Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 24: Dr. Amishi Jha & Maj. Gen. Walter Piatt

Episode Date: July 6, 2016

Dr. Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami, and Maj. Gen. Walter Piatt of the U.S. Army might seem like an unlikely pair, but they have worked together to bring Mindfulness to the troops. Jha studies how the demands of high-stress, high-stakes professions may degrade the brain's ability to make decisions and she has found in her work that groups like accountants, students, athletes and military service members benefit from Mindfulness training. Piatt has served in numerous assignments all over the world, including tours in Korea and Panama, in his more than 35-year military career. He's also completed several operational deployments including Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. I'm Dan Harris. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. We've got two people on this time.

If you were going to design a meditation show, these are probably the two least likely people you would have on the show. One is the neuroscientist. The other is a major general in the US Army. And they know each other. They've worked together, bringing mindfulness to the troops. We're going to hear about how this whole thing came about. But let me just tell you who they are. First, Dr. Amishi Jha is a neuroscientist and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She studies how the demands of high stress, high stakes, professions may degrade the brain's ability to make decisions.

And she has found in her work that groups like accountant, students, athletes, and military service members benefit from mindfulness training. The other guest is Major General Walt Piot of US Army. Walt began his military career as an enlisted soldier when he entered the Army Service in 1979. He's had a more than 35 year career. He served in numerous assignments all over the world, including tours in Korea, Panama, Hawaii, and Alaska. He's also completed several operational deployments,

including CERNAM, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It's such a pleasure to have you both on the show. Thank you for coming up. It's good to be here. Yeah, thanks, come up. So I'm gonna start with the question I start with, with everybody, and I'm gonna pick on you first to me, she says we know each other better.

How and why did you come to meditation? So, I'd say the answer is in two parts. The first is personal need. And I guess very much similar to your story. I didn't have a panic attack on national TV. Well, you're doing cocaine. I was not doing cocaine. So not really similar to my story.

So, one of the sense that I had a growing understanding, that it was my mind that was causing me a lot of pain. Gotcha. I was a new faculty member and a new mom at the University of Pennsylvania at that time. And everything outwardly looked fine. I was continuing to have success at a great institution, but the stress of it was actually crippling.

And at some point, I realized, like, I don't want to live my life like this and turn to my husband actually at that point and said, I think I'm just going to quit my job. And it was around the time the semester was about to end with, you know, just a grueling schedule of teaching and just everything was intensive, especially with the new baby, too. And he said, you know, you could do that. But why don't you just try over the summer to see if there's some some other way you can make yourself feel a little bit better. And it was really fortuitous for me that right before the summer started, we had a guest speaker in town, who was Ritchie Davidson. Okay, can could i tell everybody richy davidson yes

so richy davidson has been honest by the was on the first podcast we did uh... him and uh... the dolly lamar richy davidson is really the pioneer in terms of using neuroscience to examine the impact on the brain of uh... contemplative practice meditation et cetera et cetera so he came to the university of Pennsylvania gave his little check in you were also no so richy at that time was not out. Oh, Richie is an eminent, effective neuroscientist. So he studies how the brain's emotion systems work. And he gave a wonderful talk, a keynote, having nothing to do with mindfulness or meditation.

And at the end of his talk, he actually showed these two images on the screen of brain scans, one of what he called a positive brain, a brain of somebody in a positive mood, and the other of a person in a negative mood. And he was just trying to make the point the brain really looks different in its functioning and its profile as a function of mood. So at the end of his talk, I raised my hand and I said, how do I get that brain, the negative one, to look like that brain, the positive one. And he looked up and said meditation. And that was all he said. And he said, I've, you know, that was

the end of the question and answer session, that was it. And I was, as the first time I was, I was sort of shocked. Like, he realized you're at Penn. Like, we don't use those words here. And he was serious. He, he, I did have a chance to talk to him a little bit later about it and he was saying some of the work they were just starting. So this was a while back. But it got me curious. So that summer, I bought my first mindfulness

for beginners book by Jack Cornfield and just committed to doing the practices and it changed everything about my life. So that was on the one hand, the personal side. The professional side was after doing this for several months, I realized that the thing that it was seem to be affecting was my attention. And my entire career as a neuroscientist had been spent studying the brain's attention system. So I just became extremely curious about how it was that this thing I was doing quietly by myself for 15 to 20 minutes a day was profoundly changing everything about

my life and shifted my entire lab's research focus to explore that. Okay, I want to unpack this just a little bit. Yeah. Walt, I'm going to get to you. I promise you're going to make your life very difficult in just a few minutes, but let me stay with Amishi. It's so weird to call a guy with all these stars and bars on this jacket. Walt, I feel like I'm going to get in trouble.

What do you mean to change your attention? What do you mean by that? And also what do you mean by it like changed so much about your internal weather? What do you mean by that too? Okay, so in terms of, I mean it took a while for me to realize that this is this thing called attention that I know a lot about from my day job. It really just changed the quality of my moment to moment life. I could look at my husband and listen to the words he was saying to me.

I could be with my child, read a book and actually look at the pages and see the images as I was sitting there with him. It was like I became more present to my circumstances. And nothing had changed really about the level of stress or demand, but I was more embodied in what I was trying to do. And there was less angst around everything going on. And then that's when I was sort of like putting it together and thinking, oh, okay, the thing that might be resulting in this benefit is the way I'm directing my attention, the way I'm making my mind is staying in the moment. And it's not just moving forward to the next thing that's going to happen and worrying

anxiety, provoking thoughts or ruminating on bad things that have already happened that are kind of weighing on me. It's shifted where my mind was in time. And what were just briefly, what was the practice you were doing, what kind of meditation? So this was a basic mindfulness of breathing exercise, where the instruction was to sit in an upright, comfortable posture, pay attention to the sensations of breathing, and when my mind wandered to gently return it.

And then opening up to more receptive practices, open monitoring type practices to anchor on the breath, but to really allow any thoughts, emotions, sensations, come and then pass through. Very, very interesting. Okay, so we will continue with your story in a second, but let's get over to Walt. So how and when did you start meditating?

I wanna met a machine and for all the reasons you just heard. That's what really introduced me. We would have been since then. You weren't doing cocaine. I was not. I was doing war and a lot of it I guess. So we were coming back time and time again after each deployment, trying to reintegrate our soldiers back into society and each time we'd see soldiers

just by row out of control. And so the army was really put a lot of time and effort into help and we help our soldiers post deployment. And that's what led us to Amishian. They asked to do a can we help our soldiers post deployment. And that's what led us to Amishi. And they asked to do a research project with our soldiers in Scofield, Barracks Hawaii. Amishi did. Amishi did. And so she came out, we were introduced by an Army doctor to say this may be a different way of trying this.

So let's research the use of mindfulness in post deployment and pre-deployment training and during a deployment. And you were talking about guys coming back from Afghanistan. We just got back from Iraq. I was a brigade commander at the time, a third brigade, 25th coming back from Afghanistan. We just got back from Iraq. I was a brigade commander at the time, a third brigade, 25th Infantry Division. And we just got back from Iraq. And we had been on and off again,

you know, you're gone, a year back, a year gone, a year back. So we used back 2009 when you first started. And 2009. And so we knew what we had been doing post-appointment was not working. So we really wanted to try something new and this was presented to us as a way. So we put about 200 soldiers in the research

and even though I was a great commander, I somehow couldn't get myself into it. So I was kind of jealous to seeing about this was. Wait a minute. So when she came to you and said, yeah, we would like to get your soldiers to meditate. Did that not completely embarrassing and like, why, we would like to get your soldiers to meditate. Was that not completely embarrassing? And like, why was that not outright rejected?

Well, she tricked me. She sounded like she did this a second ago. I couldn't understand about every third word she was saying. But I could read her charts. And the charts were, the science was absolutely impressive. And that's what we're lacking in the military. We're providing a lot of information to soldiers. Like don't drink too much, you know,

but don't spend all your money at one time, don't go home and beat your wife or beat your spouse, do this and none of this was working. We had provided them enough availability of assistance, but we weren't really helping them, you know, pre-deployment, we weren't really helping them with the mental challenges of combat and a mental challenges of just stressful life within the military. And that's what this offered. And so she really led with the science, which was absolutely

convincing. She explained in 10 seconds what myself and my and the Sergeant Major for the brigade had been experiencing since our many combat deployments. So, you know, we were guilty. We were sat there and realized we were not managing stress well and it was impacting our lives. And just the way she described it, we were convinced. I don't think the word meditation came up within the first meeting. Yeah, but you knew it involves sitting, closing your eyes and paying attention to your breath. What other word is it for that? Yeah, we were, so we were a little curious, but we weren't yet suspicious. We were like, because everything we'd been doing had just not been working. You were kind of desperate. We were, we were everything we'd been doing had just not been working. So we were desperate.

We were, we were, and we were very open-minded. But then we're going to explain to it that we're going to go through some training and teach, teach soldiers to meditate and do this. Right, this, the rest of us who didn't get into the research project, we started to just teach ourselves. And we understand in a military without a doubt. We carve out time every day to do physical fitness.

It's at least an hour a day we provide for just for physical fitness. You see the benefits immediately. But we don't do any time for our mental fitness. And that's one of our most powerful weapons, really. A weapon is a soldier's mind itself because we put them in a very complex, stressful environments, and they have to be able to

interpret those environments under great stress in split seconds and make very difficult decisions. So anything that could help them be in the moment and understand what they were seeing and not what they were trained to think they were going to see was very helpful. It was helpful in accomplishing our mission the right way. And it was helpful with managing stress with our soldiers, which we think will greatly help with the post-combat deployment and just post-combat stress. I want to talk about the results of the study in a second, but what I'm surprised and I'm not hearing from you is rampant, acidic skepticism among your colleagues and peers. So did you not run into any of that?

Well, we ran into quite a bit. So the Sarge and Major and I multiple combat deployments, we were a bit desperate. So we were very open-minded and we saw the science behind it. We were very eager. But the soldiers, I'm sure they said, oh, what is the kernel we got us doing now? A lot of that, great resistance. But it was something new. But I think with shortly, people started to see a difference and then they started to get buy-in. And then there's a community that practices as well and I think athletes, especially professional athletes, or in a military, we like to call our soldiers, they are warrior athletes. But I think that, that, that comparison to professional athletes really helped them bring it in, say, well, there might be something here. When you want to see the ball, when it's getting thrown at

you, when you want to be in the moment, when you're in a, want to combat patrol in a rack or Afghanistan, and the answer is certainly yes, well, this can help you get there. But you do have to do some convincing and soldiers have to see it. If they don't feel it, they're not going to come in. So they're just not going to practice, they're not going to practice on their own. But when soldiers started to feel results, you could sense they were more eager to practice on their own. And I think Amishie's results show that. The ones that would say, yes, I would do more on my own. They showed better results. What, what, what, what did you find from that initial study? Yeah. So the study was a,

it was a very big study. The first of its kind that the medical command had funded. And we were asking a bunch of key questions because again, this is the first time anything like this had been done. One question was really around dosing. So how much time do we need to take in order to have effects? And it was an eight week period of time that we had devoted to the training. Some people got 24 hours over that eight weeks. some got 16 hours and some got eight hours. And that's where we were not sure if we were gonna have effects or not. The second question we wanted to ask was really around,

well, if you're gonna have some period of time, what should be the emphasis in that time? Should you spend your time talking to them about the downside of stress and the value of practicing, or should you just not really say much and just haven't practiced while they're in the room with the trainer. Sort of like if you go to the gym, do you want your personal trainer to tell you how great exercises are just sit there and do the reps with you?

And the other thing was just how does it compare to other things that the army was interested in trying out? That were actively part of the profile of what the army was doing for resilience. So comparing mindfulness training to positivity training, where the intention for positivity training is to cultivate more positive mood and see what the impact would be. And I'll just tell you one of the research studies that we've, that's already been published last year, which was the one with eight hours. We found that we could go down to eight hours and still find benefits.

But if that eight hours was just filled with the didactic, the information about how bad stress wasn't how great mindfulness was, it looked no different than doing nothing at all. The group that actually got the mindfulness training and mostly did practice in class significantly stayed stable over time, whereas the other group and the control group completely degraded in their attention. How are you measuring attention? So this is where the laboratory toolkit

that I already had expertise in was really helpful. Most of the things in my lab were computer-based tasks, brainwave recordings, functional MRI studies of attention. So we use that technology, where essentially you're doing something like a simple video game that is quite boring, that requires you to actually overcome that boredom and your own internal chatter in order to do the task. So we saw how often people were able to press the button when they should and not mind-wonder

and miss it completely, as well as how aware they were of whether their mind was wandering or not. But, but, but, major general Walt wasn't worried about attention among his troops who was worried about them beating their spouses and, and drinking too much and maybe running the cars off the road. So what is... So this is where it was really, I think I connected the dots in that first proof that I mentioned, which is essentially attention is one aspect of what we call executive control or cognitive control, the ability to make sure that the goals you have align with your behavior, so that you're holding in mind what your ethical code is, what you think the right way to be is, what you have align with your behavior, so that you're holding in mind what your ethical code is,

what you think the right way to be is, what you consider to be your aspirational way to be, and ensure that your behavior really serves that goal, instead of losing entirely what you'd like to be doing, and then not being able to follow in. So attention is the key kind of workhorse system that allows executive control to be possible. It's also the thing we need to regulate our emotions, to communicate well, to make decisions, to plan. So all of those

things are tied to what he wanted to see as the end result. What I noticed is that the way that the army was doing things at the time we arrived on the scene with this project was essentially, in some sense, sort of death by PowerPoint, tell people what the aspirational goal should be of how their behavior should look, but no tools on how to get there. And I think what we provided was a sort of a mental workout that would allow them to actually grow these capacities that were surely depleted after being, you know, in war, combat deployment, after combat deployment. So, did you find any, any evidence other than

anecdotal evidence that these guys were not only was there a, a, a tension capacity boosted, but that their behavior improved in some way? Well, that was sort of the, that was their own self-report. That, so that was more anecdotal. That was anecdotal when, when they would kind of describe how, and most of the things were not about their day job. It wasn't like I'm a better soldier.

It was like I can talk to my wife without yelling at her at night. You know, I can go to my daughter's soccer game and watch it. So it was really like the personal shifts that were happening in their lives, similar to what happened to me myself, that they were showing up to their life in a way that felt like it's the way they wanted to be as people. But did you find that the stuff that you cared about, because you didn't care so much, at

least correct me from wrong, but from what I heard initially, you weren't looking to boost their attention span. You were looking for them not to ruin their own lives when they got home from deployment. Were you seeing less of that among those who got this training? We were, but what we quickly learned was that this was something that wasn't going to be just post deployment. We quickly learned it, wow, that we should be doing this pre-deployment because we realized this senior folks at multiple deployments that everybody suffers from post-traumatic stress, everyone, but not everyone has to suffer

from falling into despair or disorder. But what caused that? So it was really what we realized was we need to be doing this pre-deployment. We need to be learning how to manage stress and manage attention, which gives you a better soldier to be able to face those traumatic events because he's regulated or she's regulated and then they come out the other end, you know, much, much less stressful. So saw immediately, while this is something we, this not just for our post-appointment, though that was the reason it got us there. But if certainly we saw right away that the applications of this were much more beneficial. But you did see it. I felt, I felt it, my, a lot of our senior folks felt it because they've been deployed so much.

They really felt like, well, I'm really enjoying my time with my family. You're so anxious to get home, but sometimes your mind didn't catch up. You're still deployed, and this really helped us just to really enjoy those special moments we were able to have with our family in between deployments. When we come back, you say compassion is more powerful than bullets. I do say that, I did say that. I also said before, I deployed to Afghanistan along my deployments that we could win this war without killing one more person.

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Can you tell me a little bit about the difference between pre-meditation, major general wildpiet and post-meditation? Well, I think looking back, I could see times where we were in the moment we made good decisions if we couldn't put our finger on it. I could see soldiers that experienced post-traumatic growth, but I saw a lot of soldiers experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. I saw a lot of soldiers experience post-traumatic stress disorder. And we couldn't figure out why that was. And we thought it was just because we were training very hard,

we were creating combat-like conditions within our training so that when they got to combat, they were prepared for that type of stressful environment. What we may have been doing is elevating stress to a much higher levels to our soldiers and not teaching them how to regulate. Whereas the missing ingredient? But we saw different examples of that.

Before we even knew what mindfulness was or were introduced over our many deployments. And we just tried to, why was it that way? And when I saw the science behind Amishi's work, that's what really convinced me right away that there's something here we need to pursue. But immediately what I see is, because I think some people come about it naturally, that they are, they self-regulate,

they're able to deal in stressful moments while still being very much in the moment and a stressful combat operation and make that split the second decision and make the right one, whether it's to use force or not to use force, it's one of the hardest decisions a soldier has to make and it makes it very quickly, not always with complete information, but you don't want them to have to be a high level stress when they make it because they normally make them the wrong one.

So we saw examples of that. So we saw the application of then post learning to meditate. Now it's just you're able to get away from the the stereotype that we have to be multitasking and and to be effective in the military. That the more you more you can do, the better you're doing it. And this kind of proved to me just the opposite. So now I'm very comfortable with taking a pause,

studying a problem, or even walking away from it, and doing some type of reflection, even if I don't have time to sit for 20 minutes, even just walking out in the courtyard of the Pentagon and just do what I call a mindful walk, just walk through and focus on, you know, nothing and then come back. And I'm able to get things done in a much more efficient way. So I've seen efficiency in my own life from this, but I've also seen soldiers become much more, you know, happier at home,

post-apployment, and much more effective during the deployment, during their careers. What about you, are you happier at home, and are you just happier in your moment-moment experience? I am, and I think I was. I mean, I was very happy, but I could see this dress. I could see, I could feel it coming back, you know, things were irritate me, you know, just getting stuck in traffic, loud noises.

The thing's going wrong that really never bothered me before. I was very patient, I thought very tolerant, but my wife noticed it. And then so I'd always made sure I was exercising. And exercising was my pre-mindfulness way to regulate. That was what I did. And I had to do more and more of it in order to get that feeling back

that I was being relaxed But you you you feel it. It's not it's not like you're some ticking time bomb like my chat TV But it's the little things that it's start to build up on you and then you just you know You blow up with anger on something that was just so insignificant You know prior to all these events in your life that they you start to realize something's wrong. I mean not spiraling into Disorder that's a very serious case, but all soldiers's wrong. I mean, you're not spiraling into disorder. That's a very serious case, but all soldiers are affected by it. And if you're not recognizing it and dealing with it,

then things could get a lot worse. But what I found is if you're less stressful pre-traumatic event, you handle the trauma better and you certainly come out of it a lot better. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And the policy implications are gigantic. But so that was the first study back in 2009. Can you, I assume there have been, I know there have been more.

So can you walk me through basically what you've been finding? Right. So I think that the, this, this overall profile is very similar to what I described to you. And I don't know if that was clear and what I had said before. If we look at people that are going through very high-stress situations, and that could be soldiers preparing for deployment, the deployment cycle itself, or in the civilian context, you know, undergrads preparing for finals. I mean, anything that is a high-stress period of time, protracted over multiple weeks, has an impact on attention. We know it has an impact on well- wellbeing, we know people report feeling more stressed and unhappy, but what we've been able to track is that if you look at their attention using

these simple computer games at the beginning of that interval and at the end, attention declines. And that I think is kind of an important thing for people to realize is that there are costs to going through a high stress interval. And if those same attentional resources are necessary for you to regulate your mood, to have successful interactions with people, and to solve the problems that are part of what makes the interval high stress,

and you have less of that resource, you're going to be compromised. So when I speak about that period of time and what happens to attention, we're really talking about figuring out some way we can build cognitive resilience. So allowing people to grow the capacities that we know weaken over high stress periods of time. And so that's what we've done.

We've looked at various high stress groups, undergrads, accountants, football players, all during kind of intensive periods of time. And sure enough, we find that the groups that don't get the mindfulness training or get some other form of training that doesn't emphasize this present moment awareness, degrade in their attention and their mood and the people that get the mindfulness training and actually practice it, stay stable or even get a little bit better than where they started. So that's sort of the broad brush of the kinds of things that we're looking at. But you keep working with the military, right?

And so the military thing has been very interesting. So you know, we, in this first study that we did in 2009, my partner in all of it was Dr. Liz Stanley at Georgetown. Yes, yes, yes. And I've interviewed her, yeah. Yeah, and so the thing that's really remarkable about Liz is that she sort of embodies the expertise of somebody that knows a lot about what it means to be a service member. She was in the military herself and she knows a lot about what

it means to be a mindfulness practitioner, but that's a very rare combination. She also happens to be a professor of security studies, so she professionally knows about this area. I mean that that's there's one list, Stanley, there's not hundreds of them. So now that we found that the training is effective, that's, there's one list, Stanley, there's not hundreds of them. So now that we've found that the training is effective, that offering mindfulness training pre-deployment can actually protect against the decline that you normally see, the Army's concern was, well, how do we grow this capacity? How do we have more people that can get the training?

And so over the last several years, what I've been doing, and I've been grateful that, that Walt's been part of our advisory board, is trying to figure out how we can make the training, again, low dose, low tech, highly accessible, and scalable. So, basically, you need a lot of trainers. Yes, we need more people to do this. We need more people that can do it. So there's two ways we could go.

One way was let's take people that already know a lot about mindfulness. Let's get mindfulness certified trainers and train them in how to deliver our program that we had designed for soldiers so that they already have the mindfulness piece and will teach them about contextualizing it for the community. But the other way we were going to go, simultaneous with this strategy was let's get army trainers, sports psychologists that know how to train soldiers well, who may or may not be soldiers themselves, but they know how to train service members so that they're high performance. And we train them in our program, and that's what we're doing now. We're kind of looking head to head to see which group is more effectively able to offer

the programs that soldiers benefit. Why not use technology like have this training delivered through an app or something like that? So we have done that too. That's something that's been ongoing in my lab. It's looking at various apps to see. I think that that's a good strategy to go forward. So far our challenge has been that you have to have some

buy-in and some accountability that the app is actually engaged in. Even if you turn it on in the recording plays, there's no human ensuring that people are following it. So what I'm interested in trying now is let's have an app where there's some kind of coach where there's somebody. That's a 10% happier. I know that.

Yeah. I know that. Let's have a coach. Let's have some kind of book ending of in-person sessions so that they know what this is about, what they're getting into. And then throughout the process, they are able to get the assistance that they need. So, exactly. I mean, you and I have even started talking about that, is how are ways in which we can use

this kind of, I think, a next generation of app that takes into account the human interaction to guide people, to coach people, to really allow scalable delivery. So, we could do, like like a 10% happier military style. But the thing is, I would be the wrong guy to be involved in that, because I'm like five foot seven and 120 pounds, and I've never been in a fight. The little move we were revised,

I've never been in a fight that I've won. So I might not be the right guy, but I definitely think there's, I'd be interested to see what the numbers show you because I would imagine in person pedagogy will be more impactful than an app. So far, that's what we're finding. Yeah. Is giving people an app does do actually basically it's showing us no difference depending on

the app. So if we give them a relaxation app or, you know, brain game app with like cognitive attention tasks or a mindfulness app, there's no difference. Doing something is better than nothing. Yeah, but if you want to scale this thing, that's the question. Can you train enough human beings who actually understand how to teach other human beings how to do mindfulness, which is a subtle art? That seems to be the problem. That's my next grant. That's your next grant.

That's the question I want to really pursue. And like you said, the challenge with any research design is having enough numbers and testing out different delivery models. So like I described to you, is the mindfulness expertise the key or is it the context expertise that's the key? So far, I'll give you the kind of where we're at with those results.

It looks like the thing that seems to really win out in terms of soldiers appreciating and following the training and benefiting from the training from our laboratory measures is the one that's taught by the Army Trainer. Interesting. So they need to be able to relate to the person who's teaching them this practice. And it's not the case that the Army trainers are service members themselves, but they know how to talk. They know how to talk.

Exactly. They can relate to the particulars of this culture. So if you bring in a meditation teacher, you've got 30 years of talking about the Buddha and a lot of these people have this soft pur in their voice and they feel like they're trying to give you a raky massage with their vowels. It's like those people are not gonna work

with the military. So far, it doesn't seem to be the right way to go. No, I mean, it's just intuitive. Yeah. On my end, at least they don't work with me. Right, right, exactly. And, you know, I'm not in the military for a lot of good reasons.

Do you have a hunt about what the best way to get this out? Well, I will say at first Liz Stanley was very helpful in this because she did relate to soldiers. I mean, she had been personal trauma. So that was just her and she was very intelligent and being a college professor that, I mean, she really identified with soldiers in that language

and we've done some work with the mission. I just be able to talk the soldier athlete language very helpful as we take a lot of fitness advice from folks who aren't in the military, but if they show something that's working, everybody pays attention to them. Okay, what's the latest gig? So when CrossFit came out,

you know, military's very interested, our soldiers were very interested. Some of those exercises, we've been doing the military for years, but the way we were presenting it wasn't as cool or it didn't appeal as much. But we have had a lot of good work in the military lately with apps because of our young soldiers identify them, especially when it comes to the military schooling where they

are more likely to do all the pre-class work on an app and we've seen higher graduation rates in some very difficult classes such as Jumpmaster course where you've got to learn how to be in charge of an airplane that's going to put out parachute. It's a very difficult school to pass and requires an incredible attention span. But when we downloaded things on apps that they could do all the pre-course work, it saw a lot higher success rates. Some a little bit more optimistic about it. We'll follow the science. I know the hands-on, someone who identifies much better, but we do physical training every day. And everybody in the platoon is about what you normally do

every day or a squad. They're all pretty good experts. They grow up in that environment, learning how to do physical fitness. So they're able to lead every single day. So if we can train ourselves, I know that's going to be a hard start up. I think we'll get there because they'll see the benefits

and they'll want to do it. Soldiers don't want to miss physical training in the morning. They just don't want to because they see the benefits of it. It helps them with their promotion, helps them with their life. They feel better. They get the results and if you're stationed in Hawaii, you want to go to the beach on a weekend too, so it doesn't help either. So I mean, it really helps.

But when they see the benefit, they go after it with a hunger. And especially when they hear about athletes, Seattle Seahawks doing that, Russell Wilson, I mean, people see that, they want it. They want to get after this. So I think we'll get there. It will take some convincing. It's military, just the army is very big, very big organization.

And when you come in, it almost sounds like it's too good to be true. And I think we still have a lot of convincing to do with some of our top leaders. That this isn't magic. This isn't too good to be true. This is real we still have a lot of convincing to do with some of our top leaders. This isn't magic. This isn't too good to be true. This is real. And the science will prove it.

And your brain does show the effects from practicing this. And it really doesn't cost a lot. I mean, we spend a lot of money defending our nation with building our military and all the services. This is one, I think, is affordable. The payoff is enormous to my mind. We're going to get there. It's just going to take a little bit longer. But Amisha is going to lead that charge for us. So I'm just to drill down on that second. You are part of the Army

brass. But as you talk to your colleagues, you're still bumping up against some skepticism? Skepticism, plus, you know, it's another thing we want people to do. And soldiers have a lot of things coming down from the top. Just do this. And time is one of the resources we just don't have a lot of. And so it's very hard. When you're coming into an organization

say, you're carve out this time to do this. The first resistance is, no. Does it matter what you're asking them to? Because if you're trying to take time away, that they've already have scheduled in a very overloaded, over-scheduled time of units every day are, to ask them to take, you know, just even 10 minutes, it's like they can't find it. But when they see the results, they certainly find it. Because no matter how tough our schedule is, we will make time for physical fitness.

This just has to get, you know, we have to grow it that way. Then, the priority will be on our mental fitness, our physical fitness, and then everything else. I think we'll just do everything else better in less time and be more efficient. Can you imagine a near term future where mindfulness and meditation are part of basic training? Yes. Okay. That is a crazy notion. Well, I think the soldiers said, we've tried a lot.

I mean, the army, what we have in the army now is what we call our comprehensive soldier fitness. We understand there's more than just physical fitness. It's sleep, nutrition, spirituality, and mental fitness. How we go about that is what we're trying to introduce mindfulness in. Because I think a basic training is probably the best place to introduce it. And it's probably the best place because it's a very high stress. All this very organized, great instructors take really good care of the soldiers, but

they're away from home. And it's culture shock when you come into the army. If you've never been in a maybe played high school sports, you may be a little bit used to that that kind of group shock, I guess, of really being a hard schedule to keep and not getting a lot of sleep and having to listen to someone else tell you what to do every second of the day. But we have to teach our soldiers how to be soldiers. And I think this is where it really, really would fit. It would reduce stress from the get-go. They would see the benefits of it,

because they see the benefits physical fitness right away. Some of them come, they've never done a lot of physical fitness. So we take extreme care to slowly introduce them while preventing injuries. Took us years to realize this. I don't know why, but it really did. We realized we can't start just doing,

you know, 100 pushups a day. You got it, some soldiers can't do 10. And we want them to do 100. So we'd slowly build it up. And as we've studied, you know, stress fractures and running and load bearing, how much weight and all this over the year. So we're really smart on physical fitness.

We just need to follow the science more on mental fitness. And I think that will prove mindfulness is the best course for us. Now, I think this is amazing, but Amisha, you know this. There are those in the sort of more traditional circles in the meditation world who think you're taking this ancient, sort of essentially peaceful mental art and giving it to people who are violent.

How do you respond to that? mental art and giving it to people who are violent. How do you respond to that? I think that, you know, from my point of view, if you're gonna have an 18-year-old and send him to a war zone with a weapon that can destroy an entire village, why wouldn't you wanna make sure he has access to his full capacities to make the right decisions. And that's what

this is trying to do. So in some sense, it's not about, you know, making better killers. It's that when force is to be used, it's used in a way that's appropriate, not reactive. That the decisions that are made are informed by people being able to hold their own ethical code, even in in crazy violent circumstances. And that's what's not appreciated. It's that, you know, we live in a time where we have a military. We live in a culture and a country that is inactive combats, I mean, the combat situations. And they have the capacity as individuals to actually do a lot of harm.

So it's not that we're going to prevent those circumstances from happening. It's the nature of the world. But even at the individual level, if we can empower them to be better able to access their own ability to prevent bad things from happening, why wouldn't we want to do that? I agree with you. I mean, Liz Stanley, who has been discussed a lot in this podcast who just so everybody remembers is somebody who's Worked with Amishian has also spent some time training the US Marines and how to do mindfulness. I asked her once this this question of you know

Are you training better baby killers as some in the in the sort of old school? Contemplative circles have alleged and she said no we're training people to kill fewer babies you know to make wiser more effective decisions in the field and to be more resilient when they come home So anyway, that's a long way of saying agree with you But Mami, she wanted me to ask Walt about one of his expressions which I find really interesting especially given the source You say Compassion is more powerful than bullets. I do say that. I did say that. I also said before, I deployed to Afghanistan on one of my deployments as a battalion commander,

I told our battalion that we could win this war without killing one more person. Because warfare is much more complex than just killing. And sometimes the overuse of force builds combat power, what we call in the military, builds sympathy and power for your enemy. So if you apply force incorrectly, it actually has the opposite effect that you're using a four. In this type of war, you cannot kill your way out of it.

You will not kill to win. You must be able to build while using force with surgical precision. And compassion, from my experience, was much more powerful and much more effective because it allowed us to one lead with respect for the people of Afghanistan, for the example I'll use for my good friend, Governor Peck-Tek at the time, Gula Mungal, we built a long

standing friendship. Our job is to build, not to destroy. And if we went in there with the mentality that we're going to be effective and decisive through killing, that was really just a naive approach to warfare. It's much more complicated and therefore compassion to the Afghan people and the struggle that they were enduring in Pactica province where I wrote about. And I said this was we needed to understand them. We needed to be compassionate to their needs. And that way it separated them from the enemy that was trying to undermine

their struggling and fledgling government that they were trying to build. So it was actually very effective tool, and I'm not doing it to trick. These are real emotions that we felt for our friends. They were, they still are our friends. And I think Gula Mungal said it best that when we left Pactica, I asked him, you know, why were we successful? This was in 2005, a very successful election. Pactica was not going to vote in the national election because it was too violent when we

got there. The new governor and over the help of us, we believe we are part of his larger security plan. We subordinated ourselves to the people of Pactica and almost 100% of the people of Pactica province voted. It was really kind of a tribal vote, so it was a bit different, but 50% of the people of Pectica Province voted. It was really kind of a tribal vote, so it was still a bit different, but 50% of them were female.

And Gula Mungal got a personal phone call from Humid Car's I congratulating him on what was supposed to be the most violent province in the election, turned out to be the most peaceful. But it was because we understood the struggles that the Afghan people were going on. We weren't just focusing on the enemy. And I also told our folks another one that confused soldiers a lot. I said, you know, if we focus on the enemy, we ignore the threat. There's a threat as much larger. You're talking about, you know, very serious government complex systems that have to be built in Afghanistan for people. So it was really the decisive

means to that end was capacity building within the government. That gave the Afghan people what they needed and that forced them to look internally to their government and when in the enemy then separated and it was easier for us to find the enemy and we could if we had to use force it was with surgical precision. But there were several times I'd use shoes one example. Well we left the village after doing a medical demonstration all day long. We brought female doctors in so the females could be seen. It was a very positive day at the request of the government. But as we left the convoy, our last vehicle, there was a grenade thrown on the vehicle.

And the gunner did what he was trying to do. He jumped down into his turret, he yelled grenade. Luckily the grenade didn't go in the turret. It rolled off to the back of the vehicle, got stuck in the equipment. We were carrying and exploded. He immediately jumped back up. Manda's gun saw the figure that threw the grenade running. And in a split second, decided not to shoot.

And there were so many children around. And he had a 50 caliber machine gun. He would have killed many innocent people. Plus he saw that the person fleeing could be no more than maybe 10 to 12 years old. So that's put second that soldier by not by not acting. I say acted decisively. And later on we went back to the village and we said okay they thought they thought we were going to go door to door, search every house, arrest every man. We didn't, but we stayed there. And we said, let's come to the resolution of this. And they didn't. But so I left and I said, please bring the person responsible

to our base camp and we want to talk to them. Two weeks later, the father brought the tribe, brought in the father and the young boy that threw the grenade on that vehicle. And they pleaded for us to arrest the father and leave the son, take back to the village, but they were offering his father in his place, and they'd the tribe agreed on it. And by the Afghan way, we had every right then to arrest the rest of the father. We decided not to.

We introduced the boy to the vehicle and the team that was in that vehicle that he threw that grenade on that day. And he saw that we weren't the evil infidels. We were just boys at one time just like he was. We were men just like his father was. And that we really wanted to bring peace to this very difficult land. We built more relationships with that tribe that day through this compassion, which began militarily decisive because we got incredible intelligence from this village, the rest of our deployment, and they solidified their stance against the Taliban. They would not allow them to come in and influence their young kids to take up arms against the government.

And we never had to worry about that village again. So, I know it goes against what you hear a lot of military saying but I'll tell you our military is trained to do that. That's what I think makes the United States Army very, very good. We understand that just because we're an army and we have force, the best thing to do is not to use it to absolutely have to. I find everything you just said very compelling. But I just wonder about the reputational cost to you.

I understand you wrote a couple books of poetry. Your guy who says compassion is more powerful than bullets. You're hanging out with this unreconstructed meditation person over here. Do they call you Major General Moonbeam behind your back? Or what is this a problem for you or is it good? Well, it's one of the things I like about your book because you realize you still have to go to work every day and you still have to be demanding. I'm the director of Army Operations and they may call me other things behind my back.

I'm sure they do. But there's still a very dangerous world out there. We got to do very, very tough things with people. And you got to get people to do things they don't necessarily want to do. It's a defense and security is a tough business. And especially with the increase of terrorist threats and terrorist threats in our homeland.

But I think this helps us do it better. So I make no apologies I open up. but I do think there are a lot of soldiers that are like me. I don't think I'm any different. I think we realize that our mental capacity is very important. And if we don't care for it and understand it, we're going to burn ourselves out. We're going to burn our soldiers out. We saw it.

We still see it, unfortunately, in many people. And we can't just enhance soldiers to make that optimal warrior through technology. It's just not going to work. We have to be able to give our soldiers the tools that they can manage, stress, and pay attention because the stressful environments we put them in, demand it.

So I don't know if people call me names. I mean, I'm proud of my service. I'm proud of many of my peers. I think a lot of people write. And for my experience writing was very therapeutic for me. It was a way of letting emotions go of some very difficult things. But it was also a way of honoring those who serve

in these incredibly difficult positions away from their families for years at a time. They're way you understand it. You were there, it's just very, you're put in some very difficult places. And it's just a way to identify. But I think our army understands now that we're beyond the stereotypes of, you've just, you've got to be able to just deal with it soldier, that it's just stress, deal with it. Rebs and dirt.

Yeah, and those were the days gone past. We understand the complexities of the world, we understand the complexities we put our soldiers in. We just wanna give them the tools that they can do their job to the utmost ability, do it correctly while protecting the innocent and capturing and denying our adversaries the ability to have their will against us or our nation or our allies.

What's your daily practice like? It's, I'll tell you, I have a very difficult job. The director of Army operations is not light. So I have to be in the office for my first meeting at 6.30 in the morning and have another one at 7 o'clock. But what I do is I manage my run into work in the mornings, I live a few miles from Pentagon. And so after my two briefings,

when I get another shot to go to do about a 20 minute workout and then I stop and I either in my office or in a corner in the gymnasium in the Pentagon, I go from five to 10 minutes and it's really been limiting in this job. So I do that every morning at work. I've just paying attention to the breath and when you get lost in the day.

And over like you said, it's like holding a fish, I think it's all you see very, very much like it. And in this job, it's really hard because there's a lot of demands waiting for me but I've realized if I, because when I first took the job, I stopped like practicing for a month and I could feel myself just really not handling things well.

Yeah, it's like your inner toxicity goes through the roof. And you've got a million things real life coming at you every hour that are happening around the world that you have to address for the army. So that's how I get after it every morning. So I make that a priority. I make physical fitness a priority in the morning and I make my practice a priority in the morning, and I make my practice a priority in the morning.

And then, like I said, during the day, because normally by 10 o'clock in the morning, I'm exhausted. It's like you've done a full day, and you still have another full day to go. So I'll normally walk out to the courtyard of the Pentagon or go find a corner and stop for maybe five or 10 more minutes if I can.

So I have to, I have to short my time, I have to put some increments in it, but it's, it's what I can do, so I do it. I mean, to my ears, it sounds great. I tell people five to ten minutes a day, it's awesome, and it sounds like you're doing even more than that. And also, I'm just reading between the lines, I think, I suspect you're probably bleeding it into sort of your daily activities as much as possible, which is really kind of where the rubber hits the road.

What about you, Amish? What's your daily practice? Yeah, I've been fortunate to be able to carve time out after my children and husband are out of the house to do, about I like to do 30 minutes. So I was doing, I was doing similar to what you said. I mean, I was telling people 12 minutes seems to be the sweet spot in some of our studies. But when I pushed it past that I felt even better, so I'm trying to do 30 minutes, and I like to combine the mindfulness practice with a compassion practice.

So I do loving kindness practice as well. So we've talked about loving kindness a lot on this show, but just for if in case we've got first time listeners that it is a practice just to put it briefly where loving kind of a lot on the show, but just for if in case we've got first-time listeners, that it is a practice just to put it briefly where you envisioning people in a systematic way and sending them good vibes. Yeah, or yourself. Yeah, and yourself.

And actually, one of the things I wanted to mention, just because you were asking about a Walt regarding, he is an outlier, he's an amazing person and definitely distinct than probably most other people. But thankfully, there are other enlightened leaders that we've been able to meet in the military. And in addition to all the work we're doing with active duty service members,

we're also working now with military spouses. And what's very interesting about that is, it's kind of going from the spouses benefiting themselves to then the husbands mostly, in most cases, asking what's going on and taking some of the materials that we're providing the spouses to take back to their units to practice. Progyne horse. That's very interesting.

Yeah, it's very interesting how things are shifting and that the surgeon general of the army is interested in promoting this. Well, yeah, I mean, she asked me to brief 400 of her top leaders in this topic of mindfulness. So do you, from your point of view, are you start running into some cultural obstacles as you try to? No, I would say the obstacles are real, but the obstacles are not entry into doing it. The obstacles are how you can offer this in a way that really is best practices for implementation. So most people that I meet leaders, I say I want to do a mindfulness project with your group, and they say sure, I can give you two hours in one afternoon.

And so my intention in my work is to say, really, you know, is would two hours in one afternoon have any positive lasting impact? So our projects are now really asking around, again, similar questions, how low can we push the dose? If we can get some amount of time over a couple of weeks, how should we do that? Should we do two, four hour workshops? Should we do an hour a day? These are not the most, maybe scientifically juicy areas, but they're practically so

important. So, those are the kinds of things that I'm interested in tackling now is how do we provide this? How do we scale it up? How do we have a low dose format? How do we have apps for example that could help better support what people are doing? At all levels from small unit leaders to higher level leaders to everybody. What's your vision for the, let's just say, not distant future? Like, what's your

vision for the role of mindfulness, not only in the military, but in the larger society, in the not too distant future? I think it's, I mean, that's been my interest all along. It's, I mean, we've come now with what, 50 years of work that make it obvious that our public health leaders would say, you know, daily physical activity is necessary for physical well-being. And my vision, my hope, is that we understand that the mind is the same way, and that we have the science that can provide guidance on what the daily mental exercises should be for psychological well-being. And that's sort of the work that I'm pursuing is how to answer those questions to inform a larger enterprise. So it's not just that, it's important, but how do you actually implement it in your daily

life? We're almost at a time before we go. I just want to ask you as a very prominent member of the contemplative neuroscience community. That's the name for people who use neuroscientists who study meditation. There's been some controversy about the study, the quality of the science around mindfulness and meditation, not just the neuroscience, but all of the science. Criticism is ranging from the study design isn't good. The people doing the studies are kind of in the tank, their pro-meditations, so they're

biased. What's your view on this? that people doing the studies are kind of in the tank, their pro-meditations or their biased, what's your view on this? Can we trust the science or is it being hyped? I mean, I think that absolutely it's being hyped. I think that the cultural momentum is way outpacing the rigor that we need to be able to make concrete with certainty guidance, provide guidance. And I do think that we have to be able to make concrete with certainty guidance, provide guidance. And I do think that we have to take a look at any positivity biases there might be.

And that's the criticism, is that essentially there's an overabundance of studies that are finding benefits, and you can see it. And I think that's not going to serve us at all. And I think that kind of statement, those kind of statements being made is helpful because then publishing the study in which you found nothing or publishing the study in which you actually found something that you didn't expect, like things got worse in a way that you didn't anticipate. Those are all going to become valuable for us to get a more accurate picture of what's going on. I just love having the two of you on because my whole mission is to,

sorry, that's a kind of a military term, but my mission is to make this attractive, make this practice attractive to people who would otherwise reflexively reject it. So to have a hard-charging type A neuroscientist and mom and a major general in the US Army coming on, talking about it in the way in which you do, which is down to earth relatable but also sincere, is I think extremely valuable. So thank you to both of you for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Dad. All right, there's another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you like it, I'm going to hit you up for a favor. Please subscribe to it, review it, and rate it. I want to also thank the people who produced this podcast, Josh Cohan, Lauren Efron, Sarah Amos, and the head of ABC News Digital, Dan Silver. And hit me up at Twitter, Dan B. Harris.

See you next time. 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 1-3-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.