Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 216: How to Thrive Under Stress | Elizabeth Stanley, PhD

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Elizabeth Stanley has a long history of stress and trauma. In this episode she talks about the adversities she has suffered, which include a near death experience and losing her eyesight for extended periods of time from contracting Lyme disease while serving in the military. After decades of "powering through" and not dealing with her difficult emotions, she reached a breaking point. That's when her healing journey began and she found meditation, sitting multiple long retreats. Stanley has since created a resilience training program, called Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training, that she has taught to military troops and to people working in high-stress situations. Her book, "Widen the Window," offers tools on thriving during stress and recovering from trauma. Plugzone: Website: https://elizabeth-stanley.com/ "Widen the Window": https://www.amazon.com/Widen-Window-Training-Thrive-Recover/dp/0735216592 Insiders Feedback Group: https://10percenthappier.typeform.com/to/vHz4q4 Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. For ABC, to baby this is kiki Palmer on amazon music or wherever you get your podcast from abc this is the 10% happier podcast i'm dan heres hey hey quick item of business we're posting this on the morning of uh... cember fourth so i have an announcement that has to do with cember fifth so it's got a short shelf life. But if you're listening to this in time and you happen to live within reach of New York City, Joseph Goldstein and I are going to be doing a live two-hour event together on 29th Street in Manhattan on Thursday night

from 7 to 9. I think it's mostly sold out, but there are, I believe, a few extra tickets left. I posted a link in my Twitter feed at Dan B. Harris. So if you want to check it out, go to my Twitter feed, click the link, get the tickets. It's going to be awesome. I've done a number of these with Joseph, and they're always, in my opinion, I mean, he's always just incredible.

And we'll try to post it here in the podcast feed later if we can, if that works out. Anyway, come and see us in person if you can swing it. All right, that's the item of business. Let's get to our guest this week who is an extraordinarily accomplished person who underwent an extreme form of stress and is now out with a book filled with science-based advice for how to thrive under stress. Her name is Elizabeth Stanley. She is a PhD. She's an associate professor of security studies with joint appointments in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government. She has had multiple deployments overseas as a U.S. Army Intelligence Officer and comes from a family with a

long history of military service. She also has done deep, deep meditation practice, sitting multiple long retreats. And I first met her about 10 years ago when I was first getting interested in how meditation was making its way into all different facets of the culture. I was doing a story on her for World News Tonight, then, anchored by Diane Sawyer, about the fact that she was teaching meditation to the Marines. She had invented something called mindfulness-based mind-fitness training, and she was really a pioneer in bringing meditation and mindfulness to the US military. I went out to Cam Pendleton, the Marine Base in Southern California, and saw her teaching it to the,

saw her running a big experiment where she was teaching it to the troops. And I was just super impressed by her by the depth of her practice, by her dynamism, and also her humor. She told me a story about how she was once teaching a bunch of Marines to meditate, and she said, bring your attention to your feet, and they all in Unison leaned over their laps and stared at their feet. So there were some pretty big cultural barriers to overcome in working in this environment, and I met a lot of Marines who, when I went out to shoot this story, who were very skeptical. And then I also met a lot of Marines who were really into it. And since then, it has taken off in a big way in the military, which is, of course, controversial,

which we'll talk to Elizabeth about. But the brunt of this interview is really about this story of which I had only the sort of tiniest sense before we did this interview before I was aware of her new book, Widen the Window, in which she talks about this. She went through an episode of stress that is really quite extreme and had massive physical and psychological ramifications, and it's ultimately what brought her to deep meditation practice. And in this new book, which again is called Why Didn't The Window, she talks about her stress and that she gives, she talks about five areas of habit change that we can all explore that

will both reduce our stress and help us thrive in unavoidable stress. And that is, of course, an unavoidable part of many of our lives. So this is stress advice from somebody who's been there in a big way. So enough for me, here we go. Here's Elizabeth Stanley. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too. I don't know if I've seen you much since the scene that made it into 10% happier where we were at Camp Pendleton together. Congratulations on the new book. Thank you. Before you dive into that though, let's just talk about your backstory. How did you come to meditation in the first place? Well, as I discuss in the book, have a long history with stress and trauma myself and in the course of my healing journey, while I was in

graduate school in two different degree programs and having my system begin to just fall apart started a variety experiment with a variety of different things and found meditation during that process in 2002 started in through yoga but then moved in the direction of a pasta meditation. I sat my first week-long retreat in early 2003 and it really, you know, I bit a bug. I sat my first three-month retreat in the fall of 2004. I was in Burma, you know, ordained as a nun in 2007. So it's, I feel like I've had a chance to experience quite a bit of it. But it came in through my own suffering, which is often- Well, just to ask you about that. I know the answer to this because I know you, but can

you just for those who don't walk through what the suffering was that led to the adoption of- Sure. I come from a long military lineage. There's been a Stanley serving in the US Army every generation since the Revolutionary War. both sides of the Civil War. My grandfather served in both World War II and the Pacific and in Korea, in the Korean War, and he was stationed in Germany in the post-war occupation force. He had PTSD, although the diagnosis didn't exist yet then. My dad then was active duty military, served 30 years, did almost two years in Vietnam.

He also had PTSD, and one of the themes that comes through in the book is how much intergenerational trauma and stress kind of carries. It's a lineage. So I come from that lineage, both the warrior side and the intergenerational trauma side. Both of my parents had their resilience undermined, I walk through parts of that story in the

book too. And I had a variety of early life experiences with adversity. And then in college, I did ROTC, and then I served on active duty myself, and had prolonged stress exposure during deployments during my time in Korea. And left active duty is a whistleblower after a sexual harassment situation and command reprisal for that. And it was while I was in graduate school doing these two degrees at the same time, coping

with the investigation, the after effects from my time in the service, that my system had, you know, it had been pushing for decades. I had all of this conditioning around pushing, like so many Americans do. My system just gave out. I lost my eyesight at the peak of it. Wow. Yeah. There was a scene, apparently, where you threw up on your computer. There was a scene, apparently, where you threw up on your computer. Yes. So in the summer of 2002, I had been working full-time at Georgetown, but I wasn't yet on the tenure track. And I was trying to get my dissertation finished and defended because I had been selected for a fellowship that fall. And I had to have the dissertation done. My committee had set the date with me and you know everything was on track except oh I still had to write seven of the ten chapters

and appendices. So I quit my full-time job in June and I had to deliver this to them by mid-August and I was working seven days a week you know 16 hours a day. I was at the computer I was working seven days a week, 16 hours a day. I was at the computer. And early in August, one morning, I get up, I make my cup of coffee, I turn on the computer, I'm just about to get started, I read the paragraph, I finished literally six and a half hours before, back at midnight the night before,

and I'm starting to write, and I'm halfway through the first sentence, and I just puked all over the computer all over the keyboard. Yeah the keyboard was not salvageable. So I had to throw it out, go buy a new one, I was back at the computer by 830 that morning. Oh wow, so you didn't take that as a slowdown? Well, I didn't in that moment because I mean, I was on this deadline and you know, I had the job wasn't time to think about it right then, but it was, I think this huge, you know, over the top, frying pan upside the head kind of signal that things were way out of balance. At the time, I made sense of it as, you know, this is my body, like waging this insurgency

against my drive to succeed. What it really was was just a complete adversarial relationship that I had wired between my thinking brain and my survival brain, and I had so much conditioning to compartmentalize, to suppress it, to just keep pushing, that it took, you know, signal that dramatic to get my attention to realize, no, no, you can't do this. But it didn't you know, a signal that dramatic to get my attention to realize, no, no, you can't do this. But it didn't get your attention. It didn't immediately like in that three weeks that I still had to finish it.

But, you know, as soon as I turned that thing in, I started a meditation practice that fall. I really amped up my yoga practice that fall. And it was that next spring that I sat my first week long retreat. When did the blindness happen? The blindness happened in 2004. So I was now starting to move towards recovery, but with that kind of inertia, there were so many imbalances in my system.

I was married at the time and at the time I also made also made sense of it as oh there's aspects of my life I don't want to see which I think was a truth but it took many many years later to realize I actually had Lyme disease I had been bit I mean just was a you know purely biological thing going on there I had been bit by a tick while I was on active duty I had the you know bulls-eye rash I went to the medical clinic and wanted to get antibiotics. At that point, line wasn't really understood, so it wasn't really treated. And my system had all of this ravaged immunity,

and it took hold in my optic nerves. So I had three episodes of blindness. In fact, my third episode happened while I was on my first three month for treat. So I spent six weeks of blindness. In fact, my third episode happened while I was on my first three month for a treat. So I spent six weeks of that retreat blind. And it was, you know, a turning point, an opportunity to really see that there had to be a different way, an easier way. Was that all lime or lime plus stress?

I think it was lime plus chronic inflammation, plus all this unresolved trauma that was starting to come to the surface. I had been really sick while I was on active duty. I had a near death experience. I had to be resuscitated when I was in Bosnia. It was all this stuff in my body that I had just been shoving down for decades. It was like a healing crisis. It was coming to the surface and starting to unwind.

I mean, I see that in the men and women I train too. It often, there's a period when we start to move towards regulation, where it feels like it's getting worse. You have just gonna say that. When it actually is getting better, but that's part of the process. So how did it ultimately play out for you in terms of you started meditating what happened next?

Well, I started practicing. It brought a little bit of relief. It also really uncovered all of the major imbalances. It started to bring up tremendous things. And in fact, my first kind of couple years into meditating in a sort of strict vipassana perspective with awareness of breathing as my main practice. At that point, I didn't yet have any clinical training, so I didn't understand why things were unfolding the way they were. And none of the teachers that I was working with understood how dysregulation can show up in meditation.

And so I often felt like I'm having this experience that's so unlike anybody else's experience, something must be wrong with me or I must be doing it wrong. When that wasn't it at all. In my case, I had had a near-death experience where I'd completely stopped breathing. I had had asthma. That was not from the Lyme. No, that was not from the Lyme. And just another thing entirely. I had had a near-death experience where I'd completely stopped breathing. I had had asthma. That was not from the Lyme. No, that was not from the Lyme. Just another thing entirely.

Yeah, while I was on active duty, I developed environmental asthma. And I was coughing blood, and there was a lot of smog in Korea and in the Balkans. And when we deployed to Bosnia, we were staying in this bombed out, it was the middle of winter, it was part of the I-14 that first went in right after the Dayton Peace Treaty was signed. So there were no like nice installations yet. We went into this bombed out bus factory and it had been completely just bombed out. It was a mess. It had been Muslim before the war, the Serbs had overrun this village during the war and it was supposed to come back to being Muslim Muslim before the war, the Serbs had overrun this village during the war, and it was supposed to come back to being Muslim now that the war was over.

We're in the zone of separation. And I had double pneumonia, but I hadn't had it diagnosed. I had been running this four-day convoy where we slept in our vehicles, three feet of snow, you know, sub-zero temperatures, with, you know, untreated pneumonia, so that's going on. We get here and we're trying to clear out some space to put some tents up and we don't want to do it in the mud because we're in our palace. So we're clearing out this bombed out building to find some concrete floor where we can put tents up. There's just concrete dust everywhere. And so I've been awake for days. I have double pneumonia

that it's not treated. And now I have concrete dust. And it started a really bad attack. I stopped breathing completely. Had to be evacuated. But what I didn't understand then, that I do understand now, both from my own experience and from watching the men and women I've trained, who might have histories of asthma or near drowning,

or frankly, even any freeze response when oxygen constriction is a frankly even any freeze response when oxygen constriction is a part of the freeze response. If we bring our full attention to breathing, it has the potential to tap into these unresolved memory capsules that are being stored by the body. And so when I first started meditating, 10 minutes a day, just tracking breathing, I would often find myself flipping into panic, right? Have nausea, right?

Start having more flashbacks, and I didn't understand how that was happening. I thought it was just me. But then when I started training troops, two-thirds of the men I would train in these combat units would have very similar responses. They'd either have panic or anxiety or they'd want to punch the wall or they'd want to, you know, they get really irritated and angry and act out.

And it took understanding that when you start tapping into some of this unresolved stuff that many of us are carrying in our bodies, some of the ways that meditation is typically taught don't necessarily address that. And that's part of why I created MFIT was to help create a blend that was going to be more than just meditation or awareness of breathing, more than just paying attention to body sensations, but to develop a tolerance to do that slowly over time.

What is MFIT? Yes. M-Fit is mindfulness-based, mindfulness training. It is a resilience training program that I created and that we've tested in four different neuroscience studies in the military environment with troops before they deployed to combat. We've also taught it in a range of other high-stress situations. And it's a blend of mindfulness skills training with training for body-based skills for self-regulation

that really work on helping to target the parts of our brain that focus on stress, arousal, and recovery so that the techniques can help the survival brain feel safe enough that recovery can happen. Because recovery is controlled by the survival brain feel safe enough that recovery can happen. Because recovery is controlled by the survival brain, and the survival brain is not going to recover if it's not feeling safe. We talked about this in the book, I wrote 10% happier, and it comes up every time we have somebody on the show who's blending the military culture and meditation, but just because

I suspect it's coming up in the minds of some of the listeners right now, what do you say to people who say we shouldn't be taking my precious meditation into a militaristic culture? Well, I would say two things. As long as awareness doesn't belong to any of us individually. Awareness is a natural facet of being a human being and the ability to be aware and to help create mind-body optimization is something that can enhance any aspect of life.

I think most people who get upset about the potential of mindfulness being used in, with the military, the police or some of these other high stress professions. There's a whole mindfulness movement that I know you're very familiar with. Their concern is that these skills are being divorced from an ethical framework, but in, M.F.I.T. doesn't do that. M.F.I.T. is actually seated with a very long lineage of warrior traditions that focused

on training the mind and body to be able to access a warrior ethos that was even primary to things like just war, so that they could make ethical decisions when they were wielding violence for the benefit of a community, for defending others. That's what the archetype of the warrior is about. And it's in that lineage that I seeded, MFIT. So I think there's sometimes a misunderstanding that these practices have been divorced from an ethical framework.

When it, in my, at least in the case of MFIT, they have not been. I think the quote I used from you in 10% happier was, that we're not training better baby killers, we're training people who kill fewer babies. That was indeed what you said, yes. And I think that's very powerful. I happen to agree with you that we don't live in an ideal world.

We live in the world as it is. And we need to defense. And we want our defenders to be as fit mentally as possible so that they're not being capriciously cruel or making the situation worse by the classic and surgeon's strategy is to provoke our troops to respond disproportionately. So, if you have mindfulness, you can literally take your finger off the trigger when it doesn't need to be there. Yes. To create the capacity to be able to control your impulses, to read a situation without

the bias of negativity, which stress often brings up, so you can see the full context. All of that is super important for any situation where there's the potential for lethal force. It doesn't have to be the military. It can be the police. And it isn't just to help diffuse the potential for conflict in communities. It's also diffusing the potential for inner conflict for those men and women who then are more likely.

I mean, there have been several studies that have shown that men and women who have engaged in unethical behavior are much more likely to then end up suffering from psychological injury themselves. And then it isn suffering from psychological injury themselves. And then it isn't just painful for them, it's painful for everyone in their lives, their family members, their communities. So I can't understand why anyone would question the possibility of using awareness and intentionality in all facets of human behavior, but especially in these high stress, potentially life or death situations.

I'm of the belief that more mindfulness is better than less mindfulness. So, let's just talk about stress for a second, because I can imagine some people thinking, well, your story is on the, let's just say, extreme end of the spectrum, right? I don't know how extreme it is, but you have had things happen in your life that many of us don't experience. But you did say before that you used the word pushing and you said you were pushing and so many of us, especially in this culture, push this way. Can you say more about that? Yes, absolutely. We have a very predominant cultural norm that tends to value success, sometimes divorced from the costs of that success. And many people talk about that in terms of

powering through. That's the most common phrase. In the military setting, the phrase is suck it up and drive on, where you're confronting adversity and you just want to keep going. And certainly in certain life and death situations, the capacity to do that is absolutely critical. But part of why I wrote this book and a whole theme through the book is kind of a wider cultural reflection about we collectively deal with, or don't deal with, stress and trauma. For many of us, the kind of knee jerk way we've been socialized is to suppress it, to compartmentalize it,

to put it aside, to self-medicate over it, to distract from it, sometimes even just to positively reframe from it. But none of those things is actually helping our body and our survival brain to recover. And I feel like my life was exhibit A of that way of being. And I've certainly accomplished many things in my life. But the costs to that were very, very high.

And I think we're seeing. It wasn't just a keyboard. It wasn't just the keyboard. It certainly wasn't just the keyboard. I'm still living with some of those costs. This mind-body system is going to have some of the effects of that for the rest of my life, even though I live in a very different way now,

and I'm way healthier now. There's still effects from that. And I think our culture is usually just not seeing those pieces. And I wanted to bring them back into awareness, because when we bring them into awareness, we can realize that we often divorce the choices from their effects. And then we sometimes have the effects happen later, and we feel powerless around them, and we've kind of divorced and disowned the responsibility that we have for having created some of those things through some of our choices.

So just to be clear, and this is why I asked this question, this book that I have my hand is substantive book that I have my hand on right now, and the advice that you will dispense in the next part of our discussion is for everyone not just for people on the extremes. Absolutely. In fact, one of the most, I have a whole chapter that's devoted to this particular thing that I'm going to say right now. One of the things I have noticed most often when teaching in situations that are not extreme stress is the way that we have all of these very insidious narratives that are comparative. You know, oh, well, I haven't, I haven't been raped.

I haven't been to combat. I haven't. So therefore, whatever I'm dealing with is just not important. And those, those thinking brain stories and comparisons of, you know, well, they have it much worse than I do. All of those things are ways that we devalue our stress. We dismiss it. And we sometimes just try and reframe it with our with our with our thinking brain, you know, with a, well, you know, it's okay. It's, I certainly don't have it that bad. And so, and there's all these good things

that are coming with it. All of that reframing in some ways is subtly ignoring what's going on in the parts of our physiology, that control the stress or rousal process, and most importantly, control the recovery process. So we have to bring that has to become part of the solution or we're just kicking the can in some ways. And kicking our own butt. So what do you mean by widen the window?

Yes, good question. It's an important enough concept that I chose it as a title of the book. By the window, I'm talking about the window of tolerance to stress a rousal that each of us have. You can think of it as our zone of resilience. And when we're inside our window, it is a place where both our thinking brain and our survival brain body can work together in an allied relationship.

That's when we can still function effectively, both before and during stressful experiences. We can stay connected to others. And most importantly, we can recover fully afterwards when we're inside our window. Our thinking brain decision-making can still stay online, et cetera. The window is wired throughout our life. It starts being wired while we're still in the womb.

Our parents and early care providers play an important role in the initial wiring of our window. And then there are several pathways by which our window can narrow over time. Chronic stress, shock trauma, early life adversity. Some of the habits we make choose to do day in and day out, they have effects on our window. Everybody's window can narrow. Everybody's window can also widen.

It really has, it comes down to whatever repeated experiences you're choosing to have consciously and unconsciously. So how would we go about widening our window? So one of the first things we need to do is become aware of the fact that we have one and become aware of the fact that we sometimes are going to choose strategies that might be creating an adversarial relationship that is not allowing the survival brain to fully recover. But in the book I talk about five window widening habits that we can cultivate on a regular basis that can help to widen our window. The first is

can help to widen our window. The first is awareness and reflection practices that help us to train our attention in ways that can help the survival brain feel safe because the survival brain will only recover when we are in a situation of safety. But there's several other things that are not at all related to meditation or mindfulness that actually affect our window. The first is diet. or mindfulness that actually affect our window. The first is diet. I'm looking at the list here too, so yes, I would totally agree with that. I can tell different days I'm more resilient or more awake or whatever based on what I ate the night before. Yeah, 70% of our immune system resides in our microbiome

in the bacteria and our gut, and we produce 95% of our serotonin. And so for people who have issues with anxiety and depression, you know, if diet is not a component of what you're working with, it can be a problem. So having a really healthy microbiome with probiotics, with, you know, low inflammatory foods, not much sugar. Sugar is actually quite inflammation-producing. And cutting back on caffeine, because caffeine also really messes with the microbiome.

Those are some diet pieces that affect the window. Sleep is the third window-idening habit. We really need, most people need, eight hours consistently. We are very sleep deprived in this culture. And there are several experimental studies that have shown how much, just even two weeks of six hours a night, the cognitive declines that are associated with that are very equivalent in these cognitive tests

to someone who's been awake 24 hours. You know, and when that sleep deprived, we not only have problems thinking, but we also have problems doing any kind of top-down regulation of our stress and emotions. And that's when we get impulsive and we start, we have no willpower at that point. That's when we start choosing habits that might be making it worse. The fourth window-winding habit is exercise, cardiovascular exercise, strength training and stretching. All of those things help to discharge the excess stress hormones we have and improve our immunity. And we get better sleep when we've had exercise, so these things interact with each other. And then the last one is social connections.

Our culture has moved over the last, I guess, 30 years, in a much more, I mean, we're way more connected technologically, but the statistics about how much we spend time in a meaningful way with personal relationships has really declined. And some of the research around social isolation and loneliness and the effects of that on our physical health, on our psychological well-being, it's pretty stark. And so really cultivating relationships that we can call

on and be available for is actually a window-winding habit that we have access to those that we've built them in times, you know, when things are okay so that we can draw on them when we need to. I mean, I blew it on that one for a long time and I had a moment, I think about a year ago, where I had been pushing so hard after, ironically, I wrote this book about meditation and then my life exploded. It became a lot of good ways. I didn't expect it to be successful, and then it became successful, and I had people who wanted me to write more books, and I started a podcast and blah, blah, blah.

And I then really, even leading up to the, in order to get the book done, I kind of shut down big parts of my social life because I wanted to, I had to get the book done, I felt. And I had an experience just not super extraordinary, but some colleagues of mine here at ABC were leaving the company and one of my current, a woman who still works here, named Rebecca Jarvis, who's one of our business, our chief business and economics correspondent was throwing a little party under roof deck.

And my wife and I went, we brought our kid and it was really fun. It was all these colleagues that I've really been close with for a long time. We're having a lot of fun. And on the way out, I was like, why am I in such a good mood? And I just hadn't been doing things like that for too long. And I think this is something we, everybody knows about sleep, exercise, diet, increasingly people know about meditation.

I think social connection is a, and I would probably add in there as another one that's also overlooked is exposure to nature. These are really widely overlooked. Yes. Our, we are wired as social animals. And I think in the last 15 years, neuroscientists have really started to uncover all

of the different neurobiological mechanisms that explain this. But one of the things that is really true about the nature point, for example, is that we are constantly resonating with our environment. And our nervous systems are, our survival brain is, if we are surrounded by regulated situations, and nature is a great example of a regulated situation,

our system starts moving towards regulation too. I mean, we can also be around regulated people. But in the opposite way, when we're stuck in traffic, when we're stuck in traffic, when we're stuck with all kinds of electromagnetic stimulation, noise, pollution, those things are constant stressors, and they've turned the stress on and we're often not aware of it, but it is turning it on and not turning it off. So, yes, these things are hugely important and make a big difference. It doesn't have to just be about finding time to sit down and meditate. These little choices

we make, just walking through a park can have a tremendous effect. But okay, so just because you're just with that last part, they're getting toward what I want to get to, which is I think a a lot of people hear all of the paragraphs you've just uttered and think, okay, well, I can't argue with you, meditating, sleep, diet, exercise, nature, social connections, all super important, but I don't have time to do this. I've got two jobs and three kids, I'm a single parent, even if those conditions aren't there, I have historically used attempts to change my behavior and my habits as another opportunity to invoke a phrase

we discussed before kick my own. But how do I do, I know I'm supposed to do all these things, how do I actually do this? You're just by listing them, you're tightening my window. Yes. For people that are, I feel very privileged that I have the kind of job that allows me to carve out a certain amount of time every day so that I'm taking care of these things and investing in relationships and aerosol. For people that are working three jobs or juggling multiple jobs and child care

and I get it, it's really hard. And yet, at the same time, it's kind of like these things are non-negotiable on some level. Either we're going to pay the costs now by making choices to create some amount of time for it or we're going to pay the costs now by making choices to create some amount of time for it. Or we're going to pay the cost later when our system has accumulated all of this wear and tear that starts showing up with chronic inflammation with suppressed immune function.

I mean, it took losing my eyesight for me to start paying attention to it. I don't want other people to have such extreme outcomes. We've all heard stories of people whose lives kind of went off the rails in a spectacular fashion, you know, where they have some big ethical laps, or a DUI, or a terminal medical diagnosis. One of the fun things about being human is we get to make choices. We can choose whether we're going to do that or not. But the choices are easier for me and you as affluent white people than for people who

have societal, cards stacked, deck stacked against them. Yes, there is no doubt about that. And it's become clearer over time how there are so many structural things built into the way that we have developed our society that makes some of those things worse. You know, all the hidden sugar, for example, in fast food, which for many, you know, people who have to eat that because that is what they can afford. Like there's additional costs that get baked into the way that works. I totally get and agree with what you're saying. That said, it's great to pick one habit to start with and really focus on. And if you're going to

pick one, the one that I would choose first of the paragraphs as you put it that I said before, the number one thing I would pick is sleep. That was just going to say that. Because when we are asleep, our thinking brain is offline sleeping, and that allows the rest of our system to do so much of the recovery process while the thinking brain isn't inadvertently blocking it. And so, whatever people can do to carve the time for sleep, I think that's a really, really important one.

Listeners, you should know we have a whole episode coming on sleep in the next couple of months, but so you don't have to wait. Let's dive in on sleep now. What would your advice be to those of us who need more sleep, but also have the pressure of like I think about my wife? We have a four year old, he wakes up a lot in the middle of the night, will not accept his father, which is painful on some level, but convenient on another. So she's always the one who has to deal with him. Her sleep is interrupted all the time. Somebody like her or somebody who has got two or three jobs, I need to work in order to support the family and has a limited window to use a loaded phrase, a word of time in which to sleep. What can folks who have pressure on their sleep do in order to hone in

on this? It's a great question, Dan. And I would say the first thing is to become really intentional about setting the stage for when you go to sleep, so that when you go to sleep, the sleep is truly restful. So really trying to disengage from electronics and the blue light of that, a good hour before you sleep, not doing cardiovascular exercise right before you go to sleep or you have had this big rush of new hormones,

stress hormones that then disrupt sleep, not drinking a whole lot of alcohol or having a lot of sugar at bedtime, those things actually will disrupt sleep. So even if you're not gonna be able to get eight hours uninterrupted, if you can do things that help the system to start sort of moving towards some down regulation, it will make the sleep much deeper and more restorative when you have it. And for people that have interrupted sleep as much as possible to try and make up the

time after you've had your sleep interrupted. So napping. I'm not a huge fan of napping. I mean, I think that there is still some debate in the literature. What many people have found is that napping actually can increase the likelihood of fragmented sleep later on. But that's different from someone like your wife who's having to cope with it. She's having fragmented sleep, not by choice. I mean wife who's having to cope with it. She's having fragmented sleep not by choice

I mean she's having to help your son But yes, the the jury's still out on napping so I'm gonna I'm not gonna answer that for sure So if you're having fragmented sleep or if you if your sleep has been interrupted you want to that's not your fault probably but the the the move is to make sure that the sleep you get after the interruption is as high quality as possible. Yes. And you set the stage for when you first go to bed and you set the stage for when you go back to bed after it's been interrupted so that it's going to be really restful sleep. That's not when you want to be streaming a video or playing a video game or things that actually ramp the system up.

And for many of us, when we're kind of in that wired but tired space, we gravitate towards watching an action movie or playing a video game or reading a novel that actually is getting our mind going again. Or eating crap. Or eating crap. I say that with no judgment. Self-judgment only. All of those things actually are going to work against restful sleep.

Right, so this is where picking one habit actually implicates lots of other habits on this list. So diet impacts how well you sleep, exercise, if you do it early in the day, can have a saliitary effect on your sleep. And then you haven't mentioned this yet, but I heard a sleep expert, a scientist who only works on sleep, mentioned recently that the one intervention that he thought actually really worked, he's very much against sleeping pills, is meditation. It can be very helpful. It absolutely can. You know, so many of the men and women I've trained have gone off,

either prescription drugs or non-prescription over-the-counter sleep aids over the course of working with practice. It doesn't have to be something huge. It can be 10 or 15 minutes at bedtime, gentle stretching, even lying in a hot tub, the warmth is actually great and you can feel your body in the warm water, feel the back of your body touching the bottom of the tub. It doesn't have to be like, oh, I'm meditating right now. It can just be helping the system just slowly move towards winding down. It's funny that sleep is that meditation can help a sleep because the translation of the word Buddha is awake.

And you know, you're often, you know this because you've been on longer retreats than I have, when you go on a meditation retreat where you're doing a ton of meditating, you sleep goes down to two to four hours a night and you feel fine. It's just that you don't need as much sleep. I've heard a neuroscientist mutual friend of ours, Judd Brewer, say that's because you're doing so much less suffering. Yes, I've heard him say that too. So I don't know if that's correct, but he's pretty smart, so it probably is in the neighborhood

of being correct. So how do you reconcile that? The fact that meditation is about waking up, but it can also help us sleep. reconcile that the fact that meditation is about waking up but it can also help us sleep. Well, I think that when we are living actively in the world, remember I said a while ago that we're always resonating with things around us, whether it's congestion and traffic and all the electromagnetic, you know, the blaring radios and the television screens and all of these other really amped up people, you know, stress and emotions are contagious. So if we are around people who are anxious and irritated, our systems pick and that stuff up,

picking up a lot of stuff when we're out in the world. And our system needs a little bit more to come down from that and have some recovery time. When you're on a meditation retreat, as you know, one of the whole points of being on retreat is to make the external world as quiet and in some ways as bland as possible so that you can really turn inward and focus on all of what's going on inside, which often can be quite tumultuous. But the process of sitting over a period of time and walking, it is very regulating. And so much of that repair and inflammation reduction and pruning that

is happening when we're trying to deal with all of being in life, there's just less of that happening on retreat. But it's clear, I mean, there's so many studies that have shown how much mindfulness meditation can help with sleep. And in our studies at Camp Pendleton, when we were with the one-MF Marines, over the course of that eight-week period, they did both biomarkers that were correlated with sleep, insulin-like growth factor, which we only produced that growth factor when we're getting restful sleep.

So if you're producing more of it, you know you're getting better sleep. And then self-report, they reported they were using fewer sleep bids and they were reporting sleeping up to an hour and night on average, an hour and night longer, even though we were further into the pre-deployment cycle when they actually had more stuff going on. So it does. It sets the conditions for us to get good sleep. Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this life is short. And it's full of a lot of interesting questions.

What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast. Life is short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you, but I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists,

scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs. And sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App.

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ So your book dives pretty deeply into how to change our habits. You don't just list these things that we should all do and then leave us hanging or feeling horrible about ourselves. So you have a bunch of precepts about how have a change can work, and how we're going to run through them. The first one is experimentation. Talk about that.

So when a scientist is trying to understand whether something has a cause of a relationship or not, they go all in on an experiment. They set up the conditions to test a particular thing, and they go all in and try it for a while. And then they gather data to see if this actually had the change that they were hoping it was going to have or not, right? That's part of how the experimental process works in science. We can do the same thing in our own mind and body.

We have a mind-body laboratory with us all the time. And so it's great, in fact, not to try and change all the habits at once, because then you don't know what effect it's having. So in the book, I highly recommend that, you know, I can talk till I'm blue in the face, and so can you, Dan, but people need to listen to their own intuition about what they most need. I lay out a bunch of different things, and I'm hoping that as readers read it, they will resonate, say, oh, this is the one I need to try first.

My suggestion is pick the one, try it, give it at least three weeks, and if it's something that's really hard or something that's going to bring up a fair amount of emotions or resistance, try and give it a month to really see what the effects are. And keep a journal. Doesn't have to be super elaborate, but keep some notes about what you're noticing to see if they're shifts. And then after three or four weeks, you can adjust. If this isn't a tweak a little bit,

I have done a lot of habit change in my life after things really went off the rails. And I have found that it's good to do them one at a time and just treat it like an experiment. Bring some non-judgmental curiosity to it and see what you know this. I wrote a little bit about habit change in the second book I wrote and I talked quite a bit about experimentation and quoted. Well, I don't know if it's really from him, but Thomas Edison was reputed to have said, I've never failed. I just tried 10,000 things that didn't work.

And experimentation is super useful because we're wired to fail on habit change, on forming healthy habits. We're not really wired for this. It's very hard to do. And so the only healthy attitude is, well, actually, there's another healthy attitude that I want to get into right after this. But a one very key, attitudinal shift to make going into the formation of a new habit or the breaking of a bad one is experimentation, recognizing you're going to have to try different day parts for your meditation practice, different styles of meditation, different way,

different pre-sleep routines, et cetera, et cetera, in order to nail it. Yes, absolutely. And if you bring that kind of curiosity to it, and then you can kind of hold it lightly, and not take it personally, if this particular thing that you try, didn't work out so well,

everything that doesn't work is another opportunity to learn and gather data for what might work. Right. So that again then gets to you, hit on this a little bit in the end of what you just said there, but the other key attitude to bring to bear in this process, which can be very difficult. Let's just own that, is self-compassion. Yes. Not kicking your own butt.

Yes. Absolutely. I wrote this book because I have a lot of skin in this game. There's nothing that I teach here that I have not grappled with and learned from directly in my own mind and body. I know as I was going through that process, there was so many times where I was just merciless with myself and super self-critical and ashamed and that actually just exacerbates the symptoms. It exacerbates the adversarial relationship between thinking brain and survival brain.'s loads the recovery and so if there's anything that this book can bring to other people it's hopefully the self-compassion and the awareness that you know we're not aiming to be perfect here

we're aiming to be whole and that journey requires non-judgmental curiosity and self-compassion. Well how does self-compassion is one of these things. It sounds great. Actually, I think the term is horrible. So it doesn't really start great. Terms set in the big, auto-erotic. But the concept sounds great. How do we do it? Well, I think one of the best ways to do it

is to begin to really understand that so many of the things that we're doing were deeply conditioned long before we were conscious. I mean, they started being conditioned while we were in the womb. And some of this conditioning is, you know, makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. It's pretty misaligned with where the world is today. But when we begin to understand how this works and the inertia involved, it helps us not take it quite so personally.

It isn't like our fault that some of these things happened. These many of our conditioned things happen. This conditioning was wired and it was adaptive when it was wired. It helped us to survive those situations. Being able to understand why that was so helpful helps us not kind of personalize it. And then we can realize, okay, this helped keep me safe in the past. It may not be serving me anymore.

There are strong neurobiological reasons why this just has deep inertia and it's going to be hard to shift, but that's not because I don't have willpower or I'm weak or there's it's because that's how the wiring works. So for example, I eat crap when I'm stressed. So then you can notice that's that's not theoretical example. That's me Dan I eat like crap when I'm stressed or tired and that puts you in company with almost every other American it's really stress eating is really common in our country right and it's also just common for human beings because we were wired for this yes We were wired at times when we're stressed out to get calories in. That's right.

Food actually even tastes better with your stress, which is diabolical. You know, I can understand why evolution would wire us that way, but it doesn't make sense in a modern context. So having self-compassion would be to see the evolutionary antecedents here and to notice, oh well, this is quite common among lots of people today and to give yourself a break. Yes, and I'll even go one more beyond that. When we are stressed, our thinking brain capacity tends to be degraded. When our thinking brain capacity is degraded, that's when our willpower is actually degraded too. So our ability to kind of will ourselves to do the healthy

thing or to, you know, interrupt the habit that we're being tempted towards or the craving that we're being tempted. Our willpower is degraded in that moment. So it's not just the evolutionary heritage we're dealing with, we're also dealing with the wiring in this moment that is all the inertia is down this highway towards, eat the cookie. And then when we eat it, we feel badly about it, and that's just creating a vicious cycle. That's when we start the binge bust kind of stuff

that just exacerbates it. So what do we need to understand about willpower that can help us be a little bit more compassionate toward ourselves? I think understanding how much willpower is degraded when we're stressed and especially when we're experiencing traumatic stress. But we see it as a personal failing.

Not as something that's impersonal. We do, because we're wired to not only disown kind of our traumatic stress, but we're wired to disown the shame that comes with it. And so then it kind of comes out sideways in these horrible self-judgments. The final recommendation, at least at my notes here, from that you give in terms of successful habit change, is to dig in and

really understand the why. Why are you doing this? Yes. So for most of us, our habits that we wish were different, are what I like to call sort of pseudo regulators. They are things that help us feel good in the short term, but they're actually often contributing to our stress load over the longer term. So the sugar feels nice right now, the glass of wine feels nice right now, the nicotine hit feels right now, it helps us handle the immediate, but it's actually not helping our system fully recover, right?

But it's serving a purpose. There are reasons why we're feeling called to that thing right now. And so beginning, you only want to have this kind of an inquiry when you're in a rested and regulated place, when you have the capacity to not be quite so self-judgmental, where you can really be curious about when did this have its start? What are the triggers that lead me to want to do this thing? What needs is it filling? And when we begin to understand the needs, the sort of itches that we can scratch when we do this have it, it opens the possibility then to begin to think about, okay, I see I have this need now. Are there other things I could do to meet that

need that might have less of a toxic consequence on my body's stress load? So for instance, I had, I went through a phase in my recovery where I really was, I went into huge television binging. And one point I got really curious about, how much television am I watching here? And I started, you know, I tallied up how many episodes I'd watched over the last month. When I saw how many hours it had been, I was just stunned, Dan. Like, how did I give that much of my time to binging, you know,

worthless television? And then I really got curious, why? What is it doing? And I realized that TV bingeing was meeting a whole bunch of different needs at different times. Like, sometimes I was bingeing television because I was procrastinating on a task I didn't want to be doing. And actually while I was watching the television underneath,

I was still like anxious that I wasn't doing the task. Just being aware of that helped me say, okay, I'm going to let myself watch one episode or maybe not any episodes. I'm going to set a timer in 30 minutes, I'm going to work on this thing, and then at least I've made progress, right? Sometimes it was, I was missing some TLC. I had a dental surgery or something, and I just wanted some nurturing. TV's not the best way to get nurturing.

Way better to call a friend and say, you know what, I had dental surgery, could you come over and bring chicken soup and we can sit and talk? Like that was way more nourishing. And if sometimes it was, I had so overridden my limits. You know, I had been sleep deprived, I had done too much and I had not had enough time

for recovery and television is sort of a pseudo recovery. It wasn't really recovery. Real recovery would have been sleep. And so those times I realized, you know what? I shouldn't be watching TV. I should be, I should just take a big long nap. I should sleep in tomorrow morning. So you have to be clear for yourself.

Each of us have our own go-to habits, and each of us are drawn to those habits for our unique reasons. You've got to investigate that for yourself, and that will help you figure out what the replacement might be. But in terms of the why, isn't it also important? I don't know if this is part of your argument, but isn't it also important to understand to hook our efforts, to yoke our efforts, to change our habits to to our deepest values, to be a little grandiose. In other words, to say, yeah, I'm fixing my sleep

because I want to be healthier so that I can be a better parent, so I can live longer and meet my grandchildren so that I can be more effective in my daily work, which is to help lots of people. In other words, to take it out of the realm of an exogenous extrinsic pressure, like I'm doing this because Liz Stanley told me, I'm gonna get sick if I don't,

and more of an intrinsic motivation of, I wanna do this because it's important for me to be a better human being and a healthier human being. Absolutely, but I guess my one pushback on that and it isn't really a pushback, it's just kind of a slight perspective. I want to make sure it gets into the conversation here. When we are stressed and especially when we're traumatized and the difference between stress and trauma is entirely whether we are, our survival brain is perceiving us to be helpless, powerless, and lacking control.

So when we're stressed and we're those things, the rest of our life does feel like it's this pressure on us. And in that place, our decision-making capacity gets so narrowed to what's immediate that we sometimes can get disconnected from our deepest intentions and aspirations and goals. And that's not a place where kind of reframing it with some thought is necessarily going to solve it in that moment when the craving is so hard.

And so it's really important that we don't kind of figure out the alternative things in that stressed moment. It's best if we've already had that kind of figuring it out and maybe even develop a list of alternative things you could, you know, you go to other options when we are in this very rested and regulated place when we can really tap into our deepest intentions and values. So that in that moment, when you've had the sh** day ever, and now you've been driving home and got a flat tire, and you get home and the dogs made a mess on the carpet, and the kids are screaming, and there's no dinner yet.

And your spouse is called and said, oh, I'm not going to be home tonight. And you know, whatever life has happened. In that moment it's really hard to touch into what your deep is values are. But if you've already thought about okay these would be other ways instead of in this moment I'm gonna you know crack the bottle of wine or tune out with television or play video games till two in the morning or get a motorcycle and ride 100 to 50 hours000 hour or cheat on my spouse, whatever it is that we've already have some other go-to options that we've thought through. I've asked all the questions that I wanted to ask, but we did in our pre-recording chat

establish that there was one other thing that you wanted to hit on, at least one other thing you wanted to make sure we hit on, which was a concept that I actually, not super familiar with, which is stress contagion. What is that? So, in the last 15 years or so, there's been a lot of research beginning to look at some of the ways that we are wired to interconnect. It shouldn't be surprising, but it really, I think they're starting to finally understand the mechanisms by which it works.

Stress and emotions are contagious. And for many of us, much of our stress arousal that's going on kind of in the background that we're not aware of doesn't actually originate with us. It originates in the people around us. We are most, stress and emotions are most contagious. If they are coming to us from people that we have attachment bonds with, so our parents, our children, our romantic partners, and also critically it comes to us from people who we have power differences with. So bosses, teachers, and especially leaders. And you know, so when we begin

to understand, there's a chapter in the book that walks through all the mechanisms of how this works, some of its thinking brain wiring, some of its survival brain wiring, some of its hormones, all of these things are happening in the background. When we start being aware of this, we can begin to understand and routes and self-capacian around how being in certain social environments really can take a toll on us, sitting in traffic, for example,

being at a cocktail party where everyone's being insecure and anxious. Like you pick this stuff up, but also we can pick it up just from watching or reading the news. And in a time when there has been so much polarization you pick this stuff up, but also we can pick it up just from watching or reading the news. And in a time when there has been so much polarization and so much kind of messaging that triggers stress arousal, triggers fear and anger, we can be picking it up vicariously

just in the environment around us. So it's important to understand and to not get powerless around it, but to realize that just because it's coming at us, we can still be regulated and take steps to stay regulated so that we're not constantly absorbing it. This is a little bit of a non-sequitur. Not totally, though. I was thinking about social connections within the,

as you were speaking, within the context of habit change. And I've discussed this with other folks who are, who look at, you know, habit change or behavior change. And it seems like you can harness the power of our social connections to change your own habits. In other words, if my wife and I decide in concert, we're going to get better at our pre-bed time routine, or we decide in concert, we're going to cut down on sugar, or we're not going to do so much late night snacking.

Isn't that potentially a way to supercharge our efforts? Absolutely. There's a reason why many, many people hire personal trainers for physical workouts, or have a workout buddy. people hire personal trainers for physical workouts or have a workout buddy. It's just much easier to have someone to do it with you. And it gives you the chance to go through the process of the vulnerability of making the change and the resistance that naturally comes up during the change to have someone that's helping to support that process. So absolutely. Is there anything else I should have asked that I didn't ask?

No, I think we've covered it. I think there's just one last thing I would want readers to understand and your listeners to understand. For people that come from histories of prolonged stress and trauma, it can, and we might be really suffering a lot, It can often feel insanely daunting to begin to try and take a, even just a small shift towards health and balance. But I'd like to leave people with the thought that just one small shift often has, as we've talked about today, these huge potential ripple effects that just like there's all this negative inertia around the detrimental habits, once we make some shifts, we can build lots of positive inertia and momentum towards tremendous shifts and transformations.

Amen. Or as we say in the Buddhist tradition, Sado, well spoken. As we close, let just can you plug everything just for minus the name of the book Where can we learn more about you? Etc. On the internet, etc. Etc. Plug everything absolutely so the book is called widen the window training your brain and body to thrive during stress and recover from trauma and you can learn more about me and the book and the research with MFIT on my website,

which is www.alizabeth hyphen stanley.com. Excellent work, thank you. Thank you Dan for having me, it was great to see you. Alright, big thanks to Elizabeth Stanley, nice to see you here again. Let's do some voicemails, here's number one. Hey Dan, my name's Tony and I'm calling from Sydney. First of all, really love your work. It's opened my eyes to the world of meditation which I otherwise thought wasn't for me. And I can honestly say that your books and your art have changed my life.

Anyway, so I have two questions and the first quick question is about how none of my friends meditate and I don't really have anyone to talk to about it. And I was just wondering if you had any advice on how to bring up meditation without people thinking you're, for lack of a bit of word, weird or pretentious. And then my second question is about the guided meditation from the app. I'm not sure if other people have the same problem, but I thought it out anyway. So I often find that when I'm sitting during a guided meditation, something that the teacher says will just click, and it's so helpful that I don't want to forget it,

and I want to write it down to future reference. But then I try to note that I'm clinging to the desire to write it down in order to remember it to serve me in the future. And really I should try and let that desire go and focus on what's happening in the present. So my question is, if I'm only meditating for 10 minutes daily-ish, how do I make sure I'm getting the most out of what the teachers have to say and taking it all on board to improve the next time I meditate? Without spending the entire meditation, just trying to remember that thing they said that really resonated with me, or letting it go and then forgetting it by the time the meditation's over.

Yes, so thanks again for your great work and introducing me to meditation. I can't wait to be in the next book. I can't wait for the next book either. It's gonna take me a long time. Anyway, I'm not gonna complain about that. I'm gonna answer your questions. Thank you for all the kind things you said and for two great questions.

I'm gonna do the first one quickly because I probably, some of you may have heard me give this advice before, which is, I recommend not talking about it from meditation with other people, not because we should keep it super secret, but because I found in my own experience talking about meditation unsolicited with other folks usually comes off as annoying or preachy or like you're recommending that they need to do this thing because they're fundamentally broken or whatever. So generally speaking, I only talk about meditation if somebody asks me to, in which case

I'm happy to really go for it, but I try to, you know, if somebody asks me a basic question, I'll try to be sparing in my answer, and then if they really, if it's obvious they want to dig in, then I'll really hold forth. But I recommend restraint in this area because people often don't want to hear it for one reason or another. I learned this the hard way with my wife. So the second one about what do you do when you're listening to a guided meditation, you hear something super interesting, you have this urge to write it down. I have a lot to say on this, but actually I'm reading Ray Hausman, who is the chief of our actually says everything I would have said, but also a lot more.

Here we go. It's so great to hear aware of all this happening in your practice. It makes sense that the impulse to grab after a good piece of guidance would arise. This is the nature of the mind. I will offer that it's really worth letting the experience just be what it is in that moment. In other words, let the resonance with the guidance be known, as well as you can in that moment, and simply observe the tendency of the mind to want to hold on to it. It's going to pause here for a second. That's absolutely right. So you're, I don't think you want to get up and write it down. You want to notice the urge to get up and write it down, which is sort of a clinging that we experience in any number of ways throughout the day could be clinging to one more bite of ice creamer, I looking at my son he's so cute, I hope he never grows up, et cetera, et cetera.

Noticing that clinging, which is the source of so much of our suffering, is a big opportunity for learning because then when the clinging arises in the rest of your life, you can notice that it's happening and let it go. Doesn't mean squashing it. Notice it, investigate it, and then in the investigation, in the awareness of itself, it tends to arise and pass away naturally, as opposed to when you're driven by it blindly, you just re-up it unconsciously all the time, and then you have this kind of ambient background static of suffering. So, anyway, let me continue with Ray's advice here. In doing this, you are strengthening two key aspects of the practice.

The first is simply being with our experience and allowing it to resonate through the body. This can be particularly powerful when we're experiencing something beneficial. And the second is to feel into the tendency to follow the compulsive nature of the mind and to release that so that we aren't tendency to follow the compulsive nature of the mind and to release that so that we aren't actually engaging with the compulsion regardless of what the compulsion is for. If the instructions are truly valuable, I'd suggest you go back through the session and find that piece of guidance again and write it down at that point.

So exactly right. If you hear something great in a guided meditation, just keep going with the meditation and then when it's over, scroll back through it and find it again. Great question, really appreciate that. Let's do voice mail number two. Hi again. My name is Erin from Victoria, BC Canada. I have a regular meditation practice.

Typically it's 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the afternoon, every day for the past five or so years. I listen to all of your podcasts and appreciate that I learn something every episode that I can apply to my practice and my life. And I appreciate the questions you ask, ask your guests an enjoyable variety of guests that you have on your podcast. And I also really enjoy that you share so much of your own personal experiences. Onto my question, lately I've been struggling with a question regarding the type of meditation practice that I do. A lot of my meditation practice has been mantra-based or rep-based and sometimes guided but more

so unguided. I actually really enjoy guided meditations and my question is this, is there benefit of choosing one specific meditation practice and sticking to it every session for an extended period of time, like a few months, versus mixing it up every day. I'm curious if you do a loving kindness practice in the morning and a breath-based practice in the afternoon, and what do most experienced meditation teachers do? Will I get more benefit from sticking to one type or style versus, let's say, choosing a different meditation from the 10% happier app every day.

I really appreciate your thoughts on this. Thanks. Thank you. So the aforementioned Ray Howesman and I agree on, I'm going to put this in my words, but she and I have the same response to this. So I do think, we do think that having, picking one thing and sticking with it really does make sense. I mean, you kind of think with it really does make sense. I mean, you get to kind of think about it like the scientific method.

It's really hard to gather reliable data if you're doing a different experiments every day. You kind of want to stick with one practice and over time you might get a clean signal as to what the practice is doing for you. And there are different benefits from different types of practice. One, the benefit of watching your breath, just noting the feeling of your breath coming in and going out, is one of the big benefits. From that, is it helps focus?

In fact, this kind of meditation brain scans show that it can boost the area of the brain associated with attention regulation. And then the other thing that really happens in this kind of meditation is this kind of mindfulness-based meditation, is you are concentrating on the breath, but then the instruction generally is, if something very strong comes along like physical pain or some sort of powerful emotion, boredom, restlessness, sadness, fear, anger, then you actually turn, you make that new thing, the physical sensation or the emotional storm, the object of your meditation, not that you're supposed to get lost in it, carried away by woe as me thoughts, but to investigate, what is sadness like? How does it feel in the body? What kind of thoughts arise? If you can do that without getting carried away by the thoughts or what is knee pain like?

And what kind of emotional reaction am I having to that? And then as soon as the pain or the emotion passes and you return to the breath, and what the latter does is, so the breath focus can really help you be focused and then the mindfulness of whatever strong emotion or physical sensation arises can help you not be so yanked around by emotion or physical sensation as it arises during the course of your day. And this can be massively beneficial because you're in a meeting with somebody

all of a sudden something they say makes you really angry and you're able, some percentage of the time, to notice the anger welling up without necessarily acting on it in a way that you later regret. And then loving kindness medicine, you mentioned using a mantra,

I'm not sure what you're referring to there. There's some Buddhist practices that engage, use a mantra like a mantra, I'm not sure what you're referring to there. There's some Buddhist practices that engage, use a mantra like a silently repeated word or phrase in the mind. But mostly that's associated with Hindu practice, like transcendental meditation. So I'm not an expert on that, but you might also be referring to loving kindness meditation,

which involves the repetition of, in the mind, silently of phrases where you envision people or beings can be your cat. I say that because I just finished a 11 kind of meditation retreat, nine days with Joseph Goldstein up at the Insight Meditation Society a couple days ago and you and one of the people I was he had me focus on easy people so one of them was my cat Toby although he's not that easy given that he is known to drink out of the toilet and drool but that being said I did use Toby or and my son so you can picture people sometimes easy people sometimes yourself sometimes sometimes a neutral person, a difficult person, or all beings, sometimes all of them in a sequence.

You visualize them in your mind and then repeat phrases to them like, may you be happy, may you be safe, may you be healthy, may you live with ease. It's very corny and seems ridiculous at first, but what I say to people who say that that seems ridiculous and I was one of those people is, you know, if you were a Martian and you landed here and went to a health club and saw people systematically picking up heavy things and putting them back down or running in place for an extended period of time or climbing stairs that went to nowhere. You would say that looks crazy, but these are all just forms of

exercise and this is a mental form of exercise, which has two benefits. One is it two boosts the capacity for concentration through the visualization and the repetition of the phrases. And two, it is the radical thing here is that it shows that the intention to have friendly vibes or goodwill directed toward other beings is a trainable skill. I say all of that to point out that there are different skills that can be taught by different forms of meditation. And I think, and Ray agrees with this,

it makes sense to pick one form and stick with it over time, so you can get a sense of what the benefits are in your mind and what kind of practice works best for you. And then you may decide after a couple of months that, you know what, I want to try a different practice and then you can do that consistently. The other thing you ask was about a morning practice and an evening practice where you do a different practice for each one. That makes sense to me.

That seems orderly enough that it's not going to produce a counterproductive doubt in your mind about what am I getting out of this et cetera et cetera So if you were doing 10 minutes of breath-based mindfulness work in the morning and loving ten minutes of loving kindness later in the day that sounds really good and then my own practice I kind of switch between mindfulness, you know or Vipassana insight practice where I'm either watching the breath or just doing what's called a noting practice where you make gentle mental

notes of anything that arises like pain or tightness or cold, hot, fear, anger, hunger, etc., etc. Where you basically just have it cultivating this non-judgmental awareness of whatever is happening in your mind. That's one of the big practices I do and the other is loving kindness. So, I think having a small set of practices gives, at least for me, gives some clarity, so I'm not jumping all over the place, but it also gives me options. What do really experienced meditation teachers do that was another question you asked? I have no idea, but that's a good question to bear in mind as I think it's all over the place.

But it's almost not really relevant to the rest of us because we're really at a different place in our practice. Anyway, I hope that answered the question. Two great questions as always this week. If you want to send us a voicemail, we'll put the number in the show notes. And we will most likely get your question. Thanks again for listening everybody. And I want to thank everybody who works on this show, Ryan Kessler Samuel, John's Grace Livingston, Lauren Hartzog, Tiffany Omaha, and Drew Mike Debusky is operating the boards right now on this Saturday morning as I record this. Don't forget to come to the event with me in Joseph this Thursday if tickets are still available

in New York City and in any event, I'll see you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.