Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 79: Willoughby Britton, Jared Lindahl -- Does Meditation Have a Dark Side?

Episode Date: May 24, 2017

Many of us get into meditation because we want to be calmer, less stressed and less yanked around by our emotions, but sometimes there are unwanted effects. Brown University researchers Willoughby Britton, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior, and Jared Lindahl, a visiting assistant professor of religious studies, published a new study today on the wide range of difficult experiences and challenges meditators they interviewed said they faced in their practice. 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. 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 Harris. This is as close as we get to breaking news in the meditation world. We are doing a special interview today with the pair of scientists and researchers at Brown University who have put out a fascinating new study being published today in plus one. Here's the deal. Most of us, I venture to say almost all of us get into meditation because we want the

good stuff. We want to be more calm, we want to be more relaxed, we want to have less stress, we want to be less yanked around by our emotions, we see those tantalizing brain scans, the imagery from the FMRIs, and we want our brains to be changing in that way, we see athletes and entertainers doing this stuff, and we want it, I think, certainly that was the case for me, but the truth is, sometimes there are side effects, and you don't hear a lot about it. There hasn't been an enormous amount of scientific research into this subject, a controversial subject I might add, until now, which brings us back to the aforementioned researchers at Brown University, Willoughby Britain and Jared Lindahl, who have just put out this study

that is being published, as I said, in the journal plus one. Let me just say, I'm going to give a caveat that you've heard me give before which is that meditation is a very small world so as is sometimes the case these guys are my friends and that doesn't mean I won't be asking them tough questions but just in this in the name of full disclosure and honesty I just want to say that. So Jared and Will be thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks Dan. Pleasure to be here.

I know you've been working on this. I know, just because we've been talking about it for years, I know you've been working on this really, in a very, very dog-in manner for a long time. So congratulations on finally seeing this work published. And I know it's just the beginning. I want to, before we get to kind of the meat of what you're reporting here on some of the side effects of meditation, I want to just get we get to kind of the meat of what you're reporting here on some of the

side effects of meditation, I want to just get a little bit of, so people know who they're dealing with here. I want to get a little bit of background from both of you. So, will we, let me start with you, how did you get into meditation and why this particular angle for your research? I started meditating 22 years ago, actually after the death of a friend, a childhood friend, so very much for the same reasons other people get into it, had a lot of grief and anxiety and wanted to learn ways to hold that better.

So that's how I started. And most of the research that I've done on meditation has been around the health benefits, so particularly around depression and high states of negative affect has been my main approach. High states of negative affect, can you say that in a, and we can talk about that for me? Feeling just, you know, feeling anxious, stressed, depressed, down, blue. Is that better? Yeah. Yeah. So that you were looking at mitigation of high states of negative

affect. Yeah. So I mean, that's been my main research is really, you know, the benefits, but really emotional benefits. And then looking at how, how those met different types of meditation affect the brain and the body and how do those changes in the brain and body, how do they relate to the emotional benefits? So that's been my main research.

And I think that as the field of meditation has gained more traction and more ground, we've been able to ask broader questions. And I think that it's in that larger context of many years of research on positive experiences that we're able to ask something a little bit more balanced questions. Yeah, I see it as a maturation of the field to be able to look at some of the things. Exactly.

Go beyond the health benefits. But did you, just curious from your personal experience, what drew you to looking at some of the side effects here, some of the darker aspects of meditative experience? Did you have some of these negative experiences? That peak your interest personally? Sure, I've had plenty of really challenging experiences and a number of my Dharma friends have as well.

I think we saw how meditation was being represented in the media as a sort of martini or like warm bath and it was sort of a joke. It's not quite that simple, but then we started to see that people actually believe that, that they think that it can be used for pretty much anything across the board without any downsides or challenges and anyone who's been meditating for any period of time knows that that's a little bit of a simplification. So I think that was the, just our personal practice and talking to friends and teachers that knowing that there's more to the story.

And then when I was doing my residency at Brown in a in patients psychiatric the Atric Hospital. There were two meditators that were hospitalized while I was there who had just come off a 10-day retreat. And I sort of thought, you know, two in one year seems like something worthy of following up with. So that was really the beginning of like,

I should take this seriously in my research and make this into a research study. I failed visibly at giving your full title. So you are assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University. So you are a medical doctor psychiatrist, am I saying that correctly? Actually, no, I'm not a psychiatrist.

It's very confusing because my appointment is in the Department of Psychiatry, but I'm not a psychiatrist. It's very confusing because my appointment is in the Department of Psychiatry, but I'm actually a clinical psychologist. So I have a PhD, not an MD. And you've done neuroscience research. That's right, yep. And so that brings me to your fiance, Jared Lindahl, visiting assistant professor in Brown's Cogut Center for the Humanities.

Jared, how did you get into meditation and why did you get interested in this particular angle aside from just falling in love with Willoughby? Yeah, that came much later. So I've been involved with the practice of meditation for about 20 years. My interest really started very early in college where I was first, I guess, exposed to yoga and meditation classes. And I think what interested me and what is for a long time interested me is questions around the nature of consciousness, the range of possible human experiences, how consciousness and subjective experience can be developed or regulated or wielded as a tool rather than just an investigated rather than something just sort of passively experienced. And as I was studying philosophy and anthropology

and religion in college, I became particularly interested in the contemplative techniques that are really attempts to get better acquainted with the mind and the body and emotions and perception and to have a more active and maybe dynamic relationship with those. So questions around consciousness, range of human experiences, and how those impact people has been for a long time, what've been interested in. And eventually what I came to pursue academically in my undergraduate and especially in my graduate training,

which was in the academic study of religion. And by the time I was finishing my PhD, more specifically in the cognitive science of religion. So using methodologies and existing scientific research and theories to attempt to provide some novel explanations for the relationship between religious practices and religious experiences. And so I was researching in particular experiences described in metaphors of light and luminosity. And so happened that I was giving a conference paper on that at a cognitive science of religion

conference here at Brown back in 2010. And Willoughby was paired to be my respondent to that paper based upon some expertise she had. And that's when I first became acquainted with the study. That was really just beginning at that point in 2010. So she was already pushing ahead with what's known as the varieties of contemplative experience study and at that point. Yeah, it was just getting off the ground. There were probably around, I don't know, a dozen interviews or so that had been completed at that point. And then I had a number of academic appointments after graduating

that year and still kept in touch with her. We ended up running a number of research symposia and then also writing the first paper based upon preliminary data from the study, which was really an attempt to unify my dissertation question with the reports of light experiences that she had already gathered in the first kind of half of the study.

So our prior paper that has been published on those light related experiences was putting forth a model based upon my dissertation research on how sensory deprivation is a close analog to meditative practices, and we might have something to learn from looking at sensory deprivation research in explaining certain types of experiences associated with meditation. So that led to our initial collaboration and I just, it's a hard project not to become immediately interested in and totally captivated and consumed by. So I eventually figured out how to get to Brown and really dove into directing the project, completing the interviews,

and running a lot of the qualitative analysis that we did as the basis of the paper. I like the fact that I have a tiny walk on role in your relationship, because I happen to have been stopping by in Providence on my way to see my parents in Boston the day you moved in, Jared. Yep, that's right.

I remember meeting you for the first time, and we had just gotten back from IKEA and we were unloading Billy Bookshelves and you got out of the cab and your suit and that was our first half hour together was you helping us move bookshelves. So, make a big impression on me. Right, right, exactly. Well, definitely you guys made a big impression on me. I've been, as Jared said, when you hear about this study, you do become captivated by it. So let's get to the study.

So let me start with you here, Willby. What is the headline out of this study? And Jared mentioned interviews. So we should say that you, and I'm probably going to mangle this. But the basis of the data is that you conducted, I believe, 100 interviews with meditators who had had challenging experiences, and that formed the basis of your study, and I'll let you describe what the headline the conclusions are.

Yeah, I mean, so the basic idea was to, we already know all the positive effects they've been circulating for years now, and we wanted to see what's the other side of the story, what are the other kinds of effects. And so one of the best places to find that out is to ask meditation teachers, especially ones that run their own centers, have been teaching for decades and have seen hundreds and hundreds of students.

So that's where we started was talking to really experienced teachers about, you know, what kinds of difficulties have you observed in your students. And when we asked them those questions, a number of the teachers started to tell their own stories. Oh, and my life, and my practice, here are some of the difficulties that I had. So then we started making those teachers that we were interviewing as teachers. We did a separate interview as practitioners as well.

So that's why about 60% of our sample ended up being meditation teachers themselves. So we have two sets of interviews, one of teachers talking about their students and then one of meditators who have reported various kinds of challenges. So that's the sort of basis and I think there were 92 altogether. So what are the challenges you're finding? What are people encountering? Well, there's 59 categories of experiences.

So quite a few to go over and we separated those out into seven different domains. So we have perceptual affective, which is emotional, somatic, cognitive. Pissomatic meaning body related. Yeah, bodily related body function, cognitive, motivational and social. Oh yeah, and sense of self. A lot of different, a lot of different ones. All right, well let's just start unpacking these Yeah, what would like just give me some are we talking about

So sense of self. So what do you mean by that? so There are a number of different types of changes that we're associating with sense of self this ended up being classified as its own domain of related phenomena. For a couple of reasons that I think are worth understanding at the outset. The first is that the processes around our sense of self

are really quite complicated and cut across a number of aspects of human experience. So there's bodily aspects that contribute to our sense of self. There's also narrative aspects that contribute to our sense of self. And so already it's a complex phenomenon. It's also a type of change that's really pretty central to Buddhist teachings and traditions. One of the central goals of Buddhism from the very beginning has been to introduce changes into one sense of self. And there are a number of key terms and debates around this, but often it entails

coming to an understanding that certain aspects of one's self that one took to maybe be enduring or permanent or definitive are actually less so. And they're more subject to change, revision, maybe even in some cases, teachers would say that they're illusory. They're not even real in enduring sense. So this is particularly important because this is related to some of the goals of meditation in more traditional contexts. And you'll see some of this show up even in some of the more applied aspects of meditation in, say, contemporary psychology, where maybe one of the problems that one could address

with meditation would be an enduring negative self-image or rumination about oneself that leads to these sort of states of negative emotions that Dr. Britain was talking about moments ago. What about a feeling that you don't exist? Yeah, so that's an interesting one. That's a little bit more on the deep end of the pool than simply the changes around narrative and self-image.

So there may be even before we get that to there as a bridge to that, a lot of practice instructions not across the board, but certainly in some traditions, will ask that you take a stance of distancing oneself from or even maybe de-identifying with one's transient thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. So as these things arise and pass away in the duration of your meditation session, there's some distance from identifying with those thoughts, emotions, and body sensations as me. And that can be really helpful for people who are, you know,

maybe overly identifying with certain things and getting into, again, maybe states of distress or states of sort of undesirable negative emotions on account of that. But just as there are benefits to that, if you keep doing that, or if you do that in a really intensive and prolonged process, a number of other types of changes could happen that are maybe no longer quite under your control anymore. So thoughts arise, but they don't feel like they're you at all, or body sensations arise or actions arise,

but you feel like there's no agent who's in control of those actions. So you're walking across the room and you don't know who's driving the ship? Yeah, and maybe walking across the road would be another scenario where that would be a little bit more concern. Yeah, yeah, that sounds dangerous. Like maybe we're talking about psychosis here. That's a tough one. I mean, I think there are, we do have some,

there are some other symptoms that we can discuss to get at that end of the spectrum, which is also something we saw in the study. But with regard to the changes of sense of self, maybe just to conclude on this point, I think one of the key points that we want to make here is that certain things that in certain contexts like a retreat are maybe novel insights even, maybe really helpful in the context of a retreat. If they are enduring, and especially if they're no longer in your control as that retreat or practice session ends, and as the practitioners trying to integrate

into his or her daily life, those things that were interesting, novel, maybe even insightful changes, those can become difficult to reintegrate and even a source of impairment and distress. If they're no longer something that you can manage well. So if you can't sort of have your sense of agency and sense of self come back online when you need it to, because you've spent a lot of time deconstructing it,

that can be a problem. So I think a lot of the issues we're seeing and dealing with are often arising in this context of integration, following a practice session, or integration following a retreat. That can be a particular context in which some difficulties arise. Okay, but let me press you on this guys,

because it sounds like, and we've only gotten into we're in one of the seven domains here. There are lots of domains that what you're describing here sounds like if you meditate enough, you could lose your damn mind. That sounds a little bit like a scare tactic. No, I'm not trying to be a scared to. I'm just saying this is what people are going to conclude or worry about when they hear this.

So just talk, talk me as a proxy for the listener off that ledge. Yeah, I mean, I think that the way that meditation has been marketed has been similar to a warm bath, very benign, and harmless. And I think that maybe the take home message is to have a little bit more respect for the power of these practices. So I don't think that we want to scare people away message is to have a little bit more respect for the power of these practices.

So I don't think that we want to scare people away from trying it or induce some kind of mass paranoia, but I think that the range of different experiences beyond common relaxation and even ones that are distressing or impairing to functioning have been documented before and we just documented that they are still happening in modern day Buddhist meditators and that that might be something that we want to consider as the meditation industry keeps going. Well said. And you stay this quite eloquently in your paper and in the accompanying press release

that the meditation has been around from millennia. And in the literature from way, way back, they talk about difficulties in the varying schools. You're looking at Buddhism and the three main schools of Buddhism, Zen Tibetan and Teravata, they talk about the kind of difficulties meditators will encounter. And in Teravata, for example, there's a stage of the path known as fear. So this is, you know, as you say in your own paper, this is not new, but it hasn't been looked at in this new batch of

of science and excitement that we're seeing around meditation but i i i i just want to drill a little bit deeper on that scary question i asked before what would you say to somebody who's hearing this and and is like oh well so should i not meditate now well as well to be said i don't think that think that the conclusion that should be derived from our research is that this isn't worth doing at all. And it's worth keeping in mind that because this is an interview-based study where really what we have are 60 or 92 different stories, but let's just stick with the practitioners for a minute.

We have 60 different practitioner narratives that had a wide range of experiences. And in some cases, experiences quite similar to each other. What makes a particular experience even feel negative, let alone distressing or impairing, that I think another major part of our paper is to attempt to identify what we call the influencing factors. And these are the, you know, perhaps some of the variables, probably not even all of them,

that impact whether a practitioner is going to feel distress or have a negatively valanced experience, whether they're going to be impaired, how they're going to resolve this experience, how long the experience is going to last. So when we interviewed these practitioners, in addition to them talking about usually a couple of dozen different types of experience that they have, not all of which by any means were negative, but at least somewhere. They also identified usually around a dozen of these influencing factors, and that can range from things like their early life history, some of their medical or psychiatric history. It can range from what types of practices they were doing, their degree of social support, their relationship with their teachers and their communities,

and a whole list of what we call health behaviors, which were different types of responses, usually, so things like psychotherapy, presence of absence of medication, changes in diet and exercise, these sorts of things. Really depending on the particular type of phenomena that we're talking about. So certain phenomena tended to be maybe either transient or fairly easy to resolve or integrate, whereas others definitely required a lot more support

and often support going beyond what a meditation teacher or center or practice or conception of the path could provide. So just to come back and comment a little bit on what you were mentioning earlier about the presence of these phenomena in Buddhist texts and traditions, I think you're right about that for a lot of these phenomena are there. What's interesting we found is that despite recognition or acknowledgement of a lot of these phenomena are there. What's interesting, we found, is that despite recognition or acknowledgement of a lot of these things, and I certainly wouldn't say all of them,

there's also often some disagreement about what they mean and what their value is. So as we were interviewing teachers, we were really hoping to get some consensus statement about what is a meditation difficulty and what do you do about it, but teachers really varied considerably based upon their background, their lineage, their teachers, their approach, whether they had some sort of psychological or psychiatric training, in addition to their training as a Buddhist teacher, a lot of these things could really influence what they considered to be part of the path versus what they considered to be, as you were using

the word earlier, a side effect, or let's say an unwanted effect, that in one that may be required some sort of intervention, beyond just practicing differently or some sort of, you know, fix-through practice technique. This, I think, is again another really key point from our study that the experiences themselves don't necessarily have intrinsic meaning, and they're not all intrinsically adverse. Maybe there are a couple of exceptions to this where intense fear, suicidal ideation, these types of things were pretty universally treated as things that need some sort of remedy. And it's not something that a practitioner should stay

in for a prolonged period of time. But as you pointed out, even fear can be a tricky one because there are particular conceptions of the path, as you pointed out in Teravalda Buddhism, where that's considered an expected stage, and even perhaps a sign of progress, and even though a difficult one, is could be read as moving on to something that is ultimately of benefit to the practitioners. So this ends up really always being negotiated socially with the teachers, with the communities, and in cases where practitioners don't have

that type of support or framework, these things can be even more disorienting. I think you said so many interesting things there, Jared. I mean, in particular, and I've heard Will be talk about this before in our private conversation, conversations that people who get into meditation again for the martini slash warm bath, may not know that these difficult stages are considered signs of progress in some of these schools. So you may be, but they're not signing up for that. So there seems to be some sort of cultural misunderstanding here almost. Yeah, I would say it's sort of a mismatch.

And I mean, one possible way forward is when people start meditating, it might be a good idea to think about why they're meditating. What do they want? What kind of goals are they trying to achieve? Even what is well-being, what is happiness, what is suffering? Really think about that. And then make sure that the practice and the teacher and the tradition and the program that you choose really matches

your goals because there are so many different kinds of practices and teachers and approaches and reasons to do these practices that getting a good fit is really kind of the best way to optimize your results. How common do you think difficulties are? Yeah, that's the million dollar question. And unfortunately, the way that we did the study, the methodology, is really not set up to answer that question. So it's just going to have to be, you know, stay tuned for future research kind of answer.

Do you think an analog that I use, I mean I haven't talked about this publicly, but just in my own head, is with exercise. So with exercise, you know, we all know it's possible, you could get hurt, and that's why, you know, your gym makes you sound a waiver. But it's not, you know, it's not, I get hurt once in a while, it's not having to me every day, and there are things I can do I get hurt once in a while that's not having to me every day and there are things I can do to mitigate the chances, reduce the chances that I would get hurt. Would you say that's a fair analogy? Yeah, I'm always looking for really good metaphors and analogies. I haven't found a perfect one, but I think exercise has a lot to offer.

I mean, there's, in exercise, you also hear like a no-paying, no-gain kind of instruction sometimes, and that sounds really great until you injure yourself. And then your coach is like, oh, no, I didn't mean no-paying, no-gain in that sense. So obviously, they scale back those instructions when it comes. So there are some nuances there. But within exercise, there's also people who are trained to identify what types of behaviors or pastures or intensities are likely to lead to injury, and there's entire books written about it that are too many. So I think with that analogy,

we want to build something comparable in the meditation community. That doesn't really exist now. So talk about what you want to see built. Well, I think that just to have a general awareness, so when you get the paper, there's also a code book with the 59 categories, like really detailed descriptions of these experiences.

And this is like 101 for a meditation teacher. Any teacher should be very well versed in any of these experiences and just be able to identify them when they come up. And they may have different views on what should be done about them or how to manage them, but they should at least be very familiar with what they are. I think generally speaking, someone who goes into meditation should have a sense of what they are as well, that might just a basic type of awareness. So that's the basic level. And I think as we, as the research

continues and other people are also doing research on this, we'll have a better sense of like what kinds of options are the most helpful. And I think we have some ideas of what can be tested at this point, but we don't really have real like answers. So I think that's kind of where we're going to build a really informed and adequate support structure for when these experiences come up. But don't, I mean, I go to the Insight and Meditation Society. Don't they have, if I recall correctly, they have somebody on staff to deal with people who are experiencing challenges and have for a while? Yeah, they, I mean, there have been Yeah, I mean, there have been support staff and they are awesome and they help a lot of people, but there's often only one or two people and they're not always available after the retreat ends.

And the person needs longer, more long term, or sometimes even 24 hour care. So that's a really good start, but I think we need more. And I think there are lots of clinicians now that have training and mindfulness and meditation based interventions. And they would be really great people to be taking on some of the people that are having more enduring difficulties.

This is such an, you spoke before about the cultural misunderstanding that could happen with people who are, you know, looking for a bubble bath and find that their sense of self is dissolving and that's not what they wanted. But there's another potential culture clash here, which is you could walk out of a meditation retreat, having some specific meditation-related challenges, like to list some of the things that you include,

like hypersensitivity to light or sound, or insomnia and voluntary body movements, things, or heightened sense of fear, anxiety, or a loss of emotions altogether. These are some of the things that you've found in your research, but if you go to a clinician who has no training or background in meditation, you might get, I don't know, medicated or treated in a way

that actually doesn't meet your specific needs because they're going to see it through the lens of psychopathology, right? Yeah, so I think that, you know, we have to be really aware that there are multiple frameworks at play here and they're really always have been So I think it's important to really understand where the meditator is coming from which framework or frameworks they're using and To have that decide, you know where they're seeking help. Yeah, and I think that that decide where they're seeking help. Yeah, and I think that this can really cut both ways too. So to come back to the no pain, no gain analogy

that YouTube were discussing in the context of exercise, a lot of practitioners in our study and even some teachers invoked something akin to that framework for meditation, that it's supposed to be difficult, and that's part of the process, and that's part of how one gains benefits from it. I think the challenge becomes that it's really not always clear where to draw the line between something that's difficult but can be held in the context of practice, worked through, and then benefited from, from something that can't be, and from something that's difficult but can be held in the context of practice, worked through and then benefited from, from something that can't be and from something that needs some sort of additional support.

Part of the, and I think that's something that needs to be negotiated between the practitioners and the teachers, which is why we're hoping that this study will inform both of them. One of the challenges in the current meditation world in America at least is that a lot of people go away for these retreats that may even be quite geographically distant from where they live and reside. And as Willoughby mentioned, that you might have some good resources while you're on the retreat, we hope. But that may not also get you in the to see you through the process of integration, or if these things are enduring, or they come back up in your daily practice.

A lot of people in our study had difficulties even in the context of daily practice, so this is not just limited to retreat context, but that then that those resources might not be available. It's also the case that given a lot of these, the transiency of some students coming on retreat, while there's some good attempts to understand a practitioner's background, most teachers aren't going to know a lot about the people they're working with unless they develop a close relationship with them. And so I think in this case, this is also why it's really important for the practitioners to be informed that some aspects of their life history or their personal medical or psychiatric or traumatic history, that these things could be at play and that they could be beyond

be beyond the scope of what they should expect a meditation teacher to be able to hold and help them process. So I think that, again, this is all really a process of negotiation. It really highlights the importance of communities and relationships in both appraising and responding to what's happening during meditation. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wondery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father,

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opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. How do you know that meditation is the cause of the things you're finding in your study? Because a lot of them, you've found some pretty, a whole range of things. But some of them are pretty daunting. I mean, the suicidal ideation, for example, how do you know that that isn't the result of some sort of pre-existing psychological or psychiatric condition?

Yeah, so this is one of the most challenging questions to assess causality. And so what we did was we used the methods that regulatory agencies like the FDA or the World Health Organization used to assess the safety of medical devices or medical treatments. And so they typically use 13 different criteria and we were able to use 11 of those criteria.

So I can go through them one at a time. I go through them ad nauseam in the paper, so if you want to know more about it. But subjective attribution is one. Does the teacher or the practitioner think that meditation was the cause? So the basic they thought it was counts for at least one point. Then the temporal proximity, which is also called challenge,

where the experience happened during meditation or shortly after. Then we have consistency, and there's three different kinds of consistency where it happened on more than one occasion. So they say, every time I meditate, X happens. So the temporal proximity is repeated over time. Then you have interpersonal subjective consistency

where this happens across different people. So in the context of meditation, the same experience is arising across different people. And then you have cross-modal consistency where both teachers and meditators are saying that this is caused byby-meditation. And then you have D challenge, which means that the effect goes away

when you stop meditating. So if people back off for a while and then their headaches go away or they start sleeping again, and then re-challenges when you start again, you start meditating again and then you stop sleeping again or your headaches come back.

So those are some of the ones that are related to the time frame, the temporal proximity. And then you also have subject expert judgment. So the fact that there were 32 meditation teachers who said these effects are caused by meditation. And then we also have prior published reports. So we found more than 40 published reports in the medical literature describing

these same kinds of experiences and being attributed to meditation. So we made an effort to address the causality as best we could with the design that we had. And you summarize that with admirable consideration, I have to say. And let me ask a related question, which Jared touched on a little bit earlier, the dosage question.

So you guys have talked a lot about retreats, but what about those of us who practice only five to 10 minutes a day, we use an app or we read a John Kabatzen or Sharon Salzburg book, and we're just kind of bopping along with our own five to 10 minutes or whatever. Are these people likely to bump into, you know,

hypersensitivity to light and is somatic changes such as insomnia and voluntary body movements and all this sort of litany of challenges that you lay out in your study? Yeah, I think I want to shy away from commenting on the term likely, because as Willoughby mentioned earlier, we really can't say anything conclusive about that. What I can say is that I think it's worth keeping in mind

that with those various modes of causality assessment that were just summarized, we're also looking at those in relationship to a lot of these other variables that are maybe practitioner specific or practice specific or relationship specific. And I think in this case, some things like there are some ways in which we're

getting some indication that certain practitioner level variables, so say for instance prior trauma history, the presence or absence of that, those are two different than populations that we can't just lump them together and say, well, if these two people are doing 30 minutes a day or two hours a day, that they're necessarily going to have comparable experiences, because it's not just about the amount of practice. The amount of practice definitely can be a variable, but there are a lot of other variables that we also looked at. So for instance, just stick with that example,

there is indication in our study and in other prior studies on meditation that re-experiencing of traumatic memories is something that can happen, and it doesn't necessarily need a lot of practice. And there were a lot of people, not a lot, but there were enough people in our study who were working at the lower end of practice amount and intensity that I think we should take seriously the possibility that some of these things could start to emerge, could start to show up. They might not end up being as intense as for other people in different contexts or with different backgrounds.

But this is really a question that we think needs a lot more further research. We have a mixed pool of practitioners. They were doing a lot of different things, with a lot of different amounts. So we can't really conclusively answer the question of how, whether there's a safe amount to do it, for instance. But I think people should generally be aware of what some of these phenomena are, maybe even be aware of how some of them are even closely related to things that are good. To give an example of that,

regulating your emotions and maybe decreasing your emotional range or intensity can be something that people are really trying out meditation for and it can be a really big benefit for them to do that. But at the other end of that range or the other end of that same trajectory could be the loss of emotional range altogether. And we've had a number of stories of people coming off, say, of intensive retreat and practice, and not feeling any emotional connection with their family and loved ones.

And having that be a real source of distress that what was once a kind of positive aspect of gaining more equanimity, gaining more emotional, less emotional range, that when emotions disappear altogether, that's maybe no longer desirable. Did those people started just interrupt you, Jared? I know I've interrupt you a couple of times,

but I just wanna make sure I follow up on that. Did those people say that lack of affection for their family, was that a permanent thing or was it a temporary shift? Yeah, thankfully that tended to be temporary. I don't think anybody is still going through that at least. I hope not. It's a temporary meaning, like, one of those I remember last year.

So, yeah, temporary, but long enough. And it's really the enduring nature of it and again, the loss of control over that, that can be part of why that's distressing. So, you know, this complicates matters further to also bear in mind that in these practices, a carming out of often a very monastic context, they're coming out of a tradition that at least in certain historical and geographical context was about renunciation of worldly concerns. So one could even suggest that this is again one of those things that might be a sign of some sort of progress that maybe one

is to continue on the path and that's actually considered a goal. Not all Buddhist traditions would agree with that, but it's there definitely some that for whom this sort of intense equanimity could be construed as valuable. The challenge then becomes what are the dominant motivations of people who are picking up this practice in 21st century America? And is that really what they're wanting or expecting? Regardless of whether that's considered to be the goal in some other place or time. And that's where, again, this cultural negotiation

and is a big part of what we think we're grappling with here. So let me see if I can state your bottom line in terms of, and then I'll probably, almost certainly, we'll mess this up, and then you guys just correct me. But is your bottom line to rank and file meditators, and I'm not talking about folks who are, you know, avidly attending retreats, I'm talking about you're basically, you know, you're doing five to ten minutes, a couple days a week, et cetera, is your bottom line like, yes, this is a good thing to do. Just know that there's a range of potential outcomes,

some of which may not be positive. It's not happening. Well, you don't know the frequency, but I'm kind of at a loss. So like, what should we be telling people to have their eyes open for if they're continuing or looking to establish a meditation practice? I mean, obviously meditation practice has been profoundly beneficial for many, many people. So if you're interested in meditation, you should try it.

But also know that there are many different versions and different types of practices and different programs and apps and teachers that have different orientations with different goals. So I think, you know, be an informed consumer, like do your homework and choose wisely and choose a program. It's similar to choosing a doctor. I mean, choose one that matches what you're looking for.

So I think that maybe one take home message were absolutely not trying to disweight people from meditating, which obviously a huge benefit for many people, but that's not the whole story. And I think one of the motivations for this study is to really give voice to a group of people that have felt incredibly ashamed and very isolated because they had had a less than optimal meditation experience.

And we're trying to give them a little bit of voice that this also happens. And if it happened, if you have something other than common relaxation in your meditation experience, you're not alone and it's not your fault. These are well-documented experiences and they happen. So a lot of it is reaching out to that group that has really been marginalized up until this point. And we should say, can I just add something to that? Absolutely, go ahead. I think in order to reach that community and also help them, that we hope that raising awareness about the range of possible experiences, the range of possible variables that impact those

and how they land on someone, and the range of responses for what to do with them. You know, while we don't have conclusive data on any of those things, what we have is our summary of what people told us, practitioners and teachers told us. We hope that that can not only help practitioners be more informed consumers, but the people who are responsible for guiding those practitioners, whether that's meditation teachers and centers, whether that's increasingly clinicians as well, that they're increased awareness about the range

of possible phenomena and the range of responses to them. That in time, we can help provide some resources. That will help them figure out how to, again, negotiate what are often some really challenging decisions about how to, again, negotiate what are often some really challenging decisions about how to interpret something, what is the best response, is it just to keep practicing and get through it, is it to stop practicing, seek something else, what should we do here? And we're not really in a position here to yet make those types of recommendations. This study started and emerged

from a collaboration with teachers and practitioners and clinicians, and we think the implementation of any best practices is also going to be a collaborative project. But inevitably, people listening to this podcast, some percentage will have had these experiences or maybe dealing with it right now. Is there are there resources out there for people? I mean, there are a number of teachers that are very knowledgeable and available. There are also clinicians that are knowledgeable and available. I mean, what we're hoping to do is actually

create sort of a referral list as part of our website. We've had a number of teachers and clinicians volunteer to be a resource, but we just haven't had an opportunity to put that together yet, but that's what we're hoping. Pick in people contact you. People do contact me. Like I've had more than 300 people contact me, and I do my best to talk to people as much as I can, but it's a lot of volume. And more than I can handle well. So I'm hoping that this know that we can have other people

help out with that. You, for a while, we're running something called Cheetah House in your house. The one where I help you move in the key of furniture. Can you tell us a little bit that you basically had people who were having meditation difficulties living with you for a while.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so a number of people that called us in response to the study, or some of the media coverage of the study, they were well enough to not be in the hospital, but they were not well enough to be working and they really just needed a place to be in community with other people that understood what was happening to them and support them through this. Because again, a lot of times the conflicting frameworks of being told that you're sick or this is pathological, that wasn't helping them.

They needed a little bit of space and community. So I have a big Victorian home and I have a third floor with a couple extra rooms in it, so people stayed there and healed and talked to each other. I hope that something like that can be resurrected in the future. It was financially not really that feasible to be sort of taking care of this many people with having a full-time job doing something else. So I mean, I think it's a great idea. And I think that there have been other places like that.

I believe there was one in California for a while, where sort of meditation communities where people can be supported in a more long-term way by their peers. But yeah, the Kachita House as a residential facility is no longer. It's just an apartment now. But we are trying to make the resources available on the website. And we also have started just the beginning of some support groups.

Because I think one of the things that we're finding that people find really helpful is to reach across that ice feeling of isolation and shame. And when people share their stories with each other, it's just so supportive and comforting. So the support group idea, I think, is a really great one, but we just started that. You mentioned before that, so the fact

that you've been studying this has been out in the public for a while. So that you're releasing the results on May 24th. But we've known for a while that you've been, the study's been ongoing, and that has attracted a while. So that you're releasing the results on May 24th, but we've known for a while that the study's been ongoing and that has attracted a lot of people to who've had questions. What has the reaction been in the meditation industrial complex? The people like me who have apps and other scientists

who have been touting the benefits of meditation, how do people respond to the fact that you're doing this? I mean, I'm not surprisingly, I think it's been a mix. I think there have been a lot of really encouraging responses, and that, so the centers for mindfulness, the UMass Center, the Oxford Center, the Bangor Center, the big centers that are interested in, are involved in doing mindfulness instructor trainings, have been, you know been very open and supportive of the research they've written support letters when I apply for grants. We're trying to make our code book into a questionnaire that can be used in clinical trials and meditation centers and a number of the directors of those

mindfulness centers wrote letters of support and how important this was and how much it was needed. So that was really encouraging and they've also invited me to come share the data in some of their mindfulness instructor programs the summer in the UK. So I think that's all really positive development. A number of Dharma centers have asked Jared and I to come and give, could just kind of an overview of the different experiences

that we're seeing in our data to different Dharma teachers and also, you know, the support staff at the centers. So I, hopefully that will continue. You know, and then there's other people that are just not really ready to hear it. And I think that the, the dominant narrative of this being all good, all positive panacea is a very powerful one, and one that people want that to be true, then they don't really want to hear that there is another side to this story. So I think that inevitably there's going to be some backlash, but I think that's just

the way it is. So I mentioned before, I'm part of this meditation industrial complex. I made that term up. I mean, I'm sure I'm not the first person to use it, but it's not a thing, really. But what responsibility does somebody in my position have? I mean, I have a podcast, I write books,

or I'm one book, and I'm gonna do another. I have an app. What responsibility do I have when talking about this to present it in the right light? And I guess the second part of that question is, we at the 10% happier app, we have coaches who, anybody who uses our app can has access to an experienced meditator that they can communicate with

directly through the app. These people have 10 to 15 years of experience. And we've done a lot of talking about, you know, how to know if somebody has an issue, what are the answers to their questions, when is the right point for a referral to an in-person clinical setting? Is that enough? I think that's a terrific start. No doubt about it. And I think that that probably goes above and beyond what you could find in some of the other more bare bones apps.

So certainly applaud you for making those efforts. I mean, I think that the main thing is to have a mechanism where you can really be tracking what's going on with people or they can be able to report back some of the difficulties or challenges or just uncertainties that they're having in implementing their practice of meditation via an app. This is a new experiment that has never been done before in the history of meditation and is a product of our current contemporary, highly technologous, technologized culture. And I think it has some real implications

for what types of experiences people are going to have in through this impersonal medium. Certainly, one of the things that we're finding from our study that I think should be a concern to anybody who's implementing or delivering meditation through this medium is that degree of social support and perceived social support was really, really important. And for people who didn't really have a community

or were geographically distant from their community or could only have access to a teacher very irregularly, that could be a real difficulty for them. And somebody who could really track them carefully who knew what to look for, that could really ease them through a challenging experience and maybe even keep it from being one that ended up being distressing or harmful for them and could really make it be something that was ultimately positive. I think it's great to have experienced

meditators or teachers who people can talk to. One thing I would just caution about that is that there are people who can meditate for a long time and themselves not have gone through some of these difficulties. So come back to the example of trauma history. If your coaches don't haven't had traumatic memories resurfacing in their practice because they don't have a trauma history, they might not necessarily know how to draw upon their own experience in order to respond to somebody like that.

And there's lots of other types of examples where individual differences are really important and types of examples where individual differences are really important. And naturally, teachers who have had the widest range of challenging experiences and manage them are often the best equipped to know how to respond and help people through that. But for better or worse, those teachers are not always that common or accessible or able to really help everybody who's just getting their feet wet with us. Yeah. We've developed standards of care. We know in conjunction with some experienced, very, very experienced meditation teachers,

so that our coaches who are pretty experienced themselves know when to refer people for qualified in-person support. But this is something that we, you know, it would take very seriously and we wanna continue to work on and that's why I personally, and we as a company find the work you're doing to be really valuable.

I mean, I think one of the things that I learned about monitoring for adverse effects is that negative effects of treatment are a very different kind of thing than positive effects. And so people are not going to voluntarily tell you when they're having negative effects. So it's very likely that they'll just not tell you, especially the teacher. And so there needs to be a kind of program

or monitoring system where it's actually not even enough to ask people, have you had any unusual or unpleasant effects because these open-ended questions also don't generate the kind of accurate counts as really very, that's where we have this specific code book. So you have really, really specific information about what to ask about and then when you start asking specific questions like do you feel like you don't exist or do you feel like you're existing outside your body or you know that movements happen on their own and they're not made by you um oh yeah oh yeah I have that so people like they to be, it needs to be a very specific question.

So there is a real like science to monitoring correctly. So that's another thing that I think that the entire field of meditation, including apps, will eventually, will eventually get good at that. So I think that that's probably coming down the line. Yeah, with your help. Sorry, I got it. Then one other thought that I had, you know, how do we know that the support systems that we've created are enough?

And I would say that when my phone stops ringing, then that means that the support systems that are in place are enough. But right now, like the fact that like people, I mean, I get so many emails every week and calls every week more than I can handle, that's an indication to me that we're missing something, that there's something else that needs to happen. Let me just read to you, because we've gotten some questions from our users that are interesting

along these lines. Just read one. I'm not going to use the name here, but this is a quote. And when I say users, I mean app users. I've been listening to Joseph Goldstein on the Insight Hour. These are ultimate teachings for me. And also with Sam Harris, Sam Harris' old friend of Joseph, Sam Mine, discussing higher stages of realization. But these discussions of reaching a new level of perception, shedding the conventional notion of, quote, self, a maturation of the spiritual practice, is one of the ultimate truths, or true wisdoms, or something like that, and how this can be painful and disorienting and disturbing.

This is what I want to be ignorant of. Am I alone in this? Am I the only one who wants to abandon the practice when it reaches these higher stages? What do you guys, how would you respond to this user? Yeah, this is an interesting issue that I was thinking about as Willaby was talking about monitoring. So say you're monitoring for someone who's having a, and someone reports a loss of sense of agency over their actions. It's not just an issue of identifying a particular experience. It's then an issue of what does that mean? And is that an insight? Is that part of the goal?

Or is that something that is going to be concerning? So this is again where I think the practitioners, goals and expectations, also their context, are they doing this in the context of an app that is primarily advertising better emotion and regulation, calm, and enhanced functioning in daily life? If that's the experience that's happening in that context, perhaps there's a mismatch calm and enhanced functioning in daily life. If that's the experience that's happening in that context, perhaps there's a mismatch there, and they might want to have some sort of guidance back towards the types of things that they were more expecting.

This is, of course, quite different if you are on a meditation retreat at a monastery and a traditional Buddhist context. You've done a lot of scriptural study and you're interested in having these insights into changes in sense of self and seeing if Buddhist teachings around the reduction of suffering that are thought to accompany those can really play out for you. Then I think the experience, maybe described in identical words, could mean something different for that person, who has that motivation, is in that context, and is oriented towards that goal.

And this is, for me, one of the interesting questions as meditation comes out of the monasteries and into the marketplace, how is this impacting what these different experiences mean? And it really makes the study much more complicated. It makes it complicated, amidst our sample of Buddhists, and it makes it even more complicated attempting to apply what we've found to other meditation applications, your own apps, and the field of mindfulness-based interventions, which are often really situated in different cultural contexts, with different narratives about what's supposed to happen, what is the goal here.

So in response, I think that the context is really important. The motivation is really important. And that makes it very difficult to say what any of these things mean in any intrinsic sense. So what do you guys think are the next? There are so many open questions, which you guys openly acknowledge. What are you most excited about looking at next? What are the big questions you want to tackle going forward?

Well, we have a lot of a long list, but I think for me, I'm really interested to understand the mechanism, and because I'm a neuroscientist, the neurobiological mechanisms, which I actually think are extremely low-hanging fruit, because we have a pretty good knowledge of a lot of the effects on the brain that different meditation practices have. These difficulties, I don't think they're going to be radically different than those. They're probably going to be the same, but just sort of an exaggeration. For example, a lot of my earlier research and even my TED talk goes on and on about how good meditation is at strengthening the prefrontal cortex and controlling the limbic system and the amygdala

and how that results in improved emotional reactivity or decreased emotional reactivity. So that's like, we already know that. That's the positive side. But having a really strong prefrontal cortex that shuts down your limbic system and your autonomic nervous system is also the neurobiology of dissociation and blunted affect and kind of a zombie-like state that if you keep going, could result in that. So it's not that different. And like I said, it's low-hanging fruit, which is always a good thing in research. I'm not to have to reinvent the wheel. So it's not that different. And like I said, it's low-hanging fruit, which is always a good thing in research. Not to have to reinvent the

wheel. So I think I am excited to see whether other people also take that on. I think there have been a number of other people who are looking into or already working on a number of the mechanisms that we're thinking about. Yeah, and I'll just add from my own perspective, those of you who read the paper, which I hope you will attempt to do, you'll see that the study that we're reporting on, as we've mentioned, is an interview-based qualitative study, and you might be surprised to find that it being

a qualitative study does not feature qualitative data. And this is really because this first paper is attempt to summarize what we did or methodology and what we found in our overall summary of our results. But where we can go from here is working with the many thousands of pages of transcripts that we have, the really rich and interesting

and compelling narratives that both practitioners and teachers gave us. And we can look at, you know, I undertake specific questions, whether that's looking at how people in a particular tradition or sub-tradition think about certain issues. We can look at clusters of related experiences and think about how and why those might be emerging together. We can do all sorts of, I think, creative and interesting analyses that will allow us to slowly get some of these voices and stories out there as well

and have it not just be this admittedly more abstract summary that we're offering in this first paper. So there's already a number of works in process and basically almost under review for some of our forthcoming papers and I think people can expect that we'll be thinking carefully about and writing and publishing on this for many years to come. As we wrap up here, is there something that I should have asked but didn't? I think, I mean, I think one of the, I mean, we said this in the press release and we say it in the paper, but I think it's important to sort of counteract a lot of the predominant assumptions that are, we often get in response to this research.

And that, you know, meditation difficulties only to happen to people on intensive retreats, only happen to people who have prior psychiatric vulnerabilities, like a psychiatric disorder or a trauma history, only happen to people who are not adequately prepared or have adequately supervision or don't have a teacher. And while those may play a role, we found exceptions to all of those. So I think that unfortunately,

there is no sort of pat answer for why these things happen that applies to everyone, like that everybody's experience is unique and that there's, it's a complex set of factors sort of that kind of creates the perfect storm for each person. So I think that, you know, really honoring individual differences

in diversity and complexity is the name of the game. And I know that's not the media's forte, but I'm going to ask for it anyway. You have ever since the first time I met you will be at the Buddhist Geeks conference in Boulder, Colorado back in like 2010 or something like think that you've had some sort of wearing this about the media uh... not i'm not saying it's unjustified but you this study that you've been conducting for many years now kind of conducting it somewhat involuntarily in public because people have known that you were working on this it's generated controversy

every step of the way will now it's finally out what you worry about? Well it's funny. I think that journalists and scientists have these stereotypes if each other, which are kind of true. So journalists think that we can't give a straight answer, that we caveat everything to death, we split hairs, we just have these long-winded answers that don't say anything. I'm sure people will think that who have been listening to this podcast so far, you know, and scientists are frustrated with the media, we think that, you know, they'll do anything to sell a story, they don't care about accuracy or the truth, and they want to sensationalize.

And so, you know, there's this really unfortunate relationship, and I think that that really needs to change. And it's especially now with like alternative facts and fake news and it's just, you know, there's definitely the desire to won't want to go hide and not deal with the media at all. But I also am thinking about the people who are, you know, alone and feeling ashamed of what happened to them

in meditation and they need someone to reach out to them. So I'm sort of, it's my practice right now is to like deal with the media because I do have a lot of practice. It's my meditation practice. I've had a lot of and this is not just, you know, making up stories in my mind. This is based on experience. I've had a lot of, I've been misquoted I've been, you know, I've really only gave one interview so far and that interview has been cut up and repackaged and, you know, circulated in different places where I was never invited to give commentary. So I haven't had good experiences before and I'm, I'm, but I, I think this is important

and I think that there are a lot of people that are suffering needlessly, that I can actually help. So I'm making an effort, but it's definitely not like high on my list. It's challenging for me. What is the twist that you're worried about? What is the way in which this research can get twisted that you don't want it to get twisted? I mean, I think one of the things that's most concerning to me is that there are a number of people, these are like major stakeholders in the meditation industry, these are Dharma

teachers, long-term, meditators, people who have written books, and they were brave enough to talk about their experiences, and some of them were really harrowing and heartbreaking. And they told us their stories. And some of the responses that I've seen have been various kinds of victim blaming. Like that somehow this experience that they had was their fault. They didn't know what they were getting into. They meditated too much.

They didn't have the right teacher. They did it wrong. Just some kind of way that it's their fault. And I mean, and I, we know from, you know, attribution psychology that that's called the fundamental attribution error when you, you know, make dispossitional attributions to something, especially if you don't like it. So we know that's going to happen, but it just pains me

to see that people who have already been through so much by being in this research study are being blamed again. It sort of reminds me of the Vietnam vets, or like, you know, World War II vets who are blamed for having PTSD, when in fact, it's war causes trauma and not some kind of personality weakness. So I see that pattern happening again and like it makes me really sad. What about the flip side that people would write articles that say meditation drives you crazy? I mean, that's kind of a version of that though because you know, I think that just as there are, we want to say that just as the individual factors are not the whole story, and you can't just blame the person or their approach, and that somehow meditation is not culpable, or there's no role that the practice itself played.

There is a role that the practice played, but again, it's not the only role. And so that, I think, to misconstruate that way is to assume that the practice is inherently dangerous. And that's certainly not the case either. And that's very much not what we're saying. We write in the paper what we're really looking at here is what we call an interaction-based model where there are instances in which the practice is playing a role, and our causality

assessments were in large part a way of making sure of that, and keeping people out of the study for whom this experience was just happening anyway due to other life circumstances and that they don't think meditation, play the role, it just happened to be concurrent. We did our best to try to not have that be part of what we were studying. But so that's to say that, again, there's multiple things going on here. It's not all practitioner, and it's not all practice. And exactly how much of each is responsible in these cases

is really individual. And I think to really get a handle on this is going to require a lot more research and research that's designed differently than what we did, which was primarily to document the range of these effects, but not really address issues of frequency and certainly not address in a kind of fundamental and conclusive way issues of causality. So a little bit of housekeeping here. If people want to read the study, which I recommend, because it's a good read,

or just, or also to find out more about you guys and your work, where would you send them? So we made an effort to make sure that the study and all of its as accompanying supplementary files are free and accessible to the public. So we chose an open access journal, plus one, PLOS1, like the number. So you can an open access journal plus one PLOS one like the number. So you can just go to their website and find it. You can also just follow the link that will be

part of our press release. So what I'm about to say is probably colored by my personal affection for you guys, but I do really think that this is an incredibly valuable contribution you're making. And as I said before, I see it as part of the maturation of this still new field. And I think we need to, we shouldn't be afraid of the truth here. We should talk about what the difficulties are and let people know so that they can be informed consumers.

So I thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Dan. And I also just wanna thank a few other people. I wanna thank your folks at Brown University. I'm in New York City, Europe in Providence, Rhode Island. And there was a certain amount of hustle that needed to take place on your end to make this technically possible to get you into a radio studio on campus.

So big thanks to those guys. And I want to thank the folks on my and Josh Cohan and Lauren Efron, who produced this podcast, who also had to do a certain amount of hustle. And they're going to have more hustle to do to get this posted in time. So big thanks to everybody involved here and thanks again to both of you who will be in Jared and congratulations again on getting this study out

after so many years of hard work. Thanks Dan. It's pleasure to be here. 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.

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