Good Life Project - Daniel Goleman: The Truth About Meditation (a scientific look).

Episode Date: September 18, 2017

What if much of the popular wisdom and even so-called valid research on meditation...was wrong?! According to Daniel Goleman, it's time for a meditation wake-up call.Best known for his worldwide bestseller Emotional Intelligence, Goleman reveals powerful new truths about meditation, what it really is and isn't, and how only about 1% of the 6,000+ studies done on the topic are what might be considered "good science."A lifelong student of meditation and meditative practices, Daniel Goleman spent two years in India, first as a Harvard Predoctoral Traveling Fellow and then again on a Post-Doctoral Fellowship, followed by decades of practice and study. He has moderated several Mind and Life dialogues between the Dalai Lama and scientists, ranging from topics such as Emotions and Health to Environment, Ethics and Interdependence.In his new book, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain and Body, he pulls back the curtain on this practice, dives into the claims and show what's fact and what's pretty seriously stretching the truth. The bad news, there's a whole lot of fiction in the meditation space. The good news is, there are also many profoundly life-enhancing changes that come your way. Meditation, it turns out, changes you, on the level of DNA. In this conversation, you'll discover the real benefits of this powerful practice.Rockstar Sponsors: Audible has the best audiobook performances, the largest library, and the most exclusive content. Learn more, start your 30-day trial and get your first Audible book free, go to Audible.com/goodlife.RXBAR Kids is a snack bar made with high-quality, real ingredients designed specifically for kids. It contains 7 grams of protein and has zero added sugar and no gluten, soy or dairy. Find at Target stores OR for 25% off your first order, visit RXBAR.com/goodlife.Are you hiring? Do you know where to post your job to find the best candidates? Unlike other job sites, ZipRecruiter doesn’t depend on candidates finding you; it finds them. And right now, GLP listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for FREE, That’s right. FREE! Just go to ZipRecruiter.com/good.Get paid online, on-time with Freshbooks, a cloud accounting software that makes it insanely easy for freelancers and professionals to get paid online, track expenses and do more of what you love. Get your 1-month free trial, no credit card required, at FreshBooks.com/goodlife (enter The Good Life Project in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Long-term meditators, people who have been practicing every morning for years and sometimes go to a retreat, there are many people like that. If they do one day of meditation, like six hours or so, there's what's called a down regulation of the genes for inflammation. That means the genes that create inflammation throughout the body, which are at cause in a wide range of disorders, you know, arthritis, diabetes, cancer, heart disease. They go quiet.

So you may know today's guest, Daniel Goleman, as the guy who wrote a book called Emotional Intelligence. It came out in 1995. It kind of exploded into the public's consciousness, has sold, I don't know, a gazillion copies, not just about IQ. It's not about rote intelligence. It's about this thing he called EQ, emotional intelligence. Underneath that, running under sort of his exploration as a writer, as somebody who studies psychology academically, has been a decades-long devotion, fascination with meditation and meditative practices. And that led him down a rabbit hole of really exploring the landscape of meditation these days and looking fiercely at the science of what's true, what's not true, and revealing some pretty

eye-opening outcomes about what meditation does and doesn't do for us. Some myth-busting along the way as well. And a lot of that is all wrapped up in a new book called Altered Traits, which he did with Richard Davis. And I had a chance to sit down with him and really kind of dive deep into his background. I'm curious also how a kid from the sort of central California farm country ended up in an ashram in India. And then what kind of brought him down the road to emotional intelligence and then this deep and lasting undercurrent fascination with meditation. Really excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields.

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 eight 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, it's interesting. I was probably first exposed to you and your work through the phrase in the book, emotional intelligence, which I want to talk about a bit. But then I want to talk more about where your head is at now

and sort of what your current work has been around. But that came out, was that 2005-ish? No, 1995. Ah, so I'm late by 10 years. Man, it feels like it's so interesting because it feels like it is so now. Well, it's penetrated into the culture in ways I never could have imagined. You know, when I wrote the book, people said, well, you can't use the word emotion in a business context.

Now business says, oh, emotional intelligence, it's a must-have for leadership particularly or schools. They call it social emotional learning the book really was an argument for teaching kids emotional skills social skills along with you know math and yeah yeah where did this come from from you what was the origin like what made you say there's something else that's not being talked about here i don't have a ready answer for that you know where it came from in me, but it felt right. And, you know, I've done maybe a dozen books. And every book has a kind of a point, trying to make the world a little better place maybe. So for those who may not be,

for the three people who may not be familiar with the work around emotional intelligence, four kind of main elements of this. Can you sort of give me that? Sure. Emotional intelligence is a different way of being smart. It's not what we're rewarded for in school, you know, your IQ essentially, but rather what kind of person are you? Are you self-aware?

Do you handle yourself well? Can you empathize? Can you put that together in relationship and have strong connections? Those are the four elements of emotional intelligence. We don't teach that to people in school, but it's really a key to success in life, whether it's your personal life, you want to be with someone like that, or whether it's your life in business or whatever career you choose. I just saw data that was kind of a surprise to me at

the same time, maybe not. Engineers, software writers, study of 40 of them. It turned out that success as evaluated by their peers, people who know them very well, correlated zero with IQ, correlated very highly with their emotional intelligence. Which is not necessarily a trait you associate with coders. People are certainly behind the screen. Not at all. Nor does the tech culture value it. But what it says is, you know, everybody who's a coder or an engineer has a master's,

or at least they're that smart to be in the trade. And that means you have an IQ of around 115, 120. But now you're in a pool of people who are as smart as you are. So IQ has very little predictive value in what discriminates the best from the worst. It's can you be on a team? Can you influence people? Can you work well with other people? Can you handle your own whims, desires, impulses, and stay focused?

That's all in the emotional intelligence part of your abilities. Yeah, which really contradicts the lore of Silicon Valley and the lore of the entire tech industry, which is like it's all about your product, your output. I was surprised. I was asked to give a talk at Google many years ago. And the guy who asked me wanted me to talk on emotional intelligence. And I said, okay, I'll do that. But I didn't think people would come. The room was packed and they were...

I'll talk to all three people. But I was shocked. It was really popular. They're putting it in other rooms with TV screens and stuff. And then he used that. Meng was his name. Cheng Meng. Cheng Meng. Meng Chadon is his name. Yeah, same guy. He used that to create a course

in Google University on emotional intelligence and mindfulness, which I thought was very smart. And he integrated mindfulness with emotional intelligence, which is a natural anyway. And then he wrote a book which became a bestseller about it. And you know, what's interesting to me is, and I feel like I'm actually curious because you know the answer to this, I feel like the term caught on. It became this giant phenomenon. And it kind of caught fire in more of a business setting. And you were talking about how it's still spoken about in the context of education and kids and stuff like that. Have you seen it genuinely integrated

into curriculums and educational experiences in sort of younger life? Well, first of all, I see business as adult education. It's all education. It's probably debatable. Yeah, right. Or at least HR and the courses they use for development. And emotional intelligence, partly because of the Harvard Business Review. I did an article years ago on emotional intelligence and leadership. It became their most requested reprint in the history of- No kidding. Yeah, I was astonished.

And they've been putting out a regular stream of publications on emotional intelligence ever since. There's a ready audience for it in business. And now in schools, there are thousands of schools that integrate into their regular classroom day some version of what we call social-emotional learning. It's not necessarily under that title. In fact, it's almost never. But in effect, what they're doing is teaching kids how to handle your impulses, you know, how to empathize, how to get along. And kids love it, by the way, because it deals with the real issues of their lives. Like, you know, how can you say no to someone who wants you to use drugs and keep your friends?

This is like vitally important to a middle school kid. And also just, I mean, navigating middle school, you know, and understanding how do you create a genuine sense of friendship and relationship and belonging, but also keep the essence of who you are. And because it seems like there's this big window of time with kids where so much is about just fitting in, and they don't have the skills to really understand the deeper social dynamic around that. Well, that happens around sixth grade.

The developmental psychologists have this down to a science. You know, early in life, anyone who's been a parent knows this, early in life for kids it's all about your parents and your family. And over the elementary school years that tends to wane. By middle school, forget your family, it's your friends. And it's fitting in with your friends, as you say. Well, that's a first time in your life challenge. And so social emotional learning helps kids with what matters to them most,

which is, well, how can I keep my own integrity and be friends with the kids I want to be friends with? How can I handle the fact that they didn't invite me to that party? What do you do with that? You know, these are the melodramas of life that social emotional learning helps kids master. I was just in a school, though, in Spanish Harlem, right next to the projects and the FDR expressway there. It's a very poor neighborhood. And it was a seven-year-old classroom, and they have social-emotional learning. I thought it'd be pretty chaotic. Half the kids are what they call special needs.

And the kids were very calm and focused. And the teacher said, here's why. Then they went through a session of what they call breathing buddies. Every kid would get their favorite stuffed animal, little animal, find a place to lie down on a rug, put it on their belly and watch it rise on the in-breath and fall on the out-breath, rise on the in-breath and fall on the out-breath. Well, this is a basic attention training exercise. You could call it mindfulness, but what it's doing to their brains is strengthening the circuitry for paying attention and for calming down upsetting emotions. It's the same circuit. So you get a twofer. And my argument has always been, why aren't we helping every kid with this? Because

this is a skill for life. Yeah, I so agree with that. As you were sharing that, I had this memory of, I owned a yoga center and we offered kids classes, similar age actually. And I remember vividly parents dropping off their kids and then they'd come back about five minutes early and then be peeking in the room and they'd see the kids, because we did something really similar, kind of all just lying back on a mat, you know, in a circle and with like a little, like either a beanbag or something. I'm just kind of focusing. And the parents are like, what drug did you give them? Because we try and make this happen at home all the time.

And the kids are, we can't get them to stop bouncing off the walls. Like what happened here? Like it was inconceivable that their child could access that state. And yet they can. And you know what? It works for adults too. We could all use a little bit of focusing and calming in this book, Altered Traits that I did with Richard Davidson just coming out. We looked at the strongest studies on meditation. We found even from the beginning, you get benefit for concentration, which is that focus, and your amygdala, which is the part of the brain which flips out when you get upset,

calms down under stress. So that same thing you see with the kids that you saw in your yoga classroom happens with adults when they start mindfulness or any kind of meditation. And I actually want to go layers deeper into that with you. But I want to take a little bit of a step back in time first. You've had kind of a fascinating journey. From what I know, and again, tell me if this is right, pretty much grew up in a part of California that I've never heard of. Right, exactly. It's kind of like farmland in central California. It's the central valley of California. It's a farm area. Right. So that's

the place where when I've driven from LA to San Francisco, it's like all. You go along the side of it on highway five. Okay. You go in the foothills. If you were to turn right, which I don't recommend, you go into the central valley. For me, it was idyllic. It was kind of a Norman Rockwell childhood. But these days, it's not such a pleasant area. How come? Then it was great. A lot of gangs there, a lot of violence.

The city I grew up in, Stockton, is bankrupt. Have trouble paying cops and things like that. And the secret, though, is that it was like an hour and a half or less to Berkeley. It's just inland from the Bay Area. So I was really focused toward what was happening in the Bay Area, which at that time was very exciting. Like what? Tell me.

What was going on? Well, my older sisters were there for the Beatnik days. I was there for the Summer of Love. Right. 50 years. This summer. This summer, yeah. But that was my childhood. Right. And for the summer of love. Right. 50 years. This summer. This summer, yeah. But that was my childhood. Right. And that was a big influence.

So were you back and forth fairly regularly? As much as I could. So from there, part of the bridge that I would love to sort of like know the story behind is, how do you go from there? Because the undercurrent of all the emotional intelligence work, at least it seems, and a lot of your work, eventually you become a writer and you're very prolific and written many books. But it seems to be a deep fascination around meditation on so many different levels. Where does that touch down? sister gave me a book called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, which was a collection of Zen stories. And it just blew me away. I had never even imagined that there were methods like Zen, or that people had experiences that took them out of their ordinary awareness and were transcendent. And when I got to college, I was very interested. And I looked into different kinds of meditations. I started meditating in college, frankly, because I was anxious and it helped me calm down. And when I got to graduate school, it turned out at Harvard I entered the same program that Leary and Alpert had been booted out of five years before.

And I was interested in consciousness, which was like nobody there wanted anyone interested in consciousness. Right. Well, they kind of made a statement with what happened with Albert. Yeah. But, you know, I actually got a traveling fellowship, pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India. And I made it my business to look up yogis and lamas and swamis because I wanted to know what happens. And what I realized was that Western psychology did not have an understanding of the upside potential of human being. I was in a program in clinical psychology. We were looking at what was wrong with people,

not what could be right or how right could you be? And these Eastern psychologies, and they were psychological systems, had definite maps of how you could be equanimous, how you could be loving, how you could be present, that we didn't know about in the West. And I thought this was very important. So I came back to Harvard and I said, hey, you know, there are these ancient systems of psychology that extend the map, and they were not interested at all.

But I managed to do my dissertation on meditation and stress reactivity, which was okay because it was physiological. There was some sort of like application. Well, yeah, it was practical. Yeah. And back then, a friend of mine, my fellow co-author, Richard Davidson, he and I were friends in graduate school. He did his dissertation on how meditation trains attention. But they didn't want to hear about the meditation part. And it took years and years for the traction to occur in society

that we now, you know, mindfulness everywhere. You know, meditation is something that's just like going to the gym. It's not something exotic. Yeah, I mean, it's really like going to the gym. It's not something exotic. Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting to me because it sounds like, when were you in Harvard? When were you doing, when was your? Early 70s. Okay.

Is that then around the same time? No, it's probably a little bit earlier than Seligman starts to. Earlier. It's earlier. Yeah. Right. He did positive psychology in the 90s. It was that much later.

Yeah. Wow, man. It feels like it's been around for a while now. But that gave another conceptual platform. Right. For Eastern psychologies, for meditation, for doing like yoga, doing things that helped improve the quality of being, not just get over the worst things, depression and anxiety, but actually cultivate positive states.

Yeah. That was a radical idea at one point. Yeah. And clearly when you were doing it, it's pretty radical too. But it's interesting because it does seem like the predominant culture was always, and to this day, I think it's shifting a lot, but I still feel like the predominant sort of lens is, focuses on how do we investigate how to move people from ill, sick, anxious, depressed to baseline. I think positive psychology has gone a long way in sort of shining the spotlight on

baseline to flourishing. But my sense is that's still not the driving energy within sort of like the bigger context of psychology. Well, it depends what part of psychology you're looking at. If you're looking at psychotherapy, by definition, that's helping people go from the worst states to okayness. But if you look at meditation, mindfulness, positive psychology itself, many varieties of ways to boost your being, they're taking people from okayness to even better or trying. So you end up in India. What happens there?

Well, in India, I was lucky enough to be with someone who you may have heard of. Do you know who Ram Dass is? Sure. So Ram Dass wrote a book called Be Here Now. Right. And he mentioned the old man in the blanket, Maharaji. Right, Neem Krollibaba. Neem Krollibaba.aji. Right, Neem Krollibaba. Neem Krollibaba.

So I was with Neem Krollibaba. And Neem Krollibaba was kind of ideal type of what was possible through consciousness change for the better. He was, many people would call him enlightened. He was loving. He was super present. He had an aura around him which was contagious. A friend of mine, Larry Brilliant,

who was with him, put it this way. He said, the miracle wasn't that when I was with him, I loved Maharaji. The miracle was that I loved everybody else too. So his quality of being really infiltrated you. But for me, it was an inspiration in terms of what is possible for human potential. What could we possibly be like? Then I went to Bodh Gaya, India, which is where the Buddha was enlightened, the big Buddha center. And there I studied meditations like mindfulness and its more advanced level insight meditation. And I saw texts that date from the fifth century that describe very matter of factly what you can do in meditation that will help you become like Neem Kali Baba, presumably, or they have other language for it. And it was that that I tried to bring back to psychology.

I was just about a couple decades too soon. When you first discovered these texts, did you believe that there was sort of a linear path that would take me from point A to where Maharaji was? It seems like a big... Yeah, a path. I don't know if it's linear. You know those bases they have that are taken from a medieval cathedral. I think it's more like that know those mazes they have that are taken from the medieval cathedrals? I think it's more like that where you start out one way and it looks like you're getting somewhere. Then all of a sudden you circle back. I don't know that it's linear progression.

But in the research we looked at in the book Altered Traits, now there's 6,000 peer-reviewed studies of meditation. But my co-author, Richard Davidson, has very strict standards. He looked at the methodology and he said, maybe 1% are really strong. We'll talk about those. But it makes it very clear that the more you do, the greater the benefits become. There's a dose-response relationship. So right from the beginning of, say, mindfulness, people have benefits. They focus better.

They're calmer. But he's been able to bring Olympic-level meditators over from Nepal and India, mainly Tibetan yogis. Flies them over, brings them to the brain lab, has them do different exercises and scans their brains. And the results are pretty astounding. And it suggests that something is going on here that we don't know of in our psychology, but should. For example, if you take one of the yogis and you look at their brain waves, you see something really interesting. Ordinarily, for me and maybe for you and listeners, when you get an insight like, oh, I just solved that problem I've been grappling with, I realized

what I should do with this thing, a creative insight, your brain shows a particular wave called a gamma for about a half second. It doesn't show up much otherwise, but it's very fleeting. These yogis are in gamma all the time. I don't know how to interpret that, but it sounds really great. And we've never seen it before. Perpetual insight. Yeah. They describe it as a spaciousness, a presence, a readiness for whatever comes. They said there's really no words for it. Yeah. I don't know if you know this information, but is the gamma detectable at the moment that somebody would identify as the moment of insight or shortly before?

Oh, I don't know. It's a good question. Yeah. Although it might be the moment before. Yeah, because I've seen some research where there is sort of like there is a less unconscious awareness that something just happened before we even know that we've discovered it. This has to do with how the mind is constructed and the fact that the cognitive unconscious, where this work goes on, knows things before it presents it to us in awareness. So for that reason, I suspect it might show up just before we get the idea. Yeah. Before this research, would either of you have even guessed that it was possible to

sustain a gamma brainwave state? No. No. And in fact, other scientists are just amazed. There's some other amazing findings that occurred. You don't have to be Olympic level, long-term meditators, people who've been practicing every morning for years and sometimes go to a retreat. There are many people like that. If they do one day of meditation, like six hours or so, there's what's called the down regulation of the genes for inflammation. That means the genes that create inflammation throughout the body, which are at cause in a wide range of disorders, you know, arthritis, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, they go quiet. This is what's called epigenetics.

Epigenetics is understanding that it's not the genes you have, but whether you turn them on or off. So what they found is that a day of meditation turns them off. Well, that was a shock to people in genomic science. They didn't think that a day of any kind of mental activity would affect your gene activity in the least. So along the way, there have been many discoveries that are eye-opening for science as we know it today. I think in the future, it'll be taken for granted. Yeah. Is there an understanding of why? Like in that example that you just gave,

you sit for six hours or whatever, meditation for six hours, it starts to affect you on an epigenetic level. Why? Is there an explanation or is that still an open question? Or how maybe? I think the specific mechanism is quite unknown. Yeah.

But we do know there's a general correlation between mood states and health. And this may be one of the linkages that matters. Right, explains it. Yeah. There's a general correlation between mood states and health. And this may be one of the linkages that matters. Right, explains it. Yeah. And like sitting six hours but spread out over 20 minutes a day for X number of days doesn't have the same effect. Doesn't seem to.

So interesting. So it's not just dose dependent in terms of, you know, like this much every day for a long window of time. It seems like intense periods mixed in with that. It's almost like interval training. Exactly. So the data so far seems to suggest that the benefits of meditation are enhanced by retreats,

full days, a week, a month of continual meditation, which is like going to, you know, professional baseball players go to camp in Florida for this, to up their game. So why not the mental game? It's the same principle. It has to do with mastering expertise in any domain. You know, the 10,000 hour rule is kind of a meme that's around. It's a myth. It's generally that the more hours you put in, the better you get. But the key difference is this, in any domain, meditation, chess, math, doesn't matter, golf, most amateurs improve their game to about 50 hours and then plateau. The pros, all the pros have coaches and they keep working on whatever it is they need to improve all their lives. And that's why they're

at the top of the game. So the yogis, for example, that Davidson studied at Wisconsin, all had teachers. They have teachers continuously all their lives who are somewhere more advanced in what they're doing. Just like professional singers, opera singers have voice coaches. Same thing. That's so interesting to hear you say that. And it makes perfect sense. I had the chance to sit down with Kay Anders Erickson, who was the source of the quote 10,000 hour, which we now know is. He's a little miffed at the 10,000 hour.

Yeah, he's like, look, that's not quite legit. That's not really what my research said. But he said the same thing. He's like the best of the best in any domain. He was really speaking to the role of the teacher. That's right. In the process. The expert coach.

Yeah, somebody who can look and sort of be a part of it and say, okay, we need to keep continually shifting how you're going about this so that it's not just showing up and doing it by rote, but actually saying, okay, how was that? yes, I've heard that a teacher is important. And at the same time, I've always heard some variation of the instruction of the most important thing to do is just show up and sit every day and don't judge the quality of any one given time on the mat. Yes. But you're saying that's not? I'm saying both are true. Okay. I think it's very important to have a nonjudgmental attitude toward a given meditation session. All kinds of things can happen.

It's like when you go to the gym and you're going, say you're doing Nautilus machines and do these repetitions. Every time you do the repetition, you're strengthening the muscle just a little bit. You may not enjoy it as much as you did yesterday. It doesn't matter. Same with meditation. Every time you focus on your breath and your breath wanders, you notice it wandered, you bring it back, you're strengthening a little bit the circuitry for concentration.

It doesn't matter if you enjoy it or not, just that you do it. So that's true. On the other hand, a teacher in meditation might say, well, you've really got your concentration down. Let's see if you can gain more insight. Watch your thoughts come and go. Don't treat them as distractions. Well, that's a different instruction, and it needs to come at the right time. Or it's helpful if it comes at the right time. And it turns out there are instructions like that all the way up the ladder. And I don't even know what the top of the ladder is, frankly. Yeah, and it makes complete sense that when I think about the quality of my practice, so I sit daily, just a very fundamental breath-oriented mindfulness practice. Been doing it since 2010. And I'm not in love with my practice. I don't sit and see and feel amazing.

No, that's not the point. This is not my experience. Nobody ever promised you'd feel amazing. They shouldn't promise you'll feel amazing. Yeah. And it took me a while to understand that that's okay. Yes. Yes. Exactly. And in fact, I was just talking to someone who said, you know, I tried to meditate, but I think my mind just goes crazy. I can't be a meditator. And I said, you know, actually, that's the first major insight. Congratulations, because you're looking at your mind. We don't realize how busy our mind is all

the time until we stop and look at it in meditation. And then, I don't know if this happened with you, Jonathan, it certainly happened to me. You realize your mind is wandering all the time. That's the state. And meditation is the attempt to bring discipline to that mind. 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.. Tell me how to fly this thing. 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?

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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. Thank you, Gary. and being able to do the things that they want to do in their business. By drastically simplifying things like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online, FreshBooks has totally changed the game for now more than 10 million people. You can link your FreshBooks account to your credit card and debit card, so next time you expense the business stuff or the tank of gas or lunch, it just shows up automatically. They have notifications and awesome customer service. To claim your month-long unrestricted free trial with no credit card required, go to freshbooks.com slash good life and enter the Good Life Project in the How Did You Hear About Us section. So how did you learn to meditate?

You know, I came to meditation in a bit of an odd way. I was teaching yoga for a number of years, so I took a number of workshops and had different teachers. But I became pretty fascinated with yoga initially through meditation because in a very past life I was a lawyer, and I was not handling it well. And it was causing a massive amount of stress in my life. Ended up hospitalized actually. And I was looking for ways to be okay in the, you know, the career that I had chosen at that window in time.

And yoga was interesting to me. Meditation was something that I had always been kind of interested in, but never really got. And breathing, pranayama. So I started my, it's almost like my gateway drug was breathing, pranayama. So I started, it's almost like my gateway drug was actually more pranayama. And I realized that I could very quickly come into a much more calm state through that. And that brought me to yoga, which brought me to meditation. But I dabbled in it. I never really embraced it until I was kind of forced to. 2010,

I ended up with tinnitus. So literally in the blink of an eye, just this loud high pitch ringing in my ears, and I didn't handle it well. I was one of the people that did not habituate well or easily, and it was crushing me. So I started looking into my past, and it turns out that kind of as a fluke too, I was working on a book on how people handle uncertainty. And one of the ways was mindfulness and meditation. And that turned me on to how mindfulness can help people process pain, sustain pain without the stimulus going away. The pain is still there, but you can train yourself to handle it better. And I wondered, could this also help me with the sound of my head? And that took me down a rabbit hole where I ended up kind of going back to certain teachers, going to a mindfulness-based cognitive therapist who also had tinnitus and said, well, it could

work. And then I kind of over time experimented because I realized I had to develop my own practice that would work with what I was moving through. So I tried a lot of things and ended up blending a blend of pranayama to get me to a place where I could actually be still and allow this thing to just surround me and be a part of me and not freak out with anxiety. Until finally, I got to a point where I realized sitting one day that my mind had drifted from the sound. And that was the moment where I realized I was figuring it out. And from that day on, it's a sustained practice.

And for me, it's funny, I think, because, and I'm sure you've had this conversation too, so this is a daily practice. This is like brushing my teeth for me. And people ask me, like, how do you keep doing it? And for me, I have a daily reminder in my head of where things can go when I don't. And maybe I've habituated by now and I'd be fine without it. But it also became a gateway to so much other goodness that I don't want to give it up.

Because so many of the benefits that you've talked about, I've experienced in relationships, in life, in business. So I started meditating for very similar reasons. I was in college and I was anxious. And I found meditation, hey, it helps me be less anxious, which in turn helps you be more focused. And over time, I was pleased with the benefits, general benefits of the practice. And what we found looking at the literature, One is just exactly what you mentioned. People who have chronic pain or chronic condition like tinnitus is irritating and drives you crazy, who do mindfulness are able to do two things. Change your relationship to the irritant, to the pain, whatever it is, which which is wonderful you're not caught up by

it and you're not reacting because of it you're just seeing oh it's there and the other thing is that the amygdala which is what goes nuts it's the trigger for the fight or flight response quiets down calms down so it's less reactive so those two are very powerful. Mindfulness-based stress reduction, which was developed by John Kabat-Zinn, another old friend from Cambridge, interestingly, is used very commonly now in medical settings to help people who have chronic pain because it doesn't take the physiological sensation away at all. It takes the emotional reaction away. And that's what makes all the difference. Yeah. It makes so much sense. It's interesting that

you came to it from sort of like a similar angle originally. It's funny. It seems like you were, so you, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Richie Davis, not too outside of the window, Ram Dass, those guys. It's almost like you guys are like the mindfulness mafia from that time. It's like- Well, we all saw the value very, very early. That's true. Yeah. But what's interesting is it seems like you've developed this research and the research has

been, or the interest, and then that developed for you into writing and in-depth study. And for various people, it's been expressed in different ways. And in the last, it feels like the last five years, there's been this major tipping point. And you write about this and all their traits about the difference between deep and wide in sort of the way that meditation and mindfulness is, you know, like moving out into the world. And there's a plus and a minus to that, I guess. Well, first of all, what you mentioned as the kind of tipping point for mindfulness in society, you see it very clearly.

So we reviewed all of the academic studies, peer-reviewed literature studies, and we draw a curve of how many there were per year. Five years ago, it just went ballistic. There are now more than a thousand studies a year, scientific studies of meditation or mindfulness. And the question is deep or wide, as we put it in the book. And the deepest is the way these practices are done in their native setting, say in a monastery in Asia or an ashram in Asia. Then those methods have been brought to America and their meditation centers. Some things have been left behind, but they're still pretty deep. And because some things have been left behind,

some of which are culture-specific, more people have access to the methods. Then they've been taken outside the spiritual context totally. In fact, the person who urged this was the Dalai Lama. He said to Richard Davidson, a meeting of the Mind and Life Dialogues, which he and I have helped organize for a long time. There's scientists meeting with Dalai Lama around a particular topic. There was one on destructive emotions. The Dalaiarlan says to Davidson, you know, our tradition has many methods that seem to work very well

for managing destructive emotions. I urge you to take them outside the religious context. Test them rigorously in the lab. And if they're a benefit to people, spread them very widely. And that's exactly what's been happening with the science. So Davidson was one of those who established that these methods work. MBSR, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, MBCT that you did. Those are variations of traditional methods

that have been tweaked so that they're accessible to even more wide range of people. And that's kind of level three. And level four, which is the widest, are like the apps. You know, the New York Times, the mindfulness tip for the day. Well, those go to far more people, but they aren't as deep as the other methods. So it's kind of trade-off. And I see value in both. I think if these are a benefit, why not share them as widely as possible? And on the other hand, people who are doing them in the less deep way may not realize that they could go deeper.

And some people who are doing the deep methods complain about that and say, well, they don't realize really what they're doing. But I can see the value of every level. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like there's mindfulness shaming to a certain extent, you know, like between the people who've chosen to go deeper and those who stay surface, but also those who promote the wider exposure. I mean, I see it very similarly to you. I see the wide as the point of entry for

most people. And then a certain percentage of those people will be like, huh, there's something going on here with that. Maybe I didn't even expect it. I wonder what else is happening underneath the hood here. And there's an imitation. And then the cool thing is that, yes, you can go deeper if you want. But even at that surface level, there's, I mean, what's interesting is, you know, through the research that you're talking about, there's benefit, you know, on the shallow and wide level. But it seems like there's a big bridge between that and the deeper practice. I think that there's a continuum, actually. And you marched out that continuum by how many sheer hours with instruction that you put in. So anyone who starts at a very, you know, the widest level, gone to scale, the app, can progress if they want to. They could go to, say you're doing mindfulness, go to an Insight New York weekend.

Go to Insight Meditation Center, do a week-long or 10-day retreat, and it gets richer and richer the more you do. And that's so clear from the scientific data. Yeah. Is there a downside to the wide, the lighter practice? Mindfulness is beautiful because it allows you, at least in my experience, to see more clearly, you know, the reality of your inner world and your outer world. It doesn't necessarily solve

whatever you see, though. Well, and this is my fear. I think mindfulness at the widest level has been oversold. I was looking at a website recently on mindful leadership, and I looked at the studies that they cite as basis for claims they make that this is going to help you with this or that or your business performance.

And the studies are not well done. They're bad studies, actually, from a methodological point of view. And yet they're used to hype the method. And what I fear is that people will get into, say, mindfulness at the widest level and be disappointed because nothing's... And that there'll be a backlash and that people who are making exaggerated claims are kind of setting up that situation. I think people will benefit if they try these methods, but I'd like them to try it for the right reason, not the wrong. So what is the right reason, not the wrong. So what is the right reason in your mind?

The right reasons are that sound science has shown these are the benefits that will come to you. Or the right reason might be you've got a friend who's tried it and has benefited from it. In other words, something that for you is solid, not just an empty promise. So it's really individualized. 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.

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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. One of the things also, there was, I want to say it was a couple months ago, there was a piece in the Times. But this is a conversation that I've actually had with people a number of times. And I'm curious where you stand with this.

It's about the potential for mindfulness to end up in harm. So here's the way it's been described to me, that if somebody's been through trauma, deep, profound trauma earlier in their lives, they have through whatever mechanism developed the ability to cope. They've developed a whole set of things. They've never gone to therapy or processed it. They've just figured out how to be okay on an everyday basis. And somebody says, hey, mindfulness is awesome. It'll help you with whatever. They start that practice, and through that practice, they begin to see more clearly that which they have not wanted to see or revisit on a regular basis. And it sort of drops them back into a world of darkness without necessarily the concomitant skills to understand how to process that.

And that does happen sometimes, particularly on retreats. Interesting. And there's a woman at Brown University, Willoughby, Britain, who actually has a project to counsel people like that. And I think that's very helpful. It's a very small minority, by the way, who experienced that. I know a fellow in Washington, D.C. who had PTSD as a result of service in Iraq. And after that was in the Pentagon, right where the plane hit on 9-11. And in an instant, he was under a heap of rubble, which saved his life.

Everyone else in that office died. So he was doubly traumatized. He had terrible PTSD. And he couldn't go to the mall. He couldn't go in an elevator. He had very bad symptoms. He tried mindfulness. He went to a mindfulness retreat and he couldn't stay inside where everyone else was. He stayed in a pup tent. But slowly he got into it. And he said what helped him the most was loving kindness practice. And now he's a therapist in DC, Steve

Zappola. And he specializes in other vets who have PTSD. And he helps them with that practice. So it's a mixed picture when it comes to trauma. It can be therapeutic. The thing about Willoughby's project is that you have to understand most people, the vast majority of people who do deep meditation don't have dark nights, we'll call them. And people can go to a freshman year in college or boot camp and have a dark night. We don't know what the baseline is, in other words. About a third of Americans have some kind of diagnosable mental illness. So it's very hard to differentiate what's due to the meditation, what would happen anyway. We just don't know. There's a lot to find out. But I'm glad she's doing what she's doing.

Yeah. And it makes so much sense. And it also makes me feel like, given proper resources and proper understanding of either access to people to help or tools to help. If there is something that emerges from this process, like where do I go and what do I do with this? It's not that the mindfulness is causing harm. It's that it's sort of like, it's creating an experience where stuff that is probably really good to deal with is finally emerging. But you've got to understand, where do I go from there? Exactly. And it's not just mindfulness. You're going to need other therapeutic tools for sure.

You mentioned your friend with PTSD. There's a phenomenon, post-traumatic growth. Post-traumatic growth. Right. So it turns out that some people who go through horrific experiences like that end up with PTSD or some variation of deep, profound trauma and can't take themselves out of that. And others process it in a radically different way where it becomes a source of profound growth for them. I'm curious whether you're aware of,

or you've been exposed to any of the work around, whether meditation or mindfulness might in any way be involved in sort of like the difference between those two ways of processing trauma. I don't know. Huh. It's a wonderful thought. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense that it would be, but. Possibly.

Yeah, so interesting. Among the research that you've done and with the book that you guys have come out with now, you shared some of the really interesting kind of surprising research. Is there anything else that really jumped out at you? It's like, wow, we did not see this coming. Oh, you know, I just did a list of 57 findings from the book. So the incidence, yes, a lot. Each of them a good reason to meditate. So I think I've told you the two that really pop out, the genomic finding. Wow, who expected that?

And then the gamma and the pain in the yogis. No pain, no, and then gamma all the time. That's astounding. Another thing that surprised us and pleased us was that loving kindness practice, where you systematically wish well to people that have been kind to you, to yourself, to the people you love, people you know, wider people in the city, people beyond, finally everyone, actually seems to strengthen the circuitry for,

it's the same circuitry as a parent's love for a child. It's a circuitry for concern, caring, and compassion in the brain. And it makes you more likely to actually help people. And this happens very quickly. You start seeing it right at the beginning of practice. And we think that the brain is prepared to learn to love. And for us, that was both a surprise and very pleasing. That's certainly a nice thing to think about in this day and age, where I think we need as much of that as possible. One of the things I've been curious about also is the origins of the practice across many different traditions, whether it's mindfulness or so many different ways to approach meditative practices, very often has been attached to an aspiration, whether you call it samadhi, bliss, enlightenment, whatever it may be.

And that's been, I know you're not supposed to say there's an attachment to an outcome when you're along any of these paths, but it's kind of like everybody's working towards that thing. And this is one of the ways that you get there is developing this practice. And the there has been described as having so many profound benefits. Have you found in the research that any of the states that would be described in classic literature and associated with Samadhi enlightenment, this thing, are validated scientifically in any way?

So our book is called Altered Traits. And we're actually not that interested in the states. We're interested in the lasting effects on your very being. Every spiritual tradition that has meditation, and by the way, that includes every major religion. You know, there were Christian monks in the Egyptian desert in the second century who were basically, looked like yogis in the Himalayas today. They had a mala, they had beads,

and they're doing a Montaukiri liaison. They had to go to Mount Athos when the Muslim invasion came. But it's the same unbroken tradition in Christianity. There are Jewish meditations. There's Islamic meditations. There's Hindu. There's Buddhist. Every major

religion has it. But what's kind of paradoxical actually, when we looked at the research, every tradition says the key to this deep change is stepping out of your everyday self into a transcendent being. That may or may not mean samadhi, but it does mean you're less self-focused and you're more open to the needs of others. That's one of the trait changes that we find. And the paradox for us was that was the least interesting to researchers. Researchers are happy to look at how your concentration improves, how you get calmer, how you get more loving. Less selfish, not so interested.

There are only like three or four studies we could find that bore on that. And yet, if you look in the traditions themselves, they talk about in yoga tradition from the small self to the big S self. In Buddhism, from the small self to the non-self. There may not be a difference, who knows, but the directionality is very clear. And so we're looking at traits because what we realized is that all of the spiritual traditions are talking about a being which is less concerned with selfish things, my this, my that, more open to other beings, more calm, more equanimous, more generous, more focused, more present. And it seemed to us that those are overlooked largely in our culture,

but there's intrinsic value in that mode of being. So it was the trait changes we're looking for, not in the States. And a lot of those traditions will say, for example, if you look at Patanjali, the Yoga Sutra, or you look at the Vasudha Magga, the fifth century meditation text, they both treat samadhi or concentrative highs as nice, but not the point. It's interesting. The point is who you are after you leave the cave. Yeah. Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. You just feel differently about it. Yeah. Which also describes coming full circle. When you show up in India,

and you see Maharaji sitting there, and there's just something. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I think we all want to feel that way when it comes down to it. If we could close our eyes and say, I want to move through whatever I move through on a daily basis and I want some of that. I hope we all get some of that.

Yeah, which makes me curious why that part of it is the least researched part of it. I wonder if it's because it's the least tangible, sellable, valuable in a business context, like publishable. I think that the research reflects the underlying value system of the culture. Yeah, that makes sense, I guess. Unfortunate, though. It's important that we know it. Yeah. So this feels like a good place to come full circle, actually. The name of this is Good

Life Project. So if I offer out the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Exactly the traits I mentioned, being more equidemious, being more present, being kinder and more generous. All of those traits, lasting traits of beings, I think, embody a good life. Thank you. Pleasure, Jonathan. And as we wrap up, I want to give a final shout out to our awesome sponsors and supporters. RX Bar for kids, chocolate chip, apple, cinnamon, raisin, and berry blast.

Find them at Target stores or for 25% off your first order, visit rxbar.com and enter the promo Good Life at checkout. Audible is my go-to place to find audiobooks. As a Good Life Project listener, you can now get a free audiobook with a 30-day trial at audible.com. Right now, you can post a job on ZipRecruiter for free. That's right, for free. Just go to ZipRecruiter.com slash good. Today's show is sponsored by FreshBooks, which is a super cool cloud accounting software. To claim your month-long unrestricted free trial with no credit card required, go to freshbooks.com slash good life and enter the Good Life Project in the How Did You Hear About Us section. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If the stories and ideas in any way moved you,

I would so appreciate if you would take just a few extra seconds for two quick things. One, if it's touched you in some way, if there's some idea or moment in the story or in the conversation that you really feel like you would share with somebody else, that it would make a difference in somebody else's lives, take a moment and whatever app you're using, just share this episode with somebody who you think it'll make a difference for. Email it if that's the easiest thing, whatever is easiest for you. And then, of course, if you're compelled, subscribe so that you can stay a part of this continuing experience. My greatest hope with this podcast is not just to produce moments and share stories and ideas that impact one person listening, but to let it create a conversation, to let it serve as a catalyst for the elevation of all of us together collectively, because that's

how we rise. When stories and ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change happens. And I would love to invite you to participate on that level. Thank you so much, as always, for your intention, for your attention, for your heart. And I wish you only the best. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X 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 X. 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 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. 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? Flight Risk.