We linger in the pause rather than force a pause. And that's really important to know. There's one final approach to breathing, which I have developed as my own.

This is my own personal practice over a period of many years. And it blends a bunch of different styles of breathing. And I found for me, it is the most relaxing. And so it gives me access to a place of stillness that is really quite profound. I call it teardrop breathing. And the reason is because if you sort of draw the lines of the four parts of the breath, it forms almost like a diamond with a really extended two sides or a teardrop. And the way it works for me, the way that I do it, is I will inhale for a certain count. I'll pause for that count. I'll exhale for double the length,

and then I'll pause for double the length. So for me, that might sound like inhale Exhale, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Pause, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Now, I've been doing this practice for years. So over time, my body has come to actually be trained to be able to slow my breath and extend those numbers and expand them to a point where I literally will breathe twice a minute doing that. Do not start that way. Start with very short intervals. And if they feel comfortable over time, then just allow them to organically expand a little bit and then a little bit more and then a little bit more. And maybe over time, you get to a place where it's longer. Maybe you just get to a place where you feel like,

this is really effective for me. What I have found is in the final pause, before I take the next inhale, that extended pause is kind of magical for me. There is something that happens where I feel a sense of almost bliss for just a few seconds. And every time I cycle through, but I can bring myself back to that place. It is incredibly stilling and renewing for me. So that is just one of the tools that

we're going to talk about. Using the breath as a powerful mechanism to access calm. And as I mentioned, of the tools in the toolbox, this is more of an intervention level tool. It works fairly quickly when you're in a state where you just find yourself agitated or anxious or aroused, and you really want to come back down to a much calmer, more baseline, more relaxed state in a relatively short period of time. So let's move on to our second tool. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. The second way to find calm is movement, right? So for years, I would even say generations, we looked at exercise or a lot of forms of physical movement. And we said, well, this is what we do when we want to perform at a really high level, when we're an athlete or for aesthetics.

We want to look a certain way. So we want to be like, we want to have a certain appearance. And we want to be, you know, like we want to have a certain appearance. And movement was associated with either aesthetics or athletics, performance or appearance. These were certainly the two dominant reasons that we would move our bodies. What we've learned over the last couple of decades through a growing and incredibly powerful body of research is that movement affects not just our physical ability to perform or strength or flexibility to exert ourselves or the way that we look. It affects our physiology. It affects our physical health. But here's the really fascinating

thing, that movement also has a profound effect on our mental state of being. So I remember reading many years ago a book by John Rady called Spark, where he was a therapist, psychologist, I believe, maybe a psychiatrist, I'm blanking on which it was. And he started to integrate exercise as regular modalities to help people who were experiencing profound phobia or fear or anxiety or depression and seeing stunning results often equivalent to the level of outcomes that were generated by long-term therapeutic interventions and even medication. More recently, in fact, last year on the podcast, we had a guest, Dr. Jennifer Heise, who is an associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University and director of the Neurofit Lab.

She also wrote a really fascinating book called Move the Body, Heal the Mind. We'll drop a link to that episode if you really want to go deeper into this into the show notes, by the way, so you can sort of explore more. And her work is literally really examining how physical movement affects our brains and our state of everything from cognition to creativity to mood to anxiety, depression, excitation, positivity or negativity, all these different things. And the research is crystal clear that movement can have a very immediate effect on our state of mind. Movement also, similar to breathing, can bring us from a sympathetic, agitated, activated, freaked out, anxious state into a parasympathetic, calm, relaxed, peaceful state incredibly quickly. So this falls into one of those tools that I would also call interventional. It works fairly rapidly and in the moment it will change your state very

quickly. And even better, movement or particular types of movement affect us in different ways. So one of the things that I found over time and some of the research looked at is sort of saying like, well, what kind of movement and at what level of intensity and for how long? And the answer is it really varies based on the person and based on the state that you're looking to access. One of the things that has become increasingly apparent to me when we think about moving our body is that movement that lets us lose time can be incredibly effective. Look for things that intrinsically bring your attention into the practice of movement rather than something that allows you to kind of dissociate from your body and stay in your head and let your body move while your head stays stuck in

calm, destroying chatter or spin. So for example, I live in Colorado. I have that just incredibly blessed to have this opportunity to be in this space for this season of my life. Now, not too long ago, I lived in New York City and I lived there for three decades for basically my entire adult life. And when I was trying to move my body there, I would often try and go out and walk around Central Park, which is one of the biggest parks in the world, or along the river. But when it got kind of cold and ugly there and gray, you know, I would often sort of have to move inside. And in the early days before a lot of other great

home-based equipment with a lot of variety were available, I would end up going to a traditional gym. That model is often based on maximizing revenue per square foot, which means putting tons of pieces of equipment that are based on repetitive motion. The repetitive motion does not involve intrinsically you and your attention being connected to it. So you could be walking on a treadmill or doing something else. You will experience the physiological changes in your body from that. That can be really beneficial for your immune system, for your health, for your mental health required by the nature of the activity to check out of the chatter and the spin and pay attention to the activity itself. So you may well be on that

repetitive motion device, but your head is still completely in whatever the circumstance is that is causing you so much stress and spin. So what I found is super helpful when we're thinking about what exercises or movements to say yes to. Look for things that you would experience that have a high level of change, of novelty, and that by the very nature of them, they require your mind, your attention to be focused in on the activity. So fun examples would be things like mountain biking or cycling or frisbee, yoga, play catch with something, ecstatic dance, things where your brain, basically the nature of the activity requires your brain to completely check out of the world around you and be hyper present in the activity that you're doing. For me, the simple difference

between going for a walk on streets and around the block where my mind can really wander and going for a walk or going for a hike on a trail. And for me, again, I'm very fortunate. The nature of the trail, the fact that it's rocky, it's rooty, it's craggly, it's up and down, there are trees all around me, the environment is changing all the time, my mind has to be there with me. It has to be present in the hike. And that changes what it does to me and my ability to access real states of almost transcendent calm. When I'm on a trail, I find much more difficulty accessing that state, even though I'm getting the benefits of moving my body, when I'm doing something that is much more ritualized or repeated without a lot of novelty and where the nature of the movement itself does not require me to be present in the activity. The final word again, I'll reflect back and say, with everything that I'm doing, honor whatever level of ability or mode of movement is accessible and appropriate for you. If it is not very accessible strengthening and getting more flexible, not just

about performance, not just about aesthetics, but as a powerful mechanism to rapidly get your brain into a much calmer state of being. Okay, on to number three. Okay, so this is a really fun one. Number three is music. What does the music actually do to us? So I have been somebody where music has been an essential part of my life from my earliest memories. I grew up in the seventies, like sort of the heartbeat of folk music. My house, I literally cannot remember a time when I was a kid where there wasn't some kind of music playing on the record, whether it was Seals and Cross or Country Joe and the Fish or Joe Cocker, a lot of the Woodstock era artists or folk artists. It has been this consistent theme that has stayed

through me. I then made music, I composed music, I played music. When I was in college, I was actually a club DJ, spinning three or four nights a week until three or 4 a.m. in the morning, so creating music. And what I've learned over this time is that it's not just a love of music, of the intricacy, of the frequencies, of the sounds, of the words. It is what music does to me. Music has this stunning ability to change state literally in seconds. It is fast and it is effective. And some music creates what has become known as the attunement effect. It allows our body's nervous system to naturally down-regulate. And research tells us that listening to music can activate that parasympathetic calming part of the nervous system in ways that are similar to some of the other mechanisms

that we've talked about. And no doubt you have experienced this. You may have heard something on, I'm taking myself back, on the radio. You may have heard something on your device. You may have had something streaming where, you know, it's on a list where it's just presenting you with music that has been selected because it thinks that you would like it. And you're kind of listening and like, it's fun, it's nice. And all of a sudden something comes on and it catches your breath. And you either just feel this sense of extraordinary energy or excitement, or you feel this sense of deep, calm, abiding, almost transcendence.

Maybe you feel a sense of deep, calm, abiding, almost transcendence. Maybe you feel a sense of profound sadness. What we know is that different types of music, different kinds of music, different frequencies of music affect us in really powerful ways. And our attunement to the music can change the state of our nervous systems, either take us up into sympathetic agitation

or down into parasympathetic calm. So we want to experiment with music. Bring it into what you're doing. And if you're feeling agitated, activated, anxious, run the experiment with different kinds of music, right? So for me, when I hear different kinds of music, right? So for me, when I hear different kinds of music, and I've run enough of these experiments where I really know how different specific pieces of music and even genres affect me. And a lot of people have run this experiment in the context of

wanting energy. You're exercising and you want to have something where you're excited and energized and quote pumped up. Haven't used that phrase in a really long time. So you put on some really good stuff with like a strum beat, maybe it's EDM, maybe it's metal, maybe whatever it is. You know, you want to actually have that energy. The energy from that hyper activated music literally translates into operating, regulating your body systems and giving you energy. But what most of us have not experimented with is the opposite. Using music to bring us back down into a state of calm body. It works equally effectively. So start to play with that. When you're feeling you want to come back to a place of calm, think to yourself, okay,

so what's on my playlist here? What could I choose where I could just play a song or two or three, close my eyes and vanish into the music? What music takes me away? That's the question to ask. What music takes me away, transports me? Which brings us to another really interesting secondary reason why certain music may really bring you back to a place of calm and peace. And that is because often,

music that we heard earlier in life, we associate with the state that it generated or the moment of our lives where we felt a certain way. And when we hear that music again, it could be literally decades later. It immediately anchors to that state, and it brings our system back into that state. As I'm speaking, I'm thinking back to 1979. I'm literally lying on the floor of my basement on an old, dirty shag rug. I have headphones on and a record player. And coming through the record player is a piece of old vinyl that is one of the most iconic albums that has ever been sold, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. And I'm listening to that end to end with my eyes closed, literally just lying on my back on a shag rug in

79 in the basement with the lights off, arms out to the side. And I am almost gone. It is like I'm in the physical space, but I'm actually somewhere else entirely. I'm floating somewhere else. And by the way, the only thing that is flowing through my body is music. When I hear that album now, literally almost any beat, any note from it, just a couple of seconds of it, not only does that transport me into a similar place because it does that to my body, but it has a secondary effect of triggering the anchoring effect that brings me back to that moment in my life where everything was as it should be and I was completely at peace. So it has this anchoring to the past effect, which can also deepen the effect of music. And that brings us probably to a question which is on your mind, which is what kind of music? What kind of music do I need to listen to if I want the music to bring me back to a calm place?

And intuitively, you might say to yourself, well, super activated music is going to make me like really sort of like up. Then super chill music, you know, maybe some really chill laid melodic jazz, or maybe some classical music, or maybe some soundtrack-y type of stuff, or maybe some chill piano arpeggios. In fact, that is not necessarily true. What some of the research shows is that what music has the effect of calming you is entirely dependent on you as an individual. Some people actually drop into a very relaxation response-based state when they're listening to metal. Other people will do it when they're listening to some beautiful piece of classical music or to opera.

Some others, when they're listening to something deeply melodic and instrumental. Some will listen to singer-songwriter and that's what gets them there. So run the experiment. Don't automatically assume that whatever somebody else uses will work for you or whatever sort of like a quote makes sense in your head will be the right type of music for you to access a place of calm. Try different tracks. try different things. I know for me to this day, so much of the music from when I was a kid brings me to that place really quickly, but I'm also constantly listening to new things and stumbling upon all sorts of new tracks that take me there really quickly. And in fact, I have a whole bunch of playlists on my devices that are designed where if I feel like I need this because I'm in a not the place I want to be psychologically, I'll play these tracks.

And often I will combine them with some of the other a slow intentional walk or hike outside while I'm also exploring breathing exercises. So these things can be really powerful sometimes when you combine them as well. And that brings us to number four. And this is kind of a fun one that most people have not heard of before. And this is something that I've heard called toning. And toning is, it's almost like we're building on the effect of music. It's a really interesting take. And rather than the effect that sound has on us when it comes from the outside in,

toning is the effect that sound has on us when it comes from the inside out. That means you singing, speaking, praying, chanting, taking a single syllable and repeating it in a particular way over time. So what's fascinating is that there's actually some research on the experience of toning. Interesting 2018 study published in the Journal of Music Therapy looked at the effects of toning, what they described as a form of vocalizing that utilizes the natural voice to express sounds ranging from cries, grunts, and groans to open vowel sounds and humming on full exhalation of the breath. Probably the most accessible or the most commonly recognizable form of toning would be some form of prayer or chanting. Anyone who's been exposed to the world of

spirituality or yoga has probably heard the syllable OM. And you may have heard the syllable OM sung or chanted. You may have done that yourself. You may have done it in a room with other people. And you know the effect that it can have on you. And whether the attribution by whoever is offering this is something that is spiritual or dogmatic, what we know is that there's a whole different thing that happens in your body that is purely physiological and psychological based on the vibrations and how it affects our systems. That study showed that toning often generated a deeply emotional state, most often described with the words meditative, calm, and relaxed. Now another study of 2019 out of San Francisco State showed that 20 was actually effective at reducing mind wandering and thought

intrusion, which is so often negative, better than mindfulness and increasing sensations of physical vibration. And they also noted reductions in stress and anxiety and an increase in heart rate variability, which again, is a powerful marker of activating those body systems that bring us back into a better or grounded place. Another factor in Tony was that it brought the average person's breathing rate from about 11.6 breaths a minute, which is really typical, down to 4.6 breaths a minute. And remember when we were talking about breathing, when we slow down the breath, when we extend the exhale, it activates that parasympathetic calming part of the nervous system. So literally when we're cutting the breath

rate in half, that is part of what may be happening. Now here's the cool thing about toning also. Pretty much anyone can tone. It may be a little goofy feeling. It may feel a little embarrassing. It may feel a little strange or awkward, but it is super accessible to the vast majority of people. The biggest barrier isn't your mind wandering. It's usually just getting over yourself. Omni, using the syllable om, O-M, om, right? Singular, communal, sea of oms. So in a different past life, after I was a lawyer, I actually owned a yoga center in

New York City, in Hell's Kitchen, New York City, for seven years and taught thousands, actually probably more like tens of thousands of students over a period of many years. And very often we would end class by coming up into a seated position, eyes soft, lights soft, and we would share these three ohms. And I would lead in, I would say, and, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 people would all join in. And it was funny to see new people in class who were not sort of like comfortable doing this, had never done it before. And they'd be kind of peeking out of their eyes or looking around, seeing if anyone was paying attention to them because they felt really strange doing it. And then they come back like the next day and then they come back next week. And then within a matter of a couple of weeks, the eyes stay closed. The smile that just sort of like stayed

on their face, their body relaxed into it. And you could see they're almost leaning into it and loving the feeling of doing it, not just individually, but being surrounded by this. The whole body attunes the way it does from the outside in to the sound of all the other voices sharing a similar tone, mixing in and harmonizing with the sound of that tone emanating from your own body. So we get the attunement effect plus the toning effect, and it can be incredibly powerful. So play with that a little bit, the idea of toning. Now, you may want to start out individually in your own room, in your own office, if you feel really comfortable and you have pretty soundproof walls, play with it. Choose a syllable if you want to start with. Oh, that's fine. Choose

any other syllable. Choose a line from a song. Choose a prayer that is deeply meaningful to you or three syllables from it or a word from it. Just take something, right? Close your eyes, take a few breaths just to settle it, and then just slowly repeat it as a quiet chant if you want first or just a quiet repetition of the sound. Yeah, I might just sit here and say to myself, Right? I can literally feel this subtle vibration in my body as we hit the low tone,

the baritone part of that. I may slowly feel more comfortable and over time start to find myself saying, Again, that may be a goofy syllable for you. That's fine. Find something that you're comfortable saying, repeating, singing out loud on a repeated basis, eyes closed, and notice how it changes the way that you feel. Toning.

Remember, when we do that, when we get comfortable potentially even doing that with other people, we get the blended effect of toning plus attunement. That brings us to number five. Number five in our seven ways to find calm. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. And now we're starting to sort of get more into things that can be, have more of an intervention-based effect. It can help you in the moment, but also things that are, also play the double role of being a practice, where when you do them repeatedly over time, the effect builds. And we gain the sense of being able to dip back into calm, back into peace of knees, back into a state of equanimity more easily and more regularly. By simply repeating these things over time, it starts to become more the fabric of our day rather than something that we have to fight to access in a moment where we desperately feel we need it. So journaling is number five. Journaling. Now what's interesting is I have never been a journaler for my entire life. I have always wanted to be a journaler but I've just never been

that person. And I have many friends that are that person and because I'm a writer many writers have been writing for their entire lives and they have decades of journals that they can reflect back on to pull stories and moments to remember how they felt. It's a great way to memorialize the experience of your life and to be able to look back and reflect on how you've moved through them how they've affected you. What we also know about journaling is it can be a powerful way of processing, of processing stress and struggle. So the act of pulling out of your mind and depositing on paper or on a screen or on a device, the things that are spinning in your head can feel freeing, especially when you are moving through times of

stress or struggle or feeling unable to let go of past experiences. There's actually a pretty substantial amount of research on different types of journaling. Often in the literature, it's called expressive writing. Research shows that things like even short interventions of three to five days of expressive writing, generally of around 15 minutes, about things that have caused stress or struggle, or maybe currently are causing stress or struggle, doing that on a regular basis, on a daily basis of free-form writing, even if you never talk about it and you never show anybody else a word of it, can have really powerful grounding effects. Amazing long-term benefits that range from reduced stress

to improved mood, greater psychological well-being, and even physiological effects like improved immune function, memory, athletic performance, and more. So journaling can be a powerful tool to not only make sense of your life, your experiences, but also to get it out of your head and allow your body to come back to a place of peace and ease. Now, one of the questions that often comes up when we talk about journaling is how much and how long. And the studies differ on this. Some are generally use a protocol which is around 15 to 20 minutes a day. Often it's a short intervention too. We're not talking about measuring people over months. It's often three to five days. 2021 study actually looked at a form of journaling that was just three minutes a day that they shorthanded as the three

minute makeover. That was found to be incredibly effective even at that short duration. One of the most popular and maybe iconic approaches to journaling is something called Morning Pages that was developed by writer Julia Cameron, who has also been a past guest on this show, wrote this stunning, iconic book that has sold, I don't know, tens of millions of copies called The Artist's Way, where every morning you wake up and instead of thinking about time, you actually think about pages. You write in longhand, three pages, stream of consciousness without thinking about it, without editing purely to just pour whatever it is out of your head. Now, I have done this practice in bursts over time and at different times and found it to be incredibly powerful because it does. I would wake up with a lot of stuff

spinning in my head and it would kind of just dump it out of my mind. And I could step into my day from a place of just so much more stillness and perspective. Super powerful practice. So experiment with different ways to journal if journaling is something that feels like it is available to you. I actually, the longer time listeners will all know, that in the fourth quarter of last year, October, November, I took a creative sabbatical. And I journaled the

entire time. I have about 10,000 words of journaling that came out of that one month creative sabbatical, which by the way, I also was working on a written work and I wrote about 20,000 words of that work. So I literally wrote half as much just in journaling. And I found it incredibly, incredibly powerful and effective at bringing me back to a place that allowed me to process some of the stuff that I was struggling with. It allowed me to see more clearly, get past some illusions and assumptions and chatter that was in my head about certain things and kind of poured onto the page. And no, it was just there. And if I needed to revisit anything, it was there. I never did, by the way, but it was there. And what it did was it was

a process of extraction. It kind of cleared things out so I could come back to a place of stillness and spaciousness and then focus back on the things that would actually be nourishing to me more effectively and more easily. So many people feel some version of this. And a reminder also, when you're journaling, if you find yourself journaling about things that are really tough moments from your past, and if it brings up deep emotions or feelings, please be sure, we always recommend, talk to a qualified mental health professional who may be able to help you better navigate anything that comes up that is bigger or deeper or really does require more of the attention of somebody who's qualified to help you process and integrate those things if they happen to be a part of your experience. So we are winding around to our final two of the seven ways to find calm. Number six

is nature. Nature? Wait, what? Yes, nature. So for the 30 years or so that I was living in New York City, the saving grace for me was that almost no matter where I lived in the city, and I lived in a lot of different places over three decades, I was a short walk from trees, from grass, from parks, and from water. If I did not have that available to me, I honestly don't think I would have lasted more than a few years in an urban environment because nature is the thing that has always been the place for me

where I touch stone, where I come back to stillness, where everything, my mind, my body down regulates, and I just feel a sense of spaciousness and peace and ease most readily. It is the place that I go to. Even as a kid, I grew up in a suburb outside of New York City. It was actually on Long Island. And the name of my town, my town was actually the town that East 8 from the Great Gatsby was based on. So it was a water town. It was a peninsula surrounded by water. And the end of my block was the bay. And anytime I was upset or stressed, freaking out or anxious, I would get on my bike, I'd ride down to the end of the block, I'd climb up on top of the lifeguard tower, and I would just sit there looking at the water,

being around a natural environment. It completely changed me. And to this day, nature is my number one go-to. But it's not just my personal experience. As with so much of what I've shared, there's really interesting research that now backs up our intuitive knowing that nature can be a powerful psychological reset for us. In Japan, there are forests that are actually called Shinrin-yoku forests, which translates roughly to forest bathing designated, because it is so clear that immersion in these forest-type of environments is super effective at helping people come down from a place of anxiety and spin and chatter into calm. Research done also shows that exposure to nature affects a lot of different systems in the body, from reducing blood pressure and heart rate and muscle tension and the production of stress hormones, to shifting from

stressed and anxious to more calm states, to even lowering inflammatory cytokines and inflammation in the body and improving mood. Another interesting study shows us that living in urban environments, if you live in an apartment building in a city and you have plenty of trees and green space around you, that people felt more connected to community and to neighbors and had a stronger sense of belonging and could better cope with everyday stressors than folks who were in apartments or urban environments where there really wasn't a lot of greenery. It was just all concrete, very few trees, and very little green space. Even that in an urban environment has a profoundly transformational effect, not just on our state of mind, but on our state of connectedness. In fact, MRI studies or fMRI

studies have shown that even looking at images of nature light up the parts of the brain that correspond with empathy and love. And we know from our last episode, if you haven't listened to it, it's a fantastic episode with Bob Waldinger about the power of relationships, that relationships are mission critical to not just living a good life, but also feeling a sense of peace and ease and aliveness. In the literature, we also see these two other kind of fascinating theories that have been offered about why nature has this effect on us. One is called the stress reduction theory, and it argues that access to nature influences feelings or emotions by activating that parasympathetic nervous system

to reduce stress and autonomic arousal. Another theory that's been known as the attention restoration theory, I love all these fancy names for theories, don't you? Another theory that's been known as the attention restoration theory. I love all these fancy names for theories, don't you? It says that paying attention in fast-paced urban environments and workplaces and offices or other stressful environments, it takes a ton of required focus. It is a heavy effort attention lift. That takes a lot out of us. It literally increases stress by causing so much effort to keep our attention flitting and spinning and hyper-focusing at high speed. In nature, though, research shows that people let their attention wander more expansively

and with less effort and exertion, which leads to a more relaxed state of body and mind. And we know now that nature is so important to mental and physical health that the lack of it has actually become known as a syndrome, nature deprivation. And we look at certain places, especially in urban environments. If you've ever heard the term food deserts, where we talk about parts of urban environments often where access to really good, healthy, whole foods just isn't available. We're now talking about parts of urban environments, and they're using the phrase park deserts, where access to greenery, to nature, to trees is not available. And we're talking about the potential deleterious effects that it has not just on your health and physiology, but on your state of mind and your ability to just feel like you are at peace.

Nature is stunningly important. But what we also know is that not everybody has access to nature. The good news here is that even the smallest exposure to greenery can make a difference. Research also tells us that having a simple plant in view in a house or an office changes your psychology and your physiology. It can down-regulate your state. Even being in a hospital, recovering from a procedure, there is a noticeable difference between people who have a window where they can look at a greenery and people who don't have a window where they can look at a greenery. In everything from level of perceived pain to time in the hospital before being released. Nature matters. And even if you can't

get out into local parks or beautiful green environments, you can bring nature even on the simplest levels inside or even position yourself so that you can see something through a window. All of those things make a difference. Now, like many of the other things I've talked about, one of the questions that often comes up is, well, how much and how often? And here, the research is kind of mixed. But what I'll tell you is that there is information that points to the fact that a sort of a cumulative two hours a week of exposure to greenery is the point where it starts to have a really genuine effect on our state of both mind and body. Now that may sound like two hours, or am I going to find two hours, but actually over the course of seven days, we can almost all find ways to either be out in nature

or bring nature into us where we're exposed to us. Literally, if I'm sitting here in my office studio and I had a plant or a couple of plants in my room, that would be like five, six days a week exposed to that. So it's actually much easier than most of us think to get that exposure to nature. And nature is such a profound reset for so many of us. And like I said, so many of us do not spend a lot of time outdoors or in nature anymore. It matters. It really, really does matter. So think about how you can either be out in nature more or bring more of it into you. And that brings us to the final, the seventh element in our seven ways to find calm, is meditation. More specifically, mindfulness. So you've probably heard the word meditation. Pretty safe bet that many of you have heard about this thing called mindfulness. Mindfulness is two things. One is

it's a natural practice, which is designed to really help us be able to become more aware of our inner and outer surroundings, be able to let go of whatever spin is keeping us from feeling the way we want to feel, and also more regularly just access the state of peace and ease, equanimity. And for me, this has been a practice. This has been a daily practice for about a dozen years now. And it has been for me a transformational practice. I didn't come to it willingly, which is a little bit weird given that I shared earlier, that I spent many years teaching yoga and meditation. And part of what was going on with me was that I always had so much trouble actually exploring a sitting mindfulness or meditation practice myself. And because so often I would lose myself in a very similar, completely absorbed, hyper-present state through movement. I just kind of always assumed, well, my approach is just through movement. And in fact, movement did help bring me to that place.

But sitting meditation or sitting mindfulness practice is different. So we've got the mindfulness practice that is about sitting and developing, but we also have the bigger idea of what is actually leading to just our ability to be more mindful and present as we move through the moments of our lives. And that's ultimately why I do it. I don't do it because I want to get better at the practice. I do it because I want to feel better in life. Now, why did I do it because I want to feel better in life. Now, why did I do it? Because I said I didn't come to this willingly a dozen years ago. In 2010, I got off a plane after traveling a bunch.

I was at a giant conference in Austin, Texas, and I noticed a weird sensation in one ear. Over a period of a month and a half, that turned into a whole bunch of different sensations that blossomed into what is known as full-blown tinnitus, a high-pitched, very loud sound in both ears that nobody can hear but me because it is in fact coming from inside of me, my brain. Once I started to realize that this wasn't going away, it started to destroy me from the inside out. Many, many people have this condition. Many people live with it for life and many people are pretty okay with it. But then others aren't. And I was in that group that wasn't. It was

absolutely devastating for me. So I started doing all sorts of research and I got to a point where I said, okay, months in, I started to realize this is not going away. If this is me for life, is there a way that I can be okay? If this is me for life, is there a way that I can be okay? What do I have control over? I didn't have control over the sound. As I sit here sharing with you in this moment, the sound is still with me, but I'm okay with it. So what made the difference? It turns out that as I was actually trying to work my way through this, it was a very dark period of my life. I was also writing a book. I was having a lot of trouble writing because I couldn't focus and I was barely sleeping because the sound was consuming me. But I was writing a book about

uncertainty and how people navigate and sometimes even harness high levels of high stakes uncertainty. And somehow in that, I started to research mindfulness and meditative practices because they were really powerful. And I also stumbled upon the research on mindfulness practice or a cognitive behavioral therapy that was based in mindfulness practice and how it can be incredibly powerful for chronic pain. And I started to wonder if this is effective for chronic pain. I wonder how it would be for chronic sound that my brain is generating that is causing me deep psychological pain. So I started to learn about the practice and I started to, over a period of months, develop my own version of a mindfulness practice, blending in pranayama or breathing practices, which we talked about earlier,

and other stelling practices. And over time, even though the sound never went away, it started to allow me to rewire the way my brain addresses attention so that I was no longer obsessing about the sound and it was able to let it go. I was able to just put it into the background the very same way I did with thousands of other sounds that completely sweat through me all day, every day, living in a big city and didn't even hear them anymore. I was able to finally rewire and gain a certain level of agency and control over my attention that allowed me to focus it away from the sound and be present in my life, in everything that was good, in my relationships, and know that it was just there in the background, just like everything

else. So this started for me as an urgent intervention. Over a period of years, it has turned into something that has transformed my life because it has radically changed the way that I experience adversity, challenge, struggle, suffering. It has allowed me to zoom the lens out and get a little bit meta, almost look down on myself and say, what's really happening here? And then refocus my attention. It's giving me an awareness of where my attention actually is on any given moment in time. Choose whether that is a constructive place to focus my attention or destructive, or put another way, functional or dysfunctional. And then actively re-divert my attention or actively divert my

attention to something that is more grounding and centering and peaceful. It also allows me to sort of zoom out and look down at myself where I'm in a moment or an interaction or a conversation. Maybe it's an adversarial one like that one I talked about in the very beginning of this episode, and kind of say, what's happening here? What would be the healthy, constructive, kind response? And then choose that instead of being wildly reactive. So it is incredibly powerful practice, incredibly stilling practice, and it is all about gaining the ability to focus attention and to drop thoughts that are negative and to understand at any given moment in time, where is my attention? Is it functional or dysfunctional? Is it healthy or unhealthy? Is it generative or destructive? And then make a choice about where I want to keep placing it.

Right? So this sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is. The actual instruction for mindfulness practice is really simple and straightforward. Very often we start with like a very simple practice of just focusing on the sensation of your breath. As your mind wanders, noticing that and bringing it back. And your mind will wander literally every few seconds, if not more. And that is still the case for me a dozen years later. And there are times where I judge myself and that that was a terrible practice. I was barely there for most of it. And yet still, the overall effect of it over time, I know, has profoundly changed me. And the way that I relate to my life, the way that I'm able to touch a piece, the way that I'm able to see more clearly what is and isn't happening, both in my outer world

and in my inner world, and respond consciously and constructively rather than react in autopilot and destructively. So what I thought would be a nice way to kind of bring this whole conversation to a close is I would love to just guide you through a relatively short seated mindfulness practice so you can just get a bit of a taste of what this practice is about. Just go for a couple of minutes, maybe five minutes or so here. And this last bit also, if you find it interesting, if you find it relaxing or stilling, and it's something you'd like to keep turning back to, it's something that you will be able to return to. So that's why I suggested in the beginning, you might want to actually bookmark or whatever icon is available

to you in your particular listening app. Just tap that thing so you note, so you can very easily recall this episode. And on any given day, whether it's commuting home from work, or a lot of us aren't commuting, but it's trying to come back to a place of relative calm after a stressful day, or just opening your eyes in the morning and wanting to set up your day and start it right. You can just come back to these last five or so minutes and drop yourself into this very simple, short, and sweet guided mindfulness practice. So take a breath here. And what I would invite you to do is find a nice comfortable place to sit or lie, whatever is right for your body, whatever's accessible to your physical body that feels good and comfortable, where you feel you can be in this

place, in this position for just five or so minutes, maybe a little short, maybe a little longer. We'll see how long it goes. Just kind of settle in a little bit and you can hit pause if you need to actually go somewhere or move to a different room if you need to do that. And then like settle in and then unpause this. We can keep going from here. And you want to also see if you can find a place where it's a quieter place where you won't be distracted. You can, if you're obviously you're listening to me on a particular device, if you don't have it set to do not disturb, just for a moment, you know, go and change your setting to do not disturb so that nothing else chimes or beeps or notifications don't sneak

through as we're doing this. It's going to be relatively short. You'll be okay for five minutes, not seeing everything buzz and light up. So do that. Settle in. Good. Turn the lights down if that's comfortable for you. Good. Now just settle into whatever position you're in right now. And you're comfortable just softening your eyes or even closing them lightly.

That would be great. Good. Now we'll take a few gentle breaths together. We'll start with a long, slow inhale. And a gentle exhale. And slow it now. And out. Once more. Settling into your breath.

Just noticing there's anywhere in your body that is calling your attention. Maybe tingling or a sense of warm or cold or a sense of being against something else. A sense of ease or relaxation or even tension. We don't need to do anything about that particular sensation, but just notice it. Just notice it. Notice it's a part of this moment, this experience.

And allow it to just be with the moment. Allowing your breath to just settle into a nice, comfortable rate. You don't have to manipulate it in any way now. Just allow yourself to breathe. And if it's comfortable breathing through your nose, then allow yourself to do that. And if not, just whatever is as peaceful and easeful for you as possible. And as you breathe, thinking about inhaling through the nose if that's good, begin to notice the sensation of your breath as it just enters the tip of your nose.

Notice a slight temperature change, just a little bit cooler. Allowing yourself to exhale and notice a warming sensation with the exhale. Continue to draw your attention to the sensation of the inhale as it just moves into, and then the warming as it moves out of. And allow whatever your body needs to do, just do it. And by now it's a pretty safe bet that like every other human being, your mind has already started to attract a thought or a feeling or a twinge or something over there.

And that's okay too, just notice that. Name it thinking, feeling. With your next exhale, let it ride the exhale out and just come back to the sensation of your breath. Just continually bringing your attention to the sensation of breath. You may even bring your awareness, your attention down into the area of your chest or your belly if that feels more accessible to you. And notice how those areas move with the inhale, expanding gently out and then slowly returning to a place of peace with the exhale. Not feeling the need to change anything or manipulate the breath,

simply noticing your body as your breath comes in and out. And again, thoughts or feelings may enter. Notice those two. Give it a quick name feeling. And allow it to ride the next exhale just out of your mind as your mind deposits itself back into the sensation of your breath in your body. And without forcing or intending or making it happen, notice if there's just the slightest pause that you can detect between your inhale and your exhale? Does it feel safe and spacious and natural to just linger in that pause for a heartbeat?

And with that sensation, as you linger in the pause, as you just allow it to happen, momentary as it is, and the space of the pause, notice a sense of stillness that passes into and through you, a spaciousness that we all have access to at any given moment in time

through the simple vehicle of our attention and our breath. Good. And as we start to sort of come out of this short and sweet practice, taking a nice long inhale, and through our open mouth, let your shoulders drop a little, move your body a little bit. Slowly open your eyes and come on back to the present moment.

Good. That was it. That was it. Even if your mind spun off a hundred times in just a few minutes, that was it. You were doing it. It's all part of the practice. There's no perfect. They're simply doing it.

And we come back to that as often as we can and know that the ripple effect slowly makes its way into our world, into our life, into our relationships, our state of physical, psychological being, and gives us both the power to bring our awareness into the moment, into what really matters, to be intentional in the way we walk through life, and to also alter the physiological and psychological state of our body to bring us back to a state of present awareness and calm. So that is the seventh and final way, strategy, tool, mechanism to find calm, especially in a world that seems like it is increasingly challenging to find that space. Some of these tools, as I mentioned, were more immediate in their effect.

Some of them have a slow build effect over time, and some of them are kind of a hybrid where you can use them in the moment and at the same time if you practice them every day. It has a compound interest on the experience of calm over a period of months and even years. I hope you have found this useful and valuable, and I hope that as we all move into this year together, that as much as it seems like there is groundlessness still very much in the air, that there are things that we cannot control, that you feel that now you have a toolbox of go-tos that you can turn to and know that you can come back to a place of stillness, you come back to a place of calm, that you can find ways

to reorient your intention and see and step back into a place of ease and possibility on a more regular basis and know that that will always be available to you, that your circumstances may change. There may be things that are outside of our control, but our ability to actually use these ideas, tools, and strategies to bring us back to a place of calm abiding always travels with us. Hope you found that valuable and I look forward to continuing to travel through this year and well beyond with you as we all explore this fascinating question of what it means to be alive and to live a good life on this planet. Thanks so much, everyone. Signing off,

I'll see you all next time. If you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together

with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th...

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot?